I have a couple of these and they really do work well. Between that and a pair of cutters for wire ties, I can open almost anything in under a minute. Including convoluted child toy packaging.
Toy packaging these days is far, far worse than the plastic clamshell. Dozens of industrial strength wire ties, miles of tape, plastic screwed into other plastic through cardboard, plastic pull-tabs, and obnoxiously shaped boxes. They make me pine for simple hand-slicing clamshells.
I've had similar problems with trying to make a custom graph in Cacti. For example, in MRTG, to make a graph that simply added two OIDs, you just set the source to OID1+OID2, and you're done.
Just try doing that in Cacti. You'll learn more about graph templates and CDEFs than you ever cared to know in the process...
The initial configuration of Nagios can be quite a pain, but as I said in another post farther down the page here, with judicious use of templates, it is now very easy to manage once configured.
We use both. Cacti for graphing, Nagios for monitoring and paging.
Nagios 3 did change a bit for the better. However, because they removed MySQL support I had to rewrite large portions of the existing configuration.
In the process, I made much better use of templating and now each host config is in its own file, and Nagios will load all files in given directories thanks to the cfg_dir= directive.
For example, all of my servers are in etc/nagios/servers/(servername).cfg, routers are in etc/nagios/routers/(routername).cfg, and so on.
If I want to add a server, I just pick a similar one and copy the file, change the name/IP/services/etc, and reload Nagios. With the older config (held over from Nagios 1.x) I had to edit half a dozen files or more just to add a single server. Thankfully those days are over!
Some of these abilities may have been in Nagios 2.x, but because the old config "Just Worked" it was not changed.
I wanted to use greylisting here but the idea was shot down, as some people actually expect people to be nearly instantaneous and if it's not, they moan and groan.
Doesn't matter how many times I try to explain that isn't how e-mail is supposed to work, that it's unreliable, etc, they still expect to hit send, then tell someone to check their mail 30 seconds later and it's there waiting.
It would help, though, with the person in the summary who has been confronted about taking pictures of buildings from public places.
It may not have provided proof that the someone was allowed to take pictures in a hotel or mall, but it would have let them know beforehand that he had to abide by the request to stop.
Some of the outrage is warranted, but a lot is also overblown on both sides.
A printout like that helps both sides, really. It keeps we, the photographic public, informed about where we can and cannot take pictures, and it also lets us know what can and cannot be done to us should be we confronted for doing so. It also helps law enforcement and security personnel know what their courses of action are for dealing with photographers.
Also in the general rule section, above where it says you have to abide by their requests, it says you may reasonably assume you are allowed to take pictures unless/until told otherwise, but it is a judgment call...
I've been in plenty of hotels that had no problem with picture taking, but none of them had security personnel actively doing much of anything.:-)
True, it doesn't mean you can take pictures in malls, but it does offer advice if the security personnel try to detain you or take your film or camera cards.
Of course when faced with reading all that, the security people might just feel safer tossing you out, or be so confused they'll think you really can take pictures.:-)
Actually, they have no legal basis to detain you, according to the link I posted. They can ask you to leave, but they cannot keep you against your will.
It's hard to tell from the screen shots, but it looks rather flat to me. I wonder if they left out terrain/grading entirely?
It sure would make things simpler, but it also detracts from the realism a bit. I wouldn't mind, though, one of the first things I usually did when starting a city from scratch on my own was to flatten the land out. That is, unless I was going for a certain overall effect.
They show up fine for me, just keep scrolling down. When I land on one of their pages from a google search, I see all of their gibberish posts but underneath all that, way down the page, I see the full text answers.
I cared about dropping it, just not enough to quit my job over it. As I said in a later post, I rarely use Usenet myself anymore so it doesn't really matter.
I've not heard of an ISP blocking NNTP access entirely, but I imagine that there would be ways around that (alternate ports, proxies, etc...) for the determined.
People in some places are limited, yes, but even out here in the rural Midwest, there are 4+ choices for DSL (Telco, at least three regional/national providers) and there are also cable and satellite to consider.
People here had plenty of choices, but nobody *here* cared so much about Usenet that they were willing to drop their account over it.
That said, we're so small that if one person really moaned and groaned loud enough, my boss probably would've lowered their bill by $5 just to keep them.
I agree with you with respect to less service for the same price.
I doubt the economics work the same for a company like TW, but we have seen our costs for just about everything skyrocket from the phone company lately. We were not able to cut anything out, so we were forced to raise rates for some customers.
Knowing what I know about the behind-the-scenes ISP workings, I'd have been happy that my ISP found a way to keep the rates flat with minimal customer impact.
(Of course all that means nothing if they've continually hiked your rates up, too...)
We've had people complaining to us right and left about other companies' service prices going up, most by $5/mo or so: Cable (Comcast), DSL (SBC, Verizon), and even some other local/regional ISPs.
It's not a good time to be in the access biz, unless you're a telco...
That's what I have heard from others as well. I haven't bothered to sign up for one, because my casual reading of groups like alt.sysadmin.recovery and such has waned over the years, and I didn't see paying even $5/mo worth it for how little I used it myself. I would rarely post, and only lurked in a few alt.* groups.
The servers we had, and the ones our upstream provider provides for us, were both outsourced to SuperNews. Their coverage was spotty for us, retention was OK if memory served, but they had some really bad bandwidth limitations.
This is quite a political issue, and I think they are (as many others have already speculated) using this as an excuse to do away with a very resource-intensive and negligibly profitable service.
Politicians will never learn that the kind of oddballs who go for that crap will find ways to do it, no matter what laws they have in place.
Do they have Usenet servers at every POP across the country? If so, then you are right, it does use less bandwidth to have "local" servers, but with a company like Verizon, they would have only a small number of Usenet farms used nationwide. Transmitting in their own network uses up bandwidth.
This may not be the same bandwidth that connects to internet peers, but it is not a factor that can be ignored.
Also, this point:
Keep in mind, most ISPs only pay the big bucks for their internet connectivity. The network between them and you (and all their customers) is MUCH cheaper, measured only in maintenance costs. The internet lines have the same maintenance cost, plus bandwidth costs, on top of base charges. Is not entirely true. It may be true for large ISPs like Verizon, but for non-CLEC ISPs (and maybe them, I can't speak to specifics for those) like the one I work at, we also pay a hefty cost per month for the aggregate circuit that connects us with DSL customers. It doesn't matter what a customer is downloading -- from the Internet at large or from us directly, it uses up bandwidth on this link, and it is a finite resource, and for us that actually costs more than our IP upstream at this point.
We dropped usenet several years ago when the cost kept going up from our provider.
When we dropped it, we had exactly two calls to complain. Neither of them canceled because of it. This is out of a couple thousand subscribers.
I was probably the only one who actually cared, and it wasn't that big of a deal for me; Because I work there, I still had access to our upstream provider's news servers which weren't open to our subscribers.
I doubt Verizon will hurt much because of this. If they lose anyone, it may only number in the hundreds, if that. The cost of the bandwidth saved by dumping Usenet will more than make up for the subscribers lost.
There are always independent Usenet providers, too, for a few bucks per month.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a couple of these and they really do work well. Between that and a pair of cutters for wire ties, I can open almost anything in under a minute. Including convoluted child toy packaging.
Toy packaging these days is far, far worse than the plastic clamshell. Dozens of industrial strength wire ties, miles of tape, plastic screwed into other plastic through cardboard, plastic pull-tabs, and obnoxiously shaped boxes. They make me pine for simple hand-slicing clamshells.
I've had similar problems with trying to make a custom graph in Cacti. For example, in MRTG, to make a graph that simply added two OIDs, you just set the source to OID1+OID2, and you're done.
Just try doing that in Cacti. You'll learn more about graph templates and CDEFs than you ever cared to know in the process...
The initial configuration of Nagios can be quite a pain, but as I said in another post farther down the page here, with judicious use of templates, it is now very easy to manage once configured.
We use both. Cacti for graphing, Nagios for monitoring and paging.
Nagios 3 did change a bit for the better. However, because they removed MySQL support I had to rewrite large portions of the existing configuration.
In the process, I made much better use of templating and now each host config is in its own file, and Nagios will load all files in given directories thanks to the cfg_dir= directive.
For example, all of my servers are in etc/nagios/servers/(servername).cfg, routers are in etc/nagios/routers/(routername).cfg, and so on.
If I want to add a server, I just pick a similar one and copy the file, change the name/IP/services/etc, and reload Nagios. With the older config (held over from Nagios 1.x) I had to edit half a dozen files or more just to add a single server. Thankfully those days are over!
Some of these abilities may have been in Nagios 2.x, but because the old config "Just Worked" it was not changed.
Sounds like something that pfSense might be able to do, between squid and maybe the captive portal.
I wanted to use greylisting here but the idea was shot down, as some people actually expect people to be nearly instantaneous and if it's not, they moan and groan.
Doesn't matter how many times I try to explain that isn't how e-mail is supposed to work, that it's unreliable, etc, they still expect to hit send, then tell someone to check their mail 30 seconds later and it's there waiting.
Spam seems to be fairly steady here, perhaps up a tad. Here's the Monthly graph from our main filter (not from that domain, FYI.)
It would help, though, with the person in the summary who has been confronted about taking pictures of buildings from public places.
It may not have provided proof that the someone was allowed to take pictures in a hotel or mall, but it would have let them know beforehand that he had to abide by the request to stop.
Some of the outrage is warranted, but a lot is also overblown on both sides.
A printout like that helps both sides, really. It keeps we, the photographic public, informed about where we can and cannot take pictures, and it also lets us know what can and cannot be done to us should be we confronted for doing so. It also helps law enforcement and security personnel know what their courses of action are for dealing with photographers.
Also in the general rule section, above where it says you have to abide by their requests, it says you may reasonably assume you are allowed to take pictures unless/until told otherwise, but it is a judgment call...
I've been in plenty of hotels that had no problem with picture taking, but none of them had security personnel actively doing much of anything. :-)
True, it doesn't mean you can take pictures in malls, but it does offer advice if the security personnel try to detain you or take your film or camera cards.
Of course when faced with reading all that, the security people might just feel safer tossing you out, or be so confused they'll think you really can take pictures. :-)
Actually, they have no legal basis to detain you, according to the link I posted. They can ask you to leave, but they cannot keep you against your will.
I need to stuff a copy of The Photographer's Right in my camera bag in case something like this ever happens...
I also liked having some hills for hydro power, but I never really got into segregating things like that.
Even if those things don't help in the game, as long as they don't have a detrimental effect on the outcome it is still fun to think that way.
It's hard to tell from the screen shots, but it looks rather flat to me. I wonder if they left out terrain/grading entirely?
It sure would make things simpler, but it also detracts from the realism a bit. I wouldn't mind, though, one of the first things I usually did when starting a city from scratch on my own was to flatten the land out. That is, unless I was going for a certain overall effect.
Why not toss in SimSpeedCameras and SimRedlightCameras while you're at it. ;-)
Watch the accident rates soar as your money piles up!
They show up fine for me, just keep scrolling down. When I land on one of their pages from a google search, I see all of their gibberish posts but underneath all that, way down the page, I see the full text answers.
Don't forget the failed attempt at a pyramid and great wall replica down here in Bedford. (more info at Wikipedia)
While not overtly artsy, I've always been fond of the posters that Javvin makes.
I've got their network protocols map on the wall of my office.
I cared about dropping it, just not enough to quit my job over it. As I said in a later post, I rarely use Usenet myself anymore so it doesn't really matter.
I've not heard of an ISP blocking NNTP access entirely, but I imagine that there would be ways around that (alternate ports, proxies, etc...) for the determined.
People in some places are limited, yes, but even out here in the rural Midwest, there are 4+ choices for DSL (Telco, at least three regional/national providers) and there are also cable and satellite to consider.
People here had plenty of choices, but nobody *here* cared so much about Usenet that they were willing to drop their account over it.
That said, we're so small that if one person really moaned and groaned loud enough, my boss probably would've lowered their bill by $5 just to keep them.
Really? I haven't really had a problem with it, but I use it very sparingly.
It'd be nice if they offered access to nntp clients, at least to the text-only groups.
I agree with you with respect to less service for the same price.
I doubt the economics work the same for a company like TW, but we have seen our costs for just about everything skyrocket from the phone company lately. We were not able to cut anything out, so we were forced to raise rates for some customers.
Knowing what I know about the behind-the-scenes ISP workings, I'd have been happy that my ISP found a way to keep the rates flat with minimal customer impact.
(Of course all that means nothing if they've continually hiked your rates up, too...)
We've had people complaining to us right and left about other companies' service prices going up, most by $5/mo or so: Cable (Comcast), DSL (SBC, Verizon), and even some other local/regional ISPs.
It's not a good time to be in the access biz, unless you're a telco...
Or if you're really just reading text groups, why not access them via Google Groups? That has worked fine for me in the absence of Usenet in the past.
That's what I have heard from others as well. I haven't bothered to sign up for one, because my casual reading of groups like alt.sysadmin.recovery and such has waned over the years, and I didn't see paying even $5/mo worth it for how little I used it myself. I would rarely post, and only lurked in a few alt.* groups.
The servers we had, and the ones our upstream provider provides for us, were both outsourced to SuperNews. Their coverage was spotty for us, retention was OK if memory served, but they had some really bad bandwidth limitations.
This is quite a political issue, and I think they are (as many others have already speculated) using this as an excuse to do away with a very resource-intensive and negligibly profitable service.
Politicians will never learn that the kind of oddballs who go for that crap will find ways to do it, no matter what laws they have in place.
This may not be the same bandwidth that connects to internet peers, but it is not a factor that can be ignored.
Also, this point: Keep in mind, most ISPs only pay the big bucks for their internet connectivity. The network between them and you (and all their customers) is MUCH cheaper, measured only in maintenance costs. The internet lines have the same maintenance cost, plus bandwidth costs, on top of base charges. Is not entirely true. It may be true for large ISPs like Verizon, but for non-CLEC ISPs (and maybe them, I can't speak to specifics for those) like the one I work at, we also pay a hefty cost per month for the aggregate circuit that connects us with DSL customers. It doesn't matter what a customer is downloading -- from the Internet at large or from us directly, it uses up bandwidth on this link, and it is a finite resource, and for us that actually costs more than our IP upstream at this point.
We dropped usenet several years ago when the cost kept going up from our provider.
When we dropped it, we had exactly two calls to complain. Neither of them canceled because of it. This is out of a couple thousand subscribers.
I was probably the only one who actually cared, and it wasn't that big of a deal for me; Because I work there, I still had access to our upstream provider's news servers which weren't open to our subscribers.
I doubt Verizon will hurt much because of this. If they lose anyone, it may only number in the hundreds, if that. The cost of the bandwidth saved by dumping Usenet will more than make up for the subscribers lost.
There are always independent Usenet providers, too, for a few bucks per month.
Looks like I'll be trying this tomorrow:
:)
Appendix E. OpenGL Environment Variable Settings, which was referred to by this thread, which happened to be the first hit for "compiz anti-aliasing" in Google. Go figure.