First of all apologies as this post is a little bit late on in the thread but I only just started catching up on Ask Slashdot.
I run a helpdesk for a small - medium sized ISP and recently we wanted to start an online knowledge base that would be web based. Even though I am not overly ecstatic with the result, it seems to serve its purpose. I will take you through the steps that we went through with this :
1) Installed a CGI based Wiki, sorry can't remember the name of this one. It went soooo sooo slow. True the server was only a P200 but the front page would take over 5 seconds to load sometimes.
2) Wrote a tree structured knowledge base from scratch using PHP. This in my mind was the best approach despite the time writing the knowledge base code. Unfortunately the person developing this had other ideas and this ended up getting scrapped. The one thing I loved about this was its tree structure, it was very easy to see what steps you had been down and what possible paths there were to take.
3) Finally we installed PHPWiki and was fairly impressed. It ran quick and later on when it got moved onto a dual processor system I actually noticed no speed increase, so I guess it was running as fast as it can just on a P200. It is easy to maintain, though only thing that I miss is a nice tree like structure, instead pages are just linked to each other.
Can I read my own CD-R discs using Linux (for PlayStation 2) ?
No. The PlayStation 2 is designed not to read CD-R "gold" discs. Only
PlayStation CD-ROM and PlayStation 2 CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs are compatible.
This kinda takes a lot away from the PS2. One of the joys of linux is being able to download a distribution, burn it to cd and try it out. If the PS2 doesn't real burnt cd's this is going to make trying out the latest dists a bit of a pain. Just my $0.02.
I found it very interesting when you follow the links to sign up for Lindows.com Insiders plan that you have to tick a box that states, "I hereby certify that I am not a resident of Washington State". Doesn't this seem to be going a bit far to just try and prevent workers and family of Microsoft for becoming part of the Lindows.com insiders plan (assuming that this is what it is here for).
I am also very dubious at paying $99 just to see an inside peak at a new Operating System that is based on Open Source products.
Joining the Lindows.com program also states that you may not get any software to test, doesn't this sound a bit strange. "Joining the Lindows.com Insiders program does not guarantee that you will receive any software to test or review."
Also when you sign up you agree to "Agree to a non-disclosure agreement, keeping the program itself and those things you learn as a Lindows.com Insider confidential, just as any Lindows.com employee would".
Maybe I am just being paranoid, but doesn't all of this just seem a bit ridiculous?
The stakes are high for Microsoft, which shipped about 1.5 million Xboxes over the holidays.
And then in a later paragraph...
Microsoft sales and marketing director John O'Rourke said fewer than 1 percent of the consoles have proven faulty.
Thats a hell of a lot (15,000) of people with faulty Christmas presents really. I'm surprised there hasnt been more publicity than this if that many are faulty.
Have any slashdotters reading this actually had any experience with faulty XBoxes?
Click on executable email attachments?
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 1
Although many Linux users do not run anti-virus software, they are generally more sophisticated about security threats and are unlikely to click on executable e-mail attachments, he said.
Isn't this the whole point of why it is much easier to get a virus on Outlook Express than in a linux email client. Outlook Express makes it so much easier to run a virus, it takes two clicks from memory, or none in the case of the Bad Trans B virus (or viruses with similar headers). With linux, to run a virus (to its full extent), it generally means having to save the virus, load up a shell, become root and then run a binary.
The whole organisation of the.info and.biz tld's all seems to be crap. Here in New Zealand,an Australian company managing the.biz &.info domains managed to extract from their partnering.nz registrar a mailing list of every.nz nameholder. They then mailed (physcial mail, not email) this list of people telling them that they should secure their domain by paying $250 to them. Only if you read the finer print did you actually find out that this cost was to secure a.biz or.info version of your domain and that it didnt actually secure it at all.
Since then, the.info tld has opened for business, and we only seem to see crap, hastily put up websites around, or carbon copies of the equivelant.com or.co.uk etc. Although all these new tld's are probably a good idea, I think the organisers went about things in the wrong way.
We had a similar thing here in New Zealand in our last census (2001 also). Lots of chain emails, advertisments at universities, and such circulated, asking people to fill in their religion as Jedi Knight.
I know myself that I filled in my religion in as Jedi Knight. It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens here in NZ as in the UK when the census results are counted, or if the government ends up censoring the census!
By the way... I'm looking for a job in the USA - maybe YOU know of a open position? Mail me!
Now thats gotta be a lot better advertising that putting an ad in the situations wanted of the local paper (or a usa one). Imagine having your job request slashdotted!
Wouldn't this be next to useless? Cartographers draw maps of the real world because they do not change very quickly. A map of America will still be fairly correct in 10,000 years time.
Imagine what the map of the Internet drawn just 5 years ago would have looked like compared to todays?
At first glance this seems to be a fairly basic-ish certification as the course is aimed at the Linux Professional with 6 months of experience with the Linux Operating System, but after looking at it further it covers a lot of different area's. These seem to include installation, xwindows, planning systems and all the basic linux services. One very surprising thing is that so little of the marking schedule is based on Planning the Implmentation (only 4%), I would have thought a lot more should be based on this, as this would be a valuable skill.
Overall its good seeing a course which is aimed at linux as a whole, instead of one distribution, and is also something that I would have the skills to complete myself.
Mr Barry said Optus had been fooled by a simple ruse as the spam gang split its operations, setting up the computer with sites to be spammed in the US and hosting the domain name server at Optus.
It seems that the server running on the Optus network is only acting as a Domain server for the spamming. I would hope if this is the case, that the server actually doing the Spamming, which is in the states, has also been black listed.
Plus, as the article says, running a nameserver is not against the Terms and Conditions of Optus, so there is little they can do about this. Anti-Spam people often seem to be so wrapped up in their cause, they often don't realise they are doing more harm than good, i.e. blocking half of Australia's email.
When I have tried these two products myself, I found Wine performed well upto expectations, even if certain programs did require quite a large amount of configuration to get running. VMWare on the other hand run very slow, and was close to unusable on a k6-2-500.
Theres nothing better than a quick game of sol.exe straight after installing Wine:)
At home I have a 33.6 modem, and at work I have a 10mbit connection to the internet (I work at an ISP). Nowadays I don't like having to use the net at home, but when I do I find it quite bearable. Slashdot and all my everyday sites load fairly quickly and grabbing the odd file is fine.
One of the main problems with having a fairly quick internet connection, is always getting frustrated with the congestion between yourself and the site you are visiting. Just because you have a fast connection, doesn't mean the other end does.
When I used to be on modem all the time, I could quite easily download 250 meg a day, which is not all that bad. So really, being stuck on a modem isn't all that bad, just depends on what you use it for I guess.
It probably is a good thing to point out the similarities between Windows and Mandrake, as the market that Mandrake seems to aim at is the people that are new to linux and are looking for an easy migration to linux. Having a nice and friendly desktop, that is similar to Windows will make that migration a lot easier.
"The mammoth computer is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997." So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?
Slashdot Mirror
Thats the sound of those questions flying past way above my head...
First of all apologies as this post is a little bit late on in the thread but I only just started catching up on Ask Slashdot.
I run a helpdesk for a small - medium sized ISP and recently we wanted to start an online knowledge base that would be web based. Even though I am not overly ecstatic with the result, it seems to serve its purpose. I will take you through the steps that we went through with this :
1) Installed a CGI based Wiki, sorry can't remember the name of this one. It went soooo sooo slow. True the server was only a P200 but the front page would take over 5 seconds to load sometimes.
2) Wrote a tree structured knowledge base from scratch using PHP. This in my mind was the best approach despite the time writing the knowledge base code. Unfortunately the person developing this had other ideas and this ended up getting scrapped. The one thing I loved about this was its tree structure, it was very easy to see what steps you had been down and what possible paths there were to take.
3) Finally we installed PHPWiki and was fairly impressed. It ran quick and later on when it got moved onto a dual processor system I actually noticed no speed increase, so I guess it was running as fast as it can just on a P200. It is easy to maintain, though only thing that I miss is a nice tree like structure, instead pages are just linked to each other.
Hope this is of some use.
Can I read my own CD-R discs using Linux (for PlayStation 2) ?
No. The PlayStation 2 is designed not to read CD-R "gold" discs. Only PlayStation CD-ROM and PlayStation 2 CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs are compatible.
This kinda takes a lot away from the PS2. One of the joys of linux is being able to download a distribution, burn it to cd and try it out. If the PS2 doesn't real burnt cd's this is going to make trying out the latest dists a bit of a pain. Just my $0.02.
Why bother interviewing the real Alan Cox when this chip is out there.
I found it very interesting when you follow the links to sign up for Lindows.com Insiders plan that you have to tick a box that states, "I hereby certify that I am not a resident of Washington State". Doesn't this seem to be going a bit far to just try and prevent workers and family of Microsoft for becoming part of the Lindows.com insiders plan (assuming that this is what it is here for).
I am also very dubious at paying $99 just to see an inside peak at a new Operating System that is based on Open Source products.
Joining the Lindows.com program also states that you may not get any software to test, doesn't this sound a bit strange. "Joining the Lindows.com Insiders program does not guarantee that you will receive any software to test or review."
Also when you sign up you agree to "Agree to a non-disclosure agreement, keeping the program itself and those things you learn as a Lindows.com Insider confidential, just as any Lindows.com employee would".
Maybe I am just being paranoid, but doesn't all of this just seem a bit ridiculous?
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.linuxwatch.org Port 80
The stakes are high for Microsoft, which shipped about 1.5 million Xboxes over the holidays.
And then in a later paragraph...
Microsoft sales and marketing director John O'Rourke said fewer than 1 percent of the consoles have proven faulty.
Thats a hell of a lot (15,000) of people with faulty Christmas presents really. I'm surprised there hasnt been more publicity than this if that many are faulty.
Have any slashdotters reading this actually had any experience with faulty XBoxes?
Although many Linux users do not run anti-virus software, they are generally more sophisticated about security threats and are unlikely to click on executable e-mail attachments, he said.
Isn't this the whole point of why it is much easier to get a virus on Outlook Express than in a linux email client. Outlook Express makes it so much easier to run a virus, it takes two clicks from memory, or none in the case of the Bad Trans B virus (or viruses with similar headers). With linux, to run a virus (to its full extent), it generally means having to save the virus, load up a shell, become root and then run a binary.
The whole organisation of the .info and .biz tld's all seems to be crap. Here in New Zealand ,an Australian company managing the .biz & .info domains managed to extract from their partnering .nz registrar a mailing list of every .nz nameholder. They then mailed (physcial mail, not email) this list of people telling them that they should secure their domain by paying $250 to them. Only if you read the finer print did you actually find out that this cost was to secure a .biz or .info version of your domain and that it didnt actually secure it at all.
.info tld has opened for business, and we only seem to see crap, hastily put up websites around, or carbon copies of the equivelant .com or .co.uk etc. Although all these new tld's are probably a good idea, I think the organisers went about things in the wrong way.
Since then, the
And for some more proof that Bert is evil check this out
We had a similar thing here in New Zealand in our last census (2001 also). Lots of chain emails, advertisments at universities, and such circulated, asking people to fill in their religion as Jedi Knight.
I know myself that I filled in my religion in as Jedi Knight. It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens here in NZ as in the UK when the census results are counted, or if the government ends up censoring the census!
Especially considering the stereotyped Sweedish Woman, is tall, leggy, blonde and tanned. :)
By the way... I'm looking for a job in the USA - maybe YOU know of a open position? Mail me!
Now thats gotta be a lot better advertising that putting an ad in the situations wanted of the local paper (or a usa one). Imagine having your job request slashdotted!
if ((finger2 == up) && (other_fingers == down)) { /* }
reboot -t now }
else if ((finger2 == up) && (finger1 == up) && (other_fingers == down)) {
rm -rf
Wouldn't this be next to useless? Cartographers draw maps of the real world because they do not change very quickly. A map of America will still be fairly correct in 10,000 years time.
Imagine what the map of the Internet drawn just 5 years ago would have looked like compared to todays?
At first glance this seems to be a fairly basic-ish certification as the course is aimed at the Linux Professional with 6 months of experience with the Linux Operating System, but after looking at it further it covers a lot of different area's. These seem to include installation, xwindows, planning systems and all the basic linux services. One very surprising thing is that so little of the marking schedule is based on Planning the Implmentation (only 4%), I would have thought a lot more should be based on this, as this would be a valuable skill.
Overall its good seeing a course which is aimed at linux as a whole, instead of one distribution, and is also something that I would have the skills to complete myself.
Mr Barry said Optus had been fooled by a simple ruse as the spam gang split its operations, setting up the computer with sites to be spammed in the US and hosting the domain name server at Optus.
It seems that the server running on the Optus network is only acting as a Domain server for the spamming. I would hope if this is the case, that the server actually doing the Spamming, which is in the states, has also been black listed.
Plus, as the article says, running a nameserver is not against the Terms and Conditions of Optus, so there is little they can do about this.
Anti-Spam people often seem to be so wrapped up in their cause, they often don't realise they are doing more harm than good, i.e. blocking half of Australia's email.
When I have tried these two products myself, I found Wine performed well upto expectations, even if certain programs did require quite a large amount of configuration to get running. VMWare on the other hand run very slow, and was close to unusable on a k6-2-500.
:)
Theres nothing better than a quick game of sol.exe straight after installing Wine
I wonder how many times more powerful our modern day computers are compared to this articles "computerized slide rule"? :)
At home I have a 33.6 modem, and at work I have a 10mbit connection to the internet (I work at an ISP). Nowadays I don't like having to use the net at home, but when I do I find it quite bearable. Slashdot and all my everyday sites load fairly quickly and grabbing the odd file is fine.
One of the main problems with having a fairly quick internet connection, is always getting frustrated with the congestion between yourself and the site you are visiting. Just because you have a fast connection, doesn't mean the other end does.
When I used to be on modem all the time, I could quite easily download 250 meg a day, which is not all that bad. So really, being stuck on a modem isn't all that bad, just depends on what you use it for I guess.
It probably is a good thing to point out the similarities between Windows and Mandrake, as the market that Mandrake seems to aim at is the people that are new to linux and are looking for an easy migration to linux. Having a nice and friendly desktop, that is similar to Windows will make that migration a lot easier.
"I'd like to see it beat 1000 chess champions..
all at once"
Why not make it a real challenge, and do it running WindowsME?
"The mammoth computer is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997."
So do we get to see this computer beat another chess champion?