I liked the MacBook Air form factor, but not the OS so I blew away MacOS completely and replaced it with Fedora 17. Overall it's been great, it "just works." Gnome 3 works well on it and fully integrates with the brightness and volume buttons without issue. I did however install a few Gnome extensions like Axe Menu, Alternate Tab, and Task bar, now it's not unlike any desktop I've grown used to. Libvert also works well on it allowing me to build test servers when I need. Overall it's a 95+% solution for me.
>> But if you COULD have a doctor there, without messing with Skype or a webcam, would you think that's a bad idea?
> The doctor is at the hospital, treating the other patients who may have life-threatening injuries. You're suggesting the doctor step away from those duties to help the EMTs perform... basic triage?
As a former EMT I would also point out there is a reason a doctor is in a hospital, not an ambulance. Doctors are very well trained at what they do, and they are used to having many tools at their hands in the hospital, but in the field none of those tools exist. I have said this before to many people, those who work in a hospital can be some of the worst people to provide assistance in the field as a citizen responder. This is a paradox, the best trained person is the worst person to provide assistance at a car wreck they just witnessed? But it's true. EMTs focus on the basics to get the patient to advanced care quickly (Platinum 10, golden hour). In addition doctors and nurses are not used to thinking about things like scene safety and how they could become another victim. Lastly let's say you had the hospital in a box and you could move the patient into this immediately after the accident etc, the first thing they will be doing is stabilizing, after that is done *then* they consider diagnosis and treatment.
Just in case our "Upside down" compatriots in Australia are confused about an Ox-Bow lake, you would know them as a Billabong, yes body of water that the Swagman boiled his billy by and ultimately jumped into is real...
And to bring the comparison full circle, the Big Mac Index from January 2012 showed Latvia to be -30% parity. Meaning if you were to adjust the price to US Dollars it would cost an equivalent of about US$15-16 in the US.
The index can be found here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily-chart-3
Consider this, if a CEO takes a $1 pay package and receives only company stock as their benefits package that means the company has to do well for them to make money. In addition *you* are free to invest in these companies and "freeload" on their incentive package and earn some income as well.
Statistics show that if the victim has a firearm, there's a greater chance of either he/she or the people near the victim being wounded. Homicides should drop in this context.
As for number 2... nope, nothing on that, it's Venezuela after all...
Tell that to Susanna Hupp after the Luby's shooting. She watched a gunman shoot both of her parents, while her gun was lawfully elsewhere, it was illegal at the time to conceal carry in Texas.
Statistics show taking guns away causes an increase in violent crime... See Australia and England Statistics show that allowing for more lawful firearm posession (concealed carry) tends to reduce violent crime... See Florida, Texas etc.
The bottom line really comes down to this... Do you want to have a 100% guarantee that a criminal can shoot you with impunity, or a chance to protect your life... Tell that to Susanna Hupp after the Luby's shooting.
While technically true, this argument does fall apart when a company such as Oracle rebrands RHEL into OEL, then goes on the offensive against RHEL/Red Hat when they don't have much of a team of developers to continue developing OEL should the hypothetical, but very unlikely, situation of Red Hat going away. In a situation such as that it's kind of like Oracle is biting the hand that feeds it.... CentOS on the other hand rebrands RHEL, but does not try to present themselves as the main proprietor of the distribution. In addition the CentOS community does try to push bug reports upstream when possible.
Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a subscription which includes access to software updates and some level of support.
Red Hat also announced that they will be donating $100,000 to each of the following organizations; Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and UNICEF Innovation Labs. http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat
If you're worried about a user jumping out of your app and then searching the Internet, and you're in a a testing setting, you should be looking at a wholistic approach.
Your students will break your application, it's only a matter of time. Use other approaches to make this a useless option.
1) Don't allow any Internet access from the network layer, at all, this includes DNS servers. Ideally your systems should be on a completely disconnected network, meaning there are absolutely no external network connections.
2) Use SELinux to lock down your system. SELinux uses a mandatory permissions model, meaning you *must* be granted permission to be able to do anything.
3) Lock down alternative means of cheating. Cell phones, paper notes and so forth.
4) Follow through with punishing cheating in an appropriate manner.
5) Listen to the feedback of your users (Instructors and Students). This may seem counter intuitive, but it can help you build a better system.
Before I came to Red Hat I had a similar opinion. When I worked in Silicon Valley I thought "Why would anyone want to pay for Red Hat, I can't afford it so that means it's expensive." However after being at Red Hat for over a year my opinion has changed, and that has been because of some things I have witnessed.
Support is one of the first things people think about, however there is a little more than meets the eye here. Let's start with the packages. Let's say there's a major exploit in SSHd, you will likely see a fix from Red Hat within a few days, which will then be available via RHN. The source to the rpm will also be available at ftp.redhat.com due to the GPL obligations. (More on the GPL and RH later.) At this point in time RH customers have the patch available, in this fictitious scenario let's say it took RH 3 days to release the patch from time of exploit publication. CentOS users still don't have the fix, plus CentOS operates somewhat as a "Black Box." You will get the fix when they get around to it, let's say that takes two weeks before it's released (Could be more could be less). That means your systems are vulnerable for about two weeks, in some shops that's an acceptable risk, in other places it's not. * Support from people is the other thing that people think about. Have you ever had to call RH support? If yes have you ever talked with an idiot? In the many times I have called RH support I have not dealt with anyone who I felt was sub-standard. Most often the problem I have seen is when the clients I'm working with do not present RH support with the information required in a timely manner. When the answers come back they often link to other knowledge base articles and have clear steps to either solve the problem or to better understand some of the complexities. When a solution is found and there is not a KBase article I understand (I may have heard wrong here) that there is an obligation to write a KBase article. I know that tickets are reviewed after they are closed. One ticket I opened regarding Satellite for a customer is getting discussion amongst the Satellite developers about how to best handle the same scenario in the future. * Support from Articles, this I feel is a real hidden Gem of RH. Nobody knows about it until you have a subscription, and then everyone is so used to using Google for their answers they forget to start here first. The KBase articles from RH are phenomenal! I had a customer ask me how to rebuild the RH ISO image to include their own KS script. I could Google and find 10 articles talking about much of what I'm looking for or search the KBase and find one article that has every step needed for modifying a RHEL disk to have the KS script on the disk. * Training. Having been through a few RH training classes I can say they are all very good. Yes there are some areas where I have questioned the need to know some things, but that is normal, but I'm never left feeling like the class was a waste. I have always walked out having learned many things which I can use later. * Consulting. Yes there are many open source consultants who can come onsite and help implement a solution or fix something, however how many of them have access to the people who wrote the Distro or maintain the upstream project? RH has an internal list just for technical questions, many of the engineers are on this list and very technical answers are delieverd. Often SAs (Solutions Architects) and Consultants will post questions their clients have asked. I have yet to see a response of "Why would you want to do that?" or "RTFM." * Additional products. Red Hat takes upstream projects and repackages them to integrate tightly with RH. Satellite is one example, it comes from Spacewalk and is designed to help keep internal systems up to date and patched according to their channel assignment. Could you use Spacewalk to manage your CentOS machines, yes you can! However let's say you have a problem getting Spacewlak to work right, or there's a bug, what kind of support
>His job is to maximize shareholder value. If that means settling for a lower price than the cost of pursuing a court case, that is what he is going to do.
f I had the points I'd mod your post up.:-)
You actually understand what is going on better than most people responding to this thread. It comes down to simple economics. If you can pay someone to shut up (and perhaps get a license for Open Source in general) for a fraction of what it would cost to have your legal team peruse it then it makes more sense to pay them the hush money than waste your legal team's efforts. In addition if you loose on a small fry the potential ramifications are huge as they ripple through the rest of of the patent system, which in part is built upon previous cases. Rather it makes much more sense to be strategic in dealing with those who are trolling.
The threat that one day someone will post your code and or screen shots from your programs for everyone to ridicule should be motivation to either improve or write worse code.
Does this folding tool allow for the reuse of common sub-steps? e.g. (using the example in the summary) many tasks might require the knowledge of how to find "valid traffic", but if the steps change, will every one of the super-tasks need to be updated to show this? This alone has kept me from providing embedded sub-task level documentation details many times.
Good question. As far as I know the plugin I'm thinking of you would have to update each page if the low level information changes. However if you use macro inclusions I believe that is possible.
Thinking further on that, you could create a wiki page for each subgroup, which then includes each sub information. There is the potential for a closed loop recursion happening which is a bad thing (tm).
I was reading through some of the Trac hacks for the wiki component and they had a folding plugin. If you create a table of steps you could then create a "fold" with greater detail should someone want to open it up and see it. The nice thing is you are not taken to a new page and you can continue to work and read the page you are already on. You can also imbed folds which can also allow a user to drill down to as much or as little detail as is needed or available.
All that is left now is to write enough information for the lowest common denominator.
Back in the day we used to use MSI Planet. One of the RF engineers printed up a projected plot of the whole SF bay area and put it up on the wall. It was very cool to look at the dead spots and how coverage impacted coverage long with reflection and other problems.
A friend also runs http://www.wirelessmapping.com/ where they will run projected plots for coverage of almost any RF output.
How come it's not been picked up by any major distribution?
SuSE has had it for a while now. My recollection of seeing it in YAST goes back at least a year. It's a *SNAP* to setup under SuSE. Select the package, then go to the docs directory and read the SuSE readme, run the setup program. Done, less than 10 minutes start to finish. If anything the windows client is more confusing than the Linux server under SuSE.:-)
I've got it running on my personal machines which are sitting in a colo. It runs over SSH which is great and I locked down SSH to only allow "trusted" users and everything works great! I haven't played with it's Samba integration but it's supposed to allow you to share files from your windows Client with your NX session. Also NX will apparently pipe audio across the link but I haven't played with this yet. For my needs it's been perfect.
Oh ya... the server (Linux) and client (Windows/Linux) are both free as in beer.
I just returned from Uganda with mine and it was pretty good. The keyboard is a little on the small side and the processor isn't the most powerful but it worked well for me and the touchscreen was quite nice. It had an SD and CF slot which made importing pictures onto it for viewing quite nice. The biggest limitation was the lack of USB ports, it only has one. Overall I was quite impressed with the battery and the size/weight. I purchased the padded case from Fujitsu and it was a life saver, dropped it in a mud puddle, fortunately the puddle wasn't too deep, but the case now has a fresh layer of Ugandan mud. I've also dropped it from about 3' without the padded case onto concrete and it did ok, just a few new character marks. I lost the right arrow key, but I can still press it and it still works. I have no idea now what other two functions are on that key, but they weren't important as I didn't seem to miss them.
The touchscreen was very nice to have. It made going through pictures easier and overall I found the Vista basic that came with it usable if you don't mind working a little slower. I would suggest getting a surge suppressor that works world wide. I found one at the airport that worked quite well and it provided USB power. Had I know about this device I would have brought my Plextor external DVD-RW.
I have a freind who used to work at Oracle until they moved their data center folks to Austin. He said that Larry made it very publicly known that he wanted to take over People Soft so he could fire everyone. If this is true there are soon to be several empty buildings and several thousand people without jobs in the Pleasanton area. This does not bode well for the early signs of an economic upswing I've been seeing in this area.
Slashdot Mirror
I liked the MacBook Air form factor, but not the OS so I blew away MacOS completely and replaced it with Fedora 17. Overall it's been great, it "just works." Gnome 3 works well on it and fully integrates with the brightness and volume buttons without issue. I did however install a few Gnome extensions like Axe Menu, Alternate Tab, and Task bar, now it's not unlike any desktop I've grown used to. Libvert also works well on it allowing me to build test servers when I need. Overall it's a 95+% solution for me.
>> But if you COULD have a doctor there, without messing with Skype or a webcam, would you think that's a bad idea?
> The doctor is at the hospital, treating the other patients who may have life-threatening injuries. You're suggesting the doctor step away from those duties to help the EMTs perform... basic triage?
As a former EMT I would also point out there is a reason a doctor is in a hospital, not an ambulance. Doctors are very well trained at what they do, and they are used to having many tools at their hands in the hospital, but in the field none of those tools exist. I have said this before to many people, those who work in a hospital can be some of the worst people to provide assistance in the field as a citizen responder. This is a paradox, the best trained person is the worst person to provide assistance at a car wreck they just witnessed? But it's true. EMTs focus on the basics to get the patient to advanced care quickly (Platinum 10, golden hour). In addition doctors and nurses are not used to thinking about things like scene safety and how they could become another victim. Lastly let's say you had the hospital in a box and you could move the patient into this immediately after the accident etc, the first thing they will be doing is stabilizing, after that is done *then* they consider diagnosis and treatment.
CHAOS = Chief Has Arrived On Scene.
Just in case our "Upside down" compatriots in Australia are confused about an Ox-Bow lake, you would know them as a Billabong, yes body of water that the Swagman boiled his billy by and ultimately jumped into is real...
And to bring the comparison full circle, the Big Mac Index from January 2012 showed Latvia to be -30% parity. Meaning if you were to adjust the price to US Dollars it would cost an equivalent of about US$15-16 in the US.
The index can be found here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/01/daily-chart-3
Consider this, if a CEO takes a $1 pay package and receives only company stock as their benefits package that means the company has to do well for them to make money. In addition *you* are free to invest in these companies and "freeload" on their incentive package and earn some income as well.
this should be good!
You might need to heat up the butter as it looks like it may cool and solidify before eating...
Puts on the Devil's advocate mask...
Statistics show that if the victim has a firearm, there's a greater chance of either he/she or the people near the victim being wounded. Homicides should drop in this context.
As for number 2... nope, nothing on that, it's Venezuela after all...
Tell that to Susanna Hupp after the Luby's shooting. She watched a gunman shoot both of her parents, while her gun was lawfully elsewhere, it was illegal at the time to conceal carry in Texas.
Statistics show taking guns away causes an increase in violent crime... See Australia and England
Statistics show that allowing for more lawful firearm posession (concealed carry) tends to reduce violent crime... See Florida, Texas etc.
The bottom line really comes down to this... Do you want to have a 100% guarantee that a criminal can shoot you with impunity, or a chance to protect your life... Tell that to Susanna Hupp after the Luby's shooting.
Who will they blame when gun violence goes up?
While technically true, this argument does fall apart when a company such as Oracle rebrands RHEL into OEL, then goes on the offensive against RHEL/Red Hat when they don't have much of a team of developers to continue developing OEL should the hypothetical, but very unlikely, situation of Red Hat going away. In a situation such as that it's kind of like Oracle is biting the hand that feeds it.... CentOS on the other hand rebrands RHEL, but does not try to present themselves as the main proprietor of the distribution. In addition the CentOS community does try to push bug reports upstream when possible.
Not quite....
Technically, Red Hat's "product" is a compiled copy the Linux kernel and associated Open Source Packages required to create a working operating system. Yes the source is free, and Red Hat does follow through on the GPL obligations, but on it's own the source is useless, you can't actually use it without you or someone else spending the time and effort to compile it first. Thus Red Hat is "selling" a compiled and packaged form of the associated source code, however it's sold in the form of a subscription which includes access to software updates and some level of support.
I love Linux (lowercase l), and RedHat does good things - worthy of being a going-growing concern. "Winning the war", they are not.
Red Hat has a poster in almost every office quoting Ghandi:
First they ignore You
Then they laugh at you
They they fight you
Then you win.
That quote permeates most of Red Hat Culture.
Red Hat also announced that they will be donating $100,000 to each of the following organizations; Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Law Center and UNICEF Innovation Labs. http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat
If you're worried about a user jumping out of your app and then searching the Internet, and you're in a a testing setting, you should be looking at a wholistic approach.
Your students will break your application, it's only a matter of time. Use other approaches to make this a useless option.
1) Don't allow any Internet access from the network layer, at all, this includes DNS servers. Ideally your systems should be on a completely disconnected network, meaning there are absolutely no external network connections.
2) Use SELinux to lock down your system. SELinux uses a mandatory permissions model, meaning you *must* be granted permission to be able to do anything.
3) Lock down alternative means of cheating. Cell phones, paper notes and so forth.
4) Follow through with punishing cheating in an appropriate manner.
5) Listen to the feedback of your users (Instructors and Students). This may seem counter intuitive, but it can help you build a better system.
Before I came to Red Hat I had a similar opinion. When I worked in Silicon Valley I thought "Why would anyone want to pay for Red Hat, I can't afford it so that means it's expensive." However after being at Red Hat for over a year my opinion has changed, and that has been because of some things I have witnessed.
Support is one of the first things people think about, however there is a little more than meets the eye here. Let's start with the packages. Let's say there's a major exploit in SSHd, you will likely see a fix from Red Hat within a few days, which will then be available via RHN. The source to the rpm will also be available at ftp.redhat.com due to the GPL obligations. (More on the GPL and RH later.) At this point in time RH customers have the patch available, in this fictitious scenario let's say it took RH 3 days to release the patch from time of exploit publication. CentOS users still don't have the fix, plus CentOS operates somewhat as a "Black Box." You will get the fix when they get around to it, let's say that takes two weeks before it's released (Could be more could be less). That means your systems are vulnerable for about two weeks, in some shops that's an acceptable risk, in other places it's not.
* Support from people is the other thing that people think about. Have you ever had to call RH support? If yes have you ever talked with an idiot? In the many times I have called RH support I have not dealt with anyone who I felt was sub-standard. Most often the problem I have seen is when the clients I'm working with do not present RH support with the information required in a timely manner. When the answers come back they often link to other knowledge base articles and have clear steps to either solve the problem or to better understand some of the complexities. When a solution is found and there is not a KBase article I understand (I may have heard wrong here) that there is an obligation to write a KBase article. I know that tickets are reviewed after they are closed. One ticket I opened regarding Satellite for a customer is getting discussion amongst the Satellite developers about how to best handle the same scenario in the future.
* Support from Articles, this I feel is a real hidden Gem of RH. Nobody knows about it until you have a subscription, and then everyone is so used to using Google for their answers they forget to start here first. The KBase articles from RH are phenomenal! I had a customer ask me how to rebuild the RH ISO image to include their own KS script. I could Google and find 10 articles talking about much of what I'm looking for or search the KBase and find one article that has every step needed for modifying a RHEL disk to have the KS script on the disk.
* Training. Having been through a few RH training classes I can say they are all very good. Yes there are some areas where I have questioned the need to know some things, but that is normal, but I'm never left feeling like the class was a waste. I have always walked out having learned many things which I can use later.
* Consulting. Yes there are many open source consultants who can come onsite and help implement a solution or fix something, however how many of them have access to the people who wrote the Distro or maintain the upstream project? RH has an internal list just for technical questions, many of the engineers are on this list and very technical answers are delieverd. Often SAs (Solutions Architects) and Consultants will post questions their clients have asked. I have yet to see a response of "Why would you want to do that?" or "RTFM."
* Additional products. Red Hat takes upstream projects and repackages them to integrate tightly with RH. Satellite is one example, it comes from Spacewalk and is designed to help keep internal systems up to date and patched according to their channel assignment. Could you use Spacewalk to manage your CentOS machines, yes you can! However let's say you have a problem getting Spacewlak to work right, or there's a bug, what kind of support
>His job is to maximize shareholder value. If that means settling for a lower price than the cost of pursuing a court case, that is what he is going to do.
f I had the points I'd mod your post up. :-)
You actually understand what is going on better than most people responding to this thread. It comes down to simple economics. If you can pay someone to shut up (and perhaps get a license for Open Source in general) for a fraction of what it would cost to have your legal team peruse it then it makes more sense to pay them the hush money than waste your legal team's efforts. In addition if you loose on a small fry the potential ramifications are huge as they ripple through the rest of of the patent system, which in part is built upon previous cases. Rather it makes much more sense to be strategic in dealing with those who are trolling.
http://thedailywtf.com/Default.aspx
The threat that one day someone will post your code and or screen shots from your programs for everyone to ridicule should be motivation to either improve or write worse code.
Rock music.... isn't that what we listened to last century? I've heard these whipper snappers today listen to something called techno....
Does this folding tool allow for the reuse of common sub-steps? e.g. (using the example in the summary) many tasks might require the knowledge of how to find "valid traffic", but if the steps change, will every one of the super-tasks need to be updated to show this? This alone has kept me from providing embedded sub-task level documentation details many times.
Good question. As far as I know the plugin I'm thinking of you would have to update each page if the low level information changes. However if you use macro inclusions I believe that is possible.
Thinking further on that, you could create a wiki page for each subgroup, which then includes each sub information. There is the potential for a closed loop recursion happening which is a bad thing (tm).
I was reading through some of the Trac hacks for the wiki component and they had a folding plugin. If you create a table of steps you could then create a "fold" with greater detail should someone want to open it up and see it. The nice thing is you are not taken to a new page and you can continue to work and read the page you are already on. You can also imbed folds which can also allow a user to drill down to as much or as little detail as is needed or available.
All that is left now is to write enough information for the lowest common denominator.
Back in the day we used to use MSI Planet. One of the RF engineers printed up a projected plot of the whole SF bay area and put it up on the wall. It was very cool to look at the dead spots and how coverage impacted coverage long with reflection and other problems.
A friend also runs http://www.wirelessmapping.com/ where they will run projected plots for coverage of almost any RF output.
How come it's not been picked up by any major distribution?
SuSE has had it for a while now. My recollection of seeing it in YAST goes back at least a year. It's a *SNAP* to setup under SuSE. Select the package, then go to the docs directory and read the SuSE readme, run the setup program. Done, less than 10 minutes start to finish. If anything the windows client is more confusing than the Linux server under SuSE. :-)
I've got it running on my personal machines which are sitting in a colo. It runs over SSH which is great and I locked down SSH to only allow "trusted" users and everything works great! I haven't played with it's Samba integration but it's supposed to allow you to share files from your windows Client with your NX session. Also NX will apparently pipe audio across the link but I haven't played with this yet. For my needs it's been perfect.
Oh ya... the server (Linux) and client (Windows/Linux) are both free as in beer.
What's sad is this shuts down the Wind farms up on the Alimont pass in the SF Bay Area every year.
I just returned from Uganda with mine and it was pretty good. The keyboard is a little on the small side and the processor isn't the most powerful but it worked well for me and the touchscreen was quite nice. It had an SD and CF slot which made importing pictures onto it for viewing quite nice. The biggest limitation was the lack of USB ports, it only has one. Overall I was quite impressed with the battery and the size/weight. I purchased the padded case from Fujitsu and it was a life saver, dropped it in a mud puddle, fortunately the puddle wasn't too deep, but the case now has a fresh layer of Ugandan mud. I've also dropped it from about 3' without the padded case onto concrete and it did ok, just a few new character marks. I lost the right arrow key, but I can still press it and it still works. I have no idea now what other two functions are on that key, but they weren't important as I didn't seem to miss them.
The touchscreen was very nice to have. It made going through pictures easier and overall I found the Vista basic that came with it usable if you don't mind working a little slower. I would suggest getting a surge suppressor that works world wide. I found one at the airport that worked quite well and it provided USB power. Had I know about this device I would have brought my Plextor external DVD-RW.
I have a freind who used to work at Oracle until they moved their data center folks to Austin. He said that Larry made it very publicly known that he wanted to take over People Soft so he could fire everyone. If this is true there are soon to be several empty buildings and several thousand people without jobs in the Pleasanton area. This does not bode well for the early signs of an economic upswing I've been seeing in this area.