For residential, you're more or less right on the money about this, except for a few minor details.
1. Primary limitation on residential broadband is hardware. Only so much throughput DSL can provide, additional throughput throttling at the ISP (consequently, our company doesn't do this, doesn't need to...yet), so IPv4 vs IPv6 isn't much of an issue there.
2. Hacked systems abound. For argument's sake, let us presume that I manage to convert my entire customer base to IPv6 overnight./me looks at what he just typed./me dies laughing.
Using IPv6 and providing end users with as many public IP's as they want will encourage them to hook their systems directly to the net without a hardware level of seperation. This is very, very bad. You thought Windows boxen got 0wned quickly before? Yeesh.
Now true, a router would have to exist at the demarc in order to route a full subnet to the home rather than a single IP address, and yes, you could have some basic rules to filter out some of that nasty traffic, maybe even a centralized infrastructure to manage those rules, but at the end of the day, you're still allowing the 'world' to come to your ethernet interface. As things are right now, no one comes to my ethernet interface unless I explicitly allow it. I port forward ssh, and happenstance 80 to my machine (not for much longer though), otherwise it all gets blocked at my firewall. How much do you *really* trust the Windows XP firewall? That's where you're putting your trust at the end of the day as most of the world is still on windows.
Anyhoo, enough manic rambling. I should already be in bed.
I agree to an extent, but I think throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't the way to deal with it. Perhaps it is, but why give up business X to business Y when you can have both? (There's a rhetorical answer to that, which is to keep the type of environment they want, which is a valid argument.)
A technological solution that is available however is very simple, and integrates well. The linksys wrt54g is to a point now that you can load just about anything on it. There are several captive portal solutions, all of which have one way or another to mesh with your register system. If you have an older register system, you are pretty much SOL. The technological answers are there, it's just a matter of whether or not it is worth the time and effort to set up, or if you'd prefer not to have the laptop users. In this case, the answer is that they don't want the laptop users. Fair enough. Just don't argue that there's no way to do it and keep everyone happy. There is.
Actually, check with your local wisps. Most of them will bend over backwards to meet your needs and get your business, and give you all of the personal attention you could ever want.
Smaller companies tend to be like that.
If you're in St. Louis though, give me a call and we'll get you straightened out.;)
We can't do that. I don't think I could bear to stand around waiting while we all have to listen to him scream for hours while it powers up and hurls lame insults that aren't vaguely believable at his opponents.
What about writing a worm (apparently this isn't so hard...) that runs a VB Script when the message is viewed. When the script runs, it adds an entry to the hosts file:
ip.of.some.evil.server www.windowsupdate.com
The message?
From: $Your IT Administrator
(Determine this variable by looking in the address book for those with domain admin privs, pick one at random)
Looks like there was a pretty important security update that came out last night. Please go to the Windows Update site and run it. Thanks!
If I'm readint his one correctly, you download an iso, burn it, boot off of it, then there's a command to install it to the usb drive from there. I like the way this thing claims to work. The only thing left is to set Firefox and Thunderbird as the default web/mail, but that can be adjusted after install.:)
Least common denominator. Just switch it in your xorg.conf file. Just don't freak when you take it to a machine that doesn't support a higher refresh rate.;)
Actually, what I think this is awesome for (I'm not the parent of this thread, btw) is for low-income individuals (my sister unfortunately:( ) where one must go to a library, or the local community college to use the computer (state aide pays for education), and she has to move from one environment to another. I could provide her with a more or less stripped down system to go with that 128MB keydrive I gave her for christmas because her floppy disks kept going bad. Now she can take her operating environment with her from computer to computer and have more or less the same computer experience no matter where she goes.
At least in theory anyway. This presumes an easily accessible usb port, a bios that can boot from a usb device, and a dhcp-assigned IP address that correctly assigns dns information, and a firewall or other system that checks for something or another to allow access to the network and internet....
Presuming every i386 based system is dhcp assigned, boots from usb, and has a easily accessible USB port, this is freaking cool.:)
Okay, I'm going to reply to myself for a moment here.
So far as the simple backup goes, you can skip 'tarthefile', as it's only one file anyway.:)
Also, I'm still trying to get down how to do filesystem backups vs block device backups. I'm relatively knew to the unix scene (new as in I've 'grown up' on modern unix-type OS's), but if you look at apps like CarbonCopyCloner for MacOS X, it does an elaborate copy operations of the files in the filesystem from one formatted filesystem to another, then 'blesses' the slice the filesystem resides on to make it bootable. I could use this functionality in many situations but I've never really taken the time to find the right procedure for this. FreeBSD-question mailling list members often suggest using the 'dump' command for filesystem backups, but now I'm reading that not many of them know how to actually recover from a failure using that backup.:)
Carrying both the OS and your home directory on your thumb drive is kinda interesting. I usually think of storing your home directory on a thumb drive, and then have whatever *nix loaded on various systems that know about your user account via either/etc/passwd, NIS, or LDAP. Simply plug in the drive and log in. The other way around is to store your home directory in a centralized, network-accessible location, perhaps secured via ssh/ssl (haven't put much time into this to be honest) then carry your OS on your keychain drive.
Never really considered doing *both* though. Other than thinking you'd be really screwed if it ever got lost (then again, how hard is it really to plug into a machine and home, dd if=/dev/myusbdrive of=/home/myuid/backup.todaysdate && tarthefile && bzipit && ftpitsomeplace ?
Makes backing up easier anyway.;) I'm curious about NIS or LDAP support in the Puppy distro, so far as being able to recognize user accounts from a centralized location.
While I'm on the topic, perhaps/.'ers could help me out with the whole 'home directory synchronization' thing too. Right now I feel I have two options: local home directory, or remote home directory. With local, at specified intervals I can copy or sync back to the server, but I don't know if I can set up something like 'roaming profiles' a-la windows, other than maybe adding an rsync command to.login (anything for syncing back at logout?)
There's a serious lack of information on that site. Like what the purpose of building yet another distro was, what need they were filling, other than learning to roll your own distro.
More power to them. I personally use MacOS X and FreeBSD daily. I consider setting up a Linux machine from time to time (okay mods, I'm not setting up flamebait here), but it gets to be a real turnoff finding a more or less 'standard' distro that isn't a pain to set up. FreeBSD isn't elegant at all (PC-BSD seems to be stepping up to fill that need nicely), but at least it's the devil I know (pun intended).
Gentoo and/or Debian based systems at least seem to be the way to go these days, but the every-increasing number of distros bugs me. Don't want to pick a distro only to find it discontinued and have to load a new one.:\
Do any of these software products have a way of dealing with a DirecTV tuner? I know there's no tuner card per se, but what about using an IR eye, and acting as a remote control to change channels at set times...is this possible using Myth or Freevo?
What about listings? I have OTA HD already, and I also have HD DirecTV channels. Would be nice to just output DVI or Component to the machine, and let the machine do the heavy lifting.
The fun part about that is that Microsoft more or less bullied Sega's Dreamcast out of the market. I still LOVE my dreamcast, and it died a far premature death.
Ugh...still sickens me. Part of why I'll never by an XBox, unless it's used and costs less than $75. That and there's no way I'm paying to play online. XBox live vs. PS2 where it's free to play online...hmm....lemme think about that for a moment...
My only gripe with the article is that they're going on and on about how each Jedi makes his own saber, then describes how it works, which is fine.
The only picture of a Jedi they have is of Mace Windu. No one bothers to point out that Mace built his own saber without any instruction, thus it has no crystal.
I could rant about this detail, but then it gives away exactly how much useless knowledge I possess. Sad part is, it's from haning around with those who once ate, breathed, and slept Star Wars lore that I know this, rather than looking it up myself.:P I think they knew this long before Episode 1 came out too (novels?).
I can't allow iTunes to manage the music for me. It won't allow me to control how it names files. It insists on reading the song title from the id3 tags, and then creating this structure:
Artist Name/Album Name/Song Name.mpg
That seems fine, but for me, I want it to come out this way (which has been the standard since, oh Napster):
Artist Name/Album Name/Artist Name - Song Name.mp3
That way if I'm using something OTHER than iTunes or my iPod, maybe something that only reads filenames, I'll know what the song is. You wouldn't believe how many songs have similar or identical names, and if you don't prepend the artist's name, it gets very messed up.
That said, I use MP3 Rage to manage my mp3's. Very nice tool.
Do a minimal MINIMAL Linux or FreeBSD install. I mean just as small as you can get, but include NFS and IP-over-Firewire.
That's about it really, set up a nice link to mount your device when you come in, plug in your firewire. Heck, I think you can configure the automounter to detect when the firewire network becomes available and mount it for you. That's really all there is to it. Should work out pretty well. On a side note, if you plug in a third drive, even if your SCSI card doesn't support it, you could use Vinum on FreeBSD or LVM on Linux to add capacity, and at least on Vinum you can do RAID5 or RAID10. It won't be as fast as hardware RAID, but hey when you're going cheap, you use what you can. Besides, I somehow suspect that you're wanting capacity over speed anyway, and if that's the case, use the best redundancy you can, right?
If we're going to look at it that way, then the primary "Window Managers" if you will that I interact with these days are Luna (WinXP), Aqua (OSX), KDE, and Gnome.
On OSX I can use Aqua, KDE, Gnome, or any one of a miriad of windowing environments. I lose all of the nice Cocoa and Carbon apps by choosing KDE or Gnome exclusively, but that's beside the point.
Let's say you could scrap Luna on Windows and use KDE instead. The problem of spyware and viruses would still be there. The problem is (primarily anyway) with the OS, not the windowing environment.
The fact that the GUI is closed source doesn't bother me. It's the OS underneath that matters at the end of the day. The fact that the GUI is arguably the best one out there makes it an easier choice for me. I don't mind spending money on a company that is consistently making good choices and promoting opens standards/compatability. If hte community treats them well, who knows, perhaps at some point down the road they'll have enough faith in the Open Source community to open up the source to aqua as well.
Just about everything on OSX is open source, sans the GUI. That's not very 'token' in my book. If I wanted to compile a custom kernel, I could. I install just about all of the same software on OSX that I do on FreeBSD, it just looks nicer on OSX.;)
That and do I have to say that it just works?
There's a symbiotic relationship that I think is healthy between Apple and the Open Source community. Just my personal opinion.
[localhost:~] numbski% uname -a Darwin localhost 7.9.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
Slashdot Mirror
For residential, you're more or less right on the money about this, except for a few minor details.
/me looks at what he just typed. /me dies laughing.
1. Primary limitation on residential broadband is hardware. Only so much throughput DSL can provide, additional throughput throttling at the ISP (consequently, our company doesn't do this, doesn't need to...yet), so IPv4 vs IPv6 isn't much of an issue there.
2. Hacked systems abound. For argument's sake, let us presume that I manage to convert my entire customer base to IPv6 overnight.
Using IPv6 and providing end users with as many public IP's as they want will encourage them to hook their systems directly to the net without a hardware level of seperation. This is very, very bad. You thought Windows boxen got 0wned quickly before? Yeesh.
Now true, a router would have to exist at the demarc in order to route a full subnet to the home rather than a single IP address, and yes, you could have some basic rules to filter out some of that nasty traffic, maybe even a centralized infrastructure to manage those rules, but at the end of the day, you're still allowing the 'world' to come to your ethernet interface. As things are right now, no one comes to my ethernet interface unless I explicitly allow it. I port forward ssh, and happenstance 80 to my machine (not for much longer though), otherwise it all gets blocked at my firewall. How much do you *really* trust the Windows XP firewall? That's where you're putting your trust at the end of the day as most of the world is still on windows.
Anyhoo, enough manic rambling. I should already be in bed.
Tired of the Slashdot Effect and stories full of broken links? I think I may have a real solution to the problem.
I agree to an extent, but I think throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't the way to deal with it. Perhaps it is, but why give up business X to business Y when you can have both? (There's a rhetorical answer to that, which is to keep the type of environment they want, which is a valid argument.)
A technological solution that is available however is very simple, and integrates well. The linksys wrt54g is to a point now that you can load just about anything on it. There are several captive portal solutions, all of which have one way or another to mesh with your register system. If you have an older register system, you are pretty much SOL. The technological answers are there, it's just a matter of whether or not it is worth the time and effort to set up, or if you'd prefer not to have the laptop users. In this case, the answer is that they don't want the laptop users. Fair enough. Just don't argue that there's no way to do it and keep everyone happy. There is.
goINET
:P
;)
Mr. Ashkar, you owe me.
Actually, check with your local wisps. Most of them will bend over backwards to meet your needs and get your business, and give you all of the personal attention you could ever want.
Smaller companies tend to be like that.
If you're in St. Louis though, give me a call and we'll get you straightened out.
We can't do that. I don't think I could bear to stand around waiting while we all have to listen to him scream for hours while it powers up and hurls lame insults that aren't vaguely believable at his opponents.
Fucking parasites.
I thought parasites were asexual...
What about TWiT?
TWiT == The Screen Savers
Just thought of this.
What about writing a worm (apparently this isn't so hard...) that runs a VB Script when the message is viewed. When the script runs, it adds an entry to the hosts file:
ip.of.some.evil.server www.windowsupdate.com
The message?
From: $Your IT Administrator
(Determine this variable by looking in the address book for those with domain admin privs, pick one at random)
Looks like there was a pretty important security update that came out last night. Please go to the Windows Update site and run it. Thanks!
http://www.windowsupdate.com/
Make it look believable. Heh.
If I'm readint his one correctly, you download an iso, burn it, boot off of it, then there's a command to install it to the usb drive from there. I like the way this thing claims to work. The only thing left is to set Firefox and Thunderbird as the default web/mail, but that can be adjusted after install. :)
Least common denominator. Just switch it in your xorg.conf file. Just don't freak when you take it to a machine that doesn't support a higher refresh rate. ;)
Actually, what I think this is awesome for (I'm not the parent of this thread, btw) is for low-income individuals (my sister unfortunately :( ) where one must go to a library, or the local community college to use the computer (state aide pays for education), and she has to move from one environment to another. I could provide her with a more or less stripped down system to go with that 128MB keydrive I gave her for christmas because her floppy disks kept going bad. Now she can take her operating environment with her from computer to computer and have more or less the same computer experience no matter where she goes.
:)
At least in theory anyway. This presumes an easily accessible usb port, a bios that can boot from a usb device, and a dhcp-assigned IP address that correctly assigns dns information, and a firewall or other system that checks for something or another to allow access to the network and internet....
Presuming every i386 based system is dhcp assigned, boots from usb, and has a easily accessible USB port, this is freaking cool.
Okay, I'm going to reply to myself for a moment here.
:)
:)
So far as the simple backup goes, you can skip 'tarthefile', as it's only one file anyway.
Also, I'm still trying to get down how to do filesystem backups vs block device backups. I'm relatively knew to the unix scene (new as in I've 'grown up' on modern unix-type OS's), but if you look at apps like CarbonCopyCloner for MacOS X, it does an elaborate copy operations of the files in the filesystem from one formatted filesystem to another, then 'blesses' the slice the filesystem resides on to make it bootable. I could use this functionality in many situations but I've never really taken the time to find the right procedure for this. FreeBSD-question mailling list members often suggest using the 'dump' command for filesystem backups, but now I'm reading that not many of them know how to actually recover from a failure using that backup.
So...thoughts?
Carrying both the OS and your home directory on your thumb drive is kinda interesting. I usually think of storing your home directory on a thumb drive, and then have whatever *nix loaded on various systems that know about your user account via either /etc/passwd, NIS, or LDAP. Simply plug in the drive and log in. The other way around is to store your home directory in a centralized, network-accessible location, perhaps secured via ssh/ssl (haven't put much time into this to be honest) then carry your OS on your keychain drive.
;) I'm curious about NIS or LDAP support in the Puppy distro, so far as being able to recognize user accounts from a centralized location.
/.'ers could help me out with the whole 'home directory synchronization' thing too. Right now I feel I have two options: local home directory, or remote home directory. With local, at specified intervals I can copy or sync back to the server, but I don't know if I can set up something like 'roaming profiles' a-la windows, other than maybe adding an rsync command to .login (anything for syncing back at logout?)
:)
Never really considered doing *both* though. Other than thinking you'd be really screwed if it ever got lost (then again, how hard is it really to plug into a machine and home, dd if=/dev/myusbdrive of=/home/myuid/backup.todaysdate && tarthefile && bzipit && ftpitsomeplace ?
Makes backing up easier anyway.
While I'm on the topic, perhaps
Okay, enough ranting for me.
I kinda meant non-graphical setup for the lesser knowlegeable user. I can wade through it all, but most newbs couldn't.
There's a serious lack of information on that site. Like what the purpose of building yet another distro was, what need they were filling, other than learning to roll your own distro.
:\
More power to them. I personally use MacOS X and FreeBSD daily. I consider setting up a Linux machine from time to time (okay mods, I'm not setting up flamebait here), but it gets to be a real turnoff finding a more or less 'standard' distro that isn't a pain to set up. FreeBSD isn't elegant at all (PC-BSD seems to be stepping up to fill that need nicely), but at least it's the devil I know (pun intended).
Gentoo and/or Debian based systems at least seem to be the way to go these days, but the every-increasing number of distros bugs me. Don't want to pick a distro only to find it discontinued and have to load a new one.
I've been wanting to know this for some time...
Do any of these software products have a way of dealing with a DirecTV tuner? I know there's no tuner card per se, but what about using an IR eye, and acting as a remote control to change channels at set times...is this possible using Myth or Freevo?
What about listings? I have OTA HD already, and I also have HD DirecTV channels. Would be nice to just output DVI or Component to the machine, and let the machine do the heavy lifting.
Um...where are you roughly? I work downtown, and I've never heard of this. I live out in Ballwin.
The fun part about that is that Microsoft more or less bullied Sega's Dreamcast out of the market. I still LOVE my dreamcast, and it died a far premature death.
Ugh...still sickens me. Part of why I'll never by an XBox, unless it's used and costs less than $75. That and there's no way I'm paying to play online. XBox live vs. PS2 where it's free to play online...hmm....lemme think about that for a moment...
My only gripe with the article is that they're going on and on about how each Jedi makes his own saber, then describes how it works, which is fine.
.
:P I think they knew this long before Episode 1 came out too (novels?).
The only picture of a Jedi they have is of Mace Windu. No one bothers to point out that Mace built his own saber without any instruction, thus it has no crystal
I could rant about this detail, but then it gives away exactly how much useless knowledge I possess. Sad part is, it's from haning around with those who once ate, breathed, and slept Star Wars lore that I know this, rather than looking it up myself.
I can't allow iTunes to manage the music for me. It won't allow me to control how it names files. It insists on reading the song title from the id3 tags, and then creating this structure:
Artist Name/Album Name/Song Name.mpg
That seems fine, but for me, I want it to come out this way (which has been the standard since, oh Napster):
Artist Name/Album Name/Artist Name - Song Name.mp3
That way if I'm using something OTHER than iTunes or my iPod, maybe something that only reads filenames, I'll know what the song is. You wouldn't believe how many songs have similar or identical names, and if you don't prepend the artist's name, it gets very messed up.
That said, I use MP3 Rage to manage my mp3's. Very nice tool.
2K
Do a minimal MINIMAL Linux or FreeBSD install. I mean just as small as you can get, but include NFS and IP-over-Firewire.
That's about it really, set up a nice link to mount your device when you come in, plug in your firewire. Heck, I think you can configure the automounter to detect when the firewire network becomes available and mount it for you. That's really all there is to it. Should work out pretty well. On a side note, if you plug in a third drive, even if your SCSI card doesn't support it, you could use Vinum on FreeBSD or LVM on Linux to add capacity, and at least on Vinum you can do RAID5 or RAID10. It won't be as fast as hardware RAID, but hey when you're going cheap, you use what you can. Besides, I somehow suspect that you're wanting capacity over speed anyway, and if that's the case, use the best redundancy you can, right?
If we're going to look at it that way, then the primary "Window Managers" if you will that I interact with these days are Luna (WinXP), Aqua (OSX), KDE, and Gnome.
On OSX I can use Aqua, KDE, Gnome, or any one of a miriad of windowing environments. I lose all of the nice Cocoa and Carbon apps by choosing KDE or Gnome exclusively, but that's beside the point.
Let's say you could scrap Luna on Windows and use KDE instead. The problem of spyware and viruses would still be there. The problem is (primarily anyway) with the OS, not the windowing environment.
The fact that the GUI is closed source doesn't bother me. It's the OS underneath that matters at the end of the day. The fact that the GUI is arguably the best one out there makes it an easier choice for me. I don't mind spending money on a company that is consistently making good choices and promoting opens standards/compatability. If hte community treats them well, who knows, perhaps at some point down the road they'll have enough faith in the Open Source community to open up the source to aqua as well.
Just about everything on OSX is open source, sans the GUI. That's not very 'token' in my book. If I wanted to compile a custom kernel, I could. I install just about all of the same software on OSX that I do on FreeBSD, it just looks nicer on OSX. ;)
That and do I have to say that it just works?
There's a symbiotic relationship that I think is healthy between Apple and the Open Source community. Just my personal opinion.
But the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be more adequate than ever!
That's right, because it just went out and bought a huge SUV to compensate for its indequacies...
Heh, what do you think I'm posting this from?
[localhost:~] numbski% uname -a
Darwin localhost 7.9.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.9.0: Wed Mar 30 20:11:17 PST 2005; root:xnu/xnu-517.12.7.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc