Can real-life communities succeed in the online environment as well? How so?
As of right now I am posting this through community DSL. Granted, it is for profit and more pricey than Bellsouth, but I've had negligable downtime (only twice, once due to a server upgrade on their end and once when their pipe got broke). When I call them up with a problem (like getting a static public address), I talk to as person. There is no machine that picks up and asks you to hold for fifteen minutes with confusing options. The people are generally helpful and their service is impeccable. And if you're wondering if they are a community provider, website.
Could be a boon for search and rescue in collapsed buildings!
Anyone here ever been in a collapsed building? I myself have, and often they are filled with floods, fires, and gas leeks. No amount of training is going to convince a rat to turn right and climb a board to go through a fire. No amount of training is going to convince it to continue on when it starts smelling gas.
Exactly! It consolidates everything down to one single box. It's hell to setup initially, but once you get it up and running everything works. You no longer have problems with end-users machines OS, or some setting they've screwed up (they obviously don't have root access!). The down-sides are the time it takes to get it all working right, and the time it takes to fix things if they go wrong.
Word of advice for anyone who tries this, never make this same machine also your firewall. You open yourself to remote security exploits in that case, and having to quickly upgrade say, zlib on your terminal server is not nice....
I know this is a little late, but here's a solution we've come up with that's in the cooker for some of our clients in a similar situation.
Basically you should invest $4,000 in a single server, RAID SCSI drives, dual athlon, 2 gigs of RAM. You've already got a 10/100 Mb backbone for your network, so you can slip this in just about anywhere.
Now here's where it gets fun. Load your favorite distro of linux, visit the Linux Terminal Server Project, and make a terminal server out of it. Then, check out MOSIX, or Sun's grid-computing (the later sports better redundancy, a feature I adore when working with end-users). Grab nics and boot-roms for each PC, install 'em, and boom, you've got a complete functioning cluster of what, 40 PII's? You have any idea the power those can muster?
Not only will you see a huge boost in computing power, but you also save money. Need to use quick books? What's a single liscence for Citrix cost? You can publish the app natively on your terminal server. Open Office works great for converting all those old MS documents.
As of Slackware 8.0, you can still install it on a laptop without a cd-rom or nic with only 4 megs of RAM (using a Plip connection). I believe 7.1 can be installed entirely from floppy disks.
Re:Damn right!
on
Worst Buy
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· Score: 2, Informative
According to GA law, and advertised price IS a binding contract because failure to sell an item at that price is false advertisement. It doesn't matter if the price is a misprint or some other form of mistake. The customer sees the price and decides to purchase the item. The damage is doneby then; nothing can take it away. Failure to require the merchant to honor an advertised price (mistake or not) would open up a massive loophole. Merchants could then eggs at $0.12 a dozen and then ring them up at the register as say $1.20. "It was just a misprint."
Re:What about installing Adaware afterwards?
on
Spyware Fights Back
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· Score: 1
Can't users who want Radlight install Adaware afterwards?
Straight from the article you didn't read:
Akerlund said Ad-Aware users who have had their program deleted by RadLight must re-install Ad-Aware to restore functionality.
If he called the police to come arrest a man who is in his store legally, the police are required to remove the man from the premises. The police are not guilty of doing their job; the store owner is guilty of having them arrest the customer.
Assuming the man wasn't shouting vulgarities or threatening anyone with bodily harm, he was 100% within his rights and within the law. He can fuss and carry-on all day long if he so wants to. You can't argue and say "well he was disrupting the store" without also arguing the manager was doing likewise by not making good on the sale.
It's Best Buy's obligation to make sure their prices are accurate.
This statement is 100% correct. The store manager in Dekalb who had that man arrested should in turn be arrested and sued for false arrest. When I worked for The Home Depot a few years back here in Macon, one of our signs for a 24 foot fiberglass ladder (nice ladder) was priced $100 too low. We honored it without any problems. Why? Two reasons: 1) it was our fault, and 2) it's the law.
Companies that don't honor advertised prices (whether it was an honest mistake or not) are obligated to sell the merchandise at that price. This is not '$199.95 or best offer', this is '$199.95'.
I personally have a tactic that in less than two months has all but stopped the telemarketers. When one calls and asks for me buy my first name (I have always gone by my second name, only strangers call me otherwise), my immediate response is, 'he died.'
It gets all kinds of reactions, but in the end, they stop calling.
Oh get off your high horse! My family has been in the lumber business for the last five generations (I myself hauled pulp-wood before becomming a linux technition). Since NAFTA, seventeen mills in my state (GA) have gone out of business. The primary reason for this is supply. As the United States population continues to grow numerically, it also continues to grow logistically. With Canada, the vast majority of the population is arrayed about the southern border, leaving vast forests of spruce in the central part of the country. The playing field between American sawmills and Canadian sawmills is far from level. Local governments among the States impose ridiculous restrictions, and an encroaching population encourages companies to sell off their land. This is not nearly as large a problem in Canada.
It is RIGHT for one country to support its own domestic products in lieu of foreign suppliers, particularly when they've been hand-cuffed so badly. Haven't you ever heard, blood's thicker than water?
Until the Linux installation process becomes as simple as booting from a CD and clicking "Next" a few hundred times, it will not have the user base it deserves.
I'd believe you if you didn't mention Slackware earlier in the article. I have successfuly installed a complete Slackware system simply by inserting the cd, and accepting ALL the defaults. How different is that from clicking next a million times? Plus, it doesn't reboot on you.:^)
Removing or disabling these services are necessary to secure a Windows box, and to reducing the bad PR that Microsoft receives every time a new vulnerability is discovered.
The fundamental fault with this is that most users don't see it as bad press for Microsoft. The majority of end-users of MS systems see the computer as a humming box that let's them type and download music, maybe burn a cd. In the back of their minds they know that there are magical people out there with IQ's well above normal who can access their machine almost at will, without their consent or knowledge. Frankly, they don't understand that there are other operating systems (or even what an operating system is). To them, computers as a whole are inherently insecure, not software. Most people don't blame Lookout Express of Internet Expwhorer for the exploit, they blame the computer.
It'd never work. While the idea is nice and warm and fuzzy, it's utter bullshit. What you're talking about is already being done. It's called diplomacy. Can you honestly imagine people donig this? Do you think Israel and Palastine would agree to such a game, and if so, what purpose would it serve? It definately wouldn't stop their people from killing each other no matter the outcome.
What if we were to engage in a war with So-Damn Insane (leader of Iraq)? We would tromp him hands-down, but what are the odds he would agree to whatever the terms after he lost? What would force him to acknowledge defeat, another computer battle? Puh-lease.
Face it, wars work. Wars are terrible, despicable crimes against humanity, but they work. If Hitler and the Axis Powers had lost the Second World War (and it was conducted via computer), do you honestly think they'd have stopped and not invaded Poland or France? What if they'd won and claimed Poland and France as their own? Do you really think that the citizens of the country wouldn't rebel and create an utter anarchy?
One of the reasons they didn't succeed IMO is the GPL. There's a reason very few embedded devices run linux. With embedded devices, the hardware isn't that big a deal to develop and make; the software is. A company doesn't want to invest millions to develop a new PDA OS and have to GPL it. Their competition would quickly copy it and they'd loose profits. Embedded devices are predominately BSD, IMHO. BSD doesn't require you to release the source if you don't want to. Companys don't want to release the code, plain and simple.
Nice to meet someone else who's been stuck doing Industrial Automation for Grain Elevators
Actually no, I've never done any one that. I happen to be a farmer in Southern GA. We used to grow allot of cotton, sorgum (I can never spell that right), and corn for feed. Then we went full-scale into hogs untill the market hit rock-bottom in '87 and hasn't come up since. Now we raise horses almost exclusively in addition to my job doing network engineering.
Not everyone who uses grep and vi doesn't chew tobacco.:^)
they probably use some sort of rail system for transporting grain
Actually rails aren't used to transport grain at all. We use augers to do that task. An auger is basically a sheet metal tub with a long stationary screw inside it. The bottom end is placed on one location where the grain is poured into. The screw inside rotates slowly and pulls the grain up the tub to the top where it just spills out into the top of a silo.
Some one had to say it.....
on
Homemade Gauss Gun
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Linux is not currently a threat to Windows on the desktop. Personally I prefer the linux desktop to the MS desktop, but the vast majority of people don't and won't, untill some point down the road when people change. It WILL take people (and not linux) changing before linux will become a competeing OS in the home desktop market.
Besides, this isn't targeted at the linux crowd. Sun wants to target the Windows crowd. Not only is the linux community too small to make them enough profit to support Star Office, they also suffer huge competition with Open Office, Abiword, and other word processors for the linux desktop.
IMHO, Sun doesn't care about the linux crowd. StarOffice is probably only available to linux users because it budded from open Office and therefore was already on linux. Sun has spent time and money developing StarOffice to compete with MS Office, not to win the linux desktop. Charging a modest fee for Star Office 6.0 will allow Sun to advertise Star Office, put more software on the shelves at retailers.
Slashdot Mirror
As of right now I am posting this through community DSL. Granted, it is for profit and more pricey than Bellsouth, but I've had negligable downtime (only twice, once due to a server upgrade on their end and once when their pipe got broke). When I call them up with a problem (like getting a static public address), I talk to as person. There is no machine that picks up and asks you to hold for fifteen minutes with confusing options. The people are generally helpful and their service is impeccable. And if you're wondering if they are a community provider, website.
Just... I always mispell that. And now I have to wait two minutes to defeat the slashdot lameness filter. :^) Maybe I should read the article?
Anyone here ever been in a collapsed building? I myself have, and often they are filled with floods, fires, and gas leeks. No amount of training is going to convince a rat to turn right and climb a board to go through a fire. No amount of training is going to convince it to continue on when it starts smelling gas.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Exactly! It consolidates everything down to one single box. It's hell to setup initially, but once you get it up and running everything works. You no longer have problems with end-users machines OS, or some setting they've screwed up (they obviously don't have root access!). The down-sides are the time it takes to get it all working right, and the time it takes to fix things if they go wrong.
Word of advice for anyone who tries this, never make this same machine also your firewall. You open yourself to remote security exploits in that case, and having to quickly upgrade say, zlib on your terminal server is not nice....
I know this is a little late, but here's a solution we've come up with that's in the cooker for some of our clients in a similar situation.
:-)
Basically you should invest $4,000 in a single server, RAID SCSI drives, dual athlon, 2 gigs of RAM. You've already got a 10/100 Mb backbone for your network, so you can slip this in just about anywhere.
Now here's where it gets fun. Load your favorite distro of linux, visit the Linux Terminal Server Project, and make a terminal server out of it. Then, check out MOSIX, or Sun's grid-computing (the later sports better redundancy, a feature I adore when working with end-users). Grab nics and boot-roms for each PC, install 'em, and boom, you've got a complete functioning cluster of what, 40 PII's? You have any idea the power those can muster?
Not only will you see a huge boost in computing power, but you also save money. Need to use quick books? What's a single liscence for Citrix cost? You can publish the app natively on your terminal server. Open Office works great for converting all those old MS documents.
Honestly, KDE 3.0 just came out. Use it.
hmmm....
there's so many gears and gyros
that I can play with!
As of Slackware 8.0, you can still install it on a laptop without a cd-rom or nic with only 4 megs of RAM (using a Plip connection). I believe 7.1 can be installed entirely from floppy disks.
According to GA law, and advertised price IS a binding contract because failure to sell an item at that price is false advertisement. It doesn't matter if the price is a misprint or some other form of mistake. The customer sees the price and decides to purchase the item. The damage is doneby then; nothing can take it away. Failure to require the merchant to honor an advertised price (mistake or not) would open up a massive loophole. Merchants could then eggs at $0.12 a dozen and then ring them up at the register as say $1.20. "It was just a misprint."
Straight from the article you didn't read:
Akerlund said Ad-Aware users who have had their program deleted by RadLight must re-install Ad-Aware to restore functionality.
If he called the police to come arrest a man who is in his store legally, the police are required to remove the man from the premises. The police are not guilty of doing their job; the store owner is guilty of having them arrest the customer.
Assuming the man wasn't shouting vulgarities or threatening anyone with bodily harm, he was 100% within his rights and within the law. He can fuss and carry-on all day long if he so wants to. You can't argue and say "well he was disrupting the store" without also arguing the manager was doing likewise by not making good on the sale.
You're incorrect. IANAL, but I have talked with some, and here in GA, they are required BY LAW to honor that price, period.
This statement is 100% correct. The store manager in Dekalb who had that man arrested should in turn be arrested and sued for false arrest. When I worked for The Home Depot a few years back here in Macon, one of our signs for a 24 foot fiberglass ladder (nice ladder) was priced $100 too low. We honored it without any problems. Why? Two reasons: 1) it was our fault, and 2) it's the law.
Companies that don't honor advertised prices (whether it was an honest mistake or not) are obligated to sell the merchandise at that price. This is not '$199.95 or best offer', this is '$199.95'.
Apparently the bandwidth market is too!
I personally have a tactic that in less than two months has all but stopped the telemarketers. When one calls and asks for me buy my first name (I have always gone by my second name, only strangers call me otherwise), my immediate response is, 'he died.'
It gets all kinds of reactions, but in the end, they stop calling.
Ha! I just saw New York Times and karma whored it. Boy do I feel stupid. :^)
username: privatenospam
password: privatenospam
Oh get off your high horse! My family has been in the lumber business for the last five generations (I myself hauled pulp-wood before becomming a linux technition). Since NAFTA, seventeen mills in my state (GA) have gone out of business. The primary reason for this is supply. As the United States population continues to grow numerically, it also continues to grow logistically. With Canada, the vast majority of the population is arrayed about the southern border, leaving vast forests of spruce in the central part of the country. The playing field between American sawmills and Canadian sawmills is far from level. Local governments among the States impose ridiculous restrictions, and an encroaching population encourages companies to sell off their land. This is not nearly as large a problem in Canada.
It is RIGHT for one country to support its own domestic products in lieu of foreign suppliers, particularly when they've been hand-cuffed so badly. Haven't you ever heard, blood's thicker than water?
I'd believe you if you didn't mention Slackware earlier in the article. I have successfuly installed a complete Slackware system simply by inserting the cd, and accepting ALL the defaults. How different is that from clicking next a million times? Plus, it doesn't reboot on you. :^)
The fundamental fault with this is that most users don't see it as bad press for Microsoft. The majority of end-users of MS systems see the computer as a humming box that let's them type and download music, maybe burn a cd. In the back of their minds they know that there are magical people out there with IQ's well above normal who can access their machine almost at will, without their consent or knowledge. Frankly, they don't understand that there are other operating systems (or even what an operating system is). To them, computers as a whole are inherently insecure, not software. Most people don't blame Lookout Express of Internet Expwhorer for the exploit, they blame the computer.
It'd never work. While the idea is nice and warm and fuzzy, it's utter bullshit. What you're talking about is already being done. It's called diplomacy. Can you honestly imagine people donig this? Do you think Israel and Palastine would agree to such a game, and if so, what purpose would it serve? It definately wouldn't stop their people from killing each other no matter the outcome.
What if we were to engage in a war with So-Damn Insane (leader of Iraq)? We would tromp him hands-down, but what are the odds he would agree to whatever the terms after he lost? What would force him to acknowledge defeat, another computer battle? Puh-lease.
Face it, wars work. Wars are terrible, despicable crimes against humanity, but they work. If Hitler and the Axis Powers had lost the Second World War (and it was conducted via computer), do you honestly think they'd have stopped and not invaded Poland or France? What if they'd won and claimed Poland and France as their own? Do you really think that the citizens of the country wouldn't rebel and create an utter anarchy?
One of the reasons they didn't succeed IMO is the GPL. There's a reason very few embedded devices run linux. With embedded devices, the hardware isn't that big a deal to develop and make; the software is. A company doesn't want to invest millions to develop a new PDA OS and have to GPL it. Their competition would quickly copy it and they'd loose profits. Embedded devices are predominately BSD, IMHO. BSD doesn't require you to release the source if you don't want to. Companys don't want to release the code, plain and simple.
Actually no, I've never done any one that. I happen to be a farmer in Southern GA. We used to grow allot of cotton, sorgum (I can never spell that right), and corn for feed. Then we went full-scale into hogs untill the market hit rock-bottom in '87 and hasn't come up since. Now we raise horses almost exclusively in addition to my job doing network engineering.
Not everyone who uses grep and vi doesn't chew tobacco. :^)
Actually rails aren't used to transport grain at all. We use augers to do that task. An auger is basically a sheet metal tub with a long stationary screw inside it. The bottom end is placed on one location where the grain is poured into. The screw inside rotates slowly and pulls the grain up the tub to the top where it just spills out into the top of a silo.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.....
::ducks to avoid the many groans and insults::
Linux is not currently a threat to Windows on the desktop. Personally I prefer the linux desktop to the MS desktop, but the vast majority of people don't and won't, untill some point down the road when people change. It WILL take people (and not linux) changing before linux will become a competeing OS in the home desktop market.
Besides, this isn't targeted at the linux crowd. Sun wants to target the Windows crowd. Not only is the linux community too small to make them enough profit to support Star Office, they also suffer huge competition with Open Office, Abiword, and other word processors for the linux desktop.
IMHO, Sun doesn't care about the linux crowd. StarOffice is probably only available to linux users because it budded from open Office and therefore was already on linux. Sun has spent time and money developing StarOffice to compete with MS Office, not to win the linux desktop. Charging a modest fee for Star Office 6.0 will allow Sun to advertise Star Office, put more software on the shelves at retailers.