One thing I really HATE, though, about the OLPC is that crappy sugarUI
When I got to play with an OLPC, the thing that I couldnt' get past was the quality of the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to use for normal tasks; the keys are like soft telephone buttons and require a press rather than a tap. I would hate to use it for any kind of typing or development. Another poster mentioned that you can ssh into it to install software which really seems like the optimal choice. Of course, the SugarUI really isn't designed for a standard linux user and it can be changed (to xfce, for instance), which probably would solve your issue with it.
Software issues aren't a huge deal, especially if they can be fixed via settings changes or any kind of hack. When the hardware itself (shitty display or keyboard or lack or ports) is an issue, the you have a problem. Complaints about the GUI or default installed applications are an easy problem to remedy.
The eeePC's keyboard is also small, but it's usable. I played with my cousin's and found that although the keyboard and screen were both on the small side, it was still a perfectly usable machine for being ultra-mobile and is far more usable than my cell phone (AT&T Tilt) for real work.
My primary likes with the eeePC are the size, weight, and specs for the package. Another notch in the unusably small direction and the machine would be garbage to me, but I think it juuust makes it... although another half inch wider to accommodate a larger keyboard and maybe a larger LCD would have been spectacular.
I haven't purchased any audio tracks from iTMS in the last year or two. The DRM was too restrictive for me (I have 3 machines of my own, plus 2 machines at work, so then if I plug my ipod into another machine and want to play music on it, I can't).
I hadn't heard of this offered by anyone yet. They really need to advertise this feature more. hm.
One of the primary complaints I had about online music sales (outside of the DRM limitations) was that they only offer a facility to sell the actual tracks; there's no way to bundle extras with the purchase (besides maybe a video, which the store also offers). The iTunes Music Store is especially guilty of this in that they are forcing the labels and artists to play by their rules. I really wish there was an online music store that not only offered DRM-free tracks, but also bundled artwork with them and offered the ability to order the physical CD, but download DRM-free tracks immediately so you don't need to wait for little (like $1) or no extra cost.
Looking at what NIN is offering, I feel that the price points are well set and I will be buying the $5 bundle. I'm tempted to buy the $10 bundle so I get physical CDs, but when 320kbps MP3s are available for $5, I question my need for physical media.
The availability of the PDF booklet and other art is spectacular and I really wish it was possible to get high-res album art more regularly with album purchases; even if they are just the cover. Some album covers are really nice (Pig Destroyer's "Phantom Limb" and Agoraphobic Nosebleeds "Beastial Machinery" to name just two.), and I wish I could purchase high resolution digital copies of the art with the albums.
In this case, yes they do have access to the same performance. RTFA.
I did read the article. Being able to glean how to implement an undocumented feature is not the same as having access to the same feature. Although it's not quite as big a deal as completely blocking access, it's still an obstacle to implementation.
The issue is that Apple created the OS and Product-A, that comes bundled with the OS, with whatever performance enhancers because they have access to the SPI and detailed knowledge of the internal data structures. Competing Product-B doesn't have access to said performance enhancers and therefore, have a harder time getting their application to achieve the same level of performance.
You make good points on why they do this, but at the same time, it really is stifling a competing product. If they take advantage of these performance enhancements in all of their applications, bundled or not, then they really have an unfair edge over other developers.
The reason I chose Sprint is simply because their terms of service don't have that "If you use this for anything but web browsing and email we'll drop you" clause that AT&T and Verizon have, and T-Mobile is still stuck using EDGE, which is just plain hilarious. Also the Sprint service is $20 less per month than AT&T/Verizon
Where are you located? Sprint service in this area (NYC) sucks. Everyone I know who has sprint has all kinds of issues with dropped calls and poor call quality. No one I know on sprint uses their mobile internet access, though. I'm the only AT&T mobile internet user that I know of and it costs $40/mo for unlimited... but I haven't read the contract at all, so I wasn't aware of the clauses (yes, I know... it's stupid on my part).
What's the sprint cost, if you don't mind me asking?
UMTS/HSDPA is quite usable (up 2MB/s real-world speeds) and convenient because I can use it when I'm not at home.
I've got the AT&T Tilt (HTC 8950, I think?), an HSDPA (and also 3G, edge, etc) phone, and use it to get online from my laptop when I'm on the go. Depending on where I am, I get drastically different performance, though. It seems that some locations don't support the HSDPA, so I get extremely high-latency connections (several seconds to make the connection; pinging google.com gives me ~800ms) that go at mediocre speeds (about 30K/sec).
Although when I'm in a good area, I can barely tell that I'm not on some random wireless access point somewhere. Things connect fast and when doing transfers, I see up to ~140K/sec, which is actually faster than my speakeasy DSL (it's wired to a location that's over 10,000 ft from the central office).
I can't even imagine getting 2MB/sec over the cell... That's faster than my home connection (TimeWarner cable which claims 12mbit down, but I typically max out at 1.1MB/sec). Are you sure you have your number/notation right? did you mean 2mbit/sec?
I'm not sure how I feel about the concept of people dropping home service entirely. I mean, you've got issues with sending your packets over the air and there's no real way to audit the security of that. Having not looked into the HSDPA wireless cards for laptops, I can't comment on those, but I connect to my phone over bluetooth to get online and would never do anything that required a highly secure connection. It's a matter of trust, and I don't feel safe on a cell phone network doing anything except reading slashdot, checking out the occasional xkcd comic or chatting online. Hell, I typically will plug into my LAN if I want to do banking or transfer encryption keys and the like.
You call them. They give you the points you've spent on a temporary XBox Live account, you redownload the software.
They didn't do that for us. When we got our 360 back from repairs and the content wouldn't play on the other accounts, I called and was told that the purchased content was meant for the account that purchased it and not the others, and the fact that it worked to start doesn't mean that it will always work that way into the future. I was mostly peeved because I was trying to see how many achievements I could unlock in a single round on XBLA games.
I get the feeling that depending on who you happen to talk to at support, you get different stories of how things work. When our 360 originally red-ring'd, we were told that it wouldn't be covered under warranty (we got a Rev-B 360, about a month or two after it was first released), but the unit still worked on and off... it would just occasionally not start up. After MS extended the warranty to a year, we were able to send it in and get it replaced. Although a friend of mine's unit red-ringed a couple days after ours and his got replaced, no questions asked. His also came back in about 8 days, where ours took 3 weeks.
I had just discovered the awesome 'split' feature in Tiger's Terminal about two months ago.
Yeah, I discovered that the day that I installed leopard. The funny thing is that I almost never use that feature, and now that it's gone, I find that I need it quite frequently. There's another feature that the terminal is missing that I can't remember at this second; not a necessity, but an annoyance to not have it.
I have a list somewhere of stuff that apple dropped the ball on that I typed up after a couple days with leopard. It included the fact that X11's aqua interface doesn't match the rest of the system, all the complaints about the dock and menubar and menus and soft shadows, and a bunch of power-user stuff that was either mis-implemented, removed, or broken.
It's a funny thing about leopard. It feels like apple went more for dazzling with eyecandy than with keeping up with the needs of power users. Although I can't live without spaces, now. I'm addicted.
I got my first gameboy when I was about 8 years old when I was going on a flight by myself to see my mom in FL. That one lasted me probably about 8 months. I remember the first time I broke it, I dropped it down the front steps at my gramma's house. The device stayed intact, but the screen wouldn't display anything except for a couple of horizontal black lines.
I got a new unit a couple months later from my dad which lasted me close to a year before it finally wouldn't turn on one day. We tried replacing the batteries, but nothing would fix it. I remember seeing my dad with it open on his desk doing some kind of surgery to it. He wound up taking the screen out of that one and transplanting it into my first one, thereby fixing it (I had to do a similar thing with my PSP, but that's another story). That gameboy still works to this day, although I made the mistake of putting the majority of my gameboy and gamegear games into the same drawer as this 8" speaker magnet that I had and none of them work anymore.
I've got really bad luck with electronics... Not including the normal upgrade process, only replacements for faulty units, I've had about 6 ipods, more than 10 cell phones, 3 palm pilots, 2 PSPs, 3 xbox360s, 2 Wiis, about 6 Laptops, a dozen monitors (CRT), countless harddrives (well over 20), and several new headphones, keyboards, mice, digital cameras, drive enclosures and powerbricks. Many were replaced under warranty, but still.
I don't consider your post to be flamebait... it seems like an honest question.
Aside from server space, what does BSD bring to the average desktop user?
Personally, I don't consider BSD to be a desktop OS, although I have known people to use it. What it is, though, is a OS that gives you consistency across flavours and distributions. You can go from one BSD box to another and feel confident you know where config files are kept and how the filesystem is laid out. With Linux, there's some guesswork involved, and if you don't know what distro you're on, you may have to hunt for the proper configs (maybe apache's config lives in/etc/httpd, maybe it lives in/etc/apache2, maybe it lives in/usr/local/apache2/conf).
BSD is more of a true Unix where Linux is an open source implementation of the POSIX environment.
BSD also has a completely different licensing structure than GNU/Linux. I haven't compared the licenses side by side, but I do know that there have been incompatibilities in the past and there are some fundamental differences between them.
Also, depending on the flavour (openBSD, NetBSD or FreeBSD), they have different levels of quality control and all can be considered to be extremely stable. If I was going to create my own dedicated router or firewall box, I would probably choose BSD over linux.
I was at the keynote (albeit, in a separate room, watching it on a stupid big screen... and I waited in line for 5 hours... but that's a rant for another forum), and I can really see a reason to get this machine. It's got a pretty wide audience.
Having a 15" macbookpro, this thing is heavy. It's not Dell heavy, but it's still a bit heavy. It can be a pain to lug around and I generally don't take it with me unless I know I'll be able to use it. Having a lighter machine would be very nice, but I still feel that my MacbookPro is too big.
I ordered an eeePC right before xmas (which still hasn't shipped) because I want to have a machine that I can take everywhere I go, even if I don't necessarily need it. The thing is tiny, light, sturdy and cheap. For $500, I'm not kill myself if I misplace it or it gets broken and it shouldn't be too much of a pain to carry around with me.
I was really hoping that apple's rumored subnotebook would actually be tinier... they really need something to fill the gap that the 12" powerbook left behind (not that it was really that hot of a machine). I would have been psyched for something with similar specs (maybe the option for a slower cpu), but with a smaller screen and perhaps more battery life, especially if they could have gotten the cost below $1000... maybe $1200 with a smaller solid-state drive. 32GB should be more than enough. hell, 20GB would be fine for such a thing; I've got my 80GB ipod that I can use for storing any media.
For those that love to lug around their laptop to watch movies on, why not just rip/encode your DVDs and put them on the drive, or chuck them onto your ipod?
I can see the Air being a pretty popular product, although it is pricey; but then so are most other lightweight notebooks.
Why don't you just copy the.config file over to the new kernel? Kernel migrations aren't a big issue at all imho.
I've tried doing that in the past but have wound up with errors. I believe it's because my servers are both PPC and it seems that features appear and disappear and get renamed between versions, at least between gaps of 5+ versions. Going from 2.6.12 to the latest will not work at all. there are an enormous amount of new features that require enabling.
I've had to run revdep-rebuild once or twice; because of expat and one other package, but in the last 5 years, gentoo has changed their config syntax for networks and the way that pam works with ldap logins. I've had to do big jumps in kernel upgrades because of lack of support of features I use in iptables which caused me to have to upgrade to udev from devfs, and I've had several other weekend's worth jobs because of config file and package deprication.
The reason that I say that Gentoo isn't ideal for production is because of these changes that are made. If you want to stay relatively up to date in your packages (for security reasons), it can be a pretty big pain to keep up with config changes. The measures that you can implement to protect your config files aren't always great since sometimes a minor upgrade will incorporate some new configuration option (I've seen this in apache, php and ldap on several occasions).
Rolling your own enterprise-level server management application, I think, would be easiest on gentoo because so much of the system is exposed and it is so straight forward, but my point in my original post is that for production, you'd like a reasonably stable implementation of configuration and some way of keeping my old setup until I'm ready to do a full revamp of my machine.
I didn't bash gentoo. I'm a gentoo user and I like it a lot... I just wouldn't use it for contract jobs or at my real job (sysadmin of around 130 machines); for that, I'd rather use CentOS.
As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options. I've got an issue right now where the current kernel will not boot my machine and after dozens of attempts, I haven't been able to solve it. I've got several unsolved posts in the gentoo forums about this... the downside is that I'm running gentoo on PPC hardware, so I don't have the largest pool of people to help troubleshoot.
As has been discussed before, Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.
The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.
Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.
Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.
Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.
Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.
I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the.tar.gz source files they download from sourceforge. You don't hear people bitching about Linux from scratch. The nice thing about Gentoo over LSF is that it automates a lot of the process for you and allows you to set up your system by itself, without the aide of another machine to get the system bootstrapped and initially configured. Sure, some gentoo users are cocky; but they're cocky in the same way that a guy who built his own Camarro acts around their buddy who just bought his new, shiny Saturn.
Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.
The issues that are arising with this enormous flame war between "evolutionists" and "creationists" is because it keeps escalating.
It seems to me that this whole thing started when christians wanted to teach creationism either in addition to or alternative to evolution and has escalated into this tremendous argument over science being anti-religion.
The real issue at hand is that theology does not have a place in a standard educational system. If you want that, go to a private school. I'm actually surprised that these evolutionists aren't also fighting for biblical stories in Literature classes, biblical math (pi = 3) in geometry class, and prayer before lunch.
They changed the admin password. I set these up all day, the admin is accessible by wifi... just you didn't have the right password. I meta-moderated you correctly, but you are incorrect. WAN config is disabled by default, which is configuring remotely from the internet side to the public facing IP address of the router.
really? I'll have to doublecheck. I'm 99% sure I didn't change whatever the default settings are on the one in my apartment (my roommate's unit) and that one doesn't allow wireless administration. I was fairly sure it was disabled on the other ones that I have/have set up, but those are all running dd-wrt, now, so there's no way of checking.
When we first moved into my current apartment and didn't have internet, yet, I needed to get online with my desktop machine (no wireless and no signal in my room) so I set my powerbook up to an available network and set it up to share that internet connection through ethernet, then attached that to my switch and my access point so we could all get online with a good signal.
I thought about it for a while but decided against simply leeching off the neighbor forever since I like to have some degree of control and information when things aren't working as smoothly as they should.
This has since become a non-issue since it appears that EVERYONE in neighborhood must be grabbing torrents. I rarely see more than 200K/sec come from anywhere. Usenet used to bless me with 1000K/sec+ speeds, but now I see around 170 at night and around 300 in the mornings.
The problem with WPA is that certain manufacturers of certain non-computer wifi-devices decided not to support anything other than WEP
Yeah, like my Nintendo DS. Although my Wii gets onto our network without issue.
And I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I've had significant issues getting XP machines to log into WPA2 protected wireless networks. There was supposedly a separate update which fixed that and gave you the ability to connect to such a network, but I was unable to get it installed/working at my roommate's sister's place.
I have gotten it to work on other machines, though. I'm not sure exactly what I did differently.
I'm not so familiar with Belkin, Netgear and all no-name wireless routers out there, but the newer (last year or two) Linksys WRT54G routers don't allow administrative access over the WLAN by default. You simply get an access denied page when attempting to access it. I'm kind of surprised that linksys doesn't just deny wireless connections to the administrator pages.
Unfortunately, that means that I can no longer log in to those routers with default passwords and open up ports for myself when I'm on some stranger's network and it requires me to plug in when I need to make changes on my own networks.
Of course, you should disable access to the administrator pages over the WLAN (or restrict it to a maintenance port if your router has one), change your administrator password (and username, if possible) and make sure you've got strong encryption with a strong password/key.
When I was living in manhattan (2004-2005), there were over 20 visible wireless access points from my apartment. Running kismet and walking from the front to the back of my apartment with my powerbook, I could pick up closer to 30 networks and about 3/4 of them were password protected; mostly with WEP. Nowadays, living in brooklyn, I can pick up around 15 wireless networks and all but 2 are password protected and most are using WPA or WPA2.
Re:Does anybody still filter based on ports?
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Linux Firewalls
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Considering that this book is targeted towards linux servers, port-based (and address-based) firewall rules are still really powerful.
You basically want to only open up the ports that you're actively listening on (port 80 on a webserver) for input and block everything else. Also, you want to block outgoing ports for anything that you're not using for output.
In my setup, I block everything going out except for LDAP and mysql, but I restrict those outgoing requests to the addresses of the ldap and mysql servers.
Another good feature of iptables is that you can restrict packet types, so you can block ICMP (ping) if you want. It's also got features that are useful for preventing attacks such as ssh authentication floods; you can have it only allow a certain number of connections over a certain amount of time from the outside... like... if more than 10 ssh connections are made within a 10 minute period, drop the rest.
For a server, there really isn't a super-serious need to do application level filtering, although, following the security in depth paradigm, it never hurts.
yeah, I read 3/4 of this and all his complaints have been about people that have hired him to do projects and the fact that the Django crew is a lot nicer to talk to and are cool and smart guys.
All his complaints stem from him not getting along with people, not getting paid on time, the fact that the majority of the people jumping on rails aren't smart enough to properly implement things and that he really seems to be an abrasive character.
I mean, the first several paragraphs are nothing but him talking shit about kicking people in their respective mouths.
Aside from the fact that it's about rails, why is this on slashdot, exactly?
My cousin uses the wireless adapter for his 360 to get on xboxlive... you'd think that the signal for the wireless controllers would interfere with that considering they're in such close proximity to each other.
His 360 does drop him from xbox live on occasion (probably once or twice a day) but I think it's either related to his internet connection (it's cable and I sometimes get dropped from AIM when I'm over there) or the fact that his wireless accesspoint is on the other side of his house. My laptop gets an ok signal (about 75%) in his room, so it could just be that the 360 is either too close to the floor or has a mediocre antenna.
At home, our 360 hasn't interfered with our wireless in any way noticeable. the accesspoint and 360 are on opposite sides of the room and even with 4 controllers in use on the 360, my signal on my laptop hasn't degraded.
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One thing I really HATE, though, about the OLPC is that crappy sugarUI
When I got to play with an OLPC, the thing that I couldnt' get past was the quality of the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to use for normal tasks; the keys are like soft telephone buttons and require a press rather than a tap. I would hate to use it for any kind of typing or development. Another poster mentioned that you can ssh into it to install software which really seems like the optimal choice. Of course, the SugarUI really isn't designed for a standard linux user and it can be changed (to xfce, for instance), which probably would solve your issue with it.
Software issues aren't a huge deal, especially if they can be fixed via settings changes or any kind of hack. When the hardware itself (shitty display or keyboard or lack or ports) is an issue, the you have a problem. Complaints about the GUI or default installed applications are an easy problem to remedy.
The eeePC's keyboard is also small, but it's usable. I played with my cousin's and found that although the keyboard and screen were both on the small side, it was still a perfectly usable machine for being ultra-mobile and is far more usable than my cell phone (AT&T Tilt) for real work.
My primary likes with the eeePC are the size, weight, and specs for the package. Another notch in the unusably small direction and the machine would be garbage to me, but I think it juuust makes it... although another half inch wider to accommodate a larger keyboard and maybe a larger LCD would have been spectacular.
how recently have they started offering this?
I haven't purchased any audio tracks from iTMS in the last year or two. The DRM was too restrictive for me (I have 3 machines of my own, plus 2 machines at work, so then if I plug my ipod into another machine and want to play music on it, I can't).
I hadn't heard of this offered by anyone yet. They really need to advertise this feature more. hm.
One of the primary complaints I had about online music sales (outside of the DRM limitations) was that they only offer a facility to sell the actual tracks; there's no way to bundle extras with the purchase (besides maybe a video, which the store also offers). The iTunes Music Store is especially guilty of this in that they are forcing the labels and artists to play by their rules. I really wish there was an online music store that not only offered DRM-free tracks, but also bundled artwork with them and offered the ability to order the physical CD, but download DRM-free tracks immediately so you don't need to wait for little (like $1) or no extra cost.
Looking at what NIN is offering, I feel that the price points are well set and I will be buying the $5 bundle. I'm tempted to buy the $10 bundle so I get physical CDs, but when 320kbps MP3s are available for $5, I question my need for physical media.
The availability of the PDF booklet and other art is spectacular and I really wish it was possible to get high-res album art more regularly with album purchases; even if they are just the cover. Some album covers are really nice (Pig Destroyer's "Phantom Limb" and Agoraphobic Nosebleeds "Beastial Machinery" to name just two.), and I wish I could purchase high resolution digital copies of the art with the albums.
In this case, yes they do have access to the same performance. RTFA.
I did read the article. Being able to glean how to implement an undocumented feature is not the same as having access to the same feature. Although it's not quite as big a deal as completely blocking access, it's still an obstacle to implementation.
You've sorta sidestepped the main issue, though.
The issue is that Apple created the OS and Product-A, that comes bundled with the OS, with whatever performance enhancers because they have access to the SPI and detailed knowledge of the internal data structures. Competing Product-B doesn't have access to said performance enhancers and therefore, have a harder time getting their application to achieve the same level of performance.
You make good points on why they do this, but at the same time, it really is stifling a competing product. If they take advantage of these performance enhancements in all of their applications, bundled or not, then they really have an unfair edge over other developers.
wow, that's pretty different pricing...
although my $40/mo is the unlimited phonedata plan, which is what I use for when I'm online with my computer.
if I got their Express card, it would probably be 80$/mo because of the extra line and everything, but I don't use it enough to warrant that.
The reason I chose Sprint is simply because their terms of service don't have that "If you use this for anything but web browsing and email we'll drop you" clause that AT&T and Verizon have, and T-Mobile is still stuck using EDGE, which is just plain hilarious. Also the Sprint service is $20 less per month than AT&T/Verizon
Where are you located? Sprint service in this area (NYC) sucks. Everyone I know who has sprint has all kinds of issues with dropped calls and poor call quality. No one I know on sprint uses their mobile internet access, though. I'm the only AT&T mobile internet user that I know of and it costs $40/mo for unlimited... but I haven't read the contract at all, so I wasn't aware of the clauses (yes, I know... it's stupid on my part).
What's the sprint cost, if you don't mind me asking?
UMTS/HSDPA is quite usable (up 2MB/s real-world speeds) and convenient because I can use it when I'm not at home.
I've got the AT&T Tilt (HTC 8950, I think?), an HSDPA (and also 3G, edge, etc) phone, and use it to get online from my laptop when I'm on the go. Depending on where I am, I get drastically different performance, though. It seems that some locations don't support the HSDPA, so I get extremely high-latency connections (several seconds to make the connection; pinging google.com gives me ~800ms) that go at mediocre speeds (about 30K/sec).
Although when I'm in a good area, I can barely tell that I'm not on some random wireless access point somewhere. Things connect fast and when doing transfers, I see up to ~140K/sec, which is actually faster than my speakeasy DSL (it's wired to a location that's over 10,000 ft from the central office).
I can't even imagine getting 2MB/sec over the cell... That's faster than my home connection (TimeWarner cable which claims 12mbit down, but I typically max out at 1.1MB/sec). Are you sure you have your number/notation right? did you mean 2mbit/sec?
I'm not sure how I feel about the concept of people dropping home service entirely. I mean, you've got issues with sending your packets over the air and there's no real way to audit the security of that. Having not looked into the HSDPA wireless cards for laptops, I can't comment on those, but I connect to my phone over bluetooth to get online and would never do anything that required a highly secure connection. It's a matter of trust, and I don't feel safe on a cell phone network doing anything except reading slashdot, checking out the occasional xkcd comic or chatting online. Hell, I typically will plug into my LAN if I want to do banking or transfer encryption keys and the like.
It's probably all in my head, though.
You call them. They give you the points you've spent on a temporary XBox Live account, you redownload the software.
They didn't do that for us. When we got our 360 back from repairs and the content wouldn't play on the other accounts, I called and was told that the purchased content was meant for the account that purchased it and not the others, and the fact that it worked to start doesn't mean that it will always work that way into the future. I was mostly peeved because I was trying to see how many achievements I could unlock in a single round on XBLA games.
I get the feeling that depending on who you happen to talk to at support, you get different stories of how things work. When our 360 originally red-ring'd, we were told that it wouldn't be covered under warranty (we got a Rev-B 360, about a month or two after it was first released), but the unit still worked on and off... it would just occasionally not start up. After MS extended the warranty to a year, we were able to send it in and get it replaced. Although a friend of mine's unit red-ringed a couple days after ours and his got replaced, no questions asked. His also came back in about 8 days, where ours took 3 weeks.
I had just discovered the awesome 'split' feature in Tiger's Terminal about two months ago.
Yeah, I discovered that the day that I installed leopard. The funny thing is that I almost never use that feature, and now that it's gone, I find that I need it quite frequently. There's another feature that the terminal is missing that I can't remember at this second; not a necessity, but an annoyance to not have it.
I have a list somewhere of stuff that apple dropped the ball on that I typed up after a couple days with leopard. It included the fact that X11's aqua interface doesn't match the rest of the system, all the complaints about the dock and menubar and menus and soft shadows, and a bunch of power-user stuff that was either mis-implemented, removed, or broken.
It's a funny thing about leopard. It feels like apple went more for dazzling with eyecandy than with keeping up with the needs of power users. Although I can't live without spaces, now. I'm addicted.
I got my first gameboy when I was about 8 years old when I was going on a flight by myself to see my mom in FL. That one lasted me probably about 8 months. I remember the first time I broke it, I dropped it down the front steps at my gramma's house. The device stayed intact, but the screen wouldn't display anything except for a couple of horizontal black lines.
I got a new unit a couple months later from my dad which lasted me close to a year before it finally wouldn't turn on one day. We tried replacing the batteries, but nothing would fix it. I remember seeing my dad with it open on his desk doing some kind of surgery to it. He wound up taking the screen out of that one and transplanting it into my first one, thereby fixing it (I had to do a similar thing with my PSP, but that's another story). That gameboy still works to this day, although I made the mistake of putting the majority of my gameboy and gamegear games into the same drawer as this 8" speaker magnet that I had and none of them work anymore.
I've got really bad luck with electronics... Not including the normal upgrade process, only replacements for faulty units, I've had about 6 ipods, more than 10 cell phones, 3 palm pilots, 2 PSPs, 3 xbox360s, 2 Wiis, about 6 Laptops, a dozen monitors (CRT), countless harddrives (well over 20), and several new headphones, keyboards, mice, digital cameras, drive enclosures and powerbricks. Many were replaced under warranty, but still.
I don't consider your post to be flamebait... it seems like an honest question.
/etc/httpd, maybe it lives in /etc/apache2, maybe it lives in /usr/local/apache2/conf).
Aside from server space, what does BSD bring to the average desktop user?
Personally, I don't consider BSD to be a desktop OS, although I have known people to use it. What it is, though, is a OS that gives you consistency across flavours and distributions. You can go from one BSD box to another and feel confident you know where config files are kept and how the filesystem is laid out. With Linux, there's some guesswork involved, and if you don't know what distro you're on, you may have to hunt for the proper configs (maybe apache's config lives in
BSD is more of a true Unix where Linux is an open source implementation of the POSIX environment.
BSD also has a completely different licensing structure than GNU/Linux. I haven't compared the licenses side by side, but I do know that there have been incompatibilities in the past and there are some fundamental differences between them.
Also, depending on the flavour (openBSD, NetBSD or FreeBSD), they have different levels of quality control and all can be considered to be extremely stable. If I was going to create my own dedicated router or firewall box, I would probably choose BSD over linux.
I was at the keynote (albeit, in a separate room, watching it on a stupid big screen... and I waited in line for 5 hours... but that's a rant for another forum), and I can really see a reason to get this machine. It's got a pretty wide audience.
Having a 15" macbookpro, this thing is heavy. It's not Dell heavy, but it's still a bit heavy. It can be a pain to lug around and I generally don't take it with me unless I know I'll be able to use it. Having a lighter machine would be very nice, but I still feel that my MacbookPro is too big.
I ordered an eeePC right before xmas (which still hasn't shipped) because I want to have a machine that I can take everywhere I go, even if I don't necessarily need it. The thing is tiny, light, sturdy and cheap. For $500, I'm not kill myself if I misplace it or it gets broken and it shouldn't be too much of a pain to carry around with me.
I was really hoping that apple's rumored subnotebook would actually be tinier... they really need something to fill the gap that the 12" powerbook left behind (not that it was really that hot of a machine). I would have been psyched for something with similar specs (maybe the option for a slower cpu), but with a smaller screen and perhaps more battery life, especially if they could have gotten the cost below $1000... maybe $1200 with a smaller solid-state drive. 32GB should be more than enough. hell, 20GB would be fine for such a thing; I've got my 80GB ipod that I can use for storing any media.
For those that love to lug around their laptop to watch movies on, why not just rip/encode your DVDs and put them on the drive, or chuck them onto your ipod?
I can see the Air being a pretty popular product, although it is pricey; but then so are most other lightweight notebooks.
ahhh. I'll have to check that out. I was unaware.
Thanks. =)
I've tried doing that in the past but have wound up with errors. I believe it's because my servers are both PPC and it seems that features appear and disappear and get renamed between versions, at least between gaps of 5+ versions. Going from 2.6.12 to the latest will not work at all. there are an enormous amount of new features that require enabling.
I've had to run revdep-rebuild once or twice; because of expat and one other package, but in the last 5 years, gentoo has changed their config syntax for networks and the way that pam works with ldap logins. I've had to do big jumps in kernel upgrades because of lack of support of features I use in iptables which caused me to have to upgrade to udev from devfs, and I've had several other weekend's worth jobs because of config file and package deprication.
The reason that I say that Gentoo isn't ideal for production is because of these changes that are made. If you want to stay relatively up to date in your packages (for security reasons), it can be a pretty big pain to keep up with config changes. The measures that you can implement to protect your config files aren't always great since sometimes a minor upgrade will incorporate some new configuration option (I've seen this in apache, php and ldap on several occasions).
Rolling your own enterprise-level server management application, I think, would be easiest on gentoo because so much of the system is exposed and it is so straight forward, but my point in my original post is that for production, you'd like a reasonably stable implementation of configuration and some way of keeping my old setup until I'm ready to do a full revamp of my machine.
I didn't bash gentoo. I'm a gentoo user and I like it a lot... I just wouldn't use it for contract jobs or at my real job (sysadmin of around 130 machines); for that, I'd rather use CentOS.
As an aside... although I do enjoy building my own kernel, it can be time consuming and doing large jumps (I've gone from 2.6.4 to 2.6.12 to 2.6.19) can be a real pain in the ass to remember to properly enable all options. I've got an issue right now where the current kernel will not boot my machine and after dozens of attempts, I haven't been able to solve it. I've got several unsolved posts in the gentoo forums about this... the downside is that I'm running gentoo on PPC hardware, so I don't have the largest pool of people to help troubleshoot.
As has been discussed before, Gentoo isn't an enterprise production OS... in fact, it's not totally ideal for even a single server in a small shop.
.tar.gz source files they download from sourceforge. You don't hear people bitching about Linux from scratch. The nice thing about Gentoo over LSF is that it automates a lot of the process for you and allows you to set up your system by itself, without the aide of another machine to get the system bootstrapped and initially configured. Sure, some gentoo users are cocky; but they're cocky in the same way that a guy who built his own Camarro acts around their buddy who just bought his new, shiny Saturn.
The thing about gentoo is that it gives you super-fine grained control over your packages. You want ldap support? want to not support jpeg, but to support png? do you want the package installed, but omit all the X11 bullshit? Or how about keeping a specific version of a package from upgrading when you upgrade your system? That's the power of gentoo's package management system.
Gentoo also offers insight into the innerworkings of the linux OS. You get to build your own kernel and pick EXACTLY what gets installed.
Since Gentoo is frequently on the bleeding edge, it's great for testing out new versions of applications. One of the downsides of CentOS that I've encountered was the fact that subversion isn't quite up to date, and it took several months before vim7 was in the yum repository. Of course, you could add new repositories to yum, or download an RPM specificly of what you want, but that sometimes involves waiting for someone to make the RPM or finding the repository that has what you need.
Another downside of Gentoo, especially in a production environment, is that since it's bleeding edge, many things in the system are changing and usually with a frequency that defies belief. I've been running Gentoo on my own two personal servers (hosting my websites and mysql and DNS and stuff) for nearly 5 years. The sheer number of times that I've booted the machine after doing an 'emerge -u world' and gotten "this configuration file's syntax is depricated, please use this new syntax instead" messages has been infuriating. Routine upgrades aren't routine. You can spend hours picking through config files and manually inspecting the diffs between versions. You don't want Gentoo on your server unless you enjoy spending a day doing an upgrade.
Gentoo is ideal for embedded projects and systems that aren't going to change. The OS lends itself well to projects such as DVRs and controller OSs for robotics. It's small and runs on a lot of different hardwares.
I'm always amazed at how much hate people have for gentoo because you have to build it yourself, but you don't hear people getting mad about the
Gentoo is an exercise in academia. For a user new to Linux who wants to get a feel for the ins and outs and get used to the commandline really fast, gentoo is for them.
The issues that are arising with this enormous flame war between "evolutionists" and "creationists" is because it keeps escalating.
It seems to me that this whole thing started when christians wanted to teach creationism either in addition to or alternative to evolution and has escalated into this tremendous argument over science being anti-religion.
The real issue at hand is that theology does not have a place in a standard educational system. If you want that, go to a private school. I'm actually surprised that these evolutionists aren't also fighting for biblical stories in Literature classes, biblical math (pi = 3) in geometry class, and prayer before lunch.
really? I'll have to doublecheck. I'm 99% sure I didn't change whatever the default settings are on the one in my apartment (my roommate's unit) and that one doesn't allow wireless administration. I was fairly sure it was disabled on the other ones that I have/have set up, but those are all running dd-wrt, now, so there's no way of checking.
thanks for pointing that out. =)
When we first moved into my current apartment and didn't have internet, yet, I needed to get online with my desktop machine (no wireless and no signal in my room) so I set my powerbook up to an available network and set it up to share that internet connection through ethernet, then attached that to my switch and my access point so we could all get online with a good signal.
I thought about it for a while but decided against simply leeching off the neighbor forever since I like to have some degree of control and information when things aren't working as smoothly as they should.
This has since become a non-issue since it appears that EVERYONE in neighborhood must be grabbing torrents. I rarely see more than 200K/sec come from anywhere. Usenet used to bless me with 1000K/sec+ speeds, but now I see around 170 at night and around 300 in the mornings.
Yeah, like my Nintendo DS. Although my Wii gets onto our network without issue.
And I'm not sure if this is still the case, but I've had significant issues getting XP machines to log into WPA2 protected wireless networks. There was supposedly a separate update which fixed that and gave you the ability to connect to such a network, but I was unable to get it installed/working at my roommate's sister's place.
I have gotten it to work on other machines, though. I'm not sure exactly what I did differently.
I'm not so familiar with Belkin, Netgear and all no-name wireless routers out there, but the newer (last year or two) Linksys WRT54G routers don't allow administrative access over the WLAN by default. You simply get an access denied page when attempting to access it. I'm kind of surprised that linksys doesn't just deny wireless connections to the administrator pages.
Unfortunately, that means that I can no longer log in to those routers with default passwords and open up ports for myself when I'm on some stranger's network and it requires me to plug in when I need to make changes on my own networks.
Of course, you should disable access to the administrator pages over the WLAN (or restrict it to a maintenance port if your router has one), change your administrator password (and username, if possible) and make sure you've got strong encryption with a strong password/key.
When I was living in manhattan (2004-2005), there were over 20 visible wireless access points from my apartment. Running kismet and walking from the front to the back of my apartment with my powerbook, I could pick up closer to 30 networks and about 3/4 of them were password protected; mostly with WEP. Nowadays, living in brooklyn, I can pick up around 15 wireless networks and all but 2 are password protected and most are using WPA or WPA2.
Considering that this book is targeted towards linux servers, port-based (and address-based) firewall rules are still really powerful.
You basically want to only open up the ports that you're actively listening on (port 80 on a webserver) for input and block everything else. Also, you want to block outgoing ports for anything that you're not using for output.
In my setup, I block everything going out except for LDAP and mysql, but I restrict those outgoing requests to the addresses of the ldap and mysql servers.
Another good feature of iptables is that you can restrict packet types, so you can block ICMP (ping) if you want. It's also got features that are useful for preventing attacks such as ssh authentication floods; you can have it only allow a certain number of connections over a certain amount of time from the outside... like... if more than 10 ssh connections are made within a 10 minute period, drop the rest.
For a server, there really isn't a super-serious need to do application level filtering, although, following the security in depth paradigm, it never hurts.
yeah, I read 3/4 of this and all his complaints have been about people that have hired him to do projects and the fact that the Django crew is a lot nicer to talk to and are cool and smart guys.
All his complaints stem from him not getting along with people, not getting paid on time, the fact that the majority of the people jumping on rails aren't smart enough to properly implement things and that he really seems to be an abrasive character.
I mean, the first several paragraphs are nothing but him talking shit about kicking people in their respective mouths.
Aside from the fact that it's about rails, why is this on slashdot, exactly?
My cousin uses the wireless adapter for his 360 to get on xboxlive... you'd think that the signal for the wireless controllers would interfere with that considering they're in such close proximity to each other.
His 360 does drop him from xbox live on occasion (probably once or twice a day) but I think it's either related to his internet connection (it's cable and I sometimes get dropped from AIM when I'm over there) or the fact that his wireless accesspoint is on the other side of his house. My laptop gets an ok signal (about 75%) in his room, so it could just be that the 360 is either too close to the floor or has a mediocre antenna.
At home, our 360 hasn't interfered with our wireless in any way noticeable. the accesspoint and 360 are on opposite sides of the room and even with 4 controllers in use on the 360, my signal on my laptop hasn't degraded.