I thought that apple paid the Open Group to certify themselves as a Unix, around the time that OS X came out.
What am I missing here?
One simple thing. They didn't. Their OS is based on Unix code for certain, it's pretty close to BSD compatible, but it's not Unix(tm) and, as your post shows, they've been marketing it in a way that can be argued to be misleading in that sense.
Here's also an osOpinion piece from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
Since osOpinion's publishing of this piece, the Open Group has updated their web site to include Apple into its list of vendors that support the single Unix specification.
Here's also an osOpinion piece from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
Since osOpinion's publishing of this piece, the Open Group has updated their web site to include Apple into its list of vendors that support the single Unix specification.
Here's also a report from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
Since osOpinion's publishing of this piece, the Open Group has updated their web site to include Apple into its list of vendors that support the single Unix specification. This appears likely as a direct result to osOpinion's publishing of the report.
I wondered many times when The Open Group was going to start in on Apple for calling OS X "UNIX", when they don't even let the free *BSD variants and Linux use the name.
Because Apple did certify MacOS X as a Unix with them. It underwent testing, appeared on their registry, T.O.G. even issued press releases affirming MacOS X as a "Unix".
Nothing odd about any of it until Apple starts claiming unix is a generic, they don't need to honor the licensing fee's they'd agreed to,
I have no idea who the "Open Group" is, but it sounds like they pretend to support GNU/Linux. Suing for things like the name "Unix" however seems to me to be very much against the ideals of GNU and the FSF. I'd keep a close eye on this organization; they sound like posers.
And of course you can't be bothered to look 'em up, can you? Not like you're not already on the web...
And yeah, if you've not heard of them they they can't be anybody important, can they?
I'm sure the folks at Apple are completely relieved they've got your vote and staff from The Open Group are stretching out on the tracks that run by their building right now, disconsolate that "quortra" dissed 'em...
There's no chance of you perhaps being an ignorant self-aggrandizing poser yourself, is there?
At one point Apple was listed by The Open Group as a fully compliant Unix certified by them. Since then either Apple hasn't continued to pay some sort of licensing fee (yearly?) or each new version of MacOS X must be re-licensed.
The story really is poorly reported by not including this information, and the rabid/.'ers posting would do well to have done the minimal amount of research before expressing strong opinions (this is the www...)
In any case the "Unix" certification is one of those check-off items that get used in evaluations so whether or not there's any real value to it there is an effective value. "Unix", "Posix", this-book/that-book compliance; they're common evaluation criteria and having or not having them is very important.
Of course the question is has "Unix" become a generic word like "Crayon" became or is it still specific to a vendor like "Xerox" or "Kleenex". YMMV but it looks like to me T.O.G. may have a point and paying through the nose may be one of Apples costs for the best selling Unix distribution out there.
First off the issue isn't the compression, it's encryption. Thus the problem isn't a new one, it's been around since the first extension of zip to involve other sorts of mangling. No standard zip library can read those, it's just that the big two commercial vendors have 'til now kept compatibility with each-other's encryption routines.
The unfortunate part is that this is even being called "zip" at all. These aren't, they're zip with proprietary extensions for a completely different purpose. Zip is being used as a brand name and being "embraced and extended". Truth be told these should now be called zep or something files, not misrepresented as simply zip compressed files.
What will this all break? Well for the suckers who use the encryption they're locking themselves into that one vendor's proprietary extensions. They won't be able to send their compressed files or archives and reliably assume they'll be readable. With zip now a standard part of many OS's (even WinXP now includes it) these mislabeled files will cause confusion and increased complexity.
What can folks do about this? First reconsider corporate licenses for these increasingly un-zip applications. No need to increase the Help Desk's burden with unnecessary/non-standard extensions. Send out a memo reminding folks about policies regarding encrypting company material, the management of the keys used, and the real quality of the encryption used. Look at the free alternatives to the commercial apps, there's little that these applications do that can't be done just as well with free tools.
Zip's value lies in it being a standard. Don't support inappropriate proprietary extensions to it.
Another scale model of the solar system is at Boston Massachusetts Museum of Science and nearby suburbs.
Documented here it is described in the official exhibit guide as being scaled 6,215 miles per inch (helpfully translated by the 1st site as a 1-to-400 million scale model (1 inch equals 10,000 km)). The planets are all conveniently located in public places reasonably easily reached by public transportation or for the more hardy by bicycle.
The other side of the story is that a number of Mac sites have been publicizing the online vote side of this and exhorting the faithful to cast a ballot. While I'm personally a fan of Mr. Ives work the whole tactic of stuffing the ballot box just annoys me.
Of course this is all just as bad is the newspapers, TV stations, and websites who run these sort of garbage polls and tout them as having any sort of validity. In reality they're just calculated come-on's for for the website being used and anyone with half a clue knows to discount this sort of trivially rigged "slacktivism". Nonetheless I keep getting emails asking me to vote in blahblahblah.com's poll to show my support for #cause.
My advice is not to play sucker for these folks & their fake poles, when you come across them ask the sponsors exactly how valid they consider their results to be. Then ask if this is really the "news" they pretend or are they just being slimers, do they feel this discredits their entire operation?
The pluses to the design are the high-altitude launch (elegant), and the low-speed entry (elegant).
Agreed.
The minuses as I see it are the relatively complex design,
Compared to what? X-33? Personal jetpacks? NCC-X? Sure it could be brute-forced with a big block of steel and a coupla nukes but this whole thing is about design. Indeed this one looks simpler then most of the others once one gets over it not being designed by a T-square.
lack of cargo space,
It's not intended to be a tug. Rather it's a demo meeting the X-Pride criteria put together privately in two years. Pull out the seats if you want luggage. Besides, where would it bring cargo to?
cost,
Cheaper then most anything else. Heck, privately financed at that.
unpowered landing.
This is the beta version. Ruttan's got a long history with aircraft including unpowered or marginally-powered ones, I'm sure it'll land fine, seems to have worked well for the 99 ton SST.
Oh, and the fact that it is very, very ugly.
Oh, well yeah, that it doesn't jibe with your sense of aesthetics means it hasn't a chance. Howzabout you post your photo and the rest of us can predict your odds of success?
A similar re-entry vehicle, but larger with powered maneuverability on re-entry,
Why? 'Cause you want a commercial passenger service on the 1st flight? You've got some bias against unpowered landings?
with a high-altitude balloon as a "first stage" would rock.
Why? Kewler? I think the first flight succeeding would rock, not your backseat redesigning.
And be cheaper.
How? Helium costs y'know. And that balloon & helium wouldn't be recoverable. Plus the first meter off the ground under a big balloon is really hazardous, a heck of a lot more then a glider landing.
Besides, the White Night is also the trainer for the spacecraft. Yep, you heard me, they load a profile on computer in the WN and it flies the same as the spacecraft! Double duty saving lots of money.
I'm not really sure how huge a balloon (hydrogen or helium) would have to be to drag something that big to the requisite altitude, especially if you intended to go beyond 100km.
Big. The math isn't that hard for a rough but trust me, big. and expensive. And non-reusable. And a hazard afterwords.
The second stage would be heavier, unless you had a new fuel or more efficient use of the fuel.
Yeah, well now that you've pretty much trashed all the other engineering now you want, what, super rockets? Sure, we'll just use the ones off your Voltron doll...
How about just come out with it and admit you want Star Trek teleporters, forget this nasty uncomfortable dangerous test vehicle stuff? Hell I bet the thing doesn't even have in-flight service with a decent bar cart!
Frankly you come off as the the exact sort of useless US holiday poster you mention. Lots of inane second guessing, apparently no homework before reading one article, coming up with ridiculous requirements: Cargo? For a test vehicle? Meeting X-Prize criteria? Have you EVER been around ANY sort of engineering project?
I've lived in apartments in a lot of cities, learned a thing or two about hot summers. Now living in Montreal this isn't the hottest place in summer but there is a few weeks of high temps and most structures here are optimized for the long cold winters. Here's my advice on what has worked over the years and locations...
Ensure good airflow in the space. Try and figure out if the breezes come from one side of your place or another and take advantage of that. Place fans to pull in air from one side of the house and push it out the other.
Keep air moving around you. Ceiling fans are great - cheap, quiet, out of the way. If you've appropriate mounts the landlord shouldn't care and you can take 'em with you when you leave. Also the big cheap box fans are good as they can run on a quiet low setting yet still move air over you.
Reduce the heat generated inside. Consider the lighting you really need. Is it best to light a room by bouncing light off the ceiling (a la torchiere) or would a few task lights for reading and such be more efficient? Turn off and even unplug electronics that aren't in use; things like amps, TV's, monitors, etc. put out lots of heat, some even when "off". Instead of using the dryer use a line outside.
Invest in good curtains or blinds. Obviously you'll get the best ROI on the sunny side but man does it make a difference. Make sure they're light colored on the outside, or even put an additionial white layer on the outside (pinning up cheap white sheets to the backs of colored ones work ok but your local fabric shop will have better stuff.) We've gone so far as to tape a 99 cent aluminized mylar "emergency blanket" to a patio door we don't see or use but gets lots of sunlight. Finally, good curtains mean you can go cool and nekkid without attracting unwanted attention.
Consider what rooms you air condition. We only cool our bedroom, the rest of the apartment is bearable. However we made sure to get a good AC for the bedroom and have tightly sealed the window around the AC, the door closes tightly, etc. For those like us with horizontally sliding window scoring a piece of rigid foam to fit over the tracks both seals the bottom side and reduces vibration.
Learn how to cook "cool". The less heat you generate making meals the less there is to deal with. Find recipes that require the least cooking/roasting/boiling/frying/etc. Instead of using the oven consider the toaster oven. Figure out what meals your microwave can do a good job at. Prepare meals in advance by cooking in the late evening (or early morning) when it is coolest. Avoid eating in a hot kitchen.
Consider making one room "the hot room". If you've machines acting as servers toss 'em in there. Same for other devices that produce lots of heat.
If you live on the top floor see about cooling the roof. We've talked our landlord into putting a white wash onto our roof this summer. It won't cost a lot but the heat difference should be substantial, especially as we've a flat roof with no discernable insulation. Otherwise when it gets really bad consider spraying a hose up there.
Get out of the house! Invest in books of movie tickets. Find a good park with some nice trees to sit or lay below. Here in Montreal we have an endless series of festivals (Comedy, Jazz, Carifiesta, Grand Prix, Gay Pride, Francofollies, Fireworks Competition, etc.) to keep us entertained, plus of course great street and club nightlife. Or escape the city and head to the nearest mountains, plains, or seaside, camping is cheap and fun or make friends with folks who have cottages.
Slipstick.com is an invaluable Outlook/Exchange site. It has a good-sized page of alternatives to Exchange for address book sharing and another page just about LDAP.
As I see it there are a two obvious solutions:
Use a central locked-down PAB everyone has read-access to. Updates & additions are created by users as standard address book entries and sent to a designated in-house address. Every so often in the off hours all of those files are collected and dropped into the master file (can be scripted.) Benefits are the address-book entries contain all of the Outlook set of details, will work with 3rd-party add-ins.
Or instead of using a "kludgy PHP front-end" use a better-quality one like Twiki or Horde. If with this you move your mailboxes over to IMAP you'll have also gotten a great remote-client solution. On their desktops they can use Outlook, away from them log into the webmail client, and also use it for those shared address-book updates.
By the way, a good utility for exporting from Outlook/Exchange to vCard and vCalendar files (individual files or multiple-entry files) is the free Outpod. Written for exporting to Apple iPods it is also an easy way to transfer around address books to many applications.
So you're the jerk who blocks the bottom of the escalator, stops & starts (invariably as I'm trying to pass!) in the grocery store aisle, and is completely oblivious to anyone and anthing behind or beside you.
Man I hate you.
We used to call it "Mr. Magoo syndrome", now it's "The world is my TV". In any case there should be lesser criminal charges for running folks like you down: "He wasn't in my worth-occupying-volume cone of vision, Officer!"
This sort of tech has been the subject of discussion on ne.food recently. My own take is that combo devices like the Polaris oven/'fridge are great for those with clock-steady regular lives but for myself and my friends we're too erratic with work, traffic, life, to commit to being home at 6:15pm sharp for however nice a hot meal.
Rather a unit that could be preloaded with a roast or a lasagna or whatever and then remotely triggered via webphone or such would be much more useful, improve on my parent's 50 year old CookMaster with dual timers. I'd love to prep a main course the night before, or even a series of 'em over the weekend, put them into the combo unit in the am and start it all cooking 45 minutes or whatever before I expect to be home. Or if smoething comes up I just change my plans and not trigger the cook cycle, come home at midnight after a night out on the town to my meal still ready to be cooked the next day.
However as microwave ovens are usually used as quickie-cookers I don't see a 'net enabled one of them being a big hit; most of the long cooking action happens in a heat oven. Same with most other appliances there's not much advantage to remote operation. Blender, mixer, chopper, cooktop, toaster - I wanna be there for those to be on. The 'fridge & freezer? Well it'd be nice to get an alert if they suddenly start getting warm but beyond that who cares?
Inventory control? I could see some advantage to my pantry, 'fridge & freezer keeping track of what I have, hold old it is ("Time to replace the Paprika - it's just red dust now... The chicken needs to be used within 3 days, the milk is low, the lettuce on it's way out.") but really that's a local affair, no need to make it "Internet" just networkable. Indeed rather then entering all the information locally (never had any ambition to be a market clerk) I'd just as soon prefer my grocer email me a nicely formatted file every time I shop, dismiss with the long papertape version. That my kitchen app could use to make a good guess of what is going on in the larder and make suggestions, certainly a better investment then laser-scanners on every shelf and RF tags in the dairy goods.
Every article on AOL/TW's Mystro will note TiVo which doesn't have the limitations of Mystro.
Also, for all of those sooo proud of your homebuilt's: You've reinvented the VCR, just more awkward, more expensive, and without cheap media.
Does your whatever adjust for scheduling changes, support wishlists, do smart scheduling that'll ignore recently recorded programs, re-runs, etc? Does it do this all automagically or do you need to rely on screen-scrapers or poor quality listings?
I don't mean to bust on folks, and all props to homebrew, but don't go calling something TiVo-like unless it really has the TiVo feature-set. If you've just managed to turn your couple-hundred-buck PC into an awkward thirty-buck VCR then call it what it is...
Ok, just had to day that, I'm just glad that Apple "gets it" that synchronization is an important thing. Truth be told more phones synch with PCs, albeit after buying the breathtakingly over-priced custom plug and installing software of dubious stability.
Mebbe if we're lucky the industry will come to it's senses and adopt a standard plug, like USB, use it for charging too, and support doing imports/exports in a standard way also. Naww - never happen.
The universal USB charger is out there though, really sweet.
If you google around, you will find that although the pyramids were a massive 'public-works' project, the workforce were farmers who had nothing to do during the flood season. The workers even received beer as a refreshment.
Beer, or watered-down beer, was used because it was safer then straight water. The ph and alchohol of beer (and wine) kill off most of the waterborne nasties that would make the workforce ill. It wasn't largesse it was good workforce health practice for the day.
LED's aren't necessarily the "lighting-of-the-future", actually fiber looks more likely:
Fiber is cheap these days, especially the 2nd rate stuff left over from telecomms and reused for this
One or two centralized light sources can provide all of the lumens needed for a home or office
Those one or two light sources can be optimized for output, their heat vented directly outside or recovered for use in the building, built to be super-efficient, etc.
Maintanence becomes trivial and cheap with the sources placed conveniently, not scattered all over in ceilings, up walls, etc.
The fixtures themselves are very versatile, basically a diffuser of your choice. Want a spot snap on the head for that, want a bulb-look pop on a frosted plastic bulb, same for strips and coils or flat panels
Dimmers on individual feeds are possible with LCD adapters, the same is true for color filtering
No RF noise, no flicker, durable, cool, efficient, fixtures never need replacing, what's not to love?
Frankly I look forward to having one or two "light boxes" in my attic keeping much of the heat out of my living space (or in the winter pulling it into the HVAC system), only having to replace a few well engineered super-efficient bulbs in a handy box every few years, plugging in a fiber cord instead of a an electrical one for a lamp. LEDs might become a good retrofit for older wired-not-fibered places but for new construction I'm looking to plastic.
You want to throw out that whatever at the greatest possible velocity and/or continue doing so for as long as possible.
Chemical energy in the form of oxygen/hydrogen burners like the Shuttle's main engines are very efficient but require big supplies of the fuel and large engines. Those engines are rather finicky (re-starting notoriously so), the fuel is cumbersome and expensive to haul along, etc.
A nuclear power source can be even more efficient, also supply lots of power but with a smaller volume of propellant, more flexibility of propellant, smaller engines (with reactor size/containment taken into account) and overall just be a lot simpler/less finicky then a chemical engine. Oh, and it can also supply power for shipboard operations.
Today's TiVo Announcements from CES:
on
TiVo and Rendezvous
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The last one is most relevant to the discussion here.
Basically for $99 one can order a TiVo SW upgrade (secured with public/private keys) to allow your TiVo to stream mp3s, jpegs (incl. ones from Corbis), be remotely administered from a personal account on TiVo's website, and get some extra promo material. One can then get the upgrade for addt'l TiVos in the household at half-price and be able to stream shows between TiVos on the same account.
All of this due in April, software for enabling the local mp3 & jpeg streaming to be available then, you can sign up to be notified when avaliable. Presumably these apps and the TiVos will use Rendezvous to find eachother.
So: Extra cost paid upfront, secured software, able to share but only with other extra-package TiVos on the same account and not with the general 'net population. Oh yeah, and LinkSys is the preferred networking hw vendor.
"Where can I find decent information on how to provide wireless internet service using an unlicensed technology (such as the 802.11 variants) across a state border?"
We call them "lawyers". They specialize in understanding and interpreting the law, explaining how it applies to your particular circumstance, advising you of what hoops you'll need to jump through and what your risks are.
Here you'll get geeks of varying degrees of boredem expressing their limitied legal/political understandings of how your rather vague question should be interpreted. The actual value of these expressions will be distinctly dubious and at some point you'll just have to go to a lawyer anyway.
Why anyone posts this useless sort of question to "Ask/." is beyond me, moreso why they're chosen. Exactly what utility will the answers here be beyond raising/. pageviews? Like I said, the blazingly obvious answer is "go to a lawyer", everyone here will be prefacing with "IANAL" or for the.0001% who are legally sophisticated "This does not constitute competent legal advice and you should etc."
A stripped down Redhat-based distrib entirely managed by a well-scripted web-interface they really can be locally administered by the Office Administrator. The install is short and sweet and with a few questions it sets up a well organized server offering 'bout anything a modern office would want all automagically.
Ok, actually it's all done off an impressive system of scripts and templates but as far as J. Random "Administrator" is concerned it just works, and all from the clean browser-interface. Groups and accounts, POP & IMAP, LDAP and Webmail, all come built-in. A hardy user community contributes their own extensive set of ports and script templates including user self-management web interfaces, MySQL administration, mp3 jukeboxes, log and queue management, etc.
I set this up on a donated Compaq box a year ago for a local youth services organization (read: Human Services-type folks who don't know anything about computers, aren't inclined to learn much, and really just want this stuff to work with a minimum of muss and fuss so they can get on with their real work) and they've loved it. Ok, actually they don't care: It just does what they need it to do, is easy to get to do those things, offers the services they needed and they're not interested beyond that, which is a Good Thing.
Oh yeah, services they use their E-Smith box for are:
Firewall protecting their office network
Caching speeding their web-browsing
A filter blocking many of the web-ads
A local email-server for their inter-office confidential email
A NAT allowing them to save money on the ISP plan they use
Shared File-Space
Shared Address Book
Shared Printers
Personal Directories so everything isn't only stored on their individual aging PCs
IMAP folders so all of their email records aren't only stored on their individual aging PCs
Next up is getting them a tape-backup for disaster recovery and reconfiguring things so all of their email is local IMAP-based and downloaded by the server so they can use MS Outlook in the office or the web interface when out of the office, and then VPNs for them when they're working from home.
Personally I've got E-Smith servers in both of my residences (different countries) where I use a Unisonimplementation for E-Smith to keep both boxes synchronized. It also provides a handy VPN between both houses as well as offering all of the other services listed above. Next up it'll be hosting photo galleries and some web sites for the family as well as a Twiki server for friends to share.
Oh, and best thing about all of this? It runs on low end PIII's, 200MHZ w/ 128MB RAM, not speed demons but stable, reliable, secure, and very effective. Did I mention trivial to administer too?
Y'know, if you'd have bothered to actually look around a bit on the site you'd have found the answer yourself instead of running back to/.
However, since apparently you're not real good with online resources I'll just feed it to you:
There are two versions of e-smith/SMS: Commercial and non-commercial.
The commercial version went to 5.6 recently
The non-commercial 5.6 is still in beta (hence the beta-files)
This is the regular release procedure for the product, most expect 5.6 non-commercial any-day-now
As to exactly when: "When it's ready"
If you've any other questions I really suggest you invest a few minutes looking over the e-smith.org website, particularly the FAQs and the General Phorum. Your question has been answered there MANY (many, many,) times far more authoritatively.
Slashdot Mirror
From The Open Group's own website:
Here's also an osOpinion piece from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
From The Open Group's own website:
Here's also an osOpinion piece from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
Here's also a report from May '01 questioning MacOS X's certification as Unix and at the bottom is an update noting:
Nothing odd about any of it until Apple starts claiming unix is a generic, they don't need to honor the licensing fee's they'd agreed to,
And yeah, if you've not heard of them they they can't be anybody important, can they?
I'm sure the folks at Apple are completely relieved they've got your vote and staff from The Open Group are stretching out on the tracks that run by their building right now, disconsolate that "quortra" dissed 'em...
There's no chance of you perhaps being an ignorant self-aggrandizing poser yourself, is there?
Feh. Back to your crib.
The story really is poorly reported by not including this information, and the rabid /.'ers posting would do well to have done the minimal amount of research before expressing strong opinions (this is the www...)
In any case the "Unix" certification is one of those check-off items that get used in evaluations so whether or not there's any real value to it there is an effective value. "Unix", "Posix", this-book/that-book compliance; they're common evaluation criteria and having or not having them is very important.
Of course the question is has "Unix" become a generic word like "Crayon" became or is it still specific to a vendor like "Xerox" or "Kleenex". YMMV but it looks like to me T.O.G. may have a point and paying through the nose may be one of Apples costs for the best selling Unix distribution out there.
The unfortunate part is that this is even being called "zip" at all. These aren't, they're zip with proprietary extensions for a completely different purpose. Zip is being used as a brand name and being "embraced and extended". Truth be told these should now be called zep or something files, not misrepresented as simply zip compressed files.
What will this all break? Well for the suckers who use the encryption they're locking themselves into that one vendor's proprietary extensions. They won't be able to send their compressed files or archives and reliably assume they'll be readable. With zip now a standard part of many OS's (even WinXP now includes it) these mislabeled files will cause confusion and increased complexity.
What can folks do about this? First reconsider corporate licenses for these increasingly un-zip applications. No need to increase the Help Desk's burden with unnecessary/non-standard extensions. Send out a memo reminding folks about policies regarding encrypting company material, the management of the keys used, and the real quality of the encryption used. Look at the free alternatives to the commercial apps, there's little that these applications do that can't be done just as well with free tools.
Zip's value lies in it being a standard. Don't support inappropriate proprietary extensions to it.
Documented here it is described in the official exhibit guide as being scaled 6,215 miles per inch (helpfully translated by the 1st site as a 1-to-400 million scale model (1 inch equals 10,000 km)). The planets are all conveniently located in public places reasonably easily reached by public transportation or for the more hardy by bicycle.
Of course this is all just as bad is the newspapers, TV stations, and websites who run these sort of garbage polls and tout them as having any sort of validity. In reality they're just calculated come-on's for for the website being used and anyone with half a clue knows to discount this sort of trivially rigged "slacktivism". Nonetheless I keep getting emails asking me to vote in blahblahblah.com's poll to show my support for #cause.
My advice is not to play sucker for these folks & their fake poles, when you come across them ask the sponsors exactly how valid they consider their results to be. Then ask if this is really the "news" they pretend or are they just being slimers, do they feel this discredits their entire operation?
Besides, the White Night is also the trainer for the spacecraft. Yep, you heard me, they load a profile on computer in the WN and it flies the same as the spacecraft! Double duty saving lots of money.
Big. The math isn't that hard for a rough but trust me, big. and expensive. And non-reusable. And a hazard afterwords. Yeah, well now that you've pretty much trashed all the other engineering now you want, what, super rockets? Sure, we'll just use the ones off your Voltron doll...How about just come out with it and admit you want Star Trek teleporters, forget this nasty uncomfortable dangerous test vehicle stuff? Hell I bet the thing doesn't even have in-flight service with a decent bar cart!
Frankly you come off as the the exact sort of useless US holiday poster you mention. Lots of inane second guessing, apparently no homework before reading one article, coming up with ridiculous requirements: Cargo? For a test vehicle? Meeting X-Prize criteria? Have you EVER been around ANY sort of engineering project?
Score you -3 for silly whiner.
- Ensure good airflow in the space. Try and figure out if the breezes come from one side of your place or another and take advantage of that. Place fans to pull in air from one side of the house and push it out the other.
- Keep air moving around you. Ceiling fans are great - cheap, quiet, out of the way. If you've appropriate mounts the landlord shouldn't care and you can take 'em with you when you leave. Also the big cheap box fans are good as they can run on a quiet low setting yet still move air over you.
- Reduce the heat generated inside. Consider the lighting you really need. Is it best to light a room by bouncing light off the ceiling (a la torchiere) or would a few task lights for reading and such be more efficient? Turn off and even unplug electronics that aren't in use; things like amps, TV's, monitors, etc. put out lots of heat, some even when "off". Instead of using the dryer use a line outside.
- Invest in good curtains or blinds. Obviously you'll get the best ROI on the sunny side but man does it make a difference. Make sure they're light colored on the outside, or even put an additionial white layer on the outside (pinning up cheap white sheets to the backs of colored ones work ok but your local fabric shop will have better stuff.) We've gone so far as to tape a 99 cent aluminized mylar "emergency blanket" to a patio door we don't see or use but gets lots of sunlight. Finally, good curtains mean you can go cool and nekkid without attracting unwanted attention.
- Consider what rooms you air condition. We only cool our bedroom, the rest of the apartment is bearable. However we made sure to get a good AC for the bedroom and have tightly sealed the window around the AC, the door closes tightly, etc. For those like us with horizontally sliding window scoring a piece of rigid foam to fit over the tracks both seals the bottom side and reduces vibration.
- Learn how to cook "cool". The less heat you generate making meals the less there is to deal with. Find recipes that require the least cooking/roasting/boiling/frying/etc. Instead of using the oven consider the toaster oven. Figure out what meals your microwave can do a good job at. Prepare meals in advance by cooking in the late evening (or early morning) when it is coolest. Avoid eating in a hot kitchen.
- Consider making one room "the hot room". If you've machines acting as servers toss 'em in there. Same for other devices that produce lots of heat.
- If you live on the top floor see about cooling the roof. We've talked our landlord into putting a white wash onto our roof this summer. It won't cost a lot but the heat difference should be substantial, especially as we've a flat roof with no discernable insulation. Otherwise when it gets really bad consider spraying a hose up there.
- Get out of the house! Invest in books of movie tickets. Find a good park with some nice trees to sit or lay below. Here in Montreal we have an endless series of festivals (Comedy, Jazz, Carifiesta, Grand Prix, Gay Pride, Francofollies, Fireworks Competition, etc.) to keep us entertained, plus of course great street and club nightlife. Or escape the city and head to the nearest mountains, plains, or seaside, camping is cheap and fun or make friends with folks who have cottages.
Or, consider moving someplace cooler...As I see it there are a two obvious solutions:
- Use a central locked-down PAB everyone has read-access to. Updates & additions are created by users as standard address book entries and sent to a designated in-house address. Every so often in the off hours all of those files are collected and dropped into the master file (can be scripted.) Benefits are the address-book entries contain all of the Outlook set of details, will work with 3rd-party add-ins.
- Or instead of using a "kludgy PHP front-end" use a better-quality one like Twiki or Horde. If with this you move your mailboxes over to IMAP you'll have also gotten a great remote-client solution. On their desktops they can use Outlook, away from them log into the webmail client, and also use it for those shared address-book updates.
By the way, a good utility for exporting from Outlook/Exchange to vCard and vCalendar files (individual files or multiple-entry files) is the free Outpod. Written for exporting to Apple iPods it is also an easy way to transfer around address books to many applications.Man I hate you.
We used to call it "Mr. Magoo syndrome", now it's "The world is my TV". In any case there should be lesser criminal charges for running folks like you down: "He wasn't in my worth-occupying-volume cone of vision, Officer!"
Rather a unit that could be preloaded with a roast or a lasagna or whatever and then remotely triggered via webphone or such would be much more useful, improve on my parent's 50 year old CookMaster with dual timers. I'd love to prep a main course the night before, or even a series of 'em over the weekend, put them into the combo unit in the am and start it all cooking 45 minutes or whatever before I expect to be home. Or if smoething comes up I just change my plans and not trigger the cook cycle, come home at midnight after a night out on the town to my meal still ready to be cooked the next day.
However as microwave ovens are usually used as quickie-cookers I don't see a 'net enabled one of them being a big hit; most of the long cooking action happens in a heat oven. Same with most other appliances there's not much advantage to remote operation. Blender, mixer, chopper, cooktop, toaster - I wanna be there for those to be on. The 'fridge & freezer? Well it'd be nice to get an alert if they suddenly start getting warm but beyond that who cares?
Inventory control? I could see some advantage to my pantry, 'fridge & freezer keeping track of what I have, hold old it is ("Time to replace the Paprika - it's just red dust now... The chicken needs to be used within 3 days, the milk is low, the lettuce on it's way out.") but really that's a local affair, no need to make it "Internet" just networkable. Indeed rather then entering all the information locally (never had any ambition to be a market clerk) I'd just as soon prefer my grocer email me a nicely formatted file every time I shop, dismiss with the long papertape version. That my kitchen app could use to make a good guess of what is going on in the larder and make suggestions, certainly a better investment then laser-scanners on every shelf and RF tags in the dairy goods.
Also, for all of those sooo proud of your homebuilt's: You've reinvented the VCR, just more awkward, more expensive, and without cheap media.
Does your whatever adjust for scheduling changes, support wishlists, do smart scheduling that'll ignore recently recorded programs, re-runs, etc? Does it do this all automagically or do you need to rely on screen-scrapers or poor quality listings?
I don't mean to bust on folks, and all props to homebrew, but don't go calling something TiVo-like unless it really has the TiVo feature-set. If you've just managed to turn your couple-hundred-buck PC into an awkward thirty-buck VCR then call it what it is...
Ok, just had to day that, I'm just glad that Apple "gets it" that synchronization is an important thing. Truth be told more phones synch with PCs, albeit after buying the breathtakingly over-priced custom plug and installing software of dubious stability.
Mebbe if we're lucky the industry will come to it's senses and adopt a standard plug, like USB, use it for charging too, and support doing imports/exports in a standard way also. Naww - never happen.
The universal USB charger is out there though, really sweet.
Frankly I look forward to having one or two "light boxes" in my attic keeping much of the heat out of my living space (or in the winter pulling it into the HVAC system), only having to replace a few well engineered super-efficient bulbs in a handy box every few years, plugging in a fiber cord instead of a an electrical one for a lamp. LEDs might become a good retrofit for older wired-not-fibered places but for new construction I'm looking to plastic.
MacOS X is "based" on a modified Mach kernel; it also has added support for BSD compatability and conventions, uses some BSD & modified-from BSD tools
That's vastly different from "based ontop of BSD".
Chemical energy in the form of oxygen/hydrogen burners like the Shuttle's main engines are very efficient but require big supplies of the fuel and large engines. Those engines are rather finicky (re-starting notoriously so), the fuel is cumbersome and expensive to haul along, etc.
A nuclear power source can be even more efficient, also supply lots of power but with a smaller volume of propellant, more flexibility of propellant, smaller engines (with reactor size/containment taken into account) and overall just be a lot simpler/less finicky then a chemical engine. Oh, and it can also supply power for shipboard operations.
Basically for $99 one can order a TiVo SW upgrade (secured with public/private keys) to allow your TiVo to stream mp3s, jpegs (incl. ones from Corbis), be remotely administered from a personal account on TiVo's website, and get some extra promo material. One can then get the upgrade for addt'l TiVos in the household at half-price and be able to stream shows between TiVos on the same account.
All of this due in April, software for enabling the local mp3 & jpeg streaming to be available then, you can sign up to be notified when avaliable. Presumably these apps and the TiVos will use Rendezvous to find eachother.
So: Extra cost paid upfront, secured software, able to share but only with other extra-package TiVos on the same account and not with the general 'net population. Oh yeah, and LinkSys is the preferred networking hw vendor.
Here you'll get geeks of varying degrees of boredem expressing their limitied legal/political understandings of how your rather vague question should be interpreted. The actual value of these expressions will be distinctly dubious and at some point you'll just have to go to a lawyer anyway.
Why anyone posts this useless sort of question to "Ask /." is beyond me, moreso why they're chosen. Exactly what utility will the answers here be beyond raising /. pageviews? Like I said, the blazingly obvious answer is "go to a lawyer", everyone here will be prefacing with "IANAL" or for the .0001% who are legally sophisticated "This does not constitute competent legal advice and you should etc."
A stripped down Redhat-based distrib entirely managed by a well-scripted web-interface they really can be locally administered by the Office Administrator. The install is short and sweet and with a few questions it sets up a well organized server offering 'bout anything a modern office would want all automagically.
Ok, actually it's all done off an impressive system of scripts and templates but as far as J. Random "Administrator" is concerned it just works, and all from the clean browser-interface. Groups and accounts, POP & IMAP, LDAP and Webmail, all come built-in. A hardy user community contributes their own extensive set of ports and script templates including user self-management web interfaces, MySQL administration, mp3 jukeboxes, log and queue management, etc.
I set this up on a donated Compaq box a year ago for a local youth services organization (read: Human Services-type folks who don't know anything about computers, aren't inclined to learn much, and really just want this stuff to work with a minimum of muss and fuss so they can get on with their real work) and they've loved it. Ok, actually they don't care: It just does what they need it to do, is easy to get to do those things, offers the services they needed and they're not interested beyond that, which is a Good Thing.
Oh yeah, services they use their E-Smith box for are:
- Firewall protecting their office network
- Caching speeding their web-browsing
- A filter blocking many of the web-ads
- A local email-server for their inter-office confidential email
- A NAT allowing them to save money on the ISP plan they use
- Shared File-Space
- Shared Address Book
- Shared Printers
- Personal Directories so everything isn't only stored on their individual aging PCs
- IMAP folders so all of their email records aren't only stored on their individual aging PCs
Next up is getting them a tape-backup for disaster recovery and reconfiguring things so all of their email is local IMAP-based and downloaded by the server so they can use MS Outlook in the office or the web interface when out of the office, and then VPNs for them when they're working from home.Personally I've got E-Smith servers in both of my residences (different countries) where I use a Unison implementation for E-Smith to keep both boxes synchronized. It also provides a handy VPN between both houses as well as offering all of the other services listed above. Next up it'll be hosting photo galleries and some web sites for the family as well as a Twiki server for friends to share.
Oh, and best thing about all of this? It runs on low end PIII's, 200MHZ w/ 128MB RAM, not speed demons but stable, reliable, secure, and very effective. Did I mention trivial to administer too?
However, since apparently you're not real good with online resources I'll just feed it to you:
- There are two versions of e-smith/SMS: Commercial and non-commercial.
- The commercial version went to 5.6 recently
- The non-commercial 5.6 is still in beta (hence the beta-files)
- This is the regular release procedure for the product, most expect 5.6 non-commercial any-day-now
- As to exactly when: "When it's ready"
If you've any other questions I really suggest you invest a few minutes looking over the e-smith.org website, particularly the FAQs and the General Phorum. Your question has been answered there MANY (many, many,) times far more authoritatively.