Some network connections use telco circuits, some do not.
My cable modem does not directly connect to a phone company circuit. The Vonage TA hanging off my router does not use phone company resources until after it goes through my cable companies' routers. Asside from the call management traffic, it is even possible that if I call a neighbor, none of my voice traffic will ever cross the phone company's resources.
As far as data lines shadowing voice circuits, the reverse is actually closer to the truth. In fact for well over 95% of all phone calls that you place, and over 99% of all long distance calls you place, your voice call is converted to a digital data stream that is then carried over a data line of some sort. (Sonet/ATM rings are used in nearly every major city to interconnect the telephone switches. Most telephone switches are digital switches internally as well.)
Currently "phone" companies actually pass more data for computer communications than they do voice call traffic. Remember without compression, voice calls are 56kbps data streams. Once you add compression, that drops to between 8k and 24k, depending upon what compression system they use. A single 1.544 mbps data connection uses as much data bandwidth as 24 uncompressed voice calls. If you have a DSL connection, and live on a standard city block, you are probably using more bandwidth for your computer than your entire city block is using for voice. You are probably not using as much data bandwidth as your average car parts distributor, much less any of the local representatives of various chain businesses.
At the moment the design is that somewhere the connection has to have a broadband connection to interface to the Internet. The software upgrades to these routers allow that connection to be as many as three "hops" away. The possibility is there to reach longer, and even cross more hops, however such a connection requires added cost for improved antenas.
In the future, (how long is obviously a subject for debate) it is possible that a large enough population of the Internet will be attached to wifi connected equipment that people very well may be able to perform most, if not all, of their day to day network usage without actually sending any packets over the existing Internet structure.
Note that I am not saying this will be a large portion of the Internet population. I am not saying that it will be infinately secure, or even that it will happen. Just that it is a possiblity.
A couple of years ago I know that there was a BeOS developer who was working on a DDR application for the PC. I do not know how far he got with that.
What sort of a surface will you be dancing on? Is it someone's celing? Is it carpeted with a nap that will move your pad across the room?
If you are looking for other alternatives, is there some activity you like to do that you can expand on? I dropped about 75 lb over 10 months walking at a shopping mall after work four days a week. If you are like most people you aready have a routine around work, it's often easier to add an activity to wrap up work than it is to get something going before the work day.
Easier does not necesarily mean less effective, though there are people who will point out that you get your best results if you start your day with exercise. They are right, you will. At the same time it is far more important that you do whaterver activity you plan on in a consistent manner.
That, and as best you can, have fun while doing it. If DDR does it for you, great! If it does not, don't give up a bit.
since you are concerned about the mouse pointer, I presume you are running a full X implementation. Have you considered running this as a framebuffer applicaiton, and not loading X? fbv, fbi and DFBSee are all projects on Freshmeat that may provide you a way to bypass the running of X.
You could also do bootable CD-RWs that you can update the contents of your image library at any time, with any cdrw capable computer.
Likewise, if you don't know when to start asking for help, you're probably the wrong guy as well.
Asking on slashdot is setting up a usable resource for finding many of the other resources you will probably never encounter otherwise. You could search Amazon, BN, and several Linux specific book resources, and never get an idea for how various books actually work out for the people who buy them. Ask on slashdot, and you will find out that author x in the second edition of book y, really couldn't find his ass if you told him to reach down and behind himself, then bring his hands forwards.
So far I see he has gotten referals to books that look like they are going to be great resources for pointing his users at when they have questions about the user side of the platform, a couple of administrator level guides to linux from O'Reilly, and several suggestions that he build a test box of his own to try out the things that he believes needs to be done on the servers he is becoming the administrator for.
I have also seen at least one recomendation to 'patch everything' which may, or may not be a good idea.
I have seen companies "patch everything" because they were using an outdated version of PHP, only to discover that the new version of PHP requires several completely different libraries, effectively taking the entire business offline for the week or two that it took to get all the dependencies resolved. If they had first tried the 'patch everything' approach on a dummy machine that was a mirror of the operating machine, they would have known what else needed to be done, and might not have had any business down time.
So, asking on slashdot suggests he is probably the wrong person? For a small shop, I don't think so. I think it shows that he is concerned, recognizes that there are several people here who do more than berate others, and allows him to pick out the good advice from the bad. Personally I would think the guy has a pretty good head on his neck.
But that's just my opinion, and I am not in the hiring department of the company that brought him in.
... a spreadsheet is a lousy way to keep track of this stuff.
It's ok if you are going to do a pure text data entry, but don't store it as a workbook, export it to a cvs file that you can import into a database that you build to handle the things that do not work well in a spreadsheet. You know, things like the photos of the equipment in question.
Spreadsheets also do not handle web access very well. There's two big requirements that are unmet by the spreadsheet method.
You could probably throw together a quick gui in glade or qt to access a posgres, mSQL, mysql, or other database for stuff like this, or throw together a vb interface as well. Nothing wrong with any of that except that on their own they do not meet the web accesability requirement. For that you are probably going to want to use either perl or php.
Nothing radical here, at the same time, nothing really generic enough to be a large enough project for most people to want to use.
Questions to ask are do you want to keep track of purchase date, serial number and prices for warrenty information? Are you going to keep the receipt filed someplace else? What are you going to say when your SO reads that your webcam is stashed under your last girlfriend's bed? Are you going to code remote locations some way different from the closet? How about a storage container, or garrage?
How easy will it be to update? The nic you pulled out of that system you retired a year ago was in the garage under the workbench until you installed it in that system you built for your neighbor last week. Is the database updated with it's new location? Or will you be looking under the workbench next month?
But then you are probably aware of all those questions, so forget I ever asked...
I don't know how easy it would be to find one today, but if you don't mind the added IR receiver, I happen to like my 'Surf Board' for keyboard stuff. The label on the back records it as an SK-7100, and there is support for the multimedia keys on this board for Linux, as well as Windows.
I have also used what I will call a wrist board with my laptop, as well as a couple of desktop systems, and I think it would work well as a remote for a pc based home theatre system. It is burried somewhere in storage right now, and I do not know if there is support for it in Linux, though it did come with Windows drivers, so it should work as part of a Windows based home theatre setup. Basicly it had the form of an old atari portable game system, you rested it across either wrist, it had buttons under several fingers you held the thing with, and a stylus and drawing pad you could use as a mouse, or a direct access mouse pad via your other hand.
My primary controller for my home theatre today is the Hauppauge! remote that comes with the PVR-250 board. It works well for all the gui stuff under KnoppMyth and reportedly works well with FreeVo, though I have not tested that. It does come with drivers for Windows, so that should work well also.
The only time I resort to a keyboard is when I need to do things that require text entry. That is currently less of an issue than it has been in the past. I can see it being important for someone who wants to set up passwords to restrict access to material and videos they would rather their kids not see, or listen to, but even that has been very workable via standard remotes for the past several years on digital cable systems, Sat receivers, and even some DVD and VCRs. With the V-Chip in TVs, I suspect they are controlling that via the number pad on a remote as well. Keyboards should be considered suspect in well designed home theatre systems in my opinion.
It's an option in the installer which I have not tested. I do not know how well it would work as part of dual booting windows, I am satified with the resizing fat32 partition and repartitioning the remaining portion of the HD for a/,/home, and swap partion.
I would recomend ghosting a copy of your current Windows partition and HD, and try for yourself, restoring the ghosted copy if you decide you don't like the result.
If you want to use an old PPC Mac for this, look to either Yellow Dog Linux, or Mandrake 9.1 for PPC. There are a few other ppc distributions of Linux, including Debian and possibly Gentoo, but I am not about to claim that either of them are user-friendly to a former Mac user.
BSD is obviously an option as well, but I think of it at the same level as Gentoo or Debian. Some others may think otherwise.
For that matter you may be able to work with Darwin and X for Darwin. I think that is further afield of Linux than just BSD is, but it's mostly personal opinion.
that the only time this is a valid mechanism, is when the sender of the e-mail has gotten your address through a partner agreement with a website where you provided an e-mail address as part of registering.
The other possibility is that some spammers are still using the functionality to validate e-mail addresses, but as part of that action, they hide the fact from the recipient by suspending spam to the address for some weeks or even months before re-distributing the address to their buddies. As a result, the recipient thinks that the "unsubscribe" worked, but in the end gets even more spam.
Then again, I could be wrong. I am sitting at around 2-300 spam messages per day, if I see other reports that this is working, perhaps I will try it out as well.
I would hate to put rapists and murders at the level of the spamers. As noted in the first response visable the punishment is not slow enough or painful enough to suit a large percentage of the population.
Calculation error, spam/ham ratio of 71/100 is a 42% spam volume. a 71% spam volume would be 71/29 spam/ham ratio. Considering the volume of spam I am getting, I would not be at all surprised if you were getting a 71/29 spam/ham ratio, which would support the 71% claim.
As for a punishment, I think that if the convicted spammer has not been counting the total number of messages they have sent (cc/bcc etc. counts as one message per address) then the feds should ask for a minimum of 1 us cent per e-mail address per day from the date of the earliest reported spam, through the date they pay the fine off. Thus if the spamer has a list of 10 million e-mail adresses, they will be fined aproximately $36.5 million per year. That should take care of the "profit" incentive.
...free as in beer, might I suggest starting by looking at freshmeat.com, and typing 'pic' in the litle search field. When I did it came back with this url which lists several pic programers. The first three specificly indicate they are for Linux. Several of the others indicate that Linux support is included. And so on.
I think you would probably find something similar for Basic Stamp, but I think that I have provided enough suggestions that you might be able to figure out how to look for that as well...
Then again, I could be wrong. Things like that are known to happen.
I own several laptops, of various speeds and operating systems, including an iBook.
If I were going to a coffee shop and were planing on doing a little web surfing, checking some news sites, etc, I very likely would take my iBook, even though it is neither my fastest, nor my smallest laptop.
The primary thing going for it is it's "Instant On" capability.
My IBM X21 comes out of suspend mode in about 15 seconds. Give or take a few seconds. Out of it's base, with a wifi card, I would expect it to take about a minute to get online and to the point where I could pull down a web page.
With my iBook, by the time I have the screen up, it's ready to go. Pull down the menu to find an active AP, and as necessary log in.
There are some people who report similar responsiveness with their Windows machine, but I suspect that most windows users do not _expect_ to be productive that fast with their laptop. They expect it to take a minute or two to be up and going.
If they have stopped into the coffee shop on a 15 min break, I suspect that most of them will have second thoughts about taking along their laptop, and expecting to get anything done. Theres standing in line to order your coffee, paying for it, waiting for it to be prepared, who knows how long that line is going to be, Then you go find a seat. You may have lost ten minutes already. loosing 20-40% of the remaining time, waiting on the OS to even figure out that you might want to use your computer seems to be a waste of time.
Having a laptop come up and you're off and running, using nearly all of that 5 min to get caught up on the news, slashdot, or filling the coffee shop's web cache with pr0n, seems to me to be more likely to happen with an Apple laptop than a Windows laptop.
Additionally I get far better battery life out of my Apple, than any of my Windows laptops. If I am going to be sitting at the coffee shop for an hour or so, waiting on my next interview, I expect that I would get more work done if I don't have to look for that power tap that isn't conveniently near one of the tables that isn't occupied already.
Then again, that's mostly my opinion. Yours may vary.
Actually DomainKeys does a bit more than confirm that the From header is legitimate. That (as noted) can be done at the applicatio layer.
The problem with S/MIME, PGP, GPG, and other application instantiated signers is that they do not validate any of the other headers, including Subject, XID, and authenticating that the message as forwarded was received from the computer indicated.
An example of where this could come in handy would be if all that MTA's added along the way was further received from headers, you could authenticate (at your e-mail client) that the message received two hops up was authentic by that platform.
A problem comes in is where the MTA before it does not sign, so you do not know if it is relaying inappropriately or not.
Another problem is when you use filters like PopFile, and have it add headers that allow you to filter based upon a header it installs including it's categorization.
As for this solution being computationally intensive, I would be most concerned about that with non-profit organizations (schools, charities, universities, etc) who can not afford to add new mail servers. For ISP's, and businesses like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc. the cost of adding such servers would very likely be considered part of the cost of doing business. Individuals or small companies would be unlikely to see the impact unless they were sending massive amounts of e-mail.
A lot of pattents are enforced via the argument that the function is the same, even if the implementation is different.
Copyright is concerned with the source code being identical.
Pattent law is concerned with the ability to accomplish something, and said source code is an implementation that falls within that ability. Oh, by the way, you have another implementation as well. Pay up, or stop using our IP.
When you get down to it, trademark, copyright and pattent law should not overlap. In practice, all too often in fact, not only do they overlap, you can be sued for two of them at the same time. (Not sure about being sued for Trademark infringement at the same time as either Pattents or Copyrights.)
I have, and have used, a Tandy 200. Connect via serial port, dump the data. This, as well as the Tandy 100, plus the WP-1, and other varients are really primarily text entry devices today, though they have the ability to be somewhat more. (I know the Tandy's come with a rudimentary spreadsheet, as well as a database. Not sure on the WP-1)
The biggest problem is going to be cost. For what they do, they are very expensive for the casual user. If you are a reporter, or freelance writer who can get a lot of use out of one of these, I would say go for it.
Folding keyboards for Palm and PockPC devices are reasonably comfortable for most people to enter text with. I am not fond of the thumbpads for entering text, but if you are comfortable text messaging on a cell phone, or with a Blackberry, you might want to take a look at a Zaurus 5500, which has been comming down in price.
If you prefer to "write" there are notepad data entry devices for the various PDA's as well.
Further on the "write" path is the data pen that keeps track of the movement of the pen and then downloads it via a USB port. I do not know how much memory they have, and would suspect that they are designed around taking notes at a meeting, vs. keeping track of the two week trip to Tibet.
If you don't mind a piece of electronics, but want to stay away from a computer/pda, you might want to look into a small typewriter. Type your notes, then when you get home scan them, OCR the scanned text, and post the results.
You may also find that whatever hotel you stay at as you are visiting have typewriters available for guests. This may not be handy when riding on the train and the muse strikes you, but you could use such to transcribe whatever notes you have taken into something you can scan.
For that matter, you could just do as you are, with the itterative step of scanning in your current notes, posting them as images, then manually typing the notes and decide if you want to have both the original scan and the text, or one or the other.
Another variation on that if you happen to have a cammera with a macro lens, or even a cell phone with a built in camera, would be to take photos of your notes that you can post along with whatever photos you take of the area. This would be also handy for keeping track of what you are photographing. This would work also with a film camera, but you would have the additionall wait involved in getting it developed and scanned in. Though some camera shops will allow you to get the pictures on disk or CD instead of or in addition to the prints.
Lastly you can also find digital voice recorders that you can dump the recorded audio to a computer at a later time. Memory costs dropping have really improved the amount of time you can record on these with. You might also contemplate the same with a DV camera.
Remember, pleasing everyone is almost never the goal.
That said, if the driver is available as a module for a 2.4 kernel, but the user has a 2.2 kernel, the process could be handled in one of two ways.
Feedback to the driver writer that lets them know that there is a (or several) users who could use the driver compiled for the 2.2 kernel, and would they please compile such.
Ask the user if they would like to contribute to a bounty fund for that device, such that when someone sees the available bounty, they can take a look at the situation and decide if they feel like working on the code from the later driver (assuming it is an open source driver) and do whatever needs to be done to back port the driver to the 2.2 kernal as a module the tool can install.
The down side of both options is that the user may decide that switching kernels is going to solve his problem. With some distributions this is an issue, with others it is not. Debian is fairly straightforward to upgrade the kernel, so long as it is available in the stability level you are comfortable with. That isn't necesarily true for minor revisions of the kernel in other distributions.
Why this is a down side is that if the user decides to make that change, the driver may never be built. I also do not know how many projects where end user supported bounties have been at all effective.
Of course you could use the donated money for the bounty to purchase stock in publicly owned companies that the hardware comes from, then as investors advise that you would like to see them make such drivers available. The question then would be would you get enough donations to make such investments feasable. Perhaps if the post driver availability sale of that stock were re-invested in other bounties, the bounties could become more enticing sooner. [Perhaps distribute the cash in accord with the apparent demand for specific hardware drivers? Users donating to the bountie would be considered a greater demand than users just requesting that the manufacturer make the driver available?]
Would you want this to be a non-profit to make it more attractive to users, and possibly manufacters and developers?
That's only because none of the current OS's have the ability to navigate through the file tree by right clicking on a folder or drive icon, and getting a list of sub-folders in the pop-up menu that can be navigated through.
Whether the result of a selection in this mode is a change of the contents of the current window, or a new window poping up for that folder, or a selected application starting, or an application associated with a selected document is irrelevent.
None of the systems I have worked with other than BeOS support this feature. It may not be initially intuitive, but once you have used it a couple of times, (not for months at a time, just a couple of times) you find it a significant lack in all other platforms.
Of course that can be said for several other features of BeOS, but I suspect you have heard enough arguments about features of BeOS, and I am limiting this strictly to this one desireable feature of a FileSystem Browser.
For that matter I would love to see a 'find' program for Linux that you could search for all files that begin with a number, then with a quick pulldown menu change look for all e-mail from someone in my Evolution Contacts, that has the word "help" in it's subject, and is dated in the last week. And while I am drafting a response, use another search that feeds xmms an active playlist of all mp3 files that have a composer of Mozart and a sub-genra of Sonata. I want it 'active' as I may have a p2p program in the background downloading such files, and I would like the file system search to set any 'new' files as the next in the playlist, not the last.
Note, none of the search features are particularly difficult to implement in Python, however implementing in Python is not an implementation that is part of the File System Browser.
As CISCO has not disclosed the terms of their licencing, RAND means nothing. Setting the cost at a billion dollars, can be asserted as being Reasonable and Non Discriminatory, as the only "customer" involved would be Microsoft.
In all likelyhood you very well may be right. I don't know what Cisco thinks the market for licences to their patch happens to be, so neither of us are likely to be "correct" in our valuation.
... but hopefully the 'overrated' mods won't act as double negatives....
With all the talk about how the GPU's are so great at Matrix calculations, the question should not be "What can my GPU do when it's otherwise 'Idle'?", but "What is the Matrix?"
Start by checking the apple.com website and see what options you should begin with. One observation above is to use File Vault to secure your personal data. This is all well and good, but it makes it tough to take one of the later steps.
In the event of its theft, I would like to have the thing send me its IP address
As has been noted this is not difficult. Set up a cron job, or even a boot job to find out the laptop's IP address (ifconfig |grep inet |mail me@myisp.com -s 'iBook's IP") and you get the ip on the lan in the body of the e-mail, and the external IP in the headers. Presuming smtp is not blocked. If you install the perl libraries for Jabber, you could even send a jabber message via a similar process.
... also so I could SSH in and trash my personal data with srm, while doing an SFTP backup of anything I forgot to back up.
Note that if you have been rsync on a regular basis to backup your personal data, which can be done across an ssh session, you may not need to do any sftp backups, and you could have a cron job take care of this so you are covered.
Several of the posters above have noted that you could use wget to pull down a "hidden" page on your personal web server with instructions. For that matter you could build a script that would be posted to that page, perhaps with a marker character before each line, (such ah $) that you grep out of the downloaded page, cut the first character out of the line, then save it with a random name, chmod the file to executable, then execute it. At that point the script could be doing anything you ask of such a script. Including downloading executables, and even running 'dd -if=/dev/null -of=/dev/disk0' to wipe the hd yourself.
Elsewhere others have noted that if the thief wipes your hard drive before they re-boot it, none of this works. That's as good of a reason as any to schedule backups of your personal data. It won't help you recover the laptop, or tell the police where the laptop is, but at least you have your personal data.
This also won't help if your laptop is not connected to a network of some sort. If they pull your HD and toss it into a second computer as a secondary drive, then you will want to have all of your data in a 'file vault' to restrict access. Sure with enough time they can break the encryption, and ultimately start performing identity theft on you, but the time involved is unlikely to be worth it to such a person. It's far more likely that they will wipe the drive, pawn the laptop, and hunt for another laptop that is not going to take so much effort to access the user information on.
Then again, these are just my opinions. I have been known to be wrong, so I do wish you good luck.
Well, when they come out with the Septium 7 chip, perhaps it will answer questions before they are asked.
Of course coming from Intel, one in 7 million responses will be wrong, there will be an instruction added to later dies that corrects for that and all binaries will have to be re-compiled to take advantage of that new instruction. The new instruction will cause two other errors to crop up in more common responses.
Throw together a MythTV box and see what's comming up on a channle up to a week in advance.
Pick up a Tivo or alternative, and see what's comming as far as 2 weeks in advance.
I see the movies that interest me in the theatres, or wait for the DVD's. I could care less about PPV.
Having the material to put together a FreeVo or MythTV was what prompted my decision Not to go with Digital Cable when I moved to an appartment with a North view. (I had been a DirecTV subscriber till then.) TechTV was on Digital Cable, but I didn't see anything else I felt worth subscribing to in the lineup, and knew that the cable box would entail additional hardware to change channels should I get the MythTV box going. It would have, and I am generally happy with the MythTV box, so I missed the channel, but did survive.
With the MythTV box I can select the music that I want to listen to and don't have to listen to what some creative marvel thinks I should listen to. If I want to hear a song play again, guess what.
Slashdot Mirror
Some network connections use telco circuits, some do not.
My cable modem does not directly connect to a phone company circuit. The Vonage TA hanging off my router does not use phone company resources until after it goes through my cable companies' routers. Asside from the call management traffic, it is even possible that if I call a neighbor, none of my voice traffic will ever cross the phone company's resources.
As far as data lines shadowing voice circuits, the reverse is actually closer to the truth. In fact for well over 95% of all phone calls that you place, and over 99% of all long distance calls you place, your voice call is converted to a digital data stream that is then carried over a data line of some sort. (Sonet/ATM rings are used in nearly every major city to interconnect the telephone switches. Most telephone switches are digital switches internally as well.)
Currently "phone" companies actually pass more data for computer communications than they do voice call traffic. Remember without compression, voice calls are 56kbps data streams. Once you add compression, that drops to between 8k and 24k, depending upon what compression system they use. A single 1.544 mbps data connection uses as much data bandwidth as 24 uncompressed voice calls. If you have a DSL connection, and live on a standard city block, you are probably using more bandwidth for your computer than your entire city block is using for voice. You are probably not using as much data bandwidth as your average car parts distributor, much less any of the local representatives of various chain businesses.
-Rusty
It depends upon the design.
At the moment the design is that somewhere the connection has to have a broadband connection to interface to the Internet. The software upgrades to these routers allow that connection to be as many as three "hops" away. The possibility is there to reach longer, and even cross more hops, however such a connection requires added cost for improved antenas.
In the future, (how long is obviously a subject for debate) it is possible that a large enough population of the Internet will be attached to wifi connected equipment that people very well may be able to perform most, if not all, of their day to day network usage without actually sending any packets over the existing Internet structure.
Note that I am not saying this will be a large portion of the Internet population. I am not saying that it will be infinately secure, or even that it will happen. Just that it is a possiblity.
-Rusty
A couple of years ago I know that there was a BeOS developer who was working on a DDR application for the PC. I do not know how far he got with that.
What sort of a surface will you be dancing on? Is it someone's celing? Is it carpeted with a nap that will move your pad across the room?
If you are looking for other alternatives, is there some activity you like to do that you can expand on? I dropped about 75 lb over 10 months walking at a shopping mall after work four days a week. If you are like most people you aready have a routine around work, it's often easier to add an activity to wrap up work than it is to get something going before the work day.
Easier does not necesarily mean less effective, though there are people who will point out that you get your best results if you start your day with exercise. They are right, you will. At the same time it is far more important that you do whaterver activity you plan on in a consistent manner.
That, and as best you can, have fun while doing it. If DDR does it for you, great! If it does not, don't give up a bit.
-Rusty
since you are concerned about the mouse pointer, I presume you are running a full X implementation. Have you considered running this as a framebuffer applicaiton, and not loading X? fbv, fbi and DFBSee are all projects on Freshmeat that may provide you a way to bypass the running of X.
You could also do bootable CD-RWs that you can update the contents of your image library at any time, with any cdrw capable computer.
Just a couple thoughts to kick around.
-Rusty
Likewise, if you don't know when to start asking for help, you're probably the wrong guy as well.
Asking on slashdot is setting up a usable resource for finding many of the other resources you will probably never encounter otherwise. You could search Amazon, BN, and several Linux specific book resources, and never get an idea for how various books actually work out for the people who buy them. Ask on slashdot, and you will find out that author x in the second edition of book y, really couldn't find his ass if you told him to reach down and behind himself, then bring his hands forwards.
So far I see he has gotten referals to books that look like they are going to be great resources for pointing his users at when they have questions about the user side of the platform, a couple of administrator level guides to linux from O'Reilly, and several suggestions that he build a test box of his own to try out the things that he believes needs to be done on the servers he is becoming the administrator for.
I have also seen at least one recomendation to 'patch everything' which may, or may not be a good idea.
I have seen companies "patch everything" because they were using an outdated version of PHP, only to discover that the new version of PHP requires several completely different libraries, effectively taking the entire business offline for the week or two that it took to get all the dependencies resolved. If they had first tried the 'patch everything' approach on a dummy machine that was a mirror of the operating machine, they would have known what else needed to be done, and might not have had any business down time.
So, asking on slashdot suggests he is probably the wrong person? For a small shop, I don't think so. I think it shows that he is concerned, recognizes that there are several people here who do more than berate others, and allows him to pick out the good advice from the bad. Personally I would think the guy has a pretty good head on his neck.
But that's just my opinion, and I am not in the hiring department of the company that brought him in.
-Rusty
... a spreadsheet is a lousy way to keep track of this stuff.
It's ok if you are going to do a pure text data entry, but don't store it as a workbook, export it to a cvs file that you can import into a database that you build to handle the things that do not work well in a spreadsheet. You know, things like the photos of the equipment in question.
Spreadsheets also do not handle web access very well. There's two big requirements that are unmet by the spreadsheet method.
You could probably throw together a quick gui in glade or qt to access a posgres, mSQL, mysql, or other database for stuff like this, or throw together a vb interface as well. Nothing wrong with any of that except that on their own they do not meet the web accesability requirement. For that you are probably going to want to use either perl or php.
Nothing radical here, at the same time, nothing really generic enough to be a large enough project for most people to want to use.
Questions to ask are do you want to keep track of purchase date, serial number and prices for warrenty information? Are you going to keep the receipt filed someplace else? What are you going to say when your SO reads that your webcam is stashed under your last girlfriend's bed? Are you going to code remote locations some way different from the closet? How about a storage container, or garrage?
How easy will it be to update? The nic you pulled out of that system you retired a year ago was in the garage under the workbench until you installed it in that system you built for your neighbor last week. Is the database updated with it's new location? Or will you be looking under the workbench next month?
But then you are probably aware of all those questions, so forget I ever asked...
-Rusty
I don't know how easy it would be to find one today, but if you don't mind the added IR receiver, I happen to like my 'Surf Board' for keyboard stuff. The label on the back records it as an SK-7100, and there is support for the multimedia keys on this board for Linux, as well as Windows.
I have also used what I will call a wrist board with my laptop, as well as a couple of desktop systems, and I think it would work well as a remote for a pc based home theatre system. It is burried somewhere in storage right now, and I do not know if there is support for it in Linux, though it did come with Windows drivers, so it should work as part of a Windows based home theatre setup. Basicly it had the form of an old atari portable game system, you rested it across either wrist, it had buttons under several fingers you held the thing with, and a stylus and drawing pad you could use as a mouse, or a direct access mouse pad via your other hand.
My primary controller for my home theatre today is the Hauppauge! remote that comes with the PVR-250 board. It works well for all the gui stuff under KnoppMyth and reportedly works well with FreeVo, though I have not tested that. It does come with drivers for Windows, so that should work well also.
The only time I resort to a keyboard is when I need to do things that require text entry. That is currently less of an issue than it has been in the past. I can see it being important for someone who wants to set up passwords to restrict access to material and videos they would rather their kids not see, or listen to, but even that has been very workable via standard remotes for the past several years on digital cable systems, Sat receivers, and even some DVD and VCRs. With the V-Chip in TVs, I suspect they are controlling that via the number pad on a remote as well. Keyboards should be considered suspect in well designed home theatre systems in my opinion.
Granted that's an opinion that you may not share.
-Rusty
I regularly finish in less then 10 seconds.
Oh, you mean without triping a mine.... Sorry.
-Rusty
It's an option in the installer which I have not tested. I do not know how well it would work as part of dual booting windows, I am satified with the resizing fat32 partition and repartitioning the remaining portion of the HD for a /, /home, and swap partion.
I would recomend ghosting a copy of your current Windows partition and HD, and try for yourself, restoring the ghosted copy if you decide you don't like the result.
follow up, forgot to read the lead.
If you want to use an old PPC Mac for this, look to either Yellow Dog Linux, or Mandrake 9.1 for PPC. There are a few other ppc distributions of Linux, including Debian and possibly Gentoo, but I am not about to claim that either of them are user-friendly to a former Mac user.
BSD is obviously an option as well, but I think of it at the same level as Gentoo or Debian. Some others may think otherwise.
For that matter you may be able to work with Darwin and X for Darwin. I think that is further afield of Linux than just BSD is, but it's mostly personal opinion.
-Rusty
... If they just want to play around with it, get a feel for how it acts, looks, etc. without changing the contents of the hard drive, Knoppix.
If they are comfortable with using space on their hard drive, even free space on a fat32 partition, I would recomend Mandrake.
But that's just me. They could use the Mandrake Move CD for non-harddrive breaking as well.
-Rusty
that the only time this is a valid mechanism, is when the sender of the e-mail has gotten your address through a partner agreement with a website where you provided an e-mail address as part of registering.
The other possibility is that some spammers are still using the functionality to validate e-mail addresses, but as part of that action, they hide the fact from the recipient by suspending spam to the address for some weeks or even months before re-distributing the address to their buddies. As a result, the recipient thinks that the "unsubscribe" worked, but in the end gets even more spam.
Then again, I could be wrong. I am sitting at around 2-300 spam messages per day, if I see other reports that this is working, perhaps I will try it out as well.
-Rusty
I would hate to put rapists and murders at the level of the spamers. As noted in the first response visable the punishment is not slow enough or painful enough to suit a large percentage of the population.
Calculation error, spam/ham ratio of 71/100 is a 42% spam volume. a 71% spam volume would be 71/29 spam/ham ratio. Considering the volume of spam I am getting, I would not be at all surprised if you were getting a 71/29 spam/ham ratio, which would support the 71% claim.
As for a punishment, I think that if the convicted spammer has not been counting the total number of messages they have sent (cc/bcc etc. counts as one message per address) then the feds should ask for a minimum of 1 us cent per e-mail address per day from the date of the earliest reported spam, through the date they pay the fine off. Thus if the spamer has a list of 10 million e-mail adresses, they will be fined aproximately $36.5 million per year. That should take care of the "profit" incentive.
-Rusty
...free as in beer, might I suggest starting by looking at freshmeat.com, and typing 'pic' in the litle search field. When I did it came back with this url which lists several pic programers. The first three specificly indicate they are for Linux. Several of the others indicate that Linux support is included. And so on.
I think you would probably find something similar for Basic Stamp, but I think that I have provided enough suggestions that you might be able to figure out how to look for that as well...
Then again, I could be wrong. Things like that are known to happen.
-Rusty
I own several laptops, of various speeds and operating systems, including an iBook.
If I were going to a coffee shop and were planing on doing a little web surfing, checking some news sites, etc, I very likely would take my iBook, even though it is neither my fastest, nor my smallest laptop.
The primary thing going for it is it's "Instant On" capability.
My IBM X21 comes out of suspend mode in about 15 seconds. Give or take a few seconds. Out of it's base, with a wifi card, I would expect it to take about a minute to get online and to the point where I could pull down a web page.
With my iBook, by the time I have the screen up, it's ready to go. Pull down the menu to find an active AP, and as necessary log in.
There are some people who report similar responsiveness with their Windows machine, but I suspect that most windows users do not _expect_ to be productive that fast with their laptop. They expect it to take a minute or two to be up and going.
If they have stopped into the coffee shop on a 15 min break, I suspect that most of them will have second thoughts about taking along their laptop, and expecting to get anything done. Theres standing in line to order your coffee, paying for it, waiting for it to be prepared, who knows how long that line is going to be, Then you go find a seat. You may have lost ten minutes already. loosing 20-40% of the remaining time, waiting on the OS to even figure out that you might want to use your computer seems to be a waste of time.
Having a laptop come up and you're off and running, using nearly all of that 5 min to get caught up on the news, slashdot, or filling the coffee shop's web cache with pr0n, seems to me to be more likely to happen with an Apple laptop than a Windows laptop.
Additionally I get far better battery life out of my Apple, than any of my Windows laptops. If I am going to be sitting at the coffee shop for an hour or so, waiting on my next interview, I expect that I would get more work done if I don't have to look for that power tap that isn't conveniently near one of the tables that isn't occupied already.
Then again, that's mostly my opinion. Yours may vary.
-Rusty
Actually DomainKeys does a bit more than confirm that the From header is legitimate. That (as noted) can be done at the applicatio layer.
The problem with S/MIME, PGP, GPG, and other application instantiated signers is that they do not validate any of the other headers, including Subject, XID, and authenticating that the message as forwarded was received from the computer indicated.
An example of where this could come in handy would be if all that MTA's added along the way was further received from headers, you could authenticate (at your e-mail client) that the message received two hops up was authentic by that platform.
A problem comes in is where the MTA before it does not sign, so you do not know if it is relaying inappropriately or not.
Another problem is when you use filters like PopFile, and have it add headers that allow you to filter based upon a header it installs including it's categorization.
As for this solution being computationally intensive, I would be most concerned about that with non-profit organizations (schools, charities, universities, etc) who can not afford to add new mail servers. For ISP's, and businesses like Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc. the cost of adding such servers would very likely be considered part of the cost of doing business. Individuals or small companies would be unlikely to see the impact unless they were sending massive amounts of e-mail.
Then again, that's just my opinion.
Worse.
A lot of pattents are enforced via the argument that the function is the same, even if the implementation is different.
Copyright is concerned with the source code being identical.
Pattent law is concerned with the ability to accomplish something, and said source code is an implementation that falls within that ability. Oh, by the way, you have another implementation as well. Pay up, or stop using our IP.
When you get down to it, trademark, copyright and pattent law should not overlap. In practice, all too often in fact, not only do they overlap, you can be sued for two of them at the same time. (Not sure about being sued for Trademark infringement at the same time as either Pattents or Copyrights.)
-Rusty
I have, and have used, a Tandy 200. Connect via serial port, dump the data. This, as well as the Tandy 100, plus the WP-1, and other varients are really primarily text entry devices today, though they have the ability to be somewhat more. (I know the Tandy's come with a rudimentary spreadsheet, as well as a database. Not sure on the WP-1)
The biggest problem is going to be cost. For what they do, they are very expensive for the casual user. If you are a reporter, or freelance writer who can get a lot of use out of one of these, I would say go for it.
Folding keyboards for Palm and PockPC devices are reasonably comfortable for most people to enter text with. I am not fond of the thumbpads for entering text, but if you are comfortable text messaging on a cell phone, or with a Blackberry, you might want to take a look at a Zaurus 5500, which has been comming down in price.
If you prefer to "write" there are notepad data entry devices for the various PDA's as well.
Further on the "write" path is the data pen that keeps track of the movement of the pen and then downloads it via a USB port. I do not know how much memory they have, and would suspect that they are designed around taking notes at a meeting, vs. keeping track of the two week trip to Tibet.
If you don't mind a piece of electronics, but want to stay away from a computer/pda, you might want to look into a small typewriter. Type your notes, then when you get home scan them, OCR the scanned text, and post the results.
You may also find that whatever hotel you stay at as you are visiting have typewriters available for guests. This may not be handy when riding on the train and the muse strikes you, but you could use such to transcribe whatever notes you have taken into something you can scan.
For that matter, you could just do as you are, with the itterative step of scanning in your current notes, posting them as images, then manually typing the notes and decide if you want to have both the original scan and the text, or one or the other.
Another variation on that if you happen to have a cammera with a macro lens, or even a cell phone with a built in camera, would be to take photos of your notes that you can post along with whatever photos you take of the area. This would be also handy for keeping track of what you are photographing. This would work also with a film camera, but you would have the additionall wait involved in getting it developed and scanned in. Though some camera shops will allow you to get the pictures on disk or CD instead of or in addition to the prints.
Lastly you can also find digital voice recorders that you can dump the recorded audio to a computer at a later time. Memory costs dropping have really improved the amount of time you can record on these with. You might also contemplate the same with a DV camera.
Just some ideas, others will have more.
Remember, pleasing everyone is almost never the goal.
That said, if the driver is available as a module for a 2.4 kernel, but the user has a 2.2 kernel, the process could be handled in one of two ways.
Feedback to the driver writer that lets them know that there is a (or several) users who could use the driver compiled for the 2.2 kernel, and would they please compile such.
Ask the user if they would like to contribute to a bounty fund for that device, such that when someone sees the available bounty, they can take a look at the situation and decide if they feel like working on the code from the later driver (assuming it is an open source driver) and do whatever needs to be done to back port the driver to the 2.2 kernal as a module the tool can install.
The down side of both options is that the user may decide that switching kernels is going to solve his problem. With some distributions this is an issue, with others it is not. Debian is fairly straightforward to upgrade the kernel, so long as it is available in the stability level you are comfortable with. That isn't necesarily true for minor revisions of the kernel in other distributions.
Why this is a down side is that if the user decides to make that change, the driver may never be built. I also do not know how many projects where end user supported bounties have been at all effective.
Of course you could use the donated money for the bounty to purchase stock in publicly owned companies that the hardware comes from, then as investors advise that you would like to see them make such drivers available. The question then would be would you get enough donations to make such investments feasable. Perhaps if the post driver availability sale of that stock were re-invested in other bounties, the bounties could become more enticing sooner. [Perhaps distribute the cash in accord with the apparent demand for specific hardware drivers? Users donating to the bountie would be considered a greater demand than users just requesting that the manufacturer make the driver available?]
Would you want this to be a non-profit to make it more attractive to users, and possibly manufacters and developers?
All kinds of questions...
-Rusty
That's only because none of the current OS's have the ability to navigate through the file tree by right clicking on a folder or drive icon, and getting a list of sub-folders in the pop-up menu that can be navigated through.
Whether the result of a selection in this mode is a change of the contents of the current window, or a new window poping up for that folder, or a selected application starting, or an application associated with a selected document is irrelevent.
None of the systems I have worked with other than BeOS support this feature. It may not be initially intuitive, but once you have used it a couple of times, (not for months at a time, just a couple of times) you find it a significant lack in all other platforms.
Of course that can be said for several other features of BeOS, but I suspect you have heard enough arguments about features of BeOS, and I am limiting this strictly to this one desireable feature of a FileSystem Browser.
For that matter I would love to see a 'find' program for Linux that you could search for all files that begin with a number, then with a quick pulldown menu change look for all e-mail from someone in my Evolution Contacts, that has the word "help" in it's subject, and is dated in the last week. And while I am drafting a response, use another search that feeds xmms an active playlist of all mp3 files that have a composer of Mozart and a sub-genra of Sonata. I want it 'active' as I may have a p2p program in the background downloading such files, and I would like the file system search to set any 'new' files as the next in the playlist, not the last.
Note, none of the search features are particularly difficult to implement in Python, however implementing in Python is not an implementation that is part of the File System Browser.
As CISCO has not disclosed the terms of their licencing, RAND means nothing. Setting the cost at a billion dollars, can be asserted as being Reasonable and Non Discriminatory, as the only "customer" involved would be Microsoft.
In all likelyhood you very well may be right. I don't know what Cisco thinks the market for licences to their patch happens to be, so neither of us are likely to be "correct" in our valuation.
-Rusty
... but hopefully the 'overrated' mods won't act as double negatives....
With all the talk about how the GPU's are so great at Matrix calculations, the question should not be "What can my GPU do when it's otherwise 'Idle'?", but "What is the Matrix?"
-Rusty
System: Apple iBook running OS X Panther.
... also so I could SSH in and trash my personal data with srm, while doing an SFTP backup of anything I forgot to back up.
Start by checking the apple.com website and see what options you should begin with. One observation above is to use File Vault to secure your personal data. This is all well and good, but it makes it tough to take one of the later steps.
In the event of its theft, I would like to have the thing send me its IP address
As has been noted this is not difficult. Set up a cron job, or even a boot job to find out the laptop's IP address (ifconfig |grep inet |mail me@myisp.com -s 'iBook's IP") and you get the ip on the lan in the body of the e-mail, and the external IP in the headers. Presuming smtp is not blocked. If you install the perl libraries for Jabber, you could even send a jabber message via a similar process.
Note that if you have been rsync on a regular basis to backup your personal data, which can be done across an ssh session, you may not need to do any sftp backups, and you could have a cron job take care of this so you are covered.
Several of the posters above have noted that you could use wget to pull down a "hidden" page on your personal web server with instructions. For that matter you could build a script that would be posted to that page, perhaps with a marker character before each line, (such ah $) that you grep out of the downloaded page, cut the first character out of the line, then save it with a random name, chmod the file to executable, then execute it. At that point the script could be doing anything you ask of such a script. Including downloading executables, and even running 'dd -if=/dev/null -of=/dev/disk0' to wipe the hd yourself.
Elsewhere others have noted that if the thief wipes your hard drive before they re-boot it, none of this works. That's as good of a reason as any to schedule backups of your personal data. It won't help you recover the laptop, or tell the police where the laptop is, but at least you have your personal data.
This also won't help if your laptop is not connected to a network of some sort. If they pull your HD and toss it into a second computer as a secondary drive, then you will want to have all of your data in a 'file vault' to restrict access. Sure with enough time they can break the encryption, and ultimately start performing identity theft on you, but the time involved is unlikely to be worth it to such a person. It's far more likely that they will wipe the drive, pawn the laptop, and hunt for another laptop that is not going to take so much effort to access the user information on.
Then again, these are just my opinions. I have been known to be wrong, so I do wish you good luck.
-Rusty
Well, when they come out with the Septium 7 chip, perhaps it will answer questions before they are asked.
Of course coming from Intel, one in 7 million responses will be wrong, there will be an instruction added to later dies that corrects for that and all binaries will have to be re-compiled to take advantage of that new instruction. The new instruction will cause two other errors to crop up in more common responses.
Throw together a MythTV box and see what's comming up on a channle up to a week in advance.
Pick up a Tivo or alternative, and see what's comming as far as 2 weeks in advance.
I see the movies that interest me in the theatres, or wait for the DVD's. I could care less about PPV.
Having the material to put together a FreeVo or MythTV was what prompted my decision Not to go with Digital Cable when I moved to an appartment with a North view. (I had been a DirecTV subscriber till then.) TechTV was on Digital Cable, but I didn't see anything else I felt worth subscribing to in the lineup, and knew that the cable box would entail additional hardware to change channels should I get the MythTV box going. It would have, and I am generally happy with the MythTV box, so I missed the channel, but did survive.
With the MythTV box I can select the music that I want to listen to and don't have to listen to what some creative marvel thinks I should listen to. If I want to hear a song play again, guess what.
At the same time if it works for you, go with it.
-Rusty