It does depend upon when you watched it. There were times and shows that frankly the world could have lived without. Internet Tonight comes to mind. I liked both people hosting the show, but the content was, well, let me put it this way, the show was supposed to be humorous, and did have good talent, but lousy material.
For several years Leo Lapprot hosted both Call for Help and The Screensavers. I suspect that trying to handle both audiences (the raw newbies, and the supposed non-newbies, but not supertechs) had an impact on the overall level of content in The Screensavers to it's minor detriment. I think when he handed over Call for Help to the garden gnome, The Screensavers improved tremendously.
I never was impressed with the talking heads programs, Dvorak's show on the series was something I regularly avoided. Likewise for Martin Sgt's show.
I did like the "Tech of..." series, as well as the documentaries on the leaders of technology.
In the couple of years I watched it, I can say it did help me with being able to explain some of the things I knew, to people who didn't know anything about what I could have been saying.
They did do several Linux focused episodes, but I would not say that they ever were really focused on Linux. I don't think it would have made sense for them to even have an entire series devoted to Linux, there was not enough of an audience.
TechTV was one of those stations where if you were at a Best Buy, or even a Computer Renisanse, and started fielding questions that seemed below what you felt comfortable talking about, you could recomend to other customers, or even some of the staff.
The saddest moment for me related to TechTV was when they let go of Victoria Recaneo from TechTV News. Granted it was the same day they let go of Dvorak, which partially makes up for it, but it sucked all the same. In my opinion TechTV hasn't been the same since, and that ultimately leads to today's announcement, even though the station has been through a couple of changes of hands since then.
I may not qualify as "anyone", but as it happens, Yes I do believe Comcast is that stupid.
They have effectively told their employees: "Hey, we love what you have done. We don't need you, and we are disolving this channel you have created. Some of you can apply for your old jobs back, but the descriptions may change, andy you will have to move to LA. It's been great working with you."
Tell me that _You_ would feel that moving from SF to LA on the possibility that you _might_ get a job with the same title as you had before, is a good idea.
I predict it will be some 18 year old who gives one or the other to all the guys in his school who might be a challenge to him aquiring a harrem of the best looking girls in school...
Object Oriented database of course. Atoms are objects, they interact in different ways with different atoms. Build a set of relations reflecting those interactions and your assembler simple identifies which atom it has, how it relates to other atoms, figures out where it can use this atom, or if it should store it for later use, then assembles as desired, and moves on to the next available atom.
but as I said the desktop Database is still for me the missing piece.
I have used a couple of ok pim/database thingies.
Think was a free form text based pim. Sort of a tree storage system for text based information. On my Zauraus, the alternative that I like is IQNotes which I think is much more flexiable.
As a "User oriented database" I have used Guppi to some satisfaction. Though I have encountered some of its limitations as well. For most people a single user flat file database can be accomplished via a single spreadsheet.
You can even do some "relational" work with macros on a spreadsheet as well. In an address book, you could fill in city and state from a user provided zip code, so long as you provide a sorted list of zip codes to city and state names on a seprate sheet in the same workbook, or in a set of columns off to the side in the same worksheet. That's what the =lookup(this,here,returnthis) function provides. It is not perfect in that it will return something even if it does not find an identical match, but if you have a good search list, the resulting returns should be good as well.
The FSF does prosecute cases of abuses to the GPL in some cases. See this page
The requirement of course is that the auther of a project assigns copyright to the FSF.
The OSS movement itself may be doing the same thing, in cases where they are assigned copyright, and are informed of copyright violations.
There is a difference between the FOSS movement and the OSS movement. So long as the source code is available, the OSS movement is quite happy to approve the product as Open Source. FOSS, and or FSF or GNU requires the additional step that the software be unburdened of restrictions on the user, or developers who have access to that source code, beyond that products derivative of that source code retain the same/similar licence.
Additionally, while the FOSS movement would like developers to use an approved licence to distribute their own work, which may, or may not, access GPL software, it is not a requirement. Thus if you write a plug-in for the GIMP, you are not required to abide by the same licence that the GIMP uses.
I seem to recall that some licence out of Apple was the first licence that the OSS movement approved, that the FOSS movement did not.
There are a variety of people around the world, some of them happen to like to be able to access their "own" e-mail from a variety of locations as well. Some of these people put a firewall in front of their home system to reduce the likelyhood of problems on their internal network, and really are not interested in punching a hole in that firewall to grab their e-mail from work, or school, or the coffee shop they stop in at when out of town.
Now I will grant you that there are a lot of advantages to keeping all of your e-mail on your local hard drive. There are a couple of distinct disadvantages as well. Those noted above being some. Others include potential for theft if that HD happens to be part of your laptop. Non-immediate access to e-mail addresses you don't happen to keep on your PDA (usually those from most recent e-mail aquaintences you haven't made contacts for). Giving business associates and "personal friends" multiple e-mail addresses to try to keep up with you.
While web-mail is not a perfect solution, on it's own anyway, it does allow users to access their e-mail from a lot of locations that will not allow access to imap or pop3 services. There have been a lot of corporations who have started blocking imap and pop3 traffic into their network for the very simple reason that users have introduced viri into the corproate network using just that method. This has also been common for web-mail access as well, so I suspect that within days or weeks of gmail.com going live, the login page for it will be blocked by those businesses that already block Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.
Then again, I could be entirely wrong, and you aren't just trolling for a response.
that they own Blogger.com now, and don't have any ownership over Slashdot.
Then again, perhaps we will start hearing about offers to joing gmail.com showing up on the MSN front page tomorrow. Or on various "My.Yahoo.com" pages. At that rate it wouldn't surprise me if it started showing up on Colombia Internet's home page as well.
Note: The above is largely sarcasm. I don't expect such offers to start showing up on any of those locations, well perhaps on Colombia Internet...
Wouldn't this depend upon the game? UT2003 off the Gentoo build would check to see if there was sufficient memory, and if so it would load the entire game into memory and play from there. I know this worked with 512 Meg of memory.
Without knowing the specifics, I believe it created a virtual file system in memory, then copied over a compressed file system from the CD, which it then mounted, and you played from that.
I suspect that on other alternative would be to check the hard disk for swap memory space, then use that as a file store. This should work with Linux Swap partitions, Windows fat vfat and fat32 partitions, and possibly with the NTFS drivers that allow you to write to a file as long as you do not change it's size. (If the windows NTFS swap file isn't large enough, you probably aren't going to want to play on that system anyway.)
This could provide enough space for a game that needs more than a gig of memory, or several CD's for all of the maps, graphics, textures, etc.
Then again, what do I know, I don't game on my PC that often....
Sorry to say this, but as much as I appreciate the effort to make the teaching of subjects in school easier, and for that matter more cost effective, school systems are largely ignoring their own research into providing effective instruction.
Schools are attempting to save money by doing such things as making classes 2 or even 4 hours long, so that the teachers for those classes can do other things on days that they no longer need to teach that class (usually taking classes themselves, or using those days for "inservice" work.)
This flies in the face of several decades of research that shows that instruction should be provided in 15 min blocks, and classes should not be more than 60 min long without breaks. Additionally if a student is ill one day, they loose a minimum of a week's worth of instruction in that class if that four hour block is all that is held on that course for the week. Missing that much material can easily make the difference between an A and an F in a course.
Yes. All of this is being done as part of cost cutting measures, and with a goal of meeting the "No Child Left Behind" mandate. The effect however is closer to "No Child Able To Keep Up".
Standardized test scores are going down, schools are loosing funding as a result, and some are even being forced to close their doors. Granted when they close their doors, the cost of that school goes to Zero. Supposedly that was not the intent however.
As far as adding the required functionality to OS/2, Serenity can do that directly, as they are the current developers and distributors of the current implementation of OS/2, aka E-CommStation.
I think the support would be added to Windows via a.vxd driver, running in ring 0 on the processor.
The author indicates that the Beta responsiveness is comparable to VMWare, which suggests that it is using some form of providing access to the hardware, rather than emulating hardware in software.
As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.
Then again, I'm not currently developing emulators for any platform, so what do I know.
How secure would this network be? What type of attacks would it be vulnerable to? I haven't found any tools to crack AES, only WEP, does that mean it's secure or I just that I haven't looked hard enough?
AES itself is considered a strong encryption technology. How secure it will be for a WiFi connection is anyone's bet. It is the approved NIST standard. (US centric) see http://csrc.nist.gov/CryptoToolkit/aes for more information.
You could enhance it by putting in an SSH VPN to a seprate box on your network.
Connect your AP to the network through a firewall that only allows the SSH tunnel to communicate with the tunnel server, and drops all other traffic. The ap would provide it's own DHCP server to eliminate unnecessary load on the firewall.
Then again, I work in an environment where we do not allow any wireless networking.
... was accused of generating it's own "local" news for many of it's markets? I.E. they didn't have a local news source (online newspaper in the area would probably qualify) so, rather than limiting their news to national coverage, they wrote their own stories with no basis in fact.
Fortunately in the Minneapolis, MN area we do have a reasonably good classic rock station that is not ClrCnl, which has locked out the ClrCnl morning shows. And for local traffic, one of the local Public Broadcast Radio stations provides updates every 10 min during rush hour, and actually has a great Jazz lineup.
ClrChn has attempted to "compete" in the Jazz market with their "Smooth Jazz" channel. I am not what you might call a conisour of Jazz, but I think their playlist is garbage.
I have listened to a couple of XM sat channels, but since I don't own a receiver (yet) I can't make any claims about it.
Radio stations mentioned... KQRS - http://www.92kqrs.com/ - 92.5 FM KBEM - http://www.jazz88fm.com/ - 88.5 FM - online CC-SmoothJazz - 100.5 FM
There are a couple of other locally produced stations in the area. Since I like the Jazz88FM lineup, I have not listened to them.
For those concerned, KQRS is owned by Disney, but the Morning Show should be listened to a few times before you decide to let your kids listen in.
...where you were sent e-mail, pages, called at work and home, on your cell phone, faxes, etc. Each event was a clue to a mystery, or an indication you had to go look for something.
I seem to recall the game folding itself up and going away immediately after the Trade Center Tower Attack.
Other than the phone and fax events, this sounds quite similar, and I suspect it may end up with some of the same flaws.
The primary flaw that I see with this is that I personally have no problem reading bits and pieces out of dozens of books, often several different books by the same author. This is purely my decision, and I am in a mindset for that book when I go back to reading it, because I choose to be. Getting IM's, e-mail, etc as "Novel" content, seems to me to be eliminating the reader's election to get back into the frame of mind for properly processing the content, and I suspect will end up being ignored.
Laptop base stations: You can leave your devices plugged in for power, and you don't have to hook anything up when you bring your laptop into the room.
Not to belittle the idea, since you are probably going to plug the laptop into power anyway, how is this particularly different from dropping your laptop into a docking station that has everything you need at your desk plugged into it?
(Other than the obvious fewer wires connecting everything.)
Almost everything you are going to be working with is going to need power cords (or more AA and AAA batteries going through the house, or the recharger) to work in the first place.
Personally I think the handiest use of this would be for portable hard disk archiving systems. Along the lines of the Maxtor One Button Backup drives.
One of the problems I see with that is the range. Either the range has to be small enough that WUSB only works within ~2 meters of the host computer, or there will be host contention in any house with multiple computers that can act as a WUSB host.
Then again, maybe I should stay away from this technology stuff...
Re:Not the problem for Joe User....
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GNOME for Grandma
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· Score: 1
That, or, find someone to put together a couple of excelent packages, something like Knoppix, or Mandrake Move, that just about any Linux user who can figure out how to burn them to a CD, can provide pretty much all the support Grandma is ever going to need.
Heck if given the ISO, and a Windows user can figure out how to burn to a CD, the Windows user could probably provide all the support necessary. Then again perhaps I think too highly of Windows users.....
Most of the platforms I work on, Windows and Mac OS X excepted, I put together a script to automate this, it lives in root's scripts directory, named refresh.
Cron job calls it, it goes to the configured servers, updates it's software list, then goes through the list and upgrades the software that have updates available. Works nicely for Debian and Mandrake, as well as variations of Debian such as Knoppix.
A distribution Upgrade would take a bit more work, but if I were to put something like this together for my Dad, or for some user I was visiting occasionally, such an act could probably wait for me to visit and hold its hand through the process. (Upgrading to Debian 3.0 was not a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' away...)
Not sure I can alleviate all your concerns, however...
The easiest way to see if you are affected by this issue is to get the model number of your access point, and go to the Linksys website. See what capabilities your AP has, and if the AP supports the LEAP authentication protocol.
If it does not, you are probably immune to this particular disorder. Beyond that I would say do not manage your AP over the wifi connection, without another encryption, and if possible disable login to the AP from the Internet. Beyond that I would recomend getting a good book on WiFi security, some have been reviewed here, though how good they are, I can't really judge.
Only if she is planning on using it in a comercial environment. Additionally, workstation fees are under $300 if I recall correctly. Joe may have a $1399 per processor server fee to pay, but only if he has a box set up as a server.
Granted even the $300 single processor workstation charge is abusive to the consumer.
-Rusty
Re:Sure, if you can dumb it down into a kisok...
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A Babe in Tuxland
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Might want to remember that the article is not about dumbing down the interface to make it "safe" for a child to use.
It is about refuting the claim that Linux is "hard" to use.
Can Linux be hard to use? Sure. At the same time if I turn off desktop icons and disable the TaskBar in Windows, you might find it hard to use Windows as well. That isn't the way Microsoft ships it, and the way Joe Barr configured his daughter's account is not the default view for Linux. In the default view for both Windows and Linux, you are working with a Point and Click interface. If you can learn one, you can probably learn the other, either as well, or instead.
Then again I use four differen't OS's on a regular basis. You might have more trouble switching between two.
Or possibly set the path so that the first few directory it checks for executables, libraries, etc. just happen to be children of the aplication's directory.
If you use a variable placeholder in the path, and the application first substitutes the applications path for that variable, then checks the path, the first instance of a library that matches the expectations of the application should be the the ones that the application is expecting to be able to use.
That way you don't have to export a custom path for each application, the application does that for you itself as it is launching.
Not sure if that is implementable under linux however, so if it isn't my appologies to those of you reading this who are ready to get in my face for it.
Nope. Each of those has valid uses, that they were designed for.
If you mean as a form of "universal identification", then yes I am opposed to using social security cards and drivers licences for those purposes. We do not currently require any citizen of the US to aquire a Passport, unless they plan on traveling outside of the US, Canada and Mexico. So it is not useful as a "universal" ID within the US.
In fact there is no required universal ID in the US at this time. A DL is useful as a local ID, most specifically to confirm the age of the holder. SSN has been abused as a form of ID by many organizations, but the laws instituting it specifically forbade its use as such. only recently have laws been passed that allow companies to accept your SSN as an identifier, but they still can not require it's use. (Universities who accept foreign students already have methods in place to accept an imaginary SSN as a place holder for your SSN should you decide that you want to remove your SSN from your school transcripts.)
The purpose of your SSN is to identify the Social Security Account into which your government mandated retirement benifits are to be attributed to. Your Drivers Licence indicates that you have passed the required tests to aquire the privledge of driving. Use of either as a form of ID beyond those purposes is "handy" but not legitimately required.
A person today can, should they so wish, live their entire life without a SSN, or a Drivers Licence. If you never work a day of your life, and do not elect to receive Social Security Benifits, you are not required to get an SSN. (Perhaps not strictly true. For something like the last 10 years, if your parents are claiming you as a dependent, they are currently required to list your ssn on their tax records, which means if you are under 27 you probably do have a SSN, though people over 27 may have been able to escape the requirement.)
If you find you need a form of State provided ID, but have no interest in driving, you can get a State ID card which looks very much like a drivers licence, (as the people requiring it will be familiar with that format) but it does not grant you the privledge of driving, which means it is not a drivers licence.
Then again, these rules may vary from state to state, and are definately not universal to the rest of the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
It does depend upon when you watched it. There were times and shows that frankly the world could have lived without. Internet Tonight comes to mind. I liked both people hosting the show, but the content was, well, let me put it this way, the show was supposed to be humorous, and did have good talent, but lousy material.
..." series, as well as the documentaries on the leaders of technology.
For several years Leo Lapprot hosted both Call for Help and The Screensavers. I suspect that trying to handle both audiences (the raw newbies, and the supposed non-newbies, but not supertechs) had an impact on the overall level of content in The Screensavers to it's minor detriment. I think when he handed over Call for Help to the garden gnome, The Screensavers improved tremendously.
I never was impressed with the talking heads programs, Dvorak's show on the series was something I regularly avoided. Likewise for Martin Sgt's show.
I did like the "Tech of
In the couple of years I watched it, I can say it did help me with being able to explain some of the things I knew, to people who didn't know anything about what I could have been saying.
They did do several Linux focused episodes, but I would not say that they ever were really focused on Linux. I don't think it would have made sense for them to even have an entire series devoted to Linux, there was not enough of an audience.
TechTV was one of those stations where if you were at a Best Buy, or even a Computer Renisanse, and started fielding questions that seemed below what you felt comfortable talking about, you could recomend to other customers, or even some of the staff.
The saddest moment for me related to TechTV was when they let go of Victoria Recaneo from TechTV News. Granted it was the same day they let go of Dvorak, which partially makes up for it, but it sucked all the same. In my opinion TechTV hasn't been the same since, and that ultimately leads to today's announcement, even though the station has been through a couple of changes of hands since then.
-Rusty
I may not qualify as "anyone", but as it happens, Yes I do believe Comcast is that stupid.
They have effectively told their employees: "Hey, we love what you have done. We don't need you, and we are disolving this channel you have created. Some of you can apply for your old jobs back, but the descriptions may change, andy you will have to move to LA. It's been great working with you."
Tell me that _You_ would feel that moving from SF to LA on the possibility that you _might_ get a job with the same title as you had before, is a good idea.
Why wait?
I predict it will be some 18 year old who gives one or the other to all the guys in his school who might be a challenge to him aquiring a harrem of the best looking girls in school...
Object Oriented database of course. Atoms are objects, they interact in different ways with different atoms. Build a set of relations reflecting those interactions and your assembler simple identifies which atom it has, how it relates to other atoms, figures out where it can use this atom, or if it should store it for later use, then assembles as desired, and moves on to the next available atom.
-Rusty
but as I said the desktop Database is still for me the missing piece.
I have used a couple of ok pim/database thingies.
Think was a free form text based pim. Sort of a tree storage system for text based information. On my Zauraus, the alternative that I like is IQNotes which I think is much more flexiable.
As a "User oriented database" I have used Guppi to some satisfaction. Though I have encountered some of its limitations as well. For most people a single user flat file database can be accomplished via a single spreadsheet.
You can even do some "relational" work with macros on a spreadsheet as well. In an address book, you could fill in city and state from a user provided zip code, so long as you provide a sorted list of zip codes to city and state names on a seprate sheet in the same workbook, or in a set of columns off to the side in the same worksheet. That's what the =lookup(this,here,returnthis) function provides. It is not perfect in that it will return something even if it does not find an identical match, but if you have a good search list, the resulting returns should be good as well.
The FSF does prosecute cases of abuses to the GPL in some cases. See this page
The requirement of course is that the auther of a project assigns copyright to the FSF.
The OSS movement itself may be doing the same thing, in cases where they are assigned copyright, and are informed of copyright violations.
There is a difference between the FOSS movement and the OSS movement. So long as the source code is available, the OSS movement is quite happy to approve the product as Open Source. FOSS, and or FSF or GNU requires the additional step that the software be unburdened of restrictions on the user, or developers who have access to that source code, beyond that products derivative of that source code retain the same/similar licence.
Additionally, while the FOSS movement would like developers to use an approved licence to distribute their own work, which may, or may not, access GPL software, it is not a requirement. Thus if you write a plug-in for the GIMP, you are not required to abide by the same licence that the GIMP uses.
I seem to recall that some licence out of Apple was the first licence that the OSS movement approved, that the FOSS movement did not.
Then again, I've been wrong before...
-Rusty
There are a variety of people around the world, some of them happen to like to be able to access their "own" e-mail from a variety of locations as well. Some of these people put a firewall in front of their home system to reduce the likelyhood of problems on their internal network, and really are not interested in punching a hole in that firewall to grab their e-mail from work, or school, or the coffee shop they stop in at when out of town.
Now I will grant you that there are a lot of advantages to keeping all of your e-mail on your local hard drive. There are a couple of distinct disadvantages as well. Those noted above being some. Others include potential for theft if that HD happens to be part of your laptop. Non-immediate access to e-mail addresses you don't happen to keep on your PDA (usually those from most recent e-mail aquaintences you haven't made contacts for). Giving business associates and "personal friends" multiple e-mail addresses to try to keep up with you.
While web-mail is not a perfect solution, on it's own anyway, it does allow users to access their e-mail from a lot of locations that will not allow access to imap or pop3 services. There have been a lot of corporations who have started blocking imap and pop3 traffic into their network for the very simple reason that users have introduced viri into the corproate network using just that method. This has also been common for web-mail access as well, so I suspect that within days or weeks of gmail.com going live, the login page for it will be blocked by those businesses that already block Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.
Then again, I could be entirely wrong, and you aren't just trolling for a response.
-Rusty
that they own Blogger.com now, and don't have any ownership over Slashdot.
Then again, perhaps we will start hearing about offers to joing gmail.com showing up on the MSN front page tomorrow. Or on various "My.Yahoo.com" pages. At that rate it wouldn't surprise me if it started showing up on Colombia Internet's home page as well.
Note: The above is largely sarcasm. I don't expect such offers to start showing up on any of those locations, well perhaps on Colombia Internet...
-Rusty
Wouldn't this depend upon the game? UT2003 off the Gentoo build would check to see if there was sufficient memory, and if so it would load the entire game into memory and play from there. I know this worked with 512 Meg of memory.
Without knowing the specifics, I believe it created a virtual file system in memory, then copied over a compressed file system from the CD, which it then mounted, and you played from that.
I suspect that on other alternative would be to check the hard disk for swap memory space, then use that as a file store. This should work with Linux Swap partitions, Windows fat vfat and fat32 partitions, and possibly with the NTFS drivers that allow you to write to a file as long as you do not change it's size. (If the windows NTFS swap file isn't large enough, you probably aren't going to want to play on that system anyway.)
This could provide enough space for a game that needs more than a gig of memory, or several CD's for all of the maps, graphics, textures, etc.
Then again, what do I know, I don't game on my PC that often....
-Rusty
Sorry to say this, but as much as I appreciate the effort to make the teaching of subjects in school easier, and for that matter more cost effective, school systems are largely ignoring their own research into providing effective instruction.
Schools are attempting to save money by doing such things as making classes 2 or even 4 hours long, so that the teachers for those classes can do other things on days that they no longer need to teach that class (usually taking classes themselves, or using those days for "inservice" work.)
This flies in the face of several decades of research that shows that instruction should be provided in 15 min blocks, and classes should not be more than 60 min long without breaks. Additionally if a student is ill one day, they loose a minimum of a week's worth of instruction in that class if that four hour block is all that is held on that course for the week. Missing that much material can easily make the difference between an A and an F in a course.
Yes. All of this is being done as part of cost cutting measures, and with a goal of meeting the "No Child Left Behind" mandate. The effect however is closer to "No Child Able To Keep Up".
Standardized test scores are going down, schools are loosing funding as a result, and some are even being forced to close their doors. Granted when they close their doors, the cost of that school goes to Zero. Supposedly that was not the intent however.
-Rusty
As far as adding the required functionality to OS/2, Serenity can do that directly, as they are the current developers and distributors of the current implementation of OS/2, aka E-CommStation.
.vxd driver, running in ring 0 on the processor.
I think the support would be added to Windows via a
The author indicates that the Beta responsiveness is comparable to VMWare, which suggests that it is using some form of providing access to the hardware, rather than emulating hardware in software.
As a point of recall, OS/2 has x86 virtualization already built in, which allowed users to run dos and win3.0 applications in their own seprate processor spaces.
Then again, I'm not currently developing emulators for any platform, so what do I know.
-Rusty
How secure would this network be? What type of attacks would it be vulnerable to? I haven't found any tools to crack AES, only WEP, does that mean it's secure or I just that I haven't looked hard enough?
AES itself is considered a strong encryption technology. How secure it will be for a WiFi connection is anyone's bet. It is the approved NIST standard. (US centric) see http://csrc.nist.gov/CryptoToolkit/aes for more information.
You could enhance it by putting in an SSH VPN to a seprate box on your network.
Connect your AP to the network through a firewall that only allows the SSH tunnel to communicate with the tunnel server, and drops all other traffic. The ap would provide it's own DHCP server to eliminate unnecessary load on the firewall.
Then again, I work in an environment where we do not allow any wireless networking.
-Rusty
... was accused of generating it's own "local" news for many of it's markets? I.E. they didn't have a local news source (online newspaper in the area would probably qualify) so, rather than limiting their news to national coverage, they wrote their own stories with no basis in fact.
Fortunately in the Minneapolis, MN area we do have a reasonably good classic rock station that is not ClrCnl, which has locked out the ClrCnl morning shows. And for local traffic, one of the local Public Broadcast Radio stations provides updates every 10 min during rush hour, and actually has a great Jazz lineup.
ClrChn has attempted to "compete" in the Jazz market with their "Smooth Jazz" channel. I am not what you might call a conisour of Jazz, but I think their playlist is garbage.
I have listened to a couple of XM sat channels, but since I don't own a receiver (yet) I can't make any claims about it.
Radio stations mentioned...
KQRS - http://www.92kqrs.com/ - 92.5 FM
KBEM - http://www.jazz88fm.com/ - 88.5 FM - online
CC-SmoothJazz - 100.5 FM
There are a couple of other locally produced stations in the area. Since I like the Jazz88FM lineup, I have not listened to them.
For those concerned, KQRS is owned by Disney, but the Morning Show should be listened to a few times before you decide to let your kids listen in.
...where you were sent e-mail, pages, called at work and home, on your cell phone, faxes, etc. Each event was a clue to a mystery, or an indication you had to go look for something.
I seem to recall the game folding itself up and going away immediately after the Trade Center Tower Attack.
Other than the phone and fax events, this sounds quite similar, and I suspect it may end up with some of the same flaws.
The primary flaw that I see with this is that I personally have no problem reading bits and pieces out of dozens of books, often several different books by the same author. This is purely my decision, and I am in a mindset for that book when I go back to reading it, because I choose to be. Getting IM's, e-mail, etc as "Novel" content, seems to me to be eliminating the reader's election to get back into the frame of mind for properly processing the content, and I suspect will end up being ignored.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Laptop base stations: You can leave your devices plugged in for power, and you don't have to hook anything up when you bring your laptop into the room.
Not to belittle the idea, since you are probably going to plug the laptop into power anyway, how is this particularly different from dropping your laptop into a docking station that has everything you need at your desk plugged into it?
(Other than the obvious fewer wires connecting everything.)
Almost everything you are going to be working with is going to need power cords (or more AA and AAA batteries going through the house, or the recharger) to work in the first place.
Personally I think the handiest use of this would be for portable hard disk archiving systems. Along the lines of the Maxtor One Button Backup drives.
One of the problems I see with that is the range. Either the range has to be small enough that WUSB only works within ~2 meters of the host computer, or there will be host contention in any house with multiple computers that can act as a WUSB host.
Then again, maybe I should stay away from this technology stuff...
That, or, find someone to put together a couple of excelent packages, something like Knoppix, or Mandrake Move, that just about any Linux user who can figure out how to burn them to a CD, can provide pretty much all the support Grandma is ever going to need.
Heck if given the ISO, and a Windows user can figure out how to burn to a CD, the Windows user could probably provide all the support necessary. Then again perhaps I think too highly of Windows users.....
-Rusty
Most of the platforms I work on, Windows and Mac OS X excepted, I put together a script to automate this, it lives in root's scripts directory, named refresh.
Cron job calls it, it goes to the configured servers, updates it's software list, then goes through the list and upgrades the software that have updates available. Works nicely for Debian and Mandrake, as well as variations of Debian such as Knoppix.
A distribution Upgrade would take a bit more work, but if I were to put something like this together for my Dad, or for some user I was visiting occasionally, such an act could probably wait for me to visit and hold its hand through the process. (Upgrading to Debian 3.0 was not a 'apt-get dist-upgrade' away...)
And here I thought Scotts made Wiskey...
Not sure I can alleviate all your concerns, however...
The easiest way to see if you are affected by this issue is to get the model number of your access point, and go to the Linksys website. See what capabilities your AP has, and if the AP supports the LEAP authentication protocol.
If it does not, you are probably immune to this particular disorder. Beyond that I would say do not manage your AP over the wifi connection, without another encryption, and if possible disable login to the AP from the Internet. Beyond that I would recomend getting a good book on WiFi security, some have been reviewed here, though how good they are, I can't really judge.
-Rusty
It requires an extra DVD disk in the package which is only 20% filled per patch release.
Sounds like the scramjet, not the x-prise.
Though I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Only if she is planning on using it in a comercial environment. Additionally, workstation fees are under $300 if I recall correctly. Joe may have a $1399 per processor server fee to pay, but only if he has a box set up as a server.
Granted even the $300 single processor workstation charge is abusive to the consumer.
-Rusty
Might want to remember that the article is not about dumbing down the interface to make it "safe" for a child to use.
It is about refuting the claim that Linux is "hard" to use.
Can Linux be hard to use? Sure. At the same time if I turn off desktop icons and disable the TaskBar in Windows, you might find it hard to use Windows as well. That isn't the way Microsoft ships it, and the way Joe Barr configured his daughter's account is not the default view for Linux. In the default view for both Windows and Linux, you are working with a Point and Click interface. If you can learn one, you can probably learn the other, either as well, or instead.
Then again I use four differen't OS's on a regular basis. You might have more trouble switching between two.
-Rusty
Or possibly set the path so that the first few directory it checks for executables, libraries, etc. just happen to be children of the aplication's directory.
If you use a variable placeholder in the path, and the application first substitutes the applications path for that variable, then checks the path, the first instance of a library that matches the expectations of the application should be the the ones that the application is expecting to be able to use.
That way you don't have to export a custom path for each application, the application does that for you itself as it is launching.
Not sure if that is implementable under linux however, so if it isn't my appologies to those of you reading this who are ready to get in my face for it.
-Rusty
Nope. Each of those has valid uses, that they were designed for.
If you mean as a form of "universal identification", then yes I am opposed to using social security cards and drivers licences for those purposes. We do not currently require any citizen of the US to aquire a Passport, unless they plan on traveling outside of the US, Canada and Mexico. So it is not useful as a "universal" ID within the US.
In fact there is no required universal ID in the US at this time. A DL is useful as a local ID, most specifically to confirm the age of the holder. SSN has been abused as a form of ID by many organizations, but the laws instituting it specifically forbade its use as such. only recently have laws been passed that allow companies to accept your SSN as an identifier, but they still can not require it's use. (Universities who accept foreign students already have methods in place to accept an imaginary SSN as a place holder for your SSN should you decide that you want to remove your SSN from your school transcripts.)
The purpose of your SSN is to identify the Social Security Account into which your government mandated retirement benifits are to be attributed to. Your Drivers Licence indicates that you have passed the required tests to aquire the privledge of driving. Use of either as a form of ID beyond those purposes is "handy" but not legitimately required.
A person today can, should they so wish, live their entire life without a SSN, or a Drivers Licence. If you never work a day of your life, and do not elect to receive Social Security Benifits, you are not required to get an SSN. (Perhaps not strictly true. For something like the last 10 years, if your parents are claiming you as a dependent, they are currently required to list your ssn on their tax records, which means if you are under 27 you probably do have a SSN, though people over 27 may have been able to escape the requirement.)
If you find you need a form of State provided ID, but have no interest in driving, you can get a State ID card which looks very much like a drivers licence, (as the people requiring it will be familiar with that format) but it does not grant you the privledge of driving, which means it is not a drivers licence.
Then again, these rules may vary from state to state, and are definately not universal to the rest of the planet.
-Rusty