Remember the common commerce laws provide you the protection that if you receive a product from a company, that you did not order from that company, you are under no obligation to honor any invoice from that company. If you did not order a product from a company, and they send it to you, you are perfectly in your rights to accept it as a gift, and at your option send them a nice thank you.
Actually since you never placed an order with SCO for Linux, it is perfectly legal to send them a nice letter in response thanking them for delivering to you a product that you happen to enjoy using, but since you did not order from them, are under no legal obligation to send them any money for.
I would think that it would be reasonable that when I choose to install an operating system, and compare it with another operating system that I would use the currently available software that is freely available.
Now I grant you that 9.0 is the current RH edition. however Mandrake 9.1 came out at approximately the same time. IIRC within a month of each other. A quick check to make sure, and RH9 was released March 31, Mandrake9.1 came out March 25th. Within a week of each other, and Mandrake 9.1 came out first.
Sounds like a sound plan to me. I think I will see how RedHat 6.1 stacks up against Mandrake 9.1. I think I have a copy of the CD's lying around here somewhere. If not I suppose I can order a copy from CheapBytes for a couple of bucks. If I don't like the way RH handles my Wacom USB tablet, or my USB keyboard or scoll mouse, well that's just too bad. If even CheapBytes doesn't have a copy that old, I am sure that they have something else a couple of versions out of date.
Honestly, how would you feel if you paid for software, only to be told to re-purchase the next version in less that one year's time? That's basically what you are proposing.
Really? I though I was proposing using the current version of the software to see if it supported the features that you need it to support. The software is in an environment where doing just that costs you the time to download the software three CD blanks, the temporary storage to keep the image of each CD on your hard drive as you are downloading and burning it, and the time to burn the CD's from the ISOs. You already have indicated you had the time to install and test the earlier edition, are you saying it's too much effort to see if the current version has the updates you need, even if they are not clearly indicated on the web site?
My most recent experience with Mandrake 9.0 was just a couple of weeks ago.
Just out of my own curiosity, did you choose 9.0 because you happened to have a couple of year old CDs lying around with it already on them, or did you go out of your way to get a year old distribution off of an out of date mirror? I only ask because 9.1 has been out for over six months, and would be at least as easy to download and burn images of.
I don't know that 9.1 would have addressed all of the issues that you ran into with 9.0. Then again, neither do you.
Would you be suggesting that the back end for MSN IM does not keep a journal of all messages within the corporate environment?
Especially when they are attempting to sell just that service to companies in the financial industry who are required by law to keep track of just such information so that they can show that they either have, or have not been communicating insider trading information within the company, or to clients outside of the company?
Somehow with their legal history they would understand that they are just as culpable for this information as their customers may be.
Additionally all that it would take to blow their cover is for one disgruntled former employee to come forward and show that the reason he was fired was because too much of what the company found in his IM history had nothing to do with work (except that he was hitting on a woman who works at the company, and that the evidence of such was from the server, and not his or her PC.
[sarcasm] You mean something like putting the legal representitives for Microsoft or the head of the company in jail for contempt of court until the judge's orders are carried out? Why would any judge order something like that? It's not like the people failing to follow those orders are accused of witholding their source of information for a story, or their encryption keys.
I mean all that Microsoft is accused of doing is committing software piracy. Stealing another companies pattented technology and embedding it within one of their own products.
Surely this doesn't rise to the level of a felony or anything do you think?
Is it possible that this is due to the lack of news of such a migration?
While I am sure that there are a large number of companies with deployments of varients of BSD, I would appreciate pointers to articles that show companies making a migration from any operating system to any BSD varient.
We do not see companies even reporting that they are migrating to all OS X, which uses much of BSD as parts of it's infrastructure, yet we are seeing articles and reports of reasonably large companies that are migrating from earlier Unix platforms to Linux (Amazon and Burlington Coat Factory as examples) or from NT to Linux (Cedars-Sinai from this article).
While there may be articles out there documenting companies moving to BSD, I have not seen any. Other than the OS X release, can you point to 5 articles in the past 5 years in the popular press that document such a migration?
This article is specific to the assumed cost of moving from some platform to Linux. Not to BSD. It really is not a review of the many potential migration options that exist.
Intro to Computers 101 (n/c) - This is a manditory seminar for all students using Intel architecture computers in the campus network. This seminar will be held every 15 min in the largest lecture halls on campus and will provide all students with the knowledge needed to load a Knoppix distribution of Linux, and use OpenOffice.org to access, modify and distribute the documents that you created last year. Check the system listing at the door of each lecture hall to determin if your own system will be covered, and in which lecture hall it will be covered. A CD-Rom copy of Knoppix will be provided to all students. The only exemptions that will be allowed are for those students who bring their computer to the specified certification labs to demonstrate that the computer boots into Linux and has not option to boot into Windows.
Intro to Intel Linux - Lab - 102 (n/c) : This lab will allow you to bring your laptop or desktop computer to one of the specified computer labs. At this lab you will be assisted through the process of installing Linux on your computer, and given an opportunity to experiment with the applications that your professors have recomended using for the course you will be taking. This lab superseeds Intro to Computers 101.
Follow these up with automated software that periodically polls each computer to determine what OS is running, and admin down any port that is supporting a Windows PC. This software should also generate a memo to the students in the dorm room that that port supports requesting that they bring the offending computer to a certification lab to be validated and have the network port placed back into service.
Ok, It's not perfect, but would be an option that would protect the campus.
It's just an idea. I don't expect it to be implemented. One sticking point would be that the school would have to have an agreement with any computer vendor who sells computers on campus that they would certify that the computers they sell to students and faculty on campus support the desktop releases of Linux, (Knoppix, Morphix, Lindows, Mandrak 9.x+, SuSe 9.x+, RH 9.x+) and in all likelyhood the termination of any software contracts with Microsoft.
Of concern would be the licencing costs associated with QNX. When the manufacturers are talking about 1 and 2% profit margins, even $1 per device (on a $1000 device) is 5% of a 2% profit. Worse for devices in the $50-$200 range.
Compared with rolling your own distribution of Linux that has only the features you want in the hardware you send out, with a one time charge for the development tools if you choose to use them, and you can see that there is a large potential for savings.
Quick back of the message calculation. 200,000 units at $500 each is $100 million revenue. Profit of 1% is $1 million. $2 per unit is $400,000, or 40% of what would otherwise be profit. Actual numbers would very based upon the per unit licencing cost of QNX, though I would be surprised if QNX was asking as little as $0.50.
Just my thoughts, you may have different estimates.
How is it "evil" to publish a list of IP addresses that match a listing criteria? You don't want to block e-mail from Nigeria? Fine. Don't use nigeria.blackholes.us. You don't like SPEWS listing criteria? Don't use them. (I don't because I don't like their criteria).
What he is getting at is not himself using the list, it is midling sized ISP's using these lists preventing him from sending legitimate e-mail to people who can't get that e-mail, because his ISP is blackholed even though the ISP has corrected the issue that got them on the blackhole list in the first place. Or that his ISP's ISP happens to be blackholed through no falt of his own ISP's policies or practices.
The problem with blacklists is that they decide that it is more important to thow the baby out with the bath watter than it is to see if the baby is clean.
With my schedule I set it free when I get home. It hasn't finished charging when I leave for work in the morning.
The only problem I have had is that with two dogs the dog hair tends to get wrapped around the brush and roller, and not get tossed into the refuse bin. Either every recharge, or at worst every other recharge I have to take about 10 or 20 min and clean them up.
It does help in another way as well. Because I Know that it needs a relatively clean space to work, I have done a better job of getting clutter off of my floor. Still not perfect, but better.
I am contemplating naming it 1811, as I don't think it is quite as capable as 1812. 1776, might be a better name however.
Are you looking for it to be larger? Smaller? have a longer battery life? Be programmed to actually keep track of where it has been using a trailing wheel with dead reconing so that it does provide better coverage?
What "improvements" do you want to "See"? Most of the improvements I can envision would not be visable. Most of what I can visualizes as "visable" changes don't strike me as improvements.
echo a random number of nulls onto the end of the file, and the MD5's will never match again. Likewise if the id3 tag editor does not strip extra spaces, add those to the end of random tags.
-rusty
Re:bug reports?
on
GTK+ TTY Port
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· Score: 2, Insightful
In almost every case where I have seen this disclaimer, the reason is that the developers are often much more aware of the bugs people are running into than the person who gives it a try. It's on their "to be fixed" list, and they will get to it when they have the opportunity.
This is not expected to be used in a production environment yet, so they don't need a couple hundred people reporting to them that right clicking on the [V] indicator closes the window when the user expects it to bring up a menu.
One of the things they are looking for in this case is help! in actually fixing those things you happen to run across.
I am reasonably sure that when the code gets to a level that they feel is near production level, they will change how they want bugs to be reported. As it is, effectively a bit of technology demonstration code, they know it isn't perfect.
At the same time, considering that this code is at a very early stage of development, it is possibly one of the best places to start looking at developing code. Perhaps it is something as simple as providing the supporting code for a clock module that will show time in iTime. Or it could be improving the way that a scroll bar functions on a window. If you download the CVS tree, and see a routine flagged "this routine is to be developed in the future" and you happen to think that it is something you can do as a way of learning how to write software, then by all means, jump in.
If you don't develop the best possible solution, I don't think they are going to worry too much so long as it works, and doesn't introduce serious instabilaty or security problems with the program. You may also get valuable feedback from the project lead as to what you need to improve.
Then again, perhaps that's too much work and you should just go to using safe, vetted software.
A couple observations that would suggest you are wrong.
Not everyone hates MS. If that were the case there would be no Microsoft in the first place. The marketing team at Microsoft loves Microsoft enough to succesfully market it to the vast majority of desktop customers. There are a large number of businesses who succesfully sell products because those products are usefull on Microsoft based platforms.
The next problem deals with open ports. The only time an install should leave ports open without notifying the user is when those ports are how the OS is installed. That said the only time that a port should be allowed to be open is when the person responsible for the system is aware that the port has been opened. File system shares should only be available when the person responsible for that system understands why those shares are available, and what problems having those shares available can cause. System folder shares should only be allowed when the system is part of an enterprise that needs those shares to update the systems dynamically, and even then should only be available from behind a corporate firewall.
An example I have seen of a better method of making sure that the person responsible for a system is aware that ports will be opened as part of the install is when various network services are going to be installed as part of the Mandrake install. The warning includes the option of choosing not to install those elements as part of the install check. Sure there are still potential problems. A lot of people tend to click on the "Yeah, Yeah, whatever. Install it anyway." button, who possibly should not do so.
Then again, perhaps I'm living in a world of my own and your experience is completely different.
My read of this is; back in February the FCC allowed the Baby Bells to stop leasing the equipment needed by competitors to provide DSL. Now, however, the FCC says the Baby Bells must allow competitors to lease these lines. That looks like a good thing. Is my interpretation correct?
From what I recall fo the press coverage, the current status is that if you provide both voice and data/dsl across the lines you lease from the Baby Bells, they have to lease them to you. Otherwise if you only provide data/dsl services they are not required to lease the lines.
This does not mean that they are not prevented from leasing to those providers, mearly that they are not required to lease at regulated discounted rates. It also means that if you are a company like Frontier which provides voice and data services, both to their own ISP and to other local ISPs, the Baby Bell is required to use the discounted rates for the lines that they provision for Frontier's use.
The question becomes how many companies are out there that both want to sell residental phone service and data service. Historically residental service has cost the telcos more than they earn. They make their big money off of business phone service. (enough to subsidize the residential service)
The companies that come to mind are the long distance carriers (possibly) and the mom-n-pop telcos that are looking to expand. The problem is most of the lines being leased to the competitive providers are going to business lines, meaning that the Baby Bell is not going to be able to subsidize the residental service the way they had in the past.
That's just my observation however. I could be wrong.
That's one of the perpetual fights going on. The two sides are the administrators who are tired of the fact that there are all too many systems with poor adminstration being done which happen to also be on the internet, vs. the administrators who think that if someone did this to them that they would be out of a job for happening to have poor security. (I happen to believe that those adminstrators who do have this happen to them should be out of a job for poor security, but that's a different matter.)
I think that the worst case situation would be that a security engineer finds a flaw and uses an exploit of that flaw to patch all systems against the flaw, then announces to Microsoft that the flaw existed, here is the exploit, here is the fix, and oh, by the way, the fix has been applied to nearly every Windows SV on the Net, as well as a few others. The problem then is that Microsoft would have the problem of deciding whether they should sue the security engineer or applaud him.
I think the concern of Microsoft would be whether the fix is worse than the flaw. Since they did not provide it, their own licences do not apply to the patch, which means that nearly every computer with the code installed would effectively be running unlicenced code which Microsoft might find themselves liable for. Especially if there is a flaw in it.
As I noted further down the response thread, the way that the local phone company provides the call origination information for 911 is to provide the service location for the phone number in question. (Land-line service only. Cell service provides approximate or estimated location by tower signal strength when possible)
Someone stealing service by tapping into your phone line off some bridge tap elsewhere in your telco provider area, who then dials 911 will be reported as your address, even though he or she may be across town. It doesn't happen often, so it causes major problems when it does happen.
Your phone company, (local carrier, VoIP carrier, or VoCable provider) sends the service address for the phone number you originate your call from to the 911 operator if you place a 911 call.
As long as you keep your VoIP equipment at that street address, it will be reported properly. If you happen to take the equipment with you between home and work, or drive around and use open WiFi access points to place calls, then whomever is at the address you provided as a Service address is probably going to be bothered if you call up 911.
Technically the hard wired phone companies can't trace a call origination either. If you go to a line bridge (pedestal or arial) and find dial tone, then patch that to your own pair of wires into your house, there is no way for the phone company to determine where a phone call originating on that line actually came from.
Note that this is tampering with phone company equipment which I believe is considered a felony, but that doesn't change the fact that unless a phone company rep goes to that bridge and finds the wires attached, they don't know where the call came from.
Additionally the dial tone that that line carries may be on bridge tap for a line that is not even in the neighborhood you live on. So knowing that the call originated on phone line 218-555-1111 does not tell you that the call originated at the billing address for that line. It tells you that it probably came from that address. Fortunately we do not have that many people stealing phone service.
The way that 911 works, regardless of whether it is provided by a VoIP provider or the phone company, is that the phone number and service address are forwarded to the 911 operator by the appropriate service provider.
-Rusty
p.s. Yes I have worked for the phone company, though I do not do so now. I also happen to use Vonage and live in the state of Minnesota, so I very possibly will be affected.
If you wish to calculate the cost of electricity you need to know the duration for which you are measuring. A kW/h is the measurement used by your elctric utility to determine how much they are going to charge you for the service they are providing. It is calculated by taking the power load, in this case 25.2kW and multiplying that by the hours that load is on the power grid (with 1 kW/h being the measure of a 1kW load being on the grid for one hour.)
24 of these a day, and [28-31] of days per month will provide you with the power load that this assembly will use. A standard 100 watt lightbulb will use 2.4 kW per day, and 74kW per 30 day month.
People with ID's under 6773437 shouldn't be allowed to post anonymously.
While I agree that there are flaws with going to an electronic ballot, there are several advantages over paper ballots.
As an example I live in a voting district that Senetor Wellstone represented. As a result of his plane crash and death two weeks before the general election Voting involved suplementary ballots for the senate seat he had been running for. The paper ballots had already been printed as the normal date for candidates to declare had already passed. Suplementary ballots had to be printed when Mondale ran as the party candidate replacement for Wellstone.
An electronic voting system would have mearly required a change to the template each voting machine used for the election.
Other advantages include faster reporting of vote counts. Though this can normaly be handled by an electronic counter for paper ballots (using the filled oval method)
One method of making a paper count possible with an electronic ballot system would be to print a paper copy of the selections made by the voter, and have the voter initial that the copy is what they chose, which then gets filed. It could be as simple as a table of offices with the selected candidate. A large number of ballots with the same initials would be a flag for concern as it may show an election official is not following the accepted procedure. Initials would not be generally traceable back to the person who made that mark.
A series of numbers at the top or bottom of the page, or as an additional table entry would provide a machine readable version of the selection. I don't know of any election official who would relish the thought of going through 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) ballots and reading off each name.
Per the FAQ on the site, the supercomputer draws 210A. Power requirements provide an yearly cost equivalent to the cost of the network equipment connecting the nodes.
210A at 120Vac via the power law comes to 25.2kw/hr. Tripple that to allow for cooling (It takes approx 2 watts of power to remove the heat generated by 1 watt of power usage) and you come to almost 76kw/hr. Take a look at your utility bill to come up with the hourly cost for electricity while this thing is on.
The equipment does not have cooling isolated from the rest of the building. As a result the cooling costs will ultimatly be absorbed by the operational cost of the building, and probably will not show up as a line item for the cost of this cluster.
-Rusty
p.s. more wire does not meed more juice, just more pathes for signals to follow.
I would suspect that a large portion of the reason is that there was quite a bit of hardware in the box that at the time had no support in BSD.
One of the major complaints I was hearing for several years about BSD is that if you had hardware that was not supported out of the box (display cards, sound cards, printers, etc.) you were pretty much left to write your own drivers. I am pretty sure that this is not completely the case now, but it was the general feel I got from the people I knew using BSD.
TV Tuner cards, Mpeg encoder/decoder chips/hardware, and sat receiver equipment would all have to be written from scratch, though some or even all of it may have had an available partial base available in the Linux world. There may also have been more available coders to choose from who had some familiarity with Linux than who had familiarity with BSD.
That's just my suspicion however. The real reasons may have been that the original develpment was done on a PC, and when they went to production they decided that moving over to the PPC for a cooler chip, it was just a re-compile away for Linux.
I had not read the article at that time, have since.
I am familiar with similar routers, and had indicated that a clock with a battery in the router would be most likely inappropriate. As a result yes they do need to get the time from some source if they are going to do logging of some sort.
Most of the routers that I have delt with that do not have battery backed up clocks function like the original PC did without a battery powered clock, and use a date and time that is specific to the manufacturer (ex Cisco devices use March 1 1993). As most of these devices are behind a firewall, that I do not manage, I do not know if they are trying to use SNTP to access an outside time server or not. We usually configure these with an internal time server and require authentication (not simple).
There is a clock of some sort in the router otherwise it would not know to poll again either every second (when it is not getting a response) or every period (ranges from ten seconds to several minutes) after a successful poll/response.
The fact that the polls even during successful responses come as frequently as 1 min or less suggests to me that the clock is highly inaccurate, or unrelaible. (not the same thing)
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the common commerce laws provide you the protection that if you receive a product from a company, that you did not order from that company, you are under no obligation to honor any invoice from that company. If you did not order a product from a company, and they send it to you, you are perfectly in your rights to accept it as a gift, and at your option send them a nice thank you.
-Rusty
Actually since you never placed an order with SCO for Linux, it is perfectly legal to send them a nice letter in response thanking them for delivering to you a product that you happen to enjoy using, but since you did not order from them, are under no legal obligation to send them any money for.
-Rusty
I would think that it would be reasonable that when I choose to install an operating system, and compare it with another operating system that I would use the currently available software that is freely available.
Now I grant you that 9.0 is the current RH edition. however Mandrake 9.1 came out at approximately the same time. IIRC within a month of each other. A quick check to make sure, and RH9 was released March 31, Mandrake9.1 came out March 25th. Within a week of each other, and Mandrake 9.1 came out first.
Sounds like a sound plan to me. I think I will see how RedHat 6.1 stacks up against Mandrake 9.1. I think I have a copy of the CD's lying around here somewhere. If not I suppose I can order a copy from CheapBytes for a couple of bucks. If I don't like the way RH handles my Wacom USB tablet, or my USB keyboard or scoll mouse, well that's just too bad. If even CheapBytes doesn't have a copy that old, I am sure that they have something else a couple of versions out of date.
Honestly, how would you feel if you paid for software, only to be told to re-purchase the next version in less that one year's time? That's basically what you are proposing.
Really? I though I was proposing using the current version of the software to see if it supported the features that you need it to support. The software is in an environment where doing just that costs you the time to download the software three CD blanks, the temporary storage to keep the image of each CD on your hard drive as you are downloading and burning it, and the time to burn the CD's from the ISOs. You already have indicated you had the time to install and test the earlier edition, are you saying it's too much effort to see if the current version has the updates you need, even if they are not clearly indicated on the web site?
Ok.
-Rusty
My most recent experience with Mandrake 9.0 was just a couple of weeks ago.
Just out of my own curiosity, did you choose 9.0 because you happened to have a couple of year old CDs lying around with it already on them, or did you go out of your way to get a year old distribution off of an out of date mirror? I only ask because 9.1 has been out for over six months, and would be at least as easy to download and burn images of.
I don't know that 9.1 would have addressed all of the issues that you ran into with 9.0. Then again, neither do you.
-Rusty
Would you be suggesting that the back end for MSN IM does not keep a journal of all messages within the corporate environment?
Especially when they are attempting to sell just that service to companies in the financial industry who are required by law to keep track of just such information so that they can show that they either have, or have not been communicating insider trading information within the company, or to clients outside of the company?
Somehow with their legal history they would understand that they are just as culpable for this information as their customers may be.
Additionally all that it would take to blow their cover is for one disgruntled former employee to come forward and show that the reason he was fired was because too much of what the company found in his IM history had nothing to do with work (except that he was hitting on a woman who works at the company, and that the evidence of such was from the server, and not his or her PC.
Then again I could be wrong.
-Rusty
[sarcasm] You mean something like putting the legal representitives for Microsoft or the head of the company in jail for contempt of court until the judge's orders are carried out? Why would any judge order something like that? It's not like the people failing to follow those orders are accused of witholding their source of information for a story, or their encryption keys.
I mean all that Microsoft is accused of doing is committing software piracy. Stealing another companies pattented technology and embedding it within one of their own products.
Surely this doesn't rise to the level of a felony or anything do you think?
[/sarcasm]
-Rusty
Is it possible that this is due to the lack of news of such a migration?
While I am sure that there are a large number of companies with deployments of varients of BSD, I would appreciate pointers to articles that show companies making a migration from any operating system to any BSD varient.
We do not see companies even reporting that they are migrating to all OS X, which uses much of BSD as parts of it's infrastructure, yet we are seeing articles and reports of reasonably large companies that are migrating from earlier Unix platforms to Linux (Amazon and Burlington Coat Factory as examples) or from NT to Linux (Cedars-Sinai from this article).
While there may be articles out there documenting companies moving to BSD, I have not seen any. Other than the OS X release, can you point to 5 articles in the past 5 years in the popular press that document such a migration?
This article is specific to the assumed cost of moving from some platform to Linux. Not to BSD. It really is not a review of the many potential migration options that exist.
-Rusty
Intro to Computers 101 (n/c) - This is a manditory seminar for all students using Intel architecture computers in the campus network. This seminar will be held every 15 min in the largest lecture halls on campus and will provide all students with the knowledge needed to load a Knoppix distribution of Linux, and use OpenOffice.org to access, modify and distribute the documents that you created last year. Check the system listing at the door of each lecture hall to determin if your own system will be covered, and in which lecture hall it will be covered. A CD-Rom copy of Knoppix will be provided to all students. The only exemptions that will be allowed are for those students who bring their computer to the specified certification labs to demonstrate that the computer boots into Linux and has not option to boot into Windows.
Intro to Intel Linux - Lab - 102 (n/c) : This lab will allow you to bring your laptop or desktop computer to one of the specified computer labs. At this lab you will be assisted through the process of installing Linux on your computer, and given an opportunity to experiment with the applications that your professors have recomended using for the course you will be taking. This lab superseeds Intro to Computers 101.
Follow these up with automated software that periodically polls each computer to determine what OS is running, and admin down any port that is supporting a Windows PC. This software should also generate a memo to the students in the dorm room that that port supports requesting that they bring the offending computer to a certification lab to be validated and have the network port placed back into service.
Ok, It's not perfect, but would be an option that would protect the campus.
It's just an idea. I don't expect it to be implemented. One sticking point would be that the school would have to have an agreement with any computer vendor who sells computers on campus that they would certify that the computers they sell to students and faculty on campus support the desktop releases of Linux, (Knoppix, Morphix, Lindows, Mandrak 9.x+, SuSe 9.x+, RH 9.x+) and in all likelyhood the termination of any software contracts with Microsoft.
-Rusty
"$1 is 5% of $20?? ;)"
Um, yes it is.
-Rusty
Of concern would be the licencing costs associated with QNX. When the manufacturers are talking about 1 and 2% profit margins, even $1 per device (on a $1000 device) is 5% of a 2% profit. Worse for devices in the $50-$200 range.
Compared with rolling your own distribution of Linux that has only the features you want in the hardware you send out, with a one time charge for the development tools if you choose to use them, and you can see that there is a large potential for savings.
Quick back of the message calculation. 200,000 units at $500 each is $100 million revenue. Profit of 1% is $1 million. $2 per unit is $400,000, or 40% of what would otherwise be profit. Actual numbers would very based upon the per unit licencing cost of QNX, though I would be surprised if QNX was asking as little as $0.50.
Just my thoughts, you may have different estimates.
-Rusty
"They are pure evil in their methods,"
How is it "evil" to publish a list of IP addresses that match a listing criteria? You don't want to block e-mail from Nigeria? Fine. Don't use nigeria.blackholes.us. You don't like SPEWS listing criteria? Don't use them. (I don't because I don't like their criteria).
What he is getting at is not himself using the list, it is midling sized ISP's using these lists preventing him from sending legitimate e-mail to people who can't get that e-mail, because his ISP is blackholed even though the ISP has corrected the issue that got them on the blackhole list in the first place. Or that his ISP's ISP happens to be blackholed through no falt of his own ISP's policies or practices.
The problem with blacklists is that they decide that it is more important to thow the baby out with the bath watter than it is to see if the baby is clean.
-Rusty
With my schedule I set it free when I get home. It hasn't finished charging when I leave for work in the morning.
The only problem I have had is that with two dogs the dog hair tends to get wrapped around the brush and roller, and not get tossed into the refuse bin. Either every recharge, or at worst every other recharge I have to take about 10 or 20 min and clean them up.
It does help in another way as well. Because I Know that it needs a relatively clean space to work, I have done a better job of getting clutter off of my floor. Still not perfect, but better.
I am contemplating naming it 1811, as I don't think it is quite as capable as 1812. 1776, might be a better name however.
-Rusty
Are you looking for it to be larger? Smaller? have a longer battery life? Be programmed to actually keep track of where it has been using a trailing wheel with dead reconing so that it does provide better coverage?
What "improvements" do you want to "See"? Most of the improvements I can envision would not be visable. Most of what I can visualizes as "visable" changes don't strike me as improvements.
-Rusty
echo a random number of nulls onto the end of the file, and the MD5's will never match again. Likewise if the id3 tag editor does not strip extra spaces, add those to the end of random tags.
-rusty
In almost every case where I have seen this disclaimer, the reason is that the developers are often much more aware of the bugs people are running into than the person who gives it a try. It's on their "to be fixed" list, and they will get to it when they have the opportunity.
This is not expected to be used in a production environment yet, so they don't need a couple hundred people reporting to them that right clicking on the [V] indicator closes the window when the user expects it to bring up a menu.
One of the things they are looking for in this case is help! in actually fixing those things you happen to run across.
I am reasonably sure that when the code gets to a level that they feel is near production level, they will change how they want bugs to be reported. As it is, effectively a bit of technology demonstration code, they know it isn't perfect.
At the same time, considering that this code is at a very early stage of development, it is possibly one of the best places to start looking at developing code. Perhaps it is something as simple as providing the supporting code for a clock module that will show time in iTime. Or it could be improving the way that a scroll bar functions on a window. If you download the CVS tree, and see a routine flagged "this routine is to be developed in the future" and you happen to think that it is something you can do as a way of learning how to write software, then by all means, jump in.
If you don't develop the best possible solution, I don't think they are going to worry too much so long as it works, and doesn't introduce serious instabilaty or security problems with the program. You may also get valuable feedback from the project lead as to what you need to improve.
Then again, perhaps that's too much work and you should just go to using safe, vetted software.
-Rusty
A couple observations that would suggest you are wrong.
Not everyone hates MS. If that were the case there would be no Microsoft in the first place. The marketing team at Microsoft loves Microsoft enough to succesfully market it to the vast majority of desktop customers. There are a large number of businesses who succesfully sell products because those products are usefull on Microsoft based platforms.
The next problem deals with open ports. The only time an install should leave ports open without notifying the user is when those ports are how the OS is installed. That said the only time that a port should be allowed to be open is when the person responsible for the system is aware that the port has been opened. File system shares should only be available when the person responsible for that system understands why those shares are available, and what problems having those shares available can cause. System folder shares should only be allowed when the system is part of an enterprise that needs those shares to update the systems dynamically, and even then should only be available from behind a corporate firewall.
An example I have seen of a better method of making sure that the person responsible for a system is aware that ports will be opened as part of the install is when various network services are going to be installed as part of the Mandrake install. The warning includes the option of choosing not to install those elements as part of the install check. Sure there are still potential problems. A lot of people tend to click on the "Yeah, Yeah, whatever. Install it anyway." button, who possibly should not do so.
Then again, perhaps I'm living in a world of my own and your experience is completely different.
-Rusty
My read of this is; back in February the FCC allowed the Baby Bells to stop leasing the equipment needed by competitors to provide DSL. Now, however, the FCC says the Baby Bells must allow competitors to lease these lines. That looks like a good thing. Is my interpretation correct?
From what I recall fo the press coverage, the current status is that if you provide both voice and data/dsl across the lines you lease from the Baby Bells, they have to lease them to you. Otherwise if you only provide data/dsl services they are not required to lease the lines.
This does not mean that they are not prevented from leasing to those providers, mearly that they are not required to lease at regulated discounted rates. It also means that if you are a company like Frontier which provides voice and data services, both to their own ISP and to other local ISPs, the Baby Bell is required to use the discounted rates for the lines that they provision for Frontier's use.
The question becomes how many companies are out there that both want to sell residental phone service and data service. Historically residental service has cost the telcos more than they earn. They make their big money off of business phone service. (enough to subsidize the residential service)
The companies that come to mind are the long distance carriers (possibly) and the mom-n-pop telcos that are looking to expand. The problem is most of the lines being leased to the competitive providers are going to business lines, meaning that the Baby Bell is not going to be able to subsidize the residental service the way they had in the past.
That's just my observation however. I could be wrong.
-Rusty
That's one of the perpetual fights going on. The two sides are the administrators who are tired of the fact that there are all too many systems with poor adminstration being done which happen to also be on the internet, vs. the administrators who think that if someone did this to them that they would be out of a job for happening to have poor security. (I happen to believe that those adminstrators who do have this happen to them should be out of a job for poor security, but that's a different matter.)
I think that the worst case situation would be that a security engineer finds a flaw and uses an exploit of that flaw to patch all systems against the flaw, then announces to Microsoft that the flaw existed, here is the exploit, here is the fix, and oh, by the way, the fix has been applied to nearly every Windows SV on the Net, as well as a few others. The problem then is that Microsoft would have the problem of deciding whether they should sue the security engineer or applaud him.
I think the concern of Microsoft would be whether the fix is worse than the flaw. Since they did not provide it, their own licences do not apply to the patch, which means that nearly every computer with the code installed would effectively be running unlicenced code which Microsoft might find themselves liable for. Especially if there is a flaw in it.
-Rusty
As I noted further down the response thread, the way that the local phone company provides the call origination information for 911 is to provide the service location for the phone number in question. (Land-line service only. Cell service provides approximate or estimated location by tower signal strength when possible)
Someone stealing service by tapping into your phone line off some bridge tap elsewhere in your telco provider area, who then dials 911 will be reported as your address, even though he or she may be across town. It doesn't happen often, so it causes major problems when it does happen.
Your phone company, (local carrier, VoIP carrier, or VoCable provider) sends the service address for the phone number you originate your call from to the 911 operator if you place a 911 call.
As long as you keep your VoIP equipment at that street address, it will be reported properly. If you happen to take the equipment with you between home and work, or drive around and use open WiFi access points to place calls, then whomever is at the address you provided as a Service address is probably going to be bothered if you call up 911.
-Rusty
Technically the hard wired phone companies can't trace a call origination either. If you go to a line bridge (pedestal or arial) and find dial tone, then patch that to your own pair of wires into your house, there is no way for the phone company to determine where a phone call originating on that line actually came from.
Note that this is tampering with phone company equipment which I believe is considered a felony, but that doesn't change the fact that unless a phone company rep goes to that bridge and finds the wires attached, they don't know where the call came from.
Additionally the dial tone that that line carries may be on bridge tap for a line that is not even in the neighborhood you live on. So knowing that the call originated on phone line 218-555-1111 does not tell you that the call originated at the billing address for that line. It tells you that it probably came from that address. Fortunately we do not have that many people stealing phone service.
The way that 911 works, regardless of whether it is provided by a VoIP provider or the phone company, is that the phone number and service address are forwarded to the 911 operator by the appropriate service provider.
-Rusty
p.s. Yes I have worked for the phone company, though I do not do so now. I also happen to use Vonage and live in the state of Minnesota, so I very possibly will be affected.
If you wish to calculate the cost of electricity you need to know the duration for which you are measuring. A kW/h is the measurement used by your elctric utility to determine how much they are going to charge you for the service they are providing. It is calculated by taking the power load, in this case 25.2kW and multiplying that by the hours that load is on the power grid (with 1 kW/h being the measure of a 1kW load being on the grid for one hour.)
24 of these a day, and [28-31] of days per month will provide you with the power load that this assembly will use. A standard 100 watt lightbulb will use 2.4 kW per day, and 74kW per 30 day month.
People with ID's under 6773437 shouldn't be allowed to post anonymously.
While I agree that there are flaws with going to an electronic ballot, there are several advantages over paper ballots.
As an example I live in a voting district that Senetor Wellstone represented. As a result of his plane crash and death two weeks before the general election Voting involved suplementary ballots for the senate seat he had been running for. The paper ballots had already been printed as the normal date for candidates to declare had already passed. Suplementary ballots had to be printed when Mondale ran as the party candidate replacement for Wellstone.
An electronic voting system would have mearly required a change to the template each voting machine used for the election.
Other advantages include faster reporting of vote counts. Though this can normaly be handled by an electronic counter for paper ballots (using the filled oval method)
One method of making a paper count possible with an electronic ballot system would be to print a paper copy of the selections made by the voter, and have the voter initial that the copy is what they chose, which then gets filed. It could be as simple as a table of offices with the selected candidate. A large number of ballots with the same initials would be a flag for concern as it may show an election official is not following the accepted procedure. Initials would not be generally traceable back to the person who made that mark.
A series of numbers at the top or bottom of the page, or as an additional table entry would provide a machine readable version of the selection. I don't know of any election official who would relish the thought of going through 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) ballots and reading off each name.
Then again, that's just my view.
-Rusty
Per the FAQ on the site, the supercomputer draws 210A. Power requirements provide an yearly cost equivalent to the cost of the network equipment connecting the nodes.
210A at 120Vac via the power law comes to 25.2kw/hr. Tripple that to allow for cooling (It takes approx 2 watts of power to remove the heat generated by 1 watt of power usage) and you come to almost 76kw/hr. Take a look at your utility bill to come up with the hourly cost for electricity while this thing is on.
The equipment does not have cooling isolated from the rest of the building. As a result the cooling costs will ultimatly be absorbed by the operational cost of the building, and probably will not show up as a line item for the cost of this cluster.
-Rusty
p.s. more wire does not meed more juice, just more pathes for signals to follow.
I would suspect that a large portion of the reason is that there was quite a bit of hardware in the box that at the time had no support in BSD.
One of the major complaints I was hearing for several years about BSD is that if you had hardware that was not supported out of the box (display cards, sound cards, printers, etc.) you were pretty much left to write your own drivers. I am pretty sure that this is not completely the case now, but it was the general feel I got from the people I knew using BSD.
TV Tuner cards, Mpeg encoder/decoder chips/hardware, and sat receiver equipment would all have to be written from scratch, though some or even all of it may have had an available partial base available in the Linux world. There may also have been more available coders to choose from who had some familiarity with Linux than who had familiarity with BSD.
That's just my suspicion however. The real reasons may have been that the original develpment was done on a PC, and when they went to production they decided that moving over to the PPC for a cooler chip, it was just a re-compile away for Linux.
-Rusty
I had not read the article at that time, have since.
I am familiar with similar routers, and had indicated that a clock with a battery in the router would be most likely inappropriate. As a result yes they do need to get the time from some source if they are going to do logging of some sort.
Most of the routers that I have delt with that do not have battery backed up clocks function like the original PC did without a battery powered clock, and use a date and time that is specific to the manufacturer (ex Cisco devices use March 1 1993). As most of these devices are behind a firewall, that I do not manage, I do not know if they are trying to use SNTP to access an outside time server or not. We usually configure these with an internal time server and require authentication (not simple).
There is a clock of some sort in the router otherwise it would not know to poll again either every second (when it is not getting a response) or every period (ranges from ten seconds to several minutes) after a successful poll/response.
The fact that the polls even during successful responses come as frequently as 1 min or less suggests to me that the clock is highly inaccurate, or unrelaible. (not the same thing)
-Rusty