Have a portmaster or other multi-serial-port box handle a serial-PPP connection with each mini-server. That way, you bypass the need for a bulky USB->ETHERNET adapter.
It has an embeded 100MbpsFdplx Ethernet interface. Why would you use either solution? My main concern would be finding a switch I could use to interconnect a bunch of them that wouldn't be larger than the collection of devices being interconnected.
Even with a Portmaster, 24 of these, along with a power supply to support them, would take up less space than the Portmaster required to interconnect them.
Another idea would be to interconnect via their own serial ports and build a mesh of devices. I have seen various reports of both two and three serial ports. Assuming three, you could fully mesh four devices, or partially mesh 5 or more devices. Using some learning software, you could then build up a physical nural net with each of these clusters communicating with other clusters via one, two, or more ethernet connections. Switching could be eliminated by using crossover connections between clusters. One device acts as a gateway in and out of the collection of clusters.
For communicating across the serial interface, a cell style protocol would probably work better as you are realy only sending data between two peer devices. The peer you send data to decides by the content of the data what to do next. Hand the data to someone else, send a response back to the original sender, modify the data and store it for comparison later, compare it against data from another source, whatever.
You could build a multiple input, multiple output banyan, or a matrix processing device. with arrays of input and output interfaces.
... is leading people to the conclusion that I have something to do with Customer Relationship Management. And I thought I was hard up.
It can be interesting to find out what others with your name are up to. Might even make for useful conversation starters on a date. "No I am not the Joe who's roses won first prize at the world florist's show last year."
Complaining to fans that you don't see why they don't just go read a book or get outside, does nothing to promote either as good entertainment.
This is a straw man. I didn't actually say this. I said not to try to save something just because it's been labelled a certain way. If you *really* like it, then, okay, knock yourself out.
I think the show failed because the premise (lost in space *again*) wasn't original or compelling, the villians were silly, hammy, over the top and incompetant, and the individual stories just felt like retreads of Star Trek episodes and themes, as did the "different scenario each week" setup. But, maybe the producers changed direction radically and came up with a half way interesting story to tell...
Actually the "read a book" was directed at others. My appologies that it appears to be directed at you.
You of course have made the decision that you will not find out if the show improved. I can live with that. Enjoy.
Glad to see you have an opinion on the subject. Looks like you have a real feel for the show. I mean you watched all of three episodes.
I am not about to claim that Farscape was the best thing ever on TV, but I will be watching the rest of the fourth season once they start showing it again. Why? Because I happen to like the show. I am disapointed that the Skiffy channel is dropping the series. Then again look at the company they keep.
I agree that "decent" science fiction needs to be produced and distributed. There are three ways that it can be done, and none look likely in the near future. Farscape, regardless of the flaws you and some others percieve to exist, has been better entertainment than most of the rest of the drivel on tv.
If 90% of everything is crap, then for you to hold a valid opinion on whether or not something is crap, you will have to watch better than 90% of the series to really hold an opinion you can espouse.
There are three ways to promote good programming on TV. Fan mail to the people showing the series is the least. I happen to consider offers to pay for one of the episodes out of a season to be just that. Fan mail.
The second way is to find out who is paying for the series, and let them know you appreciate it. The people paying for the series are not the broadcasters. It is the advertizers. With Tivo, ReplayTV, and other PVR systems, finding out who paid for the series, and who paid for local advertizing space in the series should be reasonably easy, though it is just as easy to skip the ads. These are the people you want to make aware that you appreciate the fact they took the risk of paying for good programming.
The third way is to make sure that the producers and broadcasters know you are letting the advertizers know what you think of the programming. When you do this, you actually improve the odds that those same producers will look for better programs to produce in the future.
Complaining to fans that you don't see why they don't just go read a book or get outside, does nothing to promote either as good entertainment.
IIRC, either there is a Library of Congress decision that there are a couple of situations where the Anti-Circumvention provision does not apply to software or hardware that circumvents copy portection.
One of those situations is in with respect to a compiled list of URLs and controll information that web proxy filters may be using.
The other situation I seem to recall reading some place was if the technology in use was obsolete or had known faults that prevent legitimate access.
Out of my own curiosity, wouldn't the fact that there is a fault with the anti-circumvention software that causes it to fail to protect against new cirvumvention tools imply that the anti-circumvention, or encryption tool in question, was, well Obsolete?
Of course if you are using a proxy server, this won't work, but you should then already know how to block the site, or I can feel sorry for you. Next time around.
Most people don't have enough movies to fill two of these things. With a couple of these, a Dazzel Holywood DV converter, and a DVD burner, you could easily go into business converting Home videos to DVDs for people.
Whether you could make any money at it would depend upon what type of home videos they brought in, and what you got them to agree to let you do with the stuff...
Actually if you look at the redbook specification, there is nothing preventing people from mixing data and music tracks on the same CD.
What Sony is going to do is include one data track that has compressed and encrypted versions of the music that is also on the CD. The compression will most likely be Sony's proprietary ATRAK scheme, which does support DRM by default.
In most cases Windows machines will only be able to access the data track on the CD, and will end up being forced to use the ATRAK player and manager to copy the files to Mini Disk, and Sony Memory Stick media.
Real Player can read ATRAK files, but I do not know if the Macintosh edition will handle the DRM system involved, and as a result may not be able to play the files on the Data track. However it is possible that the Mac will be able to directly access the music tracks on the CD, I do not know.
Unless Sony does something "screwey" with the TOC on the cd and breaks redbook compatibility, (and I wouldn't put it past them) Linux, BSD, BeOS and other platforms that can read the CD directly should be able to play the music, or even rip it to OGG, AAC or MP3 as they desire, without any support from Sony.
The only "loss" for alternate OS users would be if Sony includes restricted content in the data track that does not appear elsewhere on the CD. Additional music, images, artist information, etc.
Since a standard CD has 640 meg of data or up to 72 min of music, I would suspect that Sony will make their CDs effectively 60 min of music, about 60 meg of data in the form of compressed music, with between 10 and 40 meg of additional content. Not really a lot to work with.
I am not certain by any means, however if the people demanding the source code for a flash web site are claiming that they both have a developer who "knows flash" and that they the company believe the existing product is crap, then you should explain that it does not matter how much their current developer "knows flash" the source is not going to help.
They would be better served by their developer looking at the existing output, learning where changes need to be made, and building his or her own version of the website. I am reasonably sure that if you started looking through the source code today, without comments, it would be faster to start from scratch.
I personally think this is true even for self documenting code, as so far as I know, even the best self documented code does not show you what a gui output will look like. It may show you the generic look of a window, but if the content of that window is dynamic, by definition it will change. Then again, I could be wrong.
When the project was started, SGML varients were not widly used, and the option of including images was a concern for storage space.
Using things like BOLD and L for british pound were workarounds to have a common way of presenting the data. I suspect that it would be trivial to build a formating filter in perl, or another language that would convert BOLD to bold though it would require a bit more work to recognize that it really should be Bold or even that it should be BOLD.
Converting monetary symbols would require a bit more work, but would also not be impossible.
Re-inserting any diagrams, figures, illustrations or other graphics would require more work. If the original scanned pages are still available, as this part of the project suggests, even that would not be impossible.
One variation is the free bookmobile project that is out there. They use scans of the original book to build a new book for kids. Preparation for printing involves downloading the book over the internet, via a dsl speed sattelite link. I am not sure however if the working material is suitable for e-book reading however.
Ah, so you are saying that the IP stack completely ignores bits 72-29, specified as "Protocol" and identifying the content that follows as any of TCP, UDP, icmp, sip, rfc1700, etc.
While port 80 may be handling http traffic in either tcp or udp, you may have completely different applications using those same two ports. Apache may be using port 80 at the same time as tftp is using that port. As noted in another reply to you, IP itself does not care one bit about what port is going to get the data. It cares that there is a protocol stack that understands what IP hands it.
Likewise filtering on firewalls and in access lists on routers specifies the protocol as well as the port being handled.
If whomever you learned networking from told you that the protocol field of the IP header was unimportant and that all traffic to a port had to be of whatever type the application which opened that port to the IP stack expected, I would recomend you ask for your money back.
port 80 as used for http is a tcp port, not a udp port.
Some of the protocols that will eventually have to be blocked as a result include tftp, whois++, bootp/dhcp, ntp, udp portions of netbios, snmp (ISPs and large businesses, including the phone company, will love that one.) hsrp, (another favorite of large businesses) quake, traceroute, both MySQL and Postgres, and a few others that may not have tcp vairents, or who's tcp varients are too expensive in network bandwidth to use politely.
Additionally, there is nothing preventing users from building a ppp, ssh, httptunnel or other tunnel over tcp and completely bypassing the UDP blocks from their workstation. It may even become a part of the software for DialPad or other platforms.
There may not be one already, but you may be able to build one. I would say start by getting one of the live-CD images and on a hard disk partition with sufficient space, make a blank ISO image large enough to put all the necesary files in. copy over the contents of the live-cd image and mount the new image so you can start modifying things.
If you have VMWare, or Bochs, you may even be able to test your builds in a virtual machine.
Once you know that everything works (It sounds like you mostly just need to install a Flash and RealPlayer package) burn the new image to a CD. Check to make sure that the CD does boot and performs as expected, then give a copy to your girlfriend.
I am not saying that this would be easy, just that it is possible.
from what I read, knoppix does support various network file systems. If the user can mount their file system from the teacher's server, or another server on the network, why use a local file system for storing their work? That also resolved the issue of where you sit in class.
Never having run Windows XP, could you tell me if it will run from the CD without touching my hard disk? I might be interested in trying it out, but I don't want to loose any data in the process.
I presume that you pay your ISP a monthly bill. Additionally, they provide you access to your e-mail. All part of the understood contract between you and your ISP. Should you decide not to continue to pay your ISP, they have every right to suspend your account, or even add a.forward file to your account that redirects all your mail to/dev/null if they wish.
The question here is if your ISP messes up your accounting, whether it be failing to register the fact that you paid your bill, or double billing you, or billing you the wrong amount, should they then be allowed to prevent you from accessing your account.
This is why many businesses require written notification to cancel subscription accounts. That way they have a paper trail allowing them to take the actions that are required.
Of course you sometimes experience situations like mine where the ISP thinks I haven't been getting my e-mail so they put the.forward file redirecting my e-mail to/dev/null in my user directory. A quick sanity check noting that I receive between 20 and 100 messages a day, including spam, and they ain't sitting in the account, and I didn't have a.forward file, should have shown that there is something wrong with the system tracking whether I am logging in to get my e-mail or not.
With the other things that have been happening this week, I have no idea who may have sent me e-mail. Well, ok I know about the spam, but don't really care about that.
-Rusty
eliminating the spaces...
on
Making A Videowall
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have seen several notes deriding the spaces between the displays. The "fixes" suggested for this include using LCDs (which I suspect are outside of the budget), or disassembling the monitors and bringing the CRTs closer together. (anyone want to discuss the safty issues of pulling one of the center displays out to replace it?)
I suspect it would be far cheaper, to use fresnel lenses in front of the CRT's with modifications to the rack they built to center the CRT on the fresnel, and mask off the power light for the monitor.
Will it be perfect? No, but I think it will be more flexiable.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a portmaster or other multi-serial-port box handle a serial-PPP connection with each mini-server. That way, you bypass the need for a bulky USB->ETHERNET adapter.
It has an embeded 100MbpsFdplx Ethernet interface. Why would you use either solution? My main concern would be finding a switch I could use to interconnect a bunch of them that wouldn't be larger than the collection of devices being interconnected.
Even with a Portmaster, 24 of these, along with a power supply to support them, would take up less space than the Portmaster required to interconnect them.
Another idea would be to interconnect via their own serial ports and build a mesh of devices. I have seen various reports of both two and three serial ports. Assuming three, you could fully mesh four devices, or partially mesh 5 or more devices. Using some learning software, you could then build up a physical nural net with each of these clusters communicating with other clusters via one, two, or more ethernet connections. Switching could be eliminated by using crossover connections between clusters. One device acts as a gateway in and out of the collection of clusters.
For communicating across the serial interface, a cell style protocol would probably work better as you are realy only sending data between two peer devices. The peer you send data to decides by the content of the data what to do next. Hand the data to someone else, send a response back to the original sender, modify the data and store it for comparison later, compare it against data from another source, whatever.
You could build a multiple input, multiple output banyan, or a matrix processing device. with arrays of input and output interfaces.
-Rusty
... is leading people to the conclusion that I have something to do with Customer Relationship Management. And I thought I was hard up.
It can be interesting to find out what others with your name are up to. Might even make for useful conversation starters on a date. "No I am not the Joe who's roses won first prize at the world florist's show last year."
-Rusty
Of course this opens you up to the 90% of everything else that is crap that you were avoiding by not watching tv...
-Rusty
Actually the "read a book" was directed at others. My appologies that it appears to be directed at you.
You of course have made the decision that you will not find out if the show improved. I can live with that. Enjoy.
-Rusty
Glad to see you have an opinion on the subject. Looks like you have a real feel for the show. I mean you watched all of three episodes.
I am not about to claim that Farscape was the best thing ever on TV, but I will be watching the rest of the fourth season once they start showing it again. Why? Because I happen to like the show. I am disapointed that the Skiffy channel is dropping the series. Then again look at the company they keep.
I agree that "decent" science fiction needs to be produced and distributed. There are three ways that it can be done, and none look likely in the near future. Farscape, regardless of the flaws you and some others percieve to exist, has been better entertainment than most of the rest of the drivel on tv.
If 90% of everything is crap, then for you to hold a valid opinion on whether or not something is crap, you will have to watch better than 90% of the series to really hold an opinion you can espouse.
There are three ways to promote good programming on TV. Fan mail to the people showing the series is the least. I happen to consider offers to pay for one of the episodes out of a season to be just that. Fan mail.
The second way is to find out who is paying for the series, and let them know you appreciate it. The people paying for the series are not the broadcasters. It is the advertizers. With Tivo, ReplayTV, and other PVR systems, finding out who paid for the series, and who paid for local advertizing space in the series should be reasonably easy, though it is just as easy to skip the ads. These are the people you want to make aware that you appreciate the fact they took the risk of paying for good programming.
The third way is to make sure that the producers and broadcasters know you are letting the advertizers know what you think of the programming. When you do this, you actually improve the odds that those same producers will look for better programs to produce in the future.
Complaining to fans that you don't see why they don't just go read a book or get outside, does nothing to promote either as good entertainment.
-Rusty.
with the DMCA.
Disclaimer: IANAL
IIRC, either there is a Library of Congress decision that there are a couple of situations where the Anti-Circumvention provision does not apply to software or hardware that circumvents copy portection.
One of those situations is in with respect to a compiled list of URLs and controll information that web proxy filters may be using.
The other situation I seem to recall reading some place was if the technology in use was obsolete or had known faults that prevent legitimate access.
Out of my own curiosity, wouldn't the fact that there is a fault with the anti-circumvention software that causes it to fail to protect against new cirvumvention tools imply that the anti-circumvention, or encryption tool in question, was, well Obsolete?
-Rusty
Sure, just ad the following lines to your host table:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.127 www.newscientist.com ads.doubleclick.com
Of course if you are using a proxy server, this won't work, but you should then already know how to block the site, or I can feel sorry for you. Next time around.
-Rusty
Most people don't have enough movies to fill two of these things. With a couple of these, a Dazzel Holywood DV converter, and a DVD burner, you could easily go into business converting Home videos to DVDs for people.
Whether you could make any money at it would depend upon what type of home videos they brought in, and what you got them to agree to let you do with the stuff...
-Rusty
... I don't think the Vulcans would have much of a feeling about Vulcan Fury. It wouldn't be logical. The title doesn't make much sense either.
-Rusty
um haven't seen any sprint cdma comercials with "can you hear me now?" in them, has the Verizon nerd jumped ship to Sprint?
Would that be a phreak fone?
-Rusty
Actually if you look at the redbook specification, there is nothing preventing people from mixing data and music tracks on the same CD.
What Sony is going to do is include one data track that has compressed and encrypted versions of the music that is also on the CD. The compression will most likely be Sony's proprietary ATRAK scheme, which does support DRM by default.
In most cases Windows machines will only be able to access the data track on the CD, and will end up being forced to use the ATRAK player and manager to copy the files to Mini Disk, and Sony Memory Stick media.
Real Player can read ATRAK files, but I do not know if the Macintosh edition will handle the DRM system involved, and as a result may not be able to play the files on the Data track. However it is possible that the Mac will be able to directly access the music tracks on the CD, I do not know.
Unless Sony does something "screwey" with the TOC on the cd and breaks redbook compatibility, (and I wouldn't put it past them) Linux, BSD, BeOS and other platforms that can read the CD directly should be able to play the music, or even rip it to OGG, AAC or MP3 as they desire, without any support from Sony.
The only "loss" for alternate OS users would be if Sony includes restricted content in the data track that does not appear elsewhere on the CD. Additional music, images, artist information, etc.
Since a standard CD has 640 meg of data or up to 72 min of music, I would suspect that Sony will make their CDs effectively 60 min of music, about 60 meg of data in the form of compressed music, with between 10 and 40 meg of additional content. Not really a lot to work with.
Then again I could be wrong.
-Rusty
I am not certain by any means, however if the people demanding the source code for a flash web site are claiming that they both have a developer who "knows flash" and that they the company believe the existing product is crap, then you should explain that it does not matter how much their current developer "knows flash" the source is not going to help.
They would be better served by their developer looking at the existing output, learning where changes need to be made, and building his or her own version of the website. I am reasonably sure that if you started looking through the source code today, without comments, it would be faster to start from scratch.
I personally think this is true even for self documenting code, as so far as I know, even the best self documented code does not show you what a gui output will look like. It may show you the generic look of a window, but if the content of that window is dynamic, by definition it will change. Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Maybe I should reconsider going on with my CB/walkie-talkie network idea...
Perhaps with a few frs handsets instead...
-Rusty
Nothing says you have to follow standards. Unless you market the product as "Standards Based." Even then...
When the project was started, SGML varients were not widly used, and the option of including images was a concern for storage space.
Using things like BOLD and L for british pound were workarounds to have a common way of presenting the data. I suspect that it would be trivial to build a formating filter in perl, or another language that would convert BOLD to bold though it would require a bit more work to recognize that it really should be Bold or even that it should be BOLD.
Converting monetary symbols would require a bit more work, but would also not be impossible.
Re-inserting any diagrams, figures, illustrations or other graphics would require more work. If the original scanned pages are still available, as this part of the project suggests, even that would not be impossible.
One variation is the free bookmobile project that is out there. They use scans of the original book to build a new book for kids. Preparation for printing involves downloading the book over the internet, via a dsl speed sattelite link. I am not sure however if the working material is suitable for e-book reading however.
-Rusty
Here I thought that in the open source community it was pronounced ess cue el, where in the commercial community it was pronounced redundant.
-Rusty
Ah, so you are saying that the IP stack completely ignores bits 72-29, specified as "Protocol" and identifying the content that follows as any of TCP, UDP, icmp, sip, rfc1700, etc.
While port 80 may be handling http traffic in either tcp or udp, you may have completely different applications using those same two ports. Apache may be using port 80 at the same time as tftp is using that port. As noted in another reply to you, IP itself does not care one bit about what port is going to get the data. It cares that there is a protocol stack that understands what IP hands it.
Likewise filtering on firewalls and in access lists on routers specifies the protocol as well as the port being handled.
If whomever you learned networking from told you that the protocol field of the IP header was unimportant and that all traffic to a port had to be of whatever type the application which opened that port to the IP stack expected, I would recomend you ask for your money back.
-Rusty
port 80 as used for http is a tcp port, not a udp port.
Some of the protocols that will eventually have to be blocked as a result include tftp, whois++, bootp/dhcp, ntp, udp portions of netbios, snmp (ISPs and large businesses, including the phone company, will love that one.) hsrp, (another favorite of large businesses) quake, traceroute, both MySQL and Postgres, and a few others that may not have tcp vairents, or who's tcp varients are too expensive in network bandwidth to use politely.
Additionally, there is nothing preventing users from building a ppp, ssh, httptunnel or other tunnel over tcp and completely bypassing the UDP blocks from their workstation. It may even become a part of the software for DialPad or other platforms.
-Rusty
There may not be one already, but you may be able to build one. I would say start by getting one of the live-CD images and on a hard disk partition with sufficient space, make a blank ISO image large enough to put all the necesary files in. copy over the contents of the live-cd image and mount the new image so you can start modifying things.
If you have VMWare, or Bochs, you may even be able to test your builds in a virtual machine.
Once you know that everything works (It sounds like you mostly just need to install a Flash and RealPlayer package) burn the new image to a CD. Check to make sure that the CD does boot and performs as expected, then give a copy to your girlfriend.
I am not saying that this would be easy, just that it is possible.
-Rusty
from what I read, knoppix does support various network file systems. If the user can mount their file system from the teacher's server, or another server on the network, why use a local file system for storing their work? That also resolved the issue of where you sit in class.
running out of excuses for not getting your work done eigh?
Never having run Windows XP, could you tell me if it will run from the CD without touching my hard disk? I might be interested in trying it out, but I don't want to loose any data in the process.
-Rusty
I presume that you pay your ISP a monthly bill. Additionally, they provide you access to your e-mail. All part of the understood contract between you and your ISP. Should you decide not to continue to pay your ISP, they have every right to suspend your account, or even add a .forward file to your account that redirects all your mail to /dev/null if they wish.
.forward file redirecting my e-mail to /dev/null in my user directory. A quick sanity check noting that I receive between 20 and 100 messages a day, including spam, and they ain't sitting in the account, and I didn't have a .forward file, should have shown that there is something wrong with the system tracking whether I am logging in to get my e-mail or not.
The question here is if your ISP messes up your accounting, whether it be failing to register the fact that you paid your bill, or double billing you, or billing you the wrong amount, should they then be allowed to prevent you from accessing your account.
This is why many businesses require written notification to cancel subscription accounts. That way they have a paper trail allowing them to take the actions that are required.
Of course you sometimes experience situations like mine where the ISP thinks I haven't been getting my e-mail so they put the
With the other things that have been happening this week, I have no idea who may have sent me e-mail. Well, ok I know about the spam, but don't really care about that.
-Rusty
I have seen several notes deriding the spaces between the displays. The "fixes" suggested for this include using LCDs (which I suspect are outside of the budget), or disassembling the monitors and bringing the CRTs closer together. (anyone want to discuss the safty issues of pulling one of the center displays out to replace it?)
I suspect it would be far cheaper, to use fresnel lenses in front of the CRT's with modifications to the rack they built to center the CRT on the fresnel, and mask off the power light for the monitor.
Will it be perfect? No, but I think it will be more flexiable.
-Rusty