The second part is just nonsense though, the kind of tripe put out by the Daily Mail.
Presumably you are referring to this Mail article which is in fact referring to a Daily Telegraph interview with Lord Ashdown the former leader of the Liberal Democrats? This has also been reported by the Times and the Independent, making your comment somewhat disingenuous.
The Labour Party won't split into two, no one (except Daily Mail writers) is even suggesting that.
According to the Telegraph article Lord Ashdown is suggesting just that. Of course no one knows just yet how many Labour MP's have discussed this yet, but a huge election defeat may make this happen.
The UK does not have massive debt, it's actually still a lot lower than most other developed counties (including France, Germany and Japan). It's big by our standards but put in perspective it's not particularly unusual, in fact our previous low levels of government borrowing were unusual.
The Labour government has been spending like a drunken sailor in port. This has been widely reported both in the UK and abroad. While the UK may have less government debt than other nations the next UK government is going to have to cut back on spending on a large scale.
At the moment a poll of polls suggests that the Labour party would remain in power were an election called tomorrow
Please provide a link to the poll you refer to.
I'm no fan of labour, and Jacqui Smith is a particularly nasty, authoritarian powermonger, but I try not to delude myself by believing everything I read in the right wing press.
I go further and view all press reports with scepticism.
mark my words, it'll have bugs which will result in 1000's of "RTFM n00b" or "it's ms's protocol that sucks" responses.
Just as Slashdot is full of trolls and OT comments help forums often have people posting unhelpful comments. Just ignore them. Life is too short for arguing with idiots.
I find the Samba help forums are generally excellent if you take the time to ask a sensible question instead of just posting the first problem that comes up. Often the task of formulating a sensible question solves a problem without actually having to ask on the forums at all. I also generally find my query has already been answered in the forum and all I need to do is search.
The Samba documentation is an excellent resource and generally answers most of the questions you may have. Try starting with John Terpstra's Samba 3 by example which is a practical guide to implementing Samba 3. I don't know if John is working on a Samba 4 update to the book, but there is a WIKI, HowTO and a FAQ available. If you are risk averse you may not want to use Samba 4 in production just yet:)
First of all, why use crappy openldap when you can use the Netspace directory server that red hat bought and opensourced.
I have foung openLDAP to be reliable, compatible and easy to use. Can you elaborate on why you think it is crap?
There is a reason why they paid 23$ millions for it...
And the reasons are?
Then, AD isn't just a LDAP server with usernames and passwords....
Nor is openLDAP just a store for Windows user names and passwords. I use an openLDAP server for Windows services as well as providing user configuration for other services such as sendmail. The great advantage of using FOSS is that you are free from vendor lock in and can consider non-proprietary alternatives in other areas of your network.
Which is why many people can only use Windows setups. There's nothing like AD in the FOSS world. To start with, FOSS client apps should be lockdown-able from the server. But you can't do that...
I mean, in a office with a linux server and some linux clients, try to lockdown some options on Firefox, the desktop, evolution....surprise, you can't do it. Oh, yeah, there're a lot of workarounds everywhere, but they are different if you use KDE or Gnome or depending on the app you are using. It's a horrible mess.
Nowhere in the article do I see a desire to use FOSS desktop clients. The submitter simply wants to replace AD server with a non MS LDAP based alternative.
Windows clients and servers, on the other hand, are VERY well coupled. The day someone cares to fix this in the FOSS world, a lot of people will start using Linux in corporate networks.
This is otherwise known as vendor lock in. Some of use have tried very hard to break free of it to avoid being held to ransom by a vendor.
Until then, Windows is pretty much the only realistic option. I can't understand why Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu don't put more efforts on this, it's one of the biggest showstoppers for Linux adoption.
I have been running what you consider an unrealistic option for the best part of a decade. I have yet to be fired. Sirius the consultancy I recommended have a client list of blue chip companines, local govenment and schools. They are all running some form of FOSS backend. You might like to take a fresh look at FOSS, it really works in the real world.
In my previous post I forgot to mention that OGC/Becta are the government agency's responsible for technology in the UK educational environment. It is considerably easier for a UK school to use a Becta accredited supplier than any other supplier. It is an incredible achievement for Sirius to gain that accreditation as no other FOSS consultancy has managed to cut through government red tape thus far.
I think openLDAP should be one of the first products the submitter tries. In my experience it is reliable scalable and free of proprietary cruft. I have used it for years in a commercial network with Samba. OpenLDAP has allowed my company to drastically cut licensing costs, support costs and lengthen hardware lifecycles.
As the submitter is UK based I would recommend they contact Sirius. Sirius are the consulting company I use and they are the only UK OGC/Becta accredited FOSS specialist. Sirius have considerable experience in the UK education market and in the submitters position they would be near the top of the list of people to call. Take a look at their client list to see the kind of pedigree they have.
<disclaimer>
I have worked closely with Mark Taylor the CEO of Sirius for a long time now. Please consider anything I say about them biased, contact them youself and make up your own mind about them.
I have been running an openLDAP/GNU Linux production system for the best part of a decade now. I use openLDAP and Samba on Debian. It is my experience that the LDAP implementations from commercial vendors are often proprietary, unreliable and usually do not play nicely with FOSS services that wish to use them. Unless you have a very good reason to use a proprietary implementation might I suggest trialling plain old slapd on one of the free distributions first. You will of course benefit from much lower licensing costs in the long run if this approach works for you.
Documentation is your friend here. When you buy an item of kit create an operating and maintenance manual for it. These can simply be a folder with the hardware manuals and maintenance agreements in them. I also include the emails between management and the IT admins discussing the equipment order rationale as well as the purchase order. Make sure your emails make clear what the kit does not do as well as what it should do in these emails. Ten minutes of printing, hole punching and putting it all into a folder can stop a management witch hunt dead in its tracks for years to come. This is especially true if features have been cut due to management led budget constraints. Adding the relevant CD's/DVD's and build notes can make your life much easier in the future as a bonus.
Copyright is intended to encourage the production of work for the benefit of society as a whole. It is not intended to protect second hand sales of copyright protected works. Any one selling second hand copyrighted works takes on the risk that the work may devalue before they sell it. This risk is paid for by the profit margin they add to the sale price.
It looks like the tail command when running but allows you to scroll, search and use all the other useful fuctions of less if you spot something intersting.
It is going to be interesting to watch the progress of Microsoft in this area. Advertisers have desperately wanted to be able to accurately monitor the success rate of their Internet marketing efforts for a long time. Google seem to be making the same mistake as eBay, in that they are taking their customers for granted. It is currently very easy to waste your Google advertising budget placing advertising on irrelevant SEO spam pages. This is very profitable for Google in the short term, and keeps Wall Street happy but will have long term repercussions for Google.
The really interesting thing is going to be the mistakes Microsoft makes in this space. No one has yet been successful in this area on a large scale. Microsoft will find it difficult to prevent fraud from their clients as the parent points out, after all only the client can tell if a sale has really been made. Microsoft are going to have to make accountability work both ways to prevent false reporting. Fortunes will be made by whoever solves this problem.
It seems inevitable that P2P software will start to use many shorter duration connections in order to fool traffic shaping at the ISP level. The logical next step is to make each connection behave in the manner of traffic that is normally allowed by the ISP. An ISP faced with multiple streams of innocent looking traffic would find it very hard to determine who is downloading via P2P if the data rate was low enough. Perhaps then they would see upgrading their network as a better investment than traffic shaping equipment.
While the company featured in TFA seems to be trolling vapourware in order to grab some government cash, there are a couple of interesting points made in TFA and on the company website. First the company states on their site that the device will need to be refueled every five years. This means that if they are situated in populated areas radioactive material will need to moved to site, swapped over with spent material and the used material transported away from site. This leads me to ask several questions:
Where will new fuel be stored?
Where will spent fuel be stored?
What will the transport safety and security arrangements be?
What will level of training need to be for the personnel performing the above tasks?
If the devices proliferate will the quality of all of the above remain at an acceptable standard?
The second point the article makes is that the company intends to use a uranium compound as fuel. The old Russian devices used strontium 90 as a heat source, this was probably used as it is cheaper than plutonium 238 the other obvious choice. Uranium isotopes have extremely long half lives. I find it difficult to believe that they would use a uranium isotope, especially when they state they need to refuel every five years. You may find these devices less acceptable if any waste needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years. To me this makes the Russian RTG look like a sensible, conservative design. If the device is real then surely choosing plutonium-238, curium-242, curium-244 or the Russian favorite strontium-90 makes more sense.
I still think that apathy is going to be the problem with these devices, even if the device itself is maintained is this going to be the case with the supporting infrastructure? Organizations with toxic legacies today are often reluctant to clean up until legislation forces them to. If the device is safe within a population center the by products from its use could be unsafe outside of populated areas. In this case the risk of apathy has not been abated but merely moved elsewhere.
If you enjoyed the previous Bellona link then this one may also be of interest.
While you are correct that terrorist threats are over stated there are other good reasons for hoping that these batteries are not widely used, looking at past events can show why. The use of radioisotopes to power thermoelectric generators is not a new idea. During the 1960s to the 1980s the former Soviet union used Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) to power lighthouses and other remote equipment along the Russian northern coastline. These worked well for the most part during their service life, however the Soviet union collapsed and most of the RTG's in place were forgotten. Since then these devices have posed a considerable pollution risk to the environment as their casings degrade over time. They have also been associated with several deaths as people unaware of the dangers they contain have come into contact with them in remote areas. Many old RTG's are still in the environment today long past their design life. The Environmental Foundation Bellona has an informative article about old Soviet RTG's.
It will be interesting to see if future American companies and governments are as keen to clean up old RTG's from the environment as the current Russian government are today. I think that apathy is by far the greater danger than the terrorist.
I have a copy of Multiple view geometry in computer vision 2nd edition by Hartley and Zisserman, which I intend to read in my copious spare time. I find this area of computing fascinating and think it will have a huge impact on mapping. I would be grateful if you would recommend any other good references in this area?
Thanks
This sounds more like a simple case of greed rather than a lack of capability or bandwidth at ISP's. The BBC offered ISP peering for their content long before they launched the new video player. Take a look at the BBC peering page. Any UK ISP can pick up BBC content directly from the BBC at their favorite peering point.
The article suggests they look for discrepancies in purchasing volumes, e.g. 250 workstation licenses coupled with a lower volume of server CAL's. This may make things interesting for those of us who run Windows workstations with a GNU/Linux back office.
At the moment the focus is most probably the large scale easy to spot online tax evader, however the tax man will eventually start to narrow down to the individual scale. Inevitably legislation will follow forcing online entities to provide transaction data to tax authorities. This brings up the interesting issue of identity. Just who is behind a particular transaction?, How does the tax authority trace its data back to a company or individual?. It is currently easy to rent an anonymous P.O. box, VOIP number or online server. What strategies will governments use to overcome identity issues?.
Money can be easily moved from one country to another and exchanged from one currency to another, using difficult to trace methods. Does this mean that money itself has become stateless?. Can international money flows be effectively controlled by governments?. Can a government really expect to follow money trails and efficiently tax in the future?. As large companies manage to avoid tax worldwide now is this a sign that governments are failing to apply tax law?.
With the US trying to control online gambling with the possible side affect of driving gambling underground, now is a very interesting time for watching government reactions to online financial transactions.
If thieves are just swapping plates on stolen cars embedding a tag in the plate will not change much. As tyre manufacturers are currently embedding RFID tags in new tyres now, would it not be easier to just scan the tyres at a checkpoint. If this is combined with an automatic number plate recgonition camera it would be simple to check if the tyre ID's match the number plate. If the number plate did not match then the police could assume with a high degree of confidence that the vehicle is stolen.
If WTO rules allow Antigua to retaliate against the US by ignoring IP treaties is it really piracy at all? The US seems to have got itself in the position of allowing Antigua to lawfully ignore current IP rules.
When I was choosing which DSLR to buy I found the reviews on Ken Rockwell's site informative. He is an experienced photographer who in the past mainly used Nikon gear, and is currently using some Canon equipment. He has reviews of a reasonable range of current equipment. You may find his general photography articles interesting as well.
I ended up buying a Nikon D200, 12 -24mm and 18 -200mm VR. The 18-200mm VR lens is the lens of the moment for Nikon who can't make them fast enough. Expect a long wait if you order one. If you are going to wait for the Nikon D40 to come out be aware that it is rumored to only work with Nikon's AF-S lenses. This is unusual for Nikon as most bodies they make work with a large range of their older lenses.
The parent's comments about experimenting on a client's network are valid, but I find the "Hire someone who knows corporate IT" comment more interesting. Imaginary Friendly's company with it's clear lack of experience and long working hours do not sound like a firm prospective clients should have much confidence in. I believe this is the first problem that should be addressed. If the company has staffing issues before taking on new client's, then increasing headcount should be the number one priority. Contractors are a handy way to solve short term staffing issues as you can get them on short notice, and easily fire contractors that don't live up to expectations. With careful management contractors can be used to take the strain with new client obligations. With proper staff levels in place the problem of experience can be addressed.
Most posts on this thread seem to assume that the prospective client's infrastructure is well maintained. In my experience this is not usually the case. The original question does not say what familiarity with the new client's setup the company has. When taking on a new client the first task is to assess what you are taking on. To do this an in depth site survey should be taken, followed by a strategy session with the client. These are chargeable items. Some client's will take the output from this work and use it to find the lowest bidder for the maintenance work. The lowest bidder may not be your firm so do not do the survey for free, even if the client dangles the possibility of a large contract in front of you. A good client will pay for the work, a client unwilling to pay can be left to drive your competitors out of business.
In the larger scale environment standards go hand in hand with automation. Pretty much any task that can have a standard written for it can also be automated. Desktop machine installs should be automated at the absolute minimum. Automating the routine tasks lets you deal with the problems that you are there to solve. No matter what platform you are supporting automating the routine tasks will make the difference between small scale support and enterprise support. To start with buy everyone in your company a set of system administration books for your chosen platform so they can learn on the job. On the job experience is the best way to learn how to sysadmin in a corporate environment. Hold regular sessions with your coworkers to discuss current work and strategy. Assign responsibility for each task to a specific person so that they can make sure it gets done. Let the person responsible for the task figure out if it is a candidate for automating. Much of the work you do will be the same for each client, so a good desktop install script for instance can be used for all your clients.
Whatever you end up doing have fun and don't stop learning. I still learn new things every day even though I have been in the industry for years. Don't be scared of work on a large scale, someone out there will do it so why not you?
I have just set up a Debian GNU/Linux based DVR system on commodity hardware for a London based construction firm. This was just one machine with eight inputs nowhere near the scale you are working with, however my experiences may be of interest. I used one of the clients existing Pentium 3 fileservers and standard video cameras connected to two IEI IVC-200 capture cards. The base system is Debian testing running motion and apache2.
Some of the replies you have here suggest Zoneminder is suited to a production environment, this is not my experience. Zoneminder is difficult to install, unreliable and over complicated. I'm sure in time the project will mature, however I could not recommend it at this time. Motion offers less functionality but is much easier to install and is reliable. You will have to write you own start and stop scripts as well as web pages to display pictures and video. You will also need to write scripts to periodically archive any video saved on hard disk. None of this should present any problems for a good GNU/Linux administrator. As you seem to have a large number of similar systems you would only need to write one set of scripts and replicate them on each system.
If I were in your situation I would try and use as much of your existing hardware as possible. I assume that you are running a single machine at a variety of remote sites. From a cursory look at the Pelco site the systems you have are standard hardware, and should run GNU/Linux fine. You may find that the capture cards that Pelco provide are not supported so you may need to replace these. If most of your hardware is the same then you can configure just one machine and replicate this on the other machines. Motion supports differing camera resolutions, video/still capture and motion sensing. The motion homepage is at http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e. If you need strong security GNU/Linux provides you with many options. You can easily verify the suitability of this approach at low cost on a small scale.
If you need any further help contact the company I work for Sirius IT http://www.siriusit.co.uk/. Sirius has good contacts with the free software community and may be able to provide further help.
This is going to interesting for him if he needs to fsck a large filesystem. His hardware specification couples large disk sizes with insufficient memory for fsck to load a large number of ext2/3 inodes during a pass. I hope he has the sense (if using ext2/3 at all) to split his disks into smaller partitions.
With the current availability of large IDE,firewire and USB disks more and more people will hit resource limits during fsck processes. People using inexpensive systems such as the ones in TFA are unlikley to have the resources to back up tera byte size disks.
Debian lost a lot of its reputation with the delays for the current stable release
I disagree. I run servers for commercial clients. A large number of these prefer to run some type of free software as a server platform these days. Debian is an attractive platform because of the care that goes into it. The slow release cycle means that time can be spent on thorough, careful software engineering. Distributions with faster release cycles are rarely as reliable as Debian over the longer term. I and my clients are used to spending time setting up a machine, and then leaving it in production for 4-5 years with minimal maintenance. Using Debian I have found that power and hardware failures are the main cause of unplanned system downtime.
Debian is about software Freedom, not bleading edge technology.
If you do want to use some of the newer packages from testing or unstable try using apt pinning on a stable system. Simply put apt pinning allows you to mix and match selected packages from stable testing and unstable together. A simple howto can be found here
There are certainly a lot of challanges for Debian right now
There will always be challenges for Debian. The Debian leaders seem to do just that, lead. Perhaps that is why they remain such a well regarded distribution. Do not give up on Debian because of a few negative news stories. Debian has worked well for me for years. If you stick with it it should do the same for you.
Why not join in? If you are a FOSS consultant in the UK the OSC has a pretty dynamic mailing list discussing government and public sector consulting issues and possible tenders. If all of the smaller consultancies stand together we can compete with the big boys.
Slashdot Mirror
The second part is just nonsense though, the kind of tripe put out by the Daily Mail.
Presumably you are referring to this Mail article which is in fact referring to a Daily Telegraph interview with Lord Ashdown the former leader of the Liberal Democrats? This has also been reported by the Times and the Independent, making your comment somewhat disingenuous.
The Labour Party won't split into two, no one (except Daily Mail writers) is even suggesting that.
According to the Telegraph article Lord Ashdown is suggesting just that. Of course no one knows just yet how many Labour MP's have discussed this yet, but a huge election defeat may make this happen.
The UK does not have massive debt, it's actually still a lot lower than most other developed counties (including France, Germany and Japan). It's big by our standards but put in perspective it's not particularly unusual, in fact our previous low levels of government borrowing were unusual.
The Labour government has been spending like a drunken sailor in port. This has been widely reported both in the UK and abroad. While the UK may have less government debt than other nations the next UK government is going to have to cut back on spending on a large scale.
At the moment a poll of polls suggests that the Labour party would remain in power were an election called tomorrow
Please provide a link to the poll you refer to.
I'm no fan of labour, and Jacqui Smith is a particularly nasty, authoritarian powermonger, but I try not to delude myself by believing everything I read in the right wing press.
I go further and view all press reports with scepticism.
I prefer Beyerdynamic music and broadcast headphones as they have replaceable leads which are widely available. They are also really comfortable.
mark my words, it'll have bugs which will result in 1000's of "RTFM n00b" or "it's ms's protocol that sucks" responses.
Just as Slashdot is full of trolls and OT comments help forums often have people posting unhelpful comments. Just ignore them. Life is too short for arguing with idiots.
I find the Samba help forums are generally excellent if you take the time to ask a sensible question instead of just posting the first problem that comes up. Often the task of formulating a sensible question solves a problem without actually having to ask on the forums at all. I also generally find my query has already been answered in the forum and all I need to do is search.
The Samba documentation is an excellent resource and generally answers most of the questions you may have. Try starting with John Terpstra's Samba 3 by example which is a practical guide to implementing Samba 3. I don't know if John is working on a Samba 4 update to the book, but there is a WIKI, HowTO and a FAQ available. If you are risk averse you may not want to use Samba 4 in production just yet :)
First of all, why use crappy openldap when you can use the Netspace directory server that red hat bought and opensourced.
I have foung openLDAP to be reliable, compatible and easy to use. Can you elaborate on why you think it is crap?
There is a reason why they paid 23$ millions for it...
And the reasons are?
Then, AD isn't just a LDAP server with usernames and passwords....
Nor is openLDAP just a store for Windows user names and passwords. I use an openLDAP server for Windows services as well as providing user configuration for other services such as sendmail. The great advantage of using FOSS is that you are free from vendor lock in and can consider non-proprietary alternatives in other areas of your network.
Which is why many people can only use Windows setups. There's nothing like AD in the FOSS world. To start with, FOSS client apps should be lockdown-able from the server. But you can't do that...
I mean, in a office with a linux server and some linux clients, try to lockdown some options on Firefox, the desktop, evolution....surprise, you can't do it. Oh, yeah, there're a lot of workarounds everywhere, but they are different if you use KDE or Gnome or depending on the app you are using. It's a horrible mess.
Nowhere in the article do I see a desire to use FOSS desktop clients. The submitter simply wants to replace AD server with a non MS LDAP based alternative.
Windows clients and servers, on the other hand, are VERY well coupled. The day someone cares to fix this in the FOSS world, a lot of people will start using Linux in corporate networks.
This is otherwise known as vendor lock in. Some of use have tried very hard to break free of it to avoid being held to ransom by a vendor.
Until then, Windows is pretty much the only realistic option. I can't understand why Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu don't put more efforts on this, it's one of the biggest showstoppers for Linux adoption.
I have been running what you consider an unrealistic option for the best part of a decade. I have yet to be fired. Sirius the consultancy I recommended have a client list of blue chip companines, local govenment and schools. They are all running some form of FOSS backend. You might like to take a fresh look at FOSS, it really works in the real world.
In my previous post I forgot to mention that OGC/Becta are the government agency's responsible for technology in the UK educational environment. It is considerably easier for a UK school to use a Becta accredited supplier than any other supplier. It is an incredible achievement for Sirius to gain that accreditation as no other FOSS consultancy has managed to cut through government red tape thus far.
I think openLDAP should be one of the first products the submitter tries. In my experience it is reliable scalable and free of proprietary cruft. I have used it for years in a commercial network with Samba. OpenLDAP has allowed my company to drastically cut licensing costs, support costs and lengthen hardware lifecycles. As the submitter is UK based I would recommend they contact Sirius. Sirius are the consulting company I use and they are the only UK OGC/Becta accredited FOSS specialist. Sirius have considerable experience in the UK education market and in the submitters position they would be near the top of the list of people to call. Take a look at their client list to see the kind of pedigree they have.
<disclaimer>
I have worked closely with Mark Taylor the CEO of Sirius for a long time now. Please consider anything I say about them biased, contact them youself and make up your own mind about them.
</disclaimer>
I have been running an openLDAP/GNU Linux production system for the best part of a decade now. I use openLDAP and Samba on Debian. It is my experience that the LDAP implementations from commercial vendors are often proprietary, unreliable and usually do not play nicely with FOSS services that wish to use them. Unless you have a very good reason to use a proprietary implementation might I suggest trialling plain old slapd on one of the free distributions first. You will of course benefit from much lower licensing costs in the long run if this approach works for you.
Documentation is your friend here. When you buy an item of kit create an operating and maintenance manual for it. These can simply be a folder with the hardware manuals and maintenance agreements in them. I also include the emails between management and the IT admins discussing the equipment order rationale as well as the purchase order. Make sure your emails make clear what the kit does not do as well as what it should do in these emails. Ten minutes of printing, hole punching and putting it all into a folder can stop a management witch hunt dead in its tracks for years to come. This is especially true if features have been cut due to management led budget constraints. Adding the relevant CD's/DVD's and build notes can make your life much easier in the future as a bonus.
Copyright is intended to encourage the production of work for the benefit of society as a whole. It is not intended to protect second hand sales of copyright protected works. Any one selling second hand copyrighted works takes on the risk that the work may devalue before they sell it. This risk is paid for by the profit margin they add to the sale price.
Why not try using 'less +F /var/log/logfile'
It looks like the tail command when running but allows you to scroll, search and use all the other useful fuctions of less if you spot something intersting.
It is going to be interesting to watch the progress of Microsoft in this area. Advertisers have desperately wanted to be able to accurately monitor the success rate of their Internet marketing efforts for a long time. Google seem to be making the same mistake as eBay, in that they are taking their customers for granted. It is currently very easy to waste your Google advertising budget placing advertising on irrelevant SEO spam pages. This is very profitable for Google in the short term, and keeps Wall Street happy but will have long term repercussions for Google.
The really interesting thing is going to be the mistakes Microsoft makes in this space. No one has yet been successful in this area on a large scale. Microsoft will find it difficult to prevent fraud from their clients as the parent points out, after all only the client can tell if a sale has really been made. Microsoft are going to have to make accountability work both ways to prevent false reporting. Fortunes will be made by whoever solves this problem.
It seems inevitable that P2P software will start to use many shorter duration connections in order to fool traffic shaping at the ISP level. The logical next step is to make each connection behave in the manner of traffic that is normally allowed by the ISP. An ISP faced with multiple streams of innocent looking traffic would find it very hard to determine who is downloading via P2P if the data rate was low enough. Perhaps then they would see upgrading their network as a better investment than traffic shaping equipment.
While the company featured in TFA seems to be trolling vapourware in order to grab some government cash, there are a couple of interesting points made in TFA and on the company website. First the company states on their site that the device will need to be refueled every five years. This means that if they are situated in populated areas radioactive material will need to moved to site, swapped over with spent material and the used material transported away from site. This leads me to ask several questions:
The second point the article makes is that the company intends to use a uranium compound as fuel. The old Russian devices used strontium 90 as a heat source, this was probably used as it is cheaper than plutonium 238 the other obvious choice. Uranium isotopes have extremely long half lives. I find it difficult to believe that they would use a uranium isotope, especially when they state they need to refuel every five years. You may find these devices less acceptable if any waste needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years. To me this makes the Russian RTG look like a sensible, conservative design. If the device is real then surely choosing plutonium-238, curium-242, curium-244 or the Russian favorite strontium-90 makes more sense.
I still think that apathy is going to be the problem with these devices, even if the device itself is maintained is this going to be the case with the supporting infrastructure? Organizations with toxic legacies today are often reluctant to clean up until legislation forces them to. If the device is safe within a population center the by products from its use could be unsafe outside of populated areas. In this case the risk of apathy has not been abated but merely moved elsewhere.
If you enjoyed the previous Bellona link then this one may also be of interest.
While you are correct that terrorist threats are over stated there are other good reasons for hoping that these batteries are not widely used, looking at past events can show why. The use of radioisotopes to power thermoelectric generators is not a new idea. During the 1960s to the 1980s the former Soviet union used Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) to power lighthouses and other remote equipment along the Russian northern coastline. These worked well for the most part during their service life, however the Soviet union collapsed and most of the RTG's in place were forgotten. Since then these devices have posed a considerable pollution risk to the environment as their casings degrade over time. They have also been associated with several deaths as people unaware of the dangers they contain have come into contact with them in remote areas. Many old RTG's are still in the environment today long past their design life. The Environmental Foundation Bellona has an informative article about old Soviet RTG's.
It will be interesting to see if future American companies and governments are as keen to clean up old RTG's from the environment as the current Russian government are today. I think that apathy is by far the greater danger than the terrorist.
I have a copy of Multiple view geometry in computer vision 2nd edition by Hartley and Zisserman, which I intend to read in my copious spare time. I find this area of computing fascinating and think it will have a huge impact on mapping. I would be grateful if you would recommend any other good references in this area? Thanks
This sounds more like a simple case of greed rather than a lack of capability or bandwidth at ISP's. The BBC offered ISP peering for their content long before they launched the new video player. Take a look at the BBC peering page. Any UK ISP can pick up BBC content directly from the BBC at their favorite peering point.
The article suggests they look for discrepancies in purchasing volumes, e.g. 250 workstation licenses coupled with a lower volume of server CAL's. This may make things interesting for those of us who run Windows workstations with a GNU/Linux back office.
At the moment the focus is most probably the large scale easy to spot online tax evader, however the tax man will eventually start to narrow down to the individual scale. Inevitably legislation will follow forcing online entities to provide transaction data to tax authorities. This brings up the interesting issue of identity. Just who is behind a particular transaction?, How does the tax authority trace its data back to a company or individual?. It is currently easy to rent an anonymous P.O. box, VOIP number or online server. What strategies will governments use to overcome identity issues?.
Money can be easily moved from one country to another and exchanged from one currency to another, using difficult to trace methods. Does this mean that money itself has become stateless?. Can international money flows be effectively controlled by governments?. Can a government really expect to follow money trails and efficiently tax in the future?. As large companies manage to avoid tax worldwide now is this a sign that governments are failing to apply tax law?.
With the US trying to control online gambling with the possible side affect of driving gambling underground, now is a very interesting time for watching government reactions to online financial transactions.
If thieves are just swapping plates on stolen cars embedding a tag in the plate will not change much. As tyre manufacturers are currently embedding RFID tags in new tyres now, would it not be easier to just scan the tyres at a checkpoint. If this is combined with an automatic number plate recgonition camera it would be simple to check if the tyre ID's match the number plate. If the number plate did not match then the police could assume with a high degree of confidence that the vehicle is stolen.
If WTO rules allow Antigua to retaliate against the US by ignoring IP treaties is it really piracy at all? The US seems to have got itself in the position of allowing Antigua to lawfully ignore current IP rules.
When I was choosing which DSLR to buy I found the reviews on Ken Rockwell's site informative. He is an experienced photographer who in the past mainly used Nikon gear, and is currently using some Canon equipment. He has reviews of a reasonable range of current equipment. You may find his general photography articles interesting as well.
I ended up buying a Nikon D200, 12 -24mm and 18 -200mm VR. The 18-200mm VR lens is the lens of the moment for Nikon who can't make them fast enough. Expect a long wait if you order one. If you are going to wait for the Nikon D40 to come out be aware that it is rumored to only work with Nikon's AF-S lenses. This is unusual for Nikon as most bodies they make work with a large range of their older lenses.
Steve
The parent's comments about experimenting on a client's network are valid, but I find the "Hire someone who knows corporate IT" comment more interesting. Imaginary Friendly's company with it's clear lack of experience and long working hours do not sound like a firm prospective clients should have much confidence in. I believe this is the first problem that should be addressed. If the company has staffing issues before taking on new client's, then increasing headcount should be the number one priority. Contractors are a handy way to solve short term staffing issues as you can get them on short notice, and easily fire contractors that don't live up to expectations. With careful management contractors can be used to take the strain with new client obligations. With proper staff levels in place the problem of experience can be addressed.
Most posts on this thread seem to assume that the prospective client's infrastructure is well maintained. In my experience this is not usually the case. The original question does not say what familiarity with the new client's setup the company has. When taking on a new client the first task is to assess what you are taking on. To do this an in depth site survey should be taken, followed by a strategy session with the client. These are chargeable items. Some client's will take the output from this work and use it to find the lowest bidder for the maintenance work. The lowest bidder may not be your firm so do not do the survey for free, even if the client dangles the possibility of a large contract in front of you. A good client will pay for the work, a client unwilling to pay can be left to drive your competitors out of business.
In the larger scale environment standards go hand in hand with automation. Pretty much any task that can have a standard written for it can also be automated. Desktop machine installs should be automated at the absolute minimum. Automating the routine tasks lets you deal with the problems that you are there to solve. No matter what platform you are supporting automating the routine tasks will make the difference between small scale support and enterprise support. To start with buy everyone in your company a set of system administration books for your chosen platform so they can learn on the job. On the job experience is the best way to learn how to sysadmin in a corporate environment. Hold regular sessions with your coworkers to discuss current work and strategy. Assign responsibility for each task to a specific person so that they can make sure it gets done. Let the person responsible for the task figure out if it is a candidate for automating. Much of the work you do will be the same for each client, so a good desktop install script for instance can be used for all your clients.
Whatever you end up doing have fun and don't stop learning. I still learn new things every day even though I have been in the industry for years. Don't be scared of work on a large scale, someone out there will do it so why not you?
Steve
I have just set up a Debian GNU/Linux based DVR system on commodity hardware for a London based construction firm. This was just one machine with eight inputs nowhere near the scale you are working with, however my experiences may be of interest. I used one of the clients existing Pentium 3 fileservers and standard video cameras connected to two IEI IVC-200 capture cards. The base system is Debian testing running motion and apache2.
Some of the replies you have here suggest Zoneminder is suited to a production environment, this is not my experience. Zoneminder is difficult to install, unreliable and over complicated. I'm sure in time the project will mature, however I could not recommend it at this time. Motion offers less functionality but is much easier to install and is reliable. You will have to write you own start and stop scripts as well as web pages to display pictures and video. You will also need to write scripts to periodically archive any video saved on hard disk. None of this should present any problems for a good GNU/Linux administrator. As you seem to have a large number of similar systems you would only need to write one set of scripts and replicate them on each system.
If I were in your situation I would try and use as much of your existing hardware as possible. I assume that you are running a single machine at a variety of remote sites. From a cursory look at the Pelco site the systems you have are standard hardware, and should run GNU/Linux fine. You may find that the capture cards that Pelco provide are not supported so you may need to replace these. If most of your hardware is the same then you can configure just one machine and replicate this on the other machines. Motion supports differing camera resolutions, video/still capture and motion sensing. The motion homepage is at http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHom e. If you need strong security GNU/Linux provides you with many options. You can easily verify the suitability of this approach at low cost on a small scale.
If you need any further help contact the company I work for Sirius IT http://www.siriusit.co.uk/. Sirius has good contacts with the free software community and may be able to provide further help.
Steve
This is going to interesting for him if he needs to fsck a large filesystem. His hardware specification couples large disk sizes with insufficient memory for fsck to load a large number of ext2/3 inodes during a pass. I hope he has the sense (if using ext2/3 at all) to split his disks into smaller partitions.
With the current availability of large IDE,firewire and USB disks more and more people will hit resource limits during fsck processes. People using inexpensive systems such as the ones in TFA are unlikley to have the resources to back up tera byte size disks.Steve
I disagree. I run servers for commercial clients. A large number of these prefer to run some type of free software as a server platform these days. Debian is an attractive platform because of the care that goes into it. The slow release cycle means that time can be spent on thorough, careful software engineering. Distributions with faster release cycles are rarely as reliable as Debian over the longer term. I and my clients are used to spending time setting up a machine, and then leaving it in production for 4-5 years with minimal maintenance. Using Debian I have found that power and hardware failures are the main cause of unplanned system downtime.
Debian is about software Freedom, not bleading edge technology.If you do want to use some of the newer packages from testing or unstable try using apt pinning on a stable system. Simply put apt pinning allows you to mix and match selected packages from stable testing and unstable together. A simple howto can be found here
There are certainly a lot of challanges for Debian right nowThere will always be challenges for Debian. The Debian leaders seem to do just that, lead. Perhaps that is why they remain such a well regarded distribution. Do not give up on Debian because of a few negative news stories. Debian has worked well for me for years. If you stick with it it should do the same for you.
Steve
Why not join in? If you are a FOSS consultant in the UK the OSC has a pretty dynamic mailing list discussing government and public sector consulting issues and possible tenders. If all of the smaller consultancies stand together we can compete with the big boys.
Steve
Steve.Peters@OpenSourceConsortium.org