Linux Unwired, written by Roger Weeks, Edd Dumbill, Brian Jepson and published by our friends at O'Reilly, is an invaluable reference for anything that is Linux and wireless. It has several chapters on 802.11 (picking a card, setting it up, using security, setting up or building a Linux access point), and also covers a variety of other systems: Bluetooth, IrDA, cellular networking, and GPS. Their wireless chapter gives instructions and suggested equipment for (IIRC) AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Verizon, and possibly one or two others. It's reasonably priced, and chock full of useful stuff--I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of it to learn how to do this.
(Note: I am not associated with O'Reilly in any relationship other than being a satisfied customer.)
Um... lots of package management systems use wget. And if someone emailed me a link to the latest version, or a site had a link to it, I might perhaps use wget instead of the browser if it is faster (don't have to specify download location, etc...)
The older your LiveCD gets, the older its packages are and the more stuff needs to be recompiled for the final system. An older version also has worse hardware compatibility. Lastly, for people who use binary packages, an out-of-date install CD makes binary packages worthless, as you have to compile new versions of most packages.
This isn't a limitation. Gmail is not designed to be used as a larger disk share for another account. They allow you to forward mail and change the reply-to address, but allowing you to change the from address would make it act completely like a drop box for other accounts. That's not what it's for.
Second... allowing mail with any From: header allows anyone with a Gmail account (and they are easy to get, in large numbers, especially recursively) to spoof mail from anyone else. SMTP servers shouldn't let you send mail from anyone but yourself, right?
I haven't seen the movie, I'm just discussing the philosophical points brought up in the parent post.
Personally, I find the "everybody's unique and equally 'special'" motto annoying. First, it's obvious that everyone is different in some way. Second, everyone isn't special... I hate to put it this way--it sounds mean--but there are people in this world whose lives are just plain, regular lives that have no significance to the world at large. Of course, I think that every person knows some people who consider them special, and they are to those people. Most people eventually get married, which means that someone found them interesting and caring enough to marry; chances are at least someone you work with considers you to be intelligent, creative, or useful in some way.
But there will always be some people, who, just by the relative amount of attention they receive, are considered to be "above the rest". Celebrities--famous mathemeticians and scientists, (in)famous politicians, and athletes--are considered "more special" than others.
It depends on your point of view whether it is right to say that everyone is that special. Like I said, to someone, they are. But telling people that encourages people to do dumb stuff, like decide that they aren't going to try hard in high school since they're certainly good enough at some sport to go pro.
Just my $0.02. Actually just $0.01, since I'm not using my Karma Bonus;-)
If BitTorrent is given a bad reputation because it can be used for downloading illegal files, then restrictions will be placed on it, and those restrictions will affect your right to download legal files (such as Linux ISO's, legal music, etc...) online. As has been the case with many other P2P services, the mere mention of illegal uses very often brings with it restrictions on, or at least condemnations of, the service. Even this surprisingly balanced article still mentioned first the illegal uses, leaving the legal uses for later when discussing the legal issues behind restricting it.
As many have pointed out, BitTorrent has a different use than other P2P programs. In fact, a torrent is designed to be started and seeded by one website, which presumably would be responsible for the content. While it is impossible to find the original seed of a torrent with illegal content once it has spread far enough, the IP addresses of all users (who are all guilty of both downloading and sharing the content) are available.
Because of the structure of BitTorrent (each torrent having its own network) it is much easier to cut off illegal content while not harming legal content. It is also easier to offer legal content because you don't have the problems of spoofed files and the bad reputation that comes with entire networks used primarily for sharing illegal content.
...a lot of the internet connection shutoff posting I get have been for content shared via BitTorrent...
Do you mean that most of the requests from outside organizations to shut off students' connections are about BitTorrent files, or that most of the requests from your network administrators to shut off a connection that is using too much bandwidth are related to BitTorrent?
...did it answer calls from every phone number in existence, or just the ones on an approved list?
Caller ID is certainly not a secure method of authentication, as evidenced by the many spoofing services currently available. A better idea would be real authentication--in this situation, symmetric encryption with pre-shared keys would work, assuming you assign someone trustworthy at each end of the connection. Public-key could be used if that is impractical.
This is very true. Sitting across the room from me, I have a 333 MHz Celeron (Pentium III version). It isn't really suited to using as a desktop system, so I have Apache and Music Player Daemon on it. With Apache I can serve up a small website or develop it from any computer on my network, and MPD lets me play music and control it from anywhere in the house. It's also just nice to be able to SSH home from school.
How hard would it be to just have the phone do this? Regardless of the network, dialing a 7 digit number could just automatically cause it to be prefixed with your number's area code. That would be an even easier solution.
What if the names are the message? Like if they make a Firefox logo by coloring the names (in small print) the right colors, or something like that. You can be creative about it and still make it fit.
Oh, by full page, do they mean a full spread of left, right, top and bottom (like a whole sheet) or just one side of that?
Not necessarily--the PIC's are Harvard architecture chips (I believe), and, while the data memory is 8-bit, the instructions are some odd length like 12, 13, or 14 bits. There are ways to read and write program memory, though... a bit clumsy, due to the instruction size, but it's possible.
I think you're thinking of the Sony VAIO TR series notebooks. They're really tiny laptops, with the low-voltage, 1 GHz Pentium-M. Combined with the small screen size (less backlight area), this gives it a 7-hour battery life. Another similar model is the Toshiba LifeBook P1000 (800 MHz TransMeta Crusoe, 8.9-inch touch screen, nine hour battery life). People tend to either love or hate these notebooks: you either hate the input system and thus don't care about the small size, long battery life, and other features, or you can tolerate a smaller keyboard and tiny (or no) touchpad and you value the other features enough to buy it.
No, because I have nothing to fill in for the name, and you're posting as an anonymous coward, and the base 10 log of your username has a higher integer portion than mine.
Need an invite? I have 6. But the reason there are a lot out is that they gave out increasing numbers a while ago (2, 3, 4, 6-ish), then turned it off since they had a huge increase in support messages (and simultaneously stopped sending a personal reply to each question and began only replying to questions where there was an answer). I guess they have caught up now and they want to get closer to going public with it by getting more users--for load-testing, testing quirky browser configurations (that wouldn't show up in a limited beta-test), etc...
Does anyone else realize that you could turn this into a tablet PC by just cutting off the base and giving it a touchscreen (oh yeah, and a really heavy battery;-)? It does seem like Apple's getting closer to a tablet, with things this integrated.
Port knocking is used to protect private services, such as SSH, where the general public has no use for the service except for cracking, and the Port Knocking adds an extra layer of security. Adding OS Fingerprinting to this adds an extra layer of security in turn to the Port Knocking.
HTTP, on the other hand, is designed for public access, and for that reason neither Port Knocking nor OS Fingerprinting would be used on it. (Unless you're running an intranet server and you don't want people's home laptops connected, or something like that, but that is again a private service since it's on your local network and not designed to be used by everyone.)
The music, movie, and TV industries in the U.S. still haven't opened up to the idea of sharing things. It was one thing back when TV was analog, and music was on tapes (yeah, they complained back then, but it *was* less of a problem), but now they're scared shitless because they're broadcasting a digital stream, and, although it is compressed, any duplication, recording, or sharing of it would be at exactly the same quality.
So, they try to manipulate laws (DMCA, Broadcast Flag, etc...) their way so that nobody can copy their stuff illegally or legally. The end result is that we need organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to stand up to them and preserve our rights to use media legally.
A lot of these laws fall into a category which I particularly find disturbing: laws that cure the symptom instead of the disease. Instead of just cracking down on true copyright violation (large groups of people selling pirated movies and such, not some guy who copies a few movies for a friend), they crack down on ways to violate copyrights, or they crack down on ways to create ways to violate copyrights, or they crack down on uses of copyrighted material more broad than what is truly illegal, or they crack down on anything that could eventually lead to copyright infringement.
Now, for some analogies. (I warned you, so don't complain they suck!) People are allowed to have knives, for normal uses such as chopping vegetables. Knives, however, can also be used for violence. If knives were regulated the same way copyright law is looking, we wouldn't be able to have knives because they *could* be used to hurt people. Furthermore, most recipies involving chopping would be illegal, due to the fact that they could induce someone to create a knife for that purpose.
But look at it another way: guns--something whose purpose is solely violence--are regulated. Think about DeCSS--it is used only to decode DVD data to view it; pirates don't even need to decode DVD data to make pirated discs. If the movie industry wanted to crack down on something, it should have been DVD burners (yeah, I know, they shouldn't be regulated either... maybe they should have required a special code on consumer discs, so players won't play DeCSS-encrypted discs [presumably a copyrighted movie] when they are on a consumer disc [presumably because it is a pirated copy]), not DeCSS. That's like cracking down on knives, because they can be used to hurt people, even though they have plenty of harmless uses, while leaving guns unregulated.
Okay, shred apart my analogies. Have fun. But that is the reason we need the EFF--to protect us from corporations that would otherwise crack down on lawful acts.
So why not just release it? As the thread says, the people who have enough money to buy an HD TiVo certainly have enough money to contribute to the EFF, and their very use of the TiVo is an act protected by the EFF. Asking for donations to a good group in exchange for a donation is perfectly valid. If you don't like it, don't give money... someone else will... or maybe not, and we'll never see the code...
About layout scaling: The reason your pages do not scale with font size is probably that you are still thinking in the "old" table way of layout and giving things pixel sizes. Using ems, instead of pixels, as this article from A List Apart (a great website for web designers, and probably the best place to learn how to properly put new standards, like XHTML and CSS, into place without sacrificing flexibility) explains, has a benefit:
...you can use ems to define the dimensions of your entire layout, which will then scale in proportion to the text.
This makes it much easier to lay out pages. Take a look at my blog, where I use this technique.
Oh yeah, when you say "So much for accessibility!", you are slightly missing the point. The point of accessibility is that your content be accessible (not necessarily pretty) without problems. Tables used for layout, for example, present a problem, because screen readers do not know whether to ignore them and just follow the page in order or whether to treat them as an actual listing of information and denote the rows and columns. Look at my blog, change the font. Nothing breaks.
About overlapping text: Have you seen this or many of the other articles explaining how to use margins and floats to keep stuff from running over it. And the way to tell the browser not to run over stuff is this: if you have a sidebar, say "float: left;" (or right) in the CSS style for it. Then it will stay on the left, and the other stuff after it will wrap around it.
If you want to see an example of a page where a sidebar (on the right in this case) floats without covering up the content, visit my blog. If you email me I will give you a copy of the template, which is beautiful--it is absolutely, completely separate content and formatting.
About "will this revision be more precise about display?": No. XHTML does not specify how text is displayed. HTML is the Hyper-Text Markup Language--it is used for 'marking up' (not 'laying out' or 'beautifying') 'hyper-text' (not graphics). The point of HTML, from which it strayed and, with XHTML, is returning to, is to show the structure of text. The <p></p> tag only means "the text inside this element is a paragraph". It does not mean "the text inside this element should be displayed as a wrapped, block-level element with a margin above and below." It simply suggests to the user agent or renderer that the enclosed text should be considered, semantically, a paragraph.
Don't worry--with time, the "ripping apart" of pages into content and formatting becomes natural. The best way, in my opinion, and the one that produces the results most true to the separation of content and formatting, albeit being a bit of a challenge, is to do this: write your entire page using only XHTML--no CSS. What you will end up with is a 1990's-esque HTML page with no formatting. Create all your pages, using common classes of divs and spans everywhere. Then, create a CSS stylesheet that converts this purely semantic set of pages into a beautiful layout. The best tools for this are Firefox (although you should test in IE if you care about idiots) with the EditCSS sidebar. With these, you can load your bare-bones page and edit a stylesheet in real time, watching how styles affect the page. If you are uploading to a remote server as you develop (rather than running Apache somewhere on your LAN) it is much faster to just edit a stylesheet with this.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux Unwired, written by Roger Weeks, Edd Dumbill, Brian Jepson and published by our friends at O'Reilly, is an invaluable reference for anything that is Linux and wireless. It has several chapters on 802.11 (picking a card, setting it up, using security, setting up or building a Linux access point), and also covers a variety of other systems: Bluetooth, IrDA, cellular networking, and GPS. Their wireless chapter gives instructions and suggested equipment for (IIRC) AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Verizon, and possibly one or two others. It's reasonably priced, and chock full of useful stuff--I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of it to learn how to do this.
(Note: I am not associated with O'Reilly in any relationship other than being a satisfied customer.)
Um, he was asking for cell phone systems, not 802.11b.
But isn't ACPI under Linux great when it works? I get ~5 hours of battery life on my Asus M2400Ne...
So with about 100 computers in one of these clusters, you might be able to approach the speed of a native application?
Oh, and FIRST POST!
Um... lots of package management systems use wget. And if someone emailed me a link to the latest version, or a site had a link to it, I might perhaps use wget instead of the browser if it is faster (don't have to specify download location, etc...)
I think we should start an effort to make Patrick the largest batch of chicken soup ever. It is amazing stuff, you know...
Seriously... Patrick, you rock. Slackware is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
Hope you feel better,
Tom
GnuCash, while not suited to heavy business uses, can be used for simpler accounting tasks. I know of no replacement for TurboTax, however.
Gentoo does warrant release notifications.
The older your LiveCD gets, the older its packages are and the more stuff needs to be recompiled for the final system. An older version also has worse hardware compatibility. Lastly, for people who use binary packages, an out-of-date install CD makes binary packages worthless, as you have to compile new versions of most packages.
This isn't a limitation. Gmail is not designed to be used as a larger disk share for another account. They allow you to forward mail and change the reply-to address, but allowing you to change the from address would make it act completely like a drop box for other accounts. That's not what it's for.
Second... allowing mail with any From: header allows anyone with a Gmail account (and they are easy to get, in large numbers, especially recursively) to spoof mail from anyone else. SMTP servers shouldn't let you send mail from anyone but yourself, right?
I haven't seen the movie, I'm just discussing the philosophical points brought up in the parent post.
Personally, I find the "everybody's unique and equally 'special'" motto annoying. First, it's obvious that everyone is different in some way. Second, everyone isn't special... I hate to put it this way--it sounds mean--but there are people in this world whose lives are just plain, regular lives that have no significance to the world at large. Of course, I think that every person knows some people who consider them special, and they are to those people. Most people eventually get married, which means that someone found them interesting and caring enough to marry; chances are at least someone you work with considers you to be intelligent, creative, or useful in some way.
But there will always be some people, who, just by the relative amount of attention they receive, are considered to be "above the rest". Celebrities--famous mathemeticians and scientists, (in)famous politicians, and athletes--are considered "more special" than others.
It depends on your point of view whether it is right to say that everyone is that special. Like I said, to someone, they are. But telling people that encourages people to do dumb stuff, like decide that they aren't going to try hard in high school since they're certainly good enough at some sport to go pro.
Just my $0.02. Actually just $0.01, since I'm not using my Karma Bonus ;-)
If BitTorrent is given a bad reputation because it can be used for downloading illegal files, then restrictions will be placed on it, and those restrictions will affect your right to download legal files (such as Linux ISO's, legal music, etc...) online. As has been the case with many other P2P services, the mere mention of illegal uses very often brings with it restrictions on, or at least condemnations of, the service. Even this surprisingly balanced article still mentioned first the illegal uses, leaving the legal uses for later when discussing the legal issues behind restricting it.
Probably not...
As many have pointed out, BitTorrent has a different use than other P2P programs. In fact, a torrent is designed to be started and seeded by one website, which presumably would be responsible for the content. While it is impossible to find the original seed of a torrent with illegal content once it has spread far enough, the IP addresses of all users (who are all guilty of both downloading and sharing the content) are available.
Because of the structure of BitTorrent (each torrent having its own network) it is much easier to cut off illegal content while not harming legal content. It is also easier to offer legal content because you don't have the problems of spoofed files and the bad reputation that comes with entire networks used primarily for sharing illegal content.
Do you mean that most of the requests from outside organizations to shut off students' connections are about BitTorrent files, or that most of the requests from your network administrators to shut off a connection that is using too much bandwidth are related to BitTorrent?
Caller ID is certainly not a secure method of authentication, as evidenced by the many spoofing services currently available. A better idea would be real authentication--in this situation, symmetric encryption with pre-shared keys would work, assuming you assign someone trustworthy at each end of the connection. Public-key could be used if that is impractical.
This is very true. Sitting across the room from me, I have a 333 MHz Celeron (Pentium III version). It isn't really suited to using as a desktop system, so I have Apache and Music Player Daemon on it. With Apache I can serve up a small website or develop it from any computer on my network, and MPD lets me play music and control it from anywhere in the house. It's also just nice to be able to SSH home from school.
Old computers rock.
Repeat after me: Trolls can be funny!
Sure, it pokes fun at distros, but it's mostly fair, and it's not hateful. Enjoy it. (I run Gentoo, I agree--if it moves, compile it)
How hard would it be to just have the phone do this? Regardless of the network, dialing a 7 digit number could just automatically cause it to be prefixed with your number's area code. That would be an even easier solution.
What if the names are the message? Like if they make a Firefox logo by coloring the names (in small print) the right colors, or something like that. You can be creative about it and still make it fit.
Oh, by full page, do they mean a full spread of left, right, top and bottom (like a whole sheet) or just one side of that?
Not necessarily--the PIC's are Harvard architecture chips (I believe), and, while the data memory is 8-bit, the instructions are some odd length like 12, 13, or 14 bits. There are ways to read and write program memory, though... a bit clumsy, due to the instruction size, but it's possible.
I think you're thinking of the Sony VAIO TR series notebooks. They're really tiny laptops, with the low-voltage, 1 GHz Pentium-M. Combined with the small screen size (less backlight area), this gives it a 7-hour battery life. Another similar model is the Toshiba LifeBook P1000 (800 MHz TransMeta Crusoe, 8.9-inch touch screen, nine hour battery life). People tend to either love or hate these notebooks: you either hate the input system and thus don't care about the small size, long battery life, and other features, or you can tolerate a smaller keyboard and tiny (or no) touchpad and you value the other features enough to buy it.
No, because I have nothing to fill in for the name, and you're posting as an anonymous coward, and the base 10 log of your username has a higher integer portion than mine.
Need an invite? I have 6. But the reason there are a lot out is that they gave out increasing numbers a while ago (2, 3, 4, 6-ish), then turned it off since they had a huge increase in support messages (and simultaneously stopped sending a personal reply to each question and began only replying to questions where there was an answer). I guess they have caught up now and they want to get closer to going public with it by getting more users--for load-testing, testing quirky browser configurations (that wouldn't show up in a limited beta-test), etc...
Does anyone else realize that you could turn this into a tablet PC by just cutting off the base and giving it a touchscreen (oh yeah, and a really heavy battery ;-)? It does seem like Apple's getting closer to a tablet, with things this integrated.
You're sorta missing the point.
Port knocking is used to protect private services, such as SSH, where the general public has no use for the service except for cracking, and the Port Knocking adds an extra layer of security. Adding OS Fingerprinting to this adds an extra layer of security in turn to the Port Knocking.
HTTP, on the other hand, is designed for public access, and for that reason neither Port Knocking nor OS Fingerprinting would be used on it. (Unless you're running an intranet server and you don't want people's home laptops connected, or something like that, but that is again a private service since it's on your local network and not designed to be used by everyone.)
Why? This should be obvious.
The music, movie, and TV industries in the U.S. still haven't opened up to the idea of sharing things. It was one thing back when TV was analog, and music was on tapes (yeah, they complained back then, but it *was* less of a problem), but now they're scared shitless because they're broadcasting a digital stream, and, although it is compressed, any duplication, recording, or sharing of it would be at exactly the same quality.
So, they try to manipulate laws (DMCA, Broadcast Flag, etc...) their way so that nobody can copy their stuff illegally or legally. The end result is that we need organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to stand up to them and preserve our rights to use media legally.
A lot of these laws fall into a category which I particularly find disturbing: laws that cure the symptom instead of the disease. Instead of just cracking down on true copyright violation (large groups of people selling pirated movies and such, not some guy who copies a few movies for a friend), they crack down on ways to violate copyrights, or they crack down on ways to create ways to violate copyrights, or they crack down on uses of copyrighted material more broad than what is truly illegal, or they crack down on anything that could eventually lead to copyright infringement.
Now, for some analogies. (I warned you, so don't complain they suck!) People are allowed to have knives, for normal uses such as chopping vegetables. Knives, however, can also be used for violence. If knives were regulated the same way copyright law is looking, we wouldn't be able to have knives because they *could* be used to hurt people. Furthermore, most recipies involving chopping would be illegal, due to the fact that they could induce someone to create a knife for that purpose.
But look at it another way: guns--something whose purpose is solely violence--are regulated. Think about DeCSS--it is used only to decode DVD data to view it; pirates don't even need to decode DVD data to make pirated discs. If the movie industry wanted to crack down on something, it should have been DVD burners (yeah, I know, they shouldn't be regulated either... maybe they should have required a special code on consumer discs, so players won't play DeCSS-encrypted discs [presumably a copyrighted movie] when they are on a consumer disc [presumably because it is a pirated copy]), not DeCSS. That's like cracking down on knives, because they can be used to hurt people, even though they have plenty of harmless uses, while leaving guns unregulated.
Okay, shred apart my analogies. Have fun. But that is the reason we need the EFF--to protect us from corporations that would otherwise crack down on lawful acts.
So why not just release it? As the thread says, the people who have enough money to buy an HD TiVo certainly have enough money to contribute to the EFF, and their very use of the TiVo is an act protected by the EFF. Asking for donations to a good group in exchange for a donation is perfectly valid. If you don't like it, don't give money... someone else will... or maybe not, and we'll never see the code...
About layout scaling: The reason your pages do not scale with font size is probably that you are still thinking in the "old" table way of layout and giving things pixel sizes. Using ems, instead of pixels, as this article from A List Apart (a great website for web designers, and probably the best place to learn how to properly put new standards, like XHTML and CSS, into place without sacrificing flexibility) explains, has a benefit:
This makes it much easier to lay out pages. Take a look at my blog, where I use this technique.
Oh yeah, when you say "So much for accessibility!", you are slightly missing the point. The point of accessibility is that your content be accessible (not necessarily pretty) without problems. Tables used for layout, for example, present a problem, because screen readers do not know whether to ignore them and just follow the page in order or whether to treat them as an actual listing of information and denote the rows and columns. Look at my blog, change the font. Nothing breaks.
About overlapping text: Have you seen this or many of the other articles explaining how to use margins and floats to keep stuff from running over it. And the way to tell the browser not to run over stuff is this: if you have a sidebar, say "float: left;" (or right) in the CSS style for it. Then it will stay on the left, and the other stuff after it will wrap around it.
If you want to see an example of a page where a sidebar (on the right in this case) floats without covering up the content, visit my blog. If you email me I will give you a copy of the template, which is beautiful--it is absolutely, completely separate content and formatting.
About "will this revision be more precise about display?": No. XHTML does not specify how text is displayed. HTML is the Hyper-Text Markup Language--it is used for 'marking up' (not 'laying out' or 'beautifying') 'hyper-text' (not graphics). The point of HTML, from which it strayed and, with XHTML, is returning to, is to show the structure of text. The <p></p> tag only means "the text inside this element is a paragraph". It does not mean "the text inside this element should be displayed as a wrapped, block-level element with a margin above and below." It simply suggests to the user agent or renderer that the enclosed text should be considered, semantically, a paragraph.
Don't worry--with time, the "ripping apart" of pages into content and formatting becomes natural. The best way, in my opinion, and the one that produces the results most true to the separation of content and formatting, albeit being a bit of a challenge, is to do this: write your entire page using only XHTML--no CSS. What you will end up with is a 1990's-esque HTML page with no formatting. Create all your pages, using common classes of divs and spans everywhere. Then, create a CSS stylesheet that converts this purely semantic set of pages into a beautiful layout. The best tools for this are Firefox (although you should test in IE if you care about idiots) with the EditCSS sidebar. With these, you can load your bare-bones page and edit a stylesheet in real time, watching how styles affect the page. If you are uploading to a remote server as you develop (rather than running Apache somewhere on your LAN) it is much faster to just edit a stylesheet with this.
Just my two cents. (Actually more like a