I've been to linux-pos.org already. The problem with most of the available Linux POSes is that they are custom-tailored to specific applications. I've found POS software for gas stations, for restaurants, video stores, but nothing that is generic enough for our retail environment (bicycle stores). I need something that can handle cash register stuff and also work for phone order entry. This means that it must have a customer database (complete with address, phone, email, etc) and a speedy way of entering new information into that database. The product database needs to accomidate custom fields and the concept of "backordered".
I'd love to have what Burlington Coat Factory and Circuit City are using. However, I'm not about to pay $4,000 a seat to get it.
Nope, not an option. I'm a very experienced Perl programmer but that's irrelevant. A Web-based application cannot open cash register draws, draw to an LCD, or print receipts...at least, not without a really kludgy server-to-client piece.
On second thought, I agree with you on the ncurses interface. The speed should be a lot better and memory usage a lot less. The problem is development tools. Are there any good rapid development tools for ncurses apps? I guess I should look into Java/ncurses and Perl/ncurses interfaces.
The sad thing about this article is that we still don't have a decent, non-specific, OSS point-of-sale package for *nix. I've seen cheezy GTK-based "cash register" apps but nothing that can compete (or even compare) to Windows-based products.
This is unfortunate. My father's company runs FreeBSD and OpenBSD on all of its servers but I still have to support over 35 Windows 2000 desktops here at our stores because there is no *nix alternative. Retail is the perfect place for Linux and the BSDs. Retail people need simple, easy-to-use interfaces and they do not want to deal with the problems associated with administering Microsoft OSes (worms, spyware, etc). I would love nothing more than to replace every single Windows desktop in this company with a X11-capable thin client.
It sounds like there is a need for an embedded Linux-based external storage case. Imagine a very small (but well-ventilated) external drive case that had an embedded Linux system (with Firewire, USB2.0 and Ethernet) built in. The idea would be that you could plug in any ATA drive and it would automatically detect, format, and share the drive.
If you're like me and hardly ever break the speed limit (I'm in no hurry to get anywhere), this kind of insurance would be great. I'm 29 and have driven about 400,000 miles since I turned 16 and have had one minor accident: my Jeep rolled back into another car at a stoplight. I haven't had a traffic ticket since I was 18. I'm a good driver, live in a safe neighborhood, and I drive 1/2 mile to work. The only time I drive much anymore is on vacation. I'm a safe bet for an insurance company--but why should I pay $600/yr for car insurance that I never make a claim against?
There used to be a machine at McMurdo Station called mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov. I remember back in, oh, 1994 or so, sending finger requests to their machine and using the VMS equivalent of talk(1) (can't remember what it was called...) to send text messages to the folks logged on. I don't remember ever getting a response, though. It was also kind of fun to do traceroutes and pings to the machine. The network path was insane...apparently it went over satellite and the latency was usually at least 800ms+. Ah, memories...I miss the days when almost everyone ran open finger and talk/ntalk daemons.
They also handle audio and video. It's pretty neat (but not necessarily all that useful) to watch a movie on a SunRay, detach, log into another and see and hear the movie still playing.
This story is so "last week". This was on FoxNews.com days ago. Couldn't the editors find something, amongst the piles of rejected story submissions, that is more newsworthy than this?
Re:yes, that's actually the basic idea
on
Red Hat announces GFS
·
· Score: 4, Informative
While you do have the basic idea down, your suggestion of a clustering FS isn't the best for your application. You are describing "vertical scaling", which GFS and clusters will be very good for. Web serving is not a good place for a cluster--"horizontal scaling" is how you scale most web sites and web applications. Typically, for web serving, you will have a block of content that can fit on the hard disk of the average web server.
The best way to deliver this to the user (in this case, the slashdotter) would be to replicate this content onto a group of web servers using rsync(1). Each machine serves the content off of its local drive and can use its memory to cache/buffer the disk reads. In front of the web servers, you would put a wire-speed load balancer, such as an Nortel Alteon content switch or a Foundry Networks ServerIron switch. The load balancer, when configured properly will take care of monitoring your web servers. It would take me too long to explain it here, but these switches are sophisticated enough that they can take failed webservers out of the load-balancing group for everything from a ping failure to a content failure.
The key to designing web architectures is simplicity. Web serving does not need fancy clustering software or distributed filesystems. Very few web sites will not fit on the hard disk of your average 1U server. Keep it simple and put the intelligence up front in the switch.
What is GFS good for? Many things! It would be great for a large computational cluster that had a very large (multi-terabyte) dataset and high disk I/O requirements. Anything that has a requirement to provide one or more very large files to a number of cluster nodes would be perfect for GFS.
Several hundred emails in 30 seconds? That's not a 56K modem connection. It just isn't possible. It's almost certainly a fibre connection of some kind, and probably not DSL; most DSL connection's upstreams peak out around 128Kbps. Most cablemodems peak out around 64Kbps for upstream. If you're getting several hundred emails in 30 seconds, then you must be getting tens of thousands of connections
Nope. It's really easy to deliver several hundred identical messages in that span of time. All you have to do is specify the addresses during SMTP time (RCPT TO:). MTAs are capable of batching messages. To see what I mean, send an e-mail from Yahoo or elsewhere to five addresses at your local domain. Watch the mail server logs. All five messages will be delivered during the same SMTP connection. The message body only needs to be sent once. The sending MTA tells your mailer to deliver this same message to all five recipients.
You would not believe the amount of spam that comes from dialups. This spam is the result of home machines that have been comprimised by worms and exploited by spammers to send mass amounts of mail. For the most part, these dialup machines do not send mail to some previously collected list of addresses--instead, they use dictionary words and common names in an attempt to guess recipient accounts. They send these mails by the hundreds of thousands. My mail servers get, literally, 1-4 connections per second from dialup hosts. When they are allowed to connect and deliver, they can drop several hundred e-mails on my server in a matter of 30 seconds or so; almost every one of these e-mails will be bounced because the recipient does not exist on my system.
We are not alone in blocking dialups. Try and connect to AOL's MXes from your dialup mail server and see what you get.
It's not hard at all to block these cable/DSL/dialup hosts from sending you mail. Here's what I use: 1) A filter that looks for hostname patterns that look like consumer internet connections (DSL/cable/dialup):
[note: these are in Exim lookup-table syntax]
\N^(dsl|cable|adsl|dialup|docsis|pool|ppp|client |c lient2).*$\N \N^.*\d{1,3}-\d{1,3}-\d{1,3}-\d{1,3} .*$\N \N^c\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\..*$ \N \N^[sShH]\d{3,}.*\.[a-z][a-z]\.shawcable.net$\ N \N^.*\d+\.charter-stl.*$\N
2) Next, you block known spam-source countries. Some may take offense to this but the company I work for only sells products to people in the US, so these filters aren't a problem. To accomplish this, I set up djb's rbldns server on one of my machines. Currently, I'm blocking netblocks from Brazil, China, Korea, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey. These netblocks come courtesy of blackholes.us.
3) Anything that is not caught by those first two local options is run against the DNSBL list at SORBS. We choose to use their combined blackhole list but you could just as easily go with their anti-dialup/dsl/cable IP list.
If an e-mail makes it through all of that, it gets run through SpamAssassin and blackholed if the score is >= 7.0 and marked if the score is >= 4.0. We're also doing a bit of tarpitting. Every time we get a connection from a blacklisted IP, we tarpit them for two minutes before spitting out a 550 error code.
Despite this, we still get some spam and dictionary attacks. The spam gets filtered by the client and the dictionary guesses are blackholed by the local delivery server, which is configured not to send bounces.
What would be even cooler is an 802.11b-based serial-to-ethernet converter, with *nix drivers. The EtherPAD, unfortunately, appears to be win32-only.:(
Secondly, a decent 802.11g AP WILL cost you a good $80-$90
I posted this in an earlier comment but it's pretty interesting so I will post it again:
The CompUSA in San Antonio (and presumably, CompUSA's elsewhere) is selling the Linksys WRT54G Router/Access Point for $59.95 after instant and mail-in rebates. IIRC, the mail-in rebate is for $10. This is a great little Linux-based router that can be reflashed with custom firmware if you so choose.
Uhh, negative. The WRT54G (I think that's the right model) is $59.95 at CompUSA and Best Buy. On top of that, you can flash custom firmware on it. No iTunes streaming, though.:)
will it be able to stream to multiple locations at once?
Doesn't look like it from the screen shots. It appears to be a drop-down menu, not checkboxes, so I would imagine one at a time.
You can open up more than one instance of iTunes. I'll bet you can select different audio destinations for each iTunes instance. Syncing them, however, will probably be an issue.
I guess you weren't alive back in the days of the Tandy TRS-80 Model ]I[. I vividly remember riding along with my dad to the Tandy Computer store and staring at the rows upon rows of brown 3-ring binders. They were all identical looking except for the name of the software, which was printed on the cover. Inside the binder would be some floppy discs (and they really were floppy back then!) and maybe a manual.
I remember when he bought me an adventure game called Xenos. It came in a 3-ring binder, too, although it had a fancy 4-color insert. I can remember how stoked I was when we brought it home. It's a shame that you have to spend thousands on box design to sell a great game nowdays.
1) Call the Apple Store ahead of time and make sure that they will have exactly what you want set aside for you when you arrive.
2) Purchase a UK power adapter from a UK Apple dealer before you go. The day before you leave the US for home, ship all the manuals and paperwork back to the UK, along with the US power adapter. Take nothing but the laptop and a UK power adapter in your bag through customs.
3) Call your credit card company beforehand and make sure that they will clear your charge for the purchase.
4) When you get back to the UK, look into buying a UK keyboard for your PowerBook. IIRC, the key faces can be detached and replaced from the notebook fairly easily.
You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).
You, my friend, have obviously not been to the Bandera County Rodeo and Fair. Absolutely no Mozillas to be found, though there are some nice heifers!
scary that not only is the software Windows but it has its own built in programming enviroment with access to every program on that machine including network access, and the only tool you need is notepad.
Find me a *nix distribution without a scriptable shell on it and I will believe your argument. Let's face it, almost every operating system comes with some kind of built-in programmable environment. Hell, in most *nixes, you don't even need a text editor--you have cat(1)!
Two years ago, I was a network architect and software developer for a very large (probably the largest...) ISP. I was making a six-figure salary, had a nice apartment, a Jeep, and a pretty comfortable life. However, I wasn't happy. My heart just wasn't in the IT field and I decided to make a major lifestyle change. I quit my job, sold my Jeep and moved back home to complete the college degree that I never quite finished. I decided to make my new career in the military. I signed up for Army ROTC at my university and proceeded to get my fat, lazy ass in shape. ROTC totally changed the way I lived. I started waking up at 4:30am amd doing push-ups and sit-ups every night. Before I knew it, I was 29 years old but in the best shape of my life.
Here I am, two years into my career change, and I couldn't be happier. Sitting in a cube all day made me very sad. Although the transition was very, very tough and very, very uncertain for a while, I've come through it happier than I have ever been. If all goes as planned, I will be a college graduate and an officer in the United States Army four months from today.
Yes, you can change your career and improve your life. Ask me how.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to linux-pos.org already. The problem with most of the available Linux POSes is that they are custom-tailored to specific applications. I've found POS software for gas stations, for restaurants, video stores, but nothing that is generic enough for our retail environment (bicycle stores). I need something that can handle cash register stuff and also work for phone order entry. This means that it must have a customer database (complete with address, phone, email, etc) and a speedy way of entering new information into that database. The product database needs to accomidate custom fields and the concept of "backordered".
I'd love to have what Burlington Coat Factory and Circuit City are using. However, I'm not about to pay $4,000 a seat to get it.
Nope, not an option. I'm a very experienced Perl programmer but that's irrelevant. A Web-based application cannot open cash register draws, draw to an LCD, or print receipts...at least, not without a really kludgy server-to-client piece.
On second thought, I agree with you on the ncurses interface. The speed should be a lot better and memory usage a lot less. The problem is development tools. Are there any good rapid development tools for ncurses apps? I guess I should look into Java/ncurses and Perl/ncurses interfaces.
The sad thing about this article is that we still don't have a decent, non-specific, OSS point-of-sale package for *nix. I've seen cheezy GTK-based "cash register" apps but nothing that can compete (or even compare) to Windows-based products.
This is unfortunate. My father's company runs FreeBSD and OpenBSD on all of its servers but I still have to support over 35 Windows 2000 desktops here at our stores because there is no *nix alternative. Retail is the perfect place for Linux and the BSDs. Retail people need simple, easy-to-use interfaces and they do not want to deal with the problems associated with administering Microsoft OSes (worms, spyware, etc). I would love nothing more than to replace every single Windows desktop in this company with a X11-capable thin client.
Thoughts?
It sounds like there is a need for an embedded Linux-based external storage case. Imagine a very small (but well-ventilated) external drive case that had an embedded Linux system (with Firewire, USB2.0 and Ethernet) built in. The idea would be that you could plug in any ATA drive and it would automatically detect, format, and share the drive.
If you're like me and hardly ever break the speed limit (I'm in no hurry to get anywhere), this kind of insurance would be great. I'm 29 and have driven about 400,000 miles since I turned 16 and have had one minor accident: my Jeep rolled back into another car at a stoplight. I haven't had a traffic ticket since I was 18. I'm a good driver, live in a safe neighborhood, and I drive 1/2 mile to work. The only time I drive much anymore is on vacation. I'm a safe bet for an insurance company--but why should I pay $600/yr for car insurance that I never make a claim against?
There used to be a machine at McMurdo Station called mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov. I remember back in, oh, 1994 or so, sending finger requests to their machine and using the VMS equivalent of talk(1) (can't remember what it was called...) to send text messages to the folks logged on. I don't remember ever getting a response, though. It was also kind of fun to do traceroutes and pings to the machine. The network path was insane...apparently it went over satellite and the latency was usually at least 800ms+. Ah, memories...I miss the days when almost everyone ran open finger and talk/ntalk daemons.
They also handle audio and video. It's pretty neat (but not necessarily all that useful) to watch a movie on a SunRay, detach, log into another and see and hear the movie still playing.
This story is so "last week". This was on FoxNews.com days ago. Couldn't the editors find something, amongst the piles of rejected story submissions, that is more newsworthy than this?
Famous last words:
"Screenshots here."
While you do have the basic idea down, your suggestion of a clustering FS isn't the best for your application. You are describing "vertical scaling", which GFS and clusters will be very good for. Web serving is not a good place for a cluster--"horizontal scaling" is how you scale most web sites and web applications. Typically, for web serving, you will have a block of content that can fit on the hard disk of the average web server.
The best way to deliver this to the user (in this case, the slashdotter) would be to replicate this content onto a group of web servers using rsync(1). Each machine serves the content off of its local drive and can use its memory to cache/buffer the disk reads. In front of the web servers, you would put a wire-speed load balancer, such as an Nortel Alteon content switch or a Foundry Networks ServerIron switch. The load balancer, when configured properly will take care of monitoring your web servers. It would take me too long to explain it here, but these switches are sophisticated enough that they can take failed webservers out of the load-balancing group for everything from a ping failure to a content failure.
The key to designing web architectures is simplicity. Web serving does not need fancy clustering software or distributed filesystems. Very few web sites will not fit on the hard disk of your average 1U server. Keep it simple and put the intelligence up front in the switch.
What is GFS good for? Many things! It would be great for a large computational cluster that had a very large (multi-terabyte) dataset and high disk I/O requirements. Anything that has a requirement to provide one or more very large files to a number of cluster nodes would be perfect for GFS.
Chris
Several hundred emails in 30 seconds? That's not a 56K modem connection. It just isn't possible. It's almost certainly a fibre connection of some kind, and probably not DSL; most DSL connection's upstreams peak out around 128Kbps. Most cablemodems peak out around 64Kbps for upstream. If you're getting several hundred emails in 30 seconds, then you must be getting tens of thousands of connections
Nope. It's really easy to deliver several hundred identical messages in that span of time. All you have to do is specify the addresses during SMTP time (RCPT TO:). MTAs are capable of batching messages. To see what I mean, send an e-mail from Yahoo or elsewhere to five addresses at your local domain. Watch the mail server logs. All five messages will be delivered during the same SMTP connection. The message body only needs to be sent once. The sending MTA tells your mailer to deliver this same message to all five recipients.
You would not believe the amount of spam that comes from dialups. This spam is the result of home machines that have been comprimised by worms and exploited by spammers to send mass amounts of mail. For the most part, these dialup machines do not send mail to some previously collected list of addresses--instead, they use dictionary words and common names in an attempt to guess recipient accounts. They send these mails by the hundreds of thousands. My mail servers get, literally, 1-4 connections per second from dialup hosts. When they are allowed to connect and deliver, they can drop several hundred e-mails on my server in a matter of 30 seconds or so; almost every one of these e-mails will be bounced because the recipient does not exist on my system.
We are not alone in blocking dialups. Try and connect to AOL's MXes from your dialup mail server and see what you get.
Chris
It's not hard at all to block these cable/DSL/dialup hosts from sending you mail. Here's what I use:
t |c lient2).*$\N} .*$\N$ \N\ N
1) A filter that looks for hostname patterns that look like consumer internet connections (DSL/cable/dialup):
[note: these are in Exim lookup-table syntax]
\N^(dsl|cable|adsl|dialup|docsis|pool|ppp|clien
\N^.*\d{1,3}-\d{1,3}-\d{1,3}-\d{1,3
\N^c\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\..*
\N^[sShH]\d{3,}.*\.[a-z][a-z]\.shawcable.net$
\N^.*\d+\.charter-stl.*$\N
2) Next, you block known spam-source countries. Some may take offense to this but the company I work for only sells products to people in the US, so these filters aren't a problem. To accomplish this, I set up djb's rbldns server on one of my machines. Currently, I'm blocking netblocks from Brazil, China, Korea, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey. These netblocks come courtesy of blackholes.us.
3) Anything that is not caught by those first two local options is run against the DNSBL list at SORBS. We choose to use their combined blackhole list but you could just as easily go with their anti-dialup/dsl/cable IP list.
If an e-mail makes it through all of that, it gets run through SpamAssassin and blackholed if the score is >= 7.0 and marked if the score is >= 4.0.
We're also doing a bit of tarpitting. Every time we get a connection from a blacklisted IP, we tarpit them for two minutes before spitting out a 550 error code.
Despite this, we still get some spam and dictionary attacks. The spam gets filtered by the client and the dictionary guesses are blackholed by the local delivery server, which is configured not to send bounces.
Chris
What would be even cooler is an 802.11b-based serial-to-ethernet converter, with *nix drivers. The EtherPAD, unfortunately, appears to be win32-only.
Chris
Secondly, a decent 802.11g AP WILL cost you a good $80-$90
I posted this in an earlier comment but it's pretty interesting so I will post it again:
The CompUSA in San Antonio (and presumably, CompUSA's elsewhere) is selling the Linksys WRT54G Router/Access Point for $59.95 after instant and mail-in rebates. IIRC, the mail-in rebate is for $10. This is a great little Linux-based router that can be reflashed with custom firmware if you so choose.
Uhh, negative. The WRT54G (I think that's the right model) is $59.95 at CompUSA and Best Buy. On top of that, you can flash custom firmware on it. No iTunes streaming, though.
will it be able to stream to multiple locations at once?
Doesn't look like it from the screen shots. It appears to be a drop-down menu, not checkboxes, so I would imagine one at a time.
You can open up more than one instance of iTunes. I'll bet you can select different audio destinations for each iTunes instance. Syncing them, however, will probably be an issue.
Chris
The better question is, "exactly what does MIT get for giving RMS an office and, presumably, a salary?"
I guess you weren't alive back in the days of the Tandy TRS-80 Model ]I[. I vividly remember riding along with my dad to the Tandy Computer store and staring at the rows upon rows of brown 3-ring binders. They were all identical looking except for the name of the software, which was printed on the cover. Inside the binder would be some floppy discs (and they really were floppy back then!) and maybe a manual.
I remember when he bought me an adventure game called Xenos. It came in a 3-ring binder, too, although it had a fancy 4-color insert. I can remember how stoked I was when we brought it home. It's a shame that you have to spend thousands on box design to sell a great game nowdays.
1) Call the Apple Store ahead of time and make sure that they will have exactly what you want set aside for you when you arrive.
2) Purchase a UK power adapter from a UK Apple dealer before you go. The day before you leave the US for home, ship all the manuals and paperwork back to the UK, along with the US power adapter. Take nothing but the laptop and a UK power adapter in your bag through customs.
3) Call your credit card company beforehand and make sure that they will clear your charge for the purchase.
4) When you get back to the UK, look into buying a UK keyboard for your PowerBook. IIRC, the key faces can be detached and replaced from the notebook fairly easily.
You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).
You, my friend, have obviously not been to the Bandera County Rodeo and Fair. Absolutely no Mozillas to be found, though there are some nice heifers!
scary that not only is the software Windows but it has its own built in programming enviroment with access to every program on that machine including network access, and the only tool you need is notepad.
Find me a *nix distribution without a scriptable shell on it and I will believe your argument. Let's face it, almost every operating system comes with some kind of built-in programmable environment. Hell, in most *nixes, you don't even need a text editor--you have cat(1)!
You better squid... You guys are giving me a haddock.
Two years ago, I was a network architect and software developer for a very large (probably the largest...) ISP. I was making a six-figure salary, had a nice apartment, a Jeep, and a pretty comfortable life. However, I wasn't happy. My heart just wasn't in the IT field and I decided to make a major lifestyle change. I quit my job, sold my Jeep and moved back home to complete the college degree that I never quite finished. I decided to make my new career in the military. I signed up for Army ROTC at my university and proceeded to get my fat, lazy ass in shape. ROTC totally changed the way I lived. I started waking up at 4:30am amd doing push-ups and sit-ups every night. Before I knew it, I was 29 years old but in the best shape of my life.
:)
Here I am, two years into my career change, and I couldn't be happier. Sitting in a cube all day made me very sad. Although the transition was very, very tough and very, very uncertain for a while, I've come through it happier than I have ever been. If all goes as planned, I will be a college graduate and an officer in the United States Army four months from today.
Yes, you can change your career and improve your life. Ask me how.