I've used both Joomla (1 and 1.5) and Drupal (5) extensively in multiple projects, personally and professionaly. Hands down, Drupal is more powerful, better thought-out, and sports an excellent community and community-contributed content.
That's not to say Joomla is bad -- in fact, it's very good, and like you said, 1.5 could bring a revolution in CMS = Framework -- but many of the advances 1.5 will make have already been realized in Drupal 5.
In addition, the shear number of extensions for Drupal combined with the relative ease of developing modules for it put it ahead of Joomla squarely in my book.
I run Fedora Core 6 with Gnome/Beryl, and I have yet to have ANY problems with Beryl on my new machine -- and the effects don't even tax the CPU, unlike the other OSes.
I work in the IT department of a University. We probably won't start rolling out Vista until we have to, since we have things fairly stable right now and the re-training for some people complicates the issue. We have plans to get some Vista machines in the IT department purely for the reason of support for students and preparation for migration a year or more in the future.
Each area/building controller should have a battery backup. That's what we do with dedicated wiring from the controllers to the readers and controllers to the server, which is also batter backup. Will last for several hours, by which point either power is usually on, or we have people on the ground controlling access.
I'm a security manager at a University in the states. We're moving more and more toward electronic access control for many of the reasons you state. As always, they wanted us to do it on a budget, but I feel we've managed to install a respectable system.
We use a product of a GE child company called IdentiCard. It's a low proximity system that will do just about anything you would like it to do. To activate a reader, you must hold a card within a few inches of the reader. The typical cards store only a uniqe number that is associated with a user account in the backend. There are also smart-card variations available that work with the system (there are several smartcard programming features in the control software). Making the cards is as simple as printing the card design, assigning the card to a user, then running it through a laminator (takes a long time if you've got to make several hundred or even thousand).
The backend of the system consists of an SQL database of users, cards, access groups, reader groups, etc. The physical system consists basically of readers, the data cables, per-building (or per-area) controllers which connect to the readers, then the cabling back to the primary server in our IT department. The cable they ran seems to be some proprietary bundle of wires, but they claim they can even do things like video integration and whatnot with it.
The only thing I have not liked about the system is that each user may be assigned only 3 access groups. While an efficient and well-managed access control policy deals with this just fine, it requires you to think ahead on what access groups you want. But then, you can also define as many groups as you want, you just can't assign more than three to any single user.
I worked at the Best Buy Tech Bench just before they bought Geek Squad. It was another case as described above where I was one of the three among a larger group of Techs who 1) Actually knew what I was doing, and 2) Cared about helping customers.
I absolutely hated the pressure I got from the management to lie to customers to trick them into spending more money. My bosses would literally yell at me if I fixed a computer when they believed the customer was prepared to spend more money. Eventually, if I could fix a computer in a few minutes, I wouldn't charge people and just fixed their computer and rushed them out of the store.
I eventually quit. When they asked why, I said, "To seek an employer who understands what it is to be professional." I don't hate Best Buy (roommate works there and I shop there regularly), and I don't believe every store is like that. However, I know that many of the guys I worked with 4 years ago still work there, and are still doing the same thing. It's just a shame.
I met Adrian a couple times while he was intimately "involved" with a homosexual friend of mine. I'm wondering if there isn't something about his blood he'd rather not have known.
If you take a moment to remove the tinfoil hat and take a look at what Lucas has done... I'd say he deserves it. His methods as far as hollywood politics alone revolutionized the industry of movie-making.
Beside that, he's led development of some of the best industry departments and standards out there. He was largely responsible for Pixar!
So before you're too quick to bash him for the obvious blunders he's had, at least have the fairness to recognize what he has really done well.
My brother had strapped a cheap digital camera to a remote control airplane and took some pictures. Simply incredible what he did with that. He also got some great crash footage that was priceless.:)
When I arrived on campus to my school my freshman year, they required a series of programs installed on all computers. I was fine with it because they said they were installing network access stuff and anti-virus. Okay. Fine.
But then also happened to install a little gooddie known as WinVNC. I'm at a school with no computer majors available, so I'm one of the very few people in the population who realized what this was.
I immediately disabled WinVNC on my computers and on every box I worked on (students to this day ask me to help them before asking IT, because they're so ridiculously condescending). Turns out they tried to connect to my computer via VNC and couldn't, so they disconnected my internet access.
When they asked why I disabled it, I told them because of how insecure it was -- that anyone with minor coding knowledge could extract their password from the registry. They said that wasn't possible... wrong thing to say to a computer geek.
It took me all of 10 minutes to download the source code to WinVNC and implement the password decoding code into a nice little command line app... and BAM -- I was able to take control of any computer (including administrative computers) on campus because they were foolish enough to use the same password on every install class.
All this to say that you should NOT trust the school's IT department with too much control. The potential for abuse is too high. You don't know who's got access to the ability to manipulate YOUR machine.
iRobot has had this model and variations out for several years. It's been in military use since before Afganistan, though it saw its heaviest use there.
If you're speaking of Adrian Lamo, you're correct. He's found and reported holes in New York Times, WorldCom, and quite a few others.
I had the privilege of meeting Adrian a few weeks ago while he was in Philadelphia to speak at a convention. He knew a friend of mine, and my friend brough him over to my house.
>If you want more info on him, simply head to Google and search for Adrian Lamo.
There is a lot of controversy surrounding him, and the New York Times is still considering taking him to court. Is this adviser even aware of these types of situations? Who knows.
Re:American revolution wasn't exactly "legal" eith
on
RIAA Smacked by DoS
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is actually an incredibly interesting way of looking at the situation. While the war for independence itself was perfectly "legal" as far as things go, the initial revolts did not fit within the framework of then ruling government laws. The tea party was done as a sign of direct protest against the ridiculous taxes and excises being collected, so the people attacked an icon of the grievance.
However, this was done after several attempts to smooth things over employing legal methods. Have we done this yet? People are calling for us to contact our congressmen... have we? As citizens, we must follow the established legal means first, then pursue other possibilities only if those channels were unrightfully blocked. Yes, even if we try the legal ways, and it doesn't accomplish our goals, it still doesn't give us to right to illegally protest. Only when our right to legally protest is infringed can we in good conscience use other methods.
The DoS is an example of knee-jerk, immature reactions that come from people who don't oppose this legislation due to it's possible implications and precedents, but rather because they want to continue in their illegal activities... which is wrong.
Quite frankly, I'm in the category that immediately responds with, "Why are they making it look like Windows?"
But seriously... so what? I mean, beside all the other possible issues with this distro and others, why is its aesthetic similarities to another OS a factor worthy of deciding whether or not it is a viable distro?
So many Linux users (including myself) use Linux because they want to do things their way. I bet you could change icons if you wanted to. So, when people who want to do it "their way" start complaining about the defaults, it's a contradiction. "Your way" then becomes "KDE's way" or "GNOME's way" -- not Your way.
Yes, it's just appearance, but I'm tired of the religious devotion to being as dissimilar to Windows as possible instead of honest focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and pliability of an Operating System.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my favorite that really impacted that way I developed web sites: "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.
I've used both Joomla (1 and 1.5) and Drupal (5) extensively in multiple projects, personally and professionaly. Hands down, Drupal is more powerful, better thought-out, and sports an excellent community and community-contributed content.
That's not to say Joomla is bad -- in fact, it's very good, and like you said, 1.5 could bring a revolution in CMS = Framework -- but many of the advances 1.5 will make have already been realized in Drupal 5.
In addition, the shear number of extensions for Drupal combined with the relative ease of developing modules for it put it ahead of Joomla squarely in my book.
I run Fedora Core 6 with Gnome/Beryl, and I have yet to have ANY problems with Beryl on my new machine -- and the effects don't even tax the CPU, unlike the other OSes.
I work in the IT department of a University. We probably won't start rolling out Vista until we have to, since we have things fairly stable right now and the re-training for some people complicates the issue. We have plans to get some Vista machines in the IT department purely for the reason of support for students and preparation for migration a year or more in the future.
Each area/building controller should have a battery backup. That's what we do with dedicated wiring from the controllers to the readers and controllers to the server, which is also batter backup. Will last for several hours, by which point either power is usually on, or we have people on the ground controlling access.
I'm a security manager at a University in the states. We're moving more and more toward electronic access control for many of the reasons you state. As always, they wanted us to do it on a budget, but I feel we've managed to install a respectable system.
We use a product of a GE child company called IdentiCard. It's a low proximity system that will do just about anything you would like it to do. To activate a reader, you must hold a card within a few inches of the reader. The typical cards store only a uniqe number that is associated with a user account in the backend. There are also smart-card variations available that work with the system (there are several smartcard programming features in the control software). Making the cards is as simple as printing the card design, assigning the card to a user, then running it through a laminator (takes a long time if you've got to make several hundred or even thousand).
The backend of the system consists of an SQL database of users, cards, access groups, reader groups, etc. The physical system consists basically of readers, the data cables, per-building (or per-area) controllers which connect to the readers, then the cabling back to the primary server in our IT department. The cable they ran seems to be some proprietary bundle of wires, but they claim they can even do things like video integration and whatnot with it.
The only thing I have not liked about the system is that each user may be assigned only 3 access groups. While an efficient and well-managed access control policy deals with this just fine, it requires you to think ahead on what access groups you want. But then, you can also define as many groups as you want, you just can't assign more than three to any single user.
Identicard Home Page: http://www.identicard.com/
I worked at the Best Buy Tech Bench just before they bought Geek Squad. It was another case as described above where I was one of the three among a larger group of Techs who 1) Actually knew what I was doing, and 2) Cared about helping customers.
I absolutely hated the pressure I got from the management to lie to customers to trick them into spending more money. My bosses would literally yell at me if I fixed a computer when they believed the customer was prepared to spend more money. Eventually, if I could fix a computer in a few minutes, I wouldn't charge people and just fixed their computer and rushed them out of the store.
I eventually quit. When they asked why, I said, "To seek an employer who understands what it is to be professional." I don't hate Best Buy (roommate works there and I shop there regularly), and I don't believe every store is like that. However, I know that many of the guys I worked with 4 years ago still work there, and are still doing the same thing. It's just a shame.
It's offensive that you connected my implication with prejudice. Consider that I know the parties involved.
I met Adrian a couple times while he was intimately "involved" with a homosexual friend of mine. I'm wondering if there isn't something about his blood he'd rather not have known.
... Pr0n for the blind
If you take a moment to remove the tinfoil hat and take a look at what Lucas has done... I'd say he deserves it. His methods as far as hollywood politics alone revolutionized the industry of movie-making.
Beside that, he's led development of some of the best industry departments and standards out there. He was largely responsible for Pixar!
So before you're too quick to bash him for the obvious blunders he's had, at least have the fairness to recognize what he has really done well.
I wasn't aware Windows Update was third-party software...?
My brother had strapped a cheap digital camera to a remote control airplane and took some pictures. Simply incredible what he did with that. He also got some great crash footage that was priceless. :)
Yeah, from what I understand this story was submitted more than one time, once by myself.
Your message needs to be modded up for people to see!
When I arrived on campus to my school my freshman year, they required a series of programs installed on all computers. I was fine with it because they said they were installing network access stuff and anti-virus. Okay. Fine. But then also happened to install a little gooddie known as WinVNC. I'm at a school with no computer majors available, so I'm one of the very few people in the population who realized what this was. I immediately disabled WinVNC on my computers and on every box I worked on (students to this day ask me to help them before asking IT, because they're so ridiculously condescending). Turns out they tried to connect to my computer via VNC and couldn't, so they disconnected my internet access. When they asked why I disabled it, I told them because of how insecure it was -- that anyone with minor coding knowledge could extract their password from the registry. They said that wasn't possible... wrong thing to say to a computer geek. It took me all of 10 minutes to download the source code to WinVNC and implement the password decoding code into a nice little command line app... and BAM -- I was able to take control of any computer (including administrative computers) on campus because they were foolish enough to use the same password on every install class. All this to say that you should NOT trust the school's IT department with too much control. The potential for abuse is too high. You don't know who's got access to the ability to manipulate YOUR machine.
iRobot has had this model and variations out for several years. It's been in military use since before Afganistan, though it saw its heaviest use there.
Do they really think they can fix hatred by telling people they shouldn't talk about it on the internet?
Read the article. The data is encrypted except for what's cached.
If you're speaking of Adrian Lamo, you're correct. He's found and reported holes in New York Times, WorldCom, and quite a few others.
I had the privilege of meeting Adrian a few weeks ago while he was in Philadelphia to speak at a convention. He knew a friend of mine, and my friend brough him over to my house.
>If you want more info on him, simply head to Google and search for Adrian Lamo.
There is a lot of controversy surrounding him, and the New York Times is still considering taking him to court. Is this adviser even aware of these types of situations? Who knows.
This is actually an incredibly interesting way of looking at the situation. While the war for independence itself was perfectly "legal" as far as things go, the initial revolts did not fit within the framework of then ruling government laws. The tea party was done as a sign of direct protest against the ridiculous taxes and excises being collected, so the people attacked an icon of the grievance.
However, this was done after several attempts to smooth things over employing legal methods. Have we done this yet? People are calling for us to contact our congressmen... have we? As citizens, we must follow the established legal means first, then pursue other possibilities only if those channels were unrightfully blocked. Yes, even if we try the legal ways, and it doesn't accomplish our goals, it still doesn't give us to right to illegally protest. Only when our right to legally protest is infringed can we in good conscience use other methods.
The DoS is an example of knee-jerk, immature reactions that come from people who don't oppose this legislation due to it's possible implications and precedents, but rather because they want to continue in their illegal activities... which is wrong.
Quite frankly, I'm in the category that immediately responds with, "Why are they making it look like Windows?" But seriously... so what? I mean, beside all the other possible issues with this distro and others, why is its aesthetic similarities to another OS a factor worthy of deciding whether or not it is a viable distro? So many Linux users (including myself) use Linux because they want to do things their way. I bet you could change icons if you wanted to. So, when people who want to do it "their way" start complaining about the defaults, it's a contradiction. "Your way" then becomes "KDE's way" or "GNOME's way" -- not Your way. Yes, it's just appearance, but I'm tired of the religious devotion to being as dissimilar to Windows as possible instead of honest focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and pliability of an Operating System.