Verizon Wireless refused to give me a cell phone plan untill I gave them my SSN. Looking back, I guess I could have told them that I wasn't a citizen and therefore didn't have an SSN, but that would be lying on a contract which isn't so hot either.
I just started using Mozilla Firebird with the AdBlock extention. It is incredible. In addition to no popups, adding a few simple filters to AdBlock such as:
removes something like 99% of all banner ads and keeps all of the content images. It is just an amazing experience to visit, say the NYTimes site, without ANY blinking/flashing gifs or Flash adverts. Its like a whole new internet.
Actually its local municipality building code in PA. My parents live in Frankfort Township, Cumberland County and don't have to have a fence (its rural and the nearest neigbor is 1/2 mile away), while the adjoining townships mandate fences around pools in their building codes.
In addition to being availible for Linux, this game also looks really cool! I'm an avid fan of BF1942, but the one thing that could really improve that game is Savage's commander role, allowing changing global strategy to be communicated to the troops on the ground. Its always funny how all the players will leave a flag just after it's captured to go take another without leaving any defenders. Sad.
Well, X11 takes all of 30seconds and two clicks to install in OSX. I use it all the time to run my *NIX apps. I haven't tried Tux racer or any games, but I assume that they would work.
What was really getting me when I read headline is "How do you supe up your database?".
My development group is setting up to do some load testing on several DBs right now. The contestants are MySQL, Oracle, and Postgresql. I think we're going to run them all stock though.:P
Re:Yes, It's Worth It.
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
agree whole-heartedly. During the past 12 months I've taken off about 9 weeks. How?
Well, first of all, some admissions: 1.I'm several years out of college with no kids to support. 2.See number 1.
Aside from the above, what I have done is made my life more important than my work. I live simply and happily on what would be peanuts for many. Basically all of my income is spent on food and rent. That's about it. I get a little gear (kayaking/computer/etc), but not too much. Part of this was forced upon me by my employer (a college) not having the funds to hire me full-time. This I found, is a blessing. It forced me to only work 30 hours per week at somewhat low wages. I spend my working hours developing open-source web-applications for putting course materials online. This work is incredibly fulfilling (as open-source development can be) and I put extreme effort into it. However, I have also made it known to my [understanding] superiors, that since they don't pay me well for the amount that I do for them, that I'll take off when I please, and do great work when I am there.
This has led to a situation in which both my productivity and happiness are maximized. I work an average of 30-35 hours per week. Since I am free to take off whenever I please (to go kayaking, travel, or just sleep in) and work late to make up the time if necessary, I don't resent my job. As I don't resent it and can sleep in if needed, I can tackle my projects with gusto and drive, without burning out. I wish for the sake of others (and myself in future employment) that more employers would realize that if they give more freedom to their workers that many will be more functional and better performing. This is not to say that some won't take advantage of their freedoms, but most won't.
As an example, look at academia. In most colleges and universities around the world, faculty (and many staff such as myself) work VERY lenient hours for average pay. Now, those with the most flexibility in their work, the faculty, generally have the greatest output of work. Most professors I know publish many articles, do much research, and teach many classes, all while having the freedom to work when they feel like it (meetings and scheduled classes aside). Basically, they don't slack - but they are happy and able to enjoy life. Granted, at this level you have "had to prove your passion" via graduate school, but so have many in the commercial sector. I guess basically what I am trying to get at is that one's benefit to an employer is not strictly tied to the number of hours that they put in. Many friends in commercial software development have basically followed the Office Space mantra of "Just Spacing Out" because they hate how their jobs take over their lives. My coworkers and I don't do this because we are given the freedom to work when and as we see fit - and we do a LOT of QUALITY work willingly because of this.
An article about this same technology has been posted this morning. The Helios Plane by NASA uses electrolysis to separate water and provide energy storage for its self. In this case, the Hydrogen/Oxygen/Water system is a close loop for temporary (over-night) energy storage, but the loop could be opened for fuel production for other uses.
So, all we need is electricity. Solar cells are one of our technologies that is particularly good at generating electricity without having to do much more than set them in the sun.
On a more interesting note, I was recently talking to a chemist-friend at Northwestern University who was telling me that one of the other research groups there was working on catalysts for solar photocatalytic hydrogen production. Basically the idea is to introduce a catalyst into water that will cause hydrogen to be released when the mixture is bombarded with photons (light). Apparently hydrogen is being separated this way (in research labs), but the process isn't efficient enough yet to make it worthwhile for production purposes.
You can run IRAF on OS X as of this spring. Actually, I am thinking of setting up an openMOSIX cluster (with ClusterKnoppix) for an astronomer friend to run IRAF on. She has several image processing scripts (assembling surveys of the Small and Large Magellenic Clouds) that take 2-5 days each to run. As modern computers seem to always be more than powerful enough for every task, its cool to find an application where they are still quite hampered. I figured it would be fun to try tossing 10-20 1.8GHz Athelon machines together and seeing if they could reduce the computing time. This is something that I can't do in OS X, though I'd probably be SSHing to it from OS X to monitor the load balancing. It is kind of a moot point though, as who has 10-20 1.5+GHz Macs laying about? Anyway, the spurt in PC performace has really made PCs viable as low-end servers.
Unless Apple does someting drastic with their product (and everything else being relatively the same), e.g. offer it on x86, open-source much of it, etc. I don't see how Apple's market share changing significantly.
Quite a good point. Apple's blessing and curse is that its profits are tied to hardware. This is a blessing as they have an incredibly beautiful OS that causes windows and *nix users to go out and buy one. I have an ex-windows-now-Linux/BSD PC at home and code on a G3 with 3 monitors at work (3840x1024 pixels (-: ). I must say that I vastly prefer OSX. Almost everything I have running on my Linux box I can run on OS X. Everything else, I install on the linux box, then pipe X through ssh to X11 on OSX. The apps run off of the powerful x86 box, but apear on my Mac. Wonderful!
Their tie to their beautiful-if-slow hardware is also Apple's Achilles' heel. Since most people can't afford $2,000 for a new computer (or see it as a waste of money), OS X will never have the market share nessisary to get application developers to code natively for the OS. Luckily, with OS X you can run most any *nix app with the CLI or X11, so this is less of a problem, but it is still the thing that is holding back Apple the most. For instance, check out RedVsBlue's Apple Switch parody -- quite funny and true. The total, utter void of wicked-cool 3D games for the Mac is really crap. However, unless they get --or have the potential for-- significant market share no one is going to waste time writing apps for them.
Hopefully, OS X's ability to run most *nix apps and X11 will enable it to ride along on the wave created by Linux and keep its niche market without too much loss. While many of Apple's practices are not all that friendly (their monitor and speaker plugs, for instance), homoganization of computing is definately a bad thing and Apple does have a place. Horay for a less-Micro$haft future!
Of the bands listed in the article, Radiohead is the only one who consistantly puts out albums as a "coherent work of art". All of their albums (at least since the Bends in 1995) have had a very definate theme that pervades all of the tracks on each album. Sort of equivallent to a symphony: most people only any one movement to any of Beathoven's symphonies, but whole symphony is really nessisary to apreciate the work.
Now I'm not saying that I should be prevented from downloading just one Radiohead song, -- they're quite helpful for seeing if the album is worth getting -- but Radiohead is somewhat justified in trying to keep their albums together as a single-work.
The advent of digital distribution could be a great thing for music in general. Pop-stars that only put out one hit per album can sell many more copies of that hit at $0.99 since customers won't have to balk at paying $17 for one song. Groups that really do put together coherent albums (of arbitrary length) can price those "artistic units" acordingly. Pretty much everybody wins. No more crap filler that is or needs to be produced.
4 results for IE 1 result for lynx 1 for Netscape Netcenter 0 for Mozilla 0 for Opera
My favorite result that beat out Opera and Mozilla for the front page: "SPIN Web Browser Download a graphic Web browser for MS-DOS. Supports about 80 percent of the most common HTML codes."
Now that is an important search result!
The MSN page on Linux is quite informative about Linux. No, really, it is. Trust me. Really, quite informative. Really.
While I get what "slashd^H^H^H^H^H^H linux" is implying, I have recently been wondering where this whole ^H^H^H^H stuff comes from. It was resonably hard to find via google search -- I could only find it in a German slang dictionary -- but I discovered that ^H stands for "ControlKey + HKey" or backspace.
Sortof a textual restatment thang. Quite cool really. I hope this helps any other confused souls not-in-the-loop.
Several articles that I have read recently on wind power have stated that the current generation of turbines don't produce much noise at all. The American Wind Energy Association says that the noise level from a wind turbine at 250ft is 45DB -- about the same as a refridgerator. This is significantly less than the 150DB output of a jet airplane. An airport is several THOUSAND times louder than a wind farm.
For those that "may try this at home" (like the article): which parts can hurt you are those which are plugged in (or any high V capcitors). To be safe stick to the following guidelines:
1. Unplug it! Keeping a grounding wire connected is cool if you don't want to damage you or sensitive parts, but if the thing isn't plugged in, it can't send 5 amps through you.
2. Use one hand All of the good (and alive) electricians I know tuck one hand into their pocket/coat while working. This provents current from traveling accross your chest (and heart) on its way to ground. I have one electrician friend who was trapped (hanging from the ceiling by an arm stuck in an electrical conduit) while 220V AC ran from his fingers to his shoulder. He is alive today because current didn't pass through his chest.
I for one find those glowing/popping icons to be one of the greatest UI enhancements in a long time. As one of the previous posts mentioned, one of the big problems is having a flat interface space that doesn't change with the users needs. The glowing/popping icon thing (ala OS X) allows me to have a crap-load (yes, a technical term) of little dinky icons along the bottom of the screen for all of the GUI programs that I will ever need. by putting my mouse in the general viscinity of the application I'm looking for (I have my icons carefully arranged according to function), I get to "zoom in" on the functionality that I need. Unlike that annoying MS menu-item-hidding "function"/bug, this lets me generally see what options I have, but only tease out and find the specifics when I need them, without having to traverse through a whole bunch of menus. The "old computers" I'm finding for free these days are all at least 500MHz, plenty fast for running a WM that can let me find what I need quickly and easily and handle what some here are calling bloat.
Well, instead of a big national bank, I have been using a really nice local one, the National Bank of Middlebury. They "recommend using either Netscape Navigator TM (version 5.0 or higher) or Microsoft Internet Explorer TM (version 5.0 or higher) to access Online Banking." (Listing Netscape FIRST! -- although probably just a coincidence).
In addition to allowing me to use a decent browser, they also allow me to choose a greater than 6 digit letter/number (I haven't tried upper-ASCII) password. Too often with online banking and credit card services they make a big deal about 128-bit encryption, but only let you choose a 4-digit numerical pin. It would take me a few weeks, but I could crack that by typing the numbers by hand. This, more than an insecure browser/server connection scares me the most.
On a sort-of-off-topic side note, small local banks can be really nice (as long as they are FDIC covered). I've even gotten a call when I made some large withdrawels that were out of norm for me. Its just nice to know that you have real people and not just computers in some datacenter in another state involved in keeping your finances safe and secure. Plus, it keeps my business in the local economy.
Re:I really want to understand...
on
ClusterKnoppix
·
· Score: 1
Well, I use Knoppix whenever I am away from home and want to run X apps (such as my mail client, keeping my mail on my home machine) via ssh. I actually use this a lot, like 3 times in the past month.
As for ClusterKnoppix, well hmm... Here are several things I've come up with:
1. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do this, but I'd love to be able to turn my home network with several multi-GHz machines into a distributed DivX encoding machine.
2. Along the same lines: Instant render-farm for my home kayaking movies.
3. Want to set up a computer lab real quick and easy? I'm sure that there are lots of situations where throwing up a lab in 1/2 hour could be very useful.
4. A way to test hardware quickly: just boot from network, run diagnostics, move on to the next machine.
5. Have the moon. Ok, well, the best part of this is that you can "easily" remake the image so that it will have any additional functionality that you want. If you think of something that this almost works for, you are free to make it work.
There was a nice comment from an AC buried down there, but I didn't have any mod points, so I'll just link to it: The Programing Competition Use
A full reinstall risks loss of data. One example is your email.
This is one of my favorite parts about *nix. Just back up your home directory and you can have all of you user data/settings in place and ready to use.
Hell, it even works when changing operating systems. Last summer I went from Debian to Red Hat, and just pointed the new OS to my home directory (on another drive). All of my KDE settings, wallpapers, mozilla & evolution mail and settins were all right there in the clean OS install. Nothing to "customize" except for system settings/software.
I want to get my list of updates, select all, click one thing to get them installed, then walk away for a few minutes.
Try apt for RedHat from FreshRPMs. It is a completely painless install for apt. From then on just do: # apt-get update # apt-get dist-upgrade
Come back in about 2 min if you are on broadband and your system will be up-to-date. If you want a GUI, just do: # apt-get install synaptic to get the great Synaptic GUI.
Since installing apt/synaptic 6 months ago, I have yet to manually (or using any other manager) install any RPMs on my RedHat 8.0 machine.
Plus, with Synaptic, when you do the dist-upgrade it shows you what packages will be installed. If there are any that you don't want to upgrade, you can easily deselect them. It seems pretty perfect to me.
While thinking about it, I just did an upgrade and updated 48 packages (out of 1662 currently availible). Quite easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Wireless refused to give me a cell phone plan untill I gave them my SSN. Looking back, I guess I could have told them that I wasn't a citizen and therefore didn't have an SSN, but that would be lying on a contract which isn't so hot either.
I just started using Mozilla Firebird with the AdBlock extention. It is incredible. In addition to no popups, adding a few simple filters to AdBlock such as:
a dv/*
*/ad.*
*/ad/*
*/ads/*
*/adx/*
*adserver*
*
*doubleclick*
removes something like 99% of all banner ads and keeps all of the content images. It is just an amazing experience to visit, say the NYTimes site, without ANY blinking/flashing gifs or Flash adverts. Its like a whole new internet.
Here was me thinking we were all a scattered world-wide community. I guess I'm the only one here that isn't employed by IBM.
Actually its local municipality building code in PA. My parents live in Frankfort Township, Cumberland County and don't have to have a fence (its rural and the nearest neigbor is 1/2 mile away), while the adjoining townships mandate fences around pools in their building codes.
I'm ordering it now. :P
In addition to being availible for Linux, this game also looks really cool! I'm an avid fan of BF1942, but the one thing that could really improve that game is Savage's commander role, allowing changing global strategy to be communicated to the troops on the ground. Its always funny how all the players will leave a flag just after it's captured to go take another without leaving any defenders. Sad.
Well, X11 takes all of 30seconds and two clicks to install in OSX. I use it all the time to run my *NIX apps. I haven't tried Tux racer or any games, but I assume that they would work.
What was really getting me when I read headline is "How do you supe up your database?".
:P
My development group is setting up to do some load testing on several DBs right now. The contestants are MySQL, Oracle, and Postgresql. I think we're going to run them all stock though.
agree whole-heartedly. During the past 12 months I've taken off about 9 weeks. How?
Well, first of all, some admissions:
1.I'm several years out of college with no kids to support.
2.See number 1.
Aside from the above, what I have done is made my life more important than my work. I live simply and happily on what would be peanuts for many. Basically all of my income is spent on food and rent. That's about it. I get a little gear (kayaking/computer/etc), but not too much. Part of this was forced upon me by my employer (a college) not having the funds to hire me full-time. This I found, is a blessing. It forced me to only work 30 hours per week at somewhat low wages. I spend my working hours developing open-source web-applications for putting course materials online. This work is incredibly fulfilling (as open-source development can be) and I put extreme effort into it. However, I have also made it known to my [understanding] superiors, that since they don't pay me well for the amount that I do for them, that I'll take off when I please, and do great work when I am there.
This has led to a situation in which both my productivity and happiness are maximized. I work an average of 30-35 hours per week. Since I am free to take off whenever I please (to go kayaking, travel, or just sleep in) and work late to make up the time if necessary, I don't resent my job. As I don't resent it and can sleep in if needed, I can tackle my projects with gusto and drive, without burning out. I wish for the sake of others (and myself in future employment) that more employers would realize that if they give more freedom to their workers that many will be more functional and better performing. This is not to say that some won't take advantage of their freedoms, but most won't.
As an example, look at academia. In most colleges and universities around the world, faculty (and many staff such as myself) work VERY lenient hours for average pay. Now, those with the most flexibility in their work, the faculty, generally have the greatest output of work. Most professors I know publish many articles, do much research, and teach many classes, all while having the freedom to work when they feel like it (meetings and scheduled classes aside). Basically, they don't slack - but they are happy and able to enjoy life. Granted, at this level you have "had to prove your passion" via graduate school, but so have many in the commercial sector. I guess basically what I am trying to get at is that one's benefit to an employer is not strictly tied to the number of hours that they put in. Many friends in commercial software development have basically followed the Office Space mantra of "Just Spacing Out" because they hate how their jobs take over their lives. My coworkers and I don't do this because we are given the freedom to work when and as we see fit - and we do a LOT of QUALITY work willingly because of this.
An article about this same technology has been posted this morning. The Helios Plane by NASA uses electrolysis to separate water and provide energy storage for its self. In this case, the Hydrogen/Oxygen/Water system is a close loop for temporary (over-night) energy storage, but the loop could be opened for fuel production for other uses.
Well, highschool chemestry classes will show you that all you need to perform electrolysis (separating Hydrogen and Oxygen in water) is electricity.
Here's an explanation.
So, all we need is electricity. Solar cells are one of our technologies that is particularly good at generating electricity without having to do much more than set them in the sun.
On a more interesting note, I was recently talking to a chemist-friend at Northwestern University who was telling me that one of the other research groups there was working on catalysts for solar photocatalytic hydrogen production. Basically the idea is to introduce a catalyst into water that will cause hydrogen to be released when the mixture is bombarded with photons (light). Apparently hydrogen is being separated this way (in research labs), but the process isn't efficient enough yet to make it worthwhile for production purposes.
I just found a page from the Florida Solar Energy Center listing many forms of solar hydrogen production research projects at the center.
1. Run a Beowulf Cluster.
2. Run a MOSIX Cluster.
You can run IRAF on OS X as of this spring. Actually, I am thinking of setting up an openMOSIX cluster (with ClusterKnoppix) for an astronomer friend to run IRAF on. She has several image processing scripts (assembling surveys of the Small and Large Magellenic Clouds) that take 2-5 days each to run. As modern computers seem to always be more than powerful enough for every task, its cool to find an application where they are still quite hampered. I figured it would be fun to try tossing 10-20 1.8GHz Athelon machines together and seeing if they could reduce the computing time. This is something that I can't do in OS X, though I'd probably be SSHing to it from OS X to monitor the load balancing. It is kind of a moot point though, as who has 10-20 1.5+GHz Macs laying about? Anyway, the spurt in PC performace has really made PCs viable as low-end servers.
Unless Apple does someting drastic with their product (and everything else being relatively the same), e.g. offer it on x86, open-source much of it, etc. I don't see how Apple's market share changing significantly.
Quite a good point. Apple's blessing and curse is that its profits are tied to hardware. This is a blessing as they have an incredibly beautiful OS that causes windows and *nix users to go out and buy one. I have an ex-windows-now-Linux/BSD PC at home and code on a G3 with 3 monitors at work (3840x1024 pixels (-: ). I must say that I vastly prefer OSX. Almost everything I have running on my Linux box I can run on OS X. Everything else, I install on the linux box, then pipe X through ssh to X11 on OSX. The apps run off of the powerful x86 box, but apear on my Mac. Wonderful!
Their tie to their beautiful-if-slow hardware is also Apple's Achilles' heel. Since most people can't afford $2,000 for a new computer (or see it as a waste of money), OS X will never have the market share nessisary to get application developers to code natively for the OS. Luckily, with OS X you can run most any *nix app with the CLI or X11, so this is less of a problem, but it is still the thing that is holding back Apple the most. For instance, check out RedVsBlue's Apple Switch parody -- quite funny and true. The total, utter void of wicked-cool 3D games for the Mac is really crap. However, unless they get --or have the potential for-- significant market share no one is going to waste time writing apps for them.
Hopefully, OS X's ability to run most *nix apps and X11 will enable it to ride along on the wave created by Linux and keep its niche market without too much loss. While many of Apple's practices are not all that friendly (their monitor and speaker plugs, for instance), homoganization of computing is definately a bad thing and Apple does have a place. Horay for a less-Micro$haft future!
Of the bands listed in the article, Radiohead is the only one who consistantly puts out albums as a "coherent work of art". All of their albums (at least since the Bends in 1995) have had a very definate theme that pervades all of the tracks on each album. Sort of equivallent to a symphony: most people only any one movement to any of Beathoven's symphonies, but whole symphony is really nessisary to apreciate the work.
Now I'm not saying that I should be prevented from downloading just one Radiohead song, -- they're quite helpful for seeing if the album is worth getting -- but Radiohead is somewhat justified in trying to keep their albums together as a single-work.
The advent of digital distribution could be a great thing for music in general. Pop-stars that only put out one hit per album can sell many more copies of that hit at $0.99 since customers won't have to balk at paying $17 for one song. Groups that really do put together coherent albums (of arbitrary length) can price those "artistic units" acordingly. Pretty much everybody wins. No more crap filler that is or needs to be produced.
Yeah, searching for "Browser" on MSN returns
4 results for IE
1 result for lynx
1 for Netscape Netcenter
0 for Mozilla
0 for Opera
My favorite result that beat out Opera and Mozilla for the front page:
"SPIN Web Browser
Download a graphic Web browser for MS-DOS. Supports about 80 percent of the most common HTML codes."
Now that is an important search result!
The MSN page on Linux is quite informative about Linux. No, really, it is. Trust me. Really, quite informative. Really.
While I get what "slashd^H^H^H^H^H^H linux" is implying, I have recently been wondering where this whole ^H^H^H^H stuff comes from. It was resonably hard to find via google search -- I could only find it in a German slang dictionary -- but I discovered that ^H stands for "ControlKey + HKey" or backspace.
Sortof a textual restatment thang. Quite cool really. I hope this helps any other confused souls not-in-the-loop.
Guard: What, a Penguin?
King: Yes.
Guard: Penguins are Antarctic, this is an Arctic zone.
King: The albatros may fly south with the sun, and the pellican, yet these are no strangers to our land.
Guard: Are you suggesting that Penguins can mig-ar-rate?
Guard2: What about Gentoo Penguin?
Guard: A Gentoo Penguin may-bee, but not an Emperor Penguin, that's my point.
King: Please bring me the lawyer of your Lord an Master!
Guard2: It could grep it by the husk.
Guard: Its a simple question of code ratios, a 10 pound bird can easily eat a 5oz fish.
Guard2: What if two penguins carried it on a line?
King: Will you please answer my cease and dissist orders!
Guard: What? Held bennieth the dorsal guidence feathers?
Guard2: No, the........
--
ok, so I butchered the analogy a little...
All Your [code] Base Are Belong To Us!!!
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Several articles that I have read recently on wind power have stated that the current generation of turbines don't produce much noise at all. The American Wind Energy Association says that the noise level from a wind turbine at 250ft is 45DB -- about the same as a refridgerator. This is significantly less than the 150DB output of a jet airplane. An airport is several THOUSAND times louder than a wind farm.
For those that "may try this at home" (like the article): which parts can hurt you are those which are plugged in (or any high V capcitors). To be safe stick to the following guidelines:
1. Unplug it! Keeping a grounding wire connected is cool if you don't want to damage you or sensitive parts, but if the thing isn't plugged in, it can't send 5 amps through you.
2. Use one hand All of the good (and alive) electricians I know tuck one hand into their pocket/coat while working. This provents current from traveling accross your chest (and heart) on its way to ground. I have one electrician friend who was trapped (hanging from the ceiling by an arm stuck in an electrical conduit) while 220V AC ran from his fingers to his shoulder. He is alive today because current didn't pass through his chest.
3. Re-Read #1
I for one find those glowing/popping icons to be one of the greatest UI enhancements in a long time. As one of the previous posts mentioned, one of the big problems is having a flat interface space that doesn't change with the users needs. The glowing/popping icon thing (ala OS X) allows me to have a crap-load (yes, a technical term) of little dinky icons along the bottom of the screen for all of the GUI programs that I will ever need. by putting my mouse in the general viscinity of the application I'm looking for (I have my icons carefully arranged according to function), I get to "zoom in" on the functionality that I need. Unlike that annoying MS menu-item-hidding "function"/bug, this lets me generally see what options I have, but only tease out and find the specifics when I need them, without having to traverse through a whole bunch of menus. The "old computers" I'm finding for free these days are all at least 500MHz, plenty fast for running a WM that can let me find what I need quickly and easily and handle what some here are calling bloat.
Well, instead of a big national bank, I have been using a really nice local one, the National Bank of Middlebury. They "recommend using either Netscape Navigator TM (version 5.0 or higher) or Microsoft Internet Explorer TM (version 5.0 or higher) to access Online Banking." (Listing Netscape FIRST! -- although probably just a coincidence).
In addition to allowing me to use a decent browser, they also allow me to choose a greater than 6 digit letter/number (I haven't tried upper-ASCII) password. Too often with online banking and credit card services they make a big deal about 128-bit encryption, but only let you choose a 4-digit numerical pin. It would take me a few weeks, but I could crack that by typing the numbers by hand. This, more than an insecure browser/server connection scares me the most.
On a sort-of-off-topic side note, small local banks can be really nice (as long as they are FDIC covered). I've even gotten a call when I made some large withdrawels that were out of norm for me. Its just nice to know that you have real people and not just computers in some datacenter in another state involved in keeping your finances safe and secure. Plus, it keeps my business in the local economy.
Well, I use Knoppix whenever I am away from home and want to run X apps (such as my mail client, keeping my mail on my home machine) via ssh. I actually use this a lot, like 3 times in the past month.
As for ClusterKnoppix, well hmm... Here are several things I've come up with:
1. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to do this, but I'd love to be able to turn my home network with several multi-GHz machines into a distributed DivX encoding machine.
2. Along the same lines: Instant render-farm for my home kayaking movies.
3. Want to set up a computer lab real quick and easy? I'm sure that there are lots of situations where throwing up a lab in 1/2 hour could be very useful.
4. A way to test hardware quickly: just boot from network, run diagnostics, move on to the next machine.
5. Have the moon. Ok, well, the best part of this is that you can "easily" remake the image so that it will have any additional functionality that you want. If you think of something that this almost works for, you are free to make it work.
There was a nice comment from an AC buried down there, but I didn't have any mod points, so I'll just link to it: The Programing Competition Use
A full reinstall risks loss of data. One example is your email.
This is one of my favorite parts about *nix. Just back up your home directory and you can have all of you user data/settings in place and ready to use.
Hell, it even works when changing operating systems. Last summer I went from Debian to Red Hat, and just pointed the new OS to my home directory (on another drive). All of my KDE settings, wallpapers, mozilla & evolution mail and settins were all right there in the clean OS install. Nothing to "customize" except for system settings/software.
I'm reading this with lynx so that it looks like I'm working. My boss has learned to recognize those green bars a bit too well.
;-)
I want to get my list of updates, select all, click one thing to get them installed, then walk away for a few minutes.
Try apt for RedHat from FreshRPMs. It is a completely painless install for apt. From then on just do:
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
Come back in about 2 min if you are on broadband and your system will be up-to-date. If you want a GUI, just do:
# apt-get install synaptic
to get the great Synaptic GUI.
Since installing apt/synaptic 6 months ago, I have yet to manually (or using any other manager) install any RPMs on my RedHat 8.0 machine.
Plus, with Synaptic, when you do the dist-upgrade it shows you what packages will be installed. If there are any that you don't want to upgrade, you can easily deselect them. It seems pretty perfect to me.
While thinking about it, I just did an upgrade and updated 48 packages (out of 1662 currently availible). Quite easy.