I'm not talking about a subscription. I want to update when I want to update, and I want to pay $30 for an entire automatic system upgrade.
Several of the previous posts have mentioned a shortage of local Linux suport. This could be a great opportunity for any un/under-employed slashdotters. Put up flyers and such advertizing your services doing Linux installs and maintenence. Not a terrible line of work, and there seems to be a demand.
This past week the university that I work for has been the victim of an internal denial of service attack that may be related. From what I can gather, our sysadmins have traced the problem to some sort of irc virus/worm that is using student's computers to participate in a DDOS attack. The compromised computers were spoofing random ip adresses and (from what I heard) trying to hit SCO. These have all been stopped by our firewall, but they had been causing trouble with said firewall all week.
I don't have conformation that they were trying to hit SCO, but this headline jibes.
I realize this may be seen as a nieve question, but is it possible to make userland drivers? I.e. you start a program that talks to the AGP port (the AGP interface code would have to be GPL), but can send signals through it from a binary/proprietary program to the hardware.
Is this possible, or do drivers _have_ to be in the kernel some how. If someone could explain this it would be really helpful to those of us who aren't kernel hackers. Thanks.
We are talking about subtle cross browser, cross platform, cross version, even cross language bugs.
Actually, these sorts of things pop up really quickly with the open source approach since everyone and their brother has their browser set up with different plugins, etc. I just came accross some interesting bugs in the OS CMS I develope at work when trying to look up info in it from lynx when I installed bad video card drivers. We weren't designing it to work with text browsers, but it does now thanks to that unplanned for test.
Granted, I'm a developer and would have access to the source anyway, but I probably wouldn't be running it on my own webserver then. Or maybe I would; how does that sort of thing work in the proprietary world?
I imagine that this will not be "enforced" so much as used as the charge in court when people complain about a spammer.
If I may provide an example: J. Random Person is fed up with spam from the infamous Mr. Rawlsky. In order to combat this, J. signs up with the "Do Not Spam" list.
Several months go by to allow Mr. Ralsky time to get the list and remove addresses from it. However, Mr. Ralsky doesn't remove J.'s email address and J. (after some careful tracking with his anti-spam breathren) forwards his email to the FTC. Mr. Ralsky is screwed.
Granted, this only works if you can trace the identity of a spammer, but at least now there can be some recourse if that identity is successfully traced. Yes spammers will get better at hiding their tracks, but at least some will be stopped.
I think the wait for pickup feature might depend on your phone or your provider, but I just put in the longer amount (in your case 7 sec) since there is usually enough drivel at the begining of the recording to allow for the sequence to start after a small delay.
I navigate the menu to get to roadrunner level 2 support by pressing 1,3,1,2,3
It depends on your phone, but I was able to program in pauses between numbers so that my phone would dial, then navigate all the menus automatically (waiting several seconds here and there for the prompt to get the appropriate place). Isn't technology great!
While this may be true, since we only have one earth/climate to live in why not err on the side of caution? Research, developement, and implimentation of less/non-polluting energy sources is a huge market waiting to be developed. Yes, for now clean energy costs more, but those costs are going to creating gennerally good jobs. Its not just a loss.
Also, think about the "worst-case scenarios":
If global warming is BS and we move our economies to cleaner energy, then at worst we spend a bit more and have less smog, less acid rain, and cleaner rivers.
If global warming isn't BS and we do nothing, then we are left with artificially bad weather, rising seas, droughts, and such along with the large amount of general pollution created.
Yes we save some money (though most of the savings are captured by large industries, not households), but wouldn't you rather we screwed up in the clean direction?
If there are much better ways to handle program installs... let's hear them.
I'm a big fan of the Drag, Drop, Done method on Macs.:-) Heck, this is [pretty much] how you install Mozilla FireBird/Thunderbird. Just decompress and use. Granted, this only works for things without dependencies, but damn is it nice.
an easy to read registry of installed APPLICATIONS
Sounds good to me. Just so long as it is a big text file that you can edit maually if you move stuff around. The windows registry is a nightmare. What would this registry look like. I imagine a line looking like:
Would this cover the info needed to keep track of (for updates and removal) 99% of software or would it need to know more? The above 7 fields would probably be helpful even if you were doing things by hand; just a nice little notebook of what/where is on your system.
(been using linux/*nix exlusively for the past 2 years, writing lots scripts and just scripted an incremental backup system between a Debian box and a FreeBSD box)...but I can't for the life of me get Debian to install. I've tried disks, chroot environment from within Red Hat, and Knoppix install, but can't get a running system with any of them. For some strange reason none of the services will start when I boot, preventing me from using the network or anything else. Its not like my hardware is particularly strange, the Knoppix cd works fine, as does Red Hat (or windows back when I used it), but Debian just won't work. This is frusterating as I love the debian installs that a friend set up for me. Maybe when that new installer comes out it will work...
I guess my point is that with many Linux installs, especially Debian, its kinda hit or miss as to whether it will work or not. I've lost a couple of friends to Windows because the install they were doing just got to complicated and they gave up.
I agree with you that user-downloaded software installs are a nightmare, but have you tried Synaptic (a GUI for apt on Debian as well as Red Hat)?
1. Click on your favorite desktop or menu icon for synaptic and enter the root password. 2. Just hit the "Update List" button and listings of all (several thousand) pieces of software are updated. 3. Click some combination of "Update All" and/or double click on a package name to select the software that you want to install. 4. Click "Proceed".
All of your old and new software is now downloaded and installed with no dependency problems or any other modification.
I absolutely love this sort of system as it makes it so trivial to install AND update just about everything. At the same time however, it would be nice to have some sort of a standard GUI installer that simplified the "./configure make make install" options. I might be a bit slow at these things;-), but since nobody EVER mentions it, it took me about 8 months of frustration before I learned that "./configure --help" would give me a list of the options I could pass to the script. Everyone always just said "just do./configure; make; make install;", so that's what I did. To the letter...
Idea for a helpful GUI source installer:
- give it a tarball of the source, the installer will unpack it and give you a list of dependencies and options.
- The installer will search for allready installed apps to fullfill dependencies and let you choose if there are multiple results (or "Advanced";-) users can specify manually)
- For each of the options have some decent defaults and put descriptions next to them for easy understanding.
- when done with options, hit "go" and the thing will be installed.
The above system should be pretty compatible with current cli installation methods and might only need a standard format for listing dependencies and default options to pass to the installer. If you don't have X (or Y!) or some other GUI, don't use it. Simple.
There is a great article at Ars Technica by John Syracusa on this subject of the paradigm that the computer interface is based on, specifically spacial interfaces versus hierarchical interfaces:
As a Linux user (and user of OS X at work) I have, like most of us here, am very comfortable with flying around in and out of the hierarchical nature of the file-systems on our computers. When giving my mother tech support over the phone, she is continually amazed that I can just list to her (while driving down the road) the series of directories that she had to go through to find her necessary document. A little after this, I read the above mentioned article which gets into why the finder in Apple's OSes =9 were so "user friendly" and got some new insight.
Like many of us, when using OS 8-9, I was always annoyed with how the icons would never line up and you very soon built up this annoyingly HUGE mess of windows whenever searching very deep for something. What I missed about this system in my attempts to over-ride it, are Syracusa's main points: - There is ALWAYS a one to one correspondence between folders and windows. I.e., you can't have the same folder open in two windows. - The contents of a folder ALWAYS look EXACTLY how you last left them, even if that causes some weird overlap or scrolling nastiness.
The result of the absolute consistency of the above two things is that when you interface with the computer, you can build a visual sequence of landmarks to your data. Something akin to driving your route to work. You may not know the names of all of the streets (directories), but still find your way because you can recognize the arrangement of streets, like taking the third one after the blue house. Syracusa gives the example of light-switches. After a couple of days in a house, you don't need to hunt for them because our minds have developed over millions of years to recognize these sorts of visual information so that we can find things in the world around us.
Contrast this with your the file browser in OS X, Konqueror, Windows, etc. When you open up a given directory you really have no idea what the contents will look like. This depends on the view options you chose in the parent directory as well as auto sorting and all of these such things. Because of this lack of visual consistency, you are forced to remember the file names of every parent of the file that you are looking for. While I do well with this and am perfectly comfortable keeping the whole darned thing in my head and navigating from the cli, MOST people aren't. This is one of those things that should be heavily researched (anyone doing a psychology PhD and need a thesis topic?) in order to move not just Linux, but computing in general forward.
I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months....
accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done
While this may be the case with SeaMonkey, Firebird and Thunderbird are cranking along and breaking new frontiers in speed, features, and usability. When we get to the point that Firebird and Tunderbird are mature, then it could make sense to move resourses else. For the time being though, I'm glad that resourses are being devoted to Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird to make them as good as they can be. Mozilla is (and probably will remain for some time) one of OSS' biggest "killer apps" along with Linux and Apache. What makes it in some ways even more important than the other two though, is that it can be and is used by average users. Those average users are the ones that us OSS conoscenti need support from in government, industry, economy, and elsewhere.
If we head away from Mozilla too soon, there is a possiblity that we would miss out on the gaining of much good karma with non-geeks.
I guess that I was a bit simplistic in my post (late night writing). My gifts at christmas growing up were much as you describe. Legos, chemistry set, "Constructs", along with hand knit hats from grandma. One the best parts though, was that though I whined and demanded a Nintendo and more than 1 or 2 Transformers I was never given them. As a result, I spent indoor time with legos and outdoor time building miniature waterwheels/boats and such in the little creek nearby.
The problem with consumerism is not that we want or buy things, but that the buying of things becomes the focus of what we do. By mid-childhood when my brother and I would ask for more legos it wasn't because my friend Matt just got the Pirate Island set, but because we had used up all of our raw materials building a city.
Directly as a result of all this, I headed into science when I grew up.
One question, what about RF sheilding? Some grounded window screen (with ~2mm hole size) lining the wooden box would probably do the trick up to about 100 GHz and would be perfectly sufficient for anything emitted by the computer.
The wireless router and snazzy 5 1/4" "sound card" could be kept outside and operating in noise free bliss!
America has been based on consumerism for the last 50 years. Doesn't that make it part of American culture?
Yes, it does. It is sad that our [American] culture is defined by consumerism as opposed to food, literature, art, music, fairy tales, and social events.
When someone says "American Culture", what is the first thing that pops into your head? I think Coke, or something along those lines. Say "Russian Culture" and I think ballet, itsy-bitsy figure skaters, and vodka. "Italian?" Pasta mama mia! And opera. Ferrari is there, but somewhere down the list.
Granted, cultural history here starts about 300 years ago, versus 2,000-4,000 years in much of the rest of the world. I'm not including Native Americans because we, for all intents and purposes, exterminated them. Lack of an ancient heritage doesn't have to mean that all we think about is obtaining "stuff". We can do better than this.
On that "black friday" day, buy nothing. In fact, buy nothing (or little) whenever you can. Instead of working extra hours for money to buy christmas presents, take that time and spend it with your kids/family. Heck, make them something with your hands. They'll remember it for a heck of a lot longer than an expensive piece of anything from a store.
Actually, I just tried the Knoppix install and it wouldn't boot. For some reason none of the modules would load when booting. I find this pretty weird since knoppix boots just fine.
Oh well, I guess I'll just wait till this new Debian installer comes out so I can move off Red Hat.
I currently store parts of my.thunderbird and.phoenix directories in CVS and do the commit/update to sync work and home. In general it works pretty well, though not all my settings translate well between OS X (work) and Red Hat (home). For this reason in particular, extensions are not in my CVS and this makes keeping stuff custumized a bit of a pain still.
I must say, voicing a talking donkey has probably been Eddie Murphy's best role ever. Beverly Hills Cop just doesn't compare and The Nutty Professor was a bit of a bomb. In Donkey though, the man shines!
Here is a nice page that explains how to do incremental backups via rsync and ssh. It shows how to do nice incremental backups using only slightly more space than the source (for the differing file versions). This makes for a pretty cheap and easy backup solution. Plus with this sort of setup you could place the backup server (or even better serverS) anywhere they can be connected to the internet.
Most residential broadband connections have pretty limited upstream bandwidth, but unless you are restoring from backup often, the availible downstream bandwith would probably be sufficient to back up several GB of data over-night to a backup server at home*.
* I am assuming you are the owner of a small business and would want to back up said business' data at home.
I've had a big problem with "spots" too, though only on some generic cdrs that have no paint on the top. I was thinking that maybe it was caused by some oil or other substance that was on my finger-tips when I handled the cd. I didn't check for finger-prints though, so that is just a guess. On my CDs, it doesn't appear that the "spots" fall-away, so much as disolve away. Maybe we are talking about different things... Its still a pain though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about a subscription. I want to update when I want to update, and I want to pay $30 for an entire automatic system upgrade.
Several of the previous posts have mentioned a shortage of local Linux suport. This could be a great opportunity for any un/under-employed slashdotters. Put up flyers and such advertizing your services doing Linux installs and maintenence. Not a terrible line of work, and there seems to be a demand.
This nice article on doing freelance technical support has lots of reccomendations and info on how to go through with starting something like this.
I just got a responce from our admin, the worm is Gaobot. That's all I know at this time.
I have confirmation. SCO ips (and Google's) were being attempted by the virus/worm our users have.
;-)
From the sysadmin: "Its's gotta be some 15 yo - he also tried going after google and anyone who knows anything knows that that'd be futile"
SCO isn't [completely] lying for once.
This past week the university that I work for has been the victim of an internal denial of service attack that may be related. From what I can gather, our sysadmins have traced the problem to some sort of irc virus/worm that is using student's computers to participate in a DDOS attack. The compromised computers were spoofing random ip adresses and (from what I heard) trying to hit SCO. These have all been stopped by our firewall, but they had been causing trouble with said firewall all week.
I don't have conformation that they were trying to hit SCO, but this headline jibes.
I realize this may be seen as a nieve question, but is it possible to make userland drivers? I.e. you start a program that talks to the AGP port (the AGP interface code would have to be GPL), but can send signals through it from a binary/proprietary program to the hardware.
Is this possible, or do drivers _have_ to be in the kernel some how. If someone could explain this it would be really helpful to those of us who aren't kernel hackers. Thanks.
We are talking about subtle cross browser, cross platform, cross version, even cross language bugs.
Actually, these sorts of things pop up really quickly with the open source approach since everyone and their brother has their browser set up with different plugins, etc. I just came accross some interesting bugs in the OS CMS I develope at work when trying to look up info in it from lynx when I installed bad video card drivers. We weren't designing it to work with text browsers, but it does now thanks to that unplanned for test.
Granted, I'm a developer and would have access to the source anyway, but I probably wouldn't be running it on my own webserver then. Or maybe I would; how does that sort of thing work in the proprietary world?
I imagine that this will not be "enforced" so much as used as the charge in court when people complain about a spammer.
If I may provide an example:
J. Random Person is fed up with spam from the infamous Mr. Rawlsky. In order to combat this, J. signs up with the "Do Not Spam" list.
Several months go by to allow Mr. Ralsky time to get the list and remove addresses from it. However, Mr. Ralsky doesn't remove J.'s email address and J. (after some careful tracking with his anti-spam breathren) forwards his email to the FTC. Mr. Ralsky is screwed.
Granted, this only works if you can trace the identity of a spammer, but at least now there can be some recourse if that identity is successfully traced. Yes spammers will get better at hiding their tracks, but at least some will be stopped.
I think the wait for pickup feature might depend on your phone or your provider, but I just put in the longer amount (in your case 7 sec) since there is usually enough drivel at the begining of the recording to allow for the sequence to start after a small delay.
I navigate the menu to get to roadrunner level 2 support by pressing
1,3,1,2,3
It depends on your phone, but I was able to program in pauses between numbers so that my phone would dial, then navigate all the menus automatically (waiting several seconds here and there for the prompt to get the appropriate place). Isn't technology great!
I think it's mostly BS.
While this may be true, since we only have one earth/climate to live in why not err on the side of caution? Research, developement, and implimentation of less/non-polluting energy sources is a huge market waiting to be developed. Yes, for now clean energy costs more, but those costs are going to creating gennerally good jobs. Its not just a loss.
Also, think about the "worst-case scenarios":
If global warming is BS and we move our economies to cleaner energy, then at worst we spend a bit more and have less smog, less acid rain, and cleaner rivers.
If global warming isn't BS and we do nothing, then we are left with artificially bad weather, rising seas, droughts, and such along with the large amount of general pollution created.
Yes we save some money (though most of the savings are captured by large industries, not households), but wouldn't you rather we screwed up in the clean direction?
Sorry that the mirrors went down. Those responsible for the sacking have been sacked.
- Johnllama Llammakowski
If there are much better ways to handle program installs... let's hear them.
:-) Heck, this is [pretty much] how you install Mozilla FireBird/Thunderbird. Just decompress and use. Granted, this only works for things without dependencies, but damn is it nice.
I'm a big fan of the Drag, Drop, Done method on Macs.
an easy to read registry of installed APPLICATIONS
Sounds good to me. Just so long as it is a big text file that you can edit maually if you move stuff around. The windows registry is a nightmare. What would this registry look like. I imagine a line looking like:
<app name> <version> <bin loc> <lib loc> <conf loc> <doc loc>
Would this cover the info needed to keep track of (for updates and removal) 99% of software or would it need to know more? The above 7 fields would probably be helpful even if you were doing things by hand; just a nice little notebook of what/where is on your system.
I'd like to think I know what I'm doing...
...but I can't for the life of me get Debian to install. I've tried disks, chroot environment from within Red Hat, and Knoppix install, but can't get a running system with any of them. For some strange reason none of the services will start when I boot, preventing me from using the network or anything else. Its not like my hardware is particularly strange, the Knoppix cd works fine, as does Red Hat (or windows back when I used it), but Debian just won't work. This is frusterating as I love the debian installs that a friend set up for me. Maybe when that new installer comes out it will work...
(been using linux/*nix exlusively for the past 2 years, writing lots scripts and just scripted an incremental backup system between a Debian box and a FreeBSD box)
I guess my point is that with many Linux installs, especially Debian, its kinda hit or miss as to whether it will work or not. I've lost a couple of friends to Windows because the install they were doing just got to complicated and they gave up.
I wish I had mod points. :-)
I agree with you that user-downloaded software installs are a nightmare, but have you tried Synaptic (a GUI for apt on Debian as well as Red Hat)?
;-), but since nobody EVER mentions it, it took me about 8 months of frustration before I learned that "./configure --help" would give me a list of the options I could pass to the script. Everyone always just said "just do ./configure; make; make install;", so that's what I did. To the letter...
;-) users can specify manually)
1. Click on your favorite desktop or menu icon for synaptic and enter the root password.
2. Just hit the "Update List" button and listings of all (several thousand) pieces of software are updated.
3. Click some combination of "Update All" and/or double click on a package name to select the software that you want to install.
4. Click "Proceed".
All of your old and new software is now downloaded and installed with no dependency problems or any other modification.
I absolutely love this sort of system as it makes it so trivial to install AND update just about everything. At the same time however, it would be nice to have some sort of a standard GUI installer that simplified the "./configure make make install" options. I might be a bit slow at these things
Idea for a helpful GUI source installer:
- give it a tarball of the source, the installer will unpack it and give you a list of dependencies and options.
- The installer will search for allready installed apps to fullfill dependencies and let you choose if there are multiple results (or "Advanced"
- For each of the options have some decent defaults and put descriptions next to them for easy understanding.
- when done with options, hit "go" and the thing will be installed.
The above system should be pretty compatible with current cli installation methods and might only need a standard format for listing dependencies and default options to pass to the installer. If you don't have X (or Y!) or some other GUI, don't use it. Simple.
There is a great article at Ars Technica by John Syracusa on this subject of the paradigm that the computer interface is based on, specifically spacial interfaces versus hierarchical interfaces:
About the Finder...
As a Linux user (and user of OS X at work) I have, like most of us here, am very comfortable with flying around in and out of the hierarchical nature of the file-systems on our computers. When giving my mother tech support over the phone, she is continually amazed that I can just list to her (while driving down the road) the series of directories that she had to go through to find her necessary document. A little after this, I read the above mentioned article which gets into why the finder in Apple's OSes =9 were so "user friendly" and got some new insight.
Like many of us, when using OS 8-9, I was always annoyed with how the icons would never line up and you very soon built up this annoyingly HUGE mess of windows whenever searching very deep for something. What I missed about this system in my attempts to over-ride it, are Syracusa's main points: - There is ALWAYS a one to one correspondence between folders and windows. I.e., you can't have the same folder open in two windows. - The contents of a folder ALWAYS look EXACTLY how you last left them, even if that causes some weird overlap or scrolling nastiness.
The result of the absolute consistency of the above two things is that when you interface with the computer, you can build a visual sequence of landmarks to your data. Something akin to driving your route to work. You may not know the names of all of the streets (directories), but still find your way because you can recognize the arrangement of streets, like taking the third one after the blue house. Syracusa gives the example of light-switches. After a couple of days in a house, you don't need to hunt for them because our minds have developed over millions of years to recognize these sorts of visual information so that we can find things in the world around us.
Contrast this with your the file browser in OS X, Konqueror, Windows, etc. When you open up a given directory you really have no idea what the contents will look like. This depends on the view options you chose in the parent directory as well as auto sorting and all of these such things. Because of this lack of visual consistency, you are forced to remember the file names of every parent of the file that you are looking for. While I do well with this and am perfectly comfortable keeping the whole darned thing in my head and navigating from the cli, MOST people aren't. This is one of those things that should be heavily researched (anyone doing a psychology PhD and need a thesis topic?) in order to move not just Linux, but computing in general forward.
I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. ...
accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done
While this may be the case with SeaMonkey, Firebird and Thunderbird are cranking along and breaking new frontiers in speed, features, and usability. When we get to the point that Firebird and Tunderbird are mature, then it could make sense to move resourses else. For the time being though, I'm glad that resourses are being devoted to Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird to make them as good as they can be. Mozilla is (and probably will remain for some time) one of OSS' biggest "killer apps" along with Linux and Apache. What makes it in some ways even more important than the other two though, is that it can be and is used by average users. Those average users are the ones that us OSS conoscenti need support from in government, industry, economy, and elsewhere.
If we head away from Mozilla too soon, there is a possiblity that we would miss out on the gaining of much good karma with non-geeks.
Right on,
I guess that I was a bit simplistic in my post (late night writing). My gifts at christmas growing up were much as you describe. Legos, chemistry set, "Constructs", along with hand knit hats from grandma. One the best parts though, was that though I whined and demanded a Nintendo and more than 1 or 2 Transformers I was never given them. As a result, I spent indoor time with legos and outdoor time building miniature waterwheels/boats and such in the little creek nearby.
The problem with consumerism is not that we want or buy things, but that the buying of things becomes the focus of what we do. By mid-childhood when my brother and I would ask for more legos it wasn't because my friend Matt just got the Pirate Island set, but because we had used up all of our raw materials building a city.
Directly as a result of all this, I headed into science when I grew up.
One question, what about RF sheilding? Some grounded window screen (with ~2mm hole size) lining the wooden box would probably do the trick up to about 100 GHz and would be perfectly sufficient for anything emitted by the computer.
The wireless router and snazzy 5 1/4" "sound card" could be kept outside and operating in noise free bliss!
America has been based on consumerism for the last 50 years. Doesn't that make it part of American culture?
Yes, it does. It is sad that our [American] culture is defined by consumerism as opposed to food, literature, art, music, fairy tales, and social events.
When someone says "American Culture", what is the first thing that pops into your head? I think Coke, or something along those lines. Say "Russian Culture" and I think ballet, itsy-bitsy figure skaters, and vodka. "Italian?" Pasta mama mia! And opera. Ferrari is there, but somewhere down the list.
Granted, cultural history here starts about 300 years ago, versus 2,000-4,000 years in much of the rest of the world. I'm not including Native Americans because we, for all intents and purposes, exterminated them. Lack of an ancient heritage doesn't have to mean that all we think about is obtaining "stuff". We can do better than this.
On that "black friday" day, buy nothing. In fact, buy nothing (or little) whenever you can. Instead of working extra hours for money to buy christmas presents, take that time and spend it with your kids/family. Heck, make them something with your hands. They'll remember it for a heck of a lot longer than an expensive piece of anything from a store.
</rant>
Actually, I just tried the Knoppix install and it wouldn't boot. For some reason none of the modules would load when booting. I find this pretty weird since knoppix boots just fine.
Oh well, I guess I'll just wait till this new Debian installer comes out so I can move off Red Hat.
I currently store parts of my .thunderbird and .phoenix directories in CVS and do the commit/update to sync work and home. In general it works pretty well, though not all my settings translate well between OS X (work) and Red Hat (home). For this reason in particular, extensions are not in my CVS and this makes keeping stuff custumized a bit of a pain still.
I must say, voicing a talking donkey has probably been Eddie Murphy's best role ever. Beverly Hills Cop just doesn't compare and The Nutty Professor was a bit of a bomb. In Donkey though, the man shines!
"And in the morning, I'm making waffles!
Here is a nice page that explains how to do incremental backups via rsync and ssh. It shows how to do nice incremental backups using only slightly more space than the source (for the differing file versions). This makes for a pretty cheap and easy backup solution. Plus with this sort of setup you could place the backup server (or even better serverS) anywhere they can be connected to the internet.
Most residential broadband connections have pretty limited upstream bandwidth, but unless you are restoring from backup often, the availible downstream bandwith would probably be sufficient to back up several GB of data over-night to a backup server at home*.
* I am assuming you are the owner of a small business and would want to back up said business' data at home.
I've had a big problem with "spots" too, though only on some generic cdrs that have no paint on the top. I was thinking that maybe it was caused by some oil or other substance that was on my finger-tips when I handled the cd. I didn't check for finger-prints though, so that is just a guess. On my CDs, it doesn't appear that the "spots" fall-away, so much as disolve away. Maybe we are talking about different things... Its still a pain though.