SUCKS being forced to be bogus just to hang on to a job. I been there, I can relate. I had to quit a few jobs over bad management. One time it was a contractor, I was watching him build, what he was telling me to do, it was AWFUL skanky construction. I lasted a coupla days and just never went back. I mean, this guy was cheap, and just didn't care. Selling these big expensive houses, he'd go "all you need is ONE nail in that stud", stuff like that, were normally you would shoot two. Not caring about plumb. Just skanky stuff. Say the saw guy cut a piece short. Normally you'd set it aside, save it to cut shorter pieces out of it. Not this boss though, if you could hold it in place and a shot nail would bridge the gap, it passed.
ya, I seen stuff like that. Sucks. Hard and expensive to start your own business, hard to know much about the company and boss you are going to work for until after you get hired and start work. In the mean time, that "bill" jerk keeps showing up in the mailbox no matter what else is going on.Sucks.
Well, I hope you got a better place to code at now.
... who did it! Naughty naughty.. but hey, I feel bad now. I mean, now you got the lynchmob heading your way and all, I feel sorta sorry fer ya... tell ya whut... just betwixt you n me... I got a buddy, a good frined, well, he's a bigshot over in boogorrillaville, he's their vice minister of procurement. WELL, he sorta got himself into a fix. And it's all because of BAD CODE YOU WROTE, so you can do pennace now and fix this up. He found out that at the end of last quarter that something happned to the accounts from that buggy software they got, and it seems that 83 million drachmadinars seem to be outstanding and left in the budget unspent. whoops! It was earmarked for genetic research on advanced all wheel drive camels, but yu know those eggheads, couldn't find their trousers with a GPS and a map.. anyway,they diodn't spend it and seemed to have forgotten about it,and if he doesn't get rid of all this money and leave not a trace of it, his patooty is grass, and the project will get cancelled, and his nephew runs the largest camel herd breeding operation over there. SO, he approached me using his phreaked cell phone he snagged from a tourist, knowing I am a famous internet browser user so I know all about coding and and money laundering and banking and such like, and asked for my help. Lucky me through my skills at typed "stress and duress" internet posting I was able to flush you out and make you see the error of your ways. No harm nor foul, you can make amends and we will help you get the funds you need to staert your own ethical softweare company, maybe..say...25% of the take? Sounds good? Good! so this is what you do. First, we need a totally obscure bank account to transfer the funds through, after first establishing a shell corporation in the turks and caicos. I can't use my name or account to do this because his government monitors his email so they know to watch me close. And,well, I got this hassle with interpol and all, but that'll work out. We will first have you transfer your small account in the US over to the new dummy corporations account, just to get it setup and legit looking, then......
whoops, this is in public! We better discuss this someplace else. To continue, send me an email at my secure addy islandking@margarita.td.con
oh most likely what you said happens a lot, and what the other guys said, like I said though I gots no idea. I was really going for a -3, semi funny when I wrote that, but it's TRUE, too. heh heh he he read slashdot dev channel one day is all it takes to see that B true!
I think the software industry got TWO CHANCES left to "fix" all this insecure stuff.
1- get a national IT union so you got support to make good code and get them bozos off your back, as opposed to fast code that gets shoved out the door to support all the extra VP's they got hanging around. Unions are good for WAY more stuff then just setting pay rates.
choice deux = eventually the gubbermint is gonna pass a warranty law on code,same as every other product out there, and this EULA get outta jail free card gonna be re-voked with extreme prjudice. This will happen when something like two senators and a supreme court judge get nailed with a porn dialer hack and their old, old ladies walk in and catch them with 18 windows open with goatse and sex with a mare and teenage eskimo transgendered cheerleaders and stuff like that on the screen. ain't gonna be no lobbying effort bribe their way outta that one then.
normal EULA like we see now = biggest excuse to write/sell/distribute bad code out there, bar none
the most common are flooded lead acid batteries. some have the acid in a "gel" form so the batteries can be sealed, but in most homeowner sized rigs they are just deep storage batteries. Before they would only last around 5-7 years, now they just really don't know, they have new "desulphator" units that use high frequency oscillations to keep the plates in the batteries clean, so they extend the life. the biggest problem with the lead acids is the plates get sulphate deposits on them, and they lose efficiency. by keeping the sulphates off, they last longer and hold their charges better. the batteries themselves are recylcable when they finally really don't work, the acid is drained off, the lead remelted, etc. There are other batteries coming down the pike, using more exotic materials, but holding more, lasting longer, etc. Right now though, for joe homeowner, just regular old lead acid is the most bang for your buck, with the right design of course.
The past few years, around the planet, more watts of electrical generating capacity have gone in using wind power than from any other source. It's practical and works now, and is cost competetive.
it's all of the above. Just constructing ner plants that are primarily needed to meet newer larger peak demanss is expensive and takes boatloads of energy and costs a lot more. more effieicnt use of the plants we have now, including night time demand and timed metering, would help eliminate the need to build new plants. And introducing storage on-site where the demand is, such as direct electrical storage (perhaps the new vandaium batteries?), or any of the thermal storage techniques (storage as heat, or storage as ice depending on what is the demand), helps reduce it as well. And adding to production certainly won't hurt. We can use x-million of barrels of oil to build new skiboats, etc, or maybe use some of that to build PV panerls or wind gennys. We still have a lot of options now, I just like to see them used even more, especially by homeowners and small businesses. to me, it's a geek plus (to me anyway) to have a backup total energy scheme. We discuss the needs all the time for backing up your data, seems just as necessary to have backup power, and more than 10 minutes with a cheap UPS. The whole dang grid can collapse,blackout city, and I still got *some* power for the next coupla decades already bought and paid off and up and running, enough to run some lights and the radios and the laptop anyway.
I lit the candle,and stopped cursing the darkness.
Next step is the vehicle. I still don't know how I want to go, where I am though, there is a pretty good alternative I could get, and I been thinking about it, I could actually buy for around one grand a pretty decent model of an all terrain ambulatory biokinetic vehicle using advanced energy conversion facilities, which we have already installed. They are called a "horse" and a "pasture".;)
maybe about 1.5 months ago or so we had a thread here and someone mentioned it, that bbc had arm wrestled real into letting them distribute a less bogus player, and there was a link so I mashed it and went and got it. That player works well for me(FC2), the one I got from reals page going directly didn't. who knows, maybe it's the same player, but I trieds both back to back, the 10beta didn't work at all for me, but the bbc realplayer9 worked exactly like it should. It's also the only player I have that mozilla will actually open up all by itself. But, I will re-emphasize, I don't know for a *fact* it's different, just the one I have appears to not have any popups or ads or anything with it like I was used to seeing with previous versions of realplayer I have had over the years. Allegedly I have an xmms plugin that will play windows streams, it's there, i see the plugin, I know I have windows codecs installed, never got it to work though. Oh well...
I have realplayer 2.0 I think on an old mac laptop, them was the days, 14.4 modem and it worked, simple design, little square window, mash play, it played. I will now google for bbc link............this might be the correct page, I just don't remember if this was the link I used or not. It looks sorta familiar though.
Never tried that VLC yet, but if it uses shared libraries and codecs, I got enough of them things hanging around this box I should be able to translate and encode in klingon to ape-english, with subtitles in dogspeak. Ya, mplayer (gmplayer) just flash opens a screen then crashes. xine turns on and looks cool and won't play squat. Rhythm box opens something looks like a web page from netscape 3 then won't play anything I've tried. xmms just opens and plays, but not all the formats I need, and I have to trik it into playing a url by saving the url first to a file, then playing that file after I browse to it, I've never gotten xmms to just go play an url directly with it's own built in "play such and such" window. It plays though, that's the main point, and getting the mp3 plugin to replace the placeholder plugin was easy. mplayer scares me, it got 6 volumes of manpages to make it work that looks the encylopedia discordia. I'm sure it's a slick rig, if you are a developer and know how to do all that stuff. It's like, man, I got a linux box that works almost for everthing I need, I am chicken to screw it up, so unless I can find a binary now that I read on pages that other people successfuly use with no probs, I just don't bother.
In a way, that's a linux success story, from what I gather years ago you had to be a unix guru plus a programmer to get it to work at all, and here's an old mac click and not much else guy who can make 95% of linux work with just clicking. cool beans, my thanks to the creators and developers. And I'm not complaining, I am most greatful for what I have here. I'm only lacking the ability to seamlessly play some windows streams from some radio stations I want to hear, and some other stuff like be able to get pictures from my cheap usb camera without having a serious kernel panic. That's the last two problems I have, which I am sure will go away next coupla releases or so. I'm not worried about it.
..and there he said it was (paraphrasing here) common for programmers to sorta ignore error flags and just code out the warnings about memory leaks and arcane whatnot like that, like that made the problem "fixed". No warnings-no problems! On to the next project.....
probably more stuff too, that's all I read though.....
Not a coder here, so I have *no* idea if this is common or not, or true or not, but I *have* noticed on slashdot NO ONE writes bad code,or has written bad code, or thought about bad code, and *everyone* has personally corrected every other coder they ever met on their code, and no one has ever had a boss who knew what he was doing or could read so much as a grocery list without speaking the big words out loud, and only the *other guys* someplace else write bad code, and they always use the wrong language and editor to boot, like on bizarro dotslash forum or something. It's ALL "their" fault that there's ANY of this alleged "bad code" that causes buffer overflows and like acne and flat tires and girls who say no.. Them dang guys "over there", buncha no-good slackers....let's hang 'em!
hey,troll,YO, we use ALL of the above, or maybe you never been here to see it. We use nukes, coal, oil, natgas, hydro, wind, solar, and some others like methane cogeneration, etc. We got it all here, I'd just like to see more of the advanced designs and techniques become more widespread, in all aspects of how we use energy, and to have more points of production, because of several reasons, number one being it's better for national security, and it's better for the consumer to have more control and more choices. And we have a thriving and growing private alternate energy market as well. I got solar, you? What are YOU doing personally to help yourself and help your nation? Playing video games? Going to bars? Huh?
Just even reducing consumption (if that's all you do) doesn't go near as far as reducing consumtion AND adding to the overall energy pool. So what are you doing about it? Just sitting back with a thumb in your mouth and letting nanny government and daddy big company run your life, tell you what to do?
I'm the first one to cast a stone on some topics,including strange weird political happs in my nation and it's business and political leaders and processes, because I live here and that's part of civic duty and stuff, but I walk the talk, too, BEFORE I cast the stone, and I at least offer some alternatives to what I think needs to be changed for the better.
The USA is WAY to big to just think we are all "the same" here.
I know that's how it works, they keep using x-amount of fuel though. A big power plant "idling"is still a huge amount of fuel being used. That's the cumulative amount of fuel I am talking about, and in the total it's not an insignigficant amount. And they have the infrastructure sitting there, people to run it, etc, it all costs money and energy and it could be made more efficient by staggering loads. the industry itself is going in that direction, you can see it on their websites. if it wasn't real, they wouldn't be doing that, would they? And it would help them offset the hideously stupid spot market price vagueries. Anything we can do to mitigate cash and resources going to doofuses like the enron traders I am in favor of, and keeping those moneys in the consumers pocket instead.
...open their license some more and drop their prices then, if they weren't feeling the heat from the alternatives? If they have such a lock in, and they thought it would continue, they could ignore it, heck, they could INCREASE prices then and they could even further restrict the license.
But they aren't, they are slowly going the opposite way, ergo, I think they are "feeling the heat".
they keep the plants running, that's the bottom line. They are still burning fuel when the demand for the juice isn't there. They DO produce more than what is needed because they need to be up and running when that persky ole peak demand hits, or we get big problems. Nukes don't shut down at night, do they? Big coal plants? Oilburners? The fuel is getting burnt in most cases, even when it's not needed, because it's just so hard for them to turn them big plants on and off. They don't (in most cases)shut the plants down. To be fair, as I was before speaking in general terms, I am aware a few places they do, real small natgas peaker plants usually, but all the others keep burning and running. I am aware of the water pumping back uphill deal, they do that because they wanted to do something with the excess power so they can meet the demand during the day without having to build even larger plants and burning even more fuel, etc., and if they are already setup as a hydro or hydro coal and oil plant, and they have the water and holding area behind a dam to do so, it's a no brainer for them, so they do it..
There's also a few places that are using huge capacitors, but I haven't read much about it lately so I don't know the status of those projects. I've also seen an example of a homeowner sized capacitor storage rig, but again, been a couple years since I looked at it.
The technical idea behind what I was talking about with purchaisng at night, say to charge an electric car, is called "time sensitive pricing", that's what the industry calls it. It is being implemented,just not near to the scale that it could and should be. That's why I mentioned-for instance-using it to charge electric cars at night, or giving tax breaks to businesses to operate at what would be a third shift, and combined with the cheaper rates, it's an economic savings potentially, along with reducing over-all national energy demand. Liqwuid petroeum fuel is primariluy used for vehicles in this nation, if we can switch a lot of that to electric, and charge them at night, it would be like discovering an entire new saudi arabia or something, just with what we have NOW. I was just pointing it out to folks if they hadn't heard of it,to see if they could get in on it in their area,think about it anyway, and to even expand on the idea, by storing their own juice that they buy at off peak times for a reduced rate. Your personal demand will be the same, but you can buy it at a time when demand isn't so great,so you get a deal then from the electricos, and by storing it yourself, you have a nice UPS and other useages homeowners backup system as well you can use *when YOU want to use it*. The way it is now with the electric grid guys with "time sensitive pricing" is, you have to give up your demand during peak times. Well, DUH, it's a "peak time demand" because that's the exact time most humans find it necessary to use the dang stuff. So the solution there is to buy it when it's cheap, store it, use it when you want to. You put the savings into your gear then, help to pay for it. It's a win/win deal. Adding in your own production from whatever-solar,wind,generator,etc- is a further win in the medium and long run. Adding in the knowledge that you can remodel or build from scratch with more insulation and get energy efficient designed appliances as they need to be replaced is a further win. It all adds up. We don't have backyard mr. fusion, but all this stuff we DO got now, just a lot of people aren't doing it. That's all, no biggee, I just think it's good to be part of the energy "solution" rather than just waiting for the other guy to do it.
Really, can't see a whole lot wrong with these ideas.
And I agree, use less. I have always maintained that you approach this whole energy problem/situation from two directions simultaneously, you start dropping your demand and start adding to your own production, eventually those two lines on a graph cross, then you are actually energy independent, a *very cool* place to be.
I lived with solar power and battery banks for a number of years. It's just not that hard and it can be costed out better. I've posted on it before several times here, like for instance, instead of buying the expensive batteries with SOLARPOWER labels slapped on them that most of the dealers sell, just go to the local forklift dealer and get a forklift battery pack. MUCH cheaper amp hours per dollar then..there's other tips and tricks, too, it's doable from a grand on up to any size you feel like.
Sorry about the inefficient design of your night time electrical purchase, it does sound like a bummer, but that's a design flaw particular to your instance, it doesn't negate the concept, and many places ARE suing the concept now, just not enough. Perhaps just an OFF switch might have worked in that design. It certainly sounds screwy though.
To get back to the nightime electric angle, the basic reality is true, at night all over the world power plants have excess juice,they don't just start up and shutdown plants on demand, that takes weeks to do that with new huge plants, they just fire em up and let em go basically, only shut them down for maintenance. Think of them more like servers, when at night they are just serving to dev/null instead of out to legit requests and it makes more sense. And we all PAY for that excess capapcity, because of our useage deamnds, which are totally skewed to peaks during the day. And in a lot of cases it's just pure wasted, because we have no widely installed ways to store that electricity to use during the day. I've mentioned several times here that it's a GREAT way to have a practical UPS system for the average homeowner, something that will run a lot of your normal stuff even besides your computers, and also give you a decent backup of power stored in case of temporary outtages from storms, etc. Just get a charge controller/inverter rig, tie it in with a battery bank, then see if you can get cut a deal from your local electrico to charge it at night, for a reduced rate. The controllers/chargers/inverters I have used have easily programmable settings, when to charge, how much, etc. And it's scalable, once you have a "smart" way to get and use your juice,instead of the normal "dumb" way like most people have, you can start adding on your own production, with wind or solar. Most alternative energy guys in the US use both, that's called a hybrid system, because in the winter you get more wind, in the summer more light, and using both of them gives you a nice spread over the year. And you still have the normal grid supplied, the first way, if you want it, that's 3 sources total. You can even add in a fuel generator to that mix if you want, so you have 4 sources of input. That's CHOICE, rather than remaining tied only to bigco/government monopoly and the dumb way of using it.
My bottom line is, we can complain, or do something about it. I choose to do something. I done did it. I don't own a plasma screen TV or a brand new game machine though. Choices.
As to the trailer idea, I haven't seen it, it might exist but I don't know, just seemed a completely obvious idea to me, but gas/electric hybrid cars are common now, I live out in the stix in southern bubba land, even here I see them now, dude down the street just got a prius I notice, it's sitting in his driveway. You can't wait for this "they" guy to do it, to actually gwet the stuff, "anyone YOU" got to do it before WE all do it and it's comon and we have helpoed solve the problems. It's just like early computers, if all of us waited for the other guy to get one, where would we be now? Wait for ther government version of the peecee, or just lease one from bigco? Nope, took actual humans just deciding that computing for the masses was a good idea, that they wanted to own and control their own computer. To me, "energy for the masses" is a good idea, and it's a good idea to help break up the monopoly, to introduce better ways of using the monopoly grid juice as it is now, and for having millions more points of prod
based on a recommendation I got here on another thread some time back, I went and got the realplayer that the bbc releases. It *allegedly* has the bloat and spyware removed from the "normal" real player. It works fine on my linux box, and I haven't seen any ads, popups, etc from it. I used it to watch spaceshipone covereage from the bbc, with just a dialup connection and it was a smooth feed. The realplayer beta 10 version did NOT work though for me, so I used the 9 version from the bbc. Just goto their homepage at bbc and look down, you'll see the link to go get their version of the player.
that will play all the normal formats out there, and not be a piece of spyware and crapware, I'll try it. I notice at the site referenced there are zero comments in the forum so far. If anyone feels like registering (I don't, not a developer so it's a waste of time) ask them that question-all the formats, or what? I know that the alternatives like mplayer exist, but frankly, I just can't make mplayer (nor xine nor rhythm box) to actually play any alternative streams. I USED to be able to use mplayer, but I admit defeat, I've spent enough hours on it now, I giveth up. I use xmms that works easily for mp3 streaming and the real player from the bbc to listen to either mp3 or real streams. I haven't been able to listen to a single windows stream on mplayer (or anything else) yet, it attemtps to play it then crashes. Back when I was running RH 7x series, I got it to work quite easily, now, nope, and I downloaded all the dang codecs I could find. I'm a binary guy mostly, I just decided I wasn't going to fool with compiling and flags and suchlike anymore, it shouldn't be needed for normal computer useage unless you are running a source based distro, and I ain't. This is 2004, not 1994.
Anyway, good luck to helix in general, glad to see they keep getting hipper. It's taken a while for real to "get real" I hope the trends continue, and with redhat and novell support, maybe it will. It would be *real dang nice* to have one easily installed player with simple or no config tweaking or putzing with the kernel and modules, etc required that actually *played* everything outta the box.
the US wastes huge amounts of electricity
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· Score: 3, Informative
Every night, electrical demand goes down, but the plants keep running. That electricty is just wasted. It is a HUGE number of megawatts. Some places will even give you a rate decrease if you buy your juice only at night, yet very few homeowners or businesses take advantage of the fact. One factory I worked at had their new building built with a thermal storage scheme for heating that used pipes embedded in the concrete floors. An antifreeze liquid was circulated while it was heated with the cheaper electric at night, it heated the concrete, which radiated heat evenly up through the floor during the day. This was up in massacussetts with cold winters, and it worked great.
Electrical cars would be cheaper if they were only/mostly recharged at night, and you had a smart meter or a separate meter for the charging. We could also have battery storage in more homes and businesses, like the alternative energy rigs use now, for use during the day. Just by using thisa wasted night time juice we could eliminate the need for a lot of the new plants proposed, and by switchiung to electric cars more, eliminate the need for getting additional petroleum products.
The government could also offer tax breaks to corporations and individuals for running a third shift at night as a standard instead of a normal first shift, just to take advantage of the wasted energy. Combined with the cheaper energy they could get then, it would be quite a deal in a lot of ways. If it was significant enough taxc breaks combined with cheaper utility costs, then a lot of businesses would switch, and it would become commonplace to have the third shift as normal.
And for longer range trips with electric cars, say on the weekends you want to go asomeplace camping whatever, or on vacation, etc, the solution is simple, you have small trailers that attach to the cars that contain a normal fuel tank and a generator. The trailers could be 1/2 normal cargo, 1/2 generator and fuel tank. The range of electrics now is fine for getting to work and back for millions of people, there's just not a lot of electrics to be had. The GM EV1 cars (more 100 miles range not 50) were a hit, the owners loved them, but GM only leased them and is destroying them now, despite thousands of owners begging to purchase them. By all accounts, what I have read and heard people say, they were roomy enough, fast enough, both from a stop and on the highway, could carry enough stuff, and were a no brainer maintenance-wise. They were cheap to run, and night time reduced rate charging would have cut those expenses in half, which were good to begin with. Heck, I live out in the country and an electric car with a 100 mile range would be good enough for our purposes, we only go to town once a week, and 100 miles is more than enough to get there and back, plus some. The battery tech is good enough now, I think that's a strawman argument. It's not a solution for every single application you use a vehicle for, but for millions and millions of people it could be, just with two pieces of legislation passed,mandated cheaper electric bought only at night-not a local electrico option but they are mandated to do so, and the tax breaks for night time business in general to help reduce peak daytime demand loads. And one other piece of legilsation would be very useful to save another untold billions a year in energy costs, no new construction that didn't adhere to R-50 or better insulation standards.
We don't have near as much an energy problem as most people think, we have a problem with how we use what we already have, and how much gets totally wasted. I've worked on superinsulated residential structures and seen the difference-absolutely no comparison with normal construction. Literally drops the homes major heating and cooling bills to like a fifth what they would be normally. And really, solar and wind are here now and work, they just aren't being pushed much. I've used it enough to know it's practical for a lot of people, generally speaking.
There isn't one single magic bullet, but enough solutions exist today to mitigate a lot of our energy needs using what is available NOW, not have to develop vast new infrastructure with totally new devices and processes.
It also gives the people who take advantage of the options a false sense of worth, the potential of it anyway. Look at all the tales of woe we heard from 2 and 3 years ago from people assuming their stocks were actually tangible wealth, treating it almost exactly the same as cash in the bank. For every strike it rich stock, there's a dozen lose your shirts stocks, or something along those lines. and a lot of times it doesn't matter of the company actually had a good idea or product, mismanagement down the road or some other wildcard event could bork your "investment" you took in lieu of normal pay. It works both ways.
On the one hand, it IS a good way to get quality employees cheap,and for a company to exapand, on the other hand, it's a good way to get quality employees broke and shaking their heads wishing they had gotten a job at pizza hut instead.
I have nothing against the practice per se, but I have a variety of things against the way the market is run and regulated, but offering the options isn't one of them. I'll save my market rants for another thread sometime. Just people need to always remember, "stocks" are a piece of theoretical crap UNTIL it's turned into a good or service that you actually take advantage of.
... install another stick of ram out of your own pocket. It's not that expensive. Probably worth it in just eliminating personal frustration. or go around the office and take up a collection. Eventually the PHB might hear of it and be embarrassed about how freeking cheep they are. either way, you'd have the ram you need for the job. Maybe try sliding it in on your taxes as a work related deduction or something.
I've had to do this in jobs, just needed a particular tool, the company didn't have it or wouldn't have it, kept struggling with something that *almost* works. Bah, just went and got the tool, it all works out in the long run anyway.
I've got a great boss now, because he grew up poor and as a tool user. he saw us using our little trailer to haul cut brush around with, so he got me a dump truck. next he saw we had big piles of brush and nothing to deal with them, so I get this huge industrial chipper. He sees me using one of my puny chainsaws and next week I got a brand new whopper husqavarna. He sees us using another little tractor and a tiny trailer to haul tools around with, next week we got a big three wheeler looks like a little pickup truck. And etc, several more instances like that. He stopped by one day, I am workiong on girlfriends jeep, it needs an engine now basically, it still runs kinda sorta but is borked. Couple weeks later he drops off the keys and the title to an old 89 lincoln mark V that was surplus to him,still in good shape and under 100 thou on the clock, just gave it to my girlfriend because she needed a car that ran and he appreciates all the work we do. Not one time did we ever ask for anything, we were just just using the tools we had, which are meagre but what we have been using before we got the job.
I guess you just gotta luck out eventually and find work with a company/boss that understands that with better tools you can do a better job.
frequently I have NO IDEA what an acronym is or what the article is about. The topic heading it's posted under will give me a clue though, along with the summary and whether or not to pusue it more. Exactly like what happened with this article. If redhat relewases some new big deal, it's news usually. If it's *new* news, then I am doubly interested, as they got some medium good cred. I didn't know what a GFS was. Now I do, I learned something. I don't run a cluster but someday I might. And it's precisely because I didn't know what it was that I even looked.
Now in a manual or howto, nope, I want full words, me hates acronyms there.
And I like slashdot because you get an immediate "rest of the story" and good links from knowledgeable people, on all the sides of an issue being discussed. Saves a lot of googling. It's not perfect, but it's quite useful, and I've learned to just skim over the funny stuff and trolls, but even then sometimes you can catch some gems.
I garden. Harvesting is the most rewarding aspect to it, but dealing with the weeds and whatnot takes the most effort and requires the most knowledge and skills. You need to learn to identify the weeds and how to do this or that and admining the garden before you get to the harvesting part. If all you ever were exposed to is the harvesting part, you would never know what the totality of DIY food entails. If a gardening weblog only ever talked in the simplest terms about harvesting food, the people reading there would never understand the background or get the lingo down. Giving them a teaser will get them motivated to do more,learn more, advance.
I guess it's a balance you have to walk between too much technical info all condensed together and too little, if you want to hit a broad audience. the specialists in x-discipline will probably consider it too general and mundane, the uninitiated would conisder it too technical, but really, sticking in the middle to get to the largest numbers of people is the only way left out of those three choices that will get the job done in any reasonable fashion..
and send it registered mail to your bank. Notify them that continued use of insecure servers, and requiring you as a customer to use an insecure webrowser, could lead to a compromise of your personal data and a direct loss. It's not a threat, just a stement of actual, probable data. And if such an event occurs, that you would consider taking legal action against them. Maybe that will get their attention. And if you are a stockholder in the bank, or have a valuable mortgage there, or other serious busines, it's even worse.
I don't do online banking but if I did and that was part of it,forcing me to *use* grade c products, and having to *trust* grade c products, at a place that HAS to consider "security threats" over almost anything else, I would have long ago called up and kvetched about it or sent a missive along the lines I have outlined.
Think about it, how many people would trust a bank if it had no doors, it was running in the seediest section of town with obvious scoundrels hanging around the entrance, the vault was open,no security guard in sight, and if they forced you to come in blindfolded, turn over the keys to your car to one of the characters hanging around the opening where no door is, and to trust whatever happened then to you and your money as you came and went? No one would put up with that, but in the cyberworld, that is *exactly* what is going on all the time with these insecure out of the box office/internet "products" from that convicted monopolist corporation and with their co-opted and faked out business "partners". You would THINK after the 983rd time something like this happened that they would have bought a clue or two. And it just gets worse, all the time, it hasn't gotten any better, just the exploits get better, and paying for the privelege of getting exploited costs more.
Good idea for a geek cyberbank, BTW, that runs only better quality open source, and refuses entrance with explorer browser, and gives a helpful page where to get the alternatives. Niche market, but I bet it would get decent business over-all.
I don't see it either on certs site, but maybe looking in the wrong place. I have (I think anyway)the alert from their site, but it doesn't recommend to use a different browser and/or operating system.
I think this is the thursday past reference, but it certainly doesn't contain a reference to any browser switch.
"IIS 5 Web Server Compromises added June 24
US-CERT is aware of new activity affecting compromised web sites running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 5 and possibly end-user systems that visit these sites. Compromised sites are appending JavaScript to the bottom of web pages. When executed, this JavaScript attempts to access a file hosted on another server. This file may contain malicious code that can affect the end-user's system. US-CERT is investigating the origin of the IIS 5 compromises and the impact of the code that is downloaded to end-user systems.
Web server administrators running IIS 5 should verify that there is no unusual JavaScript appended to the bottom of pages delivered by their web server.
This activity is another example of why end users must exercise caution when JavaScript is enabled in their web browser. Disabling JavaScript will prevent this activity from affecting an end-user's system, but may also degrade the appearance and functionality of some web sites that rely upon JavaScript. US-CERT recommends that end-users disable JavaScript unless it is absolutely necessary. Users should be aware that any web site, even those that may be trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain potentially malicious code."
If anyone has the URL reference that has the browser recommendations, please provide it, it will help in spreading the word better. people might take it more seriously coming from a cert reference than just some news article.
look around, start asking some random people if they can name the players on their favorite pro sports teams. Then ask them to name some supreme court judges, their two senators, their house rep, etc. Ask some young people to name some songs from some popular groupos, then the other questions. Ask joe tv addict or movie addict that. Generally speaking, although the ability to get the information is there, it is widely underutilised in favor of "bread and circuses" data. This is observable or not, from what I have seen, it's true. From what I have read of others observations and various professional polls taken, it's generally true.
I am speaking in general terms, and as always on slashdot someone will chime in with their exception to a generality. OK, I need a clarification then. I need to put a declarative state for a sig "unless explicitly noted in a detailed statement, personal opinions of mine on most topics are meant as generalties".
begin another general statement
People can pursue happiness all they want to, if they let that pursuit become their major interest to the abandonment or near abandonment of paying attention to what is going on around them that WILL affect them, then that pursuit will interfere with important business they should be doing,and they will find themselves eventually in a position where that ability to "freely pursue" has been taken away, and they won't know what happened or how it came about.
Personally I have to have some decent weather models to look at as I plan my day and week working outside. It makes a difference what work I do and where I work. For me, for instance now during the heavy rainy season,I need the best updated weather radar map so I can see localised information to see where heavy rain clouds or developing thunderstorms are. Getting hit by lightning is no joke, I took a very near hit before and it's *no freekin joke*, so if I can see that-just a for-instance-I have around two hours before a big storm can hit, I can go farther away and work for an hour and half and still beat feet back to shelter. Sometimes just a general forecast isn't detailed enough without seeing the map, with a map you can see if the storm will hit, or move on by you by a few miles, so it's safe to go work. I currently run two maps on my homepage group and check them frequently. Another for instance, if I know after around such and such a time it will be raining steadily, I can stop and go get setup on a big equipment repair job inside someplace, or just use that downtime to go to town for supplies, etc.
I'd like to see them run a video service wirelessly as an adjunct to the weather radios, perhaps a dedicated appliance that had a small screen for the images display, and an even faster refresh rate. Of course that means the government would have to install small TV transmitters all over, but perhaps it's possible somehow wth slow scan radio instead of live streaming for the radar image. I don't have cable or satellite, so for me it's the combo of the web and various weather radios I have. I even keep my two meter portable transceiver locked on the nearest forecast freq for VERY bad emergencies, at least I got a starting point for action then, and it's the one radio I'll grab if I need to evacuate to either the nearest concrete structure or wherever, depending on the emergency.
The audio warnings though should be more customisable, currently it's not (that I know of, maybe it is with newer equipment). I don't want to be told every few minutes it is in fact raining out, I'd want to de-sensitise the warning signal then to actual hail/tornado warnings *only* at that point. Right now you get two choices, listen to the alert go off every 10 minutes, or turn the broadcast on and try to monitor it as you sleep, which plain just don't work.
And people crop farming need even longer range forecasts, they have to know if it's good to plant on x day so that the seeds just don't sprout then wither in some heat wave with no rain, or for spraying purposes, etc, you don't want to spray one day then have it wash off the next, or say for cultivation and plowing, you don't want to only half plow then try to finish in a sea of mud.
Slashdot Mirror
SUCKS being forced to be bogus just to hang on to a job. I been there, I can relate. I had to quit a few jobs over bad management. One time it was a contractor, I was watching him build, what he was telling me to do, it was AWFUL skanky construction. I lasted a coupla days and just never went back. I mean, this guy was cheap, and just didn't care. Selling these big expensive houses, he'd go "all you need is ONE nail in that stud", stuff like that, were normally you would shoot two. Not caring about plumb. Just skanky stuff. Say the saw guy cut a piece short. Normally you'd set it aside, save it to cut shorter pieces out of it. Not this boss though, if you could hold it in place and a shot nail would bridge the gap, it passed.
ya, I seen stuff like that. Sucks. Hard and expensive to start your own business, hard to know much about the company and boss you are going to work for until after you get hired and start work. In the mean time, that "bill" jerk keeps showing up in the mailbox no matter what else is going on.Sucks.
Well, I hope you got a better place to code at now.
... who did it! Naughty naughty.. but hey, I feel bad now. I mean, now you got the lynchmob heading your way and all, I feel sorta sorry fer ya... tell ya whut... just betwixt you n me... I got a buddy, a good frined, well, he's a bigshot over in boogorrillaville, he's their vice minister of procurement. WELL, he sorta got himself into a fix. And it's all because of BAD CODE YOU WROTE, so you can do pennace now and fix this up. He found out that at the end of last quarter that something happned to the accounts from that buggy software they got, and it seems that 83 million drachmadinars seem to be outstanding and left in the budget unspent. whoops! It was earmarked for genetic research on advanced all wheel drive camels, but yu know those eggheads, couldn't find their trousers with a GPS and a map.. anyway,they diodn't spend it and seemed to have forgotten about it,and if he doesn't get rid of all this money and leave not a trace of it, his patooty is grass, and the project will get cancelled, and his nephew runs the largest camel herd breeding operation over there. SO, he approached me using his phreaked cell phone he snagged from a tourist, knowing I am a famous internet browser user so I know all about coding and and money laundering and banking and such like, and asked for my help. Lucky me through my skills at typed "stress and duress" internet posting I was able to flush you out and make you see the error of your ways. No harm nor foul, you can make amends and we will help you get the funds you need to staert your own ethical softweare company, maybe..say...25% of the take? Sounds good? Good! so this is what you do. First, we need a totally obscure bank account to transfer the funds through, after first establishing a shell corporation in the turks and caicos. I can't use my name or account to do this because his government monitors his email so they know to watch me close. And ,well, I got this hassle with interpol and all, but that'll work out. We will first have you transfer your small account in the US over to the new dummy corporations account, just to get it setup and legit looking, then......
whoops, this is in public! We better discuss this someplace else. To continue, send me an email at my secure addy islandking@margarita.td.con
oh most likely what you said happens a lot, and what the other guys said, like I said though I gots no idea. I was really going for a -3, semi funny when I wrote that, but it's TRUE, too. heh heh he he read slashdot dev channel one day is all it takes to see that B true!
I think the software industry got TWO CHANCES left to "fix" all this insecure stuff.
1- get a national IT union so you got support to make good code and get them bozos off your back, as opposed to fast code that gets shoved out the door to support all the extra VP's they got hanging around. Unions are good for WAY more stuff then just setting pay rates.
choice deux = eventually the gubbermint is gonna pass a warranty law on code,same as every other product out there, and this EULA get outta jail free card gonna be re-voked with extreme prjudice. This will happen when something like two senators and a supreme court judge get nailed with a porn dialer hack and their old, old ladies walk in and catch them with 18 windows open with goatse and sex with a mare and teenage eskimo transgendered cheerleaders and stuff like that on the screen. ain't gonna be no lobbying effort bribe their way outta that one then.
normal EULA like we see now = biggest excuse to write/sell/distribute bad code out there, bar none
the most common are flooded lead acid batteries. some have the acid in a "gel" form so the batteries can be sealed, but in most homeowner sized rigs they are just deep storage batteries. Before they would only last around 5-7 years, now they just really don't know, they have new "desulphator" units that use high frequency oscillations to keep the plates in the batteries clean, so they extend the life. the biggest problem with the lead acids is the plates get sulphate deposits on them, and they lose efficiency. by keeping the sulphates off, they last longer and hold their charges better. the batteries themselves are recylcable when they finally really don't work, the acid is drained off, the lead remelted, etc. There are other batteries coming down the pike, using more exotic materials, but holding more, lasting longer, etc. Right now though, for joe homeowner, just regular old lead acid is the most bang for your buck, with the right design of course.
The past few years, around the planet, more watts of electrical generating capacity have gone in using wind power than from any other source. It's practical and works now, and is cost competetive.
it's all of the above. Just constructing ner plants that are primarily needed to meet newer larger peak demanss is expensive and takes boatloads of energy and costs a lot more. more effieicnt use of the plants we have now, including night time demand and timed metering, would help eliminate the need to build new plants. And introducing storage on-site where the demand is, such as direct electrical storage (perhaps the new vandaium batteries?), or any of the thermal storage techniques (storage as heat, or storage as ice depending on what is the demand), helps reduce it as well. And adding to production certainly won't hurt. We can use x-million of barrels of oil to build new skiboats, etc, or maybe use some of that to build PV panerls or wind gennys. We still have a lot of options now, I just like to see them used even more, especially by homeowners and small businesses. to me, it's a geek plus (to me anyway) to have a backup total energy scheme. We discuss the needs all the time for backing up your data, seems just as necessary to have backup power, and more than 10 minutes with a cheap UPS. The whole dang grid can collapse,blackout city, and I still got *some* power for the next coupla decades already bought and paid off and up and running, enough to run some lights and the radios and the laptop anyway.
;)
I lit the candle,and stopped cursing the darkness.
Next step is the vehicle. I still don't know how I want to go, where I am though, there is a pretty good alternative I could get, and I been thinking about it, I could actually buy for around one grand a pretty decent model of an all terrain ambulatory biokinetic vehicle using advanced energy conversion facilities, which we have already installed. They are called a "horse" and a "pasture".
maybe about 1.5 months ago or so we had a thread here and someone mentioned it, that bbc had arm wrestled real into letting them distribute a less bogus player, and there was a link so I mashed it and went and got it. That player works well for me(FC2), the one I got from reals page going directly didn't. who knows, maybe it's the same player, but I trieds both back to back, the 10beta didn't work at all for me, but the bbc realplayer9 worked exactly like it should. It's also the only player I have that mozilla will actually open up all by itself. But, I will re-emphasize, I don't know for a *fact* it's different, just the one I have appears to not have any popups or ads or anything with it like I was used to seeing with previous versions of realplayer I have had over the years. Allegedly I have an xmms plugin that will play windows streams, it's there, i see the plugin, I know I have windows codecs installed, never got it to work though. Oh well...
......this might be the correct page, I just don't remember if this was the link I used or not. It looks sorta familiar though.
I have realplayer 2.0 I think on an old mac laptop, them was the days, 14.4 modem and it worked, simple design, little square window, mash play, it played. I will now google for bbc link......
Never tried that VLC yet, but if it uses shared libraries and codecs, I got enough of them things hanging around this box I should be able to translate and encode in klingon to ape-english, with subtitles in dogspeak. Ya, mplayer (gmplayer) just flash opens a screen then crashes. xine turns on and looks cool and won't play squat. Rhythm box opens something looks like a web page from netscape 3 then won't play anything I've tried. xmms just opens and plays, but not all the formats I need, and I have to trik it into playing a url by saving the url first to a file, then playing that file after I browse to it, I've never gotten xmms to just go play an url directly with it's own built in "play such and such" window. It plays though, that's the main point, and getting the mp3 plugin to replace the placeholder plugin was easy. mplayer scares me, it got 6 volumes of manpages to make it work that looks the encylopedia discordia. I'm sure it's a slick rig, if you are a developer and know how to do all that stuff. It's like, man, I got a linux box that works almost for everthing I need, I am chicken to screw it up, so unless I can find a binary now that I read on pages that other people successfuly use with no probs, I just don't bother.
In a way, that's a linux success story, from what I gather years ago you had to be a unix guru plus a programmer to get it to work at all, and here's an old mac click and not much else guy who can make 95% of linux work with just clicking. cool beans, my thanks to the creators and developers. And I'm not complaining, I am most greatful for what I have here. I'm only lacking the ability to seamlessly play some windows streams from some radio stations I want to hear, and some other stuff like be able to get pictures from my cheap usb camera without having a serious kernel panic. That's the last two problems I have, which I am sure will go away next coupla releases or so. I'm not worried about it.
..and there he said it was (paraphrasing here) common for programmers to sorta ignore error flags and just code out the warnings about memory leaks and arcane whatnot like that, like that made the problem "fixed". No warnings-no problems! On to the next project.....
probably more stuff too, that's all I read though.....
Not a coder here, so I have *no* idea if this is common or not, or true or not, but I *have* noticed on slashdot NO ONE writes bad code,or has written bad code, or thought about bad code, and *everyone* has personally corrected every other coder they ever met on their code, and no one has ever had a boss who knew what he was doing or could read so much as a grocery list without speaking the big words out loud, and only the *other guys* someplace else write bad code, and they always use the wrong language and editor to boot, like on bizarro dotslash forum or something. It's ALL "their" fault that there's ANY of this alleged "bad code" that causes buffer overflows and like acne and flat tires and girls who say no.. Them dang guys "over there", buncha no-good slackers....let's hang 'em!
hey,troll,YO, we use ALL of the above, or maybe you never been here to see it. We use nukes, coal, oil, natgas, hydro, wind, solar, and some others like methane cogeneration, etc. We got it all here, I'd just like to see more of the advanced designs and techniques become more widespread, in all aspects of how we use energy, and to have more points of production, because of several reasons, number one being it's better for national security, and it's better for the consumer to have more control and more choices. And we have a thriving and growing private alternate energy market as well. I got solar, you? What are YOU doing personally to help yourself and help your nation? Playing video games? Going to bars? Huh?
Just even reducing consumption (if that's all you do) doesn't go near as far as reducing consumtion AND adding to the overall energy pool. So what are you doing about it? Just sitting back with a thumb in your mouth and letting nanny government and daddy big company run your life, tell you what to do?
I'm the first one to cast a stone on some topics,including strange weird political happs in my nation and it's business and political leaders and processes, because I live here and that's part of civic duty and stuff, but I walk the talk, too, BEFORE I cast the stone, and I at least offer some alternatives to what I think needs to be changed for the better.
The USA is WAY to big to just think we are all "the same" here.
I know that's how it works, they keep using x-amount of fuel though. A big power plant "idling"is still a huge amount of fuel being used. That's the cumulative amount of fuel I am talking about, and in the total it's not an insignigficant amount. And they have the infrastructure sitting there, people to run it, etc, it all costs money and energy and it could be made more efficient by staggering loads. the industry itself is going in that direction, you can see it on their websites. if it wasn't real, they wouldn't be doing that, would they? And it would help them offset the hideously stupid spot market price vagueries. Anything we can do to mitigate cash and resources going to doofuses like the enron traders I am in favor of, and keeping those moneys in the consumers pocket instead.
...open their license some more and drop their prices then, if they weren't feeling the heat from the alternatives? If they have such a lock in, and they thought it would continue, they could ignore it, heck, they could INCREASE prices then and they could even further restrict the license.
But they aren't, they are slowly going the opposite way, ergo, I think they are "feeling the heat".
they keep the plants running, that's the bottom line. They are still burning fuel when the demand for the juice isn't there. They DO produce more than what is needed because they need to be up and running when that persky ole peak demand hits, or we get big problems. Nukes don't shut down at night, do they? Big coal plants? Oilburners? The fuel is getting burnt in most cases, even when it's not needed, because it's just so hard for them to turn them big plants on and off. They don't (in most cases)shut the plants down. To be fair, as I was before speaking in general terms, I am aware a few places they do, real small natgas peaker plants usually, but all the others keep burning and running. I am aware of the water pumping back uphill deal, they do that because they wanted to do something with the excess power so they can meet the demand during the day without having to build even larger plants and burning even more fuel, etc., and if they are already setup as a hydro or hydro coal and oil plant, and they have the water and holding area behind a dam to do so, it's a no brainer for them, so they do it..
There's also a few places that are using huge capacitors, but I haven't read much about it lately so I don't know the status of those projects. I've also seen an example of a homeowner sized capacitor storage rig, but again, been a couple years since I looked at it.
The technical idea behind what I was talking about with purchaisng at night, say to charge an electric car, is called "time sensitive pricing", that's what the industry calls it. It is being implemented,just not near to the scale that it could and should be. That's why I mentioned-for instance-using it to charge electric cars at night, or giving tax breaks to businesses to operate at what would be a third shift, and combined with the cheaper rates, it's an economic savings potentially, along with reducing over-all national energy demand. Liqwuid petroeum fuel is primariluy used for vehicles in this nation, if we can switch a lot of that to electric, and charge them at night, it would be like discovering an entire new saudi arabia or something, just with what we have NOW. I was just pointing it out to folks if they hadn't heard of it,to see if they could get in on it in their area,think about it anyway, and to even expand on the idea, by storing their own juice that they buy at off peak times for a reduced rate. Your personal demand will be the same, but you can buy it at a time when demand isn't so great,so you get a deal then from the electricos, and by storing it yourself, you have a nice UPS and other useages homeowners backup system as well you can use *when YOU want to use it*. The way it is now with the electric grid guys with "time sensitive pricing" is, you have to give up your demand during peak times. Well, DUH, it's a "peak time demand" because that's the exact time most humans find it necessary to use the dang stuff. So the solution there is to buy it when it's cheap, store it, use it when you want to. You put the savings into your gear then, help to pay for it. It's a win/win deal. Adding in your own production from whatever-solar,wind,generator,etc- is a further win in the medium and long run. Adding in the knowledge that you can remodel or build from scratch with more insulation and get energy efficient designed appliances as they need to be replaced is a further win. It all adds up. We don't have backyard mr. fusion, but all this stuff we DO got now, just a lot of people aren't doing it. That's all, no biggee, I just think it's good to be part of the energy "solution" rather than just waiting for the other guy to do it.
Really, can't see a whole lot wrong with these ideas.
And I agree, use less. I have always maintained that you approach this whole energy problem/situation from two directions simultaneously, you start dropping your demand and start adding to your own production, eventually those two lines on a graph cross, then you are actually energy independent, a *very cool* place to be.
I lived with solar power and battery banks for a number of years. It's just not that hard and it can be costed out better. I've posted on it before several times here, like for instance, instead of buying the expensive batteries with SOLARPOWER labels slapped on them that most of the dealers sell, just go to the local forklift dealer and get a forklift battery pack. MUCH cheaper amp hours per dollar then..there's other tips and tricks, too, it's doable from a grand on up to any size you feel like.
Sorry about the inefficient design of your night time electrical purchase, it does sound like a bummer, but that's a design flaw particular to your instance, it doesn't negate the concept, and many places ARE suing the concept now, just not enough. Perhaps just an OFF switch might have worked in that design. It certainly sounds screwy though.
To get back to the nightime electric angle, the basic reality is true, at night all over the world power plants have excess juice,they don't just start up and shutdown plants on demand, that takes weeks to do that with new huge plants, they just fire em up and let em go basically, only shut them down for maintenance. Think of them more like servers, when at night they are just serving to dev/null instead of out to legit requests and it makes more sense. And we all PAY for that excess capapcity, because of our useage deamnds, which are totally skewed to peaks during the day. And in a lot of cases it's just pure wasted, because we have no widely installed ways to store that electricity to use during the day. I've mentioned several times here that it's a GREAT way to have a practical UPS system for the average homeowner, something that will run a lot of your normal stuff even besides your computers, and also give you a decent backup of power stored in case of temporary outtages from storms, etc. Just get a charge controller/inverter rig, tie it in with a battery bank, then see if you can get cut a deal from your local electrico to charge it at night, for a reduced rate. The controllers/chargers/inverters I have used have easily programmable settings, when to charge, how much, etc. And it's scalable, once you have a "smart" way to get and use your juice,instead of the normal "dumb" way like most people have, you can start adding on your own production, with wind or solar. Most alternative energy guys in the US use both, that's called a hybrid system, because in the winter you get more wind, in the summer more light, and using both of them gives you a nice spread over the year. And you still have the normal grid supplied, the first way, if you want it, that's 3 sources total. You can even add in a fuel generator to that mix if you want, so you have 4 sources of input. That's CHOICE, rather than remaining tied only to bigco/government monopoly and the dumb way of using it.
My bottom line is, we can complain, or do something about it. I choose to do something. I done did it. I don't own a plasma screen TV or a brand new game machine though. Choices.
As to the trailer idea, I haven't seen it, it might exist but I don't know, just seemed a completely obvious idea to me, but gas/electric hybrid cars are common now, I live out in the stix in southern bubba land, even here I see them now, dude down the street just got a prius I notice, it's sitting in his driveway. You can't wait for this "they" guy to do it, to actually gwet the stuff, "anyone YOU" got to do it before WE all do it and it's comon and we have helpoed solve the problems. It's just like early computers, if all of us waited for the other guy to get one, where would we be now? Wait for ther government version of the peecee, or just lease one from bigco? Nope, took actual humans just deciding that computing for the masses was a good idea, that they wanted to own and control their own computer. To me, "energy for the masses" is a good idea, and it's a good idea to help break up the monopoly, to introduce better ways of using the monopoly grid juice as it is now, and for having millions more points of prod
based on a recommendation I got here on another thread some time back, I went and got the realplayer that the bbc releases. It *allegedly* has the bloat and spyware removed from the "normal" real player. It works fine on my linux box, and I haven't seen any ads, popups, etc from it. I used it to watch spaceshipone covereage from the bbc, with just a dialup connection and it was a smooth feed. The realplayer beta 10 version did NOT work though for me, so I used the 9 version from the bbc. Just goto their homepage at bbc and look down, you'll see the link to go get their version of the player.
that will play all the normal formats out there, and not be a piece of spyware and crapware, I'll try it. I notice at the site referenced there are zero comments in the forum so far. If anyone feels like registering (I don't, not a developer so it's a waste of time) ask them that question-all the formats, or what? I know that the alternatives like mplayer exist, but frankly, I just can't make mplayer (nor xine nor rhythm box) to actually play any alternative streams. I USED to be able to use mplayer, but I admit defeat, I've spent enough hours on it now, I giveth up. I use xmms that works easily for mp3 streaming and the real player from the bbc to listen to either mp3 or real streams. I haven't been able to listen to a single windows stream on mplayer (or anything else) yet, it attemtps to play it then crashes. Back when I was running RH 7x series, I got it to work quite easily, now, nope, and I downloaded all the dang codecs I could find. I'm a binary guy mostly, I just decided I wasn't going to fool with compiling and flags and suchlike anymore, it shouldn't be needed for normal computer useage unless you are running a source based distro, and I ain't. This is 2004, not 1994.
Anyway, good luck to helix in general, glad to see they keep getting hipper. It's taken a while for real to "get real" I hope the trends continue, and with redhat and novell support, maybe it will. It would be *real dang nice* to have one easily installed player with simple or no config tweaking or putzing with the kernel and modules, etc required that actually *played* everything outta the box.
Every night, electrical demand goes down, but the plants keep running. That electricty is just wasted. It is a HUGE number of megawatts. Some places will even give you a rate decrease if you buy your juice only at night, yet very few homeowners or businesses take advantage of the fact. One factory I worked at had their new building built with a thermal storage scheme for heating that used pipes embedded in the concrete floors. An antifreeze liquid was circulated while it was heated with the cheaper electric at night, it heated the concrete, which radiated heat evenly up through the floor during the day. This was up in massacussetts with cold winters, and it worked great.
Electrical cars would be cheaper if they were only/mostly recharged at night, and you had a smart meter or a separate meter for the charging. We could also have battery storage in more homes and businesses, like the alternative energy rigs use now, for use during the day. Just by using thisa wasted night time juice we could eliminate the need for a lot of the new plants proposed, and by switchiung to electric cars more, eliminate the need for getting additional petroleum products.
The government could also offer tax breaks to corporations and individuals for running a third shift at night as a standard instead of a normal first shift, just to take advantage of the wasted energy. Combined with the cheaper energy they could get then, it would be quite a deal in a lot of ways. If it was significant enough taxc breaks combined with cheaper utility costs, then a lot of businesses would switch, and it would become commonplace to have the third shift as normal.
And for longer range trips with electric cars, say on the weekends you want to go asomeplace camping whatever, or on vacation, etc, the solution is simple, you have small trailers that attach to the cars that contain a normal fuel tank and a generator. The trailers could be 1/2 normal cargo, 1/2 generator and fuel tank. The range of electrics now is fine for getting to work and back for millions of people, there's just not a lot of electrics to be had. The GM EV1 cars (more 100 miles range not 50) were a hit, the owners loved them, but GM only leased them and is destroying them now, despite thousands of owners begging to purchase them. By all accounts, what I have read and heard people say, they were roomy enough, fast enough, both from a stop and on the highway, could carry enough stuff, and were a no brainer maintenance-wise. They were cheap to run, and night time reduced rate charging would have cut those expenses in half, which were good to begin with. Heck, I live out in the country and an electric car with a 100 mile range would be good enough for our purposes, we only go to town once a week, and 100 miles is more than enough to get there and back, plus some. The battery tech is good enough now, I think that's a strawman argument. It's not a solution for every single application you use a vehicle for, but for millions and millions of people it could be, just with two pieces of legislation passed,mandated cheaper electric bought only at night-not a local electrico option but they are mandated to do so, and the tax breaks for night time business in general to help reduce peak daytime demand loads. And one other piece of legilsation would be very useful to save another untold billions a year in energy costs, no new construction that didn't adhere to R-50 or better insulation standards.
We don't have near as much an energy problem as most people think, we have a problem with how we use what we already have, and how much gets totally wasted. I've worked on superinsulated residential structures and seen the difference-absolutely no comparison with normal construction. Literally drops the homes major heating and cooling bills to like a fifth what they would be normally. And really, solar and wind are here now and work, they just aren't being pushed much. I've used it enough to know it's practical for a lot of people, generally speaking.
There isn't one single magic bullet, but enough solutions exist today to mitigate a lot of our energy needs using what is available NOW, not have to develop vast new infrastructure with totally new devices and processes.
.... I'm the CTO, the chief terraforming officer ;)
that tyco CEO sure knows how to party!
It also gives the people who take advantage of the options a false sense of worth, the potential of it anyway. Look at all the tales of woe we heard from 2 and 3 years ago from people assuming their stocks were actually tangible wealth, treating it almost exactly the same as cash in the bank. For every strike it rich stock, there's a dozen lose your shirts stocks, or something along those lines. and a lot of times it doesn't matter of the company actually had a good idea or product, mismanagement down the road or some other wildcard event could bork your "investment" you took in lieu of normal pay. It works both ways.
On the one hand, it IS a good way to get quality employees cheap,and for a company to exapand, on the other hand, it's a good way to get quality employees broke and shaking their heads wishing they had gotten a job at pizza hut instead.
I have nothing against the practice per se, but I have a variety of things against the way the market is run and regulated, but offering the options isn't one of them. I'll save my market rants for another thread sometime. Just people need to always remember, "stocks" are a piece of theoretical crap UNTIL it's turned into a good or service that you actually take advantage of.
... install another stick of ram out of your own pocket. It's not that expensive. Probably worth it in just eliminating personal frustration. or go around the office and take up a collection. Eventually the PHB might hear of it and be embarrassed about how freeking cheep they are. either way, you'd have the ram you need for the job. Maybe try sliding it in on your taxes as a work related deduction or something.
I've had to do this in jobs, just needed a particular tool, the company didn't have it or wouldn't have it, kept struggling with something that *almost* works. Bah, just went and got the tool, it all works out in the long run anyway.
I've got a great boss now, because he grew up poor and as a tool user. he saw us using our little trailer to haul cut brush around with, so he got me a dump truck. next he saw we had big piles of brush and nothing to deal with them, so I get this huge industrial chipper. He sees me using one of my puny chainsaws and next week I got a brand new whopper husqavarna. He sees us using another little tractor and a tiny trailer to haul tools around with, next week we got a big three wheeler looks like a little pickup truck. And etc, several more instances like that. He stopped by one day, I am workiong on girlfriends jeep, it needs an engine now basically, it still runs kinda sorta but is borked. Couple weeks later he drops off the keys and the title to an old 89 lincoln mark V that was surplus to him,still in good shape and under 100 thou on the clock, just gave it to my girlfriend because she needed a car that ran and he appreciates all the work we do. Not one time did we ever ask for anything, we were just just using the tools we had, which are meagre but what we have been using before we got the job.
I guess you just gotta luck out eventually and find work with a company/boss that understands that with better tools you can do a better job.
frequently I have NO IDEA what an acronym is or what the article is about. The topic heading it's posted under will give me a clue though, along with the summary and whether or not to pusue it more. Exactly like what happened with this article. If redhat relewases some new big deal, it's news usually. If it's *new* news, then I am doubly interested, as they got some medium good cred. I didn't know what a GFS was. Now I do, I learned something. I don't run a cluster but someday I might. And it's precisely because I didn't know what it was that I even looked.
Now in a manual or howto, nope, I want full words, me hates acronyms there.
And I like slashdot because you get an immediate "rest of the story" and good links from knowledgeable people, on all the sides of an issue being discussed. Saves a lot of googling. It's not perfect, but it's quite useful, and I've learned to just skim over the funny stuff and trolls, but even then sometimes you can catch some gems.
I garden. Harvesting is the most rewarding aspect to it, but dealing with the weeds and whatnot takes the most effort and requires the most knowledge and skills. You need to learn to identify the weeds and how to do this or that and admining the garden before you get to the harvesting part. If all you ever were exposed to is the harvesting part, you would never know what the totality of DIY food entails. If a gardening weblog only ever talked in the simplest terms about harvesting food, the people reading there would never understand the background or get the lingo down. Giving them a teaser will get them motivated to do more,learn more, advance.
I guess it's a balance you have to walk between too much technical info all condensed together and too little, if you want to hit a broad audience. the specialists in x-discipline will probably consider it too general and mundane, the uninitiated would conisder it too technical, but really, sticking in the middle to get to the largest numbers of people is the only way left out of those three choices that will get the job done in any reasonable fashion..
and send it registered mail to your bank. Notify them that continued use of insecure servers, and requiring you as a customer to use an insecure webrowser, could lead to a compromise of your personal data and a direct loss. It's not a threat, just a stement of actual, probable data. And if such an event occurs, that you would consider taking legal action against them. Maybe that will get their attention. And if you are a stockholder in the bank, or have a valuable mortgage there, or other serious busines, it's even worse.
I don't do online banking but if I did and that was part of it,forcing me to *use* grade c products, and having to *trust* grade c products, at a place that HAS to consider "security threats" over almost anything else, I would have long ago called up and kvetched about it or sent a missive along the lines I have outlined.
Think about it, how many people would trust a bank if it had no doors, it was running in the seediest section of town with obvious scoundrels hanging around the entrance, the vault was open,no security guard in sight, and if they forced you to come in blindfolded, turn over the keys to your car to one of the characters hanging around the opening where no door is, and to trust whatever happened then to you and your money as you came and went? No one would put up with that, but in the cyberworld, that is *exactly* what is going on all the time with these insecure out of the box office/internet "products" from that convicted monopolist corporation and with their co-opted and faked out business "partners". You would THINK after the 983rd time something like this happened that they would have bought a clue or two. And it just gets worse, all the time, it hasn't gotten any better, just the exploits get better, and paying for the privelege of getting exploited costs more.
Good idea for a geek cyberbank, BTW, that runs only better quality open source, and refuses entrance with explorer browser, and gives a helpful page where to get the alternatives. Niche market, but I bet it would get decent business over-all.
I think this is the thursday past reference, but it certainly doesn't contain a reference to any browser switch.
"IIS 5 Web Server Compromises
added June 24
US-CERT is aware of new activity affecting compromised web sites running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 5 and possibly end-user systems that visit these sites. Compromised sites are appending JavaScript to the bottom of web pages. When executed, this JavaScript attempts to access a file hosted on another server. This file may contain malicious code that can affect the end-user's system. US-CERT is investigating the origin of the IIS 5 compromises and the impact of the code that is downloaded to end-user systems.
Web server administrators running IIS 5 should verify that there is no unusual JavaScript appended to the bottom of pages delivered by their web server.
This activity is another example of why end users must exercise caution when JavaScript is enabled in their web browser. Disabling JavaScript will prevent this activity from affecting an end-user's system, but may also degrade the appearance and functionality of some web sites that rely upon JavaScript. US-CERT recommends that end-users disable JavaScript unless it is absolutely necessary. Users should be aware that any web site, even those that may be trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain potentially malicious code."
If anyone has the URL reference that has the browser recommendations, please provide it, it will help in spreading the word better. people might take it more seriously coming from a cert reference than just some news article.
look around, start asking some random people if they can name the players on their favorite pro sports teams. Then ask them to name some supreme court judges, their two senators, their house rep, etc. Ask some young people to name some songs from some popular groupos, then the other questions. Ask joe tv addict or movie addict that. Generally speaking, although the ability to get the information is there, it is widely underutilised in favor of "bread and circuses" data. This is observable or not, from what I have seen, it's true. From what I have read of others observations and various professional polls taken, it's generally true.
I am speaking in general terms, and as always on slashdot someone will chime in with their exception to a generality. OK, I need a clarification then. I need to put a declarative state for a sig "unless explicitly noted in a detailed statement, personal opinions of mine on most topics are meant as generalties".
begin another general statement
People can pursue happiness all they want to, if they let that pursuit become their major interest to the abandonment or near abandonment of paying attention to what is going on around them that WILL affect them, then that pursuit will interfere with important business they should be doing,and they will find themselves eventually in a position where that ability to "freely pursue" has been taken away, and they won't know what happened or how it came about.
end general observation
running your own doppler radar might get a little pricey though......
Personally I have to have some decent weather models to look at as I plan my day and week working outside. It makes a difference what work I do and where I work. For me, for instance now during the heavy rainy season,I need the best updated weather radar map so I can see localised information to see where heavy rain clouds or developing thunderstorms are. Getting hit by lightning is no joke, I took a very near hit before and it's *no freekin joke*, so if I can see that-just a for-instance-I have around two hours before a big storm can hit, I can go farther away and work for an hour and half and still beat feet back to shelter. Sometimes just a general forecast isn't detailed enough without seeing the map, with a map you can see if the storm will hit, or move on by you by a few miles, so it's safe to go work. I currently run two maps on my homepage group and check them frequently. Another for instance, if I know after around such and such a time it will be raining steadily, I can stop and go get setup on a big equipment repair job inside someplace, or just use that downtime to go to town for supplies, etc.
I'd like to see them run a video service wirelessly as an adjunct to the weather radios, perhaps a dedicated appliance that had a small screen for the images display, and an even faster refresh rate. Of course that means the government would have to install small TV transmitters all over, but perhaps it's possible somehow wth slow scan radio instead of live streaming for the radar image. I don't have cable or satellite, so for me it's the combo of the web and various weather radios I have. I even keep my two meter portable transceiver locked on the nearest forecast freq for VERY bad emergencies, at least I got a starting point for action then, and it's the one radio I'll grab if I need to evacuate to either the nearest concrete structure or wherever, depending on the emergency.
The audio warnings though should be more customisable, currently it's not (that I know of, maybe it is with newer equipment). I don't want to be told every few minutes it is in fact raining out, I'd want to de-sensitise the warning signal then to actual hail/tornado warnings *only* at that point. Right now you get two choices, listen to the alert go off every 10 minutes, or turn the broadcast on and try to monitor it as you sleep, which plain just don't work.
And people crop farming need even longer range forecasts, they have to know if it's good to plant on x day so that the seeds just don't sprout then wither in some heat wave with no rain, or for spraying purposes, etc, you don't want to spray one day then have it wash off the next, or say for cultivation and plowing, you don't want to only half plow then try to finish in a sea of mud.
I'll be sending them my two cents on the subject.