As a geneticist, I'm actually an avid proponent of genetic engineering. Hell, we should engineer anything we can get our hands on as long as it is for something that we can profit from: plants producing enzymes that cure otherwise incurable disorders, plants that do not need pesticides, animals that carry humanized organs...
Look, I'm a network admin. I was on a science track until university (probably chemistry) where I switched to microelctronic engineering, so I hardly consider myself anti-science or ignorant.
There's certainly an amount of badly-informed hysteria going on around GM foods, and I'm not going to defend that. I used to be pro-GM for that reason.
Statements like the following are part of the reason I am now anti-GM, in food at least.
"Hell, we should engineer anything we can get our hands on as long as it is for something that we can profit from."
"Zeneca Agrochemicals announced that they would be distributing one type of genetically modified rice, developed by two European scientists, to Asian countries free of charge because of the crop's health benefits. On August 4, another biotech giant, Monsanto, surprised the corporate world when they announced they would be providing royalty-free licenses for all of their patented technologies that might help further the development of this particular crop."
The research goals may well be laudable, but when big companies who's primary goal is to make money become the sole suppliers of things we need to survive, things like patent law can become a big impediment to further improvement. Take patents on the human genome, patent-infringement cases against farmers, or threatened action against generic anti-aids drugs for africa as examples of why I am uneasy.
Take golden rice. What happens when it supplants existing crops, and the bio-companies decide they should make some money on their now locked in 'consumers', or if someone decides to make an improved strain and is shut down for patent infringement of one they didn't licence royalty-free. Might not happen, certainly, but give the GM companies past actions I don't exactly trust them any more, and I would certainly look a gift horse from them in the mouth.
I spend much of my day either trying to protect from other people's mistakes, or clean up after them (or sometimes my own). Genetic engineers will make mistakes just like everybody else. Sometimes those mistakes might just be insufficient testing. Sometimes it might be nature itself mutating or co-opting a modified gene into other organisms where it has unforseen consequences, such as herbicide resistant genes. That's not to say that GM is always bad; just that we should be more careful than people like you would like. Monocultures are vulnerable to new disease after all, look at the irish potato famine for an example of what could befall a modern monoculture.
As you say, world hunger is largely caused by non-natural causes. Even golden rice is only a minor part of a much bigger solution, that of poverty reduction. That poverty is largely caused by bad governments, such as those that squandered loans and have left their countries with massive debts making their problems even worse than when they started.
Making food cheaper often makes their problems worse, as they then cannot sell one of their few products into the world market. Making them dependent on GM seeds which they're not allowed to replant is another bad idea, even if yields are higher.
Oh, and one last thing. People who fear genetic engineering do so out of ignorance mostly. They do not realize that our efforts are piss-poor compared to what Nature is doing to all genetic material of all living organisms every day.
This is a shitty rationalisation. Nature can kill massive numbers of people with earthquakes, landslides, heat waves, disease etc. That doesn't mean we've got a free hand to do what we want, and when it goes wrong say, 'well nature's worse!'. As sentient beings, we have a duty to weigh up all the costs of our actions, not just the ones that show on a balance sheet.
most modern distros do now, especially the livecd's and home-user orientated distros, the software that does it is called bootsplash. It relies on you having a graphic card/monitor supported by the frame buffer drivers though, so don't expect it to work on a 486. It comes in two flavours; a high res virtual terminal with a background image, or silent mode which just has a pretty screen and a progress bar until it launches gdm/kdm etc.
If it's a server/professional workstation, the services boot loader is probably more useful. I'd sure like to have one on windows when I'm trying to troubleshoot a boot problem, without having to use safe mode - especially if the problem doesn't show up in safe mode...
Using the guide here , about scanning and tuning channels. Scan at the times when the channels are broadcasting, and manually add the correct values from mplayer's channels.conf (guide for this is in part 2, 'adding the remaining freeview channels') to the channels options using mythsetup.
I use a DVB (UK freeview) which broadcasts mpeg2, think you can do the same with HDTV in the US. That's recorded straight to disk; all I need to do is rename from.nuv to.mpeg and it plays in anything.
Re:been thinking about mythtv for a while...
on
MythTV 0.17 Released
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· Score: 1
The answer is multiple mythtv boxes. myth splits recording (mythbackend) from playback (mythfrontend) from storage and database.
Without going into the details of that, you can setup mutiple boxes. Setup something small with a nice video card next to your tv and run dvi straight into your tv if it supports it, or get a vga to component convertor cable (the simpler ones need specific configuration of the X sync timings, the more expensive boxes with silicon can do the timing conversion for you). If only for occasional use, you could always go with a simpler composite or svideo out from your video card, but the quality is less.
You can put the tuner and storage in this box if you want (but the better cpu, hdd whine and fans will add noise) or you can put tuner(s) and storage in a beefy box near another aerial drop, and just run cat5 between both boxes.
Hell, you can even have tuners in the loft, storage in the closet, and a playback box by each tv, with cat5 wiring it together. You add mythmusic, mythvideo and mythdvd, and you can have all your media stored in one place and available to all frontends/stereo/tv's.
Add an ir receiver with remote to the frontend boxes, and away you go. You can even add an ir-blaster to your tuner box so it can automatically change channel on your cable box if it only works with a remote.
The one downside is configuring. Mythtv 0.16 is a right royal pain to setup - I don't know if 0.17 will be nicer. Guess I'll find out soon:)
I'm a brit, and I was originally pro-gm crops. I thought the worry about them was another misinformed anti-science media campaign, like the MMR hysteria, and there is certainly an element of that; 'frankenfoods' etc.
I've since changed my mind, and am now anti-GM. Seeing the actions of the GM companies with patents, and forcing people to buy seed year after year with terminator genes has made me realise that big companies are pushing GM purely for their profit, not the benefit of customers.
I think africa would be worse off with GM crops as the increases in yield are offset by their inability to keep back a portion of their seed to replant, so they just end up in hock to the seed and herbicide companies.
Oh, and don't forget that GM crops mean farmers can use more herbicide with less impact on their own crops, which means you get more herbicide in the water table; which isn't exactly healthy for other people and animals using that water.
Cross-pollination is a valid fear too. Studies have shown that the herbicide-resistent genes can cross to weeds, and the GM companies willingness to sue farmers who do become cross-pollinated (plus the potential irreversible damage to organic farmers) means that I for one no longer trust the people pushing GM crops.
Hell, numerous examples such as the irish potato famine, show that imported monocultures are at risk of unforseen disease or pestilence that you don't get with a mixed crop structure.
Update to a moderately recent version of portage, (2.0.51 iirc)
and add >=media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6629 >=media -video/nvidia-glx-1.0.6629
to your/etc/portage/package.mask file, then "emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx"
That should drop you down to the 6111 driver, which is far more stable than the piece of crap 6629. Reboot, or kill your window manager, rmmod nvidia, and modprobe the new one and things should be a lot more stable.
I've gone from locking up X two or three times a day to running solid under heavy load for over three days now with no problem, so I'm fairly sure its fixed it for me too.
It looks like I'm having a similar problem on windows XP too with the current drivers, so I'm going to try the same thing there.
Note that by not using Active Directory you're giving up a *substantially* better tool for centralising desktop management - Group Policy.
Yeah, I know. Had an active directory running an a test win2k server to see if we could handle an inhouse migration of our accounts, group policies etc (our vendor wanted to wipe it all and just give us a clean system). I must admit, I wouldn't mind seeing the back of NT group policies, and going to GPO, they're more flexible.
That said, as we pull down a fixed group policy to most machines, and we use mandatory roaming profiles for each user group - and it's all worked for some time now without needing anything other than very minor modifications to the set policies. That I can just as easily run on a samba system as an NT ones.
Oh, and I know I can auth the nix servers off a windows AD using samba and kerberos (as we currently do to NT) but it's a bit of a kludge. (samba talking to NT hasn't been totally reliable for us, while samba to samba is perfect, and client to samba is also fine). Plus in a pure ldap setup I think it'll be a lot easier to tweak to contain other data, such as a custom address book data that's easier to get to.
Still, I'll probably migrate us to samba AD when it supports it, assuming I go with the linux backend.
Thanks for the 10% tip. I've already gone through a couple of AER (that's where I got the pricing from the in the first place)
I'm thinking we need the open licence (assuming we qualify), given we don't want to end up with software assurance, but I'll try and get hold of our previous purchases and see if we do have an existing agreement that nobody knows we have. (Gotta love changes in management), then I'll go back to our vendors and try and clear this up, to make it a fair comparison.
Damned annoying not being able to find an actual price without going through a reseller though. Thanks for the advice.
I've done a further break down of the costs I could work out here
I must admit, the price seemed high. However, we are a private boarding school, not a state funded one; NT CAL used to cost ~£5 5 years ago; and I'm told we'd have trouble with arranging funding if our licences require annual subscriptions and/or requires us to buy new windows and office licences in the next two-three years, or requires us to buy licences per person rather than just CAL for expected use/devices. We also have no plans to run exchange.
I'm having trouble finding that calculator for UK pricing, and I'd be the first to admit I don't understand which particular microsoft licensing scheme applies to us. I'd certainly appreciate any further light you can throw on it for me.
I'm afraid I don't have the actual costings I made previously to hand (I'm at home, documents are at work:) but I'll try and rework them.
NT CAL's used to be ~£5 last time I bought some, 5 years ago elsewhere (this is the first time I've really been involved in the big financial purchases at the school, I'm the techie not the manager). About 6 months ago, I'm told viglen quoted us £50,000 for two servers + licences. About half that was for windows licences, the rest for other licencing costs, the hardware and assistance in reimaging the workstations.
A couple of weeks ago I looked at Dell's UK site, to do some costings, on their public sector area and small business area (we're a private boarding school, so I'm not certain which camp we fall in, licensing wise)
Ignoring hardware, we're at £461 per server for windows 2003, and quoting Dell,
Additional 5 Client Licenses for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (+£149)
i.e. ~£30 a CAL.
That's in both sections.
We're looking at 3 servers for geographical reasons (we're split into a prep and senior school, plus boarding houses). We've just implemented wireless across much of the site, we're implementing access in the boarding houses, and we're looking at a plan to subsidise student and staff laptops. We're also adding up to 100 workstations during the next year.
Note, that 100 laptops is the total connected at any given time, not the total number of private laptops.
If we go with per-server licencing, i.e. one licence per concurrent connection, and split the user accounts up across them, we're looking at 125 existing fixed stations in each school, going up to 175 (ish), which will access their primary server and sometimes a shared resource server. (The workstations reach 100% usage at peak times)
We'll assume that the main servers will need 1 licence per client, and the shared server will need.5 licences per client (because of lower usage)
That's 175 licences per server. Now we add current laptops, plus projected laptops, minus students using laptops instead of workstations.
Rough estimate 200-250 licences per server in use at any given time. Say 700 licences total.
Now lets go with per-device licensing instead. We already know about the 'will be' 350 workstations, which are in up to 100% use.
Add 100 laptops.
Now factor in the laptop subsidy program, students plugging their own machines in their soon to be internet-wired boarding houses, a big growth in wireless, and that there are more laptops in the school at the moment that are in use at any one time, and presumably a lag period between a device licence being able to be reassigned to another device, and I can easily see us hitting that 250 total devices needing CAL's at any given time above known fixed use in the next year or two. , i.e. 700 devices. Thus, nearly £22,000 again.
This mode would make more sense, as then the servers would be much cheaper, as no more CAL's required, except for if we add more new devices over the next few years
Since I don't know how long a device keeps a CAL for (permanently or not?), and also knowing how hard it is to get additional smaller licence blocks through funding approval, I have to consider if we go with per-server licencing; we would need more CAL per server, say 200 per server, with 200 * 149/5 + 468 = £6,428 a server.
It all comes down to the 5 CAL for £149. Which is why I asked if I was making a silly error.
Maybe the UK licences are more expensive than canadian, maybe we CAN get them at an educational price of £5.24. So far, I've yet to have a vendor quote me that price. As far as I know, we're not in any existing software licensing program. If you know a good hardware and software vendor that sells to the UK (google turns up no lower prices than £149 for 5, not that I can find anyway) then I'm certainly interested.
We are a medium sized school with approximately 250 windows 2000 or XP workstations (OEM licensing + office XP) and 100 or so staff and student laptops.
We're looking at migrating off our aging NT servers to new backend logon and file servers. We already have several linux 'edge' or special purpose servers; firewalls, backup, web, email, pxe+dhcp, dns etc, and we have a decent amount of in-house experience in both windows and linux.
Given our desktops must remain on windows because of office and windows-only education software we priced up both windows server 2003 and linux replacements. Sticking to the same hardware for both costings, we came to some worrying conclusions.
Redhat Enterprise ES would set us back £700 a server, with free client access and 3 years of upgrades, and we've also got the option of a completely free system like debian. We'd use samba+ldap to largely replicate our existing setup, but with beefier hardware and security updates.
Windows 2003, at £30 a seat for new Client Access Licences, would set us back nearly £22,000 for current and next year projected licence requirements, just for authentication and file sharing, with extra costs in the thousands for every extra server we might add later.
Given that implementation will be done in-house regardless of our chosen solution, I'd like to know if:
a) I'm missing something obvious with regards the licensing costs for windows server 2003?
b) If I'm not, whether you expect such a large mismatch on up-front costs to seriously impact on Microsoft's server business in the education and other cash-strapped areas?
Even assuming the windows implementation is more efficient and quicker to deploy in itself, the linux system would be far simpler to integrate our existing single-purpose servers with (direct access to the ldap user database, for a start). With the CAL licencing savings alone, we could buy an extra server and 20 workstations.
So when someone uses Galileo to pilot a tanker with a dirty bomb into new york harbour (as opposed to using a lighthouse) can we expect galileo to be shot down then?
The grandparent was complaining about how dissenting governments were using GPS without paying for it (and didn't mention the US ability to turn it off when it chooses it it wants). I'm pointing out that even when such governments help fund a largely civilian funded alternative system, the US STILL wants control of it, to the extent of saying to politicians it's negotiating with about it that it reserves the right to shoot it down if they feel it's necessary.
You really think threatening your allies with blowing up over three billion's worth of infrastructure (and god knows how much damage to civilian life when their critical ship navigation systems go down permanently) if they can't turn it off is a fair negotiation tactic?
What's next? The US threatening to bomb the london jails if the British don't extradite suspected terrorists fast enough (israel bombed a palestinian one, so maybe the US might follow their example)
How would you feel if say, France told you to give them override access to the GPS system or they might have to shoot it down next time they were at war with an african nation (who happened to be using GPS to direct their guerilla units to french bases)?
And it's a shame the US threatened to shoot down the alternative european/asian Galileo system if the US military couldn't have the right to shut the new system down when it wanted, and has also applied as much pressure as it can to stop countries getting involved with Galileo at all.
And you wonder why other governments disagree with US policy sometimes?
Clinton had a much better policy - let people use the satellites free and non-degraded, leading to massive civilan commercial adoption - and given only US companies were allowed to make GPS receiver components, it had a massive benefit for the US economy directly as well as indirectly. But hey, it's far better to make your allies so suspicious of your actions that they'll invest over a billion to get their own system not under your control, huh.
Reproductive cloning, i.e. creating a human child using cloning technology is still illegal in the UK, and will remain that way for a very long time, probably permanently.
This is about cloning cells that will never have even the potential to be someone that could be enslaved.
You are aware that new embryonic stem cell lines in the US cannot be researched by any organisation receiving federal funding right? (which is virtually all of them in this field)
Since the existing lines are contaminated embryonic stem cell research has slowed badly in the US.
Embyronic stem cells are far simpler to manipulate than adult stem cells into the type of cells you want, but effective research into them has slowed to a trickle in many countries, including the US, because of religious and political reasons, not scientific ones.
Also, adult stem cells theoretically age faster than embryonic ones. That's not to say adult cells aren't useful; they're easier to create without culturing and have many useful applications that embryonic cells may not be suitable for.
In the end, one is a hammer, the other is a screwdriver. Since the US government has effectively outlawed screwdrivers, it's not surprising that more uses have been found for hammers.
Personally, I'm glad my government is funding investigation into both types of stem cells, rather than letting uninformed moral police dictate science.
Because microsoft don't say 'it'll be out when it's ready'. They give date after after date, breaking them each time.
And people who've bought the three year subscription 'upgrades free' licences feel like mugs because they listened to microsoft PR and got nothing out of it.
Except it never, ever works. Even hl2, where you had to logon to steam to tie your code permanently to your useraccount, download files not on the dvd, authenticate on the net every time steam lost your saved settings AND have the dvd in the drive to play was still available for download in under a week. (and given the steam outages recently, I rather wish I'd nicked it instead)
Windows XP authentication, especially OEM, is a royal pain in the ass for legitimate customers (try installing 200 workstations with only legal OEM keys!) for the lifetime of the product, and has no effect on 'freeloaders' whatsoever.
Yay for DRM, making the free dodgy copy far easier to install and maintain than legit ones!
Actually, according to tomshardware
an athlon-xp 1800+ falls between a P4 2.2 and a P4 2.4 northwood in grunt. Going by the synthetic benchmark, the 1800+ is approximately 50% faster than the PIII 1.2.
That said, your radeon gpu will absolutely butcher the S3 using shared system memory. Depends on what your doing with the laptop as to which would be faster for your needs. If it's general desktop use, you would be better off with the walmart one with a memory upgrade. (Assuming it does come with USB, which I've never seen a laptop without). Sorry.
Technically, both isolinux and windows xp boot cd's use the el torito boot standard, as opposed to the older 2.88MB embedded floppy image method.
Support for El torito is spotty on older motherboards, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if your BIOS doesn't support it properly. There are a variety of boot floppies that basically use their own el torito loader, rather than the BIOS one. Such a method should also help boot the XP cd for reinstalling.
Smart Bootmanager is one I've used in the past with some success. It also has the advantage that if you want to use it more often in future, you can embed it in the hard drive MBR as your boot manager, and boot multiple OS, CD's etc via that without having to use a floppy all the time. You can do the same with a number of other hard drive bootmanagers too.
Another possibility would be getting an upgraded BIOS from dell; but if you flash the wrong one you risk crippling your motherboard entirely, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you're certain the upgrade is the right one for your board!
Isolinux is the CD-ROM bootloader that most linux distro's use. Basically, it tells the computer where to find the bootable OS (in a livecd's case, there's a mini install of linux on the CD)
A number of computer BIOSes suck when trying to run this, as you've discovered.
First, download the two binary dos files, sbminst.exe and cwsdpmi.exe from smart bootmanager download site.
In a command prompt on windows xp (or dos prompt on an older version of windows), use cd (dir) to get to the directory you saved the file in. Type
smbinst.exe -d 0
with a clean, formatted floppy in the drive - which should install the smart boot manager to the floppy.
Set your BIOS to boot from the floppy first if necessary, and you should then get the smart boot manager menu - one option of which is to boot the cdrom.
The advantage of doing all this is that it bypasses your crappy computer BIOS, and uses the loader on the floppy instead to boot the CDROM.
By using the bootmanager floppy to boot your knoppix CD, you should be able to boot knoppix, mount your windows drive, and copy all your files to another hard-drive or network share.
Game patches and mods - I've grabbed several mappacks and patches that were in the 100-300 MB range using BT.
Free-to-download video - the most obvious example is Red Vs Blue.
Basically, if it's a large file that is coming from a particular source, and stays the same for days or weeks on end; it makes sense to create a torrent from it and spread the load around a bit.
Fair point. Windows XP Home costs £99. My original final point still stands though; the price has nearly tripled in 10 years for their desktop OS.
I'll even give you some increase over inflation is worth it, given the increase in functionality - but a 200% increase, including inflation?
Rather knocks a hole in the idea that once a monopoly has effective wiped out the competition that they have to keep prices low to keep their market share...
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As a geneticist, I'm actually an avid proponent of genetic engineering. Hell, we should engineer anything we can get our hands on as long as it is for something that we can profit from: plants producing enzymes that cure otherwise incurable disorders, plants that do not need pesticides, animals that carry humanized organs...
Look, I'm a network admin. I was on a science track until university (probably chemistry) where I switched to microelctronic engineering, so I hardly consider myself anti-science or ignorant.
There's certainly an amount of badly-informed hysteria going on around GM foods, and I'm not going to defend that. I used to be pro-GM for that reason.
Statements like the following are part of the reason I am now anti-GM, in food at least.
"Hell, we should engineer anything we can get our hands on as long as it is for something that we can profit from."
"Zeneca Agrochemicals announced that they would be distributing one type of genetically modified rice, developed by two European scientists, to Asian countries free of charge because of the crop's health benefits. On August 4, another biotech giant, Monsanto, surprised the corporate world when they announced they would be providing royalty-free licenses for all of their patented technologies that might help further the development of this particular crop."
The research goals may well be laudable, but when big companies who's primary goal is to make money become the sole suppliers of things we need to survive, things like patent law can become a big impediment to further improvement. Take patents on the human genome, patent-infringement cases against farmers, or threatened action against generic anti-aids drugs for africa as examples of why I am uneasy.
Take golden rice. What happens when it supplants existing crops, and the bio-companies decide they should make some money on their now locked in 'consumers', or if someone decides to make an improved strain and is shut down for patent infringement of one they didn't licence royalty-free. Might not happen, certainly, but give the GM companies past actions I don't exactly trust them any more, and I would certainly look a gift horse from them in the mouth.
I spend much of my day either trying to protect from other people's mistakes, or clean up after them (or sometimes my own). Genetic engineers will make mistakes just like everybody else. Sometimes those mistakes might just be insufficient testing. Sometimes it might be nature itself mutating or co-opting a modified gene into other organisms where it has unforseen consequences, such as herbicide resistant genes. That's not to say that GM is always bad; just that we should be more careful than people like you would like. Monocultures are vulnerable to new disease after all, look at the irish potato famine for an example of what could befall a modern monoculture.
As you say, world hunger is largely caused by non-natural causes. Even golden rice is only a minor part of a much bigger solution, that of poverty reduction. That poverty is largely caused
by bad governments, such as those that squandered loans and have left their countries with massive debts making their problems even worse than when they started.
Making food cheaper often makes their problems worse, as they then cannot sell one of their few products into the world market. Making them dependent on GM seeds which they're not allowed to replant is another bad idea, even if yields are higher.
Oh, and one last thing.
People who fear genetic engineering do so out of ignorance mostly. They do not realize that our efforts are piss-poor compared to what Nature is doing to all genetic material of all living organisms every day.
This is a shitty rationalisation. Nature can kill massive numbers of people with earthquakes, landslides, heat waves, disease etc. That doesn't mean we've got a free hand to do what we want, and when it goes wrong say, 'well nature's worse!'.
As sentient beings, we have a duty to weigh up all the costs of our actions, not just the ones that show on a balance sheet.
most modern distros do now, especially the livecd's and home-user orientated distros, the software that does it is called bootsplash. It relies on you having a graphic card/monitor supported by the frame buffer drivers though, so don't expect it to work on a 486. It comes in two flavours; a high res virtual terminal with a background image, or silent mode which just has a pretty screen and a progress bar until it launches gdm/kdm etc.
If it's a server/professional workstation, the services boot loader is probably more useful. I'd sure like to have one on windows when I'm trying to troubleshoot a boot problem, without having to use safe mode - especially if the problem doesn't show up in safe mode...
Quick tip (though it's still a pain)
Using the guide here
, about scanning and tuning channels. Scan at the times when the channels are broadcasting, and manually add the correct values from mplayer's channels.conf (guide for this is in part 2, 'adding the remaining freeview channels') to the channels options using mythsetup.
HTH!
I use a DVB (UK freeview) which broadcasts mpeg2, think you can do the same with HDTV in the US. That's recorded straight to disk; all I need to do is rename from .nuv to .mpeg and it plays in anything.
The answer is multiple mythtv boxes. myth splits recording (mythbackend) from playback (mythfrontend) from storage and database.
:)
Without going into the details of that, you can setup mutiple boxes. Setup something small with a nice video card next to your tv and run dvi straight into your tv if it supports it, or get a vga to component convertor cable (the simpler ones need specific configuration of the X sync timings, the more expensive boxes with silicon can do the timing conversion for you). If only for occasional use, you could always go with a simpler composite or svideo out from your video card, but the quality is less.
You can put the tuner and storage in this box if you want (but the better cpu, hdd whine and fans will add noise) or you can put tuner(s) and storage in a beefy box near another aerial drop, and just run cat5 between both boxes.
Hell, you can even have tuners in the loft, storage in the closet, and a playback box by each tv, with cat5 wiring it together. You add mythmusic, mythvideo and mythdvd, and you can have all your media stored in one place and available to all frontends/stereo/tv's.
Add an ir receiver with remote to the frontend boxes, and away you go. You can even add an ir-blaster to your tuner box so it can automatically change channel on your cable box if it only works with a remote.
The one downside is configuring. Mythtv 0.16 is a right royal pain to setup - I don't know if 0.17 will be nicer. Guess I'll find out soon
I'm a brit, and I was originally pro-gm crops. I thought the worry about them was another misinformed anti-science media campaign, like the MMR hysteria, and there is certainly an element of that; 'frankenfoods' etc.
I've since changed my mind, and am now anti-GM. Seeing the actions of the GM companies with patents, and forcing people to buy seed year after year with terminator genes has made me realise that big companies are pushing GM purely for their profit, not the benefit of customers.
I think africa would be worse off with GM crops as the increases in yield are offset by their inability to keep back a portion of their seed to replant, so they just end up in hock to the seed and herbicide companies.
Oh, and don't forget that GM crops mean farmers can use more herbicide with less impact on their own crops, which means you get more herbicide in the water table; which isn't exactly healthy for other people and animals using that water.
Cross-pollination is a valid fear too. Studies have shown that the herbicide-resistent genes can cross to weeds, and the GM companies willingness to sue farmers who do become cross-pollinated (plus the potential irreversible damage to organic farmers) means that I for one no longer trust the people pushing GM crops.
Hell, numerous examples such as the irish potato famine, show that imported monocultures are at risk of unforseen disease or pestilence that you don't get with a mixed crop structure.
Had a similar problem myself.
a -video/nvidia-glx-1.0.6629
/etc/portage/package.mask file, then "emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx"
Update to a moderately recent version of portage, (2.0.51 iirc)
and add
>=media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.6629
>=medi
to your
That should drop you down to the 6111 driver, which is far more stable than the piece of crap 6629. Reboot, or kill your window manager, rmmod nvidia, and modprobe the new one and things should be a lot more stable.
I've gone from locking up X two or three times a day to running solid under heavy load for over three days now with no problem, so I'm fairly sure its fixed it for me too.
It looks like I'm having a similar problem on windows XP too with the current drivers, so I'm going to try the same thing there.
HTH!
Note that by not using Active Directory you're giving up a *substantially* better tool for centralising desktop management - Group Policy.
Yeah, I know. Had an active directory running an a test win2k server to see if we could handle an inhouse migration of our accounts, group policies etc (our vendor wanted to wipe it all and just give us a clean system). I must admit, I wouldn't mind seeing the back of NT group policies, and going to GPO, they're more flexible.
That said, as we pull down a fixed group policy to most machines, and we use mandatory roaming profiles for each user group - and it's all worked for some time now without needing anything other than very minor modifications to the set policies. That I can just as easily run on a samba system as an NT ones.
Oh, and I know I can auth the nix servers off a windows AD using samba and kerberos (as we currently do to NT) but it's a bit of a kludge. (samba talking to NT hasn't been totally reliable for us, while samba to samba is perfect, and client to samba is also fine). Plus in a pure ldap setup I think it'll be a lot easier to tweak to contain other data, such as a custom address book data that's easier to get to.
Still, I'll probably migrate us to samba AD when it supports it, assuming I go with the linux backend.
Thanks for the 10% tip. I've already gone through a couple of AER (that's where I got the pricing from the in the first place)
I'm thinking we need the open licence (assuming we qualify), given we don't want to end up with software assurance, but I'll try and get hold of our previous purchases and see if we do have an existing agreement that nobody knows we have. (Gotta love changes in management), then I'll go back to our vendors and try and clear this up, to make it a fair comparison.
Damned annoying not being able to find an actual price without going through a reseller though.
Thanks for the advice.
I've done a further break down of the costs I could work out here I must admit, the price seemed high. However, we are a private boarding school, not a state funded one; NT CAL used to cost ~£5 5 years ago; and I'm told we'd have trouble with arranging funding if our licences require annual subscriptions and/or requires us to buy new windows and office licences in the next two-three years, or requires us to buy licences per person rather than just CAL for expected use/devices. We also have no plans to run exchange. I'm having trouble finding that calculator for UK pricing, and I'd be the first to admit I don't understand which particular microsoft licensing scheme applies to us. I'd certainly appreciate any further light you can throw on it for me.
I'm afraid I don't have the actual costings I made previously to hand (I'm at home, documents are at work :) but I'll try and rework them.
.5 licences per client (because of lower usage)
NT CAL's used to be ~£5 last time I bought some, 5 years ago elsewhere (this is the first time I've really been involved in the big financial purchases at the school, I'm the techie not the manager). About 6 months ago, I'm told viglen quoted us £50,000 for two servers + licences. About half that was for windows licences, the rest for other licencing costs, the hardware and assistance in reimaging the workstations.
A couple of weeks ago I looked at Dell's UK site,
to do some costings, on their public sector area and small business area (we're a private boarding school, so I'm not certain which camp we fall in, licensing wise)
Ignoring hardware, we're at £461 per server for windows 2003, and quoting Dell,
Additional 5 Client Licenses for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (+£149)
i.e. ~£30 a CAL.
That's in both sections.
We're looking at 3 servers for geographical reasons (we're split into a prep and senior school, plus boarding houses). We've just implemented wireless across much of the site, we're implementing access in the boarding houses, and we're looking at a plan to subsidise student and staff laptops. We're also adding up to 100 workstations during the next year.
Note, that 100 laptops is the total connected at any given time, not the total number of private laptops.
If we go with per-server licencing, i.e. one licence per concurrent connection, and split the
user accounts up across them, we're looking at
125 existing fixed stations in each school, going up to 175 (ish), which will access their primary server and sometimes a shared resource server. (The workstations reach 100% usage at peak times)
We'll assume that the main servers will need 1 licence per client, and the shared server will need
That's 175 licences per server. Now we add current laptops, plus projected laptops, minus students using laptops instead of workstations.
Rough estimate 200-250 licences per server in use at any given time. Say 700 licences total.
(700-15) * £149/5 = £20,413
+ 3x server licences @ £461 = £1,383
total = £21,796
the -15 is the CAL we get with the servers.
Now lets go with per-device licensing instead.
We already know about the 'will be' 350 workstations, which are in up to 100% use.
Add 100 laptops.
Now factor in the laptop subsidy program, students plugging their own machines in their soon to be internet-wired boarding houses, a big growth in wireless, and that there are more laptops in the school at the moment that are in use at any one time, and presumably a lag period between a device licence being able to be reassigned to another device, and I can easily see us hitting that 250 total devices needing CAL's at any given time above known fixed use in the next year or two.
, i.e. 700 devices.
Thus, nearly £22,000 again.
This mode would make more sense, as then the servers would be much cheaper, as no more CAL's required, except for if we add more new devices over the next few years
Since I don't know how long a device keeps a CAL for (permanently or not?), and also knowing how hard it is to get additional smaller licence blocks through funding approval, I have to consider if we go with per-server licencing; we would need more CAL per server, say 200 per server, with 200 * 149/5 + 468 = £6,428 a server.
It all comes down to the 5 CAL for £149. Which is why I asked if I was making a silly error.
Maybe the UK licences are more expensive than canadian, maybe we CAN get them at an educational price of £5.24. So far, I've yet to have a vendor quote me that price. As far as I know, we're not in any existing software licensing program. If you know a good hardware and software vendor that sells to the UK (google turns up no lower prices than £149 for 5, not that I can find anyway) then I'm certainly interested.
We are a medium sized school with approximately 250 windows 2000 or XP workstations (OEM licensing + office XP) and 100 or so staff and student laptops.
We're looking at migrating off our aging NT servers to new backend logon and file servers. We already have several linux 'edge' or special purpose servers; firewalls, backup, web, email, pxe+dhcp, dns etc, and we have a decent amount of in-house experience in both windows and linux.
Given our desktops must remain on windows because of office and windows-only education software we priced up both windows server 2003 and linux replacements. Sticking to the same hardware for both costings, we came to some worrying conclusions.
Redhat Enterprise ES would set us back £700 a server, with free client access and 3 years of upgrades, and we've also got the option of a completely free system like debian. We'd use samba+ldap to largely replicate our existing setup, but with beefier hardware and security updates.
Windows 2003, at £30 a seat for new Client Access Licences, would set us back nearly £22,000 for current and next year projected licence requirements, just for authentication and file sharing, with extra costs in the thousands for every extra server we might add later.
Given that implementation will be done in-house regardless of our chosen solution, I'd like to know if:
a) I'm missing something obvious with regards the licensing costs for windows server 2003?
b) If I'm not, whether you expect such a large mismatch on up-front costs to seriously impact on Microsoft's server business in the education and other cash-strapped areas?
Even assuming the windows implementation is more efficient and quicker to deploy in itself, the linux system would be far simpler to integrate our existing single-purpose servers with (direct access to the ldap user database, for a start). With the CAL licencing savings alone, we could buy an extra server and 20 workstations.
So when someone uses Galileo to pilot a tanker with a dirty bomb into new york harbour (as opposed to using a lighthouse) can we expect galileo to be shot down then?
The grandparent was complaining about how dissenting governments were using GPS without paying for it (and didn't mention the US ability to turn it off when it chooses it it wants). I'm pointing out that even when such governments help fund a largely civilian funded alternative system, the US STILL wants control of it, to the extent of saying to politicians it's negotiating with about it that it reserves the right to shoot it down if they feel it's necessary.
You really think threatening your allies with blowing up over three billion's worth of infrastructure (and god knows how much damage to civilian life when their critical ship navigation systems go down permanently) if they can't turn it off is a fair negotiation tactic?
What's next? The US threatening to bomb the london jails if the British don't extradite suspected terrorists fast enough (israel bombed a palestinian one, so maybe the US might follow their example)
How would you feel if say, France told you to give them override access to the GPS system or they might have to shoot it down next time they were at war with an african nation (who happened to be using GPS to direct their guerilla units to french bases)?
And it's a shame the US threatened to shoot down the alternative european/asian Galileo system if the US military couldn't have the right to shut the new system down when it wanted, and has also applied as much pressure as it can to stop countries getting involved with Galileo at all.
And you wonder why other governments disagree with US policy sometimes?
Clinton had a much better policy - let people use the satellites free and non-degraded, leading to massive civilan commercial adoption - and given only US companies were allowed to make GPS receiver components, it had a massive benefit for the US economy directly as well as indirectly. But hey, it's far better to make your allies so suspicious of your actions that they'll invest over a billion to get their own system not under your control, huh.
Well, once the RIAA and MPAA make enough money suing all their customers for ludicrous sums so they don't even have to pretend they fund new talent...
:)
software patents finish crippling any US-based innovation...
and oil becomes too expensive to burn delivering pizzas, you'll need a new list
Reproductive cloning, i.e. creating a human child using cloning technology is still illegal in the UK, and will remain that way for a very long time, probably permanently. This is about cloning cells that will never have even the potential to be someone that could be enslaved.
Then the clone drains your bank accounts, steals your wife, and commits a few crimes before pretending to flee to jamaica...
You are aware that new embryonic stem cell lines in the US cannot be researched by any organisation receiving federal funding right? (which is virtually all of them in this field)
Since the existing lines are contaminated embryonic stem cell research has slowed badly in the US.
Embyronic stem cells are far simpler to manipulate than adult stem cells into the type of cells you want, but effective research into them has slowed to a trickle in many countries, including the US, because of religious and political reasons, not scientific ones.
Also, adult stem cells theoretically age faster than embryonic ones. That's not to say adult cells aren't useful; they're easier to create without culturing and have many useful applications that embryonic cells may not be suitable for.
In the end, one is a hammer, the other is a screwdriver. Since the US government has effectively outlawed screwdrivers, it's not surprising that more uses have been found for hammers.
Personally, I'm glad my government is funding investigation into both types of stem cells, rather than letting uninformed moral police dictate science.
Because microsoft don't say 'it'll be out when it's ready'. They give date after after date, breaking them each time.
And people who've bought the three year subscription 'upgrades free' licences feel like mugs because they listened to microsoft PR and got nothing out of it.
Except it never, ever works. Even hl2, where you had to logon to steam to tie your code permanently to your useraccount, download files not on the dvd, authenticate on the net every time steam lost your saved settings AND have the dvd in the drive to play was still available for download in under a week. (and given the steam outages recently, I rather wish I'd nicked it instead)
Windows XP authentication, especially OEM, is a royal pain in the ass for legitimate customers (try installing 200 workstations with only legal OEM keys!) for the lifetime of the product, and has no effect on 'freeloaders' whatsoever.
Yay for DRM, making the free dodgy copy far easier to install and maintain than legit ones!
Actually, according to tomshardware
an athlon-xp 1800+ falls between a P4 2.2 and a P4 2.4 northwood in grunt. Going by the synthetic benchmark, the 1800+ is approximately 50% faster than the PIII 1.2.
That said, your radeon gpu will absolutely butcher the S3 using shared system memory. Depends on what your doing with the laptop as to which would be faster for your needs. If it's general desktop use, you would be better off with the walmart one with a memory upgrade. (Assuming it does come with USB, which I've never seen a laptop without). Sorry.
Technically, both isolinux and windows xp boot cd's use the el torito boot standard, as opposed to the older 2.88MB embedded floppy image method.
Support for El torito is spotty on older motherboards, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if your BIOS doesn't support it properly. There are a variety of boot floppies that basically use their own el torito loader, rather than the BIOS one. Such a method should also help boot the XP cd for reinstalling.
Smart Bootmanager is one I've used in the past with some success. It also has the advantage that if you want to use it more often in future, you can embed it in the hard drive MBR as your boot manager, and boot multiple OS, CD's etc via that without having to use a floppy all the time. You can do the same with a number of other hard drive bootmanagers too.
Another possibility would be getting an upgraded BIOS from dell; but if you flash the wrong one you risk crippling your motherboard entirely, so I wouldn't recommend it unless you're certain the upgrade is the right one for your board!
A number of computer BIOSes suck when trying to run this, as you've discovered.
Following the advice here from isolinux's site...
First, download the two binary dos files, sbminst.exe and cwsdpmi.exe from smart bootmanager download site.
In a command prompt on windows xp (or dos prompt on an older version of windows), use cd (dir) to get to the directory you saved the file in. Type
smbinst.exe -d 0
with a clean, formatted floppy in the drive - which should install the smart boot manager to the floppy.
Set your BIOS to boot from the floppy first if necessary, and you should then get the smart boot manager menu - one option of which is to boot the cdrom.
The advantage of doing all this is that it bypasses your crappy computer BIOS, and uses the loader on the floppy instead to boot the CDROM.
By using the bootmanager floppy to boot your knoppix CD, you should be able to boot knoppix, mount your windows drive, and copy all your files to another hard-drive or network share.
Two more spring to mind:
Game patches and mods - I've grabbed several mappacks and patches that were in the 100-300 MB range using BT.
Free-to-download video - the most obvious example is Red Vs Blue.
Basically, if it's a large file that is coming from a particular source, and stays the same for days or weeks on end; it makes sense to create a torrent from it and spread the load around a bit.
Fair point. Windows XP Home costs £99. My original final point still stands though; the price has nearly tripled in 10 years for their desktop OS.
I'll even give you some increase over inflation is worth it, given the increase in functionality - but a 200% increase, including inflation?
Rather knocks a hole in the idea that once a monopoly has effective wiped out the competition that they have to keep prices low to keep their market share...