Alright,
I have a sony PCG-V505BL (a 1.8ghz celeron notebook). it is quite light, has a very clear screen, and has about 2.5 hours of battery life. I picked it up for about $1000 at best buy on clearance.
It took to linux fairly well, everything is supported except for 3d acel on the ati radeon mobility. It has no built in wireless (i use a Senao 2511 EXT2 with external antenna in pcmcia, prism 2.x). I'd reccomend it to another. One nice feature is that it comes with three partitions direct from the factory, making dual boot trivial. If i want to play some 3d game i would just reboot to windows xp home, which came with this.
The easiest way to get a real list of hardware when you are shopping is to take a Gentoo LiveCD with you and boot up the laptop with it in the store (make sure no one is watching). The liveCD will detect a lot of stuff, and will give you chipset names as it does.
If you can deal with the poor 3d accel in linux, this is a nice laptop to pick up on a clearance sale (newer models have come out since). Oh yea, if you are willing to spend the extra cash and buy online, sony is extending the warranty to 3 years (with LCD), and they have had free memory stick/memory key offers.
While this would make me incredibly happy, doing so would probably add a lot more politics to the distribution of free software.
If this would happen it would become more common to insert non-compete type clauses into open source code, like "you can use this for free as long as you are not my competitor."
It really kills me to see SCO using Samba and other open source packages in their system, while at the same time spitting on the GPL. I guess it just proves that none of their money comes from actual sale of products, but just this lawsuit.
It just seems more and more fashionable lately to declare that people are violating your I.P. Although I have never heard of a sourceforge project complaining that people downloaded their source. before.
Do the Warp Pipe people plan on making a business out of their product? Or are they just horrified of competing forks? Did they close it because they are worried about people tweaking their copies to cheat at games? This is the only concievable reason I could think that they would care, but who knows.
Sony fixed my PS2 even though it was out of warranty. All I did was call the repair center and ask nicely.
I suggest you do the same before trying to self-repair. Believe me, sony is much more concerned with you being able to purchase more PS2 video games than having to absorb the cost to repair your unit.
I just have a hard time believing that McBride really cares about all those poor Linux developers who would be unable to write "infringing" code if the paid model disappeared and they lost their jobs.
I doubt i'm the only one who has seen tons of open source project pages in which the developer has written "I am looking for a job." The developers did not stop programming when they lost their job, programming for many is an enjoyable activity, and fortunatly it is also not that resource intensive (power for the computer, and internet connection).
As long as a developer finds a business (or even better creates one), that benifits from the software's open existance, they can still make money writing code. There are many specialized markets that depend on software from a very small pool of vendors. In my experience this situation often leads to customer abuse by the vendor in terms of pricing, slow updates, and overpriced support.
In such small markets the need for updates to the software never goes away, someone has to do it, even if it's free software. Since there are not many geeks out there programming these systems "for fun", companies are willing to pay for updates to this software, because someone needs to do them. One might argue that these businesses would reject this model because they want an advantage over their competitors. This is in many cases untrue because they know that their competitors need the product to function, and will obtain their own from a vendor or in-house in one way or another.
Agreed, it's really a very simple improvement to put the constant on the left hand side. I didnt even know that this should be done until I was recently informed by one of the CS professors at my school that this practice can seriously cut down on debugging logic errors.
BEGIN DISCLAIMER
Now I want to make it straight and clear that this statement is not intended to put down the kernel developers in any way, but rather to agree with the parent comment that this is a good idea in general. I have nothing but respect for the kernel developers.
END DISCLAIMER
Have you used shorewall? The scripts it uses are very readable. There are also several other iptables ruleset generation programs, including one called Firestarter.
I'd be happy to show you how to set up an iptables ruleset if you are having difficulties configuring one.
Laptops are always a touchy issue when it comes to network security. I think in the end the only thing you can do is firewall individual pc's and run a good intrusion detection system.
And if a particular system is running an operating system too old to run a firewall (some ungodly old unix system or windows 3.1 machine), as happens when expensive custom software still needs a host, you can still cheaply build a firewalling bridge to sit between this unit and it's network connection (linux is your friend).
You can try all you want to strengthen the border of your network, but those executives with their laptops (hell even most regular employees) will always put stuff behind your firewall.
Can your switches put machines into VLANs automatically based on their mac addresses? You could probably set it up that all unknown MAC addresses get put into a vlan that only has a dhcp server and a simple captive portal, telling the users that they need to register their unit to get put onto a regular network. You could make it so this vlan has only a simple web proxy going out (for temporary use).
Agreed. Microsoft is out of their minds for letting users run as root. The thought of some of the people I have seen use windows running as root on any system is enough to give me nightmares.
It's even worse when such users get brave and start "tinkering" to optomize their system by installing tons of adware based packages, which then neccessitates going in with adaware to remove all the trojans/backdoors/viruses and stuff that they downloaded.
It would be awesome if this move would improve the electromagnetic pulse response characteristics of the chips that use it. Regarding past slashdot articles on EM pulse weapons, I would like to see even consumer technology become more pulse tolerant.
I cant help but worry that EM pulse weapons designed to take out electronics in a small area could become more commmon, used by either terrorists/pranksters. I'm not talking about it happening today, but in the future maybe 10 or 20 years down the road, I think it highly likely that there will be a publicized case of someone using an EM pulse device to take out a business computer network.
Why is it that when people talk about EM pulses taking out electronics that no one thinks about people who might be wearing pacemakers. I would hope that those devices are fault tolerant enough to save the wearer in a large EM pulse situation. Perhaps the body supplies some shielding, but I wouldnt know. Lots of people these days are running devices that are essential to life.
Also, the lack of "free" for the DES upgrades came from the lack of a support contract, something which i had no control over (i didnt control the budgeting for this unit). And if they are free now, it wasnt free when we used it.
I did not give up on IOS, we used the cisco firwewall at that company until I left, although I did ask for another network admin's help to set it up.
I'd also like to see what you've gotten a 506E to do that linux cant do, i believe you are talking about more expensive gear Anonymous Coward.
Damn straight.
I had a Cisco PIX 506E and the thing was rediculously overpriced for what it offered. The manuals that accompany the device were nothing more than IOS command guides (the product guide on CD only vaguely helpful).
I became a much happier person when I moved to a linux machine with a nice shorewall iptables script.
There is one thing I have to say about the cisco 506E, it had a form factor that beats the hell out of a plain pc. I would have loved to run linux on it. It was very small/quiet/light/unobtrusive.
A small disclaimer: I know that with tons of Cisco training you can become a master of these Cisco PIX devices. However I will never forgive cisco for charging for 3DES encryption "upgrades".
A netgear FVS318 VPN firewall has twice the features as this unit for $150, although dont expect huge throughput when using 3DES or AES for vpn tunnels, for that app a 400mhz or greater linux firewall would probably do the trick. They also had buggy firmware in the past, but they seem to be working well with the 1.4 firmware. They have dyndns integration, 8 vpn tunnels, really awesome web based configuration, and a nice professional looking casing. Hooking two of these units together for a vpn is a snap.
Yea, I had a similar problem with Linksys or D-Link, i cant remember. Both of them seem about as braindead when packaging products with a Linux label.
The driver they released only worked on the 2.2 kernel with some ungodly old version of redhat. That combined with the utter lack of understanding at their call centers of the fact that they wrote "Supports Linux" on the box, all they could do was offer me a new card, which they were also unsure would support linux.
I ended up saving myself a ton of trouble and bought myself a Senao 2511 EXT2 wireless card with the prism chipset. It works beautifully, and has 200mW of power.
I like the card so much that i'd almost consider getting a pci adaptor so i can put one in my desktop. However, I noticed that Ultramesh has some PCI cards for sale that use the prism chipset and have external antenna connectors.
Has anyone messed around with meshAP from locustworld?
In part it seems like all the anti p2p attitude has pushed some schools to traffic shape the HELL out of every port greater than 1024.
I know that at one school I formerly attended they even traffic shape AIM file transfers because "they make it too easy to send copyrighted files".
This is done for the most part to make life easier on the school's sysadmins and legal department because rather than dealing with the problem of their users rights being trampled, they just make the problem go away.
And I feel very strongly that users rights are being trampled when their internet connection is being traffic shaped with preference to specific ports, rather than per user instantaneous bandwidth allocations (as may be required to fairly distribute total bandwidth). It should be the user's responsibility to determine whether or not his or her actions are legal, because in the end the end user bears the consequences.
You know that if the situation in Terminator 3 (virus spreads over majority of systems) were to ever happen, it would happen as a result of having a massively homogenous computing environment.
I really think that we should stop teaching kids how to use Word and Excel in middle school, and start teaching them how to install their own linux systems. We could create an army of informed computer users, something that Microsoft fears the most.
Seriously I can understand your feelings. Although from perhaps the reverse direction.
I became so frustrated at one of my past jobs when I spent a large portion of my day doing IT stuff when my main capacity was as a programmer. I begged and pleaded for a new IT person to assist me, but budget problems made that impossible.
Needless to say the IT stuff AND the programming stuff got behind schedule.
It wouldnt have been that bad having to watch over the IT stuff if I didnt spend 90% of that time fixing "Wierd Microsoft Office XP crash #5910333..." while trying to open "randomdocument53.doc"
I really hate MS software. Bill, if you are listening, ADD SOME INTELLIGENCE TO YOUR DEBUG MESSAGES, the end user may not get it, but the IT guy trying to figure out what the hell went wrong can sure use it.
My hopeful rant: Maybe one day i'll be happy and everyone will use linux. At least when things go wrong on linux you can be sure of finding out WHY they went wrong.
Relatively speaking you can be gauranteed that any console game you buy will run exactly as fast as it is designed to.
I long ago fought the never ending battle to stay up to date with the latest PC gaming equipment. Now I spend money on raw processor power, hd space, and memory, because my computer is now used for research.
While it costs 50$ per game for the playstation 2 usually, it is much easier to budget for than the constantly increasing PC game system requirements.
By the way, Ace Combat 04 is awesome, i wish it had online play. With the ethernet adaptor I am enjoying the only other benifit that I missed from PC gaming; online play with ATV Offroad Fury 2 and Twisted Metal black.
I high school proofs were only discussed briefly in a Geometry course. In college I didnt really use proofs much until the end of Calculus 3.
When I hit discrete math it felt like hitting a brick wall. I felt like I understood the concept of sets and logical rules fairly well, but I was weak on the area of actually knowing how to apply these concepts to the organization of a proof.
In too many college courses I've seen professors who are extremely intelligent, but have a hard time explaining concepts, rather than how to solve a very specific problem. I have no doubt that they understand the concepts in question enough to use them, but quite often I feel that they dont remember the process they used to LEARN them, and thus cannot relate to someone who is learning the topic from the ground up.
I accuse myself of having similar problems when trying to teach others about Calculus or Analog Circuit analysis. What has helped me recently is to keep a detailed journal of the topics I am studying while I am learning them, and make comments in my journal about what topics seemed strange and merit further study.
I think I found a decent copy for 14.95 used on Amazon's site, using your link.
The seller has decent ratings and he rates it in Excellent condition. I figure, why not, i can take a risk like this for 14.95 when the payoff is not having to spend 130$.
I read through some of the sample chapters, this book looks awesome.
I started reading Guha's notes, and they have been quite helpful.
Do you have a link for Lang's notes?
P.S. At first I had a problem reading most of the notes on some of the UCF sites simply because they were all in.doc format and required the symbol font. Crossover office allowed me to run Word in linux so I could read the notes.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright,
I have a sony PCG-V505BL (a 1.8ghz celeron notebook). it is quite light, has a very clear screen, and has about 2.5 hours of battery life. I picked it up for about $1000 at best buy on clearance.
It took to linux fairly well, everything is supported except for 3d acel on the ati radeon mobility. It has no built in wireless (i use a Senao 2511 EXT2 with external antenna in pcmcia, prism 2.x). I'd reccomend it to another. One nice feature is that it comes with three partitions direct from the factory, making dual boot trivial. If i want to play some 3d game i would just reboot to windows xp home, which came with this.
The easiest way to get a real list of hardware when you are shopping is to take a Gentoo LiveCD with you and boot up the laptop with it in the store (make sure no one is watching). The liveCD will detect a lot of stuff, and will give you chipset names as it does.
If you can deal with the poor 3d accel in linux, this is a nice laptop to pick up on a clearance sale (newer models have come out since). Oh yea, if you are willing to spend the extra cash and buy online, sony is extending the warranty to 3 years (with LCD), and they have had free memory stick/memory key offers.
While this would make me incredibly happy, doing so would probably add a lot more politics to the distribution of free software.
If this would happen it would become more common to insert non-compete type clauses into open source code, like "you can use this for free as long as you are not my competitor."
It really kills me to see SCO using Samba and other open source packages in their system, while at the same time spitting on the GPL. I guess it just proves that none of their money comes from actual sale of products, but just this lawsuit.
I'm sure he will incur travel expenses during this process, so it's good that funding sources are available.
It just seems more and more fashionable lately to declare that people are violating your I.P. Although I have never heard of a sourceforge project complaining that people downloaded their source. before.
Do the Warp Pipe people plan on making a business out of their product? Or are they just horrified of competing forks? Did they close it because they are worried about people tweaking their copies to cheat at games? This is the only concievable reason I could think that they would care, but who knows.
Sony fixed my PS2 even though it was out of warranty. All I did was call the repair center and ask nicely.
I suggest you do the same before trying to self-repair. Believe me, sony is much more concerned with you being able to purchase more PS2 video games than having to absorb the cost to repair your unit.
I just have a hard time believing that McBride really cares about all those poor Linux developers who would be unable to write "infringing" code if the paid model disappeared and they lost their jobs.
I doubt i'm the only one who has seen tons of open source project pages in which the developer has written "I am looking for a job." The developers did not stop programming when they lost their job, programming for many is an enjoyable activity, and fortunatly it is also not that resource intensive (power for the computer, and internet connection).
As long as a developer finds a business (or even better creates one), that benifits from the software's open existance, they can still make money writing code. There are many specialized markets that depend on software from a very small pool of vendors. In my experience this situation often leads to customer abuse by the vendor in terms of pricing, slow updates, and overpriced support.
In such small markets the need for updates to the software never goes away, someone has to do it, even if it's free software. Since there are not many geeks out there programming these systems "for fun", companies are willing to pay for updates to this software, because someone needs to do them. One might argue that these businesses would reject this model because they want an advantage over their competitors. This is in many cases untrue because they know that their competitors need the product to function, and will obtain their own from a vendor or in-house in one way or another.
Agreed, it's really a very simple improvement to put the constant on the left hand side. I didnt even know that this should be done until I was recently informed by one of the CS professors at my school that this practice can seriously cut down on debugging logic errors.
BEGIN DISCLAIMER
Now I want to make it straight and clear that this statement is not intended to put down the kernel developers in any way, but rather to agree with the parent comment that this is a good idea in general. I have nothing but respect for the kernel developers.
END DISCLAIMER
Have you used shorewall? The scripts it uses are very readable. There are also several other iptables ruleset generation programs, including one called Firestarter.
I'd be happy to show you how to set up an iptables ruleset if you are having difficulties configuring one.
Laptops are always a touchy issue when it comes to network security. I think in the end the only thing you can do is firewall individual pc's and run a good intrusion detection system.
And if a particular system is running an operating system too old to run a firewall (some ungodly old unix system or windows 3.1 machine), as happens when expensive custom software still needs a host, you can still cheaply build a firewalling bridge to sit between this unit and it's network connection (linux is your friend).
You can try all you want to strengthen the border of your network, but those executives with their laptops (hell even most regular employees) will always put stuff behind your firewall.
Can your switches put machines into VLANs automatically based on their mac addresses? You could probably set it up that all unknown MAC addresses get put into a vlan that only has a dhcp server and a simple captive portal, telling the users that they need to register their unit to get put onto a regular network. You could make it so this vlan has only a simple web proxy going out (for temporary use).
Agreed. Microsoft is out of their minds for letting users run as root. The thought of some of the people I have seen use windows running as root on any system is enough to give me nightmares.
It's even worse when such users get brave and start "tinkering" to optomize their system by installing tons of adware based packages, which then neccessitates going in with adaware to remove all the trojans/backdoors/viruses and stuff that they downloaded.
It would be awesome if this move would improve the electromagnetic pulse response characteristics of the chips that use it. Regarding past slashdot articles on EM pulse weapons, I would like to see even consumer technology become more pulse tolerant.
I cant help but worry that EM pulse weapons designed to take out electronics in a small area could become more commmon, used by either terrorists/pranksters. I'm not talking about it happening today, but in the future maybe 10 or 20 years down the road, I think it highly likely that there will be a publicized case of someone using an EM pulse device to take out a business computer network.
Why is it that when people talk about EM pulses taking out electronics that no one thinks about people who might be wearing pacemakers. I would hope that those devices are fault tolerant enough to save the wearer in a large EM pulse situation. Perhaps the body supplies some shielding, but I wouldnt know. Lots of people these days are running devices that are essential to life.
Which brand? Is that the WMP11?
Some of the manufacturers change their chipsets without changing the model number. It is quite frustrating.
I may be wrong about the spelling, but if I am correct about the model it is of the form W*11
Since when does the 506E support failover?
Also, the lack of "free" for the DES upgrades came from the lack of a support contract, something which i had no control over (i didnt control the budgeting for this unit). And if they are free now, it wasnt free when we used it.
I did not give up on IOS, we used the cisco firwewall at that company until I left, although I did ask for another network admin's help to set it up.
I'd also like to see what you've gotten a 506E to do that linux cant do, i believe you are talking about more expensive gear Anonymous Coward.
Damn straight. I had a Cisco PIX 506E and the thing was rediculously overpriced for what it offered. The manuals that accompany the device were nothing more than IOS command guides (the product guide on CD only vaguely helpful).
I became a much happier person when I moved to a linux machine with a nice shorewall iptables script.
There is one thing I have to say about the cisco 506E, it had a form factor that beats the hell out of a plain pc. I would have loved to run linux on it. It was very small/quiet/light/unobtrusive.
A small disclaimer: I know that with tons of Cisco training you can become a master of these Cisco PIX devices. However I will never forgive cisco for charging for 3DES encryption "upgrades".
A netgear FVS318 VPN firewall has twice the features as this unit for $150, although dont expect huge throughput when using 3DES or AES for vpn tunnels, for that app a 400mhz or greater linux firewall would probably do the trick. They also had buggy firmware in the past, but they seem to be working well with the 1.4 firmware. They have dyndns integration, 8 vpn tunnels, really awesome web based configuration, and a nice professional looking casing. Hooking two of these units together for a vpn is a snap.
Yea, I had a similar problem with Linksys or D-Link, i cant remember. Both of them seem about as braindead when packaging products with a Linux label.
The driver they released only worked on the 2.2 kernel with some ungodly old version of redhat. That combined with the utter lack of understanding at their call centers of the fact that they wrote "Supports Linux" on the box, all they could do was offer me a new card, which they were also unsure would support linux.
I ended up saving myself a ton of trouble and bought myself a Senao 2511 EXT2 wireless card with the prism chipset. It works beautifully, and has 200mW of power.
I like the card so much that i'd almost consider getting a pci adaptor so i can put one in my desktop. However, I noticed that Ultramesh has some PCI cards for sale that use the prism chipset and have external antenna connectors.
Has anyone messed around with meshAP from locustworld?
In part it seems like all the anti p2p attitude has pushed some schools to traffic shape the HELL out of every port greater than 1024.
I know that at one school I formerly attended they even traffic shape AIM file transfers because "they make it too easy to send copyrighted files".
This is done for the most part to make life easier on the school's sysadmins and legal department because rather than dealing with the problem of their users rights being trampled, they just make the problem go away.
And I feel very strongly that users rights are being trampled when their internet connection is being traffic shaped with preference to specific ports, rather than per user instantaneous bandwidth allocations (as may be required to fairly distribute total bandwidth). It should be the user's responsibility to determine whether or not his or her actions are legal, because in the end the end user bears the consequences.
Why dont you check out php PHPgroupware
I used it a year ago and was pretty happy with it. You will need an apache web server (or similar) with php and mysql to use it.
Good thing for you that all those things are free. If you are looking for a system to host it on, why not try gentoo
This Anonymous == JeffK http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/
You know that if the situation in Terminator 3 (virus spreads over majority of systems) were to ever happen, it would happen as a result of having a massively homogenous computing environment. I really think that we should stop teaching kids how to use Word and Excel in middle school, and start teaching them how to install their own linux systems. We could create an army of informed computer users, something that Microsoft fears the most.
Seriously I can understand your feelings. Although from perhaps the reverse direction.
I became so frustrated at one of my past jobs when I spent a large portion of my day doing IT stuff when my main capacity was as a programmer. I begged and pleaded for a new IT person to assist me, but budget problems made that impossible.
Needless to say the IT stuff AND the programming stuff got behind schedule.
It wouldnt have been that bad having to watch over the IT stuff if I didnt spend 90% of that time fixing "Wierd Microsoft Office XP crash #5910333..." while trying to open "randomdocument53.doc" I really hate MS software. Bill, if you are listening, ADD SOME INTELLIGENCE TO YOUR DEBUG MESSAGES, the end user may not get it, but the IT guy trying to figure out what the hell went wrong can sure use it.
My hopeful rant: Maybe one day i'll be happy and everyone will use linux. At least when things go wrong on linux you can be sure of finding out WHY they went wrong.
Relatively speaking you can be gauranteed that any console game you buy will run exactly as fast as it is designed to.
I long ago fought the never ending battle to stay up to date with the latest PC gaming equipment. Now I spend money on raw processor power, hd space, and memory, because my computer is now used for research.
While it costs 50$ per game for the playstation 2 usually, it is much easier to budget for than the constantly increasing PC game system requirements.
By the way, Ace Combat 04 is awesome, i wish it had online play. With the ethernet adaptor I am enjoying the only other benifit that I missed from PC gaming; online play with ATV Offroad Fury 2 and Twisted Metal black.
-Jonathan S. Romero
I high school proofs were only discussed briefly in a Geometry course. In college I didnt really use proofs much until the end of Calculus 3.
When I hit discrete math it felt like hitting a brick wall. I felt like I understood the concept of sets and logical rules fairly well, but I was weak on the area of actually knowing how to apply these concepts to the organization of a proof.
In too many college courses I've seen professors who are extremely intelligent, but have a hard time explaining concepts, rather than how to solve a very specific problem. I have no doubt that they understand the concepts in question enough to use them, but quite often I feel that they dont remember the process they used to LEARN them, and thus cannot relate to someone who is learning the topic from the ground up.
I accuse myself of having similar problems when trying to teach others about Calculus or Analog Circuit analysis. What has helped me recently is to keep a detailed journal of the topics I am studying while I am learning them, and make comments in my journal about what topics seemed strange and merit further study.
-Jonathan
I am continually amazed at how useful some of the links that I am getting back from this question are. Thanks for the UCF link.
Unfortunately I am in New York right now on a Xerox internship and will not be back at UCF before the exam.
I think I am going to go ahead and buy a copy. Also, can regular students purchase a solutions manual? Or do they only give that to the instructors?
-Jonathan
Thanks for the information.
I think I found a decent copy for 14.95 used on Amazon's site, using your link.
The seller has decent ratings and he rates it in Excellent condition. I figure, why not, i can take a risk like this for 14.95 when the payoff is not having to spend 130$.
I read through some of the sample chapters, this book looks awesome.
-Jonathan
I started reading Guha's notes, and they have been quite helpful.
.doc format and required the symbol font. Crossover office allowed me to run Word in linux so I could read the notes.
Do you have a link for Lang's notes?
P.S. At first I had a problem reading most of the notes on some of the UCF sites simply because they were all in
-Jonathan