Going on right now (well, starting soon) is the greatest wild party in the middle of nowhere, 2 hours from the closes cell signal, and they have internet access. Ask some of the Burning Man guys to help with such a setup. They don't use 4G, but they have T1s in nearby towns and they microwave it out to the festival site. It works very well, even in the worst dust storms, and is not nearly as reliant on the whims of cellular carriers.
This fire is burning right next to actual people, not sure why we need to worry about SF 200 miles away. Actual people are right on the fire line in danger, they should be the ones reported on. I know this is a tech site and the bay is the tech center, but remember the firefighters and civilians that are actually on site, and not just experiencing a minor inconvenience.
Can I just get a phone that I don't have to recharge every 8 hours if I actually use the thing? More apps, more features, more browsing all means a worse experience because it is a wireless device that I always have to have plugged in for power.
I agree there has to be some middle ground. Completely ignoring it and pretending it doesn't happen doesn't seem right, but we don't need to glamorize it. I used to be a photojournalist and shot pictures of a murder scene at a local college. We had a ton of pictures and the editors and I decided to run one that we considered in the middle of the road from everything I had shot. It was a wide shot of the whole scene at night with detectives and the street corner, and if you looked closely you could see a sheet covered object in the street. It was the person that had been killed, but small and off-center in the frame. Our goal was not to present a grotesque image but to show the scene as it was. A few people complained that it shocked them, and my best answer to them was I am sorry, but I am also glad you are shocked, we all should be shocked that someone was murdered on our campus. We can't just hide the fact that bad things happen, but we can take a minute to sit back and judge how we should present it. Live coverage doesn't allow that to be done.
I get a kick out of showing people the GPS I use for hiking/snowmobiling. It shows my coordinates, and lets me point an arrow towards other coordinates. No maps, no trails, no color, just on 1 inch screen. The battery lasts forever, its waterproof, totally reliable. But people see it and say "ewwww how do you know where you are?" I don't need a big color picture, but most people do I guess, and that is "GPS" for the rest of the world.
From my experience working on a Search & Rescue team I must say someone having the knowledge of how to navigate with a map and compass is pretty rare. Congrats on always having a backup, that is what will save you. I have rescued people that were out on a million dollar snow cat with space-aged GPS and laptops with moving maps, it all turned in to a huge pile of useless crap when it slid sideways down a hill and got stuck against some logs. They had no backup, no other plan. Technology won't save you, knowledge and planning will.
Oh, and I was a bit shocked at first... "recoveries" are for dead bodies, "rescues" are for live ones. I hope the USFS wasn't busy doing recoveries all day...
A lot of great urban "redecorating" has gone on in the middle of the day. If you do something at night, people automatically assume you are up to no good. If you are dressed like construction workers doing something in the middle of the day, you are just another noisy thing in the way of them getting to their coffee and they ignore you. One of the more famous ones I can recall from my area was in Los Angeles, there is a horrible interchange that gets everyone lost, so a guy made a CalTrans spec sign and hung it himself (http://www.good.is/post/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-real-public-service/). A more recent one was a surfing Madonna mural put up in Encinitas (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/apr/25/surfing-madonna-appears-encinitas/).
Exactly what I was going to say. They were so worried about keeping the device secret inside their disguised case they actually fixed a bug they didn't yet know about.
I have had it running via knoppmyth for a year, which I believe ran Myth.20 and just last week upgraded to Mythbuntu running a.22 pre-release version. It works great as a DVR, and the recent upgrades and changes have made it even better. I don't have many issues at all, and really enjoy the web frontend that lets me adjust my recordings, files, settings and schedules. A few friends have Windows media PCs and one is looking hard at switching over because their machine has gotten no innovation in the past two years while Myth has continued to improve.
Also all the US plugs are going up-side-down with the ground tube up top. It just looks wrong to me after seeing the little screaming face for so many years, but I guess that is progress. The idea being is something conductive fell down against the wall and knocked the plug half out, the first thing it would touch is the ground bar. Safer I guess, but lame looking.
Favorite one I have gotten recently:
"Hello, this is a dead heat without my front. I'm employees at at the i'm having a call from building being. If it's the 8 call me back at this is. Thank you. "
The arrows show data traffic as well as voice traffic. It is very nice to see a whole lot of up, down, or both arrows flashing when an app is sitting "unresponsive." You know data is flying so nothing is wrong, just wait and the app will respond when it has the data it needs. The arrows (at least on my 8330) are large for the faster network, and thin for the slow network so I even know when it will take longer because of poor network coverage. I used a Windows Mobile phone for a week and it drove me mad not knowing what was going on with the network data.
I thought about doing this same thing about a year ago. After actually thinking about it I realized that same thing; with the hub-and-spoke network model of all branches connected back to one HQ you are going to make things worse using BT and having every client trying to receive data from every other client.
For my company, we just moved to an MPLS mesh network, so it might be time to revisit the scenario.
I have gone out on searches for missing people, including ones that have basically called 911 and was able to say basically "I am stuck in the snow and dieing" but they had no idea where they were. This was before most cellphones had a GPS, and our 911 center had no idea where the call came from. Calling the cell company, we had the Sheriff on the phone along with the parents of the missing kids, and the parents paid the bill, and AT&T would not release the location info. Their friend had another phone provider (MCI? I can't remember it was so long ago), and they released the last location ping to us immediately. We also were able to quickly pull the last credit card purchase from them and figured out between their gas and snack runs and their last cellphone tower used they were probably in a certain camping area. Sure enough, a airplane spotted them shortly after we re-focussed our efforts and a few hours after that the helicopters and ground teams on snowmobiles (of which I was one) reached the party of 6 and was able to pull them all back out to their families.
While I am huge on privacy and a person's rights, I also was infuriated when the cell company that was used to make the 911 call for help refused to release the location information to us. I am sure they could have seen that 911 was recently dialed, and having the family members on the phone as well pleading with them to release it to us, they refused. There may be a class action suit on the way for releasing private information, but what about if they don't release it and the victims die? Does the family then sue the cell company for having life-saving information and withholding it, essentially preventing or hampering rescue efforts? Is this the same as not yielding to a fire engine responding to an emergency?
I have and do poke my head outside the MS world when I can, and I like it just fine. Hell, I even run MythTV as my TiVo. The problem is that is all at home, my current company is a financial institution that gets security audits that says we have to have a locked down network infrastructure, and currently that is performed with AD and some other Windows specific tools. This was in place before I arrived, and as much as they like me I doubt they are going to tear everything out and replace it on my say so while still continuing to run the business. Also, people aren't trying to get around our limits because they aren't that restrictive and more importantly they understand why we put them in place. We provide computers on a different network for people to use if they have "other needs" during their business day and the go largely unused. But thanks for assuming I only run Vista all day and my place is a horrible one to go to work for, that really helps the conversation.
Is there a way to administratively patch/upgrade/manager/limit users on these browsers without having to configure every client? I need something that can take forced settings from Active Directory, and right now that is IE. I would rather use firefox, I use it myself, but I can't but my users out there and hope they click the upgrade button and hope they don't use other features we are not allowed to as a company due to HR's rules.
WSUS servers out at all locations is fairly costly as it requires a decent server and Win2K3. That could be a lot of extra hardware and licenses to buy/support. Unless your company needs to run full bandwidth 24/7, just schedule your updates for the middle of the night and it doesn't matter there is only one server pushing it out. I currently do this for my company that has 30 branches, half overseas, and all on slower connections than I would like. Windows Updates are the lowest bandwidth concern of mine now, because they happen once a month and when no one is even around to notice.
For my company there are a few issues here: 1 - Our security auditors would throw fits if we connected our security PC to the network. 2 - Our security PC runs DOS, and getting anything in or out of that thing is a PITA.
But if you had a company without the audit issues and a newer system, it might work...
While also IANAL, I was a photojournalist for several newspapers. The burdens are much lighter on news organizations because of the idea that news for the public is of the greater good than the invasion of that limited person or corporations privacy or intellectual property. This is why news organizations never need to get releases signed or ask permission to use a shot. I had several shots I took for the paper that people later wanted to buy from me and use in an advertisement and I had to decline because I did not have release forms from everyone in the shot because I didn't have to in order to run on the front page of a newspaper, but to run it as an ad in the back of some random magazine it was required. While I still think this is stupid, comparing this to the news industry is apples to oranges.
The Nikon D70 or Canon 10D are less than $1000 now and has virtually instant startup and shutter release. Way better than the usual P&S cams, and not quite the $4-5K of the true pro level cameras you speak of. I shoot a D70, D100 and 10D for a local (albiet small-town, about 100K population) paper, and it works fine for what I do once I tweak the settings the way I want, and I often shoot full manual so the meter doesn't have to think about anything.
Same here... I have installed a few flavors of linux but never had enough time to figure out why one was better than another and always wondered if I was missing something cool on another distro. Currently I am running an XP install that I have to bitchslap to get how I want, but once done it just works. I already know how to do that, and even if it is worse than were I could be with linux I am productive on XP *right now*.
I would love to have the time in my life to satisfy those that say "if you don't like one version of linux, pick another" but there are other things to do than install distros all day. Yes I know this is slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Rasberry Pi is as quiet and small as you can get, and BMC running on it is nice. http://www.raspbmc.com/
Going on right now (well, starting soon) is the greatest wild party in the middle of nowhere, 2 hours from the closes cell signal, and they have internet access. Ask some of the Burning Man guys to help with such a setup. They don't use 4G, but they have T1s in nearby towns and they microwave it out to the festival site. It works very well, even in the worst dust storms, and is not nearly as reliant on the whims of cellular carriers.
This fire is burning right next to actual people, not sure why we need to worry about SF 200 miles away. Actual people are right on the fire line in danger, they should be the ones reported on. I know this is a tech site and the bay is the tech center, but remember the firefighters and civilians that are actually on site, and not just experiencing a minor inconvenience.
Can I just get a phone that I don't have to recharge every 8 hours if I actually use the thing? More apps, more features, more browsing all means a worse experience because it is a wireless device that I always have to have plugged in for power.
I agree there has to be some middle ground. Completely ignoring it and pretending it doesn't happen doesn't seem right, but we don't need to glamorize it. I used to be a photojournalist and shot pictures of a murder scene at a local college. We had a ton of pictures and the editors and I decided to run one that we considered in the middle of the road from everything I had shot. It was a wide shot of the whole scene at night with detectives and the street corner, and if you looked closely you could see a sheet covered object in the street. It was the person that had been killed, but small and off-center in the frame. Our goal was not to present a grotesque image but to show the scene as it was. A few people complained that it shocked them, and my best answer to them was I am sorry, but I am also glad you are shocked, we all should be shocked that someone was murdered on our campus. We can't just hide the fact that bad things happen, but we can take a minute to sit back and judge how we should present it. Live coverage doesn't allow that to be done.
I get a kick out of showing people the GPS I use for hiking/snowmobiling. It shows my coordinates, and lets me point an arrow towards other coordinates. No maps, no trails, no color, just on 1 inch screen. The battery lasts forever, its waterproof, totally reliable. But people see it and say "ewwww how do you know where you are?" I don't need a big color picture, but most people do I guess, and that is "GPS" for the rest of the world.
From my experience working on a Search & Rescue team I must say someone having the knowledge of how to navigate with a map and compass is pretty rare. Congrats on always having a backup, that is what will save you. I have rescued people that were out on a million dollar snow cat with space-aged GPS and laptops with moving maps, it all turned in to a huge pile of useless crap when it slid sideways down a hill and got stuck against some logs. They had no backup, no other plan. Technology won't save you, knowledge and planning will. Oh, and I was a bit shocked at first... "recoveries" are for dead bodies, "rescues" are for live ones. I hope the USFS wasn't busy doing recoveries all day...
Rumor was they had an HTML5 player in testing that would work in linux. http://www.thechromesource.com/netflix-plug-in-for-chrome-and-chrome-os-is-on-the-way/
A lot of great urban "redecorating" has gone on in the middle of the day. If you do something at night, people automatically assume you are up to no good. If you are dressed like construction workers doing something in the middle of the day, you are just another noisy thing in the way of them getting to their coffee and they ignore you. One of the more famous ones I can recall from my area was in Los Angeles, there is a horrible interchange that gets everyone lost, so a guy made a CalTrans spec sign and hung it himself (http://www.good.is/post/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-real-public-service/). A more recent one was a surfing Madonna mural put up in Encinitas (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/apr/25/surfing-madonna-appears-encinitas/).
Exactly what I was going to say. They were so worried about keeping the device secret inside their disguised case they actually fixed a bug they didn't yet know about.
I have had it running via knoppmyth for a year, which I believe ran Myth .20 and just last week upgraded to Mythbuntu running a .22 pre-release version. It works great as a DVR, and the recent upgrades and changes have made it even better. I don't have many issues at all, and really enjoy the web frontend that lets me adjust my recordings, files, settings and schedules. A few friends have Windows media PCs and one is looking hard at switching over because their machine has gotten no innovation in the past two years while Myth has continued to improve.
Also all the US plugs are going up-side-down with the ground tube up top. It just looks wrong to me after seeing the little screaming face for so many years, but I guess that is progress. The idea being is something conductive fell down against the wall and knocked the plug half out, the first thing it would touch is the ground bar. Safer I guess, but lame looking.
Favorite one I have gotten recently: "Hello, this is a dead heat without my front. I'm employees at at the i'm having a call from building being. If it's the 8 call me back at this is. Thank you. "
The arrows show data traffic as well as voice traffic. It is very nice to see a whole lot of up, down, or both arrows flashing when an app is sitting "unresponsive." You know data is flying so nothing is wrong, just wait and the app will respond when it has the data it needs. The arrows (at least on my 8330) are large for the faster network, and thin for the slow network so I even know when it will take longer because of poor network coverage. I used a Windows Mobile phone for a week and it drove me mad not knowing what was going on with the network data.
Sounds like someone should stop replying to people on slashdot and get to it!
I thought about doing this same thing about a year ago. After actually thinking about it I realized that same thing; with the hub-and-spoke network model of all branches connected back to one HQ you are going to make things worse using BT and having every client trying to receive data from every other client. For my company, we just moved to an MPLS mesh network, so it might be time to revisit the scenario.
I have gone out on searches for missing people, including ones that have basically called 911 and was able to say basically "I am stuck in the snow and dieing" but they had no idea where they were. This was before most cellphones had a GPS, and our 911 center had no idea where the call came from. Calling the cell company, we had the Sheriff on the phone along with the parents of the missing kids, and the parents paid the bill, and AT&T would not release the location info. Their friend had another phone provider (MCI? I can't remember it was so long ago), and they released the last location ping to us immediately. We also were able to quickly pull the last credit card purchase from them and figured out between their gas and snack runs and their last cellphone tower used they were probably in a certain camping area. Sure enough, a airplane spotted them shortly after we re-focussed our efforts and a few hours after that the helicopters and ground teams on snowmobiles (of which I was one) reached the party of 6 and was able to pull them all back out to their families. While I am huge on privacy and a person's rights, I also was infuriated when the cell company that was used to make the 911 call for help refused to release the location information to us. I am sure they could have seen that 911 was recently dialed, and having the family members on the phone as well pleading with them to release it to us, they refused. There may be a class action suit on the way for releasing private information, but what about if they don't release it and the victims die? Does the family then sue the cell company for having life-saving information and withholding it, essentially preventing or hampering rescue efforts? Is this the same as not yielding to a fire engine responding to an emergency?
I have and do poke my head outside the MS world when I can, and I like it just fine. Hell, I even run MythTV as my TiVo. The problem is that is all at home, my current company is a financial institution that gets security audits that says we have to have a locked down network infrastructure, and currently that is performed with AD and some other Windows specific tools. This was in place before I arrived, and as much as they like me I doubt they are going to tear everything out and replace it on my say so while still continuing to run the business. Also, people aren't trying to get around our limits because they aren't that restrictive and more importantly they understand why we put them in place. We provide computers on a different network for people to use if they have "other needs" during their business day and the go largely unused. But thanks for assuming I only run Vista all day and my place is a horrible one to go to work for, that really helps the conversation.
Is there a way to administratively patch/upgrade/manager/limit users on these browsers without having to configure every client? I need something that can take forced settings from Active Directory, and right now that is IE. I would rather use firefox, I use it myself, but I can't but my users out there and hope they click the upgrade button and hope they don't use other features we are not allowed to as a company due to HR's rules.
WSUS servers out at all locations is fairly costly as it requires a decent server and Win2K3. That could be a lot of extra hardware and licenses to buy/support. Unless your company needs to run full bandwidth 24/7, just schedule your updates for the middle of the night and it doesn't matter there is only one server pushing it out. I currently do this for my company that has 30 branches, half overseas, and all on slower connections than I would like. Windows Updates are the lowest bandwidth concern of mine now, because they happen once a month and when no one is even around to notice.
For my company there are a few issues here:
1 - Our security auditors would throw fits if we connected our security PC to the network.
2 - Our security PC runs DOS, and getting anything in or out of that thing is a PITA.
But if you had a company without the audit issues and a newer system, it might work...
While also IANAL, I was a photojournalist for several newspapers. The burdens are much lighter on news organizations because of the idea that news for the public is of the greater good than the invasion of that limited person or corporations privacy or intellectual property. This is why news organizations never need to get releases signed or ask permission to use a shot. I had several shots I took for the paper that people later wanted to buy from me and use in an advertisement and I had to decline because I did not have release forms from everyone in the shot because I didn't have to in order to run on the front page of a newspaper, but to run it as an ad in the back of some random magazine it was required. While I still think this is stupid, comparing this to the news industry is apples to oranges.
The Nikon D70 or Canon 10D are less than $1000 now and has virtually instant startup and shutter release. Way better than the usual P&S cams, and not quite the $4-5K of the true pro level cameras you speak of. I shoot a D70, D100 and 10D for a local (albiet small-town, about 100K population) paper, and it works fine for what I do once I tweak the settings the way I want, and I often shoot full manual so the meter doesn't have to think about anything.
Same here... I have installed a few flavors of linux but never had enough time to figure out why one was better than another and always wondered if I was missing something cool on another distro. Currently I am running an XP install that I have to bitchslap to get how I want, but once done it just works. I already know how to do that, and even if it is worse than were I could be with linux I am productive on XP *right now*.
I would love to have the time in my life to satisfy those that say "if you don't like one version of linux, pick another" but there are other things to do than install distros all day. Yes I know this is slashdot.
Yes. It is a trick.