Get a couple of these. Works great, is simple, can be quickly reconfigured, works with almost any desk that you can screw into the bottom of, and did I saw it works great?
Add some velcro ties to it if you have too much stuff otherwise all the individual hooks give you plenty of places to hang loops of cables.
There are plenty of ways to store data inexpensively in a RDBMS. There are plenty of GPL and low cost RDBMS available.
The real issue is that the more and more we move into complex data structures and we push the limits of what an ORM can do with those simple, inexpensive RDBMS, the more problems we run into trying to map our objects into rows in tables.
Here is one of the more interesting solutions that I've seen to the problem, but it only work over relatively simplistic data where managing indexes by hand is ok, and it's okay for the indexes to be incomplete at any given moment. Ironically, that gives them more availability than trying to force MySQL to do indexes. But it really depends on the data and needs.
Agreed, Kyocera made what was at the time, a major advancement, a flip phone, that was a full palm pilot, and could run whatever palm apps you could find to put on it.
I still miss my 7135, 4 years later, and have never seen another phone that rivals its features and reliability. I'm thinking of trying an iPhone soon, but even that isn't the same somehow, given the state of paid/signed apps.
Also when my third Motorola v710 gave up and I got sick of replacing them, I dug out my first phone, a Kyocera 2135, then over 4 years old, plugged it in, and told Verizon what my EIN was, and it worked GREAT. After 4 years.
Although I will agree that newer Kyocera phones aren't as good as the old ones, I wouldn't knock them too much.
In other news, anything that you don't understand is scary and could be used for bad stuff.
It's kinda like how when riding around with a much older friend, and he went off on skateboarders (while driving by a municipal park with facilities for skateboarders) I pointed out that not all skateboarders are in gangs, or destructive towards property, and that practicing in a park may be a more constructive activity than their alternatives.
He had never thought of skateboarding like that before, as he had only heard it mentioned in other contexts and had not considered the alternative I put forth. Like virtual everything in life, there are good guys that take part, and bad guys.
Now, compare 'Drupal' to 'Microsoft'. Maybe everybody HERE knows how painful it can be to get MS stuff to work, but nobody is going to be fired for saying MS because it's the biggest commodity vendor in the software space.
Look in the mirror: are you trusted there? When you are fired, who is MEGACORP going to go to when there's a problem?
Yeah, when I first read this article I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, but reading it made alot of sense. It's basically just using a simple schema like the "slacker" DBs for canonical storage, and then using additional tables as 'indexes.'
Given their needs in terms of adding features, altering the schema, and building indexes, being able to make the indexes "eventually consistent" was huge. You have to remember that to keep things nice and denormalized, you need lots of tables, joins, and that MySQL (or any other FOSS RDMS) CANNOT build indexes across tables.
There are really only a few things to power. Most of the time a generator that supplies 20-30 amps at 120V should be enough.
Growing up in the rural midwest that's exactly what my father had setup. He had a 20 amp Honda that had a special breaker panel that would plug into it. It had 3 circuits on it, the furnace, the well pump (we didn't have city water) and the refrigerator. When the power went out he would go and throw those breakers in the main panel, and connect the generator in the garage, and plumb it's exhaust out the special port he had built there, so that he could keep it inside out of the whether. For all cooking/lighting we turned to fossil fuels of some sort, whether oil lamps (of which we had many antiques that we would put to use) or a propane camp stove for cooking.
If you have FiOS or something like that, make sure you power your ONT, otherwise powering the router may be a crap shoot, as if it depends on the cable system it may or may not stay up, and the same thing with the phone company, if the DSL will work, then your regular old POTS would still work, so no point in powering up a router and VOIP just to emulate the already powered POTS.
If you are looking into a full house system you definitely want to go with something diesel, probably Kohler, where for small 20-30 amp generators, Honda gasoline models are hard to beat.
Almost every article on the web (which is a copy-paste press release) references 2 problems, a temporary outage, and "an ill advised zoom." Does anyone know what the ill-advised zoom was?
Due to the nature of the Palin hacker, that was classified as criminal action. This may or may not be criminal action.
To be analogous, either Palin's email would have had to have been accessed by a Yahoo employee, or Obama's phone records been compromised by a non Verizon employee.
As much as I like to refer people to Snopes, they aren't necessarily the end all authority in such cases. I have friends who have sent them information regarding issues on their site, only to be told, "No thanks, we already have our answer." If they really are about the truth of the matter, that response would seem to conflict with their mission.
I have looked at the Snopes article in question, and all they link to is Berg's original motion for a restraining order and Obama's website photo of his birth certificate. Not the best evidence to present.
Like I said, I want to like Snopes, but their failure to be exhaustive at times is rather disappointing, and as a result I don't tend to refer to them for anything authoritative anymore, and don't even send my friends there for stopping email forwards/fake viruses.
For what it's worth, it took me about 2 minutes to find this on Google, which is probably more relevant the Berg's motion, for that Snopes article.
No, Time Machine is basically a GUI for the great rsnapshot utility. From the aspect of browsing the backups manually, I doubt anyone could tell which system originated them.
One of the developers at NowPublic told me that this is the exact approach that they are taking. They are caching entire pages for anonymous users off of an inexpensive CDN and using some fancy Javascript to figure out when to switch the user between domains.
It takes only a moment to see that it was a rigged test because the wireless Internet device did NOT interfere with the microphone, because it did successfully detect the local television station that was broadcasting on that frequency and therefore did not try to use it. Analog TV stations are some seriously high power broad spectrum noise. Any frequency-hopping wireless Internet device would be useless attempting to use the same frequency and would obviously move on to another part of the spectrum, thereby avoiding interfering with the TV station and any other device being masked by it. That part will be conveniently left out of the headlines. The fact that the wireless microphone itself may have been useless while attempting to use that frequency, due to interference from the television station, will also be left out.
So you are saying that in fact it didn't fail at all? So what exactly where they testing?
I really think most people have no idea how these systems work. Their very definition is that they use the same frequencies as TV stations. Provided that they produce a strong enough S/N at their receiver, they could be used on the exact same frequency as a nearby TV station.
For a good overview of how these things work, go check out Shure's Wireless Frequency Finder. For example, put in Los Angeles California, and the UHF-R series (there latest, top of the line), and 50 mile radius. Now imagine you're an RF guy on a show that requires ~40 microphones, plus wireless monitor systems, and intercomm. Try to figure out what combination of frequency groups will get you the best performance with the least interference, and leave the most possible open frequencies remaining. It's not easy.
Now try to do all that, with the possibility that the available frequencies could all be wiped out because someone wanted to fire up their SkyNet^H^H^H^H^H^H GoogleMax wireless and look at pr0n.
That's basically the only thing the industry has going for it now, is that the RF environment in most places is fairly stable. Incredibly crowded, but still stable.
I think I've lost all remaining respect for Larry Page. Congratulations on opening your mouth and describing a device's normal operations as a "rigged" test. You just made yourself look like an idiot to anyone that actually understands the issue at hand, sadly that doesn't matter anymore in America.
Honestly it's not a matter of ability to do so. Its open source, there are virtually no barriers to entry. Just do it, and make it happen. Approach any project and offer them free labor and resources and see what they say.
Seriously. The world could always use more support of FLOSS. You are in the perfect place to provide it. Get students involved, show them how the FLOSS community works, and have them start working on projects and pay them.
Probably better learning experience than some university's CS programs.
I got there pretty early and caught the announcement about free tattoos. My wife showed up a bit later, and told me I should go get one. I told her I didn't think so, and she responded that those were, "the best looking temp tattoos," she'd ever seen.
Then I told her they were real. She was in shock.
Her introduction to the open source/geek culture is progressing well though.
I work for a company that is 100% open source based, and markets itself as everything open source to whatever needs our clients need. Usually this is either web presences, or local sysadmin work for businesses, schools, or non-profits.
Anyway, this came up at our last monthly meeting, someone asked the CEO what he thought a downturned economy would mean, and the summed up answer was, it'll be good for business because more commercial companies and even non-profits are contacting us for products and services in order to streamline and save a buck here and there. He said that growth figures for this year should actually be up from previous years.
So it all depends really.
Seriously thought, I don't mind the weather much since I grew up in the midwest and I actually missed the gray rainy days. To be honest, it really does make appreciate the sunny days more, and just more aware of how you are living life. Something that I totally forgot about when I lived in California.
I will say that Oregonians definitely are somewhat less than thrilled with more people moving to the area. We got some rather dirty glares when we moved up in the rental truck with our car with California plates in tow.
I really really like downtown Portland as well. Its one of the few cities I've been in that is lively and doesn't feel intimidating to me. People are very welcoming, and I missed that in California as well.
I can think of a number of reasons why many projects won't go with this. Imagine this scenario
I start contributing to an open source project, such as a web app. My contributions are released under...say... GPLv2.
I am also a consultant or run my own business. As a service, I modify and setup the application to meet my clients needs. I'm really good at this 'cause I know the software well. My clients get a good product that meets their needs of reasonable privacy, and they can choose what portions of the modifications they wish to release under GPLv2.
With AGPL, the same process breaks down. My client is not happy when I tell them I have to release the entirety of their customized web app, back to the public under AGPL. Their competitor copies it, and my client goes out of business and doesn't hire me anymore. Not good.
Some web apps are in favor of the GPLv2 model as they already have plenty of contributions, and get more meaningful enhancements committed, if they know that the people doing the work are going to go a modify it later, for private use. Case in point, Drupal.
Slashdot Mirror
Get a couple of these. Works great, is simple, can be quickly reconfigured, works with almost any desk that you can screw into the bottom of, and did I saw it works great?
Add some velcro ties to it if you have too much stuff otherwise all the individual hooks give you plenty of places to hang loops of cables.
There are plenty of ways to store data inexpensively in a RDBMS. There are plenty of GPL and low cost RDBMS available.
The real issue is that the more and more we move into complex data structures and we push the limits of what an ORM can do with those simple, inexpensive RDBMS, the more problems we run into trying to map our objects into rows in tables.
Here is one of the more interesting solutions that I've seen to the problem, but it only work over relatively simplistic data where managing indexes by hand is ok, and it's okay for the indexes to be incomplete at any given moment. Ironically, that gives them more availability than trying to force MySQL to do indexes. But it really depends on the data and needs.
Agreed, Kyocera made what was at the time, a major advancement, a flip phone, that was a full palm pilot, and could run whatever palm apps you could find to put on it.
I still miss my 7135, 4 years later, and have never seen another phone that rivals its features and reliability. I'm thinking of trying an iPhone soon, but even that isn't the same somehow, given the state of paid/signed apps.
Also when my third Motorola v710 gave up and I got sick of replacing them, I dug out my first phone, a Kyocera 2135, then over 4 years old, plugged it in, and told Verizon what my EIN was, and it worked GREAT. After 4 years.
Although I will agree that newer Kyocera phones aren't as good as the old ones, I wouldn't knock them too much.
In other news, anything that you don't understand is scary and could be used for bad stuff.
It's kinda like how when riding around with a much older friend, and he went off on skateboarders (while driving by a municipal park with facilities for skateboarders) I pointed out that not all skateboarders are in gangs, or destructive towards property, and that practicing in a park may be a more constructive activity than their alternatives.
He had never thought of skateboarding like that before, as he had only heard it mentioned in other contexts and had not considered the alternative I put forth. Like virtual everything in life, there are good guys that take part, and bad guys.
[snip]
Now, compare 'Drupal' to 'Microsoft'. Maybe everybody HERE knows how painful it can be to get MS stuff to work, but nobody is going to be fired for saying MS because it's the biggest commodity vendor in the software space.
Look in the mirror: are you trusted there? When you are fired, who is MEGACORP going to go to when there's a problem?
[snip]
Acquia, provider of commercial supported Drupal ?
Yeah, when I first read this article I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, but reading it made alot of sense. It's basically just using a simple schema like the "slacker" DBs for canonical storage, and then using additional tables as 'indexes.'
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
Given their needs in terms of adding features, altering the schema, and building indexes, being able to make the indexes "eventually consistent" was huge. You have to remember that to keep things nice and denormalized, you need lots of tables, joins, and that MySQL (or any other FOSS RDMS) CANNOT build indexes across tables.
That's a common name?
My first and middle name in quotes, gives me 1,480,000 hits on google.
Yes, my first name is the #1 most popular name for the decade I was born, and my middle name is the second most popular.
Learn what each of those are, and then study 3 major applications or frameworks to see how they go about preventing them.
For instance, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, or the Zend Framework.
I'd say you're own your own in regards to privilege escalation and logic errors with your own code.
There are really only a few things to power. Most of the time a generator that supplies 20-30 amps at 120V should be enough.
Growing up in the rural midwest that's exactly what my father had setup. He had a 20 amp Honda that had a special breaker panel that would plug into it. It had 3 circuits on it, the furnace, the well pump (we didn't have city water) and the refrigerator. When the power went out he would go and throw those breakers in the main panel, and connect the generator in the garage, and plumb it's exhaust out the special port he had built there, so that he could keep it inside out of the whether. For all cooking/lighting we turned to fossil fuels of some sort, whether oil lamps (of which we had many antiques that we would put to use) or a propane camp stove for cooking.
If you have FiOS or something like that, make sure you power your ONT, otherwise powering the router may be a crap shoot, as if it depends on the cable system it may or may not stay up, and the same thing with the phone company, if the DSL will work, then your regular old POTS would still work, so no point in powering up a router and VOIP just to emulate the already powered POTS.
If you are looking into a full house system you definitely want to go with something diesel, probably Kohler, where for small 20-30 amp generators, Honda gasoline models are hard to beat.
Almost every article on the web (which is a copy-paste press release) references 2 problems, a temporary outage, and "an ill advised zoom." Does anyone know what the ill-advised zoom was?
Due to the nature of the Palin hacker, that was classified as criminal action. This may or may not be criminal action.
To be analogous, either Palin's email would have had to have been accessed by a Yahoo employee, or Obama's phone records been compromised by a non Verizon employee.
As much as I like to refer people to Snopes, they aren't necessarily the end all authority in such cases. I have friends who have sent them information regarding issues on their site, only to be told, "No thanks, we already have our answer." If they really are about the truth of the matter, that response would seem to conflict with their mission.
I have looked at the Snopes article in question, and all they link to is Berg's original motion for a restraining order and Obama's website photo of his birth certificate. Not the best evidence to present.
Like I said, I want to like Snopes, but their failure to be exhaustive at times is rather disappointing, and as a result I don't tend to refer to them for anything authoritative anymore, and don't even send my friends there for stopping email forwards/fake viruses.
For what it's worth, it took me about 2 minutes to find this on Google, which is probably more relevant the Berg's motion, for that Snopes article.
No, Time Machine is basically a GUI for the great rsnapshot utility. From the aspect of browsing the backups manually, I doubt anyone could tell which system originated them.
One of the developers at NowPublic told me that this is the exact approach that they are taking. They are caching entire pages for anonymous users off of an inexpensive CDN and using some fancy Javascript to figure out when to switch the user between domains.
It takes only a moment to see that it was a rigged test because the wireless Internet device did NOT interfere with the microphone, because it did successfully detect the local television station that was broadcasting on that frequency and therefore did not try to use it. Analog TV stations are some seriously high power broad spectrum noise. Any frequency-hopping wireless Internet device would be useless attempting to use the same frequency and would obviously move on to another part of the spectrum, thereby avoiding interfering with the TV station and any other device being masked by it. That part will be conveniently left out of the headlines. The fact that the wireless microphone itself may have been useless while attempting to use that frequency, due to interference from the television station, will also be left out.
So you are saying that in fact it didn't fail at all? So what exactly where they testing?
I really think most people have no idea how these systems work. Their very definition is that they use the same frequencies as TV stations. Provided that they produce a strong enough S/N at their receiver, they could be used on the exact same frequency as a nearby TV station.
For a good overview of how these things work, go check out Shure's Wireless Frequency Finder. For example, put in Los Angeles California, and the UHF-R series (there latest, top of the line), and 50 mile radius. Now imagine you're an RF guy on a show that requires ~40 microphones, plus wireless monitor systems, and intercomm. Try to figure out what combination of frequency groups will get you the best performance with the least interference, and leave the most possible open frequencies remaining. It's not easy.
Now try to do all that, with the possibility that the available frequencies could all be wiped out because someone wanted to fire up their SkyNet^H^H^H^H^H^H GoogleMax wireless and look at pr0n.
That's basically the only thing the industry has going for it now, is that the RF environment in most places is fairly stable. Incredibly crowded, but still stable.
I think I've lost all remaining respect for Larry Page. Congratulations on opening your mouth and describing a device's normal operations as a "rigged" test. You just made yourself look like an idiot to anyone that actually understands the issue at hand, sadly that doesn't matter anymore in America.
Honestly it's not a matter of ability to do so. Its open source, there are virtually no barriers to entry. Just do it, and make it happen. Approach any project and offer them free labor and resources and see what they say.
Seriously. The world could always use more support of FLOSS. You are in the perfect place to provide it. Get students involved, show them how the FLOSS community works, and have them start working on projects and pay them.
Probably better learning experience than some university's CS programs.
Kate and Leopold
High speed net connection disconnected NOPE geeks have some priorities.
I got there pretty early and caught the announcement about free tattoos. My wife showed up a bit later, and told me I should go get one. I told her I didn't think so, and she responded that those were, "the best looking temp tattoos," she'd ever seen.
Then I told her they were real. She was in shock.
Her introduction to the open source/geek culture is progressing well though.
I work for a company that is 100% open source based, and markets itself as everything open source to whatever needs our clients need. Usually this is either web presences, or local sysadmin work for businesses, schools, or non-profits. Anyway, this came up at our last monthly meeting, someone asked the CEO what he thought a downturned economy would mean, and the summed up answer was, it'll be good for business because more commercial companies and even non-profits are contacting us for products and services in order to streamline and save a buck here and there. He said that growth figures for this year should actually be up from previous years. So it all depends really.
That's why I moved to Vancouver, WA.
Seriously thought, I don't mind the weather much since I grew up in the midwest and I actually missed the gray rainy days. To be honest, it really does make appreciate the sunny days more, and just more aware of how you are living life. Something that I totally forgot about when I lived in California.
I will say that Oregonians definitely are somewhat less than thrilled with more people moving to the area. We got some rather dirty glares when we moved up in the rental truck with our car with California plates in tow.
I really really like downtown Portland as well. Its one of the few cities I've been in that is lively and doesn't feel intimidating to me. People are very welcoming, and I missed that in California as well.
The Day the Router Died...
I can think of a number of reasons why many projects won't go with this. Imagine this scenario
I start contributing to an open source project, such as a web app. My contributions are released under...say... GPLv2.
I am also a consultant or run my own business. As a service, I modify and setup the application to meet my clients needs. I'm really good at this 'cause I know the software well. My clients get a good product that meets their needs of reasonable privacy, and they can choose what portions of the modifications they wish to release under GPLv2.
With AGPL, the same process breaks down. My client is not happy when I tell them I have to release the entirety of their customized web app, back to the public under AGPL. Their competitor copies it, and my client goes out of business and doesn't hire me anymore. Not good.
Some web apps are in favor of the GPLv2 model as they already have plenty of contributions, and get more meaningful enhancements committed, if they know that the people doing the work are going to go a modify it later, for private use. Case in point, Drupal.
Google maps view of the area equivalent to this map from the Univeristy site.