Illegal offshore gambling is illegal for americans to participate in, not illegal for the rest of the world (that allows it). heck some of these gambling sites are listed on stock exchanges outside the usa.
Personally I can't understand why people are willing to give money away for some virtual cards. For there to be a winner there has to be a number of losers and even the winners are losers most of the time. If you have enough money to throw it away why not choose something positive to do with it? Maybe you could pay for a well giving some kid the chance to grow to adult hood instead of dying of dysentery.
Gambling rule no 1 the odds are always stacked against you. knowing rule one why are you willing to play?
Quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Written by Douglas Adams "BEWARE THE LEOPARD"
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
you can use rdp from linux you don't need to use vnc
http://mobassh.mobatek.net/en/
is a free version of ssh server to run on windows sshfs will allow you to mount your windows drives on your local linux system.
maybe these tools could make your life a little easier.
I guess I could use nfs or smb to access remote files but take a look at this example of sshfs.
sshfs me@192.168.2.1://home/myhome/sshfs
fusermount -u/home/myhome/sshfs/
the first command mounts the root of the remote file system at/home/myhome/sshfs of course you don't need to mount all of the remote system and you can mount it anywhere you want (for that single command example it would mount about 5 hard drives with assorted file systems.) naturally the systems can be as local or remote as you want.
the 2nd command unmounts the remote system when your ready.
very little requires setting up just an empty directory for the mount point.
only fly in this ointment is Amarok it will see the files, catalog the files, but it cant play the files just about any other player will work fine.
Hardware manufacturers have to compete against other hardware manufacturers. Having a product which is compatible with as many systems as possible and comparable in cost and performance wins market share.
If you as an admin have 100 systems 92 windows PC's, a Linux box, assorted Mac's. You could buy a printer with just windows drivers and then source a printer with mac support and perhaps another with Linux support (linux and mac support actually tend to go together) or you can buy printers which support every computer you run and then some.
Who's going to get the order, the manufacturer who's printers work with pretty much everything or the one that just works with a subset of the systems?
Your right that it's going to cost manufacturers more to cover that last mile especially if they develop entirely in house but if they don't then their competitors will.
1% may be small but its enough to make or break a sale.
I like the sentiment however it has very little baring on driving, most drivers can pass tests, that doesn't mean to say they will drive outside the test in anything like a safe manner. As a simple example my father has an advanced driving test, is qualified for hgv and he drives like a complete tool, his insurance record is appalling.
If you really want to limit drivers, do it on their claims history limit them to say 4 accidents in any 5 year period just to even things out. is very little you can do to avoid being in an accident when your stationary or unlucky but too frequently should perhaps entail a ban or a retest.
I won't pretend you can throw the dice and pick up any hardware and find that everything is well supported, especially when it comes to wireless chipsets.
Your scenario of having a system die and needing a replacement so get windows isn't necessarily the only or the best alternative.
What I was saying was that its pretty simple with 3 small devices to have a system that is set up to your requirements and would be working natively with wifi and 3g internet on first boot.
The ability to take your system with you in the form of a usb memory stick which can be put in any PC is a real advantage, you should try it. Download a copy of unetbootin and feed it your favourite distro and set it up as you want and stick it in your pocket and just try it on any system you feel like. You don't have to go so far as buying the other two sticks but i'd recommend the edimax usb adapter at £20 its hardly expensive and works every time. The huawai 3g modems can be bought cheaply too without a contract for £25
You really can't have that kind of portability with windows unless its in a VM, thats possible too, but your going to need a host.
Being a Linux user already you should be right at home with it.
If you don't like it you can always reformat it and use the stick for something else.
You shouldnt need to use ndiswrapper on hardware you have chosen, because you should be choosing hardware that meets your requirements.
Your solution of using windows gives the user a clean install of windows without the applications or data that the enduser needs, my usb solution puts him right back where he was prior to his computer breaking. He doesn't need an immediate replacement either since any PC available will do.
The only advantage windows has is if the IT guy doesn't have a clue.
Actually if you can stand the performance hit, you could probably keep an install of virtualbox or vmware for windows and use a windows VM on the USB stick.
options are good there are at least three potential software platforms. i'm suggesting linux because it can be easily taken between several machines, thats a real advantage when your on the road.
i'm also suggesting a windows vm to be able to be almost as portable as linux can be.
the poster wanted options i'm offering the ones i'm familiar with that may be cost effective and practical. They may be pretty useless once the real needs are known.
actually your missing out on one of the nice things about linux it is very flexible, you can take an installed os on a hdd and switch it into a new system and boot it and be up and running pretty much straight away.
also what one person suggested putting a few linux installs on usb sticks also works a treat. you can also pick up a usb wifi stick and use that natively even if it takes you a few minutes to locate the drivers needed for a new systems internal wifi (all else fails use ndiswrapper). Another cool little thing with ubuntu is the ease of using a huawei usb 3g modem just tell it the country and operator and your up and running.
I was going to suggest 3 might be a good operator to go with since they have this thing called like home where provided your on a sister network you get your data at the same cost as for your local 3 network. I've two of these a uk version and an irish version both working trouble free in ireland. unfortunately 3 are doing something different in june and still not letting users know what it will be.
Osx is pretty portable too, I had a hp laptop running as a triple boot and after putting the hard drive into a usb drive case Osx booted up on a different system with just a couple of issues. the internal wifi wasnt supported but my ralink chipset usb stick was so it was just a case of grabbing the osx drivers and i was up and running.
sad to say windows is sorely limited when it comes to taking an installation from one system to another, you can do it with a VM usually (2000 doesn't care, XP might)
The easiest option could well be to set up a few installs of ubuntu on usb sticks. They really won't care what they are plugged into, if you add a 3g huawai modem and a edimax ralink chipset wifi stick you can pretty much be assured of a working system set up as you want it from first boot.
Thats your personalised system all in 3 sticks tops taking up as much space as a packet of cigarettes.
take along a wireless router and you can set up a lan using the 3g modem as the internet gateway (you might even do it using the wifi stick to create a wireless lan running a dhcp server on the ubuntu install).
Seems most of what they want is going to be mostly online in which case the platform doesnt need to run much more than a web browser.
Thanks for this its a bit jerky with auto hide on the top and i'm not sure where its best placed left and right can limit the page width a bit too much, but on the bottom is not bad at all. with F11 I can hide most of the browser interface and that looks to be good. Slight annoyance with full screen mode in use Skype notifications make my desktop flash up as friends log on and off but over all a great addition to my netbook.
It still needs some refinement, thou the web browser interface should be the main item on the screen it would make more sense if menu's and widgets slid on and off screen when required so generally you'd be looking at the document not the frame its in i'd perhaps like the option of pressing a key or mouse button to bring up the window controls rather than just when the mouse nears the borders.
when you think about it the borders on windows are a waste of screen space till you need them
i'm confused here the hard drive is broken, yet the data gets mirrored?
Also why pay for Av and an office suite? ClamAv or open office are available, even AVG has a free edition which doesnt bring windows down to a crawl and no way should he be paying for another copy of windows, the license is usually on the PC.
Actually i'll make this post a little useful with links to a couple of very good utilities. I had managed to fill my virtualbox partition leaving it unusable and found this blog post
essentially all i needed was to create a bigger hard drive clone the original and then resize the file system then put the cloned drive back as ide master on the primary controller.
cloning uses clonezilla's live cd Link given below for an iso image
It's nice to be able to find two very useful free tools that avoid the need to use commercial alternatives such as partition magic and norton ghost. As both disk images are bootable they are equally useful for both Windows and Linux users.
There really is less and less of a reason to bother with commercial applications and utilities these days either using a pirate copy or buying a single user license. The above two iso's should be useful to have in any computer geeks toolbox.
I Don't know for sure if Mac users can use it but http://free2.nchc.org.tw/clonezilla-live/experimental/ubuntu-based/ lists an ubuntu 9.04 based version so x86 mac users should be ok as its the same disk to install ubuntu on an x86 mac as a standard PC, pretty good chance users of older ppc macs can find a version too.
I guess it's still too early to say, but it is getting so that if your prepared to give open source a try the OS your using matters about as much as choosing FireFox or IE or Safari or Opera or...
Ubuntu is pretty good now, most issues seem to be well sorted, it is easy to use, but its not getting seen by the general public and thats the problem.
last Thursday I was traveling by train across to Ireland and the guy opposite me had an aspire one, snap says I and brought out my near identical aspire one.
I say near identical because he had Linpus lite running on his and I was running the Desktop version of ubuntu 9.04 I gave him a quick demonstration of 9.04 and he was bowled over, he didn't think until then that he could run ubuntu on his net book and had stuck with linpus and quite rightly was getting fed up and ready to chuck his aspire one.
however 5 minutes of seeing what the ubuntu desktop can do he'd decided he wanted to install ubuntu so I told him to get the desktop iso and a copy of unetbootin and how to set up a usb stick so he could install ubuntu.
It was nice to help but really it's only chance I met the guy before he chucked his Aspire One. I think its time for canonical to start advertising and customizing ubuntu for particular systems. Would it be that difficult to provide a tailored version for particular systems?
Windows Genuine Advantage sure worked for me, I've been running Linux for years now.
I prefer not to allow spy-ware on my systems, why should I? The vast majority of PC systems come with windows pre-installed, microsoft already got paid sale done. There can be no justification for treating their customers as criminals. In the USA if the Police were performing random warrant-less searches any thing found would be inadmissible in a court of law, so why should a software company be allowed to do what is illegal for the police to do?
In my country if a security guard was to stop a shopper and search their bag and find no evidence of stolen goods the shopper could then choose to sue the security company for defamation of character usually resulting in a cash award of 10-20 thousand euro. Surely Microsoft are pretty much doing the same thing.
Unfortunately you are right and I was being naive thinking that the Police would act in a reasonable manner. Without legal checks on what they can do, they can be abusive (even when there are good intentions). This has been demonstrated many many times by Police and Military in most countries.
However when you see something like this, http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/99899/Mum-warned-police-of-stalker-hours-later-she-was-dead would GPS tracking of her stalker have resulted in her still being alive today? When you compare and contrast the American case with this one, its pretty obvious that the American Police response to the stalker got the right result a dangerous man was locked up and the woman is alive, in the UK the woman is dead.
I guess whats right and what the law says is legal don't always match up too well. I believe the article said that the police asked for a warrant and got one to allow the GPS device to be put in place. It wasn't put in place without some justification. It's unfortunate that inalienable rights can be a two edged sword and there will always be challenges to legal proceedings based on them and unfortunately upholding those rights means accepting that some people will get released on a technicality.
i'm usin pay as you go which really saves money no contract, no silly bills but the caps!
one slight drawback to my 3g modem once i hit 10gb in 30 days i can either stop or pay 49 cents a mb (the modem cost 79 and i had to buy 30 euro of credit). and silly 3 won't let me buy another bundle to use in a 30 day period. (clause 5 page 12 i think of the pay as you go service contract)
So for the cost of 250 meg over plan, my friend ahem, can buy a second modem and another 10gb 30 day plan.
The better idea would be a 2nd sim card and no modem but 3 don't sell the sim separately buyer beware one thing to watch out for hsdpa modems being sold 2nd hand without the sim card.
on the plus side if i think i'll regularly go over 10gb the next month i could get 10gb for the cost of 50mb over and then top up the first modem when the second modem has exhausted its current plan.
isn't this rather silly? whats the point in refusing to sell another chunk of data when a customer wants it without stitching them on the cost, surely 10gb to last up to 30 days would be more reasonable. Instead i'm being pushed to create my own 10-20gb a month plan which actually is good for me in some ways.
Re:Three in the UK do something not too dissimilar
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Mobile Wi-Fi Hot Spot
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I can't see the point in this at all especially with such a lousy data plan.
ok Netbook + USB Hsdpa Modem set ip4 port forwarding in sysctl.conf and setup a few rules for iptables the only thing you might need in addition is a dhcp server running on your laptop to give addresses out. I'm using a similar set up here but i use eth0 to wan port of a standard wifi router but the only additional bit really is the dhcp server if the desktop was wireless even the router would be redundant.
I'm struggling a little to see why anyone would want to do this most people wouldnt consider it, those that would can do so without spending anything once they have a 3g modem and a reasonable data plan.
Ok so the people the police will need to watch out for now are the ones with the shiny new locked gates. I guess though they could have attached the device at any public location such as a car park or even at the roadside maybe. If he explicitly denied the public access then perhaps he might have had a case.
Still I don't think anyone could deny it was the right result. Unfortunately not all cases work out that way I was reading about a young woman who was murdered by a stalker and she had called the police because she was worried and they said they would send somebody out within the hour. Six hours later she was stabbed and the police got there just in time to see her die.
I really wonder about this inadmissible evidence clause that America seems to have as a get out of jail free card. If someone is innocent and the police use dubious tactics then they should be held accountable without doubt, but if the evidence is there and shows the defendants guilty, why should they be allowed to walk free?
The one interesting point in the article was the statement that the guys driveway was public and therefore the police were at liberty to attach the device to his car there.
Why is his driveway public? I would have thought he would have owned the land up to the boundary stated on his property deeds and that would include his driveway, perhaps his driveway needs to be signed private no public access.
I'm starting to think the netbook has lost its way, The ideal size in my opinion has a 9 inch screen excellent battery life and a modest relatively quick hard drive or solid state drive. Netboooks seem to be progressing to a small laptop with lousy battery life, too big and too limited by fitting too small a battery.
There's a number of things that can improve the current crop, bigger batteries 7 or 8 hours from a charge when new should be a good minimum perhaps more like 10 hours. Some of the SSD drives are really slow, that sucks, better models could incorporate a touch screen and the option of a tablet mode. Closing up as a clam shell and protecting the screen while bagged up. maybe even allowing the keyboard to un-dock or slide out and be used as an external keyboard could be a relatively cheap option. A few smart keys on the screen edges that can be assigned functions by the user could turn the system into a better than kindle like Ebook reader. I don't expect these improvements for nothing, the build price would go up but then so would the usefulness of the device.
An advanced Netbook design like this could be a near perfect tool for students. battery life long enough to last all day without needing to find a charging point, so many places will not allow anything to plug-in without having their electrical safety sticker. the ability to be able to treat this as an electronic replacement of an A4 pad typing notes or sketching diagrams with a stylus. One simple thing would be a Trapdoor usb expansion big enough to fit a Usb hspda Modem maybe a TV Card or just a plain old USB memory stick.
Make the SSD Hdd user replaceable either with a faster, larger ssd or perhaps a 1.8inch hard drive.
Trouble is no ones thinking of what people want, but just trying to avoid impacting the sales of more expensive product lines.
I'm not sure if i'd want a 3G modem built in, it becomes a little harder to get the modem in position for good reception. I'm happier using my HSPDA modem outside of my laptop. plus with a pay as you go contract i'm free to use the thing or not as required. There is also an issue of roaming which is quite easy to encounter at which point the data plan goes out the window, and you pay through the nose.
People are being fooled a little into thinking a mobile internet connection will only work for one computer for Linux users its pretty easy to share it/etc/sysctl.conf change this line to net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 and the following ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.1 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p tcp --dport 3074 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p udp --dport 88 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p udp --dport 3074 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p udp -m multiport --dports 88,3074 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254 iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -d 192.168.2.254 -p tcp --dport 3074 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -d 192.168.2.254 -p udp -m multiport --dports 88,3074 -j ACCEPT
can be run as a script by root. all you then need to do is connect eth0 on the to the wan port on a router and set the wan port to a static address of 192.168.2.254 and a gateway of 192.168.2.1 set dns to 192.168.2.1
and now you have a lan using a 3g interface, incidentally tethering a mobile will use ppp0 so once you can connect with the tethered mobile you can do the same.
My setup goes one step further chaining a second router to expand the range using tomato firmware and wds +access point mode. Performance wise it seems reasonable, the Eircom adsl link I used before used to top out at about 300kb/s download - 3G hspda modem 222kb/s The relatively small cap of 10gb in 30 days is a bit limiting but I figure the last day of the month will be good to use up whats remaining of the cap.
If you don't want to tie up a computer sharing there are a number of routers available for about 100 which will do the same job.
If I could use their service, sure why not pay for it. but the broadcast is analog and the audio is drowned out by the snow, my dab radio which i brought with me from england can't find a signal and while rte is on satellite its encrypted so i can't watch it. There might be digital terrestrial tv starting in the autumn.
I'm using a 3g phone to connect this, tested with the bbc iplayer its not fast enough for tv.
funnny thing is if I want to watch tv by satellite i can receive all the bbc channels ch4 more4 e4 itv1-4 and channel 5 in the clear from the UK, i just can't get a usable signal from an irish broadcaster. not even cable, since i'm out in the country not that i bother with the uk programming either it's all a waste of time for me anyway.
guess i will have to pay for this mythical tv service that rte provide since in theory it could be provided to me even if they don't seem to want to send it my way.
Really if rte want to collect their tax they need to put the satellite signal in the clear and then they would at least be providing the service they want to collect on.
Your NTFS comment really shows a lack of understanding on your part.
Windows has a flag which basically says I need to check this, Linux see's this flag and says Windows needs to check this and tells the user. Now you have been warned by Linux that Windows thinks there is a potentially a problem with this disk. You the user can as root force Linux to ignore this warning and mount the drive anyway, and it gives you the instruction you must issue to have this occur.
Now you have made a deliberate choice to mount this drive and should be clear that the only safe actions would be treating the disk as read only.
NTFS isn't an open format its been reverse engineered, reverse engineering the drive checking routines is perhaps a work in progress. Now Microsoft has all the necessary information about NTFS to create a file system check for NTFS that works from Linux, well maybe, because they don't have any control over the Linux environment, so the best and safest solution Microsoft can give is mount the drive in Windows.
So while you can mount NTFS with this flag raised , you do so at your own risk if you lose data it's your fault and nobody elses. If you want this drive safe and valid you can do two things, if you dual boot, boot windows, or as you say this is a portable drive presumably USB connected you could boot a windows image in virtualbox and pass the physical drive to the guest windows install (2000 makes a great guest os). you might even reserve a small fat32 partition on the drive for holding the windows image.
You could share a drive with a different format Fat32, ext2/3 or even hfs+ or just accept that 5 minutes spent booting windows and shutting it down again is better than a reverse engineered validation program running on Linux, why would someone bother writing such a thing? your free to develop such a thing yourself you have as much access to the resources you would need (outside of Microsoft) as anyone else.
I don't know about Vioxx, but perhaps it's not the only drug out there that can help, or maybe the only one your health insurance company was willing to pay for.
My niece sufferers from junior rheumatoid arthritis, within a year of the symptoms first appearing she was in a wheelchair, eventually she managed to see a specialist who put her on to a new drug treatment and very rapidly she went from being wheelchair bound to being a healthy and normal teenager.
The treatment requires 2 injections a week at a cost of £500 a week, luckily this is in the UK and its paid for by the National Health Service, a system we all pay into from our pay packets. If she had been under the American system would she have this drug or would she still be in constant pain in a wheelchair? It took a year of trials of various different medicines before she was prescribed something effective but she has it now and will continue to have it for as long as its needed.
America is a great country but the health system is a complete disgrace. Hopefully Obama will address this issue.
I explain what I think, in terms a layman can apprehend.
Ladies and gentlemen I bring forth the evidence that this is probably a fallacy.
Bruce said http://perens.com/blog/2009/01/31/13/ "Build kernel 2.6.28 or later. Earlier kernels won't help. Enable MTRR cleanup in the kernel configuration, setting Enable=1 and Spare MTRRs=1. You end up with 4 spare MTRRs, as it condenses the 8 used to just 4, and they have the same effect as far as I can tell."
I can only say thanks to bruce I built my first kernel successfully,however clearly theres a difference between what he said and what some people thought he said. I don't know why but I finished up 2 free mtrrs not 4.
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Illegal offshore gambling is illegal for americans to participate in, not illegal for the rest of the world (that allows it). heck some of these gambling sites are listed on stock exchanges outside the usa.
Personally I can't understand why people are willing to give money away for some virtual cards. For there to be a winner there has to be a number of losers and even the winners are losers most of the time. If you have enough money to throw it away why not choose something positive to do with it? Maybe you could pay for a well giving some kid the chance to grow to adult hood instead of dying of dysentery.
Gambling rule no 1 the odds are always stacked against you. knowing rule one why are you willing to play?
Quotes from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Written by Douglas Adams
"BEWARE THE LEOPARD"
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
you can use rdp from linux you don't need to use vnc
http://mobassh.mobatek.net/en/
is a free version of ssh server to run on windows sshfs will allow you to mount your windows drives on your local linux system.
maybe these tools could make your life a little easier.
hope they help
Amarok can't handle sshfs only nfs and smb. which is the only reason I can't use it.
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Dynamic_Collection
I guess I could use nfs or smb to access remote files but take a look at this example of sshfs.
sshfs me@192.168.2.1:/ /home/myhome/sshfs
fusermount -u /home/myhome/sshfs/
the first command mounts the root of the remote file system at /home/myhome/sshfs of course you don't need to mount all of the remote system and you can mount it anywhere you want (for that single command example it would mount about 5 hard drives with assorted file systems.) naturally the systems can be as local or remote as you want.
the 2nd command unmounts the remote system when your ready.
very little requires setting up just an empty directory for the mount point.
only fly in this ointment is Amarok it will see the files, catalog the files, but it cant play the files just about any other player will work fine.
Hardware manufacturers have to compete against other hardware manufacturers. Having a product which is compatible with as many systems as possible and comparable in cost and performance wins market share.
If you as an admin have 100 systems 92 windows PC's, a Linux box, assorted Mac's. You could buy a printer with just windows drivers and then source a printer with mac support and perhaps another with Linux support (linux and mac support actually tend to go together) or you can buy printers which support every computer you run and then some.
Who's going to get the order, the manufacturer who's printers work with pretty much everything or the one that just works with a subset of the systems?
Your right that it's going to cost manufacturers more to cover that last mile especially if they develop entirely in house but if they don't then their competitors will.
1% may be small but its enough to make or break a sale.
I like the sentiment however it has very little baring on driving, most drivers can pass tests, that doesn't mean to say they will drive outside the test in anything like a safe manner. As a simple example my father has an advanced driving test, is qualified for hgv and he drives like a complete tool, his insurance record is appalling.
If you really want to limit drivers, do it on their claims history limit them to say 4 accidents in any 5 year period just to even things out. is very little you can do to avoid being in an accident when your stationary or unlucky but too frequently should perhaps entail a ban or a retest.
I won't pretend you can throw the dice and pick up any hardware and find that everything is well supported, especially when it comes to wireless chipsets.
Your scenario of having a system die and needing a replacement so get windows isn't necessarily the only or the best alternative.
What I was saying was that its pretty simple with 3 small devices to have a system that is set up to your requirements and would be working natively with wifi and 3g internet on first boot.
The ability to take your system with you in the form of a usb memory stick which can be put in any PC is a real advantage, you should try it. Download a copy of unetbootin and feed it your favourite distro and set it up as you want and stick it in your pocket and just try it on any system you feel like. You don't have to go so far as buying the other two sticks but i'd recommend the edimax usb adapter at £20 its hardly expensive and works every time. The huawai 3g modems can be bought cheaply too without a contract for £25
You really can't have that kind of portability with windows unless its in a VM, thats possible too, but your going to need a host.
Being a Linux user already you should be right at home with it.
If you don't like it you can always reformat it and use the stick for something else.
You shouldnt need to use ndiswrapper on hardware you have chosen, because you should be choosing hardware that meets your requirements.
Your solution of using windows gives the user a clean install of windows without the applications or data that the enduser needs, my usb solution puts him right back where he was prior to his computer breaking. He doesn't need an immediate replacement either since any PC available will do.
The only advantage windows has is if the IT guy doesn't have a clue.
Actually if you can stand the performance hit, you could probably keep an install of virtualbox or vmware for windows and use a windows VM on the USB stick.
options are good
there are at least three potential software platforms. i'm suggesting linux because it can be easily taken between several machines, thats a real advantage when your on the road.
i'm also suggesting a windows vm to be able to be almost as portable as linux can be.
the poster wanted options i'm offering the ones i'm familiar with that may be cost effective and practical.
They may be pretty useless once the real needs are known.
actually your missing out on one of the nice things about linux it is very flexible, you can take an installed os on a hdd and switch it into a new system and boot it and be up and running pretty much straight away.
also what one person suggested putting a few linux installs on usb sticks also works a treat. you can also pick up a usb wifi stick and use that natively even if it takes you a few minutes to locate the drivers needed for a new systems internal wifi (all else fails use ndiswrapper). Another cool little thing with ubuntu is the ease of using a huawei usb 3g modem just tell it the country and operator and your up and running.
I was going to suggest 3 might be a good operator to go with since they have this thing called like home where provided your on a sister network you get your data at the same cost as for your local 3 network. I've two of these a uk version and an irish version both working trouble free in ireland. unfortunately 3 are doing something different in june and still not letting users know what it will be.
Osx is pretty portable too, I had a hp laptop running as a triple boot and after putting the hard drive into a usb drive case Osx booted up on a different system with just a couple of issues. the internal wifi wasnt supported but my ralink chipset usb stick was so it was just a case of grabbing the osx drivers and i was up and running.
sad to say windows is sorely limited when it comes to taking an installation from one system to another, you can do it with a VM usually (2000 doesn't care, XP might)
The easiest option could well be to set up a few installs of ubuntu on usb sticks. They really won't care what they are plugged into, if you add a 3g huawai modem and a edimax ralink chipset wifi stick you can pretty much be assured of a working system set up as you want it from first boot.
Thats your personalised system all in 3 sticks tops taking up as much space as a packet of cigarettes.
take along a wireless router and you can set up a lan using the 3g modem as the internet gateway (you might even do it using the wifi stick to create a wireless lan running a dhcp server on the ubuntu install).
Seems most of what they want is going to be mostly online in which case the platform doesnt need to run much more than a web browser.
Thanks for this its a bit jerky with auto hide on the top and i'm not sure where its best placed left and right can limit the page width a bit too much, but on the bottom is not bad at all. with F11 I can hide most of the browser interface and that looks to be good. Slight annoyance with full screen mode in use Skype notifications make my desktop flash up as friends log on and off but over all a great addition to my netbook.
It still needs some refinement, thou the web browser interface should be the main item on the screen it would make more sense if menu's and widgets slid on and off screen when required so generally you'd be looking at the document not the frame its in i'd perhaps like the option of pressing a key or mouse button to bring up the window controls rather than just when the mouse nears the borders.
when you think about it the borders on windows are a waste of screen space till you need them
i'm confused here the hard drive is broken, yet the data gets mirrored?
Also why pay for Av and an office suite? ClamAv or open office are available, even AVG has a free edition which doesnt bring windows down to a crawl and no way should he be paying for another copy of windows, the license is usually on the PC.
Actually i'll make this post a little useful with links to a couple of very good utilities.
I had managed to fill my virtualbox partition leaving it unusable and found this blog post
http://marcosaruj.com/archives/116
essentially all i needed was to create a bigger hard drive clone the original and then resize the file system
then put the cloned drive back as ide master on the primary controller.
cloning uses clonezilla's live cd Link given below for an iso image
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115473&package_id=221066&release_id=609030
And after cloning resize with gparted live cd link to the live iso is given below
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/gparted-live-0.3.7-7.iso?modtime=1215010676&big_mirror=0
It's nice to be able to find two very useful free tools that avoid the need to use commercial alternatives such as partition magic and norton ghost. As both disk images are bootable they are equally useful for both Windows and Linux users.
There really is less and less of a reason to bother with commercial applications and utilities these days either using a pirate copy or buying a single user license. The above two iso's should be useful to have in any computer geeks toolbox.
I Don't know for sure if Mac users can use it but
http://free2.nchc.org.tw/clonezilla-live/experimental/ubuntu-based/ lists an ubuntu 9.04 based version so x86 mac users should be ok as its the same disk to install ubuntu on an x86 mac as a standard PC, pretty good chance users of older ppc macs can find a version too.
I guess it's still too early to say, but it is getting so that if your prepared to give open source a try the OS your using matters about as much as choosing FireFox or IE or Safari or Opera or ...
Ubuntu is pretty good now,
most issues seem to be well sorted, it is easy to use, but its not getting seen by the general public and thats the problem.
last Thursday I was traveling by train across to Ireland and the guy opposite me had an aspire one, snap says I and brought out my near identical aspire one.
I say near identical because he had Linpus lite running on his and I was running the Desktop version of ubuntu 9.04
I gave him a quick demonstration of 9.04 and he was bowled over, he didn't think until then that he could run ubuntu on his net book and had stuck with linpus and quite rightly was getting fed up and ready to chuck his aspire one.
however 5 minutes of seeing what the ubuntu desktop can do he'd decided he wanted to install ubuntu so I told him to get the desktop iso and a copy of unetbootin and how to set up a usb stick so he could install ubuntu.
It was nice to help but really it's only chance I met the guy before he chucked his Aspire One.
I think its time for canonical to start advertising and customizing ubuntu for particular systems. Would it be that difficult to provide a tailored version for particular systems?
Windows Genuine Advantage sure worked for me, I've been running Linux for years now.
I prefer not to allow spy-ware on my systems, why should I? The vast majority of PC systems come with windows pre-installed, microsoft already got paid sale done. There can be no justification for treating their customers as criminals. In the USA if the Police were performing random warrant-less searches any thing found would be inadmissible in a court of law, so why should a software company be allowed to do what is illegal for the police to do?
In my country if a security guard was to stop a shopper and search their bag and find no evidence of stolen goods the shopper could then choose to sue the security company for defamation of character usually resulting in a cash award of 10-20 thousand euro. Surely Microsoft are pretty much doing the same thing.
Unfortunately you are right and I was being naive thinking that the Police would act in a reasonable manner. Without legal checks on what they can do, they can be abusive (even when there are good intentions). This has been demonstrated many many times by Police and Military in most countries.
However when you see something like this, http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/99899/Mum-warned-police-of-stalker-hours-later-she-was-dead would GPS tracking of her stalker have resulted in her still being alive today? When you compare and contrast the American case with this one, its pretty obvious that the American Police response to the stalker got the right result a dangerous man was locked up and the woman is alive, in the UK the woman is dead.
I guess whats right and what the law says is legal don't always match up too well. I believe the article said that the police asked for a warrant and got one to allow the GPS device to be put in place. It wasn't put in place without some justification. It's unfortunate that inalienable rights can be a two edged sword and there will always be challenges to legal proceedings based on them and unfortunately upholding those rights means accepting that some people will get released on a technicality.
i'm usin pay as you go which really saves money no contract, no silly bills but the caps!
one slight drawback to my 3g modem once i hit 10gb in 30 days i can either stop or pay 49 cents a mb (the modem cost 79 and i had to buy 30 euro of credit). and silly 3 won't let me buy another bundle to use in a 30 day period. (clause 5 page 12 i think of the pay as you go service contract)
So for the cost of 250 meg over plan, my friend ahem, can buy a second modem and another 10gb 30 day plan.
The better idea would be a 2nd sim card and no modem but 3 don't sell the sim separately buyer beware one thing to watch out for hsdpa modems being sold 2nd hand without the sim card.
on the plus side if i think i'll regularly go over 10gb the next month i could get 10gb for the cost of 50mb over and then top up the first modem when the second modem has exhausted its current plan.
isn't this rather silly? whats the point in refusing to sell another chunk of data when a customer wants it without stitching them on the cost, surely 10gb to last up to 30 days would be more reasonable.
Instead i'm being pushed to create my own 10-20gb a month plan which actually is good for me in some ways.
I can't see the point in this at all especially with such a lousy data plan.
ok Netbook + USB Hsdpa Modem set ip4 port forwarding in sysctl.conf and setup a few rules for iptables the only thing you might need in addition is a dhcp server running on your laptop to give addresses out. I'm using a similar set up here but i use eth0 to wan port of a standard wifi router but the only additional bit really is the dhcp server
if the desktop was wireless even the router would be redundant.
I'm struggling a little to see why anyone would want to do this most people wouldnt consider it, those that would can do so without spending anything once they have a 3g modem and a reasonable data plan.
Ok so the people the police will need to watch out for now are the ones with the shiny new locked gates.
I guess though they could have attached the device at any public location such as a car park or even at the roadside maybe. If he explicitly denied the public access then perhaps he might have had a case.
Still I don't think anyone could deny it was the right result. Unfortunately not all cases work out that way I was reading about a young woman who was murdered by a stalker and she had called the police because she was worried and they said they would send somebody out within the hour. Six hours later she was stabbed and the police got there just in time to see her die.
I really wonder about this inadmissible evidence clause that America seems to have as a get out of jail free card. If someone is innocent and the police use dubious tactics then they should be held accountable without doubt, but if the evidence is there and shows the defendants guilty, why should they be allowed to walk free?
The one interesting point in the article was the statement that the guys driveway was public and therefore the police were at liberty to attach the device to his car there.
Why is his driveway public? I would have thought he would have owned the land up to the boundary stated on his property deeds and that would include his driveway, perhaps his driveway needs to be signed private no public access.
I'm starting to think the netbook has lost its way, The ideal size in my opinion has a 9 inch screen excellent battery life and a modest relatively quick hard drive or solid state drive. Netboooks seem to be progressing to a small laptop with lousy battery life, too big and too limited by fitting too small a battery.
There's a number of things that can improve the current crop, bigger batteries 7 or 8 hours from a charge when new should be a good minimum perhaps more like 10 hours.
Some of the SSD drives are really slow, that sucks, better models could incorporate a touch screen and the option of a tablet mode. Closing up as a clam shell and protecting the screen while bagged up. maybe even allowing the keyboard to un-dock or slide out and be used as an external keyboard could be a relatively cheap option. A few smart keys on the screen edges that can be assigned functions by the user could turn the system into a better than kindle like Ebook reader.
I don't expect these improvements for nothing, the build price would go up but then so would the usefulness of the device.
An advanced Netbook design like this could be a near perfect tool for students.
battery life long enough to last all day without needing to find a charging point, so many places will not allow anything to plug-in without having their electrical safety sticker. the ability to be able to treat this as an electronic replacement of an A4 pad typing notes or sketching diagrams with a stylus. One simple thing would be a Trapdoor usb expansion big enough to fit a Usb hspda Modem maybe a TV Card or just a plain old USB memory stick.
Make the SSD Hdd user replaceable either with a faster, larger ssd or perhaps a 1.8inch hard drive.
Trouble is no ones thinking of what people want, but just trying to avoid impacting the sales of more expensive product lines.
seriously no but they do advertise against microsoft word no3 ad on the right side
Google Apps
Email, calendar, docs & more!
£33 user/year. Start free trial now
www.google.com/apps
guess even google can't make their ad quality good enough for google :/
I'm not sure if i'd want a 3G modem built in, it becomes a little harder to get the modem in position for good reception. I'm happier using my HSPDA modem outside of my laptop.
plus with a pay as you go contract i'm free to use the thing or not as required. There is also an issue of roaming which is quite easy to encounter at which point the data plan goes out the window, and you pay through the nose.
People are being fooled a little into thinking a mobile internet connection will only work for one computer /etc/sysctl.conf change this line to net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
for Linux users its pretty easy to share it
and the following
ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.1
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -s 192.168.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p tcp --dport 3074 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p udp --dport 88 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p udp --dport 3074 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i ppp0 -p udp -m multiport --dports 88,3074 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.2.254
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -d 192.168.2.254 -p tcp --dport 3074 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -d 192.168.2.254 -p udp -m multiport --dports 88,3074 -j ACCEPT
can be run as a script by root.
all you then need to do is connect eth0 on the to the wan port on a router and set the wan port to a static address of 192.168.2.254 and a gateway of 192.168.2.1 set dns to 192.168.2.1
and now you have a lan using a 3g interface, incidentally tethering a mobile will use ppp0 so once you can connect with the tethered mobile you can do the same.
My setup goes one step further chaining a second router to expand the range using tomato firmware and wds +access point mode. Performance wise it seems reasonable, the Eircom adsl link I used before used to top out at about 300kb/s download - 3G hspda modem 222kb/s The relatively small cap of 10gb in 30 days is a bit limiting but I figure the last day of the month will be good to use up whats remaining of the cap.
If you don't want to tie up a computer sharing there are a number of routers available for about 100 which will do the same job.
If I could use their service, sure why not pay for it.
but the broadcast is analog and the audio is drowned out by the snow, my dab radio which i brought with me from england can't find a signal and while rte is on satellite its encrypted so i can't watch it.
There might be digital terrestrial tv starting in the autumn.
I'm using a 3g phone to connect this, tested with the bbc iplayer its not fast enough for tv.
funnny thing is if I want to watch tv by satellite i can receive all the bbc channels ch4 more4 e4 itv1-4 and channel 5 in the clear from the UK, i just can't get a usable signal from an irish broadcaster. not even cable, since i'm out in the country not that i bother with the uk programming either it's all a waste of time for me anyway.
guess i will have to pay for this mythical tv service that rte provide since in theory it could be provided to me even if they don't seem to want to send it my way.
Really if rte want to collect their tax they need to put the satellite signal in the clear and then they would at least be providing the service they want to collect on.
Some things have an even longer history reasons
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp
I won't ruin it for those that have never heard of it before.
Your NTFS comment really shows a lack of understanding on your part.
Windows has a flag which basically says I need to check this, Linux see's this flag and says Windows needs to check this and tells the user. Now you have been warned by Linux that Windows thinks there is a potentially a problem with this disk. You the user can as root force Linux to ignore this warning and mount the drive anyway, and it gives you the instruction you must issue to have this occur.
Now you have made a deliberate choice to mount this drive and should be clear that the only safe actions would be treating the disk as read only.
NTFS isn't an open format its been reverse engineered, reverse engineering the drive checking routines is perhaps a work in progress. Now Microsoft has all the necessary information about NTFS to create a file system check for NTFS that works from Linux, well maybe, because they don't have any control over the Linux environment, so the best and safest solution Microsoft can give is mount the drive in Windows.
So while you can mount NTFS with this flag raised , you do so at your own risk if you lose data it's your fault and nobody elses. If you want this drive safe and valid you can do two things, if you dual boot, boot windows, or as you say this is a portable drive presumably USB connected you could boot a windows image in virtualbox and pass the physical drive to the guest windows install (2000 makes a great guest os). you might even reserve a small fat32 partition on the drive for holding the windows image.
You could share a drive with a different format Fat32, ext2/3 or even hfs+ or just accept that 5 minutes spent booting windows and shutting it down again is better than a reverse engineered validation program running on Linux, why would someone bother writing such a thing? your free to develop such a thing yourself you have as much access to the resources you would need (outside of Microsoft) as anyone else.
I don't know about Vioxx, but perhaps it's not the only drug out there that can help, or maybe the only one your health insurance company was willing to pay for.
My niece sufferers from junior rheumatoid arthritis, within a year of the symptoms first appearing she was in a wheelchair, eventually she managed to see a specialist who put her on to a new drug treatment and very rapidly she went from being wheelchair bound to being a healthy and normal teenager.
The treatment requires 2 injections a week at a cost of £500 a week, luckily this is in the UK and its paid for by the National Health Service, a system we all pay into from our pay packets. If she had been under the American system would she have this drug or would she still be in constant pain in a wheelchair? It took a year of trials of various different medicines before she was prescribed something effective but she has it now and will continue to have it for as long as its needed.
America is a great country but the health system is a complete disgrace. Hopefully Obama will address this issue.
I explain what I think, in terms a layman can apprehend.
Ladies and gentlemen I bring forth the evidence that this is probably a fallacy.
Bruce said http://perens.com/blog/2009/01/31/13/
"Build kernel 2.6.28 or later. Earlier kernels won't help. Enable MTRR cleanup in the kernel configuration, setting Enable=1 and Spare MTRRs=1. You end up with 4 spare MTRRs, as it condenses the 8 used to just 4, and they have the same effect as far as I can tell."
However this was took to mean /boot/grub/menu.lst. (Explanation of problem at: http://perens.com/blog/2009/01/31/13/)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
Pass enable_mtrr_cleanup to kernel in
I can only say thanks to bruce I built my first kernel successfully ,however clearly theres a difference between what he said and what some people thought he said.
I don't know why but I finished up 2 free mtrrs not 4.