However, it appears that most of the 64 bit architectures (Alpha and UltraSPARC) don't use 64-bit addressing. They use something more like 39-bit or 42-bit -- something in that general neighborhood.
You only need 4 terabytes of memory if you're altavista or fedex and you want to keep your entire database in memory at once. Otherwise a couple-hundred gigabytes should do you fine.:-)
If you go and find the stupid crypto export regulations, you'll also discover that they technically make it illegal for a US citizen with crypto expertise to travel outside of the US and sell (or give away) their crypto expertise there.
The loophole you think you've found just isn't there.
US Law forbids its citizens from exporting crypto expertise (or crypto work) as well as actual crypto binaries. If you're currently a US citizen and you want to export some crypto expertise, I think the only way you can do it is by leaving the US, becoming a citizen of another country and renouncing your US citizenship. Otherwise you'd be breaking US law and extradition might be possible.
It was a convoluted story, but apparently in order to have our meetings in O'Reilly's facility, they have to pay extra insurance costs.
At one point this came up and somebody at O'Reilly and Associates wanted to make NBLUG have their own insurance card, or something like that. After a little bit of hassle, Tim O'Reilly (the head honcho) came back from his trip (an overseas vacation or something like that) and said "No, we'll cover that", and it hasn't been an issue since.
Nonetheless, it does mean that O'Reilly, in addition to letting us use their facilities and donating books and T-shirts to give away, has a (probably small) increase in their own insurance costs.
I agree that it would be ridiculous for a LUG to have to pay for insurance. Can't squeeze blood from a turnip, anyways. (Though, since our LUG isn't incorporated in any fashion, I suppose if something did happen to somebody (broken limb, whatever) in a way that the LUG was considered responsible, the individual people would be personally responsible. Unless it happens at O'Reilly, in which case their insurance will cover it.
(In other words, we don't need any kind of insurance)
First off, I help to run a small LUG, NBLUG in my area. We don't have a strict membership roster, but there are about 25 people that show up for just about every event and twice that many show up when we have something more interesting going on. I'm, basically, second in charge.
Back when we first started, there were several people that said "Let's start a LUG". Of those, two, myself and Dustin (the main guy in charge) actually put enough energy into it to make it happen. We found a place to meet, decided on some basic "ground rules" and announced a bunch of places that we were having a meeting. The first meeting's topic was what to do with the LUG. And, of course, to solicit volunteers. Quite frankly, getting people to volunteer to help out simply hasn't been a problem. If anything, we've gotten more offers to help than we need helpers.
Money: LUGs really shouldn't need very much money. In order to get resources I'd suggest trying a few different things:
Try to get local companies to "sponsor" your LUG to some degree. O'Reilly and Associates basically does this for us -- though all that consists of is providing a nice place for us to meet at, covering the extra insurance costs and giving us a lot of books for free (as well as some t-shirts).
Charge for something *optional*. Perhaps some web space or an email address or dinner (BALUG does this)
Outright solicit donations. We did this when we wanted to sign up for SSC's LUG program. We just set a basket out (cheating by seeding with a dollar and a few bits of change in first, of course) during an InstallFest with a big sign and a printout explaining what it was for. We got more money than we needed.
People to run it: There could be all sorts of cultural differences between the left coast of the USA and Turkey, but out here finding people willing to help run a LUG was really not a problem at all. If somebody is finding that they can't donate the time to run it, then somebody who is willing to donate time (or multiple somebodies) should be found. It couldn't be that hard.
We have found it a little harder to get people good at making pretty graphics, but we found a few, even if we are bribing them with a few of the books and t-shirts that O'Reilly gave us.
It's important that somebody be able to simple show up at a LUG meeting whenever it's supposed to happen and get some kind of useful information pertaining to Linux and a chance to talk to other people that are using Linux. Remember, a LUG should really be more of a grassroots campaign to get Linux (or FreeBSD or some other free Unix) onto the computers of people and to help out people that already have Linux on their computers. These kinds of things help to further the Linux meme in good ways. Trying to make a LUG into an exclusive club so that you can all be "cool" is a bad idea. (Though, of course, allowing it to be a good place for people that already run Linux and know it well to "Network" and socialize is a Good Thing®
Computer Recycling Center (located in Santa Clara, San Francisco and Santa Rosa) does their computer recycling in a pretty cool way.
They take donations of just about anything. (software and books can't be more than 2 years old, equipment can be ancient) The schools get first pick -- anything that can be put to use in a school gets donated to a school. Anything that can't (either 'cause the schools have enough or better stuff or it's just a single component for something nobody uses anymore) they sell at really cheap prices to people that come in.
I wanted to network our house a bit, so I went down there on a Saturday and bought a perfectly fine ISA 10bT NE2000 for $2.50. They also have some complete systems, old printers, old monitors and all sorts of other strange things that somebody might be able to use. (like an ARCnet hub)
The money that they get from selling donations then goes back into their program or to the schools. (Or maybe to buy newer stuff for the schools)
Unfortunately, they seem to be mostly giving the schools Macs and PCs with Windows. I think it'd be nice if we could get them to work with the three LUGs near them on getting some Linux into the schools as well.
There is Macintosh support. Last time I checked (7 months ago) the client software worked fine, but the VNC server for the Mac was finicky and flaky.
The biggest problem with the scheme you describe for getting VNC to act like an X server is that in a large-ish environment it starts getting hard to manage ("Am I:23 or:24 on vncserver7 or vncserver8?"). Also, you end up with more work and probably more network traffic for the "server" machines than if you can get a real X server for the "client" machines.
I've found myself with some somewhat similar needs. The solution that I find works best is a private CVS repository on the most accessible machine in the bunch.
You can set up CVS with "modules" that will cover a very specific list of files that you can change by editing the modules file in the CVSROOT (just cvs checkout CVSROOT, edit the file in there and commit).
You can then have some symlinks into the directory checked out of CVS or do a little trickery and get your home directory to look to cvs like you checked it out.
With text files, you can then possibly make changes on two different machines and merge the changes together. With non-text files you need to be careful to commit changes and update everywhere relevant before changing the file someplace else. (Make sure to mark binary files as binary files, BTW)
Loki Games' President, Scott Draeker will be speaking at NBLUG tomorrow evening.
He'll be demoing Myth II as well as Civilization: Call To Power, and talking about the other upcoming titles from them. He'll also be talking about bringing Linux to the Desktop.
Look on NBLUG's web site at http://www.nblug.org/ for more details.
(The meeting is in O'Reilly's Sebastopol office, starting at 7:30 -- this is about an hour north of San Francisco)
Loki isn't the original developer, and most of their money is coming from selling boxes with the Linux version in it. They don't get any money when a Windows version is sold.
Also, I doubt that if there was a Linux version, a Windows version (same price) and then a more expensive Linux+Windows version that very many people would buy the "combo" version.
No. (This was a couple of jobs ago. Somebody else that worked there actually did the coding for that and the actual interesting bit was the control of the relay hooked up to the NT box's reset switch. We never put it on a web page or anything like that. I'd be surprised if anybody still had a copy of that code, too)
It should be a fairly easy modification to the ledstat program, though.
LEDs are 'Light Emitting Diodes', the most common choice for any little blinking light on your computer (they tend to be just a little colored light.)
LCD is 'Liquid Crystal Display' which has this liquid crystal that's polarized and changes polarization when some electricity is run through it. This is what's used on digital watches, calculators, laptop displays and the little linux based MP3 player thingy that I've seen before.
If you're interested in the former, look on metalab (ex-sunsite) under Linux/system/status you'll find that there is a led-stat.txt describing a short program and cable with LEDs, etc. (there's also a ledstatus tarball and lsm) You can modify this LED status program in a number of ways, at one place I worked we had it set up with a colored "load meter" (gets higher when more load) combined with a heartbeat (goes back and forth to give you a 'feel' of how much CPU is available) and with two of the parallel port pins hooked up to a relay hooked up to the reset switch of the NT machine next to it, so we could send a specific signal to lcdmeter and reboot the NT machine when it froze.
If you're interested in an LCD display panel, as I suspect you really are, Matrix Orbital Corporation makes a series of LCD display panels (also VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) modules that appear to be completely compatible and brighter than the LCD panels) that are sold through a few different channels, including Linux Central. These appear to use RS-232, (or I2C, whatever that is) so you'll need a spare serial port.
The software to drive these is LCDproc which works on a fairly configurable client/server interface, so it should be possible to display anything you want with LCDproc as long as you can write a client that can speak the protocol.
AlterNIC is a "cool" idea, but it's hardly a viable alternative for anybody right now. AlterNIC domains only work from sites which have added their info to their root servers info.
It's difficult to find any DNS servers that do have the AlterNIC TLDs added in. More importantly, it's even more difficult to find systems configured by default with the AlterNIC TLDs preconfigured.
If you want to use a domain to do business or reach people, "an-overly-long-domain-name.com" will still have a better chance than a nice, short, AlterNIC domain. Why? Because only a trivially small percentage of people will have any chance of reaching your domain unless you have a domain that's in the "standard" list of TLDs.
And if you were brave enough to try and register and 'push' both domains, you'd be running too much of a risk that lots of people would try the AlterNIC domain and give up without trying the 'normal' domain.
It'd be nice if AlterNIC were a viable alternative, but it's currently nowhere close to being that. Too bad.
Slashdot Mirror
However, it appears that most of the 64 bit architectures (Alpha and UltraSPARC) don't use 64-bit addressing. They use something more like 39-bit or 42-bit -- something in that general neighborhood.
:-)
39-bit = 549755813888 = 512 gigabytes.
42-bit = 4398046511104 = 4 terabytes.
45-bit = 35184372088832 = 32 terabytes.
You only need 4 terabytes of memory if you're altavista or fedex and you want to keep your entire database in memory at once. Otherwise a couple-hundred gigabytes should do you fine.
(I wish I could remember the specific figure...)
If you go and find the stupid crypto export regulations, you'll also discover that they technically make it illegal for a US citizen with crypto expertise to travel outside of the US and sell (or give away) their crypto expertise there.
The loophole you think you've found just isn't there.
US Law forbids its citizens from exporting crypto expertise (or crypto work) as well as actual crypto binaries. If you're currently a US citizen and you want to export some crypto expertise, I think the only way you can do it is by leaving the US, becoming a citizen of another country and renouncing your US citizenship. Otherwise you'd be breaking US law and extradition might be possible.
It was a convoluted story, but apparently in order to have our meetings in O'Reilly's facility, they have to pay extra insurance costs.
At one point this came up and somebody at O'Reilly and Associates wanted to make NBLUG have their own insurance card, or something like that. After a little bit of hassle, Tim O'Reilly (the head honcho) came back from his trip (an overseas vacation or something like that) and said "No, we'll cover that", and it hasn't been an issue since.
Nonetheless, it does mean that O'Reilly, in addition to letting us use their facilities and donating books and T-shirts to give away, has a (probably small) increase in their own insurance costs.
I agree that it would be ridiculous for a LUG to have to pay for insurance. Can't squeeze blood from a turnip, anyways. (Though, since our LUG isn't incorporated in any fashion, I suppose if something did happen to somebody (broken limb, whatever) in a way that the LUG was considered responsible, the individual people would be personally responsible. Unless it happens at O'Reilly, in which case their insurance will cover it.
(In other words, we don't need any kind of insurance)
First off, I help to run a small LUG, NBLUG in my area. We don't have a strict membership roster, but there are about 25 people that show up for just about every event and twice that many show up when we have something more interesting going on. I'm, basically, second in charge.
Back when we first started, there were several people that said "Let's start a LUG". Of those, two, myself and Dustin (the main guy in charge) actually put enough energy into it to make it happen. We found a place to meet, decided on some basic "ground rules" and announced a bunch of places that we were having a meeting. The first meeting's topic was what to do with the LUG. And, of course, to solicit volunteers. Quite frankly, getting people to volunteer to help out simply hasn't been a problem. If anything, we've gotten more offers to help than we need helpers.
Money: LUGs really shouldn't need very much money. In order to get resources I'd suggest trying a few different things:
People to run it: There could be all sorts of cultural differences between the left coast of the USA and Turkey, but out here finding people willing to help run a LUG was really not a problem at all. If somebody is finding that they can't donate the time to run it, then somebody who is willing to donate time (or multiple somebodies) should be found. It couldn't be that hard.
We have found it a little harder to get people good at making pretty graphics, but we found a few, even if we are bribing them with a few of the books and t-shirts that O'Reilly gave us.
It's important that somebody be able to simple show up at a LUG meeting whenever it's supposed to happen and get some kind of useful information pertaining to Linux and a chance to talk to other people that are using Linux. Remember, a LUG should really be more of a grassroots campaign to get Linux (or FreeBSD or some other free Unix) onto the computers of people and to help out people that already have Linux on their computers. These kinds of things help to further the Linux meme in good ways. Trying to make a LUG into an exclusive club so that you can all be "cool" is a bad idea. (Though, of course, allowing it to be a good place for people that already run Linux and know it well to "Network" and socialize is a Good Thing®
Computer Recycling Center (located in Santa Clara, San Francisco and Santa Rosa) does their computer recycling in a pretty cool way.
They take donations of just about anything. (software and books can't be more than 2 years old, equipment can be ancient) The schools get first pick -- anything that can be put to use in a school gets donated to a school. Anything that can't (either 'cause the schools have enough or better stuff or it's just a single component for something nobody uses anymore) they sell at really cheap prices to people that come in.
I wanted to network our house a bit, so I went down there on a Saturday and bought a perfectly fine ISA 10bT NE2000 for $2.50. They also have some complete systems, old printers, old monitors and all sorts of other strange things that somebody might be able to use. (like an ARCnet hub)
The money that they get from selling donations then goes back into their program or to the schools. (Or maybe to buy newer stuff for the schools)
Unfortunately, they seem to be mostly giving the schools Macs and PCs with Windows. I think it'd be nice if we could get them to work with the three LUGs near them on getting some Linux into the schools as well.
There is Macintosh support. Last time I checked (7 months ago) the client software worked fine, but the VNC server for the Mac was finicky and flaky.
:23 or :24 on vncserver7 or vncserver8?"). Also, you end up with more work and probably more network traffic for the "server" machines than if you can get a real X server for the "client" machines.
The biggest problem with the scheme you describe for getting VNC to act like an X server is that in a large-ish environment it starts getting hard to manage ("Am I
I've found myself with some somewhat similar needs. The solution that I find works best is a private CVS repository on the most accessible machine in the bunch.
You can set up CVS with "modules" that will cover a very specific list of files that you can change by editing the modules file in the CVSROOT (just cvs checkout CVSROOT, edit the file in there and commit).
You can then have some symlinks into the directory checked out of CVS or do a little trickery and get your home directory to look to cvs like you checked it out.
With text files, you can then possibly make changes on two different machines and merge the changes together. With non-text files you need to be careful to commit changes and update everywhere relevant before changing the file someplace else.
(Make sure to mark binary files as binary files, BTW)
Also, it's pretty easy to get cvs to work via ssh
Loki Games' President, Scott Draeker will be speaking at NBLUG tomorrow evening.
He'll be demoing Myth II as well as Civilization: Call To Power, and talking about the other upcoming titles from them. He'll also be talking about bringing Linux to the Desktop.
Look on NBLUG's web site at http://www.nblug.org/ for more details.
(The meeting is in O'Reilly's Sebastopol office, starting at 7:30 -- this is about an hour north of San Francisco)
Loki would have trouble making money then.
Loki isn't the original developer, and most of their money is coming from selling boxes with the Linux version in it. They don't get any money when a Windows version is sold.
Also, I doubt that if there was a Linux version, a Windows version (same price) and then a more expensive Linux+Windows version that very many people would buy the "combo" version.
No. (This was a couple of jobs ago. Somebody else that worked there actually did the coding for that and the actual interesting bit was the control of the relay hooked up to the NT box's reset switch. We never put it on a web page or anything like that. I'd be surprised if anybody still had a copy of that code, too)
It should be a fairly easy modification to the ledstat program, though.
LEDs are 'Light Emitting Diodes', the most common choice for any little blinking light on your computer (they tend to be just a little colored light.)
LCD is 'Liquid Crystal Display' which has this liquid crystal that's polarized and changes polarization when some electricity is run through it. This is what's used on digital watches, calculators, laptop displays and the little linux based MP3 player thingy that I've seen before.
If you're interested in the former, look on metalab (ex-sunsite) under Linux/system/status you'll find that there is a led-stat.txt describing a short program and cable with LEDs, etc. (there's also a ledstatus tarball and lsm) You can modify this LED status program in a number of ways, at one place I worked we had it set up with a colored "load meter" (gets higher when more load) combined with a heartbeat (goes back and forth to give you a 'feel' of how much CPU is available) and with two of the parallel port pins hooked up to a relay hooked up to the reset switch of the NT machine next to it, so we could send a specific signal to lcdmeter and reboot the NT machine when it froze.
If you're interested in an LCD display panel, as I suspect you really are, Matrix Orbital Corporation makes a series of LCD display panels (also VFD (Vacuum Fluorescent Display) modules that appear to be completely compatible and brighter than the LCD panels) that are sold through a few different channels, including Linux Central. These appear to use RS-232, (or I2C, whatever that is) so you'll need a spare serial port.
The software to drive these is LCDproc which works on a fairly configurable client/server interface, so it should be possible to display anything you want with LCDproc as long as you can write a client that can speak the protocol.
There are other solutions... try http://www.alternic.net.
AlterNIC is a "cool" idea, but it's hardly a viable alternative for anybody right now. AlterNIC domains only work from sites which have added their info to their root servers info.
It's difficult to find any DNS servers that do have the AlterNIC TLDs added in. More importantly, it's even more difficult to find systems configured by default with the AlterNIC TLDs preconfigured.
If you want to use a domain to do business or reach people, "an-overly-long-domain-name.com" will still have a better chance than a nice, short, AlterNIC domain. Why? Because only a trivially small percentage of people will have any chance of reaching your domain unless you have a domain that's in the "standard" list of TLDs.
And if you were brave enough to try and register and 'push' both domains, you'd be running too much of a risk that lots of people would try the AlterNIC domain and give up without trying the 'normal' domain.
It'd be nice if AlterNIC were a viable alternative, but it's currently nowhere close to being that. Too bad.
Replace the ` with a ? and it works fine.
Like this