I used MoviePass for a year, I just canceled my account two weeks ago.
At first it was great, unlimited (one per day). Then you could not watch the same movie twice, then it became 3 movies a month, I stayed with them, still a good deal.
These last 4 months has been horrible. For the $10 plan each day you have a limited selection of what you can see ( https://moviepass.com/movies/ ). On top of that, VERY often (9/10) you load the app and it says "No movies today" at all the theatres around you. I've read since I'm on the east coast, I'm luckier than those on the west coast. Sometimes you would check the app, see a movie playing nearby, and when you got to the theatre, it was no longer available. I even tried mid-day weekday shows. Hit or miss (more miss).
For computer trouble tickets we wrote a piece of software called CoAST which allows users to enter and comment on trouble tickets. I.T. can add comments and change priorities. It also includes software and asset tracking, and a library for loaner resources (like projectors)
17 million not sold, but how many were sold? If only 17 million were sold this is a big deal, if 1.7billion or more were sold, that's less than a 1% drop, and with a recession, I would say that's pretty good.
Why? Let us look at the 3 options: 1> Eternity in Heaven/Hell/Limbo/etc, so whats another 900 years here. 2> There is nothing after life. So a longer life would be great 3> I die and become a frog.
Retrospect is the way to go. Easy to setup and maintain, restores can be a little finicky. Works with Windows, OSX, and I think Linux clients. My company is backing up 50+ laptops to 3 320Gig firewire hard drives (this allows 3 backups at once). (We have a rule that ignores.mp3,.aac, movie files, and large disk images)
This is a scare article It's interesting that an article basically saying DHS "needs" more money is allowed to make it into the news, but say the words "Global Warming" and you find yourself working in Antarctica.
I would say I see more commercials while fast forwarding with Tivo than live tv. If I am fast forwarding, I am staring at the tv, noting every commercial, to see when I can hit play. We often stop to watch funny or interesting commercials (like Apple's new ones). If I'm watching Live TV, I often get up for commercials knowing that I have 3-4 minutes (what happened to 2 minutes of commercials) until I need to come back.
And what's with commercials being twice as loud as the show you're watching!
-Ben
FirstClass ( http://www.firstclass.com/ ), I mentioned this software in the main reply, but it also supports Palm Sync (syncs mail, calendar, addressbook, todo-list, and memos). You can share calendars, addresbooks, and conferences (more intelligent than folders).
Shared addressbooks do not sync up, but you could place your addresbook on your secretaries/spouses FirstClass Desktop, and give them permissions to view, or add addresses.
It is a little expensive (not compared to Exchange) but there is a free 5 user version (server and client run on Windows, Linux, and OSX)
If your office upgrades to the FirstClass Voice Services you can listen to your voicemail in Email, view faxes in EMail, or listen to your Email/calendar/addressbook over the phone! Awsome stuff!
-Ben
FirstClass Groupware http://www.firstclass.com/ is not opensource, or free (except the 5 user version), but the server AND the clients will run on Windows, OSX, or Linux. There are also web and telnet interfaces available. This is a great GroupWare platform, with EASY client setup, and the three platforms look identical to the end user. This software also allows database (ODBC) integration and a VoiceMail piece.
http://www.radiantdata.com/ Radiant Data has a product called PeerFS which is a replicated filesystem (rw/rw, active/active) which allows you to also hold MySQL databases on it. You run 2 seperate MySQL servers pointing to the same data folder, and have it use POSIX locks for writes. The data is physicaly held on each server, and synced across the network.
I am testing it at work ( http://www.concord.org/ ) now for our websites. VERY easy to setup, but it supports MyISAM tables, and NOT InnoDB (or the other way around).
This does not solve IP failover, but there are other solutions out there for that. As a bonus we're holding our php webpages and MySQL databases files on the replicated PeerFS Filesystem.
-Ben
My wife has had a Soniqcast Aireo 1Gig for 10 months. She (and I) LOVE it. It has an FM tuner, as WELL as a built in FM transmitter, adjustable to ANY FM Freq (not just 5 or so).
Think that is neat, that is nothing compared to the built in 802.11b wireless! you can leave your Aireo in the car, and have it sync up with your PC in your house late at night. Or, if you're sitting near a WAP out and about, you can connect up to your audible.com account and download books, or newspapers over the internet!
Sonicast is now selling a 20Gig model with similar features. (or will be soon)
The only 2 donwfalls are that the interface on the player is so-so, and you need MS Windows to Sync playlists. http://www.soniqcast.com/
I personaly enjoy my Archos AV480, no wireless or FM, but It can store/play/record video, and works well with Linux, MacOSX, or Windows.
Since there are 100 posts about Linux solutions, I'll make my other suggestion.
FirstClass ( www.firstclass.com ).
FirstClass is a great piece of groupware software that has been around since before the Internet. Calendars, Shared Conferences, Web Pages, VoiceMail/Fax, Shared Folders (available through CIFS/Windows File Sharing), IMAP, POP, Auth SMTP, EASY EASY EASY administration. The Mac, Linux, and Windows clients look identical, EASY setup for users, a server name, user name, password. No ugly SMTP/POP/delete messages and all of that. Different web mail templates, one looks and acts JUST like the client.
How many concurrent users, because 1mil users is not hard, 1mil concurrent users is. Also 99.9% uptime is not THAT hard, it's 9 hours of down time per year.
The downfall of FirstClass is though you can have multiple "clustered" Internet boxes (http, smtp, pop, etc), you can only have one main server. Also everything (unless you POP) is kept ON the server, so you NEED and internet connection (or modem) to work with EMail.
Another bonus is that web pages are EASY, NO HTML required. Create a document, change the fonts and colors, drag image, BAM, the web page is done.
The name says it all, http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/. Download Robert Jordan, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Self help books, or parts of the Bible for free.
The catch, 8Kb/s quality. You pay for better quality, compare this to maybe a phone call, but compared to some of those Library used books on tape...
You can also buy full DVDs, or loaded harddrive MP3 players.
I am using the internal card in an APC MasterSwitch, which allows me to control the power, and SNMP/web monitor the temperature (and create MRTG graphs). I also have a script which watches the temp and pages me at x degrees.
We are also looking at replacing Blackboard (now $7500/year for the smallest config) with dotLRN, which is actualy built on openACS. We already have blackboard exported courses importing into dotLRN, and have worked a little on making the dotLRN interface look more like Blackboard. So far dotLRN looks VERY customizable, if you know a little tcl!
As a sysadmin for Blackboard on both a Windows and a Linux platform, I say RUN AWAY from Blackboard. Everytime I restart it I cross my fingers, and keep running the restart script until it works, or try to figure out WHICH java process didnt start this time.
Blackboard support is worse than anything, Exported courses havent worked right for months, and BBs solution is to upgrade to Oracle 9, and wait for the next update in July(ish).
Sorry for the rant, I can't wait to see some of the solutions that are posted here.
-Ben
The company I work for creates open source educational software from federal grants. Most of our software is Physics or Chemistry based, but most of it is Java and written and tested on MacOSX, Linux, and Windows. Some of our software is written more for classroom use (with tests and all) but some is standalone. Here is a link to our download center.
For windows boxes, there are 4 things I do/suggest to users: 1> Backups - spend the $150 for a Maxtor OneTouch that comes with Retrospect personal. Once a week they press a button, backup done. 2> A/V - If they don't want to spend $70 for Norton or McAfee, then for free you can try AVG ( http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php ) 3> Firewall - Avoiding XP SP2's, www.zonealarm.com has a good free firewall. 4> Spyware - AdAware does a great job detecting and removing spyware. ( www.lavasoftusa.com ) Free version requires that you run it manualy once a week/month/day.
Up here in New England my company hooked up with an ISP (LightShip) who has provided me with 3 T1's, to 2 physical COs at no additional cost, and it is costing us LESS than our previous ISP. We mentioned redundancy to the Sales guy who got an Engineer on the line and mapped out their network, and the 2 different ways our Cisco router could be setup.
I only have one Cisco, and I know the copper shares some of the same poles, but a month after swapping, two of my T1s went down for 10 minutes when something happened at one of the COs ATM switches, but that other T1 kept me going. For us (a small non-profit) this is more than enough redundancy.
There are many groups out there looking for ways to integrate technology into the classroom to grab the students attention. I work for The Concord Consortium, a non profit company that supports a number of NSF and DOE projects that find different ways to help students learn. We have written opensource java software to help students visualize genetics, molecules, and math; we study HOW students learn; we spawned off an OnLine Virtaul HighSchool which is now it's own organization with 6000 students; and we are always looking forward for new ways to keep students interested and learning.
We are working with PBS on a professional development project aimed at improving Algebra content knowledge and teaching practices.
On a different note, Maine a few years back initiated the Maine Laptop program, where every year every school in Maine gets laptop's for all of its 7th grade students. Technicaly in 5 years time all Middle and High School students will have computers.
I also love 3ware, and have 3ware cards in half my linux servers.
If you're gonna do RAID 5 on parallel IDE drives, you NEED to get a 7000 series controller. I moved from a 6800 up to a 7500-8 (8 port card) and was amazed at the speed increase. Writing a 650 Meg file on the 6800 brough the load to 3 or 4, and took over a minute ( you could tell when the cache started to write to disk). On the 7500 the load barely moved and it took probobly half the time write the data.
-Ben
I've worked a a couple schools and colleges and have run into this question before.
In one college we started running WebCT (www.webct.com)for 100 distance education classes. This was developed by a college in Canada, and it worked pretty well for what we needed, and was somewhat setup for multimedia. The server ran on Linux/BSD/Unix (NT support was coming) as Perl and C scripts, and the group at WebCT said had pretty good support, not that we had many problems. There was even talk of a DEC Alpha port. WebCT has most of what you are looking for, you would just need a streaming media server. There are yearly fees for WebCT, but they are not that bad.
Another bigger college I worked at went with FirstClass for oncampus classes, and a few departments started using WebCT for Distance Ed classes. FirstClass is expensive!
The K-12 Public school district I now work for is currently using AUC ( http://auc.sourceforge.net ) to support students learning. This is an open sourced free solution that has decent mailinglist support. The OpenSource part is nice for making minor modifications. Also 50% of the suggestions end up in the next release.
Slashdot Mirror
I used MoviePass for a year, I just canceled my account two weeks ago.
At first it was great, unlimited (one per day). Then you could not watch the same movie twice, then it became 3 movies a month, I stayed with them, still a good deal.
These last 4 months has been horrible. For the $10 plan each day you have a limited selection of what you can see ( https://moviepass.com/movies/ ). On top of that, VERY often (9/10) you load the app and it says "No movies today" at all the theatres around you. I've read since I'm on the east coast, I'm luckier than those on the west coast. Sometimes you would check the app, see a movie playing nearby, and when you got to the theatre, it was no longer available. I even tried mid-day weekday shows. Hit or miss (more miss).
Ahh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Our developers use jira to track software bugs.
For computer trouble tickets we wrote a piece of software called CoAST which allows users to enter and comment on trouble tickets. I.T. can add comments and change priorities. It also includes software and asset tracking, and a library for loaner resources (like projectors)
At $20/month co-pilot is great. OSX or Windows (host or client) easy to use for both parties.
I have been seeing some problems when the client is a 64-bit Windows server. Very slow screen updates.
17 million not sold, but how many were sold? If only 17 million were sold this is a big deal, if 1.7billion or more were sold, that's less than a 1% drop, and with a recession, I would say that's pretty good.
Why? Let us look at the 3 options:
1> Eternity in Heaven/Hell/Limbo/etc, so whats another 900 years here.
2> There is nothing after life. So a longer life would be great
3> I die and become a frog.
What did I forget?
Cantenna (or use a pringles jar)
http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/SearchDetail.asp?productID=15229
Retrospect is the way to go. Easy to setup and maintain, restores can be a little finicky. Works with Windows, OSX, and I think Linux clients. My company is backing up 50+ laptops to 3 320Gig firewire hard drives (this allows 3 backups at once). (We have a rule that ignores .mp3, .aac, movie files, and large disk images)
I would say I see more commercials while fast forwarding with Tivo than live tv. If I am fast forwarding, I am staring at the tv, noting every commercial, to see when I can hit play. We often stop to watch funny or interesting commercials (like Apple's new ones). If I'm watching Live TV, I often get up for commercials knowing that I have 3-4 minutes (what happened to 2 minutes of commercials) until I need to come back.
And what's with commercials being twice as loud as the show you're watching!
-Ben
FirstClass ( http://www.firstclass.com/ ), I mentioned this software in the main reply, but it also supports Palm Sync (syncs mail, calendar, addressbook, todo-list, and memos). You can share calendars, addresbooks, and conferences (more intelligent than folders).
Shared addressbooks do not sync up, but you could place your addresbook on your secretaries/spouses FirstClass Desktop, and give them permissions to view, or add addresses.
It is a little expensive (not compared to Exchange) but there is a free 5 user version (server and client run on Windows, Linux, and OSX)
If your office upgrades to the FirstClass Voice Services you can listen to your voicemail in Email, view faxes in EMail, or listen to your Email/calendar/addressbook over the phone! Awsome stuff!
-Ben
FirstClass Groupware http://www.firstclass.com/ is not opensource, or free (except the 5 user version), but the server AND the clients will run on Windows, OSX, or Linux. There are also web and telnet interfaces available. This is a great GroupWare platform, with EASY client setup, and the three platforms look identical to the end user. This software also allows database (ODBC) integration and a VoiceMail piece.
http://www.radiantdata.com/
Radiant Data has a product called PeerFS which is a replicated filesystem (rw/rw, active/active) which allows you to also hold MySQL databases on it. You run 2 seperate MySQL servers pointing to the same data folder, and have it use POSIX locks for writes. The data is physicaly held on each server, and synced across the network.
I am testing it at work ( http://www.concord.org/ ) now for our websites. VERY easy to setup, but it supports MyISAM tables, and NOT InnoDB (or the other way around).
This does not solve IP failover, but there are other solutions out there for that. As a bonus we're holding our php webpages and MySQL databases files on the replicated PeerFS Filesystem.
-Ben
My wife has had a Soniqcast Aireo 1Gig for 10 months. She (and I) LOVE it.
It has an FM tuner, as WELL as a built in FM transmitter, adjustable to ANY FM Freq (not just 5 or so).
Think that is neat, that is nothing compared to the built in 802.11b wireless! you can leave your Aireo in the car, and have it sync up with your PC in your house late at night. Or, if you're sitting near a WAP out and about, you can connect up to your audible.com account and download books, or newspapers over the internet!
Sonicast is now selling a 20Gig model with similar features. (or will be soon)
The only 2 donwfalls are that the interface on the player is so-so, and you need MS Windows to Sync playlists.
http://www.soniqcast.com/
I personaly enjoy my Archos AV480, no wireless or FM, but It can store/play/record video, and works well with Linux, MacOSX, or Windows.
Since there are 100 posts about Linux solutions, I'll make my other suggestion.
FirstClass ( www.firstclass.com ).
FirstClass is a great piece of groupware software that has been around since before the Internet. Calendars, Shared Conferences, Web Pages, VoiceMail/Fax, Shared Folders (available through CIFS/Windows File Sharing), IMAP, POP, Auth SMTP, EASY EASY EASY administration. The Mac, Linux, and Windows clients look identical, EASY setup for users, a server name, user name, password. No ugly SMTP/POP/delete messages and all of that. Different web mail templates, one looks and acts JUST like the client.
How many concurrent users, because 1mil users is not hard, 1mil concurrent users is. Also 99.9% uptime is not THAT hard, it's 9 hours of down time per year.
The downfall of FirstClass is though you can have multiple "clustered" Internet boxes (http, smtp, pop, etc), you can only have one main server. Also everything (unless you POP) is kept ON the server, so you NEED and internet connection (or modem) to work with EMail.
Another bonus is that web pages are EASY, NO HTML required. Create a document, change the fonts and colors, drag image, BAM, the web page is done.
FirstClass is definatly worth a look.
-Ben
2 Words:
Relaying Denied.
The name says it all, .
http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/
Download Robert Jordan, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Self help books, or parts of the Bible for free.
The catch, 8Kb/s quality. You pay for better quality, compare this to maybe a phone call, but compared to some of those Library used books on tape...
You can also buy full DVDs, or loaded harddrive MP3 players.
I use an internal APC environmental monitoring card, which costs about $150. There is an external version for about $250 USD. http://www.apc.com/products/category.cfm?id=7&subi d=29
I am using the internal card in an APC MasterSwitch, which allows me to control the power, and SNMP/web monitor the temperature (and create MRTG graphs). I also have a script which watches the temp and pages me at x degrees.
We are also looking at replacing Blackboard (now $7500/year for the smallest config) with dotLRN, which is actualy built on openACS. We already have blackboard exported courses importing into dotLRN, and have worked a little on making the dotLRN interface look more like Blackboard. So far dotLRN looks VERY customizable, if you know a little tcl!
As a sysadmin for Blackboard on both a Windows and a Linux platform, I say RUN AWAY from Blackboard. Everytime I restart it I cross my fingers, and keep running the restart script until it works, or try to figure out WHICH java process didnt start this time.
Blackboard support is worse than anything, Exported courses havent worked right for months, and BBs solution is to upgrade to Oracle 9, and wait for the next update in July(ish).
Sorry for the rant, I can't wait to see some of the solutions that are posted here.
-Ben
Brings new meaning to the term "blue screen of death"!
The company I work for creates open source educational software from federal grants. Most of our software is Physics or Chemistry based, but most of it is Java and written and tested on MacOSX, Linux, and Windows. Some of our software is written more for classroom use (with tests and all) but some is standalone. Here is a link to our download center.
For windows boxes, there are 4 things I do/suggest to users:
1> Backups - spend the $150 for a Maxtor OneTouch that comes with Retrospect personal. Once a week they press a button, backup done.
2> A/V - If they don't want to spend $70 for Norton or McAfee, then for free you can try AVG ( http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php )
3> Firewall - Avoiding XP SP2's, www.zonealarm.com has a good free firewall.
4> Spyware - AdAware does a great job detecting and removing spyware. ( www.lavasoftusa.com ) Free version requires that you run it manualy once a week/month/day.
Up here in New England my company hooked up with an ISP (LightShip) who has provided me with 3 T1's, to 2 physical COs at no additional cost, and it is costing us LESS than our previous ISP. We mentioned redundancy to the Sales guy who got an Engineer on the line and mapped out their network, and the 2 different ways our Cisco router could be setup.
I only have one Cisco, and I know the copper shares some of the same poles, but a month after swapping, two of my T1s went down for 10 minutes when something happened at one of the COs ATM switches, but that other T1 kept me going. For us (a small non-profit) this is more than enough redundancy.
There are many groups out there looking for ways to integrate technology into the classroom to grab the students attention. I work for The Concord Consortium, a non profit company that supports a number of NSF and DOE projects that find different ways to help students learn. We have written opensource java software to help students visualize genetics, molecules, and math; we study HOW students learn; we spawned off an OnLine Virtaul HighSchool which is now it's own organization with 6000 students; and we are always looking forward for new ways to keep students interested and learning.
We are working with PBS on a professional development project aimed at improving Algebra content knowledge and teaching practices.
On a different note, Maine a few years back initiated the Maine Laptop program, where every year every school in Maine gets laptop's for all of its 7th grade students. Technicaly in 5 years time all Middle and High School students will have computers.
-Ben
I also love 3ware, and have 3ware cards in half my linux servers.
If you're gonna do RAID 5 on parallel IDE drives, you NEED to get a 7000 series controller. I moved from a 6800 up to a 7500-8 (8 port card) and was amazed at the speed increase. Writing a 650 Meg file on the 6800 brough the load to 3 or 4, and took over a minute ( you could tell when the cache started to write to disk). On the 7500 the load barely moved and it took probobly half the time write the data.
-Ben
I've worked a a couple schools and colleges and have run into this question before.
In one college we started running WebCT (www.webct.com)for 100 distance education classes. This was developed by a college in Canada, and it worked pretty well for what we needed, and was somewhat setup for multimedia. The server ran on Linux/BSD/Unix (NT support was coming) as Perl and C scripts, and the group at WebCT said had pretty good support, not that we had many problems. There was even talk of a DEC Alpha port. WebCT has most of what you are looking for, you would just need a streaming media server. There are yearly fees for WebCT, but they are not that bad.
Another bigger college I worked at went with FirstClass for oncampus classes, and a few departments started using WebCT for Distance Ed classes. FirstClass is expensive!
The K-12 Public school district I now work for is currently using AUC ( http://auc.sourceforge.net ) to support students learning. This is an open sourced free solution that has decent mailinglist support. The OpenSource part is nice for making minor modifications. Also 50% of the suggestions end up in the next release.