First, check out DemoLinux, and see if it has rdesktop on it or if you can get them to add it by sending a polite email. If so, then you are mostly done. Otherwise:
To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:
Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.
So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.
To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your.xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.
The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.
Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the/etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.
But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.
Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.
If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.
I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.
The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun being had among the CRC people we dealt with.
And then he blisefully continues in the very next paragraph:
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
Hello ? If Wolfram is such a bunch of privately owned old-school in-it-for-the-fun boys, how come the cash approach won ? What happened to all the stuff about short term versus long term ? Didn't do much good to be free of all those "uninvolved stockholders", now did it ?
I used Mathematica in school, and liked it. From now on it's Maxima only, however. Long live the GPL.
I remember seeing a television commercial that ran in Texas during the late 70s. It advertised an oil drilling services company, the type of outfit you'd hire to keep parts and pipe supplied to a drilling site. The commercial claimed decades of experience and pleased customers, and ended with the exhortation "You say you don't have an oil well ? Well GET ONE!!!"
I believe that applies in this case.
But should you not wish to get linux installed on a machine, look at these links (obtained by the google search on "Reading an HFS disk on Windows"):
I believe all you have to do is pop it in a linux machine and mount it with filesystem type hfs. Hfs is the "Hierarchical File System" which is what Mac's use.
According to the specs I found on the web, your machine had an IDE drive. This makes it easy to find a machine to plug it into. At one point I believe most Mac's were scsi machines.
So it's the same simple $12 solution, except you have to have compiled "hfs" amoung the files system types in your kernel.
I only have the full version of kermit installed on DOS, but it does offer "wyse50" when I do "set term type ?"
For what it's worth, there are also wyse entries in/etc/termcap on linux. I don't think that automatically allows any linux software to emulate a Wyse, it allows you to attach a Wyse to a linux machine.
There are also a variety of interesting hits on the google search for "wyse terminal emulator."
Sure it does. It does a lot more, but it definitely does that. Look at the What is Kermit page and do a page search on "terminal emulation."
A "terminal" is a keyboard and monitor (or in the old days, a teletype machine (that's where "tty" comes from), basically a keyboard and line printer) with a wire connection to a host computer. For each such piece of hardware built, there was a protocol for how the host computer could tell the screen what to display and what bytes would be sent with each keystroke. (Actually some terminals allowed you edit an entire line and then send it at once.)
When I take one computer and hook it to another with a piece of wire, the software that causes the first computer to send exactly the same things to make it look like the terminal hardware is on the other end is naturally enough called a "terminal emulator."
You can take an old PDP11, disconnect it's vt220 or vt100 terminal, hook up the wire to a computer instead, run kermit connected to that port, tell kermit to pretend to be a vt100 or vt220 or whatever, and the PDP11 should not be able to figure out that there isn't a real hardware terminal on the other end.
These days you don't have to have a separate hardware port for each terminal, you can connect many at once via Linux's virtual terminals or networks or whatever.
I have been trying to get full (i.e., all F-keys, escape and backspace/delete etc) terminal emulation going on a DOS machine connected to a linux machine over a serial cable. I can specify what terminal type that the getty should use on that line in/etc/inittab.
On the DOS machine I am using kermit. There is a vt300.ini file which puts it into vt300 emulation mode. Except that if I connect to the linux machine, I have to do "set term type ansi-bbs" to be able to see any text, and if I start up midnight commander not all of the F-keys work.
I looked the various "set key" commands in the vt300.ini file, and I had the hope that I could look at the termcap definition of vt300 (actually vt320) on the linux machine and somehow figure out how to set the F-keys to send the right thing.
But no luck so far. How do you figure out exactly what mc is expecting for a certain key ? Isn't this somehow in the ncurses library related stuff ? Should I try a different terminal type -- perhaps midnight commander wouldn't work correctly even if I had a real hardware vt320 ?
In general, how do you debug stuff like this ? Is there a program in the ncurses package, or that uses it, that I can run, press a key, and it will show me what the terminal emulator should send (in terms of what binary combination) to emulate that key ? Then I could generate the key-to-binary mapping by hand, and then use that to generate a file of "set key" commands to configure kermit correctly. If I was trying to emulate something with more F-keys than my keyboard, I could look into using shift-Fkey to emulate the higher ones, or whatever. But I would at least know what I needed to send, and that's the part I'm having trouble figuring out.
By the way, the/etc/termcap file has some interesting reading in the comments. Check it out next time you are waiting for a compile to finish.
I think you could do this by installing apache on a windows box that had office on it, and running some visual basic scripts from cgi scripts.
Then put the whole little thing in a package with a click-and-configure interface, so that clueless admins anywhere could install it. Better yet, see if the cygwin guys will include it in their package.
There is no need to send anyone a microsoft.doc or.xls document, ever. MSOffice can read in html, rtf, and other formats. So the translation is only coming in, not going out.
Well, perhaps the exception might be the excell spreadsheets. Some people mail back and forth a huge number of spreadsheets with fairly complecated macros, such that rendering the document as delimited text would loose quite a bit of information.
The best thing to have is a single windows machine which you can access remotely for the purpose of occasionally loading up a received document and saving it out in another more interchangable format. The usual mode of operation would be to read the incoming document with OpenOffice, and only resort to that machine if the result is horribly broken; then you make changes or whatever, but save it out in an open format such as rtf or text, and only send open formats out of the company.
OpenOffice can do the task. Keeping around a few of the windows machines as a backup and use as translators is probably something you need to do regardless of the quality of OpenOffice or whatever other package, as long as the people you communicate with stick with MS.
I'd like to add that I've never actually had a big problem simply importing MS docs into Star Office. At more I just have to hilight the entire document and select a smaller font. Sometimes the bullets in powerpoint presentations have a funny star instead of a round black dot, but that is also easily fixed.
But I mostly use Star Office to simply translate the document into html; I think process the document from there using emacs, first cleaning it up quite a bit.
I also use Star Office to save.xls files as delimited test, and then process them with perl scripts.
This is not the same usage mode as the average secretary in a MS shop, however.
What you need to complete the ability to switch is a web-based way to convert MS documents. This way you can provide a few linux machines for people to use and see others use and get over the fear; documents can be submitted to a server through web page, returned as html or RTF or whatever depending on what you want to do with it. All those MS tools provide "save as . .." functions in various formats.
If you email an MS document to yourself at a Yahoo email address, you can go to the Yahoo web interface and veiw the document as html. For a small home office this is acceptable; for a bigger company, you search around in yahoo's site you can find a link to the company that provides the server that does that MStrash-to-html conversion.
But what we really need (and have been needing for a while) is a set of CGI and visual basic scripts that will allow a person to install apache on a windows2k or XP or whatever flavor of the week with the cygwin stuff, and provide a small web page that will take submitted documents, load them into the appropriate MS tool and save them as the appropriate format, and return them to the user. You can already buy this for a price, but a GPLd project along these lines would break a lot of dependancies on MS. I hate MS too much to even acquire a copy of the OS and Office and learn VB to start such a project.
If the trolls on slashdot can have moderator points and mod themselves up, how the hell do you think you are going to make this work ? What's to stop the owner of a porn site from running scripts that flood the system with good ratings ? All the same attacks, distributed scripts which log in to thousands of the open NT boxes left by Code Red and then do their work, etc, are still there.
What you need is a way to assure that a particular rating came from a real person and that a real person is not doing more of the rating. A meta-mod like system of ranking the rankers has a built in time lag, and the "enemy" can always produce new moderators wholesale.
So in the end, the you still cannot insulate yourself completely from the rest of humanity. There are pornographers out there, and they are also part of the human race, and so the normal interaction of a human will eventually lead you to one.
You can try to move to the right side of the tracks, but eventually "they" will move in next door, or you will find out the preacher in your white little church was one of "them" all along. You can set your threshold to 4, miss all the good stuff, and still get a little goatse now and then. You can ban TVs and computers and make your daughters wear burkas, but then the fact that your society lacked the democratizing characteristics of TVs and etc means that your leaders allowed something to happen that brings "them" back at the point of a gun.
Give up. You are human and humans are dirty. There is nothing you can do to stop yourself from being a member of the single giant community that is the globalized world.
I would use the Free Software Foundation's "GNU Software for MS-Windows and MS-DOS" cd. I just ordered the new edition from the gnu.org order page for $35.
The previous edition of this CD was very good. It installed all the standard suite of GNU tools, including bash, emacs, gcc, perl, awk, grep, etc. It puts everything in one directory, no messing with the registry and shit, so it is easy to uninstall (just delete that directory). Also, using these tools does not restrict your freedom; you have the source code and the free use of it, and these same tools will be available to you should you work on other operating systems and architectures. For me, the advantage over cygwin was the nice package of stuff on the CD with the setup script, because most of the machines I was installing this on didn't have network connections.
I would advise installing either that CD or the cygwin package and teaching your friends to use emacs and one of the mail readers in it, such as rmail or gnus (I personally use gnus but it was a bit of a learning curve). I know gnus can be configured to use a remote pop server such as a yahoo account, and the other mail readers probably can also.
I am looking forward to using the new edition of this CD on a free operating system -- FreeDos -- for the first time, and I also supported the FSF by purchasing this (3 copies) and T-shirts as well.
The page for ordering the CD (and other FSF stuff) is here, and the description of the CD is here.
For myself, working at home on a cable modem box, I don't need a lot of backup space. What I do want is the back to be at a remote location. And I do want it to be as automated as possible because if it requires me to physically do something on a regular basis I'll just stop after a couple of months, as soon as my schedule gets tight or whatever.
My solution is to find another person on a fast connection who has the same needs, and arrange to let him ssh into my box and have a few gigs worth of space, and give me the same.
Right now the only scriptified part is creating the backup files. I encrypt them and scp them to his box by hand. I will eventually have it all automated, including deleting the oldest backup if space is getting tight.
This probably isn't an option for a "real" backup solution, such as for a business or a network with a number of users. But all I want is my home directory, mail, etc. Hell, my bookmarks file and mail are probably most of what I want, and the rest is mainly small latex docs.
I think there is probably a way to use freenet for this, but I didn't think that through all the way. If I inserted my backups into freenet, and a fire burned down my house, how would I know what keys to use to get my backups back out of freenet ?
Re:OT: These Fucking Trolls
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
My record is 58 hours. Afterwards I slept for 24 hours straight and woke up having to pee real bad and extremely thirsty. It was a combination of trying to get problem sets done and foolishing taking other people's night shifts at work because I needed the money.
Here is a partial list of books published online, that I happened to like enough to bookmark. I find that reading a book on the computer screen is tedious, I mostly use the online version as a reference.
I have a lot of other links also, but my bookmarks have become so nested and folderized that many are lost in there, I really need bookmarks for my bookmarks . . . Anyway, I would suggest that if you find yourself looking for interesting reading online, you will find plenty. If you choose you can find scanned in pdf's of various works on newsgroups and in freenet, etc.
However, my advice is to use the 'net primarily as a way to figure out what to read, and become familar with the local public library. Almost all libraries have inter-library loans which give you access to huge amount of stuff. When I can't get a work that way, I fall back upon checking databases of used bookstore inventories -- http://abe.com/ and http://powellsbooks.com/ are the places I generally go to.
Does anyone know where I could get an image of the cdrom that came with the book "GNU Tools for MS-DOS" several years ago ?
This was a very nice package of perl, bash, emacs, gcc, awk, grep, and all associated common GNU utilities, for DOS and Windows. I used to use it to make Windows useful, now I have need of it again to use on DOS (this time I'll be able to use it on a GPL DOS, see freedos.org.)
My only copy of that cdrom is now scratched or otherwise corrupted, a few key files can't be read. I even thought about buying a cd polishing kit in an attempt to recover it, but they were charging 30 dollars for them.
At one point, the shortest domain name to use for pinging was x.org. But ping x.org doesn't respond anymore, you have to use www.x.org, which is way too many charcters. Now I use ping w.tv, which is the shortest domanin name that will respong to pings that I know of. Given the two-character country codes, I don't think you can do better. Anyone have a shorter one ?
But y-a-h-o-o-dot-c-o-m would give me carpral, dude. Way too many characters.
The easy part is converting and indexing all the docs. Not that that is easy. What I would do is something along the lines of scripts to convert them to html and put them in a database with a web browsable front end, building indexes of keywords, accompanied by A LOT of manual labour inserting meta-information about each document.
Almost any document editor these days can import and export html.
The hard part is getting people to start using it. They won't insert their new documents, they won't use it to efficiently look up stuff instead of poking around in their harddrives and email archives, they will just keep doing what got them in trouble in the first place.
And the only thing you can do about it is get a new job.
Yes, and prior to Bush's action, all federally funded stem cell research was prohibited. What Bush actually did was *extend* the funding to those 60 lines.
Note also that some stem research was proceeding with private funding anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
To start, look at the files in this minimal distribution that runs X:
2-Disk Xwindow Linux
Look at other minimal distributions including the various floppy linuxes and bigger ones like Peanut Linux. Ibiblio's list of distributions is probably the place to start. Look at some of those distributions that come on busincard sized CDs.
So pick one of these that seems configurable and set up a machine with the hardware you have in mind and install it (or boot from the floppies) and start adding to it. First do X, then your rdesktop client, whatever that is. Here's a hint: don't worry about removing compilers, unused libs, etc until you are done. Even then, keep several CDs of the "development edition" around, because you may need all that stuff to add more things in the future.
To get your automatic boot up and start of the client and etc, look at how Mandrake does the automatic log in thing, and simply put all the commands you want to be run in your .xinitrc file, and then have the window manager be the last command. Look at man xinit for details.
The final step would be to trim it down and set it up. My approach here would be to make it a bootable CD like Finnix. In fact, what I would do is start with Finnix, add X and the other stuff, and if I still had space on the CD, stop. Free space on a read-only medium is useless, you might as well put every single thing you think you might need on there until you fill it up.
Some modifications I would make to Finnix would be putting all of the /etc directory in the ram disk, so you could re-configure things on the fly, and if your machine did have a local harddrive, maybe you could use that for swap. Running off a CD means that the user can just turn off the machine when done -- there is no disk to fsck, everytime it starts up it thinks it is the first time, so to speak. I've been playing with modifying finnix, I copied the cd to disk and modified some stuff, and got busy and never burned my new copy to see if it would boot.
But in the long run, you have to realize that you are not going to get someone to do this for you for $150. You might try out DemoLinux and see if it already meets your needs as is -- I would expect that you would need to add that rdesktop thing. You have to either pony up the money, or do it yourself.
Inspite of what some Zealot Hypesters may have told you about Linux being as easy to use as the interface to a coke machine or whatever, you have to come to the realization that Linux is about Freedom. It will always be easier not to be free. Worrying about "is linux ready to meet this bulletized list of requirements" is like worrying whether you might have to walk around a lot and get rained on sometimes and have to get a job if they let you out of prison. If you have any self-respect, it doesn't matter: a free system is the only choice. This means that you have to either put up with not being able to do what you want with computers, or bite the bullet and spend some of your own personal time reading and learning how to install things and configure stuff. Just like you spend your personal time reading the newspaper and going to vote.
If I sound like a dirty gnu hippie Stallman-worshipping fanatic, it's because I am, and I'm proud of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/14/opinion/14KRUG.h tml
Are you sure that you didn't get your statistic from someone who couldn't think up a number bigger than 100 billion or a period longer than a year ?
Also, if we spend 300 million in a day, then we spend 30 million in one tenth that, or 2.4 hours, a lot less than 12.
Calculators are your friend, but if you are stupid in the first place, they won't help much.
I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders that appears so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.
The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun being had among the CRC people we dealt with.
And then he blisefully continues in the very next paragraph:
We eventually concluded that there was no real business discussion possible. CRC was simply incapable of listening to or evaluating an actual business proposal. So we weighed the costs of continued litigation against the costs of giving CRC some of the cash for which it appeared so hungry. The cash approach won.
Hello ? If Wolfram is such a bunch of privately owned old-school in-it-for-the-fun boys, how come the cash approach won ? What happened to all the stuff about short term versus long term ? Didn't do much good to be free of all those "uninvolved stockholders", now did it ?
I used Mathematica in school, and liked it. From now on it's Maxima only, however. Long live the GPL.
I believe that applies in this case.
But should you not wish to get linux installed on a machine, look at these links (obtained by the google search on "Reading an HFS disk on Windows") :
HFS Utilities Homepage
Port of hfsutils to DOS
Good luck and have fun.
I believe all you have to do is pop it in a linux machine and mount it with filesystem type hfs. Hfs is the "Hierarchical File System" which is what Mac's use.
According to the specs I found on the web, your machine had an IDE drive. This makes it easy to find a machine to plug it into. At one point I believe most Mac's were scsi machines.
So it's the same simple $12 solution, except you have to have compiled "hfs" amoung the files system types in your kernel.
The first time I ever customized any of the my environment files was because CDE was an ungodly slow hog.
I switched to fvwm. There was no fvwm2 at the time.
What do you mean by a "crypto board" ? A hardware random number generator ? An embedded computer ?
It seems to me that crypto stuff is not necessarily well suited for special hardware, it can all be done just fine in ordinary software.
I only have the full version of kermit installed on DOS, but it does offer "wyse50" when I do "set term type ?"
/etc/termcap on linux. I don't think that automatically allows any linux software to emulate a Wyse, it allows you to attach a Wyse to a linux machine.
For what it's worth, there are also wyse entries in
There are also a variety of interesting hits on the google search for "wyse terminal emulator."
A "terminal" is a keyboard and monitor (or in the old days, a teletype machine (that's where "tty" comes from), basically a keyboard and line printer) with a wire connection to a host computer. For each such piece of hardware built, there was a protocol for how the host computer could tell the screen what to display and what bytes would be sent with each keystroke. (Actually some terminals allowed you edit an entire line and then send it at once.)
When I take one computer and hook it to another with a piece of wire, the software that causes the first computer to send exactly the same things to make it look like the terminal hardware is on the other end is naturally enough called a "terminal emulator."
You can take an old PDP11, disconnect it's vt220 or vt100 terminal, hook up the wire to a computer instead, run kermit connected to that port, tell kermit to pretend to be a vt100 or vt220 or whatever, and the PDP11 should not be able to figure out that there isn't a real hardware terminal on the other end.
These days you don't have to have a separate hardware port for each terminal, you can connect many at once via Linux's virtual terminals or networks or whatever.
I have been trying to get full (i.e., all F-keys, escape and backspace/delete etc) terminal emulation going on a DOS machine connected to a linux machine over a serial cable. I can specify what terminal type that the getty should use on that line in /etc/inittab.
/etc/termcap file has some interesting reading in the comments. Check it out next time you are waiting for a compile to finish.
On the DOS machine I am using kermit. There is a vt300.ini file which puts it into vt300 emulation mode. Except that if I connect to the linux machine, I have to do "set term type ansi-bbs" to be able to see any text, and if I start up midnight commander not all of the F-keys work.
I looked the various "set key" commands in the vt300.ini file, and I had the hope that I could look at the termcap definition of vt300 (actually vt320) on the linux machine and somehow figure out how to set the F-keys to send the right thing.
But no luck so far. How do you figure out exactly what mc is expecting for a certain key ? Isn't this somehow in the ncurses library related stuff ? Should I try a different terminal type -- perhaps midnight commander wouldn't work correctly even if I had a real hardware vt320 ?
In general, how do you debug stuff like this ? Is there a program in the ncurses package, or that uses it, that I can run, press a key, and it will show me what the terminal emulator should send (in terms of what binary combination) to emulate that key ? Then I could generate the key-to-binary mapping by hand, and then use that to generate a file of "set key" commands to configure kermit correctly. If I was trying to emulate something with more F-keys than my keyboard, I could look into using shift-Fkey to emulate the higher ones, or whatever. But I would at least know what I needed to send, and that's the part I'm having trouble figuring out.
By the way, the
I think you could do this by installing apache on a windows box that had office on it, and running some visual basic scripts from cgi scripts.
Then put the whole little thing in a package with a click-and-configure interface, so that clueless admins anywhere could install it. Better yet, see if the cygwin guys will include it in their package.
There is no need to send anyone a microsoft .doc or .xls document, ever. MSOffice can read in html, rtf, and other formats. So the translation is only coming in, not going out.
Well, perhaps the exception might be the excell spreadsheets. Some people mail back and forth a huge number of spreadsheets with fairly complecated macros, such that rendering the document as delimited text would loose quite a bit of information.
The best thing to have is a single windows machine which you can access remotely for the purpose of occasionally loading up a received document and saving it out in another more interchangable format. The usual mode of operation would be to read the incoming document with OpenOffice, and only resort to that machine if the result is horribly broken; then you make changes or whatever, but save it out in an open format such as rtf or text, and only send open formats out of the company.
OpenOffice can do the task. Keeping around a few of the windows machines as a backup and use as translators is probably something you need to do regardless of the quality of OpenOffice or whatever other package, as long as the people you communicate with stick with MS.
I'd like to add that I've never actually had a big problem simply importing MS docs into Star Office. At more I just have to hilight the entire document and select a smaller font. Sometimes the bullets in powerpoint presentations have a funny star instead of a round black dot, but that is also easily fixed.
.xls files as delimited test, and then process them with perl scripts.
But I mostly use Star Office to simply translate the document into html; I think process the document from there using emacs, first cleaning it up quite a bit.
I also use Star Office to save
This is not the same usage mode as the average secretary in a MS shop, however.
What you need to complete the ability to switch is a web-based way to convert MS documents. This way you can provide a few linux machines for people to use and see others use and get over the fear; documents can be submitted to a server through web page, returned as html or RTF or whatever depending on what you want to do with it. All those MS tools provide "save as . . ." functions in various formats.
If you email an MS document to yourself at a Yahoo email address, you can go to the Yahoo web interface and veiw the document as html. For a small home office this is acceptable; for a bigger company, you search around in yahoo's site you can find a link to the company that provides the server that does that MStrash-to-html conversion.
But what we really need (and have been needing for a while) is a set of CGI and visual basic scripts that will allow a person to install apache on a windows2k or XP or whatever flavor of the week with the cygwin stuff, and provide a small web page that will take submitted documents, load them into the appropriate MS tool and save them as the appropriate format, and return them to the user. You can already buy this for a price, but a GPLd project along these lines would break a lot of dependancies on MS. I hate MS too much to even acquire a copy of the OS and Office and learn VB to start such a project.
If the trolls on slashdot can have moderator points and mod themselves up, how the hell do you think you are going to make this work ? What's to stop the owner of a porn site from running scripts that flood the system with good ratings ? All the same attacks, distributed scripts which log in to thousands of the open NT boxes left by Code Red and then do their work, etc, are still there.
What you need is a way to assure that a particular rating came from a real person and that a real person is not doing more of the rating. A meta-mod like system of ranking the rankers has a built in time lag, and the "enemy" can always produce new moderators wholesale.
So in the end, the you still cannot insulate yourself completely from the rest of humanity. There are pornographers out there, and they are also part of the human race, and so the normal interaction of a human will eventually lead you to one.
You can try to move to the right side of the tracks, but eventually "they" will move in next door, or you will find out the preacher in your white little church was one of "them" all along. You can set your threshold to 4, miss all the good stuff, and still get a little goatse now and then. You can ban TVs and computers and make your daughters wear burkas, but then the fact that your society lacked the democratizing characteristics of TVs and etc means that your leaders allowed something to happen that brings "them" back at the point of a gun.
Give up. You are human and humans are dirty. There is nothing you can do to stop yourself from being a member of the single giant community that is the globalized world.
The previous edition of this CD was very good. It installed all the standard suite of GNU tools, including bash, emacs, gcc, perl, awk, grep, etc. It puts everything in one directory, no messing with the registry and shit, so it is easy to uninstall (just delete that directory). Also, using these tools does not restrict your freedom; you have the source code and the free use of it, and these same tools will be available to you should you work on other operating systems and architectures. For me, the advantage over cygwin was the nice package of stuff on the CD with the setup script, because most of the machines I was installing this on didn't have network connections.
I would advise installing either that CD or the cygwin package and teaching your friends to use emacs and one of the mail readers in it, such as rmail or gnus (I personally use gnus but it was a bit of a learning curve). I know gnus can be configured to use a remote pop server such as a yahoo account, and the other mail readers probably can also.
I am looking forward to using the new edition of this CD on a free operating system -- FreeDos -- for the first time, and I also supported the FSF by purchasing this (3 copies) and T-shirts as well.
The page for ordering the CD (and other FSF stuff) is here, and the description of the CD is here.
Yeah. I mean, who buys "Windows for Dummies 53d edition" anyway ?
For myself, working at home on a cable modem box, I don't need a lot of backup space. What I do want is the back to be at a remote location. And I do want it to be as automated as possible because if it requires me to physically do something on a regular basis I'll just stop after a couple of months, as soon as my schedule gets tight or whatever.
My solution is to find another person on a fast connection who has the same needs, and arrange to let him ssh into my box and have a few gigs worth of space, and give me the same.
Right now the only scriptified part is creating the backup files. I encrypt them and scp them to his box by hand. I will eventually have it all automated, including deleting the oldest backup if space is getting tight.
This probably isn't an option for a "real" backup solution, such as for a business or a network with a number of users. But all I want is my home directory, mail, etc. Hell, my bookmarks file and mail are probably most of what I want, and the rest is mainly small latex docs.
I think there is probably a way to use freenet for this, but I didn't think that through all the way. If I inserted my backups into freenet, and a fire burned down my house, how would I know what keys to use to get my backups back out of freenet ?
My record is 58 hours. Afterwards I slept for 24 hours straight and woke up having to pee real bad and extremely thirsty. It was a combination of trying to get problem sets done and foolishing taking other people's night shifts at work because I needed the money.
You ?
http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/electricCircuits/
Here is a partial list of books published online, that I happened to like enough to bookmark. I find that reading a book on the computer screen is tedious, I mostly use the online version as a reference.
Handbook of applied cryptography: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
Underground: (I actually haven't read this yet) http://www.underground-book.com/
Netizens: (only partly read this) http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/
http://www.und.nodak.edu/org/crypto/crypto/army.fi eld.manual/
Big Breach: http://www.antioffline.com/bigbreach/
The Prof's Book: http://frode.home.cern.ch/frode/crypto/Turing/inde x.html
I have a lot of other links also, but my bookmarks have become so nested and folderized that many are lost in there, I really need bookmarks for my bookmarks . . . Anyway, I would suggest that if you find yourself looking for interesting reading online, you will find plenty. If you choose you can find scanned in pdf's of various works on newsgroups and in freenet, etc.
However, my advice is to use the 'net primarily as a way to figure out what to read, and become familar with the local public library. Almost all libraries have inter-library loans which give you access to huge amount of stuff. When I can't get a work that way, I fall back upon checking databases of used bookstore inventories -- http://abe.com/ and http://powellsbooks.com/ are the places I generally go to.
Does anyone know where I could get an image of the cdrom that came with the book "GNU Tools for MS-DOS" several years ago ?
This was a very nice package of perl, bash, emacs, gcc, awk, grep, and all associated common GNU utilities, for DOS and Windows. I used to use it to make Windows useful, now I have need of it again to use on DOS (this time I'll be able to use it on a GPL DOS, see freedos.org.)
My only copy of that cdrom is now scratched or otherwise corrupted, a few key files can't be read. I even thought about buying a cd polishing kit in an attempt to recover it, but they were charging 30 dollars for them.
At one point, the shortest domain name to use for pinging was x.org. But ping x.org doesn't respond anymore, you have to use www.x.org, which is way too many charcters. Now I use ping w.tv, which is the shortest domanin name that will respong to pings that I know of. Given the two-character country codes, I don't think you can do better. Anyone have a shorter one ?
But y-a-h-o-o-dot-c-o-m would give me carpral, dude. Way too many characters.
Yes, it can be done.
The easy part is converting and indexing all the docs. Not that that is easy. What I would do is something along the lines of scripts to convert them to html and put them in a database with a web browsable front end, building indexes of keywords, accompanied by A LOT of manual labour inserting meta-information about each document.
Almost any document editor these days can import and export html.
The hard part is getting people to start using it. They won't insert their new documents, they won't use it to efficiently look up stuff instead of poking around in their harddrives and email archives, they will just keep doing what got them in trouble in the first place.
And the only thing you can do about it is get a new job.
Hope that helps.
Yes, and prior to Bush's action, all federally funded stem cell research was prohibited. What Bush actually did was *extend* the funding to those 60 lines.
Note also that some stem research was proceeding with private funding anyway.
I agree with you.
And the moderator who thought this was offtopic is a moron.
Shit, now I'm getting invalid form keys.