so far, my favorites are the sidekick LX, nokia E90, oqo model 2, and blackberry curve.
the sidekick lx is comfortable and fast to type on. it feels good in your hands and you type non alpha numerics easily. if not for edge lag, you can forget your even using one. LX has a nice screen and plenty of room for 80 characters across with a clear font. dead as a development platform, because microsoft bought danger, so the only third party apps available are in its software catalog, but if you can ssh to a real computer that might not matter.
the nokia E90 is just sweet if you can afford one. nice keyboard, s2puttys a nice ssh client. overall its better than a sidekick but expensive and not supported in the US.
oqo2 model 2 really is a laptop and probably overkill. but it is the fastest and most comfortable of these devices. in the US you get ev-do so its a high speed connection anytime. fits in jeans pockets.
the curve has a crappy keyboard and nothing on the sides to wrap your hands around so it cramps your fingers, but you do get used to it. rove mobile ssh is expensive but mostly workable. the combination is more pleasant than a treo with p2ssh. midpssh is a free app that runs on the curve, but its not ready for use yet.
theres a kernel headers warning in the 2.6 package. it tells you your going to have mismatched kernel headers from either the kernel, or from glibc. take your pick. what it doesnt tell you about is the convenient build scripts in the source for glibc. carefull to upgradepkg --reinstall, NOT installpkg if you do this.
why not just include a set of glibc packages to go with? (to use if your not just testing 2.6)
and, maybe, for the 2.6 kernels, not bother with the seperate alsa driver. the one in the kernel works, and one less build script to run for users.
i was surprised to see 2.4 still default (and ill be really surprised if its default for the next release)
sony vaio u101 (discontinued, import) everything works out of the box(even rare things like suspend and temp sensor) hardware feels like it was meant to run linux, including things like 3d accel, screen brightness (better control than windows) temp sensor, etc. this is my main laptop.
apple ibook g4 1.25ghz also runs ubuntu, power management works, but its not as nice. 3d does work. mostly run it in os x for when i need a mac at work, i like the u101 better.
fujitsu p2120 runs fine, couldnt suspend then, probably can now. everything else works, but that transmeta chip is slow...
thinkpad A21p ran ubuntu fine, everything worked.
compaq m700 everything worked out of the box in debian, so ubuntu should be no prob.
the only things to watch out for are acpi (make sure it can suspend if you care about that) and the wifi card, unless you want to use a pc-card slot. ubuntu is good about hardware support.
usually laptops are easier than desktops to run nix on or at least look up. look up linux laptop sellers and linux friendly ones ( http://powernotebooks.com/ http://www.emperorlinux.com/ etc) along with all the sites dedicated to linux laptops. also good to check bsd sites and see if anyone on #ubuntu is using / looking at a laptop your interested in.
if you just need windows for a couple school apps, you might want to use qemu or vmware(player and server are free) qemus performance isnt bad with virtualization, but you cant like watch movies in it and stuff like with vmware. but anyway, its pretty easy to manage a 3 gig win2k partition and maybe a backup or two, or just run it in snap shot mode with another virtual disk for data or just using the included samba (both qemu and vmware have this) on a host only network so windows doesnt get exposed at all.
I haven't succumbed to any of those attacks yet, and I'm not likely to. But I would like to know what to do to reduce their frequency.
on a personal level, these are all things that can help.
run ssh on a nonstandard port (beware of restrictive networks)
dont respond to ping
dont accept from where you dont want to use it. if you never go to foodonia, dont accept traffic on your ssh port from there. google for ip blocks by country etc. if its non critical that you can get to it, then only accept from those places your likely to use it from. (your work, your school, your friends house etc)
port knocking
stuff that wont reduce frequency of attacks, but will protect against them
disable password auth (use ssh keys or something)
disable root access from ssh (theres reasons not to do this too, but if your in doubt, then its probably a good idea)
os x also comes with bash, perl, python, tcl/tk, ruby, c (c++, obj-c), and many others, which are not locked to os x.
not that applescript is a bad thing. its like a tcl(1) of the mac platform, but thats not a general purpose language. of course applescript is a really good thing if your going to use os x alot. learning the given shell and how to script it will save effort in any platform you spend that much time on. its a good lazyness that equals efficiency (and creativity)
(1) tcl stands for "tool command language" it was meant to tie together other tools easily, but ended up just being its own scripting langauge especially after tk(the graphical part) came out. applescript is also meant to tie apple apps together with the finder and aqua, and also make simple apps easy to write. (its gui shell scripting) thus serving the same purpose for more graphically oriented users. the big differnces are applescript can access mac specific stuff (like applescript hooks in cocoa / carbon apps) and tcl/tk scripts can also run on unix/linux/windows etc.
you can help yourself. there definately traps in some stuff (like the filesystem) but the hardest part is just remembering to install X11 and the dev tools.
most of whats in there is same stuff youll find in any linux distro (or typical freebsd system) cups, samba, apache, mysql, lots of scripting languages, gdb, tcpdump etc. even vim and emacs. ipfw (the firewall) is right out of freebsd and so far it works the same too, but i havent done much with it on osx.
install fink or darwinports and youll not touch the compiler much unless you want to. i spend most of my time in os x with X11 running enlightenment in full screen with focus follows mouse, virtual desktops etc. (theres an applet called desktop manager for that in aqua too). sometimes you get a surprise, like the seq command missing, but those have always been easy to work around.
google has also found drivers where apple has not provided, but the driver situation is way behind linux here.
if your remote tech support for her, set ssh to only use keys (not passwords, see/etc/sshd_config), log yourself in, and fast user switch out with vncserver running (and set to only accept from localhost) its a resonably secure way to use the mac remotely. run it on "display:1" (port 5901) to make it easier for her to turn it on and off to see her screen.
im not saying apple is a good fit for you or your sister, just that you can help yourself. there isnt much that a typical linux distro can do that you cant on a mac, aside from the driver thing. (i still use linux and bsd more, but thats partly a hardware thing)
the 2.6 line has been kinda dev-ish with distros taking up alot of the work. 2.4 is still maintained and slackware has backported sets for newer hardware (acpi, sata, etc)
if you want to run 2.6, you probably want to update your kernel anyway, the 2.6 packages (in testing) make this easy, including a good config to start with. the notes warn about the 2.4/2.6 header issuses, so use the slackbuild script in the glibc source package. and also, this time, use the alsa drivers in the kernel (theyll work with the provided userland, but its not like upgrading that is hard either. checkinstall (in extras) is your friend here)
you have to license the very format. translation: you must ask permission just to see the spec. thats not even near open the way svg is. im really sick of this lie macro^H^H^H^Hadobe keeps spreading that swf is open.
its open when you dont need thier permission to see it.
it depends on the motherboard/bios. alot of them are buggy. its kinda random. some wont take a pci card at all if theres an agp card, some will take multiple some will take all of them. its consistant across os on the ones ive tried, so im pretty sure its a bios/hardware thing.
i actually have 3 monitors, and high spec is relitive but im also at 1600x1200. anyway, one screen for irc/email/web/chat/gkrellm etc. the other screen has a bunch of ssh windows open. window manager is blackbox but thats out of lazyness, i actually prefer enlightenment. gnu screen is your friend.
the other set up is x2vnc to go from mac to linux to windows (linux in the middle) usually when doing this, from windows ill run gaim and firefox over X11 back off the same linux box because i dont give windows a default route(1) that way i can still use that screen to save space. in this case, i usually have web and sometimes other docs (like pdfs) on the mac so its all spread over differnt spaces. again, all the work(or at least the ssh sessions) itself is on the center screen (linux)
for the X11 apps on windows, cygwin with X11 over openssh. the private key is protected by EFS instead of sshs built in. on startup, it launches a gnome-panel on top. speakers are still plugged into the linux box so sound still works, ive even run xmms from cygwin this way.
even though im using x2vnc here, i keep a usb extention cable from all three near the monitor, and the keyboard and mouse on a tiny 4 port hub. that way its easy to change which one the hardware goes to (linux is running x2vnc since its in the middle in both cases) this has the added bonus of the mac as a convinient guest terminal from time to time. (just grab a mouse and keyboard from the pile)
but most of the time, its just the linux box turned and two monitors. i have done 6 on linux by using 2 pci cards along with the agp one, but dont have any real need for that.
(1) i dont feel safe letting widnows access the internet directly. yes, i realize there is a simple 165 step method to armor windows to deal with the internet, but i dont know windows all that well and really have better things to do with my time.
i misread the above post to have refernced this, which is what my pose was actually refering to.
The technical committee is also being sponsored by Intel, Apple Computer, NextPage and some European customers, including British Petroleum and the British Library.
something many mac zealots wont admit. apple is microsofts bitch. there. i said it.
MS stops making software for apple, apple niches and dies quickly. (though possibly not now since it would seriously promote openoffice and drive apple to fund it and throw developers at it etc, so they just might pull it off, and thats something MS does not want to risk. but neither does apple) so apple might not be as much of thier bitch now, but they still are.
proof, apple is a member of the bsa. i cant think of any other reason.
remote apps still exist, they are still usefull. including a well done ssh and X11 implementations (preferably based on xfree86 and openssh) would make life soo much easier....
im not talking about full sessions (remote terminal/vnc/nx etc) but apps that blend in with your desktop and those running from other machines. X11 is the already used standard for this.
its like windows is hostile to X11 or something. on a mac (yes, 10.4 on a g4) i can watch a movie in firefox over X11 over ssh and forget its even remote, hell, i can even run blender like that.
but on windows ssh + X11 are hacked on 3rd party kludges...how long will MS pretend ssh doesnt exist? single sign on with ssh and X11 and SMB is like from a windows PDC/KDC only (for you konfused KDE freaks, thats key distribution server, as in kerberos) and still looks like a hack easily ruined by the next upgrade (new to smb, so maybe its my ignorance)
those two would make windows play so much better in a unix network. of course, it would also mean that windows is just playing along, and NOT the needed master so MS would probably not see "value" in it...
also see http://gaim.sf.net/ gaims chat logs can simply be copied into eachother since each "conversation" is a seperate file. its probably runs on all the platforms you need (the latest always compiles out of the box on os x with fink)
there are a few remote file shares you can use, some of which work over ssh, and thus your prefs/logs etc can be kept with them. or you can simply script your client to sync whenever it starts / stops / whenever, which would thus be transparent (and probably faster with something like rsync)
so anyway, yea, its sad that in this day and age, we dont have software working together much, but at least you can work around it. centericq is a pretty simple way to not have to worry about any of it, all you need is ssh. thus the beuty of remote apps. if you dont like centericqs interface, check out http://bitlbee.org/ to use an irc client instead.
run the windows network behind a linux box without a default route(so they cant talk to anything outside the local network).
anyone who wants to access the internet can run apps off the linux box with X11. make an alias to a bat file on the users desktop for the icon, (you can set properties and change the icons on an alias, as opposed to the bat file itself) they click on the big blue 'e' and they dont need to know that firefox is actually running from a differnt machine and only displaying in front of them.
ive been doing this recently in various ways, usually involving ssh (putty or openssh). a few years ago it was with just the ssh and xfree86 that came with cygwin. there are many X servers for windows, ill let you figure out which X server you like. putty is actually kinda slow (but otherwise, great), all the openssh for windows projects i see are repackaged bundles of cygwin, but they work.
the easiest way to do sound is simply plug the speakers into the linux box. i guess you could use esd (theres a java one and the NX one, see above) or some similar noise redirector but so far, no ones asked for noise, and speakers in the linux box work fine for my own use, so i havent really looked into it.
if you want to make uploads/downloads easy, just use samba to make a shared folder.
the included openssh and X11 on a mac way outperforms any X server ive tried on windows, even the big apps feel local over ssh over wifi(802.11g).
of course, this is for "knowledge worker" offices and the like. its the last thing youd want in a design / fx / game studio for example. users in such environments tend to take care of themselves anyway.
but for networks where this does work, security is pretty tight...
wanted to go with biodiesel. i live in LA, (southern califonia) where you cant buy a new diesel car (one with 7500 miles on it) and if you do manage, theres no biodiesel here either (ive looked long and hard, if you know of biodeisel gas stations, please tell me)
given that my car is starting to cost more to maintain than its worth, and since i dont like the idea of adding yet another heap of metal to a landfill (and because im not a mechanic) im looking at new cars. would have rather waited for the newer things to come out, but thats perpetual.
the insight isnt as nice a car on the inside (where i will be when im actually driving. the view is great from inside the prius), and the electric assist motor doesnt really leave room for another energy source. the prius does. it also does well on crash tests and cargo space. while not a sports car, the 0 ramp up time for the motor could certainly help avoiding those accidents.
for now, plugging in a modded prius might use coal energy. maybe. maybe that electricity is hydro, maybe its nuclear, maybe it came from a farm of sterling engines... the point is, its not stuck on that like the hybrid assist engines.
of course, it is a new, thin metal car, and low speed fender benders could be expensive. but i care more about the big accidents that this thing was made to let the people survive (as oppsed to trashing the people in favor of itself like the old big cars like to do)
supposedly the entire battery is recyclable and not environmentally dangerous. i dont know enough chemistry to prove/disprove this, but it makes sense. something to look up later. but thats an after thought given other factors. (a normal gas car still does much damage)
i dont really like the idea of the car depending on electricity if it doesnt have to, a biodiesel engine whos battery was there soley for the lights and radio (and maybe a plug for your own toys) would be great, since i like simplicity of design (funny idea that simple designs tend to be more reliable, or at least more predictable) but since im stuck with electric, might as well take as much advantage of it as i can. do bad you cant get a car which can run solely on electric or fuel without worry of the other.
the cng car would be good if it also had an unleaded or diesel option...
btw, i dont give a crap about fasion. in fact, i find much of it ugly.
ROI on security work is invisible to the accounting department. my wild guess is her dept. is understaffed.
another wild guess (from having seen too much commercial software development) is that too many companies rush to ship working code trying to get first to market, or look good on deadlines etc.
a quick google said nothing about link level encryption, is there any or do we treat this as one very large hub where anyone can listen in? is it time for all of use to use ipsec? what about traffic analysis? eat the (probably scarce) bandwidth with random anti timing packets?
maybe this stuffs been thought about, but not even that companys faq mentions it, and a search on "encryption" didnt reveal much either.
how much (that your allowed to admit to) do you research to inhibit oss development, such as by patenting methods and copyrighting code that would have evolved on its own?
or to make sure your methods are as hard as possible to integrate with oss methods (esp through clever legal tricks)
Slashdot Mirror
thats all i needed, thanks.
(i dont know how that got modded insightfull either, but hey, they cant tell my voice from seargents anyway)
so what frequency do i use to control the soldiers, listen in on them, or jam thier signals?
hope their crypto is good.
so far, my favorites are the sidekick LX, nokia E90, oqo model 2, and blackberry curve.
the sidekick lx is comfortable and fast to type on. it feels good in your hands and you type non alpha numerics easily. if not for edge lag, you can forget your even using one. LX has a nice screen and plenty of room for 80 characters across with a clear font. dead as a development platform, because microsoft bought danger, so the only third party apps available are in its software catalog, but if you can ssh to a real computer that might not matter.
the nokia E90 is just sweet if you can afford one. nice keyboard, s2puttys a nice ssh client. overall its better than a sidekick but expensive and not supported in the US.
oqo2 model 2 really is a laptop and probably overkill. but it is the fastest and most comfortable of these devices. in the US you get ev-do so its a high speed connection anytime. fits in jeans pockets.
the curve has a crappy keyboard and nothing on the sides to wrap your hands around so it cramps your fingers, but you do get used to it. rove mobile ssh is expensive but mostly workable. the combination is more pleasant than a treo with p2ssh. midpssh is a free app that runs on the curve, but its not ready for use yet.
havent tried any windows mobile phones.
if you can, wait for android.
theres a kernel headers warning in the 2.6 package. it tells you your going to have mismatched kernel headers from either the kernel, or from glibc. take your pick. what it doesnt tell you about is the convenient build scripts in the source for glibc. carefull to upgradepkg --reinstall, NOT installpkg if you do this.
why not just include a set of glibc packages to go with? (to use if your not just testing 2.6)
and, maybe, for the 2.6 kernels, not bother with the seperate alsa driver. the one in the kernel works, and one less build script to run for users.
i was surprised to see 2.4 still default (and ill be really surprised if its default for the next release)
sony vaio u101 (discontinued, import)
everything works out of the box(even rare
things like suspend and temp sensor) hardware
feels like it was meant to run linux,
including things like 3d accel, screen
brightness (better control than windows)
temp sensor, etc. this is my main laptop.
apple ibook g4 1.25ghz
also runs ubuntu, power management works,
but its not as nice. 3d does work. mostly
run it in os x for when i need a mac at
work, i like the u101 better.
fujitsu p2120
runs fine, couldnt suspend then, probably
can now. everything else works, but that
transmeta chip is slow...
thinkpad A21p ran ubuntu fine, everything worked.
compaq m700 everything worked out of the box in
debian, so ubuntu should be no prob.
the only things to watch out for are acpi (make sure
it can suspend if you care about that) and the wifi card,
unless you want to use a pc-card slot. ubuntu is
good about hardware support.
usually laptops are easier than desktops to run nix on
or at least look up. look up linux laptop sellers and
linux friendly ones ( http://powernotebooks.com/
http://www.emperorlinux.com/ etc) along with all the
sites dedicated to linux laptops. also good to check
bsd sites and see if anyone on #ubuntu is using / looking
at a laptop your interested in.
if you just need windows for a couple school apps,
you might want to use qemu or vmware(player and
server are free) qemus performance isnt bad with
virtualization, but you cant like watch movies
in it and stuff like with vmware. but anyway,
its pretty easy to manage a 3 gig win2k partition
and maybe a backup or two, or just run it in snap
shot mode with another virtual disk for data or
just using the included samba (both qemu and
vmware have this) on a host only network so
windows doesnt get exposed at all.
on a personal level, these are all things that can help.
stuff that wont reduce frequency of attacks, but will protect against them
os x also comes with bash, perl, python, tcl/tk, ruby, c (c++, obj-c), and many others, which are not locked to os x.
not that applescript is a bad thing. its like a tcl(1) of the mac platform, but thats not a general purpose language. of course applescript is a really good thing if your going to use os x alot. learning the given shell and how to script it will save effort in any platform you spend that much time on. its a good lazyness that equals efficiency (and creativity)
(1) tcl stands for "tool command language" it was meant to tie together other tools easily, but ended up just being its own scripting langauge especially after tk(the graphical part) came out. applescript is also meant to tie apple apps together with the finder and aqua, and also make simple apps easy to write. (its gui shell scripting) thus serving the same purpose for more graphically oriented users. the big differnces are applescript can access mac specific stuff (like applescript hooks in cocoa / carbon apps) and tcl/tk scripts can also run on unix/linux/windows etc.
you can help yourself. there definately traps in some stuff (like the filesystem) but the hardest part is just remembering to install X11 and the dev tools.
/etc/sshd_config), log yourself in, and fast user switch out with vncserver running (and set to only accept from localhost) its a resonably secure way to use the mac remotely. run it on "display:1" (port 5901) to make it easier for her to turn it on and off to see her screen.
most of whats in there is same stuff youll find in any linux distro (or typical freebsd system) cups, samba, apache, mysql, lots of scripting languages, gdb, tcpdump etc. even vim and emacs. ipfw (the firewall) is right out of freebsd and so far it works the same too, but i havent done much with it on osx.
install fink or darwinports and youll not touch the compiler much unless you want to. i spend most of my time in os x with X11 running enlightenment in full screen with focus follows mouse, virtual desktops etc. (theres an applet called desktop manager for that in aqua too). sometimes you get a surprise, like the seq command missing, but those have always been easy to work around.
google has also found drivers where apple has not provided, but the driver situation is way behind linux here.
if your remote tech support for her, set ssh to only use keys (not passwords, see
im not saying apple is a good fit for you or your sister, just that you can help yourself. there isnt much that a typical linux distro can do that you cant on a mac, aside from the driver thing. (i still use linux and bsd more, but thats partly a hardware thing)
the 2.6 line has been kinda dev-ish with distros taking up
alot of the work. 2.4 is still maintained and slackware has
backported sets for newer hardware (acpi, sata, etc)
if you want to run 2.6, you probably want to update your
kernel anyway, the 2.6 packages (in testing) make this easy,
including a good config to start with. the notes warn
about the 2.4/2.6 header issuses, so use the slackbuild
script in the glibc source package. and also, this time,
use the alsa drivers in the kernel (theyll work with the
provided userland, but its not like upgrading that is hard
either. checkinstall (in extras) is your friend here)
nice. but the vast majority of us dont have "unlimited" storage. for the rest of us, rdiff-backup is as good as it gets.
you have to license the very format. translation: you must ask permission just to see the spec. thats not even near open the way svg is. im really sick of this lie macro^H^H^H^Hadobe keeps spreading that swf is open.
its open when you dont need thier permission to see it.
it depends on the motherboard/bios. alot of them are buggy. its kinda random. some wont take a pci card at all if theres an agp card, some will take multiple some will take all of them. its consistant across os on the ones ive tried, so im pretty sure its a bios/hardware thing.
i actually have 3 monitors, and high spec is relitive but im also at 1600x1200. anyway, one screen for irc/email/web/chat/gkrellm etc. the other screen has a bunch of ssh windows open. window manager is blackbox but thats out of lazyness, i actually prefer enlightenment. gnu screen is your friend.
the other set up is x2vnc to go from mac to linux to windows (linux in the middle) usually when doing this, from windows ill run gaim and firefox over X11 back off the same linux box because i dont give windows a default route(1) that way i can still use that screen to save space. in this case, i usually have web and sometimes other docs (like pdfs) on the mac so its all spread over differnt spaces. again, all the work(or at least the ssh sessions) itself is on the center screen (linux)
for the X11 apps on windows, cygwin with X11 over openssh. the private key is protected by EFS instead of sshs built in. on startup, it launches a gnome-panel on top. speakers are still plugged into the linux box so sound still works, ive even run xmms from cygwin this way.
even though im using x2vnc here, i keep a usb extention cable from all three near the monitor, and the keyboard and mouse on a tiny 4 port hub. that way its easy to change which one the hardware goes to (linux is running x2vnc since its in the middle in both cases) this has the added bonus of the mac as a convinient guest terminal from time to time. (just grab a mouse and keyboard from the pile)
but most of the time, its just the linux box turned and two monitors. i have done 6 on linux by using 2 pci cards along with the agp one, but dont have any real need for that.
(1) i dont feel safe letting widnows access the internet directly. yes, i realize there is a simple 165 step method to armor windows to deal with the internet, but i dont know windows all that well and really have better things to do with my time.
i misread the above post to have refernced this, which is what my pose was actually refering to.
c e+formats/2100-1012_3-5965443.html?tag=nefd.top
The technical committee is also being sponsored by Intel, Apple Computer, NextPage and some European customers, including British Petroleum and the British Library.
second sentance in the body of the article at
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+standardize+Offi
something many mac zealots wont admit. apple is microsofts bitch. there. i said it.
MS stops making software for apple, apple niches and dies quickly. (though possibly not now since it would seriously promote openoffice and drive apple to fund it and throw developers at it etc, so they just might pull it off, and thats something MS does not want to risk. but neither does apple) so apple might not be as much of thier bitch now, but they still are.
proof, apple is a member of the bsa. i cant think of any other reason.
remote apps still exist, they are still usefull. including a well done ssh and X11 implementations (preferably based on xfree86 and openssh) would make life soo much easier....
im not talking about full sessions (remote terminal/vnc/nx etc) but apps that blend in with your desktop and those running from other machines. X11 is the already used standard for this.
its like windows is hostile to X11 or something. on a mac (yes, 10.4 on a g4) i can watch a movie in firefox over X11 over ssh and forget its even remote, hell, i can even run blender like that.
but on windows ssh + X11 are hacked on 3rd party kludges...how long will MS pretend ssh doesnt exist? single sign on with ssh and X11 and SMB is like from a windows PDC/KDC only (for you konfused KDE freaks, thats key distribution server, as in kerberos) and still looks like a hack easily ruined by the next upgrade (new to smb, so maybe its my ignorance)
those two would make windows play so much better in a unix network. of course, it would also mean that windows is just playing along, and NOT the needed master so MS would probably not see "value" in it...
at least your contact/buddy list is stored server side. anyway, heres an answer,
http://thekonst.net/centericq
ssh home when you want it.
if you want to keep it running, see http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/screen.html
also see http://gaim.sf.net/
gaims chat logs can simply be copied into eachother since each "conversation" is a seperate file.
its probably runs on all the platforms you need (the latest always compiles out of the box on os x with fink)
there are a few remote file shares you can use, some of which work over ssh, and thus your prefs/logs etc
can be kept with them. or you can simply script your client to sync whenever it starts / stops / whenever,
which would thus be transparent (and probably faster with something like rsync)
so anyway, yea, its sad that in this day and age, we dont have software working together much, but at least
you can work around it. centericq is a pretty simple way to not have to worry about any of it, all you need
is ssh. thus the beuty of remote apps. if you dont like centericqs interface, check out http://bitlbee.org/
to use an irc client instead.
laptops are still an issue...
run the windows network behind a linux box without a default route(so they cant talk to anything outside the local network).
anyone who wants to access the internet can run apps off the linux box with X11. make an alias to a bat file on the users desktop for the icon, (you can set properties and change the icons on an alias, as opposed to the bat file itself) they click on the big blue 'e' and they dont need to know that firefox is actually running from a differnt machine and only displaying in front of them.
ive been doing this recently in various ways, usually involving ssh (putty or openssh). a few years ago it was with just the ssh and xfree86 that came with cygwin. there are many X servers for windows, ill let you figure out which X server you like. putty is actually kinda slow (but otherwise, great), all the openssh for windows projects i see are repackaged bundles of cygwin, but they work.
and, of course, theres NX...
the easiest way to do sound is simply plug the speakers into the linux box. i guess you could use esd (theres a java one and the NX one, see above) or some similar noise redirector but so far, no ones asked for noise, and speakers in the linux box work fine for my own use, so i havent really looked into it.
if you want to make uploads/downloads easy, just use samba to make a shared folder.
the included openssh and X11 on a mac way outperforms any X server ive tried on windows, even the big apps feel local over ssh over wifi(802.11g).
of course, this is for "knowledge worker" offices and the like. its the last thing youd want in a design / fx / game studio for example. users in such environments tend to take care of themselves anyway.
but for networks where this does work, security is pretty tight...
wanted to go with biodiesel. i live in LA, (southern califonia) where you cant buy a new diesel car (one with 7500 miles on it) and if you do manage, theres no biodiesel here either (ive looked long and hard, if you know of biodeisel gas stations, please tell me)
given that my car is starting to cost more to maintain than its worth, and since i dont like the idea of adding yet another heap of metal to a landfill (and because im not a mechanic) im looking at new cars. would have rather waited for the newer things to come out, but thats perpetual.
the insight isnt as nice a car on the inside (where i will be when im actually driving. the view is great from inside the prius), and the electric assist motor doesnt really leave room for another energy source. the prius does. it also does well on crash tests and cargo space. while not a sports car, the 0 ramp up time for the motor could certainly help avoiding those accidents.
for now, plugging in a modded prius might use coal energy. maybe. maybe that electricity is hydro, maybe its nuclear, maybe it came from a farm of sterling engines... the point is, its not stuck on
that like the hybrid assist engines.
of course, it is a new, thin metal car, and low speed fender benders could be expensive. but i care more about the big accidents that this thing was made to let the people survive (as oppsed to trashing the people in favor of itself like the old big cars like to do)
supposedly the entire battery is recyclable and not environmentally dangerous. i dont know enough chemistry to prove/disprove this, but it makes sense. something to look up later. but thats an after thought given other factors. (a normal gas car still does much damage)
i dont really like the idea of the car depending on electricity if it doesnt have to, a biodiesel engine whos battery was there soley for the lights and radio (and maybe a plug for your own toys) would be great, since i like simplicity of design (funny idea that simple designs tend to be more reliable, or at least more predictable) but since im stuck with electric, might as well take as much advantage of it as i can. do bad you cant get a car which can run solely on electric or fuel without worry of the other.
the cng car would be good if it also had an unleaded or diesel option...
btw, i dont give a crap about fasion. in fact, i find much of it ugly.
they tried that with the oregon school district, and also demanded "one million dollars" (a year) (which they couldnt afford)
pulled a new smile out of thier slimy assholes when an army of volunteers showed up to convert the district to linux...
ROI on security work is invisible to the accounting department. my wild guess is her dept. is understaffed.
another wild guess (from having seen too much commercial software development) is that too many companies rush to ship working code trying to get first to market, or look good on deadlines etc.
a quick google said nothing about link level encryption, is there any or do we treat this as one very large hub where anyone can listen in? is it time for all of use to use ipsec? what about traffic analysis? eat the (probably scarce) bandwidth with random anti timing packets?
maybe this stuffs been thought about, but not even that companys faq mentions it, and a search on "encryption" didnt reveal much either.
how much (that your allowed to admit to) do you research to inhibit oss development, such as by patenting methods and copyrighting code that would have evolved on its own?
or to make sure your methods are as hard as possible to integrate with oss methods (esp through clever legal tricks)
ha ha!
we all know the above is true.
we all know the cant admit it.
they can tell you the sky is red with a staight face.