From just breifly browsing the specs, I can say that it's a well thought out system, but Universities should have a well thought out criteria when evaulating new software:
It it quality software? Is it realtivily bug free? Is it prone to crashes or does it like to crash other systems/software?
Is it platform independent (most Universities have Macs, Windows, UNIX, and what have you to support...)
Is it secure? Plain text passwords on a university network = Very Bad Thing
Does it have support/training options for the IT staff? Will our support staff be able to support our userbase from day one?
Does it depend on systems out of the IT departments control?
Well, the last one pretty much tells us that we don't want it, because what are you going to do if 1,000 students in a large lecture are waiting 24 hours for the assignment that their teacher sent via e-mail, and is due the next day.
And then there are the bandwith considerations. With napster, gnutilla, and the usual heavy trafic, how are we going to deal with ads going out to everyone who access the system? The campus better have a powerful cache server.
Ok, I'm going to go and make that part of the IT departments offical policy at my place of employment now. =)
Is it just me, or did they just alienate a large group of people who would actually use their product? Shouldn't the fact that the programmer worked in support for their server be a good thing? That's the intent isn't, basically selling "advertising space" on their servers, so if I'm reading my issue of Linux Journal and see a product I want more info on, I can scar the barcode in the ad and my computer will take me to more info.
I wish they put some thought into it first. Like, hey...we just got support in a new operating system, and we didn't have to pay to develop the drivers or anything. Wow, neat!
What they're actually seeing is: Oh no! Now someone can use our product for something other than we intended for.
Well, nobody got a cease and desist order for Furby Autopsy, or various Tickle Me Elmo and Barney mutliations. Maybe Matel should have come after me for hanging my action figures infront of a space heater. I tell you, those He-Man action figures looked really cool while they melted!
BMW doesn't care when James Bond drives his brand new car off the top level of a parking ramp. Boeing doesn't complain when yet another disaster movie shows a 747 crashing down. You think that would hurt the pockets more than someone writing a driver for a simple bar-code scanner...
First off, you're better off with a NT domain controller than a SAMBA PDC. A pentium 200 PDC can authinticate about 40 users a minute.
Now the real fun begins, and when you set this up, make sure you document it so you get it right every time. First, create a user on the PDC. In a mixed UNIX/Windows enviorment, keeping home directories and profiles on a SAMBA enabled server is best, because you can export them via SAMBA or NFS.
Anything that supports PAM can authinticate agnist the PDC. (Even a w2k controller as long as it's running in mixed mode.) Create UNIX accounts like this: adduser --disabled-password username. What's the point of setting a local password, you're not going to use it anyway...
Now your PAM module. pam-smb-auth works well for the basics. (Shell logins etc) but doesn't do much besides ask the PDC for a yes or no. pan-ntdom is based on pam-smb-auth but is extended for NT domains. (It can usderstand some of the domain security and such.) User security = DOMAIN for samba and you shouldn't have to worry about accessing SAMBA shares and PAM modules for samba.
w2k access SAMBA shares just fine. I had an issue with updating the romain profiles, time on the file server was not in-sync with time on the client.
You may have to pay for Applixware 5.0, BUT, I think it was worth it. It's faster than Star Office, (and the printing components work a bit better too.), highly compatible with MS Office (and Corel and others), and it uses GTK!
Applixware Office includes just an e-mail client (sigh, avoid it.) word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, graphics, an sql thingy (only works with mySQL right now), html editor, macro support (Applixware macros), Applixware builder (uses SHELF), and it uses GTK!
Another good thing is a documented, sgml-like ASCII file format.
It's box says it's fast, native, and compatible. It is. I'd highly recomend it.
Actually, AOL has been rather good to linux lately. They haven't been anal about gaim, even when gaim started supporting oscar. (You think that they'd be a bit miffed since gaim doesn't support ads)
Then there's the aolserver, whatever the advantages of that over apache I haven't a clue.
AOL for Linux might sound like the end of the world, but really, it would set some sort of precident for the software industry. AOL is doing it, why aren't we?
I still wouldn't use it myself, but I know a few people who might give Linux a shot if they could use AOL under Linux.
Isn't that what interns are for? Even better, teach them some basic html and have them create html documents. I found going from html to pdf more useful because somehow the links survive into the pdf, and show up in acrobat reader as bookmarks. Very cool.
In all honesty, you're not going to get away going from dead tree to digital paper without proofreading at least once. There is no OCR package that perfect. Same goes for your data entry folks.
Great, the browser is skinable. That has to be one of the most useless features I've seen. I don't want my browser to have it's own look and feel, I want it to look like the rest of my desktop. (GNOME at the moment) Would it be too much to ask to just let it use GTK themes?
Looks like someone started on such a project, though that page hasn't been updated since November 20, 1998.
Maybe that option is in the Mozilla source, I haven't been following development that closely. At least the Mozilla folks decided to move away from Motif. Motif just looks ugly compared to GTK (or even QT)
The cast of Wild Wild West will finially be able to see some new faces in therapy sessions. After all, you'd probally be in a depressing rut after either of these movies.
And maybe they'll finially convince Will Smith to retire the overly hyped sexy (not really...) singer/actor wannabe. Be thankful Men In Black was a good flick.
From the first time I installed debian I knew that non-free wasn't an official part of the distribution, but was included on the official cd's and the official servers for the convience of the end user.
Then again, I read the histroy of Debian soon after installing it. Most new users probally don't.
If non-free isn't part of the distribution, make sure it's known. A dns entry and virtual ftp site isn't that hard to do.
It's not like you can remove that part of the distribution anyway, since it isn't part of the distribution.
Since this section isn't part of Debian's distribution, the policy for package maintainers should be --prefix=/usr/local or/usr/opt, not/usr.
Go ahead and pull non-free from the official cd's if you want. Places like Cheapbytes will put it back on.
All I really ask is that Debian devolpers don't force me off Debian and on to a Debian based distro (Storm, Corel) simply because they don't want to include non-free.
Girlfriend's brother comments to friends "Wouldn't it be kinda cool to have a list of the people you don't like on the web?" <li>Brother's friend creates a I hate my ex-girlfriend page. <li>ex-girlfriend's father calls school <li>School calls police <li>Police call parents, tell parents that they told the school to go fsck themselves, they have better things to do. <li>Geek comunity declares local police "get it"
OS, Applications, Internet, Publishing, Hardware, Marketing, Legal. MS seems to be building a publishing company (many MS games for example are just published by the giant, not developed) Cut that division off and watch it go belly up. Fun stuff. Hardware has to go somewhere...probally downhill until Logitech buys them out.
OS, Software, Internet, Marketing, Legal. Then Microsoft Lawyers can really fsck with the US Legal system, and what company wouldn't want to hire out the Microsoft Marketing department? That way, OS, Software, and Internet contract marketing to hype their products, and hire legal when they get in trouble.
This is kinda bordering the line between seriousness and funny isn't it?
What's wrong with that? My high school make a great deathmatch map. Smoke filled bathrooms, strange disections going on in the classrooms, working elevator (that went to the unseen 4th floor and the roof)
Awful as it is, the libiary was one of the best places. Porn displayed on the workstations, and bookshelves at just the right hight for walking behind. (Watch out, there are gaps in the books...) A few overturned tables where there weren't bookshelves.
And the lunchroom brought new meaning to "beware of food."
Of corse, the evil bots had to spawn from the administrative offices. =)
October GNOME hasn't got KDE quite beat yet. With KDE's panel you can easily chinge the hieght and such. With the current stable, you're pretty much stuck.
With Helix Gnome (and CVS Gnome) you get a little more control of panel sizes and placement. I just finished compiling Helix Gnome yesterday, and I'm pleased. I like the small panels (24 pixel height) so much better that being stuck at 48 pixel panels.
The next stable release will probally have KDE2 beat (my opinion, never was a KDE fan) The KDE browser might be the only good reason to add some KDE suppot packages. =)
For interested Potato users, I threw up the Helix Gnome packages I compiled under potato here:
I'm willing to bet there's not a person here who has anything agnist MS's hardware department. The well mouse is the greatest thing MS came up with. Granted I perfer the shape and size of Logitech mice, but the best feeling wheel is on a MS mouse. Is your keyboard a MS Natural? And most of the Sidewinder line (exclude all game pads save the original) are outstanding products.
Office is an outstanding product. (Most of the time) that continues to raise bar for other office suites. (Corel Office is impressive as well, and better priced.) They would have a ture winner if the file formats were not propritoary. (I once has someone ask for my resume in Word format instead of PDF. I wrote them back and told them why I wasn't going to put that into a format where my resume might not look the way I wanted it to, withdrew my application [mostly because I had found a better job by this point])
IE: It is a good browser. So is Netscape. Stability wise, they're about even. There is a measuer of convience havin IE installed on automatically on a windows machine. Having a browser right away is about as important as having your networking drivers right away. You need both to get the latest software and drivers for your machine. Maybe MS should include a stripped down IE (with as much functionality as kfm or gmc)
Running IE on a Mac is quite the experience. The UI is just...interesting. Port the mac version to linux, that would be kinda cool.
OS: The downfall It may have it's strong points, but it has an extremely long list of weaknesses. It's used as the tool to get you to buy/use all of the above products. MS could probally remain one company IF they released native versions of the above software for platforms other than Windows and Mac (on the same release schedule.)
That way, you don't have to run a MS OS to use your MS Software. They would be allowing for other operating systems to compete fairly.
The competition to MS software is there, and there are great alternitives (Quicken, Corel, Netscape,...) but if you want to choose MS over it's competitiors, you have to take Windows as well. There's the root of the OS antitrust...
I seem to remember it being Compaq. I remember hearing stories about the first Compaq luggables, and how the salesman showed the shop crew that he could drop the thing from waist height, pick it up, open it up and plug it in, and the thing still ran.
I also remember the CFOs take... "Groan...did they have to show the shop crew that?!?"
Its difficult to compare ads on the net to ads on TV. When surfing the net, my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing the web page and force me to view adds, like the regular commercial breaks on TV.
Akkkk! Don't give marketing people any ideas, it would be like Vigor all over again, only worse!
Sounds like this unit is a godsend to anyone who watches Fox on Sunday night. I mean, they have some pretty good shows, but after hearing "My butt is sweating. It just needs to air out...The TRAILER!" durrning ever commercial break, Malcom In The Middle was loosing it's appeal. They did the same with the Simpsons and the X-Files. They're hyping their shows so much I want to turn off the TV instead of keep watching...and the "Fox has the big shows" was ok when it started, but not durring every damn commerical break!!!
Am I the only one who finds users who say "Yay, we get a free comercial player for our fovorite OS, but I'd still perfer something open source."
Granted most of what Real Player does is propitery, but at least they're attempting to be crossplatform and provide a free player to something besides windows and mac.
It's not open source. Oh well, at least it works. Off to/usr/local or/opt you go. I have no problem with non-open source software running on my linux box. Loki, Real, Netscape, Star Office, etc. currently have space on my harddrive, and it doesn't look like it's about to change anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that was intentional. Play with it a bit and you'll hit paydirt sooner or later. ;)
From just breifly browsing the specs, I can say that it's a well thought out system, but Universities should have a well thought out criteria when evaulating new software:
It it quality software? Is it realtivily bug free? Is it prone to crashes or does it like to crash other systems/software?
Is it platform independent (most Universities have Macs, Windows, UNIX, and what have you to support...)
Is it secure? Plain text passwords on a university network = Very Bad Thing
Does it have support/training options for the IT staff? Will our support staff be able to support our userbase from day one?
Does it depend on systems out of the IT departments control?
Well, the last one pretty much tells us that we don't want it, because what are you going to do if 1,000 students in a large lecture are waiting 24 hours for the assignment that their teacher sent via e-mail, and is due the next day.
And then there are the bandwith considerations. With napster, gnutilla, and the usual heavy trafic, how are we going to deal with ads going out to everyone who access the system? The campus better have a powerful cache server.
Ok, I'm going to go and make that part of the IT departments offical policy at my place of employment now. =)
Is it just me, or did they just alienate a large group of people who would actually use their product? Shouldn't the fact that the programmer worked in support for their server be a good thing? That's the intent isn't, basically selling "advertising space" on their servers, so if I'm reading my issue of Linux Journal and see a product I want more info on, I can scar the barcode in the ad and my computer will take me to more info.
I wish they put some thought into it first. Like, hey...we just got support in a new operating system, and we didn't have to pay to develop the drivers or anything. Wow, neat!
What they're actually seeing is: Oh no! Now someone can use our product for something other than we intended for.
Well, nobody got a cease and desist order for Furby Autopsy, or various Tickle Me Elmo and Barney mutliations. Maybe Matel should have come after me for hanging my action figures infront of a space heater. I tell you, those He-Man action figures looked really cool while they melted!
BMW doesn't care when James Bond drives his brand new car off the top level of a parking ramp. Boeing doesn't complain when yet another disaster movie shows a 747 crashing down. You think that would hurt the pockets more than someone writing a driver for a simple bar-code scanner...
First off, you're better off with a NT domain controller than a SAMBA PDC. A pentium 200 PDC can authinticate about 40 users a minute.
Now the real fun begins, and when you set this up, make sure you document it so you get it right every time. First, create a user on the PDC. In a mixed UNIX/Windows enviorment, keeping home directories and profiles on a SAMBA enabled server is best, because you can export them via SAMBA or NFS.
Anything that supports PAM can authinticate agnist the PDC. (Even a w2k controller as long as it's running in mixed mode.) Create UNIX accounts like this: adduser --disabled-password username. What's the point of setting a local password, you're not going to use it anyway...
Now your PAM module. pam-smb-auth works well for the basics. (Shell logins etc) but doesn't do much besides ask the PDC for a yes or no. pan-ntdom is based on pam-smb-auth but is extended for NT domains. (It can usderstand some of the domain security and such.) User security = DOMAIN for samba and you shouldn't have to worry about accessing SAMBA shares and PAM modules for samba.
w2k access SAMBA shares just fine. I had an issue with updating the romain profiles, time on the file server was not in-sync with time on the client.
Hope that helps a little...
You may have to pay for Applixware 5.0, BUT, I think it was worth it. It's faster than Star Office, (and the printing components work a bit better too.), highly compatible with MS Office (and Corel and others), and it uses GTK!
Applixware Office includes just an e-mail client (sigh, avoid it.) word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, graphics, an sql thingy (only works with mySQL right now), html editor, macro support (Applixware macros), Applixware builder (uses SHELF), and it uses GTK!
Another good thing is a documented, sgml-like ASCII file format.
It's box says it's fast, native, and compatible. It is. I'd highly recomend it.
Actually, AOL has been rather good to linux lately. They haven't been anal about gaim, even when gaim started supporting oscar. (You think that they'd be a bit miffed since gaim doesn't support ads)
Then there's the aolserver, whatever the advantages of that over apache I haven't a clue.
AOL for Linux might sound like the end of the world, but really, it would set some sort of precident for the software industry. AOL is doing it, why aren't we?
I still wouldn't use it myself, but I know a few people who might give Linux a shot if they could use AOL under Linux.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probally is.
Isn't that what interns are for? Even better, teach them some basic html and have them create html documents. I found going from html to pdf more useful because somehow the links survive into the pdf, and show up in acrobat reader as bookmarks. Very cool.
In all honesty, you're not going to get away going from dead tree to digital paper without proofreading at least once. There is no OCR package that perfect. Same goes for your data entry folks.
Great, the browser is skinable. That has to be one of the most useless features I've seen. I don't want my browser to have it's own look and feel, I want it to look like the rest of my desktop. (GNOME at the moment) Would it be too much to ask to just let it use GTK themes?
Looks like someone started on such a project, though that page hasn't been updated since November 20, 1998.
Maybe that option is in the Mozilla source, I haven't been following development that closely. At least the Mozilla folks decided to move away from Motif. Motif just looks ugly compared to GTK (or even QT)
The cast of Wild Wild West will finially be able to see some new faces in therapy sessions. After all, you'd probally be in a depressing rut after either of these movies.
And maybe they'll finially convince Will Smith to retire the overly hyped sexy (not really...) singer/actor wannabe. Be thankful Men In Black was a good flick.
From the first time I installed debian I knew that non-free wasn't an official part of the distribution, but was included on the official cd's and the official servers for the convience of the end user.
/usr/opt, not /usr.
Then again, I read the histroy of Debian soon after installing it. Most new users probally don't.
If non-free isn't part of the distribution, make sure it's known. A dns entry and virtual ftp site isn't that hard to do.
It's not like you can remove that part of the distribution anyway, since it isn't part of the distribution.
Since this section isn't part of Debian's distribution, the policy for package maintainers should be --prefix=/usr/local or
Go ahead and pull non-free from the official cd's if you want. Places like Cheapbytes will put it back on.
All I really ask is that Debian devolpers don't force me off Debian and on to a Debian based distro (Storm, Corel) simply because they don't want to include non-free.
<li>Brother's friend creates a I hate my ex-girlfriend page.
<li>ex-girlfriend's father calls school
<li>School calls police
<li>Police call parents, tell parents that they told the school to go fsck themselves, they have better things to do.
<li>Geek comunity declares local police "get it"
OS, Applications, Internet, Publishing, Hardware, Marketing, Legal. MS seems to be building a publishing company (many MS games for example are just published by the giant, not developed) Cut that division off and watch it go belly up. Fun stuff.
Hardware has to go somewhere...probally downhill until Logitech buys them out.
OS, Software, Internet, Marketing, Legal. Then Microsoft Lawyers can really fsck with the US Legal system, and what company wouldn't want to hire out the Microsoft Marketing department? That way, OS, Software, and Internet contract marketing to hype their products, and hire legal when they get in trouble.
This is kinda bordering the line between seriousness and funny isn't it?
cat /vmlinuz | lame SomeMetalicaSong.mp3
After blowing their ear drums listening to Metalica full volume, most fans won't notice the difference.
After a lengthy court battle, judges ruled in favor of CK, as a result, Mother Nature must phase roses out of the echo system.
In rebbuttial, Mother Nature threatened to phase lawyers out of the echosystem.
What's wrong with that? My high school make a great deathmatch map. Smoke filled bathrooms, strange disections going on in the classrooms, working elevator (that went to the unseen 4th floor and the roof)
Awful as it is, the libiary was one of the best places. Porn displayed on the workstations, and bookshelves at just the right hight for walking behind. (Watch out, there are gaps in the books...) A few overturned tables where there weren't bookshelves.
And the lunchroom brought new meaning to "beware of food."
Of corse, the evil bots had to spawn from the administrative offices. =)
October GNOME hasn't got KDE quite beat yet. With KDE's panel you can easily chinge the hieght and such. With the current stable, you're pretty much stuck.
With Helix Gnome (and CVS Gnome) you get a little more control of panel sizes and placement. I just finished compiling Helix Gnome yesterday, and I'm pleased. I like the small panels (24 pixel height) so much better that being stuck at 48 pixel panels.
The next stable release will probally have KDE2 beat (my opinion, never was a KDE fan) The KDE browser might be the only good reason to add some KDE suppot packages. =)
For interested Potato users, I threw up the Helix Gnome packages I compiled under potato here:
ringworld.org
ringworld.net
g33ks.net
I'm willing to bet there's not a person here who has anything agnist MS's hardware department. The well mouse is the greatest thing MS came up with. Granted I perfer the shape and size of Logitech mice, but the best feeling wheel is on a MS mouse. Is your keyboard a MS Natural? And most of the Sidewinder line (exclude all game pads save the original) are outstanding products.
...) but if you want to choose MS over it's competitiors, you have to take Windows as well. There's the root of the OS antitrust...
Office is an outstanding product. (Most of the time) that continues to raise bar for other office suites. (Corel Office is impressive as well, and better priced.) They would have a ture winner if the file formats were not propritoary. (I once has someone ask for my resume in Word format instead of PDF. I wrote them back and told them why I wasn't going to put that into a format where my resume might not look the way I wanted it to, withdrew my application [mostly because I had found a better job by this point])
IE:
It is a good browser. So is Netscape. Stability wise, they're about even. There is a measuer of convience havin IE installed on automatically on a windows machine. Having a browser right away is about as important as having your networking drivers right away. You need both to get the latest software and drivers for your machine. Maybe MS should include a stripped down IE (with as much functionality as kfm or gmc)
Running IE on a Mac is quite the experience. The UI is just...interesting. Port the mac version to linux, that would be kinda cool.
OS: The downfall
It may have it's strong points, but it has an extremely long list of weaknesses. It's used as the tool to get you to buy/use all of the above products. MS could probally remain one company IF they released native versions of the above software for platforms other than Windows and Mac (on the same release schedule.)
That way, you don't have to run a MS OS to use your MS Software. They would be allowing for other operating systems to compete fairly.
The competition to MS software is there, and there are great alternitives (Quicken, Corel, Netscape,
I seem to remember it being Compaq. I remember hearing stories about the first Compaq luggables, and how the salesman showed the shop crew that he could drop the thing from waist height, pick it up, open it up and plug it in, and the thing still ran.
I also remember the CFOs take...
"Groan...did they have to show the shop crew that?!?"
George Carlin:
War is just a bunch of prick waving. Me are insecure about the size of their dicks and go to war to kill eachother over it.
Have you ever noticed that the rockets, the bombs, the bullets, the torpedos, are all shaped like dicks?
It's s subconscience need to project the penis into other peoples business. It's called fu**ing with people!
I'm sure you can find a mp3 of this on napster or Scour or something. =)
Its difficult to compare ads on the net to ads on TV. When surfing the net, my browser doesn't uncontrollably stop showing the web page and force me to view adds, like the regular commercial breaks on TV.
Akkkk! Don't give marketing people any ideas, it would be like Vigor all over again, only worse!
Sounds like this unit is a godsend to anyone who watches Fox on Sunday night. I mean, they have some pretty good shows, but after hearing "My butt is sweating. It just needs to air out...The TRAILER!" durrning ever commercial break, Malcom In The Middle was loosing it's appeal. They did the same with the Simpsons and the X-Files. They're hyping their shows so much I want to turn off the TV instead of keep watching...and the "Fox has the big shows" was ok when it started, but not durring every damn commerical break!!!
Am I the only one who finds users who say "Yay, we get a free comercial player for our fovorite OS, but I'd still perfer something open source."
/usr/local or /opt you go. I have no problem with non-open source software running on my linux box. Loki, Real, Netscape, Star Office, etc. currently have space on my harddrive, and it doesn't look like it's about to change anytime soon.
Granted most of what Real Player does is propitery, but at least they're attempting to be crossplatform and provide a free player to something besides windows and mac.
It's not open source. Oh well, at least it works. Off to