I personally have a personal project I developed as a web app. I then changed direction and it eventually evolved into a media center platform using Nginx, php w/fpm and a customized version of Surf. basically just stripped out all the UI widgets and set it to fullscreen on a Linux box connected to my TV.
Thats not the point though. What I am saying is no matter what you are trying to accomplish you will probably have to find something open source and customize it to your needs. I dont need anything other than Linux support for what I am doing, but I think there are unofficial Win builds of Surf.
You will no doubt have to do customizations though.
Why does my A/C in a house take all the heat and discharge it outside into the atmosphere, which meanwhile a pool heater is running 5 feet away using energy to generate more heat for the pool?
Not everyone has a pool to heat. I'd say it's less than 10% of the North American population has one. If it's hot enough for the A/C to be turned on, turn if off and go hang out in the cold pool instead of trying to heat the pool.
Why does the Pizza place down the street run their heater in the winter yet has these giant metal exhaust ducts running from their pizza ovens, venting heat to the outside world? (Why no fins/blowers on these ducts to disperse heat into the pizza-joint?)
Trust me, you don't need to blow it into the dining area. They are hot enough on their own. The ventilation makes it bearable.
Why do people call incandescent light bulbs "energy wasters", when then can (in the cooler months) defray the work needed to be done by a household heating unit?
I live in an Apartment Building which provides hotwater/steam baseboard heat free included in my rent. CFL's save me money because I pay for my power. Everyone's situation is different, clearly.
We need IPv6 to be fully supported by everyone, first. More domains and sub-domains means more SSL certificates and exchange servers, etc. Which means more IP addresses.
I know, I know, name based hosting and all that. Unfortunately large corps don't think that way, they think in terms of IP blocks. They will see this as a reason for more IP block thus diminishing the already relatively low number of IPv4 addresses.
So in conclusion, focus on IPv6 first.
My personal opinion on this is it's a stupid gimmick by ICANN to make more money although I do see the value in some very specific use cases. Although I think we might be shooting ourselves in the foot here.
there's a lot of lightweight, mostly turn-key Apache/MySQL stuff I've set up opportunistically,... [snip]... PHP apps...
In my experience, Apache, MySQL and PHP are anything but lightweight.
Not flaimbaiting, just wanted to point it out. I've been a web developer for over 10 years and the above setup is all my preference (well, LAMP, not MAMP - *NIX is *NIX though)
I also use Gentoo./boot is ext2 / is JFS/home is JFS/Media is XFS/tmp is tmpfs/var/tmp is symlinked back to/tmp/tmp is limited to 4GB so it doesn't use up all of my RAM (8GB). Haven't had any oases with portage/emerge saturating it. Not even a rebuild of openoffice. I've only
I live in Canada, and it is not available here, unfortunately.
But yes, I did find that shortly after I posted my comment. Thank you for bringing it up. I think it's a step in the right direction, if they could build a hybrid version I think they could have a real winner, plugin hybrid would be best, but I'd settle for a regen-braking hybrid.
Rapid recharge is also not a viable solution and wont be attainable for a while. Even if it is, you're looking at hundreds of Amps and really high Voltage, you'll need licensed electricians filling up cars. No more hiring 16 year old students for minimum wage.
As for battery banks and all that, it just doesn't seem viable. You have to get that electricity from somewhere, even coming off the powerlines the amount of power coming from there is not enough to keep up with the power banks. I've seen lineups at current gas stations of 6-8 vehicles per pump, when there is 6-10 pumps available. You'll need a HUGE battery bank, and would require more than a forklift and semi truck to move it (why would you want to move a fuel station, anyway?)
Someone else mentioned a flywheel buried under ground would be the most efficient method for storing huge amounts of electricity, but then you are back to burying things underground.:-)
Here where I live (Saskatchewan, Canada), Propane tanks at fill stations are above ground. The one Natural Gas station we do have in town has a reserve tank similar to the propane tanks, but it is tied right to the Natural Gas grid that goes to all of the homes in the area.
Perhaps I am just thinking that everywhere has natural gas lines? Virtually every home in Canada has a natural gas line coming into the home (with the exception of the few who have Geothermal heating or another alternative, but the number is virtually a fraction of a percent).
Lithium Ion has a limit on how many times it can be recharged, as well, if I just bought a new car and went to a battery swap station and got a 3 year old junkie battery, I'd be pretty pissed.
People wont want to swap out a multi-thousand dollar battery pack every few hundred kilometers on long trips. You never know how old of a battery you will end up at home with.
I would like to see vehilces manufactaured that run on natural gas. It burns clean with virtually no emissions, and is pretty ubiquitous (some places even have natural gas filling stations - my town of 30K people has one)
Extra points if they would make them plugin hybrids.
Most forklifts run on natural gas or propane and are safe to use indoors because of the lack of harmful emissions.
I know its another natural resource but I think it's a much cleaner alternative to gasoline. The electric grid isn't there yet in terms of rapid charging and the batteries aren't there yet in terms of range for people who go on trips longer than 150km.
So far Tesla's model S is looking pretty promising in terms of the range and all that but is out of reach for most consumers. And there is still the problem of longer trips, if I want to drive 1800km in two days it's just not going to happen. With natural gas it could be possible provided I plan out all of my filling stops but that is up to me.
1. Microsoft wants to ask a lot of obnoxious and hard to understand questions during installation and initialization of newer versions.
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others do not.
2. People are afraid that upgrades will break something.
Not sure about you, but I'd rather risk having something old break with the benefit of being able to actually browse the web. Things are so far along since IE6 that it really is a completely new world online.
3. A lot of web sites - especially company internal web sites are still designed for IE6.
Installing an alternate browser alongside IE6 will not break it's ability to serve the Intranets while adding the ability to browse the rest of the internet.
4. A lot of companies are afraid of upgrading from IE6 due to concerns of various kinds and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it".
That's a personality problem, not a productivity problem. I'm a young person so I suppose I am biased and don't count. I don't understand that way of thinking. IE6 _is_ broken, they just don't see it that way, I suppose.
5. If you do a fresh install of XP SP3 you will have to postpone the installation of IE8 until some patches are installed or you end up with a broken browser - which will be fixed if you uninstall and reinstall, but it may have scared a few.
I've done a recent install of XP SP3 (slipstreamed that I built when SP3 came out), I had no issues. This was in a virtual environment.
Robbins' move to Microsoft, on 13 June 2005, attracted attention[15][16] within the Linux community, which has historically had a combative relationship with Microsoft. He described his role working for Bill Hilf as "...helping Microsoft to understand Open Source and community-based projects..."[17]
However, Robbins resigned less than a year later on 16 January 2006 due to frustrations that he was unable to fully utilize his technical skills in this position. His new job is at ABC Coding Solutions where he will be focused on building in.NET on Windows.[18]
I'm quite certain he browses Slashdot, perhaps he could chime in on what Microsoft has been up to?
On a more serious note: MrEricSir, how much do you charge? I need you to rewrite the content on my website. We all know buzzwords sell! I'm just not that savvy, I guess..
But then, try changing the locale on a running system...
This depends on your linux distro... on gentoo: # init 3 (assuming you're not ssh'd in)
- edit/etc/env.d/02locale # env-update && source/etc/profile # init 5
As others have mentioned, Linux is such a configurable system it can be like windows if you so choose it to be. That's the point.
Linux/GNU is one (many as a whole, I guess) of those things that it really is a "jack-of-all-trades" if it is understood how to do so. It is used in virtually every form of technology these days.
I personally feel that today Linux is right where it needs to be.
I use Linux on the desktop. I have for years (pushing 8 years now). I currently run Gentoo Linux with XFCE4 as my GUI. It just works for everything that I need to use it for. I have it installed this way on two desktops (my wife's, mine) and my MSI Wind netbook. I also have it installed on my Media Center PC running some custom software I've written myself (pending open source release).
I gave up on Windows completely when Vista was released (by that I mean I've stopped supporting family's PC's with anything that isn't XP -- virtually all of them now).
I run an install of XP under VirtualBox from time to time when I need to do some testing under IE 6 through 8. Although I think it's been a few months since I've done that.
To me Apple is in the same boat as Windows, I just don't want it. I've found what I want on my desktop and it exists here today with very little effort.
I live in Saskatchewan where we have Sasktel (a province owned Crown Corp) everywhere and a few others like Shaw, Access Communications, Bell, Telus, etc in a few select area's.
As far as I know, Sasktel owns all telephone lines in the province and in turn sells Internet, TV (IPTV) and telephone over ADSL (currently transitioning to VDSL). I currently pay about $140/month for all three (I think it can get as low as about $80 depending on which plans and addon's you have on each service, I'm closer to the high end). No caps have ever been witnessed by myself or anyone else I know with Sasktel.
The cable companies are different, though. Shaw & Access Communications are ridiculous. higher speeds, shittier service (more outages) and bullshit caps. The prices are competitive, though.
That's the situation I'm in... I can't imagine living with restrictions others have pointed out here on Slashdot (in ON, QC, etc.)
You don't have to hack anything, you don't have to think either, but some people do, and many people feel that someone attempting to prevent them from doing non-dangerous and perfectly legal things with the products they bought is wrong.
Surely the bots aren't registrering on his honeypot forums with the same password as is used for the e-mail they use to register.
That's exactly what they are doing.
From what I gather, he's written a program to automatically feed suspicious looking e-mail addresses into and check the the registration password/e-mail combo to see if they are using the same for both the e-mail address and the forum software. If there it is a successful combination, it flags and suspends the account.
Dunno if that is 100% correct, but that's what I've gathered (I have not RTFA either)
Slashdot Mirror
I personally have a personal project I developed as a web app. I then changed direction and it eventually evolved into a media center platform using Nginx, php w/fpm and a customized version of Surf. basically just stripped out all the UI widgets and set it to fullscreen on a Linux box connected to my TV.
Thats not the point though. What I am saying is no matter what you are trying to accomplish you will probably have to find something open source and customize it to your needs. I dont need anything other than Linux support for what I am doing, but I think there are unofficial Win builds of Surf.
You will no doubt have to do customizations though.
Why does my A/C in a house take all the heat and discharge it outside into the atmosphere, which meanwhile a pool heater is running 5 feet away using energy to generate more heat for the pool?
Not everyone has a pool to heat. I'd say it's less than 10% of the North American population has one. If it's hot enough for the A/C to be turned on, turn if off and go hang out in the cold pool instead of trying to heat the pool.
Why does the Pizza place down the street run their heater in the winter yet has these giant metal exhaust ducts running from their pizza ovens, venting heat to the outside world? (Why no fins/blowers on these ducts to disperse heat into the pizza-joint?)
Trust me, you don't need to blow it into the dining area. They are hot enough on their own. The ventilation makes it bearable.
Why do people call incandescent light bulbs "energy wasters", when then can (in the cooler months) defray the work needed to be done by a household heating unit?
I live in an Apartment Building which provides hotwater/steam baseboard heat free included in my rent. CFL's save me money because I pay for my power. Everyone's situation is different, clearly.
Screw Folding@Home.
Mine BitCoin! At least if you mine long enough you can convert the Bitcoin into Newegg gift cards or something.
We need IPv6 to be fully supported by everyone, first. More domains and sub-domains means more SSL certificates and exchange servers, etc. Which means more IP addresses.
I know, I know, name based hosting and all that. Unfortunately large corps don't think that way, they think in terms of IP blocks. They will see this as a reason for more IP block thus diminishing the already relatively low number of IPv4 addresses.
So in conclusion, focus on IPv6 first.
My personal opinion on this is it's a stupid gimmick by ICANN to make more money although I do see the value in some very specific use cases. Although I think we might be shooting ourselves in the foot here.
there's a lot of lightweight, mostly turn-key Apache/MySQL stuff I've set up opportunistically, ... [snip] ... PHP apps ...
In my experience, Apache, MySQL and PHP are anything but lightweight.
Not flaimbaiting, just wanted to point it out. I've been a web developer for over 10 years and the above setup is all my preference (well, LAMP, not MAMP - *NIX is *NIX though)
Switch your real FTP server to a random, non-standard port.
Set up Honeyd on port 21: http://www.honeyd.org/
I also use Gentoo. /boot is ext2 /home is JFS /Media is XFS /tmp is tmpfs /var/tmp is symlinked back to /tmp /tmp is limited to 4GB so it doesn't use up all of my RAM (8GB). Haven't had any oases with portage/emerge saturating it. Not even a rebuild of openoffice.
/ is JFS
I've only
I live in Canada, and it is not available here, unfortunately.
But yes, I did find that shortly after I posted my comment. Thank you for bringing it up. I think it's a step in the right direction, if they could build a hybrid version I think they could have a real winner, plugin hybrid would be best, but I'd settle for a regen-braking hybrid.
Lucky of you.
Here where I live, the local Natural Gas company (SaskEnergy) has converted most (if not all) work related vehicles to Natural gas.
What I am speaking of is I wish the large North American vehicle Manufacturers would start producing Natural Gas Vehicles for the masses.
Rapid recharge is also not a viable solution and wont be attainable for a while. Even if it is, you're looking at hundreds of Amps and really high Voltage, you'll need licensed electricians filling up cars. No more hiring 16 year old students for minimum wage.
As for battery banks and all that, it just doesn't seem viable. You have to get that electricity from somewhere, even coming off the powerlines the amount of power coming from there is not enough to keep up with the power banks. I've seen lineups at current gas stations of 6-8 vehicles per pump, when there is 6-10 pumps available. You'll need a HUGE battery bank, and would require more than a forklift and semi truck to move it (why would you want to move a fuel station, anyway?)
Someone else mentioned a flywheel buried under ground would be the most efficient method for storing huge amounts of electricity, but then you are back to burying things underground. :-)
Here where I live (Saskatchewan, Canada), Propane tanks at fill stations are above ground. The one Natural Gas station we do have in town has a reserve tank similar to the propane tanks, but it is tied right to the Natural Gas grid that goes to all of the homes in the area.
Perhaps I am just thinking that everywhere has natural gas lines? Virtually every home in Canada has a natural gas line coming into the home (with the exception of the few who have Geothermal heating or another alternative, but the number is virtually a fraction of a percent).
Lithium Ion has a limit on how many times it can be recharged, as well, if I just bought a new car and went to a battery swap station and got a 3 year old junkie battery, I'd be pretty pissed.
People wont want to swap out a multi-thousand dollar battery pack every few hundred kilometers on long trips. You never know how old of a battery you will end up at home with.
I would like to see vehilces manufactaured that run on natural gas. It burns clean with virtually no emissions, and is pretty ubiquitous (some places even have natural gas filling stations - my town of 30K people has one)
Extra points if they would make them plugin hybrids.
Most forklifts run on natural gas or propane and are safe to use indoors because of the lack of harmful emissions.
I know its another natural resource but I think it's a much cleaner alternative to gasoline. The electric grid isn't there yet in terms of rapid charging and the batteries aren't there yet in terms of range for people who go on trips longer than 150km.
So far Tesla's model S is looking pretty promising in terms of the range and all that but is out of reach for most consumers. And there is still the problem of longer trips, if I want to drive 1800km in two days it's just not going to happen. With natural gas it could be possible provided I plan out all of my filling stops but that is up to me.
It's just the entertainment console, not the part that makes the tires move when you hit the gas. Don't worry about it.
1. Microsoft wants to ask a lot of obnoxious and hard to understand questions during installation and initialization of newer versions.
Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others do not.
2. People are afraid that upgrades will break something.
Not sure about you, but I'd rather risk having something old break with the benefit of being able to actually browse the web. Things are so far along since IE6 that it really is a completely new world online.
3. A lot of web sites - especially company internal web sites are still designed for IE6.
Installing an alternate browser alongside IE6 will not break it's ability to serve the Intranets while adding the ability to browse the rest of the internet.
4. A lot of companies are afraid of upgrading from IE6 due to concerns of various kinds and "if it ain't broken, don't fix it".
That's a personality problem, not a productivity problem.
I'm a young person so I suppose I am biased and don't count. I don't understand that way of thinking. IE6 _is_ broken, they just don't see it that way, I suppose.
5. If you do a fresh install of XP SP3 you will have to postpone the installation of IE8 until some patches are installed or you end up with a broken browser - which will be fixed if you uninstall and reinstall, but it may have scared a few.
I've done a recent install of XP SP3 (slipstreamed that I built when SP3 came out), I had no issues. This was in a virtual environment.
IE6 is broken, no matter how you want to swing it.
There's no problem with running Firefox or an alternative browser alongside IE6 installed.
People can use IE6 for the Intranet and another browser for everything else.
Thats a case of the local administrators to install it, Intranet works, people can browse the real internet with a browser that actually works.
Easy as that.
If the admins aren't willing to install an updated browser, they are neglecting a huge security hole and don't deserve their jobs.
Thank you for that.
I've been trying to come up with an easy and elegant way warn users they are using IE6, and that they absolutely must upgrade.
Setting this up now.
Anyone remember when Daniel Robbins (founder of Gentoo Linux) went to work for MS?
From Wikipedia
Robbins' move to Microsoft, on 13 June 2005, attracted attention[15][16] within the Linux community, which has historically had a combative relationship with Microsoft. He described his role working for Bill Hilf as "...helping Microsoft to understand Open Source and community-based projects..."[17]
However, Robbins resigned less than a year later on 16 January 2006 due to frustrations that he was unable to fully utilize his technical skills in this position. His new job is at ABC Coding Solutions where he will be focused on building in .NET on Windows.[18]
I'm quite certain he browses Slashdot, perhaps he could chime in on what Microsoft has been up to?
On a more serious note: MrEricSir, how much do you charge? I need you to rewrite the content on my website. We all know buzzwords sell! I'm just not that savvy, I guess..
But then, try changing the locale on a running system...
This depends on your linux distro... on gentoo: /etc/env.d/02locale /etc/profile
# init 3 (assuming you're not ssh'd in)
- edit
# env-update && source
# init 5
and you're good to go. :-)
Has the innovator been out-innovated due to a sluggish product roadmap?
Yes.
As others have mentioned, Linux is such a configurable system it can be like windows if you so choose it to be. That's the point.
Linux/GNU is one (many as a whole, I guess) of those things that it really is a "jack-of-all-trades" if it is understood how to do so. It is used in virtually every form of technology these days.
I personally feel that today Linux is right where it needs to be.
I use Linux on the desktop. I have for years (pushing 8 years now). I currently run Gentoo Linux with XFCE4 as my GUI. It just works for everything that I need to use it for. I have it installed this way on two desktops (my wife's, mine) and my MSI Wind netbook. I also have it installed on my Media Center PC running some custom software I've written myself (pending open source release).
I gave up on Windows completely when Vista was released (by that I mean I've stopped supporting family's PC's with anything that isn't XP -- virtually all of them now).
I run an install of XP under VirtualBox from time to time when I need to do some testing under IE 6 through 8. Although I think it's been a few months since I've done that.
To me Apple is in the same boat as Windows, I just don't want it. I've found what I want on my desktop and it exists here today with very little effort.
Linux is right where it needs to be.
I live in Saskatchewan where we have Sasktel (a province owned Crown Corp) everywhere and a few others like Shaw, Access Communications, Bell, Telus, etc in a few select area's.
As far as I know, Sasktel owns all telephone lines in the province and in turn sells Internet, TV (IPTV) and telephone over ADSL (currently transitioning to VDSL). I currently pay about $140/month for all three (I think it can get as low as about $80 depending on which plans and addon's you have on each service, I'm closer to the high end). No caps have ever been witnessed by myself or anyone else I know with Sasktel.
The cable companies are different, though. Shaw & Access Communications are ridiculous. higher speeds, shittier service (more outages) and bullshit caps. The prices are competitive, though.
That's the situation I'm in... I can't imagine living with restrictions others have pointed out here on Slashdot (in ON, QC, etc.)
You don't have to hack anything, you don't have to think either, but some people do, and many people feel that someone attempting to prevent them from doing non-dangerous and perfectly legal things with the products they bought is wrong.
Precisely. If I felt the need to place my brand new DeWalt DC390B Circular Saw in my Panasonic NN-P794SF Genius Prestige Microwave and turn it on High for 45 minutes, I have the right to do so, goddamnit!
Wait, what was that part about non-dangerous? Shi[> NO CARRIER]
I use the keyboard Ctrl plus +/- keys to using the mouse you insensitive clod!
Surely the bots aren't registrering on his honeypot forums with the same password as is used for the e-mail they use to register.
That's exactly what they are doing.
From what I gather, he's written a program to automatically feed suspicious looking e-mail addresses into and check the the registration password/e-mail combo to see if they are using the same for both the e-mail address and the forum software. If there it is a successful combination, it flags and suspends the account.
Dunno if that is 100% correct, but that's what I've gathered (I have not RTFA either)