Yeah, we all know about freedesktop.org, Ywindows, etc. But name an alternative that works now. I'm pretty fond of my GNOME DE and I won't be bailing out on X until something else actually works.
Fortunately for me, my Radeon 8500 runs just fine with xfree-4.3.0 and I have no plans to go shopping for the latest "AlphaGammatron v2.990zeta" video card. Hopefully a suitable replacement will come along, but it isn't here yet.
I'm not going to link this because I don't want the poor guy to get slashdotted. But those that are truly interested can search Google or Freshmeat and find it.
It's completely free and contains almost 50 bootable utilities ranging from hardware diagnostics to offline NT password/registry editor to linux recovery distros.
"The hoopla around him losing his job gave the story some extra frisson," said Internet security expert Bruce Schneier, a co-author of Geer's.
frisson
n : an almost pleasurable sensation of fright; "a frisson of
surprise shot through him" syn: shiver, chill, quiver,
shudder, thrill, tingle
Overall, this is one of the best written articles I've read in quite some time. The author lets the intelligence of his sources shine clearly. And it's always nice to learn a new word.
Bogofilter does a really good job set as a filter rule in sylpheed-claws. Very few of those 'random valid word' type spams evade the filter, but every now and then one does.
No problem. Just drag that sucker into the spam folder and the next hourly cron job learns about it. I've never seen it miss a repeat spam and false positives are extremely rare.
The lander is completely unpowered as far as propulsion goes. The separation was successful, but there is still plenty that can go wrong. And the same for the two NASA probes. Let's see how it all shakes out before making any conclusions.
I was in the USAF from 1977 to 1982 in the Electronic Security Command (nee Security Service and called something else now). Though we were technically DOD personnel, all of our tasking came through the NSA and that's who we reported to and through to other agencies. My last station was at Fort Meade. Life was exciting working the Soviet problem from northern Japan and later China, Vietnam and parts of the Indian Ocean from the Philippines.
Without going into specifics, I'll say that their methods of checking someone out were very thorough. They didn't bother with polygraphs because they know as well as anyone how unreliable they are. But a highschool friend's dad happened to be an investigator who did part of my background check and the amount of crap they dug up was astounding. Some of it was stuff that I didn't know about myself before then.
Looking back, I'm almost surprised that I got the TS/SCI clearance based on their criteria (special compartmented intelligence is only one step below 'eyes only' and strictly 'need to know'). But nearly all of us took our work and the need to keep secrets very seriously. 'Gig talk' in a bar would cost you a round.
The phone system almost never dies, while power outages are common here in Key West. If I'm watching TV when the power goes out, I just go and reload slashdot until cable comes back up.
Yep, I do a lot of SOHO network setups for fun and profit. In fact I have such a job lined up tomorrow morning. There's no way I'm going to recommend / install something like that. It could be pretty hard on the reputation a self employed geek like myself. My clients trust me for good reasons and I'm not letting Belkin screw that up.
So I sent an email to the address on their front page (kannynmc@belkin.com) and told them exactly that. Of course, it was sent from my semi-disposable yahoo account. Somewhat cowardly, no doubt, but they're sure not getting my real address.
My local telco (Bellsouth) offers unlimited long distance to all 50 states for $24.99 a month. I don't use long distance much, but my roommate does, and he was paying upwards of $85 / month with our previous ATT service.
Being born in 1957, I watched the industry switch from vinyl (45's, 33's and 78's), to reel-to-reel, to eight-tracks (argghh), to cassettes, and now CD's and DVD's. They resisted every one of these changes to varying degrees. But they all happened anyway. 'Why?', you ask. Well, I would say that sound quality, durability and portability got better and even though the price remained relatively stable, you were getting more bang-per-buck.
So I think that the point of the article is that times and technologies are changing. Is the RIAA going to wake up and or not? They need to offer services such as these. If it's affordable and easy to use it will make money.
Unlike in the past, there now exists a near-zero cost distribution medium; namely the internet/WWWW. Napster showed that the distribution was doable and iTunes shows that it can be profitable (even with a miniscule user base that excludes all Windows and *nix users).
That's one of the first things I thought of and then realized that there are two important differences.
1) It was designed from the ground up to run on Linux. Possibly the biggest problem that 'linmodem' driver developers had was getting specs from manufacturers. Obviously that's not an issue here.
2) When winmodems first appeared in the early Pentium days, resources were scarce. Running one on a desktop system that had lots of other things needing those same resorces was a problem. Now even most low end PCs have power to spare. The boxes used in their test were Proliant servers that were dedicated to the task. I don't see that as a bottleneck.
Ironically, the clunkiness of KDE and the freedom to configure things as I wanted them in GNOME were my main reasons to switch from Suse to Redhat back when GNOME was still in beta and enlightenment was its default WM. Fortunately, sawmill (now known as sawfish) appeared shortly thereafter and things really started to look up. By the time that gnome-1.4 arrived, all I was interested in was updates. In my opinion, they had found the right combination of useability and configurability. Several distros later, GNOME is still my DE of choice but it is much harder to configure. The peak was gnomecc and the nadir is the horribly fragmented gnome-control-center.
Previously, recent Windows users who wanted to feel comfortable could run KDE and those who wanted more control could choose GNOME. That is no longer the case. At this point, there are pathetically few reasons for me to stick with GNOME but there are far fewer reasons to switch to KDE. Don't take this as a flame against KDE, I just don't like it. If you do then so be it.
The good news is that Gentoo's portage system provides for slotted packages so I still have the 1.4 libs available to use with apps that need them without breaking 2.x stuff.
So, what's my dream? Maybe a fork of gnome-1.4.4 with more useability and original confifurability built in and the original ideals intact. Well, we can all dream, can't we?
Last thing first, yeah I suppose devfs has been in the kernel for a while (I was an early adopter, since a patch was required) but it has been and still is labeled as EXPERIMENTAL. Since the developer insisted on keeping such tight control of it and resisted outside input I don't think that it progressed as it should have. Hence, udev which may prove to be a better solution. IMHO, devfs was so far superior to the previous solution that it encouraged development of something even better. I guess we'll see.
I have long been patching my kernels with i2c and lm_sensors, usually with CVS though sometimes with the latest releases if problems popped up, which were usually due to other patches and the order in which they were applied. It's all in the kernel now and no patches are needed. So now a slightly different set of modules need to be loaded. For 2.4.x kernels it is:
Of course that's for my hardware and yours will probably be different. The 'sensors -s' command no longer needs to be run and no fiddling is required with sensor divs to get the temps and fan rpms to read correctly.
That is one of two items that he missed in the article. Indeed, in the 2.4.x kernels if you used devfs you did not need to enable/dev/pts file system support but you do with 2.6. Interestingly, now that devfs is officially in the kernel they are thinking of replacing it with udev.
Also, it is not mentioned that you need to create the/sys directory. It apparently has something to do with sysfs which I don't quite understand yet, but it was necessary to get all my sensors reading correctly.
I have built two splashproof computers for marine surveying on small boats. Pelican cases are what I used. You only need to seal the one or two through-case holes that you will need to run your wires.
I would post a link to some pics, but my home server can't handle the Slashdot effect.
Re:Suicide bombers (A perspective view)
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
First, you must take into account the mindset of the era. It was considered to be a real possibility that nukes would be flying around in abundance and WWII was fresh in the minds of most everyone. Having been born in the year that this article covers, I am old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis and doing 'duck and cover' drills (what a joke) in elementary school.
Western culture in general and American culture in particular doesn't encourage suicide bombers or kamikazes. The main point being that they had a chance, however slim, to survive. The pilots were well aware of this fact according to their personal accounts. Closing one eye, painting the tail white and the lob maneuver itself were all designed to increase the likleyhood of the pilot coming home.
It seems pretty ridiculous now, but back then it was looked upon as a last ditch 'all or nothing' gamble.
I work for the outfit that is doing this survey and a couple others here in the keys plus one each in Portugal and Morocco (RPM, not Mel Fisher's). Putting aside the overseas projects, since that involves several more layers of bureaucracy, and not knowing the laws covering the Hudson, I can only give you an idea of what happens here.
Just about anything inside the reef is within the Floida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS), so we have to pull a permit from them as well as from NOAA. FKNMS is a joint state / federal authority and NOAA of course is federal. In some areas we are allowed to do non-invasive surveys, such as towing magnetometers, a sidescan sonar or a sub-bottom profiler. Any excavation, which is done scientifically and with respect for the site, requires a separate permit. All data collected, whether from towed surveys or excavation must be shared with the permitting agency but is otherwise proprietary.
Hey, it's expensive to do this kind of work and there are plenty of treasure hunters that would love to get a hold of some of our "numbers". But as the article points out, those wrecks are mostly the workaday variety and probably of little commercial value. I think they are doing the right thing by holding back until the historically significant sites can be identified and protected even if the Hudson is not exactly a diving hot spot.
The only time my DSL provider (Bellsouth) has had to send a tech out was to replace my fried Alcatel 1000 about a year and a half ago. I've handled my own installations of dialup and DSL with them for the last 4 years. They are quite Linux friendly though they do not support it.
He was prepared to do a normal windows installation when I showed him my router and firewall setup. We plugged in a couple cables and bang, it was running. He was very happy to not have to deal with all the extra crap. "Wow, that's Linux? Cool.", he said. Probably his easiest call ever, total 15 minutes 10 of them me showning him how feature-rich Linux is.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we all know about freedesktop.org, Ywindows, etc. But name an alternative that works now. I'm pretty fond of my GNOME DE and I won't be bailing out on X until something else actually works.
Fortunately for me, my Radeon 8500 runs just fine with xfree-4.3.0 and I have no plans to go shopping for the latest "AlphaGammatron v2.990zeta" video card. Hopefully a suitable replacement will come along, but it isn't here yet.
I'm not going to link this because I don't want the poor guy to get slashdotted. But those that are truly interested can search Google or Freshmeat and find it.
It's completely free and contains almost 50 bootable utilities ranging from hardware diagnostics to offline NT password/registry editor to linux recovery distros.
"The hoopla around him losing his job gave the story some extra frisson," said Internet security expert Bruce Schneier, a co-author of Geer's.
frisson
n : an almost pleasurable sensation of fright; "a frisson of
surprise shot through him" syn: shiver, chill, quiver,
shudder, thrill, tingle
Overall, this is one of the best written articles I've read in quite some time. The author lets the intelligence of his sources shine clearly. And it's always nice to learn a new word.
Bogofilter does a really good job set as a filter rule in sylpheed-claws. Very few of those 'random valid word' type spams evade the filter, but every now and then one does.
No problem. Just drag that sucker into the spam folder and the next hourly cron job learns about it. I've never seen it miss a repeat spam and false positives are extremely rare.
The lander is completely unpowered as far as propulsion goes. The separation was successful, but there is still plenty that can go wrong. And the same for the two NASA probes. Let's see how it all shakes out before making any conclusions.
I was in the USAF from 1977 to 1982 in the Electronic Security Command (nee Security Service and called something else now). Though we were technically DOD personnel, all of our tasking came through the NSA and that's who we reported to and through to other agencies. My last station was at Fort Meade. Life was exciting working the Soviet problem from northern Japan and later China, Vietnam and parts of the Indian Ocean from the Philippines.
Without going into specifics, I'll say that their methods of checking someone out were very thorough. They didn't bother with polygraphs because they know as well as anyone how unreliable they are. But a highschool friend's dad happened to be an investigator who did part of my background check and the amount of crap they dug up was astounding. Some of it was stuff that I didn't know about myself before then.
Looking back, I'm almost surprised that I got the TS/SCI clearance based on their criteria (special compartmented intelligence is only one step below 'eyes only' and strictly 'need to know'). But nearly all of us took our work and the need to keep secrets very seriously. 'Gig talk' in a bar would cost you a round.
The phone system almost never dies, while power outages are common here in Key West. If I'm watching TV when the power goes out, I just go and reload slashdot until cable comes back up.
That's good for two hours, minimum.
Yep, I do a lot of SOHO network setups for fun and profit. In fact I have such a job lined up tomorrow morning. There's no way I'm going to recommend / install something like that. It could be pretty hard on the reputation a self employed geek like myself. My clients trust me for good reasons and I'm not letting Belkin screw that up.
So I sent an email to the address on their front page (kannynmc@belkin.com) and told them exactly that. Of course, it was sent from my semi-disposable yahoo account. Somewhat cowardly, no doubt, but they're sure not getting my real address.
Reading directly from my bill:
Federal Universal Service Fund Fee - $1.29
Federal Tax - $0.79
State Communications Tax (Florida) - $0.62
Local Communications Tax (Florida) - $0.63
That's it. I'm no fan of huge monopolistic companies, but a deal is a deal.
My local telco (Bellsouth) offers unlimited long distance to all 50 states for $24.99 a month. I don't use long distance much, but my roommate does, and he was paying upwards of $85 / month with our previous ATT service.
I guess that means that pi really are squared.
WinModems, WinPrinters and now WinFS.
The first two were such huge innovations I just can't wait for the next one.
Being born in 1957, I watched the industry switch from vinyl (45's, 33's and 78's), to reel-to-reel, to eight-tracks (argghh), to cassettes, and now CD's and DVD's. They resisted every one of these changes to varying degrees. But they all happened anyway. 'Why?', you ask. Well, I would say that sound quality, durability and portability got better and even though the price remained relatively stable, you were getting more bang-per-buck.
So I think that the point of the article is that times and technologies are changing. Is the RIAA going to wake up and or not? They need to offer services such as these. If it's affordable and easy to use it will make money.
Unlike in the past, there now exists a near-zero cost distribution medium; namely the internet/WWWW. Napster showed that the distribution was doable and iTunes shows that it can be profitable (even with a miniscule user base that excludes all Windows and *nix users).
That's one of the first things I thought of and then realized that there are two important differences.
1) It was designed from the ground up to run on Linux. Possibly the biggest problem that 'linmodem' driver developers had was getting specs from manufacturers. Obviously that's not an issue here.
2) When winmodems first appeared in the early Pentium days, resources were scarce. Running one on a desktop system that had lots of other things needing those same resorces was a problem. Now even most low end PCs have power to spare. The boxes used in their test were Proliant servers that were dedicated to the task. I don't see that as a bottleneck.
And I think most of us could guess where the good docotor was positioned at that moment.
I'd have to agree with about 90% of this parent.
Ironically, the clunkiness of KDE and the freedom to configure things as I wanted them in GNOME were my main reasons to switch from Suse to Redhat back when GNOME was still in beta and enlightenment was its default WM. Fortunately, sawmill (now known as sawfish) appeared shortly thereafter and things really started to look up. By the time that gnome-1.4 arrived, all I was interested in was updates. In my opinion, they had found the right combination of useability and configurability. Several distros later, GNOME is still my DE of choice but it is much harder to configure. The peak was gnomecc and the nadir is the horribly fragmented gnome-control-center.
Previously, recent Windows users who wanted to feel comfortable could run KDE and those who wanted more control could choose GNOME. That is no longer the case. At this point, there are pathetically few reasons for me to stick with GNOME but there are far fewer reasons to switch to KDE. Don't take this as a flame against KDE, I just don't like it. If you do then so be it.
The good news is that Gentoo's portage system provides for slotted packages so I still have the 1.4 libs available to use with apps that need them without breaking 2.x stuff.
So, what's my dream? Maybe a fork of gnome-1.4.4 with more useability and original confifurability built in and the original ideals intact. Well, we can all dream, can't we?
Last thing first, yeah I suppose devfs has been in the kernel for a while (I was an early adopter, since a patch was required) but it has been and still is labeled as EXPERIMENTAL. Since the developer insisted on keeping such tight control of it and resisted outside input I don't think that it progressed as it should have. Hence, udev which may prove to be a better solution. IMHO, devfs was so far superior to the previous solution that it encouraged development of something even better. I guess we'll see.
I have long been patching my kernels with i2c and lm_sensors, usually with CVS though sometimes with the latest releases if problems popped up, which were usually due to other patches and the order in which they were applied. It's all in the kernel now and no patches are needed. So now a slightly different set of modules need to be loaded. For 2.4.x kernels it is:
i2c-dev
i2c-amd756
w83781d
i2c-isa
i2c-proc
And for 2.6 it is:
i2c-core
i2c-dev
i2c-amd756
w83781d
i2c-isa
i2c-proc
Of course that's for my hardware and yours will probably be different. The 'sensors -s' command no longer needs to be run and no fiddling is required with sensor divs to get the temps and fan rpms to read correctly.
That is one of two items that he missed in the article. Indeed, in the 2.4.x kernels if you used devfs you did not need to enable /dev/pts file system support but you do with 2.6. Interestingly, now that devfs is officially in the kernel they are thinking of replacing it with udev.
Also, it is not mentioned that you need to create the /sys directory. It apparently has something to do with sysfs which I don't quite understand yet, but it was necessary to get all my sensors reading correctly.
Yeah, that's why I used my disposable yahoo email address. Isn't that's what they are for?
I have built two splashproof computers for marine surveying on small boats. Pelican cases are what I used. You only need to seal the one or two through-case holes that you will need to run your wires.
I would post a link to some pics, but my home server can't handle the Slashdot effect.
First, you must take into account the mindset of the era. It was considered to be a real possibility that nukes would be flying around in abundance and WWII was fresh in the minds of most everyone. Having been born in the year that this article covers, I am old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis and doing 'duck and cover' drills (what a joke) in elementary school.
Western culture in general and American culture in particular doesn't encourage suicide bombers or kamikazes. The main point being that they had a chance, however slim, to survive. The pilots were well aware of this fact according to their personal accounts. Closing one eye, painting the tail white and the lob maneuver itself were all designed to increase the likleyhood of the pilot coming home.
It seems pretty ridiculous now, but back then it was looked upon as a last ditch 'all or nothing' gamble.
They might group you with others who prefer clean underwear. Then again, maybe not.
I work for the outfit that is doing this survey and a couple others here in the keys plus one each in Portugal and Morocco (RPM, not Mel Fisher's). Putting aside the overseas projects, since that involves several more layers of bureaucracy, and not knowing the laws covering the Hudson, I can only give you an idea of what happens here.
Just about anything inside the reef is within the Floida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS), so we have to pull a permit from them as well as from NOAA. FKNMS is a joint state / federal authority and NOAA of course is federal. In some areas we are allowed to do non-invasive surveys, such as towing magnetometers, a sidescan sonar or a sub-bottom profiler. Any excavation, which is done scientifically and with respect for the site, requires a separate permit. All data collected, whether from towed surveys or excavation must be shared with the permitting agency but is otherwise proprietary.
Hey, it's expensive to do this kind of work and there are plenty of treasure hunters that would love to get a hold of some of our "numbers". But as the article points out, those wrecks are mostly the workaday variety and probably of little commercial value. I think they are doing the right thing by holding back until the historically significant sites can be identified and protected even if the Hudson is not exactly a diving hot spot.
The only time my DSL provider (Bellsouth) has had to send a tech out was to replace my fried Alcatel 1000 about a year and a half ago. I've handled my own installations of dialup and DSL with them for the last 4 years. They are quite Linux friendly though they do not support it.
He was prepared to do a normal windows installation when I showed him my router and firewall setup. We plugged in a couple cables and bang, it was running. He was very happy to not have to deal with all the extra crap. "Wow, that's Linux? Cool.", he said. Probably his easiest call ever, total 15 minutes 10 of them me showning him how feature-rich Linux is.
It anti-aliases your GNOME widget fonts and there is a separate patch for Mozilla (good up to 0.9.6), which works nicely with Galeon, BTW.
Check it out.