I was wondering how Cacti relates to Nagios. Do the both do the same job or compliment one-another? In four words the post you're complaining about answered that question nicely.

I am a longtime user of cacti, and dealt with MRTG before then. Nagios is designed for simple on-off monitoring. It does this very well. If you need pager rotation schedules, nagios is prolly your best bet. I like wowing the executives with pretty color graphs, and that is a job for Cacti. You can visually see the impact on the system of jobs running on your MySQL servers. You can see when script kiddies attack your Apache hosts and then get blocked by your scripts. And it looks great printed full-page on the new color laser printer you should be taking advantage of. Unless you need something expressly wacky, or a difinitive pager rotation, cacti and related modules (thold) can monitor your whole computing environment, and page you when there are problems. I've had trouble handling cloud management, mostly due to new machines spawning, and old machines dying. I'm sure others have had similar issues. It is a pain to run scripts to add new hosts, and manage removing hosts that have been terminated.

You were doing great up until that "it works on everything" part. Plenty of folks have pulled their hair out with Myth in the past and you make it sound like a breeze. Look at the numbers of folks posting here that have given up on it and you can plainly see it's far from easy. I for one hope that this version is VERY good but please, the rah rah it works great stuff can be saved - most of us know better having tried it already.

In my experience, it does work on every PC I've run it on. It even works on my OSX work laptop.

I have had trouble getting crappy hardware to work, but I can hardly blame MythTV. Once it works, it just keeps working. I think some people may have a hard time figuring out how to install drivers and getting their machine to work in the first place. This is when I switched from Centos over to KnoppMyth. Installed, detected my new PVR-150, and worked until successive upgrades.

Now I have three and a half computers dedicated to MythTV. One is a recording-only host that connects to the CableTV HDHomerun. One was driving my analog projector until the projector power supply went -- it recorded from the Antenna HDHomerun. Then I have another one with my old PVR-150, which also drives the old TV downstairs. The other half is the master backend and MySQL database with no tuner. I am using Centos, and the atrpms yum repositories.

I just did a channel-scan after my upgrade, and I seem to have more channels, and also the audio channels from my sub-basic Comcast cable feed. I think I get more enjoyment out of harvesting television shows than I do by watching them. Think Captain Kirk's head on a 6-foot screen.

I for one welcome our MythTV .22 Overlords!

I've been using MythTV for a bunch of years now, and I find it an absolute blast. It works on every PC I can find, and even on my work OSX laptop, which still lets me watch The It's Alive Show while I'm hacking away. It even eats the commercials, and does a better job with digital television signals. I can't wait for multirec support for my HDHomeRun.

If you haven't tried MythTV recently, check it out again.

Is it possible that these mafia people are stupid? Imagine we can reprocess nuclear waste, in many of the ways that slashdotters will include below. Now this nuclear waste conveniently stored underwater, is fuel that we can use to power our toys with. This is assuming that there wasn't any damage to the containers, and a big cleanup isn't required. Hopefully, when the world comes to its senses, and makes better use of its resources, we won't have these kinds of problems. (It always drives me crazy that there are organizations that will burn or throw away or sequester potentially useful materials. Sure mercury is poisonous. Extract it from your waste, and sell it to someone that needs it. The same with CO2, and even radon. I wonder about gold production from mining landfills.)

...or beta blockers or digitalis or any commonly prescribed drug...

Boy do I wish they gave out digitalis as a commonly prescribed drug. And cyanide.

no filesystem, just raw writes and reads to that card. and no I don't need JFFS to wear level it, SD cards have that built into their hardware.

You still have an operating system, which interfaces with the hardware, and tells it how to write. You must be working with tiny specialized robots.

When you do something like this, you'll realize that we do in fact need more of a modular operating system and environment to work with in order to do some of the larger tasks. And you'll still need logs from each device.

Linux shits all over the chests and faces of the MS-loving ignorami and fucks their wives and sisters.

So is that like a uh... Cleaveland Steamer?

Honestly, most robotics does not need ANY OS. I dont need my super Roomba 40000 to have a filesystem and keep detailed records.

You either don't work with robots -- or don't need logs. How do you know when your robot is working properly if you don't have any logs? In any but the smallest systems, you need logs of some sort, even if it is just a there-was-an-error flag.

I worked for a robot company recently, and while they did collect logs, they didn't collect all of the logs, which made it hard to debug certain things. I suggested and put together something as simple as syslog, and an NFS share to receive proprietary binary logs, and a method of moving them into a tarball per run. This is now part of all of their robotic systems because they can now find out *why* something isn't working right.

Doomsday Devices come in all shapes and sizes. Like this paper mache cone.

What does Rupert Murdoch, of all people, know about Quality Journalism?

Who cares? He's got lots of money, and he can (try) to do whatever he wants.

Rupert Merdoch

I for one welcome our human brain on a microchip overlords. My wife is a grad student in anatomy neuroscience. Her work is like figuring out what a computer system does by analyzing the components inside one of many chips. We still have no idea how the brain works, where consciousness comes from. I hope projects like this (simulations, modeling, wild crazy speculative experiments) increase our understanding of how it works.

I've experimented with similar imaging, though I was just trying to take a picture of anything at all. I used a carboard box wrapped in aluminum tape, with a pinhole made from a piece of soda can. I used the scanner to measure the hole, and counted the pixels. I got close at least. I was using LED scanners, and wasn't able to find any cheap USB scanners which used a CCD and mirror -- the LED scanners have a scanning element the entire width of the scanner, and the construction prevents the light from being received from the pinhole. Also, there isn't much gain that can be applied to these kinds of things. I expected to take many images, and add them together. I used SANE and scanbuttond.

Excellent! I wonder if there's any evidence of UFOs. Glad they were able to grab the images off the tape, and I look forward to looking at it, and meeting our new alien overlords.

From the perspective of a GNU/Linux person, there seems to be less innovation, and more chairs. Less innovation in that we've not had much that was new since Gates left. Yes there is Vista and xbox and zune stuff, but what is new about these things? Nothing. I think Balmer throws chairs.