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Australian AvP Ban Reversed 71

Posted by Soulskill from the people-have-spoken dept.
Earlier this month, we discussed news that Sega's new Aliens vs. Predator video game had been refused classification in Australia, effectively banning it. After a scathing response from the developer saying they wouldn't censor the game, and later news that the classification scheme may be updated to include an R18+ rating, it now seems that the Classification Board has seen fit to give the game a green light after all. Sega's Darren Macbeth told Kotaku, "We are particularly proud that the game will be released in its original entirety, with no content altered or removed whatsoever. This is a big win for Australian gamers. We applaud the Classification Review Board on making a decision that clearly considers the context of the game, and is in line with the modern expectations of reasonable Australians."
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Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-feed dept.
When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.
Media

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

Posted by timothy from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.
plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
Debian

FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux 206

Posted by Soulskill from the changing-horses dept.
dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."

Comment Re:OpsView (Score 1) 342

by vevel (#28629585) Attached to: What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System?
I would agree with your assessment on Opsview http://opsview.org/ . It is working well for me so far. I recently built did a nearly painless build (via apt-get install blah) of it on a Debian box, and they also have a VM available.
I'm not sure why the NMIS / MRTG combo doesn't do the trick for your trending / graphing needs -- I've used plain old NMIS http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/ (which opsview includes) to do a lot of the things I have done in the past with Cacti. If there's other stuff you're getting out of cacti these days, I'd be interested in hearing that. These are all basically frontends to RRDtool, if memory serves.

Opsview has a clean (IMO) interface (no goofy Windows-like dropdown like groundworks), and does monitoring (agentless or agent-ful/agenty), trending, psuedo-useful but mgmt-pleasing network visualization (via nagviz), alerting, custom hoopla, etc..

My additional need has been configuration management for network devices, which is where RANCID http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/ comes in. Rancid also allows a lot of nice (expect-based) mass-configuration of network devices (e.g., changing snmp passwords globally). Command-line required. There is also a (somewhat weak) 'looking-glass' plugin that comes with NMIS (and I think opsview) so that you could tie in viewing of RANCID configs from the same NMIS/opsview dashboard.

My only complaint with opsview at the moment is that the integration with MRTG and NMIS isn't very tight. You just click over to their dashboards. On the plus side, device/host configuration is shared, which is fantastic. (Also, you don't have to install them separately, which is actually a pretty big win.) Another good thing -- if you're talking 5000 devices, agents and distributed monitoring are there for you.

Comment Wikipedia chart (from hell?) and reading rec (Score 1) 342

by vevel (#28629313) Attached to: What Would You Want In a Large-Scale Monitoring System?
This sounds like the perfect opportunity to harness the power of app partisans to fix the wikipedia article comparing monitoring software. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_monitoring_systems . Some good info there. And probably bad info. But certainly has a good list of applications. Also, if you like nagios (and he seems to me to be fair to a lot of packages, including ossim), you might check out some of David Josephsen's articles (or Nagios book), etc.. His site is http://www.skeptech.org/ . A decent design article is here -- Best Practices for Designing a Nagios Monitoring System -- http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.aspx?p=705685 .
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Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel 717

Posted by samzenpus from the let-civilization-collapse-initiative dept.
To save money, more than 20 Michigan counties have decided to turn deteriorating paved roads back to gravel. Montcalm County estimates that repaving a road costs more than $100,000 a mile. Grinding the same mile of road up and turning it into gravel costs $10,000. At least 50 miles of road have been reverted to gravel in Michigan the past three years. I can't wait until we revert back to whale oil lighting and can finally be rid of this electricity fad.

Comment Re:Terducken power wafers (Score 1) 299

by vevel (#25199717) Attached to: New Solar Cell Sets World Efficiency Record
Well, if you do decide to subscribe to my conspiracy theories, you can order a free, no-risk trial at any time.

Alternately, a different finance-related conspiracy theory can be found here: http://abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread393789/pg1 and here: http://finance.google.com/group/google.finance.983582/browse_thread/thread/aad550b590f931bf .

Of course, massively bogus, though entertaining, especially if you liked (or liked some of the background sources of) the Da Vinci Code.

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