I'll seventeenth the GQ-4X. I have a bunch of adapters, some soldering tongs, and the like for reverse engineering and reprogramming chips. It's been a great programmer, works fine under virtualization (I use it on a mac, using a windows guest VM, inside of VMWare Fusion. It does not work to share this with a guest under Virtualbox, but Virtualbox is crap for USB support).

I grabbed mine from mcumall also. It's been a very reliable (with one exception) programmer.

My only problem with mcumall's parts was one of their PLCC32 adapters was laid out wrong. It promised to work with a particular Atmel chip, but had one of the address lines swapped with the 'read' strobe, which made for very confusing output until a friend exhibited the intelligence to trace the adapter out. My buddy cut the trace on the board and blue-wired the adapter, since then it has worked fine.

This is what "I wonder if...," means. A request for all parts of the source to which an owner of the product is entitled would tell for sure.

According to Digital Bond, Beresford's PLC runs Linux. Cue the GPL requests for Siemen's source code now (I wonder if the backdoor username and password are hard-coded into a GPL's utility :)).

Disclosure: I work for Digital Bond.

Reid

You could probably configure it to send the files to the bitbucket, sure. A lot of times an open file server would be used to host malicious software (so some exploit says to grab its payload from ftp://yourftpserver/uploadedfile.exe). In thise case the files would be interesting for a honeypot to capture, so that they could be analyzed to see what the malicious payload is doing.

Dionaea has a nice FTP honeypot. It will even let bad guys (or bad automated programs) upload files. It's available here [carnivore.it].

Be careful, of course. You want to be safe in case these attacks are automated tools doing something icky like uploading kiddie porn or illegal music to your honeypot...(I'm not sure which would be worse).

I learned Linux by installing it on my desktop and forcing myself to run it as my primary OS. What taught me the most? When things went wrong.

I recommend coming up with ways to break the computer wherein fixing it will cause learning. Start by assigning the use of a utility or system service that is actually configured incorrectly and isn't running. This teaches things like: run the program from the command-line to see what it is outputting to stdout, look at log files, edit configuration text files. Make things harder by breaking boot services, changing the xserver configuration so that it starts as a command-line, etc. Finish by breaking grub, or deleting /etc/passwd and forcing them to boot into single-user mode to fix things.

Troubleshooting a computer is the best way to learn...

I recommend that anyone interested in the issue of 'subjective reality' read Farhad Manjoo (of Slate Magazine)'s "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society". It's quite a fascinating look at the issue of our new media landscape...

What upsets me the most is that if I legally purchase windows for my computer I am limited on how much I can upgrade

Sadly you didn't purchase windows, you licensed it. Welcome to the world: intellectual property gets all the protection that physical property gets, with none of the 'disadvantages' (ability to loan, etc).

It's that time again. Before anyone comments on GPL lifting, please take the GPL quiz:

The GPL Quiz

Anyone who gets a perfect score may comment in this thread, all others please keep uninformed conclusions out.

A prototype of Orion did get built in San Diego. The test flight was conducted from Point Loma (now the site of Space and Naval Warfare System Center's model ship-testing pool) using conventional explosives with a delivery tube. By all measures it was successful. Freeman Dyson then worked out the engineering needed for the pusher plate and delivery mechanism for the full nuclear-weapon version. I think there's quite a bit on this in John McPhee's excellent book, _The Curve of Binding Energy_.

Orion always bothered me because it seemed almost biblical (people ascending to the heavens, leaving behind a scorched earth). It would make a pretty good way to get a lot of stuff off the planet if something dire were about to happen -- meteor impact, decay of orbit, or something.

Anyway, I used to know where pictures of the test flight were, but I can't seem to find them at the moment :(. Perhaps some smarter googler than myself can point us in the right direction...

Reid

I'm an embedded systems developer. My flashes are all NAND and NOR.

The summarizer says:

But a lot of open source projects seem to treat the press as an annoyance...

And the press-person says:

'...it generally does mean, "Drop everything and answer us now." If the journalist doesn't give you a deadline ("I need to know by 2pm"), it's okay to ask how long you can take to reach the right developer in Poland, but err on the side of "emergency response." It's unreasonable, I know, but so are our deadlines.'

Wow, I can't imagine why volunteer developers consider the press an annoyance. Maybe the press should cut back on the 30-second deadline and take some time to actually get facts, instead of getting something out the door now, even if it isn't right. I think that journalists with this attitude are probably in the wrong business -- you should be doing research and finding the story, not demanding that a non-storyteller drops what they're doing to give you the story on a silver platter. Software only appears to move quickly...in reality, businesses are slow to adopt new software these days. Taking the time to do thorough research on an open source project will not kill the press, just like waiting a few weeks for a story on a software project will not kill the software project.

Me, I would prefer to read the right story than the first story. I wish that the press' job to make sure that the right story is the first story...but that shall continue to be my wish.

Not only that, but it would probably save money. I've often wondered what happens behind the scenes with bills...who writes the actual words? The politicians or their lawyers? And how do they deal with concurrency/locking issues (the potential money-saving part here for using some kind of RCS that can do merges nicely)?

RedHat's satellite server has some pretty options for this, if you dig deeply enough.

RHSS lets you create configuration files to deploy to all of your machines. It lets you use macros in deployed configuration files, and you can use server-specific variables (they call them Keys iirc) inside of the configuration files to be deployed on remote servers. For example, you create a generic firewall configuration with a macro block that queries the variable SMBALLOWED. If the value is set, it includes an accept rule for the smb ports. Otherwise, those lines aren't included in the deployed config. Every server that you deploy that you expect to run an SMB server on, you set the local server variable SMBALLOWED=1. Satellite server can also be set up to push config files via XMPP (every server on your network stays connected to the satellite via xmpp, the satellite issues commands like 'update blah_config' to the managed server, and the managed server retrieves the latest version of the config file from the satellite server).

Satellite is pretty darned fancy, but also was pretty buggy back when I used it. Good luck!

Reid

This Slashdot article is full of simplistic drivel designed to provoke ideologically based knee-jerk responses instead of any kind of reasoned debate.

You must be new here...

The report that this guy bases his entire premise on is a report that begs the reader specifically not to draw any conclusions yet. It simply indicates an anomaly of airspeed indicator readings. We don't know yet what caused the crash, and this schmuck drawing conclusions already just says that he deserves to be thrown in the clink by the blog police.

As for the counter-argument, just look at the cockpit flight recorder of the Buffalo plane that crashed last winter. The pilots were talking about how they never flew in snow and that snow and icing kind of freaked them out. And they were flying in the northeast. In winter. The stall indicator lit up, and so the pilots cut the throttle. 'Battle-hardened', right? Try tired and/or poorly trained.