Ready the electromagnets!

The muggles have discovered magic. Cower in fear!

It looked good on paper.

There goes the planet.

I plan on using the PowerMax+
http://www.homesecuritystore.com/p-755-visonic-powermax-powermax-plus-wireless-home-security-system.aspx

And the GSM unit to be able to control the system via touch-tones and SMS. The system is highly scalable and configurable; so you can expand the system as your budget allows.
http://www.homesecuritystore.com/p-755-visonic-powermax-powermax-plus-wireless-home-security-system.aspx

Maybe this hack can be used to improve book scanning.

Have they tried overclocking?

Sounds like a plot for a Disney|PIXAR movie. WALL-E meets Sleeping Beauty?

What does this have to do with your rights online?

Before they can even think about making their web sites accessible for those with disabilities, they need to make the sites accessible for the general public. Nearly every time I have needed to find some information at the state level, I've had to sort through pages of outdated info, buried 4 or more links deep. I can only imagine what this process is like through a screen reader or other adaptive technology.

To make matters worse, the bank demo was using IE6.

Thank you for your detailed response. Insight like this is exactly why I posted to ask /. If I had any mod points left, I'd mod the parent up.

Upon further investigation, I discovered http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf Which states, in part:

"MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as Internet Broadcast AVC Video) during the next License term from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2015. Products and services other than Internet Broadcast AVC Video continue to be royalty-bearing, and royalties to apply during the next term will be announced before the end of 2010."

Therefore, the statement in the grandparent comment is incorrect.

I will make my videos free to end users, so at this time I will not need to pay any fees. However, if I had planned on charging for access to the videos, I may have gotten into some trouble if I had not read your comment. Thank you.

Reverse psychology works very well!

There are four modern distros that I can recommend for someone in your situation.

For servers: Although these distros can be used for workstations, they are super stable (running only mature versions of software) and make great server OSes:

CentOS - This distro is designed for use in enterprise situations. It's very useful if you plan on, or think you may work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the future.

http://centos.org/ http://www.centos.org/docs/5/

Debian - A stable distro that uses only free http://www.debian.org/intro/free software out of the box. There is also a "testing" version of Debian that you can use if you like the way Debian works, but want to use newer software. See http://www.debian.org/releases/

Which one should you use? That depends on which workstation distro you want to use, as I will explain below.


Workstation distros: These distros Are designed mainly for workstation use and are less stable (Less mature, but still very usable) than the distros above.

Fedora: Uses the cutting edge of open source software to provide a super modern workstation distro. It has the best hardware support of any Linux distro I have seen. Great environment for developing Linux software as well.

http://fedoraproject.org/ http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/index.html

Ubuntu: I have mixed feelings about Ubuntu. It is based on Debian. It is designed to make Linux easy to use for the average computer user. As such, it makes a great workstation distro. Every two releases they have what's called a long term support release. Which is supposed to be more stable than a standard Ubuntu release. However, the Ubuntu team seems to be more focused on usability and eye-candy than stability and hardware support. Even when using only LTS releases, I always seem to find a few nasty regressions or memory leaks and such. Because of this, I would only recommend it to those who are VERY accustomed to Windows or Mac OS and want as little change as possible. IMHO it is not suitable for medium to large size businesses.

http://www.ubuntu.com/ https://help.ubuntu.com/

Because Ubuntu is based on Debian, it uses the same package management system (apt & deb). So if you use ubuntu for your workstations, you should use Ubuntu server or Debian for your server OS.

The same rule applies for Fedora and CentOS. It uses a different package management system (yum&rpm).

There is also another distro that uses RPM & yum called OpenSUSE, but I don't have much experience with it. http://www.opensuse.org/en/

Some books to read if you go the Ubuntu/Debian route:

https://www.amazon.com/Official-Ubuntu-Book-Benjamin-Mako/dp/0137081308/ http://apress.com/book/view/1590598202

And for CentOS/Fedora: http://apress.com/book/view/1430219645

And a very good book on many Linux distros: http://apress.com/book/view/1430219122

Choosing a distro is a bit like choosing a car; you need to find the best one to fit for your needs. Try all of these distros for a wile, read the documentation, install them, use them as if they were running on your production systems. Then make a choice.