Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Low-power, high-capacity (Score 1) 609

Cheap solution: - Buy an atom-based motherboard with SATA and PCI slots (Since it's a home server, you probably won't need a beefier CPU.) - Put SATA cards in said PCI slots - Put it in a huge case, invest in hard disks You can easily get a NAS with six SATA drives that will run at less than 200 watts (you can save a lot there if you have drives spin-down while idle, but I'm told this reduces their lifetime.) I have a similar machine set up in my closet serving up 2TB of space to my network. It costs about $5/month in energy to keep it on 24/7.

Comment Try your local county (Score 1) 366

You might check in with your local county. A few weeks ago, I heard about the IT department in my county making some big changes in the way their network is run, so I volunteered to help out. It was about half physical moving and organizing of equipment and half technical work. IT isn't actually my field, but I knew enough of it to be a help rather than a hindrance. It may be the case that your county doesn't need your help with IT, but they're certain to have something with which you can help out.

Comment Re:Offer the Ebook for free. (Score 1) 987

You're comparing apples to oranges here. The submitter of the story is talking about a ten year old textbook in computer science. You, on the other hand, are talking about fiction. Updates to textbooks usually* contain new and useful information that makes them better choices than old versions. Slight changes to a fictional story tend to add no value whatsoever. The best advice that I can give the author is to come out with a new and up-to-date edition of his book. That and try to be competitive; as it stands, I'd rather get MacKay's e-book on the same subject since it's both free and more current.

Comment Re:Open source ? (Score 1) 201

You seem to be confused as to what I was referring to with "the textbooks", I should have clarified. "the textbooks" in this case refer to the textbooks being written for this program, not any textbook you can pick up off of the shelf. The point that I was making is that this project can correctly be called open source if both the compiled document and the LaTeX code are released to the public. If they are indeed making the textbook freely available, it would seem logical to also release the source of the book. I'm not saying that is exactly what will happen, or even close to it, but in this case it would not be inappropriate to apply the open source label.

Comment Re:Open source ? (Score 1) 201

The only problem with what you say is that the textbooks that are currently published do not have their LaTeX source published for free for anyone to change. This is what makes them "closed source" textbooks. Specifically, it's your second bullet point that has a problem. You left out the bit where the source (LaTeX) is also made freely available to anyone who wants it.

Comment Re:Webmin (Score 3, Interesting) 209

I have to second this. Webmin has everything you ask for and then some. If you have an update script on each machine, you could easily update all of your machines at once with the cluster management tools. I know it works well with APT (having used it myself), but I can't speak for any of the other package managers. In the worst case, it's still easy to push an update command to the non-apt machines through the Webmin cluster tools.

Comment Re:Swedish does not derive from Latin (Score 5, Insightful) 88

English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.) Swedish and English actually come from the same language family (Germanic) and share a large number of words (whether they share more than English shares with Latin is something that I don't know.) By the hypothesis you mentioned, the concept of habeus corpus is not something that English speakers should be able to conceptualize either.

Comment Secure? (Score 3, Insightful) 54

It doesn't seem like such a good idea to integrate an RFID reader into the tablet as a security device. Any hospital that can afford equipment like this will probably have tons of people walking down the hall with RFIDs that can grant access to these things. The only way that this could really add to the security is if it's part of some multiple authentication system (i.e. require two methods of authentication to log in out of three, but even that sounds like a bad idea.)

There was also no mention of any encryption of the medical records stored on these things. I definitely wouldn't trust Windows permissions to keep the records on these safe. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great step toward making hospitals more efficient, but they need to be secure or they'll just be a liability.

Slashdot Top Deals

"I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest." -- Alexandre Dumas (fils)

Working...