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Here's a photo of my H120 (same form factor as the H320, unless I'm mistaken) next to a Hitachi laptop hard drive. Unfortunately, the H120 is too small (especially in width) to contain the drive. It's a shame, too, because I love my H120 so much I don't know what I'd do if the drive failed and I couldn't replace it.

(I even wrote about my Soekris/m0n0wall box on my website recently).

I've been trying to figure out a good solution to this question myself, and I think I'm just going to have to make one I like. It's hard to find something someone else has programmed that suits your own needs for such a personalized usage, in my opinion.

What I've planned out is something that would have a calendar, address book, to-do list, misc storage, etc. Problem is, I don't want to have to do all the categorizing myself. So I figured, so long as I enter appointments in a predictable way (e.g. LL1: Date LL2: Time LL3: Place LL4: Comment) I can make the computer work out what kind of information it is. Same with the other types. I can even add simple stuff like URL's I want to remember. Then, I can just enter in a generic text-area any information, and have the machine do the categorization and organizing. Have it recognize dates and give me a timeline for my day, week, month, etc. Have it recognize contacts and store them in my addressbook. Etc.

What I think could make this really nice, though, would be something you see a lot of in Wikis (and some neat ideas like infocalypse)--the ability to link elements together with some sort of simple syntax, e.g. [link]. Better yet, have the machine link it.

The point is that it isn't just the information, but the relationships it makes, that are important. If I have an appointment for a certain job, I might want a list of "relevant links" next to it, such as the contact information of the people involved, any notes I've made in relation to that job, and so forth. I'm not sure how to do this, exactly, by automation (keywords are limited but may work, making me do it by hand defeats the purpose; I'm far too lazy to do anything by hand) but I probably won't actually start coding this for a long time anyway, so I suppose I have time to think. Any suggestions?

I haven't downloaded it yet; my only currently running Linux machine uses 2.4.21-ac4 and that's not likely to change for a while.

I just happened to click on the links in the story and noticed that kernel.org wasn't responding as fast as it normally does.

Before this, I used to host a medium-traffic database-driven website on an old Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM running -- get this -- Windows 2000 Server. And it never blinked either (except when I got Slashdotted once; that really hurt).

Anyway, in an article about a great low-overhead super efficient webserver like Boa, I'd really like to see benchmarks on systems that are actually low-end, as opposed to systems that are low-end if your other server is a quad Xeon with 16 gigs of RAM.

Er, take a look at these uptime stats and count the number of Windows systems with uptimes over a year. I see three, and one of those has been up over two years. It really bugs me when slashbots spout off about Windows' unreliability when a Windows server is really every bit as reliable as the sysadmin in charge of it.

If you'd like a simple Windows app to download and install the latest nightly build of Mozilla or Phoenix with just a few button clicks, check out MozUpdate.

I want one, just to have a home server that is not x86, is this board really for real???

Depending on what type of server and how heavy of use it's going to be getting, then why bother with a $600 motherboard that you just have to buy more parts for anyways? If you're willing to do a little messing around, just get an old PowerMac for cheap (make sure it's at least a 2nd generation PowerMac as anything before doesn't have PCI, and try to avoid those with the 601 processor, especially the 7200.)

Although it's not quite the same thing that you want to use it for, my router is a PowerMac 7600/132 (604 processor at 132MHz, 92MB of RAM) which was purchased for ~30 USD (+ shipping). As of this post it's been running for 32 days, 7 hours and 24 minutes without any sort of problems.

Only possible problems are the hardware quirks, but NetBSD has a good model support page detailing most of them for anyone who wishes to run any *nix, and the fact that if there isn't enough storage space then you may have to pay a bit for it depending on whether or not the drives are SCSI or IDE. But, with PPC you tend to pay a bit more for the hardware anyways...

Either way, PenguinPPC is a good place to check out info on Linux on the PPC architecture. (And for old Mac owners, MkLinux is a good place to check for solutions to problems that may be missing from the documentation of your chosen distro (*cough*Debian*cough*) )

Unless you've got a site like Slashdot, I strongly recommend hosting off your own DSL line. It's extremely cheap (even free if you were already paying for the line anyway), and it's so much less troublesome than dealing with a hosting company.

Unless you've got a site like Slashdot, I strongly recommend hosting off your own DSL line. It's extremely cheap (even free if you were already paying for the line anyway), and it's so much less troublesome than dealing with a hosting company.

Uptime is a measure of how long a system has been running without a reboot. Uptime generally requires stability, assuming the machine in question is actually doing something. But I could boot up a fresh, clean install of Windows 95 and (after patching the 49.7 day registry uptime counter bug) let it sit in a corner doing nothing, and the damn thing would probably keep running till the next Ice Age.

Stability, on the other hand, is a measure of many things. Mostly it is a measure of how well an operating system responds to instability in software. Linux is incredibly good at this; when a program on Linux crashes or has a problem, the OS steps over it and keeps right on going. Windows has been notoriously bad at this, until Windows 2000 and XP.

Now, if you re-read my message, you'll notice that nowhere did I claim that I thought Windows XP was more stable than Linux. I merely claimed that it was more stable than previous versions of Windows. Furthermore, since Windows XP, as you said, has been out for about a month now, it would be impossible (and incredibly stupid) to rate its stability by comparing the uptime of a Windows system with that of a Linux system.

To illustrate my point (that uptime does not always equal stability), back when uptimes.net was running full force, I achieved an uptime of about 155 days from a beta version of Windows 2000 running on a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM, serving up lots of dynamic webpages at wonko.com. In the end, I had to turn the machine off because I moved.

Now, the only reason I achieved that incredible uptime with a beta OS running on inferior hardware was that it wasn't doing a whole lot. It was just running IIS and MSSQL Server, and that was about it. Now, if I had been serving Slashdot off that box, it probably wouldn't have lasted a week. Thus, we see that uptime != stability.

I remember an interview with Hemos and CmdrTaco where they admitted to messing with someone's karma who was trying to sell their Slashdot account on eBay. Cmdr's opinion was (at the time of the interview that is) that karma doesn't matter, that it's not THAT important.

I remember reading that... I believe it was a log of an IRC chat. Can you post a link to it? I don't remember where it was. I don't think it was an article on Slashdot.

If I remember correctly, the owner of the account "FascDot Killed My Pr" was selling his account on eBay because he didn't want to post on Slashdot anymore, and given the account's high karma (above the karma cap) and low user number, he considered it marketable. He advertised it by continuing to post regularly, but with "Bid on me! (Serious offers only)" as his signature with a link to the auction page on eBay.

Well, CmdrTaco found out, and, right at the exact minute the auction ended (and the winning bidder was chosen), he reset the account's karma to zero. When questioned about it in the IRC chat you mentioned, his justification for his action was, "Virtual property is stupid."

I do remember Taco and co. talking about people trying to sell their EverQuest accounts on eBay last spring on Geeks In Space. I don't remember exactly what they were saying, but I think basically they were making fun of the idea.

Anyway, it's quite clear that for better or for worse, karma has become a sort of pissing game that has affected a lot of people. Heck, I'm kind of annoyed that I only had about +35 karma when the karma cap was put in place. I think it would have been cool to have "excessive karma", even if only for a short time.

I've been a Slashdot reader since early 1999, and I got my account in January 2000. I don't remember too well, but checking the archives suggests that CmdrTaco and co. used to regularly participate in the discussions and post news stories about various changes and amendments to the Slashdot rules. These days, of course, they don't. Today, Taco seems more like an enigmatic figure behind the curtain, secretly manipulating Slashdot (bitchslapping people, instituting karma caps, adding lameness filters, etc.) from behind the scenes. I think if he came out into the open again and had a regular dialogue with the readers, people would understand his actions and be a lot less critical of him. He could do all the things he's doing now, and people would understand. Perhaps Slashdot's huge userbase or Andover.Net's control prevents him from doing so.

That said (just had to get it off my chest), some earlier posts in the discussion pointed out that Sony has a clause in the EverQuest enduser licence that forbids selling characters.

As for more Slashdot accounts going on sale, I believe at least one other account was sold on eBay, but secretly. I'm not too sure about that. I also know Signal11's account was given to a troll to "burn off the karma". Basically, someone was using Signal11's high karma to flame and insult people with the score +1 bonus. It was great fun to read, just because of the extreme rudeness "Signal11" exhibited. Eventually, he trolled one of Michael's (jellicle's) stories and Michael changed the password, effectively banning "Signal11".

Anyway, if Slashdot doesn't explicitly forbid the trade of user accounts, karma and all, they shouldn't object to it when people do it. But, to be safe, if you're going to auction or sell your Slashdot account, don't let Taco and co. know. Advertise it on Kuro5hin, or better yet, WonkoSlice or Plastic.

Thanks for mentioning this. I was hoping someone would.

Hey CmdrTaco, I'm a proto-radio jockey wannabe. I'm currently trying to get some voice-over work, but that pathway looks pretty dim. It's just not an recognized skill around here, I guess. The local radio station already has it's fill of DJ's, so I'm willing to demolish my vocal, but no one will let me. If you need an additional voice, I'd be happy to give mine up.

I though about starting up my own MP3 broadcast, but they're so abundant now, there's no real point. And, I'm afraid it might suck. Anyway, I'll put up an MP3 of my sound as soon as I can.

Does anyone have anything for me to read?

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The camera takes very nice pictures, even at the lower resolutions. It has six resolutions...three quality levels at 1280x960, and three levels at 640x480. It has a ton of features, including a zoom lens, telephoto, 180-degree rotating lens, and a ton of options that you can set such as auto or manual focus, white balance, etc. If you want to see some pictures I took with my camera, go here. Those pix were taken on the lowest quality setting at 1280x960.

Oh yeah, and the camera also records sound bytes, if you're into that sort of thing. All in all, a very professional, high-quality camera for only $329. I was surprised.

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This story is three days old: evidence

Check www.wonko.com for a Slash-like system running on Win2000/MSSQL using ASP's.

You can see some slightly old statistics for wonko.com over here. Those stats are only for a few hours, but I'll update them again when I get home this evening (I'm at work now). You can see stats for the front page here (only the front page though, these stats aren't server-wide). That's just the WWW service. The FTP service isn't very active. The machine has never given me an illegal operation, or for that matter any serious error at all (/me knocks on wood). I've probably rebooted about 5 times since the initial installation of Windows 2000 Server, but only to install new drivers or software...never due to a crash or error (although one time was because the power went out, but that's hardly any fault of Windows).

The only thing I can think of that you might have done to cause your box to crash every 4 days is if you went through the system services and set them all to start on system startup...or perhaps your swap file is insanely small and you keep running out of memory...and of course, there's always the chance that you're running a third-party app that's leaking memory. What types of calls do you use to talk to the SQL server? It's possible that something may be opening database connections and forgetting to close them, though SQL Server tends to notice that and deal with it in most cases.

And of course, it's entirely possible that you just have bad karma. :) Slashdot reported months and months ago on a scientific study in which researchers found that some computer users just simply encounter more bugs than others, even when using the same unmodified systems. They weren't able to explain it any other way than saying that certain users are just more bug-prone than others. I use this to explain why I generally tend to have excellent luck with Microsoft software, yet the Linux kernel often coredumps in the middle of an install when I'm sitting in front of the machine it's installing on (yes, it's true...if you doubt me, I'll be happy to demonstrate...my aura must be anti-Linux or something). ;)

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4 days?!???!? You've got to be kidding me. Either that or you're the most unlucky Win2K user on the planet.

As I've stated here many times before, I run wonko.com on a Windows 2000 Server. The machine is a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of RAM and a 6-gig hard drive. I use IIS5's www and ftp services, and SQL Server 7.0 for my database backend. That sucker has been running nonstop and without trouble since the day I booted it up, about 80 days ago. A friend of mine has been running his Win2000 server for nearly 200 days now, with no problems.

The stability of Windows 2000 is very much improved over that of NT4. If your server only lasts 4 days, you must've done something horribly wrong to it when you set it up.

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I think it's [Win2K] the best thing ever to come out of Microsoft.

Could well be. That really isn't saying much. There is plenty of room for improvement in Windows. (Most would say that is an understatement.)

For that matter, it's the best OS currently on the market.

Really? You don't use many OSes, do you? According to your own website, you've had Windows 2000 go bonkers. SVCHOST.EXE starting eating up all your RAM and CPU. Very interesting, that.

You see, there are no mystery processes under Linux. There are no huge, monolithic programs that are part of the system. No single, huge "System Services Manager". So if you see something sucking up CPU time, you kill it. And if you need to find out what is wrong, you open up the source in the debugger and trace it. With Microsoft, when SVCHOST.EXE goes wonky, you do not and cannot determine what is wrong by examining the problem directly. You have to jump through hoops, like reinstalling the OS, for example.

Another thing about Linux: Linux backup software can handle file names longer then eight characters. I guess in Micros~1 land, that is too advanced to do.

I find it very interesting that you assert Win2K is the best OS on the market, when you yourself have encountered problems Linux has never had, and never will.

to late for that to happen they already have become too mainstream and/or political.. you'll notice it when you visit sites like Dtheatre.com and wonko etc... the news is still out there but it is just being thourghourly filtered. news also gets posted slower then ever and on some days they post shit to get somthing new up on the site.. about 80% of what I now read on slashdot has been on one of the many geek sites.. and It is my opinion that this is all a result of commercialization

Go here for the original...sheesh.

Go to http://wonko.com and vote! There's a poll! Vote for Linux!

Do you get paid to find and report holes in Linux? Huh? Unless you work for a company that sells their own distribution and therefore it's your actual job, then no, the majority of you don't. So just what is the source of this stuck-up, arrogant, anti-Microsoft attitude? So what if Netscape won't read the page? I'd think that would be Netscape's fault, but no, you insist that the blame is to be placed on Microsoft. My Microsoft web browser doesn't choke on Javascript. Netscape's browser does. Netscape is the obvious problem here.

The open-source community has been calling for Microsoft to do something like this for a long time now. Microsoft is begging for you guys to show them what you're talking about when you say "Windoze sux". If Windows sucks so much, it shouldn't be any trouble to knock out that IIS box, should it? Huh? Then why are you wasting time complaining? Get over there and kill that sucker! And while you're at it, if you want an even easier challenge, you're more than welcome to try and kill my own Windows 2000 beta 3 web server. I haven't optimized it for security, because I don't see any need to. It's on a tiny pipe, and it'd probably be a snap to wipe that sucker out. Go for it! Go kill http://wonko.com/ and then let me know about it! Tell me how lame my system was and how easy it was for you to crack it. Go on! I dare you. :)

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Wonko the Sane

Do you get paid to find and report holes in Linux? Huh? Unless you work for a company that sells their own distribution and therefore it's your actual job, then no, the majority of you don't. So just what is the source of this stuck-up, arrogant, anti-Microsoft attitude? So what if Netscape won't read the page? I'd think that would be Netscape's fault, but no, you insist that the blame is to be placed on Microsoft. My Microsoft web browser doesn't choke on Javascript. Netscape's browser does. Netscape is the obvious problem here.

The open-source community has been calling for Microsoft to do something like this for a long time now. Microsoft is begging for you guys to show them what you're talking about when you say "Windoze sux". If Windows sucks so much, it shouldn't be any trouble to knock out that IIS box, should it? Huh? Then why are you wasting time complaining? Get over there and kill that sucker! And while you're at it, if you want an even easier challenge, you're more than welcome to try and kill my own Windows 2000 beta 3 web server. I haven't optimized it for security, because I don't see any need to. It's on a tiny pipe, and it'd probably be a snap to wipe that sucker out. Go for it! Go kill http://wonko.com/ and then let me know about it! Tell me how lame my system was and how easy it was for you to crack it. Go on! I dare you. :)

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Wonko the Sane

As I've mentioned before, I run Windows 2000 Server beta 3 over at WonkoSlice, and it's really, really nice. Granted, as far as stability goes, it is less stable than Linux, although I haven't had a Windows-related crash on my Win2000 box ever since I first booted it up about 4 months ago. But as far as performance, ease-of-use, and speedy setup go, it leaves Linux in the dust. When I first installed Win2000, I did so with zero prior knowledge of how to run a web server or how to configure Win2000. I had my server up and running flawlessly within two hours. When I installed RedHat Linux with no prior Linux experience and only minimal web server experience, it took me days just to get the stupid system running correctly and get all my hardware installed, and by the time I started trying to set the web server up, I had totally screwed the system up and had to fdisk the partition and restart from scratch. Windows was much easier.

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Wonko the Sane

Just so you guys know, I don't actually have any affiliation with WonkoSlice, and they'll probably get pissed at me for talking about them on Slashdot (they hate that), but I just wanted to make my thoughts known.

Just so you guys know, I don't actually have any affiliation with WonkoSlice, and they'll probably get pissed at me for talking about them on Slashdot (they hate that), but I just wanted to make my thoughts known.

WonkoSlice beat Slashdot to the punch again, this time by three days!

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Wonko the Sane

I've never seen the /. effect happen from a page with just a casual mention as a tagline before. Interesting.

And speaking of the doctor...have you ever seen The Simpsons before? Have you ever paid attention to the character of the doctor? He's never been anything but a disgusting two-bit quack who doesn't really care about people's health. Sheesh...if you're going to be this offended by what you watch, then I assure you: television and the Internet are most certainly not mediums you should be getting involved with.

-- Wonko the Sane
http://wonko.com/

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Wonko the Sane