I'm inclined to believe that a big chunk of the driver not displaying as much of a reaction to car movements is that the driver knows what's gonna happen, while the passenger does not. As teh driver, I know precisely when the clutch is gonna go down and when it will engage, and I'm already adjusting myself to compensate. For a passenger, it's pretty much a surprise.
Sure, shifting tends to happen in a straight line, but take off from a stop sign, and teh bush is someone's driveway down the street. They back out in front of you while you're accelerating. You hand's occupied, and you're probably inbetween gears with the clutch down so you have no engine braking. It's happened to me (seems to happen almost every day on the motorcycle - though my hands are on the bars at all times on the bike so it's not really the same).
Regardless, the point is that there are lots of reasons to take one's hands off of the wheel. Cellphones are popular, but so are drinks, makeup, books, etc. I heard someone telling about seeing a guy playing a trumpet while driving once. The problem isn't the cellphone, just as violence isn't due to guns, etc. The problem is the *people*.
Cellphones are owned by a large chunk of the population now. 15 years ago, almost no one had them. Have automotive accident rates increase proportionately to the number of people who have cell phones? Even without knowing the numbers, I'm confident in saying "nope". Well, that sort of implies that cell phones aren't the problem. Inattentive drivers are the problem. The idiot that cuts you off when talking on their cell phone is more than likely the same asshole who doesn't care about other drivers. They would've cut you off anyway. The moron who crashed into you rneighbor because she was dialing a phone? She would've been unwrapping a sandwich or finding that piece of paper with someone's address in her purse otherwise.
People are bad drivers, and they've always been bad drivers. Pointing the finger at a common piece of technology isn't doing anything but looking for a scapegoat. The problem is underqualified people who can't figure out when they need to stop all the other crap - talking on the cellphone, talking with passengers, daydreaming, eating a sandwich, playing a horn - and pay close attention to the road around them. The problem is furthermore that people don't know how to properly handle their car in an emergency situation, and they end up not being able to get out of situations they shouldn't have been in to begin with.
Training and more restricted driver's licenses. Oh, and real punishment for friggin' drunk drivers, not "well, the fifth time you do it, we'll suspend your license for a year so you'll have to be careful not to get caught driving anyway". But that's a separate rant.:)
The reason that you are supposed to have two hands on the wheel is twofold.... The other is that if you end up hitting a nonvisible road hazard, or experiencing a blowout or something, you will be much better prepared to handle the situation if both hands are already on the wheel.
Presuming the nonvisible road hazzard didn't jerk the wheel from your vice-like grip, followed by getting one of your thumbs caught in a spoke and the subsequent unusability of that hand. By keeping one hand on the wheel only, you're assured the use of a spare if the main hand become damaged.:)
Sure, I keep both hands on the wheel most of the time, too, but in the events where steering is what saved me from an accident, I've ended up removing one or the other hand so I can get a wider sweep of the wheel. If I can't control the wheel with one hand, odds are pretty good that a little extra force from the other hand isn't gonna make a difference. That spare hand's better utilized muflfing the screams of my passengers, so at least I can go in peace.;)
But Serenity was a good movie? Hmph. The Last Samuri was about the only good movie Tom Cruise has ever been involved with... And there wasn't *much* talking.;)
Coomenting out the wrong line in pam.d/system-auth can lock everyone out, and having a local root account won't help.:)
Besides, any time you edit anything in/etc related to system authentication, you should already have a root shell opened up in another terminal ready to go - that way, even if all auth breaks, you have a shell you can use to fix it. That's the only time I feel good about being logged in as root (even though it's usually a "sudo su -" and not a terminal login)...
You'll get a few STDERR warnings about stuff not existing, but it'll work just fine. And it doesn't require a bare star.:)
In general, rm -rf dirname/* dirname/.??* (or possibly dirname/{*,.??*} if you really like the Bourne list expansion version) will do what you need. Wrap it in a shell script if you do it all the time...
Why would you use a host-based ACL to block access to ssh when you can just make ssh listen only on the loopback interface to begin with?
Also, what good is it to give each user a separate UID 0 account if you have to give them all the "real" root password anyway? Never mind all of the other nuiscances that come up when you have multiple accounts using the same UID...
Using sudo mitigates all of those problems, while retaining each user's distinct account settings. All the while, it's easier to administer and doesn't require everyone to use the same hacked-up shell.
What you've done is like solving the problem of how to automatically shift gears in a car by rigigng up a system of levers and pulleys to a manual gearbox (note, sometimes it won't work, so you have to manually shift), when someone already invented a flawless automatic transmission you could've used instead.:)
Actually, no, turning and signaling aren't difficult. You signal your intent to turn *before* you actually do it. If you're trying to signal while you're turning, you're part of the problem.:) In an Automatic, I almost always drive with my left hand, even though I'm right handed, so it doesn't make a difference. In either case, it's trivial to slide one's hand down the wheel to hit the signal with an extended finger. Well, it's trivial in any reasonably designed car - and every car I've ever seen is designed properly in that regard.
As far as turning being safer with both hands, I'm not sure you've ever actually driven. At any road speed, you won't be jerking the wheel very far in either direction, and it won't take much force to do so. If you can't do it safely with one hand, and you're not legally disbled, you probably shouldn't be driving. What happens if someone steps/pulls out in front of you (say they were behind a bush or something so you couldn't see them in advance) when in mid-shift on a manual-equipped vehicle? Yup, one hand's available to swerve.
Regarding talking on the cell phone while driving, well, if you can't do it, I hope you don't ever drive with passengers in the car. Their talking is every bit as distracting as cell phone talking. What's the difference? Your hand is holding somethign up against your head? Does the position of your hand really affect your ability to concnetrate? Mine doesn't. It's the conversation that's distracting, not the hand. Though, I'll definitely concede that dialing and whatnot can be a bit more of a distraction.:)
I'm stading my ground. A driver's license is simply too easy to get, and too difficult to lose. We have all sorts of laws designed to prevent underqualified idiots from huritng people, when what we *should* be doing is preventing the underqualified idiots from getting in a position to hurt people in the first place.
Doh. I missed the manual tranny mention. In my defence, that part (and the rest of the post) was using a general "you" and not the original poster.;)
Anyway, I think that if you're too fragile to withstand the forces your car will exert upon you via the seatbelt while you're braking, you're too fragile to safely drive (elderly or not). That nonwithstanding, if you're holding yourself back with the steering wheel instead of the belts, you're not in control of the vehicle - presumably at a time when you most need to be in control. Leaning on the wheel can pretty easily cause a swerve when you don't want a swerve...
The American writen test really is easy. There's a chunk on recognizing road signs, and soem questions aobut which way to turn your wheel when parking on a hill, how soon to turn on your blinker / turn off your high beams, etc. That's the test you take to get your license, and I think it's the same test you take to get a learner's permit. It's been so long that I don't exactly remember...
What? Are you comparing PXE and Kickstart like they're similar in any way? Lemme see if I can help clear up some of your confusion...
PXE is a standardized boot environment for network booting. Your network card and TFTP + DHCP servers work together to set that up. Most modern NICs support PXE as their netboot option. It's OS neutral.
Kickstart is a file format that describes what packages to install, where to get them, and what installer options to use. It's redHat's format, but Ubuntu supports Kickstart files. On Debian-based distros, though, better than that is FAI (Fully Automatic Installer). It not only specifies the installer options, package sources, and packages to install, it lets you pre-configure the packages in lots of cases, and it's easy to build from an installed system. Kickstart lets you run scripts at differnet times, sure, but so does FAI. The RHEL installer builds a kickstart file based on your install settings, but that doesn't packages installed later - you can build an FAI file from a running system's current configuration at any time.
Anyway, to network install a RedHat-based distro, you have to network boot the installer. Same thing as with Ubuntu or any other distro. Both support PXE, and AFAIK that's it for netboot. Unless you count EFI, which I'm sure Ubuntu supports, and I assume FC does since RHEL does. Both also support making bootable images for CDs that have setup options. But, like RPM, RedHat's option is "ok" but still lacking some nice features compared to other systems.
Right. This'll become just another of those laws that aren't enforced, but go into the pile of "if a cop wants to ticket you for something badly enough, he can probably find something". And everyone will magically feel safer. Kinda like the law passed in IL a couple years ago making it illegal to drive in the left lane on the interstate if you're not actively passing someone. People still do it, and it never shows up in the newspaper's "police beat" section as an offense anyone was ticketed for...
Seat belts hold you back better than two hands on a flexible ring of plastic. As far as driving with two hands, this may come as a surprise, but many people have vehicles which require one hand to operate a transmission. Gonna legislate mandatory automatic transmissions now, too?
The problem is that people are incompetent, and don't take driving seriously. The combination is no good. Make it harder to get and keep a driver's license, and the problem will take care of itself - but that won't happen because Americans have this thing about admitting failure. Everyone apparently has the right to not fail at anything, ever, including driver's tests. I was just watching one of those "we follow this family around" style TV shows a day or two ago, and the kid was taking the driver's test to get his learning permit. He had to take the test 4 times before he passed, and the fourth time he *still* didn't get a perfect score. What bizarro world do I live in where it's ok to just know "most" of the rules that apply to driving? It's the *same test every time*. He had a short book with all the answers. And it took him four shots. In the interim, he managed to wreck the family's van on their farm. He should *not* be driving on the road, but in America, no one fails.
Xandros is a modified Debian - not a totally separate distribution like SuSE (I know, they stopped the mixed-case capitalization, but I like the dropped u). So, "buying" Xandros really wounld't be the same thing. They wouldn't really be getting a whole distro, just a team of people who modify someone else's distro. Xandros would not necesarily be "bad", but with Novell, they'd get the actual point of origination for a distro. And Novell has a bunch of other cool stuff beyond SuSE, like the zen management things and a big respected (generally) name, among others...
Nevermind, of course, that Ubuntu's better than Xandros (Corel didn't go away because it was a great distro).;)
Just think, if it was possible to do this with EL wire and/or LEDs, we could do thisnow without having to wait until some "good idea" gets to production...
Firewall plus destination address combined with "target DROP" or "destination nat fakeauthserver.localdomain". I'm not worried (largely because I don't use Windows for anything). Pirates aren't worried either.
Unfortunately, with sites like that, you still end up eventually attracting the "I've installed two distros of Linux, now I'm teh Unix g0d!" kind of people, and they're almost always prolific posters. I follow things like the Postfix mailing list, and there are some people up there who truly do have the mad SMTP skillz, but there's a *lot* of "how do I do something that's in the docuemntation and asked weekly" posts as well.
The solution isn't to somehow ban those people, it's to develop the ability to quickly identify them for ignoring. Slashdot's good with the friend+1/foe-1 thing, and a lot of forum software has "ignore user" capability. But it comes down to simply developing the ability to quickly scan and identify things that warrent further investigation. Unfortunately.
BTW, I've never seen the ads in.sigs. Probably because I turned off viewing of signatures several years ago.:) Now if I could just find a way to erase the.sigs that people are apparently inserting to their comment with some kind of javascript/greasemonkey kind of thing...
The other kids go to a friend's house and watch skinimax, or sneak glances at the magazines on the top shelf at the bookstore. Article just said "have seen", not "have spent full days exclusively looking at it"...
That's funny because a few weeks ago I was out wandernig around and found what appeared to be a film canister inside a sealed baggie covered with dirt. So I carried it to the nearest trash can and disposed of it. Keeping the world clean, by golly!:)
The serial port is there *because* people would want a dial-up. It's intended as a fail-over solution in the event of a failure in the main connection, but it would work just as well as the main connection. It supports dial-on-demand, as well, so you can make it feel almost like you have an always-on conenction. If that's your thing, that is.:)
I do believe you on the Linksys thing, though it'd be interesting to find out which one(s) caused the problem. I could see them putting content inspection stuff on some of the higher-end "personal" routers, particularly wireles access points. That kind of thing can be a little tricky to set up well, esp. if it's some canned solution. At least, IMHO...
I think my wife would be annoyed if I brought a girlfriend...:)
I dunno, from the previews it just doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. Maybe after it shifts to the "less expensive" rack, or shows up on a movie channel or something, I'll remember that "SpryGuy said this doens't totally suck"...
Add me to the list of people who won't pay. I took the test for entertainment value - I get people asking me "what's your IQ" and similar ocasionally, and it seemed an amusing way to spend a credit card "cash back" check. Some of those test-takers are real geeks.:) I scored in the top 1 percent. Yippie. I'm a genius among geniuses. Boy, howdy, I guess I should pay another $50 per year so I can get an ID card that lets me prove to other people that I'm smart. "Hey, Cletus, look at this membership card!"
Or, I could save my money, automatically preventing myself from associating with those arrogant pricks who feel compelled to tell everyone they're in Mensa, and let people get to know me just like they get to know everyone else. It's not a score on some test that makes you smart. I'd not be surprised to find that several people think I'm dumb, in fact. Rather, I like to think that smart's defined by one's ability to acquire, apply, and transfer knowledge. I like to help people and learn stuff. If someone feels helped when I leave, or I feel that I've learned something, everyone's happy. An impression of "smartness" isn't important, though obviously any positive impression someone shares will make you feel nice.:)
Oh, and on-topic, I read at well above my age level all the way through school, and started reading before I was three. Math skills came early, too. I've been good at school work my whole life, but realized that I could still do "well enough" with a lot less effort early on. I was an honor roll student, but not "top of my class" because that kind of crap's just not important to anyone but the people who receive the "honor", and a jealous few who wish they could, for whatever reason. The rest of the world, AFAICT, could give half a shit who was validictorian of X graduating class, for example. But the on-topic point is that we're not all slow starters. Chalk up another one to the "overgeneralization always leads to wrong conclusions" cliche...
Sounds like someone's got some kind of antivirus problem - I don't think the Linksys wired routers even have the capability to inspect traffic like email (though some have quality of service settings, and I found out that some Cisco load balancers are configured to drop packets which have the QOS flag set to "normal", so it's possible that such settings would cause other problems with particular ISPs).
The snapgear, though, is cool. Having a serial port lets you use an external modem until you get broadband, and then lets you configure the modem as a failover connection that's only brought up on demand.
My ISP is wireless. Previously I had an 802.11b card in a regular PC acting as my router. They've changed technologies now, though, and the new setup works siilarly to cable/DSL in that I have a little box (built in to the antenna and powered over the ethernet cable) which just bridges my network to the wireless network. I threw a Cisco PIX 501 in between myself and the internet for that one. They're also cool little devices, and they work well out of the box for a home user, but they're expensive (bought mine on eBay), harder to configure by a "regular" person, and really, not as featureful as a Linux-based firewall. I wanted to learn the Cisco PIX setup stuff for certification reasons, though, and it does all I really need (boot faster than a regular PC, some port forwarding from two static IPs, VPN endpoint, and NAT pooling), so it works out. If I didn't have the educational need, though, I'd probably either buy a SnapGear (Cyberguard, whatever) unit, or use a spare PC.
It's kinda cool to walk into my basement and see the rack of Cisco stuff running my home network, though...:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm inclined to believe that a big chunk of the driver not displaying as much of a reaction to car movements is that the driver knows what's gonna happen, while the passenger does not. As teh driver, I know precisely when the clutch is gonna go down and when it will engage, and I'm already adjusting myself to compensate. For a passenger, it's pretty much a surprise.
:)
Sure, shifting tends to happen in a straight line, but take off from a stop sign, and teh bush is someone's driveway down the street. They back out in front of you while you're accelerating. You hand's occupied, and you're probably inbetween gears with the clutch down so you have no engine braking. It's happened to me (seems to happen almost every day on the motorcycle - though my hands are on the bars at all times on the bike so it's not really the same).
Regardless, the point is that there are lots of reasons to take one's hands off of the wheel. Cellphones are popular, but so are drinks, makeup, books, etc. I heard someone telling about seeing a guy playing a trumpet while driving once. The problem isn't the cellphone, just as violence isn't due to guns, etc. The problem is the *people*.
Cellphones are owned by a large chunk of the population now. 15 years ago, almost no one had them. Have automotive accident rates increase proportionately to the number of people who have cell phones? Even without knowing the numbers, I'm confident in saying "nope". Well, that sort of implies that cell phones aren't the problem. Inattentive drivers are the problem. The idiot that cuts you off when talking on their cell phone is more than likely the same asshole who doesn't care about other drivers. They would've cut you off anyway. The moron who crashed into you rneighbor because she was dialing a phone? She would've been unwrapping a sandwich or finding that piece of paper with someone's address in her purse otherwise.
People are bad drivers, and they've always been bad drivers. Pointing the finger at a common piece of technology isn't doing anything but looking for a scapegoat. The problem is underqualified people who can't figure out when they need to stop all the other crap - talking on the cellphone, talking with passengers, daydreaming, eating a sandwich, playing a horn - and pay close attention to the road around them. The problem is furthermore that people don't know how to properly handle their car in an emergency situation, and they end up not being able to get out of situations they shouldn't have been in to begin with.
Training and more restricted driver's licenses. Oh, and real punishment for friggin' drunk drivers, not "well, the fifth time you do it, we'll suspend your license for a year so you'll have to be careful not to get caught driving anyway". But that's a separate rant.
Presuming the nonvisible road hazzard didn't jerk the wheel from your vice-like grip, followed by getting one of your thumbs caught in a spoke and the subsequent unusability of that hand. By keeping one hand on the wheel only, you're assured the use of a spare if the main hand become damaged.
Sure, I keep both hands on the wheel most of the time, too, but in the events where steering is what saved me from an accident, I've ended up removing one or the other hand so I can get a wider sweep of the wheel. If I can't control the wheel with one hand, odds are pretty good that a little extra force from the other hand isn't gonna make a difference. That spare hand's better utilized muflfing the screams of my passengers, so at least I can go in peace.
But Serenity was a good movie? Hmph. The Last Samuri was about the only good movie Tom Cruise has ever been involved with... And there wasn't *much* talking. ;)
Coomenting out the wrong line in pam.d/system-auth can lock everyone out, and having a local root account won't help. :)
/etc related to system authentication, you should already have a root shell opened up in another terminal ready to go - that way, even if all auth breaks, you have a shell you can use to fix it. That's the only time I feel good about being logged in as root (even though it's usually a "sudo su -" and not a terminal login)...
Besides, any time you edit anything in
cd /usr/src/RPM
:)
rm -rf {SPECS,SOURCES,BUILD}/{.??*,*}
You'll get a few STDERR warnings about stuff not existing, but it'll work just fine. And it doesn't require a bare star.
In general, rm -rf dirname/* dirname/.??* (or possibly dirname/{*,.??*} if you really like the Bourne list expansion version) will do what you need. Wrap it in a shell script if you do it all the time...
Why would you use a host-based ACL to block access to ssh when you can just make ssh listen only on the loopback interface to begin with?
:)
Also, what good is it to give each user a separate UID 0 account if you have to give them all the "real" root password anyway? Never mind all of the other nuiscances that come up when you have multiple accounts using the same UID...
Using sudo mitigates all of those problems, while retaining each user's distinct account settings. All the while, it's easier to administer and doesn't require everyone to use the same hacked-up shell.
What you've done is like solving the problem of how to automatically shift gears in a car by rigigng up a system of levers and pulleys to a manual gearbox (note, sometimes it won't work, so you have to manually shift), when someone already invented a flawless automatic transmission you could've used instead.
Actually, no, turning and signaling aren't difficult. You signal your intent to turn *before* you actually do it. If you're trying to signal while you're turning, you're part of the problem. :) In an Automatic, I almost always drive with my left hand, even though I'm right handed, so it doesn't make a difference. In either case, it's trivial to slide one's hand down the wheel to hit the signal with an extended finger. Well, it's trivial in any reasonably designed car - and every car I've ever seen is designed properly in that regard.
:)
As far as turning being safer with both hands, I'm not sure you've ever actually driven. At any road speed, you won't be jerking the wheel very far in either direction, and it won't take much force to do so. If you can't do it safely with one hand, and you're not legally disbled, you probably shouldn't be driving. What happens if someone steps/pulls out in front of you (say they were behind a bush or something so you couldn't see them in advance) when in mid-shift on a manual-equipped vehicle? Yup, one hand's available to swerve.
Regarding talking on the cell phone while driving, well, if you can't do it, I hope you don't ever drive with passengers in the car. Their talking is every bit as distracting as cell phone talking. What's the difference? Your hand is holding somethign up against your head? Does the position of your hand really affect your ability to concnetrate? Mine doesn't. It's the conversation that's distracting, not the hand. Though, I'll definitely concede that dialing and whatnot can be a bit more of a distraction.
I'm stading my ground. A driver's license is simply too easy to get, and too difficult to lose. We have all sorts of laws designed to prevent underqualified idiots from huritng people, when what we *should* be doing is preventing the underqualified idiots from getting in a position to hurt people in the first place.
Doh. I missed the manual tranny mention. In my defence, that part (and the rest of the post) was using a general "you" and not the original poster. ;)
Anyway, I think that if you're too fragile to withstand the forces your car will exert upon you via the seatbelt while you're braking, you're too fragile to safely drive (elderly or not). That nonwithstanding, if you're holding yourself back with the steering wheel instead of the belts, you're not in control of the vehicle - presumably at a time when you most need to be in control. Leaning on the wheel can pretty easily cause a swerve when you don't want a swerve...
The American writen test really is easy. There's a chunk on recognizing road signs, and soem questions aobut which way to turn your wheel when parking on a hill, how soon to turn on your blinker / turn off your high beams, etc. That's the test you take to get your license, and I think it's the same test you take to get a learner's permit. It's been so long that I don't exactly remember...
What? Are you comparing PXE and Kickstart like they're similar in any way? Lemme see if I can help clear up some of your confusion...
d -netboot-tools and http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/misc/kernel -image-netbootable - as long as we're talking about network booting...
PXE is a standardized boot environment for network booting. Your network card and TFTP + DHCP servers work together to set that up. Most modern NICs support PXE as their netboot option. It's OS neutral.
Kickstart is a file format that describes what packages to install, where to get them, and what installer options to use. It's redHat's format, but Ubuntu supports Kickstart files. On Debian-based distros, though, better than that is FAI (Fully Automatic Installer). It not only specifies the installer options, package sources, and packages to install, it lets you pre-configure the packages in lots of cases, and it's easy to build from an installed system. Kickstart lets you run scripts at differnet times, sure, but so does FAI. The RHEL installer builds a kickstart file based on your install settings, but that doesn't packages installed later - you can build an FAI file from a running system's current configuration at any time.
Anyway, to network install a RedHat-based distro, you have to network boot the installer. Same thing as with Ubuntu or any other distro. Both support PXE, and AFAIK that's it for netboot. Unless you count EFI, which I'm sure Ubuntu supports, and I assume FC does since RHEL does. Both also support making bootable images for CDs that have setup options. But, like RPM, RedHat's option is "ok" but still lacking some nice features compared to other systems.
Also interesting to note about Ubuntu is the presence of http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/dapper/misc/initr
From TFA: In states without laws, a number of municipalities have passed their own local restrictions.
There are states without laws? Huh. I thought all states had at least a few anti-sodomy laws or similar on the books. But no laws at all. Weird.
I like how the male is waving. "Hi, Joe. Why yes, I did realize that I'm naked. Thanks for asking!"
Right. This'll become just another of those laws that aren't enforced, but go into the pile of "if a cop wants to ticket you for something badly enough, he can probably find something". And everyone will magically feel safer. Kinda like the law passed in IL a couple years ago making it illegal to drive in the left lane on the interstate if you're not actively passing someone. People still do it, and it never shows up in the newspaper's "police beat" section as an offense anyone was ticketed for...
Seat belts hold you back better than two hands on a flexible ring of plastic. As far as driving with two hands, this may come as a surprise, but many people have vehicles which require one hand to operate a transmission. Gonna legislate mandatory automatic transmissions now, too?
The problem is that people are incompetent, and don't take driving seriously. The combination is no good. Make it harder to get and keep a driver's license, and the problem will take care of itself - but that won't happen because Americans have this thing about admitting failure. Everyone apparently has the right to not fail at anything, ever, including driver's tests. I was just watching one of those "we follow this family around" style TV shows a day or two ago, and the kid was taking the driver's test to get his learning permit. He had to take the test 4 times before he passed, and the fourth time he *still* didn't get a perfect score. What bizarro world do I live in where it's ok to just know "most" of the rules that apply to driving? It's the *same test every time*. He had a short book with all the answers. And it took him four shots. In the interim, he managed to wreck the family's van on their farm. He should *not* be driving on the road, but in America, no one fails.
What the heck, use them both!
/
/
# rm -Rrf
Or maybe even all three, while we're feeling bold
# rm --recursive -r -R -f
Something about a recursive rf removal sounds even more exciting than normal...
Xandros is a modified Debian - not a totally separate distribution like SuSE (I know, they stopped the mixed-case capitalization, but I like the dropped u). So, "buying" Xandros really wounld't be the same thing. They wouldn't really be getting a whole distro, just a team of people who modify someone else's distro. Xandros would not necesarily be "bad", but with Novell, they'd get the actual point of origination for a distro. And Novell has a bunch of other cool stuff beyond SuSE, like the zen management things and a big respected (generally) name, among others...
;)
Nevermind, of course, that Ubuntu's better than Xandros (Corel didn't go away because it was a great distro).
Just think, if it was possible to do this with EL wire and/or LEDs, we could do this now without having to wait until some "good idea" gets to production...
I think most drivers would notice you setting attempting to set them on fire, whether your clothes wre soaked in gasoline or not. :)
Firewall plus destination address combined with "target DROP" or "destination nat fakeauthserver.localdomain". I'm not worried (largely because I don't use Windows for anything). Pirates aren't worried either.
Unfortunately, with sites like that, you still end up eventually attracting the "I've installed two distros of Linux, now I'm teh Unix g0d!" kind of people, and they're almost always prolific posters. I follow things like the Postfix mailing list, and there are some people up there who truly do have the mad SMTP skillz, but there's a *lot* of "how do I do something that's in the docuemntation and asked weekly" posts as well.
.sigs. Probably because I turned off viewing of signatures several years ago. :) Now if I could just find a way to erase the .sigs that people are apparently inserting to their comment with some kind of javascript/greasemonkey kind of thing...
The solution isn't to somehow ban those people, it's to develop the ability to quickly identify them for ignoring. Slashdot's good with the friend+1/foe-1 thing, and a lot of forum software has "ignore user" capability. But it comes down to simply developing the ability to quickly scan and identify things that warrent further investigation. Unfortunately.
BTW, I've never seen the ads in
The other kids go to a friend's house and watch skinimax, or sneak glances at the magazines on the top shelf at the bookstore. Article just said "have seen", not "have spent full days exclusively looking at it"...
That's funny because a few weeks ago I was out wandernig around and found what appeared to be a film canister inside a sealed baggie covered with dirt. So I carried it to the nearest trash can and disposed of it. Keeping the world clean, by golly! :)
The serial port is there *because* people would want a dial-up. It's intended as a fail-over solution in the event of a failure in the main connection, but it would work just as well as the main connection. It supports dial-on-demand, as well, so you can make it feel almost like you have an always-on conenction. If that's your thing, that is. :)
I do believe you on the Linksys thing, though it'd be interesting to find out which one(s) caused the problem. I could see them putting content inspection stuff on some of the higher-end "personal" routers, particularly wireles access points. That kind of thing can be a little tricky to set up well, esp. if it's some canned solution. At least, IMHO...
I think my wife would be annoyed if I brought a girlfriend... :)
I dunno, from the previews it just doesn't look like something I'd enjoy. Maybe after it shifts to the "less expensive" rack, or shows up on a movie channel or something, I'll remember that "SpryGuy said this doens't totally suck"...
Add me to the list of people who won't pay. I took the test for entertainment value - I get people asking me "what's your IQ" and similar ocasionally, and it seemed an amusing way to spend a credit card "cash back" check. Some of those test-takers are real geeks. :) I scored in the top 1 percent. Yippie. I'm a genius among geniuses. Boy, howdy, I guess I should pay another $50 per year so I can get an ID card that lets me prove to other people that I'm smart. "Hey, Cletus, look at this membership card!"
:)
Or, I could save my money, automatically preventing myself from associating with those arrogant pricks who feel compelled to tell everyone they're in Mensa, and let people get to know me just like they get to know everyone else. It's not a score on some test that makes you smart. I'd not be surprised to find that several people think I'm dumb, in fact. Rather, I like to think that smart's defined by one's ability to acquire, apply, and transfer knowledge. I like to help people and learn stuff. If someone feels helped when I leave, or I feel that I've learned something, everyone's happy. An impression of "smartness" isn't important, though obviously any positive impression someone shares will make you feel nice.
Oh, and on-topic, I read at well above my age level all the way through school, and started reading before I was three. Math skills came early, too. I've been good at school work my whole life, but realized that I could still do "well enough" with a lot less effort early on. I was an honor roll student, but not "top of my class" because that kind of crap's just not important to anyone but the people who receive the "honor", and a jealous few who wish they could, for whatever reason. The rest of the world, AFAICT, could give half a shit who was validictorian of X graduating class, for example. But the on-topic point is that we're not all slow starters. Chalk up another one to the "overgeneralization always leads to wrong conclusions" cliche...
Sounds like someone's got some kind of antivirus problem - I don't think the Linksys wired routers even have the capability to inspect traffic like email (though some have quality of service settings, and I found out that some Cisco load balancers are configured to drop packets which have the QOS flag set to "normal", so it's possible that such settings would cause other problems with particular ISPs).
:)
The snapgear, though, is cool. Having a serial port lets you use an external modem until you get broadband, and then lets you configure the modem as a failover connection that's only brought up on demand.
My ISP is wireless. Previously I had an 802.11b card in a regular PC acting as my router. They've changed technologies now, though, and the new setup works siilarly to cable/DSL in that I have a little box (built in to the antenna and powered over the ethernet cable) which just bridges my network to the wireless network. I threw a Cisco PIX 501 in between myself and the internet for that one. They're also cool little devices, and they work well out of the box for a home user, but they're expensive (bought mine on eBay), harder to configure by a "regular" person, and really, not as featureful as a Linux-based firewall. I wanted to learn the Cisco PIX setup stuff for certification reasons, though, and it does all I really need (boot faster than a regular PC, some port forwarding from two static IPs, VPN endpoint, and NAT pooling), so it works out. If I didn't have the educational need, though, I'd probably either buy a SnapGear (Cyberguard, whatever) unit, or use a spare PC.
It's kinda cool to walk into my basement and see the rack of Cisco stuff running my home network, though...