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  1. Re:what' I'd rather see... on At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, because at less than .10 cent per *kilo*watt hour and, umm, 24*30, uhh, 720 hours per month, let's see, err, that's 216000 wats used, max, AKA 216 kilowatts, well, uhh. Hmph. That's a whopping 21.6 cents per month. Good gracious, time to get that second job working nights, or maybe just recycle a few aluminum cans to finance such an astronomical power bill. :)

    average cost of electricity in US as of 1999

    That said, I've got about 5 computers and matching monitors (there's where the power's eaten up) running 24x7, and totally understand the desire to keep power use down... :)

  2. Re:If they learn from each other... on Georgia Tech Cracks Down on Learning · · Score: 2

    Precisely my reasoning behind the famous "a degree is just a piece of paper" rant. Now if you don't mind, I'll go back to studying the history of the USA from Antiquity to 1865 in order to be granted a degree in Computer Science. :)

  3. Re:No specifics on African ISPs Being Fleeced by the West · · Score: 1

    They're not. Someone just wanted to rant/whine, and did just that. Hence the lack of facts. I'm suprised no one's mentioned that this must be GW's fault, and that it would never have happened if we had a popular vote in the US, or some other similarly stupid cause. :)

  4. Re:better than DHTML on Flash and Open Source · · Score: 2

    It's not better or more widely supported, it's just easier in that you only have to develop it once. There are plenty of DHTML libraries pre-written in ecmascript (javascript, jscript, whatever your browser calls it) that degrade nicely. Flash doesn't degrade - it either works or doesn't - unless you take the time to implement some extra code. At that point, you could've just set up a faster, easier ecma-based menu system.

    What ever happened to applets? Those work in more browsers and provide more flexibility... :)

  5. Re:Controlling a Digital Cable receiver, Sat Syste on PVR For Linux · · Score: 2

    With an infrared port plus a few moments of your time you've got the magic to send macros to anything you want - including a dish controller. :)

  6. Re:Wow, this is lame on A New Low for Web Advertisers: Pop-Up Downloads · · Score: 2, Funny

    So, what you're saying is that IE will install software if you tell it that it's OK? Good heavens, what *is* the world coming to? I'll bet that if you type in the address of a porn site in IE, it'll download and display a bunch of pornographic images, too - without even asking you if it's OK!

  7. Re:I don't get it.... on EchoStar Asks Supreme Court to Let Unlock Local Channels · · Score: 1

    But, my Dish Network system already takes the feeds that go into it and inserts their national ads. Why in the heck can't they just take a local feed from someplace, insert their ads over the top of the local's ads, and rebroadcast that? They could use the same system that cable channels use, where there's just pre-defined blank space that the broadcaster just fills in with their appropriate ads. Give the local broadcaster a cut of the ad revenue and be done with it. Good gosh, all I want it to be able to get FOX on my darned dish.

    As it is, I've filed a waiver request because of "poor signal" in my area. That's apperently how you get around the law - though I really do have a sorta poor signal. It takes about a month to get it, but then you can get a feed from the nearest major metropolitan area - which is about 150 miles away in my case... It shoul dbe done within a couple months. Sigh.

  8. Re:Looks like Gnome won the desktop war. on KDE 3.0 is Out · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    And no, I'm not kidding. I'm using Gnome right now... This pretty much puts the final nail in the coffin for KDE.

    Of course my opinion's more important than yours. :)

  9. Re:Wow. on Best High-Tech Toilet? · · Score: 1

    If Mt. Dew is making you spend too much time *on* the toilet, you're one of

    1. a woman
    2. married to a woman and too lazy to put the seat up and then back down
    3. having some serious internal problems

    I'm guessing that the majority of the slashdot readership who have excessive Mt. Dew intakes are not in any of those categories.

  10. Re:Dont you get it? THESE PEOPLE DONT CARE on CBDTPA Finds A Champion In the House · · Score: 1

    How about every *reasonable* interperatation? If we threw out all of the votes of people who would only respect the winner if it was the person they voted for, maybe one of the third-party candidates would've won. Maybe people who think they got screwed should abstain from the next election so it doesn't happen again. Or maybe they should accept that the loser lost and the winner won, and start working on getting their candidate in next time. The prez is just one part of the equation who can be overridden by either of the other 2 parts of the gov't, you know?

    AFAIK, it was just a few conties in Florida where people ended up confused because they're too stupid to vote - not the whole state - therefore having the whole state abstain would've been less than aceptable. :)

  11. Re:Doesn't it say something about society? on AdCritic To Return · · Score: 1

    Until a few months ago when I upgraded to a dish/pvr system (which is really good if there are only a few shows that you like but you don't like them enough to modify your schedule to watch them), I was paying $18/mo for cable, complete with sci-fi, discovery, and comedy central. I personally dislike sci-fi in general, but that's where MST3K is. You might see if you can get a complete rate guide from your cable folks - several offer a few premium-like channels as an add-on to simple basic cable.

    A PVR seriously increases my tv watching joy, and gives me time to read my bookcase full of O'Reillys at my convenience. You can skip the shows and go straight to the commercials if that's what turns you on... :)

  12. Re:Version 1.0? on Mozilla Tree Closes for 1.0 · · Score: 1

    OK, I suppose that's valid. That whole inheritance thing appears to actually be a problem. I thought there was something you could do with the z-index of the sub-elements, but then, I could be mistaken there.

  13. Re:Version 1.0? on Mozilla Tree Closes for 1.0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    IE6 and Mozilla both support w3c standard CSS V2 in that respect. If you would just stop using "document.all" and similar to refer to elements, instead using the getElementById() to get a reference to the element and then using the element's "style.visibility" attribute, you'd have no problems with cross-browser visibility (in the 6.x browsers and IE5.x).

    At least, that's probably what the problem is, based on my own experience trying to do the same thing... :)

  14. Re:Money on Ebert, Gillmor on the Music Industry · · Score: 1

    That's what I meant. I saw the quote "A person is smart, but people are stupid" once, and had that in mind when I posted. :)

  15. Re:Money on Ebert, Gillmor on the Music Industry · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh, all "they" have to do is call the new tech the "consumer protection act" or "the patriotic music industry saving plan" or some similar crap, then put up some TV ads about how people who don't give up all their fair use rights must hate babies and america. Then, people will be confused and forget all about how "logic" works. No one will bother to ask "who's being protected" or "what do babies have to do with copy protection shemes".

    People are stupid, in general. If the new copy protection tech isn't *way* more expensive than the old stuff, people will just give in and buy it, because they saw a commercial with some copy-protected player and a bunch of bikini-clad women. :)

    Not that I'm bitter...

  16. Re:I liked it on Review: Blade II - Electric Boogaloo · · Score: 1

    Just like the mustang running from the police helicopter in "Gone in 60 seconds" that was filmed at like 50MPH or so and played back at double speed, eh?

  17. Re:Sprint? on (Almost) I-mode Service Coming in April · · Score: 1

    Their roll out will be followed by a bunch of people buying stuff, and then immediately getting pissed off at Sprint for abhorrent customer support. Then, they'll wait a year and find out that they have to pay $150 for cancelling their service one day early. They'll wonder why the phone rep didn't mention that they could avoid that charge by waiting a day...

    Later on, the customers will find out that other companies exist that provide good support. The suckers born every minute, however, will fill the void and keep sprint afloat.

    Not that I'm bitter or anything. :)

  18. Re:Other arches. on Ximian GNOME and "Low-End" Systems · · Score: 1

    I dunno, I was running ximian under LinuxPPC on a 7200/120 for a while (within the last year), and it was fine. Programs take a little longer to start up, but having a small, slow disk and not a lot of RAM (32M, IIRC) tends to do that. The machine was certainly usable, though, and was far from painful. Not like reading mail with mutt over a high-latency 26K dialup, anyway... :)

  19. Re:No License? on Pay Dirt in Scanned Driver's Licenses · · Score: 2

    I stayed in a hotel in Chicago (a big city in Illinois, for those who don't know) a while back. I'm from about an hour or so south of Chicago. Anyway, when I want to pay for the room, the person said "we don't accept checks from IL." I guess that means that they accept checks from other states, or something. The sign clearly stated that they *do* accept personal checks, so I'm not sure what her problem was. Some of those Chicagoans don't realize that there's a whole state outside of Chicago, so maybe that was it. Who knows.

  20. Re:My experience on Beware Employment Contracts · · Score: 1

    No, but the fact that they make you sign up for a new 1-year contract every time you change your cell phone coverage, even if it's to a plan tha tgives them more money and even if they don't notify you of the change (it's in your contract, you implicitly agree). $150 later, I will never go back to Sprint, and I will make it one of my life's goals to keep everyone away from them. My other goal is to keep people from buying stuff at Computer Rennisaince. I've got simple, easily attainable goals. :)

  21. Re:GNU superfriends? on GNU-Friends Interviews · · Score: 1

    I dunno, I still like the "super best friends" better - but David Blane might disagree. The GNU people are kinda cult-ish, though. Hmmm...

  22. mine works on Linux Tuning Tricks? · · Score: 1

    Funny, the Ultra/100 drive in my Redhat 7.2 box is using DMA by default:

    # /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hde
    /dev/hde:
    Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.72 seconds =177.78 MB/sec
    Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.82 seconds = 35.16 MB/sec

    # /sbin/hdparm -d /dev/hde
    /dev/hde:
    using_dma = 1 (on)

    I know that I didn't have to do anything special to get it working - I just did a regular install and let it go.

  23. Re:Portscanning? on Mapping The CIA Nonclassified Network · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I ran a quick "nmap -O" on a few air force servers just a few weeks ago, because they were mirrorring one of our web sites very aggressively (many requests per second) and I wanted to get some information on exactly what the machine was that was pulling stuff down that hard. I've yet to be visited by anyone, in person or via email.

    Then, the site being mirrored was one that we'd developed for the air force, so I assume that they must've figured it was ok or maybe realized that it's bad form to monopolize most of our T1 for several minutes at a time and not felt like pushing the issue... :)

    I'm pretty sure that individual bases or however they're grouped each are alowed some leeway in their security implemntations, so they probably don't all track connection information down to each individual ping...

  24. Re:Pneumatic Blowlines on Build Your Own Roller Coaster · · Score: 2

    Nope, you're not alone. I too came from a farm (and go back every once in a while). The sys admin career is much better suited to my inherent laziness than grain and livestock raising. The cattle are strangely harder to fool than most users, though both seem to believe that sys admins are somehow magical beings... :)

  25. Re:Justification? on Lycoris Linux at ExtremeTech · · Score: 2

    I've installed and used Lycoris (and quite a few other distros). I didn't pay a dime. I downloaded the ISOs from their site. Not only was that [essentially] free, but they support rsync. The ISO was compressed in transit. That rocks.

    Anyway, the distro is really quite nice. You just run the installer, and it takes care of the details. You need to add a user (or users) and a printer, but while you're doing that the pakcages are being installed in the background. Keeping with the Calderalike intaller, you play solitare until the install is finished.

    It starts up with a nice, friendly interface. I set some of my windows-only cow orkers on it, and they were able to Get Stuff Done with little to no problem. Wine is pre-configured and starts up windows programs with just a click. The network browser works on a windows network with little problem. About everything just works.

    For me, it's a bit too sugar coated - but it's certainly acceptable. If I were going to deploy linux workstations today, replacing all of our windows machines, I would use Lycoris. It's the distro you give to people who aren't already into linux, and people that don't really *want* to get deep into linux.

    They actually provide remote tech support for a reasonable fee, too (I'm not sure if it's via vnc, ssh, or something their own). It's really well thought-out and well implemented. The problem will be getting it sold and installed in enough places to keep them around. If they market it right, I don't see why that'll be a problem.