Licensing problems, lack of support, and a myriad of other problems plague these old computers.
Licensing problems are only an issue if you insist on running Wintendos. A P100 makes a fine SOHO firewall.. Throw BSD, smoothwall, etc. on it with a spare ethernet card or two and you're flying for DSL/Cable.
They're also fine for all sorts of classroom uses that don't demand heavy computations. This would include things like doing word processing with AbiWord (Not sure about Open Office, though -- haven't tried it)
Laptops are the obvious go here.. They have a built-in UPS, they are designed for low power. Although most machines usually go into high-power mode when connected to AC, many (Ibooks are an example) can be set to use power-saving settings when attached to power.
Check that out before you buy a laptop.
Somebody else mentioned that laptops usually have DC going into them (external converter). A very few take DC direct in, and that would be bad for you. If you can do direct DC->DC conversion to whatever your (external) adapter puts out, you'll save a good bit on power conversion.
Yes, a desktop would be more expandable, but just how much expandability do you really need? If you're preparing to live 15MI from powered civilization, then I'd have to presume that you're going for a vaguely minimalist lifestyle. If that's the case, make due with what you get on a laptop.
I'm still using a P3/450. Other than doing thing like recompiling the kernel, I really don't miss the extra CPU. A voodo3 gives me all of the graphics I need. You'd have to look pretty hard for a new laptop that doesn't give you more power than that, today.
One thing that is useful on a laptop is an external keyboard and mouse. Most laptops can also take an external display, so you can also add a nice 17"LCD if you'd like.
If you think Will Smith is a bad pick, what about the coyote ugly chick cast as resident super-geinus Susan Calvin?
Will Smith isn't a bad actor, and neither should you hold the fact that an actress played a 'hot chick' against her. For a lot of actresses -- especially at the start of their carreer -- that's pretty much all that they get offered 95% of the time.
Being a hot babe doesn't mean that someone is either good or bad at something. Some people make the mistake of presuming that beautiful -> dumb. If you do that, you can miss some real jewels. Of course, presuming that beautiful -> smart is similarly fraught with danger. Having worked in a research lab, I can say that I've been blessed to have met a good number of brilliant women who would also classify as very beautiful... On the other hand, I've also run into a couple of women who seemed to have made their way thru their undergrad degree by batting their eyes at whomever was willing to be beguiled by them. Happily, few of the latter seem to make it into (and fewer through) grad school in the faculty of science (can't speak for other faculties).
Similarly, I'd say that Will Smith is a pretty good actor: He's got two things going against him:
1) he's known as a comedian, and
2) he's black
In a lot of ways, I'd say that comedy is a much harder trade than general acting... It requires a much better sense of balance to avoid crossing the line from comedic and stupid. Historically, comedians have had much more success crossing over into serious work than vice-versa.
As for him being black, there's not much you can do about that. Either you'll learn to live with a black investigator in a non-comedic context or you won't... Thankfully, people have (for the most part) managed to drop that preconception most of the time.
My nephew recorded an MP3 (his digital voice recorder encodes to MP3 format) of himself singing me Happy Birthday, I downloaded it.
Please tell me which law I broke, exactly?
I thought you were talking about running Win-98 for weeks without a reboot.
I've done that - no troll. The trick is to replace Explorer as your shell with something stable,....
Well, given that MS claims that IE is an integral part of Win 98 (yeah, I know,... Gag me with a lawyer...) I think that it would be fair to argue what what you're running is no longer really Win 98, anymore.
Others have made the same comment, but not quite so bluntly.
RedHat may be EOLing their support for 7.3, but as long as there are enough people still using it who are willing to pay the price, there will be somebody who will make critical (and even not-so-critical) patches available -- even if it has to be done in-house.
For people with (the just recently EOLed) Win/98 the options for support are.... well, I might as well just take them out to the barn and shoot them. It's not just difficult for me to provide any meaningfull support for Win'98.. If you believe their EULA, it's pretty much illegal. When MS EOL's XP, you won't even have the option of transferring to a new box/HD if something goes wrong with your hardware, because the OS will just self-destruct, and MS won't want to talk to you about it.
Another example of what happens when you trust yourself to closed soure is what happened to Israel with hebrew support on Mac Office. It's to Microsoft's advantage to get them to move to Windows instead, so they just decided to not support it on the Mac. No ammount of money that Israel offered them is going to get them to change their mind, because Microsoft wants Israel to be a Windows-only country. It has bull squat to do with cutomer service or direct profit. The country of Israel is at the mercy of Microsoft's (larger) business plan.
Isreal's answer is that they're moving to Open Office on the Mac -- but wait! OO isn't supported on OSX! That's OK. Israel can pay for a small skunk-works to get it working, and get OO's hebrew support up to snuff. No forcing anybody to do anything there... they want it, they can afford to pay someone to do it, it gets done.
QED
First Germany, now Israel... next, the world, (bwahahahaha!).
Say, I run an important mailing list. A random power failure, severe disk corruption, nobody really knows what works OK and what is broken, week-old backup of data, no system backup, no network, no other computer to move the harddisk, I must work with this broken system.....
People who get support at that level from the likes of SUN are usually paying $10,000/month for their support contract.
For a measly $5,000, I'll hunt down a copy of whatever version of Linux you're running on that box, Install it on my machine, fly down to your office, use my box to recover whatever's left of your disk, and get it running again to the best of my ability.
Unless you're doing something strange that requires that you stay with an old distro, I'll even take a good run at getting you going on a more recent copy of the OS, on a 2 year old used server that I got off of another customer last week (but with a newer hard disk) -- probably 4 times as fast as whatever you had things running on yesterday.
Yep. That's right... All for the low, low price of $5,000. Try and get that from sun (and don't even bother trying to get that sort of support from Microsoft).
Seriously, though. There's no reason to use Windows 9x anymore except in very rare, special (in that warm, "special student" kind of way) scenarios.
I have one Windows game that runs on win-95. It still runs just fine, so I'm continuing to use win95. It's a network game, so when there aren't enough people playing the game, I expect that I'm just going to reformat the C: partition, and that will be the end of using MS software at home.
Damned if I'm gonna pay $150 for a new OS just to run a $35 game.
What does Oracle say about this, especially in light of the recent rsync and kernel do_brk vulns?
Not many people actually run the rsync server.. for those who do, I doubt that Oracle would complain about me installing the most recent copy of that.
The do_brk vuln is a bit more interesting, but I'm expecting that somebody has patches for that for kernels going a good ways back. From my reading of the story on that, I'm guessing that the patch is actually kinda small. I expect that it shouldn't be too difficult to get Oracle's blessing to support that specific patch on RH kernels for older systems. If Oracle is demanding that people keep using an older rev of the kernel, they could even make a 'blessed' copy of the kernel with that specific patch available on their websites.
It IS expensive to upgrade. How long does it take to do it? How much time spent is acceptable to the non-Linux fanatic user?
If you're just upgrading one or two packages, the upgrade could take as little as a minute or two.
If you're upgrading the entire OS, then it's obviously going to take a good bit longer (a couple of hours).
On the other hand, this time could be compared to how long it takes to do the periodic clean+reinstall that Win-98 seems to reqire for so many people.
The pattern of newer software generally working better than older software isn't local to OS. There are a lot of things that Win-XP does better than Win-98, and you're free to upgrade there too (it's just not free for you to do the upgrade).
In most cases, however, it's a lot easier for you to just upgrade the package in question... For most commonly used (Open Source) packages/distros where upgrades aren't feasible, somebody is still backporting important bug fixes. It may not be the original distributor, but who cares, as long as the work gets done.
Here in BC, $$45CDN/month (after taxes) gets me 1.5megabits down and.5 up. For a bit more (up to $150/month) you can get unregulated speeds (up to 4megabit.... rumors of some lucky SOBS getting as much as 8megabit).
Cable prices are about the same for home users. That gets you 3Meg down and.5meg up, but subject to the neighbourhood glut problem.
For $20CAD/month the cable companies now offer cable 'lite'... 120K down and something similar up. I think that Telus has responded in kind.
The Canadian dollar is currently worth about $0.75USD, so that would be about $33 and $15USD/month respectively for the two levels of service.
Al gore did not claim to "invent" the internet. He claimed to have taken the initiative in it's creation as the internet. Mostly, I'd say that he's the victim of 'sound byte' creation... As a politician you have to be able to fit your message into 5-15 second sound bytes.
If he'd said
'Back in the '80s I took the initiative in enabling the ArpaNet to be commercialized and expanded into what we now know as the Internet",
It never would have made it out of the cutting room. Even if it had, only the most high geeks would have understood what he was really talking about. He might have gotten off better by saying 'enabling' rather than 'creating' but that's about as far as I would have edited his statement even in hindsight.
You really don't understand that the Oklahoma City bombing was done ONCE by ONE MAN, do you?
Wrong: Two people have been convicted of direct involvement. Others may have also been involved, but the FBI, et.al. seemed quite happy to let that trail go cold (much less the kind of witch hunt among right-wing militias that there is today against the Muslim community)
You also really don't understand that it took 18 or 19 hijackers, all muslim, to carry out the four (4) attacks on September 11, do you?
I'm guessing that there are a lot more Muslims in the US than there are members of right wing militas. Joining a Militia is much more a matter of choice than being Muslim. Much like Christianity, the Muslim community runs the gamut from ultra-pacifist to radical Yahoo.
Given the choice of having a rip-roaring socio-political argument with a random Muslim or a militia member, I'd feel much safer arguing with a Muslim. Even getting into the 90th percentile of radicality within the Muslim community, the most that they're going to threaten me with is ending up in hell after I die..
Actually, I did have an argument like that with a Muslim... He refused to give me a copy of the Quran to read (so I could argue with him more knowledgably) because he figured that, even after reading it, I was unlikely to convert... Apparently, if I die ignorant of the Quran, I still have a decent shot at (a lesser) heaven, but if I refuse to convert after having access to 'the word', then I'd be doomed to hell -- and he liked me too much to risk that.
Walking away from a similar kind of argument with McVeigh's "associates", I'd be listening for the sound of a cocking gun.
Some of them would probably be happy to shoot just me for being 'too uppity a colored'.
Does this mean that I have to turn off all the caching servers at my corporate clients?
It could get worse than that -- what about the cache used in your network switches??? (this includes 10/100 'hubs'). It's not like you need to be using switches... All you have to do to avoid SOCAN royalties is go back to a dumb hub.
Same logic would also apply to firewalls... They're not necessary they just make life easier for people using the internet.
This, of course, presumes that SOCAN wins their appeal.
From what I recall, it was a US court decision, but really, it's the same damn thing. You're not making a "copy" in the traditional sense,
I agree with you, but big the question is "Does The Supreme Court agree with us?".
From the CTV report:
The Federal Court agreed with the Copyright Board that ISPs were indeed carriers or transmitters of content
except when ISPs engaged in caching content to speed up the performance of their systems.
As far as I can tell, they were after money. Religion and politics would seem to have nothing to do with their actions. Certainly no more than McVeigh and friends (including those who weren't cought).
I would, however, note that, after the bombing in Oklahoma, people were chomping at the bit to blame it on Muslims. When it proved to be the work of Christian US Militia members, there was not the kind of witch hunt there was against US muslems subsequent to 9/11.
Third, by my count, there are far more human rights violations in the middle-east Muslim countries than there are in the European or American Christian countries.
Yugoslavia???
If you include Central and South America in 'American Christian' then I think that we might have a pretty tight horse race in terms of government run/sanctioned torture, murder and mayhem. I was, however, mostly referring to things like USA citizens (predominantly christian) shooting each other.
Since September 11, the US has killed more civilians in each of Iraq and Afghanistan than died in the trade tower attacks. The US is now threatening similar treatment against Iran and Syria.
Many people strongly believe that US intervention in tht area has far more to do with oil reserves and other 'strategic' interests than human rights or terrorism. This feeling is especially strong in the Middle East (including Iraq).
The USA's studied inaction in places like Africa supports this contention.
As for your constitutional question, it confers rights to people (or persons), not citizens. Similarly, the Declaration of Independence holds as self evident truths that 'all men are created equal' not just those men who happened to have carved out a home for themselves within the bounds of the USA.
If SOCAN wins this case, and I end up paying an extra $50/year for my internet connection, I think it's time to buy a CD burner, and install gnutella. I use my 'net connection for computing, not compiling, but if I'm gonna be charged by the music industry for being connected, then I think I should be making the most of it.
There's a lot of music that I'd like to download. So far, I've been restrained in the matter. Now I'm gonna have me some fun.
As far as I can tell, this story and the CTV story from Friday are the same story. What SOCAN appears to be doing is using a loophole. They're claiming that the ISP's use of (transparent) caches constitutes a copy of the music that should result in royalties. What this ignores is that most of what goes across the net isn't music... They're effectively asking for a backdoor patent on cache technologies.
More interestingly, they're ignoring the fact that most caches are of web pages, while most music is (AFAIK) transferred by P2P, which is (I believe) rarely, if ever cached.
If the music industry wins this case, ISPs would have the option of turning off their caches or paying a royalty of as high as to 10% of their income.
Slashdot Mirror
That should have been: " A very few take AC direct in,"
Licensing problems are only an issue if you insist on running Wintendos. A P100 makes a fine SOHO firewall.. Throw BSD, smoothwall, etc. on it with a spare ethernet card or two and you're flying for DSL/Cable.
They're also fine for all sorts of classroom uses that don't demand heavy computations. This would include things like doing word processing with AbiWord (Not sure about Open Office, though -- haven't tried it)
Somebody else mentioned that laptops usually have DC going into them (external converter). A very few take DC direct in, and that would be bad for you. If you can do direct DC->DC conversion to whatever your (external) adapter puts out, you'll save a good bit on power conversion.
Yes, a desktop would be more expandable, but just how much expandability do you really need? If you're preparing to live 15MI from powered civilization, then I'd have to presume that you're going for a vaguely minimalist lifestyle. If that's the case, make due with what you get on a laptop.
I'm still using a P3/450. Other than doing thing like recompiling the kernel, I really don't miss the extra CPU. A voodo3 gives me all of the graphics I need. You'd have to look pretty hard for a new laptop that doesn't give you more power than that, today.
One thing that is useful on a laptop is an external keyboard and mouse. Most laptops can also take an external display, so you can also add a nice 17"LCD if you'd like.
Will Smith isn't a bad actor, and neither should you hold the fact that an actress played a 'hot chick' against her. For a lot of actresses -- especially at the start of their carreer -- that's pretty much all that they get offered 95% of the time.
Being a hot babe doesn't mean that someone is either good or bad at something. Some people make the mistake of presuming that beautiful -> dumb. If you do that, you can miss some real jewels. Of course, presuming that beautiful -> smart is similarly fraught with danger. Having worked in a research lab, I can say that I've been blessed to have met a good number of brilliant women who would also classify as very beautiful... On the other hand, I've also run into a couple of women who seemed to have made their way thru their undergrad degree by batting their eyes at whomever was willing to be beguiled by them. Happily, few of the latter seem to make it into (and fewer through) grad school in the faculty of science (can't speak for other faculties).
Similarly, I'd say that Will Smith is a pretty good actor: He's got two things going against him:
1) he's known as a comedian, and
2) he's black
In a lot of ways, I'd say that comedy is a much harder trade than general acting... It requires a much better sense of balance to avoid crossing the line from comedic and stupid. Historically, comedians have had much more success crossing over into serious work than vice-versa.
As for him being black, there's not much you can do about that. Either you'll learn to live with a black investigator in a non-comedic context or you won't... Thankfully, people have (for the most part) managed to drop that preconception most of the time.
Please tell me which law I broke, exactly?
Copyright. The copyright on Happy Birthday is not expired. and it won't for another couple of decades (unless copyright laws change again).
I've done that - no troll. The trick is to replace Explorer as your shell with something stable,....
Well, given that MS claims that IE is an integral part of Win 98 (yeah, I know, ... Gag me with a lawyer...) I think that it would be fair to argue what what you're running is no longer really Win 98, anymore.
That'd be just fine by me.... Next big storm, I get to sue SCO for damages!.
I think it's just been done.
Although the Tuesday SF Chronicle article (referred to in this slashdot article) claims that Jimo will be up to 300 feet long, Both the astrobio.net article, (also referred to here) and a Monday SF Chronicle article (pointed to by today's SFC article) refer to Jimo being 60-100 feet long.
I'm thinking that somebody saw 100 feet, and thought metres. Hopefully they're not the engineers for the current mission.
Oh, sorry. My mistake.
I thought you were talking about running Win-98 for weeks without a reboot.
silly comment of the minute:
"I've been booting my Linux box daily for the last year. The computer's fine, but my shoe's starting to wear out."
RedHat may be EOLing their support for 7.3, but as long as there are enough people still using it who are willing to pay the price, there will be somebody who will make critical (and even not-so-critical) patches available -- even if it has to be done in-house.
For people with (the just recently EOLed) Win/98 the options for support are .... well, I might as well just take them out to the barn and shoot them. It's not just difficult for me to provide any meaningfull support for Win'98.. If you believe their EULA, it's pretty much illegal. When MS EOL's XP, you won't even have the option of transferring to a new box/HD if something goes wrong with your hardware, because the OS will just self-destruct, and MS won't want to talk to you about it.
Another example of what happens when you trust yourself to closed soure is what happened to Israel with hebrew support on Mac Office. It's to Microsoft's advantage to get them to move to Windows instead, so they just decided to not support it on the Mac. No ammount of money that Israel offered them is going to get them to change their mind, because Microsoft wants Israel to be a Windows-only country. It has bull squat to do with cutomer service or direct profit. The country of Israel is at the mercy of Microsoft's (larger) business plan.
Isreal's answer is that they're moving to Open Office on the Mac -- but wait! OO isn't supported on OSX! That's OK. Israel can pay for a small skunk-works to get it working, and get OO's hebrew support up to snuff. No forcing anybody to do anything there... they want it, they can afford to pay someone to do it, it gets done.
QED
First Germany, now Israel... next, the world , (bwahahahaha!).
People who get support at that level from the likes of SUN are usually paying $10,000/month for their support contract.
For a measly $5,000, I'll hunt down a copy of whatever version of Linux you're running on that box, Install it on my machine, fly down to your office, use my box to recover whatever's left of your disk, and get it running again to the best of my ability. Unless you're doing something strange that requires that you stay with an old distro, I'll even take a good run at getting you going on a more recent copy of the OS, on a 2 year old used server that I got off of another customer last week (but with a newer hard disk) -- probably 4 times as fast as whatever you had things running on yesterday.
Yep. That's right... All for the low, low price of $5,000. Try and get that from sun (and don't even bother trying to get that sort of support from Microsoft).
I have one Windows game that runs on win-95. It still runs just fine, so I'm continuing to use win95. It's a network game, so when there aren't enough people playing the game, I expect that I'm just going to reformat the C: partition, and that will be the end of using MS software at home.
Damned if I'm gonna pay $150 for a new OS just to run a $35 game.
Not many people actually run the rsync server.. for those who do, I doubt that Oracle would complain about me installing the most recent copy of that.
The do_brk vuln is a bit more interesting, but I'm expecting that somebody has patches for that for kernels going a good ways back. From my reading of the story on that, I'm guessing that the patch is actually kinda small. I expect that it shouldn't be too difficult to get Oracle's blessing to support that specific patch on RH kernels for older systems. If Oracle is demanding that people keep using an older rev of the kernel, they could even make a 'blessed' copy of the kernel with that specific patch available on their websites.
If you're just upgrading one or two packages, the upgrade could take as little as a minute or two.
If you're upgrading the entire OS, then it's obviously going to take a good bit longer (a couple of hours).
On the other hand, this time could be compared to how long it takes to do the periodic clean+reinstall that Win-98 seems to reqire for so many people.
The pattern of newer software generally working better than older software isn't local to OS. There are a lot of things that Win-XP does better than Win-98, and you're free to upgrade there too (it's just not free for you to do the upgrade).
In most cases, however, it's a lot easier for you to just upgrade the package in question... For most commonly used (Open Source) packages/distros where upgrades aren't feasible, somebody is still backporting important bug fixes. It may not be the original distributor, but who cares, as long as the work gets done.
Cable prices are about the same for home users. That gets you 3Meg down and .5meg up, but subject to the neighbourhood glut problem.
For $20CAD/month the cable companies now offer cable 'lite'... 120K down and something similar up. I think that Telus has responded in kind.
The Canadian dollar is currently worth about $0.75USD, so that would be about $33 and $15USD/month respectively for the two levels of service.
And so Melinda is still 'bobbing' for Bill...
Wrong: Two people have been convicted of direct involvement. Others may have also been involved, but the FBI, et.al. seemed quite happy to let that trail go cold (much less the kind of witch hunt among right-wing militias that there is today against the Muslim community) You also really don't understand that it took 18 or 19 hijackers, all muslim, to carry out the four (4) attacks on September 11, do you?
I'm guessing that there are a lot more Muslims in the US than there are members of right wing militas. Joining a Militia is much more a matter of choice than being Muslim. Much like Christianity, the Muslim community runs the gamut from ultra-pacifist to radical Yahoo.
Given the choice of having a rip-roaring socio-political argument with a random Muslim or a militia member, I'd feel much safer arguing with a Muslim. Even getting into the 90th percentile of radicality within the Muslim community, the most that they're going to threaten me with is ending up in hell after I die..
Actually, I did have an argument like that with a Muslim... He refused to give me a copy of the Quran to read (so I could argue with him more knowledgably) because he figured that, even after reading it, I was unlikely to convert... Apparently, if I die ignorant of the Quran, I still have a decent shot at (a lesser) heaven, but if I refuse to convert after having access to 'the word', then I'd be doomed to hell -- and he liked me too much to risk that.
Walking away from a similar kind of argument with McVeigh's "associates", I'd be listening for the sound of a cocking gun. Some of them would probably be happy to shoot just me for being 'too uppity a colored'.
It could get worse than that -- what about the cache used in your network switches??? (this includes 10/100 'hubs'). It's not like you need to be using switches... All you have to do to avoid SOCAN royalties is go back to a dumb hub.
Same logic would also apply to firewalls... They're not necessary they just make life easier for people using the internet.
This, of course, presumes that SOCAN wins their appeal.
I'd say yes, unless you can prove that none of your employees have ever used your net connection to download music. (IANAL)
I agree with you, but big the question is "Does The Supreme Court agree with us?". From the CTV report:
(emphasis mine)The CBC report has a pointer to the actual Federal court decision that is being appealed.
As far as I can tell, they were after money. Religion and politics would seem to have nothing to do with their actions. Certainly no more than McVeigh and friends (including those who weren't cought).
I would, however, note that, after the bombing in Oklahoma, people were chomping at the bit to blame it on Muslims. When it proved to be the work of Christian US Militia members, there was not the kind of witch hunt there was against US muslems subsequent to 9/11.
Yugoslavia???
If you include Central and South America in 'American Christian' then I think that we might have a pretty tight horse race in terms of government run/sanctioned torture, murder and mayhem. I was, however, mostly referring to things like USA citizens (predominantly christian) shooting each other.
Since September 11, the US has killed more civilians in each of Iraq and Afghanistan than died in the trade tower attacks. The US is now threatening similar treatment against Iran and Syria.
Many people strongly believe that US intervention in tht area has far more to do with oil reserves and other 'strategic' interests than human rights or terrorism. This feeling is especially strong in the Middle East (including Iraq).
The USA's studied inaction in places like Africa supports this contention.
As for your constitutional question, it confers rights to people (or persons), not citizens. Similarly, the Declaration of Independence holds as self evident truths that 'all men are created equal' not just those men who happened to have carved out a home for themselves within the bounds of the USA.
There's a lot of music that I'd like to download. So far, I've been restrained in the matter. Now I'm gonna have me some fun.
More interestingly, they're ignoring the fact that most caches are of web pages, while most music is (AFAIK) transferred by P2P, which is (I believe) rarely, if ever cached.
If the music industry wins this case, ISPs would have the option of turning off their caches or paying a royalty of as high as to 10% of their income.