A cheap USB thumb drive provides plenty of storage for passwords, private keys and other critical data and keeps them away from the hard disk. Some USB drives use a fingerprint sensor for data protection, others use regular encryption of the whole drive or at least the file system.
If you sell the old PC, remove the USB thumb drive and use it with the new box.
In the past, "eye-candy" proved quite essential for future improvements of usability. Think of anti-aliased fonts, subpixel rendering or further in the past (Windoze 3.1) "3D-effect" buttons and borders, which kept a then-average 386/33 box as busy as shadows and translucency do on current hardware but allowed easier recognition of GUI functions.
Shadowed and alpha-transparent widgets and dialogs will certainly improve usability a lot. Maybe in the future we won't need menus or toolbars at all, as document structure can be made visible with shadows and alpha-transparent frames, with some icons or widgets attached to the borders.
Wobbly windows can be useful to draw the user's attention to warning messages or system alerts.
IMHO spindles are the ideal storage stack for CDs, as long as they come with a plastic cover to keep the dust away.
To find files on a whole shelf of spindles, do "find . -print > cd$x_$y.txt" on any freshly-toasted CD. Label the CD "spindle $x, cd $y". Store "cd$x_$y.txt" on your hard disk, a USB thumb drive or a distinguishable (colored, different brand etc.) multi session CD. A single "grep $something cd*.txt" would find any stored file.
IMHO the greatest achievement of the recent 20 years of IT history is Free Software. 20 years ago the software world consisted of proprietary software with extremely high license fees, restrictive license aggreements and the inability to improve and adopt expensive software to special needs - may it be the legendary printer driver which should alert the administrators about paper jams.
20 years later, Free Software is flourishing. A whole operating system and a lot of additional software, even most Internet infrastructure is powered by software which can be adopted and improved freely. You can take part of the IT world without missing anything by not using non-free software at all, which has been impossible even five years ago. A few years later, Free Software might have overtaken proprietary software everywhere, even on Aunt Kate's desktop PC, her mobile phone and her TV.
Now replace "software" by "music", "video", "literature" or generally "media" and think 25 years back... that's our current situation.
tmpfs consists of "file system cache" without a physical file system, stored in shared memory and pageable to swap space. Lacking real I/O, it runs like crazy and makes the slowest boxes fly. Export the file system via NFS or Samba/CIFS and use it for very fast network storage.
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=$muchbutlessthenvirtualmemory tmpfs/work
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=384M,nr_inodes=384k tmpfs/work
tmpfs paged out to swap space on a real hard disk is still much faster then ext2/ext3/reiserfs/xfs/jfs/... on a hard disk partition. Without swap space, don't fill them up beyond your physical memory size minus about 32 MB for the operating system, or set the size limit to such a value.
The only disadvantage of tmpfs is the complete loss of its content after unmounting it. And of course you'll have to fill it after mounting it.
For smaller installations (thin clients, dedicated firewalls), the OS doesn't need much storage and may fit onto a flash memory. Most mainboards and notebooks can boot via USB thumbdrives, which provide enough memory for a small price (256 MB for about 25 or 30 €). They don't contain any moving parts nor make any noise. As long as you don't use flash memory as swapspace or for database storage, it will go for many years without wearing the flash cells. And if it's worn, a new thumbdrive is still less expensive than the cheapest harddisk.
A harddisk is useful if a LOT of backup/filebase/DB/media/pr0n storage is needed, but in the future it may become less essential as far as the OS itself is concerned.
Businesses have to deal with other businesses in China, and well there are plenty of families who legitimately want to email from China to the US and back.
So what if they can't because the rest of the world doesn't exchange *any* Internet traffic with China? They'll have two possibilities - live with their intranet and use phones or other communication methods - or make Chinese ISPs solve their spam problems. If e. g. Volkswagen China can't use Chinanet as ISP because no one can access their Web site and nobody wants to receive their emails, they'll have to find a solution - using own infrastructure or different ISPs, maybe tunneling their IP traffic to Europe and use European email and web servers. So some other, whitehat ISPs will get their money, not Chinanet. This is the most (and only) effective way of the Internet itself solving spam problems if legislation can't and/or doesn't.
A few years ago a German ISP, Primekom, was harboring many spammers and offering de-facto bulletproof hosting. Blacklisting helped only as much as most legitimate customers backed away from Primekom and choose different ISPs. After some time, Primekom's peering partners became less amused routing spam traffic, so they cancelled their peering contracts, leaving Primekom alone with a slow, thin uplink to somewhere in Eastern Europe, being even to slow for spammers.
So Primekom couldn't but get rid of these spammers. Now Primekom (or what has been remaining, which is not really much) is considered cured. Same with other ISPs in different countries.
AFAICT there a two thresholds of blacklisting effects: The lower one with occasionally delivery failures may be ignored, with recipients being told to no longer use a certain blacklist. The higher one with frequent delivery failures can't be ignored without asking almost *any* recipient for whitelisting. The only solution in latter case consists in getting rid of the blacklisting itself.
It's time to turn China (together with their peers if necessary) into an intranet and make them choose between spammers and non-spammers. Collateral damage due to blacklistings and nullroutings is bad, but collateral damage due to spam, fraud and phishing is worse.
Now imagine several thousands or millions of Spamcast customers using Windows-powered set-top boxes. First thing spammers will do is get such a thing and examine it for possible exploits. Legitimate customers won't even get the idea that their set-top box could catch a virus or a trojan which could do harm to anyone. Most of them won't ever update their set-top box top fix known security holes. Why should they? Would Spamcast tell them to do so? Or even Microsoft?
So it won't take very long until the world gets hammered by the worst and biggest spam cluster the Internet has ever seen.
Why not use mobile phones as Bluetooth audio receivers? Many phones provide Bluetooth, D/A converters, even MP3 players. As most people carry mobile phones anyway, they wouldn't need any additional hardware, only plug a pair of earphones into the phone and a USB bluetooth dongle into their PC.
If a CPU didn't turn 100 % of electrical power into heat, what should the remaining energy be transformed to? The CPU neither lights nor drives the PC around the room. Kernel compilations don't count as physical "work".
"Swiss Army Knife" distributions like tomsrtbt or a modified Debian bootdisk fit well onto an even small thumbdrive. They are very useful for fresh installations or to make a system with fscked LILO table bootable. Larger USB sticks can take a Knoppix distro.
On the host side, "mtools" provide easy access onto the thumbdrive. Just chgrp floppy/dev/sda, edit/etc/mtools.conf to map drive A: to/dev/sda and access the USB stick with "mdir", "mcopy" etc. like a (nowadays unneeded) floppy drive without mounting it.
SPAM will continue to exist until people stop making spam profitable.
That's why it is a really bad[TM] idea to order viagra, software and other spamvertised things for non-existant addresses or other spammers, using fake credit card informations. Soon after the campaign the spammer will get lots of retoured (undeliverable or rejected) packages and pay a lot of money for nothing.
Bullet-proof hosting is expensive, too, so think about the spammer's budget if you/.^H^H"visit" a spammer's site.;-)
Get a normal 3.5" or 2.5" IDE disk, put it into an external case (20 - 60 bucks) and connect it via USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) with your computer. Most home users can't deal with IP networking anyway, but they can plug in an external drive. And if they really need to share the data, they still can turn an old PC into a file server or simply open a NFS or SMB share.
ObexFTP can in fact transfer any kind of data between phones, PDAs and notebooks. The "pen" would be a nice method not to share actual files but locations where they can be obtained via ObexFTP.
Many worms spread themselves by not sending emails directly but via configured email relays. The recipients will see them together with worm-relayed spam coming from ISP's email relays like smtp*.wanadoo.fr. Of course they can be blocked, too, but lots of legitimate emails would get rejected.
OTOH with clueless ISPs like Wanadoo, their customers would suffer from severe delivery problems anyway and need to think about a third-party relay like a freemailer, or simply change ISP. But for this to occur, such worm-spitting relays would have to be blocked by a large number of correspondents and not only by a few individual admins. Only widely-used DNSBLs like SBL or SPEWS would be able to make Wanaspew work on their problems, not a new and barely known blacklist.
Slashdot Mirror
Why use a mirror? Let's /. Adobe so they can see that the GNU/Linux platform is important enough to support, especially with other Adobe products.
If you sell the old PC, remove the USB thumb drive and use it with the new box.
Shadowed and alpha-transparent widgets and dialogs will certainly improve usability a lot. Maybe in the future we won't need menus or toolbars at all, as document structure can be made visible with shadows and alpha-transparent frames, with some icons or widgets attached to the borders.
Wobbly windows can be useful to draw the user's attention to warning messages or system alerts.
To find files on a whole shelf of spindles, do "find . -print > cd$x_$y.txt" on any freshly-toasted CD. Label the CD "spindle $x, cd $y". Store "cd$x_$y.txt" on your hard disk, a USB thumb drive or a distinguishable (colored, different brand etc.) multi session CD. A single "grep $something cd*.txt" would find any stored file.
20 years later, Free Software is flourishing. A whole operating system and a lot of additional software, even most Internet infrastructure is powered by software which can be adopted and improved freely. You can take part of the IT world without missing anything by not using non-free software at all, which has been impossible even five years ago. A few years later, Free Software might have overtaken proprietary software everywhere, even on Aunt Kate's desktop PC, her mobile phone and her TV.
Now replace "software" by "music", "video", "literature" or generally "media" and think 25 years back... that's our current situation.
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=$muchbutlessthenvirtualmemory tmpfs /work /work
# mount -t tmpfs -o size=384M,nr_inodes=384k tmpfs
tmpfs paged out to swap space on a real hard disk is still much faster then ext2/ext3/reiserfs/xfs/jfs/... on a hard disk partition. Without swap space, don't fill them up beyond your physical memory size minus about 32 MB for the operating system, or set the size limit to such a value.
The only disadvantage of tmpfs is the complete loss of its content after unmounting it. And of course you'll have to fill it after mounting it.
A harddisk is useful if a LOT of backup/filebase/DB/media/pr0n storage is needed, but in the future it may become less essential as far as the OS itself is concerned.
So what if they can't because the rest of the world doesn't exchange *any* Internet traffic with China? They'll have two possibilities - live with their intranet and use phones or other communication methods - or make Chinese ISPs solve their spam problems. If e. g. Volkswagen China can't use Chinanet as ISP because no one can access their Web site and nobody wants to receive their emails, they'll have to find a solution - using own infrastructure or different ISPs, maybe tunneling their IP traffic to Europe and use European email and web servers. So some other, whitehat ISPs will get their money, not Chinanet. This is the most (and only) effective way of the Internet itself solving spam problems if legislation can't and/or doesn't.
A few years ago a German ISP, Primekom, was harboring many spammers and offering de-facto bulletproof hosting. Blacklisting helped only as much as most legitimate customers backed away from Primekom and choose different ISPs. After some time, Primekom's peering partners became less amused routing spam traffic, so they cancelled their peering contracts, leaving Primekom alone with a slow, thin uplink to somewhere in Eastern Europe, being even to slow for spammers.
So Primekom couldn't but get rid of these spammers. Now Primekom (or what has been remaining, which is not really much) is considered cured. Same with other ISPs in different countries.
AFAICT there a two thresholds of blacklisting effects: The lower one with occasionally delivery failures may be ignored, with recipients being told to no longer use a certain blacklist. The higher one with frequent delivery failures can't be ignored without asking almost *any* recipient for whitelisting. The only solution in latter case consists in getting rid of the blacklisting itself.
It's time to turn China (together with their peers if necessary) into an intranet and make them choose between spammers and non-spammers. Collateral damage due to blacklistings and nullroutings is bad, but collateral damage due to spam, fraud and phishing is worse.
Why not delegate splash screens to a special daemon which can be decorated with skins, docked into the KDE/GNOME panel or just deactivated?
So we'll get GPL 3 together with GNU Hurd 1.0?
"No security holes found in Windows XP SP2 for three months" would surely count as news.
Now imagine several thousands or millions of Spamcast customers using Windows-powered set-top boxes. First thing spammers will do is get such a thing and examine it for possible exploits. Legitimate customers won't even get the idea that their set-top box could catch a virus or a trojan which could do harm to anyone. Most of them won't ever update their set-top box top fix known security holes. Why should they? Would Spamcast tell them to do so? Or even Microsoft?
So it won't take very long until the world gets hammered by the worst and biggest spam cluster the Internet has ever seen.
Why not use mobile phones as Bluetooth audio receivers? Many phones provide Bluetooth, D/A converters, even MP3 players. As most people carry mobile phones anyway, they wouldn't need any additional hardware, only plug a pair of earphones into the phone and a USB bluetooth dongle into their PC.
If you're using a proxy, the browser doesn't (shoudn't) care about DNS lookups or the host file, except for finding the proxy itself.
If a CPU didn't turn 100 % of electrical power into heat, what should the remaining energy be transformed to? The CPU neither lights nor drives the PC around the room. Kernel compilations don't count as physical "work".
Wouldn't it be more effective to transform spinach into methane by natural methods and build fuel cells into underwear?
My car is already catching a lot of flies, especially during night trips. Attaching a "fly generator" to the front would save much fuel.
On the host side, "mtools" provide easy access onto the thumbdrive. Just chgrp floppy /dev/sda, edit /etc/mtools.conf to map drive A: to /dev/sda and access the USB stick with "mdir", "mcopy" etc. like a (nowadays unneeded) floppy drive without mounting it.
That's why it is a really bad[TM] idea to order viagra, software and other spamvertised things for non-existant addresses or other spammers, using fake credit card informations. Soon after the campaign the spammer will get lots of retoured (undeliverable or rejected) packages and pay a lot of money for nothing.
Bullet-proof hosting is expensive, too, so think about the spammer's budget if you /.^H^H"visit" a spammer's site. ;-)
Get a normal 3.5" or 2.5" IDE disk, put it into an external case (20 - 60 bucks) and connect it via USB 2.0 or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) with your computer. Most home users can't deal with IP networking anyway, but they can plug in an external drive. And if they really need to share the data, they still can turn an old PC into a file server or simply open a NFS or SMB share.
man xmodmap
As long as the one-handed keyboards gives any kind of output, it can be mapped al gusto.
Windows 95 Hardware Detection is scanning your system...
ObexFTP can in fact transfer any kind of data between phones, PDAs and notebooks. The "pen" would be a nice method not to share actual files but locations where they can be obtained via ObexFTP.
OTOH with clueless ISPs like Wanadoo, their customers would suffer from severe delivery problems anyway and need to think about a third-party relay like a freemailer, or simply change ISP. But for this to occur, such worm-spitting relays would have to be blocked by a large number of correspondents and not only by a few individual admins. Only widely-used DNSBLs like SBL or SPEWS would be able to make Wanaspew work on their problems, not a new and barely known blacklist.