Ok, John, ok already. We get your point about not voting. If you think however that when 90% of the American population refuses to vote that some amazing good and political reform will come out of it you are dead wrong. You are letting your intense hatred of policitcs and corporate government (a hatred that I wholeheartedly share with you) cloud your judgement. Sit, breathe deeply like the Jedi, and then turn your brain back on. The current political system wants you to do one of the same three things this year.1) Vote Republican, 2) Vote Democrat, or 3) Not Vote.
The only way you are ever going to see any real change without throwing a very nasty revolution and destroying the government the hard way is to vote those asinine republicans and democrats right out of office. It's so simple I'm amazed that more people don't see it. You can lay 110% of all the problems in this country that you attribute to government to either one party or the other. In my mind they have both proven themselves too incompetent to be allowed to have any say in anything.
Just vote them out. How hard is it to friggin' vote? Just drop by the DMV or register online and you can get your voice heard. The only wasted votes this year are the ones not being made, and the ones going to the same assholes that helped to create the vast sucking black hole we currently call a government.
Get out and VOTE, but NOT for the republicans or democrats. Vote for Nader, vote for Browne, vote for Cthulu, hell vote for the bum across the street in the dumpster, any of them will make better presidents than we've had in decades. When it comes to the character of the man in office I don't care if he fucks chickens. If he can balance the budget, get people back to work, and put an end to this ceaseless yammering in the meda about our children, I'll break down the pearly gates of heaven for him myself to let him get in where he belongs.
The more votes the big two lose to the other parties, the more money and power they lose as well. It might seem like gnats fighting a tornado at this point, but hey isn't that way the pioneers of the open-source movement must have felt like trying to fight off the software moguls?
You can't destroy the system. Only those you put in office have that power. The republicans and democrats will never do it, no matter what happens. You'll have to put some people in there that have the brains and the guts to make these changes.
I'm voting libertarian, not because I like Browne, but because I find, to my complete surprise, that at least one political party has some of the same opinions and views that I do.
Personally I'd like to see about 50 political parties that are all about the same size. Once we get that kind of anarchy and choice we will see a lot less of those democrat-vs-republican bullshit adgendas and anything that gets done will only get done because it is necessary or wanted by the majority of the country. If there are that many parties they will all have to team up to get anything done. As it is we get nothing done just because both of our current parties hate eachother and won't even agree on the few good things anymore because they are out to spite eachother. The party of the candidate that proposes a bill or reform should, in a perfect world, have ZERO impact on how it is viewed by the other representatives.
Perhaps, one day in the future we can get this country to the point where we won't need the representatives. You'll probably be lucky to live long enough to see that start happening. Once we have given the sum total power of the political arena over to average joe american, we might be able to actually get something done in this world. It's all idealistic bullshit, but hey, fuck you, that's how democracy started anyways:P
Oh, and another thing. For those of you who keep saying "I choose not to vote because I can't support a corrupt system", will you climb out of your diapers and grow the fuck up? That makes about a much sense as not going to school because you feel the education system in this country is a joke (which it is). Even pacificsts had to fight wars to ensure peace. Lots of them fought to get the votes that you are choosing not to use. They fought them even though they had to put their lives on the line and all it's going to cost you is an hour of your time and a few dollars in gasoline. Until ALL of the people like you finally do VOTE and OVERRULE the morons voting democrat and republican this year we will see NO change.
The day that a third party president wins the popular vote, and the electoral college ellects a republican or democrat in his place, we will have won. That will spark a shitstorm in this country that will make the goverment think they have been dropped into the very pits of hell itself. I guarantee you it will also be the last time that the electoral college votes on anything ever again.
I know there are three or four justices that might be replaced, but frankly I don't trust Bush OR Gore to appoint any decent candidates. If the supreme court gets tipped towards republican, we are in for a universe of trouble in the years ahead. If it goes democrat, the software community might get a break but they will fuck it up some other way, liberals always do.
This election will be my first time voting in ANY election, at the age of 24. I was taking the no-vote stance but honestly it just doesn't make sense to me anymore. Too much of my future can be damaged by the decisions made by a few brain dead bitchwads that are running this country for me to sit on the fence anymore.
Besides, if you sit on the fence long enough, you get hemorrhoids. My butt itches already:P
Everyone always says "get involved in the system if you don't like it, and make a difference!"
Wake up. Getting involved in this system NEVER makes ANY difference. Someone please name an instance where the involvment of the little people made difference one in anything recently (last 20 years or so), especially with large issues.
Of course, not getting involved makes no difference either. That's the problem. There is no way to MAKE a difference without having billions of dollars to spend or plenty of power to wield. Welcome to the American plutocracy, and lately, the corporatocracy (if that's even a word).
The only place politics still work (poorly at that, but that's my own personal experience) is at the local level. Go to your town hall sometime and see for yourself. It might give you an insight into how it is supposed to work, and never does.
Let them pass their laws, and nibble away at our freedoms as much as they like. When they pass their absurd laws and nobody obeys them, and pass their internet regulations that have no jurisdiction outside the US only to find that the rest of the world is laughing at them, what will they do?
They'll do nothing, just like the rest of us. The whole system is so broken that neither end can understand or affect the other. They can't jail everyone, and unpopular laws are impossible to enforce (prohibition, copy protection, etc).
Eventually the whole mess will collapse under its own weight and fall apart, and I think we'll live to see it happen. Time for the next american revolution. Maybe this time we can get it right and use the net to have a real democracy. WTF do I need repesentatives for when I can read the issues myself, read the opinions of the experts myself (all of them, and the crackpots too), and then make my own educated decision?
True, I can't be everwhere and read everything, but I probably shouldn't be voting on something that I don't understand or that doesn't concern me. I'll leave that to the people who are concerned and know what the hell is going on. Our current representatives sure as hell don't.
And why have only two parties? Seems like you could fix the system by having about 50. Who has enough money to lobby all 50 parties? Now you really have a lot of choice in your representatives:)
Just sit back and relax guys. This doesn't seem to be the time to act. That time will come eventually, and everyone will know it when it gets here. In the meantime enjoy yourself, have a good time, do what you feel you should be ableto do, and let the rest of them run around like idiots. Just be aware that sometime we will all have to get together and fix this mess. I'm sure we'll see it coming a mile away.
I'd also remind you that the US isn't the only country out there. Get on a damn plane and visit some of them, it'll be the most fun you've ever had, and it'll open your eyes wider than anything else if you haven't done it before. If the US becomes too intolerable, then leave! I certainly would.
Here's to hoping that we make this revolution a lot less bloody than our last few.
PS. Nothing pisses me off more than the worthlessness of the vote that so many people died for. It's like a carrot that they dangle in front of your nose to get you to move ahead and fight for it, but when you get it, it's rotten to the core, and full of maggots.
Geek houses (or apartments in our case) just grow themselves. Let's face it, who starts out with $20,000 and says "Hey, let's buy a shitload of awesome computer equipment and build a network." Most people have more practical uses for the money.
Let's see... ours started with two roomates living together at my parent's house while finishing college. We relocated to a larger city to get real computer jobs. Over time, we upgraded our computers. With a little extra cash, we resurrected our old systems and put them to good use. The phone modem was replaced with cable internet access. Another geek moved in with us, bringing two more computers. Once again, everyone upgraded over the course of a year or so. Cat5 running all through the house, along the ceilings, floors, through the air vents, etc.
The current configuration is 12 computers. One massive fileserver (60GB Raid0 IDE, hey, it's cheap, and 2 years old), several smaller servers made from older computers, gratuitous Linux gateway machine, and the three geek primary machines, most of which put corporate iron to shame:)
We even have one hooked to the entertainment center, for watching pirated movies, video clips, and to facilitate the conversion of just about every media format into just about every other format. I'm waiting for the TiVO hack that lets me use it as a digital movie recorder:)
Planned upgrades: 525 GB Raid5 IDE fileserver, with 5 SCSI CD Changers (we have too much data to store it all on CDs... need live storage). This can be done for under $2500 thanks to a awesome 8 bay UDMA100 tower Promise is planning to release around christmas. Just slap in 8 75GB IBM drives and have a blast, and it connects to the host system using LVD160:)
One of my roomates has gotten 'nostalgic' about his first computer, so he's rebuilding it (NexGen P100 clone) by mounting it on a large board, building a plexiglass case around it, and hanging it on the wall in the living room (no keyboard, mouse or monitor). Install Linux, add a network connection, add a digital tickertape, and write some funky perl scripts and we'll be watching Slashdot headlines scroll across the ticker in the living room. Perhaps one day we'll get it to chime the hour, announce CallerID information, do the doorbell, and get a webcam on it.
Let's see, we have an old Alpha we picked up for $50 (there was a story about those on here a few months ago, we figured why not), perhaps we can hook that up in the kitchen with the old VT100 terminal I got recently, and use it to browse for cooking recipies or something...
We were actually considering doing an inventory of our hardware and setting up a geek house page at some time in the future. I'll keep you posted:)
Of course, the network is switched, and we are getting sick of all the cables... We picked up a copy of "Smart Homes for Dummies" which I can highly reccommend. You can get cables for your house that have the 4 primary outlets (Cat5, Phone, Cable, and AC) all in one bundle, just run them through the wall. That's nowhere near as hard as it seems, btw. I think that is what puts most geeks off... "We have to open the walls? Ugh. Too much work."
The problem is that geeks just can't throw hardware away...
First, I'm stunned. I never would have figured Lars for a genius. What we have here is someone who is just as passionate as we are about this, and just as educated on the issue. Thing is, he is on the other side of the fence. Let's hope he will work with us on this, because the only way we will ever find a happy medium is by talking to people like him about it.
Our problem - We want to participate in a mass media digital distribution network capable of getting any media that we want, be it music, movies, text, or software, to our computers in as fine a quality and with as much speed as possible. Library of Congress on tap, for lack of a better term.
Their problem - Nobody is paying the copyright holders for the acquisition of their property, and it can potentially cause them to lose a lot of money. They don't mind that we are interested in acquiring their media digitally - hell, that's what they want. They want you to buy their goods.
Lars said it - the copyright holders must be able to choose their own terms for this digital distribution. They can charge whatever they see fit (including free) for the media. They can choose to be a part of it or not, but they still retain their rights. That is the only way a commercial service like Napster can remain legal. They have to provide a way to block media that is not supposed to be there - they provide the service, so they bear the responsibility. That's the law, and breaking it will only get you slammed into oblivion because big business runs this country.
Solution - Develop a system that allows firm control of the media that is distributd over it. There's no need to control users or invade privacy. Only the copyright holder of a piece of work should be allowed to introduce it into the system, and on their terms alone. They should also retain the ability to remove it at any time.
Why should they be required to regulate their service, when, for example, an ISP is not required to regulate Usenet/IRC? Simple. Their service exists for the express purpose of providing you with said content, a content that exists ONLY on their service. ISPs are like a phone company. They only provide a medium, not the content. If you provide content, you are responsible for maintaining control over it. Granted, it is a very gray area, and it can be argued either way, however this way would allow the artists to protect their rights, and that's how the courts are going to see it.
THIS WILL NOT STOP PIRACY. It will however reduce it greatly. Most of the people who use Napster do it out of convenience (and to try before you buy). If a LEGAL alternative exists that falls within reason, most people will use that instead, simply because it is legal and moral. Only when it is too expensive (like current CD prices) will it be shunned for an illegal alternative.
Napster in its current form is incapable of this. Everyone can be a server/client, and there is no way they can take that back. That program is released, and it will continue to serve as a vehicle for piracy until a better one comes along, just like Usenet and IRC always have. DON'T waste your time trying to control the things that cannot be controlled. Even forcing Napster out of business will not make people stop using Napster. The software exists with or without the company that created it.
Instead, design and create a digital distribution format that allows people to PAY for the property. Once that system is in place, the vast majority of the users will use that instead, cutting the piracy back down to reasonable levels (like old fashioned bootlegging). Just because some pirate steals it doesn't mean that 10 other people won't go out and buy it. Also, don't assume that the pirate would actually buy it if he couldn't steal it.
Since a system like this does not (AFAIK) exist, everyone uses the next best thing - Napster. Napster should have given a bit more thought to this before they let the cat out of the bag. They have the ability to create such a system, they just took the quick way out, and now they are paying for it.
Lastly - Some might say that this will not be any different than the currently exiting system, and if there are only a few digital providers they can do or charge whatever they want. Not true, for three reasons. First, the copyright holder should set the cost. Second, it is a lot easier to create such a digital system than it is to create, for example, a record label. There will be a lot of distributors, and consumers can choose the one they like. AOL/Time Warner will probably jump on this in half a minute. Third, they cannot justify the cost of charging $10 per song, because they never produce anything. All they provide you with is a means to download digital information, and possibly a central server structure from which to download it.
As I understand it, an Appeal is an attempt by the defendant to have the case taken to the next highest level in a court of law. Microsoft is already at the Federal level. How many more levels can they go? Isn't the next level the Supreme Court? And if it is, AFAIK you cannot appeal a Supreme Court decision.
If that is true, then will there really be years of appeals? It looks like one appeal will take them directly to the top, and in this case I think it is likely that the Supreme Court will uphold Jackson's decision. Supreme Court justices hold their positions until they decide to leave (read: for life). This is so their decisions are not affected by politics, since they have no re-elections to worry about.
Or am I just blowing smoke out my ass?;)
If there are any legal scholars out there, would you care to enlighen us?
By the way, I think this bit is worth posting to Slashdot - the actual rulings from the end of the documents.
****Begin MS Findings****
In accordance with the Conclusions of Law filed herein this date, it is, this ______ day of April, 2000,
ORDERED, ADJUDGED, and DECLARED, that Microsoft has violated 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2, as well as the following state law provisions: Cal Bus. & Prof. Code 16720, 16726, 17200; Conn. Gen. Stat. 35-26, 35-27, 35-29; D.C. Code 28-4502, 28-4503; Fla. Stat. chs. 501.204(1), 542.18, 542.19; 740 Ill. Comp. Stat. ch. 10/3; Iowa Code 553.4, 553.5; Kan. Stat. 50-101 et seq.; Ky. Rev. Stat. 367.170, 367.175; La. Rev. Stat. 51:122, 51:123, 51:1405; Md. Com. Law II Code Ann. 11-204; Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 93A, 2; Mich. Comp. Laws 445.772, 445.773; Minn. Stat. 325D.52; N.M. Stat. 57-1-1, 57-1-2; N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law 340; N.C. Gen. Stat. 75-1.1, 75-2.1; Ohio Rev. Code 1331.01, 1331.02; Utah Code 76-10-914; W.Va. Code 47-18-3, 47-18-4; Wis. Stat. 133.03(1)-(2); and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that judgment is entered for the United States on its second, third, and fourth claims for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1232; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that the first claim for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1232 is dismissed with prejudice; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that judgment is entered for the plaintiff states on their first, second, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth claims for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1233; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that the fifth claim for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1233 is dismissed with prejudice; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that Microsoft's first and second claims for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1233 are dismissed with prejudice; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that the Court shall, in accordance with the Conclusions of Law filed herein, enter an Order with respect to appropriate relief, including an award of costs and fees, following proceedings to be established by further Order of the Court.
I can't believe the bullshit in that letter. I can barely choke down that statement about the best trained networking force on the planet. These bootcampers and paper MCSEs actually have the fscking gall to complain about the retirement of NT4? We saw it coming two years ago - or you should have if you had your eyes open. It's Microsoft, for crissakes! All they do is screw people. Of course they want to force everyone to use Win2K.
MCSE certifications DONT MEAN CRAP. Any fsckwad can pass those tests with their brain turned off. All you have to do is MEMORIZE. If you can't think and know nothing about computers, take heart! You can still get your MCSE.
MCSEs tend to think that they know everything because they have NEVER been exposed to a real computing situation. Ever. Their answer to it all is simply follow the three R's - Reboot, Reformat, and Reinstall.
Your value does not depend on your certification. The only reason you need one of these certifications is to get in the damned door somewhere. Microsoft has made these tests too easy. They are giving you a single, one time free shot to upgrade your core to Win2K. That should be enough. Hell, I'll be able to upgrade mine in a weekend, simply because I know my shit after trying in vain to support Microsoft products for the better part of three years now. Its absolutely amazing when you learn how much you really don't know when you are in the field. You learn more there in a week than you do reading all of the study guides on the market.
Going into a company that is dependent on windows, and trying to make everything work correctly after a bunch of MCSEs have fscked it all up, is one hell of a tough job. I steer people away from Microsoft products every chance I get for mission critical work.
I got lucky. The company I work for has three main networking professionals. Bill, the Unix guy, Carmen, the Novell guy, and Me, for the Microsoft shit. Unlike most MCSEs, I know from painful experience just how to get those obscene Microsoft products to work. That doesn't mean I have to like them. I learn more by watching Bill and Carmen than I do reading books.
Microsoft products may look pretty, but they are the smelly shitstain on the boots of real networking professionals the world over. I hope that someone, anyone, comes along and puts them out of business.
We have lots of Linux boxes at home. Now there's a server. Did you know that NT simply CANNOT handle hosting multiple quake3 players from the internal network to any single outside server? You and your buddy can't join the same game outside your local network. You would have to install 3rd party software to add that forgotten 'feature'. Never had that problem with ipchains - worked like a charm right out of the box. Microsoft only promises. Linux delivers.
And to those of you who say the MCSE tests aren't that easy - fsck you, yes they are, I know, I passed them without knowing a tenth of what I do now. If you still disagree, you probably haven't worked in the field very much, have you?
I'll pass the accelerated Win2K exam the same way - study for a weekend and take the test. The only 'new' feature is active directory, and it stinks like a smelly cesspool behind a shanty in vietnam. You can't even turn it off.
Win2K also completely freaks out samba (at least on our home LAN), so watch out for any of you who are trying to make Linux work with windows.
The thing tht I resent the most is that if you don't have a worthless piece of paper, no one takes you seriously. If you do have the paper, chances are you aren't worth looking at because you spent your time getting the paper and not the experience.
Have the rest of you noticed a complete and total barrier to anyone who is under 25 (I'm 23) getting any credibility and responsibility in the IT field? If you aren't thirty you can't possibly know your stuff. Apparently I am a freak of nature, but then again so are my two roomates, both also MCSEs and hating it.
We have to play the certification game for now, until we can start up our company. I think I'll get CCNA, CCDA, CNA, and finish off the damned MCSE+I. I spend all my day supporting Exchange, SQL and Proxy, so why not read the books and get the certifications, right? Trouble is, the things you need to know to make it all work and the things you need to know to pass the test are two very different things.
You'll have to excuse me if I come off as being a little irate here... I just had a really, really bad day supporting small business server. It works, but I think fixing it may have cost me a few bits of sanity. Anyone have modem sharing just plain break for no reason, then spend an entire day fixing it with no success, then come in the next morning and find out that it is working perfectly, having apparently repaired itself overnight? That one stumped MS Support too;) I'm off to some quake server to vent my frustrations on other hapless geeks... have a nice day.
I can give you some input on #1. The main (and only) advantage to using IDE over SCSI is price. I have a 70GB (4x17.2GB Maxtor) UDMA Raid0 running on a server at home. It cost me only about $700 to build it. It is running on a Promise Ultra66 controller. I have run raid on it under both Linux and WinNT and it works great. Disk performance is actually very impressive, much faster than a normal IDE drive, but that is to be expected when you stripe 4 UDMA drives. It is still nowhere even close to the speed of a good SCSI Raid setup.
I'm always amused at the large number of people who immediately think that because you are placing IDE/UDMA drives in a Raid configuration it will cause the drives to die quickly. That's bullshit. Granted, the SCSI drives will last you a hell of a lot longer, but IDE won't keel over and die just because it is Raided and under a high performance load. Most IDE drives will last at least for the length of their warranty period. Make sure you get the 'SMART' enabled drives and some monitoring software to give you a heads up if the drives begin to exhibit signs of failure.
If you want reliability and speed and are willing to pay for it, use SCSI. If you want large amounts of space and average speed at a decent price use UDMA. My needs run to cheap space and lots of it, and so far the UDMA solution has worked well for me.
I wouldn't recommend anything but a SCSI solution to you for any situation where you are looking for high performance fault tolerant systems. In your case I would go with option number two in your post above, and option three only if you are really, really worried about losing your data.
PS - This is running as a software Raid0, there is no hardware present. I have seen a number of benchmarks (some from Ars-Technica, don't have the link) that claim the performance of the Promise raid controllers is exactly the same as a software raid. I'm not sure if their competitors have this problem, or even if they have any competitors in this area.
David Arkenstone (New Age Cinematic Rock - Pure idea music, fantastic for inspiration) Bjorne Lynne (Symphonic Rock - Great for getting work done and good inspiration music) Mike Oldfield (Styles all his own, mostly rock or classical, great for working) Pink Floyd (Best band around, good for problem solving tasks) Robert Miles (Well-Composed Techno/Rock, good for working) Yanni (New Age Rock/Classical - good for stress relief) Rick Wakeman (Progressive Rock, good for inspiration) Metallica (Metal, great for those really tough pieces of code) Enya (Very relaxing New Age, great for bug hunting. Do not operate heavy machinery while listening to Enya)
That pretty much covers my favorites. I have 30.3 days worth of non-repeating music on a big fat raid array. Most of it is Rock, Metal, NewAge, Classical, or Pop. I have 3 mix discs of pop that I guarantee would put any existing radio stations out of business in a few weeks flat just due to the quality of the playlist. I love MP3s.
Another good bit that he was in recently was an HBO remake of the 12 Angry Men. He played the angry man who wasn't on speaking terms with his son. As always, he did a damn fine job in that. Jack Lemmon was playing the man with the knife... seeing them together was absolutely awesome. Proof that his talent did not diminish with age. If any of you fans missed that one, get it... you won't be disappointed.
I have to agree with the fella above who liked him in A Christmas Carol - he was brilliant.
And I have never seen Dr. Strangelove... something that I plan to fix very soon after seeing it spoken so well of.
Why do we have representatives? Well, back in the good ole days (think original 13 states), there was no way for everyone in the country to be aware of what was happening. We therefore had to choose a representative whom we trusted to make good decisions for us. It then became his job to stay current on all political issues. It was also difficult back then because the average man did not have an education that is adequate for that job.
This is also why we still have Senators and House Reps. They live and breathe politics every day, all day (a job I don't envy them for). They know a great deal more than almost anyone else politically and can bring this knowledge to bear on anything presented to them. The common man is not going to take the time to stay informed on all political matters, so again we choose someone to do it for us. I agree that the current system is becoming corrupt. Hey, we had a good run tho... 200 years before the corruption began to become a real problem. That is the best track record in history, I think...
Were this to become a 'real' democracy, there would be no need for House Reps or Senators. Everyone would have access to all of the imformation that they would need to become informed on a single topic that interests them. It would be as simple as reading the information, looking at the proposal, reviewing what expert opinions are on both sides, and then clicking that little yes or no button in your web browser.
The implications of this suggest that the internet may well suck the power out of the government just as it does with every other power structure that it touches. The Recording Industry, Software Industry (Linux is the internet's collective answer to the Microsoft virus), News Industry, and very soon Radio, Television, Movies, and Printed Press are all feeling the bite of a superior information dissemination network that is slowly cutting into their business and providing more useful information and consumer choice without the bullshit.
The government is not ready for this. We aren't either. Give it a few years. Hopefully we may also be the first country to have a truly 'bloodless' revolution in our government - a restructuring without the need for lots of angry people with guns. In any case, it is clear that most people in the US are becoming more and more dissatisfied with their government. Give those people a tool and they will use it. Once again, history begins to repeat itself.
Isn't this fascinating? The internet drains all power out of every apsect of society that it touches, and returns it directly to those who use it. We can't survive without it now, it has become far to tightly tied to the economy. It is immune to most laws since it is a global network, and few laws apply everywhere. There is no way to control it, regulate it, destroy it, or even corrupt it.
How the hell did something like this come into being by accident? It wasn't by design, I seriously doubt that the founders knew what they were doing (to this extent at least). This seems to be a natural result of the process of information sharing.
Did you ever notice that the internet maps posted on here a while ago look a lot like a map of the human brain?
Looks like I lived in China in a past life and pissed off a few people... I live in interesting times.
The 300a used to be the gem for overclocking, that was what I started with. However, the BP6 was designed specifically with higher multipliers like the 466 and upcoming 500/533/566 in mind. It supports a large number of front side bus speeds, from 66 to 133, and from 72 to 85 it counts in increments of 1 or 2, so that means you can run at 72, 73, 75, 78, etc. The PCI bus (cause of most crashes in an OC'ed system) is separated with a special controller so that it does not have the clocking problems that come with most other motherboards. This also saves the strain on your peripheral cards. I have a dual 466 overclocked to 575 and it runs great - never locks or crashes. The case temperature is at 39'C, but I have 7 hdd and a tnt2 making heat as well as the overclocked celerons, and 9 fans to keep it cool. The BP6 also lets you adjust the core voltage of each cpu separately, a must have for overclocking like this.
There was an interview posted at FullOn3D that has a few questions and answers from these guys. Mostly stuff about the manufacturing, driver support and features, etc.
"The product delivers a fillrate of 1200 million texels per second and a geometry throughput of 15 million triangles per second. This translates to a real-world performance in, for example, id Software's Quake III Arena of over 200 frames per second at true color in full monitor resolutions with all details and features enabled."
That is for a single chipset - single! What the hell do you do with 128MB of graphics memory?
The quad gives you 4x all those numbers... 4800 million texels, 60 million triangles, Quake at 800fps?! Oh, and of couse the ability to have 512MB of graphics memory...
All this and they say that it will be affordable too.
And what processor(s) on earth can possibly feed this monster enough data to use it to its full potential?
This is total bullshit. Even if the data on the site was controversial, their rights END when they tell you to shut it down. It is completely illegal for them to destroy your data like they have done. I have a friend who is an IP lawyer and he thinks you would have a good shot at landing a nice settement if you sue them. Verbal contracts are STILL contracts, you just need someone to verify that you had such a contract in the first place. You would need someone who heard the contract or has firsthand knowledge of its existence to testify to that fact and then you have proof that it existed.
You should also ask for the drives - if they don't know what they are doing when they delete it you might be able to retrieve some of the data. It takes a triple format to totally erase all data from standard hard drives. There are companies that specialize in recovering data in these situations. My 1st ISP had a hacker breakin where he wiped their system and they got it all back using a company like that. They can also restore CDs if they were only broken - you need to burn the pits and valleys out to destroy a cd, shattering it only destroys the ones under the cracks and those can be repaired often. I don't know any off the top of my head but I am sure a quick search will turn up someone who can provide these services, though they are not cheap. If a fellow slashdotter has any such information could you post it below?
This is blatant censorship - just because they do not like the nature of the data does not give them the right to destroy it. They have the right move it off of their servers only. Destroying the backups instead of returning them to you, especially if they know you have no other copies, is illegal destruction of intellectual property. If you had any of it copyrighted it will be even better for you in court.
At the very least you should be able to get the university to allow you time to make up for the lost class materials.
Even if there is a 'hidden' side to this story, it is still irrelevant. Destruction of IP is still a crime.
Sorry about the rant but this sort of thing really, really ticks me off...
Too little, too late, and I have no sympathy for them.
MP3 will always be here for us to fall back on even if they come up with a dozen new standards. It isn't good enough for audiophiles, but it is good enough for the vast majority of music listeners. The promise of new formats with better quality and higher compression is not enough to outweigh the loss of freedom from the copy protection schemes.
I honestly don't understand why they even keep trying. If they had embraced this instead of fighting it they could have probably found a way to turn a profit on this whole thing. Now they are just playing catch-up to a blooming digital music industry that will move many times faster than they can hever hope to catch up with.
As far as artists's rights - RIAA has been pirating those for years. Now they have the gall to act upset because someone else is pirating that which they 'rightfully' stole first? The ownership of the music should belong only to the artists who produce it.
Related stuff that you might find interesting:
Related SDMI article on MP3.Com covering the same story. http://www.mp3.com/news/281.html
SDMI Revocation and technical information. http://www.mp3.com/news/279.html
Final outcome of the RIAA/Diamond lawsuit. This one is particularly interesting since it effectively legalized all MP3 files and killed the AHRA. http://www.mp3.com/news/277.html
The Free Music Philosophy (Sounds a little familiar...) http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.html
Now I am just waiting for the first REAL portable CD/MP3 player... Naiam was going to make one but it has become vaporware. Anyone know of any commercial projects in this direction?
Be careful with this one or that fryguy might be visiting you sooner than you think;)
The safest way to handle an IDE hotswap is to unplug the power first and let the drive totally spin down, and then unplug the data cable. When powering a hotswapped drive back up do it the other way - data cable then power cable. Never mess with that data cable if the drive is running. Unplugging the data cable first can cause bad things to happen, or so I have been told. We had a hardware course at the college I attended. The guy who was teaching it really knew his hardware and that was the way he recommended doing it. He explained why but it has been too long... something about toasting the controller.
A neat trick based on this is hotswapping for data recovery. If you lose a hard drive to a bad ondisk controller and you have another identical hard drive, boot from the good drive, then follow the above steps to swap them - chances are that you can get your data back this way unless the controller on your bad drive is really fried.
Thanks for the helpful information. There are a few things here that I haven't tried yet for that server. I went ahead and built it - for the technically inclined these are the specs:
Tyan Tiger 1692DL Mainboard with 2 Celeron 300a cpus. (Socket 370 w adapter cards) 128MB RAM (1 PC100 DIMM) Onboard IDE: 4 Nakamichi 16x5 CD-ROM Changers. Promise Ultra33 IDE Controller: 4 17.2GB Maxtor hard drives.
One Matrox Millenium II Card (AGP) One 3Com 10/100 NIC (3c905b) Addtronics 7890 case (awesome case)
Yes, I know, I am a sick bastard - I get that alot;)
I tried linux on it (RH52 w 2.2.9 I think) but was unable to get the system to see more than the first drive on each changer. I have tried every version of Windows (From 95 to Win2000 Advanced Server Beta 3) and none of them are capable of finding the other drives except for Win98 (ugh). For my own sanity I refuse to use that OS as a server. Linux is preferred because I can mount disks on directories instead of that brain dead drive letter assignment method that windows uses.
This server gets a lot of use, but the cd-roms are for infrequently accessed data (setup discs for various software, old backups). This server is only supporing a small number of users (5 including me, plus a few net connections every now and then). It was necessary beacuse of the large amount of data that we move around. It was also the 'budget model'. Having more cash I would have definitely gone SCSI with both the drives and changers.
I'm glad I don't have a whole lot to do this weekend - I'm sure that all of your suggestions will keep me busy for hours hacking away at it. Any suggetsions on a distro that handles this sort of thing better than others? Please, no flamewars... by now it's a redundant, and very crispy, topic.
While I'm at it - is it possible to get a third IDE controller into a system?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, John, ok already. We get your point about not voting. If you think however that when 90% of the American population refuses to vote that some amazing good and political reform will come out of it you are dead wrong. You are letting your intense hatred of policitcs and corporate government (a hatred that I wholeheartedly share with you) cloud your judgement. Sit, breathe deeply like the Jedi, and then turn your brain back on. The current political system wants you to do one of the same three things this year.1) Vote Republican, 2) Vote Democrat, or 3) Not Vote.
:P
:P
The only way you are ever going to see any real change without throwing a very nasty revolution and destroying the government the hard way is to vote those asinine republicans and democrats right out of office. It's so simple I'm amazed that more people don't see it. You can lay 110% of all the problems in this country that you attribute to government to either one party or the other. In my mind they have both proven themselves too incompetent to be allowed to have any say in anything.
Just vote them out. How hard is it to friggin' vote? Just drop by the DMV or register online and you can get your voice heard. The only wasted votes this year are the ones not being made, and the ones going to the same assholes that helped to create the vast sucking black hole we currently call a government.
Get out and VOTE, but NOT for the republicans or democrats. Vote for Nader, vote for Browne, vote for Cthulu, hell vote for the bum across the street in the dumpster, any of them will make better presidents than we've had in decades. When it comes to the character of the man in office I don't care if he fucks chickens. If he can balance the budget, get people back to work, and put an end to this ceaseless yammering in the meda about our children, I'll break down the pearly gates of heaven for him myself to let him get in where he belongs.
The more votes the big two lose to the other parties, the more money and power they lose as well. It might seem like gnats fighting a tornado at this point, but hey isn't that way the pioneers of the open-source movement must have felt like trying to fight off the software moguls?
You can't destroy the system. Only those you put in office have that power. The republicans and democrats will never do it, no matter what happens. You'll have to put some people in there that have the brains and the guts to make these changes.
I'm voting libertarian, not because I like Browne, but because I find, to my complete surprise, that at least one political party has some of the same opinions and views that I do.
Personally I'd like to see about 50 political parties that are all about the same size. Once we get that kind of anarchy and choice we will see a lot less of those democrat-vs-republican bullshit adgendas and anything that gets done will only get done because it is necessary or wanted by the majority of the country. If there are that many parties they will all have to team up to get anything done. As it is we get nothing done just because both of our current parties hate eachother and won't even agree on the few good things anymore because they are out to spite eachother. The party of the candidate that proposes a bill or reform should, in a perfect world, have ZERO impact on how it is viewed by the other representatives.
Perhaps, one day in the future we can get this country to the point where we won't need the representatives. You'll probably be lucky to live long enough to see that start happening. Once we have given the sum total power of the political arena over to average joe american, we might be able to actually get something done in this world. It's all idealistic bullshit, but hey, fuck you, that's how democracy started anyways
Oh, and another thing. For those of you who keep saying "I choose not to vote because I can't support a corrupt system", will you climb out of your diapers and grow the fuck up? That makes about a much sense as not going to school because you feel the education system in this country is a joke (which it is). Even pacificsts had to fight wars to ensure peace. Lots of them fought to get the votes that you are choosing not to use. They fought them even though they had to put their lives on the line and all it's going to cost you is an hour of your time and a few dollars in gasoline. Until ALL of the people like you finally do VOTE and OVERRULE the morons voting democrat and republican this year we will see NO change.
The day that a third party president wins the popular vote, and the electoral college ellects a republican or democrat in his place, we will have won. That will spark a shitstorm in this country that will make the goverment think they have been dropped into the very pits of hell itself. I guarantee you it will also be the last time that the electoral college votes on anything ever again.
I know there are three or four justices that might be replaced, but frankly I don't trust Bush OR Gore to appoint any decent candidates. If the supreme court gets tipped towards republican, we are in for a universe of trouble in the years ahead. If it goes democrat, the software community might get a break but they will fuck it up some other way, liberals always do.
This election will be my first time voting in ANY election, at the age of 24. I was taking the no-vote stance but honestly it just doesn't make sense to me anymore. Too much of my future can be damaged by the decisions made by a few brain dead bitchwads that are running this country for me to sit on the fence anymore.
Besides, if you sit on the fence long enough, you get hemorrhoids. My butt itches already
Everyone always says "get involved in the system if you don't like it, and make a difference!"
:)
Wake up. Getting involved in this system NEVER makes ANY difference. Someone please name an instance where the involvment of the little people made difference one in anything recently (last 20 years or so), especially with large issues.
Of course, not getting involved makes no difference either. That's the problem. There is no way to MAKE a difference without having billions of dollars to spend or plenty of power to wield. Welcome to the American plutocracy, and lately, the corporatocracy (if that's even a word).
The only place politics still work (poorly at that, but that's my own personal experience) is at the local level. Go to your town hall sometime and see for yourself. It might give you an insight into how it is supposed to work, and never does.
Let them pass their laws, and nibble away at our freedoms as much as they like. When they pass their absurd laws and nobody obeys them, and pass their internet regulations that have no jurisdiction outside the US only to find that the rest of the world is laughing at them, what will they do?
They'll do nothing, just like the rest of us. The whole system is so broken that neither end can understand or affect the other. They can't jail everyone, and unpopular laws are impossible to enforce (prohibition, copy protection, etc).
Eventually the whole mess will collapse under its own weight and fall apart, and I think we'll live to see it happen. Time for the next american revolution. Maybe this time we can get it right and use the net to have a real democracy. WTF do I need repesentatives for when I can read the issues myself, read the opinions of the experts myself (all of them, and the crackpots too), and then make my own educated decision?
True, I can't be everwhere and read everything, but I probably shouldn't be voting on something that I don't understand or that doesn't concern me. I'll leave that to the people who are concerned and know what the hell is going on. Our current representatives sure as hell don't.
And why have only two parties? Seems like you could fix the system by having about 50. Who has enough money to lobby all 50 parties? Now you really have a lot of choice in your representatives
Just sit back and relax guys. This doesn't seem to be the time to act. That time will come eventually, and everyone will know it when it gets here. In the meantime enjoy yourself, have a good time, do what you feel you should be ableto do, and let the rest of them run around like idiots. Just be aware that sometime we will all have to get together and fix this mess. I'm sure we'll see it coming a mile away.
I'd also remind you that the US isn't the only country out there. Get on a damn plane and visit some of them, it'll be the most fun you've ever had, and it'll open your eyes wider than anything else if you haven't done it before. If the US becomes too intolerable, then leave! I certainly would.
Here's to hoping that we make this revolution a lot less bloody than our last few.
PS. Nothing pisses me off more than the worthlessness of the vote that so many people died for. It's like a carrot that they dangle in front of your nose to get you to move ahead and fight for it, but when you get it, it's rotten to the core, and full of maggots.
Geek houses (or apartments in our case) just grow themselves. Let's face it, who starts out with $20,000 and says "Hey, let's buy a shitload of awesome computer equipment and build a network." Most people have more practical uses for the money.
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Let's see... ours started with two roomates living together at my parent's house while finishing college. We relocated to a larger city to get real computer jobs. Over time, we upgraded our computers. With a little extra cash, we resurrected our old systems and put them to good use. The phone modem was replaced with cable internet access. Another geek moved in with us, bringing two more computers. Once again, everyone upgraded over the course of a year or so. Cat5 running all through the house, along the ceilings, floors, through the air vents, etc.
The current configuration is 12 computers. One massive fileserver (60GB Raid0 IDE, hey, it's cheap, and 2 years old), several smaller servers made from older computers, gratuitous Linux gateway machine, and the three geek primary machines, most of which put corporate iron to shame
We even have one hooked to the entertainment center, for watching pirated movies, video clips, and to facilitate the conversion of just about every media format into just about every other format. I'm waiting for the TiVO hack that lets me use it as a digital movie recorder
Planned upgrades: 525 GB Raid5 IDE fileserver, with 5 SCSI CD Changers (we have too much data to store it all on CDs... need live storage). This can be done for under $2500 thanks to a awesome 8 bay UDMA100 tower Promise is planning to release around christmas. Just slap in 8 75GB IBM drives and have a blast, and it connects to the host system using LVD160
One of my roomates has gotten 'nostalgic' about his first computer, so he's rebuilding it (NexGen P100 clone) by mounting it on a large board, building a plexiglass case around it, and hanging it on the wall in the living room (no keyboard, mouse or monitor). Install Linux, add a network connection, add a digital tickertape, and write some funky perl scripts and we'll be watching Slashdot headlines scroll across the ticker in the living room. Perhaps one day we'll get it to chime the hour, announce CallerID information, do the doorbell, and get a webcam on it.
Let's see, we have an old Alpha we picked up for $50 (there was a story about those on here a few months ago, we figured why not), perhaps we can hook that up in the kitchen with the old VT100 terminal I got recently, and use it to browse for cooking recipies or something...
We were actually considering doing an inventory of our hardware and setting up a geek house page at some time in the future. I'll keep you posted
Of course, the network is switched, and we are getting sick of all the cables... We picked up a copy of "Smart Homes for Dummies" which I can highly reccommend. You can get cables for your house that have the 4 primary outlets (Cat5, Phone, Cable, and AC) all in one bundle, just run them through the wall. That's nowhere near as hard as it seems, btw. I think that is what puts most geeks off... "We have to open the walls? Ugh. Too much work."
The problem is that geeks just can't throw hardware away...
First, I'm stunned. I never would have figured Lars for a genius. What we have here is someone who is just as passionate as we are about this, and just as educated on the issue. Thing is, he is on the other side of the fence. Let's hope he will work with us on this, because the only way we will ever find a happy medium is by talking to people like him about it.
Our problem - We want to participate in a mass media digital distribution network capable of getting any media that we want, be it music, movies, text, or software, to our computers in as fine a quality and with as much speed as possible. Library of Congress on tap, for lack of a better term.
Their problem - Nobody is paying the copyright holders for the acquisition of their property, and it can potentially cause them to lose a lot of money. They don't mind that we are interested in acquiring their media digitally - hell, that's what they want. They want you to buy their goods.
Lars said it - the copyright holders must be able to choose their own terms for this digital distribution. They can charge whatever they see fit (including free) for the media. They can choose to be a part of it or not, but they still retain their rights. That is the only way a commercial service like Napster can remain legal. They have to provide a way to block media that is not supposed to be there - they provide the service, so they bear the responsibility. That's the law, and breaking it will only get you slammed into oblivion because big business runs this country.
Solution - Develop a system that allows firm control of the media that is distributd over it. There's no need to control users or invade privacy. Only the copyright holder of a piece of work should be allowed to introduce it into the system, and on their terms alone. They should also retain the ability to remove it at any time.
Why should they be required to regulate their service, when, for example, an ISP is not required to regulate Usenet/IRC? Simple. Their service exists for the express purpose of providing you with said content, a content that exists ONLY on their service. ISPs are like a phone company. They only provide a medium, not the content. If you provide content, you are responsible for maintaining control over it. Granted, it is a very gray area, and it can be argued either way, however this way would allow the artists to protect their rights, and that's how the courts are going to see it.
THIS WILL NOT STOP PIRACY. It will however reduce it greatly. Most of the people who use Napster do it out of convenience (and to try before you buy). If a LEGAL alternative exists that falls within reason, most people will use that instead, simply because it is legal and moral. Only when it is too expensive (like current CD prices) will it be shunned for an illegal alternative.
Napster in its current form is incapable of this. Everyone can be a server/client, and there is no way they can take that back. That program is released, and it will continue to serve as a vehicle for piracy until a better one comes along, just like Usenet and IRC always have. DON'T waste your time trying to control the things that cannot be controlled. Even forcing Napster out of business will not make people stop using Napster. The software exists with or without the company that created it.
Instead, design and create a digital distribution format that allows people to PAY for the property. Once that system is in place, the vast majority of the users will use that instead, cutting the piracy back down to reasonable levels (like old fashioned bootlegging). Just because some pirate steals it doesn't mean that 10 other people won't go out and buy it. Also, don't assume that the pirate would actually buy it if he couldn't steal it.
Since a system like this does not (AFAIK) exist, everyone uses the next best thing - Napster. Napster should have given a bit more thought to this before they let the cat out of the bag. They have the ability to create such a system, they just took the quick way out, and now they are paying for it.
Lastly - Some might say that this will not be any different than the currently exiting system, and if there are only a few digital providers they can do or charge whatever they want. Not true, for three reasons. First, the copyright holder should set the cost. Second, it is a lot easier to create such a digital system than it is to create, for example, a record label. There will be a lot of distributors, and consumers can choose the one they like. AOL/Time Warner will probably jump on this in half a minute. Third, they cannot justify the cost of charging $10 per song, because they never produce anything. All they provide you with is a means to download digital information, and possibly a central server structure from which to download it.
As I understand it, an Appeal is an attempt by the defendant to have the case taken to the next highest level in a court of law. Microsoft is already at the Federal level. How many more levels can they go? Isn't the next level the Supreme Court? And if it is, AFAIK you cannot appeal a Supreme Court decision.
;)
If that is true, then will there really be years of appeals? It looks like one appeal will take them directly to the top, and in this case I think it is likely that the Supreme Court will uphold Jackson's decision. Supreme Court justices hold their positions until they decide to leave (read: for life). This is so their decisions are not affected by politics, since they have no re-elections to worry about.
Or am I just blowing smoke out my ass?
If there are any legal scholars out there, would you care to enlighen us?
By the way, I think this bit is worth posting to Slashdot - the actual rulings from the end of the documents.
****Begin MS Findings****
In accordance with the Conclusions of Law filed herein this date, it is, this ______ day of April, 2000,
ORDERED, ADJUDGED, and DECLARED, that Microsoft has violated 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2, as well as the following state law provisions: Cal Bus. & Prof. Code 16720, 16726, 17200; Conn. Gen. Stat. 35-26, 35-27, 35-29; D.C. Code 28-4502, 28-4503; Fla. Stat. chs. 501.204(1), 542.18, 542.19; 740 Ill. Comp. Stat. ch. 10/3; Iowa Code 553.4, 553.5; Kan. Stat. 50-101 et seq.; Ky. Rev. Stat. 367.170, 367.175; La. Rev. Stat. 51:122, 51:123, 51:1405; Md. Com. Law II Code Ann. 11-204; Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 93A, 2; Mich. Comp. Laws 445.772, 445.773; Minn. Stat. 325D.52; N.M. Stat. 57-1-1, 57-1-2; N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law 340; N.C. Gen. Stat. 75-1.1, 75-2.1; Ohio Rev. Code 1331.01, 1331.02; Utah Code 76-10-914; W.Va. Code 47-18-3, 47-18-4; Wis. Stat. 133.03(1)-(2); and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that judgment is entered for the United States on its second, third, and fourth claims for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1232; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that the first claim for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1232 is dismissed with prejudice; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that judgment is entered for the plaintiff states on their first, second, fourth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth claims for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1233; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that the fifth claim for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1233 is dismissed with prejudice; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that Microsoft's first and second claims for relief in Civil Action No. 98-1233 are dismissed with prejudice; and it is
FURTHER ORDERED, that the Court shall, in accordance with the Conclusions of Law filed herein, enter an Order with respect to appropriate relief, including an award of costs and fees, following proceedings to be established by further Order of the Court.
Thomas Penfield Jackson
U.S. District Judge
I can't believe the bullshit in that letter. I can barely choke down that statement about the best trained networking force on the planet. These bootcampers and paper MCSEs actually have the fscking gall to complain about the retirement of NT4? We saw it coming two years ago - or you should have if you had your eyes open. It's Microsoft, for crissakes! All they do is screw people. Of course they want to force everyone to use Win2K.
;) I'm off to some quake server to vent my frustrations on other hapless geeks... have a nice day.
MCSE certifications DONT MEAN CRAP. Any fsckwad can pass those tests with their brain turned off. All you have to do is MEMORIZE. If you can't think and know nothing about computers, take heart! You can still get your MCSE.
MCSEs tend to think that they know everything because they have NEVER been exposed to a real computing situation. Ever. Their answer to it all is simply follow the three R's - Reboot, Reformat, and Reinstall.
Your value does not depend on your certification. The only reason you need one of these certifications is to get in the damned door somewhere. Microsoft has made these tests too easy. They are giving you a single, one time free shot to upgrade your core to Win2K. That should be enough. Hell, I'll be able to upgrade mine in a weekend, simply because I know my shit after trying in vain to support Microsoft products for the better part of three years now. Its absolutely amazing when you learn how much you really don't know when you are in the field. You learn more there in a week than you do reading all of the study guides on the market.
Going into a company that is dependent on windows, and trying to make everything work correctly after a bunch of MCSEs have fscked it all up, is one hell of a tough job. I steer people away from Microsoft products every chance I get for mission critical work.
I got lucky. The company I work for has three main networking professionals. Bill, the Unix guy, Carmen, the Novell guy, and Me, for the Microsoft shit. Unlike most MCSEs, I know from painful experience just how to get those obscene Microsoft products to work. That doesn't mean I have to like them. I learn more by watching Bill and Carmen than I do reading books.
Microsoft products may look pretty, but they are the smelly shitstain on the boots of real networking professionals the world over. I hope that someone, anyone, comes along and puts them out of business.
We have lots of Linux boxes at home. Now there's a server. Did you know that NT simply CANNOT handle hosting multiple quake3 players from the internal network to any single outside server? You and your buddy can't join the same game outside your local network. You would have to install 3rd party software to add that forgotten 'feature'. Never had that problem with ipchains - worked like a charm right out of the box. Microsoft only promises. Linux delivers.
And to those of you who say the MCSE tests aren't that easy - fsck you, yes they are, I know, I passed them without knowing a tenth of what I do now. If you still disagree, you probably haven't worked in the field very much, have you?
I'll pass the accelerated Win2K exam the same way - study for a weekend and take the test. The only 'new' feature is active directory, and it stinks like a smelly cesspool behind a shanty in vietnam. You can't even turn it off.
Win2K also completely freaks out samba (at least on our home LAN), so watch out for any of you who are trying to make Linux work with windows.
The thing tht I resent the most is that if you don't have a worthless piece of paper, no one takes you seriously. If you do have the paper, chances are you aren't worth looking at because you spent your time getting the paper and not the experience.
Have the rest of you noticed a complete and total barrier to anyone who is under 25 (I'm 23) getting any credibility and responsibility in the IT field? If you aren't thirty you can't possibly know your stuff. Apparently I am a freak of nature, but then again so are my two roomates, both also MCSEs and hating it.
We have to play the certification game for now, until we can start up our company. I think I'll get CCNA, CCDA, CNA, and finish off the damned MCSE+I. I spend all my day supporting Exchange, SQL and Proxy, so why not read the books and get the certifications, right? Trouble is, the things you need to know to make it all work and the things you need to know to pass the test are two very different things.
You'll have to excuse me if I come off as being a little irate here... I just had a really, really bad day supporting small business server. It works, but I think fixing it may have cost me a few bits of sanity. Anyone have modem sharing just plain break for no reason, then spend an entire day fixing it with no success, then come in the next morning and find out that it is working perfectly, having apparently repaired itself overnight? That one stumped MS Support too
I can give you some input on #1. The main (and only) advantage to using IDE over SCSI is price. I have a 70GB (4x17.2GB Maxtor) UDMA Raid0 running on a server at home. It cost me only about $700 to build it. It is running on a Promise Ultra66 controller. I have run raid on it under both Linux and WinNT and it works great. Disk performance is actually very impressive, much faster than a normal IDE drive, but that is to be expected when you stripe 4 UDMA drives. It is still nowhere even close to the speed of a good SCSI Raid setup.
I'm always amused at the large number of people who immediately think that because you are placing IDE/UDMA drives in a Raid configuration it will cause the drives to die quickly. That's bullshit. Granted, the SCSI drives will last you a hell of a lot longer, but IDE won't keel over and die just because it is Raided and under a high performance load. Most IDE drives will last at least for the length of their warranty period. Make sure you get the 'SMART' enabled drives and some monitoring software to give you a heads up if the drives begin to exhibit signs of failure.
If you want reliability and speed and are willing to pay for it, use SCSI. If you want large amounts of space and average speed at a decent price use UDMA. My needs run to cheap space and lots of it, and so far the UDMA solution has worked well for me.
I wouldn't recommend anything but a SCSI solution to you for any situation where you are looking for high performance fault tolerant systems. In your case I would go with option number two in your post above, and option three only if you are really, really worried about losing your data.
PS - This is running as a software Raid0, there is no hardware present. I have seen a number of benchmarks (some from Ars-Technica, don't have the link) that claim the performance of the Promise raid controllers is exactly the same as a software raid. I'm not sure if their competitors have this problem, or even if they have any competitors in this area.
David Arkenstone (New Age Cinematic Rock - Pure idea music, fantastic for inspiration)
Bjorne Lynne (Symphonic Rock - Great for getting work done and good inspiration music)
Mike Oldfield (Styles all his own, mostly rock or classical, great for working)
Pink Floyd (Best band around, good for problem solving tasks)
Robert Miles (Well-Composed Techno/Rock, good for working)
Yanni (New Age Rock/Classical - good for stress relief)
Rick Wakeman (Progressive Rock, good for inspiration)
Metallica (Metal, great for those really tough pieces of code)
Enya (Very relaxing New Age, great for bug hunting. Do not operate heavy machinery while listening to Enya)
That pretty much covers my favorites. I have 30.3 days worth of non-repeating music on a big fat raid array. Most of it is Rock, Metal, NewAge, Classical, or Pop. I have 3 mix discs of pop that I guarantee would put any existing radio stations out of business in a few weeks flat just due to the quality of the playlist. I love MP3s.
Another good bit that he was in recently was an HBO remake of the 12 Angry Men. He played the angry man who wasn't on speaking terms with his son. As always, he did a damn fine job in that. Jack Lemmon was playing the man with the knife... seeing them together was absolutely awesome. Proof that his talent did not diminish with age. If any of you fans missed that one, get it... you won't be disappointed.
I have to agree with the fella above who liked him in A Christmas Carol - he was brilliant.
And I have never seen Dr. Strangelove... something that I plan to fix very soon after seeing it spoken so well of.
Cheers
Why do we have representatives? Well, back in the good ole days (think original 13 states), there was no way for everyone in the country to be aware of what was happening. We therefore had to choose a representative whom we trusted to make good decisions for us. It then became his job to stay current on all political issues. It was also difficult back then because the average man did not have an education that is adequate for that job.
This is also why we still have Senators and House Reps. They live and breathe politics every day, all day (a job I don't envy them for). They know a great deal more than almost anyone else politically and can bring this knowledge to bear on anything presented to them. The common man is not going to take the time to stay informed on all political matters, so again we choose someone to do it for us. I agree that the current system is becoming corrupt. Hey, we had a good run tho... 200 years before the corruption began to become a real problem. That is the best track record in history, I think...
Were this to become a 'real' democracy, there would be no need for House Reps or Senators. Everyone would have access to all of the imformation that they would need to become informed on a single topic that interests them. It would be as simple as reading the information, looking at the proposal, reviewing what expert opinions are on both sides, and then clicking that little yes or no button in your web browser.
The implications of this suggest that the internet may well suck the power out of the government just as it does with every other power structure that it touches. The Recording Industry, Software Industry (Linux is the internet's collective answer to the Microsoft virus), News Industry, and very soon Radio, Television, Movies, and Printed Press are all feeling the bite of a superior information dissemination network that is slowly cutting into their business and providing more useful information and consumer choice without the bullshit.
The government is not ready for this. We aren't either. Give it a few years. Hopefully we may also be the first country to have a truly 'bloodless' revolution in our government - a restructuring without the need for lots of angry people with guns. In any case, it is clear that most people in the US are becoming more and more dissatisfied with their government. Give those people a tool and they will use it. Once again, history begins to repeat itself.
Isn't this fascinating? The internet drains all power out of every apsect of society that it touches, and returns it directly to those who use it. We can't survive without it now, it has become far to tightly tied to the economy. It is immune to most laws since it is a global network, and few laws apply everywhere. There is no way to control it, regulate it, destroy it, or even corrupt it.
How the hell did something like this come into being by accident? It wasn't by design, I seriously doubt that the founders knew what they were doing (to this extent at least). This seems to be a natural result of the process of information sharing.
Did you ever notice that the internet maps posted on here a while ago look a lot like a map of the human brain?
Looks like I lived in China in a past life and pissed off a few people... I live in interesting times.
EvilNight
The 300a used to be the gem for overclocking, that was what I started with. However, the BP6 was designed specifically with higher multipliers like the 466 and upcoming 500/533/566 in mind. It supports a large number of front side bus speeds, from 66 to 133, and from 72 to 85 it counts in increments of 1 or 2, so that means you can run at 72, 73, 75, 78, etc. The PCI bus (cause of most crashes in an OC'ed system) is separated with a special controller so that it does not have the clocking problems that come with most other motherboards. This also saves the strain on your peripheral cards. I have a dual 466 overclocked to 575 and it runs great - never locks or crashes. The case temperature is at 39'C, but I have 7 hdd and a tnt2 making heat as well as the overclocked celerons, and 9 fans to keep it cool. The BP6 also lets you adjust the core voltage of each cpu separately, a must have for overclocking like this.
There was an interview posted at FullOn3D that has a few questions and answers from these guys. Mostly stuff about the manufacturing, driver support and features, etc.
"The product delivers a fillrate of 1200 million texels per second and a geometry throughput of 15 million triangles per second. This translates to a real-world performance in, for example, id Software's Quake III Arena of over 200 frames per second at true color in full monitor resolutions with all details and features enabled."
;)
That is for a single chipset - single! What the hell do you do with 128MB of graphics memory?
The quad gives you 4x all those numbers... 4800 million texels, 60 million triangles, Quake at 800fps?! Oh, and of couse the ability to have 512MB of graphics memory...
All this and they say that it will be affordable too.
And what processor(s) on earth can possibly feed this monster enough data to use it to its full potential?
Needless to say, I want one
This is total bullshit. Even if the data on the site was controversial, their rights END when they tell you to shut it down. It is completely illegal for them to destroy your data like they have done. I have a friend who is an IP lawyer and he thinks you would have a good shot at landing a nice settement if you sue them. Verbal contracts are STILL contracts, you just need someone to verify that you had such a contract in the first place. You would need someone who heard the contract or has firsthand knowledge of its existence to testify to that fact and then you have proof that it existed.
You should also ask for the drives - if they don't know what they are doing when they delete it you might be able to retrieve some of the data. It takes a triple format to totally erase all data from standard hard drives. There are companies that specialize in recovering data in these situations. My 1st ISP had a hacker breakin where he wiped their system and they got it all back using a company like that. They can also restore CDs if they were only broken - you need to burn the pits and valleys out to destroy a cd, shattering it only destroys the ones under the cracks and those can be repaired often. I don't know any off the top of my head but I am sure a quick search will turn up someone who can provide these services, though they are not cheap. If a fellow slashdotter has any such information could you post it below?
This is blatant censorship - just because they do not like the nature of the data does not give them the right to destroy it. They have the right move it off of their servers only. Destroying the backups instead of returning them to you, especially if they know you have no other copies, is illegal destruction of intellectual property. If you had any of it copyrighted it will be even better for you in court.
At the very least you should be able to get the university to allow you time to make up for the lost class materials.
Even if there is a 'hidden' side to this story, it is still irrelevant. Destruction of IP is still a crime.
Sorry about the rant but this sort of thing really, really ticks me off...
Too little, too late, and I have no sympathy for them.
l
MP3 will always be here for us to fall back on even if they come up with a dozen new standards. It isn't good enough for audiophiles, but it is good enough for the vast majority of music listeners. The promise of new formats with better quality and higher compression is not enough to outweigh the loss of freedom from the copy protection schemes.
I honestly don't understand why they even keep trying. If they had embraced this instead of fighting it they could have probably found a way to turn a profit on this whole thing. Now they are just playing catch-up to a blooming digital music industry that will move many times faster than they can hever hope to catch up with.
As far as artists's rights - RIAA has been pirating those for years. Now they have the gall to act upset because someone else is pirating that which they 'rightfully' stole first? The ownership of the music should belong only to the artists who produce it.
Related stuff that you might find interesting:
Related SDMI article on MP3.Com covering the same story.
http://www.mp3.com/news/281.html
SDMI Revocation and technical information.
http://www.mp3.com/news/279.html
Final outcome of the RIAA/Diamond lawsuit.
This one is particularly interesting since it effectively legalized all MP3 files and killed the AHRA.
http://www.mp3.com/news/277.html
The Free Music Philosophy (Sounds a little familiar...)
http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp.htm
Now I am just waiting for the first REAL portable CD/MP3 player... Naiam was going to make one but it has become vaporware. Anyone know of any commercial projects in this direction?
Be careful with this one or that fryguy might be visiting you sooner than you think ;)
The safest way to handle an IDE hotswap is to unplug the power first and let the drive totally spin down, and then unplug the data cable. When powering a hotswapped drive back up do it the other way - data cable then power cable. Never mess with that data cable if the drive is running. Unplugging the data cable first can cause bad things to happen, or so I have been told. We had a hardware course at the college I attended. The guy who was teaching it really knew his hardware and that was the way he recommended doing it. He explained why but it has been too long... something about toasting the controller.
A neat trick based on this is hotswapping for data recovery. If you lose a hard drive to a bad ondisk controller and you have another identical hard drive, boot from the good drive, then follow the above steps to swap them - chances are that you can get your data back this way unless the controller on your bad drive is really fried.
Just my $0.02
Thanks for the helpful information. There are a few things here that I haven't tried yet for that server. I went ahead and built it - for the technically inclined these are the specs:
;)
;)
Tyan Tiger 1692DL Mainboard with 2 Celeron 300a cpus. (Socket 370 w adapter cards)
128MB RAM (1 PC100 DIMM)
Onboard IDE: 4 Nakamichi 16x5 CD-ROM Changers.
Promise Ultra33 IDE Controller: 4 17.2GB Maxtor hard drives.
One Matrox Millenium II Card (AGP)
One 3Com 10/100 NIC (3c905b)
Addtronics 7890 case (awesome case)
Yes, I know, I am a sick bastard - I get that alot
I tried linux on it (RH52 w 2.2.9 I think) but was unable to get the system to see more than the first drive on each changer. I have tried every version of Windows (From 95 to Win2000 Advanced Server Beta 3) and none of them are capable of finding the other drives except for Win98 (ugh). For my own sanity I refuse to use that OS as a server. Linux is preferred because I can mount disks on directories instead of that brain dead drive letter assignment method that windows uses.
This server gets a lot of use, but the cd-roms are for infrequently accessed data (setup discs for various software, old backups). This server is only supporing a small number of users (5 including me, plus a few net connections every now and then). It was necessary beacuse of the large amount of data that we move around. It was also the 'budget model'. Having more cash I would have definitely gone SCSI with both the drives and changers.
I'm glad I don't have a whole lot to do this weekend - I'm sure that all of your suggestions will keep me busy for hours hacking away at it. Any suggetsions on a distro that handles this sort of thing better than others? Please, no flamewars... by now it's a redundant, and very crispy, topic.
While I'm at it - is it possible to get a third IDE controller into a system?
Thanks guys - EvilNight out.