1.) Keep the computers off. I mean, wtf. I turn mine off when I go to sleep, cause I don't want to hear it. And that's even watercooled and very quiet - I just don't want to hear it. Plus it costs money. Are you even home that often? What's your computer even doing, really? If it's that bad, find an old laptop with a dead battery and make it the apartment server so you can leave it downloading your new Lost episodes or whatever. Need space? USB HDD. Laptops use less power. Also, encourage everyone to get an LCD. Nothing like a 19" TV-style computer monitor to use electricity all the time. LCD's pay for themselves in about a year or less these days.
2.) Turn the lights off when not home or not using the apartment.
3.) In the winter, keep the thermostat (or whatever that thing's called in the UK) set lower, so the heat kicks on less. Use blankets, or wear a sweater. I have an afghan that my aunt made me; I commonly curl up on the couch with it to play some Dragon Quest VIII, or read a book.
4.) In the summer, keep the AC temp up a little, and use a good old fashioned box fan, or open a window. I don't know your climate so this may be less practical. It works great in the Appalachian mountains in western Virginia; I don't remember it working so well when I lived in Memphis TN, which is hot and humid all summer. Anyway, box fan = more efficient than hugeass compressor.
5.) Set your refridgerator on "saves energy" rather than "reduces exterior moisture". I'd much rather have the exterior moisture; but then, it's hardly ever above 20% humidity in the winter here.
That's about it. Try not to own anything like a 5 foot iguana (thanks, wife) that constantly needs a full spectrum bulb, a black-lite bulb, a ceramic bulb, a water fountain, 2 heated fake rocks, and a nuculear processing plant to keep it happy.
And NTC won't let anyone else use their lines for anything. Their cable they sub-lease straight from Adelphia. Know how I know? It has ADELPHIA ADS! Call such and such number to get your FREE ADELPHIA DVR!!!! Except when you don't have adelphia.
They have jacks in the apartment where it's an ethernet jack, a phone jack, and a cable tv jack all in one. All run at the same time. You have to use their phone service (so i'm paying $40+$40+$15/month), even though I'd rather not even have a local phone. But, verizon has no access to the lines (even though verizon has to allow others access to the lines owned by verizon (similar to the UK, i assume), NTC is under no such obligation).
Take Blacksburg, VA. Home of Virginia Tech. "Most wired small-town in America" circa 1997.
What do we have as a choice for ISP? Well, almost every large apartment complex has a choice of NTC or... NTC. And I mean, my choices are: NTC for Cable, Local Phone, and Ethernet; or go-fuck-yourself. They charge $40 PER PORT for ethernet access, plus $40 for really shitty cable that looks so grainy that I can't watch CBS and PBS.
That $40/port may work for Janie and Jenny Tri-Delta, but I'm a power user, people. I have my computer, my wife's computer, her laptop, my windows laptop, my mac laptop, my Tivo, my media center PC, and my Playstation 2. I'm not about to pay you assholes $300+/month for internet access.
On top of which they rate limit the entire connection per switchport. When downloading something from a site which can saturate NTC's small pipes, I often get kicked off AIM, or my wife gets kicked off WoW, my 96kbps stream from di.fm times out... because they drop 1/x packets where x -> 1 until you're back under their cap, which leaves services that use keep-alive or ocasional packets out to dry.
I'm probably going to switch to Verizon, because verizon still owns phone lines in my apartment; some people aren't that lucky. A lot of newer apartments were built since NTC was the local monopoly; and even though laws prohibit a monopoly on local telephone service - they can't do anything for you if the local telco doesn't own any wiring in your building.
Not to mention: Why don't people start posting BitTorrents that mandate use of non-standard bit torrent ports. I.E., why aren't there torrents that mandate use of, say, ftp and ftp-data? Those are left open by ISP's, and if they throttle them, you're going to really piss off the users. Or, how about Itunes? Does it use a specific port? WMPlayer Streaming?
Find a popular app that an ISP wouldn't dare restrict, and run on that port.
Well, I can tell you after installing it on 60 lab machines for the CS department at Virginia Tech, Mathematica will run on Linux. Which it should; it's natively a Unix application, and runs on things like Alpha/True64's too.
It doesn't want to run, however, over cygwin on a windows box. Of course, there's a native Windows install for it, but running over cygwin, it's looking for fonts that no one knows where are. And if you said/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts, you'd be wrong.
A multifunction printer will probably "print", but scanning with it might be difficult. It still can work, though. Webcams actually have decent support in Linux (in the same way that, for instance, USB ethernet adapters do, or any ethernet adapter for that matter) - most webcams whatever the branding have a very specific and limited chipset in them, so the same drivers work for a wide variety of cameras.
But, I agree with your point at face value. If you have a Windows boxen plus a Linux boxen, you can rule the universe. But just a linux desktop leaves things to be desired.
Pretty much any TiVo will be upgradable. I have a 5XXX TiVo, and I upgraded mine. You want to get a modern one (don't get an older or used one), because the later ones sport a later kernel that supports drives bigger than 120GB (or if you put a 140 in, it'll only see 137GB, or whatever that limit was). Mine has 160GB in it, and I can record 180ish hours at full quality. With compression, I can fit about 4x that, but the compression they use is pretty bad on anything other than "High". Especially if you already have grainy cable.
The Hindsdale How-To is the definitive faq, including tools, for the tivo hacker. Basically, you're just doing a dd if=/old/disk of=/new/big/disk && some-command-to-expand new file system to fill/new/big/disk. http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/in dex9.html
Keep in mind: As far as I know, Tivo doesn't really care if you hack your tivo, but you instantly forego any possiblity of warranty or tech support.
Pulling programs off the tivo is easy. Most tivos support a wide variety of USB-Ethernet adapters via their USB ports. Hook your tivo up to your home network and get a copy of Tivo2Go from Tivo.com. It will allow you to pull files from the Tivo, but keep in mind, 1.) you're going to have to google for the tool which strips the TiVo DRM out, 2.) the files are HUGE, so you're going to want to divx for storage, and 3.) if you distribute the files, there's no way of knowing if they have any information which can be traced back to you, or your tivo subscription number, etc etc.
Hope that helps. I love my tivo. I messed with a Windows Media Center PC when I worked at a system builder / consultant shop, and I never got it to do what I wanted. The TiVo "Just Works(tm)". It's a breath of fresh air.
I don't understand why this is a "security risk" anyway. I mean, I guess if your browser is set to automatically accept when a website sends you a file, and automatically run it... then, maybe. Maybe in the same way that you could have your browser set to automatically accept, download, and execute a.com file. But, my browser doesn't download files without asking, and it doesn't execute them either. And the only pls files I use are from di.fm.
For starters, you can go to www.oldversion.com and get winamp 2.95 along with a bunch of other versions. The train wreck that was winamp3 was also mostly corrected when they went to winamp5, and if you see from (http://www.winamp.com/player/free.php) there's a "lite" version that weighs in at 0.85MB, and which supports mp3, wav, ogg, au, midi, cda, aac, etc. Since it doesn't support modern skins, I would suspect that it's probably just a rehash of 2.9x
I don't use the video features of Winamp. They were present in 2.95, but they weren't bloated yet. And I don't think it was a grab at the windows media player headspace. It really seemed like they just tacked it on because it wasn't hard to do. I think it uses the windows renderer and codecs anyway, just without all the crap in WMP.
Anyway, yeah, I still use 2.95 of winamp, just like I still use instant messanger 4.8. I'm open to change; I'm just not going to "upgrade" to a bloated product. What is it with software these days, anyway? Every piece of software tries to be everything to everyone. Ugh.
I brought the game and it doesn't play on my PS2. Which SUCKS. I spent 2 months convincing myself that I wanted this game and it was worth $50. And now, I need to spend another $150 on it. I mean, I could buy a used one, but... hell, I've got a used one that works "pretty good". It's old and it's clogged with dust and the front bezel is popped off, so I'm sure it's just worn out, but. Damn.
vlc might be good for you, but frankly i think i'll stick to a player that can actually handle things like improving the image quality Automatically.
There's no such thing. It's not possible.
This is something I hear constantly. There is no such thing as "improving image quality". You can't do it.
The best image you'll get is the origional. You can't add accurate information to it. Any information you add is extrapolated. You can't "make it look better" by "smoothing things out". That just means bluring stuff, which makes the image quality worse.
Windows Media Player "looks" better because it's cutting corners and blending and bluring things. VLC just plays files, man.
Except at my house, where my internet provider rate limits both BitTorrent traffic and cumulative traffic. BitTorrent is rate-limited network-wide, and total traffic is limited on a per-port basis, where they start dropping 1/x packets, where x is approaching 1 until they stick you where they want you.
This sucks, as my wife plays WoW, and everytime they release an update, she has to either wait for the in-game bit-torrent-esque thing to download it at literally 3KB/sec, or go wait in line at file planet for 3 hours. And even then, when she downloads a big patch, it kicks everything else offline - AIM for instance, because of the way it's ratelimited, AIM packets are more likely to be left behind and never re-requested.
And even with all that, they're trying to push the whole "One port, One computer" thing, so that they can charge me $40/month for every device in the house, including my laptop, my work laptop, my media center, and my tivo. Fuck them.
Ugh. I hate my network provider. Anyway, sometimes the distribution model sucks.
1.) Get VLC. Comes with almost every codec on earth installed, and is lightweight, and doesn't look like the abortion that is windows media player. Yes, this includes DVD codecs. The first rule of fight club is...
2.) 2 months ago, Maximum PC concluded the opposite - that ATI's graphics, which everyone had always assumed looked better, in fact looked bad. I'm sure this conclusion about which is better changes monthly.
I agree completely with the Interactive Movie comment. I hate this new focus on making games as pretty as possible, while completely obliterating any soul they had. FF-III still is a great game.
Can someone convince me why I should / should not buy this game? I like DW I, II, and III, and I was a huge fan of USFFIII and FFIX.
Re:Fuzzing and Obfuscation
on
Mitnick on OSS
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention, adding . in the $PATH before/usr/bin and/usr/sbin and/usr/local/[s|]bin. Even if . were in your root path, as long as it was at the end, after the normal entries, then yeah, you'd still be safe.
No one is going to type./ls - that's what security in Linux does - it's designed to prevent crap like that.
Keep in mind also, with regards to licensing issues - the origional poster said he worked in a University. Pretty much every major university has a volume license for the entire MSDN Academic Alliance library. I know we do. Not to mention, we end up with volume licenses, or site-wide licenses, for a lot of software, like Mathematica, Matlab, Autocad, etc.
We've used Norton Ghost to clone the labs before. I think we may have a license for it. This year, however, we used G4U (Ghost4Unix), a free implementation. There are two things it lacks that Norton has. One, Norton Ghost is Multicast. Two, Norton understood filesystems and individual files, and therefore, you could create an image on a 40GB drive and ghost it onto a 20Gb drive if it had less than 20GB worth of stuff.
However, G4U, while it doesn't understand files or filesystems, is more versatile in that the OS's and Filesystems it "supports" are "all of them". It uses gzip on the image, so if you do a bit of dd if=/dev/zero of=/bunchofzeros and let it run for an hour or so, you'll have a compressable image. Also Norton tends to choke on the grub bootloader (no idea why).
The point still remains that this country is very fiercely divided between left and right, politically, and that each side is willing to go along with anything their party leaders say. Still, though... you've got to wonder how much more of this the Republican constituants will accept. I can't imagine some of them aren't getting a little nervous about raising the right flag as the things they are asked to get behind are pulling further and further away from morality.
Appearantly, the discussion of the link to amazon with a refer to slashdot has been completely smurfed by the removal of any link to any place where this book can be purchased.
there wasn't much that was technically new in the late 90s
Ironically, you're telling us this via the internet.
The internet existed in consumer easily-accessable form around 93/94, but the 2nd half of the 90s saw 1.) an explosion of the number of people who had access to it, 2.) an explosion of the amount of content available on the internet, and 3.) a shift away from the idea that the internet was a geek toy and towards acceptance that it was a completely new venue for everyone, including businesses, government, organizations, etc., to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a document management system like moodle or Microsoft Sharepoint?
Has it been 3 months already? It's like clockwork, the people making fun of my username.
You're way not origional.
1.) Keep the computers off. I mean, wtf. I turn mine off when I go to sleep, cause I don't want to hear it. And that's even watercooled and very quiet - I just don't want to hear it. Plus it costs money. Are you even home that often? What's your computer even doing, really? If it's that bad, find an old laptop with a dead battery and make it the apartment server so you can leave it downloading your new Lost episodes or whatever. Need space? USB HDD. Laptops use less power. Also, encourage everyone to get an LCD. Nothing like a 19" TV-style computer monitor to use electricity all the time. LCD's pay for themselves in about a year or less these days.
2.) Turn the lights off when not home or not using the apartment.
3.) In the winter, keep the thermostat (or whatever that thing's called in the UK) set lower, so the heat kicks on less. Use blankets, or wear a sweater. I have an afghan that my aunt made me; I commonly curl up on the couch with it to play some Dragon Quest VIII, or read a book.
4.) In the summer, keep the AC temp up a little, and use a good old fashioned box fan, or open a window. I don't know your climate so this may be less practical. It works great in the Appalachian mountains in western Virginia; I don't remember it working so well when I lived in Memphis TN, which is hot and humid all summer. Anyway, box fan = more efficient than hugeass compressor.
5.) Set your refridgerator on "saves energy" rather than "reduces exterior moisture". I'd much rather have the exterior moisture; but then, it's hardly ever above 20% humidity in the winter here.
That's about it. Try not to own anything like a 5 foot iguana (thanks, wife) that constantly needs a full spectrum bulb, a black-lite bulb, a ceramic bulb, a water fountain, 2 heated fake rocks, and a nuculear processing plant to keep it happy.
~Will
And NTC won't let anyone else use their lines for anything. Their cable they sub-lease straight from Adelphia. Know how I know? It has ADELPHIA ADS! Call such and such number to get your FREE ADELPHIA DVR!!!! Except when you don't have adelphia.
They have jacks in the apartment where it's an ethernet jack, a phone jack, and a cable tv jack all in one. All run at the same time. You have to use their phone service (so i'm paying $40+$40+$15/month), even though I'd rather not even have a local phone. But, verizon has no access to the lines (even though verizon has to allow others access to the lines owned by verizon (similar to the UK, i assume), NTC is under no such obligation).
It's really terrible.
~Will
And in some places it's worse than that.
Take Blacksburg, VA. Home of Virginia Tech. "Most wired small-town in America" circa 1997.
What do we have as a choice for ISP? Well, almost every large apartment complex has a choice of NTC or... NTC. And I mean, my choices are: NTC for Cable, Local Phone, and Ethernet; or go-fuck-yourself. They charge $40 PER PORT for ethernet access, plus $40 for really shitty cable that looks so grainy that I can't watch CBS and PBS.
That $40/port may work for Janie and Jenny Tri-Delta, but I'm a power user, people. I have my computer, my wife's computer, her laptop, my windows laptop, my mac laptop, my Tivo, my media center PC, and my Playstation 2. I'm not about to pay you assholes $300+/month for internet access.
On top of which they rate limit the entire connection per switchport. When downloading something from a site which can saturate NTC's small pipes, I often get kicked off AIM, or my wife gets kicked off WoW, my 96kbps stream from di.fm times out... because they drop 1/x packets where x -> 1 until you're back under their cap, which leaves services that use keep-alive or ocasional packets out to dry.
I'm probably going to switch to Verizon, because verizon still owns phone lines in my apartment; some people aren't that lucky. A lot of newer apartments were built since NTC was the local monopoly; and even though laws prohibit a monopoly on local telephone service - they can't do anything for you if the local telco doesn't own any wiring in your building.
~W
Not to mention: Why don't people start posting BitTorrents that mandate use of non-standard bit torrent ports. I.E., why aren't there torrents that mandate use of, say, ftp and ftp-data? Those are left open by ISP's, and if they throttle them, you're going to really piss off the users. Or, how about Itunes? Does it use a specific port? WMPlayer Streaming?
Find a popular app that an ISP wouldn't dare restrict, and run on that port.
Well, I can tell you after installing it on 60 lab machines for the CS department at Virginia Tech, Mathematica will run on Linux. Which it should; it's natively a Unix application, and runs on things like Alpha/True64's too.
It doesn't want to run, however, over cygwin on a windows box. Of course, there's a native Windows install for it, but running over cygwin, it's looking for fonts that no one knows where are. And if you said
A multifunction printer will probably "print", but scanning with it might be difficult. It still can work, though. Webcams actually have decent support in Linux (in the same way that, for instance, USB ethernet adapters do, or any ethernet adapter for that matter) - most webcams whatever the branding have a very specific and limited chipset in them, so the same drivers work for a wide variety of cameras.
But, I agree with your point at face value. If you have a Windows boxen plus a Linux boxen, you can rule the universe. But just a linux desktop leaves things to be desired.
~W
Pretty much any TiVo will be upgradable. I have a 5XXX TiVo, and I upgraded mine. You want to get a modern one (don't get an older or used one), because the later ones sport a later kernel that supports drives bigger than 120GB (or if you put a 140 in, it'll only see 137GB, or whatever that limit was). Mine has 160GB in it, and I can record 180ish hours at full quality. With compression, I can fit about 4x that, but the compression they use is pretty bad on anything other than "High". Especially if you already have grainy cable.
The Hindsdale How-To is the definitive faq, including tools, for the tivo hacker. Basically, you're just doing a dd if=/old/disk of=/new/big/disk && some-command-to-expand new file system to fill
http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/i
Keep in mind: As far as I know, Tivo doesn't really care if you hack your tivo, but you instantly forego any possiblity of warranty or tech support.
Pulling programs off the tivo is easy. Most tivos support a wide variety of USB-Ethernet adapters via their USB ports. Hook your tivo up to your home network and get a copy of Tivo2Go from Tivo.com. It will allow you to pull files from the Tivo, but keep in mind, 1.) you're going to have to google for the tool which strips the TiVo DRM out, 2.) the files are HUGE, so you're going to want to divx for storage, and 3.) if you distribute the files, there's no way of knowing if they have any information which can be traced back to you, or your tivo subscription number, etc etc.
Hope that helps. I love my tivo. I messed with a Windows Media Center PC when I worked at a system builder / consultant shop, and I never got it to do what I wanted. The TiVo "Just Works(tm)". It's a breath of fresh air.
~Will
There's not one clear front-runner in the genre?!?
I'd say the fact that 5 MILLION WoW accounts exist would say otherwise. 1 in 100 Americans have a WoW account. That's statistically significant.
~W
I don't understand why this is a "security risk" anyway. I mean, I guess if your browser is set to automatically accept when a website sends you a file, and automatically run it... then, maybe. Maybe in the same way that you could have your browser set to automatically accept, download, and execute a
For starters, you can go to www.oldversion.com and get winamp 2.95 along with a bunch of other versions. The train wreck that was winamp3 was also mostly corrected when they went to winamp5, and if you see from (http://www.winamp.com/player/free.php) there's a "lite" version that weighs in at 0.85MB, and which supports mp3, wav, ogg, au, midi, cda, aac, etc. Since it doesn't support modern skins, I would suspect that it's probably just a rehash of 2.9x
I don't use the video features of Winamp. They were present in 2.95, but they weren't bloated yet. And I don't think it was a grab at the windows media player headspace. It really seemed like they just tacked it on because it wasn't hard to do. I think it uses the windows renderer and codecs anyway, just without all the crap in WMP.
Anyway, yeah, I still use 2.95 of winamp, just like I still use instant messanger 4.8. I'm open to change; I'm just not going to "upgrade" to a bloated product. What is it with software these days, anyway? Every piece of software tries to be everything to everyone. Ugh.
~Will
Common Carrier Status
Ugh.
I brought the game and it doesn't play on my PS2. Which SUCKS. I spent 2 months convincing myself that I wanted this game and it was worth $50. And now, I need to spend another $150 on it. I mean, I could buy a used one, but... hell, I've got a used one that works "pretty good". It's old and it's clogged with dust and the front bezel is popped off, so I'm sure it's just worn out, but. Damn.
vlc might be good for you, but frankly i think i'll stick to a player that can actually handle things like improving the image quality Automatically.
There's no such thing. It's not possible.
This is something I hear constantly. There is no such thing as "improving image quality". You can't do it.
The best image you'll get is the origional. You can't add accurate information to it. Any information you add is extrapolated. You can't "make it look better" by "smoothing things out". That just means bluring stuff, which makes the image quality worse.
Windows Media Player "looks" better because it's cutting corners and blending and bluring things. VLC just plays files, man.
Except at my house, where my internet provider rate limits both BitTorrent traffic and cumulative traffic. BitTorrent is rate-limited network-wide, and total traffic is limited on a per-port basis, where they start dropping 1/x packets, where x is approaching 1 until they stick you where they want you.
This sucks, as my wife plays WoW, and everytime they release an update, she has to either wait for the in-game bit-torrent-esque thing to download it at literally 3KB/sec, or go wait in line at file planet for 3 hours. And even then, when she downloads a big patch, it kicks everything else offline - AIM for instance, because of the way it's ratelimited, AIM packets are more likely to be left behind and never re-requested.
And even with all that, they're trying to push the whole "One port, One computer" thing, so that they can charge me $40/month for every device in the house, including my laptop, my work laptop, my media center, and my tivo. Fuck them.
Ugh. I hate my network provider. Anyway, sometimes the distribution model sucks.
~Will
2 things:
1.) Get VLC. Comes with almost every codec on earth installed, and is lightweight, and doesn't look like the abortion that is windows media player. Yes, this includes DVD codecs. The first rule of fight club is...
2.) 2 months ago, Maximum PC concluded the opposite - that ATI's graphics, which everyone had always assumed looked better, in fact looked bad. I'm sure this conclusion about which is better changes monthly.
~W
I agree completely with the Interactive Movie comment. I hate this new focus on making games as pretty as possible, while completely obliterating any soul they had. FF-III still is a great game.
~Will
Can someone convince me why I should / should not buy this game? I like DW I, II, and III, and I was a huge fan of USFFIII and FFIX.
Not to mention, adding . in the $PATH before
No one is going to type
~W
I stand corrected.
That's linear growth! I'm ashamed of you!
Keep in mind also, with regards to licensing issues - the origional poster said he worked in a University. Pretty much every major university has a volume license for the entire MSDN Academic Alliance library. I know we do. Not to mention, we end up with volume licenses, or site-wide licenses, for a lot of software, like Mathematica, Matlab, Autocad, etc.
We've used Norton Ghost to clone the labs before. I think we may have a license for it. This year, however, we used G4U (Ghost4Unix), a free implementation. There are two things it lacks that Norton has. One, Norton Ghost is Multicast. Two, Norton understood filesystems and individual files, and therefore, you could create an image on a 40GB drive and ghost it onto a 20Gb drive if it had less than 20GB worth of stuff.
However, G4U, while it doesn't understand files or filesystems, is more versatile in that the OS's and Filesystems it "supports" are "all of them". It uses gzip on the image, so if you do a bit of dd if=/dev/zero of=/bunchofzeros and let it run for an hour or so, you'll have a compressable image. Also Norton tends to choke on the grub bootloader (no idea why).
~Will
The point still remains that this country is very fiercely divided between left and right, politically, and that each side is willing to go along with anything their party leaders say. Still, though... you've got to wonder how much more of this the Republican constituants will accept. I can't imagine some of them aren't getting a little nervous about raising the right flag as the things they are asked to get behind are pulling further and further away from morality.
Appearantly, the discussion of the link to amazon with a refer to slashdot has been completely smurfed by the removal of any link to any place where this book can be purchased.
there wasn't much that was technically new in the late 90s
Ironically, you're telling us this via the internet.
The internet existed in consumer easily-accessable form around 93/94, but the 2nd half of the 90s saw 1.) an explosion of the number of people who had access to it, 2.) an explosion of the amount of content available on the internet, and 3.) a shift away from the idea that the internet was a geek toy and towards acceptance that it was a completely new venue for everyone, including businesses, government, organizations, etc., to exist.
And here we are.