The speed increments nowadays are much less steep than it was in the mid 90s.
Not really. Granted, the speed increases were greater, but they came less often. The path from 100 to 200 Mhz Pentium took about as long as the path from 1.5 Ghz to 3.0 Ghz (which, by the way, has been out, sans the 800Mhz bus for a while).
Oh, that's a brilliant idea guaranted to prevent disputes. Not.
See, that's the thing. Of course it has the potential for abuse.
But if the band abuses the agreement, in the end they hurt themselves. If you're in the indie punk world, and Ian Mckay is not on your good side, your band is pretty much dead. He's pretty influential (he's in Fugazi, after all).
But the agreement is based on trust. If either party betrays the trust, the deal's off. And keep in mind, it's a much better deal than any band could ever find on a record label: Keep the copyrights, keep the merchandise profits, keep 50% of CD profits. That's just insane.
Because there's no contract w/ Ian. Just a handshake and an understanding of mutual goal: the release of good music.
Because No record label in the world would ever give any band 50/50 on records, even after they have recouped all their costs. 90/10, mabey, if the band is lucky.
I seriously, whole heartedly, wish you success. If the world had more people willing to get to know the artists and give them a hand, rather than finding ways to fuck them, we'd be in a better world, musically.
But the real money-burner is promotion and distribution. Thousands, hundreds of thousands are spent on replication and distribution and marketing just so regular people (including the non net-savvy) can hear about new music.
Check it: Record album on your dime. Create CD's on your own dime. Pay CD Baby $35. Send them any number of your CD's. Sell them at whatever you want, CD Baby keeps $4 of each sale. CD Baby retains no rights to the music, the name, the distribution rights, or anything. All they are is hella-cheap internet distribution.
Case in point: You're a punk band, not interested in making a lot of money. You produce your CD on your own time, pay for the recording. Then you buy a truckload of cheap CD-R's and cases. You use your friend's 32X burner to burn 100 copies, and you print out the inside case label. Say it costs you $1.75 per CD. You send them in, charge $7, and you make $1.25 per CD, after costs.
That's cool. Distribution has always been the problem.
Or, there are other people, like Ian Mckay of the DC/mathrock scene and Dischord records. His solution is this: No written contracts. Just handshakes. He pays for the recording and mastering of your band's CD. He distributes the CD. All out of pocket. When it's done, he keeps all the proceeds of CD sales until the debt is paid off, and then the band and the label split it 50/50. He doesn't touch merchandise or touring profits. If a band ever gets into a disagreement with Ian and want to screw him, he hands them their master and tells them to get the fuck out, deal off, and they lose him as a contact and gain him as a bad reference.
So, I think slowly, music is changing. Attitudes are changing. The industry is changing. If I was to say one band has given me more joy over the course of my lifetime, I would have to say it was Less Than Jake. However, I'm seriously considering not purchasing LTJ's new album, because it's being put out by warner bros. records.
I honestly think, in the long run, there are too many people willing to eat what they're given by the RIAA, and pay $21.99 for a CD. But the number of people who know what major labels put bands through and aren't willing to put up with it is increasing all the time.
Umm... id Software games have always been OpenGL based. Seeing how the XBox only supports Direct3D, and I don't seen why John Carmack would waste the time porting the entire codebase to Direct3D.
Incorrect. id games since Quake have been OpenGL based. Quake was the first, if I recall. I seem to remember there being a Quake CD without GL support, and then later a CD that included the origional executable, as well as "GLQUAKE.exe".
But, games like wolfenstein, heretic, doom, etc were obviously not OpenGL based.
Plus, they've been working on this game so freakin' long, I would expect them to have ports for PalmOS at this point. I can only think of 2 games that have been promised for longer than Doom III: Neverwinter Nights and DN:Forever.
but some genres (namely FPS's and RTS's) are just better with PC-style input devices.
I would agree, but the I played Splinter Cell the other day. I can't see how it could possibly be harder to play on the PC than it already is. Haven't played the console version. I have one of those PSX - USB boxes, so I'll see if that helps.
I will agree that I'd never, ever consider playing street fighter with a mouse and keyboard.
For every legit mail sent by someone on a DSL line running their own sendmail, there are 6,000 spam messages. It's sick.
They're not blocking mail.dsl.att.net or mail.ntelos.net or mail.verizondsl.com. They're blocking mail from dhcp-66-234-22-212.dynamic.dsl.verizon.com. It's not a bad thing.
Use your ISP's SMTP server. Almost every ISP provides an smtp server, and if yours doesn't, consider jumping ship (what else are they not providing you?).
Smart ISP's even block outbound port 25 traffic on their networks.
"FROM:" addresses are arbitrary people. It doesn't matter who it's sent from. I can write the return address on an envelope as my home, but mail it from wherever I wish. Same with email. You don't need your own mail server. Or, mabey you do, but I need spam a lot less.
It is in the child's best interest to be watched like a hawk watching a mouse. A parent should be able to step in a teach the child a lesson that could be very dangerous to learn through trial and error. A child should learn many things by trial and error but some things are just too dangerous to learn that way.
School is one of those dangerous lessons. Without a proper education you can seriously mess up your future. Mess that up through trial and error and you may not get the chance again.
The problem with this line of thinking is that the most remembered lessons are the ones that are self taught.
There are some things which children can be taught, but there are some things that they can't. You can tell a child how bad it is to do this or that, and explain to them the consequences of doing it, but it really doesn't sink in until they've been there, done that. You can tell your son that it's bad to drink, and that it's wrong, immoral, and illegal. But, if all of his friends are doing it, and nothing bad seems to come of them, then you have just underminded your own authority.
The time to teach a child that they must do their homework is elementary school. I fully support elementary schools setting a program like this up, in which the parent is made aware, at all times, of the homework situation. However, by high school, these lessons are either learned or they are not. High school is a time to learn more important lessons, like prioritizing your time. Like deciding which lessons are the most important to do. Like determining whether or not it is necessacary to study for the chemistry test. Whether they should read chapters 1-3 in their history book and 2-8 in the Great Gadspy. A child needs to learn these lessons in high school, and the only way to effectively learn them is without a parent looking over their shoulder at every moment, with a list of assignments that must be done.
I made it through my senior year with a 4.0 (albiet with honors classes), and hardly ever did homework at home. I did it all in my other classes. I would do my 3rd period homework in 2nd period, and my 5th period homework at lunch. If my mother had had a list of assignments when I was in school, and was constantly looking over my back, I probably would have killed her.
Also, this whole thing hinges on another aspect of Puritan hegemony: The fact that grades matter.
I don't disagree that grades should matter, in some respect. However, if you child is a brilliant musician, or a world class artist, or a thrilling, dynamic writer, how can you fault them for showing little interest in math? How can you fault an artist for not wanting to do calculus? How can you fault a chemist for showing no interest in his spanish lessons?
Your child must make his own choices. Your sphere of influence will last until 13 or 14 years, and after that, you must *trust* your child to make his own decisions, and you can only count on input and suggestions at that point.
Fox succeeds in spades, and their numbers are reflecting this.
Hear, hear! When the war started, I, of course, turned to CNN. But, then, I realized that CNN was boring, if I wanted to be entertained, I turned to Fox News. Everyone knows it's sensationalism at it's worst, but it's so entertaining!
To back up my own post, would you seriously not buy this for $3000? That's a freakin fast machine - 1Ghz Sun Ultra IIIi, 512MB Ram, 4 X gigabit ethernet ports, 64 bit PCI slot... damn.
They are starting by replacing all of their low to medium-level extremely expensive UNIX solutions with Linux implementations, and waiting for Linux to overtake UNIX on the top tier. This saves them tons "in the meantime" and prepares them for the eventual replacement of their high-end solutions.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ. WHY do people keep insisting that Sun hardware is really that epxpensive??? We got a Quad-processor 4x300Mhz 64 bit Ultra Sparc II machine, with 1 GB of ram, ethernet controller and scsi for a little over $1500, almost 1.5 years ago. HOLY FREAKING CRAP is that cheap. Oh, and solaris is free. Or, at least, solaris7 that we use was free when we downloaded it a couple of months ago.
So, for less than $2500, all told, you can get a quad processor Ultra Sparc machine, 1GB+ of ram, Sbus ethernet card, and 3 hard drives totalling something around 40 gigs, and that price includes the OS? Boy, I fail to see where that's expensive, even with my margin of error of $1000 built in, in case you can't find a good deal.
Now, tell me something that your $1500 Linux box can do faster than my solaris box. It compiles hella-fast. It's more stable than any machine I've ever seen. Solaris NFS is leaps ahead of linux NFS.
This is your "low-to-medium" end Unix system. It's not expensive. It works. I hate solaris, with a passion, but I have to admit that it works like a freaking charm.
I think you got confused in your head between "low-to-medium" unix systems, feature wise, and "high-end" unix systems, price wise. Just keep in mind, if you pay $56,000 for a server from sun, it's going to blow your mind away.
I'm all for linux. But please don't spread mis-information you heard on slashdot. Sun/solaris low end systems are already *not that expensive*, and they're great hardware, stable software, and come with great support. Linux may be the OS that's growing by leaps and bounds, but it has a long way to go in order to overtake commercial unix systems which scale to 106 processors efficiently.
That's Aiwa, who is owned by sony. That's sony's "cheap arm".
Of course, in home electronics, it's hard to say what's high end. Is my $500 yamaha DD/DTS reciever "high end"? It's certainly higher than a comparable sony. But it's not an Onkyo. But, then, is a $1200 Onkyo high end? Well, sure, compared to my yamaha, but not to the $8,000 Denon.
High, mid, and low grade are all subjective. For most people's budget, sony is a safe buy. Stay away from Aiwa, get yamaha if you can afford it. In the speakers department, stay away from yamaha (they're not bad, and yamaha will back 'em up (6 year warranty, i think), but they don't sound good. Actually, for the money, Sony speakers don't sound that bad. Get JBL if budget allows. Stear clear of cerwin vega and pioneer, unless you have to have those 15"ers in your living room to impress your honky tonk friends.
It's all budget based, dude. I'm sure I'll get flamed by audiophiles, but, to them, I say: I have the best equipment I could afford. I like the way it sounds, and I'm satisfied with the price. Yamaha Reciever (5240), Toshiba DVD player, Sony tower speakers, JBL center channel, pioneer CD player, panasonic VCR, RCA satelite receiver.
Quoting from Maximum PC, April 2003, p34, "Let's play... The Price is Wrong!" subtitle: So, what do you get from a $200 Walmart PC?
Ratings based on the Via 800 Mhz C3, 128 MB pc133, 10GB 5400RPM drive.
"To benchmark the curiously frail Walmart box, we wiped Lindows and installed WinXP. The results screamed, 'I just got my buttocks handed to me on a platter, whoopee!'. The rig finished our Premiere test in 38 minutes and 40 seconds - nearly four times as long as our 2Ghz P4 Zero-point system. This came as no surprise, of course, because SiSoft Sandra rated the Via CPU at about Pentium II 300 Mhz levels."
Benchmarks: Bench - - - - - - - 0-point - - - - - Walmart PC SYSmark 2002 - - - - 205 - - - Would not run Premiere 6.01 (sec) -615 - - 2340 Audiograbber (sec) - 151 - - - 428 MusicMatch (sec) - - 227 - - - 1486 Jedi Knight II (fps)-50.3 - - -Couldn't run 3dMark 2001SE (fps) -31.3 - - -Couldn't run
We were cleaning out old computers at netmar, and we unearthed a Sun 3/160 (check here for pictures of a 3/160). It's not really a computer, in it's present form. It's just a VME backplane with 12 full-height slots for plugging anything you want into it.
We found the origional processor board, which had a 17 Mhz processor and 4MB of ram (1986, folks). But, we found out, you can swap anything into it. When we pulled out another double-decker board, we were thrilled to find a bonanza of upgrades: 2 M-bus slots, each with 2 Ross HyperSparcs (we think they're 40 Mhz, making it 160Mhz total), 64 MB of ram (in 4MB 30pin simms), and onboard scsi.
Must have been nice to buy a computer in 1986, and then swap out the mainboard for 1992 hardware, but keep the same config. Of course, that's the least you should expect when you essentially spend $30,000 on a glorified backplane.
Oh, FYI - 160 Mhz of multi-threaded Sun 4m is still a beast of a machine.
I mean, it's not exactly a slocket, but it's the same concept.
They exist. They work. If you really wanted to take your Socket 370 and put it in a slot 1, you could find a slocket to do it.
The problem was always stability. I don't know much about chip fabrication, but I think it had something to do with the length of the pathways adding some sort of resistance, or feedback, or something.
I think it was reccomended, but optional, in one of the RFC's.
At any rate, if everyone's mail server were configured correctly with both a forward and a reverse dns zone that matched, it wouldn't be a problem. But, you can't rely on people to do that.
It's always a trade off as to how we want to administer our mail server. The more spammers lists we add in, the less spam we get, but we end up bouncing a lot of legit mail and having to deal with clients who get rejected for spam. Of course, why anyone wants to put penis enlargement in a normal email subject line is beyond me.
Case in point: If you follow the letter of the spec, you really are supposed to reject email which comes from a server who's forward and reverse lookups don't match, or who are missing either. Logic behind this is to block people on DSL lines who have a DHCP-assigned IP address from sending spam through one of the few ISP's who aren't yet blocking outbound port 25 traffic. Unfortunately, what this ends up doing is pissing off a lot of people who run their own little mail server in their office of 20 people, and don't have it configured correctly in the DNS, or something like that.
So, it's hard to know where the line is. Spam costs us money either way - but it costs us less money in bandwidth than in tech support, so we're inclined to go for slightly less strict spam rules (aka good sendmail rules and only one spam db instead of like 6 of them) so that we don't have to deal with the customer complaints. Surprisingly, few customers complain about spam, compared to customers who complain about spam rejections. I would attribute that to the fact that, even with only light spam filtering, we still catch a lot of spam (I would say probably 80%), and what gets through, most people accept as an inevitibility. But, the bandwidth issue is small, because spam constitutes incomming bandwidth, and as a webhosting provider, incomming bandwidth is never in short supply.
Now, if we catch someone doing spamming on the network (outgoing), we deal with that damn quick. Some of those spam lists, if they catch you, will block your entire/24.
Yeah, I always heard the anecdote "Microsoft users hate unix because it essentially hasn't changed much in 30 years. Unix people love it for this exact reason", or something like that, implying that age = stability and reliability.
I don't see where legacy hardwar is a bad thing. I have an athlon XP 1800+ and a bunch of fairly new hardware, but I still use my ps2 ports, my paralell port, and my com port on a daily basis.
I think it's a good thing to have a lowest common denominator when dealing with hardware. I think it's a good idea to always have the floppy drive to fall back on.
I ran into an instance just a little while ago where I had to have one. I tried to make my primary hard drive the drive which was on a Raid controller. For some reason, windows XP didn't have the driver for my onboard promise ata100 raid chipset, and couldn't find the drive. So, in the installation procedure, i had to load an external driver ("press F6 to load a 3rd party scsi or raid driver"). The only option for loading the driver was a floppy - can't do it from a CD (or at least i couldn't figure out how to)
But, it's nice knowing that, if nothing else, you have ps2 ports for any old keyboard and a floppy drive for booting emergencies. Proven technology is a good thing. Besides, why throw out an essentially good design? Yeah, as the article says it's all based on the AT spec, but, we've gone beyond 4MB of ram, we're no longer using AT keyboards, we've ditched the com port mouse, we're using 15 pin SVGA monitor plugs instead of the oldskool 9-pin, our ram isn't 30 pin or 72 pin simms anymore, we're using 168pin sdram, and even that's on it's way out, in favor of 184 pin ddr. The BNC network connections are gone, as are the 15 pin connections. We're using ATX soft-off power supplies now. I haven't used an ISA slot in 4 years, and it's been 2 since I've owned a motherboard with one on it (well, that's a daily user anyway). I say, let these things work themselves out. Compared to the 1984 picture in that article, most of our computers are legacy-free - think about how many pieces of hardware you have right now that would connect to a 286. My speakers? My floppy? Mabey the hard drive? Yeah, that's about it.
It's not about creating a legacy-free PC. It's about the continual evolution of the existing PC into the next big changes. We're doing just fine so far, why bash the basis we've been going on as we evolve for 20 years? It's got us this far, let's ride it out a little further, see where it goes.
I doubt you'll read this, since you posted as AC, but i actually didn't know that. I would have thought that guns were involved in most murders... hrm..
Actually, slashdot is running more than 10 computers. I posted this comment, poking fun at an editor a while back. Rob wrote back and posted this comment, saying that they were using more than the FAQ said. Appearantly, the FAQ is out of date.
But, as to seeing php pages fail, yes, it happens. I think it's a lot of what you say - for example, where I work, our shared server that runs linux serves ~90 different sites, and yeah, we support mod_perl and postgres, but almost all people use php/mysql. Perl tends to be very heavy on the system (because of all it does), but even so, under moderate load, perl sites still work fine. It's just that there's a threshold that, when you cross it, you kill a machine running mod perl. Whenever a site we host is slashdotted, and it's running perl, it's not just bandwidth issues, it's the machine comming to a screeching slam as it processes the requests. PHP does the same thing, but not with a threshold like perl, in my expierence, the drain on the system increases in a linear fashion.
The machine is a 1.4 P-4 w/ 640 MB of RDRAM. No one likes the P-4, and it's not the most efficient chip, but it was new and top of the line at the time. But, even so, at noon earlier today, the load on the system was below.10. Right now, it's high, because it's running dumps/gzips for amanda. But, the machine is by no means overloaded.
We're a webhosting company, so all of our servers are webservers.
Or, let me clarify. All of the machines we lease to customers are webservers, in addition to being mail servers, etc.
All the machines we use (our mail servers, NIS servers, shared hosting servers, DNS servers) exclusively run one service, and we always build the services.
But, for client machines, (most) customers don't want to have a box with just a kernel and SSH installed, and do it themselves, they want a fully functioning box when they start out. Also, they want to be able to use RPMS, because most of them know less than we do about the server (not condescending, that's what we're here for - we're tech support).
The problem comes in that security issues on client machines are *our* problem. If something happens to any machine on our network, it could affect everyone else (slapper, anyone?). So, we have to keep our clients' machines up to date.
Which we can't do anymore.
I just used the apache snafu as an example. What I was really driving at is that you shouldn't abandon an OS that's a year old. We harp on MS for abandoning Windows 95 a year ago, and it was 6 years old. How should we feel about this? RH 7.3 was released last spring. I feel like it's just now broken in, and you want me to upgrade to a X.0 release because i can't get updates for 7.3 anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
The speed increments nowadays are much less steep than it was in the mid 90s.
Not really. Granted, the speed increases were greater, but they came less often. The path from 100 to 200 Mhz Pentium took about as long as the path from 1.5 Ghz to 3.0 Ghz (which, by the way, has been out, sans the 800Mhz bus for a while).
Oh, that's a brilliant idea guaranted to prevent disputes. Not.
See, that's the thing. Of course it has the potential for abuse.
But if the band abuses the agreement, in the end they hurt themselves. If you're in the indie punk world, and Ian Mckay is not on your good side, your band is pretty much dead. He's pretty influential (he's in Fugazi, after all).
But the agreement is based on trust. If either party betrays the trust, the deal's off. And keep in mind, it's a much better deal than any band could ever find on a record label: Keep the copyrights, keep the merchandise profits, keep 50% of CD profits. That's just insane.
~Will
Why is one more evil than the other?
Because Ian doesn't retain rights to the record.
Because there's no contract w/ Ian. Just a handshake and an understanding of mutual goal: the release of good music.
Because No record label in the world would ever give any band 50/50 on records, even after they have recouped all their costs. 90/10, mabey, if the band is lucky.
~Will
I seriously, whole heartedly, wish you success. If the world had more people willing to get to know the artists and give them a hand, rather than finding ways to fuck them, we'd be in a better world, musically.
Good luck, sir.
But the real money-burner is promotion and distribution. Thousands, hundreds of thousands are spent on replication and distribution and marketing just so regular people (including the non net-savvy) can hear about new music.
This just got easier, by the way.
Surf to CD Baby.
Check it: Record album on your dime. Create CD's on your own dime. Pay CD Baby $35. Send them any number of your CD's. Sell them at whatever you want, CD Baby keeps $4 of each sale. CD Baby retains no rights to the music, the name, the distribution rights, or anything. All they are is hella-cheap internet distribution.
Case in point: You're a punk band, not interested in making a lot of money. You produce your CD on your own time, pay for the recording. Then you buy a truckload of cheap CD-R's and cases. You use your friend's 32X burner to burn 100 copies, and you print out the inside case label. Say it costs you $1.75 per CD. You send them in, charge $7, and you make $1.25 per CD, after costs.
That's cool. Distribution has always been the problem.
Or, there are other people, like Ian Mckay of the DC/mathrock scene and Dischord records. His solution is this: No written contracts. Just handshakes. He pays for the recording and mastering of your band's CD. He distributes the CD. All out of pocket. When it's done, he keeps all the proceeds of CD sales until the debt is paid off, and then the band and the label split it 50/50. He doesn't touch merchandise or touring profits. If a band ever gets into a disagreement with Ian and want to screw him, he hands them their master and tells them to get the fuck out, deal off, and they lose him as a contact and gain him as a bad reference.
So, I think slowly, music is changing. Attitudes are changing. The industry is changing. If I was to say one band has given me more joy over the course of my lifetime, I would have to say it was Less Than Jake. However, I'm seriously considering not purchasing LTJ's new album, because it's being put out by warner bros. records.
I honestly think, in the long run, there are too many people willing to eat what they're given by the RIAA, and pay $21.99 for a CD. But the number of people who know what major labels put bands through and aren't willing to put up with it is increasing all the time.
~Will
and but there is a PC version.
Conjunction junction, what's your function...?
unless they cripple the engine just to get it running on PS2.
As pointed out above: XBox = Direct3D, PS2 = GL. How... cripple? Wha? Xbox has better hardware.
But, of course, they've been working on this freaking game so long, they should have ported it to commodore 64 by now.
~wx
Umm... id Software games have always been OpenGL based. Seeing how the XBox only supports Direct3D, and I don't seen why John Carmack would waste the time porting the entire codebase to Direct3D.
Incorrect. id games since Quake have been OpenGL based. Quake was the first, if I recall. I seem to remember there being a Quake CD without GL support, and then later a CD that included the origional executable, as well as "GLQUAKE.exe".
But, games like wolfenstein, heretic, doom, etc were obviously not OpenGL based.
Plus, they've been working on this game so freakin' long, I would expect them to have ports for PalmOS at this point. I can only think of 2 games that have been promised for longer than Doom III: Neverwinter Nights and DN:Forever.
~Wx
but some genres (namely FPS's and RTS's) are just better with PC-style input devices.
I would agree, but the I played Splinter Cell the other day. I can't see how it could possibly be harder to play on the PC than it already is. Haven't played the console version. I have one of those PSX - USB boxes, so I'll see if that helps.
I will agree that I'd never, ever consider playing street fighter with a mouse and keyboard.
Dude, it's not the point.
For every legit mail sent by someone on a DSL line running their own sendmail, there are 6,000 spam messages. It's sick.
They're not blocking mail.dsl.att.net or mail.ntelos.net or mail.verizondsl.com. They're blocking mail from dhcp-66-234-22-212.dynamic.dsl.verizon.com. It's not a bad thing.
Use your ISP's SMTP server. Almost every ISP provides an smtp server, and if yours doesn't, consider jumping ship (what else are they not providing you?).
Smart ISP's even block outbound port 25 traffic on their networks.
"FROM:" addresses are arbitrary people. It doesn't matter who it's sent from. I can write the return address on an envelope as my home, but mail it from wherever I wish. Same with email. You don't need your own mail server. Or, mabey you do, but I need spam a lot less.
It is in the child's best interest to be watched like a hawk watching a mouse. A parent should be able to step in a teach the child a lesson that could be very dangerous to learn through trial and error. A child should learn many things by trial and error but some things are just too dangerous to learn that way.
School is one of those dangerous lessons. Without a proper education you can seriously mess up your future. Mess that up through trial and error and you may not get the chance again.
The problem with this line of thinking is that the most remembered lessons are the ones that are self taught.
There are some things which children can be taught, but there are some things that they can't. You can tell a child how bad it is to do this or that, and explain to them the consequences of doing it, but it really doesn't sink in until they've been there, done that. You can tell your son that it's bad to drink, and that it's wrong, immoral, and illegal. But, if all of his friends are doing it, and nothing bad seems to come of them, then you have just underminded your own authority.
The time to teach a child that they must do their homework is elementary school. I fully support elementary schools setting a program like this up, in which the parent is made aware, at all times, of the homework situation. However, by high school, these lessons are either learned or they are not. High school is a time to learn more important lessons, like prioritizing your time. Like deciding which lessons are the most important to do. Like determining whether or not it is necessacary to study for the chemistry test. Whether they should read chapters 1-3 in their history book and 2-8 in the Great Gadspy. A child needs to learn these lessons in high school, and the only way to effectively learn them is without a parent looking over their shoulder at every moment, with a list of assignments that must be done.
I made it through my senior year with a 4.0 (albiet with honors classes), and hardly ever did homework at home. I did it all in my other classes. I would do my 3rd period homework in 2nd period, and my 5th period homework at lunch.
If my mother had had a list of assignments when I was in school, and was constantly looking over my back, I probably would have killed her.
Also, this whole thing hinges on another aspect of Puritan hegemony: The fact that grades matter.
I don't disagree that grades should matter, in some respect. However, if you child is a brilliant musician, or a world class artist, or a thrilling, dynamic writer, how can you fault them for showing little interest in math? How can you fault an artist for not wanting to do calculus? How can you fault a chemist for showing no interest in his spanish lessons?
Your child must make his own choices. Your sphere of influence will last until 13 or 14 years, and after that, you must *trust* your child to make his own decisions, and you can only count on input and suggestions at that point.
~Will
Fox succeeds in spades, and their numbers are reflecting this.
Hear, hear! When the war started, I, of course, turned to CNN. But, then, I realized that CNN was boring, if I wanted to be entertained, I turned to Fox News. Everyone knows it's sensationalism at it's worst, but it's so entertaining!
~Will
To back up my own post, would you seriously not buy this for $3000? That's a freakin fast machine - 1Ghz Sun Ultra IIIi, 512MB Ram, 4 X gigabit ethernet ports, 64 bit PCI slot... damn.
They are starting by replacing all of their low to medium-level extremely expensive UNIX solutions with Linux implementations, and waiting for Linux to overtake UNIX on the top tier. This saves them tons "in the meantime" and prepares them for the eventual replacement of their high-end solutions.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ. WHY do people keep insisting that Sun hardware is really that epxpensive???
We got a Quad-processor 4x300Mhz 64 bit Ultra Sparc II machine, with 1 GB of ram, ethernet controller and scsi for a little over $1500, almost 1.5 years ago. HOLY FREAKING CRAP is that cheap.
Oh, and solaris is free. Or, at least, solaris7 that we use was free when we downloaded it a couple of months ago.
So, for less than $2500, all told, you can get a quad processor Ultra Sparc machine, 1GB+ of ram, Sbus ethernet card, and 3 hard drives totalling something around 40 gigs, and that price includes the OS? Boy, I fail to see where that's expensive, even with my margin of error of $1000 built in, in case you can't find a good deal.
Now, tell me something that your $1500 Linux box can do faster than my solaris box. It compiles hella-fast. It's more stable than any machine I've ever seen. Solaris NFS is leaps ahead of linux NFS.
This is your "low-to-medium" end Unix system. It's not expensive. It works. I hate solaris, with a passion, but I have to admit that it works like a freaking charm.
I think you got confused in your head between "low-to-medium" unix systems, feature wise, and "high-end" unix systems, price wise. Just keep in mind, if you pay $56,000 for a server from sun, it's going to blow your mind away.
I'm all for linux. But please don't spread mis-information you heard on slashdot. Sun/solaris low end systems are already *not that expensive*, and they're great hardware, stable software, and come with great support. Linux may be the OS that's growing by leaps and bounds, but it has a long way to go in order to overtake commercial unix systems which scale to 106 processors efficiently.
Sony is "mid-end". They're not low end.
That's Aiwa, who is owned by sony. That's sony's "cheap arm".
Of course, in home electronics, it's hard to say what's high end. Is my $500 yamaha DD/DTS reciever "high end"? It's certainly higher than a comparable sony. But it's not an Onkyo. But, then, is a $1200 Onkyo high end? Well, sure, compared to my yamaha, but not to the $8,000 Denon.
High, mid, and low grade are all subjective. For most people's budget, sony is a safe buy. Stay away from Aiwa, get yamaha if you can afford it. In the speakers department, stay away from yamaha (they're not bad, and yamaha will back 'em up (6 year warranty, i think), but they don't sound good. Actually, for the money, Sony speakers don't sound that bad. Get JBL if budget allows. Stear clear of cerwin vega and pioneer, unless you have to have those 15"ers in your living room to impress your honky tonk friends.
It's all budget based, dude. I'm sure I'll get flamed by audiophiles, but, to them, I say: I have the best equipment I could afford. I like the way it sounds, and I'm satisfied with the price.
Yamaha Reciever (5240), Toshiba DVD player, Sony tower speakers, JBL center channel, pioneer CD player, panasonic VCR, RCA satelite receiver.
Quoting from Maximum PC, April 2003, p34, "Let's play... The Price is Wrong!" subtitle: So, what do you get from a $200 Walmart PC?
Ratings based on the Via 800 Mhz C3, 128 MB pc133, 10GB 5400RPM drive.
"To benchmark the curiously frail Walmart box, we wiped Lindows and installed WinXP. The results screamed, 'I just got my buttocks handed to me on a platter, whoopee!'. The rig finished our Premiere test in 38 minutes and 40 seconds - nearly four times as long as our 2Ghz P4 Zero-point system. This came as no surprise, of course, because SiSoft Sandra rated the Via CPU at about Pentium II 300 Mhz levels."
Benchmarks:
Bench - - - - - - - 0-point - - - - - Walmart PC
SYSmark 2002 - - - - 205 - - - Would not run
Premiere 6.01 (sec) -615 - - 2340
Audiograbber (sec) - 151 - - - 428
MusicMatch (sec) - - 227 - - - 1486
Jedi Knight II (fps)-50.3 - - -Couldn't run
3dMark 2001SE (fps) -31.3 - - -Couldn't run
Ahh, the planar system...
We were cleaning out old computers at netmar, and we unearthed a Sun 3/160 (check here for pictures of a 3/160). It's not really a computer, in it's present form. It's just a VME backplane with 12 full-height slots for plugging anything you want into it.
We found the origional processor board, which had a 17 Mhz processor and 4MB of ram (1986, folks). But, we found out, you can swap anything into it. When we pulled out another double-decker board, we were thrilled to find a bonanza of upgrades: 2 M-bus slots, each with 2 Ross HyperSparcs (we think they're 40 Mhz, making it 160Mhz total), 64 MB of ram (in 4MB 30pin simms), and onboard scsi.
Must have been nice to buy a computer in 1986, and then swap out the mainboard for 1992 hardware, but keep the same config. Of course, that's the least you should expect when you essentially spend $30,000 on a glorified backplane.
Oh, FYI - 160 Mhz of multi-threaded Sun 4m is still a beast of a machine.
~Will
Slockets.
I mean, it's not exactly a slocket, but it's the same concept.
They exist. They work. If you really wanted to take your Socket 370 and put it in a slot 1, you could find a slocket to do it.
The problem was always stability. I don't know much about chip fabrication, but I think it had something to do with the length of the pathways adding some sort of resistance, or feedback, or something.
~Will
I think it was reccomended, but optional, in one of the RFC's.
At any rate, if everyone's mail server were configured correctly with both a forward and a reverse dns zone that matched, it wouldn't be a problem. But, you can't rely on people to do that.
~Will
It's always a trade off as to how we want to administer our mail server. The more spammers lists we add in, the less spam we get, but we end up bouncing a lot of legit mail and having to deal with clients who get rejected for spam. Of course, why anyone wants to put penis enlargement in a normal email subject line is beyond me.
/24.
Case in point: If you follow the letter of the spec, you really are supposed to reject email which comes from a server who's forward and reverse lookups don't match, or who are missing either. Logic behind this is to block people on DSL lines who have a DHCP-assigned IP address from sending spam through one of the few ISP's who aren't yet blocking outbound port 25 traffic.
Unfortunately, what this ends up doing is pissing off a lot of people who run their own little mail server in their office of 20 people, and don't have it configured correctly in the DNS, or something like that.
So, it's hard to know where the line is. Spam costs us money either way - but it costs us less money in bandwidth than in tech support, so we're inclined to go for slightly less strict spam rules (aka good sendmail rules and only one spam db instead of like 6 of them) so that we don't have to deal with the customer complaints. Surprisingly, few customers complain about spam, compared to customers who complain about spam rejections. I would attribute that to the fact that, even with only light spam filtering, we still catch a lot of spam (I would say probably 80%), and what gets through, most people accept as an inevitibility. But, the bandwidth issue is small, because spam constitutes incomming bandwidth, and as a webhosting provider, incomming bandwidth is never in short supply.
Now, if we catch someone doing spamming on the network (outgoing), we deal with that damn quick. Some of those spam lists, if they catch you, will block your entire
~Will
Yeah, I always heard the anecdote "Microsoft users hate unix because it essentially hasn't changed much in 30 years. Unix people love it for this exact reason", or something like that, implying that age = stability and reliability.
I don't see where legacy hardwar is a bad thing. I have an athlon XP 1800+ and a bunch of fairly new hardware, but I still use my ps2 ports, my paralell port, and my com port on a daily basis.
I think it's a good thing to have a lowest common denominator when dealing with hardware. I think it's a good idea to always have the floppy drive to fall back on.
I ran into an instance just a little while ago where I had to have one. I tried to make my primary hard drive the drive which was on a Raid controller. For some reason, windows XP didn't have the driver for my onboard promise ata100 raid chipset, and couldn't find the drive. So, in the installation procedure, i had to load an external driver ("press F6 to load a 3rd party scsi or raid driver"). The only option for loading the driver was a floppy - can't do it from a CD (or at least i couldn't figure out how to)
But, it's nice knowing that, if nothing else, you have ps2 ports for any old keyboard and a floppy drive for booting emergencies. Proven technology is a good thing. Besides, why throw out an essentially good design? Yeah, as the article says it's all based on the AT spec, but, we've gone beyond 4MB of ram, we're no longer using AT keyboards, we've ditched the com port mouse, we're using 15 pin SVGA monitor plugs instead of the oldskool 9-pin, our ram isn't 30 pin or 72 pin simms anymore, we're using 168pin sdram, and even that's on it's way out, in favor of 184 pin ddr. The BNC network connections are gone, as are the 15 pin connections. We're using ATX soft-off power supplies now. I haven't used an ISA slot in 4 years, and it's been 2 since I've owned a motherboard with one on it (well, that's a daily user anyway).
I say, let these things work themselves out. Compared to the 1984 picture in that article, most of our computers are legacy-free - think about how many pieces of hardware you have right now that would connect to a 286. My speakers? My floppy? Mabey the hard drive? Yeah, that's about it.
It's not about creating a legacy-free PC. It's about the continual evolution of the existing PC into the next big changes. We're doing just fine so far, why bash the basis we've been going on as we evolve for 20 years? It's got us this far, let's ride it out a little further, see where it goes.
~Will
I doubt you'll read this, since you posted as AC, but i actually didn't know that. I would have thought that guns were involved in most murders... hrm..
I'll go see if i can find some statistics.
Then again, on the earlier example -- while it's true that guns don't kill people
I think the guns help.
"...Now, we have to piss in the boat!"
Actually, slashdot is running more than 10 computers. I posted this comment, poking fun at an editor a while back. Rob wrote back and posted this comment, saying that they were using more than the FAQ said. Appearantly, the FAQ is out of date.
.10. Right now, it's high, because it's running dumps/gzips for amanda. But, the machine is by no means overloaded.
But, as to seeing php pages fail, yes, it happens. I think it's a lot of what you say - for example, where I work, our shared server that runs linux serves ~90 different sites, and yeah, we support mod_perl and postgres, but almost all people use php/mysql. Perl tends to be very heavy on the system (because of all it does), but even so, under moderate load, perl sites still work fine. It's just that there's a threshold that, when you cross it, you kill a machine running mod perl. Whenever a site we host is slashdotted, and it's running perl, it's not just bandwidth issues, it's the machine comming to a screeching slam as it processes the requests. PHP does the same thing, but not with a threshold like perl, in my expierence, the drain on the system increases in a linear fashion.
The machine is a 1.4 P-4 w/ 640 MB of RDRAM. No one likes the P-4, and it's not the most efficient chip, but it was new and top of the line at the time. But, even so, at noon earlier today, the load on the system was below
We're a webhosting company, so all of our servers are webservers.
Or, let me clarify. All of the machines we lease to customers are webservers, in addition to being mail servers, etc.
All the machines we use (our mail servers, NIS servers, shared hosting servers, DNS servers) exclusively run one service, and we always build the services.
But, for client machines, (most) customers don't want to have a box with just a kernel and SSH installed, and do it themselves, they want a fully functioning box when they start out. Also, they want to be able to use RPMS, because most of them know less than we do about the server (not condescending, that's what we're here for - we're tech support).
The problem comes in that security issues on client machines are *our* problem. If something happens to any machine on our network, it could affect everyone else (slapper, anyone?). So, we have to keep our clients' machines up to date.
Which we can't do anymore.
I just used the apache snafu as an example. What I was really driving at is that you shouldn't abandon an OS that's a year old. We harp on MS for abandoning Windows 95 a year ago, and it was 6 years old. How should we feel about this? RH 7.3 was released last spring. I feel like it's just now broken in, and you want me to upgrade to a X.0 release because i can't get updates for 7.3 anymore?
Woah.