My roommates and I, in the end-of-summer boredom lurch, just set up a computer running MS-DOS 6.22 just to play the old games! Man, back in the day... Anyway, I'm only 21, so I never did much with dos, so despite what I think I know about "computers" and windows or other microsoft products, etc, I know exactly crap about EMS and XMS and EMM386 and HIMEM and SMARTDRV. We've run into problems with wing commander running at the speed of light because it counts clock cycles, not seconds, and with some games not liking the fact that the machine has 160 megs of ram. One of the games suggested we make $ExtraRam sized cache with smartdrv so the game thought we had less memory, except instead of $ExtraRam being 5,341 KB, it was 157,325,210 KB... But anyway, here's my list of games I have installed:
Doom 2 Mechwarrior 2 Wing Commander Wing Commander II Wing Commander III Privateer Jazz Jackrabbit Rise of the Triad Duke Nukem I Duke Nukem II Duke Nukem 3D Warcraft I Command and Conquer Command and Conquer: Red Alert
I don't know how many of these have mac ports - Doom2 did, I use to own it...
I also didn't know that windows 3.1 wasn't an operating system. That bugged me - when you install windows, it doesn't install any OS files, just the interface to dos... Despite saying "Windows Operating System" on the floppies.
Dreamcasts didn't have any "bootsrapping" whodinglers or anything.. you just stick in a CD-R of the game you downloaded from alt.binaries.dreamcast and play away.
You're actually behind. The CD's you download from a.b.dreamcast already have the bootloader on them. That's the 2nd gen rips. The first gen were GD's or whatever that had been converted to bin/cue's. You had to put a dreamcast boot disk into the drive and then this picture of a dog would appear and then you open it and insert the downloaded game.
Google search for "Utopia Boot Loader".
Dreamcasts have always had this copy protection, and to my knowledge you haven't been able to just copy a disk with something like cloneCD and expect it to work without modding the DC. It's just that the later games eliminated the need to load the boot loader on a seperate CD. Some games you still have to load that way, i.e. Echo the Dolphin is about 701 megs, no room for a bootloader.
We're not turning 10% away. It's just that I know it renders in I.E. fine, and that's 90%. I've checked it with netscape 4.7 and 6.0 and that accounts for over 99%. After that, what's next? I mean, it doesn't render in lynx. It looks ok in kmeleon and galeon. Never tried konqueror....
slashdot.org gives the W3C validator a 403 forbidden response (insert witty comment about the fact that they know that it's not compliant), and slashcode... well see for yourself. There's so many errors I can't even count.
So we should just give in and conform? I can't bring myself to do that. Wrong is wrong no matter how many people beleive it so.
I know. It sucks. But... I'm no web developer. I'm an amateur web designer. But when I started working at netmar, my boss asked me to do the new webpage design. So I did.
It renders perfectly in I.E. It's a little sloppy in mozilla. I HATE that I did it that way, but I've tried to make it look not so bad in netscape-esque browsers, and some little things look bad. But where money comes into the question, I can't bring a situation where we might alienate some potential client cause something doesn't render in I.E.
What you're suggesting is to let Microsoft determine HTML standards?
I would state facts rather than rhetorical questions. I.E. constitutes about 90% of the visitors to my page. If I write my pages to the exact specifications of the W3C, and something doesn't render properly in I.E., then I'll alienate lots of people. I'm as pro-anything-not-microsoft as the next guy, but you have to at some point face facts. I.E. is the internet's browser. If you don't write pages to work with it, you may be right, but it's awful pretentious to call 90% of the internet wrong. I know it's done on slashdot on a daily basis, but elitism is what slashdot is all about - having a community of people who are better than 90% of the internet. What happens when you have to interact with that 90%?
Do you honestly think that new versions of slashcode aren't checked out with I.E. to see if they look right, on the principle of "I.E. is wrong, we shouldn't account for it"? There's my rhetorical question.
Yes, but Mozilla was leading up to 1.0 for years. It really is a mature application, as applications go, so most of the "gross" holes probably have been addressed. The remaining holes fall under the law of diminishing returns, where there are certainly some, but they will found less frequently as time passes. In this regard, Mozilla and IE are on equal footing.
I completely agree with this. The difference I see is that we praise Mozilla for closing all the gross holes and when they get to the point where they're just closing off small holes, we have a party. When *any* bug is found in I.E., we throw a good old fashioned slashdot anti-MS flamewar. We insult microsoft for being closed, we question the programmers' parentage, we completely go off.
It's a difference in perception. Mozilla and I.E. have security issues. Mozilla is closed source, so it's better, right? Right? Yes, mozilla is open source, but I've never even compiled it. Usually, I download the RPM. If i'm feeling really bored, I'll download the binary tar.gz. I don't open up the Moz code and try to fix the security holes. So what does it matter that Mozilla is open source if you don't do anything with the source. Especially if you're talking about Moz on windows. What, are you going to compile it with MS Visual Studio? Or how about Borland C++ 3.51?
It comes down to this: Mozilla and I.E. are essentially in the same boat. I don't look at the source of either. I trust someone to fix the problems of both. Why are they treated differently? What good is having the option to look at the source code?
I am quite disappointed with HP's recent conduct with two issues related to the DMCA. I am in a senior enough position as a UNIX administrator that I have significant impact in how a multi-hundred dollar IT budget is spent. HP's invocation of the DMCA reduces my trust in HP as a vendor of secure and reliable technology. Therefore I am less inclined now than I ever have been in the past to purchase HP products.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable to want to have a job. In this world, how many places could you possibly work where you completely agree with the ethics and motivations of any management team?
Food, clothing, and shelter come first. Ethics, beliefs, and protests come second. Call me weak willed, but I would be unwilling to walk out of a job because I didn't agree with the management if it was going to leave my life / family in limbo. A lot of people on slashdot like to nay-say these things, but how many would *really* be able to walk out on a salary to prove a point? When it comes to put up or shut up, I'll shut up and take my paycheck, thank you.
Lexmark and Canon are solid competitors. Samsung is also a newcomer to the field. There are many other options than HP.
Absolutely. The next time I need a high quality enterprise server running a 64 bit Unix based OS for my company, and for some reason we decide to move away from Solaris, I plan to reccomend to my boss that we check out the servers from Lexmark and Cannon.
This isn't something we'll necessarily have a lot of time to prepare for, even if we do discover it before it hits. And even then, how much prep time will we need? What are our options?
OK, gentlemen, we have an asteroid, it's comming right for us, and you have only 18 years to find a way to avoid extinction.
You can get a pack of 10 floppies for about $2. Or even say 20 for $2. At 1.44 MB each, that's 28.8 Megs, $1 buys you 14.4 Megs.
I just saw a 50 pack of CD-R's at walmart for a little less than $18. At 700 MB per disk, that's 35,000 Megs, and a dollar buys you 1.944 GIGS.
Now, even if you're talking CD-RW's so you have the same capabilities, you can still get 10 CD-RW's for $10. At 700 MB, that's 7,000 MB, and $1 buys you 700 Megs.
Or how about Hard Drives? You can reliably find an 80 GB hard drive for $130. At 80,000 Megs, a dollar buys you 615 MB.
My point wasn't that no machine can handle it. But I doubt that a credit card company is using a sub-$800 machine to hold their databases of terabytes. My point also wasn't Linux V Windows, but rather that my parent claimed that people's OS's start to slow down because they're stupid. That is a flamebait statement.
Right on both counts. First, this isn't a server. It's a homebrew computer, built with OEM parts bought from pricewatch. Not the highest quality stuff, but the hard drive is a Maxtor 7200 RPM 30 GB. But the machine wasn't built (hardware wise) to take that punishment.
And it could be an OS bug, or a problem with NTFS. As another reply to my post pointed out, it could be a badly fragmented swap file.
Yeah, I told him to make a data partition, but he apparantly is lazy or something. I think his excuse is he likes to start clean. Makes him feel fresh or something.
Most cruft can be attributed to users who do not take the time to learn about their computers and what it takes to maintain them.
This statement is flamebait, pure and simple. And it's not even troll tuesday.
I have a friend who, every night, takes 3 DVD's, rips them, and sets up a queue in Gordion Knot to compress them to CD size. Then he wakes up in the morning and does it with 3 more. He has a connection at blockbuster. So while everyone else's computer is sitting idle, or running dnetc, his is slamming DVD's.
Downside? He re-installs once a week. He starts with a fresh install of windows XP, NTFS formatted. But, I don't care what the OS is, if it has a journalised filesystem, or if it runs a disk cleanup utility in the background, when you slam 12 gigs on, in the form of three VOB file that are 4 gigs EACH, then wipe it off, TWICE a day, there is NO operating system that handles that well. That's punishment that no filesystem was designed to take, or at least no file system that can take that and still run windows and Gordion Knot. After a week of that (which would be 168 GB, in 4GB files, added then deleted to the filesystem, not to mention temp files created while compressing), the computer churns to a halt when trying to do anything requiring moderate disk access.
I don't think your statement is intended to do anything except karma whoring. There are extreme circumstances in every case, and it's obvious that you, and everyone else on slashdot know this.
I don't think it would be such a bad idea. It would save you from having to buy a different cert, not only for different machines (we're about to buy one for homer.netmar.com), but also aliases - as in www.netmar.com and netmar.com don't need a different cert.
You'd still have to have the default.key and default.cert, and as long as you held on to them, you wouldn't have problems. Obviously, you wouldn't let your dedicated server clients have access to it, even though they have a primary hostname of company.netmar.com. But having the wildcard would mean that I wouldn't have to buy 3 certs for netmar.com, www.netmar.com, and homer.netmar.com. It would just be easier.
What do you see as the security risk? If they're only on our shared servers, and only we have access to httpd.conf, I'm missing how it could be used against us.
Not that it's not a moot point, they're not supported in I.E., so we're not doing it.
Really? We've had good luck with the time aspect. Their tech support isn't incredibly responsive, but I just thought that's cause they're (supposedly) in south africa or something and on a different sleep schedule.
Hrm.. My thought on the matter is that if you're going to get bad support from verisign and about the same from somewhere else, ocham's economic razor - all else being equal, choose the cheaper one. Is verisign's support that much better for certs than it is for domains? I've delt with them for domains and it's horrid.
Oh yeah, and I meant to add that the best thing i've seen to rip via oggs is Exact Audio Copy. It absolutely rules. Check out their website - it's free for non commercial use. Just download and unpack the ogg codec, tell EAC you want to rip with an external program, it already has the commands built in. I suggest telling it to rip constant bitrate Quality 7. Remember ogg is variable regardless. I've found that telling EAC to rip variable bitrate with oggs sounds a little funny. Anyway EAC is slow as christmas, but that's because it reads every bit like 8 times to verify it. I think it's finally gotten into most people's heads that when they rip, quality is paramount over speed. It's ripped greenday CD's that spent a year on the floor of my car, face down. Highly reccomended.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and, hey - Notice to all of you who just discovered lan parties: BRING HEADPHONES.
Also, if you're looking to set up an old box for pleasure, you can usually get the OS of your choice here:
d isk.com/original.htm
http://386page.gooddays.org/
And for those of us who are mac-less, don't forget those old boot floppies:
http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.boot
~Will
My roommates and I, in the end-of-summer boredom lurch, just set up a computer running MS-DOS 6.22 just to play the old games! Man, back in the day...
Anyway, I'm only 21, so I never did much with dos, so despite what I think I know about "computers" and windows or other microsoft products, etc, I know exactly crap about EMS and XMS and EMM386 and HIMEM and SMARTDRV. We've run into problems with wing commander running at the speed of light because it counts clock cycles, not seconds, and with some games not liking the fact that the machine has 160 megs of ram. One of the games suggested we make $ExtraRam sized cache with smartdrv so the game thought we had less memory, except instead of $ExtraRam being 5,341 KB, it was 157,325,210 KB...
But anyway, here's my list of games I have installed:
Doom 2
Mechwarrior 2
Wing Commander
Wing Commander II
Wing Commander III
Privateer
Jazz Jackrabbit
Rise of the Triad
Duke Nukem I
Duke Nukem II
Duke Nukem 3D
Warcraft I
Command and Conquer
Command and Conquer: Red Alert
I don't know how many of these have mac ports - Doom2 did, I use to own it...
I also didn't know that windows 3.1 wasn't an operating system. That bugged me - when you install windows, it doesn't install any OS files, just the interface to dos... Despite saying "Windows Operating System" on the floppies.
~Will
What's so wrong with amanda?
~Will
Dreamcasts didn't have any "bootsrapping" whodinglers or anything.. you just stick in a CD-R of the game you downloaded from alt.binaries.dreamcast and play away.
You're actually behind. The CD's you download from a.b.dreamcast already have the bootloader on them. That's the 2nd gen rips. The first gen were GD's or whatever that had been converted to bin/cue's. You had to put a dreamcast boot disk into the drive and then this picture of a dog would appear and then you open it and insert the downloaded game.
Google search for "Utopia Boot Loader".
Dreamcasts have always had this copy protection, and to my knowledge you haven't been able to just copy a disk with something like cloneCD and expect it to work without modding the DC. It's just that the later games eliminated the need to load the boot loader on a seperate CD.
Some games you still have to load that way, i.e. Echo the Dolphin is about 701 megs, no room for a bootloader.
~Will
We're not turning 10% away. It's just that I know it renders in I.E. fine, and that's 90%. I've checked it with netscape 4.7 and 6.0 and that accounts for over 99%. After that, what's next? I mean, it doesn't render in lynx. It looks ok in kmeleon and galeon. Never tried konqueror....
Not incompetent, just amature.
slashdot and slashcode also aren't W3C compliant:
slashdot.org gives the W3C validator a 403 forbidden response (insert witty comment about the fact that they know that it's not compliant), and slashcode... well see for yourself. There's so many errors I can't even count.
~Will
So we should just give in and conform? I can't bring myself to do that. Wrong is wrong no matter how many people beleive it so.
I know. It sucks. But...
I'm no web developer. I'm an amateur web designer. But when I started working at netmar, my boss asked me to do the new webpage design. So I did.
It renders perfectly in I.E. It's a little sloppy in mozilla. I HATE that I did it that way, but I've tried to make it look not so bad in netscape-esque browsers, and some little things look bad. But where money comes into the question, I can't bring a situation where we might alienate some potential client cause something doesn't render in I.E.
What you're suggesting is to let Microsoft determine HTML standards?
I would state facts rather than rhetorical questions. I.E. constitutes about 90% of the visitors to my page. If I write my pages to the exact specifications of the W3C, and something doesn't render properly in I.E., then I'll alienate lots of people. I'm as pro-anything-not-microsoft as the next guy, but you have to at some point face facts. I.E. is the internet's browser. If you don't write pages to work with it, you may be right, but it's awful pretentious to call 90% of the internet wrong. I know it's done on slashdot on a daily basis, but elitism is what slashdot is all about - having a community of people who are better than 90% of the internet. What happens when you have to interact with that 90%?
Do you honestly think that new versions of slashcode aren't checked out with I.E. to see if they look right, on the principle of "I.E. is wrong, we shouldn't account for it"? There's my rhetorical question.
~Will
Yes, but Mozilla was leading up to 1.0 for years. It really is a mature application, as applications go, so most of the "gross" holes probably have been addressed. The remaining holes fall under the law of diminishing returns, where there are certainly some, but they will found less frequently as time passes. In this regard, Mozilla and IE are on equal footing.
I completely agree with this. The difference I see is that we praise Mozilla for closing all the gross holes and when they get to the point where they're just closing off small holes, we have a party. When *any* bug is found in I.E., we throw a good old fashioned slashdot anti-MS flamewar. We insult microsoft for being closed, we question the programmers' parentage, we completely go off.
It's a difference in perception. Mozilla and I.E. have security issues. Mozilla is closed source, so it's better, right? Right? Yes, mozilla is open source, but I've never even compiled it. Usually, I download the RPM. If i'm feeling really bored, I'll download the binary tar.gz. I don't open up the Moz code and try to fix the security holes.
So what does it matter that Mozilla is open source if you don't do anything with the source. Especially if you're talking about Moz on windows. What, are you going to compile it with MS Visual Studio? Or how about Borland C++ 3.51?
It comes down to this: Mozilla and I.E. are essentially in the same boat. I don't look at the source of either. I trust someone to fix the problems of both. Why are they treated differently? What good is having the option to look at the source code?
~Will
Dear Ms. Fiorina
I am quite disappointed with HP's recent conduct with two issues related to the DMCA. I am in a senior enough position as a UNIX administrator that I have significant impact in how a multi-hundred dollar IT budget is spent. HP's invocation of the DMCA reduces my trust in HP as a vendor of secure and reliable technology. Therefore I am less inclined now than I ever have been in the past to purchase HP products.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable to want to have a job. In this world, how many places could you possibly work where you completely agree with the ethics and motivations of any management team?
Food, clothing, and shelter come first. Ethics, beliefs, and protests come second. Call me weak willed, but I would be unwilling to walk out of a job because I didn't agree with the management if it was going to leave my life / family in limbo. A lot of people on slashdot like to nay-say these things, but how many would *really* be able to walk out on a salary to prove a point? When it comes to put up or shut up, I'll shut up and take my paycheck, thank you.
~Will
Lexmark and Canon are solid competitors. Samsung is also a newcomer to the field. There are many other options than HP.
Absolutely. The next time I need a high quality enterprise server running a 64 bit Unix based OS for my company, and for some reason we decide to move away from Solaris, I plan to reccomend to my boss that we check out the servers from Lexmark and Cannon.
HP makes more than printers.
~Will
This isn't something we'll necessarily have a lot of time to prepare for, even if we do discover it before it hits. And even then, how much prep time will we need? What are our options?
OK, gentlemen, we have an asteroid, it's comming right for us, and you have only 18 years to find a way to avoid extinction.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20020623% 26mode=classic
That's another userfriendly link to an RIAA centric cartoon.
~Will
Floppies are cheap
True, but not cheap enough. Not by a longshot.
You can get a pack of 10 floppies for about $2. Or even say 20 for $2.
At 1.44 MB each, that's 28.8 Megs, $1 buys you 14.4 Megs.
I just saw a 50 pack of CD-R's at walmart for a little less than $18.
At 700 MB per disk, that's 35,000 Megs, and a dollar buys you 1.944 GIGS.
Now, even if you're talking CD-RW's so you have the same capabilities, you can still get 10 CD-RW's for $10.
At 700 MB, that's 7,000 MB, and $1 buys you 700 Megs.
Or how about Hard Drives? You can reliably find an 80 GB hard drive for $130. At 80,000 Megs, a dollar buys you 615 MB.
Which is cheaper?
~Will
My point wasn't that no machine can handle it. But I doubt that a credit card company is using a sub-$800 machine to hold their databases of terabytes. My point also wasn't Linux V Windows, but rather that my parent claimed that people's OS's start to slow down because they're stupid. That is a flamebait statement.
Will
Right on both counts. First, this isn't a server. It's a homebrew computer, built with OEM parts bought from pricewatch. Not the highest quality stuff, but the hard drive is a Maxtor 7200 RPM 30 GB. But the machine wasn't built (hardware wise) to take that punishment.
And it could be an OS bug, or a problem with NTFS. As another reply to my post pointed out, it could be a badly fragmented swap file.
~Will
Yeah, I told him to make a data partition, but he apparantly is lazy or something. I think his excuse is he likes to start clean. Makes him feel fresh or something.
~Will
Most cruft can be attributed to users who do not take the time to learn about their computers and what it takes to maintain them.
This statement is flamebait, pure and simple. And it's not even troll tuesday.
I have a friend who, every night, takes 3 DVD's, rips them, and sets up a queue in Gordion Knot to compress them to CD size. Then he wakes up in the morning and does it with 3 more. He has a connection at blockbuster. So while everyone else's computer is sitting idle, or running dnetc, his is slamming DVD's.
Downside? He re-installs once a week.
He starts with a fresh install of windows XP, NTFS formatted. But, I don't care what the OS is, if it has a journalised filesystem, or if it runs a disk cleanup utility in the background, when you slam 12 gigs on, in the form of three VOB file that are 4 gigs EACH, then wipe it off, TWICE a day, there is NO operating system that handles that well. That's punishment that no filesystem was designed to take, or at least no file system that can take that and still run windows and Gordion Knot. After a week of that (which would be 168 GB, in 4GB files, added then deleted to the filesystem, not to mention temp files created while compressing), the computer churns to a halt when trying to do anything requiring moderate disk access.
I don't think your statement is intended to do anything except karma whoring. There are extreme circumstances in every case, and it's obvious that you, and everyone else on slashdot know this.
~Will
The Sword of Truth (currently boob five)
Must be a romance.
~Will
I don't think it would be such a bad idea. It would save you from having to buy a different cert, not only for different machines (we're about to buy one for homer.netmar.com), but also aliases - as in www.netmar.com and netmar.com don't need a different cert.
You'd still have to have the default.key and default.cert, and as long as you held on to them, you wouldn't have problems. Obviously, you wouldn't let your dedicated server clients have access to it, even though they have a primary hostname of company.netmar.com. But having the wildcard would mean that I wouldn't have to buy 3 certs for netmar.com, www.netmar.com, and homer.netmar.com. It would just be easier.
What do you see as the security risk? If they're only on our shared servers, and only we have access to httpd.conf, I'm missing how it could be used against us.
Not that it's not a moot point, they're not supported in I.E., so we're not doing it.
~Will
Really? We've had good luck with the time aspect. Their tech support isn't incredibly responsive, but I just thought that's cause they're (supposedly) in south africa or something and on a different sleep schedule.
Hrm.. My thought on the matter is that if you're going to get bad support from verisign and about the same from somewhere else, ocham's economic razor - all else being equal, choose the cheaper one. Is verisign's support that much better for certs than it is for domains? I've delt with them for domains and it's horrid.
~Will
Oh yeah, and I meant to add that the best thing i've seen to rip via oggs is Exact Audio Copy. It absolutely rules. Check out their website - it's free for non commercial use. Just download and unpack the ogg codec, tell EAC you want to rip with an external program, it already has the commands built in. I suggest telling it to rip constant bitrate Quality 7. Remember ogg is variable regardless. I've found that telling EAC to rip variable bitrate with oggs sounds a little funny.
Anyway EAC is slow as christmas, but that's because it reads every bit like 8 times to verify it. I think it's finally gotten into most people's heads that when they rip, quality is paramount over speed. It's ripped greenday CD's that spent a year on the floor of my car, face down. Highly reccomended.
~Will