Re:Let's hear it for legacy free!
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
An ethernet printserver will handle your printer just fine.
There are USB breakout boxes for rs232 and ps/2, though my understanding is that they wren't always completely reliable.
Re:$40 for a serial port or $5 for 2S 1P + PS/2
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
The real problem is space. I just bought an Asus A7N8X, and the ports are really crammed in tight. It came with 3 break-out panels for firewire, additional USB, and the second serial port. They could have done away with those if they dropped serial and parralell, or maybe serial and ps/2. Mine doesn't even have integrated video.
As for the cost, though, yeah it might only be $10 total to support all these legacy parts, but that's per board, and if you're making a million boards that's a significant amount of money that could be better applied.
Don't get me wrong, I use my parallel and serial ports on a daily basis (ps/2, though, I only use on the rare occasions that I want GRUB to boot something other than my default, which hasn't happened since december). However, I recognize that I am in a minority that is rapidly shrinking into irrelevance, and that it costs manufacturers money to support me.
Re:ISA slot adapter card for PCI slot?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
Well, The ISA slots are basically hung off the PCI bus on most modern motherboards that include them, so electronically I don't see why it would be difficult. The real issue would dealing with the resource allocation issues. Normally that would be done in BIOS, setting aside certain IRQs for ISA. I might be significantly more difficult to grab and hold an IRQ if your BIOS expects all your peripherals to be PCI/PnP and willing to share.
Re:Unfortunately...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
but like in the isa slot case, there's no point in being non-backwards compatible just for the sake of it(most of them boards that kicked isa slot first sure had the possibility to add it without it dragging performance down, ie. the support for it was there but the physical slot wasn't..)
That's not true, actually. Having to support ISA complicates timing and degrades performance of the PCI bus it is generally attached to. There are very good reasons for eliminating the ISA slot, and frankly I'm suprised it held out as long as it did.
Israel has huge security concerns and has a large military, but they are not mutually inclusive. Israel has security issues because of a violent indiginous population.
And why exactly are those indigenous people violent? Could it perhaps be because Isreal became a nation by invading their territory and continues to attack and oppress them? Isreal's security issues are a direct result of it's use of military force. I really don't think that's the example you wanted to use.
You make an excellent point about the Melians. I don't advocate eliminating the military, but it should be apparent that we would need far less of it if we kept our noses out of other peoples business.
I would argue that the US has a bigger security problem because it is free, than because it has a large military. Freedom of movement, association, speech and immigration all allow terrorism to continue. This is why all of these things have been restricted since 9/11.
I would argue that the US has few, if any, security problems beyond what we have created for ourselves with the way we conduct ourselves in the world, and a large part of that is how we use our military might. Restricting the freedoms of Americans will not solve those issues, but respecting the sovereignty of other nations, particularly in the Middle East, just might.
Does that mean we should continue to restrict freedoms? It is the same solution to trimming the military in order to resolve the security dilemma.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Please explain, or perhaps restate.
I don't pretend to know the answer, but I have elected officials who should and, I trust, do.
Our elected officials have unfortunately shown that they understand no solution but violence. As several very wise men have said, "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent". I'll give Asimov credit here, but I believe Voltaire, for one, said something very similar.
Seriously, there is nothing that can kill your sex life as effectively as a small child. My wife and I had sex 2-3 times a week before our daughter was born. She's almost 3 now, and we have sex about once every 5 or 6 weeks. There are complications in our situation, which I'll get into below, so the change might not be so drastic for you. At minimum, though, expect a 3-6 month "dry spell" after the birth. On the bright side, though, you can do it as often as you like pretty much right up to the end.
During the pregnancy, make sure your wife stays in shape. It will make the pregnancy and especially the birth much easier if she's in good physical condition. Pregnant does not mean invalid. My wife tested for her yellow belt at 8.5 months.
Simethicon (sp?) is worth it's wight in platinum. I have heard these gas drops refered to as Pink Gold. You probably won't need them for another year or so. Hopefully you will remember them when your baby has been crying for 3 hours and nothing seems to help. Most likely this will be the answer you seek.
As for the 2 income thing, my wife is a waitress and I'm a tech, so we've managed to work things out where we work opposite schedules. The good part is that one of us is always home with our daughter, which I think has had a very positive effect on her behavior (consistent discipline is easier when the child is mainly watched by parents) and her education (she can recognize most letters by sight and can count to 10 in English, Spanish, and Korean). The down side is that we don't get much time together as a couple, and that has certainly not helped our sex life. Although this is obviously not a viable solution for all families, I recommend it if there's any way you can work it out.
A large part of the expense of a child for the first few years is day care, disposable diapers, and formula. Minimizing any or all of these will do a lot to ease the financial burden, and that's a lot easier to when at least one parent is home at all times.
Another factor to consider is that, in my experience, full time parents tend to go stir-crazy. I saw this happen to my dad with my half siblings, who are 15 and 17 years younger than me, and with my wife before she went back to work. I imagine it happened with my mom as well, but I was too young to notice. All of them now view work as a welcome and refreshing alternative to staying home all day. After a full day with a 2 year old, my wife certainly looks forward to going to work!
Finally, prepare to be amazed. Nothing you have ever done or seen even comes close to the wonders you will witness as a father. Nothing is as challenging or as rewarding.
I never offered a reason for the situation, only that it exists.
You implied that huge security needs require huge militaries. I suggested huge militaries create huge security needs.
The facts you stated, while true, do not stand on their own in the manner you intended. Without providing any further annalysis, I don't see how these facts support your "apples and oranges" claim, and in fact I have provided an annalysis under which they do not.
The school year in which the Colombine incident occured was a big year for school shootings. There were 15 people killed in school shootings that year. Another 15 kids died that year playing high school football, but that wasn't on the national news, was it?
Okay, last time I checked the terrorists were attacking us because of their religion, not because of any of your reasons.
You didn't look very hard, did you? I've got news for you; the recent terrorist attacks had nothing to do with religion. They had everything to do with the fact that US actions in the Middle East have, over the past decades, consisted mainly of subverting popular governments and suplanting them with dictators friendly to American corporate interests like, for example, Saddam Hussein. How do you think Saddam got the technology to make these deadly chemical and biological weapons. I'll give you a hint: we sold it to him in the late 1980s, and it was Donald Rumsfeld that brokered the deal.
All this rhetoric about Saddam using chemical weapons on "his own people" is a bunch of bologna. He used them on the Kurds who, while they may have been within his borders, are definately NOT his people. Incidentally, the Kurds are Shiite, I bet you can't guess which Islamic sect is most popular among Islamic terrorists?
And what about Afghanistan? How did that country become a breeding ground for anti-western terrorism, and how did those terrorist training camps get started, anyway? Oh, that's right, WE started them in the name of Stopping Communism, and after thousands of Afghanies died fighting the Soviets, we abandoned them to the mercy of the warlords we created. Gosh, I can't imagine why all those orphaned Afghani kids might have had something against the US...
If you're going to give a better solution, at least know what the problem is.
I agree. It's also important to know what the problem is not, and I hope I've helped you with that.
Uh, sorry, but I think the keyword in that phrase is accidents. There's not a lot we can do to prevent it.
According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the six most common behaviors which cause accidents are: (a) unsafe speed, (b) violation of right-of-way rules, (c) making improper turns, (d) failing to obey stop signals and signs, (e) improper lane changes, and (f) driving on the wrong side of the road. Are you honestly suggesting that none of these are preventable?
Norway, Canada and Beligum have relatively little threatening them and very little international interests. The US has huge interests and is the single most threatened nation in the world (in terms of power).
Did you ever stop to consider that maybe the reason those countries aren't threatened is because they aren't threatening anyone else? The US is the most hated nation in the world because we can't seem to keep our noses out of other people's business and we like to tell everyone what to do. In politics that's called Imperialism, but in the real world that's called bullying. Whatever term you use it breeds ill will, and that ill will is the source of the threats against us.
Note that Win9x/ME is inherently RAM bound. By default it will not use more than 256M, although you can increase that to 512M using msconfig. msconfig is also useful for dealing with all that crap that sets itself up to run at startup, but isn't in your startup folder. It's included in Win98SE by default, but I don't know if it is with the other Win9x's. It's not included with Win2k, but allegedly works if you can get a copy.
Don't know. SuSE's been in business for over 10 years now, maybe they started the trend? You know, sort of how Moore's Law drives chip developement. Customers expect the next version to come out within a certain amount of time, so the designers do everything they can to ensure that it does.
Really, though, I think 6 months is just a reasonable pace. It's fast enough that the users don't feel like their falling behind, but not so fast that they feel like all they ever do is update their system. 6 months is also a reasonable period to "capture" the current state of Linux as a whole. I think we can agree that what most people mean when they say "Linux" is far more than just the kernel, that it encompasses a huge amount of code that is constantly being improved. With a longer period between versions the changes would be more drastic, increasing the chances of breaking things.
First, I wouldn't build the rack myself. I would buy a good prebuilt one like an Anvil or SKB (Musicians Friend has an SKB 6-space for $70 right now).
From there, you can either buy a good rackmaount PC chassis, which will be expensive, or you can modify a standard case to mount in a rack. If you can pick up a tower that's just under 19" tall that should work. You can find raw materials for the bracketry at your local hardware store, or you can look up a local small machine shop and work with them. Small machine shops are great, because they usually have very knowledgable machinists who can be a great help if you don't really know what you're doing.
Of course, if you're going to spend that kind of money you can just buy a rackmount case. Kontron has some nice ones that will accept an ATX motherboard, but they start around $800. I'm not sure what kind of shock-mounting the ATX ones have. I've only used their backplane-based systems, but those are pretty good. You'd probably be looking at something like the 4-space Omnix 400 series to accomodate your PCI cards. With a 6-space rack that leaves a little storage space to pack your keyboard, mouse, cables, etc.
Regardless of what case solution you go with, you are definately going to want something more than just a single screw holding your peripheral cards in. If you go with a modified standard case that will mean constucting some sort of custom bracket to hold the other end of the card down. An industrial chassis like you'd get from Kontron should already be set up for that.
First, there's the online SuSE support database, which you can get to from their website. I honestly don't use it much since I have a hard time finding what I'm looking for. Maybe I just use the wrong terminology in my searches, I don't know.
Where I usually go is USENET, particularly alt.linux.suse, although if the question is regarding a specific application, such as Samba or Wine, I'll usually go to the appropriate comp.os.* group.
One area where SuSE really stands out, though, is their printed manuals, which are hands down the most useful Linux books in my collection (of course, I'm a SuSE user, so YMMV).
What it comes down to is that in the 3 years I've been using SuSE (or Linux at all, really) I've only had occasion to contact support twice. They were a little slow to respond, but in both cases it was problems that aren't covered under installation support. They did answer, though, and I suspect, based on my own customer service experience, that unpaid support questions get answered last. I wouldn't consider the current delay to be indicative of the type of support you'd get from them under contract.
Here's a good example: the story's author likes how SuSE prompts you for information constantly during install. I've heard that as a criticism from other people - why won't this thing just install, dammit!?
The way I read that it was a criticism, but was mitigated by the fact that it resulted in an immediately usable system upon completion of the install.
Of course, my posting that only enforces your observation.
As far as i know the human eye can only see about 30fps, and from playing Counter-Strike a lot, people seem to be generally pleased as long as they have above 60fps.
This is pure myth. The human eye can see far more than 30fps.
AFAIK this myth comes from NTSC TV being roughly 30fps, but even that is a myth in some respects, since your TV picture is interleved. What that means is that each frame is split into 2 fields, one comprising all the odd numbered lines and one comprising all the even numbered ones. These alternate, giving an effective 60 fps. This combined with other effects, such as motion blur, trick your brain into ignoring the flicker and perceiving motion.
It should be noted that the MINIMUM fps at which the brain will ignore flicker is about 24fps, which is what film runs at (although I've been told that most film runs at an effective 72fps, though I don't know how it's split up). PAL TV (used in Europe, and many African and Asian TV markets) runs at 25fps interleved, and while I've never had a problem with it myself I know several Americans who find it irritating. [1] The reason PAL uses 25fps and NTSC uses 30fps has little to do with image quality, and much more to do with the ease of synching those refresh rates with the frequency of the AC power sources available in those areas; 50Hz in Europe and 60Hz in the US.
So, basically, 30fps is the slightly above the minimum refresh rate at which the brain can be tricked into perciving motion from a series of still images. I can consciously percieve a difference up to around 100fps. That is, for example, roughly the point at which the default machinegun in Quake 3 becomes a useful weapon since I can track moving targets with it smoothly.
On a subconscious level faster is always better. If you stare at a 60Hz monitor all day your eyes will be strained, perhaps blurring your vision or making your eyes hurt, perhaps causing headaches. These effects are reduced as you raise the refresh rate of your monitor.
As a side note, Counter-Strike (and all Half-life based games) are limited to 60fps by default. There's a text file (I don't remember what it's called) where this limit can be raised to 99. Try it and see if you notice a difference.
[1] I'm a technician at a manufacturer of professional video production equipment. This is why I know people who care about things like the refresh rate of television. This is also why I have experience with PAL, despite the fact that I've only left the continent of North America twice, and both of those were trips to Hawaii.
SuSE has released a new version roughly every 6 months for years. It's not driven by anything beyond that being a reasonable pace. It keeps customers fairly current, bundles a reasonable amount of overall improvement in each release, but isn't so frequent that the end-user feels like they are constantly updating. You can expect SuSE 8.3/9.0 (depending on the amount and importance of the changes) around October.
Although there may be a few comanies that are honest and just didn't know, of course these would be few and far between. This type of fantasy company would have no problem with it. For the rest of them, they will come up with any reason possible to fire you or lay you off.
I don't run my own company, but if I did I would like to think that I would be one of these fantasy bosses, as I firmly believe that the carrot is a more effective motivator than the stick.
However, if an employee put me in that position I would certainly fire them for getting me in trouble with the government rather than just coming to me directly. Many problems can be worked out that way to the benefit of all concerned, with no need for lawyers or beaurocrats to get involved. If your employer refuses to compensate you fairly for the work you're doing, though, I wouldn't worry too much about burning any bridges; you don't want to work for them anyway. Whining about the "current economy" is just that. There are other jobs out there. I've been laid off or quit several jobs in the last 3 years, and haven't been unemployed for more than 2 weeks at any given time.
The software (and hardware) market is full of so many highly-qualified people, most with years of experience, that employers have little to no incentive to care whether their current employees are happy or not. If they're not, they can either leave or get fired, and it will be easy to replace them, probably with someone more qualified and/or with more experience, who will work for as much or maybe less money.
This is an extremely stupid, short-sighted view.
When you lay someone off you lose their training and experience, and no matter how qualified or experienced their replacement is, it will take them time to get up to speed your product. That's exactly how I got my current job, and after 7 months I'm still figuring out previously known problems that never got documented because the guy I replaced had been working on the product for years. With that kind of experience on a single product there's bound to be a lot of things that don't get documented, simply because from that perspective they seem obvious.
In the real world, skilled workers are not as easily replaced as the MBAs would like to believe.
It's got the Realtek 8139 chip, which is probably the most supported Ethernet chip on the planet, which is good since it's on something like 80% of NICs sold. It's well supported under Linux, Win9x drivers are easy to find, and when I put a few of them in some Win2k machines a while back I didn't even have to install them, they just worked without even a "Windows has found new hardware" message or anything.
Slashdot Mirror
An ethernet printserver will handle your printer just fine.
There are USB breakout boxes for rs232 and ps/2, though my understanding is that they wren't always completely reliable.
The real problem is space. I just bought an Asus A7N8X, and the ports are really crammed in tight. It came with 3 break-out panels for firewire, additional USB, and the second serial port. They could have done away with those if they dropped serial and parralell, or maybe serial and ps/2. Mine doesn't even have integrated video.
As for the cost, though, yeah it might only be $10 total to support all these legacy parts, but that's per board, and if you're making a million boards that's a significant amount of money that could be better applied.
Don't get me wrong, I use my parallel and serial ports on a daily basis (ps/2, though, I only use on the rare occasions that I want GRUB to boot something other than my default, which hasn't happened since december). However, I recognize that I am in a minority that is rapidly shrinking into irrelevance, and that it costs manufacturers money to support me.
Well, The ISA slots are basically hung off the PCI bus on most modern motherboards that include them, so electronically I don't see why it would be difficult. The real issue would dealing with the resource allocation issues. Normally that would be done in BIOS, setting aside certain IRQs for ISA. I might be significantly more difficult to grab and hold an IRQ if your BIOS expects all your peripherals to be PCI/PnP and willing to share.
but like in the isa slot case, there's no point in being non-backwards compatible just for the sake of it(most of them boards that kicked isa slot first sure had the possibility to add it without it dragging performance down, ie. the support for it was there but the physical slot wasn't..)
That's not true, actually. Having to support ISA complicates timing and degrades performance of the PCI bus it is generally attached to. There are very good reasons for eliminating the ISA slot, and frankly I'm suprised it held out as long as it did.
Israel has huge security concerns and has a large military, but they are not mutually inclusive. Israel has security issues because of a violent indiginous population.
And why exactly are those indigenous people violent? Could it perhaps be because Isreal became a nation by invading their territory and continues to attack and oppress them? Isreal's security issues are a direct result of it's use of military force. I really don't think that's the example you wanted to use.
You make an excellent point about the Melians. I don't advocate eliminating the military, but it should be apparent that we would need far less of it if we kept our noses out of other peoples business.
I would argue that the US has a bigger security problem because it is free, than because it has a large military. Freedom of movement, association, speech and immigration all allow terrorism to continue. This is why all of these things have been restricted since 9/11.
I would argue that the US has few, if any, security problems beyond what we have created for ourselves with the way we conduct ourselves in the world, and a large part of that is how we use our military might. Restricting the freedoms of Americans will not solve those issues, but respecting the sovereignty of other nations, particularly in the Middle East, just might.
Does that mean we should continue to restrict freedoms? It is the same solution to trimming the military in order to resolve the security dilemma.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Please explain, or perhaps restate.
I don't pretend to know the answer, but I have elected officials who should and, I trust, do.
Our elected officials have unfortunately shown that they understand no solution but violence. As several very wise men have said, "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent". I'll give Asimov credit here, but I believe Voltaire, for one, said something very similar.
Seriously, there is nothing that can kill your sex life as effectively as a small child. My wife and I had sex 2-3 times a week before our daughter was born. She's almost 3 now, and we have sex about once every 5 or 6 weeks. There are complications in our situation, which I'll get into below, so the change might not be so drastic for you. At minimum, though, expect a 3-6 month "dry spell" after the birth. On the bright side, though, you can do it as often as you like pretty much right up to the end.
During the pregnancy, make sure your wife stays in shape. It will make the pregnancy and especially the birth much easier if she's in good physical condition. Pregnant does not mean invalid. My wife tested for her yellow belt at 8.5 months.
Simethicon (sp?) is worth it's wight in platinum. I have heard these gas drops refered to as Pink Gold. You probably won't need them for another year or so. Hopefully you will remember them when your baby has been crying for 3 hours and nothing seems to help. Most likely this will be the answer you seek.
As for the 2 income thing, my wife is a waitress and I'm a tech, so we've managed to work things out where we work opposite schedules. The good part is that one of us is always home with our daughter, which I think has had a very positive effect on her behavior (consistent discipline is easier when the child is mainly watched by parents) and her education (she can recognize most letters by sight and can count to 10 in English, Spanish, and Korean). The down side is that we don't get much time together as a couple, and that has certainly not helped our sex life. Although this is obviously not a viable solution for all families, I recommend it if there's any way you can work it out.
A large part of the expense of a child for the first few years is day care, disposable diapers, and formula. Minimizing any or all of these will do a lot to ease the financial burden, and that's a lot easier to when at least one parent is home at all times.
Another factor to consider is that, in my experience, full time parents tend to go stir-crazy. I saw this happen to my dad with my half siblings, who are 15 and 17 years younger than me, and with my wife before she went back to work. I imagine it happened with my mom as well, but I was too young to notice. All of them now view work as a welcome and refreshing alternative to staying home all day. After a full day with a 2 year old, my wife certainly looks forward to going to work!
Finally, prepare to be amazed. Nothing you have ever done or seen even comes close to the wonders you will witness as a father. Nothing is as challenging or as rewarding.
I never offered a reason for the situation, only that it exists.
You implied that huge security needs require huge militaries. I suggested huge militaries create huge security needs.
The facts you stated, while true, do not stand on their own in the manner you intended. Without providing any further annalysis, I don't see how these facts support your "apples and oranges" claim, and in fact I have provided an annalysis under which they do not.
Here's another example:
The school year in which the Colombine incident occured was a big year for school shootings. There were 15 people killed in school shootings that year. Another 15 kids died that year playing high school football, but that wasn't on the national news, was it?
Okay, last time I checked the terrorists were attacking us because of their religion, not because of any of your reasons.
You didn't look very hard, did you? I've got news for you; the recent terrorist attacks had nothing to do with religion. They had everything to do with the fact that US actions in the Middle East have, over the past decades, consisted mainly of subverting popular governments and suplanting them with dictators friendly to American corporate interests like, for example, Saddam Hussein. How do you think Saddam got the technology to make these deadly chemical and biological weapons. I'll give you a hint: we sold it to him in the late 1980s, and it was Donald Rumsfeld that brokered the deal.
All this rhetoric about Saddam using chemical weapons on "his own people" is a bunch of bologna. He used them on the Kurds who, while they may have been within his borders, are definately NOT his people. Incidentally, the Kurds are Shiite, I bet you can't guess which Islamic sect is most popular among Islamic terrorists?
And what about Afghanistan? How did that country become a breeding ground for anti-western terrorism, and how did those terrorist training camps get started, anyway? Oh, that's right, WE started them in the name of Stopping Communism, and after thousands of Afghanies died fighting the Soviets, we abandoned them to the mercy of the warlords we created. Gosh, I can't imagine why all those orphaned Afghani kids might have had something against the US...
If you're going to give a better solution, at least know what the problem is.
I agree. It's also important to know what the problem is not, and I hope I've helped you with that.
Uh, sorry, but I think the keyword in that phrase is accidents. There's not a lot we can do to prevent it.
According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the six most common behaviors which cause accidents are: (a) unsafe speed, (b) violation of right-of-way rules, (c) making improper turns, (d) failing to obey stop signals and signs, (e) improper lane changes, and (f) driving on the wrong side of the road. Are you honestly suggesting that none of these are preventable?
Norway, Canada and Beligum have relatively little threatening them and very little international interests. The US has huge interests and is the single most threatened nation in the world (in terms of power).
Did you ever stop to consider that maybe the reason those countries aren't threatened is because they aren't threatening anyone else? The US is the most hated nation in the world because we can't seem to keep our noses out of other people's business and we like to tell everyone what to do. In politics that's called Imperialism, but in the real world that's called bullying. Whatever term you use it breeds ill will, and that ill will is the source of the threats against us.
Imagine if they actually prosecuted people for that! Silly pedestrians, always getting in the way...
There are states where the pedestrian does not have the right of way. I believe Nevada is one of them.
If the car has the right of way and it hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian is at fault. No vehicular manslaughter.
Note that Win9x/ME is inherently RAM bound. By default it will not use more than 256M, although you can increase that to 512M using msconfig. msconfig is also useful for dealing with all that crap that sets itself up to run at startup, but isn't in your startup folder. It's included in Win98SE by default, but I don't know if it is with the other Win9x's. It's not included with Win2k, but allegedly works if you can get a copy.
I first read that as Bionic Cheese Interface, and spent far too much time pondering why someone would want bionic cheese...
SuSE started in 1992, though they don't give a month. I would assume it was in the fall since 8.1 was their 10 year aniversary release.
Don't know. SuSE's been in business for over 10 years now, maybe they started the trend? You know, sort of how Moore's Law drives chip developement. Customers expect the next version to come out within a certain amount of time, so the designers do everything they can to ensure that it does.
Really, though, I think 6 months is just a reasonable pace. It's fast enough that the users don't feel like their falling behind, but not so fast that they feel like all they ever do is update their system. 6 months is also a reasonable period to "capture" the current state of Linux as a whole. I think we can agree that what most people mean when they say "Linux" is far more than just the kernel, that it encompasses a huge amount of code that is constantly being improved. With a longer period between versions the changes would be more drastic, increasing the chances of breaking things.
First, I wouldn't build the rack myself. I would buy a good prebuilt one like an Anvil or SKB (Musicians Friend has an SKB 6-space for $70 right now).
From there, you can either buy a good rackmaount PC chassis, which will be expensive, or you can modify a standard case to mount in a rack. If you can pick up a tower that's just under 19" tall that should work. You can find raw materials for the bracketry at your local hardware store, or you can look up a local small machine shop and work with them. Small machine shops are great, because they usually have very knowledgable machinists who can be a great help if you don't really know what you're doing.
Of course, if you're going to spend that kind of money you can just buy a rackmount case. Kontron has some nice ones that will accept an ATX motherboard, but they start around $800. I'm not sure what kind of shock-mounting the ATX ones have. I've only used their backplane-based systems, but those are pretty good. You'd probably be looking at something like the 4-space Omnix 400 series to accomodate your PCI cards. With a 6-space rack that leaves a little storage space to pack your keyboard, mouse, cables, etc.
Regardless of what case solution you go with, you are definately going to want something more than just a single screw holding your peripheral cards in. If you go with a modified standard case that will mean constucting some sort of custom bracket to hold the other end of the card down. An industrial chassis like you'd get from Kontron should already be set up for that.
First, there's the online SuSE support database, which you can get to from their website. I honestly don't use it much since I have a hard time finding what I'm looking for. Maybe I just use the wrong terminology in my searches, I don't know.
Where I usually go is USENET, particularly alt.linux.suse, although if the question is regarding a specific application, such as Samba or Wine, I'll usually go to the appropriate comp.os.* group.
One area where SuSE really stands out, though, is their printed manuals, which are hands down the most useful Linux books in my collection (of course, I'm a SuSE user, so YMMV).
What it comes down to is that in the 3 years I've been using SuSE (or Linux at all, really) I've only had occasion to contact support twice. They were a little slow to respond, but in both cases it was problems that aren't covered under installation support. They did answer, though, and I suspect, based on my own customer service experience, that unpaid support questions get answered last. I wouldn't consider the current delay to be indicative of the type of support you'd get from them under contract.
Here's a good example: the story's author likes how SuSE prompts you for information constantly during install. I've heard that as a criticism from other people - why won't this thing just install, dammit!?
The way I read that it was a criticism, but was mitigated by the fact that it resulted in an immediately usable system upon completion of the install.
Of course, my posting that only enforces your observation.
As far as i know the human eye can only see about 30fps, and from playing Counter-Strike a lot, people seem to be generally pleased as long as they have above 60fps.
This is pure myth. The human eye can see far more than 30fps.
AFAIK this myth comes from NTSC TV being roughly 30fps, but even that is a myth in some respects, since your TV picture is interleved. What that means is that each frame is split into 2 fields, one comprising all the odd numbered lines and one comprising all the even numbered ones. These alternate, giving an effective 60 fps. This combined with other effects, such as motion blur, trick your brain into ignoring the flicker and perceiving motion.
It should be noted that the MINIMUM fps at which the brain will ignore flicker is about 24fps, which is what film runs at (although I've been told that most film runs at an effective 72fps, though I don't know how it's split up). PAL TV (used in Europe, and many African and Asian TV markets) runs at 25fps interleved, and while I've never had a problem with it myself I know several Americans who find it irritating. [1] The reason PAL uses 25fps and NTSC uses 30fps has little to do with image quality, and much more to do with the ease of synching those refresh rates with the frequency of the AC power sources available in those areas; 50Hz in Europe and 60Hz in the US.
So, basically, 30fps is the slightly above the minimum refresh rate at which the brain can be tricked into perciving motion from a series of still images. I can consciously percieve a difference up to around 100fps. That is, for example, roughly the point at which the default machinegun in Quake 3 becomes a useful weapon since I can track moving targets with it smoothly.
On a subconscious level faster is always better. If you stare at a 60Hz monitor all day your eyes will be strained, perhaps blurring your vision or making your eyes hurt, perhaps causing headaches. These effects are reduced as you raise the refresh rate of your monitor.
As a side note, Counter-Strike (and all Half-life based games) are limited to 60fps by default. There's a text file (I don't remember what it's called) where this limit can be raised to 99. Try it and see if you notice a difference.
[1] I'm a technician at a manufacturer of professional video production equipment. This is why I know people who care about things like the refresh rate of television. This is also why I have experience with PAL, despite the fact that I've only left the continent of North America twice, and both of those were trips to Hawaii.
SuSE has released a new version roughly every 6 months for years. It's not driven by anything beyond that being a reasonable pace. It keeps customers fairly current, bundles a reasonable amount of overall improvement in each release, but isn't so frequent that the end-user feels like they are constantly updating. You can expect SuSE 8.3/9.0 (depending on the amount and importance of the changes) around October.
Although there may be a few comanies that are honest and just didn't know, of course these would be few and far between. This type of fantasy company would have no problem with it. For the rest of them, they will come up with any reason possible to fire you or lay you off.
I don't run my own company, but if I did I would like to think that I would be one of these fantasy bosses, as I firmly believe that the carrot is a more effective motivator than the stick.
However, if an employee put me in that position I would certainly fire them for getting me in trouble with the government rather than just coming to me directly. Many problems can be worked out that way to the benefit of all concerned, with no need for lawyers or beaurocrats to get involved. If your employer refuses to compensate you fairly for the work you're doing, though, I wouldn't worry too much about burning any bridges; you don't want to work for them anyway. Whining about the "current economy" is just that. There are other jobs out there. I've been laid off or quit several jobs in the last 3 years, and haven't been unemployed for more than 2 weeks at any given time.
The library.
Of course, it's not really renting because they don't charge you anything.
EV was the only thing that ever made me consider buying a Mac. I spent endless hours playing that game at a friends house. Very addictive!
The software (and hardware) market is full of so many highly-qualified people, most with years of experience, that employers have little to no incentive to care whether their current employees are happy or not. If they're not, they can either leave or get fired, and it will be easy to replace them, probably with someone more qualified and/or with more experience, who will work for as much or maybe less money.
This is an extremely stupid, short-sighted view.
When you lay someone off you lose their training and experience, and no matter how qualified or experienced their replacement is, it will take them time to get up to speed your product. That's exactly how I got my current job, and after 7 months I'm still figuring out previously known problems that never got documented because the guy I replaced had been working on the product for years. With that kind of experience on a single product there's bound to be a lot of things that don't get documented, simply because from that perspective they seem obvious.
In the real world, skilled workers are not as easily replaced as the MBAs would like to believe.
That NIC is certainly not OS specific.
It's got the Realtek 8139 chip, which is probably the most supported Ethernet chip on the planet, which is good since it's on something like 80% of NICs sold. It's well supported under Linux, Win9x drivers are easy to find, and when I put a few of them in some Win2k machines a while back I didn't even have to install them, they just worked without even a "Windows has found new hardware" message or anything.
This is one case where generic is good.