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User: MarcQuadra

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  1. Re:Another day.... on Apple Offers Update to Recent AirPort Update · · Score: 1

    Wireless ease is Apple's bread-and-butter these days, the XServe/iBook/Airport combos being shipped to schools are a BIG part of Apple's bottom-line, and offer major possibility of growth.

    I definitely understand having a LOT of R&D going to this technology, it's really changing the way kids are learning and people are working.

    If it weren't for the iBook's wireless abilities I'd be adminning a lab of bland Dell OptiPoopers instead of mobile airport carts full of durable kid-friendly iBooks.

  2. Apple should release 'iTunes Express' on iTunes One Year Anniversary Sparks Comparison · · Score: 1

    I think Apple really oughtta release an iTunes client for Linux, but they'd have to retain full control of it for obvious reasons. I think an excellent soultion would be 'iTunes Express' which would be a Java client that lets us access and buy music from Apple. I don't think they'd release a straight-binary because there are too many camps to play to (redhat, mandrake, gentoo, linspire, etc.). A java client would be nice though, as it would work under Win32 and MacOS as well, letting you 'run iTunes' without affecting the host machine.

  3. Gentoo _MADE_ Me. on Daniel Robbins Resigns As Chief Gentoo Architect · · Score: 1

    I WANTED to like linux since I started using it in 1998, with Debian. I always dual-booted with Windows though, no matter what distro I used because Debian, Redhat, and Mandrake would always be just short of what I wanted, they were either too bloaty or too cryptic.

    The Gentoo install system taught me more about *NIX in the course of a few days than three years of other distros did. I fell in love instantly.
    It didn't hurt that I could FINALLY build binaries tuned for my CPU, while other distros were much more 'generic'.

    I stopped using Windows in 2002, switching my small network of a Mac G3 server, an Athlon, a PIII laptop, and whatever else I had laying around totally to Gentoo.

    It was the best thing I ever did with computers. Ever.

    Now I live in the blissful world of roaming profiles that work between Windows, Macs, and Linux boxes, automatic synchronizing and updating with emails telling me when config files need to be updated, and universal config files (XF86Config anyone?) that dynamically adjust to whatever host they reside on.

    I've switched a few friends over to Linux using Gentoo, they really dig how I can call up all sorts of window managers and apps compared to whatever Microsoft foists on them. I've even sold some Gentoo boxes to small businesses as file/print/domain servers, they're so stable that I have to charge the customers for when I _DON'T_ have to go service them.

    I had an NPTL/2.6-based distro built on gcc-3.3 and 2.6 headers WAY before anyone else did. Gentoo lets me live comfortably on the 'frontier' in a 'mobile home' that I had 'custom built' and it's truly exciting, and it helps pave the way for the rest of the people who need bugs shaken out and versions pushed.

    I don't think I'd ever be able to do all this if I hadn't learned the 'basics' from a Gentoo install.

    Thanks Daniel!

  4. Re:Didn't do -mfpmath=sse,387 on Genetic Algorithms for GCC Optimization · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's good reason for that, GCC can make code with '-mfpmath=sse,387' but it's not been 'modeled' properly, nor can GCC properly predict the outcome of trying to use registers that might be shared or step on each other. I'd run SCREAMING from that flag, '-mfpmath=sse' gets you properly-formed code for a fact, and that's what we're all looking for.

  5. Gay Hackers? on Kernel 2.4.26 Out · · Score: 1

    Actually, I was thinking about this today. I work as an admin at a high school, and there's always a few students hovering about the tech crew. I get the vibe that a disproportionately high number of the geeks here are homosexual. Is this something I should know by now or just a fluke?

    Does the social stigma of being gay drive otherwise normal people to geekdom? Does geekiness drive the people to alternate sexualities? Or do the two go hand-in-hand?

  6. Re:Apple Prices on Element Computer: ION Linux on Linux Hardware · · Score: 1

    It's not about that, it's about Total Cost of Ownership. If we have to service the PC hardware three times as often as the Macs, AND we can get four years out of a Mac, but only three out of a PC, there's a HUGE value advantage for a machine that costs one or two hundred more at purchase time.

    Macs have less stuff to break, they have very few fans, or very low-RPM fans that tend not to die, which means you have many fewer CPU, drive, and PSU failures. When there's only three cables coming out the back of the box (network, power, and kbrd) there's a MUCH lower chance of having to replace mangled boards.

    I have to recommend machines to give to kids age six through eighteen, the young ones have no problem yanking keyboards and throwing mice at each other. I feed those kids eMacs and iBooks (if the curriculum demands portability) because it lets me focus on technology delivery, not technology repair.

  7. Apple Prices on Element Computer: ION Linux on Linux Hardware · · Score: 1

    The really funny thing is how much cheaper iBooks are than the 'cheap' PC counterparts. They were talking about switching the lower school where I work to PCs to save money.

    I've got a chart of features, price, and experience with how long the Macs last in the hands of students compared to Dells. The iBooks cost about 40% LESS than the similarly-equipped Dell machines, the gap grows even more when you get to year three and have to replace ALL the Dells but 3/4 of the iBooks are still good for another year.

    eMacs are also cheap in the long run, the things are freakin' bulletproof, I've got two labs of them in the hands of hyperactive fourth-graders and they're totally unscathed after two years (excepting keyboards and mice). The Dell labs we have with GX150s have all had their front panels knocked out and CD-ROM trays damaged, most floppy drives will kill disks, and the rat's nest of cables is getting unmanageable.

  8. Floppies do suck! on Element Computer: ION Linux on Linux Hardware · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Agreed fully, and remember, on a Mac you've got OpenFirmware, so you can EASILY do a one-time boot off a USB or FireWire drive.

    Apple made considerations to eliminate the floppy, PC makers have not. PCs still don't have standardized boot protocols for stuff like USB or FireWire, so they NEED floppies to make stuff like BIOS flashes easy to use.

    The best thing about adminning on a platform with no floppy? Never having to tell anyone that their disk ate their work.

  9. Re:No way on Iomega Ships 35GB 'Son of Jaz' · · Score: 1

    WORD! I've got a set of about ten disks from way back when they introduced the 'Zip Plus' which could do SCSI or LPT, great for me because I was using it to transfer data between Macs and PCs. These disks are VERY rugged, and I've had MUCH better luck with them than the set I bought a few years later, none of which are still operable.

  10. Re:Why UFS? on Mac OS X Trojan Horse Infects MP3s · · Score: 2, Informative

    I chose UFS fo my desktop for three reasons:

    1. Case sensitive.
    2. Thought it would be more resistant to corruption.
    3. To see if it had any other advantages or disadvantages.

    What I found was that it's a lot slower on laptops, but about the same real-world speed on desktops. Several third-party apps needed TLC to work right, because case sensitivity broke them. Cloning using Carbon Copy Cloner doesn't work with UFS.

    I still use that UFS desktop, but I think next time I wipe it I'll go HFS+. I heard I can enable case-sensitivity in HFS+ now, so the benefits of HFS outweigh those of UFS for me now.

    I'd like to see Apple implement resource forks as a plugin for reiser4 and then make darwin/OSX work on top of it. I think reiser4 would kick HFS+ arse.

  11. Hookers, Booze, and Russians on Russian Group Plans Manned Mars Mission By 2011 · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Well considering that these guys are Russian, I'd expect them to be HIGHLY susceptible to both hookers and booze. Should make a good reality show though:

    "Dima, pass the vot-kah and Natasha, I am to be feeling sober ant lonesome."

  12. VoIP Data requirements on Gigabit Networking for the Home? · · Score: 1

    I use VoIP, and I have my box turned up to full-duplex maximum quality, it consumes about 90Kbits/sec each way, when someone's talking. That's about 10 Kilobytes a second, you could do full-quality VoIP over two bonded 56k modems!

  13. Re:How does this work? on Mac OS X Trojan Horse Infects MP3s · · Score: 1

    it's a one-liner put in a cronjob, no magic involved. This is from my memory, it might need a tweak to actually work. the real copy is buried on the server at work right now and it's too early to remote in.

    find /UsersRemote -type f | xargs chmod u-x,g-x,o-x

    just make sure to specify 'type f' for files, 'x' on a directory means traverse, so you have to only disallow-execute on files.

  14. Re:Why would they? on Suicide Caught on Surveillance Tape Appears Online · · Score: 1

    LOL. I live in Rhode Island, using FOIA here is like spitting on the hood of a police car.

    A judge has ordered Providence Police to hand over records on police brutality THREE times over the past five years and they just shrug it off without complying.

    The police here can regularly be found INSIDE the local strip club while on duty, saturday nights I've seen five on-duty cops in the club at once. If you look too long at them or they think you're talking about them they'll leave at the same time you do and slowly walk after you until you take off from the parking lot, it's some scary shit to have two lawbreaking cops slowly walking your way in a dark parking lot after you spotted them getting private dances.

    So sure, I'd make an FOIA request, but I'd rather be living out-of-state first.

  15. Re:How does this work? on Mac OS X Trojan Horse Infects MP3s · · Score: 1

    Alright, but unless this thing hooks a local root exploit too it's not going to get far in any corporate/academic network.

    There's only THREE 'admin' users recognized by _MY_ Mac OS X machines, and even admins can only add new apps, they can't write over, delete, or replace existing files in protected folders. If you want to overwrite an existing app you need to hunt me down and make me log in as root, erase the app you want to replace and reinstall it as admin.

    Sure, my users might authenticate as themselves and run this app, but the farthest it can go is their own home folder unless it has a local root exploit. My users don't have privileges. Did I mention that a script trolls the home folders at night and unsets the 'executable' flag in all the user's homes?

  16. Re:Ironic the Intego released a solution fast enou on Mac OS X Trojan Horse Infects MP3s · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sorry to burst your bubble, but the whole 'app is really a directory' thing is a SOLUTION to the 'resource fork' storage problem. And it allows for cleanly implemented multi-platform 'fat' binaries. Apple's Classic fat binaries were kludgy, the CODE resource fork held the 68K binary and the data fork held the PowerPC binary, hardly extensible.

    I've got an OSX install on purely UFS, and sure enough, it allows you to pack x86 and PPC binaries (or multiple PPC/X86 binaries, for optimization/bitness) into the same *.app so you can have one application file that executes on multiple architectures. It might not be Apple's hacked-up old kludgy way to get a 'fat binary' but it's effectively the same result but done MUCH cleaner and capable of living on many diverse file-systems.

    Imagine how cool it would be to have ONE shared 'applications' folder mounted read-only on all your clients, the x86 clients execute the x86 code from camino.app and the PPC machines execute the PPC code from the same place. It would be an administrator's utopia!

  17. Re:Why would they? on Suicide Caught on Surveillance Tape Appears Online · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yesterday I took a piece of paper from District Court to the Police station, on it was an order to erase my record of arrest because I hadn't committed a crime. I asked for a reciept or confirmation that they had erased my records and they said there was 'no procedure for that, trust us'. Now I don't have proof that my employer won't find this particularly offensive record when they do occasional background checks (I work at a school).

    Privacy of suspects and citizens surely is part of the police duties, if they can provide records they should be obligated to properly handle them.

  18. Re:300,000 developers for under 5 % of market shar on Apple Developer Profile Changing? · · Score: 1

    Well there's a lot of the darwin stuff you have to register as a developer to get access to. I'm by no means a developer, but I do like to pull darwin kernels/compilers/tools from Apple CVS and install them every now'n'then to see get a feel for upcoming stuff. I'm VERY down with Apple's modifications to GCC, they really have it tweaked to all hell for the PowerPC.

    I'm actually trying now to see if I can pull Apple's tweaked GCC-3.3 to build my next Gentoo/PPC system, that would be a feat.

  19. Debt! on Train Your Own Replacement · · Score: 1

    Oh, consumers won't be able to buy the products?

    I believe most Americans carry substantial ability to absorb debt. The average American carries over $2000 in credit-card debt alone, and Americans show no sign of reducing spending when their income growth is slowed or stopped.

    I only have a credit card to build good credit, I carry $300 of debt on it, pay off $200/month and charge a new $200 monthly. Most of my buddies have several thousand dollars in debt out in cards and no way to realistically pay it off.

    Have you noticed all the 'poor looking' people driving expensive almost-new cars? They're living beyond their means. I make a little over $30K/year and I have to drive a ten-year-old Ford Escort and live in a basement apartment to make ends meet.

  20. Re:Camino & Firefox on Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a VERY good reason to use Camino over FireFox. Camino will pull a lot of preferences from the system prefs, like proxy config and home page. Firefox needs to be manually configured. At a site like mine where users move from proxied networks back to their home networks a lot it doesn't make much sense to have to swith your location AND your firefox prefs.

    That said, I wish FireFox had some OS-specific 'glue' to pull those prefs from the system, it would make the product much more viable for office rollouts. You could even make it an option in the prefs:

    'Try to get as many preferences from the system (pulled preferences will be shaded in blue)'

  21. on legalizing drugs on States Link Databases to Find Tax Cheats · · Score: 1

    "the drug dealers" would be the local pharmacy or bodega, and the proceeds would go to in-country hemp/coco/poppy farmers, thus eliminating the need to subsidize them.

    The law enforcement costs would be drastically cut without illegal drugs, and there would be HUGE margins on the product.

    Of course, a lot of the tax profit would have to go to rehab and prevention programs, but it's still a winning game.

    I can make VERY good arguments for legalizing the 'big five' drugs (acid, weed, heroin, coke, and ecstasy). Not the least of which is that if it's LEGAL it can be REGULATED, so you will be guaranteed purity and quality, VASTLY reducing overdoses and deaths by poisoning.

  22. Re:Scheduler? on Linux 2.6.5 is Released · · Score: 1

    Something's DEFINITELY broken on your end. I've got a celery 600MHz with 256MB playing full-screen movies right now, and I can play MP3s in the background with no problem.

    But I use Gentoo, and I've built the entire system with NPTL (i.e. I build from scratch from 2.6.3 _headers_).

  23. The Monkey on My Back on Why Do Other Geeks Leave the House? · · Score: 1

    Whenever I leave the house I end up coming home WAY too late with WAY too high a blood alcohol content.

    I've found that by staying home during the week I can get much more done and feel much healthier.

  24. Re:Hyponatremia on Death by Coffee? · · Score: 1

    That's such propagandist/alarmist crap. Sure you feel 'down' for a few days if you REALLY overdo it (like the night I ate five pills), but I've always bounced back after a few days.

    The stuff about never enjoying those things again is probably true only for people who can't handle that life isn't alwas as good as it has been. I accept that cheesecake today might not be as good as cheesecake yesterday, MDMA or not.

    I stopped doing it because I have to concentrate on more important things, like career and my hobbies. I can still 'fully enjoy' all the things I used to, even those I did while on MDMA.

    As for needing more and more, again, only true if you're doing it TOO OFTEN. Dropping two or three times a year doesn't build any tolerance

  25. MUCH more than a presentation tool! on HyperCard Gone for Good · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ugh. too many people think of it as a game or presentation tool.

    HyperCard had REALLY powerful features that made it ideal for building ledgers, contacts databases, tools to run Scout Troops, take computerized tests in schools, etc.

    My dad still runs his business on HyperCard, he designed the stacks he uses back in the late eighties, and the format is so amazingly extensible.

    You culd write front-ends for very complex things easily and without knowing much more than natural language. Today the tools that let you do thing that Hypercard could do are much more complex and expensive, and require MUCH more development. Very few database engineers would have jobs today if HyperCard took off like it should have.

    Apple should have made HC web-enabled, and let people run a 'HC Player' plugin written in Java. My job would be an order of magnitude simpler and more efficient if HC were properly fed ten years ago.