A few years ago, there was some event during a thunderstorm - we never quite figured out what - that fried two TiVo modems, a garage door opener (the circuit board was visibly burned and light bulb shattered), [...] The house was, at the time, "protected" with two Cutler-Hammer CHSP suppressors (MOV). After the incident, their "protection working fine" LED was still lit!
It has already been pointed out that this was very likely due to common/ground spike. But more to the point, this illustrates my biggest pet peeve with surge protectors and (home) UPSes...
Surge protectors are all exactly the same, no matter how much you pay for them. From the "free after mail-in rebate" to the bulky, major brand-name, $100 gold-plated wonders with the $500 million insurance policy. They all do exactly the same thing... They buy a 2"sq. varistor package for $2 and connect it inline on the "hot" wire. Neutral and Ground lines are passed through, entirely unfiltered and unprotected.
And you're not the only person to get screwed over by this fact. Just about a year a friend of mine went through a similar incident... An electrified fence, some distance away, shorted to ground, and absolutely destroyed every small electrical device within a square city block. The responsible party was required to pay for much of the damage, but the point remains: surge protectors are COMPLETELY useless in such a scenario, a scenario which occurs fairly frequently. For the price of 3 fuses, which can be found in any home hardware store, any power strip can be modified to be practically impervious to a surge of any size, over any of the 3 power lines. Companies that make surge protectors and home UPSes opt, instead, to offer damn near no protection, while fooling the public into believing they're somehow being made safe.
Why 5 minutes? It usually takes less than a second to run a sync on the disks depending on how active they are.
You've never tried that on a server with a several GBs of RAM. It can take quite a while to flush all the RAM-cached fs data to disk... on the order of a couple minutes.
Sorry dude, the light from florescent sucks compared to incandescent. Most of my friends feel the same.
The plural of "anecdote" is *not* "evidence". Sorry. I don't care how many of your friends believe the world is flat.
I would suggest that you and your friends go find some good ones, rather than the latest Wal-mart specials...
CFL bulbs are only full power for about 12-15 months- for the rest of their lifespan, they put out less light.
No. Nobody puts a 12-month timer in them... Florescent bulbs are only "full power" for about the first second you turn them on. After that, it's a very slow (and entirely linear) decline.
And guess what? LED arrays have a similar decrease in output over their lifetime as well. Incandescents do as well, for that matter.
You're absolutely right that Opera, since the start, styled itself to be like "the internet running on a VM" (or "the browser as a platform"). A design that has since proven to be visionary (and which has been copied by every other major browser).
It's so visionary that, several years later, they introduced an option to turn it off...
And no, absolutely no other browser has copied it.
Your example is actually a pretty good one of how Opera does things right (by applying the same paradigm already in use by the vast majority of applications)
Did you even READ my comment? I specifically said Opera's simply does a WORSE job handling it's virtual windows than any other (REAL!) window manager.
What's the point of tabs, if they just duplicate existing window manager functionality, and waste screen real-estate with an extra tab bar taking up your screen? It's a complete pointless waste.
instead of coming up with some arbitrary new rule ("always switch to the tab whose icon is on the right" or "always switch to the tab whose icon is on the left"
Except that there's an extremely good reason for that rule, and it works wonderfully. If you are looking at a page, and open 5 tabs from it, upon closing the page you go right to those tabs, in order, first to last. Extremely simple. Opera, however, just leaves those tabs sitting in the background, and sends you back to the last existing tab you had open. It's not helpful, and makes no sense. If you wanted that functionality, you could just disable the use of tabs, and let your (much superior) window manager handle the browser windows.
as you pointed out, FF and Mozilla don't even agree on which "side" to pick).
Except that's NOT what I pointed out, and it's NOT true. So you're really going 0 for 10 here.
Mozilla, with it's first implementation of tabs, went right to left, but it wasn't long until everyone figured out that left to right was simpler, easier, etc, and all gecko browsers quickly switched over. (I seriously doubt Seamonkey switched back while I wasn't looking).
Unfortunately, Opera has always piled on the features, but never bothered to make them usable. Tabs are an obvious example... Mozilla, from the start, implemented tabs linearly... Close one, and you go to the next one to the left (later, the right). Simple, intuitive. Opera had tabs, but they dumped the user in a second-window-manager hell, as the cycle based on when they were last viewed. It's an absolute mess, and WORSE than managing multiple windows with a window manager, which was actually designed to do the job reasonably well. Using Opera was like having a window on your destop, running it's own little session of Windows 3.11 in a VM...
IIRC, it wasn't until some time after Mozilla was released with tabs that Opera offered users with the option of handling tabs in a similar manner to Mozilla...
Apple did not release Safari because of Firefox. After all, Firefox was on Apple. They released it because they wanted to be in control of their future. As it was, MS had announced that they were going to pull MSIE from them.
No. It's not his fault that you can't read...
He specifically said Apple release Safari v3.1 to stay competitive with the performance of Firefox3.
Are you talking about classic 24" to 36" long tubes? The light from them is pretty bad.
Well, no. CFLs have been around for a LONG TIME. I had a set a good 20 years ago... The only thing that's changed, recently, is that the ballasts are dirt cheap, so we just throw them away, rather than swapping the bulb.
Still, there's nothing wrong with long tubes. It's exactly the same tech. No doubt you're basing your judgment on very old tube setups, versus new CFLs.
The modern CFL's draw 13 to 17 watts. The LED draws about 2 watts for half the light. So 4 watts for the same light.
I haven't got any idea what you're talking about. There isn't any LED tech in the world that is even AS efficient as CFLs right now. It's merely hoped that they will get there soon.
I want LED to work-- they last a long time, they use no power, and they have no mercury.
I would be interested to hear you explain your opposition to florescent lighting. They are much more energy efficient than existing LEDs (and have been for DECADES), and contains a very tiny amount of mercury. LEDs aren't exactly free of toxic chemicals.
If the speed limit is 60, 65, or 70, and that person can't drive (at least) the speed limit, then they really shouldn't be on the road, regardless of the lane.
Either you don't drive, or you're absolutely oblivious to the world around you when you do... The speed limit is the maximum, not the minimum.
In CA, the speed limit for trucks is 55 MPH, and often, they don't all get up to even that speed. Elsewhere, load weight, terrain, and aerodynamic drag naturally limit loaded trucks to speeds not much faster than that. Staying in the far right lane, with the slower trucks will indeed allow you to keep-up with the flow of traffic going just 55MPH.
What's so exciting about this "research"? Peercast has been around for over 6 years now. I was watching streaming P2P video with it myself, a good 4+ years ago. It's based on the Gnutella protocol rather than BT, but in the case of sequential live streams, the difference is sure to be minimal, anyhow.
Despite having much more focus on audio, I count 15 video channels listed in the YP right now... Peercast is open source as well.
I've lost a CEO.. literally _lost_. he responds to e-mails, signs documents, the business continues to run completely, I just can't figure out where in the building the CEO is.
Personally I'm surprised there's not been more uproar about the requirement to move internal DNS servers (yes, that means your Windows Domain Controllers in most corporate environments) outside any NAT'ing devices (eg: firewalls),
NAT is not a firewall. A firewall is not NAT.
I wouldn't think that practically any major sites are running their public-facing DNS servers from behind a NAT (though I expect most are behind a firewall).
Looks like someone doesn't remember NT 3.51. What a piece of junk. NT 4.0 was barely better.
I still have my NT 3.51 install CD around here somewhere... It hasn't even been that long since the last time I installed and played around with it.
There wasn't anything wrong with NT 3.51. It was, in fact, very fast and stable. That was before they decided to integrate the graphics into the kernel, which has caused a lot of crashes with systems ever since.
The interface is a bit... "clunky"... being Win3.1-like after all. The biggest problem was that Windows 95 came out not long after, and took over the world, so app compatibility with NT 3.51 wasn't long lived at all. Still, there was a reasonablely lengthy overlap, when you could continue to get Win3.1 apps of everything you might need, so it's not even an exception to the rule, really.
NT 4.0 was (and remains) a damn good OS that I still use from time to time. You certainly haven't given any reasons that you happen to dislike it.
"Lots" is a relative term... Sure, there's a large number of channels, but the vast majority of them are either non-English language, shop at home, religious, etc., etc.
Once you eliminate those, you've mostly just got some crappy local stations with re-runs of 20+ year old shows... Of course you'll get at least one station from each major network, so it's an improvement over OTA (analog) antenna, but it's certainly not "lots" compared to cable or DBS.
There are, of course, notable exceptions that make it worthwhile. I'd rather watch BBC World than any other 24/7 news channel (admittedly, that's setting the bar pretty low) and there's really no other way to get it. PBS provides several channels with different programming (on Ku), which is the majority of what I watch.
Windows 2000 was the *best* OS Microsoft ever came out with.
Such is true with every version of NT... The older, the better...
That holds true right up until the point that they can't run some new software that you need... Then, the next oldest NT-based OS becomes the *best ever*.
Mark my words, in just a few years, a significant number of applications will not run on 2000, the next release of Windows (7) will be an infamous bloated beast that nobody likes, and people will be singing the praises of XP as the *BEST EVER* Microsoft OS.
That's not to say I entirely disagree with you. I've still got 2000 running on a machine that I steadfastly refuse to upgrade. However, before new applications became by and large incompatible with it, and lack of drivers for newer hardware passed it by, Windows NT 4.0 was the "*best* OS Microsoft ever came out with" without question. However, even FEWER of us were exposed to and used NT 4.0 in it's time, so it doesn't have quite as big of a following. The same will be true of 2000 in comparison to XP in the next few years, though.
I miss the NT4 days, as you will miss the 2000 days, and others will eventually miss the XP days... etc. Someone is bound to eventually miss the Vista days (gasp!), when computers are so fast and cheap that the system requirements for it look quaint.
The fact that you're complaining without any specific details or other qualifications
What is there to explain? The inherent limitations of "software firewalls" are very well-known. Without a separate (hardware) firewall, you simply can not possibly stop machines from being exploited.
Forcing someone to update as soon as the network is connected is still much too late. Your system gains nothing except a false sense of security, and monopoly lock-in (see alternatives like windizupdates.com).
The fact that you've deployed a system to install updates, doesn't remotely imply it was or is secure. Certainly, online threats have become far more advanced in the past decade.
You've already got most everything you need... For the cost of a DVB-S receiver ($40 for a PCI model, $100 for a set-top-box), you can get quite a few free TV channels, in addition to raw feeds and other eccentric stuff. No monthly fees required. That doesn't include most "cable" channels, but much more than you'll get with an antenna.
Alternatively, if your dish was already fitted with a Ku-band LNBF, you could simply aim it at the DirecTV sat, and get a VERY strong signal, eliminating drop-outs even in the even of airplane flyovers, or extremely heavy rain fade.
But I would suggest throwing out the DirecTV subscription, and going with the big-ugly-dish you already own, and a 4DTV receiver. It's easily the cheapest way to get subscription channels, probably less than 1/4rd the price of DirecTV or DishNet. Ala carte subscriptions are a big advantage that could save you dramatically.
Throwing in a feel-good measure, that doesn't actually improve security, isn't a legitimate security measure. Just because the status quo isn't good, doesn't mean ANY and all changes you can come up in 5 minutes on a napkin is an improvement.
I'm fine with funny mods not giving karma, but I think they should at least act as buffers from losing it.
Agreed. I'm even more annoyed when (slightly) funny posts get modded as "Insightful" and the like, presumably for these reasons.
-
And for the record, I'll be sticking with the classic discussion system, until it's removed... At which point I may just leave. The new comment system doesn't appear to be useful in any way, shape or form./. has a terribly habit of 'upgrades' that remove useful functionality, add bugs and useless time consuming steps, and leave everyone worse off because someone wanted to play around with some new idea they had.
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It has already been pointed out that this was very likely due to common/ground spike. But more to the point, this illustrates my biggest pet peeve with surge protectors and (home) UPSes...
Surge protectors are all exactly the same, no matter how much you pay for them. From the "free after mail-in rebate" to the bulky, major brand-name, $100 gold-plated wonders with the $500 million insurance policy. They all do exactly the same thing... They buy a 2"sq. varistor package for $2 and connect it inline on the "hot" wire. Neutral and Ground lines are passed through, entirely unfiltered and unprotected.
And you're not the only person to get screwed over by this fact. Just about a year a friend of mine went through a similar incident... An electrified fence, some distance away, shorted to ground, and absolutely destroyed every small electrical device within a square city block. The responsible party was required to pay for much of the damage, but the point remains: surge protectors are COMPLETELY useless in such a scenario, a scenario which occurs fairly frequently. For the price of 3 fuses, which can be found in any home hardware store, any power strip can be modified to be practically impervious to a surge of any size, over any of the 3 power lines. Companies that make surge protectors and home UPSes opt, instead, to offer damn near no protection, while fooling the public into believing they're somehow being made safe.
You've never tried that on a server with a several GBs of RAM. It can take quite a while to flush all the RAM-cached fs data to disk... on the order of a couple minutes.
That's going to make it hard to type...
The plural of "anecdote" is *not* "evidence". Sorry. I don't care how many of your friends believe the world is flat.
I would suggest that you and your friends go find some good ones, rather than the latest Wal-mart specials...
No. Nobody puts a 12-month timer in them... Florescent bulbs are only "full power" for about the first second you turn them on. After that, it's a very slow (and entirely linear) decline.
And guess what? LED arrays have a similar decrease in output over their lifetime as well. Incandescents do as well, for that matter.
It's so visionary that, several years later, they introduced an option to turn it off...
And no, absolutely no other browser has copied it.
Did you even READ my comment? I specifically said Opera's simply does a WORSE job handling it's virtual windows than any other (REAL!) window manager.
What's the point of tabs, if they just duplicate existing window manager functionality, and waste screen real-estate with an extra tab bar taking up your screen? It's a complete pointless waste.
Except that there's an extremely good reason for that rule, and it works wonderfully. If you are looking at a page, and open 5 tabs from it, upon closing the page you go right to those tabs, in order, first to last. Extremely simple. Opera, however, just leaves those tabs sitting in the background, and sends you back to the last existing tab you had open. It's not helpful, and makes no sense. If you wanted that functionality, you could just disable the use of tabs, and let your (much superior) window manager handle the browser windows.
Except that's NOT what I pointed out, and it's NOT true. So you're really going 0 for 10 here.
Mozilla, with it's first implementation of tabs, went right to left, but it wasn't long until everyone figured out that left to right was simpler, easier, etc, and all gecko browsers quickly switched over. (I seriously doubt Seamonkey switched back while I wasn't looking).
Unfortunately, Opera has always piled on the features, but never bothered to make them usable. Tabs are an obvious example... Mozilla, from the start, implemented tabs linearly... Close one, and you go to the next one to the left (later, the right). Simple, intuitive. Opera had tabs, but they dumped the user in a second-window-manager hell, as the cycle based on when they were last viewed. It's an absolute mess, and WORSE than managing multiple windows with a window manager, which was actually designed to do the job reasonably well. Using Opera was like having a window on your destop, running it's own little session of Windows 3.11 in a VM...
IIRC, it wasn't until some time after Mozilla was released with tabs that Opera offered users with the option of handling tabs in a similar manner to Mozilla...
No. It's not his fault that you can't read...
He specifically said Apple release Safari v3.1 to stay competitive with the performance of Firefox3.
Well, no. CFLs have been around for a LONG TIME. I had a set a good 20 years ago... The only thing that's changed, recently, is that the ballasts are dirt cheap, so we just throw them away, rather than swapping the bulb.
Still, there's nothing wrong with long tubes. It's exactly the same tech. No doubt you're basing your judgment on very old tube setups, versus new CFLs.
I haven't got any idea what you're talking about. There isn't any LED tech in the world that is even AS efficient as CFLs right now. It's merely hoped that they will get there soon.
I would be interested to hear you explain your opposition to florescent lighting. They are much more energy efficient than existing LEDs (and have been for DECADES), and contains a very tiny amount of mercury. LEDs aren't exactly free of toxic chemicals.
Actually, I'd say they convert 100% of the electricity into heat (nominal)...
In fact LEDs and CFLs also convert 100% of the electricity into heat.
As do computers, TVs, electric cars, refrigerators, et al.
Either you don't drive, or you're absolutely oblivious to the world around you when you do... The speed limit is the maximum, not the minimum.
In CA, the speed limit for trucks is 55 MPH, and often, they don't all get up to even that speed. Elsewhere, load weight, terrain, and aerodynamic drag naturally limit loaded trucks to speeds not much faster than that. Staying in the far right lane, with the slower trucks will indeed allow you to keep-up with the flow of traffic going just 55MPH.
What's so exciting about this "research"? Peercast has been around for over 6 years now. I was watching streaming P2P video with it myself, a good 4+ years ago. It's based on the Gnutella protocol rather than BT, but in the case of sequential live streams, the difference is sure to be minimal, anyhow.
Despite having much more focus on audio, I count 15 video channels listed in the YP right now... Peercast is open source as well.
I've lost a CEO.. literally _lost_. he responds to e-mails, signs documents, the business continues to run completely, I just can't figure out where in the building the CEO is.
Overhead...
Additional point of failure...
Pointlessness and Futility...
It's not a crime against humanity, but there's little or no good reasons to do it, and a few reasons not to.
NAT is not a firewall.
A firewall is not NAT.
I wouldn't think that practically any major sites are running their public-facing DNS servers from behind a NAT (though I expect most are behind a firewall).
Yep: http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/nonGenuine.aspx?displaylang=en&cCode=USA&Error=8&submit=1
It's always nice to know those who DIDN'T break any laws have to pay full price for XP, while the law-breakers get to pay half price and be legal.
You could get much better performance by just adding some sapho...
I still have my NT 3.51 install CD around here somewhere... It hasn't even been that long since the last time I installed and played around with it.
There wasn't anything wrong with NT 3.51. It was, in fact, very fast and stable. That was before they decided to integrate the graphics into the kernel, which has caused a lot of crashes with systems ever since.
The interface is a bit... "clunky"... being Win3.1-like after all. The biggest problem was that Windows 95 came out not long after, and took over the world, so app compatibility with NT 3.51 wasn't long lived at all. Still, there was a reasonablely lengthy overlap, when you could continue to get Win3.1 apps of everything you might need, so it's not even an exception to the rule, really.
NT 4.0 was (and remains) a damn good OS that I still use from time to time. You certainly haven't given any reasons that you happen to dislike it.
"Lots" is a relative term... Sure, there's a large number of channels, but the vast majority of them are either non-English language, shop at home, religious, etc., etc.
Once you eliminate those, you've mostly just got some crappy local stations with re-runs of 20+ year old shows... Of course you'll get at least one station from each major network, so it's an improvement over OTA (analog) antenna, but it's certainly not "lots" compared to cable or DBS.
There are, of course, notable exceptions that make it worthwhile. I'd rather watch BBC World than any other 24/7 news channel (admittedly, that's setting the bar pretty low) and there's really no other way to get it. PBS provides several channels with different programming (on Ku), which is the majority of what I watch.
Such is true with every version of NT... The older, the better...
That holds true right up until the point that they can't run some new software that you need... Then, the next oldest NT-based OS becomes the *best ever*.
Mark my words, in just a few years, a significant number of applications will not run on 2000, the next release of Windows (7) will be an infamous bloated beast that nobody likes, and people will be singing the praises of XP as the *BEST EVER* Microsoft OS.
That's not to say I entirely disagree with you. I've still got 2000 running on a machine that I steadfastly refuse to upgrade. However, before new applications became by and large incompatible with it, and lack of drivers for newer hardware passed it by, Windows NT 4.0 was the "*best* OS Microsoft ever came out with" without question. However, even FEWER of us were exposed to and used NT 4.0 in it's time, so it doesn't have quite as big of a following. The same will be true of 2000 in comparison to XP in the next few years, though.
I miss the NT4 days, as you will miss the 2000 days, and others will eventually miss the XP days... etc. Someone is bound to eventually miss the Vista days (gasp!), when computers are so fast and cheap that the system requirements for it look quaint.
What is there to explain? The inherent limitations of "software firewalls" are very well-known. Without a separate (hardware) firewall, you simply can not possibly stop machines from being exploited.
Forcing someone to update as soon as the network is connected is still much too late. Your system gains nothing except a false sense of security, and monopoly lock-in (see alternatives like windizupdates.com).
The fact that you've deployed a system to install updates, doesn't remotely imply it was or is secure. Certainly, online threats have become far more advanced in the past decade.
I wrote about think kind of thing briefly in my journal a while back: http://slashdot.org/~evilviper/journal/189083
You've already got most everything you need... For the cost of a DVB-S receiver ($40 for a PCI model, $100 for a set-top-box), you can get quite a few free TV channels, in addition to raw feeds and other eccentric stuff. No monthly fees required. That doesn't include most "cable" channels, but much more than you'll get with an antenna.
Alternatively, if your dish was already fitted with a Ku-band LNBF, you could simply aim it at the DirecTV sat, and get a VERY strong signal, eliminating drop-outs even in the even of airplane flyovers, or extremely heavy rain fade.
But I would suggest throwing out the DirecTV subscription, and going with the big-ugly-dish you already own, and a 4DTV receiver. It's easily the cheapest way to get subscription channels, probably less than 1/4rd the price of DirecTV or DishNet. Ala carte subscriptions are a big advantage that could save you dramatically.
Throwing in a feel-good measure, that doesn't actually improve security, isn't a legitimate security measure. Just because the status quo isn't good, doesn't mean ANY and all changes you can come up in 5 minutes on a napkin is an improvement.
Agreed. I'm even more annoyed when (slightly) funny posts get modded as "Insightful" and the like, presumably for these reasons.
-
And for the record, I'll be sticking with the classic discussion system, until it's removed... At which point I may just leave. The new comment system doesn't appear to be useful in any way, shape or form. /. has a terribly habit of 'upgrades' that remove useful functionality, add bugs and useless time consuming steps, and leave everyone worse off because someone wanted to play around with some new idea they had.