I have a concept where the motherboard is a thing of the past.
Get rid of the ISA bus, PCI bus, memory bus, serial ports, parallel ports, and the AGP bus.
Replace everything with a gigabit switched ethernet network. Each computer componment on the box is connected to the switch with two twisted pairs, one a send and the other a receive. They are also connected to the 5v and 12 volt power supplies and a common point ground.
The CPU only has power and a gigabit ethernet connection.
The ethernet card is a pair of ethernet connections with a network address translator in between that acts as a gateway between the internal and external networks.
Memory also only has power and an ethernet connections and sends back information to the device that requests that info. This allows multiple devices to all send and recieve data simultaneously from memory. It would even be possible to have dual ethernet ports on a memory card to double the bandwidth of the memory, or to put multiple memory devices in a computer and then sharing them between and amoung devices.
Harddrives also would have only power and ethernet connections and would look and work simimilar to a memory device.
This allows any number of computer components to be clustered together by connecting the switches of "boxes" together with a strait through twisted pair. The number of compoments is limitted only by the size of the box and the number of connections the switch allows.
Your external components are also connected directly to the main bus with two twisted pairs, giving your monitor, speakers, printer, keyboard, mouse and joystick the same level of connection as the rest of your internal components.
The idea and information contained within are hereby released into the public domain. Any use of this design in real world applications is free and may not be patented in any form.
What does everyone thing of my design? Is it feasible?
This slight differences becomes profound when you are running multiple servers. To figure reliablity on more than one machine you multiply the reliablity of all the boxes together.
So 1000 Linux boxes, each with a reliablity of 99.95% will together have a reliablity of only 60.33% (.9995^1000) Which means that 40% of the time at least one box would be down.
A 1000 Windows boxes, each with a reliablity of 99.26% will together have a reliablity of only 0.5% (.9926^1000) which means that 99.5% of the time you would have at least one Windows box down.
Since the primary problem with Linux was the disk subsystem it is concevable that by using a hot swappable RAID drive you could increase its reliablity to the the 99.99% range.
Theoretically this would result in an increase in reliability to 90.39% (.9999^1000) or having at least one box down 10% of the time. Of course it may be more cost effective to hire more support personnel to fix broken boxes rather than put a hot swapable raid drive in every machine, this would be a business decision.
Going by the hours of down time per OS, you would need 4 hours of support per year per Linux box. Those same 1000 Linux boxes would need 4000 hours of support a year, or 2 FTE's simply to fix the boxes as they break.
The RAID drives would drop this to about.67 FTE. I would recomend the raid drives if they cost less than 2 FTE's which would result in a repayment of the investment after 2 years that continued for at least a 5 year period for a savings of 3 FTE over a 5 year period.
You would need 61000 hours of support a year for the 1000 windows boxes, or 30 FTE's to fix the broken Windows boxes.
This seems about what I have seen in the real world.
You will probably need around the same user support and application development for each platform. I don't think that there is any big savings there with Linux but would welcome any numbers proving me wrong.
And by the way, in case you didn't know, FTE means full time equivalent. This is Pointy Haired Boss talk for human being. 1 FTE is one person hired for an entire year or two people working half time or any other way you want to slice up the time.
If NT using so called "advanced features" makes the server crash then it isn't so advanced is it? Maybe NT should disable unstable drivers like the Linux kernel does.
The hardware that was used was a couple of year old mid range boxes which most companies use as servers. Linux and NT were supported equally well on both boxes. This isn't bleeding edge by any streach of the imagination. If the NT drivers aren't stable after 2 years then they will never be stable.
This is simply proof that Windows NT crashes all the time like most people on slashdot says it does.
If you noticed, Linux only crashed once because of a hardware issue. Linux had exactly zero crashes due to the OS or the software running on the box. Linux the OS is as stable as your hardware. You can't get better than that.
Windows was down 65 hours, Linux was down 4 hours during the entire year of testing. According to the _report_ Linux is over 16 times more reliable than NT.
Quite frankly, my boss doesn't want to hear excuses as to _why_ a server is down, he doesn't want it to go down in the first place. With Linux I am 16 times closer to the goal than with NT. With Linux I can even fix the down time of the hard drive problem by adding a RAID system that would have dropped the down time to less than an hour. And if I put in hot swapable RAID maybe the server would have stayed up all year.
With Windows you have odd problems all the time that you can't fix because you don't know what caused them and since they only ever happen once there is nothing you can do but suffer through them over 30 times a year, hoping that one of the crashes doesn't damage the boxes file system beyond recovery.
I have shown you a report with hard facts, show me a report for as long a time that proves otherwise. And don't give me any anecdotal evidence, I want hard numbers.
I least I didn't attack a fellow human being by calling them ignorant or inflamatory. The truth must have stuck a little too close to home for you and you blindly struck out at me with clear vindictiveness. Don't worry, I am a big man, I forgive you.:)
I pointed out that W2K is built on top of the NT code base. A true statement.
I claimed that anyone who believed that W2K was a new product (clearly a lie from Microsoft) also more than likely believed other false claims from Microsoft. Such as the claim that Windows 95 doesn't run on top of DOS. For your information, Windows 95 and 98 do run on top of DOS. Another true statement.
If speaking the truth is considered inflamatory then there is little hope for the future.
I then directed people to not be taken in by the media, but to review all the facts and to draw their own conclusions. Clearly a skill that isn't being taught in school anymore.
If you find the truth and a request for people to think for themselves to be ignorant and inflamatory then this is your problem.
If you don't like the format of this site, you are free to leave. No one is forcing you to read these "ignorant and inflamatory" remarks. At least on this site we can post our views. Unlike the Microsoft site which seems to be lacking any "Reply to this" button...
"In a world of hype, wouldn't it be nice to get a refreshing dose of reality?"
Yes, it would! Why? Do you know someone who knows reality from fiction? ('cause these people are obviously on Crack!)
"The truth is out there."
Is the writer of the Xfiles working for Microsoft now?
Gee, reliable doesn't mean fool proof. Don't you know that nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious?
I once said that we should replace all the Sun Enterprise Servers running the hospitals patient care software with Windows NT. After everyone stopped laughing (one person was laughing so hard he cried) we went on with the meeting.
Yes, the backend database machines failed and the web server front ends kept running. Those two services are so similar to one another that this is a valid comparisson, NOT!
Yes, having multiple vendors available to guarantee reliablility will make something more reliable, NOT!
--
Here is some anecdotal evidence for you.
I worked for . Any computer that had patient information on it was a UNIX box. We used Sun at the hospitals, Dec Alphas for the Database machines and IBM H50's to route information from one to the other. All of the UNIX boxes were rock solid. I never saw any of the UNIX boxes go down except for the rare occassion when there was a hardware problem. When this happened a redundant machine as always dropped into place immeadiately.
The Suns never even had hardware problems. They had duplicate CPU's that took over processes when one of the CPU's died. You could change the CPU's when the system was running, but it wouldn't restart the CPU unless you rebooted. The machine had a raid 5 system running that not only was hot swappable, but it had hot spares that would automatically take over if one of the drives failed. The Sun machine had Error Correcting Memory using Hamming codes. You could literally pop out a stick of memory and replace it without bringing the machine down. It had hot swappable Ethernet cards, duplicate hot swappable SCSI controller cards. Those machines only went down when they were told to go down.
And if despite all of this robustness this machine failed, the Hospital had a second duplicate machine in a seperate room that would take over from the first machine.
Those Sun machines were a thing of beauty. *wipes a tear from his eye*
The person who gives the most re-election money
on
Politics Follows Code
·
· Score: 2
is the one that gets the ear of the congressman.
I agree that the "Mom and Pop" stores are the backbone of the American economy.
But I don't believe that they have that stong of a voice Because these business are ran by numerous individuals from every walk of life, they tend to cancel out each others voices. For every small businessman on one side of an issue you can find another small businessman on the other side of the issue. So small businesses tend to distribute their money amoung all the canidates and support both sides of the issues.
But the large companies, whose controlling boards heavily overlap with each other, can goto these congressmen and say, if you support certain legislation for me I will put a million dollars into a political action committee for you.
This is why we need campaign finance reform. We need to stop the undue influence of the corporations over the congressmen. We need to force these congressmen to goto the people in their own district and ask for support from the people that they are supposed to be representing.
Giving the lone gunmen their own show would be a great idea. Me and my friends would all watch this show. Hell, I like them better than Sculley and Moulder. The few shows that had these fellows in them were the best X-files. These three are actually funny and can act.
Someone with a clue needs to setup a five year plan and hire some good writers to setup a complex plot that wraps up before the interest in this show ends.
The trouble that three people not associated with the government could get into boggles the mind. Whenever Moulder shot someone he could just hold up his badge and say "FBI." These three can't do that without ending up in jail. They are going to have to think their way out of jams.
I see possibilities from Mission Impossible as well as Get Smart in a show with the Lone Gunmen.
because web pages load in just a few seconds when there are no graphics but I stopped doing that because too many sites were using frames with no alt tags on their graphic links or worse, server side image maps, which provide no information to the client whatsoever. I would go to some sites with lynx and see nothing.
When I write a webpage every graphic has an alt tag, I use tables, not frames, I never use image maps. I always browse the page with several different browsers to make sure that the page is equally viewable whether it is text or graphics. Oh, and I use a few optimized jpg's for my very sparce graphics.
I hate sights that say "best when viewed with ___ browser" Because I know that most of these sites are going to look like a graphics design artist threw up all over the screen. Let the font fest begin!
Please people, remember that fonts are graphics too. Please don't send me a picture of text. I get annoyed when I am sent twenty buttons with text embedded in the buttons. A menu like the one that slashdot has in the upper left side of the page is great. Please, don't change this!
And how about those sights where all the fonts are jammed together. Aren't those sites just lovely. Web designers need to stop trying to control the placement of every letter on the screen and just let the text flow where it will. Concentrate on the overall view, let the idividual web browsers worry about the exact placement of text.
I just wonder if XML is going to help or hurt the cause of putting more info in the tags?
I think that what we need is high speed uplinks as well as downlinks to the internet for home users. Cable modems are almost useless at letting your computer become a server, let alone how low the bandwidth would be if everyone on your block was uploading files to the internet.
If anybody can setup a web server in our own home and only pay a few dollars a month for a high speed two way connection then effectively we can all own a cross between a printing press and a movie studio.
Allowing them to give us a fat pipe down but a thin pipe up is nearly the equivalent of having a TV instead of a computer.
It is the equivalent of using hearing aids but being forced to wear a gag.
The media is trying to silence us but still wants us to watch their ads and listen to their jingles.
These people obviously have way too much time on their hands.
I have just tried to dash something out and realized just how hard this is. Anyone who can do this really is a poet. It would take a few days to even make a halfway decent haiku.
Somewhere there is a planet where all the people live in complete piece and harmony. Where no one fights anyone else. Where no one even knows what a weapon is. I want to find that planet, because it sure would be easy to take over.
It is unfortunate that women are discouraged from the sciences.
What can we do to make this better?
Encourage all your young relatives to excel in math and science, male as well as female. Try to get them interested in math and science through subscriptions to popular science magazines. Encourage them to participate in the science fairs. Give your own daughter rewards for doing well in school. Ask your young family members what college are they going to attend once they graduate from high school?
The best advice that I can give is this: Treat all women how you would want your daughter or mother to be treated.
And this advice doesn't go to just men. Too often I see women treating each other very badly. For women to suceed you must respect each other. What goes around, comes around.
I believe that anyone who comes here and reads this forum can report on what they read, without geting anyone's permission.
After all, if I went to a users group meeting in person I could write up an article about what I had learned.
Taking in a large number of sources, distilling that information into a cohesive whole and then putting that information back out to the people is what writers do. I don't see that changing in the future just because the public forum is on a web site instead of a mail server.
If you like Windows for gaming, disregard this post.:)
I bought Myth II for Linux a month ago and loved it! It runs fast, the graphics are great and best of all, no crashing! I am planning on buying one Linux game a month.
If you want to game on Linux _now_ is the time to buy a Linux game. You know you want to...
And just think that you can justify the purchase to your significant other. "But I have to buy a Linux game to help all the other people out!"
Buying a Linux game is alturistic, because if Loki sells enough games, then future games will come out for Linux at the same time as Windows. They don't care what OS they sell their games on, only that the games that they sell make money.
So help everyone out and buy a Linux version of a game today. (And have fun playing those games!)
When you digitally "sign" a document your key is used to create a cryptographic checksum of the entire page. Neither the page nor your signature can be changed afterward. Changing even a single bit anywhere in the file will invalidate your signature.
So any corruption will invalidate your order. I assume that they will present the order to your creditors and that creditor will double check your order to ensure that you signed the document.
The only thing that this still doesn't save us from is ourselves. If someone lets others know their "pin" code and leaves their "ident" card laying around, they are going to get ripped off.
And clever criminals may break into your machine and leave hacked code laying around that sends them your keys the next time you order something online.
Won't it be nice trying to cancel your old identity and get a new identity assigned to you. And now none of your old web sites recognise you for you with your new identity.
one that should be treated with a great deal of sensitivity on everyones part.
The reality is that we are all more alike each another than we are different from each other. All general statements are inacurate when applied to any one individual.
I believe that people should be free to speak their minds and that by exposing ignorance to the light of day that it will wither and die. Left to itself to fester in darkness, hate will grow.
There are limits to speech. Speech that says I believe this way or that way about some other race is O.K., even if I am wrong about what I believe. But if I am calling for some crime to be committed, and someone then commits that crime, that I am as resposible as if I committed the crime myself. And I believe that the law should reflect this.
Allow people to speak as they will, but if someone is rabble rousing, hold that person responsible for the actions of those who did as they were told.
Slashdot Mirror
I am in the process of converting some pdf's into html and no, PDF's are much bigger than the same amount of html and .jpg files.
I can fit an entire magazine with pictures on a floppy disk, but the same PDF file is 5 times that size.
Plus, once you get the content onto a web site you can do searches across a wide variety of sources, not just a single pdf file or a single CDROM.
I have a concept where the motherboard is a thing of the past.
Get rid of the ISA bus, PCI bus, memory bus, serial ports, parallel ports, and the AGP bus.
Replace everything with a gigabit switched ethernet network. Each computer componment on the box is connected to the switch with two twisted pairs, one a send and the other a receive. They are also connected to the 5v and 12 volt power supplies and a common point ground.
The CPU only has power and a gigabit ethernet connection.
The ethernet card is a pair of ethernet connections with a network address translator in between that acts as a gateway between the internal and external networks.
Memory also only has power and an ethernet connections and sends back information to the device that requests that info. This allows multiple devices to all send and recieve data simultaneously from memory. It would even be possible to have dual ethernet ports on a memory card to double the bandwidth of the memory, or to put multiple memory devices in a computer and then sharing them between and amoung devices.
Harddrives also would have only power and ethernet connections and would look and work simimilar to a memory device.
This allows any number of computer components to be clustered together by connecting the switches of "boxes" together with a strait through twisted pair. The number of compoments is limitted only by the size of the box and the number of connections the switch allows.
Your external components are also connected directly to the main bus with two twisted pairs, giving your monitor, speakers, printer, keyboard, mouse and joystick the same level of connection as the rest of your internal components.
The idea and information contained within are hereby released into the public domain. Any use of this design in real world applications is free and may not be patented in any form.
What does everyone thing of my design? Is it feasible?
I didn't compare anything. I talked only about the hardware that is available from Sun.
This slight differences becomes profound when you are running multiple servers. To figure reliablity on more than one machine you multiply the reliablity of all the boxes together.
.67 FTE. I would recomend the raid drives if they cost less than 2 FTE's which would result in a repayment of the investment after 2 years that continued for at least a 5 year period for a savings of 3 FTE over a 5 year period.
So 1000 Linux boxes, each with a reliablity of 99.95% will together have a reliablity of only 60.33% (.9995^1000) Which means that 40% of the time at least one box would be down.
A 1000 Windows boxes, each with a reliablity of 99.26% will together have a reliablity of only 0.5% (.9926^1000) which means that 99.5% of the time you would have at least one Windows box down.
Since the primary problem with Linux was the disk subsystem it is concevable that by using a hot swappable RAID drive you could increase its reliablity to the the 99.99% range.
Theoretically this would result in an increase in reliability to 90.39% (.9999^1000) or having at least one box down 10% of the time. Of course it may be more cost effective to hire more support personnel to fix broken boxes rather than put a hot swapable raid drive in every machine, this would be a business decision.
Going by the hours of down time per OS, you would need 4 hours of support per year per Linux box. Those same 1000 Linux boxes would need 4000 hours of support a year, or 2 FTE's simply to fix the boxes as they break.
The RAID drives would drop this to about
You would need 61000 hours of support a year for the 1000 windows boxes, or 30 FTE's to fix the broken Windows boxes.
This seems about what I have seen in the real world.
You will probably need around the same user support and application development for each platform. I don't think that there is any big savings there with Linux but would welcome any numbers proving me wrong.
And by the way, in case you didn't know, FTE means full time equivalent. This is Pointy Haired Boss talk for human being. 1 FTE is one person hired for an entire year or two people working half time or any other way you want to slice up the time.
If NT using so called "advanced features" makes the server crash then it isn't so advanced is it? Maybe NT should disable unstable drivers like the Linux kernel does.
The hardware that was used was a couple of year old mid range boxes which most companies use as servers. Linux and NT were supported equally well on both boxes. This isn't bleeding edge by any streach of the imagination. If the NT drivers aren't stable after 2 years then they will never be stable.
This is simply proof that Windows NT crashes all the time like most people on slashdot says it does.
If you noticed, Linux only crashed once because of a hardware issue. Linux had exactly zero crashes due to the OS or the software running on the box. Linux the OS is as stable as your hardware. You can't get better than that.
Windows was down 65 hours, Linux was down 4 hours during the entire year of testing. According to the _report_ Linux is over 16 times more reliable than NT.
Quite frankly, my boss doesn't want to hear excuses as to _why_ a server is down, he doesn't want it to go down in the first place. With Linux I am 16 times closer to the goal than with NT. With Linux I can even fix the down time of the hard drive problem by adding a RAID system that would have dropped the down time to less than an hour. And if I put in hot swapable RAID maybe the server would have stayed up all year.
With Windows you have odd problems all the time that you can't fix because you don't know what caused them and since they only ever happen once there is nothing you can do but suffer through them over 30 times a year, hoping that one of the crashes doesn't damage the boxes file system beyond recovery.
I have shown you a report with hard facts, show me a report for as long a time that proves otherwise. And don't give me any anecdotal evidence, I want hard numbers.
I least I didn't attack a fellow human being by calling them ignorant or inflamatory. The truth must have stuck a little too close to home for you and you blindly struck out at me with clear vindictiveness. Don't worry, I am a big man, I forgive you. :)
I pointed out that W2K is built on top of the NT code base. A true statement.
I claimed that anyone who believed that W2K was a new product (clearly a lie from Microsoft) also more than likely believed other false claims from Microsoft. Such as the claim that Windows 95 doesn't run on top of DOS. For your information, Windows 95 and 98 do run on top of DOS. Another true statement.
If speaking the truth is considered inflamatory then there is little hope for the future.
I then directed people to not be taken in by the media, but to review all the facts and to draw their own conclusions. Clearly a skill that isn't being taught in school anymore.
If you find the truth and a request for people to think for themselves to be ignorant and inflamatory then this is your problem.
If you don't like the format of this site, you are free to leave. No one is forcing you to read these "ignorant and inflamatory" remarks. At least on this site we can post our views. Unlike the Microsoft site which seems to be lacking any "Reply to this" button...
You can click cancel on the login screen and are immeadiately given full administrator rights to the entire box!
Anyone can install the zombie program on the Windows9x computers at any number of businesses and student computer labs.
All it takes is physical access to a Win9x box that has an internet connection and you can own that box and control it from anyplace in the world.
Anyone who things that W2K is really a brand new product, also thinks that Windows 95 doesn't run on top of DOS.
Don't buy all the marketing hype. Learn to think for yourself.
Hotmail has BSD web front ends, Solaris database backends.
BSD web front ends, Solaris database back ends.
In fact the author of this zdnet article gets kind of harsh on Microsoft.
Actually they use BSD for the web front ends and Solaris for the database back ends.
Just trying to set the record strait.
"In a world of hype, wouldn't it be nice to get a refreshing dose of reality?"
Yes, it would! Why? Do you know someone who knows reality from fiction? ('cause these people are obviously on Crack!)
"The truth is out there."
Is the writer of the Xfiles working for Microsoft now?
Gee, reliable doesn't mean fool proof. Don't you know that nothing can be made foolproof because fools are so ingenious?
I once said that we should replace all the Sun Enterprise Servers running the hospitals patient care software with Windows NT. After everyone stopped laughing (one person was laughing so hard he cried) we went on with the meeting.
Yes, the backend database machines failed and the web server front ends kept running. Those two services are so similar to one another that this is a valid comparisson, NOT!
Yes, having multiple vendors available to guarantee reliablility will make something more reliable, NOT!
--
Here is some anecdotal evidence for you.
I worked for . Any computer that had patient information on it was a UNIX box. We used Sun at the hospitals, Dec Alphas for the Database machines and IBM H50's to route information from one to the other. All of the UNIX boxes were rock solid. I never saw any of the UNIX boxes go down except for the rare occassion when there was a hardware problem. When this happened a redundant machine as always dropped into place immeadiately.
The Suns never even had hardware problems. They had duplicate CPU's that took over processes when one of the CPU's died. You could change the CPU's when the system was running, but it wouldn't restart the CPU unless you rebooted. The machine had a raid 5 system running that not only was hot swappable, but it had hot spares that would automatically take over if one of the drives failed. The Sun machine had Error Correcting Memory using Hamming codes. You could literally pop out a stick of memory and replace it without bringing the machine down. It had hot swappable Ethernet cards, duplicate hot swappable SCSI controller cards. Those machines only went down when they were told to go down.
And if despite all of this robustness this machine failed, the Hospital had a second duplicate machine in a seperate room that would take over from the first machine.
Those Sun machines were a thing of beauty. *wipes a tear from his eye*
is the one that gets the ear of the congressman.
I agree that the "Mom and Pop" stores are the backbone of the American economy.
But I don't believe that they have that stong of a voice Because these business are ran by numerous individuals from every walk of life, they tend to cancel out each others voices. For every small businessman on one side of an issue you can find another small businessman on the other side of the issue. So small businesses tend to distribute their money amoung all the canidates and support both sides of the issues.
But the large companies, whose controlling boards heavily overlap with each other, can goto these congressmen and say, if you support certain legislation for me I will put a million dollars into a political action committee for you.
This is why we need campaign finance reform. We need to stop the undue influence of the corporations over the congressmen. We need to force these congressmen to goto the people in their own district and ask for support from the people that they are supposed to be representing.
Giving the lone gunmen their own show would be a great idea. Me and my friends would all watch this show. Hell, I like them better than Sculley and Moulder. The few shows that had these fellows in them were the best X-files. These three are actually funny and can act.
Someone with a clue needs to setup a five year plan and hire some good writers to setup a complex plot that wraps up before the interest in this show ends.
The trouble that three people not associated with the government could get into boggles the mind. Whenever Moulder shot someone he could just hold up his badge and say "FBI." These three can't do that without ending up in jail. They are going to have to think their way out of jams.
I see possibilities from Mission Impossible as well as Get Smart in a show with the Lone Gunmen.
because web pages load in just a few seconds when there are no graphics but I stopped doing that because too many sites were using frames with no alt tags on their graphic links or worse, server side image maps, which provide no information to the client whatsoever. I would go to some sites with lynx and see nothing.
When I write a webpage every graphic has an alt tag, I use tables, not frames, I never use image maps. I always browse the page with several different browsers to make sure that the page is equally viewable whether it is text or graphics. Oh, and I use a few optimized jpg's for my very sparce graphics.
I hate sights that say "best when viewed with ___ browser" Because I know that most of these sites are going to look like a graphics design artist threw up all over the screen. Let the font fest begin!
Please people, remember that fonts are graphics too. Please don't send me a picture of text. I get annoyed when I am sent twenty buttons with text embedded in the buttons. A menu like the one that slashdot has in the upper left side of the page is great. Please, don't change this!
And how about those sights where all the fonts are jammed together. Aren't those sites just lovely. Web designers need to stop trying to control the placement of every letter on the screen and just let the text flow where it will. Concentrate on the overall view, let the idividual web browsers worry about the exact placement of text.
I just wonder if XML is going to help or hurt the cause of putting more info in the tags?
away our FREEDOM!!!!
I think that what we need is high speed uplinks as well as downlinks to the internet for home users. Cable modems are almost useless at letting your computer become a server, let alone how low the bandwidth would be if everyone on your block was uploading files to the internet.
If anybody can setup a web server in our own home and only pay a few dollars a month for a high speed two way connection then effectively we can all own a cross between a printing press and a movie studio.
Allowing them to give us a fat pipe down but a thin pipe up is nearly the equivalent of having a TV instead of a computer.
It is the equivalent of using hearing aids but being forced to wear a gag.
The media is trying to silence us but still wants us to watch their ads and listen to their jingles.
I like it!
These people obviously have way too much time on their hands.
I have just tried to dash something out and realized just how hard this is. Anyone who can do this really is a poet. It would take a few days to even make a halfway decent haiku.
The most useless, worst waste of money in the world is an army that comes in second.
If you would have piece, train for war.
Somewhere there is a planet where all the people live in complete piece and harmony. Where no one fights anyone else. Where no one even knows what a weapon is. I want to find that planet, because it sure would be easy to take over.
It is unfortunate that women are discouraged from the sciences.
What can we do to make this better?
Encourage all your young relatives to excel in math and science, male as well as female. Try to get them interested in math and science through subscriptions to popular science magazines. Encourage them to participate in the science fairs. Give your own daughter rewards for doing well in school. Ask your young family members what college are they going to attend once they graduate from high school?
The best advice that I can give is this: Treat all women how you would want your daughter or mother to be treated.
And this advice doesn't go to just men. Too often I see women treating each other very badly. For women to suceed you must respect each other. What goes around, comes around.
I believe that anyone who comes here and reads this forum can report on what they read, without geting anyone's permission.
After all, if I went to a users group meeting in person I could write up an article about what I had learned.
Taking in a large number of sources, distilling that information into a cohesive whole and then putting that information back out to the people is what writers do. I don't see that changing in the future just because the public forum is on a web site instead of a mail server.
If you like Windows for gaming, disregard this post. :)
I bought Myth II for Linux a month ago and loved it! It runs fast, the graphics are great and best of all, no crashing! I am planning on buying one Linux game a month.
If you want to game on Linux _now_ is the time to buy a Linux game. You know you want to...
And just think that you can justify the purchase to your significant other. "But I have to buy a Linux game to help all the other people out!"
Buying a Linux game is alturistic, because if Loki sells enough games, then future games will come out for Linux at the same time as Windows. They don't care what OS they sell their games on, only that the games that they sell make money.
So help everyone out and buy a Linux version of a game today. (And have fun playing those games!)
Look out Civ, here I come!
When you digitally "sign" a document your key is used to create a cryptographic checksum of the entire page. Neither the page nor your signature can be changed afterward. Changing even a single bit anywhere in the file will invalidate your signature.
So any corruption will invalidate your order. I assume that they will present the order to your creditors and that creditor will double check your order to ensure that you signed the document.
The only thing that this still doesn't save us from is ourselves. If someone lets others know their "pin" code and leaves their "ident" card laying around, they are going to get ripped off.
And clever criminals may break into your machine and leave hacked code laying around that sends them your keys the next time you order something online.
Won't it be nice trying to cancel your old identity and get a new identity assigned to you. And now none of your old web sites recognise you for you with your new identity.
Cash is always good.
one that should be treated with a great deal of sensitivity on everyones part.
The reality is that we are all more alike each another than we are different from each other. All general statements are inacurate when applied to any one individual.
I believe that people should be free to speak their minds and that by exposing ignorance to the light of day that it will wither and die. Left to itself to fester in darkness, hate will grow.
There are limits to speech. Speech that says I believe this way or that way about some other race
is O.K., even if I am wrong about what I believe. But if I am calling for some crime to be committed, and someone then commits that crime, that I am as resposible as if I committed the crime myself. And I believe that the law should reflect this.
Allow people to speak as they will, but if someone is rabble rousing, hold that person responsible for the actions of those who did as they were told.