The '-i' option on most rm commands requests confirmation before performing each task. Which is a great option, except if the directory is a zillion files and subdirectories, in which case its too many 'y's to answer.
I'd like to suggest an -I option, which would provide all the goodness that we've come to know and love from -i EXCEPT that answering 'YES' (all caps, full word) would cause rm to stop asking and keep rm-ing everything.
I'd even make the new '-I' the default behavior of rm unless overridden with a shell variable or another command-line switch.
IIRC and early RH install (like 3.x?) used to have the following in their.bash_profile for root:
alias rm='/bin/rm -i $*'...so that you couldn't hurt yourself too bad out of the box.
...if the the cable cos can pull their heads out of their asses long enough.
AOL-TWs SA PVR, while not a Tivo, offers "good enough" performance for most people and rents from AOL-TW in my area for $5.95 per month. I have to keep my Series2 w/lifetime for like 5 years to make that work.
Cable Cos are already making you have a box if you want certain channels, they'll be all digital soon enough requiring EVERYONE to have a box. If PVR is part of it, WTF would anyone spend nearly $800 on a Tivo?
I love the way my Tivo works, but they are way too expensive. If I had to do it over again, I might have bought a Panasonic DVD-R w/HDD.
I love my Tivo and don't think any PC-based solution can touch it for ease of use or "home entertainment" integration (formfactor, UI, etc).
However, this Home Media option is a total ripoff. I can play MP3s now. I can look at JPGs now. Remote scheduling? Not important. Multi-room viewing would be cool, but not cool enough to spend another $500 on another Tivo and another subscription.
Why haven't they fixed some of the obvious needs, like batch-save-to-vcr? Bring back "Teach Tivo" so I don't get just SNL reruns recorded? Figure out how to enable the "power button" feature of cable box IR (yes, I know its a single signal that toggles state, but they can tell when I'm getting video on the inputs -- put it together!!) and all kinds of other annoyances.
This is just a cash grab for Tivo, does nothing to the basic TV-watching aspect of it and its overpriced. No thanks.
ISA slot adapter card for PCI slot?
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
Does anyone make an ISA slot adapter for PCI slots? Ie, something you can plug into a PCI slot that gives you an ISA slot? Is it even possible, or is there too much boot-time initialization required for the hardware and OS to see it as a valid ISA slot?
Where's law enfrocement when it comes to fraudulent businesses, anyway? At least half the spam I have is for products that are obviously fraudulent, and some (like untested medical products) that may be illegal.
About the other half is for porn, of which I presume a large precentage are running credit card scams.
The Iraq T-shirts ad may be about the most legit spam I've gotten, but who knows. But I got only one. The other 99 in my bogofilter-current directory are all total BS.
Is it the war on terror or something, or does the federal government just not give a shit about prosecuting fraud?
It has other problems. Lack of international support, hard-coded text, no configuration options. Some users are demanding a GUI, KDE/Gnome support and a port to Java as well. I've even heard talk of a version that's capable of using MySQL.
There's also some concern that Microsoft is going to release their own version with Palladium support.
...is that you can get kind of dependent on them. I don't build anything that's not in ports anymore, and its eliminated my skill at building crap from.tgz files like I used to under Linux.
But it's not a skill that I miss terribly, actually, and hasn't been a problem.
I can't help but agree with this a little bit, and I think a lot of it is personality driven.
My take on it is that geeks are too willing to argue over technical differences. In some cases the differences are meaningful, in many cases they're only superficially meaningful and ego prevents pursuit of the greater good (ie, a really good widget) in favor of some fuzzy technological benefit that doesn't really impact the user.
There's also the issue of personality and control. Established projects have leaders (defacto or otherwise) that control what goes into these projects, and some of them are willing to deny good ideas just to keep control of the project.
The personality and control thing also comes into play with people who want to start their own projects. I think a lot of them get started because someone wants to be in that postition -- I admin the sourceforge site, the www.myossproject.com site, the IRC channel, yadda yadda. The project itself is almost secondary to achieving the status symbols of open source development.
Another contributing factor may be that more established projects are complex software development efforts. Good ideas are relatively easy to come up with, but implementing them within the scope of a large project requires mroe experience and skill than a lot of newer developers have, so they do new projects instead.
Diversity is a good, but sometimes I think that too much diversity just weakens what's out there without providing any benefit.
Sysinstall is functional, but it's kind of creaky as an installer IMHO. There's a bunch of functionality that seems to belong more inside of an installed and running system (such as a lot of the configuration bits) than in an installer.
If you're going to require all your installation tools to fit on a floppy, then an installer should have just the tools necessary to get the install files onto a system such that the system can be booted and then used. While it might be nice to have a bunch of post-install configuration options available, the technical constraints of boot media make this kind of prohibitive.
Perhaps one idea might be a meta-installer that installs the installation files onto the computer, and then reboots into a bigger environment where you can do more extensive system configuration and package management as well as providing a richer, more user-friendly tool. I hate to say this, but as annoyingly slow as Win2k's installer is, they use a very similar kind of bootstrap installation.
The other idea is to merge the two-stage install with a single stage install on a CD and just give up on the floppy.
I'm sure none of these ideas are terribly original, but they seem that way relative to sysinstall. I've only used FreeBSD over the past 3 years, so I have no idea what the Linux distros do. Do they do anything interesting with multistage installations?
I can't read Japanese, but their appears to be an MSRP of 145,000 yen on the Sony page. That's ~$1200 at current exchange rates, and far more expensive the similar Panasonic unit which has an MSRP of $999, and generally goes for about $700 on EBay. Shouldn't these kinds of devices be going *down* in price, not up? I realize the Sony unit has some networking features for guide data and so forth, but I can't see those adding $300 worth of value, unless its a total Tivo replacement.
It's also not clear what writable format they're using -- + or - or all of them. I'm mildly biased in favor of the - format because it seems to be the most compatible where I've tried it.
As far as a Tivo replacement, I'm not sure I see that. Tivo is pretty far down the pike in terms of scheduling, selection, conflict avoidance and user interface. I don't think this Sony unit is meant to be that, but instead as a VCR on steriods.
I'm personally waiting for the DVD writer decks to drop in the $300-400 range. I have a Tivo, so I don't need an extra source of guide data. The internal HDD is nice for basic editing (from what I understand of the Panasonic DMR-HS2 unit that has one), but its a big added cost as well. I could live with just the writer. I'd hope they'd drop to sub-$500 this year, perhaps closer to Christmas, but maybe the economy/war/malaise will make us wait even longer.
Re:Note to BSA: go fuck yourselves
on
BSA IDC FUD
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· Score: 1
You're right, the BSA can get a court to issue a subpeona but as I said in my parent post, they'd have to go to court to get one. It strikes me as unlikely that a judge would issue one just because they acted nicely -- it would likely have to be part of a civil suit, which would require hearings and all kinds of opportunities for the BSA's victim to cry foul.
The BSA can't get a search warrant, that's a tool of criminal investigations. Only the government can get one, and it would require good probably cause that the company is engaging in criminal behavior -- sloppy recordkeeping or poor IT management isn't criminal.
Re:Note to BSA: go fuck yourselves
on
BSA IDC FUD
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I've always thought that the BSA raid stories were BS. There's too much fear, not enough reality.
IANAL, but...
1) BSA can't just demand to search your business. You can tell them no, they have no legal power.
2) They can go to court and get access, but this is a complex process frought with a lot of potential closed doors and not a small amount of cost and delay. Token cooperation may yield a judge that dismisses the BSA claims altogether, especially if you can argue that its just a strongarm tactic to increase revenue and not a legitimate enforcement tactic based upon a well-founded suspicion of intential copyright violation.
3) The whole raid concept itself sounds kind of dubious -- there's loads of companies that it would take a huge team of people MONTHS to try to audit, and that's with real good cooperation. Geographic dispersion, security or other governmental/law enforcement obligations may seriously hamper it as well.
Like caseless ammunition for infantry weapons -- loads of resources and weight are lost to shell casings. If the shell casing represents 15% of the shell mass, then eliminating it should allow for 15% more ammunition to be carried. More ammunition means less resources devoted to supply lines and more resources devoted to fighting power.
Better targeting systems. One thing that gave us huge advantages over Afghani forces was our guys actually can aim their rifles -- lots of irregular forces just kind of spray and run, which wastes ammo. An infantry targeting system that could combine small, instantaneous adjustments to windage and elevation to compensate for motion, wind or other ballistic effects on aiming would go a long way towards improving the hit ratio. More hits, less ammo, less supplies.
It'd be great, too, to shrink the kinds of ammo available for the 25mm Bushmaster to be usable in rifles as well. High explosive, incindiery or other types of ammo while larger than standard.223 rifle rounds would pack a better punch against hardened targets (buildings, bunkers, vehicles, helicopters).
How about a laptop with VGA Input?
on
LCD Price Fixing?
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· Score: 1
I'd love to see a laptop (preferrably a UXGA display..) with a VGA IN that would let you use the laptop display as a display. Bonus points for use of the pointing device and keyboard as well. More bonus points if the computer part can be run at the same time.
I'm reminded of those rackmount LCD/keybaords they want $1500 for -- usually only 800x600 resolution, too.
Much of the benefit I listed was not so much cost but proximity that matters. No matter what an employer pays me, I can't create *time*. Going to the clinic, the store, childcare is *time consuming*. Even if you have carte blanche to leave work whenever to deal with these things, you still end up making up the time elsewhere. Having these commonly used resources at work would pay huge dividends in saved time.
Employees that don't use it, don't have to pay for it -- I'd be fine with surcharges to use the company facilities. It still provides the time dividend.
Obviously there's a strong common sense thing about not doing this, but it think in certain circumstances it becomes a normal small business. Stable, known customer base and suppliers makes it pretty comfortable and you can start doing stuff like this fairly safely. Or you could in the 80s.
I was thinking the same thing, but then it occurred to me that it would not only be really unpopular, but would not prevent a black market in -- you got it -- money!
Besides, they don't have any good substitutes for it. SmartCards require electronic readers and can be hacked, traditional mag stripe cards suffer those defects as well as needing access (at least occasionally) to a whole infrastructure. And neither one is economically viable for $.50 purchases.
incredible benefits (games, massages, free snacks, and a grand piano)
Those are bullshit benefits that any company could provide for the cost of an exec's car compensation, and only appeal to twentysomethings still rebelling against mom & dad's "no junkfood" rules.
Incredible benefits would be in-building healthcare clinics, a childcare center, a credit union and maybe a post office or mailing center, a decent cafeteria, along with generous time-off and flex-time (I'm sure they have this kind of arrangement already). These are the kinds of resources adults need but have a hard time getting access to due to operating hours and work hours not always meshing.
Bah. if there was a decent toolchain for DivX encoding, a cohesive codec, and a standardized set of codec settings (to accomplish the usual sp/lp/ep quality-vs-size tradeoffs), there's no reason why you can't have a set-top box that does well.
Infinite flexibilty is nice on computers, but its also a pain in the ass. Just because you have a hundred dials to spin doesn't mean you should.
I'd personally like to see this kind of information embedded into the windshield somehow so you can skip the goggles.
The low-visibility info would be great. Snow can obliterate lane markings and even road boundaries in flat areas -- having that appear on my windshield would be a big help, as would some kind of sensor info to help spot frontal obstacles in poor visibility.
I find DVD-R a useful increase over CD-R. Our disc images for desktops are all too big to fit on a single CD-R, and dumps of user data have been going over this amount for a while, too.
My most recent bootable DVD-R for imaging fits 4 platforms, Win2kSP3, Office2000 and some other bricabrac on a single disc. Archiving old user data is much easier, and they're happier to have it archived to a single media.
30G would be a worthwhile upgrade over 4.7G as well, since its about the same jump as CDR-DVDR.
Any of the MO drives I've used (which all ancient by today's standards) had abyssmal R/W speeds. They were a godsend for archiving "big" files in their day, but only for archiving. Too slow to work off of and the drives and cart pricing were stratospheric.
Slashdot Mirror
The '-i' option on most rm commands requests confirmation before performing each task. Which is a great option, except if the directory is a zillion files and subdirectories, in which case its too many 'y's to answer.
.bash_profile for root:
...so that you couldn't hurt yourself too bad out of the box.
I'd like to suggest an -I option, which would provide all the goodness that we've come to know and love from -i EXCEPT that answering 'YES' (all caps, full word) would cause rm to stop asking and keep rm-ing everything.
I'd even make the new '-I' the default behavior of rm unless overridden with a shell variable or another command-line switch.
IIRC and early RH install (like 3.x?) used to have the following in their
alias rm='/bin/rm -i $*'
...if the the cable cos can pull their heads out of their asses long enough.
AOL-TWs SA PVR, while not a Tivo, offers "good enough" performance for most people and rents from AOL-TW in my area for $5.95 per month. I have to keep my Series2 w/lifetime for like 5 years to make that work.
Cable Cos are already making you have a box if you want certain channels, they'll be all digital soon enough requiring EVERYONE to have a box. If PVR is part of it, WTF would anyone spend nearly $800 on a Tivo?
I love the way my Tivo works, but they are way too expensive. If I had to do it over again, I might have bought a Panasonic DVD-R w/HDD.
I love my Tivo and don't think any PC-based solution can touch it for ease of use or "home entertainment" integration (formfactor, UI, etc).
However, this Home Media option is a total ripoff. I can play MP3s now. I can look at JPGs now. Remote scheduling? Not important. Multi-room viewing would be cool, but not cool enough to spend another $500 on another Tivo and another subscription.
Why haven't they fixed some of the obvious needs, like batch-save-to-vcr? Bring back "Teach Tivo" so I don't get just SNL reruns recorded? Figure out how to enable the "power button" feature of cable box IR (yes, I know its a single signal that toggles state, but they can tell when I'm getting video on the inputs -- put it together!!) and all kinds of other annoyances.
This is just a cash grab for Tivo, does nothing to the basic TV-watching aspect of it and its overpriced. No thanks.
Does anyone make an ISA slot adapter for PCI slots? Ie, something you can plug into a PCI slot that gives you an ISA slot? Is it even possible, or is there too much boot-time initialization required for the hardware and OS to see it as a valid ISA slot?
Where's law enfrocement when it comes to fraudulent businesses, anyway? At least half the spam I have is for products that are obviously fraudulent, and some (like untested medical products) that may be illegal.
About the other half is for porn, of which I presume a large precentage are running credit card scams.
The Iraq T-shirts ad may be about the most legit spam I've gotten, but who knows. But I got only one. The other 99 in my bogofilter-current directory are all total BS.
Is it the war on terror or something, or does the federal government just not give a shit about prosecuting fraud?
It has other problems. Lack of international support, hard-coded text, no configuration options. Some users are demanding a GUI, KDE/Gnome support and a port to Java as well. I've even heard talk of a version that's capable of using MySQL.
There's also some concern that Microsoft is going to release their own version with Palladium support.
...is that you can get kind of dependent on them. I don't build anything that's not in ports anymore, and its eliminated my skill at building crap from .tgz files like I used to under Linux.
But it's not a skill that I miss terribly, actually, and hasn't been a problem.
I can't help but agree with this a little bit, and I think a lot of it is personality driven.
My take on it is that geeks are too willing to argue over technical differences. In some cases the differences are meaningful, in many cases they're only superficially meaningful and ego prevents pursuit of the greater good (ie, a really good widget) in favor of some fuzzy technological benefit that doesn't really impact the user.
There's also the issue of personality and control. Established projects have leaders (defacto or otherwise) that control what goes into these projects, and some of them are willing to deny good ideas just to keep control of the project.
The personality and control thing also comes into play with people who want to start their own projects. I think a lot of them get started because someone wants to be in that postition -- I admin the sourceforge site, the www.myossproject.com site, the IRC channel, yadda yadda. The project itself is almost secondary to achieving the status symbols of open source development.
Another contributing factor may be that more established projects are complex software development efforts. Good ideas are relatively easy to come up with, but implementing them within the scope of a large project requires mroe experience and skill than a lot of newer developers have, so they do new projects instead.
Diversity is a good, but sometimes I think that too much diversity just weakens what's out there without providing any benefit.
I've always called it the 90-10 rule. 90% of the work takes 10% of the time, 10% of the work takes 90% of the time.
I like the not necessary part. Does that mean they'll replace them for free if lost, stolen or damaged?
Sysinstall is functional, but it's kind of creaky as an installer IMHO. There's a bunch of functionality that seems to belong more inside of an installed and running system (such as a lot of the configuration bits) than in an installer.
If you're going to require all your installation tools to fit on a floppy, then an installer should have just the tools necessary to get the install files onto a system such that the system can be booted and then used. While it might be nice to have a bunch of post-install configuration options available, the technical constraints of boot media make this kind of prohibitive.
Perhaps one idea might be a meta-installer that installs the installation files onto the computer, and then reboots into a bigger environment where you can do more extensive system configuration and package management as well as providing a richer, more user-friendly tool. I hate to say this, but as annoyingly slow as Win2k's installer is, they use a very similar kind of bootstrap installation.
The other idea is to merge the two-stage install with a single stage install on a CD and just give up on the floppy.
I'm sure none of these ideas are terribly original, but they seem that way relative to sysinstall. I've only used FreeBSD over the past 3 years, so I have no idea what the Linux distros do. Do they do anything interesting with multistage installations?
I can't read Japanese, but their appears to be an MSRP of 145,000 yen on the Sony page. That's ~$1200 at current exchange rates, and far more expensive the similar Panasonic unit which has an MSRP of $999, and generally goes for about $700 on EBay. Shouldn't these kinds of devices be going *down* in price, not up? I realize the Sony unit has some networking features for guide data and so forth, but I can't see those adding $300 worth of value, unless its a total Tivo replacement.
It's also not clear what writable format they're using -- + or - or all of them. I'm mildly biased in favor of the - format because it seems to be the most compatible where I've tried it.
As far as a Tivo replacement, I'm not sure I see that. Tivo is pretty far down the pike in terms of scheduling, selection, conflict avoidance and user interface. I don't think this Sony unit is meant to be that, but instead as a VCR on steriods.
I'm personally waiting for the DVD writer decks to drop in the $300-400 range. I have a Tivo, so I don't need an extra source of guide data. The internal HDD is nice for basic editing (from what I understand of the Panasonic DMR-HS2 unit that has one), but its a big added cost as well. I could live with just the writer. I'd hope they'd drop to sub-$500 this year, perhaps closer to Christmas, but maybe the economy/war/malaise will make us wait even longer.
You're right, the BSA can get a court to issue a subpeona but as I said in my parent post, they'd have to go to court to get one. It strikes me as unlikely that a judge would issue one just because they acted nicely -- it would likely have to be part of a civil suit, which would require hearings and all kinds of opportunities for the BSA's victim to cry foul.
The BSA can't get a search warrant, that's a tool of criminal investigations. Only the government can get one, and it would require good probably cause that the company is engaging in criminal behavior -- sloppy recordkeeping or poor IT management isn't criminal.
I've always thought that the BSA raid stories were BS. There's too much fear, not enough reality.
IANAL, but...
1) BSA can't just demand to search your business. You can tell them no, they have no legal power.
2) They can go to court and get access, but this is a complex process frought with a lot of potential closed doors and not a small amount of cost and delay. Token cooperation may yield a judge that dismisses the BSA claims altogether, especially if you can argue that its just a strongarm tactic to increase revenue and not a legitimate enforcement tactic based upon a well-founded suspicion of intential copyright violation.
3) The whole raid concept itself sounds kind of dubious -- there's loads of companies that it would take a huge team of people MONTHS to try to audit, and that's with real good cooperation. Geographic dispersion, security or other governmental/law enforcement obligations may seriously hamper it as well.
Like caseless ammunition for infantry weapons -- loads of resources and weight are lost to shell casings. If the shell casing represents 15% of the shell mass, then eliminating it should allow for 15% more ammunition to be carried. More ammunition means less resources devoted to supply lines and more resources devoted to fighting power.
.223 rifle rounds would pack a better punch against hardened targets (buildings, bunkers, vehicles, helicopters).
Better targeting systems. One thing that gave us huge advantages over Afghani forces was our guys actually can aim their rifles -- lots of irregular forces just kind of spray and run, which wastes ammo. An infantry targeting system that could combine small, instantaneous adjustments to windage and elevation to compensate for motion, wind or other ballistic effects on aiming would go a long way towards improving the hit ratio. More hits, less ammo, less supplies.
It'd be great, too, to shrink the kinds of ammo available for the 25mm Bushmaster to be usable in rifles as well. High explosive, incindiery or other types of ammo while larger than standard
I'd love to see a laptop (preferrably a UXGA display..) with a VGA IN that would let you use the laptop display as a display. Bonus points for use of the pointing device and keyboard as well. More bonus points if the computer part can be run at the same time.
I'm reminded of those rackmount LCD/keybaords they want $1500 for -- usually only 800x600 resolution, too.
Much of the benefit I listed was not so much cost but proximity that matters. No matter what an employer pays me, I can't create *time*. Going to the clinic, the store, childcare is *time consuming*. Even if you have carte blanche to leave work whenever to deal with these things, you still end up making up the time elsewhere. Having these commonly used resources at work would pay huge dividends in saved time.
Employees that don't use it, don't have to pay for it -- I'd be fine with surcharges to use the company facilities. It still provides the time dividend.
Obviously there's a strong common sense thing about not doing this, but it think in certain circumstances it becomes a normal small business. Stable, known customer base and suppliers makes it pretty comfortable and you can start doing stuff like this fairly safely. Or you could in the 80s.
Don't laugh, but I used to know a guy in college that sold pot and would take checks from trusted customers.
I was thinking the same thing, but then it occurred to me that it would not only be really unpopular, but would not prevent a black market in -- you got it -- money!
Besides, they don't have any good substitutes for it. SmartCards require electronic readers and can be hacked, traditional mag stripe cards suffer those defects as well as needing access (at least occasionally) to a whole infrastructure. And neither one is economically viable for $.50 purchases.
incredible benefits (games, massages, free snacks, and a grand piano)
Those are bullshit benefits that any company could provide for the cost of an exec's car compensation, and only appeal to twentysomethings still rebelling against mom & dad's "no junkfood" rules.
Incredible benefits would be in-building healthcare clinics, a childcare center, a credit union and maybe a post office or mailing center, a decent cafeteria, along with generous time-off and flex-time (I'm sure they have this kind of arrangement already). These are the kinds of resources adults need but have a hard time getting access to due to operating hours and work hours not always meshing.
Bah. if there was a decent toolchain for DivX encoding, a cohesive codec, and a standardized set of codec settings (to accomplish the usual sp/lp/ep quality-vs-size tradeoffs), there's no reason why you can't have a set-top box that does well.
Infinite flexibilty is nice on computers, but its also a pain in the ass. Just because you have a hundred dials to spin doesn't mean you should.
I'd personally like to see this kind of information embedded into the windshield somehow so you can skip the goggles.
The low-visibility info would be great. Snow can obliterate lane markings and even road boundaries in flat areas -- having that appear on my windshield would be a big help, as would some kind of sensor info to help spot frontal obstacles in poor visibility.
I find DVD-R a useful increase over CD-R. Our disc images for desktops are all too big to fit on a single CD-R, and dumps of user data have been going over this amount for a while, too.
My most recent bootable DVD-R for imaging fits 4 platforms, Win2kSP3, Office2000 and some other bricabrac on a single disc. Archiving old user data is much easier, and they're happier to have it archived to a single media.
30G would be a worthwhile upgrade over 4.7G as well, since its about the same jump as CDR-DVDR.
Any of the MO drives I've used (which all ancient by today's standards) had abyssmal R/W speeds. They were a godsend for archiving "big" files in their day, but only for archiving. Too slow to work off of and the drives and cart pricing were stratospheric.