I'm really willing to give this series a chance. I don't think Voyager was "horrible" like a lot of people do, though it certainly wasn't as great as Next Gen or even DS9. Does anybody beleive that if this show gets canceled, there will be a massive fan mail campain like there was when the orginal series was on the chopping board? I don't think there will be.
The inheiriters to Gene's vision get two more chances to save Star Trek from destruction. The first is the "Enterprise" series, and the second is the new upcoming movie. Fortunatly for them, the next movie is an even-numbered one (odd-numbered trek movies have been cursed since the first one, while even numbered ones are great).
One bad omen: Some of the promotional ads for "Enterprise" are using some pop crap for background music. Star Trek has a perfectly good composer, Jerry Goldsmith, who is as good as Star War's John Williams. They really ought to USE HIM! When "Enterprise" comes on, and I hear the opening credits being sung by N'Sync, I will shut off the TV, rip the tape out of the VCR, and burn it (the tape, not the VCR . . . on second thought, the VCR goes, too).
Since the poster seemed concerned about power, does anyone know details about how to reduce power consumption on a motherboard?
Even a GHz processor doesn't take that much power once the computer is on. The monitor is the real energy-hog part of the system, which isn't an issue for running a router.
486s (until recently, I hear) have been in constant production because they are great for embedded systems, so obviously they don't take much power. Running a firewall without a hard drive (either through booting over the network or from a floppy) is a definate possiblity and would get rid of another power-sucking part of the computer. You could also underclock the processor to reduce power consumption. You can probably get the clock down to 16-30 MHz and still have a zippy firewall.
There is a place in my town where the local state and university departments drop off their old equiptment. I picked up a P133 (32 MB RAM, 2.1 GB hard drive, AWE sound card) for $35, and they were selling 10/100 NICs for $3 apeice. That is $41 for a computer which is way more powerful then what is needed here.
Note that this same place went through some restructurings a few months ago; before that they were much cheeper. I have a complete 486 DX/4 100 system (8 MB RAM, 200 MB hard drive) which was $5. It came in one of those massive full-tower cases, which I then sold on eBay (the case alone) for around $50. Ten to one profit margins are nice:)
If there is nothing else connected to the cable modem (i.e., the NIC is jacked right into the modem via a crossover cable), then there are no collisions on that side. If there are collisions happening on the internal network, this could be solved by putting in a switch instead of a hub. Also, increasing the MTU of clients on the internal network could give better performance.
Using old computers for a rounter/firewall really doesn't take as much power as the above suggests. Recently, my local newspaper had an article on power consumption. It noted that a modern PC takes about as much power as an alarm clock; not much at all. Older equiptment (486 or Pentium) will probably do better, especialy if you can find a low-end power supply to go with.
For what you want, I suggest two boxes. Both can be between a 486 DX 50 to around a P100. You could even do a 386 DX if need be, but I've found that 486s go for around the same price anyway. I suggest the DX processors because I simply don't like the idea of math coprocessor emulation having to sit in my kernel. Give them both a floppy drive and an old hard drive (You can squeeze a good GNU/Linux distro into 40 MB if need be, but be careful of bloated distros like Red Hat; use Debian or even some form of BSD). If you don't want to waste those good 10/100 NICs on this, don't. A simple 10 Mbps NIC has more then enough bandwidth for a cable modem or DSL (except for the very very high speed DSL solutions, which nobody has yet anyway). The second box only needs one NIC (can also be 10 Mbps), but should have a larger hard drive. From this one, run stuff like DHCP, caching DNS, etc.
Personly, I have a 486 DX/4 100 with a 200 MB drive running Debian 2.2r2 and a Linux 2.4 kernel and an IPTables NAT firewall. This has two 10 Mbps NICs and a modem (I'm currently on dial-up, but the second NIC is there for when I finaly get cable or DSL). Another box runs a DHCP and DNS server. Yet another box is a small file server (using Samba) and also runs an FTP and HTTP server.
My information comes from this kuro5hin post; when I posted the parent, I hadn't seen any of the replies to that post. It might be just hearsay as well. Additionaly, the K5 post doesn't specificly mention the fly-by-wire system, just the avionics, which I had assumed was tied into the fly-by-wire. Perhaps this was wrong.
What is more, some of the replies mention that FCC rules specify that such systems must be able to be disabled quickly in the event of a malfunction. I remember a video of the first public demenstration of fly-by-wire; the plane disappeared into some trees a few seconds after take off, then you see a very large ball of flame coming out of the forest.
Having people brought in so soon (either for questioning or as suspects) worries me a lot. These attacks show a very high degree of sophistication, and not just in their timing (as many news orginizations have bleeted out of late).
First, you have the fly-by-wire system, installed on all big commerical jets, which just plain won't let you fly the plane into a building. This system has to be disabled without completely destroying your ability to manuver. I have been told that there are very few people around who know how to do this. This person would either have to know which planes would be used for the job in advance and then disable those planes while they are sitting on the ground (while also getting around security on the ground and getting into the hanger, and also not doing so much damage that it would be picked up on preflight checks). Alternativly, the person to disable the system could be on the plane during flight, in which case he/she probably knew they were on a suicide mission. The list of people who can carry out such a job AND are willing to commit suicide must be very, very small.
Secondly, there is a matter of how to hit the WTC. Those buildings were designed to take an aircraft smashing into them, so just flying them into a random position isn't enough. What really made the towers collapse (so say the structural engineers) was the fires breaking out and weaking the steel supports at the top, thus forcing the bottom to take on more weight. To do this, you want a plane with lots of gas in it to cause a bigger fire. Indeed, the planes involved were going to the other end of the country, and would thus have lots of gas on board.
There are probably lots of other details I'm missing, but this is enough to show that these attacks are far more sophisticated then a lot of people know.
Now you want to tell me that these highly planned attacks became so sloppy in implementation that people are being rounded up the day after? Given, humans make mistakes (or maybe the FBI got lucky), but this still seems unlikely. This is what worries me. I think the FBI is starting a witch hunt and will arrest anyone, and the American public will back the entire thing.
Sorry, my pinky hit enter too soon. What I ment to say was:
"Most security can be broken" is correct. A One Time Pad (OTP) will theoreticly give you absolute security (provided you generate it with truely random values and you completely destroy the OTP after one use). Despite giving you absolute secrity, OTPs are generaly impractical for real world situations.
486s (and a few old Pentiums) are the workhorses of my network. I've got a 486 as a firewally, one Pentium 75 running DHCP and DNS, and another Pentium 90 as a small Samba fileserver (mostly for transfering files between GNU/Linux and Windows) and WINS server (also has a Web and FTP server, but I want to move those to another machine).
All that old computer stuff is still quite useful, so don't knock it. It's amazing what can be done with a few old Pentiums.
I dread the day motherboard manufacturers will finally kill ISA slots though...
Already done. I bought a new Asus A7V about six months ago. It has no ISA slots (just PCI, AGP, and a stupid "reiser" port, which is basicly a "special" port for WinModems).
Maybe they can't compete with hi-tech toys like video games?
While maybe that's true for many children, I've noticed that really smart people around comptuers are almost unianimous in loving Lego's both as a child and (quite often) right now.
At a meeting of my local LUG, somebody mentioned that they had found a Lego CAD program. Everyone in the room went deaf at the sound of these nerds ripping out their Palm Pilots to take down the URL:)
Umm, did you just bash sony for making a market full of same old crap, then hail Nintendo for making remakes of their best SNES games?
Yes, both Mario Cart and Star Fox appeared in both SNES and N64 versions. However, the N64 versions were a lot better in terms of gameplay and multiplayer. Mario Cart had no story (racing games never do), and Star Fox has a lame story, so gameplay, graphics (which I don't care so much about), and mutliplayer is all there is to compete over.
Mario Cart on SNES had mutiplayer, and it was good (I'm a particular fan of the deathmatch-style contest it uses). Mario Cart 64 takes advantage of the N64 extra two controlers (more freinds to beat the crap out of), and you get deathmatch tracks with mutilple levels, which adds a lot to gameplay. Star Fox on SNES had no mutiplayer, so any addition of mutiplayer would be a bonus.
No, neither of those examples are just rehashes of the old games. All the changes made would require major reworking of how the game works.
Re:Where is this "change" everyone's bitching abou
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
Zelda was only cartoony on The NES and SNES, and that only because EVERYTHING looks cartoony in 8/16-bit color. N64 didn't look cartoony at all.
I agree that the Playstation has just made developers release the Same Old Crap. I remember when the N64 came out and there were only a few games available, compared to hundreds on the PSX. However, the games on the N64 were far superior in quality (me and my freinds stayed up all night beating each other in Star Fox and Mario Cart).
I realize that Miyamoto likes doing new things, but is this cartoon really the answer? I'll wait to play the game before passing judgement.
A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded.
It says "online music enthusiasts". Not "pirates" or "theives", just "music enthusiasts". In other words, these people may have downloaded their music ligitimatly right off mp3.com and 70% of those people burned it to a CD.
To the RIAA, it's just music they don't get paid for, and it matters little if they had anything to do with distributing that music.
My point is that Jxta is making development decisions that are best left up to implementers. For instance, the Freenet developers are never going to allow broadcast anything, but if Freenet were made within the Jxta framework, they would have to live with broadcast node announcement (despite the fact that the experimental 0.4 Freenet is getting support for a uber-efficent node announcement that scales linearly).
Jxta was created by Sun to be a "framework" for P2P networks. What exactly that means is rather vague. It appears to make basic development decisions that are better left up to indiviual projects (such as broadcast seaches). TCP/IP is really the only thing most P2P networks have in common, and even that could often be easily replaced with a diffrent underlieing protocol if it was necessary.
There are several other assumptions that Jxta makes that it shouldn't. See this article for more information.
OTOH, beware of teachers who know too many languages. My Java Programming professor last semester also taught the VB programming class. He would often forget which class he was in and start writing VB in the middle of a block of Java.
The whole goal of the 0.4 phase was to increase efficency. A C++ version called "whiterose" is being worked on (it actualy seems to be in a propetual state of "being worked on":).
Slashdot Mirror
The animated Star Trek, despite being under Roddenbery's wing, was not cannon. It doesn't count.
I'm really willing to give this series a chance. I don't think Voyager was "horrible" like a lot of people do, though it certainly wasn't as great as Next Gen or even DS9. Does anybody beleive that if this show gets canceled, there will be a massive fan mail campain like there was when the orginal series was on the chopping board? I don't think there will be.
The inheiriters to Gene's vision get two more chances to save Star Trek from destruction. The first is the "Enterprise" series, and the second is the new upcoming movie. Fortunatly for them, the next movie is an even-numbered one (odd-numbered trek movies have been cursed since the first one, while even numbered ones are great).
One bad omen: Some of the promotional ads for "Enterprise" are using some pop crap for background music. Star Trek has a perfectly good composer, Jerry Goldsmith, who is as good as Star War's John Williams. They really ought to USE HIM! When "Enterprise" comes on, and I hear the opening credits being sung by N'Sync, I will shut off the TV, rip the tape out of the VCR, and burn it (the tape, not the VCR . . . on second thought, the VCR goes, too).
The end of Zimmerman's message says it can be freely distributed, so forward away.
Really? That's odd, I was under the impression that the 386DX does have a coprocessor. If not, then what's the diffrence between a 386SX and DX?
(And don't worry about your age; my first computer was an Apple //c, and my first PC was a 386SX 16).
Since the poster seemed concerned about power, does anyone know details about how to reduce power consumption on a motherboard?
Even a GHz processor doesn't take that much power once the computer is on. The monitor is the real energy-hog part of the system, which isn't an issue for running a router.
486s (until recently, I hear) have been in constant production because they are great for embedded systems, so obviously they don't take much power. Running a firewall without a hard drive (either through booting over the network or from a floppy) is a definate possiblity and would get rid of another power-sucking part of the computer. You could also underclock the processor to reduce power consumption. You can probably get the clock down to 16-30 MHz and still have a zippy firewall.
There is a place in my town where the local state and university departments drop off their old equiptment. I picked up a P133 (32 MB RAM, 2.1 GB hard drive, AWE sound card) for $35, and they were selling 10/100 NICs for $3 apeice. That is $41 for a computer which is way more powerful then what is needed here.
Note that this same place went through some restructurings a few months ago; before that they were much cheeper. I have a complete 486 DX/4 100 system (8 MB RAM, 200 MB hard drive) which was $5. It came in one of those massive full-tower cases, which I then sold on eBay (the case alone) for around $50. Ten to one profit margins are nice :)
If there is nothing else connected to the cable modem (i.e., the NIC is jacked right into the modem via a crossover cable), then there are no collisions on that side. If there are collisions happening on the internal network, this could be solved by putting in a switch instead of a hub. Also, increasing the MTU of clients on the internal network could give better performance.
Using old computers for a rounter/firewall really doesn't take as much power as the above suggests. Recently, my local newspaper had an article on power consumption. It noted that a modern PC takes about as much power as an alarm clock; not much at all. Older equiptment (486 or Pentium) will probably do better, especialy if you can find a low-end power supply to go with.
For what you want, I suggest two boxes. Both can be between a 486 DX 50 to around a P100. You could even do a 386 DX if need be, but I've found that 486s go for around the same price anyway. I suggest the DX processors because I simply don't like the idea of math coprocessor emulation having to sit in my kernel. Give them both a floppy drive and an old hard drive (You can squeeze a good GNU/Linux distro into 40 MB if need be, but be careful of bloated distros like Red Hat; use Debian or even some form of BSD). If you don't want to waste those good 10/100 NICs on this, don't. A simple 10 Mbps NIC has more then enough bandwidth for a cable modem or DSL (except for the very very high speed DSL solutions, which nobody has yet anyway). The second box only needs one NIC (can also be 10 Mbps), but should have a larger hard drive. From this one, run stuff like DHCP, caching DNS, etc.
Personly, I have a 486 DX/4 100 with a 200 MB drive running Debian 2.2r2 and a Linux 2.4 kernel and an IPTables NAT firewall. This has two 10 Mbps NICs and a modem (I'm currently on dial-up, but the second NIC is there for when I finaly get cable or DSL). Another box runs a DHCP and DNS server. Yet another box is a small file server (using Samba) and also runs an FTP and HTTP server.
My information comes from this kuro5hin post; when I posted the parent, I hadn't seen any of the replies to that post. It might be just hearsay as well. Additionaly, the K5 post doesn't specificly mention the fly-by-wire system, just the avionics, which I had assumed was tied into the fly-by-wire. Perhaps this was wrong.
What is more, some of the replies mention that FCC rules specify that such systems must be able to be disabled quickly in the event of a malfunction. I remember a video of the first public demenstration of fly-by-wire; the plane disappeared into some trees a few seconds after take off, then you see a very large ball of flame coming out of the forest.
Having people brought in so soon (either for questioning or as suspects) worries me a lot. These attacks show a very high degree of sophistication, and not just in their timing (as many news orginizations have bleeted out of late).
First, you have the fly-by-wire system, installed on all big commerical jets, which just plain won't let you fly the plane into a building. This system has to be disabled without completely destroying your ability to manuver. I have been told that there are very few people around who know how to do this. This person would either have to know which planes would be used for the job in advance and then disable those planes while they are sitting on the ground (while also getting around security on the ground and getting into the hanger, and also not doing so much damage that it would be picked up on preflight checks). Alternativly, the person to disable the system could be on the plane during flight, in which case he/she probably knew they were on a suicide mission. The list of people who can carry out such a job AND are willing to commit suicide must be very, very small.
Secondly, there is a matter of how to hit the WTC. Those buildings were designed to take an aircraft smashing into them, so just flying them into a random position isn't enough. What really made the towers collapse (so say the structural engineers) was the fires breaking out and weaking the steel supports at the top, thus forcing the bottom to take on more weight. To do this, you want a plane with lots of gas in it to cause a bigger fire. Indeed, the planes involved were going to the other end of the country, and would thus have lots of gas on board.
There are probably lots of other details I'm missing, but this is enough to show that these attacks are far more sophisticated then a lot of people know.
Now you want to tell me that these highly planned attacks became so sloppy in implementation that people are being rounded up the day after? Given, humans make mistakes (or maybe the FBI got lucky), but this still seems unlikely. This is what worries me. I think the FBI is starting a witch hunt and will arrest anyone, and the American public will back the entire thing.
Sorry, my pinky hit enter too soon. What I ment to say was:
"Most security can be broken" is correct. A One Time Pad (OTP) will theoreticly give you absolute security (provided you generate it with truely random values and you completely destroy the OTP after one use). Despite giving you absolute secrity, OTPs are generaly impractical for real world situations.
everyone knows that most (all?) security can be broken
486s (and a few old Pentiums) are the workhorses of my network. I've got a 486 as a firewally, one Pentium 75 running DHCP and DNS, and another Pentium 90 as a small Samba fileserver (mostly for transfering files between GNU/Linux and Windows) and WINS server (also has a Web and FTP server, but I want to move those to another machine).
All that old computer stuff is still quite useful, so don't knock it. It's amazing what can be done with a few old Pentiums.
I dread the day motherboard manufacturers will finally kill ISA slots though ...
Already done. I bought a new Asus A7V about six months ago. It has no ISA slots (just PCI, AGP, and a stupid "reiser" port, which is basicly a "special" port for WinModems).
Maybe they can't compete with hi-tech toys like video games?
While maybe that's true for many children, I've noticed that really smart people around comptuers are almost unianimous in loving Lego's both as a child and (quite often) right now.
At a meeting of my local LUG, somebody mentioned that they had found a Lego CAD program. Everyone in the room went deaf at the sound of these nerds ripping out their Palm Pilots to take down the URL :)
Umm, did you just bash sony for making a market full of same old crap, then hail Nintendo for making remakes of their best SNES games?
Yes, both Mario Cart and Star Fox appeared in both SNES and N64 versions. However, the N64 versions were a lot better in terms of gameplay and multiplayer. Mario Cart had no story (racing games never do), and Star Fox has a lame story, so gameplay, graphics (which I don't care so much about), and mutliplayer is all there is to compete over.
Mario Cart on SNES had mutiplayer, and it was good (I'm a particular fan of the deathmatch-style contest it uses). Mario Cart 64 takes advantage of the N64 extra two controlers (more freinds to beat the crap out of), and you get deathmatch tracks with mutilple levels, which adds a lot to gameplay. Star Fox on SNES had no mutiplayer, so any addition of mutiplayer would be a bonus.
No, neither of those examples are just rehashes of the old games. All the changes made would require major reworking of how the game works.
Zelda was only cartoony on The NES and SNES, and that only because EVERYTHING looks cartoony in 8/16-bit color. N64 didn't look cartoony at all.
I agree that the Playstation has just made developers release the Same Old Crap. I remember when the N64 came out and there were only a few games available, compared to hundreds on the PSX. However, the games on the N64 were far superior in quality (me and my freinds stayed up all night beating each other in Star Fox and Mario Cart).
I realize that Miyamoto likes doing new things, but is this cartoon really the answer? I'll wait to play the game before passing judgement.
But just look at this quote from the article:
A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded.
It says "online music enthusiasts". Not "pirates" or "theives", just "music enthusiasts". In other words, these people may have downloaded their music ligitimatly right off mp3.com and 70% of those people burned it to a CD.
To the RIAA, it's just music they don't get paid for, and it matters little if they had anything to do with distributing that music.
Jxta seems to be a bit better at being a true P2P network without having to know the address of a node before-hand,
Only because of broadcast node announcement. That'll make the ghosts of Gnutella come back to haunt Jxta.
My point is that Jxta is making development decisions that are best left up to implementers. For instance, the Freenet developers are never going to allow broadcast anything, but if Freenet were made within the Jxta framework, they would have to live with broadcast node announcement (despite the fact that the experimental 0.4 Freenet is getting support for a uber-efficent node announcement that scales linearly).
Jxta was created by Sun to be a "framework" for P2P networks. What exactly that means is rather vague. It appears to make basic development decisions that are better left up to indiviual projects (such as broadcast seaches). TCP/IP is really the only thing most P2P networks have in common, and even that could often be easily replaced with a diffrent underlieing protocol if it was necessary.
There are several other assumptions that Jxta makes that it shouldn't. See this article for more information.
OTOH, beware of teachers who know too many languages. My Java Programming professor last semester also taught the VB programming class. He would often forget which class he was in and start writing VB in the middle of a block of Java.
While this may not be a good idea for the non-technical, most of those on this site could make their own.
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The whole goal of the 0.4 phase was to increase efficency. A C++ version called "whiterose" is being worked on (it actualy seems to be in a propetual state of "being worked on" :).
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