Too many comments here miss the point of what Bruce says:
Regulation is coming!
If technologically savvy people do not get engaged then technologically illiterate people will make the rules. You could become a politician, but you can also support lawyers, politicians and (the right) lobbyists.
But no matter what, regulation is coming!
The internet and technology play a bigger and bigger rule in our daily lives and that makes regulation inevitable. I am sorry if this offends your belief in freedom, libertarianism, small government, or whatever. Where many people become engaged there need to be rules that govern those social and economic relationships. Wasn't "bureaucracy" an achievement in Civilisation or some similar game? Letâ(TM)s create small and few rules.
Regulation is coming ! (thank you game of thrones)
Oh, and I did not mean to call the Brother a "cheap hobbyist printer", it looks very nice. The Lexmark and the Epson are built for much larger print runs, though.
Thats what I believed, too. But it is not true any more for "bigger" printers. For normal SOHO use I would prefer a laser any time, too, beacuse it's more rugged, but who knows how much the original poster really wants to print in color?
I'll give you a comparison in Euros, from this website: http://www.druckerchannel.de Who knows? Maybe toner is cheaper and ink is more expensive in the US. But here the difference is not even funny: (for color that is)
Prices are for the standardized ISO test pages and the original toner/ink. Maybe you can hunt for vastly different prices with refills but it's a hunt and you have to find quality. I think that if the original toner/ink gives you a nice price, refills should be even cheaper by a comparable amount for each printer so that the difference in costs per page stays about the same between the compared printers.
Your Brother would cost me €193 to buy and with the original toner I would have to pay 13 cents for a color page and 1.5 cents for b/w, €40 for 4000 pages of black toner €99 for 3500 pages of each color €119 every 25000 for a drum kit €77 every 50000 for a transfer unit €14 every 5000 for a waste toner box
Epson B510dn 0.8 cents b/w and 3.1 cents color €58 for 8000 pages of black ink €52 for 7000 pages for each of the three colors €15 every 35000 pages for the waste ink box The printer itself is available for €400
Now heres an expensive color laser with cheap toner costs: The Xerox Colorqube 8870DN color laserprinter costs €2000 and you have to pay 3.5 cents for each ISO color page.
Here is a a color laser theat costs a little bit less than the Epson to buy: The Kyocera FS-C5250DN color laser costs €380 and you have to pay 8.3 cents for each ISO color page. (Very nice printer) Its €82 for 7000 pages of black toner and €90 for 5000 pages of toner for each color.
Bot the Epson and the Kyocera are rock solid and you can get on site maintainance contracts. Don't compare them with a cheap hobyyist printer that will be a pain to maintain.
And while I'm at it, here's the multifunction color laser Lexmark X748de: 6.7 cents per color page, 1.4 cents b/w See, just like I said it's nice for printing black and white unlike some color laser vendors who also gouge you on black toner. But it's a €2000 initial purchase price. €162 for 12000 pages of black toner €190 for 10000 pages of each color €92 every 20000 pages for a drum kit (but you can get away with lying to the printer and use the old drums some more) €7 every 25000 pages for a waste toner box.
Very solid, if you want to have a nice color laser that works as a copier, too. Its a flatbed scanner with a document feed and it scans both sides of the page.
I have used all of these printers but the Xerox and the brother. The Lexmark and the Kyocera are rock solid in typical laser fashion. The Epson can be finicky feeding paper. The 500 page bootom try is suspectible to paper orientation problems. See the arrow on the side each 500 page ream of paper? Thats the side the Epson wants to print on first. No such problems with the smaller top feed. Normally I do not like Inkjets, but we use the Epson every day, so nothing dries up inside.
- Laser ist cheaper than Inkjet This is not true. A cheap color laser has very expensive toner needs whereas an expensive inkjet printer can be cheaper than many color lasers. If you cheaply want to print color the Epson B510DN is a goot choice. It is not so great for photos though and as with any Inkjet it wants to be used regularily. If you want a color laser you have to buy a very expensive model to achieve cheap toner costs. This is only interesting if you have to print enough color pages,
Personally I would buy an Kyocera FS-1370 for cheap black and white laser printing. As mentioned by a post above this, it only needs toner and cheap refills are available without loss of quality. A new toner cartridge wheighs like a pound and it's all toner. But if you buy a cheap color laser from Kyocera the toner costs a lot.
For cheap color printing I would buy the above mentioned Epson.
And I woul buy a dedicated scanner.
If space constrains make you buy an all in one machine for scanning copying and color printing. I would get an Lexmark X748de It's expensive but the toner costs are OK. YOu can even use it as a b/w laser without feeling too bad. Lexmark has a rightfully deserved bad reputation for their small printers because ink was very expensive. Their professional models are great, though and the repair service is good.
Vodafone Websessions: Walk into the Vodafone store at the airport €30 for the UMTS (3G) usb stick, €5/day (capped at 1GB transfer volume) or 10€/week (similarly capped at 1GB). The only problem might be that they don't have the package and will have to send it to your hotel/address. It's pay as you go, after login you have to enter your credit card info.Similar offers are available from T-Online (web'n'walk €50 with a usb stick including €10 on the pre paid account.). O2 and Eplus are generally cheaper but their 3G coverage is often not as good as Telekom or Vodafone.
Of course there are tons of other options available.
You know, Sega could just release a decent game with a fantasy league, no sweat. With the kicker that you could create your *own* fantasy league!
There would immediately be hundreds of websites with skins and mods for the real league.
But than most of the revenue stram for those kinds of games comes from yearly updates, I guess.
(Fools buy it every year. Happy flaming about that;-)
(Mmmh, they could do an online league. Every player builds his own team and they pay for access to the servers.....)
OpenBSD is great for learning, too
on
OpenBSD 3.6 Released!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I want to recommend OpenBSD to anyone who wants to build a small server and it is a must for a firewall/NAT box.
I have never seen such a clear, concise, and easy to understand configuration file as that of pf.conf (IP filter). The files for the boot-up configuration rc.conf and rc.local are also very clear and easy to understand.
Everything has very _good_ man pages and sample configuration files with lots of comments.
The faq on openbsd.org is quite good, too.
One aspect of security is simplicity, which implies easily understood configuration files.
Another aspect of security is that you learn about the fundamentals of your system/network. OpenBSD's lack of graphical configuration aids is a great help here. You simply _have_ to learn about your system to be able to operate it, but at the same time learning is made easy, by great documentation.
And if anybody is put off by OpenBSD's (in)famous penchant for straight/rude talking developers: Don't worry, I found people friendly and helpful. They are only put off, by questions that are very obvious and have been covered in the documentation extensively. But I am also the kind of person who loathes to ask for help in a D.I.Y. shop such as Home Depot, preferring to find things unaided so that I learn more and more about the products they offer, so that I will be more knowledgeable when doing my next project.
I bought a SONY VAIO F180 in April 1999. Great price, great design, 1 year warranty, because I registered immideately. I bought it in the US via Sony Direct.
May 2000, back in Germany , the right display hinge broke. I called support in Germany about this and learned that Sony has no world wide cooperation with all its Sony minions, unlike, say, Toshiba (thats what my friend told me about Toshs).
So I called the American support and they blabbed about shipping it to Florida and stuff, so it would have been an open ended thing regarding money that I would have to spend. There was no way that they could just ship the broken part.
Faced with this dilemma, I opened the case myself. Cudos for Sony here, because it was real easy, but display hinge is made of the *cheapest* metal. Think desktop PC slot covers. It wasn't even cheap on purpose, the metal was still way stronger than the glass cover of the LCD backlight, so the breaking hinge wouldn't protect the LCD from breaking to save me some money.
I finally repaired it myself by using a piece of desktop slot cover metal to solder the 2 broken parts of the hinge together, like with a brace. And I dare say it's stronger than the original part;-).
2001 I had to fix the right hinge the same way.
2002 I read that Sony Germany now asks for $20 just to qoute you the price of a spare part (they dropped that policy by now).
So I love Sony for their design and components, but I dread their support.
I could go on and on about this: When I bought the notebook computer above, I asked them if the modem would be usable under Linux, they said "yes". Lucky for me I didn't expect this, but asked to amuse myself and in a faint hope that it would work. It was a Windows only soft modem of course.
Anyway, the design of that F180 is still sleeek and many other laptop vendors have worse looking machines. It did it's job for 3 years now and is still very functional even though I do not treat it daintily (it's a tool, dammit).
I will soon buy the successor to that laptop, it won't be a Sony. I dream of a TiBook, but probably go for Tosh or HP (even though their displays are suppose to be crap on _some_ models. I hate inconsistency.)
Well, for laptops comparative reviews are still possible, for desktops they do not make sense anymore.
There are two major computer publications in my country (Germany) and several minor ones.
One does comparative reviews for desktops and sucks (Computer Bild), because they just tell you "buy this" and do not show that many alternatives. The other (c't) has a special topic issue about once a year where they try to educate you about hardware, prices and configurations for gamers, office workers, multimedia, etc. They are great (or at least, they suck way less than any other publiction in this respect).
For laptops comparative reviews are still possible if you differentiate by price, but it is already impossible to compare the whole spread of the market. But laptops are still too restricted, I, for once, would _love_ to build my own laptop from components. Less beefy processor, great screen, great keyboard, slim but wide to accomodate said keyboard, integrated WLAN antenna, 20G Harddisk is enough... The vendors are not that versatile even with customizable offerings.
Just out of spite I consider to buy a TiBook soon. It seems perfect for my needs, even if it is a _tad_ expensive, but hey I do not have to go with the mainstream Intel/AMD/MS stuff anymore. I am not dependent on certain applications and price is not as big an issue anymore as it was in highschool.
Marcus
Re:according to the site...
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 1
Yep. Just set two marks for the beginning and end of commercials and it writes a new file sans ads.
Any old Box + Pentium I,
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 1
it just pushes MPEG2 streams from the sky onto you hard disk. If you get the "good" DVB card, decoding is done in hardware, too, and it comes with a near perfect TV-Out for broadcasts and VDR Menues.
You need more beef for the divx->MPEG2 transcoding stuff.
It only works with DVB broadcasts, that is a certain standardized format for digital TV
Maybe with some more knowlege about the encryption
on
PVR For Linux
·
· Score: 1
DVB usually has a standard way of encrypting channels. There is a CI (Common Interface, ~PCMCIA) in which you can stick a CAM (Common Access Module) for the encryption algorithm into which comes a smart card with your key.
If Dish uses something similar, using a DVB card for your PC might be possible for watching dish tv. It works for many encrypted channel here in Europe.
THen again, dish might use something totally different. Somebody here should know more about it...
And I think the dutch Calvinism is much more a thing of history, a thing of the past than the American brand of Puritanism.
Don't get me wrong I love many aspects of Americans and America but I came to find above to be true especially in rural areas, which altogether are much bigger than the cities.
Marcus
Saying 'shoot' instead of 'shit' doesn't make you a better person.
Why don't you use the smtp relay of your ISP? (Your ISP offers one I hope? And don't tell me the additional hop annoys you too much..)
What else can admins do but block these dynamically allocated IP address pools?
Marcus
Domino... really needs a gateway in front of it
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
A company I know was using notes for all their mail. A blackhohle database notified them that they were acting as an open relay (that was the default install of that notes version) and asked them to remedy the situation.
To check things out I telnetted to port 25 and tried to relay some mail manually and just by accidentally entering some malformed input (I think I was trying to use backspace) I crashed the whole notes server!
Frowns all around;-)
Now a smtp gateway protects that notes server from the internet.
And as an internal solution with all its other features it is really great, but to crash due to malformed input? That's worse than bad that's eh,mhh,yeah worse.
I hope newer notes versions do not show that behaviour.
I guess this means we can look forward to people carrying large foldable/portable antennae along with their notebooks? Or mounting huge ones on their rooftops?
The return of the Wi-Fi enabled Beanie Hat (TM)!
I think these Lucent Range Extenders would look great mounted on a baseball hat...
As far as I know only sound (as you implied correctly above) was stored digitally on a laserdisk. So connecting it to a regular computer to transfer the data would invovle a lot of work. (Digitzing the images, referencing them for access, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Too many comments here miss the point of what Bruce says:
Regulation is coming!
If technologically savvy people do not get engaged then technologically illiterate people will make the rules.
You could become a politician, but you can also support lawyers, politicians and (the right) lobbyists.
But no matter what, regulation is coming!
The internet and technology play a bigger and bigger rule in our daily lives and that makes regulation inevitable.
I am sorry if this offends your belief in freedom, libertarianism, small government, or whatever. Where many people become engaged there need to be rules that govern those social and economic relationships.
Wasn't "bureaucracy" an achievement in Civilisation or some similar game? Letâ(TM)s create small and few rules.
Regulation is coming ! (thank you game of thrones)
Oh, and I did not mean to call the Brother a "cheap hobbyist printer", it looks very nice. The Lexmark and the Epson are built for much larger print runs, though.
Thats what I believed, too. But it is not true any more for "bigger" printers. For normal SOHO use I would prefer a laser any time, too, beacuse it's more rugged, but who knows how much the original poster really wants to print in color?
I'll give you a comparison in Euros, from this website: http://www.druckerchannel.de
Who knows? Maybe toner is cheaper and ink is more expensive in the US. But here the difference is not even funny: (for color that is)
Prices are for the standardized ISO test pages and the original toner/ink. Maybe you can hunt for vastly different prices with refills but it's a hunt and you have to find quality. I think that if the original toner/ink gives you a nice price, refills should be even cheaper by a comparable amount for each printer so that the difference in costs per page stays about the same between the compared printers.
Your Brother would cost me €193 to buy and with the original toner I would have to pay 13 cents for a color page and 1.5 cents for b/w,
€40 for 4000 pages of black toner
€99 for 3500 pages of each color
€119 every 25000 for a drum kit
€77 every 50000 for a transfer unit
€14 every 5000 for a waste toner box
Epson B510dn 0.8 cents b/w and 3.1 cents color
€58 for 8000 pages of black ink
€52 for 7000 pages for each of the three colors
€15 every 35000 pages for the waste ink box
The printer itself is available for €400
Now heres an expensive color laser with cheap toner costs:
The Xerox Colorqube 8870DN color laserprinter costs €2000 and you have to pay 3.5 cents for each ISO color page.
Here is a a color laser theat costs a little bit less than the Epson to buy:
The Kyocera FS-C5250DN color laser costs €380 and you have to pay 8.3 cents for each ISO color page. (Very nice printer)
Its €82 for 7000 pages of black toner and €90 for 5000 pages of toner for each color.
Bot the Epson and the Kyocera are rock solid and you can get on site maintainance contracts. Don't compare them with a cheap hobyyist printer that will be a pain to maintain.
And while I'm at it, here's the multifunction color laser Lexmark X748de: 6.7 cents per color page, 1.4 cents b/w
See, just like I said it's nice for printing black and white unlike some color laser vendors who also gouge you on black toner.
But it's a €2000 initial purchase price.
€162 for 12000 pages of black toner
€190 for 10000 pages of each color
€92 every 20000 pages for a drum kit (but you can get away with lying to the printer and use the old drums some more)
€7 every 25000 pages for a waste toner box.
Very solid, if you want to have a nice color laser that works as a copier, too. Its a flatbed scanner with a document feed and it scans both sides of the page.
I have used all of these printers but the Xerox and the brother. The Lexmark and the Kyocera are rock solid in typical laser fashion. The Epson can be finicky feeding paper. The 500 page bootom try is suspectible to paper orientation problems. See the arrow on the side each 500 page ream of paper? Thats the side the Epson wants to print on first. No such problems with the smaller top feed. Normally I do not like Inkjets, but we use the Epson every day, so nothing dries up inside.
Already people are perpetuating a lot of myths.
- Laser ist cheaper than Inkjet
This is not true. A cheap color laser has very expensive toner needs whereas an expensive inkjet printer can be cheaper than many color lasers. If you cheaply want to print color the Epson B510DN is a goot choice. It is not so great for photos though and as with any Inkjet it wants to be used regularily.
If you want a color laser you have to buy a very expensive model to achieve cheap toner costs. This is only interesting if you have to print enough color pages,
Personally I would buy an Kyocera FS-1370 for cheap black and white laser printing. As mentioned by a post above this, it only needs toner and cheap refills are available without loss of quality. A new toner cartridge wheighs like a pound and it's all toner. But if you buy a cheap color laser from Kyocera the toner costs a lot.
For cheap color printing I would buy the above mentioned Epson.
And I woul buy a dedicated scanner.
If space constrains make you buy an all in one machine for scanning copying and color printing. I would get an Lexmark X748de It's expensive but the toner costs are OK. YOu can even use it as a b/w laser without feeling too bad. Lexmark has a rightfully deserved bad reputation for their small printers because ink was very expensive. Their professional models are great, though and the repair service is good.
Vodafone Websessions: Walk into the Vodafone store at the airport €30 for the UMTS (3G) usb stick, €5/day (capped at 1GB transfer volume) or 10€/week (similarly capped at 1GB). The only problem might be that they don't have the package and will have to send it to your hotel/address. It's pay as you go, after login you have to enter your credit card info.Similar offers are available from T-Online (web'n'walk €50 with a usb stick including €10 on the pre paid account.). O2 and Eplus are generally cheaper but their 3G coverage is often not as good as Telekom or Vodafone.
Of course there are tons of other options available.
I guess you really have to begin producing the action figures mentioned in the previous post now.
You should get your phone system to put the 9 already in front of the number when it sends the callerid to the ip phone, duh.
The truth is no insult!
You made "kshhhhhh boing, boing! Kshhhhhhhh." ?
56k is pure luxury! In my time we had 9600baud modems! (Nobody knew the difference between baud and bits/s back then)
On review: Isn't there something like this already? I don't like spr0ts games. I have no idea. Seems so obvious.
(Now racing --with a force feedback wheel-- that is fun.)
You know, Sega could just release a decent game with a fantasy league, no sweat. With the kicker that you could create your *own* fantasy league!
;-)
There would immediately be hundreds of websites with skins and mods for the real league.
But than most of the revenue stram for those kinds of games comes from yearly updates, I guess.
(Fools buy it every year. Happy flaming about that
(Mmmh, they could do an online league. Every player builds his own team and they pay for access to the servers.....)
I want to recommend OpenBSD to anyone who wants to build a small server and it is a must for a firewall/NAT box.
/network. OpenBSD's lack of graphical configuration aids is a great help here.
I have never seen such a clear, concise, and easy to understand configuration file as that of pf.conf (IP filter).
The files for the boot-up configuration rc.conf and rc.local are also very clear and easy to understand.
Everything has very _good_ man pages and sample configuration files with lots of comments.
The faq on openbsd.org is quite good, too.
One aspect of security is simplicity, which implies easily understood configuration files.
Another aspect of security is that you learn about the fundamentals of your system
You simply _have_ to learn about your system to be able to operate it, but at the same time learning is made easy, by great documentation.
And if anybody is put off by OpenBSD's (in)famous penchant for straight/rude talking developers: Don't worry, I found people friendly and helpful. They are only put off, by questions that are very obvious and have been covered in the documentation extensively. But I am also the kind of person who loathes to ask for help in a D.I.Y. shop such as Home Depot, preferring to find things unaided so that I learn more and more about the products they offer, so that I will be more knowledgeable when doing my next project.
Marcus
I bought a SONY VAIO F180 in April 1999. Great price, great design, 1 year warranty, because I registered immideately. I bought it in the US via Sony Direct.
;-).
May 2000, back in Germany , the right display hinge broke.
I called support in Germany about this and learned that Sony has no world wide cooperation with all its Sony minions, unlike, say, Toshiba (thats what my friend told me about Toshs).
So I called the American support and they blabbed about shipping it to Florida and stuff, so it would have been an open ended thing regarding money that I would have to spend. There was no way that they could just ship the broken part.
Faced with this dilemma, I opened the case myself. Cudos for Sony here, because it was real easy, but display hinge is made of the *cheapest* metal. Think desktop PC slot covers.
It wasn't even cheap on purpose, the metal was still way stronger than the glass cover of the LCD backlight, so the breaking hinge wouldn't protect the LCD from breaking to save me some money.
I finally repaired it myself by using a piece of desktop slot cover metal to solder the 2 broken parts of the hinge together, like with a brace. And I dare say it's stronger than the original part
2001 I had to fix the right hinge the same way.
2002 I read that Sony Germany now asks for $20 just to qoute you the price of a spare part (they dropped that policy by now).
So I love Sony for their design and components, but I dread their support.
I could go on and on about this:
When I bought the notebook computer above, I asked them if the modem would be usable under Linux, they said "yes". Lucky for me I didn't expect this, but asked to amuse myself and in a faint hope that it would work. It was a Windows only soft modem of course.
Anyway, the design of that F180 is still sleeek and many other laptop vendors have worse looking machines. It did it's job for 3 years now and is still very functional even though I do not treat it daintily (it's a tool, dammit).
I will soon buy the successor to that laptop, it won't be a Sony.
I dream of a TiBook, but probably go for Tosh or HP (even though their displays are suppose to be crap on _some_ models. I hate inconsistency.)
Marcus
Well, for laptops comparative reviews are still
possible, for desktops they do not make sense anymore.
There are two major computer publications in my country (Germany) and several minor ones.
One does comparative reviews for desktops and sucks (Computer Bild), because they just tell you "buy this" and do not show that many alternatives. The other (c't) has a special topic issue about once a year where they try to educate you about hardware, prices and configurations for gamers, office workers, multimedia, etc. They are great (or at least, they suck way less than any other publiction in this respect).
For laptops comparative reviews are still possible if you differentiate by price, but it is already impossible to compare the whole spread of the market. But laptops are still too restricted, I, for once, would _love_ to build my own laptop from components. Less beefy processor, great screen, great keyboard, slim but wide to accomodate said keyboard, integrated WLAN antenna, 20G Harddisk is enough... The vendors are not that versatile even with customizable offerings.
Just out of spite I consider to buy a TiBook soon. It seems perfect for my needs, even if it is a _tad_ expensive, but hey I do not have to go with the mainstream Intel/AMD/MS stuff anymore. I am not dependent on certain applications and price is not as big an issue anymore as it was in highschool.
Marcus
Yep. Just set two marks for the beginning and end of commercials and it writes a new file sans ads.
it just pushes MPEG2 streams from the sky onto you hard disk. If you get the "good" DVB card, decoding is done in hardware, too, and it comes with a near perfect TV-Out for broadcasts and VDR Menues.
You need more beef for the divx->MPEG2 transcoding stuff.
It only works with DVB broadcasts, that is a certain standardized format for digital TV
DVB usually has a standard way of encrypting channels.
There is a CI (Common Interface, ~PCMCIA) in which you can stick a CAM (Common Access Module) for the encryption algorithm into which comes a smart card with your key.
If Dish uses something similar, using a DVB card for your PC might be possible for watching dish tv.
It works for many encrypted channel here in Europe.
THen again, dish might use something totally different. Somebody here should know more about it...
Marcus
And I think the dutch Calvinism is much more a thing of history, a thing of the past than the American brand of Puritanism.
Don't get me wrong I love many aspects of Americans and America but I came to find above to be true especially in rural areas, which altogether are much bigger than the cities.
Marcus
Saying 'shoot' instead of 'shit' doesn't make you a better person.
Fool!
Why don't you use the smtp relay of your ISP? (Your ISP offers one I hope? And don't tell me the additional hop annoys you too much..)
What else can admins do but block these dynamically allocated IP address pools?
Marcus
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
;-)
:-)
A company I know was using notes for all their mail. A blackhohle database notified them that they were acting as an open relay (that was the default install of that notes version) and asked them to remedy the situation.
To check things out I telnetted to port 25 and tried to relay some mail manually and just by accidentally entering some malformed input (I think I was trying to use backspace) I crashed the whole notes server!
Frowns all around
Now a smtp gateway protects that notes server from the internet.
And as an internal solution with all its other features it is really great, but to crash due to malformed input? That's worse than bad that's eh,mhh,yeah worse.
I hope newer notes versions do not show that behaviour.
Use notes, but never without protection
Marcus
I guess this means we can look forward to people carrying large foldable/portable antennae along with their notebooks? Or mounting huge ones on their rooftops?
The return of the Wi-Fi enabled Beanie Hat (TM)!
I think these Lucent Range Extenders would look great mounted on a baseball hat...
Books can be slashdotted the easiest.
Ever tried to read a book with somebody
else at the same time?
As far as I know only sound (as you
implied correctly above) was stored digitally
on a laserdisk.
So connecting it to a regular computer to
transfer the data would invovle a lot of
work. (Digitzing the images, referencing them
for access, etc.)
And I smell burned bear when
those things overheat.