> buy a copy of XP, install, activate, update, reboot, update, reboot, get SP1 & 2
Nice little roll, there. I probably oughtn't point out that if you're actually buying a copy of XP these days that it'll have SP2 applied to it already. At least, all the stores around here sell it this way.
Of course, it's totally irrelevant how tricksey the DVD player itself is w.r.t. crypto, so long as the unit has to send a decoded signal that any cheap Wal-mart-purchased TV can view. For practical purposes, this Achille's Heel just can't be solved w/o getting everyone (consumers) to throw all their {A/V gear, players, televisions, PC's} out and start over.
Is it really? How often do you boot? I reboot whenever there's a power failure (and thank God for ext3). None yet this winter, so I really can't recall how long the boot takes.
Working through an LFS-based custom system setup (so as to get a *really* small system footprint; "why" is irrelevant) can require a "few" reboots to workout (1) what is needed in the kernel, and (2) setup the init scripts (which in my case differed quite a bit from my box-distro). Assuming the target system doesn't have full development tools in it or web access (or what have you) it can take booting back and forth until the more tricky bits get resolved. But that's just one example from my recent past.:)
Depending on whose number you believe, flash drives are good for about 100k writes... not that such a number tells me how long it would last. Anyway, I'm working on a CF-based server, but the CF will be effectively read-only, as the file system will mount into a ram-drive... for what I'm needing, I don't need any additional writes (or I can mount a network drive or something).
Excellent thought; I might keep an eye out for someone junking an old laptop. Though this is tending towards being OT, I have a current 'project' brewing slowly at home where I'm going to put a pci modem on a riser card on a mini-ITX board (w/ onboard LAN) and run it via a LFS-based linux build; sort of a small-profile, DIY dialup-modem firewall/router box. Got the S/W mostly sorted out; just remains to work the H/W and case (since I'm wanting to build really small so as to be portable, should I need to tote it around to firewall someone's crud-infested dialup-based PC in the future... though the impetus was more based on getting a silent system for personal use).
Well, for original thread starter you replied to, it might have been a BB connection. I'm more accutely aware of my family only having dialup, however; I recently wiped and restored my cousin's XP system since it wasn't responding to anything user-oriented. While I didn't have my CD of utils handy to help out (it was a vacation trip; I was unprepared), it wouldn't have mattered; SO MUCH spyware/adware was running that just getting it to display 'Start' took minutes, that and the 'net connection was running full bore w/o me asking it to. Was pretty hopeless. On a side note, not being technically inclined, she thought she might actually need a new computer (a common theme, it seems)... she did sorta get one when I was finished, plus the requisite lecture and followup CD-in-the-mail. I despise that this is the common state of affairs on windows boxes.:-/
Except for those who know that a quick ctrl+ / ctrl- pair fixes things up nicely w/o a refresh, troll. =) (Yes, I'm aware it's not a panacea for all FF/site issues.)
I caught a pop-up layer/frame thing yesterday while looking for inflation data. (Sorry I don't have the site address now; The popup iframe was served directly to advert site registration.) Having ad-block already installed, I blocked the iframe and reloaded... I still wound up with an empty pseudo-window thing (had border, title, and "X", but no content) popping up in front of the content I was interested in, so in my mind FF1.0/Ad-block still currently fails here.
short of lugging a home-built linux box w/ modem, NIC, and NAT/firewall running on it, please point us to relatively inexpensive hardware firewall / router gizmo's that have a built-in 56k modem... I've only seen such a thing advertised once on the web and it was > $300 at the time; never seen such a thing at the local store. Note: the most recent survey showed broadband usage is still below 25%, so a great many people are still dialing up (self included). Seriously, I'd likely buy one at a reasonable price from a reputable maker.
> I haven't been in a theater in a few years, so I > don't even know how much tickets are these days.
Just went over the past weekend. In central CT (nowhere-spectacular, USA), a mid-afternoon "matinee" ticket price was just jacked up $0.50 to $6.00 per person. The evening price (that I've not paid for in a long, long time) is $9.00 per person. The small soda is, IIRC, $3.50 (and fairly small). Nothing about the theater, staff, or location really merits these prices (though apparently enough people pay it just the same). Its officially to the point now where it'd more feasable for my wife/I to wait a few months and buy a pre-viewed DVD from the rental store for ~$10 than see a matinee for $12. (Yes, of course, justing renting would be cheaper; that's not the point I'm making.)
Excellent flick. I do feel a little cheated that, where I saw the movie (central CT in a National Amusements theater) there was NO preview/teaser for SW EP 3. (Additionally, people who stay to the end of the credits to see the extra funny bit might be disappointed, as there doesn't seem to be anything beyond static credits.) *shrug* Still, _The Incredibles_ itself is a nice piece of work.
[Mandrake] is quite rigid and require to enjoy GUI config tools (cause some of them cannot be bypassed).
I'm curious what tools you're referring to. I'm far from any expert on any distro, but I've never had a problem dumping out to a console window, su'ing to root, and tweaking the odd config file by hand (mainly in that I still don't understand where some things are at in the mdk gui tools ; seems like I always have to hand-edit/etc/hosts for my 3-machine home LAN)... and the systems I do this cover most of the common gamut a normal person would need to bother with.
I thought Kill Bill didn't have any CGI work. Wasn't it a deliberate choice by Tarantino?
IIRC, there was a brief moment where the live action snapped over to hand-drawn anime style action, then snapped back to live action. (Unless my old age is getting movies mixed up.) Pretty interested effect, I thought.
Name one other commerical program that charges you monthly (to the tune of $60 a year), simply to use their software which may or may not work as advertised, whose performance varies so wildly that you simply cannot predict whether it will work for you or not until you pay up...
> Business Apps don't necessarily mean "MS Office."
True. However, I did interview with an engineering group at Lockheed in Ft. Worth. While this is hardly a representative cross section of ALL of Lockheed, they did seem to have an awful lot of information in excel tables with a visual basic "GUI" veneer on top of it all to do data lookups. I suppose it works, but I had always thought lockheed harked back far enough to have tons of data pre-dating MS Excel. [shrug]
A nitpick (but sometimes important, depending on your audience)... but you're free to do with it (to a degree) what you wish, so long as, if you redistribute it, you contribute any changes back. (Sure, you imply this in your next paragraph, but people who are Just Joining might not pick up on that.)
I think you, I, and ESR all agree the point they are taking this tack is because it *IS* an important point, but what I carried away was that the energy we expend explaining to the man-on-the-street (or more correctly, management, etc) about the difference between gratis/libre is energy better spent elsewhere. I've practically worked up a spiel (sp?) to carefully caveat the difference between these when I mention linux/open-source/etc to people who aren't familiar. Would be nice if the ambiguity didn't exist.
Someone may well correct me, but I think it has its roots in the comedian Yakov Smirnov (sp?) who used a similar bit in his routines to describe how backward things were in Soviet Russia compared to the U.S.
I'll definitely attest to the FDB hard drives for near-silent operation. All my main drives are now FDB. Second to this, some manufacturers do make nice/quiet optical drives... I recently bought a Sony combo drive (it was just under $100 at the neighborhood store) and I have to check the drive light to make sure it's doing anything. My biggest noise source right now with three PC's all running is the cheapo power supply on one of them (which I can't change since, thanks to the cheapo case, I can't seem to extricate).
Well, as someone who started on an Atari 2600, who's been a PC game player for about 20 years ("gamer" oversells things a bit to describe me), who has seen the ads for every nintendo since it first came out, and who has owned a PS2 for just over two years now, I think "3DO"s main problem is that I have no idea what the f*ck it is, looks like, or who made it, when it was released, etc. Maybe it was not successfully marketed to non-gamer-types for anyone to really care?
I hate having to take a contrarian point of view here, but the general delivery of parent's comment (rant) is starting to turn into its own little troll here on/., and while I generally agree with the sentiment expressed, people need to understand that no single person has ultimate, omniscient training in every conceivable thing... that is, the FBI agents involved in this little affair are probably not trained or assigned to (1) child abduction (2) murder (3) drug or (4) extortion units. These were probably something more akin to "computer crimes" agents (or whatever) that actually did have a block of free time some day to do a raid on a school.
Same argument goes to everyone who whines about why/. posts the latest case mod by some teenager when cancer, hunger, national broad-band, $YOUR_PASSIONATE_ISSUE otherwise goes unresolved.
You implied work/office, but on my home LAN of 3 machines (two dual' into '98), I gave up on NFS and went fully-samba. I might not have had NFS *properly* config'ed through and through, but my home network is fairly simple. Still, I'd have occasional problems with NFS/automount hanging up somewhere causing machines to *not* be able to shutdown properly. (It'd hang the shutdown scripts.) Since I went all-samba (even for the all-Linux aspect of the network) this just doesn't happen to me anymore, so samba/automount seems more tolerant of oddball problems. (YMMV)
Slashdot Mirror
> buy a copy of XP, install, activate, update, reboot, update, reboot, get SP1 & 2
Nice little roll, there. I probably oughtn't point out that if you're actually buying a copy of XP these days that it'll have SP2 applied to it already. At least, all the stores around here sell it this way.
Of course, it's totally irrelevant how tricksey the DVD player itself is w.r.t. crypto, so long as the unit has to send a decoded signal that any cheap Wal-mart-purchased TV can view. For practical purposes, this Achille's Heel just can't be solved w/o getting everyone (consumers) to throw all their {A/V gear, players, televisions, PC's} out and start over.
Is it really? How often do you boot? I reboot whenever there's a power failure (and thank God for ext3). None yet this winter, so I really can't recall how long the boot takes.
:)
Working through an LFS-based custom system setup (so as to get a *really* small system footprint; "why" is irrelevant) can require a "few" reboots to workout (1) what is needed in the kernel, and (2) setup the init scripts (which in my case differed quite a bit from my box-distro). Assuming the target system doesn't have full development tools in it or web access (or what have you) it can take booting back and forth until the more tricky bits get resolved. But that's just one example from my recent past.
Depending on whose number you believe, flash drives are good for about 100k writes... not that such a number tells me how long it would last. Anyway, I'm working on a CF-based server, but the CF will be effectively read-only, as the file system will mount into a ram-drive... for what I'm needing, I don't need any additional writes (or I can mount a network drive or something).
Excellent thought; I might keep an eye out for someone junking an old laptop. Though this is tending towards being OT, I have a current 'project' brewing slowly at home where I'm going to put a pci modem on a riser card on a mini-ITX board (w/ onboard LAN) and run it via a LFS-based linux build; sort of a small-profile, DIY dialup-modem firewall/router box. Got the S/W mostly sorted out; just remains to work the H/W and case (since I'm wanting to build really small so as to be portable, should I need to tote it around to firewall someone's crud-infested dialup-based PC in the future... though the impetus was more based on getting a silent system for personal use).
Well, for original thread starter you replied to, it might have been a BB connection. I'm more accutely aware of my family only having dialup, however; I recently wiped and restored my cousin's XP system since it wasn't responding to anything user-oriented. While I didn't have my CD of utils handy to help out (it was a vacation trip; I was unprepared), it wouldn't have mattered; SO MUCH spyware/adware was running that just getting it to display 'Start' took minutes, that and the 'net connection was running full bore w/o me asking it to. Was pretty hopeless. On a side note, not being technically inclined, she thought she might actually need a new computer (a common theme, it seems) ... she did sorta get one when I was finished, plus the requisite lecture and followup CD-in-the-mail. I despise that this is the common state of affairs on windows boxes. :-/
> ...when reading Slashdot.
Except for those who know that a quick ctrl+ / ctrl- pair fixes things up nicely w/o a refresh, troll. =)
(Yes, I'm aware it's not a panacea for all FF/site issues.)
I caught a pop-up layer/frame thing yesterday while looking for inflation data. (Sorry I don't have the site address now; The popup iframe was served directly to advert site registration.) Having ad-block already installed, I blocked the iframe and reloaded... I still wound up with an empty pseudo-window thing (had border, title, and "X", but no content) popping up in front of the content I was interested in, so in my mind FF1.0/Ad-block still currently fails here.
short of lugging a home-built linux box w/ modem, NIC, and NAT/firewall running on it, please point us to relatively inexpensive hardware firewall / router gizmo's that have a built-in 56k modem... I've only seen such a thing advertised once on the web and it was > $300 at the time; never seen such a thing at the local store. Note: the most recent survey showed broadband usage is still below 25%, so a great many people are still dialing up (self included). Seriously, I'd likely buy one at a reasonable price from a reputable maker.
> I haven't been in a theater in a few years, so I
> don't even know how much tickets are these days.
Just went over the past weekend. In central CT (nowhere-spectacular, USA), a mid-afternoon "matinee" ticket price was just jacked up $0.50 to $6.00 per person. The evening price (that I've not paid for in a long, long time) is $9.00 per person. The small soda is, IIRC, $3.50 (and fairly small). Nothing about the theater, staff, or location really merits these prices (though apparently enough people pay it just the same). Its officially to the point now where it'd more feasable for my wife/I to wait a few months and buy a pre-viewed DVD from the rental store for ~$10 than see a matinee for $12. (Yes, of course, justing renting would be cheaper; that's not the point I'm making.)
Excellent flick. I do feel a little cheated that, where I saw the movie (central CT in a National Amusements theater) there was NO preview/teaser for SW EP 3. (Additionally, people who stay to the end of the credits to see the extra funny bit might be disappointed, as there doesn't seem to be anything beyond static credits.) *shrug* Still, _The Incredibles_ itself is a nice piece of work.
[Mandrake] is quite rigid and require to enjoy GUI config tools (cause some of them cannot be bypassed).
/etc/hosts for my 3-machine home LAN) ... and the systems I do this cover most of the common gamut a normal person would need to bother with.
I'm curious what tools you're referring to. I'm far from any expert on any distro, but I've never had a problem dumping out to a console window, su'ing to root, and tweaking the odd config file by hand (mainly in that I still don't understand where some things are at in the mdk gui tools ; seems like I always have to hand-edit
I thought Kill Bill didn't have any CGI work. Wasn't it a deliberate choice by Tarantino?
IIRC, there was a brief moment where the live action snapped over to hand-drawn anime style action, then snapped back to live action. (Unless my old age is getting movies mixed up.) Pretty interested effect, I thought.
Name one other commerical program that charges you monthly (to the tune of $60 a year), simply to use their software which may or may not work as advertised, whose performance varies so wildly that you simply cannot predict whether it will work for you or not until you pay up...
... not counting Everquest? ;-)
> what does FOSS stand for?
Free/Open Source Software (as when you aren't splitting hairs about the differences between "Free" and "Open").
> Business Apps don't necessarily mean "MS Office."
True. However, I did interview with an engineering group at Lockheed in Ft. Worth. While this is hardly a representative cross section of ALL of Lockheed, they did seem to have an awful lot of information in excel tables with a visual basic "GUI" veneer on top of it all to do data lookups. I suppose it works, but I had always thought lockheed harked back far enough to have tons of data pre-dating MS Excel. [shrug]
A nitpick (but sometimes important, depending on your audience) ... but you're free to do with it (to a degree) what you wish, so long as, if you redistribute it, you contribute any changes back. (Sure, you imply this in your next paragraph, but people who are Just Joining might not pick up on that.)
I think you, I, and ESR all agree the point they are taking this tack is because it *IS* an important point, but what I carried away was that the energy we expend explaining to the man-on-the-street (or more correctly, management, etc) about the difference between gratis/libre is energy better spent elsewhere. I've practically worked up a spiel (sp?) to carefully caveat the difference between these when I mention linux/open-source/etc to people who aren't familiar. Would be nice if the ambiguity didn't exist.
You're confusing "pick and drop" with "cease and desist", though, aren't you? ;-)
Just curious though, what started this cliche?
Someone may well correct me, but I think it has its roots in the comedian Yakov Smirnov (sp?) who used a similar bit in his routines to describe how backward things were in Soviet Russia compared to the U.S.
Almost... its "Your Math May Vary". ;-)
I'll definitely attest to the FDB hard drives for near-silent operation. All my main drives are now FDB. Second to this, some manufacturers do make nice/quiet optical drives... I recently bought a Sony combo drive (it was just under $100 at the neighborhood store) and I have to check the drive light to make sure it's doing anything. My biggest noise source right now with three PC's all running is the cheapo power supply on one of them (which I can't change since, thanks to the cheapo case, I can't seem to extricate).
> I never understood why 3DO did so badly ...
Well, as someone who started on an Atari 2600, who's been a PC game player for about 20 years ("gamer" oversells things a bit to describe me), who has seen the ads for every nintendo since it first came out, and who has owned a PS2 for just over two years now, I think "3DO"s main problem is that I have no idea what the f*ck it is, looks like, or who made it, when it was released, etc. Maybe it was not successfully marketed to non-gamer-types for anyone to really care?
I hate having to take a contrarian point of view here, but the general delivery of parent's comment (rant) is starting to turn into its own little troll here on /., and while I generally agree with the sentiment expressed, people need to understand that no single person has ultimate, omniscient training in every conceivable thing... that is, the FBI agents involved in this little affair are probably not trained or assigned to (1) child abduction (2) murder (3) drug or (4) extortion units. These were probably something more akin to "computer crimes" agents (or whatever) that actually did have a block of free time some day to do a raid on a school.
/. posts the latest case mod by some teenager when cancer, hunger, national broad-band, $YOUR_PASSIONATE_ISSUE otherwise goes unresolved.
Same argument goes to everyone who whines about why
You implied work/office, but on my home LAN of 3 machines (two dual' into '98), I gave up on NFS and went fully-samba. I might not have had NFS *properly* config'ed through and through, but my home network is fairly simple. Still, I'd have occasional problems with NFS/automount hanging up somewhere causing machines to *not* be able to shutdown properly. (It'd hang the shutdown scripts.) Since I went all-samba (even for the all-Linux aspect of the network) this just doesn't happen to me anymore, so samba/automount seems more tolerant of oddball problems. (YMMV)