...are people who not only get on their soapbox before knowing what they're talking about, but also tell us what the view is like from up there.
People here (and elsewhere) attack Microsoft for very good reasons: Microsoft is evil incorporate and puts its own interests far ahead of its users' needs (whether it be privacy, security, stability, etc) in a very heavy-handed and public way which makes for easy bashing. Many people also tend to be unfairly nasty towards them. Microsoft BOB, for example, got a very unjustified bad rap, as did the paper clip in Office and the jumping "search dog" in XP.
Is Sony any better or worse than MS? I don't know; I don't own any Sony stuff and I don't keep up on their practices. The new CD format thing sure does seem to suck, though, and judging from the ~50 comments I've read many people here agree it's a bad idea. They also appear to think that Sony aims to prevent fair use by adopting it. That sentiment would seem to be in opposition to your assessment of the Slashdot readers. So why all the harsh words?
You've come to the wrong place for unbiased opinions. You'd do better to complain about the weather.
is the ability to Cancel a download, click the link again, and have the browser (usually) pick up where the previous download attempt left off.
I don't know about Mozilla, but Opera has this. It also seems more stable (and perhaps less bloated, although I haven't quantified that statement) than Mozilla as well. You also get a pop-up killer feature, is my favorite feature of Opera. My next favorite is the fact that Opera starts to download a file while you are choosing the location to save it to. More often than not, the download is done before I navigate to where it should be.
-B
Re:WTF. It's 5/7/5, people.
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
They also don't know
Haiku is about nature
Traditionally
I guess it's back to RedHat (going to lose the fast install and low footprint)
You ever bother choosing "Custom Install" in Red Hat? You can get as small a footprint as you want. As for fast install, that's completely useless for me, although your situation may be different. How often do you install? It's about once a year for me and I don't mind taking to the time to look through what's new when I do install. And you even get a kickstart file made automatically for you as a bonus. Makes installing on more than one box very quick.
Using Red Hat will also give you something to bitch about, too, so there's an up side....
Get the $87 Radeon 8500LE at newegg.com. It smokes a Geforce3 and costs less.:)
Do they have 3D Linux drivers? Last I checked, you had to hack-up an X server, kinda like what was going on with Voodoo3 when it first came out. I was seriously thinking about Radeon until I did a google search on it. Although I didn't read that far into any of the details...
nVidia's model might hurt them in the future, but you gotta love the fact that I will still be able to get drivers from nVidia after VisionTek folds. Cookie cutter boards do have their advantages. Cookie cutter boards do have their advantages..
You know what I just realized? I've never installed drivers from VisionTek. I always go to nVidia's site, grab the Win32 and Linux drivers and stick them both on a network share. I never even thought about going to VisionTek's site. Huh. Maybe that's what's killing them? The cookie producers can't get out from under the name of the company that makes the dough?
Anyway, great board. I'm eventually going to stop dual booting and get a dedicated Win32 box (grumble... Loki's dead... grumble...), like maybe one of those barebones cubist boxes from Shuttle. I'll probably stick a GeForce4 in that, but I'm keeping the GTS Pro in my main Linux workstation. Of course, I still have a machine with a Voodoo3 in it, so I may be a bit of an anachronist...
-B
Re:Worth learning LWP instead of doing it manually
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Can anyone discuss if it's worth it to learn this module and convert HTML the "right" way? Does it provide more reliability, easy of use or deployment, or other spiffiness?
First, I don't know what "the right way" means. Whatever works for your situation works and is just as "right" as any other solution. Second, I don't know excatly what you're using in comparision. I can think of a dozen ways to grab text from a web page/ftp site, create a web robot, etc. The LWP modules do a good job of pulling lots of functionality into one package, though, so if you expect to expand your current process's capabilities at any point, I'd maybe recommend it over something like a set of shell scripts.
Having said all that, I can say that yes, in general, it's worth it to learn the modules if you know you're going to be doing a lot of network stuff along with other programmatic stuff. It provides all the reliability, ease of use/deployment, and other general spiffiness you get with Perl. If you have a grudge against Perl, then it probably won't do anything for you; learning LWP won't make you like Perl if you already hate it. But if you have other means to gather similar data and you think might like to take advantage of Perl's other strengths (database access, text parsing/generation, etc) then you'd do well to use something "internal" to Perl rather than 3 or 4 disparate sets of tools glued together (version changes, patches, etc can make keeping everything together hard sometimes). Of course, you can also use Perl to glue these programs together and then integrate LWP code bit-by-bit in order to evaluate the modules' strengths and weaknesses.
Does the LWP stuff replace things like wget for quick one-liners? No. Does it make life a little easier if you have to do something else, or a whole bunch of something elses, after you do your network-related stuff? Yes.
Or is it just a bloated Perl module that slaps a layer of indirection onto what is sometimes a very simple task?
Ah, I have been trolled. Pardon me.
-B
The GeForce2 GTS is a good buy still
on
VisionTek Folds
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've got a GeForce2 GTS Pro, the 64MB AGP one. I'm using it on this very PC. It's been a great card. I bought it (right after the GeForce3s had just been out, whenever that was) for like $75.00 brand new. I figured that I'd get the highest end of the previous model and save some cash to upgrade when another new model comes out. By all rights I should have bought a GeForce3 by now since they are getting cheap in the face of the GeForce4s, but the GTS Pro I have seems fine still. It doesn't have all the latest features (I don't think it does hardware T&L for example), but I haven't noticed any game I've played lagging at med-high settings on my AMD 1.33GHz (that includes MoH:AA, SoF2, GTA3, and even the new Battlefield 1942 demo).
I was going to get a Geforce4 Ti not too long ago, figuring I'd already "saved" money by leaping the GeForce3 upgrade and could therefore justify spending more to get the newest high-end card, but I just don't feel the need. Works great in Windows, works great in Linux, reasonably fast, not that hot as long as I have my extra fans on, so it's all good.
If anyone needs a fair-to-decent 3D card with good dual-boot support, grab the GeForce2 GTS like T-Kir says. It's a bargain, even still.
-B
Only encrypt what needs to be safe, not everything
on
Crypto Leash for Laptops?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Why the hell would you want/usr to be encrypted? That would take like a year. All you need is to keep your personal files encrypted -- $HOME,/var/spool/mail, and so forth. I use BestCrypt on my laptop and one of my Linux servers. It does a great job whether you use Linux or Windows or both.
On the laptop, I have an encrypted home directory. I never suspend my laptop, so I always log in/out when I use it in different locations. If someone stole it, they'd have a nearly impossible time getting to my personal files.
On the fileserver I use it via Samba and NFS mounts. This is why I chose BestCrypt over some other kind of encrypted filesystem/volume, actually. My wife can mount a volume file from her Windows machine via Samba and I can mount them via NFS (or via Samba when I'm booted into Windows game mode).
Best part is that there's no batteries, bracelets, rings, whatever to worry about. Just remember your passphrase and you're good to go. I'd recommend BestCrypt to anyone.
And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.
You're spot-on with this. People are rarely kind to a network.
I once worked for a Fortune 500 company who put our entire division (only 160 people; we where the smallest in the company by a factor of 10) in its own building way far away from the rest on campus. They signed the lease on the building and began build-out before they realized that the big cemetary and canyon/bridge between us and the Home Office prevented any sort of digging a trough for a fibre run. So they gave us this line-of-site microwave transceiver (dunno what kind, beyond that is was the flaky kind) to put on the roof which would talk with another one on a building that was on campus. The microwave link was supposed to top out at 10mpbs, but I don't think we ever got more than 5-7mpbs due to the long range, fog, birds, whatever.
You think that would be enough for 160 people, right? Not a chance. What most people didn't know was that all the mail servers and windows shares and Unix file/print servers and everything but our desktop machines were on the other side of that link. It made for a real tragedy. And most people were really oblivious as to why this was bad and why you had to be polite to the network. They couldn't grasp that the little blue wire wasn't like the power cord going into a desklamp. I can safely say that the nicer someone's hair, the more likely they meaner they were to our network link. We used to joke that at times we'd probably get better bitrates with two cans and a string, yelling ones and zeroes at each other...
You'd get some half-wit trying to print his 340 page PPT presentation himself in full color (instead of send it to the media center) and mail would slow to a crawl. Mail itself was another excercise in futility. The S&M (that's sales and marketing for the previously mentioned "garage shop" types) folks loved to email big PPT files as attachments to six or eight mailing lists at once. They'd send meeting notes as Word docs, each with graphic headers and footers of the company logo and address, and everyone would have to annotate them. It was almost funny to see them get all confused when people's edits would conflict and the head honcho would have to email out 6 or 8 versions for an eyeball diff. The art department would often print big tif file proofs, in color, rather than look at them on-screen. The web guys were always ftp'ing stuff to the ftp servers, updating web sites stuff, etc. Trying checking in 150MB of source while all this is going on. Now imagine the hilarity of trying to do it when the frog-in-the-blender exe is being re-re-re-remailed to you. I used to save network-related work for lunch or really late in the day when everyone that didn't know what the word "bandwidth" meant was out golfing or getting their hair waxed or whatever it is suits do when it's after 3pm and time to leave work.
The one incident that made it all worth it for me was this one time when a guy came to me asking if I'd burn a CD (I had the only burner) of all ~400MB of his new artwork/media kit/.ppt/.doc stuff so he could drive it over to main campus for some meeting/deadline he had. When I asked why didn't he save his work in a shared folder or something, he said that he tried, but the "network is down and IT says it works so they won't come out and fix it". Turns out that he tried to save his stuff to a share and found it very slow, so tried again and again. And then he tried saving to another shared folder, again and again. Then he tried ftp'ing it three or four times when emailing it to a cohort on main campus was also "taking forever". No matter what he tried, the network was slow, so he figured his only recourse was sneakernetting it over to his meeting or whatever it was he had going on. His copying this file 15-20 times slowed our link to a barely-noticable crawl. My ssh sessions reminded me of way back when I had a 1200 baud modem. I think I was in the middle of a daily build or something, and knew check-in would take 8 hours. So I burned his CD for him and then quit for the day without telling anyone why I was leaving.
I wound up working from home a lot once I got a cable modem.
Yeah, that was a great week. The amusing part was that it was actually the second highest traffic week of that 3 month period, and the same was true for the comments.
I dug it. One of my sites was the topic of someone's successful article submission and it made the front page. I figure the high number of articles being posted lowered the bar enough for me to get posted. Heh. Seriously though, there's some balance between the fark-ish 80 items per hour and Slashdot's 8 per day that the blackout hit just right, IMO.
So, yeah, have a Blackout whenever y'all want.
Hey, if it gets more stories (with fewer comments; after a couple hundred it gets Usenetish) on the front page, then I'm all for it. In fact, maybe we could make it a regular event, perhaps a Geeks from Space replacement? Easier on your guys (except for approving submissions, maybe). Or maybe it could be like Arbor Day and every/16 could decide when they want to hold their own Slashdot Blackout Week. Keep it rotating, cut down on the the jibba jabba a bit.
Slashdot has become the comment board for Fark, not The Register.
Speaking of which, did anyone else really like the S/N ratio and volume of stories during that Slashdot Blackout thing? More stories, fewer coments would be fine by me. (Assuming I have any say at all, which I don't. I'm not actually paying for Slashdot or anything. My subsidy is purely limited to clicking banner ads and buying the occasional item from Thinkgeek.)
-B
Re:Using Linux in all aspects from the ground up .
on
Penguin Airlines
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"It's 'chgres -x -p#30240 -usrname=John Doe -t12:00 -tx13:35 -fn usa412."
I don't mean to be pedantic, but you probably ought to quote the username. The shell will think it's another arg otherwise. So you'd change his reservation like so:
As a journalist, one should never use such words as "claims" or "asserts".
Remember that you're talking about USA Today, here. It's not exactly the paragon of journalism. They hire "writers". You might as well argue that sentences shouldn't begin with conjunctions.
Just a brief point to make, it's 2.038K. 2.38K is 2380. Nifty sounding year, but not appropriate to this conversation
Yeah, that was a mental typo. I really meant Y20.38K, see. Yeah, that's the ticket...
-B
Go see the list of critical dates
on
1985 Usenet About Y2k
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you've thought about Y2.38K, then you might like JR Stockton's Critical
and Significant Dates page. I found it while rummaging through Google looking for info related to Steltor's CorporateTime UNIAPI_TIME time value from their API. (UNIAPI_TIME was a "weird" number, which turned out to minutes since their epoch -- 1/1/90. I couldn't find any info about it, so I "decoded" it myself with a tiny Perl script. In case anyone cares.)
Anyway, Stockton's page had me occupied for a few good hours. It's quite a read. It has great stuff on it, like the base filedate for Windows "Last Modified" calculation, when 16-bit BSDs die, when NTFS fails, etc. LOTS of good dates there.
I even submitted my newly-discovered UNIAPI_TIME epoch value. It was much more exciting that submitting my transmeta-based Gateway/AOL Webpad's BogoMips value to the BogoMips mini-HOWTO.
Games install but won't play/start. Errors are something like WineX coudln't read the CD, the CD wasn't in the drive, the drive couldn't be initialized, etc. (I'm paraphrasing from memory, so don't quite me). The actual error message varies by game. FWIW, I have Plextor drives, a PlexWriter 8/20 CD-R and a UltraPleX 40max CD-ROM. They are great drives. Neither work with WineX.
Are you sure it's not a config issue on your end?
Yep. Mostly sure. I've used WineX with a nearly similar setup on a non-SCSI system with a nearly completely identical config. From what I can gather, there are certain SCSI drives which have issues. I've followed the support forum closely, too. I've made the symlinks, run everything as root, etc. without success. I even tried mounting an ISO image of the game disc via the loopback and symlinking to that. Didn't work. (Although if you ever want *fast* access to a CD-ROM and you have the disc space, locally mounting an ISO can be handy...)
Christ just get a freaking IDE CD/DVD drive and stop whinning - they cost next to nothing these days.
"Whining"? I was warning, you nitwit. As in "They keep saying SCSI support is fixed with each new release, but check before you pay money because it hasn't been fixed in the past..." That's whining exactly how? I bet you wouldn't think it was whining if you had SCSI hardware.
And how do you equate this to me getting new hardware? Where the hell did you get that one?! I have certain hardware. Transgaming said their software works on that hardware. I paid money, installed said software, and found that it doesn't work. I repeated this cycle three times. I don't care what the freaking drives cost, I have my own freaking hardware already freaking installed that WineX is supposed to freaking work on but freaking won't.
Normally I don't respond to ACs, but your response was especially inane. And it reminds me again why I shouldn't bother...
I paid for a subscription when I first heard about WineX. That was last year about this time, and my subscription has run out. I had hoped that WineX would take the place of Loki going down (or not releasing patches or new games -- same thing), but WineX is not a good replacement for a native port if you have certain hardware, namely SCSI CD-ROM/CD-R(W) drives.
WineX will not work with SCSI drives and copy-protected CDs. Every new release has something about how SCSI support has improved, is fixed, etc, but it never seems to work. If you check their forums you'll see what I mean. Most every issue is marked "fixed", with the solution seemingly always being a symlink or some such. It's not fixed as of the last release.
Does anyone know if they got it fixed this time? I tried to check the release notes at http://downloads.transgaming.com/files/winex-2_1-r eleasenotes.txt, but got a 500 error (on a.txt file no less). If the SCSI issues are fixed, then I'm gladly subscribing again. If not, I'm saving my money and keeping my new dual-boot setup.
If you have SCSI drives, make sure you investigate this before giving them any money or you'll likely have paid for nothing. I don't think SCSI support is real high on their support list. It's been broken for almost a year, after all...
Certainly my response was no "stupider" than your post, in which you apparently said you wanted something for nothing. Although, getting something for nothing, or even at a deep discount, is pretty smart. So I take that back. Your original post was not stupid. It was merely fanciful. Not as fanciful as wanting a pony, however. Nothing is more fanciful nor, dare I say, whimsical, than wanting a pony.
First we start with a totally unrelated metaphor... ...followed by a childish attempt to use absurd logic to discredit me... ...and finishes with a source of data contains an irrelevant piece of data.
Uh, yeah, sure. A direct example of paying 1/6 as much for something is *comepletely* unrelated to what you were saying. Ok, right. And I was really using world peace and my wanting a pony as a logical statement. It was a joke. Get over it.
The $400 a month price tag is actually for commercial internet service.
So you can find residential services with the bandwidth you want for less than $400? Then quit whining and do it. You said you wanted certain up and down speeds. Well, for $400 you can have it, business or not. You never said you wanted a connection at home, in any case.
Im saying I'd pay nearly double the price to remove the cap.
Then say that, you nitwit. You said "I wish I could do a 2 meg down 1 meg up. I'd pay $80 a month for that RIGHT NOW.". That is not saying "I gladly pay double my current rate if their service had no cap, like the way it used to be." And since you've clarified your initial statement so that us normal people can understand what gems of wisdom you chose to bestow upon us, I actually happen agree with you (talk regarding my anus notwithstanding). I would also gladly pay double what I pay if my capped service was uncapped. I never have a problem paying a fair price. But unreasnably wanting to pay 1/6 of the goign rate for something is just, well... childish.
Let's also consider that the data sheet YOU showed me illustrates very clearly that DSL is considerably more expensive than cable.
I showed you a data sheet that had a Net connection close to what you said you wanted. That connection is more expensive than cable, it's true. Maybe you should find a data sheet for residential Net service that gives you 2/1 up/down speeds at $80/month. But you can't, because DSL is more expensive than cable. See? We're in complete agreement. That's how I got to the whole "You don't want to pay what you should have to pay" thing. You wanted fast for cheap, when in fact fast costs more than cheap. More succintly: if you want a fast Net connection, you're going to have to pay for it.
There's no way that cable modem service with that type of bandwidth would cost $400 a month. I used to have it for $50.
And how many users were on your node? How many now? Did you at any time think that the cable company was obligated, in any way, to give you anything but "high speed" service? Did they ever promise 2/1 up/down speeds for that price? If so, then you have room to bitch. More likely, they said it was "up to" some multiple faster than an analog modem.
Hey, man, I'm with you. Bandwidth ought to be cheaper. There's lots of extra supply these days. Fibre is everywhere. T1s and such are (somewhat) cheaper than they used to be (I remember paying $900/month for a fractional T1 in 1995 and thought I was getting a good deal), but like you, I don't understand why we still don't have faster residential Net connections.
At the risk of (again) seeming overly chimeric, I would rather have a 2mbps/1mbps up/down Net connection for $80 a month than a pony. Or even world peace. I'd have to think about the kids hunger thing, though (but I have a sneaky suspicion that I would opt for the fast Net connection and then just leave Sally Struthers to work her magic on behalf of the kids).
What you childishly said is that I want a an 85% discount on my internet connection.
What you childishly said was that you wanted to pay 85% of what it should cost to have that much bandwidth. You said you'd pay $80 for what costs around $500, and I gave you a link showing you what you can get for $500. Seemed pretty clear to me. I mean, I think I read both sentences of your original post right. You think if they removed the cap you'd get your 2mbps up again? Dream on. They capped because they realized they could put more people on each node, like I said. Now if they remove the cap, you're likely not going to get much more than you get now since they have more customers on your network segment than they did originally. It might go up a tiny bit, but you'll never, ever, never get even 1mbps in any direction -- unless you want to pay $400 per month. That was my main point.
What I'm really saying is that I'll pay more for less restrictions.
Then you should have said that. That's a statement I can get behind.
I suppose it's hard to see my side of this when your point of view is obstructed by your anus.
Now... why do you have to get all mean like that? Look man, try not to take everything so personally. Life will be easier that way. You'd think I disparaged your family honor or something. Why so touchy? You recently switch to decaf? Howard Stern fire you? What?
It's hard to see your side of this because you never said what your side was. We're actually in agreement (again, except for that anus thing). Can't we all just get along?
Slashdot Mirror
People here (and elsewhere) attack Microsoft for very good reasons: Microsoft is evil incorporate and puts its own interests far ahead of its users' needs (whether it be privacy, security, stability, etc) in a very heavy-handed and public way which makes for easy bashing. Many people also tend to be unfairly nasty towards them. Microsoft BOB, for example, got a very unjustified bad rap, as did the paper clip in Office and the jumping "search dog" in XP.
Is Sony any better or worse than MS? I don't know; I don't own any Sony stuff and I don't keep up on their practices. The new CD format thing sure does seem to suck, though, and judging from the ~50 comments I've read many people here agree it's a bad idea. They also appear to think that Sony aims to prevent fair use by adopting it. That sentiment would seem to be in opposition to your assessment of the Slashdot readers. So why all the harsh words?
You've come to the wrong place for unbiased opinions. You'd do better to complain about the weather.
-B
I don't know about Mozilla, but Opera has this. It also seems more stable (and perhaps less bloated, although I haven't quantified that statement) than Mozilla as well. You also get a pop-up killer feature, is my favorite feature of Opera. My next favorite is the fact that Opera starts to download a file while you are choosing the location to save it to. More often than not, the download is done before I navigate to where it should be.
-B
Haiku is about nature
Traditionally
-B
You ever bother choosing "Custom Install" in Red Hat? You can get as small a footprint as you want. As for fast install, that's completely useless for me, although your situation may be different. How often do you install? It's about once a year for me and I don't mind taking to the time to look through what's new when I do install. And you even get a kickstart file made automatically for you as a bonus. Makes installing on more than one box very quick.
Using Red Hat will also give you something to bitch about, too, so there's an up side....
-B
Do they have 3D Linux drivers? Last I checked, you had to hack-up an X server, kinda like what was going on with Voodoo3 when it first came out. I was seriously thinking about Radeon until I did a google search on it. Although I didn't read that far into any of the details...
-B
You know what I just realized? I've never installed drivers from VisionTek. I always go to nVidia's site, grab the Win32 and Linux drivers and stick them both on a network share. I never even thought about going to VisionTek's site. Huh. Maybe that's what's killing them? The cookie producers can't get out from under the name of the company that makes the dough?
Anyway, great board. I'm eventually going to stop dual booting and get a dedicated Win32 box (grumble... Loki's dead... grumble...), like maybe one of those barebones cubist boxes from Shuttle. I'll probably stick a GeForce4 in that, but I'm keeping the GTS Pro in my main Linux workstation. Of course, I still have a machine with a Voodoo3 in it, so I may be a bit of an anachronist...
-B
First, I don't know what "the right way" means. Whatever works for your situation works and is just as "right" as any other solution. Second, I don't know excatly what you're using in comparision. I can think of a dozen ways to grab text from a web page/ftp site, create a web robot, etc. The LWP modules do a good job of pulling lots of functionality into one package, though, so if you expect to expand your current process's capabilities at any point, I'd maybe recommend it over something like a set of shell scripts.
Having said all that, I can say that yes, in general, it's worth it to learn the modules if you know you're going to be doing a lot of network stuff along with other programmatic stuff. It provides all the reliability, ease of use/deployment, and other general spiffiness you get with Perl. If you have a grudge against Perl, then it probably won't do anything for you; learning LWP won't make you like Perl if you already hate it. But if you have other means to gather similar data and you think might like to take advantage of Perl's other strengths (database access, text parsing/generation, etc) then you'd do well to use something "internal" to Perl rather than 3 or 4 disparate sets of tools glued together (version changes, patches, etc can make keeping everything together hard sometimes). Of course, you can also use Perl to glue these programs together and then integrate LWP code bit-by-bit in order to evaluate the modules' strengths and weaknesses.
Does the LWP stuff replace things like wget for quick one-liners? No. Does it make life a little easier if you have to do something else, or a whole bunch of something elses, after you do your network-related stuff? Yes.
Or is it just a bloated Perl module that slaps a layer of indirection onto what is sometimes a very simple task?
Ah, I have been trolled. Pardon me.
-B
I was going to get a Geforce4 Ti not too long ago, figuring I'd already "saved" money by leaping the GeForce3 upgrade and could therefore justify spending more to get the newest high-end card, but I just don't feel the need. Works great in Windows, works great in Linux, reasonably fast, not that hot as long as I have my extra fans on, so it's all good.
If anyone needs a fair-to-decent 3D card with good dual-boot support, grab the GeForce2 GTS like T-Kir says. It's a bargain, even still.
-B
On the laptop, I have an encrypted home directory. I never suspend my laptop, so I always log in/out when I use it in different locations. If someone stole it, they'd have a nearly impossible time getting to my personal files.
On the fileserver I use it via Samba and NFS mounts. This is why I chose BestCrypt over some other kind of encrypted filesystem/volume, actually. My wife can mount a volume file from her Windows machine via Samba and I can mount them via NFS (or via Samba when I'm booted into Windows game mode).
Best part is that there's no batteries, bracelets, rings, whatever to worry about. Just remember your passphrase and you're good to go. I'd recommend BestCrypt to anyone.
-B
You're spot-on with this. People are rarely kind to a network.
I once worked for a Fortune 500 company who put our entire division (only 160 people; we where the smallest in the company by a factor of 10) in its own building way far away from the rest on campus. They signed the lease on the building and began build-out before they realized that the big cemetary and canyon/bridge between us and the Home Office prevented any sort of digging a trough for a fibre run. So they gave us this line-of-site microwave transceiver (dunno what kind, beyond that is was the flaky kind) to put on the roof which would talk with another one on a building that was on campus. The microwave link was supposed to top out at 10mpbs, but I don't think we ever got more than 5-7mpbs due to the long range, fog, birds, whatever.
You think that would be enough for 160 people, right? Not a chance. What most people didn't know was that all the mail servers and windows shares and Unix file/print servers and everything but our desktop machines were on the other side of that link. It made for a real tragedy. And most people were really oblivious as to why this was bad and why you had to be polite to the network. They couldn't grasp that the little blue wire wasn't like the power cord going into a desklamp. I can safely say that the nicer someone's hair, the more likely they meaner they were to our network link. We used to joke that at times we'd probably get better bitrates with two cans and a string, yelling ones and zeroes at each other...
You'd get some half-wit trying to print his 340 page PPT presentation himself in full color (instead of send it to the media center) and mail would slow to a crawl. Mail itself was another excercise in futility. The S&M (that's sales and marketing for the previously mentioned "garage shop" types) folks loved to email big PPT files as attachments to six or eight mailing lists at once. They'd send meeting notes as Word docs, each with graphic headers and footers of the company logo and address, and everyone would have to annotate them. It was almost funny to see them get all confused when people's edits would conflict and the head honcho would have to email out 6 or 8 versions for an eyeball diff. The art department would often print big tif file proofs, in color, rather than look at them on-screen. The web guys were always ftp'ing stuff to the ftp servers, updating web sites stuff, etc. Trying checking in 150MB of source while all this is going on. Now imagine the hilarity of trying to do it when the frog-in-the-blender exe is being re-re-re-remailed to you. I used to save network-related work for lunch or really late in the day when everyone that didn't know what the word "bandwidth" meant was out golfing or getting their hair waxed or whatever it is suits do when it's after 3pm and time to leave work.
The one incident that made it all worth it for me was this one time when a guy came to me asking if I'd burn a CD (I had the only burner) of all ~400MB of his new artwork/media kit/.ppt/.doc stuff so he could drive it over to main campus for some meeting/deadline he had. When I asked why didn't he save his work in a shared folder or something, he said that he tried, but the "network is down and IT says it works so they won't come out and fix it". Turns out that he tried to save his stuff to a share and found it very slow, so tried again and again. And then he tried saving to another shared folder, again and again. Then he tried ftp'ing it three or four times when emailing it to a cohort on main campus was also "taking forever". No matter what he tried, the network was slow, so he figured his only recourse was sneakernetting it over to his meeting or whatever it was he had going on. His copying this file 15-20 times slowed our link to a barely-noticable crawl. My ssh sessions reminded me of way back when I had a 1200 baud modem. I think I was in the middle of a daily build or something, and knew check-in would take 8 hours. So I burned his CD for him and then quit for the day without telling anyone why I was leaving.
I wound up working from home a lot once I got a cable modem.
-B
I dug it. One of my sites was the topic of someone's successful article submission and it made the front page. I figure the high number of articles being posted lowered the bar enough for me to get posted. Heh. Seriously though, there's some balance between the fark-ish 80 items per hour and Slashdot's 8 per day that the blackout hit just right, IMO.
So, yeah, have a Blackout whenever y'all want.
Hey, if it gets more stories (with fewer comments; after a couple hundred it gets Usenetish) on the front page, then I'm all for it. In fact, maybe we could make it a regular event, perhaps a Geeks from Space replacement? Easier on your guys (except for approving submissions, maybe). Or maybe it could be like Arbor Day and every /16 could decide when they want to hold their own Slashdot Blackout Week. Keep it rotating, cut down on the the jibba jabba a bit.
-B
Speaking of which, did anyone else really like the S/N ratio and volume of stories during that Slashdot Blackout thing? More stories, fewer coments would be fine by me. (Assuming I have any say at all, which I don't. I'm not actually paying for Slashdot or anything. My subsidy is purely limited to clicking banner ads and buying the occasional item from Thinkgeek.)
-B
I don't mean to be pedantic, but you probably ought to quote the username. The shell will think it's another arg otherwise. So you'd change his reservation like so:
Yes, I realize you were joking.
-B
Bob wouldn't know what to do with it anyway...
-B
-B
And how!
-B
Remember that you're talking about USA Today, here. It's not exactly the paragon of journalism. They hire "writers". You might as well argue that sentences shouldn't begin with conjunctions.
-B
Yeah, that was a mental typo. I really meant Y20.38K, see. Yeah, that's the ticket...
-B
Anyway, Stockton's page had me occupied for a few good hours. It's quite a read. It has great stuff on it, like the base filedate for Windows "Last Modified" calculation, when 16-bit BSDs die, when NTFS fails, etc. LOTS of good dates there.
I even submitted my newly-discovered UNIAPI_TIME epoch value. It was much more exciting that submitting my transmeta-based Gateway/AOL Webpad's BogoMips value to the BogoMips mini-HOWTO.
-B
I'm going to buy a subscription tonight. I'll let you know how it goes.
BTW, what brand/model drives to you have?
-B
Games install but won't play/start. Errors are something like WineX coudln't read the CD, the CD wasn't in the drive, the drive couldn't be initialized, etc. (I'm paraphrasing from memory, so don't quite me). The actual error message varies by game. FWIW, I have Plextor drives, a PlexWriter 8/20 CD-R and a UltraPleX 40max CD-ROM. They are great drives. Neither work with WineX.
Are you sure it's not a config issue on your end? Yep. Mostly sure. I've used WineX with a nearly similar setup on a non-SCSI system with a nearly completely identical config. From what I can gather, there are certain SCSI drives which have issues. I've followed the support forum closely, too. I've made the symlinks, run everything as root, etc. without success. I even tried mounting an ISO image of the game disc via the loopback and symlinking to that. Didn't work. (Although if you ever want *fast* access to a CD-ROM and you have the disc space, locally mounting an ISO can be handy...)
-B
"Whining"? I was warning, you nitwit. As in "They keep saying SCSI support is fixed with each new release, but check before you pay money because it hasn't been fixed in the past..." That's whining exactly how? I bet you wouldn't think it was whining if you had SCSI hardware.
And how do you equate this to me getting new hardware? Where the hell did you get that one?! I have certain hardware. Transgaming said their software works on that hardware. I paid money, installed said software, and found that it doesn't work. I repeated this cycle three times. I don't care what the freaking drives cost, I have my own freaking hardware already freaking installed that WineX is supposed to freaking work on but freaking won't.
Normally I don't respond to ACs, but your response was especially inane. And it reminds me again why I shouldn't bother...
-B
WineX will not work with SCSI drives and copy-protected CDs. Every new release has something about how SCSI support has improved, is fixed, etc, but it never seems to work. If you check their forums you'll see what I mean. Most every issue is marked "fixed", with the solution seemingly always being a symlink or some such. It's not fixed as of the last release.
Does anyone know if they got it fixed this time? I tried to check the release notes at http://downloads.transgaming.com/files/winex-2_1-r eleasenotes.txt, but got a 500 error (on a .txt file no less). If the SCSI issues are fixed, then I'm gladly subscribing again. If not, I'm saving my money and keeping my new dual-boot setup.
If you have SCSI drives, make sure you investigate this before giving them any money or you'll likely have paid for nothing. I don't think SCSI support is real high on their support list. It's been broken for almost a year, after all...
-B
Now that's funny.
-B
Certainly my response was no "stupider" than your post, in which you apparently said you wanted something for nothing. Although, getting something for nothing, or even at a deep discount, is pretty smart. So I take that back. Your original post was not stupid. It was merely fanciful. Not as fanciful as wanting a pony, however. Nothing is more fanciful nor, dare I say, whimsical, than wanting a pony.
First we start with a totally unrelated metaphor...
...followed by a childish attempt to use absurd logic to discredit me ...
...and finishes with a source of data contains an irrelevant piece of data.
Uh, yeah, sure. A direct example of paying 1/6 as much for something is *comepletely* unrelated to what you were saying. Ok, right. And I was really using world peace and my wanting a pony as a logical statement. It was a joke. Get over it.
The $400 a month price tag is actually for commercial internet service.
So you can find residential services with the bandwidth you want for less than $400? Then quit whining and do it. You said you wanted certain up and down speeds. Well, for $400 you can have it, business or not. You never said you wanted a connection at home, in any case.
Im saying I'd pay nearly double the price to remove the cap.
Then say that, you nitwit. You said "I wish I could do a 2 meg down 1 meg up. I'd pay $80 a month for that RIGHT NOW.". That is not saying "I gladly pay double my current rate if their service had no cap, like the way it used to be." And since you've clarified your initial statement so that us normal people can understand what gems of wisdom you chose to bestow upon us, I actually happen agree with you (talk regarding my anus notwithstanding). I would also gladly pay double what I pay if my capped service was uncapped. I never have a problem paying a fair price. But unreasnably wanting to pay 1/6 of the goign rate for something is just, well... childish.
Let's also consider that the data sheet YOU showed me illustrates very clearly that DSL is considerably more expensive than cable.
I showed you a data sheet that had a Net connection close to what you said you wanted. That connection is more expensive than cable, it's true. Maybe you should find a data sheet for residential Net service that gives you 2/1 up/down speeds at $80/month. But you can't, because DSL is more expensive than cable. See? We're in complete agreement. That's how I got to the whole "You don't want to pay what you should have to pay" thing. You wanted fast for cheap, when in fact fast costs more than cheap. More succintly: if you want a fast Net connection, you're going to have to pay for it.
There's no way that cable modem service with that type of bandwidth would cost $400 a month. I used to have it for $50.
And how many users were on your node? How many now? Did you at any time think that the cable company was obligated, in any way, to give you anything but "high speed" service? Did they ever promise 2/1 up/down speeds for that price? If so, then you have room to bitch. More likely, they said it was "up to" some multiple faster than an analog modem.
Hey, man, I'm with you. Bandwidth ought to be cheaper. There's lots of extra supply these days. Fibre is everywhere. T1s and such are (somewhat) cheaper than they used to be (I remember paying $900/month for a fractional T1 in 1995 and thought I was getting a good deal), but like you, I don't understand why we still don't have faster residential Net connections.
At the risk of (again) seeming overly chimeric, I would rather have a 2mbps/1mbps up/down Net connection for $80 a month than a pony. Or even world peace. I'd have to think about the kids hunger thing, though (but I have a sneaky suspicion that I would opt for the fast Net connection and then just leave Sally Struthers to work her magic on behalf of the kids).
What you childishly said is that I want a an 85% discount on my internet connection.
What you childishly said was that you wanted to pay 85% of what it should cost to have that much bandwidth. You said you'd pay $80 for what costs around $500, and I gave you a link showing you what you can get for $500. Seemed pretty clear to me. I mean, I think I read both sentences of your original post right. You think if they removed the cap you'd get your 2mbps up again? Dream on. They capped because they realized they could put more people on each node, like I said. Now if they remove the cap, you're likely not going to get much more than you get now since they have more customers on your network segment than they did originally. It might go up a tiny bit, but you'll never, ever, never get even 1mbps in any direction -- unless you want to pay $400 per month. That was my main point.
What I'm really saying is that I'll pay more for less restrictions.
Then you should have said that. That's a statement I can get behind.
I suppose it's hard to see my side of this when your point of view is obstructed by your anus.
Now... why do you have to get all mean like that? Look man, try not to take everything so personally. Life will be easier that way. You'd think I disparaged your family honor or something. Why so touchy? You recently switch to decaf? Howard Stern fire you? What?
It's hard to see your side of this because you never said what your side was. We're actually in agreement (again, except for that anus thing). Can't we all just get along?
-B