I doubt the child porn came from Gonzales himself. The FBI collects images and videos for use as evidence during the investigations of child porn cases. Most likely Mueller asked one of his subordinates to compile and censor a small collection of child porn images for use in the meeting.
That said, it was a dirty trick. Most people are disgusted by child porn without having to see it. It was inappropriate for government officials to use these pictures the way they did.
How is it that the MS fanbois leap to defend MS & Bash Apple without reading the article?
Do you even know what Web site you're on? For anyone on Slashdot to read the article before commenting would set a dangerous precedent that would lead to intelligent, informed discussions. And who the hell wants that?
I've got to disagree. A.com domain is incredibly valuable for a business. If I want to visit a company's Web site (one I've never been to), I type companyname CTRL+Enter (i.e. www.companyname.com) in the address bar. If the site doesn't come up, I Google the name of the company and see what comes up.
The real problem is when a company's name is somewhat generic (e.g. "Tom's Computer Repair Service"). Google for that and you'll be lucky to find the result you want in the first page or two.
If a company without a unique name (whose corresponding.com domain probably wouldn't be taken anyway) has a Web presence without a logical, intuitive domain name, chances are they're not going to be much better off than if they didn't have a Web presence at all.
The chart looked about as I expected: World of Warcraft towers above the rest while several other MMOs lose ground. But what I didn't expect to see is that WoW's gains are significantly higher than its competitors' losses. World of Warcraft is doing more than dominating the market--it's increasing the size of the market.
I'm interested to see whether those gamers will move to other MMO games after World of Warcraft or if they're only in it for WoW.
I've been beta testing OneCare for several months now, and I like it more than any other "Internet security" product I've tried--far more than both Norton and McAfee (I've used both in heterogeneous environments).
Mostly, I like that OneCare isn't nearly as pervasive as either Norton or McAfee. It certainly doesn't seem to be, anyway. It's also much less annoying. It will only get in your way when it detects a real problem (a virus, or a program trying to access the Internet). The only thing about it that annoys me: every time you update an application (say, World of Warcraft or iTunes), you have to re-authorize the application to access the Internet. Many times this requires opening the newly-updated application, authorizing it, closing it, and opening it again.
One thing that most geeks will notice upon first launching OneCare is that there isn't much you can configure. You get to configure the basics (e.g. what to scan and when) but not much else. At first, I saw this as a major disadvantage. I usually like to configure every little setting in an application, so I was a bit miffed when OneCare only presented me with a few options to change. But as I continue to use it, I don't really care so much. It does what it needs to do and I haven't had any problems with it. Besides, when it works, why do you need to change anything?
I found the built-in backup utility useless, however. The thing will scan your entire computer for documents, media files, etc. then back it up to a file, very similar to the backup utility built into Windows. But you can't choose folders not to be backed up (that I can find), so your multi-gig music or video collection will be included in every backup. For some people, this won't be a problem, but for me it made it impossible to do a backup with the utility (I don't have the hard drive space to back up every audio and video file I've got). So I guess there is one place where a lack of configurability actually causes a problem. Worse still is that OneCare will show a yellow shield (green means you're all good, yellow means there's a problem but it's not severe, and red means you have a problem that requires immediate attention) if you haven't performed a backup with OneCare--so anyone that can't back up their data because of this problem will see a yellow shield, which may cause some people to worry.
I've been pretty happy with OneCare overall, and I plan to continue to use it even after they start charging me for it. At $50 a year, it's a reasonable, competitive price. But at $50 a year for up to three computers, it's a steal. (Getting it for $20 my first year doesn't hurt, either.)
...don't run well on older hardware. I have an old Pentium II 400MHz that ran Windows XP fine enough to be usable. It wasn't always "snappy" but it wasn't slow enough to be distracting. I tried to install Ubuntu on the same machine and it was more sluggish than Windows XP. Simple operations took just long enough that they were noticeably slower than they were meant to be.
While my experience may not prove Microsoft irrefutably right, it's enough for me to agree with their point: that Linux is not always going to run well on older hardware.
While I personally wouldn't use one of these services, I completely understand the people who do use them. Just think of a fairly typical scenario.
Let's say you've got 400 CDs you want to rip. You've also got a fast computer with a DVD burner. Let's also say you want your music in VBR ~256kbps MP3. Decent quality but with files small enough that you won't need a SAN just to store it all (like you realized you'd need that one time you tried FLAC).
Assume it takes no time whatsoever to get a CD, put it in your computer, and let your ripping program query your favorite metadata server. But you still want to check the accuracy of the song titles and other information (you remember the last time you tried this and relied on CDDB, only to realize after you were done that one in every five tracks was misspelled or completely wrong). Let's say it takes one minute to confirm the accuracy of the metadata and make any corrections.
Now, like I said, you've got a fast computer. So you can rip a CD in about five minutes. Add to that the one minute per disc to check the metadata accuracy and you're looking at six minutes per CD. Good! That's 10 per hour. OK, you've got 400 CDs and you can do 10 an hour. That'll only take you... hrm--I never was any good at math--carry the six, divide by pi... 40 hours. Oh. That's a full time job for a week! Dang.
Well, you've got a decent job designing widgets. You make about $40 an hour (a little over $80k per year). Which means that every CD you're ripping is worth about $4.00 in time--and you're giving up two full weeks of free time, or maybe taking a week of vacation time. This doesn't sound so fun anymore. But your loving wife just bought you an iPod for Christmas and you'd hate to let it go to waste. Couldn't you just pay someone to do it for you? I mean, you're busy. You've got a wife and, oh, let's say seven kids (you're Catholic). You just don't have that kind of time in the evenings and you just spent your vacation time on a nice, long cruise to Alaska.
Oh, and your wife makes the best meatloaf. She serves it with this incredible sauce that her mother taught her to make. At least that lousy in-law of yours was good for something! This week she cooked it too long, though. It was dry and tough. It was harder to swallow than that worm your friends dared you to eat when you were 12. Those were the times...
But I digress.
Without hesitating, you hit that Purchase button and this place sends you a few empty spindles in a box. You just stick on the provided label and send it back to them with all your CDs inside. Early next week your discs return along with a smaller spindle of DVDs containing all your music. (Excellent! Now when your hard drive crashes, like it did last year, you won't have to spend another $400 to get everything ripped again.) You copy the files to your hard drive. It takes about an hour and a half total. You copy the songs to your iPod and put your DVDs in the safe next to your father's pocketwatch and that original 1977 Darth Vader doll--ACTION FIGURE!!!--sorry, action figure--that your wife keeps asking you to sell but you have to remind her will be worth more money in another 10 years. Secretly, though, you still love Star Wars (not those new pieces of junk--though that newest one wasn't so bad--but the original... you just called it Star Wars, none of this "A New Hope" or "Episode IV" nonsense) and you just couldn't stand to sell it. And besides, does she need to nag you about it every week? I mean, she's a great woman, but can't she just let it go? It's not like it's hurting anyone. You let her keep that ragged old stuffed bear she had as a child. It's filthy and it smells (can't she just throw it in the washer?) but she keeps it on her side of the bed. She still sleeps with it sometimes. What's up with that? I mean, she's 45 years old, married, and the mother of seven children, for crying out loud! You've been thinking about talking to her about it. Maybe she needs to see a shrin
This patent does not hurt Microsoft. They can work around the patent and it won't cost them a dime beyond the development costs. Instead, this patent hurts users. It's not Microsoft that has to click an extra time to interact with an embedded object. It's the users.
And not just IE users.
The lawsuit may have been directed at Microsoft but every modern browser also infringes on the patent (including Firefox, Safari, and Opera). If Eolas desired (unlikely but possible), they could go after these other browser makers with similar lawsuits. And given that Microsoft, with its huge legal defense coffers, couldn't get the lawsuit dropped, do you really think the Mozilla Foundation could successfully defend against the lawsuit?
(Disclaimer: I don't work at AMD or sell any of their products. I'm just a fan.)
Through a local small computer company with ties to AMD, I've been beta testing AMD's GX Thin Client product, which is based on a Geode GX 533 processor (which runs at 400MHz). Granted, this isn't the exact product listed in the story, but it's built on the same platform and only seems to differ, really, in that the Thin Client doesn't include a hard drive.
The first thing one notices about the Thin Client is its size. It's small. Most hardcover novels are considerably larger than the Thin Client. Most Linksys routers are larger than the Thin Client.
The Thin Client includes flash memory for storage (128MB, if I recall), which you can take out and replace with a CompactFlash card (using the provided adapter). The Thin Client I received included a version of Windows XP Embedded and Windows CE. The performance under XP Embedded was surprisingly poor. Simply moving a window around the screen rapidly could bring the system to its knees. Windows CE, however, was pretty responsive but ultimately not very useful.
On the bright side, it runs Linux. Just load up a slim distro (Debian Base, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, etc.) onto a CF card with the appropriate drivers (which AMD doesn't yet publish on their site--I got them from one of the project leaders--but I'm sure they'll be available once the Thin Client hits the market). It works swimmingly.
Now for a bit of bad news: the Thin Client only has USB 1.1 ports, so you're limited to ~11Mbps transfer speeds over USB. It has built-in 10/100 Ethernet, but you'll never hit anywhere near 100Mbps. The processor becomes your bottleneck when it comes to any kind of network utilization. (I never seem to get above 15Mbps.) File transfers will be limited by the R/W speed of the CF card. I would not expect to use this kind of device for anything multimedia-related, nor anything that requires even moderate processing power.
But the Geode does shine in one area that's very important to me: power consumption. The processor draws about 6W under an average load. In standby, it draws less than 1W. (The rest of the system draws a few more watts, of course.) This is important to me because I have a couple of sites (I work for a WISP) that run off of wind and solar power. Since the Geode consumes less power than the average night light, I can plug it into one of those sites and not worry about it. I wouldn't even consider putting an EPIA-based machine at one of those sites--it would drain the batteries in just a few hours.
The Geode isn't very good at running a GUI or any processor-intensive application. It is, however, good at running services like Apache, Nagios, and others.
I think AMD is marketing these devices to the wrong crowd--they shouldn't be general-purpose computers for the third-world (the $100 laptop would put this to shame in terms of value). It should, however, be marketed to network geeks who need monitoring and testing tools at various locations across their network. No other device comes close in terms of cost and power consumption.
I plan on buying dozens of the Thin Clients once they hit the market. They might not be perfect in every way (the processor-limited network transfers bug me), but they do have their uses.
One of the things that we're curious about is, some people will tell you that comets actually produce organic compounds...We want to see if that's inside.
So this is, what, the most expensive episode of MythBusters ever?
Check out the Brenthaven laptop cases at Apple's Web store. They have bags for each size of PowerBook.
I have the Professional 15 Shoulder Case for my 15" PowerBook and it's incredibly well-made.
The case itself is made with sturdy canvas-like Nylon material. Its shoulder strap is attached via sturdy metal clips on sturdy metal rings. The handles are reinforced with sturdy rods to ensure you always have a good grip. The pad on the shoulder strap has a non-slip surface, which is very nice.
The laptop itself is kept in a sleeve within the case. The sleeve is attached to the case with Velcro so it can come out--but only when you want it to. The sleeve has a semi-hard shell around it for extra protection, which is nice if you just want to carry the laptop in the sleeve (the sleeve has a handle). The laptop fits very snugly inside the sleeve to keep it from slipping out. (It was overly snug when I first got it, but it has since loosened just enough to be snug yet easily removable.)
There are pockets everywhere in this case, inside and out. Pockets of every shape and size. It can hold all your accessories, manuals, CDs, and plenty more. You'll never be at a loss for room.
The case is a little pricey at $149.99 (only available through Apple) but it's well worth it if you're interested in protecting your PowerBook. If you have a smaller budget, there's also the Pro File 15, also by Brenthaven, which I can only assume is made of a similar quality but with fewer features. It can be had, again only through Apple, for $119.99. There's also a more expensive backpack-style case for the 15" PowerBook if... wait for it... that's your bag.
Small Business Server exists for just that--small businesses--and the licensing scheme reflects that. A Small Business Server must be the only server on a single-domain network. Which means it acts as PDC, file server, print server, mail server, SQL server, and so on. All of the software in Small Business Server on one server only.
You can buy enough CALs to accommodate up to 50 users, but if your network exceeds that, you'll have to purchase the full versions of Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000, and Exchange 2000 Server.
Because the Small Business Server only accommodates 50 clients, you can expect that a decent box will be able to handle anything its users can throw at. Though if you put it on the Web and get massive traffic, every other aspect of your network will suffer.
If you decide the network needs another server, you'll have to get the "Migration Pack," which will give you full standard licenses of each product with five CALs each. You'll be able to install each product on a different server (though you'll need to purchase a new Windows 2000 Server license for each new server) to increase performance.
Though it seems like Small Business Server is a trap, it's actually a boon for small businesses because they will be able to afford the software and because they have few employees, the strain on even a multi-purpose server will be minimal. And when the business outgrows the single server solution, the Migration Pack makes it simple enough to expand the network.
You just have to look in the right place. They may have removed the page that allows you to download the files, but they didn't remove the files themselves.
Though mentioned several times before, I feel that no one mentioned the most important aspect of colocation: redundant connections. T1/T3 lines probably won't fail, but there's still the chance, and if they do, you're screwed for however long it takes the phone company to fix the problem (and if you've ever tried to get a Baby Bell to fix something, you'll know why this will be a problem).
A redundant connection will keep your site up and running even if the primary connection fails. Ideally, the redundant connection should be able to handle 50% of peak capacity and should be leased from a different provider than the primary line (so that an entire company outage won't shut down both lines).
Now, you CAN get redundant lines into your house, but it won't be cheap and you'll end up paying for a redundant connection that you may never use. Colocators already have redundant connections set up, which means you won't have to worry about any of this. You may have to pay a dollar amount per Gibibyte of throughput over a certain amount, but this is unavoidable when using anyone else as a host. Just be sure to agree on a deal that will provide you enough base bandwidth so that you won't wind up paying thousands of dollars in excess bandwidth fees.
With the right colocator and the right agreement, you'll end up getting the right amount of allotted bandwidth and you won't have to bother yourself with all the things that make hosting your site from home troublesome.
Microsoft ditching IIS? Not likely...
on
Apache 2.0 vs. IIS
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Microsoft will not be ditching IIS. It is not an option in Windows XP Home because the average XP Home user isn't creating database-driven Web sites in ASP or Perl/CGI (you'd be lucky to find an XP Home user that knows HTML, I'd wager). Further, IIS is not a pre-installed option in Windows 2000 Professional, so why should it be in Windows XP Professional? Most XP Professional users are not Web developers (though many Web developers are XP Professional users) that don't need IIS installed on their system.
I suppose anti-Microsoft fanatics will also say that IIS on XP Professional being limited to 10 concurrent connections is further proof that Microsoft is dropping IIS. (Windows 2000 Professional is also limited to 10 concurrent connections.) But really this is just a way for Microsoft to ensure that people buy their more expensive Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (and their forthcoming Windows.NET Server and Windows.NET Advanced Server).
Just because something isn't included in the Home version and isn't installed (by default) in the Workstation version of a product doesn't mean it is being dropped.
Anyone who argues that Microsoft is giving up their fight to be dominant in the Web server market doesn't know anything about Microsoft strategy and obviously knows nothing about their.NET campaign.
What is your view on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project? Does it represent a wide-spread "belief" among the astronomy or is it simply a few rogue astornomers chasing a false hope of other intelligent life? What's more, would the SETI@home project mean the possible end to any single astronomer finding proof of the existence of intelligent life taking the credit for the find? Wouldn't it have been pure luck anyway?
Enigma was awesome. Nobody could decipher it. We had to steal one of the machines to crack the code. German agents were ordered to destroy their machines before they died to keep them from falling into the Allies' hands. Funny. The Allies had to steal the source of the encryption to crack it. Today, we could crack it in a matter of minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who thinks the only reason an Australian newspaper was so they could use the "Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie" pun in the headline?
Didn't think so.
I doubt the child porn came from Gonzales himself. The FBI collects images and videos for use as evidence during the investigations of child porn cases. Most likely Mueller asked one of his subordinates to compile and censor a small collection of child porn images for use in the meeting.
That said, it was a dirty trick. Most people are disgusted by child porn without having to see it. It was inappropriate for government officials to use these pictures the way they did.
How is it that the MS fanbois leap to defend MS & Bash Apple without reading the article?
Do you even know what Web site you're on? For anyone on Slashdot to read the article before commenting would set a dangerous precedent that would lead to intelligent, informed discussions. And who the hell wants that?
I've got to disagree. A .com domain is incredibly valuable for a business. If I want to visit a company's Web site (one I've never been to), I type companyname CTRL+Enter (i.e. www.companyname.com) in the address bar. If the site doesn't come up, I Google the name of the company and see what comes up.
.com domain probably wouldn't be taken anyway) has a Web presence without a logical, intuitive domain name, chances are they're not going to be much better off than if they didn't have a Web presence at all.
The real problem is when a company's name is somewhat generic (e.g. "Tom's Computer Repair Service"). Google for that and you'll be lucky to find the result you want in the first page or two.
If a company without a unique name (whose corresponding
The chart looked about as I expected: World of Warcraft towers above the rest while several other MMOs lose ground. But what I didn't expect to see is that WoW's gains are significantly higher than its competitors' losses. World of Warcraft is doing more than dominating the market--it's increasing the size of the market.
I'm interested to see whether those gamers will move to other MMO games after World of Warcraft or if they're only in it for WoW.
"Can also be used as a night light"
They obviously know their audience...
I wonder if I'm the only one who's disappointed the article wasn't about pens and stationery...
I've been beta testing OneCare for several months now, and I like it more than any other "Internet security" product I've tried--far more than both Norton and McAfee (I've used both in heterogeneous environments).
Mostly, I like that OneCare isn't nearly as pervasive as either Norton or McAfee. It certainly doesn't seem to be, anyway. It's also much less annoying. It will only get in your way when it detects a real problem (a virus, or a program trying to access the Internet). The only thing about it that annoys me: every time you update an application (say, World of Warcraft or iTunes), you have to re-authorize the application to access the Internet. Many times this requires opening the newly-updated application, authorizing it, closing it, and opening it again.
One thing that most geeks will notice upon first launching OneCare is that there isn't much you can configure. You get to configure the basics (e.g. what to scan and when) but not much else. At first, I saw this as a major disadvantage. I usually like to configure every little setting in an application, so I was a bit miffed when OneCare only presented me with a few options to change. But as I continue to use it, I don't really care so much. It does what it needs to do and I haven't had any problems with it. Besides, when it works, why do you need to change anything?
I found the built-in backup utility useless, however. The thing will scan your entire computer for documents, media files, etc. then back it up to a file, very similar to the backup utility built into Windows. But you can't choose folders not to be backed up (that I can find), so your multi-gig music or video collection will be included in every backup. For some people, this won't be a problem, but for me it made it impossible to do a backup with the utility (I don't have the hard drive space to back up every audio and video file I've got). So I guess there is one place where a lack of configurability actually causes a problem. Worse still is that OneCare will show a yellow shield (green means you're all good, yellow means there's a problem but it's not severe, and red means you have a problem that requires immediate attention) if you haven't performed a backup with OneCare--so anyone that can't back up their data because of this problem will see a yellow shield, which may cause some people to worry.
I've been pretty happy with OneCare overall, and I plan to continue to use it even after they start charging me for it. At $50 a year, it's a reasonable, competitive price. But at $50 a year for up to three computers, it's a steal. (Getting it for $20 my first year doesn't hurt, either.)
...don't run well on older hardware. I have an old Pentium II 400MHz that ran Windows XP fine enough to be usable. It wasn't always "snappy" but it wasn't slow enough to be distracting. I tried to install Ubuntu on the same machine and it was more sluggish than Windows XP. Simple operations took just long enough that they were noticeably slower than they were meant to be.
While my experience may not prove Microsoft irrefutably right, it's enough for me to agree with their point: that Linux is not always going to run well on older hardware.
While I personally wouldn't use one of these services, I completely understand the people who do use them. Just think of a fairly typical scenario.
Let's say you've got 400 CDs you want to rip. You've also got a fast computer with a DVD burner. Let's also say you want your music in VBR ~256kbps MP3. Decent quality but with files small enough that you won't need a SAN just to store it all (like you realized you'd need that one time you tried FLAC).
Assume it takes no time whatsoever to get a CD, put it in your computer, and let your ripping program query your favorite metadata server. But you still want to check the accuracy of the song titles and other information (you remember the last time you tried this and relied on CDDB, only to realize after you were done that one in every five tracks was misspelled or completely wrong). Let's say it takes one minute to confirm the accuracy of the metadata and make any corrections.
Now, like I said, you've got a fast computer. So you can rip a CD in about five minutes. Add to that the one minute per disc to check the metadata accuracy and you're looking at six minutes per CD. Good! That's 10 per hour. OK, you've got 400 CDs and you can do 10 an hour. That'll only take you... hrm--I never was any good at math--carry the six, divide by pi... 40 hours. Oh. That's a full time job for a week! Dang.
Well, you've got a decent job designing widgets. You make about $40 an hour (a little over $80k per year). Which means that every CD you're ripping is worth about $4.00 in time--and you're giving up two full weeks of free time, or maybe taking a week of vacation time. This doesn't sound so fun anymore. But your loving wife just bought you an iPod for Christmas and you'd hate to let it go to waste. Couldn't you just pay someone to do it for you? I mean, you're busy. You've got a wife and, oh, let's say seven kids (you're Catholic). You just don't have that kind of time in the evenings and you just spent your vacation time on a nice, long cruise to Alaska.
Oh, and your wife makes the best meatloaf. She serves it with this incredible sauce that her mother taught her to make. At least that lousy in-law of yours was good for something! This week she cooked it too long, though. It was dry and tough. It was harder to swallow than that worm your friends dared you to eat when you were 12. Those were the times...
But I digress.
Without hesitating, you hit that Purchase button and this place sends you a few empty spindles in a box. You just stick on the provided label and send it back to them with all your CDs inside. Early next week your discs return along with a smaller spindle of DVDs containing all your music. (Excellent! Now when your hard drive crashes, like it did last year, you won't have to spend another $400 to get everything ripped again.) You copy the files to your hard drive. It takes about an hour and a half total. You copy the songs to your iPod and put your DVDs in the safe next to your father's pocketwatch and that original 1977 Darth Vader doll--ACTION FIGURE!!!--sorry, action figure--that your wife keeps asking you to sell but you have to remind her will be worth more money in another 10 years. Secretly, though, you still love Star Wars (not those new pieces of junk--though that newest one wasn't so bad--but the original... you just called it Star Wars, none of this "A New Hope" or "Episode IV" nonsense) and you just couldn't stand to sell it. And besides, does she need to nag you about it every week? I mean, she's a great woman, but can't she just let it go? It's not like it's hurting anyone. You let her keep that ragged old stuffed bear she had as a child. It's filthy and it smells (can't she just throw it in the washer?) but she keeps it on her side of the bed. She still sleeps with it sometimes. What's up with that? I mean, she's 45 years old, married, and the mother of seven children, for crying out loud! You've been thinking about talking to her about it. Maybe she needs to see a shrin
I don't think you realize something.
This patent does not hurt Microsoft. They can work around the patent and it won't cost them a dime beyond the development costs. Instead, this patent hurts users. It's not Microsoft that has to click an extra time to interact with an embedded object. It's the users.
And not just IE users.
The lawsuit may have been directed at Microsoft but every modern browser also infringes on the patent (including Firefox, Safari, and Opera). If Eolas desired (unlikely but possible), they could go after these other browser makers with similar lawsuits. And given that Microsoft, with its huge legal defense coffers, couldn't get the lawsuit dropped, do you really think the Mozilla Foundation could successfully defend against the lawsuit?
(Disclaimer: I don't work at AMD or sell any of their products. I'm just a fan.)
Through a local small computer company with ties to AMD, I've been beta testing AMD's GX Thin Client product, which is based on a Geode GX 533 processor (which runs at 400MHz). Granted, this isn't the exact product listed in the story, but it's built on the same platform and only seems to differ, really, in that the Thin Client doesn't include a hard drive.
The first thing one notices about the Thin Client is its size. It's small. Most hardcover novels are considerably larger than the Thin Client. Most Linksys routers are larger than the Thin Client.
The Thin Client includes flash memory for storage (128MB, if I recall), which you can take out and replace with a CompactFlash card (using the provided adapter). The Thin Client I received included a version of Windows XP Embedded and Windows CE. The performance under XP Embedded was surprisingly poor. Simply moving a window around the screen rapidly could bring the system to its knees. Windows CE, however, was pretty responsive but ultimately not very useful.
On the bright side, it runs Linux. Just load up a slim distro (Debian Base, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, etc.) onto a CF card with the appropriate drivers (which AMD doesn't yet publish on their site--I got them from one of the project leaders--but I'm sure they'll be available once the Thin Client hits the market). It works swimmingly.
Now for a bit of bad news: the Thin Client only has USB 1.1 ports, so you're limited to ~11Mbps transfer speeds over USB. It has built-in 10/100 Ethernet, but you'll never hit anywhere near 100Mbps. The processor becomes your bottleneck when it comes to any kind of network utilization. (I never seem to get above 15Mbps.) File transfers will be limited by the R/W speed of the CF card. I would not expect to use this kind of device for anything multimedia-related, nor anything that requires even moderate processing power.
But the Geode does shine in one area that's very important to me: power consumption. The processor draws about 6W under an average load. In standby, it draws less than 1W. (The rest of the system draws a few more watts, of course.) This is important to me because I have a couple of sites (I work for a WISP) that run off of wind and solar power. Since the Geode consumes less power than the average night light, I can plug it into one of those sites and not worry about it. I wouldn't even consider putting an EPIA-based machine at one of those sites--it would drain the batteries in just a few hours.
The Geode isn't very good at running a GUI or any processor-intensive application. It is, however, good at running services like Apache, Nagios, and others.
I think AMD is marketing these devices to the wrong crowd--they shouldn't be general-purpose computers for the third-world (the $100 laptop would put this to shame in terms of value). It should, however, be marketed to network geeks who need monitoring and testing tools at various locations across their network. No other device comes close in terms of cost and power consumption.
I plan on buying dozens of the Thin Clients once they hit the market. They might not be perfect in every way (the processor-limited network transfers bug me), but they do have their uses.
Because the International Astronomical Union always turns to the Slashdot community for answers to the really tough questions.
... just like Betamax and Mac OS.
Check out the Brenthaven laptop cases at Apple's Web store. They have bags for each size of PowerBook.
I have the Professional 15 Shoulder Case for my 15" PowerBook and it's incredibly well-made.
The case itself is made with sturdy canvas-like Nylon material. Its shoulder strap is attached via sturdy metal clips on sturdy metal rings. The handles are reinforced with sturdy rods to ensure you always have a good grip. The pad on the shoulder strap has a non-slip surface, which is very nice.
The laptop itself is kept in a sleeve within the case. The sleeve is attached to the case with Velcro so it can come out--but only when you want it to. The sleeve has a semi-hard shell around it for extra protection, which is nice if you just want to carry the laptop in the sleeve (the sleeve has a handle). The laptop fits very snugly inside the sleeve to keep it from slipping out. (It was overly snug when I first got it, but it has since loosened just enough to be snug yet easily removable.)
There are pockets everywhere in this case, inside and out. Pockets of every shape and size. It can hold all your accessories, manuals, CDs, and plenty more. You'll never be at a loss for room.
The case is a little pricey at $149.99 (only available through Apple) but it's well worth it if you're interested in protecting your PowerBook. If you have a smaller budget, there's also the Pro File 15, also by Brenthaven, which I can only assume is made of a similar quality but with fewer features. It can be had, again only through Apple, for $119.99. There's also a more expensive backpack-style case for the 15" PowerBook if... wait for it... that's your bag.
Small Business Server exists for just that--small businesses--and the licensing scheme reflects that. A Small Business Server must be the only server on a single-domain network. Which means it acts as PDC, file server, print server, mail server, SQL server, and so on. All of the software in Small Business Server on one server only.
You can buy enough CALs to accommodate up to 50 users, but if your network exceeds that, you'll have to purchase the full versions of Windows 2000 Server, SQL Server 2000, and Exchange 2000 Server.
Because the Small Business Server only accommodates 50 clients, you can expect that a decent box will be able to handle anything its users can throw at. Though if you put it on the Web and get massive traffic, every other aspect of your network will suffer.
If you decide the network needs another server, you'll have to get the "Migration Pack," which will give you full standard licenses of each product with five CALs each. You'll be able to install each product on a different server (though you'll need to purchase a new Windows 2000 Server license for each new server) to increase performance.
Though it seems like Small Business Server is a trap, it's actually a boon for small businesses because they will be able to afford the software and because they have few employees, the strain on even a multi-purpose server will be minimal. And when the business outgrows the single server solution, the Migration Pack makes it simple enough to expand the network.
You just have to look in the right place. They may have removed the page that allows you to download the files, but they didn't remove the files themselves.
Though mentioned several times before, I feel that no one mentioned the most important aspect of colocation: redundant connections. T1/T3 lines probably won't fail, but there's still the chance, and if they do, you're screwed for however long it takes the phone company to fix the problem (and if you've ever tried to get a Baby Bell to fix something, you'll know why this will be a problem).
A redundant connection will keep your site up and running even if the primary connection fails. Ideally, the redundant connection should be able to handle 50% of peak capacity and should be leased from a different provider than the primary line (so that an entire company outage won't shut down both lines).
Now, you CAN get redundant lines into your house, but it won't be cheap and you'll end up paying for a redundant connection that you may never use. Colocators already have redundant connections set up, which means you won't have to worry about any of this. You may have to pay a dollar amount per Gibibyte of throughput over a certain amount, but this is unavoidable when using anyone else as a host. Just be sure to agree on a deal that will provide you enough base bandwidth so that you won't wind up paying thousands of dollars in excess bandwidth fees.
With the right colocator and the right agreement, you'll end up getting the right amount of allotted bandwidth and you won't have to bother yourself with all the things that make hosting your site from home troublesome.
Microsoft will not be ditching IIS. It is not an option in Windows XP Home because the average XP Home user isn't creating database-driven Web sites in ASP or Perl/CGI (you'd be lucky to find an XP Home user that knows HTML, I'd wager). Further, IIS is not a pre-installed option in Windows 2000 Professional, so why should it be in Windows XP Professional? Most XP Professional users are not Web developers (though many Web developers are XP Professional users) that don't need IIS installed on their system.
I suppose anti-Microsoft fanatics will also say that IIS on XP Professional being limited to 10 concurrent connections is further proof that Microsoft is dropping IIS. (Windows 2000 Professional is also limited to 10 concurrent connections.) But really this is just a way for Microsoft to ensure that people buy their more expensive Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (and their forthcoming Windows.NET Server and Windows.NET Advanced Server).
Just because something isn't included in the Home version and isn't installed (by default) in the Workstation version of a product doesn't mean it is being dropped.
Anyone who argues that Microsoft is giving up their fight to be dominant in the Web server market doesn't know anything about Microsoft strategy and obviously knows nothing about their .NET campaign.
What is your view on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project? Does it represent a wide-spread "belief" among the astronomy or is it simply a few rogue astornomers chasing a false hope of other intelligent life? What's more, would the SETI@home project mean the possible end to any single astronomer finding proof of the existence of intelligent life taking the credit for the find? Wouldn't it have been pure luck anyway?
Enigma was awesome. Nobody could decipher it. We had to steal one of the machines to crack the code. German agents were ordered to destroy their machines before they died to keep them from falling into the Allies' hands. Funny. The Allies had to steal the source of the encryption to crack it. Today, we could crack it in a matter of minutes.