Do Linux users want to be treated like babies all of a sudden? I know I certainly don't. And, somehow, I don't believe the linux community in general is going to be too impressed with useful utility encased in meaningless, obfuscating metaphors.
I will be.
If Linux is ever going to replace Windows as a viable desktop operating system - which I think the majority of the Linux community rightly wants - then it's time to get your head out of the sand and look at the reality.
This XP box is insipid, insulting, cartoonish, wasteful of CPU cycles and hardware resources. And, I think, Windows is almost at the point where any idiot can use it.
If you've ever done a stint in tech support, you know how the operating system must pander to the idiot who doesn't realize that a case sensitive password must be entered with the Caps Lock in the same mode as it was when the password was created.
Linux should not go this way by default, or else we will drive away both power users and developers.
But there's plenty of room for distributions and tools which are designed to make Linux easy for the proles to handle.
Don't knock them, applaud them. Unless you want to see all Internet protocols commoditized by The Borg.
My suggestion is an ancient DOS program called Troubleshooter. (ts.exe)
It fits on a floppy, boots, tells you all sorts of stuff, including checking CD-ROM drives, multimedia, video cards, convergence and purity checks for monitors in various modes, everything.
Does memory, CPU, bus tests, hard disk tests.
The only problem is that it's older than Pentium MMX, and I've never seen a newer version. It identifies a Pentium, including the speed, but not MMX. I tried it on a 500MHz Celeron, and it told me that I had a 760MHz Pentium. I tried it on a 1.5 GHz Athlon and it told me that I had a 2500MHz K6.
It's less useful for IDing machines now, but it's still great for doing hardware tests.
Ever seen one of today's garden variety computers running on sea-going vessels? How about in other places where water, or salt water is a large part of the environment?
Yes. Imagine HP Vectra computers on shock-proof feet to protect them from engine vibrations. We often used to use these as part of our ISIS engine management systems in engine control rooms: hot, steamy, smelling of saltwater and diesel fuel.
The Vectras lasted just fine. I think any other quality computer would, too. The biggest killer is the vibrations; the heat, humidity and salt are no worse than if you lived in, say, Tampa, with no air conditioning.
Equipment specifically built for a marine environment is always very tough, but that's the same for almost anything sold to industry instead of consumers. Industry more often wants quality; consumers claim they want quality and then run out and buy Samsung TV sets.
Now if I can justify the cost for the darn thing, itll be perfect. The ultimate computing machine
Hey, that seat is a really good idea. However, it disturbs me that the guy didn't go all out and make a powered top, so that it slides into position when you sit down. A couple of power window motors would do that job very nicely.
Even better, those Lincolns with the seat memory don't have magic seats. All that's needed is appropriate software, and an interface to the computer.
Imagine it: Sit down. Log in. Immediately, the computer adjusts the seat and desktop position. Heated seats could be employed, which would warm your tender buttocks on those days when the air conditioner is just set a notch too high. Do your work, log off. Instantly, the desktop rolls back and the seat reclines to a position where egress is easy.
Save money, too. Why bother with a regulated supply to run DC motors? The computer to seat control electronics could run off the computer's power supply. A bunch of relays would control the seat motors, desktop and heater. If they're just DC motors, use a car battery charger - they're cheaper and provide lots more current.
Jeez. I gotta build me one of these. I've got a set of leather bucket seats from a 1971 Chrysler Imperial kicking around my garage, just begging for a home.(Well, the back seat has already made an excellent sofa in the basement den.)
You are the among the last of a dying breed. Long gone are the days of Kiss The Blade, sociology/ethics/physics/psychology major and euroderf. Almost all the trolls left here are mindless crapflooders. I salute you.
see the web site of the kookoo CoCo High Priest. The best link on that page is about an innovative 4 MHz acceleration project they are putting together. I'm not kidding.
We had one in the TI world. The TI-99/4A had a TMS 9900 16-bit processor (in *1979*, boys and girls), but back then, memory was super-expensive. The ROM, video processor and TMS9901 coontroller were on the 16 bit bus, everything else was on a kludged together 8-bit bus... including the RAM.
A popular TI hack was to solder 8 bit static RAMs piggybacked over the 2x8bit ROMs which resided on the 16 bit bus. A little address decode logic (piggyback some 74xx chips onto some other ICs, and a little point to point wiring) and you had a TI-99/4A with full 16-bit memory. Instant speed increase of over 40%. And because of the bus bottleneck and the *really slow* doubly-interpreted BASIC, those machines desperately needed speed upgrades. Running object code instead of BASIC, on a TI with that upgrade, was lightning fast.
The page linked to in your sig really pisses me off. I don't understand how you can write such intelligent and insightful posts and also write the same old tired anti-Microsoft FUD that we see here everyday.
Perhaps because Microsoft deserves it.
Code Red was awful, yes... The reason it got so bad was because of clueless IIS admins who didn't follow security news.
Absolutely. It's like driving while talking on your cellphone. You're not being a responsible Information Superhighway user, and are putting the systems of others at risk. Those people sharing the Internet with you, like those unfortunate enough to have to share a freeway with you, have every right to be angry with you.
Please don't blame Microsoft unless you can show me an open-source alernative whose history is free from security flaws.
I don't expect anything to be free of security or other flaws. Millions of lines of code, one "greater than", when you meant "greater than or equal to", is all it takes to make a buffer overrun.
When "I'm Happy Joe Hubby Accountant On A Cable Modem And I Can Install Windows Without Calling A Professional" installs Windows and gets IIS by default (some configurations of Windows 2000 Professional, for example) and is running that security liability with no need and often no understanding of what he's doing, Microsoft's actions put me at risk.
No software company should be enabling network services by default. You should have to decide that you need it and be forced to manually install it. This would weed out probably 99% of the machines which attack *my* server and waste *my* bandwidth. Sure, it's not as user-friendly, but Microsoft doesn't own the Internet, and I think I have a right to be pissed off about the waste of *my* bandwidth that *their* cavalier attitude has directly caused.
Apache has them too, despite the fact that Slashdot does not publicize them as heavily as Microsoft's bugs. Let he who is without sin yadda yadda yadda.
I've been subscribing to the CERT security newsletters since... oh, about 1995. In those seven years, I've seen a lot more bulletins for Windows and its services than for any other single operating system. Based on that, Microsoft's code seems to be sloppy. Why? Don't know. Some open-source stuff is disastrous, lots of closed-source stuff is excellent. The problem isn't a fundamental distribution and review model; it appears to be Microsoft.
Second, I do not deny the fact that IIS seems to have more problems, but I'm going to defend Microsoft again for a second and note that IIS 5 on Win2k includes a hell of a lot more functionality than a base Apache install.
Sure! That's a great idea! Probably 5% of the people running Intranet and Internet websites on IIS will use those added features; for the rest, they're a liability - and to me too, as an Internet user victimized by the bugs inherent in more code being run.
IIS also tends to have to run with administrator rights in order to make use of this. Hack IIS, and you've rooted the box. Hack Apache, and you've got a user account with limited permissions. All to provide higher functionality by default to the 5% who will use it? I'm *so* glad that they weren't inconvenienced at the risk of security.
I know that gobs of functionality and tight system integration may offend your delicate Linux-asshole sensibilities, but there are millions of people who find them to be benefits of Microsoft's application platform.
I agree. In fact, that's why I'm running Windows 2000 at the moment. It's still better as a desktop than anything under Linux. But for a server, it's negligent. Microsoft's philosophy still isn't sufficiently paranoid for their machines to be safe on a routable IP address.
I'm not trying to excuse security flaws, but I believe that one reason why IIS has had a greater densitity of incidents than Apache is because of the incredible pace at which Microsoft develops new technology. (And their customers like that.)
I didn't pay for someone else's copy of IIS to be attacking my machine. I don't like that.
One of biggest failures of quality control, in any industry, occurs when the marketing department gets ahead of engineering.
Want to fly in a 747 that was built with developments at the "incredible pace" Microsoft accomplishes, or do you prefer Boeing's current model, one that is more conservative, refusing to release products until they're unlikely to get you killed? How would you feel if Boeing switched to The Microsoft Incredible Pace method and their planes were consistently crashing on your house, even though you've never bought a 747 on your American Express, and are therefore not their customer but are being very much affected by their flaws?
If you can't accept the fact that there are people with different -- not better or worse, just different -- opinions than yours, then you're no better than that dipshit Rob Malda.
I don't know Rob, so I can't comment on him.
What I can say, though, is that you have yet to demonstrate that your opinion is even remotely technically on par with mine. Therefore, your opinion is, I'm sorry to say it, worse than mine. If your arguments weren't ill-considered and ill-guided, you would succeed in causing me to change my mind.
But you haven't, and therefore you remain wrong.
Third, and most importantly, IIS is used by a hell of a lot more people than Apache.
Really? www.netcraft.com
Many of these people are not qualified to administrate an HTTP server, but we'll discuss that in a second.
"NEW FROM BOEING! A 747 SO EASY TO FLY, EVEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER CAN DO IT! WHILE TALKING ON A CELLPHONE! SEATS 400! PILOT'S LICENSE NOT REQUIRED AND YOU CAN RENT THIS AIRPLANE AT ANY THRIFTY'S AIRPLANE RENTAL!"
Is that a good idea, or would you be building underground too?
Before that, I want to remind you that Microsoft has always tried to keep these kind of people from running a web server without knowing it. WinNT4 Workstation does not come with IIS, and Win2k Pro does not install it by default.
Hmmm... Windows 2000 Pro full install? That's interesting, I could swear that it did.
Even if not, you know that during installation, many people will choose Custom Install and manually click literally every single checkbox, without understanding what they're doing. Next time you're reinstalling Windows, why don't you go upstairs, get your dad out of his living room chair, invite him downstairs to your basement suite, and watch him follow the on-screen instructions.
The only potentially problematic situation is when a user upgrades from Win98 with Personal Web Server installed to Win2k Pro -- then IIS is automatically installed as a replacement. But even in that case, the user had to have known enough to install PWS on Win98.
See my last reply.
As I was saying, the real reason that IIS is installed on so many machines is that Windows is popular. And the IIS graphical interface is much simpler for users who don't have time to learn the details of HTTP server administration.
"YOU TOO CAN FLY THIS 747, ALL WITHOUT HAVING TO LEARN HOW TO DRIVE A STICKSHIFT AUTOMOBILE, MUCH LESS LEARN HOW TO CALCULATE WIND SHEAR VECTORS!"
Two weeks later: "House for sale. 38 bedroom mansion, all the amenities. Only $44,000. (Right at the end of a runway)"
Yes, there is a good argument that such users shouldn't be running servers, but are you going to stop them? Who are you to decide who can and cannot run a web server?
An Internet user who is incurring costs directly due to Microsoft putting chainsaws into the hands of high school children.
you can blame Microsoft for being bother popular and easy to use, you're nothing but an elitist who is bitter that what you once considered technical work can now be accomplished by "mere" businesspeople.
Nope; if they weren't polluting and endangering the Internet though their tactics and incompetence, I'd salute Microsoft for being a very important part of getting web publishing into the hands of the masses.
And Mopar, when will you tire of your childish anti-IIS rants?
I tired of them long ago. But the problem still isn't gone, so I will continue to be a voice until the problem is gone. It's called "advocacy". Unfortunately, it does take time. You know, like baking a potato before microwave ovens became popular. (You do know about that, right? Before we had microwave ovens, we had to actually wait 45 minutes to bake a potato well. Or, are you too young to know about patience? Ever downloaded a megabyte of Fidonet mail at 2400 baud? No? Then you won't understand the patience advocacy often requires.)
I have plenty of complaints about pro-Microsoft bigots, but at least they have a sense of perspective. I don't hear Bill Gates blasting UNIX because of the original Internet worm, do I?
Probably for the same reason that Hyundai wouldn't dare to make fun of Mercedes because their first car had wooden wheels.
Are anti-Microsoft bigots really so starved for factual arguments that they will beat a dead horse until it is pulp and bones?
Nope. IIS is my particular horse, and, while I keep on putting potassium cyanide into its feed trough, it still hasn't died yet.
I'm trying to do you a favor. Try to look at that IIS page with an objective eye. The logfile itself isn't the problem; it's your sneering, condescending attitude.
I feel a right to be every bit as condescending in that page as I am with you right now.
Why's that? I get the occasional e-mail from people telling me that they followed my instructions and their computer stopped working. Apparently, I'm not condescending enough.
Besides, I own the domain name. I own the hardware it's running on, and I pay for the electricity and bandwidth it consumes. I believe, within the rules of slander, I am entitled to freedom of speech; therefore, I can say what I want. Don't like it? Go away. I don't care. I don't like children.
If your Linux/Apache platform were perfect, such arrogance might be justified, but it is not.
When you sit in your grade 11 math class, do you feel justified in sneering when you've worked hard to do your homework, and get a 95%, but the guy who sits behind you and always pokes you with a pen because he's bored, gets a 52%?
It's just a different choice. There are advantages and disadvantages to all systems. That's why even though I run my personal website on the same Linux/Apache combination as yours, I don't look down on Windows or IIS as a platform.
Really? Which of the Linux/Apache advantages made you choose that over Windows? It must have been really great for you to spend all that time learning about icky text files.
You're making yourself look stupid, and whatever truth there is in your open-source advocacy is lost when you promote open-source in such a disgusting manner.
I would be well not to have my webserver attacked constantly by misconfigured machines outside of my control. Maybe if that happened, my attitude would change.
I suspect that most visitors to my website will see my open disgust and contempt for Microsoft's waste of my bandwidth; those who are too simple to understand it are unlikely to convert to the "complexities" of *NIX. ("What do you mean, there's no C drive! That's preposterous, do I look like I was born yesterday?")
You would do well to study the former Representative Traficant's case -- you both have poor attitudes that make it difficult for an audience to listen to your message.
I think my message came through loud and clear. Judging from the number of people who bookmark it (favicon.ico, and grepping out Konqueror users which retrieve the icon by default), lots of users seem to have enjoyed the presentation enough to want to see it again.
Now, then... I found your post very Interesting and Informative. If I weren't a member of the Troll underclass, I would mod you up. Instead, I've crafted this post in the hope that it will make you think, and perhaps even improve your technical advocacy.
Well, you're right about being a troll, anyway. And, besides consuming oxygen, I think the only other thing we have in common is a fondness for writing.
You may email me at trolltuesday@yahoo.com if you have any comments.
I'll pass. If you want to read this, you're welcome to come back and read it. Otherwise, my reply shall remain such that you may be mocked in a public forum and this post may be spidered by search engines. The keywords "microsoft", "irresponsible" and "security" are repeated often enough and close enough together that a Google search for those words should find this tome pretty well.
You see, that's advocacy. Slow, tedious, and effective.
Oh yeah, I post at +2. Cleaning out your smegma on a daily basis might increase your IQ sufficiently for you to share that honor.
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools
But *why* does Microsoft feel the need to deface every Slashdotted IIS website with instructions for the administrator of the box?
I mean, when something breaks, why not just have an "5xx Server Error - Oops, this server is overloaded at the moment, please come back when traffic tapers off" or similar visitor-oriented message?
I've had to support Windows users who see this message in a browser window, get confused that there's something wrong with *their* machine, and ask me to fix it!
Either Microsoft's plan is to make newbie users think that the reason they can't view the site is a flaw on their end (not with Microsoft's well-planned attempts to take over the server market as well), or the people who administer Microsoft websites are sufficiently stupid that they don't monitor their site's condition in ways other than visiting it! (ie. find the log files, and go through them periodically)
I think it would be so much more elegant to display a concise error to the website's visitor, and automagically mail a description of the error and corrective instructions to administrator@$HOSTNAME. (One would hope that by the time one is administering a server farm, one could have figured out the mail aliases database, and could have 300 servers reporting in to one e-mail address, yet, interestingly, few of these people appear to have figured out how to hide the ASP error messages...)
If you car breaks down by the side of the road, the gauges on the dashboard aren't flashed on a huge public billboard which instantly appears on the car. Passers-by seeing you and laughing at you: "Ha-ha! He ran out of fuel! Dummy!"
Not withstanding the experience of any particular site under a mighty Slashdotting, and even if Apache on *NIX were inferior, I'd still be embarrassed to run IIS precisely because insults my intelligence... in the public forum of my own webpage.
Yes, these people are paying money (electricity, bandwidth, machine time) to have their mistakes publicized. That sounds like a great way to run a business.
So you think you are old?....I'm not old (26) but HD didn't exists on the consumer market when I started.....my first real personal computer was an Apple II. and then the macintosh.
Anyway, just remember how much application you could put on a single 800k floppy.
TI-99/4A!:) I had a 5.25" single-sided single-density floppy disk drive, with a whopping 90k per diskette. The average application was about 20k, word processor, Editor/Assembler development package, etc. Sticking in another diskette was like adding a new hard disk drive to your machine today!:)
Then some nut in the TI User's Group realized that we could stick two of the new half-height double-sided drives then becoming popular in PC/XTs into the disk drive bay. 180k per drive, two drives at once! (TI Disk Controller cards wouldn't run double-density, so we didn't get the full 360k/disk.) Literally, you could go weeks or months using nothing but the two diskettes in the two drives.
I kinda miss that. But, then again, that was before the good porn came in large, high-resolution 1+ megabyte JPGs. (16 colors was enough back then, too...)
Does anyone know if fluid dynamic bearings would change the minimum temperature that a drive requires to spin up?
Well, assuming that these fluid bearings are smooth races with a "ball bearing" of oil molecules in between (ie. like bearings in any car engine since the 1930s), absolutely.
From the descriptions, from what I can tell, we're only talking about bringing automotive engine main bearing technology, on some scale, to hard disk drives.
Whatever the liquid lubricant, when it's cold, it's likely to be thicker. Which will mean that it will take more motor torque to get it spinning when it's cold. (Think of how much slower your starter motor turns your engine on a really cold day; not all of that is the reduced efficiency of the battery in cold weather!)
I think, in cold environments, these drives might take a while longer to spin up, but once they're spinning, the turbulence in the oil in the bearings will warm it up quickly enough. Also, when it's really cold, the bearing clearances will be smaller because they probably will have contracted more than the journals.
Compared to ball bearings which will have no fluid filling the bearing clearances as the temperature changes, I'd imagine these will be less prone to vibration and read/write errors as the bearing temperature changes. (Not that it matters much, all modern hard disk drives use a closed-loop servo system to detect the position of the heads relative to the platters.)
Would someone care to educate the Slashdot masses about the differences between the old bearings and these new liquid ones? I'm in the market for a new drive, and I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
Well, I can't speak for hard disk drives, but I can maybe draw an analogy.
Wheel bearings - on cars, trucks, bicycles, whatever - use ball bearings. They're a set of caged balls, and one surface literally rolls over the other on a cushion of tiny little balls or cylindrical rollers. Here's an animated GIF and some other neat stuff. The problem is that, whatever the lubrication, eventually the balls and their races will wear, which increases the clearance between the two surfaces and causes looseness ("play") within the bearings. In wheel bearings, this translates into a shimmy in the wheel and weird tire wear. In a hard disk drive, this would result in a shimmy to the platters, causing less precision in data reading and writing as the platters vibrate nanometers back and forth under the heads. As the drives get to higher and higher capacities with the same physical disk size, the tracks being used must be getting smaller, and therefore this error becomes more crucial. Also, notice that hard drives which have been running for a long time tend to get noisy... Never mind that bits of metal being worn out of bearings have to be contained somehow so that the platters and heads don't get damaged.
Liquid bearings are used in all modern car engines. Oil is pumped from the oil pan into a very tiny space between a relatively soft bearing shell and a very smooth and hard crankshaft or camshaft journal. As the shaft spins, the oil is distributed thoughout the bearing surface and eventually leaks out the sides where it drains back to the pan to be pumped through the system again. Here's a picture of the main bearings of a Ford V8. You can see the little holes where oil is pumped into them. While the engine is running, theoretically, the shaft's journal and the bearing surface never actually touch each other; they ride on a cushion of continually replaced microscopic ball bearings (oil molecules). During circulation, the oil takes the heat away from the bearings, and washes away impurities.
How you'd implement something like this in a hard disk drive, I have no idea, and I'd love to see any real techical info on it. (Marketing hype will not answer the questions I have.) But it's a great idea; in a server, with the hard disks spinning all the time, the hydrodynamics of the situation suggest that the platter bearings would never wear, and would therefore never have their tolerances open up and incur vibration.
But a seal would be required to keep the lubricant off the platters, and that seal would itself eventually wear out. Not to mention that it's unlikely they'll include a provision to do an oil change on these things. Stopping and starting cycles will wear the bearing and journal material, causing tiny abrasive bits to be floating in the oil.
I like the idea, I think it's a great step, and I'll look forward to seeing how hard disk manufacturers have solved the problems.
Would the new bearings come at a price premium?
For sure! Even if it costs less to machine these than the super-tight clearance ball-bearings that modern hard disks must use, they'll still be a "new feature" which can enhance prices and profit margins. But I think they will actually cost more to make; it's just that ball bearings (like older stepper motor head actuators) have too many limitations to work with modern capacity and track density demands.
Re:Optical Mice use LEDs, *NOT* Lasers.
on
LEDs for the Blind
·
· Score: 2
WTF? Time to stop overclocking your 5Y3.
[grin] Wow! Tubes, here!
Actually, it's a 35Z5; it turns out the cause was the output tube, a 50L6, had been replaced with a 25L6 sometime long ago. I plopped a 50L6 in the socket, and all the tubes are a lot happier.
I concur with your and the poster's premise on that. You can't even by a toaster these days that lasts more than 4 years. People had a toaster for life back in the day.
Overheard recently at a church in Pat Buchanan country:
It's not them nation-destroying ho-mo-sex-shuls who are sending us to hell!
It's not them weird Catholic priests diddling little boys!
It's not even them communists with the long hair telling us that we should sell the church's Chevy Tahoe and make the poor children ride to Sunday School in a car with a silly furrin' name like hon-duh!
It's Computer-Aided Design! Calculators! They ARE the Great Satan!
When I was a boy in Theology school, and we was designing Pulpit-warmers (you know, to keep our hands warm as we preach), we used sliderules for all them complicated technical numbers.
We used logarithm tables in big books to come up with the numbers we added and subtracted on our sliderules to multiply and divide.
I wasn't one of them fancy pretty-boy engineering students, NO! I could not afford a 16" sliderule with a leather belt case like those pretty-boys with their pocket protectors and horn-rimmed glasses! All I could afford was a 10" long Keuffel and Esser sliderule! When I got beyond two decimal places of accuracy, all the little lines was too tiny for me to see!
My logarithm table book included all my sines and cosines as well! Them fancy-pants engineering students had four decimal places of accuracy in their books, but I had only THREE!
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, I had to learn to make do! I had to learn to round up and down, allowing for the imprecision of my calculating devices! And now, here I am, 40 years later, my hands kept WARM! by the very same pulpit-heater I built back then!
Now today! All those children, designing things, and the computer does it for them! 15 places of accuracy! 20 if they demand it! Carried through every stage of calculuation, all the way to ultimate strength. Things just ain't overbuilt the way they used to be!
Look at this. The Saturn V rocket, which got man to the moon and back on Apollo, it was built with sliderules and log tables! The shuttle? CAD and calculators. Guess which one is in the shop more often? Guess which one blowed up?
My own machine gun for when the damned commies come for my car keys and cigarettes, it keeps on breaking too. Them round advance arms keep breaking because the metal's too flimsy and miscalculated strength! It's a conspiracy! They'll run us over and replace that there cross with a PICTURE OF STALIN! Is that what you want? "In Lenin We Trust" on the money?
Computers and CAD and calculators are The Great Satan! They are the tools of OVERTHROW being used to put GODLESS COMMUNISTS in power!
Or maybe because all the shitty stuff from way-back-then has already broken, and only the quality stuff remains. That way we only have evidence of old quality stuff. That doesn't mean only quality stuff was made.
Yeah, absolutely. Remember 8-tracks? Even the media's design inherently didn't allow it to be quality-built, no matter how well engineered your 8-track player might have been. (Plastic "shaft" cast into the shell, holding up the pinch roller - wow and flutter galore, and as the shaft wore, it got worse.)
Commodore 64s and Vic-20s often used chromed cardboard as RFI shielding over the motherboard, and an overall cheap (under-rated components) design. I think they survive because there were so many of them made, and so many people have memories that they've become cult items.
The Volkswagen car was similar; it was Hitler's People's Car, part of the German government's campaign to assure all its people that they would have a radio and a car and a few other things we now consider to be essential. Ferdinand Porsche designed a durable car, extraordinarily innovative and high-tech for its day (late 1930s), but it was a mega-cheap car even then.
Similar, was the Volksempfanger, the German radio of the people. Bakelite cabinet (cheap and easy to make). On some of the cheaper models, the chassis - to which tube sockets and a large transformer was mounted - was *cardboard*.
Cheap has always existed, but, to quote the old cliche, "Quality remains long after price is forgotten".
I remember the days, back in college. Surviving on Mountain Dew and Jolt. Microwaveable.
I used to work in the TV industry as a technician. And, on one really long show - I think it was a telethon - one of the older techs took me aside and showed me Burbank Toast.
Burbank Toast is kinda like French Toast, but it's faster and easier to make, and has a lot more kick to it. It's so-named because it originated among technicians in Burbank's film and TV studios; it's therefore authentic California cuisine.
One warning: it's *very* good, but when you come down, you'll swear off eating it ever again. And then you'll find yourself making it when you next need excess energy.
Yeah, I agree. Instead of posting it in science, it should be in Slashdot's lesser-trafficked "Amateur Metallurgy" section.
Back to the grill, he's removed one of the plates on the side of his grill and fitted it with a piece of tailpipe. Then, when he's grilling, he sticks a hair dryer in the tailpipe and uses it to whip the coals into an inferno.
I think that's pretty close to the definition of a "blast furnace", and I've melted iron with similar techniques. I'd be surprised if his barbecue doesn't... sag.
It's probably almost as safe as Jaguars, which never even start.
No... Jags are probably on parr with Volvos, even running Windows 98. (Volvo owns Ford, guess what webserver www.ford.com runs on... urk.)
Jags have Lucas Electrics. Unlike Ozzy, Joe Lucas is the original Prince of Darkness.
Q: Why is it the British like warm beer?
A: Because Lucas makes refrigerators!
Q: How many Lucas engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None! They just redefine darkness as the prevailing standard!
No, that last joke started with Lucas, not Microsoft.:)
Honestly, I thought the stories of honking your horn and having the headlights go out were an urban myth and an exaggeration by those who don't know anything about automotive electrical systems. Then I rewired a 1950s MG for a friend. On the pre-work test drive, that happened to me.
How? I had the system all apart, and all I can guess is that the headlights and the horn relay shared a *slightly* corroded ground connection. I couldn't believe that would do it.
How about a car where the headlights draw 20 amps, the parking light circuit another 10 amps, the windshield wipers another 15 amps, and the generator only puts out 40 amps?
(Electrical Engineering Homework: if the battery is rated for 50Amp-hours, the ignition system stops working when the system voltage gets below 7 volts, and the vehicle speed is 35 MPH, how far can you get on a rainy night before the engine stops running and the battery is too dead to run the starter?)
Jaguar not starting? That's okay. The starter motor cranking overheats the wire's insulation. The wire's insulation catches fire and ignites the fuel spilled when the fuel pump's relay stuck on when the car was last run. Ka-boom.
I'm sorry - a bit hazy on this. You are saying that Linux needs to come bundled with Evolution as it's default mail client or it doesn't matter that it's good? Linux isn't about "bundling things" like windows. You have a choice. No it is not part of KDE, and I don't want it to be. Linux is supposed to be modular. Besides, you are arguing that Evolution must be installed by default for it to be usefull?? You use eudora through wine!!!
No, that's not what I'm arguing at all. I'm arguing that the default must be useful.
kmail is the default mail client in the most popular desktop (KDE), but it's not a credible desktop alternative to Windows because it lacks the features (most *glaringly* a spell checker) that Outlook has. If Evolution were the default mail client, I'd argue that it was too big.
The default browser has to be at least as capable as Internet Explorer.
The default mail client has to be at least as capable as Outlook Express.
The default media player has to be at least as capable as Windows Media Player.
Capable = same features, same size and hardware requirements, same stability, same integration with other apps, same ease-of-use.
Otherwise, Linux is *not* going to be seen as a credible alternative to Windows. That's it, that's all.
Most casual users and newbies aren't going to download Evolution because they don't like kmail. They're going to give up, format the hard drive, and stick the Windows CD back in.
Evolution does on-the-fly, underlining spellchecking.
How very, very *good* for it. And I already knew that, I've run it but still prefer Eudora on Wine, for unrelated reasons.
Is Evolution the default mail client for the biggest desktop on Linux? No? Okay, then I'll care about its features when it is.
Why?
Most Windows end users will stick with whatever stupid icons and shortcuts to "Setup MSN" and other crap Microsoft leaves on their desktops. I don't think it's particular to Windows - most users simply aren't brave or interested enough to (remove shortcuts strewn all over their desktop, let alone) try out software simply based on speculation - they stick with what they know. What they know is what is included as defaults with the desktop.
We learned this from having to support secretaries confused by their Windows 95 systems, didn't we? Or did you not ever have to support Windows machines?
Whether Evolution has decent spell checking, voice dictation, secretly funnels money from Bill Gates bank account to mine, and performs excellent fellatio, is irrelevent. The mail client included by default with the most popular desktop must support all the basic features most users will ever need. A "post-1997 era" underlining spellchecker is one of those things.
Otherwise, Linux is not even a credible alternative, let alone a viable one.
Mozilla 1.0 shipped without a spellchecker for its email client / html composer as well, granted this is a feature but it is very common in every other popular email client.
Yup.
I like Mozilla 1.0, but as long as it's still missing that, it's NOT READY.
I just find myself using external applications on Windows as well, as Word does a pretty good job of spellchecking a huge block of copied text from Messenger or composer.
In Windows, I never did that.
My e-mail client (to this day) is Eudora, which I run under Wine, because the only e-mail client which approaches Eudora is kmail, and kmail doesn't have something so 1997 as an underlining spell checker.
Even running a Windows program in emulation sucks less than running anything available natively. Houston, we have a problem.
StarOffice does have an underlining spell checker, but I'm not drafting my e-mail on that, then copying and pasting it across. At that point, putting up with a blue screen every two days is still more efficient than running Linux.
Can we not come up simply with a library, callable by *any* KDE/Gnome app, which provides the functionality of an underlining spellchecker? *Any* GUI program expecting text input (ie. HTML forms like this one) could invoke it and give you a non-intrusive spellchecker. That's the sort of new features Linux needs - stuff borne of having to have equivalent features to Windows just simply for credibility, then a little "hey, can't we let other programs use this as well?" extension.
So I give up on the RPM methond and decide to wade a little deeper in the pool and install from source.
I've done that, too. Installing from source is almost always faster and easier than installing from RPMs.
Which, I find, is incredibly ironic.
Uh...how about "match label". I type in "libgal" and hit find - I get NO FEEDBACK. No hourglass-ish thing telling me it's trying, no rapidly changing display of which directory it currently looking in, nothing - after I press the button it returns to it's unpressed state and I'm sitting at my desk wondering how long I should wonder wether it's still working. As far as I can tell it never even tried to search.
I've had the same run-in with that on RH6.2 and 7.1.
End users have no time or patience to deal with this sort of thing, nor should they.
Joe Idiot doesn't care that his car won't start at 8:15AM on the third Tuesday of every month. All he knows is that was on the way to work, stopped at the gas station near his house, and is currently stranded at the pump with a car that won't start. He's held in limbo for reasons he doesn't understand and doesn't care to understand.
When he finally gets to the office, all he'll be doing is complaining about how much his car sucks.
This is especially frustrating because Linux is so near to being a viable desktop alternative to Windows, and yet I suspect that many in the community won't see these problems as important.
Look at the default mail client (kmail) on the most popular desktop (KDE). The spell-checker has to be manually invoked and doesn't show potential errors by underlying it, but by forcing you to take active steps by evaluating the context of each suspect word. That's *so* 1996. ("Woah! I haven't seen a spell checker like that since before we got Outlook!") Stupid things like this cost us credibility to purchasing managers, and keep up off corporate desktops, who otherwise would jump at Linux (no Klez virii, free licenses, etc.).
We shoot ourselves in the foot each time.
Optical Mice use LEDs, *NOT* Lasers.
on
LEDs for the Blind
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I always thought it was just a regular LED. Do optical mice like my Cordless Mouseman have actual lasers? The light spreads so much it does not definitely look like a laser, but i know nothing about hardware, so could anyone enlighten me on this?
Well, like the filament of the rectifier tube in my 1939 Stewart-Warner radio, it hurts my eyes to stare into it, and it's red, but it's definitely not a laser.
Lasers come in wavelengths (colors) ranging from invisible to invisible, and everything in between. For a variety of reasons, almost all the lasers you're likely to encounter will be red or IR (invisible).
You can tell a laser from any other source of light very easily:
Is the light coherent? As in, if you shine the light at the house across the street, does the dot appear to be the same diameter as it was when you pointed it at your hand? Coherency is a basic feature of laser light; some spread is normal, but if it spreads like a flashlight, it's not coherent.
Speckle. Laser light almost always appears speckled. Regular light consists of an infinite number of wavelengths of light mixed to make white. Ranges can be filtered out with sheets of glass, plastic, etc - think of sunlight in a stained glass window, there may be 300 different wavelengths that we would describe as red light. But laser light is at a peak wavelength, with some slight impurities. But it's very precise. If all your light is at one wavelength, when it hits an imperfect (ie. any) surface, some light will reflect back 180 degrees out of phase and cancel itself out (like adding -1 and +1, they cancel to zero). This accentuates imperfections on the reflecting surface in the form of speckle.
I don't see either one of these behaviors with the light from my own Mouseman. So, all I can assume is that it's merely a bright LED.
LEDs are certainly bright enough: many cars use LED third brake lights, some new Cadillacs and Mercedes are using them as the main taillights, and I've seen traffic lights in Toronto (Eglinton East at Sloan) and Ottawa (Gladstone at some intersection between Preston and Bronson), so LEDs are certainly up to the task of lighting an image of my mousepad.
Slashdot Mirror
Do Linux users want to be treated like babies all of a sudden? I know I certainly don't. And, somehow, I don't believe the linux community in general is going to be too impressed with useful utility encased in meaningless, obfuscating metaphors.
I will be.
If Linux is ever going to replace Windows as a viable desktop operating system - which I think the majority of the Linux community rightly wants - then it's time to get your head out of the sand and look at the reality.
I'm typing this on a Windows XP box at work. It's not by choice that I am using Windows, in fact, I have defenestrated my home computers despite several problems with Linux as a viable desktop operating system.
This XP box is insipid, insulting, cartoonish, wasteful of CPU cycles and hardware resources. And, I think, Windows is almost at the point where any idiot can use it.
If you've ever done a stint in tech support, you know how the operating system must pander to the idiot who doesn't realize that a case sensitive password must be entered with the Caps Lock in the same mode as it was when the password was created.
Linux should not go this way by default, or else we will drive away both power users and developers.
But there's plenty of room for distributions and tools which are designed to make Linux easy for the proles to handle.
Don't knock them, applaud them. Unless you want to see all Internet protocols commoditized by The Borg.
www.glowingplate.com/dissent
My suggestion is an ancient DOS program called Troubleshooter. (ts.exe)
It fits on a floppy, boots, tells you all sorts of stuff, including checking CD-ROM drives, multimedia, video cards, convergence and purity checks for monitors in various modes, everything.
Does memory, CPU, bus tests, hard disk tests.
The only problem is that it's older than Pentium MMX, and I've never seen a newer version. It identifies a Pentium, including the speed, but not MMX. I tried it on a 500MHz Celeron, and it told me that I had a 760MHz Pentium. I tried it on a 1.5 GHz Athlon and it told me that I had a 2500MHz K6.
It's less useful for IDing machines now, but it's still great for doing hardware tests.
for every offense, I could probably download MP3's from LimeWire and XNap faster with the decreased internet traffic.
Why doesn't it surprise me that fax.com runs on IIS?
The slimier the organization, the slimier their webserver.
Oh well, at least it will make it easier for someone to shut them down.
Yes. Imagine HP Vectra computers on shock-proof feet to protect them from engine vibrations. We often used to use these as part of our ISIS engine management systems in engine control rooms: hot, steamy, smelling of saltwater and diesel fuel.
The Vectras lasted just fine. I think any other quality computer would, too. The biggest killer is the vibrations; the heat, humidity and salt are no worse than if you lived in, say, Tampa, with no air conditioning.
Equipment specifically built for a marine environment is always very tough, but that's the same for almost anything sold to industry instead of consumers. Industry more often wants quality; consumers claim they want quality and then run out and buy Samsung TV sets.
Here's a radar system with a 68000-based computer doing the video processing. Here's a Great Lakes bulker, pretty small potatoes in the marine world, yet it still has a diesel engine approximately four stories tall.
Now if I can justify the cost for the darn thing, itll be perfect. The ultimate computing machine
Hey, that seat is a really good idea. However, it disturbs me that the guy didn't go all out and make a powered top, so that it slides into position when you sit down. A couple of power window motors would do that job very nicely.
Even better, those Lincolns with the seat memory don't have magic seats. All that's needed is appropriate software, and an interface to the computer.
Imagine it: Sit down. Log in. Immediately, the computer adjusts the seat and desktop position. Heated seats could be employed, which would warm your tender buttocks on those days when the air conditioner is just set a notch too high. Do your work, log off. Instantly, the desktop rolls back and the seat reclines to a position where egress is easy.
Save money, too. Why bother with a regulated supply to run DC motors? The computer to seat control electronics could run off the computer's power supply. A bunch of relays would control the seat motors, desktop and heater. If they're just DC motors, use a car battery charger - they're cheaper and provide lots more current.
Jeez. I gotta build me one of these. I've got a set of leather bucket seats from a 1971 Chrysler Imperial kicking around my garage, just begging for a home.(Well, the back seat has already made an excellent sofa in the basement den.)
The best reason for going back to the moon is to replentish our supply of cheese. It wouldn't be that hard to go back there.
Feh. We could accomplish the same thing by simply outlawing circumcision.
You are the among the last of a dying breed. Long gone are the days of Kiss The Blade, sociology/ethics/physics/psychology major and euroderf. Almost all the trolls left here are mindless crapflooders. I salute you.
see the web site of the kookoo CoCo High Priest. The best link on that page is about an innovative 4 MHz acceleration project they are putting together. I'm not kidding.
We had one in the TI world. The TI-99/4A had a TMS 9900 16-bit processor (in *1979*, boys and girls), but back then, memory was super-expensive. The ROM, video processor and TMS9901 coontroller were on the 16 bit bus, everything else was on a kludged together 8-bit bus... including the RAM.
A popular TI hack was to solder 8 bit static RAMs piggybacked over the 2x8bit ROMs which resided on the 16 bit bus. A little address decode logic (piggyback some 74xx chips onto some other ICs, and a little point to point wiring) and you had a TI-99/4A with full 16-bit memory. Instant speed increase of over 40%. And because of the bus bottleneck and the *really slow* doubly-interpreted BASIC, those machines desperately needed speed upgrades. Running object code instead of BASIC, on a TI with that upgrade, was lightning fast.
And I thought that was an impressive TI hack until I saw this. My God, that looks like a bank of 72 pin SIMMs in a TRS-80.
The page linked to in your sig really pisses me off. I don't understand how you can write such intelligent and insightful posts and also write the same old tired anti-Microsoft FUD that we see here everyday.
Perhaps because Microsoft deserves it.
Code Red was awful, yes... The reason it got so bad was because of clueless IIS admins who didn't follow security news.Absolutely. It's like driving while talking on your cellphone. You're not being a responsible Information Superhighway user, and are putting the systems of others at risk. Those people sharing the Internet with you, like those unfortunate enough to have to share a freeway with you, have every right to be angry with you.
Please don't blame Microsoft unless you can show me an open-source alernative whose history is free from security flaws.I don't expect anything to be free of security or other flaws. Millions of lines of code, one "greater than", when you meant "greater than or equal to", is all it takes to make a buffer overrun.
When "I'm Happy Joe Hubby Accountant On A Cable Modem And I Can Install Windows Without Calling A Professional" installs Windows and gets IIS by default (some configurations of Windows 2000 Professional, for example) and is running that security liability with no need and often no understanding of what he's doing, Microsoft's actions put me at risk.
No software company should be enabling network services by default. You should have to decide that you need it and be forced to manually install it. This would weed out probably 99% of the machines which attack *my* server and waste *my* bandwidth. Sure, it's not as user-friendly, but Microsoft doesn't own the Internet, and I think I have a right to be pissed off about the waste of *my* bandwidth that *their* cavalier attitude has directly caused.
Apache has them too, despite the fact that Slashdot does not publicize them as heavily as Microsoft's bugs. Let he who is without sin yadda yadda yadda.I've been subscribing to the CERT security newsletters since... oh, about 1995. In those seven years, I've seen a lot more bulletins for Windows and its services than for any other single operating system. Based on that, Microsoft's code seems to be sloppy. Why? Don't know. Some open-source stuff is disastrous, lots of closed-source stuff is excellent. The problem isn't a fundamental distribution and review model; it appears to be Microsoft.
Second, I do not deny the fact that IIS seems to have more problems, but I'm going to defend Microsoft again for a second and note that IIS 5 on Win2k includes a hell of a lot more functionality than a base Apache install.Sure! That's a great idea! Probably 5% of the people running Intranet and Internet websites on IIS will use those added features; for the rest, they're a liability - and to me too, as an Internet user victimized by the bugs inherent in more code being run.
IIS also tends to have to run with administrator rights in order to make use of this. Hack IIS, and you've rooted the box. Hack Apache, and you've got a user account with limited permissions. All to provide higher functionality by default to the 5% who will use it? I'm *so* glad that they weren't inconvenienced at the risk of security.
I know that gobs of functionality and tight system integration may offend your delicate Linux-asshole sensibilities, but there are millions of people who find them to be benefits of Microsoft's application platform.I agree. In fact, that's why I'm running Windows 2000 at the moment. It's still better as a desktop than anything under Linux. But for a server, it's negligent. Microsoft's philosophy still isn't sufficiently paranoid for their machines to be safe on a routable IP address.
I'm not trying to excuse security flaws, but I believe that one reason why IIS has had a greater densitity of incidents than Apache is because of the incredible pace at which Microsoft develops new technology. (And their customers like that.)I didn't pay for someone else's copy of IIS to be attacking my machine. I don't like that.
One of biggest failures of quality control, in any industry, occurs when the marketing department gets ahead of engineering.
Want to fly in a 747 that was built with developments at the "incredible pace" Microsoft accomplishes, or do you prefer Boeing's current model, one that is more conservative, refusing to release products until they're unlikely to get you killed? How would you feel if Boeing switched to The Microsoft Incredible Pace method and their planes were consistently crashing on your house, even though you've never bought a 747 on your American Express, and are therefore not their customer but are being very much affected by their flaws?
If you can't accept the fact that there are people with different -- not better or worse, just different -- opinions than yours, then you're no better than that dipshit Rob Malda.I don't know Rob, so I can't comment on him.
What I can say, though, is that you have yet to demonstrate that your opinion is even remotely technically on par with mine. Therefore, your opinion is, I'm sorry to say it, worse than mine. If your arguments weren't ill-considered and ill-guided, you would succeed in causing me to change my mind.
But you haven't, and therefore you remain wrong.
Third, and most importantly, IIS is used by a hell of a lot more people than Apache.Really? www.netcraft.com
Many of these people are not qualified to administrate an HTTP server, but we'll discuss that in a second."NEW FROM BOEING! A 747 SO EASY TO FLY, EVEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER CAN DO IT! WHILE TALKING ON A CELLPHONE! SEATS 400! PILOT'S LICENSE NOT REQUIRED AND YOU CAN RENT THIS AIRPLANE AT ANY THRIFTY'S AIRPLANE RENTAL!"
Is that a good idea, or would you be building underground too?
Before that, I want to remind you that Microsoft has always tried to keep these kind of people from running a web server without knowing it. WinNT4 Workstation does not come with IIS, and Win2k Pro does not install it by default.Hmmm... Windows 2000 Pro full install? That's interesting, I could swear that it did.
Even if not, you know that during installation, many people will choose Custom Install and manually click literally every single checkbox, without understanding what they're doing. Next time you're reinstalling Windows, why don't you go upstairs, get your dad out of his living room chair, invite him downstairs to your basement suite, and watch him follow the on-screen instructions.
The only potentially problematic situation is when a user upgrades from Win98 with Personal Web Server installed to Win2k Pro -- then IIS is automatically installed as a replacement. But even in that case, the user had to have known enough to install PWS on Win98.See my last reply.
As I was saying, the real reason that IIS is installed on so many machines is that Windows is popular. And the IIS graphical interface is much simpler for users who don't have time to learn the details of HTTP server administration."YOU TOO CAN FLY THIS 747, ALL WITHOUT HAVING TO LEARN HOW TO DRIVE A STICKSHIFT AUTOMOBILE, MUCH LESS LEARN HOW TO CALCULATE WIND SHEAR VECTORS!"
Two weeks later: "House for sale. 38 bedroom mansion, all the amenities. Only $44,000. (Right at the end of a runway)"
Yes, there is a good argument that such users shouldn't be running servers, but are you going to stop them? Who are you to decide who can and cannot run a web server?An Internet user who is incurring costs directly due to Microsoft putting chainsaws into the hands of high school children.
you can blame Microsoft for being bother popular and easy to use, you're nothing but an elitist who is bitter that what you once considered technical work can now be accomplished by "mere" businesspeople.Nope; if they weren't polluting and endangering the Internet though their tactics and incompetence, I'd salute Microsoft for being a very important part of getting web publishing into the hands of the masses.
And Mopar, when will you tire of your childish anti-IIS rants?I tired of them long ago. But the problem still isn't gone, so I will continue to be a voice until the problem is gone. It's called "advocacy". Unfortunately, it does take time. You know, like baking a potato before microwave ovens became popular. (You do know about that, right? Before we had microwave ovens, we had to actually wait 45 minutes to bake a potato well. Or, are you too young to know about patience? Ever downloaded a megabyte of Fidonet mail at 2400 baud? No? Then you won't understand the patience advocacy often requires.)
I have plenty of complaints about pro-Microsoft bigots, but at least they have a sense of perspective. I don't hear Bill Gates blasting UNIX because of the original Internet worm, do I?Probably for the same reason that Hyundai wouldn't dare to make fun of Mercedes because their first car had wooden wheels.
Are anti-Microsoft bigots really so starved for factual arguments that they will beat a dead horse until it is pulp and bones?Nope. IIS is my particular horse, and, while I keep on putting potassium cyanide into its feed trough, it still hasn't died yet.
I'm trying to do you a favor. Try to look at that IIS page with an objective eye. The logfile itself isn't the problem; it's your sneering, condescending attitude.I feel a right to be every bit as condescending in that page as I am with you right now.
Why's that? I get the occasional e-mail from people telling me that they followed my instructions and their computer stopped working. Apparently, I'm not condescending enough.
Besides, I own the domain name. I own the hardware it's running on, and I pay for the electricity and bandwidth it consumes. I believe, within the rules of slander, I am entitled to freedom of speech; therefore, I can say what I want. Don't like it? Go away. I don't care. I don't like children.
If your Linux/Apache platform were perfect, such arrogance might be justified, but it is not.When you sit in your grade 11 math class, do you feel justified in sneering when you've worked hard to do your homework, and get a 95%, but the guy who sits behind you and always pokes you with a pen because he's bored, gets a 52%?
It's just a different choice. There are advantages and disadvantages to all systems. That's why even though I run my personal website on the same Linux/Apache combination as yours, I don't look down on Windows or IIS as a platform.Really? Which of the Linux/Apache advantages made you choose that over Windows? It must have been really great for you to spend all that time learning about icky text files.
You're making yourself look stupid, and whatever truth there is in your open-source advocacy is lost when you promote open-source in such a disgusting manner.I would be well not to have my webserver attacked constantly by misconfigured machines outside of my control. Maybe if that happened, my attitude would change.
I suspect that most visitors to my website will see my open disgust and contempt for Microsoft's waste of my bandwidth; those who are too simple to understand it are unlikely to convert to the "complexities" of *NIX. ("What do you mean, there's no C drive! That's preposterous, do I look like I was born yesterday?")
You would do well to study the former Representative Traficant's case -- you both have poor attitudes that make it difficult for an audience to listen to your message.I think my message came through loud and clear. Judging from the number of people who bookmark it (favicon.ico, and grepping out Konqueror users which retrieve the icon by default), lots of users seem to have enjoyed the presentation enough to want to see it again.
Now, then... I found your post very Interesting and Informative. If I weren't a member of the Troll underclass, I would mod you up. Instead, I've crafted this post in the hope that it will make you think, and perhaps even improve your technical advocacy.Well, you're right about being a troll, anyway. And, besides consuming oxygen, I think the only other thing we have in common is a fondness for writing.
You may email me at trolltuesday@yahoo.com if you have any comments.I'll pass. If you want to read this, you're welcome to come back and read it. Otherwise, my reply shall remain such that you may be mocked in a public forum and this post may be spidered by search engines. The keywords "microsoft", "irresponsible" and "security" are repeated often enough and close enough together that a Google search for those words should find this tome pretty well.
You see, that's advocacy. Slow, tedious, and effective.
Oh yeah, I post at +2. Cleaning out your smegma on a daily basis might increase your IQ sufficiently for you to share that honor.
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools
But *why* does Microsoft feel the need to deface every Slashdotted IIS website with instructions for the administrator of the box?
I mean, when something breaks, why not just have an "5xx Server Error - Oops, this server is overloaded at the moment, please come back when traffic tapers off" or similar visitor-oriented message?
I've had to support Windows users who see this message in a browser window, get confused that there's something wrong with *their* machine, and ask me to fix it!
Either Microsoft's plan is to make newbie users think that the reason they can't view the site is a flaw on their end (not with Microsoft's well-planned attempts to take over the server market as well), or the people who administer Microsoft websites are sufficiently stupid that they don't monitor their site's condition in ways other than visiting it! (ie. find the log files, and go through them periodically)
I think it would be so much more elegant to display a concise error to the website's visitor, and automagically mail a description of the error and corrective instructions to administrator@$HOSTNAME. (One would hope that by the time one is administering a server farm, one could have figured out the mail aliases database, and could have 300 servers reporting in to one e-mail address, yet, interestingly, few of these people appear to have figured out how to hide the ASP error messages...)
If you car breaks down by the side of the road, the gauges on the dashboard aren't flashed on a huge public billboard which instantly appears on the car. Passers-by seeing you and laughing at you: "Ha-ha! He ran out of fuel! Dummy!"
Yet this is *exactly* what IIS does. Don't believe me? How 'bout ASP errors primarily displaying programming bugs in the user-created scripting?
Not withstanding the experience of any particular site under a mighty Slashdotting, and even if Apache on *NIX were inferior, I'd still be embarrassed to run IIS precisely because insults my intelligence... in the public forum of my own webpage.
Yes, these people are paying money (electricity, bandwidth, machine time) to have their mistakes publicized. That sounds like a great way to run a business.
So you think you are old?
TI-99/4A! :) I had a 5.25" single-sided single-density floppy disk drive, with a whopping 90k per diskette. The average application was about 20k, word processor, Editor/Assembler development package, etc. Sticking in another diskette was like adding a new hard disk drive to your machine today! :)
Then some nut in the TI User's Group realized that we could stick two of the new half-height double-sided drives then becoming popular in PC/XTs into the disk drive bay. 180k per drive, two drives at once! (TI Disk Controller cards wouldn't run double-density, so we didn't get the full 360k/disk.) Literally, you could go weeks or months using nothing but the two diskettes in the two drives.
I kinda miss that. But, then again, that was before the good porn came in large, high-resolution 1+ megabyte JPGs. (16 colors was enough back then, too...)
Does anyone know if fluid dynamic bearings would change the minimum temperature that a drive requires to spin up?
Well, assuming that these fluid bearings are smooth races with a "ball bearing" of oil molecules in between (ie. like bearings in any car engine since the 1930s), absolutely.
From the descriptions, from what I can tell, we're only talking about bringing automotive engine main bearing technology, on some scale, to hard disk drives.
Whatever the liquid lubricant, when it's cold, it's likely to be thicker. Which will mean that it will take more motor torque to get it spinning when it's cold. (Think of how much slower your starter motor turns your engine on a really cold day; not all of that is the reduced efficiency of the battery in cold weather!)
I think, in cold environments, these drives might take a while longer to spin up, but once they're spinning, the turbulence in the oil in the bearings will warm it up quickly enough. Also, when it's really cold, the bearing clearances will be smaller because they probably will have contracted more than the journals.
Compared to ball bearings which will have no fluid filling the bearing clearances as the temperature changes, I'd imagine these will be less prone to vibration and read/write errors as the bearing temperature changes. (Not that it matters much, all modern hard disk drives use a closed-loop servo system to detect the position of the heads relative to the platters.)
Would someone care to educate the Slashdot masses about the differences between the old bearings and these new liquid ones? I'm in the market for a new drive, and I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
Well, I can't speak for hard disk drives, but I can maybe draw an analogy.
Wheel bearings - on cars, trucks, bicycles, whatever - use ball bearings. They're a set of caged balls, and one surface literally rolls over the other on a cushion of tiny little balls or cylindrical rollers. Here's an animated GIF and some other neat stuff. The problem is that, whatever the lubrication, eventually the balls and their races will wear, which increases the clearance between the two surfaces and causes looseness ("play") within the bearings. In wheel bearings, this translates into a shimmy in the wheel and weird tire wear. In a hard disk drive, this would result in a shimmy to the platters, causing less precision in data reading and writing as the platters vibrate nanometers back and forth under the heads. As the drives get to higher and higher capacities with the same physical disk size, the tracks being used must be getting smaller, and therefore this error becomes more crucial. Also, notice that hard drives which have been running for a long time tend to get noisy... Never mind that bits of metal being worn out of bearings have to be contained somehow so that the platters and heads don't get damaged.
Liquid bearings are used in all modern car engines. Oil is pumped from the oil pan into a very tiny space between a relatively soft bearing shell and a very smooth and hard crankshaft or camshaft journal. As the shaft spins, the oil is distributed thoughout the bearing surface and eventually leaks out the sides where it drains back to the pan to be pumped through the system again. Here's a picture of the main bearings of a Ford V8. You can see the little holes where oil is pumped into them. While the engine is running, theoretically, the shaft's journal and the bearing surface never actually touch each other; they ride on a cushion of continually replaced microscopic ball bearings (oil molecules). During circulation, the oil takes the heat away from the bearings, and washes away impurities.
How you'd implement something like this in a hard disk drive, I have no idea, and I'd love to see any real techical info on it. (Marketing hype will not answer the questions I have.) But it's a great idea; in a server, with the hard disks spinning all the time, the hydrodynamics of the situation suggest that the platter bearings would never wear, and would therefore never have their tolerances open up and incur vibration.
But a seal would be required to keep the lubricant off the platters, and that seal would itself eventually wear out. Not to mention that it's unlikely they'll include a provision to do an oil change on these things. Stopping and starting cycles will wear the bearing and journal material, causing tiny abrasive bits to be floating in the oil.
I like the idea, I think it's a great step, and I'll look forward to seeing how hard disk manufacturers have solved the problems.
Would the new bearings come at a price premium?For sure! Even if it costs less to machine these than the super-tight clearance ball-bearings that modern hard disks must use, they'll still be a "new feature" which can enhance prices and profit margins. But I think they will actually cost more to make; it's just that ball bearings (like older stepper motor head actuators) have too many limitations to work with modern capacity and track density demands.
WTF? Time to stop overclocking your 5Y3.
[grin] Wow! Tubes, here!
Actually, it's a 35Z5; it turns out the cause was the output tube, a 50L6, had been replaced with a 25L6 sometime long ago. I plopped a 50L6 in the socket, and all the tubes are a lot happier.
Nice, cheery glow...
I concur with your and the poster's premise on that. You can't even by a toaster these days that lasts more than 4 years. People had a toaster for life back in the day.
Overheard recently at a church in Pat Buchanan country:
It's not them nation-destroying ho-mo-sex-shuls who are sending us to hell!
It's not them weird Catholic priests diddling little boys!
It's not even them communists with the long hair telling us that we should sell the church's Chevy Tahoe and make the poor children ride to Sunday School in a car with a silly furrin' name like hon-duh!
It's Computer-Aided Design! Calculators! They ARE the Great Satan!
When I was a boy in Theology school, and we was designing Pulpit-warmers (you know, to keep our hands warm as we preach), we used sliderules for all them complicated technical numbers.
We used logarithm tables in big books to come up with the numbers we added and subtracted on our sliderules to multiply and divide.
I wasn't one of them fancy pretty-boy engineering students, NO! I could not afford a 16" sliderule with a leather belt case like those pretty-boys with their pocket protectors and horn-rimmed glasses! All I could afford was a 10" long Keuffel and Esser sliderule! When I got beyond two decimal places of accuracy, all the little lines was too tiny for me to see!
My logarithm table book included all my sines and cosines as well! Them fancy-pants engineering students had four decimal places of accuracy in their books, but I had only THREE!
So you see, ladies and gentlemen, I had to learn to make do! I had to learn to round up and down, allowing for the imprecision of my calculating devices! And now, here I am, 40 years later, my hands kept WARM! by the very same pulpit-heater I built back then!
Now today! All those children, designing things, and the computer does it for them! 15 places of accuracy! 20 if they demand it! Carried through every stage of calculuation, all the way to ultimate strength. Things just ain't overbuilt the way they used to be!
Look at this. The Saturn V rocket, which got man to the moon and back on Apollo, it was built with sliderules and log tables! The shuttle? CAD and calculators. Guess which one is in the shop more often? Guess which one blowed up?
My own machine gun for when the damned commies come for my car keys and cigarettes, it keeps on breaking too. Them round advance arms keep breaking because the metal's too flimsy and miscalculated strength! It's a conspiracy! They'll run us over and replace that there cross with a PICTURE OF STALIN! Is that what you want? "In Lenin We Trust" on the money?
Computers and CAD and calculators are The Great Satan! They are the tools of OVERTHROW being used to put GODLESS COMMUNISTS in power!
Or maybe because all the shitty stuff from way-back-then has already broken, and only the quality stuff remains. That way we only have evidence of old quality stuff. That doesn't mean only quality stuff was made.
Yeah, absolutely. Remember 8-tracks? Even the media's design inherently didn't allow it to be quality-built, no matter how well engineered your 8-track player might have been. (Plastic "shaft" cast into the shell, holding up the pinch roller - wow and flutter galore, and as the shaft wore, it got worse.)
Commodore 64s and Vic-20s often used chromed cardboard as RFI shielding over the motherboard, and an overall cheap (under-rated components) design. I think they survive because there were so many of them made, and so many people have memories that they've become cult items.
The Volkswagen car was similar; it was Hitler's People's Car, part of the German government's campaign to assure all its people that they would have a radio and a car and a few other things we now consider to be essential. Ferdinand Porsche designed a durable car, extraordinarily innovative and high-tech for its day (late 1930s), but it was a mega-cheap car even then.
Similar, was the Volksempfanger, the German radio of the people. Bakelite cabinet (cheap and easy to make). On some of the cheaper models, the chassis - to which tube sockets and a large transformer was mounted - was *cardboard*.
Cheap has always existed, but, to quote the old cliche, "Quality remains long after price is forgotten".
I remember the days, back in college. Surviving on Mountain Dew and Jolt. Microwaveable.
I used to work in the TV industry as a technician. And, on one really long show - I think it was a telethon - one of the older techs took me aside and showed me Burbank Toast.
Burbank Toast is kinda like French Toast, but it's faster and easier to make, and has a lot more kick to it. It's so-named because it originated among technicians in Burbank's film and TV studios; it's therefore authentic California cuisine.
One warning: it's *very* good, but when you come down, you'll swear off eating it ever again. And then you'll find yourself making it when you next need excess energy.
Burbank Toast (Serves 2-3 hungry broadcast technicians)
Why is this posted as Science?
Yeah, I agree. Instead of posting it in science, it should be in Slashdot's lesser-trafficked "Amateur Metallurgy" section.
Back to the grill, he's removed one of the plates on the side of his grill and fitted it with a piece of tailpipe. Then, when he's grilling, he sticks a hair dryer in the tailpipe and uses it to whip the coals into an inferno.I think that's pretty close to the definition of a "blast furnace", and I've melted iron with similar techniques. I'd be surprised if his barbecue doesn't... sag.
It's probably almost as safe as Jaguars, which never even start.
No... Jags are probably on parr with Volvos, even running Windows 98. (Volvo owns Ford, guess what webserver www.ford.com runs on... urk.)
Jags have Lucas Electrics. Unlike Ozzy, Joe Lucas is the original Prince of Darkness.
Q: Why is it the British like warm beer?
A: Because Lucas makes refrigerators!
Q: How many Lucas engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None! They just redefine darkness as the prevailing standard!
No, that last joke started with Lucas, not Microsoft. :)
Honestly, I thought the stories of honking your horn and having the headlights go out were an urban myth and an exaggeration by those who don't know anything about automotive electrical systems. Then I rewired a 1950s MG for a friend. On the pre-work test drive, that happened to me.
How? I had the system all apart, and all I can guess is that the headlights and the horn relay shared a *slightly* corroded ground connection. I couldn't believe that would do it.
How about a car where the headlights draw 20 amps, the parking light circuit another 10 amps, the windshield wipers another 15 amps, and the generator only puts out 40 amps?
(Electrical Engineering Homework: if the battery is rated for 50Amp-hours, the ignition system stops working when the system voltage gets below 7 volts, and the vehicle speed is 35 MPH, how far can you get on a rainy night before the engine stops running and the battery is too dead to run the starter?)
Lucas Electric jokes here.
Urk.
Jaguar not starting? That's okay. The starter motor cranking overheats the wire's insulation. The wire's insulation catches fire and ignites the fuel spilled when the fuel pump's relay stuck on when the car was last run. Ka-boom.
I'm sorry - a bit hazy on this. You are saying that Linux needs to come bundled with Evolution as it's default mail client or it doesn't matter that it's good? Linux isn't about "bundling things" like windows. You have a choice. No it is not part of KDE, and I don't want it to be. Linux is supposed to be modular. Besides, you are arguing that Evolution must be installed by default for it to be usefull?? You use eudora through wine!!!
No, that's not what I'm arguing at all. I'm arguing that the default must be useful.
kmail is the default mail client in the most popular desktop (KDE), but it's not a credible desktop alternative to Windows because it lacks the features (most *glaringly* a spell checker) that Outlook has. If Evolution were the default mail client, I'd argue that it was too big.
The default browser has to be at least as capable as Internet Explorer.
The default mail client has to be at least as capable as Outlook Express.
The default media player has to be at least as capable as Windows Media Player.
Capable = same features, same size and hardware requirements, same stability, same integration with other apps, same ease-of-use.
Otherwise, Linux is *not* going to be seen as a credible alternative to Windows. That's it, that's all.
Most casual users and newbies aren't going to download Evolution because they don't like kmail. They're going to give up, format the hard drive, and stick the Windows CD back in.
Evolution does on-the-fly, underlining spellchecking.
How very, very *good* for it. And I already knew that, I've run it but still prefer Eudora on Wine, for unrelated reasons.
Is Evolution the default mail client for the biggest desktop on Linux? No? Okay, then I'll care about its features when it is.
Why?
Most Windows end users will stick with whatever stupid icons and shortcuts to "Setup MSN" and other crap Microsoft leaves on their desktops. I don't think it's particular to Windows - most users simply aren't brave or interested enough to (remove shortcuts strewn all over their desktop, let alone) try out software simply based on speculation - they stick with what they know. What they know is what is included as defaults with the desktop.
We learned this from having to support secretaries confused by their Windows 95 systems, didn't we? Or did you not ever have to support Windows machines?
Whether Evolution has decent spell checking, voice dictation, secretly funnels money from Bill Gates bank account to mine, and performs excellent fellatio, is irrelevent. The mail client included by default with the most popular desktop must support all the basic features most users will ever need. A "post-1997 era" underlining spellchecker is one of those things.
Otherwise, Linux is not even a credible alternative, let alone a viable one.
Mozilla 1.0 shipped without a spellchecker for its email client / html composer as well, granted this is a feature but it is very common in every other popular email client.
Yup.
I like Mozilla 1.0, but as long as it's still missing that, it's NOT READY.
I just find myself using external applications on Windows as well, as Word does a pretty good job of spellchecking a huge block of copied text from Messenger or composer.In Windows, I never did that.
My e-mail client (to this day) is Eudora, which I run under Wine, because the only e-mail client which approaches Eudora is kmail, and kmail doesn't have something so 1997 as an underlining spell checker.
Even running a Windows program in emulation sucks less than running anything available natively. Houston, we have a problem.
StarOffice does have an underlining spell checker, but I'm not drafting my e-mail on that, then copying and pasting it across. At that point, putting up with a blue screen every two days is still more efficient than running Linux.
Can we not come up simply with a library, callable by *any* KDE/Gnome app, which provides the functionality of an underlining spellchecker? *Any* GUI program expecting text input (ie. HTML forms like this one) could invoke it and give you a non-intrusive spellchecker. That's the sort of new features Linux needs - stuff borne of having to have equivalent features to Windows just simply for credibility, then a little "hey, can't we let other programs use this as well?" extension.
So I give up on the RPM methond and decide to wade a little deeper in the pool and install from source.
I've done that, too. Installing from source is almost always faster and easier than installing from RPMs.
Which, I find, is incredibly ironic.
Uh...how about "match label". I type in "libgal" and hit find - I get NO FEEDBACK. No hourglass-ish thing telling me it's trying, no rapidly changing display of which directory it currently looking in, nothing - after I press the button it returns to it's unpressed state and I'm sitting at my desk wondering how long I should wonder wether it's still working. As far as I can tell it never even tried to search.I've had the same run-in with that on RH6.2 and 7.1.
End users have no time or patience to deal with this sort of thing, nor should they.
Joe Idiot doesn't care that his car won't start at 8:15AM on the third Tuesday of every month. All he knows is that was on the way to work, stopped at the gas station near his house, and is currently stranded at the pump with a car that won't start. He's held in limbo for reasons he doesn't understand and doesn't care to understand.
When he finally gets to the office, all he'll be doing is complaining about how much his car sucks.
I would say there are a lot more than 10 things wrong, but that's just me.
I ranted about this the other day when there was the article about the Linux user who went back to Windows.
Add my list of gripes to the things that the community needs to do.
This is especially frustrating because Linux is so near to being a viable desktop alternative to Windows, and yet I suspect that many in the community won't see these problems as important.
Look at the default mail client (kmail) on the most popular desktop (KDE). The spell-checker has to be manually invoked and doesn't show potential errors by underlying it, but by forcing you to take active steps by evaluating the context of each suspect word. That's *so* 1996. ("Woah! I haven't seen a spell checker like that since before we got Outlook!") Stupid things like this cost us credibility to purchasing managers, and keep up off corporate desktops, who otherwise would jump at Linux (no Klez virii, free licenses, etc.).
We shoot ourselves in the foot each time.
I always thought it was just a regular LED. Do optical mice like my Cordless Mouseman have actual lasers? The light spreads so much it does not definitely look like a laser, but i know nothing about hardware, so could anyone enlighten me on this?
Well, like the filament of the rectifier tube in my 1939 Stewart-Warner radio, it hurts my eyes to stare into it, and it's red, but it's definitely not a laser.
Lasers come in wavelengths (colors) ranging from invisible to invisible, and everything in between. For a variety of reasons, almost all the lasers you're likely to encounter will be red or IR (invisible).
You can tell a laser from any other source of light very easily:
Is the light coherent? As in, if you shine the light at the house across the street, does the dot appear to be the same diameter as it was when you pointed it at your hand? Coherency is a basic feature of laser light; some spread is normal, but if it spreads like a flashlight, it's not coherent.
Speckle. Laser light almost always appears speckled. Regular light consists of an infinite number of wavelengths of light mixed to make white. Ranges can be filtered out with sheets of glass, plastic, etc - think of sunlight in a stained glass window, there may be 300 different wavelengths that we would describe as red light. But laser light is at a peak wavelength, with some slight impurities. But it's very precise. If all your light is at one wavelength, when it hits an imperfect (ie. any) surface, some light will reflect back 180 degrees out of phase and cancel itself out (like adding -1 and +1, they cancel to zero). This accentuates imperfections on the reflecting surface in the form of speckle.
I don't see either one of these behaviors with the light from my own Mouseman. So, all I can assume is that it's merely a bright LED.
LEDs are certainly bright enough: many cars use LED third brake lights, some new Cadillacs and Mercedes are using them as the main taillights, and I've seen traffic lights in Toronto (Eglinton East at Sloan) and Ottawa (Gladstone at some intersection between Preston and Bronson), so LEDs are certainly up to the task of lighting an image of my mousepad.