My guess is that your actual "friends" or at least the people that know you are importing their address books into facebook, which includes your email address. Facebook then emails everyone on those lists that doesn't have an account. At least that's my best guess after I got one of those creepy emails from facebook exactly as you describe.
I would recommend the open source OpenFire server. Install it on your own server, then set the preferences to force SSL connections. Then communicates passed between clients on any platform are SSL encrypted. Turn off local client logging for better security. Beyond that, it's all client-side stuff that doesn't port as well.
Well, one nice thing about Eve that helps casual gamers is that you are constantly leveling, wether or not you're logged. In a lot of ways, imo, that actually ecourages people to not play and instead live their lives while they train up skills. So after a year, you will be at the same skill point level as someone who plays 40+ hours a week. You won't have nearly as much money or ships, etc as them, though. So yeah, you can play just 5-10 hours a week and still have fun, and still progress at the same rate as everyone else. I've actually done that before... just set up EveMon so it tells me when my skills are done training, and only log in to start the next skill training. Then when I got to the point I wanted to be at, I started playing more to be able to afford the new class of ship or weapon I trained up and had fun. Just know that Eve is very much a blank slate type of game. It's all what you make it. If you want quests and level progress and what not, go play wow. If you want some of the best PVP available, go Eve. Just know that it's going to take you months to years to really get into it and understand it. It's got an extreme learning curve.
Anything written by Arthur C Clarke. I was devouring everything clark when I was around 10. I started with Rendezvous with Rama, which remains my favorite book of all time. It was actualy on the pre-teen shelf at the library when I was a kid. The sequels are really good, too, imo... though many disagree. The 2001 series is good, Hammer of God, Songs of Distant Earth, Childhood's End. Too many to list. Sometimes the themes are a little advanced, but don't underestimate young readers. I think kids should pick up more advanced books early anyways... it helps development. Too many adults these days are still stuck in a Dr. Seuss world =)
Here's a quick primer. These are the commands I use all the time. There are a ton more in the man pages or online help.
"screen" to start a new shell under screen
All commands start with CTRL-A, then another key for the command itself. If you really want to send a CTRL-A to your application (Like to go to the beginning of the current line in bash for example, hit CTRL-A twice.)
CTRL-A CTRL-D Detach your current session
"screen -rd" to get back to it
CTRL-A CTRL-C create another "window" CTRL-A CTRL-N next window CTRL-A CTRL-P previous window CTRL-A " see list of current windows CTRL-A [ Copy mode... you can see the scrollback buffer with this. Esc to exit CTRL-A ? Help for further stuff.
I run just one instance of screen with multiple "windows." Works beautifully. When you start running more than one screen process under the same user it can make it difficult to re-attach because you have to tell it which pty to attach to.
I have the exact same setup, and it runs good enough for me. Average of about 50 fps in medium/640, 30 fps in medium/800, 30 fps in high/640, 20 fps in high/800. I've found that it is a pretty stable framerate too... I never have it dip too low at the wrong moment, such as when you get attacked by several enemies.
Might want to check your setup, cause it might not be the hardware that's the problem.
Actually, I'm sure any modern compiler would correctly see his function as a tail recursion call, thus reusing the current space on the stack and so it would be as efficient as a for(;;) infinite loop. Search google for "tail recursion" for more info.
So maybe his sig really is l33ter than you thought =)
This is just anecdotal, so take it with whatever grain of salt you want to. I've extensively used a few different database servers in the last 5 years or so, and am an Oracle certified DBA for 8i. Mainly MySQL, PostgreSQL, db2, Oracle and Access. When it comes to performance, Access can be fast. Not sure about the validity of it, but I remember hearing somewhere that Access uses ISAM tables, just like MySQL used to use in the 3.x days before MyISAM and InnoDB. I've done some stuff in Access that was fast, and stome stuff that was painfully slow.
A project I worked on once initially had a requirement of developing a prototype in Access. This was doing some hard crunching on a lot of data (so much so that we kept hitting the 2 gig limit of Access). It eventually got to the point where we were doing a certain operation that was pretty simple really. Read a bunch of data from one table, and insert results from the calculations in a couple other tables. This was originally developed completely in Access using VBA. It was slow, to say the least. I had profiling code in it so that I could see the current progress, and the projected completion time. The first time we ran it, it projected that it would be finished in a couple months. We spent a week tweaking like mad until we got that down to just under 4 weeks.
So then we decided it was time to scrap Access as a DB, and moved all the data to a db2 database. Our initial hope was to continue using the VBA code, though... so we hooked up the VBA code to the db2 database through ODBC. Even after another week of tweaking (including figuring out how to sorta do prepares with the kludgy API) the performance was even more abysmal than when it was in Access. Somewhere around 6 weeks if I remember right.
At this time I convinced the project manager that I could get the performance up if I ported it to Perl. I finally got the go ahead, and spent a few hours porting the code over (remember, this was a pretty simple function, it just had some ugly calculations). My first result with Perl was about 1 week. But then I realized that I had forgotten to prepare my inserts outside of the main loop. Fixed that and the thing ran in 6 hours. I swear... I'm not exaggerating or anything.
My lesson from the experience, was that Access can't handle large amounts of data (besides the fact that it has a built-in 2 gig hard limit), and that preparing before your loop is a HUGE optimization. I had used prepares like that before, but on such limited samples that it didn't make that big of a difference.
Like I said, anecdotal, but it definitely tought me some lessons.
I know exactly what you're talking about. Look at any of the big games and you will find all those childish idiots just out to ruin your fun. I've seen them in Everquest, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 1942, etc, etc. But then find yourself a smaller game with a tighter community and you won't find many of those people. For years I have found that community in MUDs. Rarely did I ever meet a true jerk in even the big muds that have up to 500 people online at once. Then I tried the free trial of Asheron's Call 2, and found an almost secong-gen graphical MMORPG with almost the same experience. In the 2 months that I have been playing I have met exactly 1 jerk. The signal-to-noise ratio is VERY low. At any time I find it really easy to get a good group together of random people to do a quest or whatever. Everyone I meet generally falls over themselves trying to help people out. At low level I met several high-level people that would just hang out at the newbie towns helping people with questions, doing quests, giving them good items, etc, etc. Most of my fun with the game has come in returning the favor.
In other words, try out AC2. There's a free 15 day trial with no credit card needed or anything. www.asheronscall2.com.
(I am not affiliated with any of the developers... just a satisfied customer).
Maybe it's just me, but recently RedHat released a kernel upgrade to 2.4.18 that fixed the ptrace vulnerability. But then within 12 hours released another kernel upgrade to 2.4.20. Nothing is wrong with this, except that the 2.4.20 kernel does not seem to be QA tested at all. It includes the early ptrace patch which had a bug where processes that switched user ids did not have their/proc//environ and/proc//cmdline files readable, even by root. This resulted in ps reporting that all these processes were swapped out, and ptrace not working on suid processes. This is a VERY obvious bug that should have been found in QA testing right away. There are corrected ptrace patches that fix this problem on several kernel lists.
However, while that bug is really just a minor annoyance, there seem to be other serious problems. I tried deploying it on several machines, and 3 out of 4 had severe stability problems. Only my dell workstation has worked with it. The other machines were Dell servers using serverworks chipsets. All of them couldn't stay up for more than 20 minutes, and they also wrote tons of errors to the syslog.
Late last week redhat finally released the new enterprise kernel source, 2.4.9-e.24. I compiled that and have been running it perfectly on all those same servers that had problems with the mainline 7.2 update. (We have always run the enterprise kernels on non-enterprise versions of redhat).
To me, this looks like RH skipped some major QA testing when releasing the 2.4.20 kernel just to get the fix out asap. So for me, I'll stick with the enterprise kernels, and in the future I am going to install redhat enterprise versions from the start.
And I'll also be sticking with supported redhat products, as compiling from source for over 50 servers is not fun. When redhat doesn't release an update in a timely manner, like the recent OpenSSL delay, then I'll spend the time to build my own RPMs, but I'd rather install redhat's tested RPMs.
So to make this someone more on topic, to answer your question, go with the baseline if you don't mind either installed a new OS every year, or rolling your own updates. If you want enterprise level support, and to reduce your load in administering several similar boxes, go with redhat enterprise. I think it's worth the money.
Nicodemus
Re:Gosh the negativity...
on
Linux Server Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not a function of linux, per se, but rather a function of vixie cron, an updated version of cron written by Paul Vixie. I'm pretty sure that I've seen vixie cron running on a tweaked solaris box before, so check around for a standard package.
Am I the only person that thinks that the entire series is awesome? I enjoyed the first book for it's technicality and vision, but let's face it... characters are not Clarke's strong point. The following trilogy, however, have the best characters and aliens in any SciFi I've ever read. They are fully realized, have very different personalities, and are very believable with plenty of flaws. Just look at Wakefield and Des Jardins for very good examples. Hell, even O'Toole isn't perfect. I've read everything that Gentry Lee has put out so far, and it's all top quality stuff, especially if you love good characters. The combo of Clarke and Lee is definitely the BEST combo I have ever seen. Clarke does the technical SciFi type stuff, and Lee adds the human touch.
I'm beginning to wonder if people who didn't like the series are the type that think Star Trek and Star Wars are SciFi, and are really only happy with Pop SciFi or mech anime. For those of us that actually enjoy literary tales, the whole Rama series is breath taking. The rama series is always the first books I recommend to anyone, followed closely by George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. So if you're on the fence on whether to read this series, do so. I've even gotten several females to read it that aren't into SciFi and they all ate it up ravenously.
I've burned about 100 on my 52x24x52x lite-on cdrw, and have had mixed results. I had a 4x yamaha drive that died on me, and so when I went shopping I chose the 52x instead of the 48x lite-on (which was about $60 vs $80... still half the price of my yamaha 4x when I bought it) because the 48x only had 12x rewrite and the 52x has 24x rewrite. Well, anyways... back to the mixed results. Right before my 4x died I had bought 2 spindles of cheap PNY 16x CDRs. So when I got my new drive I decided to see what the burner would burn at on them, since it is supposed to limit its speed based on the media automatically. Well, about 1 in 20 burn at 24x, but the rest burn at 52x. With the first spindle, I never had a single error. With the second I've had about 1 in 5 give me errors toward the end of the disc. Anyways... I just pulled out 5 cds from the first spindle, and 5 from the second that were good (since I throw away any that burn bad) and tested them all with nero's tester, and every single one came up good. BTW, if I remember to set the speed down to 24x with these cds from the second spindle, they never give me a problem. So I think it's just a matter of them being rated for 16x.
What does this mean? with all 16x rated CDRs, I've had pretty damn good luck burning at 52x. I'm sure that if I got actual 48x or 52x (once they start appearing) CDRs, I would never have a problem. Overall I'm very happy with the burner, except that I now burn a lot more CDs than I used to, since it's now about 2.5 minutes (including lead-in and lead-out) instead of half an hour. =)
I suggest listening to Digitally Imported Radio to get an idea of what you like. They have channels for trance, hard trance, eurodance and house. My favorite is the trance channel, though I dive into the eurodance channel every once in a while. I would also suggest checking out trance.nu for a taste of the trance community, and if you want to buy some CDs, I prefer euromusicworld.com.
Measuring the performance of a CPU using megahertz is like comparing the speed of 2 vehicles based on horsepower alone. For instance, would you say that a 5500 pound muscle car with 300 horsepower is just immediately faster than a 300 pound motorcycle with only 100 horsepower? When you look at the 1/4 mile numbers, you'll find a nasty surprise. The motorcycle will beat the crap out of the car any day. When comparing CPUs, you need to look at the end results, which in this case are benchmarks. Whether they be synthetic, or my preferred method: FPS. I find it interesting that an Athlon XP 2100+ running at 1.73 gHz can run Wolfenstein.1 frames faster than the p4 at 2.53 gHz. That alone should tell you that you're looking at the wrong number. If you're going to blame anyone, blame intel for creating the p4 the way they did, which resulted in them being able to clock it faster, but without actually making it faster. They're the ones with the nasty PR, if you ask me. AMD is just trying to compensate for the general uninformed masses.
Most of us are thinking, "Well, that doesn't apply to me since I never buy whole systems. I buy each component by itself and build the whole thing myself. So how would this apply to me?" Well, what I think would work a whole lot better is to create a fee for each component individually. So motherboards, monitors, hard drives, etc would each have their own fee that relates exactly to the resources required to recycle that one part. This would make a lot more sense than a per-computer fee. Even if you don't look at it from the component level, why should someone who buys a new iMac, which is mostly plastic and doesn't have a CRT at all, pay as much as someone who buys a full tower with multiple hard drives and multiple monitors? I hope by September when they begin to roll this out they will have resolved this issue. Otherwise, I'm all for the fee. I think it's definitely needed.
I do a similar thing with my qmail server, but instead of by domain, I use qmail's.qmail-default ability so that all users on my system can employ a similar theme. For example, my slashdot email is user-slashdot@domain.com, cdnow (which I caught selling my address) is user-cdnow@domain.com, and cnn is user-cnn@domain.com. Then when an address starts getting spam, I create a.qmail-cdnow file that runs a script that returns either 99 to drop the email on the floor, or 100 to return a bounce message. At this point in time, I have no spam in my inbox.
My Abit KT7-RAID had the option hidden as well, and it wasn't until I enabled it so that I could turn off ACPI that my system finally got stable, even with win2k. I found Paul's KT7 FAQ invaluable. Specifically this item.
I would have never even taken a second glance at this game if I was a the store, but after playing it at DesertLAN in Pheonix this weekend, I have to say that it is the absolute most addicting game ever. I wasn't interested in getting a gamecube until I played this game. It's got great puzzles (like labyrinth and marble drop) and mini-games (like monkey bowling, 9-ball and golf) for single player action, but also racing, fighting, and pilot-wings-ish target drop modes for great party play. Just buy 3 extra controllers and you're set. And I would bet that the female side of the force would get a kick out of it too.
This announcement is a promotion for linux in the server market, not workstation. The END USER, as you put it, does not interface with the OS directly. You are arguing as if amazon put the OS on every amazon users' home computers, overwriting windows or something. This change has already happened, and if you go to the site from whatever OS is your favorit, then you will notice no difference.
I personally think linux is an awesome server OS. I find that it's interface, especially remote, is far better than Windows, BSD, Solaris, and other UNIX systems. You can't do crap with windows remotely, plus it's proven unstable. With other OSes, like Solaris, their stock tools are horrible. Maybe it's because I absolutely love Gnu tools, but I find it to be a pain in the ass to use Solaris out of the box. And I don't want to spend 2 days installing Gnu tools, etc. BSD is better, but still not there. It's tools share a lot in common with Solaris and other commercial UNIX systems. Give me a box, whether it be x86, PowerPC, Alpha or SPARC, and I'll have you a fully tweaked server OS on it in much less time than any other OS.
Plus go compare a service contract from redhat to one from Microsoft or Sun. If you can't see plain numbers...
I am wondering if you have any experience at all adminstrating web servers...
Most crypto is made outside of the US, and as such they would have no control for adding back doors to it. They would have to create an import restriction so that US citizen's can only use US written crypto. And that wouldn't hurt Bin Laden at all. So don't worry...
Find a good external shell of some sort with SSH and pass any illegal software through it. Or find a good SSL HTTPS proxy for downloading from web sites. Let them try and sniff that.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that your actual "friends" or at least the people that know you are importing their address books into facebook, which includes your email address. Facebook then emails everyone on those lists that doesn't have an account. At least that's my best guess after I got one of those creepy emails from facebook exactly as you describe.
Nicodemus
I would recommend the open source OpenFire server. Install it on your own server, then set the preferences to force SSL connections. Then communicates passed between clients on any platform are SSL encrypted. Turn off local client logging for better security. Beyond that, it's all client-side stuff that doesn't port as well.
Nicodemus
Well, one nice thing about Eve that helps casual gamers is that you are constantly leveling, wether or not you're logged. In a lot of ways, imo, that actually ecourages people to not play and instead live their lives while they train up skills. So after a year, you will be at the same skill point level as someone who plays 40+ hours a week. You won't have nearly as much money or ships, etc as them, though. So yeah, you can play just 5-10 hours a week and still have fun, and still progress at the same rate as everyone else. I've actually done that before... just set up EveMon so it tells me when my skills are done training, and only log in to start the next skill training. Then when I got to the point I wanted to be at, I started playing more to be able to afford the new class of ship or weapon I trained up and had fun. Just know that Eve is very much a blank slate type of game. It's all what you make it. If you want quests and level progress and what not, go play wow. If you want some of the best PVP available, go Eve. Just know that it's going to take you months to years to really get into it and understand it. It's got an extreme learning curve.
-Nicodemus
Anything written by Arthur C Clarke. I was devouring everything clark when I was around 10. I started with Rendezvous with Rama, which remains my favorite book of all time. It was actualy on the pre-teen shelf at the library when I was a kid. The sequels are really good, too, imo... though many disagree. The 2001 series is good, Hammer of God, Songs of Distant Earth, Childhood's End. Too many to list. Sometimes the themes are a little advanced, but don't underestimate young readers. I think kids should pick up more advanced books early anyways... it helps development. Too many adults these days are still stuck in a Dr. Seuss world =)
Nicodemus
Here's a quick primer. These are the commands I use all the time. There are a ton more in the man pages or online help.
"screen" to start a new shell under screen
All commands start with CTRL-A, then another key for the command itself. If you really want to send a CTRL-A to your application (Like to go to the beginning of the current line in bash for example, hit CTRL-A twice.)
CTRL-A CTRL-D Detach your current session
"screen -rd" to get back to it
CTRL-A CTRL-C create another "window"
CTRL-A CTRL-N next window
CTRL-A CTRL-P previous window
CTRL-A " see list of current windows
CTRL-A [ Copy mode... you can see the scrollback buffer with this. Esc to exit
CTRL-A ? Help for further stuff.
I run just one instance of screen with multiple "windows." Works beautifully. When you start running more than one screen process under the same user it can make it difficult to re-attach because you have to tell it which pty to attach to.
Nicodemus
I have the exact same setup, and it runs good enough for me. Average of about 50 fps in medium/640, 30 fps in medium/800, 30 fps in high/640, 20 fps in high/800. I've found that it is a pretty stable framerate too... I never have it dip too low at the wrong moment, such as when you get attacked by several enemies.
Might want to check your setup, cause it might not be the hardware that's the problem.
Nicodemus
Actually, I'm sure any modern compiler would correctly see his function as a tail recursion call, thus reusing the current space on the stack and so it would be as efficient as a for(;;) infinite loop. Search google for "tail recursion" for more info.
So maybe his sig really is l33ter than you thought =)
Nicodemus
Not to mention the Tempur-Pedic Mattress, certified space technology!!!
Nicodemus
P.S. I have no affiliation with Tempur-Pedic... I just think their commercials are funny.
This is just anecdotal, so take it with whatever grain of salt you want to. I've extensively used a few different database servers in the last 5 years or so, and am an Oracle certified DBA for 8i. Mainly MySQL, PostgreSQL, db2, Oracle and Access. When it comes to performance, Access can be fast. Not sure about the validity of it, but I remember hearing somewhere that Access uses ISAM tables, just like MySQL used to use in the 3.x days before MyISAM and InnoDB. I've done some stuff in Access that was fast, and stome stuff that was painfully slow.
A project I worked on once initially had a requirement of developing a prototype in Access. This was doing some hard crunching on a lot of data (so much so that we kept hitting the 2 gig limit of Access). It eventually got to the point where we were doing a certain operation that was pretty simple really. Read a bunch of data from one table, and insert results from the calculations in a couple other tables. This was originally developed completely in Access using VBA. It was slow, to say the least. I had profiling code in it so that I could see the current progress, and the projected completion time. The first time we ran it, it projected that it would be finished in a couple months. We spent a week tweaking like mad until we got that down to just under 4 weeks.
So then we decided it was time to scrap Access as a DB, and moved all the data to a db2 database. Our initial hope was to continue using the VBA code, though... so we hooked up the VBA code to the db2 database through ODBC. Even after another week of tweaking (including figuring out how to sorta do prepares with the kludgy API) the performance was even more abysmal than when it was in Access. Somewhere around 6 weeks if I remember right.
At this time I convinced the project manager that I could get the performance up if I ported it to Perl. I finally got the go ahead, and spent a few hours porting the code over (remember, this was a pretty simple function, it just had some ugly calculations). My first result with Perl was about 1 week. But then I realized that I had forgotten to prepare my inserts outside of the main loop. Fixed that and the thing ran in 6 hours. I swear... I'm not exaggerating or anything.
My lesson from the experience, was that Access can't handle large amounts of data (besides the fact that it has a built-in 2 gig hard limit), and that preparing before your loop is a HUGE optimization. I had used prepares like that before, but on such limited samples that it didn't make that big of a difference.
Like I said, anecdotal, but it definitely tought me some lessons.
Nicodemus
I know exactly what you're talking about. Look at any of the big games and you will find all those childish idiots just out to ruin your fun. I've seen them in Everquest, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 1942, etc, etc. But then find yourself a smaller game with a tighter community and you won't find many of those people. For years I have found that community in MUDs. Rarely did I ever meet a true jerk in even the big muds that have up to 500 people online at once. Then I tried the free trial of Asheron's Call 2, and found an almost secong-gen graphical MMORPG with almost the same experience. In the 2 months that I have been playing I have met exactly 1 jerk. The signal-to-noise ratio is VERY low. At any time I find it really easy to get a good group together of random people to do a quest or whatever. Everyone I meet generally falls over themselves trying to help people out. At low level I met several high-level people that would just hang out at the newbie towns helping people with questions, doing quests, giving them good items, etc, etc. Most of my fun with the game has come in returning the favor.
In other words, try out AC2. There's a free 15 day trial with no credit card needed or anything. www.asheronscall2.com.
(I am not affiliated with any of the developers... just a satisfied customer).
Nicodemus
=)
Nicodemuis
Maybe it's just me, but recently RedHat released a kernel upgrade to 2.4.18 that fixed the ptrace vulnerability. But then within 12 hours released another kernel upgrade to 2.4.20. Nothing is wrong with this, except that the 2.4.20 kernel does not seem to be QA tested at all. It includes the early ptrace patch which had a bug where processes that switched user ids did not have their /proc//environ and /proc//cmdline files readable, even by root. This resulted in ps reporting that all these processes were swapped out, and ptrace not working on suid processes. This is a VERY obvious bug that should have been found in QA testing right away. There are corrected ptrace patches that fix this problem on several kernel lists.
However, while that bug is really just a minor annoyance, there seem to be other serious problems. I tried deploying it on several machines, and 3 out of 4 had severe stability problems. Only my dell workstation has worked with it. The other machines were Dell servers using serverworks chipsets. All of them couldn't stay up for more than 20 minutes, and they also wrote tons of errors to the syslog.
Late last week redhat finally released the new enterprise kernel source, 2.4.9-e.24. I compiled that and have been running it perfectly on all those same servers that had problems with the mainline 7.2 update. (We have always run the enterprise kernels on non-enterprise versions of redhat).
To me, this looks like RH skipped some major QA testing when releasing the 2.4.20 kernel just to get the fix out asap. So for me, I'll stick with the enterprise kernels, and in the future I am going to install redhat enterprise versions from the start.
And I'll also be sticking with supported redhat products, as compiling from source for over 50 servers is not fun. When redhat doesn't release an update in a timely manner, like the recent OpenSSL delay, then I'll spend the time to build my own RPMs, but I'd rather install redhat's tested RPMs.
So to make this someone more on topic, to answer your question, go with the baseline if you don't mind either installed a new OS every year, or rolling your own updates. If you want enterprise level support, and to reduce your load in administering several similar boxes, go with redhat enterprise. I think it's worth the money.
Nicodemus
It's not a function of linux, per se, but rather a function of vixie cron, an updated version of cron written by Paul Vixie. I'm pretty sure that I've seen vixie cron running on a tweaked solaris box before, so check around for a standard package.
Nicodemus
Am I the only person that thinks that the entire series is awesome? I enjoyed the first book for it's technicality and vision, but let's face it... characters are not Clarke's strong point. The following trilogy, however, have the best characters and aliens in any SciFi I've ever read. They are fully realized, have very different personalities, and are very believable with plenty of flaws. Just look at Wakefield and Des Jardins for very good examples. Hell, even O'Toole isn't perfect. I've read everything that Gentry Lee has put out so far, and it's all top quality stuff, especially if you love good characters. The combo of Clarke and Lee is definitely the BEST combo I have ever seen. Clarke does the technical SciFi type stuff, and Lee adds the human touch.
I'm beginning to wonder if people who didn't like the series are the type that think Star Trek and Star Wars are SciFi, and are really only happy with Pop SciFi or mech anime. For those of us that actually enjoy literary tales, the whole Rama series is breath taking. The rama series is always the first books I recommend to anyone, followed closely by George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. So if you're on the fence on whether to read this series, do so. I've even gotten several females to read it that aren't into SciFi and they all ate it up ravenously.
Nicodemus
I've burned about 100 on my 52x24x52x lite-on cdrw, and have had mixed results. I had a 4x yamaha drive that died on me, and so when I went shopping I chose the 52x instead of the 48x lite-on (which was about $60 vs $80... still half the price of my yamaha 4x when I bought it) because the 48x only had 12x rewrite and the 52x has 24x rewrite. Well, anyways... back to the mixed results. Right before my 4x died I had bought 2 spindles of cheap PNY 16x CDRs. So when I got my new drive I decided to see what the burner would burn at on them, since it is supposed to limit its speed based on the media automatically. Well, about 1 in 20 burn at 24x, but the rest burn at 52x. With the first spindle, I never had a single error. With the second I've had about 1 in 5 give me errors toward the end of the disc. Anyways... I just pulled out 5 cds from the first spindle, and 5 from the second that were good (since I throw away any that burn bad) and tested them all with nero's tester, and every single one came up good. BTW, if I remember to set the speed down to 24x with these cds from the second spindle, they never give me a problem. So I think it's just a matter of them being rated for 16x.
What does this mean? with all 16x rated CDRs, I've had pretty damn good luck burning at 52x. I'm sure that if I got actual 48x or 52x (once they start appearing) CDRs, I would never have a problem. Overall I'm very happy with the burner, except that I now burn a lot more CDs than I used to, since it's now about 2.5 minutes (including lead-in and lead-out) instead of half an hour. =)
Nicodemus
Nicodemus
Measuring the performance of a CPU using megahertz is like comparing the speed of 2 vehicles based on horsepower alone. For instance, would you say that a 5500 pound muscle car with 300 horsepower is just immediately faster than a 300 pound motorcycle with only 100 horsepower? When you look at the 1/4 mile numbers, you'll find a nasty surprise. The motorcycle will beat the crap out of the car any day. When comparing CPUs, you need to look at the end results, which in this case are benchmarks. Whether they be synthetic, or my preferred method: FPS. I find it interesting that an Athlon XP 2100+ running at 1.73 gHz can run Wolfenstein .1 frames faster than the p4 at 2.53 gHz. That alone should tell you that you're looking at the wrong number. If you're going to blame anyone, blame intel for creating the p4 the way they did, which resulted in them being able to clock it faster, but without actually making it faster. They're the ones with the nasty PR, if you ask me. AMD is just trying to compensate for the general uninformed masses.
Nicodemus
Most of us are thinking, "Well, that doesn't apply to me since I never buy whole systems. I buy each component by itself and build the whole thing myself. So how would this apply to me?" Well, what I think would work a whole lot better is to create a fee for each component individually. So motherboards, monitors, hard drives, etc would each have their own fee that relates exactly to the resources required to recycle that one part. This would make a lot more sense than a per-computer fee. Even if you don't look at it from the component level, why should someone who buys a new iMac, which is mostly plastic and doesn't have a CRT at all, pay as much as someone who buys a full tower with multiple hard drives and multiple monitors? I hope by September when they begin to roll this out they will have resolved this issue. Otherwise, I'm all for the fee. I think it's definitely needed.
Nicodemus
Doing my part to boycott the blackout.
I do a similar thing with my qmail server, but instead of by domain, I use qmail's .qmail-default ability so that all users on my system can employ a similar theme. For example, my slashdot email is user-slashdot@domain.com, cdnow (which I caught selling my address) is user-cdnow@domain.com, and cnn is user-cnn@domain.com. Then when an address starts getting spam, I create a .qmail-cdnow file that runs a script that returns either 99 to drop the email on the floor, or 100 to return a bounce message. At this point in time, I have no spam in my inbox.
Nicodemus
My Abit KT7-RAID had the option hidden as well, and it wasn't until I enabled it so that I could turn off ACPI that my system finally got stable, even with win2k. I found Paul's KT7 FAQ invaluable. Specifically this item.
I would have never even taken a second glance at this game if I was a the store, but after playing it at DesertLAN in Pheonix this weekend, I have to say that it is the absolute most addicting game ever. I wasn't interested in getting a gamecube until I played this game. It's got great puzzles (like labyrinth and marble drop) and mini-games (like monkey bowling, 9-ball and golf) for single player action, but also racing, fighting, and pilot-wings-ish target drop modes for great party play. Just buy 3 extra controllers and you're set. And I would bet that the female side of the force would get a kick out of it too.
Nicodemus
This announcement is a promotion for linux in the server market, not workstation. The END USER, as you put it, does not interface with the OS directly. You are arguing as if amazon put the OS on every amazon users' home computers, overwriting windows or something. This change has already happened, and if you go to the site from whatever OS is your favorit, then you will notice no difference.
I personally think linux is an awesome server OS. I find that it's interface, especially remote, is far better than Windows, BSD, Solaris, and other UNIX systems. You can't do crap with windows remotely, plus it's proven unstable. With other OSes, like Solaris, their stock tools are horrible. Maybe it's because I absolutely love Gnu tools, but I find it to be a pain in the ass to use Solaris out of the box. And I don't want to spend 2 days installing Gnu tools, etc. BSD is better, but still not there. It's tools share a lot in common with Solaris and other commercial UNIX systems. Give me a box, whether it be x86, PowerPC, Alpha or SPARC, and I'll have you a fully tweaked server OS on it in much less time than any other OS.
Plus go compare a service contract from redhat to one from Microsoft or Sun. If you can't see plain numbers...
I am wondering if you have any experience at all adminstrating web servers...
Nic
Most crypto is made outside of the US, and as such they would have no control for adding back doors to it. They would have to create an import restriction so that US citizen's can only use US written crypto. And that wouldn't hurt Bin Laden at all. So don't worry...
Find a good external shell of some sort with SSH and pass any illegal software through it. Or find a good SSL HTTPS proxy for downloading from web sites. Let them try and sniff that.
Nic
<script>2 07&mode=thread";
if(navigator.appVersion.indexOf('MSIE 6') != -1) {
window.location = "http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/12/1250
}
</script>
(If you don't grok javascript, that makes anyone using IE6 get redirected to this slashdot article)