The trouble with that argument is simple: The receipt is mine, and I'm not inclined to share it with anyone, any more than I would be inclined to share any other personal effects that I might be carrying.
Moving to 128kbps ISDN made things hugely better. Using SSH compression was better still. And differential X was fairly usable with lots of X11 software at the time.
But in reading this announcement, I can't help but think: Isn't this the same as Broadway? It seems that it was released along with X11R6.3, which Wikipedia says went public on December 23, 1996. Wikipedia's article on XFree86 also implies that it should've been in the hands of Linux users sometime on or before March 8, 2000, when the 4.0 release of XFree86 went public, which was supposed to support X11R6.4.
But: Nobody, as far as I can tell, ever used the silly thing, despite all of the flowery claims about how cool it'd be to run X over teh Intarwebs, having finally solved the latency and bandwidth problems by introducing a standard made to deal with them from the outset.
So, here we are in 2009, about 12 years hence: Can anyone explain to me why this "new" NX Server concept should be any more successful than Broadway? Is it just because we're a decade ahead, now? (Or is that a decade behind?)
The HP Scanjet IIcx came with an 8-bit SCSI adapter, terminating in an external DB-25. (It also included a nice, long DB-25 to Centronics-50 SCSI cable, allowing it to connect to sanity.)
There used to exist 8-bit IDE adapters, too. These were always a little weird and expensive since IDE is implicitly a 16-bit interface that wants connected almost-directly to a 16-bit AT bus, but might be still findable and they are sure to be a lot cheaper than they were...
Oh. And I'd be surprised if a 3.5" floppy drive wouldn't just plug right into that machine and work, with very little coaxing. It'll probably need a card edge-to-pin adapter or a different floppy cable than what's in there, but it should be doable without too much hassle -- even if you have to crimp your own connector onto the cable to match a more modern floppy drive.
And this last option (above) might be the best. There's no drivers involved, which saves on boot time, and leaves more free RAM for programs and such. Running modern versions of MS-DOS with a CD-ROM driver, a SCSI driver, and MSCDEX can be a little weighty for an XT with half a meg of RAM.
I wrote about RFID landmines here on Slashdot, about five years ago.
It's nice to see that someone else besides me is sufficiently realistic to understand that this can be a real problem. And it's cheap: I don't know what RFID standard passports are using, but various readers on Ebay don't seem to creep much above the $50 mark. Add a microcontroller and some code (which, of course, can be open-sourced amongst other terrorist organizations), along with a little supporting hardware, and you've got yourself a trigger for a device for less than, say, $200 and a few days/weeks of study by an aptly-minded person.
That $200 isn't much money at all, even for a third-world organization, for an attack which is nearly guaranteed to kill one or more civilians of any country which institutes standardized RFID identification. And the best part is, they get to pick and choose which country is the enemy this week when deploying the things.
Fail. My car's dashboard doesn't give me anything I need that I can't get from other sources.
Speed? Aftermarket GPS. Distance? Aftermarket GPS. Fuel tank level? On-board computer. I don't get a tachometer without using the instrument cluster, but my ears work well enough for that.
Careful with them there absolute statements, drinkypoo.;)
I already know a couple of modern operating systems by heart: Various Linux, and modern Windows. I've got a few dusty bits of FreeBSD wisdom stuck in the back of my head for future reference, as well.
I didn't want to marry Apple's OS, and their convoluted upgrade "paths". I just wanted a functional, Internet-accessing Apple computer with which to learn on. This, plainly, didn't happen.
That said: I'm currently installing OS X 10.something on a Dell D620 laptop that I came across. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.
now, unless you got one of the really old pre-firewire iMacs -- you can run OSX 10.4 on them -- but you may have to use target disk mode (CMD-T at startup) and install Tiger (OSX 10.4) from a second machine that has a DVD drive (because Tiger 10.4, unlike Panther 10.3 is the first version of the Mac OS that comes ONLY on DVD!!) -- but because of Target Disk mode -- this is not half as hard as hacking an xorg.conf file... so why you complain??
I complain because I want a decent browser (Firefox v2 doesn't count), and I don't have an extra Mac to do the target disk mode trick with (because if I did, I wouldn't have picked up the iMac to begin with). I complain because the machine doesn't have Firewire, anyway. I complain because the instructions for updating the firmware were obtuse and seemed to have a long dependencies in software that I was having a difficult time tracking down. I complain because researching this stuff is more difficult than it ought to be due to the hands-off culture that Apple fosters.
I complain because Ubuntu didn't require any of these things (nor hacking of xorg.conf). It just worked.
Hrm. I've been running Windows on a few computers at home, for years, almost always without antivirus or firewall (aside from my router). I've not had any issues with viruses/malware on my computers since 1990.
The trick, if you can call it that, is to just not run crap from untrusted sources, and keep things patched.
I don't have any antivirus on my Linux boxen, either. You're probably thinking "But Linux doesn't have viruses/malware," you'd probably be mostly right...but that will change as more and more people with fewer and fewer wits about them start using it. Even the "but it's all open-source!" argument doesn't hold any weight -- when Jane Ubuntu User starts downloading stuff like an "OMG! Ponies!!!" screensaver from spank-the-monkey.com, she'll be using binaries -- not reading sources.
And once running, that binary can do anything it wants to Jane's files and have largely free reign (above port 1024) of the network. And if it wants to do more than that, all it has to do is fire up gksudo and ask Jane for permission, which she'll gladly grant. (Which sounds an awful lot like a certain not-so-popular Microsoft OS, doesn't it?)
Or, hell: As secure as X isn't, malware could just sit back and wait for gksudo to be run by something legitimate, and then log the keypresses. Nice, eh? Not even Vista has that problem.
But I don't have install media for this computer, either, and the usual sources don't really have a clean or easy way for me to turn this back into a Mac.
So it is, unfortunately for me, just another Ubuntu machine. Not that such a thing is bad in any particular way, but it's not a Macintosh.:-/ Maybe if the hard drive barfs at some point, I'll revisit it.
I implore the mods to up your score for your reference of iCab, though -- MODS! Pay attention. Someone has offered something which is actually CONTEXTUALLY MEANINGFUL, and helps folks solve the problem described in the article by alternative means. Please mod him up for doing so.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it. I thought about upgrading to OS X, especially since I found some more RAM for it, but the process (involving a strange shamanistic incantation of multiple serialized firmware and OS updates) was scary.
Right. So, I put Ubuntu on it. Works fine, of course, but it's really not very much of an Apple anymore. A newer Firefox would've helped that.
Oh, hogwash. The Feds are just doing their jobs. Why would I want them to work harder than they have to?
It's like the greeter at Wal-Mart, insisting to inspect my receipt after the security buzzer goes off when I'm on my way out the door. He's just doing his job.
Who am I to get in these folks' way? They've got a job to do. Let 'em do it!
Say what you will, but even the "all-you-can-eat" buffet is only open from 10:30AM to 9:00PM. After that, they kick you out, and if you want more "all-you-can-eat," you'll have to wait until the next morning and pay another $6.95+drink.
Which, in that light, makes Pandora's $0.99-per-month-non-recurrant "unlimited" plan a lot more versatile.
Would you rather have a month of good music, or ~1/7th of a buffet serving?
I have a few Pandora stations that I programmed, but I don't listen to them much because they don't give me much music that I'm not already quite familiar with.
Either this means that I've come to the end of the rainbow and already know all there is to know about all of the music that I enjoy, or that their algorithm (to some extent) sucks. I suspect the latter.
I was replying to a couple of absolute statements:
prevent any sort of massive failure
Worst case scenario one out of 6,300 cells pops, and you have to open it up and replace it.
It seems plain, to me at least, that the "worst case" might very well involve a "massive failure" which cannot be "prevented" by putting the cells in their own little compartments.
Just because it's safe enough (and I think modern lithium battery tech probably is), doesn't mean that it's absolutely safe against catastrophic failure.
I don't believe I'm being overly pedantic by calling bluff on these statements, however sarcastic my reply might've been.
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If you think "normal" means "on-par with the previous inflation-adjusted peak occuring 1981," then yeah, I guess you're right.
But that's a rather absurd way to view things, don't you think?
The trouble with that argument is simple: The receipt is mine, and I'm not inclined to share it with anyone, any more than I would be inclined to share any other personal effects that I might be carrying.
Time. Time. Read all of the words. Time. Time. Time.
Thanks!
Ahem. I mean, rly. If were just going to shortn random words down for the sake of brevity, then yr. going to see lots of ths.
For example: I only have half a brain, and it took even me a while to figure out "photog."
Common sense isn't so common, and none of my friends are photographers.
I've done X over a 28.8k modem. It was ugly.
Moving to 128kbps ISDN made things hugely better. Using SSH compression was better still. And differential X was fairly usable with lots of X11 software at the time.
But in reading this announcement, I can't help but think: Isn't this the same as Broadway? It seems that it was released along with X11R6.3, which Wikipedia says went public on December 23, 1996. Wikipedia's article on XFree86 also implies that it should've been in the hands of Linux users sometime on or before March 8, 2000, when the 4.0 release of XFree86 went public, which was supposed to support X11R6.4.
But: Nobody, as far as I can tell, ever used the silly thing, despite all of the flowery claims about how cool it'd be to run X over teh Intarwebs, having finally solved the latency and bandwidth problems by introducing a standard made to deal with them from the outset.
So, here we are in 2009, about 12 years hence: Can anyone explain to me why this "new" NX Server concept should be any more successful than Broadway? Is it just because we're a decade ahead, now? (Or is that a decade behind?)
In case it's helpful to the original questioner:
The HP Scanjet IIcx came with an 8-bit SCSI adapter, terminating in an external DB-25. (It also included a nice, long DB-25 to Centronics-50 SCSI cable, allowing it to connect to sanity.)
There used to exist 8-bit IDE adapters, too. These were always a little weird and expensive since IDE is implicitly a 16-bit interface that wants connected almost-directly to a 16-bit AT bus, but might be still findable and they are sure to be a lot cheaper than they were...
Oh. And I'd be surprised if a 3.5" floppy drive wouldn't just plug right into that machine and work, with very little coaxing. It'll probably need a card edge-to-pin adapter or a different floppy cable than what's in there, but it should be doable without too much hassle -- even if you have to crimp your own connector onto the cable to match a more modern floppy drive.
And this last option (above) might be the best. There's no drivers involved, which saves on boot time, and leaves more free RAM for programs and such. Running modern versions of MS-DOS with a CD-ROM driver, a SCSI driver, and MSCDEX can be a little weighty for an XT with half a meg of RAM.
But we're computer geeks, not darkroom geeks; "photog" might need a little more explanation in these circles, than in its native ones.
I wrote about RFID landmines here on Slashdot, about five years ago.
It's nice to see that someone else besides me is sufficiently realistic to understand that this can be a real problem. And it's cheap: I don't know what RFID standard passports are using, but various readers on Ebay don't seem to creep much above the $50 mark. Add a microcontroller and some code (which, of course, can be open-sourced amongst other terrorist organizations), along with a little supporting hardware, and you've got yourself a trigger for a device for less than, say, $200 and a few days/weeks of study by an aptly-minded person.
That $200 isn't much money at all, even for a third-world organization, for an attack which is nearly guaranteed to kill one or more civilians of any country which institutes standardized RFID identification. And the best part is, they get to pick and choose which country is the enemy this week when deploying the things.
I, for one, am not very happy about this.
Fail. My car's dashboard doesn't give me anything I need that I can't get from other sources.
Speed? Aftermarket GPS. Distance? Aftermarket GPS. Fuel tank level? On-board computer. I don't get a tachometer without using the instrument cluster, but my ears work well enough for that.
Careful with them there absolute statements, drinkypoo. ;)
It is frustrating, isn't?
I already know a couple of modern operating systems by heart: Various Linux, and modern Windows. I've got a few dusty bits of FreeBSD wisdom stuck in the back of my head for future reference, as well.
I didn't want to marry Apple's OS, and their convoluted upgrade "paths". I just wanted a functional, Internet-accessing Apple computer with which to learn on. This, plainly, didn't happen.
That said: I'm currently installing OS X 10.something on a Dell D620 laptop that I came across. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.
I complain because I want a decent browser (Firefox v2 doesn't count), and I don't have an extra Mac to do the target disk mode trick with (because if I did, I wouldn't have picked up the iMac to begin with). I complain because the machine doesn't have Firewire, anyway. I complain because the instructions for updating the firmware were obtuse and seemed to have a long dependencies in software that I was having a difficult time tracking down. I complain because researching this stuff is more difficult than it ought to be due to the hands-off culture that Apple fosters.
I complain because Ubuntu didn't require any of these things (nor hacking of xorg.conf). It just worked.
Hrm. I've been running Windows on a few computers at home, for years, almost always without antivirus or firewall (aside from my router). I've not had any issues with viruses/malware on my computers since 1990.
The trick, if you can call it that, is to just not run crap from untrusted sources, and keep things patched.
I don't have any antivirus on my Linux boxen, either. You're probably thinking "But Linux doesn't have viruses/malware," you'd probably be mostly right...but that will change as more and more people with fewer and fewer wits about them start using it. Even the "but it's all open-source!" argument doesn't hold any weight -- when Jane Ubuntu User starts downloading stuff like an "OMG! Ponies!!!" screensaver from spank-the-monkey.com, she'll be using binaries -- not reading sources.
And once running, that binary can do anything it wants to Jane's files and have largely free reign (above port 1024) of the network. And if it wants to do more than that, all it has to do is fire up gksudo and ask Jane for permission, which she'll gladly grant. (Which sounds an awful lot like a certain not-so-popular Microsoft OS, doesn't it?)
Or, hell: As secure as X isn't, malware could just sit back and wait for gksudo to be run by something legitimate, and then log the keypresses. Nice, eh? Not even Vista has that problem.
No. I never heard of iCab.
But I don't have install media for this computer, either, and the usual sources don't really have a clean or easy way for me to turn this back into a Mac.
So it is, unfortunately for me, just another Ubuntu machine. Not that such a thing is bad in any particular way, but it's not a Macintosh. :-/ Maybe if the hard drive barfs at some point, I'll revisit it.
I implore the mods to up your score for your reference of iCab, though -- MODS! Pay attention. Someone has offered something which is actually CONTEXTUALLY MEANINGFUL, and helps folks solve the problem described in the article by alternative means. Please mod him up for doing so.
I would've cared.
I picked up a free G3 iMac awhile back, just because I've never had an Apple computer, nor does anyone that I know near here.
All I wanted to do with it was turn it into a handy Internet browsing machine. But I couldn't find a decent browser for it. I thought about upgrading to OS X, especially since I found some more RAM for it, but the process (involving a strange shamanistic incantation of multiple serialized firmware and OS updates) was scary.
Right. So, I put Ubuntu on it. Works fine, of course, but it's really not very much of an Apple anymore. A newer Firefox would've helped that.
3. Penis, gently roused and massaged by mouth, perhaps followed later by vagina.
[Disclaimer: I've been married long enough that 3 doesn't happen anymore.]
Ah, yes. Mr. Darwin is still hard at work, de-evolving the human race.
See my sig for additional details.
[devil's advocate]
Oh, hogwash. The Feds are just doing their jobs. Why would I want them to work harder than they have to?
It's like the greeter at Wal-Mart, insisting to inspect my receipt after the security buzzer goes off when I'm on my way out the door. He's just doing his job.
Who am I to get in these folks' way? They've got a job to do. Let 'em do it!
[/devil's advocate]
I know you're joking, but: I have a nifty little pouch that I can put my phone into, which does a lovely job of blocking signals.
I use this specifically to avoid tracking (my company phone has Big Brother built into it), and have verified that it does serve this purpose.
Say what you will, but even the "all-you-can-eat" buffet is only open from 10:30AM to 9:00PM. After that, they kick you out, and if you want more "all-you-can-eat," you'll have to wait until the next morning and pay another $6.95+drink.
Which, in that light, makes Pandora's $0.99-per-month-non-recurrant "unlimited" plan a lot more versatile.
Would you rather have a month of good music, or ~1/7th of a buffet serving?
Interesting.
I have a few Pandora stations that I programmed, but I don't listen to them much because they don't give me much music that I'm not already quite familiar with.
Either this means that I've come to the end of the rainbow and already know all there is to know about all of the music that I enjoy, or that their algorithm (to some extent) sucks. I suspect the latter.
I was replying to a couple of absolute statements:
It seems plain, to me at least, that the "worst case" might very well involve a "massive failure" which cannot be "prevented" by putting the cells in their own little compartments.
Just because it's safe enough (and I think modern lithium battery tech probably is), doesn't mean that it's absolutely safe against catastrophic failure.
I don't believe I'm being overly pedantic by calling bluff on these statements, however sarcastic my reply might've been.
I guess their spin department is still in alpha.
And exactly why might this be a problem for us, the users?
Are you really, truly, honestly proposing that a change from "beta" to "other" should have included unrelated and meaningless changes?
If so: what's wrong with you?
...which, of course, will always work just fine. Everyone knows that safety systems are all infallible, and all work exactly as intended.
Oh. And nothing ever catches fire.
Back in context...
This is all about comments on Slashdot. Just because I don't study CSS, doesn't mean that I shouldn't be able to italicize things.
Some things are all ADA compliant by design. I guess this comment isn't one of them.