Right then. So how long before they just include some weak general-purpose instructions in the GPU, add SATA and ethernet to the cards, and call it a budget PC?
I didn't miss them. They're just not even on my map.
See, I don't care about satellites. I can get from A to B faster, and with lower latency, and for fewer dollars, by almost ANY modern electronic method than I can with an amateur satellite.
And while 100mW on 49.1MHz may not be enough for the things that you've listed, 1 Watt of 900MHz ought to be, and it's probably cheaper, and lighter, and more reliable that way, anyhow.
Warning: I work with hams on a daily basis as part of my job, and have for some time. I am, therefore, rather biased.
Ham radio is dead. It is not cutting-edge. It is not exciting. It is not a viable or useful communications medium except in a state of emergency, where despite everyone's best efforts, government communication falls on its face during a disaster.
And the ONLY reason that the government systems still fall on their face is that, even with expensive plug-boards like the JPS ACU-1000, they're STILL reliant on a commercial vendor (whom they can't reach, because Things Are Fucked) to program the bloody Motorola radios and make sense of the frequencies, PL tones, and integration issues between sites and formats.
So, government employees don't know how to program a radio. What a loser of a reason for hams to exist.
Most of the times, I see hams talking on their radios more about being hams than about anything useful. Such-and-such repeater is acting up, So-and-so's ratty homebuilt antenna took damage in yesterday's wind, would you please show up early and make the coffee for the weekly radio club meeting this Thursday, I'm standing in the park in $towntwentymilesaway talking into an HT HOW DO I SOUND?
These conversations are point-to-point in subject, and also pointedly boring. But they are (unfortunately) shared with everyone.
IM, or even SMS would be better for this sort of banter, but of course, since the IM systems typically Actually Work, then there'd not be so much to talk about, much less any need for a club (often with real property, even) to exist to talk about just how cool Jabber is to use.
See, these days, I don't need to build a high-power low-frequency Yagi to talk to Europe from Ohio. I just pick up my Vonage phone and dial. It's free, as in I don't pay anything extra to do so, so why not? Give it a year or two, and the same thing will happen for cell phones, making the whole game completely wireless, and far lighter than a 5-Watt portable.
Satellite? I just sent a file to Germany that was over 100 megabytes, and it only took a few minutes on my residential broadband. Isn't "satellite" just another term for "fickle, expensive, and slow"?
And Pioneer? Voyager? Dude: I carry more technology than that in my fucking wristwatch. I should -hope- that amateur radio has advanced similarly...but that doesn't make it fun, or exciting. It just makes it more advanced than it used to be. (Duh.)
Ham radio was, I thought, supposed to be about communicating in ways which otherwise weren't possible with people who otherwise were unreachable. It used to be high-tech. It used to be cutting-edge.
My bank's ATM machine lets me do almost anything with floats.
I can deposit a check for $500, and immediately take $500 back out. Even if that only leaves $1 of my money in the bank. And even though I have no sort of overdraft protection, credit lines, or any such nonsense (zero equals zero).
I've done this fairly routinely for years, and never thought much of it.
I guess my bank is just more trusting than those that the rest of you folks use.
I've been doing remote backups for a few months now of our mail/web/DB/whatever server at work, over what is essentially slow consumer-quality cable (384k up).
Speeds are good. The initial backup took some time (a weekend), and now consumes between 25 and 35 minutes daily (yay rsync). What's more, with it rolling on a daily basis, it seems that disk is the primary bottleneck, not the network.
I don't know why it'd be any different for a typical home user.
So, $.15/GB/month, Amazon's service sounds like it'd be a cheap and very effective (ie, automatic) insurance policy.
All the world needs now is for someone to write a usable, drop-in, encrypting, OSS backup tool for it. Preferably with some concept of copy-on-write snapshots, so that multiple backup generations may be kept at low cost.
A doctor's office that I occasionally do work for has a Canon scanner up at the the front desk which they use to scan, from what I gather, all of their patient-related documents into a computer.
It's a dandy little box. You just put a stack of papers into it, and it scans them - both sides at once. It doesn't seem to care much about bent corners, or creases, or folds, or slightly-off sizes. And when it does begin to misfeed for whatever reason, it has the remarkable ability to shake the paper stack until things begin feeding properly again.
And, IIRC, it scans at some insane real-world speed of something like 15 double-sided pages per minute, including occasional pauses to let the computer/interface catch up.
They don't bother with OCR there (and last I checkd, OCR was generally still pretty sucky), so I cannot speak of its performance in that area. But the hardware sure seems to have existed, at least, for the past year or so.
You edit photos that consist of black and white lines???
Unless your family members are all referees, that's the most absolutely fucking worthless tool with which to evaluate a display that I've ever. It has no semblence to any photographic editing task, and is designed to demonstrate (not "test") precisely two flaws inherent in CRT monitors design: Imprecise pixel placement, and limited bandwidth, while also demonstrating none of the LCDs flaws.
Anyway: Your test looks fine at a perfectly reasonable 1600x1200 on my 19" Viewsonic P95f+ CRT. No moire patterns of strangeness to speak of.
Also looks fine on my laptop's LCD at 1920x1200, as long as I'm dead-centered in front of it.
Of course, the laptop's LCD looks like ass once you get off-axis, whereas a CRT does not change. And the LCD is not as bright, now that it's a few months old. Also doesn't have the same range of color as a good CRT, but that conveniently is not tested on the web page you specified. Oh - and the LCD refreshes at a paltry 60Hz (pixel response time be damned), due to its DVI interface, whereas the CRT, at the resolutions I use, never works at less than 85Hz. And the LCD's idea of white does not match my idea of white and cannot be adjusted without further reducing gamut, whereas the CRT can be (and has been) calibrated without detriment. Etc, so on, so forth.
LCDs are good for lots of things. But photo editing is not their strong suite.
Even if it were cheaper to regulate/switch/whatever DC than it is to transform, rectify, and filter AC (a notion that the retail market seems to disagree with), you seem to be missing two very important reasons why manufacturers like to use external AC adapters:
1. Small form factor devices. A cell phone WITHOUT a high-ratio DC-DC converter will always be smaller, lighter, and generate less heat than one WITH a high-ratio DC-DC converter. This is obvious. Therefore, under the suggested plan will either require larger devices, or DC-DC wall warts instead of the much-less-fashionable AC-DC wall warts that nobody likes.
2. Ease of safety approval. It is cheaper, easier, and SAFER to have Underwriters Laboratories inspect and certify one (1) 120VAC -> 7.5VDC wall wart which can power a thousand (1,000) different devices, than it is to certify 1,000 different devices individually.
Besides, I don't want high-current 48VDC around the house. That stuff will hurt you, and tends to hold on in ways that AC does not. And, simply by being in excess of twenty-five (25) volts, it is also considered high voltage in many jurisdictions, and so would need to be treated just like standard AC power in terms of permitting, licensing, and regulation. And so, this is why point #2, above, is still a Big Deal - all of those lovely internalized 48 -> 5 DC-DC converters will need approved.
I guess one could reduce the proposed voltage to, say, 24VDC, and include stiff current limiting to bypass some regulations. But then, the wiring would need to be twice as big, and thus at least twice as expensive. And then current goes up, which makes the connections more important and more prone to failure. And price per outlet goes up, because we need fuses, or breakers, or some other current-limiting apparatus. And so on, and so forth.
Who wants yet another cable plant in their house, anyway? We've already got Cat 5, satellite coax, OTA coax, cable modem coax, telephone, and multiple AC voltages in many rather basic houses.
I mean: Geez. This was all figured out a long time ago, with Edison vs. Westinghouse. Edison's Direct Current lost to Westinghouse's Alternating Current.
It was figured out again, years ago here on Ask Slashdot. It was a bad idea then, too, and nothing has changed since.
PS/2 and parallel ports seem to be disappearing in a hurry. Your supposed fix for the USB key problem is, well, somewhat flawed if it makes the whole rest of the workstation unusable at the same time...
Oh, yeah. Functional port forwarding, in the world of firewalls and DHCP and NAT that we live in, works wonders.
uPNP fixes the problem of configuring it, and is supported by most of the current crop of home routers (and, at least, Azureus). But the security nuts hate it because it does what people want it to do: It forwards ports automatically.
"Security flaw!" they shout from the rooftops. "Any program can open a port to teh Intar-Web!" they harp. "Think of the children!" they scream.
Thing is, uPNP seems to work just fine. And, personally, given the amount of trust I give to every program I run as root or Administrator, the last thing I'm worried about is whether or not it has a listening port on teh Intar-Web.
...there is also the possibility that, while outside of your home, you might elect to wear a mask or makeup, in a deliberate attempt to disguise your identity. You might also speak softly, or with a characteristically different voice, or in a different language. You could carry cash, instead of credit cards or checks.
Nothing wrong with any of that, even if it does look a bit out of place to those around you.
Now then, I might elect to use Tor, PGP, S/MIME, OpenVPN in a deliberate attempt to disguise my identity.
And there's nothing wrong with that, either.
The notion that I might be conducting myself "in public" does not require me to wear my secrets on my shirtsleaves.
Be pissed all you want. No matter how angry you are, I'll still be forced to choose between software suspend and accelerated 3D with Linux.
I know that it's the fault of the driver; I just choose not to care. There is just simply no driver which offers a combination of proper power management support, 3D acceleration, and stability under Linux.
It does seem that it would be pretty trivial to dump the state of a video card and restore it later, particularly if you designed the thing in-house, and it is definately absurd that it doesn't work.
But it doesn't matter - there's lots of other things that Just Fucking Work about XP which Linux falls down on.
Modern ALPS Glidepoints Just Fucking Work in XP. They can work well with Linux and X, but it requires one to use the Synaptics driver (!) and a few days (!!!) of trial and error, restarting X and all applications with every iteration of (trial and error).
Sound support. ALSA is very good, but with very limited scope. JACK and a few other projects aim to increase the scope, but become very unmanagable very quickly to anyone not overtly preoccupied with playing with it (even with supposedly easy-to-use configuration tools). Windows' DirectX audio Just Fucking Works. And the free (as in beer) Kx driver for the beloved emu10k1 chip does all manner of wonderful hardware DSP things in mere minutes with Windows that, while possible, would take weeks to properly sort out with Linux. And audio latency? I remember Linus arguing against the kernel supporting realtime processes. *sigh*
I'd go on, but it's pointless. And don't get me wrong, oh pissed-off one: I like Linux, and have been using it as my main desktop OS for 10 years or more. Further, you can have my Spamassassin-filtering, F-prot/ClamAV-scanning, fault-tolerant, high-speed, low-cost, snapshotting, backed-up-to-a-remote-server-with-Rsync-in-mere-mi nutes-over-Roadrunner postfix/Gentoo mail server when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
But the fact remains that little of it Just Fucking Works. It took hard work to get that mail thrashing machine to turn its tricks, but that's OK because it works extremely well and lives a largely hands-off existance.
However, it took hard work and KERNEL PATCHES to get the DVD+RW drive to work correctly on my laptop. Which is just fucking stupid, as common a thing as that is. And I wouldn't mind so much, but the patches (which were trivial) were already old by the time I got around to using them, and still weren't integrated into an official kernel.
This is 2006: I shouldn't have to grok GCC in order to figure out how to cut a CD on my computer.
And while hardware support of network devices has always been stellar with Linux, don't get me started about trying to get 802.11 WPA or WPA2 working with a large and varying collection of wireless networks.
And every time I press a hardware button on my laptop (like, the button to adjust brightness), the kernel froths at the mouth about the unknown key presses, spewing several lines of useless shit onto the console. Which makes text mode almost unusable at times. And sure, I can map all of those buttons and make that, but the fact is that they work JUST BLOODY FINE without the kernel knowing what they're up to, and I don't want to spend an hour or more fucking with scan codes just to make the kernel shut up about them.
I should not even need to know what a scan code IS.
Meanwhile, since X, by most definitions, defaults to being broken without a serious investment in time, research, and effort, the whole thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth as I systematically feed XP a handful of drivers, reboot half a dozen times, and get on with things Just Fucking Working, accelerated 3D, suspend-to-disk, touchpad, WPA, and all.
Being angry about it all won't turn wishful thinking into fact, though. I suggest that you get over it, and realize that there are definitely some areas in which Linux (and pals) absolutely suck ass, with dismal hope for timely recovery.
While you were busy assuming things, you *also* assumed that the computers are, in fact, in different locations.
You additionally assumed that he doesn't want to listen to, say, Real streams. And you assumed that he doesn't want to hear informational sounds ("ding!" says the server as it finishes downloading/crashing/whatever).
I mean, for the sake of fuck: If he just wanted to play his MP3s over a network, I assume, by virtue of his use of the "server" adjective, that he'd be doing it already with the Media Center box.
Quit assuming things, and give this guy what he asked for: He wants the moral equivilent of ESD, but he wants it to run on Windows instead of Linux.
AFAICT, this does not exist[2]. But that doesn't mean it's a dumb thing to be doing[1], does it?.
[1]: The best gaming machine I currently posess is an XP laptop. I frequently sit at my desk at home with a rather nice audio system flanking me, playing games on said laptop. I should be able to route audio from there, over the network (without wires, even) and have it play through one of several other real computers in this room (with real sound cards), but I cannot.
Yes, I know I can just plug a wire into the laptop. But that's somewhat defeating of the purpose of having a portable computer which, in addition to being a gaming machine, also tends to go with me basically everywhere. I want fewer things to plug into it when I come home, not more.
And I know that it's a stupid problem to have, having been solved on *nix for at least a decate (perhaps longer if you count Network Audio System), but it's still a problem, because most games don't run for shit on *nix, if they work at all, and least of all with ATI's half-supported binary driver that breaks software suspend.[3]
[2]: Apple, I believe, has this working with some of their Airport models, but only for OS X.
[3]: Yep - people with ATI-equipped Linux laptops get to choose betweeen proper power management and accelerated 3D graphics, whereas things just fucking work under XP.
BMWs are, typically, pretty efficient for what they are. My 325i gets a very real 30 mpg on the highway, and even manages about 17 mpg in-town with my maniacal driving, which is about the same as a new Honda Accord V6's EPA rating.
Not amazing performance, but certainly not within the range of any "gas guzzler" description any more than the aforementioned Honda. Besides, the BMW has 5 big, fat, energy-sucking performance tires (a real spare!), a set of tools, and a cast-iron block, not to mention being rear-drive.
Further, it is 10 years old, with 149,000 miles on the engine
Remember, gas is -expensive- in Europe. The cars are designed accordingly.
That's why we have URLs to denote what, exactly, is being specified. For example, http://getfirefox clearly specifies that we're to connect to a host named getfirefox using HTTP, implicitly using TCP port 80.
More importantly, the presense of the aich tee tee pee two-dots-over-eachother-what-is-that-a-semicolon backslash backslash combination shouts to the clueless that the forthcoming script must have something to do with that Intar-Web thing.
Of course, nobody uses URLs properly anymore - the marketing people killed that idea a long time ago. And since this latest fuckjob idea of flattening the namespace is also a product of the same sort of marketers, I hereby don't give a shit if their goals conflict and result in alienation of their audience.
They've made their bed, and now they get to sleep in it.
The sound card is almost always designed to drive headphones with its "line-level" output. It is, therefore, low-impedance - typically in the several-hundred Ohm range.
Powered speakers are high-impedance. 47K ohms is common.
This all conspires to mean that you can drive lots of pairs of cheap self-amplified computer speakers with a single cheap computer sound card, and that it such a topology is even within the design parameters of the gear in question.
But don't just take my word for it: We'll make some assumptions and pound out a silly example!
Let's assume we want to drive 16 (!) amplified speaker pairs of 47K ohms each.
This gives us a load of about 2.8K, which is nowhere near as demanding as the set of headphones that the sound card device is intended to drive. It is also substantially higher than the output impedance of the sound card, and is therefore Just Fine(tm) by the defacto standard methods of interfacing consumer line-level audio devices.
Sure, it'll be attenuated somewhat compared to driving one set of speakers. It will be measurable. It will be predictable. Is it such a big deal to turn up the volume in compensation? The frequency response will be fine, so what's the big deal?
This is just line-level audio, folks. It's supposed to be easy, and in this case, it is particularly so.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not the world's foremost Windows licensing guru, but I have an option on my XP Pro laptop which lets me encrypt files and directories.
How is the retracted update different from the functionality which I have seen in-place since I bought the machine a year ago?
Right, then.
Paragraphs, anyone?
Right then. So how long before they just include some weak general-purpose instructions in the GPU, add SATA and ethernet to the cards, and call it a budget PC?
Ok. I'll buy that: Ham operators do it because it's a challenge.
Just like amateur football/tennis/baseball players play football/tennis/baseball without compensation: Because it challenges them.
But simply being challenging does not make it useful or productive, does it? Of course not.
Thank you for playing. It's been challenging.
I didn't miss them. They're just not even on my map.
See, I don't care about satellites. I can get from A to B faster, and with lower latency, and for fewer dollars, by almost ANY modern electronic method than I can with an amateur satellite.
And while 100mW on 49.1MHz may not be enough for the things that you've listed, 1 Watt of 900MHz ought to be, and it's probably cheaper, and lighter, and more reliable that way, anyhow.
FWIW, so on, so forth.
Warning: I work with hams on a daily basis as part of my job, and have for some time. I am, therefore, rather biased.
Ham radio is dead. It is not cutting-edge. It is not exciting. It is not a viable or useful communications medium except in a state of emergency, where despite everyone's best efforts, government communication falls on its face during a disaster.
And the ONLY reason that the government systems still fall on their face is that, even with expensive plug-boards like the JPS ACU-1000, they're STILL reliant on a commercial vendor (whom they can't reach, because Things Are Fucked) to program the bloody Motorola radios and make sense of the frequencies, PL tones, and integration issues between sites and formats.
So, government employees don't know how to program a radio. What a loser of a reason for hams to exist.
Most of the times, I see hams talking on their radios more about being hams than about anything useful. Such-and-such repeater is acting up, So-and-so's ratty homebuilt antenna took damage in yesterday's wind, would you please show up early and make the coffee for the weekly radio club meeting this Thursday, I'm standing in the park in $towntwentymilesaway talking into an HT HOW DO I SOUND?
These conversations are point-to-point in subject, and also pointedly boring. But they are (unfortunately) shared with everyone.
IM, or even SMS would be better for this sort of banter, but of course, since the IM systems typically Actually Work, then there'd not be so much to talk about, much less any need for a club (often with real property, even) to exist to talk about just how cool Jabber is to use.
See, these days, I don't need to build a high-power low-frequency Yagi to talk to Europe from Ohio. I just pick up my Vonage phone and dial. It's free, as in I don't pay anything extra to do so, so why not? Give it a year or two, and the same thing will happen for cell phones, making the whole game completely wireless, and far lighter than a 5-Watt portable.
Satellite? I just sent a file to Germany that was over 100 megabytes, and it only took a few minutes on my residential broadband. Isn't "satellite" just another term for "fickle, expensive, and slow"?
And Pioneer? Voyager? Dude: I carry more technology than that in my fucking wristwatch. I should -hope- that amateur radio has advanced similarly...but that doesn't make it fun, or exciting. It just makes it more advanced than it used to be. (Duh.)
Ham radio was, I thought, supposed to be about communicating in ways which otherwise weren't possible with people who otherwise were unreachable. It used to be high-tech. It used to be cutting-edge.
That time is past.
Neither does Dual-link DVI, most of the time.
What's your point?
I notice that you use the terms "DVI" and "Dual-link DVI" interchangably, yet you freely admit that they're diffrerent animals.
Nevertheless, you seem to be happy with Dual-link DVI, but you want 20gb/s worth of bandwidth.
How about Dual-link Displayport?
My bank's ATM machine lets me do almost anything with floats.
I can deposit a check for $500, and immediately take $500 back out. Even if that only leaves $1 of my money in the bank. And even though I have no sort of overdraft protection, credit lines, or any such nonsense (zero equals zero).
I've done this fairly routinely for years, and never thought much of it.
I guess my bank is just more trusting than those that the rest of you folks use.
It's not that bad, really.
I've been doing remote backups for a few months now of our mail/web/DB/whatever server at work, over what is essentially slow consumer-quality cable (384k up).
Speeds are good. The initial backup took some time (a weekend), and now consumes between 25 and 35 minutes daily (yay rsync). What's more, with it rolling on a daily basis, it seems that disk is the primary bottleneck, not the network.
I don't know why it'd be any different for a typical home user.
So, $.15/GB/month, Amazon's service sounds like it'd be a cheap and very effective (ie, automatic) insurance policy.
All the world needs now is for someone to write a usable, drop-in, encrypting, OSS backup tool for it. Preferably with some concept of copy-on-write snapshots, so that multiple backup generations may be kept at low cost.
A doctor's office that I occasionally do work for has a Canon scanner up at the the front desk which they use to scan, from what I gather, all of their patient-related documents into a computer.
It's a dandy little box. You just put a stack of papers into it, and it scans them - both sides at once. It doesn't seem to care much about bent corners, or creases, or folds, or slightly-off sizes. And when it does begin to misfeed for whatever reason, it has the remarkable ability to shake the paper stack until things begin feeding properly again.
And, IIRC, it scans at some insane real-world speed of something like 15 double-sided pages per minute, including occasional pauses to let the computer/interface catch up.
They don't bother with OCR there (and last I checkd, OCR was generally still pretty sucky), so I cannot speak of its performance in that area. But the hardware sure seems to have existed, at least, for the past year or so.
Do you honestly think that your conversation would have gone differently if it had happened with Acer, Gateway, Dell, Lenova, HP, or Asus?
Just curious.
Eeew.
You edit photos that consist of black and white lines???
Unless your family members are all referees, that's the most absolutely fucking worthless tool with which to evaluate a display that I've ever. It has no semblence to any photographic editing task, and is designed to demonstrate (not "test") precisely two flaws inherent in CRT monitors design: Imprecise pixel placement, and limited bandwidth, while also demonstrating none of the LCDs flaws.
Anyway: Your test looks fine at a perfectly reasonable 1600x1200 on my 19" Viewsonic P95f+ CRT. No moire patterns of strangeness to speak of.
Also looks fine on my laptop's LCD at 1920x1200, as long as I'm dead-centered in front of it.
Of course, the laptop's LCD looks like ass once you get off-axis, whereas a CRT does not change. And the LCD is not as bright, now that it's a few months old. Also doesn't have the same range of color as a good CRT, but that conveniently is not tested on the web page you specified. Oh - and the LCD refreshes at a paltry 60Hz (pixel response time be damned), due to its DVI interface, whereas the CRT, at the resolutions I use, never works at less than 85Hz. And the LCD's idea of white does not match my idea of white and cannot be adjusted without further reducing gamut, whereas the CRT can be (and has been) calibrated without detriment. Etc, so on, so forth.
LCDs are good for lots of things. But photo editing is not their strong suite.
Even if it were cheaper to regulate/switch/whatever DC than it is to transform, rectify, and filter AC (a notion that the retail market seems to disagree with), you seem to be missing two very important reasons why manufacturers like to use external AC adapters:
1. Small form factor devices. A cell phone WITHOUT a high-ratio DC-DC converter will always be smaller, lighter, and generate less heat than one WITH a high-ratio DC-DC converter. This is obvious. Therefore, under the suggested plan will either require larger devices, or DC-DC wall warts instead of the much-less-fashionable AC-DC wall warts that nobody likes.
2. Ease of safety approval. It is cheaper, easier, and SAFER to have Underwriters Laboratories inspect and certify one (1) 120VAC -> 7.5VDC wall wart which can power a thousand (1,000) different devices, than it is to certify 1,000 different devices individually.
Besides, I don't want high-current 48VDC around the house. That stuff will hurt you, and tends to hold on in ways that AC does not. And, simply by being in excess of twenty-five (25) volts, it is also considered high voltage in many jurisdictions, and so would need to be treated just like standard AC power in terms of permitting, licensing, and regulation. And so, this is why point #2, above, is still a Big Deal - all of those lovely internalized 48 -> 5 DC-DC converters will need approved.
I guess one could reduce the proposed voltage to, say, 24VDC, and include stiff current limiting to bypass some regulations. But then, the wiring would need to be twice as big, and thus at least twice as expensive. And then current goes up, which makes the connections more important and more prone to failure. And price per outlet goes up, because we need fuses, or breakers, or some other current-limiting apparatus. And so on, and so forth.
Who wants yet another cable plant in their house, anyway? We've already got Cat 5, satellite coax, OTA coax, cable modem coax, telephone, and multiple AC voltages in many rather basic houses.
I mean: Geez. This was all figured out a long time ago, with Edison vs. Westinghouse. Edison's Direct Current lost to Westinghouse's Alternating Current.
It was figured out again, years ago here on Ask Slashdot. It was a bad idea then, too, and nothing has changed since.
The word to describe you is "masochist."
FWIW, HTH.
Er. Uh.
How are you to use your USB printer?
Or:
Your USB keyboard and mouse?
PS/2 and parallel ports seem to be disappearing in a hurry. Your supposed fix for the USB key problem is, well, somewhat flawed if it makes the whole rest of the workstation unusable at the same time...
Right.
So, let's put all of this back into context, ok?
To forward a port, you must first:
1. Understand Debian's filesystem layout
2. Learn iptables syntax
3. Comprehend SSH
4. Grok vi (!)
That's so simple, it almost makes me jealous.
I mean, compare it to the long-winded series of steps that I have to do here at home to forward a port:
1. Click checkbox labeled "Enable uPNP"
I'll stick to uPNP, thanks.
Oh, yeah. Functional port forwarding, in the world of firewalls and DHCP and NAT that we live in, works wonders.
uPNP fixes the problem of configuring it, and is supported by most of the current crop of home routers (and, at least, Azureus). But the security nuts hate it because it does what people want it to do: It forwards ports automatically.
"Security flaw!" they shout from the rooftops. "Any program can open a port to teh Intar-Web!" they harp. "Think of the children!" they scream.
Thing is, uPNP seems to work just fine. And, personally, given the amount of trust I give to every program I run as root or Administrator, the last thing I'm worried about is whether or not it has a listening port on teh Intar-Web.
...there is also the possibility that, while outside of your home, you might elect to wear a mask or makeup, in a deliberate attempt to disguise your identity. You might also speak softly, or with a characteristically different voice, or in a different language. You could carry cash, instead of credit cards or checks.
Nothing wrong with any of that, even if it does look a bit out of place to those around you.
Now then, I might elect to use Tor, PGP, S/MIME, OpenVPN in a deliberate attempt to disguise my identity.
And there's nothing wrong with that, either.
The notion that I might be conducting myself "in public" does not require me to wear my secrets on my shirtsleaves.
Be pissed all you want. No matter how angry you are, I'll still be forced to choose between software suspend and accelerated 3D with Linux.
i nutes-over-Roadrunner postfix/Gentoo mail server when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I know that it's the fault of the driver; I just choose not to care. There is just simply no driver which offers a combination of proper power management support, 3D acceleration, and stability under Linux.
It does seem that it would be pretty trivial to dump the state of a video card and restore it later, particularly if you designed the thing in-house, and it is definately absurd that it doesn't work.
But it doesn't matter - there's lots of other things that Just Fucking Work about XP which Linux falls down on.
Modern ALPS Glidepoints Just Fucking Work in XP. They can work well with Linux and X, but it requires one to use the Synaptics driver (!) and a few days (!!!) of trial and error, restarting X and all applications with every iteration of (trial and error).
Sound support. ALSA is very good, but with very limited scope. JACK and a few other projects aim to increase the scope, but become very unmanagable very quickly to anyone not overtly preoccupied with playing with it (even with supposedly easy-to-use configuration tools). Windows' DirectX audio Just Fucking Works. And the free (as in beer) Kx driver for the beloved emu10k1 chip does all manner of wonderful hardware DSP things in mere minutes with Windows that, while possible, would take weeks to properly sort out with Linux. And audio latency? I remember Linus arguing against the kernel supporting realtime processes. *sigh*
I'd go on, but it's pointless. And don't get me wrong, oh pissed-off one: I like Linux, and have been using it as my main desktop OS for 10 years or more. Further, you can have my Spamassassin-filtering, F-prot/ClamAV-scanning, fault-tolerant, high-speed, low-cost, snapshotting, backed-up-to-a-remote-server-with-Rsync-in-mere-m
But the fact remains that little of it Just Fucking Works. It took hard work to get that mail thrashing machine to turn its tricks, but that's OK because it works extremely well and lives a largely hands-off existance.
However, it took hard work and KERNEL PATCHES to get the DVD+RW drive to work correctly on my laptop. Which is just fucking stupid, as common a thing as that is. And I wouldn't mind so much, but the patches (which were trivial) were already old by the time I got around to using them, and still weren't integrated into an official kernel.
This is 2006: I shouldn't have to grok GCC in order to figure out how to cut a CD on my computer.
And while hardware support of network devices has always been stellar with Linux, don't get me started about trying to get 802.11 WPA or WPA2 working with a large and varying collection of wireless networks.
And every time I press a hardware button on my laptop (like, the button to adjust brightness), the kernel froths at the mouth about the unknown key presses, spewing several lines of useless shit onto the console. Which makes text mode almost unusable at times. And sure, I can map all of those buttons and make that, but the fact is that they work JUST BLOODY FINE without the kernel knowing what they're up to, and I don't want to spend an hour or more fucking with scan codes just to make the kernel shut up about them.
I should not even need to know what a scan code IS.
Meanwhile, since X, by most definitions, defaults to being broken without a serious investment in time, research, and effort, the whole thing leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth as I systematically feed XP a handful of drivers, reboot half a dozen times, and get on with things Just Fucking Working, accelerated 3D, suspend-to-disk, touchpad, WPA, and all.
Being angry about it all won't turn wishful thinking into fact, though. I suggest that you get over it, and realize that there are definitely some areas in which Linux (and pals) absolutely suck ass, with dismal hope for timely recovery.
FWIW, HTH, HAND.
While you were busy assuming things, you *also* assumed that the computers are, in fact, in different locations.
You additionally assumed that he doesn't want to listen to, say, Real streams. And you assumed that he doesn't want to hear informational sounds ("ding!" says the server as it finishes downloading/crashing/whatever).
I mean, for the sake of fuck: If he just wanted to play his MP3s over a network, I assume, by virtue of his use of the "server" adjective, that he'd be doing it already with the Media Center box.
Quit assuming things, and give this guy what he asked for: He wants the moral equivilent of ESD, but he wants it to run on Windows instead of Linux.
AFAICT, this does not exist[2]. But that doesn't mean it's a dumb thing to be doing[1], does it?.
[1]: The best gaming machine I currently posess is an XP laptop. I frequently sit at my desk at home with a rather nice audio system flanking me, playing games on said laptop. I should be able to route audio from there, over the network (without wires, even) and have it play through one of several other real computers in this room (with real sound cards), but I cannot.
Yes, I know I can just plug a wire into the laptop. But that's somewhat defeating of the purpose of having a portable computer which, in addition to being a gaming machine, also tends to go with me basically everywhere. I want fewer things to plug into it when I come home, not more.
And I know that it's a stupid problem to have, having been solved on *nix for at least a decate (perhaps longer if you count Network Audio System), but it's still a problem, because most games don't run for shit on *nix, if they work at all, and least of all with ATI's half-supported binary driver that breaks software suspend.[3]
[2]: Apple, I believe, has this working with some of their Airport models, but only for OS X.
[3]: Yep - people with ATI-equipped Linux laptops get to choose betweeen proper power management and accelerated 3D graphics, whereas things just fucking work under XP.
Gas guzzling beemer, eh?
BMWs are, typically, pretty efficient for what they are. My 325i gets a very real 30 mpg on the highway, and even manages about 17 mpg in-town with my maniacal driving, which is about the same as a new Honda Accord V6's EPA rating.
Not amazing performance, but certainly not within the range of any "gas guzzler" description any more than the aforementioned Honda. Besides, the BMW has 5 big, fat, energy-sucking performance tires (a real spare!), a set of tools, and a cast-iron block, not to mention being rear-drive.
Further, it is 10 years old, with 149,000 miles on the engine
Remember, gas is -expensive- in Europe. The cars are designed accordingly.
Yes, of course.
And such an op-amp already exists at the output of the sound card. No need to muddy the waters with extra parts.
No, it won't - or at least, it's not supposed to.
That's why we have URLs to denote what, exactly, is being specified. For example, http://getfirefox clearly specifies that we're to connect to a host named getfirefox using HTTP, implicitly using TCP port 80.
More importantly, the presense of the aich tee tee pee two-dots-over-eachother-what-is-that-a-semicolon backslash backslash combination shouts to the clueless that the forthcoming script must have something to do with that Intar-Web thing.
Of course, nobody uses URLs properly anymore - the marketing people killed that idea a long time ago. And since this latest fuckjob idea of flattening the namespace is also a product of the same sort of marketers, I hereby don't give a shit if their goals conflict and result in alienation of their audience.
They've made their bed, and now they get to sleep in it.
It doesn't have to be difficult.
The sound card is almost always designed to drive headphones with its "line-level" output. It is, therefore, low-impedance - typically in the several-hundred Ohm range.
Powered speakers are high-impedance. 47K ohms is common.
This all conspires to mean that you can drive lots of pairs of cheap self-amplified computer speakers with a single cheap computer sound card, and that it such a topology is even within the design parameters of the gear in question.
But don't just take my word for it: We'll make some assumptions and pound out a silly example!
Let's assume we want to drive 16 (!) amplified speaker pairs of 47K ohms each.
This gives us a load of about 2.8K, which is nowhere near as demanding as the set of headphones that the sound card device is intended to drive. It is also substantially higher than the output impedance of the sound card, and is therefore Just Fine(tm) by the defacto standard methods of interfacing consumer line-level audio devices.
Sure, it'll be attenuated somewhat compared to driving one set of speakers. It will be measurable. It will be predictable. Is it such a big deal to turn up the volume in compensation? The frequency response will be fine, so what's the big deal?
This is just line-level audio, folks. It's supposed to be easy, and in this case, it is particularly so.