The general trick with Slackware is to only upgrade those packages which need upgrading, with a "if it's not broke, don't fix it" mentality. Use upgradepkg, or removepkg/installpkg to get this done.
I've been upgrading my Slackware desktop machine peicemeal since 3.0. It runs the latest, greatest versions of everything I care about, but I'm pretty sure I haven't upgraded awk, sed, ncurses or SVGAlib in years. Some more frequently-used software gets updated as often as Patrick releases it, such as X, and I keep a few smaller things on the bleeding edge (LAME, grip, etc) by compiling by hand.
I don't care if I don't have the latest versions of esd, lpr, KDE, Gnome, or a slew of other random programs, because I seldom/never use them.
Subscribe to the slackware-security list and you'll stay updated as to things which might need fixing, even if they're not broke.
In my experience, old releases of slackware tend to cooperate very well with new binary packages of stuff.
Yes, you can still do a floppy install, but not of the -whole-thing-. The idea is that you're able to load enough of the system from floppies to get the machine usable and onto the network, at which point you're free to install the rest with ftp downloads, NFS-shared CD-ROM drives, or whatever means suits you.
Sure, it does UMSDOS. No reason not to - the code's been there for ages and works well, why throw it out? My first Slackware install was UMSDOS.
It might support some aspect of SysV init by now, but I wouldn't know. I'm a BSD fan.;)
Re:It's a gamer's review, not an audiophile one
on
The State of PC Audio
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· Score: 2
While the SB Live series does have some issues, mostly with resampling and irrevocable DSP-meddling of even 48KHz signals, things aren't as bad as you make them out to be.
The coaxial digital output on the Live 5.1 card I have ($20, IIRC) seems justfine to me.
I'm using an Audio Alchemy DDE v1.1 as a good, -external- stereo DAC. This box predates the Live series by many years, and originates from the period of the 1990s when audiophiles were going apeshit trying to seperate the analog and digital sections of their systems. I got it off ebay for a song, now that those audiophiles are deciding that they want surround sound with their DVDs . ..
Sounds coming out of this combination tend to be on-par with the high-end Carver CD player that I've been using for reference for many years, with its stacked 18-bit Burr-Brown DACs and hand-drawn analog section -- resampling be damned.
Of course, it's only stereo. Fine with me - I don't have any music recorded in quad, let alone 5.1, and if I'm serious about watching a DVD I'd rather relax on the couch in front of the TV...
I'll take another peek inside of it (or its partially-(dis)assembled brother) and see what I find.
I do doubt, somewhat, that it has much similarity to any of NCR's own designs. The ghosts of usenet past seem to indicate that the product appeared at the same time that NCR was being bought by AT&T, and that NCR was embarassed to have their name on such a finickey, expensive machine.
It's been good to me, though.
Thanks for the pointer on the meaning of PhoenixView.
I've got a Uniden phone which, while not WiFi, certainly lives in the same 2.4GHz slice of spectrum. It works well.
Same with my microwave oven.
As long as the latter remains true, and my -neighbor's- microwave continues to cause interference on my 2.4GHz devices, it seems rather silly to go about trying to reduce clutter from 500mW radios on a band which irrevocably has ~1KW transmitters in every home.
Perhaps, instead, we should marvel that 2.4GHz communications work at all, and enjoy it while it still does.
Trouble with piano rolls is that there's no dynamic content -- the notes, however detailed they may be in the time domain, are binary.
I've got some MP3s of Gershwin, recorded from his own piano rolls. Interesting stuff to hear, for sure, but I'd rather hear a more modern analog recording of a performance by a skilled pianist than a binary representation of the original author on punched paper.
I've got a 32x reader, and 8x writer, both from Plextor, both SCSI. Safedisc works fine -- even after you copy the title (protection intact!) with CloneCD.:)
I might theorize that since SCSI CD-ROM drives are generally higher quality than their IDE counterparts, they might consume sufficient time trying to read the Safedisc-damaged, impossible sectors that the OS gives up, assumes that the drive is broken/unresponsive and pukes out an error, wheras a different drive might give up soon enough that things "work."
A friend of mine, a decade or so ago, showed me an IBM tablet running Windows. 486DX-50, which was a wicked-fast machine at the time. He talked about trying to find a bit of software called "Pen for OS/2", so he could load his OS of choice and not have to tote a keyboard wherever he went. Nice machine - I remember a good TFT display, and generally slick-looking design. It'd probably run a 2.0 kernel great, though 2.2 seems to be a bit slower on such machines. 2.4 and glibc has been almost unusable on every 486 I've tried it on. If a box like this could be located, -and- some manner of handwriting software which isn't positively maddening, it'd be a fine machine for doing light work with remote X apps.
It might also be worth investigating keeping whatever Windows preload, along with the handwriting software, installed, and use something like eXceed to display X.
On the other hand of the spectrum, a lot of slower computers just aren't up to the task of running a modern OS - at ALL.
I've got an NCR Safari 3170 running Linux. It is a 386SLC at 25MHz. It feels a bit quicker than other 386s I've used, probably due to the RAM and caching controllers being built into the CPU (!) (this thing has a higher transistor count than a 486DX).
It ran Slackware 3.0 for a few days, with 4 megs of RAM, and a 150 meg hard drive of JVC manufacture.
Even in textmode, it was swapping too much for anything but being a telnet-based terminal.
Not long after that, I rounded up a 2.1 gig drive and an extra 8 megs of RAM for the thing, which helped so much that I decided to configure X for it.
The decisively odd PhoenixView chipset is, probably obviously, unsupported so I was stuck in plain VGA mode. 640x480 has never been enough for most things X. Watching that tiny display refresh with 4-bit greyscale made me sick - it took several seconds to scroll down -one line- in a remote Netscape session. Some of that could be due to the PCMCIA NE2000 ethernet card I equipped it with, which is only good for about 75kBps inbound on the machine. The Windows 3.x preload, which had genuine PhoenixView drivers, was also pretty slow.
I can't imagine trying to do useful, modern graphical things with a machine of this calibre, unless it involves ncurses or, perhaps, aalib.
It is positively wonderful as a terminal for my headless FreeBSD machine. It uses very little power (10W or less, from all appearances), and consumes very little desk space (being from the era preceeding the arrival of 16" "notebook" displays, it is quite a bit smaller than most current portables). And it, as well as the parts laptop I used to breathe life into it, the 8 meg RAM upgrade, and hard drive, were free.
Dead reliable, too. Uptime of 33 days at this time.
I guess the point is this: Old computers can still do useful things, as long as the software being run on them is in-keeping with what was common when they were new. Old Slackware releases are nice for this, if for no reason other than that they are easy to find and that, historically, Slackware has always been fairly light-weight and efficient.
Old software like this may be full of old holes, but who cares? It sits on my desk, in my apartment, behind a locked door and a nailed-down firewall. If anyone manages to get past either of those security measures, I've got a lot more to worry about than a compromised 10-year-old laptop.
Bowie accepts that the (rather modern) "traditional" concept of music sales is on its way out, and forecasts that bands will have to tour in order to stay alive. From the tone, he's comfortably excited about it.
If you want to support this ideal, snag tickets to one of his concerts. If you -really- want to give him money, buy a t-shirt as well. The bands make a killing on those when they sell them at shows, and you'll be able to display your support for David Bowie (the "word of mouth" concept he spoke of in the interview).
Meanwhile, go ahead and leech his new album, Heathen, from Gnutella or gIFT or KaZaA or IRC or whatever your fancy is, enjoy it, and look forward to the show, unless you also feel like supporting your local hole in the wall record store and like the feel of glossy jewel case inserts.
In the small town of Bluffton, Ohio, there is a mom-and-pop theater which shows first-run movies at $3 per seat.
Nice little place. The popcorn is cheap, and the audio is excellent.
Same mom-and-pop own a drive-in theater (yes, they still exist) near Kenton, Ohio, which also has cheap popcorn, excellent audio, and first-run films. Saw Spiderman there a couple of weeks back with my girlfriend and kid for $10, snacks included.
No projection problems to report, for either establishment.
Yet, I'm pretty sure that these places would not be able to drop $125k on a digital projector. While they're by no means run-down or ill-maintained, they're also not exactly high-budget operations.
That you cannot reach far enough outside of your shell to realize that such theaters actually operate, and are still doing good presentations of 35mm film, does not cause them to wink out of existance.
A bit better of a hack (loose use of a term, that) seems to be to download iriver's firmware instead, from here:
http://www.iriverhk.com/English/downc.htm
This will revert a RioVolt SP-250 back to its roots by making it be an iRiver iMP-250.
IIRC, the menus are prettier, and there's a few extra options. I like the iRiver boot logo a bit better than Rio's. Also, the version number is higher -- iRiver distributes 2.2, whereas Rio is still at 2.0.;)
I don't know about your TiVo, but the model here has no power switch.
Nevermind that this isn't the UK -- I'm not going to turn it off, or send it back. I'd lose -nothing- by these practices, except perhaps a bit of energy to push a hard disk head around which would be otherwise-idle.
And even if the show weren't being recorded in otherwise-unusable space, I've got 120 gigs of storage inside that box. I wouldn't miss a donation of a half hour worth of bits toward a Beeb sitcom.
And, of course, the TiVo -only- records these programs if you haven't scheduled anything else for it to do. Not a bad gig; if they can make a buck off of it and help keep the hardware cheap, I'm all for it.
Sorry to cut this post short, but my 1993-vintage post-American Telegraph and Telephone buyout National Cash Register-manufactured laptop is in need of a nap.
At my previous residence, which was situated in the middle of an Ohio corn field, there was no cable TV. The telco CO was 20 miles away. 802.11b provided an excellent last-mile solution.
Standard equipment all 'round, on my end. Cisco Aironet 350 in the garage, a white plastic Pringles can-looking antenna on the garage, and Cat5 running to the FreeBSD box inside the house.
Real-live, actual, sustained file transfers of 300 kilobytes per second were pretty common between myself and anyone else in the world with good connectivity to att.net. VCDs flowed forth from the ether with astounding ease, while mp3 downloads became nauseating, as one begins realizing that they're downloading hundreds of times more music than they'll ever have time to sort, let alone seriously listen to.
Hard drives, even those of several hundred gigabytes, start feeling pretty small with that sort of bandwidth.
There was no rain fade to speak of. Storms which completely disabled a well-tuned directv system had no effect on the net connection. Having the antenna turn 90 degrees in an intense wind storm did not phase it.
Of course, the antenna arrays on the ISP end were several hundred feet in the air, and I had a clear view of the entire tower (and the small buildings at its base), which was just over 2 miles away.
I'm sure that there are others who were less fortunate. This ISP (comwavz) claims to be able to cover entire counties with a single tower, which (around here) means a radius of perhaps 15 or 20 miles.
Even with the ruler-flat landscape here in the upper-left corner of Ohio, it is difficult to imagine that a wireless link of 15 miles would work very well, with only a quarter-Watt of output power with which to play. OTOH, it's also a little past last mile territory, either, so this last conjecture might be beginning to stray off-topic.
Thus, I'll conclude: The last -2- miles work fine with 802.11. So fine, in fact, that I was happier with it than any other consumer broadband choice I've ever had the pleasure of abusing, from dual-channel ISDN to 1.5Mbps SDSL, and the spattering of ADSL and cable and satellite that rests in between, irrespective of cost.
In 1992, people had a tendancy to largely ignore speed limits. It was found that neither raising nor lowering posted speed limits had any significant effect on actual vehicle speed or accident rate.
In 1994, in New York, only 4% of motorists were found to be traveling within posted 55mph speed limits.
If most people speed, but it is only a factor in 30 percent of fatal crashes, then it is statistically obvious that driving faster is safer.
Anyone know how the snapshot feature is supposed to work, or have any experiences with it that they'd like to relay?
It sounds similar, if not identical, to what an ISP of mine used around 1994-1995 (and perhaps still do). They had a NetApps filer for their users' home directories, which provided a few.snapshot directories.
Inside of.snapshot were the ghosts of ~ past. Which was -very- nice when you changed or deleted something and then change your mind about it hours, days, or weeks later. One could go back in time, and retrieve any of several periodic revisions of anything which had been modified.
Incidentally, the aforementioned shell box was also running FreeBSD, although a much earlier incarnation than that being discussed here.
I don't know about other Trinitrons, but I bought a 15" Sony 5 or 6 years ago.
After a couple of those years of being on constantly, I noticed that it was dimmer than before. So dim, in fact, that it was getting nearly impossible to read in ambient daylight.
DejaNews told me that if I were either brave, stupid, or highly skilled, I'd be able to tweak the gain up with a screwdriver. Someone else had mentioned that this would tend to make the focus drift in time. It seemed like a worthwhile pursuit.
These adjustments are on the flyback transformer. If you don't know how to take reasonable safety precautions to prevent electricity from flowing across your heart, don't go near this thing - or anything else inside of a CRT. It will kill you if you give it a chance.
That said, the gain (or bias, or whatever - I don't care) and focus are two little recessed screws. I used a plastic screwdriver to turn them. They're the -only- adjustments on the flyback, which appears as a brick on the end of the dust-covered wire that attaches to the top of the CRT.
Stay away from that wire, too.
And never do anything with the thing plugged in or turned on. Electricity, in the form of high-voltage DC, will leap forth, grab you by the arm, and burn the hair off of your chest before cooking you like a hotdog. See movie, The Green Mile for details.
Having said that, I put the monitor (sans most of its plastic chassis) on a non-conductive surface, turned it on, and started fiddling. I turned the gain/bias/whatever knob up until white (#FFFFFF) was blooming a bit on-screen, and then turned the contrast down on the front panel to compensate. The idea being that, if it turned darker in the next year or so, I'd be able to avoid cracking it open again, and instead just push a button on the front panel.
I also made the focus as dead-on as I could.
Results: It was a joy to use again. All the lovely Trinitron colorspace, still visible when the sun was out. The focus was sharper than I'd ever remembered it being before.
2 or 3 years later, the monitor is still quite bright, with no obvious degradation. The focus is still razor-like. Still has the colorspace I've always liked. Still hasn't been opened up again.
I'm extremely happy with my dingy Sony Trinitron.
Re:Any Open Source/Linux/BSD Companies doing well?
on
Lineo near Death
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· Score: 2
You'll have to ask yourself the question below from the standpoint of a corporation. This is because you, by yourself, don't matter. There's not enough people in the world that give a fuck about open source software for anyone else to matter, either. And there quite likely will never be. People don't generally think of publicly-traded corporations as charities, and it seems rather unlikely that they ever will.
That said:
Would you, the one who must answer to your shareholders and their families and dinnertables, rather feel good about what you're doing for the GPL community and see how long you can tread water, or bring home a few dollars selling BSD?
Is there really a reason to go about trusting, implicitly, this "winamp" organization of which you speak?
Dear Slashdot,
on
30-pin SIMMs
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· Score: 5, Funny
I seem to have trouble finding my ass.
I used both hands, even.
Can someone help me find my ass?
http://memman.com sells memory, including 30-pin simms. Not that it'd be difficult to with google, yahoo, altavista, lycos, or any number of other similar things.
http://www.slackware.com/getslack has a list of mirrors. Some of them are fast, some of them are good, and some of them are both.
Costs a couple hundred bucks. 1 HP motor, has a filter that's supposed to be able to trap toner, and looks like it's got all sorts of exciting, elongated attachments for your sucking pleasure.
However, like someone else here, I suggest putting the keyboard through the dishwasher. I tend to take the electronics out of mine first and just run the plastic (keycaps, chassis) through, but there's nothing particularly bad about water and keyboards, or any other modern electronics.
Just make sure things get dried out before the metal bits (fasteners, microswitch parts and other contacts) begin to oxidize, but even a little of that would be far from fatal.
Big Mac, Mc Dlt, a Quarter-Pounder with some cheese Fillet-o-Fish, a hamburger, a cheeseburger, a Happy Meal Mcnuggets, tasty golden french fries, regular and larger size And salads, chef or garden, or a chicken salad oriental Big Big Breakfast, Egg Mcmuffin, hot hotcakes and sausage Maybe biscuits, bacon, egg and cheese and sausage, danish, hashbrown too and for dessert hot apple pies and sundaes three varieties A soft serve cone, three kinds of shakes, and chocolately-chip cookies And to drink a Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, an orange drink, a Sprite, A coffee (decaf too) a lowfat milk also an orange juice I love Mcdonald's good time great taste And I get this all at one place! The good time, great taste... of McDonald's...
Regular CDs aren't very durable, either. On the label side, all that protects the data from damage is a very thin layer of sprayed-on laquer. Scratches through this laquer are generally fatal to the data beneath, and are troublingly easy to create.
The flexible CDs also use a very thin layer of sprayed-on laquer.
I submit, thus, that these flexible CDs are as at least as impervious to harm their fragile grandparents, bit-rot and aluminum-eating microbes included.
Slashdot Mirror
The general trick with Slackware is to only upgrade those packages which need upgrading, with a "if it's not broke, don't fix it" mentality. Use upgradepkg, or removepkg/installpkg to get this done.
I've been upgrading my Slackware desktop machine peicemeal since 3.0. It runs the latest, greatest versions of everything I care about, but I'm pretty sure I haven't upgraded awk, sed, ncurses or SVGAlib in years. Some more frequently-used software gets updated as often as Patrick releases it, such as X, and I keep a few smaller things on the bleeding edge (LAME, grip, etc) by compiling by hand.
I don't care if I don't have the latest versions of esd, lpr, KDE, Gnome, or a slew of other random programs, because I seldom/never use them.
Subscribe to the slackware-security list and you'll stay updated as to things which might need fixing, even if they're not broke.
In my experience, old releases of slackware tend to cooperate very well with new binary packages of stuff.
Yes, you can still do a floppy install, but not of the -whole-thing-. The idea is that you're able to load enough of the system from floppies to get the machine usable and onto the network, at which point you're free to install the rest with ftp downloads, NFS-shared CD-ROM drives, or whatever means suits you.
;)
Sure, it does UMSDOS. No reason not to - the code's been there for ages and works well, why throw it out? My first Slackware install was UMSDOS.
It might support some aspect of SysV init by now, but I wouldn't know. I'm a BSD fan.
While the SB Live series does have some issues, mostly with resampling and irrevocable DSP-meddling of even 48KHz signals, things aren't as bad as you make them out to be.
.
The coaxial digital output on the Live 5.1 card I have ($20, IIRC) seems justfine to me.
I'm using an Audio Alchemy DDE v1.1 as a good, -external- stereo DAC. This box predates the Live series by many years, and originates from the period of the 1990s when audiophiles were going apeshit trying to seperate the analog and digital sections of their systems. I got it off ebay for a song, now that those audiophiles are deciding that they want surround sound with their DVDs . .
Sounds coming out of this combination tend to be on-par with the high-end Carver CD player that I've been using for reference for many years, with its stacked 18-bit Burr-Brown DACs and hand-drawn analog section -- resampling be damned.
Of course, it's only stereo. Fine with me - I don't have any music recorded in quad, let alone 5.1, and if I'm serious about watching a DVD I'd rather relax on the couch in front of the TV...
Interesting.
I'll take another peek inside of it (or its partially-(dis)assembled brother) and see what I find.
I do doubt, somewhat, that it has much similarity to any of NCR's own designs. The ghosts of usenet past seem to indicate that the product appeared at the same time that NCR was being bought by AT&T, and that NCR was embarassed to have their name on such a finickey, expensive machine.
It's been good to me, though.
Thanks for the pointer on the meaning of PhoenixView.
Why not?
I've got a Uniden phone which, while not WiFi, certainly lives in the same 2.4GHz slice of spectrum. It works well.
Same with my microwave oven.
As long as the latter remains true, and my -neighbor's- microwave continues to cause interference on my 2.4GHz devices, it seems rather silly to go about trying to reduce clutter from 500mW radios on a band which irrevocably has ~1KW transmitters in every home.
Perhaps, instead, we should marvel that 2.4GHz communications work at all, and enjoy it while it still does.
Trouble with piano rolls is that there's no dynamic content -- the notes, however detailed they may be in the time domain, are binary.
I've got some MP3s of Gershwin, recorded from his own piano rolls. Interesting stuff to hear, for sure, but I'd rather hear a more modern analog recording of a performance by a skilled pianist than a binary representation of the original author on punched paper.
I've got a 32x reader, and 8x writer, both from Plextor, both SCSI. Safedisc works fine -- even after you copy the title (protection intact!) with CloneCD. :)
I might theorize that since SCSI CD-ROM drives are generally higher quality than their IDE counterparts, they might consume sufficient time trying to read the Safedisc-damaged, impossible sectors that the OS gives up, assumes that the drive is broken/unresponsive and pukes out an error, wheras a different drive might give up soon enough that things "work."
A friend of mine, a decade or so ago, showed me an IBM tablet running Windows. 486DX-50, which was a wicked-fast machine at the time. He talked about trying to find a bit of software called "Pen for OS/2", so he could load his OS of choice and not have to tote a keyboard wherever he went. Nice machine - I remember a good TFT display, and generally slick-looking design. It'd probably run a 2.0 kernel great, though 2.2 seems to be a bit slower on such machines. 2.4 and glibc has been almost unusable on every 486 I've tried it on. If a box like this could be located, -and- some manner of handwriting software which isn't positively maddening, it'd be a fine machine for doing light work with remote X apps.
It might also be worth investigating keeping whatever Windows preload, along with the handwriting software, installed, and use something like eXceed to display X.
On the other hand of the spectrum, a lot of slower computers just aren't up to the task of running a modern OS - at ALL.
I've got an NCR Safari 3170 running Linux. It is a 386SLC at 25MHz. It feels a bit quicker than other 386s I've used, probably due to the RAM and caching controllers being built into the CPU (!) (this thing has a higher transistor count than a 486DX).
It ran Slackware 3.0 for a few days, with 4 megs of RAM, and a 150 meg hard drive of JVC manufacture.
Even in textmode, it was swapping too much for anything but being a telnet-based terminal.
Not long after that, I rounded up a 2.1 gig drive and an extra 8 megs of RAM for the thing, which helped so much that I decided to configure X for it.
The decisively odd PhoenixView chipset is, probably obviously, unsupported so I was stuck in plain VGA mode. 640x480 has never been enough for most things X. Watching that tiny display refresh with 4-bit greyscale made me sick - it took several seconds to scroll down -one line- in a remote Netscape session. Some of that could be due to the PCMCIA NE2000 ethernet card I equipped it with, which is only good for about 75kBps inbound on the machine. The Windows 3.x preload, which had genuine PhoenixView drivers, was also pretty slow.
I can't imagine trying to do useful, modern graphical things with a machine of this calibre, unless it involves ncurses or, perhaps, aalib.
It is positively wonderful as a terminal for my headless FreeBSD machine. It uses very little power (10W or less, from all appearances), and consumes very little desk space (being from the era preceeding the arrival of 16" "notebook" displays, it is quite a bit smaller than most current portables). And it, as well as the parts laptop I used to breathe life into it, the 8 meg RAM upgrade, and hard drive, were free.
Dead reliable, too. Uptime of 33 days at this time.
I guess the point is this: Old computers can still do useful things, as long as the software being run on them is in-keeping with what was common when they were new. Old Slackware releases are nice for this, if for no reason other than that they are easy to find and that, historically, Slackware has always been fairly light-weight and efficient.
Old software like this may be full of old holes, but who cares? It sits on my desk, in my apartment, behind a locked door and a nailed-down firewall. If anyone manages to get past either of those security measures, I've got a lot more to worry about than a compromised 10-year-old laptop.
Did you even read the article?
Bowie accepts that the (rather modern) "traditional" concept of music sales is on its way out, and forecasts that bands will have to tour in order to stay alive. From the tone, he's comfortably excited about it.
If you want to support this ideal, snag tickets to one of his concerts. If you -really- want to give him money, buy a t-shirt as well. The bands make a killing on those when they sell them at shows, and you'll be able to display your support for David Bowie (the "word of mouth" concept he spoke of in the interview).
Meanwhile, go ahead and leech his new album, Heathen, from Gnutella or gIFT or KaZaA or IRC or whatever your fancy is, enjoy it, and look forward to the show, unless you also feel like supporting your local hole in the wall record store and like the feel of glossy jewel case inserts.
It matters, because if he doesn't watch The Weather Channel's commercials, he'll be stealing drivers for his video card!
Really?
In the small town of Bluffton, Ohio, there is a mom-and-pop theater which shows first-run movies at $3 per seat.
Nice little place. The popcorn is cheap, and the audio is excellent.
Same mom-and-pop own a drive-in theater (yes, they still exist) near Kenton, Ohio, which also has cheap popcorn, excellent audio, and first-run films. Saw Spiderman there a couple of weeks back with my girlfriend and kid for $10, snacks included.
No projection problems to report, for either establishment.
Yet, I'm pretty sure that these places would not be able to drop $125k on a digital projector. While they're by no means run-down or ill-maintained, they're also not exactly high-budget operations.
That you cannot reach far enough outside of your shell to realize that such theaters actually operate, and are still doing good presentations of 35mm film, does not cause them to wink out of existance.
A bit better of a hack (loose use of a term, that) seems to be to download iriver's firmware instead, from here:
;)
http://www.iriverhk.com/English/downc.htm
This will revert a RioVolt SP-250 back to its roots by making it be an iRiver iMP-250.
IIRC, the menus are prettier, and there's a few extra options. I like the iRiver boot logo a bit better than Rio's. Also, the version number is higher -- iRiver distributes 2.2, whereas Rio is still at 2.0.
I don't know about your TiVo, but the model here has no power switch.
Nevermind that this isn't the UK -- I'm not going to turn it off, or send it back. I'd lose -nothing- by these practices, except perhaps a bit of energy to push a hard disk head around which would be otherwise-idle.
And even if the show weren't being recorded in otherwise-unusable space, I've got 120 gigs of storage inside that box. I wouldn't miss a donation of a half hour worth of bits toward a Beeb sitcom.
And, of course, the TiVo -only- records these programs if you haven't scheduled anything else for it to do. Not a bad gig; if they can make a buck off of it and help keep the hardware cheap, I'm all for it.
Who is this Advanced Micro Designs company?
All of the Durons I've seen were made by Advanced Micro Devices.
Sorry to cut this post short, but my 1993-vintage post-American Telegraph and Telephone buyout National Cash Register-manufactured laptop is in need of a nap.
At my previous residence, which was situated in the middle of an Ohio corn field, there was no cable TV. The telco CO was 20 miles away. 802.11b provided an excellent last-mile solution.
Standard equipment all 'round, on my end. Cisco Aironet 350 in the garage, a white plastic Pringles can-looking antenna on the garage, and Cat5 running to the FreeBSD box inside the house.
Real-live, actual, sustained file transfers of 300 kilobytes per second were pretty common between myself and anyone else in the world with good connectivity to att.net. VCDs flowed forth from the ether with astounding ease, while mp3 downloads became nauseating, as one begins realizing that they're downloading hundreds of times more music than they'll ever have time to sort, let alone seriously listen to.
Hard drives, even those of several hundred gigabytes, start feeling pretty small with that sort of bandwidth.
There was no rain fade to speak of. Storms which completely disabled a well-tuned directv system had no effect on the net connection. Having the antenna turn 90 degrees in an intense wind storm did not phase it.
Of course, the antenna arrays on the ISP end were several hundred feet in the air, and I had a clear view of the entire tower (and the small buildings at its base), which was just over 2 miles away.
I'm sure that there are others who were less fortunate. This ISP (comwavz) claims to be able to cover entire counties with a single tower, which (around here) means a radius of perhaps 15 or 20 miles.
Even with the ruler-flat landscape here in the upper-left corner of Ohio, it is difficult to imagine that a wireless link of 15 miles would work very well, with only a quarter-Watt of output power with which to play. OTOH, it's also a little past last mile territory, either, so this last conjecture might be beginning to stray off-topic.
Thus, I'll conclude: The last -2- miles work fine with 802.11. So fine, in fact, that I was happier with it than any other consumer broadband choice I've ever had the pleasure of abusing, from dual-channel ISDN to 1.5Mbps SDSL, and the spattering of ADSL and cable and satellite that rests in between, irrespective of cost.
In 1992, people had a tendancy to largely ignore speed limits. It was found that neither raising nor lowering posted speed limits had any significant effect on actual vehicle speed or accident rate.
In 1994, in New York, only 4% of motorists were found to be traveling within posted 55mph speed limits.
If most people speed, but it is only a factor in 30 percent of fatal crashes, then it is statistically obvious that driving faster is safer.
Anyone know how the snapshot feature is supposed to work, or have any experiences with it that they'd like to relay?
.snapshot directories.
.snapshot were the ghosts of ~ past. Which was -very- nice when you changed or deleted something and then change your mind about it hours, days, or weeks later. One could go back in time, and retrieve any of several periodic revisions of anything which had been modified.
It sounds similar, if not identical, to what an ISP of mine used around 1994-1995 (and perhaps still do). They had a NetApps filer for their users' home directories, which provided a few
Inside of
Incidentally, the aforementioned shell box was also running FreeBSD, although a much earlier incarnation than that being discussed here.
I don't know about other Trinitrons, but I bought a 15" Sony 5 or 6 years ago.
After a couple of those years of being on constantly, I noticed that it was dimmer than before. So dim, in fact, that it was getting nearly impossible to read in ambient daylight.
DejaNews told me that if I were either brave, stupid, or highly skilled, I'd be able to tweak the gain up with a screwdriver. Someone else had mentioned that this would tend to make the focus drift in time. It seemed like a worthwhile pursuit.
These adjustments are on the flyback transformer. If you don't know how to take reasonable safety precautions to prevent electricity from flowing across your heart, don't go near this thing - or anything else inside of a CRT. It will kill you if you give it a chance.
That said, the gain (or bias, or whatever - I don't care) and focus are two little recessed screws. I used a plastic screwdriver to turn them. They're the -only- adjustments on the flyback, which appears as a brick on the end of the dust-covered wire that attaches to the top of the CRT.
Stay away from that wire, too.
And never do anything with the thing plugged in or turned on. Electricity, in the form of high-voltage DC, will leap forth, grab you by the arm, and burn the hair off of your chest before cooking you like a hotdog. See movie, The Green Mile for details.
Having said that, I put the monitor (sans most of its plastic chassis) on a non-conductive surface, turned it on, and started fiddling. I turned the gain/bias/whatever knob up until white (#FFFFFF) was blooming a bit on-screen, and then turned the contrast down on the front panel to compensate. The idea being that, if it turned darker in the next year or so, I'd be able to avoid cracking it open again, and instead just push a button on the front panel.
I also made the focus as dead-on as I could.
Results: It was a joy to use again. All the lovely Trinitron colorspace, still visible when the sun was out. The focus was sharper than I'd ever remembered it being before.
2 or 3 years later, the monitor is still quite bright, with no obvious degradation. The focus is still razor-like. Still has the colorspace I've always liked. Still hasn't been opened up again.
I'm extremely happy with my dingy Sony Trinitron.
You'll have to ask yourself the question below from the standpoint of a corporation. This is because you, by yourself, don't matter. There's not enough people in the world that give a fuck about open source software for anyone else to matter, either. And there quite likely will never be. People don't generally think of publicly-traded corporations as charities, and it seems rather unlikely that they ever will.
That said:
Would you, the one who must answer to your shareholders and their families and dinnertables, rather feel good about what you're doing for the GPL community and see how long you can tread water, or bring home a few dollars selling BSD?
Perhaps you'd like the University to wipe your ass for you, as well?
Quoth:
If such a message came from a company with not a bad reputation (winamp comes to mind), i would install the program
I guess you didn't realize that Winamp is Nullsoft is America Online whom is also the proud owner of Time Warner, among other things.
Is there really a reason to go about trusting, implicitly, this "winamp" organization of which you speak?
I seem to have trouble finding my ass.
I used both hands, even.
Can someone help me find my ass?
http://memman.com sells memory, including 30-pin simms. Not that it'd be difficult to with google, yahoo, altavista, lycos, or any number of other similar things.
http://www.slackware.com/getslack has a list of mirrors. Some of them are fast, some of them are good, and some of them are both.
Go away.
3M has a vacuum, as displayed on this page from the Mouser Electronics catalog.
Costs a couple hundred bucks. 1 HP motor, has a filter that's supposed to be able to trap toner, and looks like it's got all sorts of exciting, elongated attachments for your sucking pleasure.
However, like someone else here, I suggest putting the keyboard through the dishwasher. I tend to take the electronics out of mine first and just run the plastic (keycaps, chassis) through, but there's nothing particularly bad about water and keyboards, or any other modern electronics.
Just make sure things get dried out before the metal bits (fasteners, microswitch parts and other contacts) begin to oxidize, but even a little of that would be far from fatal.
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Big Mac, Mc Dlt, a Quarter-Pounder with some cheese
Fillet-o-Fish, a hamburger, a cheeseburger, a Happy Meal
Mcnuggets, tasty golden french fries, regular and larger size
And salads, chef or garden, or a chicken salad oriental
Big Big Breakfast, Egg Mcmuffin, hot hotcakes and sausage
Maybe biscuits, bacon, egg and cheese and sausage, danish, hashbrown too
and for dessert hot apple pies and sundaes three varieties
A soft serve cone, three kinds of shakes, and chocolately-chip cookies
And to drink a Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, an orange drink, a Sprite,
A coffee (decaf too) a lowfat milk also an orange juice
I love Mcdonald's good time great taste
And I get this all at one place!
The good time, great taste... of McDonald's...
ugh.
Regular CDs aren't very durable, either. On the label side, all that protects the data from damage is a very thin layer of sprayed-on laquer. Scratches through this laquer are generally fatal to the data beneath, and are troublingly easy to create.
The flexible CDs also use a very thin layer of sprayed-on laquer.
I submit, thus, that these flexible CDs are as at least as impervious to harm their fragile grandparents, bit-rot and aluminum-eating microbes included.