Actually, if I could get my Mom to switch from her webtv to something a little more modern, she'd be likely to notice that "send photo" button (or whatever it's labeled) in aim.
I take your point that ipsec is likely to be an issue for more sophisticated users than your Gran. And you're right that most ftp servers finally know about passive mode by now (though some were pretty late getting around to it -- I'm thinking about the S/390 implementation in particular).
Regardless, you did say "There's absolutely no reason a dialup user should have a public ip address", and I only pointed out exceptions. Had you said "most dialup users don't require a public ip address" I'd have kept my mouth shut.
"Relational databases were developed in the 1970s as a way of improving the efficiency of complex systems.
Huh? Go back and reread some of Codd's papers (in the late 60's, BTW) and you'll see that efficiency was never a motivator. Simplicity was his aim, filesystem details were made irrrelevant, explicit navigation was obsoleted, and a built-in security model was included.
When relational systems finally began to appear (and I'm thinking specifically about IBM's System R) they were dog slow, and the extant hierarchical and CODASYL network databases of the day ran rings around them. Still do, unless you throw lots of hardware at the RDBMS.
RDBMS have lots of advantages over older technologies, but performance is not among them.
"dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs..."
Puh-leeze. The engine indexes everything it finds, just as the dozens of webcrawlers on the 'net do. Bram Cohen's system isn't "dedicated" to indexing illegal stuff. It's mindless; it can't tell the difference.
By listing only the illegal things that appear on the P2P networks, you help perpetuate the notion that they are inherently bad, and become a willing stooge for the MPAA and its lackeys. It wasn't germane to your post, anymore than mentioning
"the animosity between the two companies [Novell and Microsoft] is well documented"
You hear much less of that these days. When Ray Noorda was running things Novell went berserk, spending truckloads of money to invade Microsoft's space. Consider the DR acquisition, the WordPerfect acquisition, and the Corsair project -- which itself spawned Caldera.
"I was running PaperPort on my Wife's Windows machine the other night and it automatically updated itself to 10SP1."
But really, plain-Jane users ought NOT to be able to update the software -- PaperPort should NOT be able to update itself unless you are running with administrator privilege.
Of course, I'll guess that you were running as an administrator -- one of those double edged sword things. It makes administration of the box a little easier for the user, but it also makes administration of the box by ne'er-do-wells easier too.
In general, autoupdate is a bad thing, unless it's implemented as a formal XP service and detached from whatever user happens to be logged on at any given time.
Great for your firewall, but...
on
OpenBSD 3.7 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My home firewall is an (aging) OBSD 3.3 box that I really ought to upgrade one of these days... but it just runs and runs and runs. The pf stateful packet filter is compact and fast.
But OBSD is more problematic on my web/mail server. The ports collection is nowhere near as comprehensive as FreeBSD's (or Debian & Gentoo for that matter) and so you'll likely scrounge for upstream versions of more obscure packages.
Worse, OBSD's Apache is stuck at version 1 (Theo has issues with the Apache 2 license) and more and more software wants Apache 2. I guess you can fix that, but it's back upstream you go me bucko. Oh, and OBSD's default Apache installation is chrooted, which you'll probably defeat after your first CGI integration experience.
I like OBSD a lot, and I don't mean to suggest that it's only good for embedding in a router. But if your application requirements are remotely bleeding edge (and you want to save yourself some work at the risk of some unquantifiable security exposure) then you might want to look elsewhere.
"Apple used a switching power supply. the first I had ever seen. it was small, and took up no room."
The power switch for the Apple ][ was an integral part of that power supply, and it wasn't very rugged. If you broke that switch you were looking at a power supply replacement at (if I remember correctly) $150 or so.
Enter Kensington, whose first product was the "System Saver", a combination muffin fan, external power switch, and surge suppressor. Many of my Apple ][ buds owned one. It kept that Apple power switch from being used all the time, and it helped keep the inside cool (if you had lots of cards then the ribbon cables and their retainers blocked the ventilation slots in back. I knew people that routinely ran their computers with the cover propped open.
(Oh, the Kensington web site brags that they "became the number-one-selling peripheral for the Apple II". This distinction has to go to the M&R Sup-R-Mod, the add-in RF modulator that sold with nearly every machine, thereby circumventing FCC emissions rules.)
"So many of us, me included, rather than just unsubscribing from opt-in lists, hit the junk button in our mail client."
Sometimes you can't opt-out! A friend of mine with a houseboat thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a weather alert service promoted by a local TV station. (WESH in Orlando, for those who care.) He submitted the email address for his pager, which dutifully beeped him whenever there was a possibility of severe weather in the area.
Problem was that the pager went off altogether too frequently, and my friend didn't care if there was a storm cell in -say- Flagler County, a hundred miles to the northeast. So he tried to unsubscribe, again and again and again... and those damned alerts just kept on comin'.
The list was really easy to get onto, but impossible to opt out of. My friend eventually had to change pagers to lose the things.
Moral: sometimes those broadcasts are solicited email that are no longer welcome, and there is no way to unsubscribe. I'd call that "spam": no-longer-solicited bulk email.
"Laptops" -- good point, no sense burning your battery up while you're in transit.
(If you carry one around! One of our OBSD boxes is a beater Compaq Armada, which serves as the household firewall. It never gets turned off, or moved from it's spot on the bookshelf, or even hardly ever touched.)
Does hibernation work yet? Or is that one of those maddening model-dependent things in Linux?
In my house (maybe a little atypical) we have DSL and machines scattered around the house. They're usually hot, with a browser seconds away. The last time I booted the Gentoo box was two weeks ago (kernel upgrade) and the OBSD boxes haven't been booted since the hurricanes last year.
The wife's and daughters' MS-Windows boxes go through regular b0rk-and-reboot cycles, so boot time means something to them - but not to me.
I wonder how many people with DSL households shut down their machines between uses?
(My machines aren't entirely idle while we're gone. There's a web and mail server, a firewall, and some folding-at-home, so we're not burning electricity just for the hell of it.)
Re:History: Failure to learn, doomed to repeat
on
Dell Still Intel Only
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· Score: 2, Informative
If memory serves me right, I believe that Compaq came out within seconds telling anyone who would listen that they had i386 processors now
Intel announced the 80386DX in October of '85. Almost a year later, Compaq announced the Deskpro 386, the first 16MHz 80386 based computer. IBM followed up six months after that with the 20MHz microchannel PS/2 model 80.
Moller's M400 is supposedly designed to roll as well. From the FAQ:
4.11. How suited is the Skycar to taxiing and does it require special roads? It will taxi; however, it was engineered for ground travel only as is required to travel from your home to its point of take-off and back. The top ground speed will be 30-35 miles per hour. It does not require special roads.
4.12. Are there limitations to using the Skycar for ground travel? The M400 was engineered to meet the size and other requirements set forth by the DOT and will be "street legal" primarily because it can be treated under the same category as a three-wheeled motorcycle. It should be noted that Skycar was developed for short distance ground travel at low speeds as a means to conveniently transport it from storage locations to approved take-off locations and back.
4.28 How is the Skycar powered on the ground? Does it use thrust from the nacelles or do the wheels have a direct drive of some kind? Current plans call for one engine to provide electrical power to motors in the drive wheels. Alternatively, one engine could provide sufficient thrust for ground propulsion as a backup to the electric drive.
"Why is everyone so worried about whether Linux gains market share over Windows anyway... As long as we can all still use Linux or other open-source software, what does it matter what the rest of the world does?"
Because the hardware manufacturers care about the rest of the world. We were stuck with crap like winprinters and winmodems because of the myopic vision of hardware marketers.
It took way too long to get wireless support for Linux. Sound card support was a mess for years. We are still fighting the video card suppliers, who treat Linux as an afterthought if they release drivers at all.
More Linux users mean a larger mindshare of the people who make the products we use. Larger mindshare will lead to better support.
"And all the solutions that are really a Linux or Windows PC in a smaller box had the same problem: they crash."
Could you expand on this a little more? My perception (from scanning the MythTV mailing list) was that Myth could be complex to set up, but that it was pretty stable after you were done. Maybe you just didn't have the patience to dink with it?
More on-topic: there is a lucid comparison between Tivo and MythTV on the Myth mailing list here.
"Resource Manager [...] is simply a zSeries like WorkLoad Manager tool"
Perhaps you meant "System Resource Manager" rather than WLM? Dispatcher controls and storage isolation (such as you describe) have been part of SRM since the birth of MVS.
z/OS Workload Manager is a higher-level layer that allocates processor, storage and I/O resources for you, based upon general goals that you set for arbitrary classes of work. You give WLM the relative importance of the applications you run, and specify your performance expectations. WLM dynamically adjusts dispatching priorities, assigns more or less storage, and generally performs the workaday tuning that a performance analyst had to do manually when there was only SRM.
... which returns true if both arguments are the same object.
Common Lisp has a number of equality operators (eq, eql, equal, equalp, =) which are subtly different.
CL differentiates among objects that are equal in type and value, equal in value regardless of type, are identical, or some combination of these.
"The designer also certifies that the logo does not infringe
upon the rights of any third party and that it does not
violate any copyright."
IANAL and all that, but if I have to conduct a trademark and servicemark search, and "certify" that the logo does not infringe -- thereby making me liable for FreeBSD's use of the logo -- then $500 is chump change.
Sorry, pass.
Not "Gentoo without all that compiling"
on
Arch In Depth
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The reviewer twice referred to Arch as "Gentoo without all that compiling", suggesting that Arch's performance (with its precompiled 686 binaries) would appeal to Gentoo users.
I doubt that those precompiled 686 binaries would appeal much to Gentoo users with AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS systems.
And as for "all that compiling", Gentoo allows you to install from binary packages if you must. But I compile away some of the bloat via USE flags; you can't do that with Arch binaries.
Slashdot Mirror
I take your point that ipsec is likely to be an issue for more sophisticated users than your Gran. And you're right that most ftp servers finally know about passive mode by now (though some were pretty late getting around to it -- I'm thinking about the S/390 implementation in particular).
Regardless, you did say "There's absolutely no reason a dialup user should have a public ip address", and I only pointed out exceptions. Had you said "most dialup users don't require a public ip address" I'd have kept my mouth shut.
Unless that user wants to establish a P2P session with a [g]AIM user and exchange files or photos.
Unless that user is doing IPSEC with the corporate office and NAT traversal is unavailable for some reason.
More than you think: 41% of home Internet users still use dialup according to this report.When relational systems finally began to appear (and I'm thinking specifically about IBM's System R) they were dog slow, and the extant hierarchical and CODASYL network databases of the day ran rings around them. Still do, unless you throw lots of hardware at the RDBMS.
RDBMS have lots of advantages over older technologies, but performance is not among them.
By listing only the illegal things that appear on the P2P networks, you help perpetuate the notion that they are inherently bad, and become a willing stooge for the MPAA and its lackeys. It wasn't germane to your post, anymore than mentioning
Of course, I'll guess that you were running as an administrator -- one of those double edged sword things. It makes administration of the box a little easier for the user, but it also makes administration of the box by ne'er-do-wells easier too.
In general, autoupdate is a bad thing, unless it's implemented as a formal XP service and detached from whatever user happens to be logged on at any given time.
But OBSD is more problematic on my web/mail server. The ports collection is nowhere near as comprehensive as FreeBSD's (or Debian & Gentoo for that matter) and so you'll likely scrounge for upstream versions of more obscure packages.
Worse, OBSD's Apache is stuck at version 1 (Theo has issues with the Apache 2 license) and more and more software wants Apache 2. I guess you can fix that, but it's back upstream you go me bucko. Oh, and OBSD's default Apache installation is chrooted, which you'll probably defeat after your first CGI integration experience.
I like OBSD a lot, and I don't mean to suggest that it's only good for embedding in a router. But if your application requirements are remotely bleeding edge (and you want to save yourself some work at the risk of some unquantifiable security exposure) then you might want to look elsewhere.
Just around the corner, another man is struggling to crawl to a second stand marked "Iced drink antidote - $2".
Enter Kensington, whose first product was the "System Saver", a combination muffin fan, external power switch, and surge suppressor. Many of my Apple ][ buds owned one. It kept that Apple power switch from being used all the time, and it helped keep the inside cool (if you had lots of cards then the ribbon cables and their retainers blocked the ventilation slots in back. I knew people that routinely ran their computers with the cover propped open.
(Oh, the Kensington web site brags that they "became the number-one-selling peripheral for the Apple II". This distinction has to go to the M&R Sup-R-Mod, the add-in RF modulator that sold with nearly every machine, thereby circumventing FCC emissions rules.)
... which completely omitted the big payoff idea from Sagan's book. Read Contact if you haven't, and forget that silly movie.
Problem was that the pager went off altogether too frequently, and my friend didn't care if there was a storm cell in -say- Flagler County, a hundred miles to the northeast. So he tried to unsubscribe, again and again and again... and those damned alerts just kept on comin'.
The list was really easy to get onto, but impossible to opt out of. My friend eventually had to change pagers to lose the things.
Moral: sometimes those broadcasts are solicited email that are no longer welcome, and there is no way to unsubscribe. I'd call that "spam": no-longer-solicited bulk email.
(If you carry one around! One of our OBSD boxes is a beater Compaq Armada, which serves as the household firewall. It never gets turned off, or moved from it's spot on the bookshelf, or even hardly ever touched.)
Does hibernation work yet? Or is that one of those maddening model-dependent things in Linux?
The wife's and daughters' MS-Windows boxes go through regular b0rk-and-reboot cycles, so boot time means something to them - but not to me.
I wonder how many people with DSL households shut down their machines between uses?
(My machines aren't entirely idle while we're gone. There's a web and mail server, a firewall, and some folding-at-home, so we're not burning electricity just for the hell of it.)
The fix for Gentoo bug #88863 was marked stable for x86 yesterday. Sometimes there's some value in compiling your own.
Yeah, I'm a fanboy.
It took way too long to get wireless support for Linux. Sound card support was a mess for years. We are still fighting the video card suppliers, who treat Linux as an afterthought if they release drivers at all.
More Linux users mean a larger mindshare of the people who make the products we use. Larger mindshare will lead to better support.
More on-topic: there is a lucid comparison between Tivo and MythTV on the Myth mailing list here.
I believe he once claimed (referring to Linda Lovelace) that "only in America could a c*****cker go so far".
z/OS Workload Manager is a higher-level layer that allocates processor, storage and I/O resources for you, based upon general goals that you set for arbitrary classes of work. You give WLM the relative importance of the applications you run, and specify your performance expectations. WLM dynamically adjusts dispatching priorities, assigns more or less storage, and generally performs the workaday tuning that a performance analyst had to do manually when there was only SRM.
(An oldie but a goodie: PDF presentation contrasting SRM and WLM.)
Common Lisp has a number of equality operators (eq, eql, equal, equalp, =) which are subtly different. CL differentiates among objects that are equal in type and value, equal in value regardless of type, are identical, or some combination of these.
IANAL and all that, but if I have to conduct a trademark and servicemark search, and "certify" that the logo does not infringe -- thereby making me liable for FreeBSD's use of the logo -- then $500 is chump change.
Sorry, pass.
I doubt that those precompiled 686 binaries would appeal much to Gentoo users with AMD64, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha and MIPS systems.
And as for "all that compiling", Gentoo allows you to install from binary packages if you must. But I compile away some of the bloat via USE flags; you can't do that with Arch binaries.