Would you even need a PC? Wouldn't the router do everything you needed?
Before I got my various home router appliances, I was using a two NIC 486/66 with 32 ram running Freesco from floppy. I even had it configured for dialup access if needed. Finding memory for something that old may be hard but I'm sure there are many unemployed Pentium 1's looking for a job.
Don't be so sure, geeks can figure it out but the business types that have wireless will not. We have wireless in our office. We set the users up for use in our office but we get tons of calls because they can not get it working at the airport, client sites, Starbucks, hotels, and even at their own house. Some of them even have problems getting the wired rj45 working at those same locations which requires no configuration.
Although phasing out, the same concert used to be available on VHS (in HI-FI audio, not digital but very good quality) for $14.99. It included all the same exact audio, plus the great video footage of the concert. Funny that the DVD release of the concert still has not been released.
There are so many examples of the f**ked up pricing with the RIAA.
"check engine" light comes on. The causes for a CEL and codes are directly related to the emmision control systems. Yes, those monitored systems may cause problems for drivability but that system monitors a very small % of what could go wrong with a car that you do not have a special light for. A "Service Engine Soon" light (SEL) on some GM vehicles is different. It accounts for more parameters but still not something that an operator is going to fix over the phone
ONSTAR: "Yes sir, your SEL is on and returns a code of P1481 which is in reference to the cooling fan actual speed being different than the desired speed requested by the PCM. This could be the result of the hall effect sensor misreading the speed or a fan clutch assembly problem."
I guess that is better then not knowing what is wrong but I doubt that information will actually help someone. Damn, back in the day, we just glanced at the temperature gauge every so often..
OnStar for being able to unlock my car when I lock my keys in the car
Electrical tape, a spare key, and a good spot under the car. Use your imagination. I'll take my chances that someone will not stumble upon it while "browsing" under my car. Not as slick as as calling someone on your cell phone and getting them to unlock it for you but probably takes less time and it's free.
Don't get me wrong, Onstar does offer useful features but IMHO, the recurring price is extreme considering what you can already do yourself for free a little preperation ahead of time.
However, laptops are designed to be power efficient when running on battery, not when plugged into the wall
Big picture here.. You can control the power settings either way. Can't you just set the laptop power settings for when "power is present" to the same as "when running on batteries"? Seems to me it should take the same power either way with the exception of the extra amount required to charge the battery if it needs to be when plugged in.
I bought one Lindows and one Lycoris machine for my kids for christmas. Good deal at $199 each at Walmart.com. Both have used Knoppix, Mandrake Move, and Fedora with on thier older machines with good results. I've had the new ones running periodically to configure everything for the local network and creating shortcuts to various places on the home file server and both have been good so far. The Lycoris "looks and feels" nicer but I could not get any video when I played movies with various codecs. I only have two complaints so far with Lindows. Every sub menu has a link to the click and run software library. A bit overboard I think. The other is the always run as root thing. Does not seem like such a good idea. I may look into changing that or wait until they trash it and try something else. I added an extra 256MB in each. The specs and hardware for the computers are identical. I forget the MB type but the CD is an LG and the hardrive is a Maxtor.
There are old threads on alt.cellular.sprintpcs that indicte that even with the tracking turned off, the signal is still transmitted all the time. The E911 only selection tells Sprint to not release your information to third parties. Basically, that choice on your phone sets a flag on the Sprint network, not actually disabling the position xmit function of the phone itself. I do not frequent alt.cellular.sprintpcs much any more but I have not read anything that indicates that is not the case.
My opinion here but "pop" music in last few or more years is very shallow. Maybe I'm getting older or being a little nostalgic, and maybe my parents used to say the same thing years ago but I find no interest in songs that repeat something about "the club" and the same old "I saw you over there, I'm gonna treat my baby right" song. It's catchy to young teens but definatly different from the "pop" music from 10+ years ago. Good for the RIAA though as they can pump the same crap out with a bunch of different faces.
If you stay long enough you're left with back problems, wrist problems, and bone spurs for your trouble.
And how is this is any different from working at any grocery store, Target, Sears, gas station, or toll both, ticket counter, convienence store etc?
Does Walmart buy special non ergonomic keyboards for the registers (moot point anyway as everything is scanned), and special granite floor pads to stand on that cause these problems?
What do other retailers in the US pay for wages and is it really any different then Walmart? Walmart is big so it is easy to get some statistics but if you add up 10 or 15 other mid sized retailers you will find the same wages, the same working conditions, but yet, they are somehow not "evil".
Many words are redefined for advertising purposes.
Many stores advertise in huge bold letters on thier ads, "We will beat any Advertised Price". If you read the conditions (which are not normally availabe in the same ad), it usually excludes mail order stores, sale prices, clearance items, local stores only within so many miles, only with a competitors ad, does not include warehouse stores, delivery etc etc etc.. I'm sorry, that is far from "Any Price". If anything, it should say they will match "a few stores price". If you search for matresses, you will rarely find the same exact model in more then one store. That is on purpose, you can't match prices on different model's.. Montgomery Wards would match price on similar features, obviously that business model was not enough.
My Comcast service in Northern VA was recently uncapped or changed to roughly 3mbit down (upload stayed at 256kbit). I don't normally wear the tinfoil hat but I see one of two things driving this.
Tiered pricing/byte limites are on the horizon or we are experiencing the benefits of competition between broadband providers. Maybe a little of both. Seems odd for a broadband provider and more so for a cable company to give something for nothing.
Old school GTE dialup had 150hr/month. I do not recall it being marketed as unlimited though. They had a web control panel that showed your monthly stats and would send warning emails when you got close. I always joked about having no life and being online via dialup that much but I came very close to 150hrs several months in a row when I was unemployed during a winter.
And I've always used EAC and LAME on W32 which are both free (and damn good also). These do not get mentioned because it does not fit into the Apple zealots agenda when they feel the urge to contantly defend thier position. I guess an "all in wonder" solution that some think the iTunes provides is good for some people but the Apple defenders will never admit to an Apple product as not being perfect without 15 lame excuses about why Apple did it the way they did and how you too should feel that is was in your best interest that it was done that way.
In true/. style, this will be modded down as off topic, BUT if I portrayed the Apple zealots in a good way it would somehow be considered +5 insightful. Go figure
I am not of any party and I have no religious preference. I could care less what party someone is from.
I vote for the candidate that appears to be the most in sync with what I want. You should try that sometime.
The two party system leads to nothing but corruption. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. The decisions a countries leaders make should be debated from more then two sides. Specially when the real goal is to make more power for themselves. You will NEVER see campaign finance reform under the current system.
And if they made the drinking age 75 it would drop even more. What makes 21 such a better choice? Many studies reference 25 as a cutoff. You can not seperate out the death rate statistics of raising the drinking age because at the same time cars have got safer, roads have extra safety features, seat belt use is way up, and in many places the speed limits have been lowered all in the same 20 year period. Thankfully through an effort on many sides, the death rate among many groups is going down but how can any one group take the credit for the total %. How can you break the numbers down?
Here are some interesting statistics to chew on.
Here says: Juveniles arrested for DUI were disproportionately male (84 percent) and white (91 percent).
Damn, maybe the law should allow non white males under 18 to drink.
Here says: Declines in DUI arrest rates have occurred for every age group. Of particular note is the decrease in DUI arrest rates for those under the age of 21 compared to their rates of DUI arrest in the early 1980's when States had not adopted a uniform drinking age. In 1980 persons between 16 and 20 years old accounted for 10 percent of licensed drivers but 15 percent of DUI arrestees. In 1996, this age group accounted for 7 percent of drivers and 8 percent of DUI arrestees.
Considering the drinking age in 1980 and 1996 was also 2l in all but a few areas but yet the % goes way down. Law may have been a factor but what about the other groups decline? What ever caused those declines probably was a factor in the underage group too.
I am not claiming the law has no effect but anyone or any organization for or against some idea can interpet statistics and just about "prove" anything. Researches have determined that 78% of all statistics were made up, shortly after that another firm came up with 79%.
I did the same in the past and that is a very good idea. It's works even better if you leave IE as the Windows "Default Browser". Anything spyware/application wise/etc that tries to phone home or fetch something using the default browser or calling the IE rendering engine directly will also get blocked automatically and you can happily continue to use your other browser with out any problems!
It can be done. Mom doesn't know shit about Gator, nothing about the extra "search helpers" embedded into IE, the date manager, the time syncronizer, comet cursor, and the software she has that gives her popups all the time and those got installed without any problems. I'm sure that same technology that allowed those to be installed could also be used for Firebird considering in its current state it's not even actually an "install" but more of a tarball and a shortcut to MozillaFirebird.exe.
Maybe a true hoax but I would suspect any company would jump on the "hacker" bandwagon when something goes wrong. It's easier to blame some voodoo internet cracker then blame yourself, probably much harder for someone to prove you wrong also. MS did the same thing recently. Remember the Blaster worm? Before the worm was to officially attack www.windowsupdate.com MS was already having DOS issues and instability with the update sites. Inital reports of DOS were being looked into by investigaters. The Blaster worms programmed DOS scheduled for later in the week had very little effect on MS directly as they rerouted the site elsewhere. Do you think that just maybe they were having a real issue trying to support thier users actually using the update service? That is not what I'd call a DOS attack. Funny also how they farmed out the update site to Akamai shortly after for "security reasons" (there is no mention of needing it for load levels) and no more was ever heard about the inital investigation by authorities from the inital "attack". I use Windows update almost daily at work and I noticed severe slowdowns that entire week and sometimes connections were refused entirely, not just during the the time frames of the two claimed DOS attacks either. I threw out the BS flag for that DOS claim.
I've heard quite a few FM setups and although I agree with your limitations, I believe your opinion is too heavily weighted on the quality (or lack) of commercial FM broadcasts. It's not audio cd quality but definately better quality then any radio station I've ever heard, add to the fact that your listening to compressed audio anyway and in a moving car and it turns into a very good alternative.
Knoppix.. It DOES work on older hardware, sometimes very nicely.
I have a Knoppix hd-install option on a P200/128MB ram 4GB drive and it works fine. With the exception of Open Office and one of the games, everything is perfectly usable. It is no powerhouse but no different then Win98SE on the same machine (except more stable then Win98).
Fedora on the same machine works but is a little too slow and I have not tried Mandrake Move on it yet.
Microsoft will retire several of its products next week, including Windows 98 and SQL Server 7, to comply with a court order related to its dispute with Sun Microsystems over Java.
This is misleading. As I understand the situation, they did NOT retire these packages because the court order told them too. They retired them because they did not want to get them into compliance and spend the resources on those packages. That is a big difference.
As with most MS settlements, they win even when they lose.
Wal-Mart sells PCs with Lindows on them from their website.
Walmart sells them with Lindows, Lycoris and Suse preinstalled. My links are for the cheapest ones I could find with the respective software (the first two are identical in hardware, the Suse machine appears to be different.
This past weekend, I ordered one with Lindows and one with Lycoris for my kids. They've been using Linux in some form either dual boot with W98 on one computer and Fedora or Knoppix hd-install on the other on Pentium 200's (ouch) with no problems. I'll let them try the Lindows and Lycoris first and put the Knoppix or another distro on it if they don't like them. I have never bought a complete computer before but the $199 for everything sounded too good to pass up. My total cost with tax and shipping was $446 for both computers.
Hopefully, all goes well with the machines. If not, I'm sure I'll be posting my negative experience in the next Lindows/Lycoris/Walmart PC/cheap computer/Linux on the Desktop story on slashdot!
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Would you even need a PC? Wouldn't the router do everything you needed?
Before I got my various home router appliances, I was using a two NIC 486/66 with 32 ram running Freesco from floppy. I even had it configured for dialup access if needed. Finding memory for something that old may be hard but I'm sure there are many unemployed Pentium 1's looking for a job.
Don't be so sure, geeks can figure it out but the business types that have wireless will not. We have wireless in our office. We set the users up for use in our office but we get tons of calls because they can not get it working at the airport, client sites, Starbucks, hotels, and even at their own house. Some of them even have problems getting the wired rj45 working at those same locations which requires no configuration.
Here's one to chew on...
Pink Floyd "Pulse" on CD costs $28.99
Although phasing out, the same concert used to be available on VHS (in HI-FI audio, not digital but very good quality) for $14.99. It included all the same exact audio, plus the great video footage of the concert. Funny that the DVD release of the concert still has not been released.
There are so many examples of the f**ked up pricing with the RIAA.
"check engine" light comes on.
The causes for a CEL and codes are directly related to the emmision control systems. Yes, those monitored systems may cause problems for drivability but that system monitors a very small % of what could go wrong with a car that you do not have a special light for. A "Service Engine Soon" light (SEL) on some GM vehicles is different. It accounts for more parameters but still not something that an operator is going to fix over the phone
ONSTAR:
"Yes sir, your SEL is on and returns a code of P1481 which is in reference to the cooling fan actual speed being different than the desired speed requested by the PCM. This could be the result of the hall effect sensor misreading the speed or a fan clutch assembly problem."
I guess that is better then not knowing what is wrong but I doubt that information will actually help someone. Damn, back in the day, we just glanced at the temperature gauge every so often..
OnStar for being able to unlock my car when I lock my keys in the car
Electrical tape, a spare key, and a good spot under the car. Use your imagination. I'll take my chances that someone will not stumble upon it while "browsing" under my car. Not as slick as as calling someone on your cell phone and getting them to unlock it for you but probably takes less time and it's free.
Don't get me wrong, Onstar does offer useful features but IMHO, the recurring price is extreme considering what you can already do yourself for free a little preperation ahead of time.
However, laptops are designed to be power efficient when running on battery, not when plugged into the wall
Big picture here.. You can control the power settings either way. Can't you just set the laptop power settings for when "power is present" to the same as "when running on batteries"? Seems to me it should take the same power either way with the exception of the extra amount required to charge the battery if it needs to be when plugged in.
I bought one Lindows and one Lycoris machine for my kids for christmas. Good deal at $199 each at Walmart.com. Both have used Knoppix, Mandrake Move, and Fedora with on thier older machines with good results. I've had the new ones running periodically to configure everything for the local network and creating shortcuts to various places on the home file server and both have been good so far. The Lycoris "looks and feels" nicer but I could not get any video when I played movies with various codecs. I only have two complaints so far with Lindows. Every sub menu has a link to the click and run software library. A bit overboard I think. The other is the always run as root thing. Does not seem like such a good idea. I may look into changing that or wait until they trash it and try something else. I added an extra 256MB in each. The specs and hardware for the computers are identical. I forget the MB type but the CD is an LG and the hardrive is a Maxtor.
There are old threads on alt.cellular.sprintpcs that indicte that even with the tracking turned off, the signal is still transmitted all the time. The E911 only selection tells Sprint to not release your information to third parties. Basically, that choice on your phone sets a flag on the Sprint network, not actually disabling the position xmit function of the phone itself. I do not frequent alt.cellular.sprintpcs much any more but I have not read anything that indicates that is not the case.
My opinion here but "pop" music in last few or more years is very shallow. Maybe I'm getting older or being a little nostalgic, and maybe my parents used to say the same thing years ago but I find no interest in songs that repeat something about "the club" and the same old "I saw you over there, I'm gonna treat my baby right" song. It's catchy to young teens but definatly different from the "pop" music from 10+ years ago. Good for the RIAA though as they can pump the same crap out with a bunch of different faces.
If you stay long enough you're left with back problems, wrist problems, and bone spurs for your trouble.
And how is this is any different from working at any grocery store, Target, Sears, gas station, or toll both, ticket counter, convienence store etc?
Does Walmart buy special non ergonomic keyboards for the registers (moot point anyway as everything is scanned), and special granite floor pads to stand on that cause these problems?
What do other retailers in the US pay for wages and is it really any different then Walmart? Walmart is big so it is easy to get some statistics but if you add up 10 or 15 other mid sized retailers you will find the same wages, the same working conditions, but yet, they are somehow not "evil".
Same here..
Can someone give us give a brief description of what this articles is trying to say?
Many words are redefined for advertising purposes.
Many stores advertise in huge bold letters on thier ads, "We will beat any Advertised Price". If you read the conditions (which are not normally availabe in the same ad), it usually excludes mail order stores, sale prices, clearance items, local stores only within so many miles, only with a competitors ad, does not include warehouse stores, delivery etc etc etc.. I'm sorry, that is far from "Any Price". If anything, it should say they will match "a few stores price". If you search for matresses, you will rarely find the same exact model in more then one store. That is on purpose, you can't match prices on different model's.. Montgomery Wards would match price on similar features, obviously that business model was not enough.
New trend?
My Comcast service in Northern VA was recently uncapped or changed to roughly 3mbit down (upload stayed at 256kbit). I don't normally wear the tinfoil hat but I see one of two things driving this.
Tiered pricing/byte limites are on the horizon or we are experiencing the benefits of competition between broadband providers. Maybe a little of both. Seems odd for a broadband provider and more so for a cable company to give something for nothing.
Maybe the exact opposite...
Unlimited really equals 150 hours by some providers but yet AOL gives 1000hrs/month during the trial period (hint: more then unlimited).
Old school GTE dialup had 150hr/month. I do not recall it being marketed as unlimited though. They had a web control panel that showed your monthly stats and would send warning emails when you got close. I always joked about having no life and being online via dialup that much but I came very close to 150hrs several months in a row when I was unemployed during a winter.
And I've always used EAC and LAME on W32 which are both free (and damn good also).
/. style, this will be modded down as off topic, BUT if I portrayed the Apple zealots in a good way it would somehow be considered +5 insightful. Go figure
These do not get mentioned because it does not fit into the Apple zealots agenda when they feel the urge to contantly defend thier position.
I guess an "all in wonder" solution that some think the iTunes provides is good for some people but the Apple defenders will never admit to an Apple product as not being perfect without 15 lame excuses about why Apple did it the way they did and how you too should feel that is was in your best interest that it was done that way.
In true
I am not of any party and I have no religious preference.
I could care less what party someone is from.
I vote for the candidate that appears to be the most in sync with what I want. You should try that sometime.
The two party system leads to nothing but corruption. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. The decisions a countries leaders make should be debated from more then two sides. Specially when the real goal is to make more power for themselves. You will NEVER see campaign finance reform under the current system.
And if they made the drinking age 75 it would drop even more. What makes 21 such a better choice? Many studies reference 25 as a cutoff. You can not seperate out the death rate statistics of raising the drinking age because at the same time cars have got safer, roads have extra safety features, seat belt use is way up, and in many places the speed limits have been lowered all in the same 20 year period. Thankfully through an effort on many sides, the death rate among many groups is going down but how can any one group take the credit for the total %. How can you break the numbers down?
Here are some interesting statistics to chew on.
Here says:
Juveniles arrested for DUI were disproportionately male (84 percent) and white (91 percent).
Damn, maybe the law should allow non white males under 18 to drink.
Here says:
Declines in DUI arrest rates have occurred for every age group. Of particular note is the decrease in DUI arrest rates for those under the age of 21 compared to their rates of DUI arrest in the early 1980's when States had not adopted a uniform drinking age. In 1980 persons between 16 and 20 years old accounted for 10 percent of licensed drivers but 15 percent of DUI arrestees. In 1996, this age group accounted for 7 percent of drivers and 8 percent of DUI arrestees.
Considering the drinking age in 1980 and 1996 was also 2l in all but a few areas but yet the % goes way down. Law may have been a factor but what about the other groups decline? What ever caused those declines probably was a factor in the underage group too.
I am not claiming the law has no effect but anyone or any organization for or against some idea can interpet statistics and just about "prove" anything. Researches have determined that 78% of all statistics were made up, shortly after that another firm came up with 79%.
I did the same in the past and that is a very good idea. It's works even better if you leave IE as the Windows "Default Browser". Anything spyware/application wise/etc that tries to phone home or fetch something using the default browser or calling the IE rendering engine directly will also get blocked automatically and you can happily continue to use your other browser with out any problems!
It can be done. Mom doesn't know shit about Gator, nothing about the extra "search helpers" embedded into IE, the date manager, the time syncronizer, comet cursor, and the software she has that gives her popups all the time and those got installed without any problems. I'm sure that same technology that allowed those to be installed could also be used for Firebird considering in its current state it's not even actually an "install" but more of a tarball and a shortcut to MozillaFirebird.exe.
Maybe a true hoax but I would suspect any company would jump on the "hacker" bandwagon when something goes wrong. It's easier to blame some voodoo internet cracker then blame yourself, probably much harder for someone to prove you wrong also.
MS did the same thing recently. Remember the Blaster worm? Before the worm was to officially attack www.windowsupdate.com MS was already having DOS issues and instability with the update sites. Inital reports of DOS were being looked into by investigaters. The Blaster worms programmed DOS scheduled for later in the week had very little effect on MS directly as they rerouted the site elsewhere. Do you think that just maybe they were having a real issue trying to support thier users actually using the update service? That is not what I'd call a DOS attack. Funny also how they farmed out the update site to Akamai shortly after for "security reasons" (there is no mention of needing it for load levels) and no more was ever heard about the inital investigation by authorities from the inital "attack". I use Windows update almost daily at work and I noticed severe slowdowns that entire week and sometimes connections were refused entirely, not just during the the time frames of the two claimed DOS attacks either. I threw out the BS flag for that DOS claim.
I've heard quite a few FM setups and although I agree with your limitations, I believe your opinion is too heavily weighted on the quality (or lack) of commercial FM broadcasts. It's not audio cd quality but definately better quality then any radio station I've ever heard, add to the fact that your listening to compressed audio anyway and in a moving car and it turns into a very good alternative.
Knoppix..
It DOES work on older hardware, sometimes very nicely.
I have a Knoppix hd-install option on a P200/128MB ram 4GB drive and it works fine. With the exception of Open Office and one of the games, everything is perfectly usable. It is no powerhouse but no different then Win98SE on the same machine (except more stable then Win98).
Fedora on the same machine works but is a little too slow and I have not tried Mandrake Move on it yet.
Microsoft will retire several of its products next week, including Windows 98 and SQL Server 7, to comply with a court order related to its dispute with Sun Microsystems over Java.
This is misleading. As I understand the situation, they did NOT retire these packages because the court order told them too. They retired them because they did not want to get them into compliance and spend the resources on those packages. That is a big difference.
As with most MS settlements, they win even when they lose.
Wal-Mart sells PCs with Lindows on them from their website.
Walmart sells them with Lindows, Lycoris and Suse preinstalled. My links are for the cheapest ones I could find with the respective software (the first two are identical in hardware, the Suse machine appears to be different.
This past weekend, I ordered one with Lindows and one with Lycoris for my kids. They've been using Linux in some form either dual boot with W98 on one computer and Fedora or Knoppix hd-install on the other on Pentium 200's (ouch) with no problems. I'll let them try the Lindows and Lycoris first and put the Knoppix or another distro on it if they don't like them. I have never bought a complete computer before but the $199 for everything sounded too good to pass up.
My total cost with tax and shipping was $446 for both computers.
Hopefully, all goes well with the machines. If not, I'm sure I'll be posting my negative experience in the next Lindows/Lycoris/Walmart PC/cheap computer/Linux on the Desktop story on slashdot!
Gur svefg crefba gb ebgngr guvf naq ercyl vf n trrx!