"And Mom and Dad gonna build a system? Doubt it, they do thier [sic] pricing at Dell.com..."
Okay... here's what I just picked up from Dell a couple of weeks ago for a computer at the office.
P4/2.0GHz
256MB RAM
40x CD burner
Windows XP Pro
Network, modem, etc.
One-year onsite warranty
I paid $714 shipped. Note that it came with a crappy video card. (Well, crappy if you want to use it to play games. We, of course, didn't.)
Go with XP Home instead of Pro (you don't need Pro unless you're running a domain or multiple processors) and you get $100 or so of that price to upgrade to a great video card.
Honestly, I think the people who are saying that PCs are $2000 haven't bought a computer in a while. It's now more cost-effective to buy a Dell, with all of its goodies like onsite warranties, than it is to build it yourself.
You're right -- most people would rather go to Dell than build it themselves. I used to build all my own PCs, but it's no longer worth it. The days of the $2000 PC are over. The days of the over-$1000 PC are rapidly approaching an end.
My boyfriend just picked up a 20.1" flat panel (yes, the equivalent of a 22" CRT) from Dell for $800 shipped. You want a $2000 PC? Get that plus a $1000 PC.
(No, damnit, I don't work for Dell, but I'm sold on their onsite service plan, and they build quality PCs that are affordable. Also, I use GotApex to find the best deals at Dell [and others]. No, I don't work for them either.:P)
If it's good enough for Sun Cobalt...
on
XFS on a Web Server?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sun Cobalt is using XFS on their new RaQ550 web servers.
I've seen the demo and it looks cool. Not sure why they chose XFS, but I'm sure you can ask the developers.
It's part of the PC Design Checklist.
on
1.3GHz Duron Arrives
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Optimized for Windows XP" has little to do with the performance and/or features of the chip. It has more to do with the "standard" PC that Microsoft and Intel require you to have to get the "Designed for..." logos on your computer system.
The PC Design Checklist has a set of requirements that your hardware must meet in order to be certified for use with Windows XP. Basically, if you're a system manufacturer and want to pre-install Windows, you must follow these guidelines and use only parts that also meet the guidelines. AMD certified their products with Microsoft so that OEMs would be able to include them in PCs that have Windows pre-installed.
Microsoft and Intel come out with new requirements every year for PCs to get the latest "Designed for..." label and to preinstall Windows. Some of the latest requirements are that PCs are not allowed to have ISA devices and that the PC must be at the desktop/login stage no more than 35 seconds after the power button is pressed. (See the link I posted above for full details.)
It's not a conspiracy by Microsoft and Intel, or anything of that sort. It's the same thing that a lot of manufacturers go through to say that their products are "certified" for such-and-such uses. Note that you, as a PC manufacturer, are free to not certify your computer with Microsoft, but you lose the OEM discounts on Windows preinstalls if you do, and you lose the free advertising provided by Microsoft.
This, overall, is a Good Thing -- otherwise, cheap manufacturers might still be trying to force-feed us ISA devices and no USB ports.
I complained about the very same thing to CmdrTaco in an email a while ago. He responded on 8/30/01. Below is the text of my email as well as his reply.
My email: I
> enjoy the site because of the moderation system, where users can post
> comments and only the most informative or best comments can get read.
> In other words, I don't have to waste my time sorting through 75-100
> awful comments to find the few true gems.
>
> I've noticed recently (in fact, since the upgrade) that the moderation
> system seems to have gone downhill. First, a lot of good insightful
> comments don't get moderated, and the few comments that do get
> moderated seem to have been modded down as "offtopic" or something
> similar. I know you say in your moderation guidelines to try to mod up
> instead of down, so I don't think the moderation system itself is at
> fault. Rather, it seems that there are very few moderators actually
> perusing the stories!
>
> For instance, there was an article today about AMD. With 150 comments
> posted, there were NONE moderated above 2. With 175 posted, there was
> ONE moderated to a 3. Something is seriously wrong here. If the
> comments aren't being moderated, this is no better than the imbecile
> flamewars on fc or ZDNet.
CmdrTaco's reply: I think part of it is that I'm out of town and not moderating much;)
-----
My comments: I only find something wrong with this if the editors of Slashdot aren't doing their job. I believe that part of the job of owning a community site is listening to that community. It's very similar to running a company -- if you don't listen to your target market, they will leave for a company that does.
However, this thread, and moreover the fact that this entire thread has been moderated to -1, says that someone at Slashdot is not listening. That endangers the very idea of being the self-appointed king of a community -- that you listen to your constituents. At this point, Slashdot has become ridiculed for everything from its UI to CmdrTaco's grammar to Jon Katz to the asinine comments posted without moderation possibilities to submitted articles. (Witness the war today about CmdrTaco's comment regarding the cheating system used at a university.)
The fact is that Slashdot needs to change. Personally, I have several ideas about how it can change for the better, ranging from more moderation points in the system to the abolishment of the "Offtopic" moderation. (Can you imagine if you were at a dinner party and the conversation drifted to something besides the "assigned" topic and you complained about it? This is the same type of thing.)
On a slightly unrelated note, I believe the 50-karma point cap should be abolished because it doesn't encourage people to post good comments after hitting 50 karma. Furthermore, I believe karma should be milked for all it is worth, and that people should be praised for high karma -- even to the point of putting a "Top Karma Whores" box on the front page listing the 5-10 people in the system with the biggest karma (ala FuckedCompany's scoring system.) Why not? Positive karma means you have posted what is viewed as a good comment. Why not make it a contest? People love competition.
The way to solve all of this, of course, is to simply make a Slashdot discussion forum, and have user input not only discussed but actively implemented. The whole point of open source is that anyone can contribute. It's sad to see that one of the biggest open-source-proponent websites can't encourage the same level of participation.
"When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: 'Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process.'" (my emphasis)
So unless the FBI has gotten a court order against the 84.8% of web surfers who use Internet Explorer, this is pure FUD.
LOL... glad to see you are as irritated by that as I am. Thanks for the post.
AGAIN: If you can't replace "it's" with "it is" in the sentence you were using, use "its". "it is existence" would not be correct; therefore, the correct form of the word is "its".
I don't want to be a troll, but I'm really sick of seeing this kind of amateurish grammar on Slashdot, and I know I'm not the only one. Taco seems to have given up. He always uses "its", but that's not correct either! Remember the "it is" rule stated above, and you'll be correct every time.
P.S. "Better then" is not correct either. When comparing, use "than."
There's something I haven't yet seen posted regarding this article. Slashdot editors and posters are running right to the "Microsoft wants to take over my DVD player" without looking at the tiny step in between.
Consider these three facts:
1. New copy-protected CDs come with Windows Media tracks for your computer instead of regular audio tracks.
2. People are complaining that these new CDs won't work in their DVD players.
3. Thus, the MPAA encourages Microsoft to put WMA support into DVD players so that people will stop whining about their CDs being unplayable.
Once 90% of the people can play the CD on their Windows computer, and most of the others can play it on their DVD player, very few people complain about copy protection.
Microsoft and the MPAA undoubtedly have larger intentions here, but this small facet of the whole WMA deal has been completely overlooked.
Keep complaining about copy protection, and please try to buy a nice high-end DVD player NOW, rather than later. We don't need copy protected CDs, and we can make them fail, but not if we keep buying the technology that makes them work.
"So what it comes down to, is I also have to mangle the output name be making it.txt_ so that IE will not try and read it, along with passing it a bad content type, otherwise if it's application/octet-stream or some such, it will STILL RENDER IT IN THE DAMN WINDOW..."
I had this same problem. Basically, you must make sure to pass the filename as part of the content header, but not attached to the end of the script name. This way, IE will always pop up a window asking you to save. It will tell you that it is saving your script name, but in reality, it will save the page you want it to.
First, write the page from your database to your local server as a file. Then do the following (my script is written in PHP; translate as needed.)
I wrote my database contents to a variable called $content, then executed the following code:
# put content into file called download/$page_num.html
$fp = fopen ("download/${page_num}.html", "w");
fwrite($fp, $content);
fclose($fp);
if ($action == "download") {
# set up file download to client
header("Content-Type: text/unknown\n");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"${page_num}.html\"");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: ascii");
$fn=fopen("download/${page_num}.html", "r");
fpassthru($fn);
unlink("download/${page_num}.html");
exit;
};
Note the key difference between my script and yours is the fact that I'm not passing anything but a content header to IE. Don't use your_script.php?filename=xxx... that doesn't work. Just write the filename as a variable and put that variable in the content disposition header. Also note that the Content Type can't be text/html, or, really, anything that IE will recognize.
This works in both Netscape and IE. Note that if you're working cross-platform using text files, you'll have to convert line breaks. I use the following code:
# get os for carriage returns:P
if(strstr(getenv('HTTP_USER_AGENT'), 'Win')) {
$content = eregi_replace("\r","",$content);
};
Again, that's PHP -- translate if necessary.
Here's the final trick I'll pull out of my bag: if you set a Content Type to application/vnd-msexcel or somesuch (I could be off on that), and send the client a tab-delimited text file, it will open in Excel. Same goes for plain text and Word. It's a great trick to pull when you know your client is going to be using Windows and will say, "Hey, how did you get your script to make an Excel file? That's so cool!" (Always nice to have a little extra trick to impress your clients...;)
Supposedly, it performs just like a SCSI drive, but it's IDE. A couple of these in the aforementioned rack in a mirrored RAID combo would make a perfect backup.
I'm definitely swapping out my current configuration for two of these once I can afford the $600.:)
JXTA = P2P Protocols
JXTA = has some developers
JXTA = coming from a company with a shaky past in "revolutionary new technologies"
JXTA = something that not many people understand
JXTA = not being marketed heavily by Sun.
The general public and some geeks equate "P2P" with "illegal music sharing". To make matters worse, Bill Joy has failed to put this invention into terms that non-computer-literates can understand.
I'm keeping an ear to the ground for cool new projects involving JXTA. However, I fear that like JINI before it, it will be relegated to obscurity because of a failure of marketing and a lack on understanding of how it will benefit consumers.
The #1 sales trick is "Explain benefits, not features." Consumers don't care if it provides "ground rules for P2P applications." They want to know what benefits it provides to them. So far, I've seen much discussion on JXTA's technical merits, but absolute zero discussion on what kind of cool applications are going to use it. Where is the "JXTA-enabled" widget that will "change your life"?
After reading this article, I begin to see why it will be doubly tough for Slashdot to make the jump to subscription-based revenue.
The biggest problem I see with Slashdot is that Slashdot doesn't have a Cringely or a Coursey or a Dvorak. Sure, Slashot has Jon Katz, but I just don't find his articles as readable as a Cringley column or a Dvorak rant.
I see the real difference between Slashdot and Salon on a couple of other fronts as well. Besides not having several columns by intersting authors, most of Slashdot's content is made interesting by the readers, not by the story submitters. Personally, I am horrified by both the obvious lack of attention given to grammar, as well as the oft-biased one-liners added by the story submitters. Finally, although it has gotten better in recent times, Slashdot seems to crash a lot... even more than an overloaded MySQL database would suggest.
For Slashdot to take a viable community and turn it profitable, the story editors do a lot more than Salon did. The fact remains that Salon's content is mostly unique, whereas Slashdot's content (in terms of story submissions) is mostly regurgitated. Salon's readers will pay because it's hard to find Salon-like articles anywhere else. On the other hand, I can honestly say that if ZDNet had a moderation system, I'd only rarely visit Slashdot. ZDNet's columnists keep me entertained, and their news is grammatically correct and up-to-date because they pay people to go out and write it.
It all boils down to whether Slashdot can successfully differentiate itself from the hundreds of other "Cool Linux Stories" sites. In the end, what keeps Slashdot's readers coming back is the discussion and the attached moderation system. What remains to be seen is whether or not people will pay for that.
...on TreoPlayer.com reveals some interesting facts:
Check out the source code. Lovely ol' Frontpage inserted an author meta tag with the name "Jerzy Bilyk".
Here is where it gets interesting. Run a Google search on "Jerzy Bilyk", and you come up with this page (Google cache used because the original doesn't exist anymore). It lists a "Bilyk, Jerzy" as having a supended license (among other crimes.) The police department is in Plano, IL.
Now here's the really interesting part: a WHOIS on treoplayer.com shows a John Bastion as owning the domain. His address? Sugar Grove, IL: about 12 miles from Plano. (Mapquest proves it).
I think, from this, we can safely declare one golden rule: if you're going to do a hoax and submit it to Slashdot, don't freakin' use Frontpage!:D
P.S. I'm available as a consultant if anyone from Slashdot would like to hire an editor/story checker.;)
I am one of the many AT&T@Home customers who got switched off this weekend. I was notified by phone that it would be 7 days before my Internet connection was back up again. I was pleasantly surprised to find it up and running when I got back home from work tonight. I set my ethernet card to DHCP and was off and running as soon as it grabbed an IP.
Anyway, I was just reading the other article about @Home, and noticed the many complaints about the new 1.5MBps download cap. All I can say is, Are you serious? After using dialup for two days, I'm glad I have broadband again!
Let's look at the facts:
-- I had Speakeasy DSL at my old place of residence. I got 5 static IPs and a 1.5 down/384 up connection for $100 a month. Now, for half that price, I get the same download speed. I really don't think there is a complaint to be made there.
-- The Speakeasy/Covad/PacBell trio took six weeks to get my DSL installed. I found I had to reset the modem every month or so because it would myseriously give up the ghost. My cable modem was installed at 8AM the day after I called, and running by 8:30 that same morning.
I have only once had to reset my cable modem, excluding this weekend's outage.
--AT&T said that they would take 7 days to get those of us in the Bay Area back up. They took 3. Not bad, considering this was pretty much unexpected on their end.
-- As some of you in the Bay Area know, the @Home gateway out of San Jose was completely overtaxed. My ping on my favorite Quake III server went from 27 to 100 within the past couple of months. Now that I'm on AT&T's new network, my ping is 50 -- quite acceptable.
For those of you whining about the 1.5MBps cap, I say go back to dialup. Better yet, sign on with PacBell DSL. You'll get 608/128 (yes, less than half the speed you get now) for the same price. Plus, you'll get idiots from tech support and billing problems (by the time I cancelled PacHell and moved to cable modem at my current place of residence, they had managed to rack up over $900 of incorrect charges on my account, which took 4 months to resolve.)
Let's not forget that there are still millions of broadband-starved people in this world. I should think that there are better things to complain about than the fact that your $40 a month broadband connection went from sometimes-incredibly-super-fast to still-fast-but-maybe-not-as-fast-as-it-was-before. We should give AT&T credit for handling this well and for getting us online in half the time they originally promised.
We here at Slashdot would like to advise you to use the following format when submitting bug-related stories.
"Crashing a [product] with [method used to crash it]"
"An article at [source] reports that [security expert] demonstrated how to crash [product] using [Pick one: buffer overflow; malformed headers; Javascript]." [insert wizened statement about how this will affect future direction of products in this category] [attach silly remarks by Slashdot writer like "Well, that's why I use [competing product]!"]
Also, please use the following template when replying:
"Those @(#&@! bastards! Who do they think they are, making [product] so buggy! Why do they have to include [useless feature that no one wants/uses anyway]?? I'll never use a [company] [product] again! Please, fellow Slashdotters, I urge you to boycott [company]!"
This will save us a lot of time and moderation points.
I would like to see a "consoles" category on Slashdot. That way, all of these articles about the Gamecube and Xbox could go in their own category, which users could then remove from the front page. Right now, they are in the generic "technology" category, which contains many other articles that might be interesting to those of us who couldn't care less about the latest console hack.
I am sure you have a great point, but it is obscured by your clear lack of grammatical skills. I must warn you: even though you may think that being an engineer means that you don't need to communicate with other people, this is NOT the case.
No one has perfect grammar, but to be able to make an eloquent point in writing is crucial, regardless of your job title. You lose your audience if your prose is rife with spelling mistakes and poorly constructed sentences. On the other hand, if you can easily sum up the benefits of your idea, you can win supporters -- even if that idea is as simple as going forward with a project you have at work. Never forget that those pointy-haired bosses about whom you like to joke are the ones who will be reading resumes and project proposals of yours. They could reject them based not on content, but on presentation. It makes a difference.
I urge you to take a writing skills class before you graduate. Not only will it help you get a job by writing a good resume, but it will help you keep that job by being able to communicate with others effectively.
I work for a large company doing web development for the external site. There
are several problems with our website. Since our group (Internet Engineering)
is in charge of future development for the site, we've charted out the problems
and their solutions. Here is a short synopsis:
Content management system. It's crucial when doing a large website.
Ours is horribly outdated. Keys to a good content management system: it should
be web-based, and it should be a standard, out-of-the-box solution with as
little customization as possible. It should allow for maximum flexibility.
(We've run into problems with ours not supporting custom META tags, for instance.)
Don't let IT run your website unless you know all of IT personally.
In a large company, unless you have a dedicated (and by that I mean reporting
to the same VP as your core web team) IT department, you're asking for it.
If I told you what IT refuses to do to our website, you'd be shocked. For
instance, we only support {ancient scripting language}. We were supposed to
have other scripting languages supported this year, but that hasn't happened.
Our department is slowly absorbing IT's functions so we can crank things out
faster. Meanwhile, we continue to get last priority with IT, and we don't
have the root passwords to our own servers. (In recent months, they have given
us tools to check log files, but that was two years in the making.)
Follow IBM's rule. You mentioned IBM's web services division. In fact, IBM
is the standard by which most other e-commerce sites should be judged as far
as organizational hierarchy. IBM did a presentation earlier this year about
their web site; basically a "tell-all". Several other high-profile
companies attended. Someone asked an IBM person why they did the informational
session; the reply was "We're so far ahead of everyone else; we don't
think anyone can catch up." Key point to IBM's success: totally separating
nearly EVERYONE who develops for the web site under the same department. If
you have someone in each department doing the website, you're going to get
a website that defines subsections by the organization's departments, some
of which may be mumbo-jumbo to outsiders. For instance, "Information
Services". What is that? Separating products into categories like "Software"
and "Desktop Systems" is much more meaningful, but this can only
happen if you have one group in charge of the web site. Otherwise, the tendency
is to title subsections by the department name, which results in some weird
naming conventions.
Where I work is not important; what's important is what you can learn from
our mistakes. Every major company has organizational problems with their web
site. Your company must take these issues and deal with them now as opposed
to later. A content management system is an invaluable tool in helping with
these issues. Most feature workflow routing so you can have one manager signing
off on several people's projects before they get published. You can then also
hire graphic designers without having to hire a complementary Dreamweaver jockey;
good systems create HTML and correct menus for you in a lot of cases. Most take the
Developers / Graphic Designers / Managers / Administrators approach, where they
place you in one group and you get different tasks according to what group you're
in. This may or may not work for you; the good thing is that in a good content
management system, you can customize it to fit your needs.
It's great that you've asked this question when your group is still small.
It shows a lot of forethought that the older, larger companies didn't have time
for. In a lot of respects, you're lucky: you can design an ideal system. Just
make sure it will scale and that you can easily upgrade if some new time-saving
feature comes out in a year or two.
"Get satelite like my brother and then possibly not get the local stations (he doesn't)?"
Before complaining on Slashdot, you might want to at least CALL the satellite company to see if that's true in your area. I live 30 miles out of San Francisco and I get the local SF channels. I am quite happy with my DirecTV + TiVO offering.
Does anyone else get sick of people who complain without researching their options first? If the cable company still has your business regardless of how much you like it or dislike it, you have given them NO incentive to change! You have a choice of what company you give your money to -- USE IT! Change to satellite, then write a letter to the cable company's VP of customer service explaining why you changed. Don't complain on Slashdot -- I highly doubt the suits who put the ads in are reading your post.
It does a lot of network chatter and actually communicates with a name server outside of our firewall!
*sigh*. I love it when people write conspiracy theories when it's really just a standard Dynamic DNS client that is poking around on the network.
Once again, this is a cool idea that Microsoft has implemented if your corporation uses nothing but Microsoft servers. (Note: this is the same dynamic DNS that is used by many websites to give you your own domain name, so you don't have to have a Microsoft server to support it. However, most regular DNS servers do not have this option enabled.) The dynamic DNS option is enabled by default, however, in Windows 2000, and it causes a waste of network services (to the point of becoming a DOS attack on a company's DNS servers) when those DNS servers do not support it. Here is more information (that I wrote when researching it for my company):
Windows 2000 supports something called Dynamic DNS (DDNS), which lets clients automatically update their own A records. This means that a DNS server supporting Dynamic DNS would be almost completely self-maintained, as whenever the computer connects or disconnects from the network, it adds/removes its own records. It basically completely eliminates the need for static IPs (except for things like web servers and such that touch the outside world.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft, in its blind Microsoft-only world, made Dynamic DNS registration turned on by default on all Windows 2000 clients, even in companies without a dynamic DNS server. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic on the network as every time the computer connects or disconnects, it sends a little message to the DNS server. I've even been told (without proof) that it sends a request to every DNS server on its list, possibly upgrading the request all the way to the root server if it doesn't get its way with the first server on its list.
This had a lot of UNIX admins frightened about job security (my take: if you're sitting there all day updating DNS records, you better find some new job skills anyway) and it has evolved into a fascinating topic of research for me. Some pretty good takes on it can be found here:
This is really interesting because it's one small facet of the many ways Microsoft is subtly pushing UNIX around. ("Hey! We have this cool thing implemented in Windows now! Fire your UNIX sysadmins and throw away your UNIX servers, because our servers are so much easier to maintain!")
Interesting point of departure...
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It used to be that Netscape offered official builds of Netscape for anything from AIX to Solaris. Now it looks like they are switching gears and only offering official builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
I would say that this speaks volumes about what sort of client platform most of their customers are using, and how the UNIX client landscape has changed recently. A few years ago, anti-Microsoft or pro-UNIX people (some one, some the other, some both) were seen running anything from HP-UX to OS/2. Netscape, accordingly, released versions of Netscape for nearly every OS. Now, these groups have condensed into the people running MacOS X and Linux. The people running something else as a client have slowly faded away, until these clients were considered a niche market. This is shown even by Slashdot, which has switched from "news for nerds" to an almost exclusively Linux-advocacy site.
This bodes well for Linux and MacOS, both of which have their markets. I am seeing more people use both of them not because they have an axe to grind with Microsoft, but purely for curiosity and learning's sake.
But what of the other client platforms? Obviously, Mozilla is still being released for them, but if official, "supported" browser/office software is no longer available, will anything but Linux/MacOS/Windows as a client go away? Or has it already?
Just an interesting trend, IMHO.
Re:Rumors of passing on are vastly overrated
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
Actually, Windows 2000 and Windows XP have compatibility layers that let you run a program under "DOS" or "Windows 98". It's basically an emulation layer. It comes built-in with Windows XP; for Windows 2000 it is a free download. More information can be found at Microsoft.com.
And as the other guy said, Scorched Earth does run on Windows XP. I'd recommend the upgrade just to make your system more stable -- what's the point of being able to play old games if your system crashes three times a day?
Check out MyDivaPlayer.com. They have a 128MB player that also supports CompactFlash for $135 shipped after discount. It is extremely small -- about 3"; fits in the palm of your hand. I haven't had any experience with it, but the few reviews I could find are raves. I plan to buy one for Christmas. The coolness factor of having a mini "Zip drive"/MP3 player/voice recorder for $135 is really what attracted me to this one.
--Erica
My rule of thumb: Make it look good on IE 5. Make it work on Netscape. Sure, my table borders may look bad on Netscape, but is the information there and can the website user read it properly? That is what counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay... here's what I just picked up from Dell a couple of weeks ago for a computer at the office.
I paid $714 shipped. Note that it came with a crappy video card. (Well, crappy if you want to use it to play games. We, of course, didn't.)
Go with XP Home instead of Pro (you don't need Pro unless you're running a domain or multiple processors) and you get $100 or so of that price to upgrade to a great video card.
Honestly, I think the people who are saying that PCs are $2000 haven't bought a computer in a while. It's now more cost-effective to buy a Dell, with all of its goodies like onsite warranties, than it is to build it yourself.
You're right -- most people would rather go to Dell than build it themselves. I used to build all my own PCs, but it's no longer worth it. The days of the $2000 PC are over. The days of the over-$1000 PC are rapidly approaching an end.
My boyfriend just picked up a 20.1" flat panel (yes, the equivalent of a 22" CRT) from Dell for $800 shipped. You want a $2000 PC? Get that plus a $1000 PC.
(No, damnit, I don't work for Dell, but I'm sold on their onsite service plan, and they build quality PCs that are affordable. Also, I use GotApex to find the best deals at Dell [and others]. No, I don't work for them either.
Sun Cobalt is using XFS on their new RaQ550 web servers.
More information.
I've seen the demo and it looks cool. Not sure why they chose XFS, but I'm sure you can ask the developers.
"Optimized for Windows XP" has little to do with the performance and/or features of the chip. It has more to do with the "standard" PC that Microsoft and Intel require you to have to get the "Designed for..." logos on your computer system.
The PC Design Checklist has a set of requirements that your hardware must meet in order to be certified for use with Windows XP. Basically, if you're a system manufacturer and want to pre-install Windows, you must follow these guidelines and use only parts that also meet the guidelines. AMD certified their products with Microsoft so that OEMs would be able to include them in PCs that have Windows pre-installed.
Microsoft and Intel come out with new requirements every year for PCs to get the latest "Designed for..." label and to preinstall Windows. Some of the latest requirements are that PCs are not allowed to have ISA devices and that the PC must be at the desktop/login stage no more than 35 seconds after the power button is pressed. (See the link I posted above for full details.)
It's not a conspiracy by Microsoft and Intel, or anything of that sort. It's the same thing that a lot of manufacturers go through to say that their products are "certified" for such-and-such uses. Note that you, as a PC manufacturer, are free to not certify your computer with Microsoft, but you lose the OEM discounts on Windows preinstalls if you do, and you lose the free advertising provided by Microsoft.
This, overall, is a Good Thing -- otherwise, cheap manufacturers might still be trying to force-feed us ISA devices and no USB ports.
I complained about the very same thing to CmdrTaco in an email a while ago. He responded on 8/30/01. Below is the text of my email as well as his reply.
;)
My email:
I
> enjoy the site because of the moderation system, where users can post
> comments and only the most informative or best comments can get read.
> In other words, I don't have to waste my time sorting through 75-100
> awful comments to find the few true gems.
>
> I've noticed recently (in fact, since the upgrade) that the moderation
> system seems to have gone downhill. First, a lot of good insightful
> comments don't get moderated, and the few comments that do get
> moderated seem to have been modded down as "offtopic" or something
> similar. I know you say in your moderation guidelines to try to mod up
> instead of down, so I don't think the moderation system itself is at
> fault. Rather, it seems that there are very few moderators actually
> perusing the stories!
>
> For instance, there was an article today about AMD. With 150 comments
> posted, there were NONE moderated above 2. With 175 posted, there was
> ONE moderated to a 3. Something is seriously wrong here. If the
> comments aren't being moderated, this is no better than the imbecile
> flamewars on fc or ZDNet.
CmdrTaco's reply:
I think part of it is that I'm out of town and not moderating much
-----
My comments:
I only find something wrong with this if the editors of Slashdot aren't doing their job. I believe that part of the job of owning a community site is listening to that community. It's very similar to running a company -- if you don't listen to your target market, they will leave for a company that does.
However, this thread, and moreover the fact that this entire thread has been moderated to -1, says that someone at Slashdot is not listening. That endangers the very idea of being the self-appointed king of a community -- that you listen to your constituents. At this point, Slashdot has become ridiculed for everything from its UI to CmdrTaco's grammar to Jon Katz to the asinine comments posted without moderation possibilities to submitted articles. (Witness the war today about CmdrTaco's comment regarding the cheating system used at a university.)
The fact is that Slashdot needs to change. Personally, I have several ideas about how it can change for the better, ranging from more moderation points in the system to the abolishment of the "Offtopic" moderation. (Can you imagine if you were at a dinner party and the conversation drifted to something besides the "assigned" topic and you complained about it? This is the same type of thing.)
On a slightly unrelated note, I believe the 50-karma point cap should be abolished because it doesn't encourage people to post good comments after hitting 50 karma. Furthermore, I believe karma should be milked for all it is worth, and that people should be praised for high karma -- even to the point of putting a "Top Karma Whores" box on the front page listing the 5-10 people in the system with the biggest karma (ala FuckedCompany's scoring system.) Why not? Positive karma means you have posted what is viewed as a good comment. Why not make it a contest? People love competition.
The way to solve all of this, of course, is to simply make a Slashdot discussion forum, and have user input not only discussed but actively implemented. The whole point of open source is that anyone can contribute. It's sad to see that one of the biggest open-source-proponent websites can't encourage the same level of participation.
The news article about Magic Lantern, which you apparently failed to read when it was posted to Slashdot, contains the following text:
"When asked if Magic Lantern would require a court order for the FBI to use it, as existing keystroke logger technology does, Bresson said: 'Like all technology projects or tools deployed by the FBI it would be used pursuant to the appropriate legal process.'" (my emphasis)
So unless the FBI has gotten a court order against the 84.8% of web surfers who use Internet Explorer, this is pure FUD.
Sheesh.
LOL... glad to see you are as irritated by that as I am. Thanks for the post.
AGAIN: If you can't replace "it's" with "it is" in the sentence you were using, use "its". "it is existence" would not be correct; therefore, the correct form of the word is "its".
I don't want to be a troll, but I'm really sick of seeing this kind of amateurish grammar on Slashdot, and I know I'm not the only one. Taco seems to have given up. He always uses "its", but that's not correct either! Remember the "it is" rule stated above, and you'll be correct every time.
P.S. "Better then" is not correct either. When comparing, use "than."
There's something I haven't yet seen posted regarding this article. Slashdot editors and posters are running right to the "Microsoft wants to take over my DVD player" without looking at the tiny step in between.
Consider these three facts:
1. New copy-protected CDs come with Windows Media tracks for your computer instead of regular audio tracks.
2. People are complaining that these new CDs won't work in their DVD players.
3. Thus, the MPAA encourages Microsoft to put WMA support into DVD players so that people will stop whining about their CDs being unplayable.
Once 90% of the people can play the CD on their Windows computer, and most of the others can play it on their DVD player, very few people complain about copy protection.
Microsoft and the MPAA undoubtedly have larger intentions here, but this small facet of the whole WMA deal has been completely overlooked.
Keep complaining about copy protection, and please try to buy a nice high-end DVD player NOW, rather than later. We don't need copy protected CDs, and we can make them fail, but not if we keep buying the technology that makes them work.
"So what it comes down to, is I also have to mangle the output name be making it .txt_ so that IE will not try and read it, along with passing it a bad content type, otherwise if it's application/octet-stream or some such, it will STILL RENDER IT IN THE DAMN WINDOW..."
:P
;)
I had this same problem. Basically, you must make sure to pass the filename as part of the content header, but not attached to the end of the script name. This way, IE will always pop up a window asking you to save. It will tell you that it is saving your script name, but in reality, it will save the page you want it to.
First, write the page from your database to your local server as a file. Then do the following (my script is written in PHP; translate as needed.)
I wrote my database contents to a variable called $content, then executed the following code:
# put content into file called download/$page_num.html
$fp = fopen ("download/${page_num}.html", "w");
fwrite($fp, $content);
fclose($fp);
if ($action == "download") {
# set up file download to client
header("Content-Type: text/unknown\n");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"${page_num}.html\"");
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: ascii");
$fn=fopen("download/${page_num}.html", "r");
fpassthru($fn);
unlink("download/${page_num}.html");
exit;
};
Note the key difference between my script and yours is the fact that I'm not passing anything but a content header to IE. Don't use your_script.php?filename=xxx... that doesn't work. Just write the filename as a variable and put that variable in the content disposition header. Also note that the Content Type can't be text/html, or, really, anything that IE will recognize.
This works in both Netscape and IE. Note that if you're working cross-platform using text files, you'll have to convert line breaks. I use the following code:
# get os for carriage returns
if(strstr(getenv('HTTP_USER_AGENT'), 'Win')) {
$content = eregi_replace("\r","",$content);
};
Again, that's PHP -- translate if necessary.
Here's the final trick I'll pull out of my bag: if you set a Content Type to application/vnd-msexcel or somesuch (I could be off on that), and send the client a tab-delimited text file, it will open in Excel. Same goes for plain text and Word. It's a great trick to pull when you know your client is going to be using Windows and will say, "Hey, how did you get your script to make an Excel file? That's so cool!" (Always nice to have a little extra trick to impress your clients...
Hope this helps --
Erica
I said I wanted two. On Pricewatch, they are approximately $300 each. $300 x 2 = $600.
:)
By the way, I'm female.
The 100GB Western Digital Special Edition hard drive with 8MB of cache.
:)
Supposedly, it performs just like a SCSI drive, but it's IDE. A couple of these in the aforementioned rack in a mirrored RAID combo would make a perfect backup.
I'm definitely swapping out my current configuration for two of these once I can afford the $600.
Napster = P2P
Napster = cool
Napster = sued
Napster = shut down
Gnutella = True P2P
Gnutella = slow
Gnutella = bandwidth-hogging
Gnutella = unsure future
JXTA = P2P Protocols
JXTA = has some developers
JXTA = coming from a company with a shaky past in "revolutionary new technologies"
JXTA = something that not many people understand
JXTA = not being marketed heavily by Sun.
The general public and some geeks equate "P2P" with "illegal music sharing". To make matters worse, Bill Joy has failed to put this invention into terms that non-computer-literates can understand.
I'm keeping an ear to the ground for cool new projects involving JXTA. However, I fear that like JINI before it, it will be relegated to obscurity because of a failure of marketing and a lack on understanding of how it will benefit consumers.
The #1 sales trick is "Explain benefits, not features." Consumers don't care if it provides "ground rules for P2P applications." They want to know what benefits it provides to them. So far, I've seen much discussion on JXTA's technical merits, but absolute zero discussion on what kind of cool applications are going to use it. Where is the "JXTA-enabled" widget that will "change your life"?
My favorite quote from the Wired article you mentioned:
;)
Bill Joy, 1998: "It's better to be Yahoo than Netscape."
Now, who said this man wasn't a visionary?
After reading this article, I begin to see why it will be doubly tough for Slashdot to make the jump to subscription-based revenue.
The biggest problem I see with Slashdot is that Slashdot doesn't have a Cringely or a Coursey or a Dvorak. Sure, Slashot has Jon Katz, but I just don't find his articles as readable as a Cringley column or a Dvorak rant.
I see the real difference between Slashdot and Salon on a couple of other fronts as well. Besides not having several columns by intersting authors, most of Slashdot's content is made interesting by the readers, not by the story submitters. Personally, I am horrified by both the obvious lack of attention given to grammar, as well as the oft-biased one-liners added by the story submitters. Finally, although it has gotten better in recent times, Slashdot seems to crash a lot... even more than an overloaded MySQL database would suggest.
For Slashdot to take a viable community and turn it profitable, the story editors do a lot more than Salon did. The fact remains that Salon's content is mostly unique, whereas Slashdot's content (in terms of story submissions) is mostly regurgitated. Salon's readers will pay because it's hard to find Salon-like articles anywhere else. On the other hand, I can honestly say that if ZDNet had a moderation system, I'd only rarely visit Slashdot. ZDNet's columnists keep me entertained, and their news is grammatically correct and up-to-date because they pay people to go out and write it.
It all boils down to whether Slashdot can successfully differentiate itself from the hundreds of other "Cool Linux Stories" sites. In the end, what keeps Slashdot's readers coming back is the discussion and the attached moderation system. What remains to be seen is whether or not people will pay for that.
...on TreoPlayer.com reveals some interesting facts:
:D
;)
Check out the source code. Lovely ol' Frontpage inserted an author meta tag with the name "Jerzy Bilyk".
Here is where it gets interesting. Run a Google search on "Jerzy Bilyk", and you come up with this page (Google cache used because the original doesn't exist anymore). It lists a "Bilyk, Jerzy" as having a supended license (among other crimes.) The police department is in Plano, IL.
Now here's the really interesting part: a WHOIS on treoplayer.com shows a John Bastion as owning the domain. His address? Sugar Grove, IL: about 12 miles from Plano. (Mapquest proves it).
I think, from this, we can safely declare one golden rule: if you're going to do a hoax and submit it to Slashdot, don't freakin' use Frontpage!
P.S. I'm available as a consultant if anyone from Slashdot would like to hire an editor/story checker.
I am one of the many AT&T@Home customers who got switched off this weekend. I was notified by phone that it would be 7 days before my Internet connection was back up again. I was pleasantly surprised to find it up and running when I got back home from work tonight. I set my ethernet card to DHCP and was off and running as soon as it grabbed an IP.
. We should give AT&T credit for handling this well and for getting us online in half the time they originally promised.
Anyway, I was just reading the other article about @Home, and noticed the many complaints about the new 1.5MBps download cap. All I can say is, Are you serious? After using dialup for two days, I'm glad I have broadband again!
Let's look at the facts:
-- I had Speakeasy DSL at my old place of residence. I got 5 static IPs and a 1.5 down/384 up connection for $100 a month. Now, for half that price, I get the same download speed. I really don't think there is a complaint to be made there.
-- The Speakeasy/Covad/PacBell trio took six weeks to get my DSL installed. I found I had to reset the modem every month or so because it would myseriously give up the ghost. My cable modem was installed at 8AM the day after I called, and running by 8:30 that same morning.
I have only once had to reset my cable modem, excluding this weekend's outage.
--AT&T said that they would take 7 days to get those of us in the Bay Area back up. They took 3. Not bad, considering this was pretty much unexpected on their end.
-- As some of you in the Bay Area know, the @Home gateway out of San Jose was completely overtaxed. My ping on my favorite Quake III server went from 27 to 100 within the past couple of months. Now that I'm on AT&T's new network, my ping is 50 -- quite acceptable.
For those of you whining about the 1.5MBps cap, I say go back to dialup. Better yet, sign on with PacBell DSL. You'll get 608/128 (yes, less than half the speed you get now) for the same price. Plus, you'll get idiots from tech support and billing problems (by the time I cancelled PacHell and moved to cable modem at my current place of residence, they had managed to rack up over $900 of incorrect charges on my account, which took 4 months to resolve.)
Let's not forget that there are still millions of broadband-starved people in this world. I should think that there are better things to complain about than the fact that your $40 a month broadband connection went from sometimes-incredibly-super-fast to still-fast-but-maybe-not-as-fast-as-it-was-before
Hi Slashdotters,
We here at Slashdot would like to advise you to use the following format when submitting bug-related stories.
"Crashing a [product] with [method used to crash it]"
"An article at [source] reports that [security expert] demonstrated how to crash [product] using [Pick one: buffer overflow; malformed headers; Javascript]." [insert wizened statement about how this will affect future direction of products in this category] [attach silly remarks by Slashdot writer like "Well, that's why I use [competing product]!"]
Also, please use the following template when replying:
"Those @(#&@! bastards! Who do they think they are, making [product] so buggy! Why do they have to include [useless feature that no one wants/uses anyway]?? I'll never use a [company] [product] again! Please, fellow Slashdotters, I urge you to boycott [company]!"
This will save us a lot of time and moderation points.
Thank you,
The Slashdot Team
Slightly OT, but please read before moderating.
I would like to see a "consoles" category on Slashdot. That way, all of these articles about the Gamecube and Xbox could go in their own category, which users could then remove from the front page. Right now, they are in the generic "technology" category, which contains many other articles that might be interesting to those of us who couldn't care less about the latest console hack.
Thanks--
I am sure you have a great point, but it is obscured by your clear lack of grammatical skills. I must warn you: even though you may think that being an engineer means that you don't need to communicate with other people, this is NOT the case.
No one has perfect grammar, but to be able to make an eloquent point in writing is crucial, regardless of your job title. You lose your audience if your prose is rife with spelling mistakes and poorly constructed sentences. On the other hand, if you can easily sum up the benefits of your idea, you can win supporters -- even if that idea is as simple as going forward with a project you have at work. Never forget that those pointy-haired bosses about whom you like to joke are the ones who will be reading resumes and project proposals of yours. They could reject them based not on content, but on presentation. It makes a difference.
I urge you to take a writing skills class before you graduate. Not only will it help you get a job by writing a good resume, but it will help you keep that job by being able to communicate with others effectively.
I work for a large company doing web development for the external site. There are several problems with our website. Since our group (Internet Engineering) is in charge of future development for the site, we've charted out the problems and their solutions. Here is a short synopsis:
Where I work is not important; what's important is what you can learn from our mistakes. Every major company has organizational problems with their web site. Your company must take these issues and deal with them now as opposed to later. A content management system is an invaluable tool in helping with these issues. Most feature workflow routing so you can have one manager signing off on several people's projects before they get published. You can then also hire graphic designers without having to hire a complementary Dreamweaver jockey; good systems create HTML and correct menus for you in a lot of cases. Most take the Developers / Graphic Designers / Managers / Administrators approach, where they place you in one group and you get different tasks according to what group you're in. This may or may not work for you; the good thing is that in a good content management system, you can customize it to fit your needs.
It's great that you've asked this question when your group is still small. It shows a lot of forethought that the older, larger companies didn't have time for. In a lot of respects, you're lucky: you can design an ideal system. Just make sure it will scale and that you can easily upgrade if some new time-saving feature comes out in a year or two.
"Get satelite like my brother and then possibly not get the local stations (he doesn't)?"
Before complaining on Slashdot, you might want to at least CALL the satellite company to see if that's true in your area. I live 30 miles out of San Francisco and I get the local SF channels. I am quite happy with my DirecTV + TiVO offering.
Does anyone else get sick of people who complain without researching their options first? If the cable company still has your business regardless of how much you like it or dislike it, you have given them NO incentive to change! You have a choice of what company you give your money to -- USE IT! Change to satellite, then write a letter to the cable company's VP of customer service explaining why you changed. Don't complain on Slashdot -- I highly doubt the suits who put the ads in are reading your post.
*sigh*. I love it when people write conspiracy theories when it's really just a standard Dynamic DNS client that is poking around on the network.
Once again, this is a cool idea that Microsoft has implemented if your corporation uses nothing but Microsoft servers. (Note: this is the same dynamic DNS that is used by many websites to give you your own domain name, so you don't have to have a Microsoft server to support it. However, most regular DNS servers do not have this option enabled.) The dynamic DNS option is enabled by default, however, in Windows 2000, and it causes a waste of network services (to the point of becoming a DOS attack on a company's DNS servers) when those DNS servers do not support it. Here is more information (that I wrote when researching it for my company):
Windows 2000 supports something called Dynamic DNS (DDNS), which lets clients automatically update their own A records. This means that a DNS server supporting Dynamic DNS would be almost completely self-maintained, as whenever the computer connects or disconnects from the network, it adds/removes its own records. It basically completely eliminates the need for static IPs (except for things like web servers and such that touch the outside world.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft, in its blind Microsoft-only world, made Dynamic DNS registration turned on by default on all Windows 2000 clients, even in companies without a dynamic DNS server. This creates a lot of unnecessary traffic on the network as every time the computer connects or disconnects, it sends a little message to the DNS server. I've even been told (without proof) that it sends a request to every DNS server on its list, possibly upgrading the request all the way to the root server if it doesn't get its way with the first server on its list.
This had a lot of UNIX admins frightened about job security (my take: if you're sitting there all day updating DNS records, you better find some new job skills anyway) and it has evolved into a fascinating topic of research for me. Some pretty good takes on it can be found here:
(Yale: Making UNIX DNS servers and Windows 2000 play nice)
(eWeek article from 1999 discussing Windows 2000 DDNS and the impact it has on UNIX DNS servers)
This is really interesting because it's one small facet of the many ways Microsoft is subtly pushing UNIX around. ("Hey! We have this cool thing implemented in Windows now! Fire your UNIX sysadmins and throw away your UNIX servers, because our servers are so much easier to maintain!")
It used to be that Netscape offered official builds of Netscape for anything from AIX to Solaris. Now it looks like they are switching gears and only offering official builds for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
I would say that this speaks volumes about what sort of client platform most of their customers are using, and how the UNIX client landscape has changed recently. A few years ago, anti-Microsoft or pro-UNIX people (some one, some the other, some both) were seen running anything from HP-UX to OS/2. Netscape, accordingly, released versions of Netscape for nearly every OS. Now, these groups have condensed into the people running MacOS X and Linux. The people running something else as a client have slowly faded away, until these clients were considered a niche market. This is shown even by Slashdot, which has switched from "news for nerds" to an almost exclusively Linux-advocacy site.
This bodes well for Linux and MacOS, both of which have their markets. I am seeing more people use both of them not because they have an axe to grind with Microsoft, but purely for curiosity and learning's sake.
But what of the other client platforms? Obviously, Mozilla is still being released for them, but if official, "supported" browser/office software is no longer available, will anything but Linux/MacOS/Windows as a client go away? Or has it already?
Just an interesting trend, IMHO.
Actually, Windows 2000 and Windows XP have compatibility layers that let you run a program under "DOS" or "Windows 98". It's basically an emulation layer. It comes built-in with Windows XP; for Windows 2000 it is a free download. More information can be found at Microsoft.com.
And as the other guy said, Scorched Earth does run on Windows XP. I'd recommend the upgrade just to make your system more stable -- what's the point of being able to play old games if your system crashes three times a day?
Check out MyDivaPlayer.com. They have a 128MB player that also supports CompactFlash for $135 shipped after discount. It is extremely small -- about 3"; fits in the palm of your hand. I haven't had any experience with it, but the few reviews I could find are raves. I plan to buy one for Christmas. The coolness factor of having a mini "Zip drive"/MP3 player/voice recorder for $135 is really what attracted me to this one. --Erica
My rule of thumb: Make it look good on IE 5. Make it work on Netscape. Sure, my table borders may look bad on Netscape, but is the information there and can the website user read it properly? That is what counts.