Somehow, people survived for thousands of years without air conditioning. Could it be that "modern" housing design, where one style suits the entire country, isn't the best idea?
Next you'll be telling us that putting large sliding glass doors on the north side of houses in North Dakota is a bad thing. Spoilsport.
Seriously though, I agree with the poster. Just because we do have the power to heat or cool through brute force does not mean we have to use it.
Research traditional housing in regions with similiar climates. Look at how the older houses are built in your region. Understand the tricks, such as cross-ventilation and breezeways.
Audiostar asks: "I am interested in adding some security to several of my computers, but am unsure as to which product to go with...
Er, what sort of security?
A simple bios boot password will prevent the computer-naive from accessing your machine.
GnuPG under Windows and the unix clones will allow you to encrypt/decrypt and digitally sign files.
The unix clones tend to be able to encrypt their entire filesystem by whatever algorythm you want. NTFS claims some sort of filesystem encryption as well, but I'm unfamiliar with the mechanism and thus won't recommend it.
OpenBSD has encrypted swap and tends to be tops on the 'utterly paranoid' scale.
How about you tell us what you are trying to do exactly, and we'll tell you the best solution.
Repeat after me. There was no Starship Troopers movie.
Bah, at least the book and the movie has a few things in common. Hell, you even got a watered down version of Heinlein's political evangelizing.
Take "The Postman" as an example of a book to movie adaptation gone horribly wrong. Remember the super soldiers in the movie? How about the AI supercomputers? Bear flag republic? Oopsie, I forgot, that was all dropped from the movie. To add insult to injury, I'm told the author is happy with the adaptation!
In a few months, there's a good possibility that "I, Robot" will be the subject of a similiar rant.
Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the like are decent movie adaptations. Not the best, not the worse. Heck, if you want to argue bad Heinlein movie adaptations, look at "The Puppetmasters". At least, in the book, the parasites were smarter.
I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary.
RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.
Subversion,
CVS, Arch and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.
As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also
Gnu Emacs or XEmacs and a host of other good text editors.
Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.
Attach it to a specific distro: We all love having to run RH 7.3. Unpatched, of course, since the updates will break the software.
Attach it to a specific kernel: We all love having to run 2.4.17-whatever-patch-level-2.43-and-a-half.
Don't use the package manager to install: SysAdmins wouldn't be entertained if they didn't have to figure out what software, at what versions, needed to be present to run your system. RPM? Deb? Those are for the lazy.
Refuse to integrate with other software: Everyone should have a custom machine for your software.
Update the MS Window version first: Us linux folks want to be lagging behind those windows users. Change scares us.
Its commercial software like this that makes me try to stick to free, mainstream alternatives.
WindowMaker does allow you to add workspaces, but it's not an automatic one. If you prefer a screen dedicated to The GIMP, it's going to stay open all the time even when you're not running The GIMP.
FVWM can be scripted to do this,though the FvwmEvent module. Its a hack, but it should work.
Ah, good ol' FVWM. If you know how to ask it politely, it can do a lot of things.
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
What if p2p will never pay the artists?
Right now, there is plenty of free-beer music out there on the net. P2P might be the most efficient way of transferring free music without imposing large bandwidth fees on the artist (although, bit torrent would also work)
What happens 15 or 20 years down the road when its possible to easily reproduce song-quality voice on a home PC? Right now, a good keyboard and a mediocre machine (with an expensive soundcard) does an adequate job of replacing a studio for a lot of artists.
Perhaps commercial mass music is the exception, not the rule.
<tinfoil hat>The reason why the RIAA does not crack down on the p2p networks is that a p2p network spreading commercial music is a lot less dangerous then a p2p network that is forced to only allow free music.</tinfoil hat>
Not a bad thing, as more often than not, roguelikes tend to choke on their complexities, leading to woeful imbalance/inconsistency or excessive demand on gamers to grok the system as presented to make any headway at all (NetHack).
Part of the perceived "imbalance" of Nethack (and a lot of other roguelikes) is that, in the roguelikes, often the best tactic is to run away.
Being a frequent reader of rec.games.roguelike.nethack, I notice that the ascention posts tend to include a lot of fleeing. There also tends to be a lot of "I'm avoiding level 15, due to a polymorph trap/arch lich problem, and level 19 due to a nymph that stole my fully charged wand of death."
A lot of other games don't teach the fine art of running for your life. A lot of other games allow you to be more careless with your character's life.
In short, there's a severe lack of paranoia that roguelikes demand.
Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
rec.games.roguelike.nethack
1980's era, although it has had regular updates throughout the years. Based heavily on rogue, which is much older.
I was shocked, yes shocked, at how easy OpenBSD was installed on my intel machine. The mac install was another kettle of fish but the intel install was the easiest install I've ever done. FreeBSD wasn't exactly a difficult install either. I don't remember NetBSD being hard come to think of it. Actually, has anybody found an intel BSD OS difficult to install?
"Painless BSD install" means "I don't need to know what I'm doing."
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD have *detailed* installation instructions available on the project's homepage. I've installed OpenBSD as a BSD newbie on a laptop without any serious problems.
Why is reading the manual considered so un-user friendly? After all, you are installing megabytes of binaries onto varying architectures with countless permutations of additional hardware. Then you are probably planning to add additional software to the system (additional countless permutations). Finally, the chances are good that you are going to hook the system up to a world wide network full of hostile machines.
Call me an elitist, but perhaps the OpenBSD way is the best -- rather simple install (if you are willing to read the Instruction Manual) and services turned off by default. If you need something, you need to know how to configure and activate it yourself.
Don't get me wrong -- I have nothing against end users, and I am not advocating a difficult UI for them. I have no doubts that I could set up a BSD system that's user friendly enough for my mother. But using a system is not the same as installing it -- no more then driving a car is the same as designing a car.
I have yet to find any spyware that wasn't easily removed
A lot of spyware has a tendency to destroy TCP/IP networking under windows. In my experience, spyware results in a sizeable percentage of computer repairs. I see less computers obviously damaged by viruses then by spyware.
There's no question that contact with living things is a stress reducer. Plants, animals, and even other human beings. Machines can't really do that for me.
When I go to the zoo, the big tiger does not reduce my stress. The machine that made the bars that seperates me from the tiger does.
Fubar1971: I'm sorry, but I can't work late tonight. You're the boss, tell me what to get on first. If I can make it both in time, I will.
Basicly, make your boss do the management thing - prioritize. Of course, you can't use that every night but once in a while you can. Just try to put a positive spin on it, you're working as fast as you can, you simply can't do more than one job at a time.
In some workplace environments, doing that will result in a lecture about managing the employee's own time more effectively.
Re:it took you this long to switch from sendmail?
on
Postfix
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Any program that just dies with the error message "cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?" doesn't belong in an enterprise server.
Luckily, although qmail might have abandoned you with its error message, other F/OSS software authors have heard your plea:
To emphasize the highly professional nature of Nmap, all instances of "fucked up" in error message text has been changed to "b0rked".
( I'm half tempted to email in a patch to qmail
that adds the configure flag of --idonthaveasenseofhumor )
My thoughts exactly. I typically look at the money I'll gain from pushing the issue, and then figure that the maximum amount of time I'll spend on it is no more than how long it would take me to earn that much at $40 an hour. The other week I called in about a $10 shipping overcharge on some parts I ordered, but I spent no more than 15 minutes investigating the issue and getting it resolved.
Your analysis is flawed.
You ignore the possibility that by investigating these companies, you end up pressuring them to have a higher quality of business.
If that increases the quality of the product, then we've all gained more then the $40+ that was lost.
Obviously, unlike a PC, a Mac computer "just works."
Therefore, it doesn't need a return policy.
;)
Re:Good luck finding cheap internal modems
on
Micro ATX and Linux?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Very few PCI modems aren't Winmodems nowadays, and the ones that aren't are upwards of $50. Not the kind of price you want to add to a pre-built machine.
Although there are some good Winmodems, my general experience is that the $25 winmodem tends to experience more network problems -- including more unexpected dropped connections and lower speed.
The "expensive" $50 hardware modem is better built, more reliable, and is compatible with almost any OS that supports a dialup connection.
The NSA might be one of the most evil things the earth has ever produced, but I'm not sure if my marketing department is even of this plane of existance.
Hardware like this is trouble for organizations
which want to be private.
How long until we can build a cheap mostly-plastic flier that can fly high enough, yet take good enough pictures, of secret sites?
What's stopping us from finding an open WAP nearby and dropping a cheap WAPWireless Controller bridge? Perhaps with a few more cheap relays if we don't have the range.
Sit down in an internet cafe, bounce your signal through eastern Europe, and get ready to get your own pics of Area 51. Sure, you lose the flyer, but so what?
Perhaps we'll end up living in a transparent society...
You mean that a cheesy diploma from a paper-mill that reads the O'Reilly manuals to you for a semester or two and charges you tens of thousands of dollars is no substitute for a real degree or real experience?
I've investigated several 2 and 4 year colleges/universities, and for the administration side of computers[1], none of the offered classes could match a good collection of O'Reilly books.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised that the whole IT jig doesn't implode. Or perhaps it did already.
Here I sit back, reading slashdot on a pentium 166MMHX, with 80M of memory, through Galeon and the
X Windows System on a OpenBSD machine.
I read the posts that say X is slow.
X is currently using about 5% - 7.5% of my processor. It jumps up to about 15% when I change windows. MPG123 consistantly uses more CPU then X. Galeon tends to use more CPU then X as well.
I read the posts that say X is bloated.
X is currently using 15MB of memory/8MB resident.
Galeon is using about 16MB / 27 MB resident.
As for hard to set up, linux distros usually set up X for me. There are even several configuration utilities shipped with XFree86.
I also tend to use the network transparency of X, which is easily accomplished through ssh -X.
Don't know why you guys keep having problems, but may I suggest bloated OS installs and bloated WMs?
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, people survived for thousands of years without air conditioning. Could it be that "modern" housing design, where one style suits the entire country, isn't the best idea?
Next you'll be telling us that putting large sliding glass doors on the north side of houses in North Dakota is a bad thing. Spoilsport.
Seriously though, I agree with the poster. Just because we do have the power to heat or cool through brute force does not mean we have to use it.
Research traditional housing in regions with similiar climates. Look at how the older houses are built in your region. Understand the tricks, such as cross-ventilation and breezeways.
Oh, and learn to live at 75 degrees. :)
Audiostar asks: "I am interested in adding some security to several of my computers, but am unsure as to which product to go with...
Er, what sort of security?
A simple bios boot password will prevent the computer-naive from accessing your machine.
GnuPG under Windows and the unix clones will allow you to encrypt/decrypt and digitally sign files.
The unix clones tend to be able to encrypt their entire filesystem by whatever algorythm you want. NTFS claims some sort of filesystem encryption as well, but I'm unfamiliar with the mechanism and thus won't recommend it.
OpenBSD has encrypted swap and tends to be tops on the 'utterly paranoid' scale.
How about you tell us what you are trying to do exactly, and we'll tell you the best solution.
What I'd really love to see is a war film where the lines between good and evil aren't really that clear.
Although not really a war film, try 'Mother Night'. Vonnegut at his best.
Repeat after me. There was no Starship Troopers movie.
Bah, at least the book and the movie has a few things in common. Hell, you even got a watered down version of Heinlein's political evangelizing.
Take "The Postman" as an example of a book to movie adaptation gone horribly wrong. Remember the super soldiers in the movie? How about the AI supercomputers? Bear flag republic? Oopsie, I forgot, that was all dropped from the movie. To add insult to injury, I'm told the author is happy with the adaptation!
In a few months, there's a good possibility that "I, Robot" will be the subject of a similiar rant.
Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the like are decent movie adaptations. Not the best, not the worse. Heck, if you want to argue bad Heinlein movie adaptations, look at "The Puppetmasters". At least, in the book, the parasites were smarter.
I hope that instead of a save button, some programs will constantly save work and provide a timeline-like feature to go through all changes in the document if neccessary.
I use vim and RCS for this purpose.
RCS allows me to check in and out revisions, and each revision has a change log. I can roll back changes, check differences, and even make my own branch of a file.
Subversion, CVS, Arch and many others also can fill the same role. Heck, you can even make a directory named backup and rename a copy of the file to 'myfile_date'. The reason why I settled on RCS is that its relatively simple to use and its cross platform (Linux, BSD, Windows-via-Cygwin, etc). I've been tempted to adopt one of the larger revision control systems for additional features, but haven't gotten around to it.
As for Vim, its cross platform, rather full featured, and if the power goes out, I still can recover the file. Plus its easy to use with RCS through a few simple aliases and/or keymaps. There is also Gnu Emacs or XEmacs and a host of other good text editors.
Sure, there could be one program that would do both, but that wouldn't be as useful. The unix philosophy of "do one thing, and do it well" is less of a pain in the long run. This way, I can reuse my $editor_of_choice in many other unix applications - slrn, mutt, etc. If I had one integrated program, sooner or later I'd become fed up with one part of it or another, and I would be forced to continue using it.
Just my $.02.
YMMV.
Users are generally like people who leave their car unlocked and then complain that their radio is missing when they get back.
I own a '79 Dodge D100 pickup, stock radio. Never locked the bugger, and yet I always seem to have my radio. :)
Seriously though, if you have an expensive radio, and someone wants it, locking your car will only result in a broken window and a missing radio.
Locks are to keep honest people honest.
Its commercial software like this that makes me try to stick to free, mainstream alternatives.
WindowMaker does allow you to add workspaces, but it's not an automatic one. If you prefer a screen dedicated to The GIMP, it's going to stay open all the time even when you're not running The GIMP.
FVWM can be scripted to do this,though the FvwmEvent module. Its a hack, but it should work.
Ah, good ol' FVWM. If you know how to ask it politely, it can do a lot of things.
But note: if the goal is to "legitimize" p2p so that artists get paid, how would you do it?
What if p2p will never pay the artists?
Right now, there is plenty of free-beer music out there on the net. P2P might be the most efficient way of transferring free music without imposing large bandwidth fees on the artist (although, bit torrent would also work)
What happens 15 or 20 years down the road when its possible to easily reproduce song-quality voice on a home PC? Right now, a good keyboard and a mediocre machine (with an expensive soundcard) does an adequate job of replacing a studio for a lot of artists.
Perhaps commercial mass music is the exception, not the rule.
<tinfoil hat>The reason why the RIAA does not crack down on the p2p networks is that a p2p network spreading commercial music is a lot less dangerous then a p2p network that is forced to only allow free music.</tinfoil hat>Not a bad thing, as more often than not, roguelikes tend to choke on their complexities, leading to woeful imbalance/inconsistency or excessive demand on gamers to grok the system as presented to make any headway at all (NetHack).
Part of the perceived "imbalance" of Nethack (and a lot of other roguelikes) is that, in the roguelikes, often the best tactic is to run away.
Being a frequent reader of rec.games.roguelike.nethack, I notice that the ascention posts tend to include a lot of fleeing. There also tends to be a lot of "I'm avoiding level 15, due to a polymorph trap/arch lich problem, and level 19 due to a nymph that stole my fully charged wand of death."
A lot of other games don't teach the fine art of running for your life. A lot of other games allow you to be more careless with your character's life.
In short, there's a severe lack of paranoia that roguelikes demand.
Then my question is, for every person who claims they'd rather play Atari or any given classic system than a present day one, how many serious gamers who own both ACTUALLY spend more hours per week playing 1970s/1980s games than post 1990 ones over long periods.
rec.games.roguelike.nethack
1980's era, although it has had regular updates throughout the years. Based heavily on rogue, which is much older.
The players of nethack seem rather dedicated.
iRATE
If the mainstream music organizations want to make their music difficult to listen to, why take the extra effort?
" If it offers a painless BSD install "
I was shocked, yes shocked, at how easy OpenBSD was installed on my intel machine. The mac install was another kettle of fish but the intel install was the easiest install I've ever done. FreeBSD wasn't exactly a difficult install either. I don't remember NetBSD being hard come to think of it. Actually, has anybody found an intel BSD OS difficult to install?
"Painless BSD install" means "I don't need to know what I'm doing."
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD have *detailed* installation instructions available on the project's homepage. I've installed OpenBSD as a BSD newbie on a laptop without any serious problems.
Why is reading the manual considered so un-user friendly? After all, you are installing megabytes of binaries onto varying architectures with countless permutations of additional hardware. Then you are probably planning to add additional software to the system (additional countless permutations). Finally, the chances are good that you are going to hook the system up to a world wide network full of hostile machines.
Call me an elitist, but perhaps the OpenBSD way is the best -- rather simple install (if you are willing to read the Instruction Manual) and services turned off by default. If you need something, you need to know how to configure and activate it yourself.
Don't get me wrong -- I have nothing against end users, and I am not advocating a difficult UI for them. I have no doubts that I could set up a BSD system that's user friendly enough for my mother. But using a system is not the same as installing it -- no more then driving a car is the same as designing a car.
Just my $.02
I have yet to find any spyware that wasn't easily removed
A lot of spyware has a tendency to destroy TCP/IP networking under windows. In my experience, spyware results in a sizeable percentage of computer repairs. I see less computers obviously damaged by viruses then by spyware.
is there any reason to really use NetBSD over even FreeBSD unless you have some extravagantly ancient hardware?
Portable code tends to be rather clean code.
Clean code tends to run better and have fewer bugs.
There's no question that contact with living things is a stress reducer. Plants, animals, and even other human beings. Machines can't really do that for me.
When I go to the zoo, the big tiger does not reduce my stress. The machine that made the bars that seperates me from the tiger does.
Fubar1971: I'm sorry, but I can't work late tonight. You're the boss, tell me what to get on first. If I can make it both in time, I will.
Basicly, make your boss do the management thing - prioritize. Of course, you can't use that every night but once in a while you can. Just try to put a positive spin on it, you're working as fast as you can, you simply can't do more than one job at a time.
In some workplace environments, doing that will result in a lecture about managing the employee's own time more effectively.
Any program that just dies with the error message "cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?" doesn't belong in an enterprise server.
Luckily, although qmail might have abandoned you with its error message, other F/OSS software authors have heard your plea:
To emphasize the highly professional nature of Nmap, all instances of "fucked up" in error message text has been changed to "b0rked".
( I'm half tempted to email in a patch to qmail that adds the configure flag of --idonthaveasenseofhumor )
My thoughts exactly. I typically look at the money I'll gain from pushing the issue, and then figure that the maximum amount of time I'll spend on it is no more than how long it would take me to earn that much at $40 an hour. The other week I called in about a $10 shipping overcharge on some parts I ordered, but I spent no more than 15 minutes investigating the issue and getting it resolved.
Your analysis is flawed.
You ignore the possibility that by investigating these companies, you end up pressuring them to have a higher quality of business.
If that increases the quality of the product, then we've all gained more then the $40+ that was lost.
Obviously, unlike a PC, a Mac computer "just works."
Therefore, it doesn't need a return policy.
Very few PCI modems aren't Winmodems nowadays, and the ones that aren't are upwards of $50. Not the kind of price you want to add to a pre-built machine.
Although there are some good Winmodems, my general experience is that the $25 winmodem tends to experience more network problems -- including more unexpected dropped connections and lower speed.
The "expensive" $50 hardware modem is better built, more reliable, and is compatible with almost any OS that supports a dialup connection.
You get what you pay for...
Nobody, not even marketing, dicks with the NSA.
The NSA might be one of the most evil things the earth has ever produced, but I'm not sure if my marketing department is even of this plane of existance.
Hardware like this is trouble for organizations which want to be private.
How long until we can build a cheap mostly-plastic flier that can fly high enough, yet take good enough pictures, of secret sites?
What's stopping us from finding an open WAP nearby and dropping a cheap WAPWireless Controller bridge? Perhaps with a few more cheap relays if we don't have the range.
Sit down in an internet cafe, bounce your signal through eastern Europe, and get ready to get your own pics of Area 51. Sure, you lose the flyer, but so what?
Perhaps we'll end up living in a transparent society...
You mean that a cheesy diploma from a paper-mill that reads the O'Reilly manuals to you for a semester or two and charges you tens of thousands of dollars is no substitute for a real degree or real experience?
I've investigated several 2 and 4 year colleges/universities, and for the administration side of computers[1], none of the offered classes could match a good collection of O'Reilly books.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised that the whole IT jig doesn't implode. Or perhaps it did already.
[1] As opposed to the programming side.
Here I sit back, reading slashdot on a pentium 166MMHX, with 80M of memory, through Galeon and the X Windows System on a OpenBSD machine.
I read the posts that say X is slow.
X is currently using about 5% - 7.5% of my processor. It jumps up to about 15% when I change windows. MPG123 consistantly uses more CPU then X. Galeon tends to use more CPU then X as well.
I read the posts that say X is bloated.
X is currently using 15MB of memory/8MB resident. Galeon is using about 16MB / 27 MB resident.
As for hard to set up, linux distros usually set up X for me. There are even several configuration utilities shipped with XFree86.
I also tend to use the network transparency of X, which is easily accomplished through ssh -X.
Don't know why you guys keep having problems, but may I suggest bloated OS installs and bloated WMs?
FVWM + XFree86 works for me!