W2K and XP are closely related to Win9x and Win3.11, to the extent of the code being derived and shared between the branches of the MS family. Some of the NT code is new, but I'm guessing a lot of it was modified and reused from the non-NT line.
If you threw in a 40 gig hdd, a video card with
composite out (or use the svid if your tv
supports it), 256 megs of memory, and the slowest
cpu that works (as long as its over 1 ghz, it
should be fine, since we want coolness instead
of power), and you'd have a cheap but effective
emulation gaming box set to hook up to the tv.
Throw Windows 98 on it, install MAME, neoRageX,
Nesticle, zSNES, Massage, no$GMB, and whatever
else you want, add a few USB joysticks (AxisPad
Pro works for all of the above examples, and is
very similiar to the playstation controllers with
analog sticks), and you have yourself the perfect
retro emulation box for less then half a grand.
There should be enough room left over for about
30 gigs of music or video too, which, if you
sacrifice range of playable games and go with
linux (which one day, might actually have the
mapper support that nesticle or fwnes includes),
you could make yourself a homebuilt tivo with
the addition of a TV tuner.
Well, I'm not sure what browser he's using, but
ctl-e ctl-e under lynx launches your default
browser, and I'd be willing to bet that some of
the other browsers out there have the same
functionality.
But obviously, given your convictions, you
wouldn't be using an operating system that was
derived from something called 'Quick and Dirty
Operating System (QDOS)', so why don't you take
your *n[i|u]x of choice and use your preferred
cpu?
Unless you think that x86 & x86-64 are the best
cpus when compared to the competition.
Myself, I'll stick to windows on big fast (very,
very warm) athlons as my gaming platform, and
linux on older, but fast enough for me, intels for
my personal servers. That works out well for me,
so I can't bitch.
Some BIOSes won't boot without a video card. Some will. On the old Pentium motherboard I gained from upgrading my fiancee's machine, the original bios wouldn't allow booting without a vga card, but an upgraded bios (free from the website, of course), did.
With an old 10 mbit ISA ethernet card, a 2 gig hard drive, and a debian boot disk, I configured a nice little stand-alone server, although I used a VGA card for setup. Tom's Linux Boot Disk (google for tomsrtbt) will auto-detect some NICs, and grab an IP address from DHCP automagically, so, with a bit of hacking, its probably possible to make a varient of tomsrtbt that allows SSH or telnet login, which would allow setup of a machine without a video card. My current headless linux box runs without a video card, floppy drive, or cd drive, although I'm using a windows machine with file sharing to fake a floppy and cd drive.:) It works perfectly, save for a small bug where my wtmp logs seems to fill up with garbage. (I think inetd is trying to launch login sessions to the vga terminals, and dying in odd yet wonderful ways that it never expected too). All in all, headless linux is a wonderful way of doing things, and a pure headless machine does increase physical security.
Windows is a little braindead about video cards. For those of you that think an old 1 meg VGA video card will work, it doesn't really. Windows terminal services will only support whatever resolution that the physical vid card will support. However, other then needing a video card that can support the resolution you want to use, headless windows is workable. I ran a win2k adv. server at home for about 2 weeks as a headless DHCP/test server. (Yes, it was a legit copy, we had one from microsoft's big bag of shit that they'll send resalers for a reasonable price ($500/year)). One word of warning - I can upgrade a headless linux box with relative ease : for example, from debian stable to testing, and convert the filesystem to ext2 to ext3, without ever hooking up a monitor. However, I've seen windows machines pop up error messages to the local display without sending it to any terminal services displays, and I wouldn't be surpised if windows would pop up a prompt before it launched the terminal services server, which should effectively freeze a machine from remote access. My test server never BSOD, so I don't know how it handles that remotely (my guess is poorly though).
For a lark, I would run windows headless (or in my case, because I wanted a test machine and ran out of monitors & desktop space), but for serious work, especially remote administration, my advice is: don't! Bad things will probably happen, and if your business depends on high uptimes, you'll be road tripping to see those remote machines sooner or later.:) Stick with linux, remote administration is possible, including software upgrades and patches. Properly administered, a linux machine shouldn't need physical maintainance except for hardware. (Assuming you do have your server on a UPS, but you do, right?)
As far as I understand, Debian is based on stability and a free software mentality. Which means that it won't sacrifice stability for the latest release. This can be frustrating, especially to non-debian users, but, on the other hand, I will attest that their stable package is rock solid. Even their testing package is pretty good. Unstable isn't bad, but does have the habit of breaking every so often.
There are other distros that cater to those who want shiny things, or the latest and greatest. Debian caters to those who want stability. Don't fault them for that.
Drake is wrong, for the following reasons
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 2
I agree with the idea that Drake's equation is wrong, but not for the reasons stated.
Drake is assuming that all life must evolve on an earthlike planet. Europa-like planets, with a possible liquid ocean, and warmth supplied by the tidal forces of a gas giant, seem much more plausable. (Btw, the book discussed seems to ignore this possibility as well). Jovian planets seem more common then earth-like planets, and some of the reasons the book brings up for the decreased incidence of life don't apply (Jovian planets can be at a distance from the sun where the sun's energy fluctuations wouldn't matter, since the moons are warmed by tidal forces. Of course, in some discovered systems, Jovian planets are rather close to their stars, which means the $64k question for this scenerio is: how many stars have Jovian-type planets with the appropiate moons at the right distance?).
On earth, life took quite some time to jump from sea to land. On a Europian planet, there is no land, but there is another "beach" they can wash against - airless vacuum. I don't see any reason why a creature can't evolve to live in a vacuum, which leads to the idea of a lifeform being able to live in interstellar space. Imagine a creature that is content to drift through space in a dormant state, only "waking up", when its near enough to a star for its version of photosynthesis. Damned if I'd know how such a life could generate intelligence, but if I was a Europan, staring at earth, monkeys making fire wouldn't be an idea I'd come up with.;)
Of course, we have the Jovian planets themselves, with thick atmospheres, and the chance of liquid water to exist in that atmosphere.
The point of these examples, is that the Drake equation is misleading, making assumptions that might not be true.
I use Apache, XnView, Gvim, PHP, the Gimp, mySQL, and many other applications under windows. Show them that GPL does not have to be an all or nothing step, you can mix and match win32 and GPL, and have a system that you are mostly familiar with, and high-performing apps, for less then the cost of a pure Microsoft solution.
Then, show them the ease of linux remote administration, the windows compatability, and how linux is usually faster/more reliable on slower hardware. Show them the stability of linux vs windows.
I'm my experience, the disadvantage you have is warez. There are plenty of 'free', easy to use software for windows if you know where to look. Bring up BSA horror stories, and talk about the GPL.
/home/dasunt/.nethackrc includes the following lines:
OPTIONS=DECgraphics,color
Then I always do an 'export TERM=xterm-color' (even on the command prompt), and then run nethack. That way, I get colors and the pretty walls (like in the windows version by default).
My two toshiba laptops are both slower and older then the examples provided. One is a Pentium 75, 16 megs of memory, and the other is an old 486 with 4 megs of memory. I hate to think what the reviewer would call them!
I work in a Windows shop myself, and am
wondering, what single-floppy distro do you use
that has NTFS support? I only have the magical
NT password changer (great tool btw).
If I had time, I was going to try to hack NTFS
into tomsrtbt, since I really like that distro
myself.
In Minnesota, we have strict laws about throwing out old computers too. In some places (Minneapolis), the laws are taken seriously. In other places (northern Minnesota), they aren't.
However, I was talking to someone who had a relative in the computer recycling business. If they recieved anything that had no resale value (and they frequently did), they'd just ship it to Wisconsin, which has lax landfill laws.
Actually, I think the lawsuites aren't focusing on the fact that guns kill people, but on the evidence that gun manufactures specifically targetted the criminal market and tried to flood high-crime areas with guns.
Its equivalent to being able to sell most chemicals with little regulation in the US, but packaging a "make-your-own-meth-kit", even if you don't name it as such, would probably get you into a lot of legal hot water.
Before you pass judgement on lawsuites, maybe you should look at the reasons why they are suing.
As an owner of an older laptop (p75 with 16 megs of memory and a 700 meg hdd), I've noticed two major problems. One is bloat - with shared libraries, a system with a lot of apps might not take up as much space as a comparable win9x system, but with a few apps, the system takes up more space then a comparable win9x system. At the moment, I'm using 500 megs of hdd space under linux to do the same things that 300 megs of hdd space did under windows.
My main complain is X applications. There are more then a few applications that simple *aren't* usable at 640x480 (the maximum resolution a Toshiba 400CS can do). bbconf is a pain to use, and so is xchat. (For the latter, I'm now using bitchx). Of course, if I wanted to, I could substitute a completely console based environment for an x-based one, using centericq for icq, lynx instead of dillo (which needs cookie support badly), and command line apps instead of the few X apps I use for images. Right now, under X, I'm mainly using xterms.:)
(Well, I guess, this leads credit to the theory that I'm not a pirate. At least, not one familiar with unicoded programs.)
OTOH, the "Test Key" part of the program fails with legit XP Home keys.:( (Legit as in, already activated, working fine, straight from the shrink-wrap sticker). It liked a pro key I had from a microsoft action pack (IIRC, that key has several licenses attached to it), and it liked the pirated Corp key I found. Odd.
So, this really sucks for home users, I'm guessing. I'd try to test the XP home keys it gens, but I would rather avoid ticking off MS and I don't particularily want to take the time it takes to make the keys.
Or maybe I'm doing something wrong. Used the base64 windows port, kPad (win32) to save the text, and it seems invalid here. Doesn't make a working zip.
Oh well, I didn't really have a use for it. As far as I'm told, the corporate pirated edition works fine anyways, and doesn't need a whole night just to generate 25 keys. (windows XP corp requires no activation, and finding product keys for it is relatively easy).
OTOH, I like 2k better. Less eye candy. Or win98 for the games.
Maybe I don't value the one song I like on NewBigBand's Album at $20. After all, the $20 would make me a lot happier by going to the movies with my S.O. So, I go to the movies instead of buying the new Album.
OTOH, if I could get the one song for say, $2 bucks (the cost of my time to download it on a slow 56k connection), then, yes, I'll download it, because I want a copy.
I just don't want the copy when it costs $20. I do want a copy when it costs close to $0.
I remember a case from way way back ago, concerning a game console that had been reversed engineered so that a third party could develop games for it without having to license the technology.
However, when such games ran, the startup automatically triggered a screen that said something to the effect of "This game has been officially licensed by Somecompany".
At trial, since the console manufacturer failed to show that there was a way of booting a game without that text, they lost the case.
Now there is something remotely similar to the MS case here. MS is claiming that there is no way to deintegrate IE. *However*, they have failed to prove this. True, its proving a negative, which is difficult (at least logically, legally is another story), but MS will be on weak footing until they show the source code to someone else and let them try.
Agreed. Most of the popular books out there are available in one of the following formats: txt, rtf, pdf, html, or lit. You just have to know where to look
Personally, lit is pretty good (as long as you have a MS product to read it on), pdf is good and cross-platform friendly, and text works anywhere.:) Not that fond of html, since it makes books bulky (IMHO).
But that's just my $.02.
OTOH, she should fear piracy. The reason why more books aren't pirated is because most people don't know where to find them. Sad, but true. If people realized there was a large bookwarezing community, I'm guessing most would pirate. Sure, some would prefer the paperback copy, but not many. (I prefer both. For example, I might like a copy of "Linux in a Nutshell" by my computer desk at home, but a nice pdf file that I can keep on my laptop would be nice. Unfortunately, that book seems rare on the bookwarez sites, and I have no scanner, so I'm stuck with the unweildy dead tree edition.)
Slashdot Mirror
W2K and XP are closely related to Win9x and Win3.11, to the extent of the code being derived and shared between the branches of the MS family. Some of the NT code is new, but I'm guessing a lot of it was modified and reused from the non-NT line.
Er, I mean "ctl-e ctl-e launches the defined text editor under lynx". I currently have it set to vim.
Btw, have you tried using cmd.com instead of command.com for pasting? Might work better. (Then again, might not, I haven't tried).
If you threw in a 40 gig hdd, a video card with composite out (or use the svid if your tv supports it), 256 megs of memory, and the slowest cpu that works (as long as its over 1 ghz, it should be fine, since we want coolness instead of power), and you'd have a cheap but effective emulation gaming box set to hook up to the tv. Throw Windows 98 on it, install MAME, neoRageX, Nesticle, zSNES, Massage, no$GMB, and whatever else you want, add a few USB joysticks (AxisPad Pro works for all of the above examples, and is very similiar to the playstation controllers with analog sticks), and you have yourself the perfect retro emulation box for less then half a grand. There should be enough room left over for about 30 gigs of music or video too, which, if you sacrifice range of playable games and go with linux (which one day, might actually have the mapper support that nesticle or fwnes includes), you could make yourself a homebuilt tivo with the addition of a TV tuner.
I'm drooling now.
Well, I'm not sure what browser he's using, but ctl-e ctl-e under lynx launches your default browser, and I'd be willing to bet that some of the other browsers out there have the same functionality.
But obviously, given your convictions, you wouldn't be using an operating system that was derived from something called 'Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS)', so why don't you take your *n[i|u]x of choice and use your preferred cpu?
Unless you think that x86 & x86-64 are the best cpus when compared to the competition.
Myself, I'll stick to windows on big fast (very, very warm) athlons as my gaming platform, and linux on older, but fast enough for me, intels for my personal servers. That works out well for me, so I can't bitch.
Gasoline. Lots and lots of gasoline. :)
Some BIOSes won't boot without a video card. Some will. On the old Pentium motherboard I gained from upgrading my fiancee's machine, the original bios wouldn't allow booting without a vga card, but an upgraded bios (free from the website, of course), did.
With an old 10 mbit ISA ethernet card, a 2 gig hard drive, and a debian boot disk, I configured a nice little stand-alone server, although I used a VGA card for setup. Tom's Linux Boot Disk (google for tomsrtbt) will auto-detect some NICs, and grab an IP address from DHCP automagically, so, with a bit of hacking, its probably possible to make a varient of tomsrtbt that allows SSH or telnet login, which would allow setup of a machine without a video card. My current headless linux box runs without a video card, floppy drive, or cd drive, although I'm using a windows machine with file sharing to fake a floppy and cd drive. :) It works perfectly, save for a small bug where my wtmp logs seems to fill up with garbage. (I think inetd is trying to launch login sessions to the vga terminals, and dying in odd yet wonderful ways that it never expected too). All in all, headless linux is a wonderful way of doing things, and a pure headless machine does increase physical security.
Windows is a little braindead about video cards. For those of you that think an old 1 meg VGA video card will work, it doesn't really. Windows terminal services will only support whatever resolution that the physical vid card will support. However, other then needing a video card that can support the resolution you want to use, headless windows is workable. I ran a win2k adv. server at home for about 2 weeks as a headless DHCP/test server. (Yes, it was a legit copy, we had one from microsoft's big bag of shit that they'll send resalers for a reasonable price ($500/year)). One word of warning - I can upgrade a headless linux box with relative ease : for example, from debian stable to testing, and convert the filesystem to ext2 to ext3, without ever hooking up a monitor. However, I've seen windows machines pop up error messages to the local display without sending it to any terminal services displays, and I wouldn't be surpised if windows would pop up a prompt before it launched the terminal services server, which should effectively freeze a machine from remote access. My test server never BSOD, so I don't know how it handles that remotely (my guess is poorly though).
For a lark, I would run windows headless (or in my case, because I wanted a test machine and ran out of monitors & desktop space), but for serious work, especially remote administration, my advice is: don't! Bad things will probably happen, and if your business depends on high uptimes, you'll be road tripping to see those remote machines sooner or later. :) Stick with linux, remote administration is possible, including software upgrades and patches. Properly administered, a linux machine shouldn't need physical maintainance except for hardware. (Assuming you do have your server on a UPS, but you do, right?)
Just my $.02
~ Das
As far as I understand, Debian is based on stability and a free software mentality. Which means that it won't sacrifice stability for the latest release. This can be frustrating, especially to non-debian users, but, on the other hand, I will attest that their stable package is rock solid. Even their testing package is pretty good. Unstable isn't bad, but does have the habit of breaking every so often.
There are other distros that cater to those who want shiny things, or the latest and greatest. Debian caters to those who want stability. Don't fault them for that.
I agree with the idea that Drake's equation is wrong, but not for the reasons stated.
Drake is assuming that all life must evolve on an earthlike planet. Europa-like planets, with a possible liquid ocean, and warmth supplied by the tidal forces of a gas giant, seem much more plausable. (Btw, the book discussed seems to ignore this possibility as well). Jovian planets seem more common then earth-like planets, and some of the reasons the book brings up for the decreased incidence of life don't apply (Jovian planets can be at a distance from the sun where the sun's energy fluctuations wouldn't matter, since the moons are warmed by tidal forces. Of course, in some discovered systems, Jovian planets are rather close to their stars, which means the $64k question for this scenerio is: how many stars have Jovian-type planets with the appropiate moons at the right distance?).
On earth, life took quite some time to jump from sea to land. On a Europian planet, there is no land, but there is another "beach" they can wash against - airless vacuum. I don't see any reason why a creature can't evolve to live in a vacuum, which leads to the idea of a lifeform being able to live in interstellar space. Imagine a creature that is content to drift through space in a dormant state, only "waking up", when its near enough to a star for its version of photosynthesis. Damned if I'd know how such a life could generate intelligence, but if I was a Europan, staring at earth, monkeys making fire wouldn't be an idea I'd come up with. ;)
Of course, we have the Jovian planets themselves, with thick atmospheres, and the chance of liquid water to exist in that atmosphere.
The point of these examples, is that the Drake equation is misleading, making assumptions that might not be true.
Just my $.02
I use Apache, XnView, Gvim, PHP, the Gimp, mySQL, and many other applications under windows. Show them that GPL does not have to be an all or nothing step, you can mix and match win32 and GPL, and have a system that you are mostly familiar with, and high-performing apps, for less then the cost of a pure Microsoft solution.
Then, show them the ease of linux remote administration, the windows compatability, and how linux is usually faster/more reliable on slower hardware. Show them the stability of linux vs windows.
I'm my experience, the disadvantage you have is warez. There are plenty of 'free', easy to use software for windows if you know where to look. Bring up BSA horror stories, and talk about the GPL.
Just my $.02
Star Wars fits neatly into the genre of "Space Opera", with a slight hint of science fantasy thrown in.
Under linux:
/home/dasunt/.nethackrc includes the following lines:
OPTIONS=DECgraphics,color
Then I always do an 'export TERM=xterm-color' (even on the command prompt), and then run nethack. That way, I get colors and the pretty walls (like in the windows version by default).
My two toshiba laptops are both slower and older then the examples provided. One is a Pentium 75, 16 megs of memory, and the other is an old 486 with 4 megs of memory. I hate to think what the reviewer would call them!
I work in a Windows shop myself, and am wondering, what single-floppy distro do you use that has NTFS support? I only have the magical NT password changer (great tool btw).
If I had time, I was going to try to hack NTFS into tomsrtbt, since I really like that distro myself.
So, since beethoven is dead, and we don't want to
'control' his work, we can't reproduce it anymore
since he has no say in it?
What a wonderful world we live in!
In Minnesota, we have strict laws about throwing out old computers too. In some places (Minneapolis), the laws are taken seriously. In other places (northern Minnesota), they aren't.
However, I was talking to someone who had a relative in the computer recycling business. If they recieved anything that had no resale value (and they frequently did), they'd just ship it to Wisconsin, which has lax landfill laws.
Actually, I think the lawsuites aren't focusing on the fact that guns kill people, but on the evidence that gun manufactures specifically targetted the criminal market and tried to flood high-crime areas with guns.
Its equivalent to being able to sell most chemicals with little regulation in the US, but packaging a "make-your-own-meth-kit", even if you don't name it as such, would probably get you into a lot of legal hot water.
Before you pass judgement on lawsuites, maybe you should look at the reasons why they are suing.
As an owner of an older laptop (p75 with 16 megs of memory and a 700 meg hdd), I've noticed two major problems. One is bloat - with shared libraries, a system with a lot of apps might not take up as much space as a comparable win9x system, but with a few apps, the system takes up more space then a comparable win9x system. At the moment, I'm using 500 megs of hdd space under linux to do the same things that 300 megs of hdd space did under windows.
My main complain is X applications. There are more then a few applications that simple *aren't* usable at 640x480 (the maximum resolution a Toshiba 400CS can do). bbconf is a pain to use, and so is xchat. (For the latter, I'm now using bitchx). Of course, if I wanted to, I could substitute a completely console based environment for an x-based one, using centericq for icq, lynx instead of dillo (which needs cookie support badly), and command line apps instead of the few X apps I use for images. Right now, under X, I'm mainly using xterms.
Just my $.02
D'oh.
:( (Legit as in, already activated, working fine, straight from the shrink-wrap sticker). It liked a pro key I had from a microsoft action pack (IIRC, that key has several licenses attached to it), and it liked the pirated Corp key I found. Odd.
I'm an idiot.
Forgot to use the -d option.
(Well, I guess, this leads credit to the theory that I'm not a pirate. At least, not one familiar with unicoded programs.)
OTOH, the "Test Key" part of the program fails with legit XP Home keys.
So, this really sucks for home users, I'm guessing. I'd try to test the XP home keys it gens, but I would rather avoid ticking off MS and I don't particularily want to take the time it takes to make the keys.
Just my experience.
As far as I can tell, that doesn't work.
Or maybe I'm doing something wrong. Used the base64 windows port, kPad (win32) to save the text, and it seems invalid here. Doesn't make a working zip.
Oh well, I didn't really have a use for it. As far as I'm told, the corporate pirated edition works fine anyways, and doesn't need a whole night just to generate 25 keys. (windows XP corp requires no activation, and finding product keys for it is relatively easy).
OTOH, I like 2k better. Less eye candy. Or win98 for the games.
Maybe I don't value the one song I like on NewBigBand's Album at $20. After all, the $20 would make me a lot happier by going to the movies with my S.O. So, I go to the movies instead of buying the new Album.
OTOH, if I could get the one song for say, $2 bucks (the cost of my time to download it on a slow 56k connection), then, yes, I'll download it, because I want a copy.
I just don't want the copy when it costs $20. I do want a copy when it costs close to $0.
Simple economics.
I remember a case from way way back ago, concerning a game console that had been reversed engineered so that a third party could develop games for it without having to license the technology.
However, when such games ran, the startup automatically triggered a screen that said something to the effect of "This game has been officially licensed by Somecompany".
At trial, since the console manufacturer failed to show that there was a way of booting a game without that text, they lost the case.
Now there is something remotely similar to the MS case here. MS is claiming that there is no way to deintegrate IE. *However*, they have failed to prove this. True, its proving a negative, which is difficult (at least logically, legally is another story), but MS will be on weak footing until they show the source code to someone else and let them try.
Oh, and IANAL.
I prefer a simple book.pdf to a book/ with tons of jpg's and html files.
Just easier to keep organized.
But... Melville?
Agreed. Most of the popular books out there are available in one of the following formats: txt, rtf, pdf, html, or lit. You just have to know where to look
Personally, lit is pretty good (as long as you have a MS product to read it on), pdf is good and cross-platform friendly, and text works anywhere. :) Not that fond of html, since it makes books bulky (IMHO).
But that's just my $.02.
OTOH, she should fear piracy. The reason why more books aren't pirated is because most people don't know where to find them. Sad, but true. If people realized there was a large bookwarezing community, I'm guessing most would pirate. Sure, some would prefer the paperback copy, but not many. (I prefer both. For example, I might like a copy of "Linux in a Nutshell" by my computer desk at home, but a nice pdf file that I can keep on my laptop would be nice. Unfortunately, that book seems rare on the bookwarez sites, and I have no scanner, so I'm stuck with the unweildy dead tree edition.)
As I said above, just my $.02