I'm a linux "newbie", I have to admit. I have found that my lack of knowledge does seem to offend a significant section of the 31337 linux community. Unfortunately, until they develope a method if transmitting knowledge directly to the brain, my method of learning is going to continue to be installing a system (RH 6.2, since I have a disk handy), and playing with it until I understand what I'm doing.
Unfortunately, I believe my Win98 box with Zonealarm is probably more secure then my linux box at the moment. I'm not worried about my windows box being hacked anytime soon, but I do worry about my linux box. I'll admit, I don't know jack about linux security, and it isn't the easiest subject to pick up through self-teaching. Asking for help in the linux community gets mixed results, ranging from outright refusal (because I'm a newbie, remember), to those that seem a tad paranoid about security (what do you mean, I shouldn't be able to telnet into the box remotely?).
Therefore, I get mixed feelings about the usefulness of my linux box. I'm in love with the bash shell, (re)compiling programs is rather nifty, symlinks rock, and other attributes make linux fun to play and work with, but the security issue still scares me. My networking experience is limited to setting up a small LAN here and there, and I have no background in security. Trying to do research into the issue of linux security brings up plenty of FUD, out-of-date information, and information that assumes that I have more knowledge then I do. I am not an idiot, but I am ignorant. I need my information in small, easily digestable chunks, and based on the assumption that I know nothing. But I'm not finding any information in that format. Which means that my linux box I play with is still probably pretty insecure.
As I see it, (IAMAL), either I should be able to sue the record companies to recoup my loss, however pitiful, on the tax they impose on blank media storage devices, or else I should be able to use the fact that I paid a small fee on the blank media that is used to cover the loss of piracy, therefore, I should have a legal right to do whatever I want with the CDs.
Now I strongly suspect that the law isn't interpretated this way (at least in most countries, Canada being the only exception I know of), but would it be possible to have a smart lawyer to argue this viewpoint?
Reality Master 101 writes: Not everything is practical just because there is a need for it.
Warning: Rant Ahead!
Partially true. In your example, you said that if price of gasoline went up, teleportation or fusion-powered cars wouldn't be developed. I agree. However, if the price of gasoline went to $20/gallon tomarrow (an outrageous rate, but its just an example), then we'd either see a changeover to natural gas/electric or some other alternative energy source vehicle, or cars would be developed that got 400 miles/gallon.
So why would gas/electictric cars be implimented and not fusion or teleportation? Well, first we have a demand for transportation. The demand for transportation is rather high, at least in the developed world, and especially in the US, since all of us seem to want to live in the woods and commute to the city. Therefore, if the demand is high, we *will* find something to fulfill the need, as long as the cost of fulfilling the demand is not so great that we have to sacrific other, equally important demands. We don't commute to work via helicopters because the time, money, and energy we would have to exert to be able to use them isn't worth the extra few minutes we'd shave from our commute time. We don't commute to work with buses because we prefer living in areas with lower population densities (e.i. suburbs) which make buses impractical and we don't like the inconvience of having to conform to the bus's schedule and having to interact with other members of our community. We are looking for something that fulfills our need to get from point A to point B with the lowest oppertunity cost to us. This is the economics/social side of the scale. On the other side of the scale is the harsh laws of science and technology, which dictate what has been done, what is possible, and what is impossible, and what the costs for doing each are. Say we have a possible solution set such as this { car (gasoline), car (electric), walking, teleportation, car (fusion) }. Science tells us the teleportation looks impossible. Therefore, we eliminate it. Technology tells us that fusion powered cars haven't been done yet, and considering everything that we know about "hot" fusion, its doubtful we could ever fit a fusion reactor in a vehicle the size of a car. We are now left with gasoline-powered cars, electric-cars, and walking, in this simplified example. Walking is too much of an inconvience to us, science doesn't have a problem with it, but human nature, and the time it would take, plus distance that would have to be traveled, make it impossible. On the economic/psycology/social side, walking isn't happening. So what will it be, electric or gasoline? The technology that's in place makes gasoline-powered vehicle cheaper then electric, and gasoline, even at the high prices that it is lately, is still an economical means of transport. Plus, we have human nature, gasoline is tried and true, electric isn't. Electric also has some problems with travelling long distance, and infrastructure doesn't support electric right now. Therefore gas is the best solution to our problem. In the future, if electric becomes more ideal then gasoline (enough to override our habit of sticking with what we know), we will switch.
So, we learn this. Each problem/solution pair depends on economics, human nature (psycological/social), science, and technology.
Lets apply this to Napster, OpenNap, Gnutella, and the rest of the field. Napster was nice and easy, a lot of us became accustomed to using it, and the technology (on our end) was cheap. However, Napster is either dead or moving towards a fee-based service. All of a sudden, from the economics viewpoint, Napster is less ideal. OpenNap is simular to Napster, there is the additionaly hassle of finding a server, but since Napster is having trouble, OpenNap seems a lot more attractive. However, OpenNap from the social viewpoint, is insecure, it has a central server, it can be attacked. Therefore, what do we have left? Gnutella is free of cost, and cannot be shut down through elimination of a central server. It is harder to use, and technology says it won't scale in the current format. Plus, it eats up bandwidth like a hog.:) However, science says its possible to build a gnutella-like network that will scale. Therefore, we have NeoGnutella, which will be built if there is a big enough of demand, or OpenNap. OpenNap is, as we mentioned before, is easier to use, and simular to the Napster that most of us know and love, while NeoGnutella will have the benefit of never being able to be shut down. What will win? I personally think that both will survive, due to the fact that there is a large enough market to be divided up by 2 players (again, simplified example) but that OpenNap will probably grab most of the Napster fallout due to simularity to its commercial cousin. However, if OpenNap servers become attacked legally and thus often shut down, we will switch to the NeoGnutella because finding one "node" that we can persistantly connect to is a lot easier then refinding OpenNap servers, even if OpenNap seems to scale better then any distributed net solution, and even if OpenNap is more familiar. Therefore, the long term outlook for Gnutella depends upon if it will be adapted to scale, and if OpenNap will be attacked, as well as other issues not addressed in this rant. We all have different wants. OpenNap, Gnutella, Freenet, FTP/HTTP "warez" sites, IRC "warez" channels, Napster, (formerly) Scour, and other services have evolved to meet this need. Since Napster was the most appealing to most users (and because of media hype), it became one of the biggest file sharing programs out there. Now since Napster has a rocky future, another method will become the biggest.
The above was a rant, and presented simplified examples. I didn't mention gyro-driven cars, monorails, carts hauled by penguins, or bicycles, amoung other things, because I was trying to keep the examples simple (and carts hauled by penguins aren't really practical). I didn't mention stuff like how critical user mass applies to file sharing systems because it didn't pertain to the topic of the comment. So please, don't flame me with a comment how widget-driven cars are the ideal solution, or that file sharing also depends on bandwidth. Nitpicking just wastes both of our time. On the other hand, valid comments are appreciated.:)
mcc writes: Would the "give poor performance and kill the CPU" argument still hold for those of us who use modems primarily for file transfer, and never run anything more interaction-intensive than IRC
Well, assuming that the sources know what they are talking about, then no. The winmodem can't suck up enough cpu/memory so that games would take a hit, therefore, we must assume that the overhead a winmodem imposes on a system is rather small. (Which makes some sense, since cheap winmodems work on a p133 or so.) Therefore, if you are running something less intensive then a 3d online game, presumably, you have the resources to spare for a winmodem. Thus, if a winmodem cost you less then a hardware modem, you come out ahead.
You don't like Best Buy because of the rebates? That's like saying you don't like a root canal because its hard to find parking at the dentist.
I'm surprized that you even succeeded in buying stuff at the store, I find it rather difficult to do that.
Recent Phone Call
Me: Dial number, listen to automated voice, punch in extension for computer department, get placed on hold and listen to muzak, finally get phone picked up. Hello, do you carry heatsinks?
Him: (Sounds very confused) Heatsinks?
Me: Yes, a piece of metal, often aluminum, that sits on top of a cpu and is designed to dissipate heat. Usually it will have a small fan attached to it.
Him: (Sounding even more confused) I don't think we stock any computers that come with them, and I don't think we carry them seperately.
BestBuy makes me wonder... Sure, their stuff might be relatively cheap (at least in my area), but they don't carry quality parts and they don't have the technical expertise backing them up. Its lik walking into an auto parts store and asking about alternators, only to get a blank stare. *Sigh* These places do not deserve business.
If I posted a comment to slashdot about linux not having a decent GUI or not being able to operate on a wide variety of hardware, I'd be flamed out of existance. However, I can easily post about windows being unstable and frequently BSODing, even though I haven't had a problem with BSODs on a properly configured machine, and win2k doesn't seem to need to reboot. Things that were true 5 years ago aren't true today. Linux does have some very nice desktops, runs on most hardware (although cutting edge still might be a problem), and windows has gained a lot of stability since the win95 days.
Windows does have its faults, but if you want to start ranting about stability you sound like a bunch of linux zealots without a clue. Anecdotal evidence does not prove a point. If it did, I could "prove" that linux "sucks", since I've seen my gnome desktop crash more then a few times, and I've managed to crash and trash the hard disk of a redhat 6.2 install as an unprivilaged user repeatedly. (A recent release of ADOM would always do this when I tried to save and exit).
Don't be afraid to admit that windows does have some good points. We don't have to promote linux by tearing down the competition, its much better to promote linux by its own merits.
As for your problems, there is a registry hack to unload *.dlls after you close a program, it helps to free up resources (especially mem usage). Also, if you have been getting a lot of BSOD, check your setup, something is wrong with the box somewhere. Its my humble opinion that a stable windows box should have few, if any, bsods.
Scientists realize that an astroid is a relatively large gravitational body and can be used in a manner consistant with newtonian physics to adjusts the earth's orbit. Wowee.
No offense, but what goddessses? Ayeka is a princess, Ryoko is a space pirate (half mass(sp?)/half Washuu according to the OAV), Kiyone (who wasn't in the OAVs) is just a normal alien, AFAIK, and so is Mihoshi. Ryo-ohki is also not a goddess, and Washuu is presumably another normal alien, since it mentions her going to school and having a child in the series. Maybe you are mixing up your anime.
AFAIK, they "discover" planets by looking for a doppler shift in the star's light that the planet causes by "tugging" the star as it orbits around it. Therefore, large planets are easier to discover then small planets.
Agreed, I'm waiting for someone to give a free nytimes login name/password. Until then, does someone want to explain what "synchronized" orbits are? The only thing I can think of is two planets, in different orbits, with revolutions around the parent sun of equal length. Or else two planets in the same orbit. The former sounds rather impossible if I understand elementary astrophysics,although I admit that I'm a tad weak in that field.:) The latter sounds possible, I haven't heard it being done with two planets, but Jupiter in our solar system does have groups of astroids just before and just after its position in orbit. *Sigh* Next time, give details when posting!
I am not an electrical engineer or an expert at electronics, however I am familiar with some arcade machines, being well entrenched in the emultion scene. The ROM images of the recent games out there are only a few meg, I doubt you'd see any images of more then 100 megs, even with recent games, and old games were alot less, many not even reaching 1 meg. So why not encrypt the data using pgp or another strong encryption scheme, and then at boot, where some of the games run through a long boot sequence anyways, decode the information and store it in RAM? Not sure if the games main processor would be able to decode it fast enough, but a dedicated cpu and circuit should.
No offense, but the question "Why should anybody use Linux" is legit. This isn't meant to be flamebait, however, some members of the linux community give the impression that the only reason people should use linux is because Linux Torvalds is an all knowing, all caring benevolent god, and Bill Gates is evil incarnate. If you want to advocate linux, stick to discussing linux's benefits, such as its stability, and openess of code/standards. Be willing to compromise, for some people, windows is going to be the better choice of opperating system, and some people will want to stick with apple, or BeOS. Admit that linux does have its faults, its not the most user-friendly operating system, and it does have a problem supporting some hardware. Alienating vast segments of the population by being rude and condescending will not convince more people to use linux. Saying that you should use linux because "windows sucks, linux rules" is not really a valid argument, no matter what you may think.
PurpleBob writes Yes, nethack is fun in a retro sort of way, but there's higher standards now.
Warning: Rant Ahead
Thank you, you hit a bitter nerve, and helped give me more proof that the average consumer is an idiot. You have proved that eye candy is more desirable then quality, although you aren't the first to do so. In my humble opinion, Diablo was the really shitty Nethack clone with prettier pictures and worse gameplay. Pretty pictures can be nice, but in the end, I will return to the well designed world.
Lets say Joe Blow is too self-centered to do this for the good of others, there is still a simple solution. Make a kickass screen saver and explain in the terms of use that it is free, but it uses spare CPU cycles to do distributing computing.
In short, use Joe Blow's greed against him, give it away for free, and stick the distributing computing aspect of it somewhere in a click-through agreement. If he's like most people out there, he won't even know its there.
Let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Maybe Microsoft (as a whole) isn't racist, it could just be a few bad apples. Microsoft is a large company with many employees, the odds are good that sooner or later they will hire a racist employee, and if there aren't enough complaints, how will they know there is a problem.
Also, the technology field is not a field for the poor, and poverty does tend to fall upon minorities and women (especially single women with children). I'm white and male myself, but I grew up in a single-parent household, my first computer I owned was a 286 I bought for myself around 5 years ago. School gave me enough experience with computers to learn BASIC, but not much more. Everything I learned I was self-taught, and if I was going to enter the technical field now (and I'm considering it), I would probably go for a MSCE and a little training to be a network admin, since it needs little schooling and jobs are available. Pay might not be great, but its money. Now with such training, I might be qualified to staff Microsoft's help lines or sweep the floors, not much more. I'm sure not going to be a code monkey on Whistler or Office 2002.
Continuing to be a devil's advocate, I would ask for hard evidence of racial bias, for example, having two employees of equal skill and training, and picking the white employee consistantly for advances in position, and raises in pay, and the employee has to be high-ranking enough for these to be the company's decision, and not a rotten boss's decision. Alternatively, if you could show me that valid complaints against bad bosses were brought to management's attention and ignored, you could prove to me that Microsoft is racist. Otherwise, the problem didn't exist, or its the occasional racist employee that management doesn't know about
Actually, on a x86 machine, it is possible to change your BIOS screen's logo, unfortunately, I believe its bios dependent, and there is no collection of howto's that lists several bioses (biosi?). A google search with your bios and a few other keywords ("change splash screen" or "change image" seems to work) should find it if its possible and a common bios.
Well we are on the subject...
To change Microsoft Windows startup/shutdown screen, do a search for logo.sys (boot), logow.sys (please wait...), and logos.sys (its now safe to...). Back them up, and then replace them with a 256 color bitmap with dimensions of 320 (width) x 400 (height). To remove the annoying startup screen (like I did) just download Tweak UI which can be found at Microsoft's website (its one of their powertools, and a free download). Tweak UI does a couple of other nice tricks, its worth hunting down if you need to use windows. www.regedit.com has a list of other things to customize with windows.
Under linux, I wouldn't want to do a change like this, the information is rather useful that's displayed, and I'd hate for the dang image to cover up the error messages, it seems rather counter-productive.
You, me, and probably a significant amount of slashdot users want some sort of information in webpages, rather then just eye-candy, but I'm guessing that most users want pretty pictures with a minimal amount of useful information. I have never met a website with static content that needed anything more then pure html, and I must praise sites like slashdot that have dynamic content that is handled on the server side, and not by my computer. However, I am the exception here, stuff like flash is popular, so even if I refuse to download and install the plugin, I'm guessing many other people do. After graphical browsers and the AOLers, you were misleading yourself if you expected anything with more information then a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode.
Oh well, I still have lynx. Speeds up websurfing, and is more enjoyable for 90% of the pages I visit.
The "new" Celeron is at 100 mhz bus speed, the "old" Celery officially runs at 66 mhz. Now my questions are (a) does this mean that the new Celery will give 150% the performance of an old Celery at the same clock speed?, and (b) is this new Celery that is released at 100 mhz any faster then a Celery that has been OC'ed to a 100 mhz bus. Can some knowledgable person give me an answer? Thanks in advance. Oh, and I know the answer to (a) is rather complicated and depends on what the computer is being used for, just give a detailed answer.:)
(I have the strange craving for vegetables now and some nice dip...)
The army isn't the one we should worry about...
on
EMP Artillery Shells
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· Score: 4
Anyone with a knowledge of electricity can build an EMP gun. I remember a website on the internet showing how one was built out of a telsa coil with an aluminum foil reflector, powered by a 12 volt car battery and (IIRC) a coil. A google search can't find it, so I'm relying on memory, but the entire thing could be built with off the shelf parts, or even salvaged junk. In a test, it crashed a computer at 200 yards (computer rebooted without a problem). Now imagine a slightly more powerful version of this gun, still built with off-the-shelf components. Then stick it in a van, aim it out a tinted window (else the van's body will contain the pulse) and drive past a few government buildings, corperate offices, and banks. Its a wonderful terrorist/militia-freaks weapon, or a nice "prank" by a bunch of stupid kids. Its not far-fetched to think of an organized, coordinated attack on a country that has lots of electronics and has a sizeable terrorist element (Israel is probably at a big risk here).
Anyways, whenever I hear about EMP weapons, I always think of the terrorist aspects of them.
Just my $.02
P.S.: A properly directed EMP gun can also stop annoying bragging about uptimes and stability.:) Just kidding!
Its simple, the normal automobiles that we have work, there is no need to innovate. Unless someone finds a loophole in physics to exploit anti-gravity, driving on a roadway will get you farther on a gallon of gasoline then flying above. Our roadway infrastructure in the US (and most developed countries) provides a perfect means from getting from point A to point B. The world is made for cars that run on the ground, few people would go through the added hassle and cost of buying a flying car if they did exist. The only thing that flying cars give us would be possibly more speed, and there is nothing that prevents us from raising the speed limit on Interstates to over 100 mph, ala the autoban. Sure, its not as fast as a jet flight, but its a lot cheaper for the daily commute. Expect to see more efficient engines, softer rides, more "luxeries" in the cab. The industry knows that flying cars won't sell, but these improvements will.
Btw, the same reasoning of "it works for most people" and "infrastructure already supports it" is why we will probably not see any 3D TV sets anytime soon but the 2D variety of TV will continue to improve in picture quality and sound quality.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a linux "newbie", I have to admit. I have found that my lack of knowledge does seem to offend a significant section of the 31337 linux community. Unfortunately, until they develope a method if transmitting knowledge directly to the brain, my method of learning is going to continue to be installing a system (RH 6.2, since I have a disk handy), and playing with it until I understand what I'm doing.
Unfortunately, I believe my Win98 box with Zonealarm is probably more secure then my linux box at the moment. I'm not worried about my windows box being hacked anytime soon, but I do worry about my linux box. I'll admit, I don't know jack about linux security, and it isn't the easiest subject to pick up through self-teaching. Asking for help in the linux community gets mixed results, ranging from outright refusal (because I'm a newbie, remember), to those that seem a tad paranoid about security (what do you mean, I shouldn't be able to telnet into the box remotely?).
Therefore, I get mixed feelings about the usefulness of my linux box. I'm in love with the bash shell, (re)compiling programs is rather nifty, symlinks rock, and other attributes make linux fun to play and work with, but the security issue still scares me. My networking experience is limited to setting up a small LAN here and there, and I have no background in security. Trying to do research into the issue of linux security brings up plenty of FUD, out-of-date information, and information that assumes that I have more knowledge then I do. I am not an idiot, but I am ignorant. I need my information in small, easily digestable chunks, and based on the assumption that I know nothing. But I'm not finding any information in that format. Which means that my linux box I play with is still probably pretty insecure.
As I see it, (IAMAL), either I should be able to sue the record companies to recoup my loss, however pitiful, on the tax they impose on blank media storage devices, or else I should be able to use the fact that I paid a small fee on the blank media that is used to cover the loss of piracy, therefore, I should have a legal right to do whatever I want with the CDs.
Now I strongly suspect that the law isn't interpretated this way (at least in most countries, Canada being the only exception I know of), but would it be possible to have a smart lawyer to argue this viewpoint?
As soon as we get affordable residential T-3 service, Gnutella still won't scale because we'll be trading high quality movie files. :)
Reality Master 101 writes: Not everything is practical just because there is a need for it.
:) However, science says its possible to build a gnutella-like network that will scale. Therefore, we have NeoGnutella, which will be built if there is a big enough of demand, or OpenNap. OpenNap is, as we mentioned before, is easier to use, and simular to the Napster that most of us know and love, while NeoGnutella will have the benefit of never being able to be shut down. What will win? I personally think that both will survive, due to the fact that there is a large enough market to be divided up by 2 players (again, simplified example) but that OpenNap will probably grab most of the Napster fallout due to simularity to its commercial cousin. However, if OpenNap servers become attacked legally and thus often shut down, we will switch to the NeoGnutella because finding one "node" that we can persistantly connect to is a lot easier then refinding OpenNap servers, even if OpenNap seems to scale better then any distributed net solution, and even if OpenNap is more familiar. Therefore, the long term outlook for Gnutella depends upon if it will be adapted to scale, and if OpenNap will be attacked, as well as other issues not addressed in this rant. We all have different wants. OpenNap, Gnutella, Freenet, FTP/HTTP "warez" sites, IRC "warez" channels, Napster, (formerly) Scour, and other services have evolved to meet this need. Since Napster was the most appealing to most users (and because of media hype), it became one of the biggest file sharing programs out there. Now since Napster has a rocky future, another method will become the biggest.
:)
Warning: Rant Ahead!
Partially true. In your example, you said that if price of gasoline went up, teleportation or fusion-powered cars wouldn't be developed. I agree. However, if the price of gasoline went to $20/gallon tomarrow (an outrageous rate, but its just an example), then we'd either see a changeover to natural gas/electric or some other alternative energy source vehicle, or cars would be developed that got 400 miles/gallon.
So why would gas/electictric cars be implimented and not fusion or teleportation? Well, first we have a demand for transportation. The demand for transportation is rather high, at least in the developed world, and especially in the US, since all of us seem to want to live in the woods and commute to the city. Therefore, if the demand is high, we *will* find something to fulfill the need, as long as the cost of fulfilling the demand is not so great that we have to sacrific other, equally important demands. We don't commute to work via helicopters because the time, money, and energy we would have to exert to be able to use them isn't worth the extra few minutes we'd shave from our commute time. We don't commute to work with buses because we prefer living in areas with lower population densities (e.i. suburbs) which make buses impractical and we don't like the inconvience of having to conform to the bus's schedule and having to interact with other members of our community. We are looking for something that fulfills our need to get from point A to point B with the lowest oppertunity cost to us. This is the economics/social side of the scale. On the other side of the scale is the harsh laws of science and technology, which dictate what has been done, what is possible, and what is impossible, and what the costs for doing each are. Say we have a possible solution set such as this { car (gasoline), car (electric), walking, teleportation, car (fusion) }. Science tells us the teleportation looks impossible. Therefore, we eliminate it. Technology tells us that fusion powered cars haven't been done yet, and considering everything that we know about "hot" fusion, its doubtful we could ever fit a fusion reactor in a vehicle the size of a car. We are now left with gasoline-powered cars, electric-cars, and walking, in this simplified example. Walking is too much of an inconvience to us, science doesn't have a problem with it, but human nature, and the time it would take, plus distance that would have to be traveled, make it impossible. On the economic/psycology/social side, walking isn't happening. So what will it be, electric or gasoline? The technology that's in place makes gasoline-powered vehicle cheaper then electric, and gasoline, even at the high prices that it is lately, is still an economical means of transport. Plus, we have human nature, gasoline is tried and true, electric isn't. Electric also has some problems with travelling long distance, and infrastructure doesn't support electric right now. Therefore gas is the best solution to our problem. In the future, if electric becomes more ideal then gasoline (enough to override our habit of sticking with what we know), we will switch.
So, we learn this. Each problem/solution pair depends on economics, human nature (psycological/social), science, and technology.
Lets apply this to Napster, OpenNap, Gnutella, and the rest of the field. Napster was nice and easy, a lot of us became accustomed to using it, and the technology (on our end) was cheap. However, Napster is either dead or moving towards a fee-based service. All of a sudden, from the economics viewpoint, Napster is less ideal. OpenNap is simular to Napster, there is the additionaly hassle of finding a server, but since Napster is having trouble, OpenNap seems a lot more attractive. However, OpenNap from the social viewpoint, is insecure, it has a central server, it can be attacked. Therefore, what do we have left? Gnutella is free of cost, and cannot be shut down through elimination of a central server. It is harder to use, and technology says it won't scale in the current format. Plus, it eats up bandwidth like a hog.
The above was a rant, and presented simplified examples. I didn't mention gyro-driven cars, monorails, carts hauled by penguins, or bicycles, amoung other things, because I was trying to keep the examples simple (and carts hauled by penguins aren't really practical). I didn't mention stuff like how critical user mass applies to file sharing systems because it didn't pertain to the topic of the comment. So please, don't flame me with a comment how widget-driven cars are the ideal solution, or that file sharing also depends on bandwidth. Nitpicking just wastes both of our time. On the other hand, valid comments are appreciated.
mcc writes: Would the "give poor performance and kill the CPU" argument still hold for those of us who use modems primarily for file transfer, and never run anything more interaction-intensive than IRC
Well, assuming that the sources know what they are talking about, then no. The winmodem can't suck up enough cpu/memory so that games would take a hit, therefore, we must assume that the overhead a winmodem imposes on a system is rather small. (Which makes some sense, since cheap winmodems work on a p133 or so.) Therefore, if you are running something less intensive then a 3d online game, presumably, you have the resources to spare for a winmodem. Thus, if a winmodem cost you less then a hardware modem, you come out ahead.
Just my $.02
It wasn't the fact that they didn't carry them that upset me, it was the fact that they didn't know what they were.
On the other hand, BestBuy does carry sound cards, hard drives, and video cards, last time I checked, as well as ethernet cards and modems.
You don't like Best Buy because of the rebates? That's like saying you don't like a root canal because its hard to find parking at the dentist. I'm surprized that you even succeeded in buying stuff at the store, I find it rather difficult to do that.
Recent Phone Call
Me: Dial number, listen to automated voice, punch in extension for computer department, get placed on hold and listen to muzak, finally get phone picked up. Hello, do you carry heatsinks?
Him: (Sounds very confused) Heatsinks?
Me: Yes, a piece of metal, often aluminum, that sits on top of a cpu and is designed to dissipate heat. Usually it will have a small fan attached to it.
Him: (Sounding even more confused) I don't think we stock any computers that come with them, and I don't think we carry them seperately.
BestBuy makes me wonder... Sure, their stuff might be relatively cheap (at least in my area), but they don't carry quality parts and they don't have the technical expertise backing them up. Its lik walking into an auto parts store and asking about alternators, only to get a blank stare. *Sigh* These places do not deserve business.
If I posted a comment to slashdot about linux not having a decent GUI or not being able to operate on a wide variety of hardware, I'd be flamed out of existance. However, I can easily post about windows being unstable and frequently BSODing, even though I haven't had a problem with BSODs on a properly configured machine, and win2k doesn't seem to need to reboot. Things that were true 5 years ago aren't true today. Linux does have some very nice desktops, runs on most hardware (although cutting edge still might be a problem), and windows has gained a lot of stability since the win95 days.
Windows does have its faults, but if you want to start ranting about stability you sound like a bunch of linux zealots without a clue. Anecdotal evidence does not prove a point. If it did, I could "prove" that linux "sucks", since I've seen my gnome desktop crash more then a few times, and I've managed to crash and trash the hard disk of a redhat 6.2 install as an unprivilaged user repeatedly. (A recent release of ADOM would always do this when I tried to save and exit).
Don't be afraid to admit that windows does have some good points. We don't have to promote linux by tearing down the competition, its much better to promote linux by its own merits.
As for your problems, there is a registry hack to unload *.dlls after you close a program, it helps to free up resources (especially mem usage). Also, if you have been getting a lot of BSOD, check your setup, something is wrong with the box somewhere. Its my humble opinion that a stable windows box should have few, if any, bsods.
Tux vs BSD devil.
(Makes me almost want to take up claymation or computer modeling.)
Scientists realize that an astroid is a relatively large gravitational body and can be used in a manner consistant with newtonian physics to adjusts the earth's orbit. Wowee.
No offense, but what goddessses? Ayeka is a princess, Ryoko is a space pirate (half mass(sp?)/half Washuu according to the OAV), Kiyone (who wasn't in the OAVs) is just a normal alien, AFAIK, and so is Mihoshi. Ryo-ohki is also not a goddess, and Washuu is presumably another normal alien, since it mentions her going to school and having a child in the series. Maybe you are mixing up your anime.
Oh well, just another quibble.
AFAIK, they "discover" planets by looking for a doppler shift in the star's light that the planet causes by "tugging" the star as it orbits around it. Therefore, large planets are easier to discover then small planets.
Agreed, I'm waiting for someone to give a free nytimes login name/password. Until then, does someone want to explain what "synchronized" orbits are? The only thing I can think of is two planets, in different orbits, with revolutions around the parent sun of equal length. Or else two planets in the same orbit. The former sounds rather impossible if I understand elementary astrophysics,although I admit that I'm a tad weak in that field. :) The latter sounds possible, I haven't heard it being done with two planets, but Jupiter in our solar system does have groups of astroids just before and just after its position in orbit. *Sigh* Next time, give details when posting!
I sat down with pen, paper, and a calculator, and figured it out, using my extrodonary mental powers. It says "first post". :)
I am not an electrical engineer or an expert at electronics, however I am familiar with some arcade machines, being well entrenched in the emultion scene. The ROM images of the recent games out there are only a few meg, I doubt you'd see any images of more then 100 megs, even with recent games, and old games were alot less, many not even reaching 1 meg. So why not encrypt the data using pgp or another strong encryption scheme, and then at boot, where some of the games run through a long boot sequence anyways, decode the information and store it in RAM? Not sure if the games main processor would be able to decode it fast enough, but a dedicated cpu and circuit should.
Just my $.02
No offense, but the question "Why should anybody use Linux" is legit. This isn't meant to be flamebait, however, some members of the linux community give the impression that the only reason people should use linux is because Linux Torvalds is an all knowing, all caring benevolent god, and Bill Gates is evil incarnate. If you want to advocate linux, stick to discussing linux's benefits, such as its stability, and openess of code/standards. Be willing to compromise, for some people, windows is going to be the better choice of opperating system, and some people will want to stick with apple, or BeOS. Admit that linux does have its faults, its not the most user-friendly operating system, and it does have a problem supporting some hardware. Alienating vast segments of the population by being rude and condescending will not convince more people to use linux. Saying that you should use linux because "windows sucks, linux rules" is not really a valid argument, no matter what you may think.
Oh well, just my $.02
PurpleBob writes Yes, nethack is fun in a retro sort of way, but there's higher standards now.
Warning: Rant Ahead
Thank you, you hit a bitter nerve, and helped give me more proof that the average consumer is an idiot. You have proved that eye candy is more desirable then quality, although you aren't the first to do so. In my humble opinion, Diablo was the really shitty Nethack clone with prettier pictures and worse gameplay. Pretty pictures can be nice, but in the end, I will return to the well designed world.
Games can be open source, they can be GPL, and at least the one in this link has been running on linux for several years now.
Lets say Joe Blow is too self-centered to do this for the good of others, there is still a simple solution. Make a kickass screen saver and explain in the terms of use that it is free, but it uses spare CPU cycles to do distributing computing.
In short, use Joe Blow's greed against him, give it away for free, and stick the distributing computing aspect of it somewhere in a click-through agreement. If he's like most people out there, he won't even know its there.
Let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Maybe Microsoft (as a whole) isn't racist, it could just be a few bad apples. Microsoft is a large company with many employees, the odds are good that sooner or later they will hire a racist employee, and if there aren't enough complaints, how will they know there is a problem.
Also, the technology field is not a field for the poor, and poverty does tend to fall upon minorities and women (especially single women with children). I'm white and male myself, but I grew up in a single-parent household, my first computer I owned was a 286 I bought for myself around 5 years ago. School gave me enough experience with computers to learn BASIC, but not much more. Everything I learned I was self-taught, and if I was going to enter the technical field now (and I'm considering it), I would probably go for a MSCE and a little training to be a network admin, since it needs little schooling and jobs are available. Pay might not be great, but its money. Now with such training, I might be qualified to staff Microsoft's help lines or sweep the floors, not much more. I'm sure not going to be a code monkey on Whistler or Office 2002.
Continuing to be a devil's advocate, I would ask for hard evidence of racial bias, for example, having two employees of equal skill and training, and picking the white employee consistantly for advances in position, and raises in pay, and the employee has to be high-ranking enough for these to be the company's decision, and not a rotten boss's decision. Alternatively, if you could show me that valid complaints against bad bosses were brought to management's attention and ignored, you could prove to me that Microsoft is racist. Otherwise, the problem didn't exist, or its the occasional racist employee that management doesn't know about
Just my $.02
Actually, on a x86 machine, it is possible to change your BIOS screen's logo, unfortunately, I believe its bios dependent, and there is no collection of howto's that lists several bioses (biosi?). A google search with your bios and a few other keywords ("change splash screen" or "change image" seems to work) should find it if its possible and a common bios.
Well we are on the subject...
To change Microsoft Windows startup/shutdown screen, do a search for logo.sys (boot), logow.sys (please wait...), and logos.sys (its now safe to...). Back them up, and then replace them with a 256 color bitmap with dimensions of 320 (width) x 400 (height). To remove the annoying startup screen (like I did) just download Tweak UI which can be found at Microsoft's website (its one of their powertools, and a free download). Tweak UI does a couple of other nice tricks, its worth hunting down if you need to use windows. www.regedit.com has a list of other things to customize with windows.
Under linux, I wouldn't want to do a change like this, the information is rather useful that's displayed, and I'd hate for the dang image to cover up the error messages, it seems rather counter-productive.
You, me, and probably a significant amount of slashdot users want some sort of information in webpages, rather then just eye-candy, but I'm guessing that most users want pretty pictures with a minimal amount of useful information. I have never met a website with static content that needed anything more then pure html, and I must praise sites like slashdot that have dynamic content that is handled on the server side, and not by my computer. However, I am the exception here, stuff like flash is popular, so even if I refuse to download and install the plugin, I'm guessing many other people do. After graphical browsers and the AOLers, you were misleading yourself if you expected anything with more information then a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode.
Oh well, I still have lynx. Speeds up websurfing, and is more enjoyable for 90% of the pages I visit.
Just my $.02
The "new" Celeron is at 100 mhz bus speed, the "old" Celery officially runs at 66 mhz. Now my questions are (a) does this mean that the new Celery will give 150% the performance of an old Celery at the same clock speed?, and (b) is this new Celery that is released at 100 mhz any faster then a Celery that has been OC'ed to a 100 mhz bus. Can some knowledgable person give me an answer? Thanks in advance. Oh, and I know the answer to (a) is rather complicated and depends on what the computer is being used for, just give a detailed answer. :)
(I have the strange craving for vegetables now and some nice dip...)
Anyone with a knowledge of electricity can build an EMP gun. I remember a website on the internet showing how one was built out of a telsa coil with an aluminum foil reflector, powered by a 12 volt car battery and (IIRC) a coil. A google search can't find it, so I'm relying on memory, but the entire thing could be built with off the shelf parts, or even salvaged junk. In a test, it crashed a computer at 200 yards (computer rebooted without a problem). Now imagine a slightly more powerful version of this gun, still built with off-the-shelf components. Then stick it in a van, aim it out a tinted window (else the van's body will contain the pulse) and drive past a few government buildings, corperate offices, and banks. Its a wonderful terrorist/militia-freaks weapon, or a nice "prank" by a bunch of stupid kids. Its not far-fetched to think of an organized, coordinated attack on a country that has lots of electronics and has a sizeable terrorist element (Israel is probably at a big risk here).
:) Just kidding!
Anyways, whenever I hear about EMP weapons, I always think of the terrorist aspects of them.
Just my $.02
P.S.: A properly directed EMP gun can also stop annoying bragging about uptimes and stability.
Its simple, the normal automobiles that we have work, there is no need to innovate. Unless someone finds a loophole in physics to exploit anti-gravity, driving on a roadway will get you farther on a gallon of gasoline then flying above. Our roadway infrastructure in the US (and most developed countries) provides a perfect means from getting from point A to point B. The world is made for cars that run on the ground, few people would go through the added hassle and cost of buying a flying car if they did exist. The only thing that flying cars give us would be possibly more speed, and there is nothing that prevents us from raising the speed limit on Interstates to over 100 mph, ala the autoban. Sure, its not as fast as a jet flight, but its a lot cheaper for the daily commute. Expect to see more efficient engines, softer rides, more "luxeries" in the cab. The industry knows that flying cars won't sell, but these improvements will.
Btw, the same reasoning of "it works for most people" and "infrastructure already supports it" is why we will probably not see any 3D TV sets anytime soon but the 2D variety of TV will continue to improve in picture quality and sound quality.
Just my $.02