Imagine how I feel. I used to be the ubergeek of my friends, but my best box has an XP 1600+ now. I might upgrade it after Christmas, assuming either a) the announced layoffs don't happen or B) I get another job before the severance runs out. To be even more sad, my wife has a 266MHz Dell laptop and a K6-2/500 desktop, and all our files are on a Debian sever with a Celeron 300a. The #2 processor in our house is the Via C3-800 in the MAME machine.
Something like 90% of the energy needed to get to the Moon is spent just getting to low earth orbit. While it might be an interesting project, a Lagrange point space station isn't going to make space travel much cheaper. We've got to solve the "first 100 mile problem", to paraphrase the telecomm industry.
I can't say whether a space elevator is feasible, but it seems a more useful goal to shoot for. That, or some method of launch better than strapping on a shitload of explosives and lighting the fuse.
Do you use a label with your own account# for UPS to bill the actual shipping charges? I can't see how you would be able to accurately calculate the shipping cost without knowing the weight and box size, which would be difficult unless you're talking about buying CDs, DVDs, or something of a standard size/weight.
Also, you aren't considering that some sellers might be inflating the shipping by a few bucks to cover the cost of buying bubble wrap or a box or padded mailer.
Basically, if you've placed a bid of $X on an item that has plainly stated in the auction description "add $15 for shipping and handling", and you send the seller $X and a $6 UPS shipping label (without contacting them to discuss the arrangements), you aren't holding up your end of the bargain. In this case, I think they'd be justified in refusing to deal with you. Of course, if they're really overcharging $10 for shipping, you probably don't want to deal with them in the first place.
Obviously someone thinks so, the post is a 5, Funny and I didn't even use my karma bonus. Of course,/. moderators have been known to hit the crack pipe a time or two!
Windows NT based systems have extremely stable NTFS support, far more stable than any journaling file system currently in popular use in linux.
More stable than SGI's XFS or IBM's JFS? Perhaps AS stable, but I'd have to see some evidence before believing that either of those fs's fall short of NTFS. I guess those might not fit your criteria of "popular use", though.
Seriously though, I have three XP machines at home and use NTFS on all three of them, so I am aware that it's a decent file system. The joke was just so obvious, though, that I had to jump on it.
Ah, ok. I haven't dealt with a disc with multiple titles yet. I'll keep those issues in mind.
One thing I was hoping to do at some point was take some of the Baby Einstein discs, which are pretty short, and try to combine two or more of them onto one DVD-R, with a simple menu to choose which title to watch. Can Recode do that, or how would you go about it? I've had my burner less than a week, and obviously you've done your research, so I'd appreciate any advice. My email should be accessible above if you want to take this increasingly off-topic thread off of/..
one additional one that is quite important: you can remove certain titlesets, replacing them with a blank screen or a message stating that "This title has been removed."
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how is that important? Besides, I was under the impression that you could remove pretty much anything you want with DVD Shrink anyway.
Not to mention that DVD Shrink is free, and handles CSS and RCE with no hoops through which to jump.
Dude, it's a Disney movie. Of course the main character's mom gets whacked in the first 5 minutes. Of course, it's 100% irrelevant to the plot, and could hardly spoil the movie.
Of course, that wouldn't be worth $5k to me (I have a $1500 HD-ready* CRT RPTV), but some people have different priorities, I guess.
* - at the time I bought it, models with included tuners were $1000 more, and no stations were broadcasting digitally in our area. I recently picked up a Samsung tuner for $200 on eBay now that we have a few. SEC football in HD on CBS was awesome.
I'm able to skip all the previews (all 1.8GB of them) on the full-frame version of Finding Nemo, but I think the FBI warning is unskippable. You can skip the THX trailer, but if you hit skip when the Disney logo comes up, you end up in Chapter 2 after Nemo's mom dies. Luckily the widescreen version has no previews. That's the only Disney movie we own, unless you count the Baby Einstein stuff, which is still untarnished with previews and unskippable crap.
If you get a DVD burner for your PC for Christmas, Google for 'DVD Shrink' - it's a pretty simple program that lets you re-author the DVD without the previews, menus, and extras. You can also get rid of extraneous audio tracks and/or subtitles, or even recompress the video if you need to, to get a dual-layer DVD to fit on a single-layer DVD-R.
Granted, all this crap shouldn't be be necessary. You'd think of all companies Disney would be sensitive to the needs of parents and their kids, but in reality their only sensitivity is to profits. Too bad we're all too spineless to just not buy their products until they give us what WE want.
Is it even possible to boot Linux from FAT32? I guess you could load the kernel with Grub, and if init was a single file or E.g. busybox that would sort of work, but sooner or later the inability to create symlinks or properly set file permisions would surely cause problems.
Typically nothing is in / but directories. You mount proc on/proc, devfs on/dev, then mount $FILESYSTEM_OF_CHOICE on/lib,/bin,/sbin,/etc,/usr,/var,/home, and so forth. Actually some of those might be safe to have on FAT32. I think it would be doable, but not advisable.
Linux still runs on FAT32 itself, though the Open Source community continuously claims to be more innovative, etc..
Umm, no. Linux can read/write FAT32 filesystems, but typically it is installed on ext2 or ext3 filesystems. Or XFS, or Reiser, or JFS, or.... Basically, anything which supports Unix-like permissions. Does anyone still use the old Minix filesystem?
In theory I guess you could install it on FAT32, but it would be horribly insecure and very kludgey since FAT32 won't support permissions, symlinks, device nodes, sparse files, and probably some other necessities that I'm forgetting right now.
Actually, I have another use for it. Back when I had a Win98 dual-boot box, I could run Quake III under Linux with a symlink for the PAK0.PK3 file pointing to my FAT32 partition. On my current XP/Linux box with an NTFS partition, it didn't work - I had to copy the file to my ext3 partition, wasting a scad of diskspace. I'm guessing that QIII opens the.PK3 files r/w and errors out if that fails.
Yes, it is different. There's no attempt to "lock-in". You don't have to use the added features of the GNU tools, you can even get rid of them and install BSD versions if you want. It's nothing like what Microsoft did with LDAP and Kerberos to create Active Directory, for example.
Also, we weren't talking about code re-use here. If you are trying to compare GNU to Microsoft and complaining that you can't re-use the code in a non-GPL program, I'll listen when Microsoft lets me *see* the source code to Windows, much less re-use it in my own software under ANY license.
He meant X as a variable, not as in the X windows system. Thats why he defined X.
Umm, it's called a joke. I'm sure it's a tough concept when you first encounter it, but it's well worth the effort. Anyway, his "definition" was the following:
X is something into which a great deal of time/work/hope has been invested.
As far as I can tell, that could just as easily mean X the window manager. Besides, X(Free86, specifically) is just about the most-attacked open source project, so I could almost see someone legitimately being confused. Maybe that's why you missed the humor?
Quit worrying, guys. By the time the analog TV transmitters are turned off, which will probably be 2010 at the rate things are going, you'll be able to buy an HD tuner from one of us "early adopters" on eBay for $10. You don't need a new TV, most of the tuners will downconvert to NTSC so as long as you have a video input on your TV you're fine.
I have formulated a law, I call it the Law of Brooks. It states that no conversation can go beyond a certain length of time, or any online discussion beyond a certain number of posts, without a perfect opportunity to reference or quote a Mel Brooks film popping up. I haven't yet determined the numbers involved, but I think they're astonishingly small.
So nexium avoids telling you all the bad stuff it does, while at the same time implying their pill solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything...without actually saying that it solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
It seems like such a thing would be the ebola of computer viruses and some hacker would have wanted to stake a claim on that one.
Well, it would have the same evolutionary disadvantage as ebola - it's too deadly. A better idea would have to be less obvious. You don't want to send an email to everyone on the address book at once, that draws attention to the virus. It would be better to attack by stealth, through open IP ports with insecure services running, but if you must go email, spread slowly so as not to draw undue attention. Also, you don't want to kill the host immediately. Give your virus time to spread and infect other machines. You want to write the HIV of computer viruses, not the ebola.
Finally, I'd suggest killing the host in a way that makes it obvious that it is the work of a virus. Just writing random garbage to the FAT and rebooting is too much like standard operating procedure for Windows.
Re:Taking a moment for clarification.
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The behavior that you have described when applied to other organizations is called "embrace and extend" and is univerally derided by the slashbot crowd.
Well, not exactly. The GNU tools don't do anything to lock you in to their way of doing things. Most, if not all, can operate in backwards-compatible mode just like the traditional Unix tools. If you don't use the GNU features, your shell scripts should run unmodified on other Unix variants in most cases.
This is far, far different from the Microsoft embrace-and-extend philosophy, whose goal is to lock you into Microsoft tools by NOT being compatible with anyone else's version of the same tool.
1) The last PC game I bought was Quake III for Linux. I paid $4 at E.B. after Loki went out of business. Wait, that's not true, I paid $5 for Madden 2003 at Toys-R-Us the other day, I just haven't gotten around to playing it yet. And you're right, there is no way in hell I would spend $40 on a PC game.
2) Ah hah, so *you're* the one responsible for the RIAA not making as much money as they want! How dare you listen to old music, thus depriving poor starving Britney of her well-deserved money?:)
I might also point out that the RIAA's wet dream would be to make you pay by pushing music to pay-per-listen and having DRM make your older music expire. Then we'll have to pay up or do without music entirely, and you won't be able to avoid spending the money just by listening to your old CDs.
And where are the $10 CDs? Besides in the bargain bin, the last home of musicians so bad that even their mothers didn't buy a copy? $15-20 is more like the norm now.
Seriously, they are not overpriced! They are already cheap!
The cost of manufacture is in the neighborhood of $0.10 and the artists and composers get about $0.40 (some of which goes to pay back the record company loan which covered recording and production costs, which is why I'm not including those costs here). A couple bucks go to the retailer. So yes, they are overpriced, at least in terms of their real value.
I have an honest question for you, how much would you like CD's sold for, at what price would you buy them?
For me, about $5-10, depending on how good the music is. Luckily, the used market makes this possible. Unfortunately, there's no reasonable way to acquire a single song if you don't want an entire CD (singles are priced about $5 now I think, and there's no used market). I think this is the real reason piracy is so rampant, and why iTunes is so succesful. After all, $10 for a lossy, restricted album with no physical medium or artwork isn't a great deal, but $1 for a single beats anything available in the record store.
By the way, nice Slashdot name, it really shows me what kind of attitude you have in general, a piss poor one!
Strong words coming from Anonymous Coward. By the way, with the economy in its current state, you might not want to make comments like "get a REAL JOB", lest irony bite you in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine how I feel. I used to be the ubergeek of my friends, but my best box has an XP 1600+ now. I might upgrade it after Christmas, assuming either a) the announced layoffs don't happen or B) I get another job before the severance runs out. To be even more sad, my wife has a 266MHz Dell laptop and a K6-2/500 desktop, and all our files are on a Debian sever with a Celeron 300a. The #2 processor in our house is the Via C3-800 in the MAME machine.
Something like 90% of the energy needed to get to the Moon is spent just getting to low earth orbit. While it might be an interesting project, a Lagrange point space station isn't going to make space travel much cheaper. We've got to solve the "first 100 mile problem", to paraphrase the telecomm industry.
I can't say whether a space elevator is feasible, but it seems a more useful goal to shoot for. That, or some method of launch better than strapping on a shitload of explosives and lighting the fuse.
Go ask Soviet Russia :-)
What if Soviet Russia asks ME first?
Do you use a label with your own account# for UPS to bill the actual shipping charges? I can't see how you would be able to accurately calculate the shipping cost without knowing the weight and box size, which would be difficult unless you're talking about buying CDs, DVDs, or something of a standard size/weight.
Also, you aren't considering that some sellers might be inflating the shipping by a few bucks to cover the cost of buying bubble wrap or a box or padded mailer.
Basically, if you've placed a bid of $X on an item that has plainly stated in the auction description "add $15 for shipping and handling", and you send the seller $X and a $6 UPS shipping label (without contacting them to discuss the arrangements), you aren't holding up your end of the bargain. In this case, I think they'd be justified in refusing to deal with you. Of course, if they're really overcharging $10 for shipping, you probably don't want to deal with them in the first place.
Wow you dissed windows, you are SO COOL!
/. moderators have been known to hit the crack pipe a time or two!
Obviously someone thinks so, the post is a 5, Funny and I didn't even use my karma bonus. Of course,
Windows NT based systems have extremely stable NTFS support, far more stable than any journaling
file system currently in popular use in linux.
More stable than SGI's XFS or IBM's JFS? Perhaps AS stable, but I'd have to see some evidence before believing that either of those fs's fall short of NTFS. I guess those might not fit your criteria of "popular use", though.
Seriously though, I have three XP machines at home and use NTFS on all three of them, so I am aware that it's a decent file system. The joke was just so obvious, though, that I had to jump on it.
Ah, ok. I haven't dealt with a disc with multiple titles yet. I'll keep those issues in mind.
/..
One thing I was hoping to do at some point was take some of the Baby Einstein discs, which are pretty short, and try to combine two or more of them onto one DVD-R, with a simple menu to choose which title to watch. Can Recode do that, or how would you go about it? I've had my burner less than a week, and obviously you've done your research, so I'd appreciate any advice. My email should be accessible above if you want to take this increasingly off-topic thread off of
one additional one that is quite important: you can remove certain titlesets, replacing them with a blank screen or a message stating that "This title has been removed."
Perhaps I'm missing something, but how is that important? Besides, I was under the impression that you could remove pretty much anything you want with DVD Shrink anyway.
Not to mention that DVD Shrink is free, and handles CSS and RCE with no hoops through which to jump.
Dude, it's a Disney movie. Of course the main character's mom gets whacked in the first 5 minutes. Of course, it's 100% irrelevant to the plot, and could hardly spoil the movie.
You can't hang a 40" CRT on a wall.
Of course, that wouldn't be worth $5k to me (I have a $1500 HD-ready* CRT RPTV), but some people have different priorities, I guess.
* - at the time I bought it, models with included tuners were $1000 more, and no stations were broadcasting digitally in our area. I recently picked up a Samsung tuner for $200 on eBay now that we have a few. SEC football in HD on CBS was awesome.
I'm able to skip all the previews (all 1.8GB of them) on the full-frame version of Finding Nemo, but I think the FBI warning is unskippable. You can skip the THX trailer, but if you hit skip when the Disney logo comes up, you end up in Chapter 2 after Nemo's mom dies. Luckily the widescreen version has no previews. That's the only Disney movie we own, unless you count the Baby Einstein stuff, which is still untarnished with previews and unskippable crap.
If you get a DVD burner for your PC for Christmas, Google for 'DVD Shrink' - it's a pretty simple program that lets you re-author the DVD without the previews, menus, and extras. You can also get rid of extraneous audio tracks and/or subtitles, or even recompress the video if you need to, to get a dual-layer DVD to fit on a single-layer DVD-R.
Granted, all this crap shouldn't be be necessary. You'd think of all companies Disney would be sensitive to the needs of parents and their kids, but in reality their only sensitivity is to profits. Too bad we're all too spineless to just not buy their products until they give us what WE want.
Is it even possible to boot Linux from FAT32? I guess you could load the kernel with Grub, and if init was a single file or E.g. busybox that would sort of work, but sooner or later the inability to create symlinks or properly set file permisions would surely cause problems.
/proc, devfs on /dev, then mount $FILESYSTEM_OF_CHOICE on /lib, /bin, /sbin, /etc, /usr, /var, /home, and so forth. Actually some of those might be safe to have on FAT32. I think it would be doable, but not advisable.
Typically nothing is in / but directories. You mount proc on
Linux still runs on FAT32 itself, though the Open Source community continuously claims to be more innovative, etc..
Umm, no. Linux can read/write FAT32 filesystems, but typically it is installed on ext2 or ext3 filesystems. Or XFS, or Reiser, or JFS, or.... Basically, anything which supports Unix-like permissions. Does anyone still use the old Minix filesystem?
In theory I guess you could install it on FAT32, but it would be horribly insecure and very kludgey since FAT32 won't support permissions, symlinks, device nodes, sparse files, and probably some other necessities that I'm forgetting right now.
If it's as stable at reading/writing as Windows, then this will be a great hack.
Man, talk about setting your expectations low....
Actually, I have another use for it. Back when I had a Win98 dual-boot box, I could run Quake III under Linux with a symlink for the PAK0.PK3 file pointing to my FAT32 partition. On my current XP/Linux box with an NTFS partition, it didn't work - I had to copy the file to my ext3 partition, wasting a scad of diskspace. I'm guessing that QIII opens the .PK3 files r/w and errors out if that fails.
Yes, it is different. There's no attempt to "lock-in". You don't have to use the added features of the GNU tools, you can even get rid of them and install BSD versions if you want. It's nothing like what Microsoft did with LDAP and Kerberos to create Active Directory, for example.
Also, we weren't talking about code re-use here. If you are trying to compare GNU to Microsoft and complaining that you can't re-use the code in a non-GPL program, I'll listen when Microsoft lets me *see* the source code to Windows, much less re-use it in my own software under ANY license.
He meant X as a variable, not as in the X windows system. Thats why he defined X.
Umm, it's called a joke. I'm sure it's a tough concept when you first encounter it, but it's well worth the effort. Anyway, his "definition" was the following:
X is something into which a great deal of time/work/hope has been invested.
As far as I can tell, that could just as easily mean X the window manager. Besides, X(Free86, specifically) is just about the most-attacked open source project, so I could almost see someone legitimately being confused. Maybe that's why you missed the humor?
Quit worrying, guys. By the time the analog TV transmitters are turned off, which will probably be 2010 at the rate things are going, you'll be able to buy an HD tuner from one of us "early adopters" on eBay for $10. You don't need a new TV, most of the tuners will downconvert to NTSC so as long as you have a video input on your TV you're fine.
I have formulated a law, I call it the Law of Brooks. It states that no conversation can go beyond a certain length of time, or any online discussion beyond a certain number of posts, without a perfect opportunity to reference or quote a Mel Brooks film popping up. I haven't yet determined the numbers involved, but I think they're astonishingly small.
So nexium avoids telling you all the bad stuff it does, while at the same time implying their pill solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything...without actually saying that it solves the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
I don't need a pill to tell me it's 42!
It seems like such a thing would be the ebola of computer viruses and some hacker would have wanted to stake a claim on that one.
Well, it would have the same evolutionary disadvantage as ebola - it's too deadly. A better idea would have to be less obvious. You don't want to send an email to everyone on the address book at once, that draws attention to the virus. It would be better to attack by stealth, through open IP ports with insecure services running, but if you must go email, spread slowly so as not to draw undue attention. Also, you don't want to kill the host immediately. Give your virus time to spread and infect other machines. You want to write the HIV of computer viruses, not the ebola.
Finally, I'd suggest killing the host in a way that makes it obvious that it is the work of a virus. Just writing random garbage to the FAT and rebooting is too much like standard operating procedure for Windows.
The behavior that you have described when applied to other organizations is called "embrace and extend" and is univerally derided by the slashbot crowd.
Well, not exactly. The GNU tools don't do anything to lock you in to their way of doing things. Most, if not all, can operate in backwards-compatible mode just like the traditional Unix tools. If you don't use the GNU features, your shell scripts should run unmodified on other Unix variants in most cases.
This is far, far different from the Microsoft embrace-and-extend philosophy, whose goal is to lock you into Microsoft tools by NOT being compatible with anyone else's version of the same tool.
1) The last PC game I bought was Quake III for Linux. I paid $4 at E.B. after Loki went out of business. Wait, that's not true, I paid $5 for Madden 2003 at Toys-R-Us the other day, I just haven't gotten around to playing it yet. And you're right, there is no way in hell I would spend $40 on a PC game.
:)
2) Ah hah, so *you're* the one responsible for the RIAA not making as much money as they want! How dare you listen to old music, thus depriving poor starving Britney of her well-deserved money?
I might also point out that the RIAA's wet dream would be to make you pay by pushing music to pay-per-listen and having DRM make your older music expire. Then we'll have to pay up or do without music entirely, and you won't be able to avoid spending the money just by listening to your old CDs.
Yes, hence "what we'd been saying" as opposed to "what we've been saying".
Well, at least he's old & will (hopefully) die soon.
That's what we'd been saying about Strom Thurmond for the last fifty years.
If you can't afford 10-15 bucks for a CD
And where are the $10 CDs? Besides in the bargain bin, the last home of musicians so bad that even their mothers didn't buy a copy? $15-20 is more like the norm now.
Seriously, they are not overpriced! They are already cheap!
The cost of manufacture is in the neighborhood of $0.10 and the artists and composers get about $0.40 (some of which goes to pay back the record company loan which covered recording and production costs, which is why I'm not including those costs here). A couple bucks go to the retailer. So yes, they are overpriced, at least in terms of their real value.
I have an honest question for you, how much would you like CD's sold for, at what price would you buy them?
For me, about $5-10, depending on how good the music is. Luckily, the used market makes this possible. Unfortunately, there's no reasonable way to acquire a single song if you don't want an entire CD (singles are priced about $5 now I think, and there's no used market). I think this is the real reason piracy is so rampant, and why iTunes is so succesful. After all, $10 for a lossy, restricted album with no physical medium or artwork isn't a great deal, but $1 for a single beats anything available in the record store.
By the way, nice Slashdot name, it really shows me what kind of attitude you have in general, a piss poor one!
Strong words coming from Anonymous Coward. By the way, with the economy in its current state, you might not want to make comments like "get a REAL JOB", lest irony bite you in the ass.