With a bit of patience and the pin-outs you could probably drive a 5.25" or 8" floppy with your USB floppy controller and a bit of hacking. The 5.25" was more-or-less pin-for-pin compatible with the 3.5" drives. And I'm pretty sure that the standard 5.25" HD drives were nearly electrically compatible with the 8" drives. I had a set of simple instructions to make a cable to hook a 5.25" drive to an 8" controller at one point (or was it vice versa) back in the days of Linux infancy. I never did try it - notgiveadamn got the best of me.
Capsaicin mixed with a lidocaine derivative produced an anesthetic that affected only pain transmitting neurons, without affecting motor neurons. The lidocaine derivative was unable to penetrate nerve cells on its own, but the capsaicin opened pores that are only present in pain neurons.
I read gmail via web at work, pop on my phone, pop & web at home. That means stupid effort to make sure that all the messages I've read are marked read everywhere, and that all the messages I haven't read get read without marking something read by habit. Worse - Gmail pop seems to have a tricky way of deciding what should or should not be downloaded. I've been hoping for GMail IMAP for ages, and praying for it ever since I got my e-mail friendly phone.
Actually, (IIRC) the driver has been sitting in somebody's desk drawer for months, waiting for AMDTI to bless it. The developer got the specs under NDA or something quite a while ago.
If every service / customer is independent of every other service / customer, then outages tend to stay small and simple. And with a simple, stupid datacenter your failure modes also tend to be simple and stupid. 99.999% uptime is often worth the cost to keep too many servers running.
I read another comment that explained the service a couple hours ago and checked it out. As far as I can see so far (many downloads later), the standard eMusic service is standard issue mp3s once they finally get delivered to disk -- down to a level that mpg123 is happily playing them. The only problem is that you have to use a 'special' download manager to get them first. There's a rather beta version of the download manager for Linux, but it's worked (just) well enough so far.
There's a lot of people that aren't going to love this service, since none of the majors have signed on. But there's a lot of indie and downright obscure stuff up here - for finding an obscure avant jazz title, it may sometimes be better than amazon.
Right now I'm in love. I've found records I was going to buy at the store this week, records that I wanted but couldn't justify paying $15 for, records that I was curious about, obscure jazz releases...
Then again, maybe Apple just hasn't released a patch for this yet. Dell calls this an URGENT update for the BIOS. Good bet that both MacOS and Linux are actually affected.
That's what I thought when I bought all my CDs - 5-8 years later when I looked to dump them onto a Nano, it turns out that most of them had a couple good songs and were otherwise disposable, even regrettable. You get older, you grow up, you get over yourself.
Eh - 4/3rds just isn't an especially lovable standard. It pushes the sensor size a bit smaller than a lot of DSLR people would really like to see. I'd have to use some pretty ridiculously wide lenses to get a decently wide Field Of View. The 1.5x crop sensors that the rest of the DSLR makers (Nikon / Canon / Pentax) use are already a bit small.
I could almost forgive the small sensors if the manufacturers were really doing nice, innovative things with them, but the 4/3rds cameras are (unless I've missed something) staying relatively clunky/large, and features like live preview aren't being done well yet.
The Inquirer had these numbers a couple of weeks ago friday, newegg adjusted by the following Monday, and this past friday, the local Frys flogged me a retail boxed AM2 3800x2 EE and a cheap motherboard for $90 - which feels like it Must have cost SOMEBODY money.
Yes - but it did it erased the noise at the cost of destroying the texture of the baby's terrycloth bib and softening several wrinkles in the background cloth in the upper left quadrant. Maybe other people can turn down the filter and get better results, but very few of the examples are acceptable. The swirly pattern that it introduces in fact gives me an almost physiological nausea.
Agreed on the k100. The image stabilization is just this side of a miracle. The price is entirely fair. The kit lens is not brilliant, but good. Damn thing just feels good in my hand. Pentax lens selection isn't great, but for the interested amateur I think it serves. More- I grabbed a 20 year old 50mm lens that had been mouldering in my closet; it doesn't quite Just Work, but it's a hell of a lot of fun to have a classic all-manual with an aperture ring and wide, smooth manual focus ring snapped onto a brand new, gee-whiz digicam.
I really liked using the black marker system on my ballot this morning, with one exception. It took a long time to fill out properly. Not a problem running down the front of the ballot, but my eyes started swimming half way through the judicial retentions.
OH! You've "went to law school". You do realize that on Slashdot, claiming IAAL and a couple bux might buy you a cup of bad coffee. But GOD! they might throw in a doughnut for 70 cents if it weren't for idiots like him who forget to admit they're not lawyers until the end of their Slashdot posts!
-Wait... http is a goddamn simple transport to parse/proxy. -Even if it weren't, web browsers aren't supposed to let websites talk to hardware unless I let them.
So I'm going to have to sign up to make the web not be anonymous. Even if I don't actually get to opt in, I can opt out. Remind me why I'm supposed to get worked up. Just like any good Evangelical Christian would tell you: 1> If you take the mark of the beast you're going to hell. 2> There will be things that you will have trouble doing if you don't take the mark of the beast. 3> but that doesn't mean you have to take the mark.
No. I've got a Nano now. The screen is the same size as my phone. The phone has very light scratching after a month. The nano has significant scratching in 48 hours.
I've had my nano for 36 hours now. I don't mind if the body of it gets scratched up a bit, it's a tool for me, not a fetish object. But I've inadvertently dropped my cig lighter in the same pocket with my nano a couple times, and each time the nano comes away with significant scratches and scuffs on the screen. I'm not running around, I'm hardly moving and the screen is being very quickly damaged. I'm afraid that even if I am hyper-cautious of it, the screen will be unreadable within a few weeks.
I treat my cell phone like shit, it looks fine under worse conditions, same for my pager, same for my other mp3 player. The MP3 player even has dents in it by now. But, while I treat these electronics like shit, there are no noticable scratches on the screens. But even with extreme caution, the screen on my Nano will soon be illegible. THIS IS UNNACCEPTABLE.
Yeah, but I've been doing linux installs for 10 or 12 years, back when they used to be truly heinous. Fresh FC4 install for me from CD was not the worst, but it was BAD!
-Install using a NORMAL, MANUAL partition scheme crashed the graphical installer. I had to use the text-mode installer. -After install finished, grub was set up to pass the wrong command-line options, so booting required intervention. -yum --update (or equiv, I don't have a FC box handy) overwrote some GPG signature file. This broke yum for future updates. Yes, it asked me, but the update wouldn't go forward without loading the md5 file. So we're back to being FSCKED! At least I didn't have to put a lot of effort into configuring yum. Big improvement. -Migrating my backed up home directory, I managed to log in sucessfully the 1st time with GDM. After that, the session would crash on login for obscure reasons until I zapped.g*. again. -Why are all these GODDAMN DAEMONS running? -And WHY doesn't the default FC package manager give me at least the OPTION of seeing all the available/installed packages so I can decide for MYSELF what to install. OH!!! I just remembered, FC3 had rpmdrake, which worked for that. Maybe FC4 will have it too? I'll have to try it when I get home. -My atmel wireless card has a config for PCMCIA, but no firmware RPM that I can find, even looking over YUM. There better not be, I made sure it was installed while I was running the installer, and damned if it didn't work when booting from the installer CD.
My ancient orinoco card is not configured in PCMCIA, but if you read the right bits of/var/log/messages and have done this before, you can make it work pretty easily. -I think I passed the kernel the acpi=force option in grub. Which is why the kernel tells me I need to pass the acpi=force option to enable acpi, right? ---
I haven't even begun to play with laptop features, fancy new hardware, or hoary old hardware on FC4. It's supposed to be a GDDMN mature distro. So Why TF did I spend hours trying to get to even a moderately operational install?
Ah! It can't be coincidental that git looks like monotone when Linus' first announcement that he's dropping bitkeeper sez: look at monotone. But those differences are important:
-It lacks the sql db of course so it lacks the overhead of talking to the SQL db. -it stores whole files instead of deltas so there's no overhead from diff (in exchange for slightly more time to compress). -there are no certs. And I'm too lazy to find out what they mean by certs, but I wager the cert concept can be mapped to an rsync concept readily. -And rsync takes care of the network replication. because nobody has a monotone client on their desk, but everybody who matters has rsync.
Every change makes monotone faster, and easier to work with for someone with the kernel-developer mindset (notice: the linux kernel has drivers for a hell of a lot of things, but no SQL client yet), if at the expense of disk space and flexibility.
Hell, everyone else has chimed in, why not me: I run a little 333 lapper for browsing at home, a p3 550 on my desk at work, and a beefy athlon laptop for misc. Things take longer to load, true... openoffice and *bird are beasts, but once they're running I don't really care what computer I'm on very much until I start running out of ram.
The kernel bloat issue is a total non-starter for v2.6 over 2.4. The stuff that's been added to the kernel has either IMPROVED desktop performance across the board, or added drivers. And you want sound to work when you buy a new computer, right?
I mean, sure, 2.6 isn't going to run on a 4MB 16 MHZ 386 like it did when I started using linux, at least without aggressive tuning, but on any hardware made in the last 10 years or so there's nothing better, at least after a little bit of tuning.
There's something to the stability argument for branching a new kernel, but with every distro shipping their own custom-patched kernel, whatever legitimate problems introduced to existing features (and I haven't seen many) is compensated for by the fact you don't have to build your own kernel to get features/drivers that were added to dev two years ago but never made it back to the stable tree.
I believe (it's been an astonishingly long time, but I used to care) that the Kaypro 16 ran MS-DOS. The kaypro II / IV were the first kaypro gen. The next gen were the 2, 4 and 10 (the 10 had a 10 MB hard drive), which boosted the CPU speed from 2 to 4 MHZ IIRC, moved from full to half-height floppies, and improved the display rom. The 1 was the last of the Kaypro z80 production machines, assembled from whatever parts were lying around the office, and moving the disk mounting from horizontal to vertical.
The Kaypro z80 machines were fairly basic single-board machines with no expansion slots, etc. The 16 retained the same form factor but instead mounted a 4 slot ISA backplane with the CPU mounted on one board on the backplane, which had to be a fairly significant challenge to do while leaving room for 2 half-height 5.25" disk drives.
Finally, not long before they died, kaypro released a laptop, the model 2000, which was a sleek little mother for it's day, with a brushed aluminum case. I'd say it was the best looking computer I've seen prior to recent generations of Powerbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
With a bit of patience and the pin-outs you could probably drive a 5.25" or 8" floppy with your USB floppy controller and a bit of hacking. The 5.25" was more-or-less pin-for-pin compatible with the 3.5" drives. And I'm pretty sure that the standard 5.25" HD drives were nearly electrically compatible with the 8" drives. I had a set of simple instructions to make a cable to hook a 5.25" drive to an 8" controller at one point (or was it vice versa) back in the days of Linux infancy. I never did try it - notgiveadamn got the best of me.
Interesting note (that I heard about this in a more reputable place... Nature?): per http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Capsaicin_Mixed_with_Lidocaine_Gives_Less_Risky_Anesthetic_09293.html
Capsaicin mixed with a lidocaine derivative produced an anesthetic that affected only pain transmitting neurons, without affecting motor neurons. The lidocaine derivative was unable to penetrate nerve cells on its own, but the capsaicin opened pores that are only present in pain neurons.
IANAD, and only in rats for now.
I read gmail via web at work, pop on my phone, pop & web at home. That means stupid effort to make sure that all the messages I've read are marked read everywhere, and that all the messages I haven't read get read without marking something read by habit. Worse - Gmail pop seems to have a tricky way of deciding what should or should not be downloaded. I've been hoping for GMail IMAP for ages, and praying for it ever since I got my e-mail friendly phone.
Actually, (IIRC) the driver has been sitting in somebody's desk drawer for months, waiting for AMDTI to bless it. The developer got the specs under NDA or something quite a while ago.
What a Country!
Why? Reliability!!!
If every service / customer is independent of every other service / customer, then outages tend to stay small and simple. And with a simple, stupid datacenter your failure modes also tend to be simple and stupid. 99.999% uptime is often worth the cost to keep too many servers running.
When they offer that information free over the wire unencrypted, $6.33 will be too much to pay for it.
I read another comment that explained the service a couple hours ago and checked it out. As far as I can see so far (many downloads later), the standard eMusic service is standard issue mp3s once they finally get delivered to disk -- down to a level that mpg123 is happily playing them. The only problem is that you have to use a 'special' download manager to get them first. There's a rather beta version of the download manager for Linux, but it's worked (just) well enough so far.
There's a lot of people that aren't going to love this service, since none of the majors have signed on. But there's a lot of indie and downright obscure stuff up here - for finding an obscure avant jazz title, it may sometimes be better than amazon.
Right now I'm in love. I've found records I was going to buy at the store this week, records that I wanted but couldn't justify paying $15 for, records that I was curious about, obscure jazz releases...
Then again, maybe Apple just hasn't released a patch for this yet. Dell calls this an URGENT update for the BIOS. Good bet that both MacOS and Linux are actually affected.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
That's what I thought when I bought all my CDs - 5-8 years later when I looked to dump them onto a Nano, it turns out that most of them had a couple good songs and were otherwise disposable, even regrettable. You get older, you grow up, you get over yourself.
Eh - 4/3rds just isn't an especially lovable standard. It pushes the sensor size a bit smaller than a lot of DSLR people would really like to see. I'd have to use some pretty ridiculously wide lenses to get a decently wide Field Of View. The 1.5x crop sensors that the rest of the DSLR makers (Nikon / Canon / Pentax) use are already a bit small.
I could almost forgive the small sensors if the manufacturers were really doing nice, innovative things with them, but the 4/3rds cameras are (unless I've missed something) staying relatively clunky/large, and features like live preview aren't being done well yet.
That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The Inquirer had these numbers a couple of weeks ago friday, newegg adjusted by the following Monday, and this past friday, the local Frys flogged me a retail boxed AM2 3800x2 EE and a cheap motherboard for $90 - which feels like it Must have cost SOMEBODY money.
Yes - but it did it erased the noise at the cost of destroying the texture of the baby's terrycloth bib and softening several wrinkles in the background cloth in the upper left quadrant. Maybe other people can turn down the filter and get better results, but very few of the examples are acceptable. The swirly pattern that it introduces in fact gives me an almost physiological nausea.
Agreed on the k100. The image stabilization is just this side of a miracle. The price is entirely fair. The kit lens is not brilliant, but good. Damn thing just feels good in my hand. Pentax lens selection isn't great, but for the interested amateur I think it serves. More- I grabbed a 20 year old 50mm lens that had been mouldering in my closet; it doesn't quite Just Work, but it's a hell of a lot of fun to have a classic all-manual with an aperture ring and wide, smooth manual focus ring snapped onto a brand new, gee-whiz digicam.
I really liked using the black marker system on my ballot this morning, with one exception. It took a long time to fill out properly. Not a problem running down the front of the ballot, but my eyes started swimming half way through the judicial retentions.
OH! You've "went to law school". You do realize that on Slashdot, claiming IAAL and a couple bux might buy you a cup of bad coffee. But GOD! they might throw in a doughnut for 70 cents if it weren't for idiots like him who forget to admit they're not lawyers until the end of their Slashdot posts!
-Wait... http is a goddamn simple transport to parse/proxy.
-Even if it weren't, web browsers aren't supposed to let websites talk to hardware unless I let them.
So I'm going to have to sign up to make the web not be anonymous. Even if I don't actually get to opt in, I can opt out. Remind me why I'm supposed to get worked up. Just like any good Evangelical Christian would tell you:
1> If you take the mark of the beast you're going to hell.
2> There will be things that you will have trouble doing if you don't take the mark of the beast.
3> but that doesn't mean you have to take the mark.
No. I've got a Nano now. The screen is the same size as my phone. The phone has very light scratching after a month. The nano has significant scratching in 48 hours.
I've had my nano for 36 hours now. I don't mind if the body of it gets scratched up a bit, it's a tool for me, not a fetish object. But I've inadvertently dropped my cig lighter in the same pocket with my nano a couple times, and each time the nano comes away with significant scratches and scuffs on the screen. I'm not running around, I'm hardly moving and the screen is being very quickly damaged. I'm afraid that even if I am hyper-cautious of it, the screen will be unreadable within a few weeks.
I treat my cell phone like shit, it looks fine under worse conditions, same for my pager, same for my other mp3 player. The MP3 player even has dents in it by now. But, while I treat these electronics like shit, there are no noticable scratches on the screens. But even with extreme caution, the screen on my Nano will soon be illegible. THIS IS UNNACCEPTABLE.
Yeah, but I've been doing linux installs for 10 or 12 years, back when they used to be truly heinous. Fresh FC4 install for me from CD was not the worst, but it was BAD!
.g*. again. /var/log/messages and have done this before, you can make it work pretty easily.
-Install using a NORMAL, MANUAL partition scheme crashed the graphical installer. I had to use the text-mode installer.
-After install finished, grub was set up to pass the wrong command-line options, so booting required intervention.
-yum --update (or equiv, I don't have a FC box handy) overwrote some GPG signature file. This broke yum for future updates. Yes, it asked me, but the update wouldn't go forward without loading the md5 file. So we're back to being FSCKED! At least I didn't have to put a lot of effort into configuring yum. Big improvement.
-Migrating my backed up home directory, I managed to log in sucessfully the 1st time with GDM. After that, the session would crash on login for obscure reasons until I zapped
-Why are all these GODDAMN DAEMONS running?
-And WHY doesn't the default FC package manager give me at least the OPTION of seeing all the available/installed packages so I can decide for MYSELF what to install. OH!!! I just remembered, FC3 had rpmdrake, which worked for that. Maybe FC4 will have it too? I'll have to try it when I get home.
-My atmel wireless card has a config for PCMCIA, but no firmware RPM that I can find, even looking over YUM. There better not be, I made sure it was installed while I was running the installer, and damned if it didn't work when booting from the installer CD.
My ancient orinoco card is not configured in PCMCIA, but if you read the right bits of
-I think I passed the kernel the acpi=force option in grub. Which is why the kernel tells me I need to pass the acpi=force option to enable acpi, right?
---
I haven't even begun to play with laptop features, fancy new hardware, or hoary old hardware on FC4. It's supposed to be a GDDMN mature distro. So Why TF did I spend hours trying to get to even a moderately operational install?
Ah! It can't be coincidental that git looks like monotone when Linus' first announcement that he's dropping bitkeeper sez: look at monotone. But those differences are important:
-It lacks the sql db of course so it lacks the overhead of talking to the SQL db.
-it stores whole files instead of deltas so there's no overhead from diff (in exchange for slightly more time to compress).
-there are no certs. And I'm too lazy to find out what they mean by certs, but I wager the cert concept can be mapped to an rsync concept readily.
-And rsync takes care of the network replication. because nobody has a monotone client on their desk, but everybody who matters has rsync.
Every change makes monotone faster, and easier to work with for someone with the kernel-developer mindset (notice: the linux kernel has drivers for a hell of a lot of things, but no SQL client yet), if at the expense of disk space and flexibility.
Hell, everyone else has chimed in, why not me: I run a little 333 lapper for browsing at home, a p3 550 on my desk at work, and a beefy athlon laptop for misc. Things take longer to load, true... openoffice and *bird are beasts, but once they're running I don't really care what computer I'm on very much until I start running out of ram.
The kernel bloat issue is a total non-starter for v2.6 over 2.4. The stuff that's been added to the kernel has either IMPROVED desktop performance across the board, or added drivers. And you want sound to work when you buy a new computer, right?
I mean, sure, 2.6 isn't going to run on a 4MB 16 MHZ 386 like it did when I started using linux, at least without aggressive tuning, but on any hardware made in the last 10 years or so there's nothing better, at least after a little bit of tuning.
There's something to the stability argument for branching a new kernel, but with every distro shipping their own custom-patched kernel, whatever legitimate problems introduced to existing features (and I haven't seen many) is compensated for by the fact you don't have to build your own kernel to get features/drivers that were added to dev two years ago but never made it back to the stable tree.
I believe (it's been an astonishingly long time, but I used to care) that the Kaypro 16 ran MS-DOS. The kaypro II / IV were the first kaypro gen. The next gen were the 2, 4 and 10 (the 10 had a 10 MB hard drive), which boosted the CPU speed from 2 to 4 MHZ IIRC, moved from full to half-height floppies, and improved the display rom. The 1 was the last of the Kaypro z80 production machines, assembled from whatever parts were lying around the office, and moving the disk mounting from horizontal to vertical.
The Kaypro z80 machines were fairly basic single-board machines with no expansion slots, etc. The 16 retained the same form factor but instead mounted a 4 slot ISA backplane with the CPU mounted on one board on the backplane, which had to be a fairly significant challenge to do while leaving room for 2 half-height 5.25" disk drives.
Finally, not long before they died, kaypro released a laptop, the model 2000, which was a sleek little mother for it's day, with a brushed aluminum case. I'd say it was the best looking computer I've seen prior to recent generations of Powerbooks.