Winamp certianly does not have spyware included in it! Real, MusicMatch and others may, but winamp has a very clean reputation. Since they're owned by AOL, an AOL icon is placed on your desktop (although the last time I used it, the installer actually PROMPTED you if you wanted it there!).
Winamp had bloat problems with version 3. It sucked. Everyone who's involved with winamp, even the developers, acknowledge this. Winamp 5 is MUCH better. With 'new' skins enabled, it takes up slightly more than winamp 2 (which didn't support 'new skins). Disabling the skins results in winamp 5 occupying LESS ram than winamp 2. This is quite an accomplishment, as winamp 2 has been around for many years. Any modern windows PC should be able to run it without a problem. Very few programs can make this claim any more.
If your computer can't spare the 5mb or so that winamp5 takes up, you need to consider an upgrade!
While I hate to be the apple zealot, it is worth mentioning that the Xserve RAID works out to $3.14 per GB. And you can rest assured that the hardware backing it up is top-notch and redundant to boot.
If you want TRUE redundancy, double the price to $6.28 per GB. Still not a ton of money. Don't forget that a company like Google has tremendous purchasing power, not to mention that they typically have been known to use commodity hardware which is almost always cheaper than Apple's stuff.
I find it hard to believe that a university isn't willing to shell out an additional $5 per student to give them a decent sized quota. At LEAST 200mb...
When I first used gentoo linux, I was most impressed by the quality of the documentation provided.
And then I realized. It wasn't necessarily high qualty nor at the time did it contain better content than the guides for Debian and Red Hat. It was presented in a much cleaner format using CSS and a nice clean layout. Since then, the quality of the gentoo documentation has only improved.
See the difference? They both contain useful information. The TLDP documentation makes me feel like i'm reading a legal document. Blegh! The gentoo document is much less harsh on the user.
This is scary, considering that gentoo is widely considered one of the most difficult of the linuxes to use, as it contains absolutely no installer. Thanks to the clear documentation, I actually perfer the gentoo installation process over fedora's, as it's easy (thanks to the documentation), and gives me a tremendous amount of control. I think this fact can only be capitalized by the fact that I use a mac 95% of the time as my desktop machine.
Please... add some color. It helps. Lots of people are visual learners. It just so happens that most linux users aren't (Reading a monotonous 26-page manpage on ls of all things makes me want to gouge my eyes out)
It proved invaluable to the Italian Air Force in World War II.
As I recall, the allies took most of Italy in under 2 months. Unvaluable seems to fit better than invaluable.
German reinforcements were the only reason the rest of Italy managed to stand as long as it did (though they DID surrender 2 months after the invasion, it was a moot point, as the fighting continued)
I honestly don't think that it would have been physically possible for the allies to capture the country any faster. The planes certainly didn't save italy.
BTW, about the paper airplane thing, wouldn't it be easy to attain a realy long flight by hand-launching the thing off of a really tall building or an airplane. Or you could pull a dirty trick and launch it on Nasa's "Vomit Comet" antigravity plane or another suitable gravity-free enviornment)
What you need is a managed switch. They will allow you to limit bandwidth or completely disconnect a specific port. HP's switches are supposed to be particularly good
Be warned... a managed switch WILL cost several times more than a normal switch.
But apart from that, your only other choice is to use some sort of arbitrary setup to limit bandwidth to certain IP addresses and force each user to have one static IP (virtually impossible to enforce with your setup)
Great.... just when the novelty of not having to create 20 floppies to install debian began to wear off...
But, honestly, why can't we use a system like was used in the latter days of the debian floppy installer? The 20 floppies contained a base-install with everything necessary to connect to the internet and download the rest of the system, which was a LOT less than the normal ISO image. This was a godsend for anybody on 56k.
If your company can afford to pay 1000 people and run a T3, they have the money to buy a PROPER Cisco-based setup.
Oh. And hire an experienced professional to install it (i don't dobut that you could manage it, though). I wouldn't trust a job of this size to someone who 'did it once at home and it worked'. The enterprise works much differently than your basement.
If you set it up and something goes wrong, you, my friend, are screwed.
Despite all the fancy physics I see you doing, you have one simple problem.
For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.
If the rocket goes up, the platform has to absorb the force of the launch. While it'll be much less than a traditional launch, you will still need a pretty big 'push' to get off into space. In other words, it goes down. With the same momentum as the rocket moving up (actually, a little more due to the force of gravity) (actual velocity depends upon the ratio between the mass of the platform and rocket.)
For earth launches, we have the mass of the earth to absorb the force. Unless we build a rocket with a mass in the same league as the mass of earth, the earth's not going to move anywhere.
In order for this to work, the platform would need to be disposable or able to recover from such an enormous downward thrust.
Windows 2000/XP: Partially text-mode, and yet, could be easily installed by ANYBODY.
Knoppix - Winner for obvious reasons
RedHat - A bit overcomplicated the last time I used it, but easy nonetheless. The graphical installer is nice, but doesn't always work. If you're lucky, you're sent to the curses-based textmode installer which is lightyears better than debian's. (of course, there are screwups, and videocard detection can crash on exotic hardware)
Gentoo - No installer is a good installer. HONESTLY! If you carefully follow their directions exactly using the examples they give you, a proficent Windows user could get it working. The installation process is incredibly well-documented. As a plus, a quick post to their forum will usually yield a solution in under an hour. I have yet to see another free distro which offers that kind of support. Despite all this, they still need a REAL installer.
Mac OS X : Next, I agree, Next, Yes, Reboot. Done. Enough said.
BeOS: I once accidentally installed this without realizing it (the version that came packaged for windows).
Debian: From the people that brought you EMACS! Debian was my first distro, mostly because it was availible on floppies (my PC at the time wouldn't boot from a CD), and it had a nifty install-on-demand feature which required you to only download the 20mb base (yes, onto floppies), which would then allow you to set up a LAN or PPP connection to download the proper packages (I was on 56k, so the PPP option was a godsend). Needless to say, it wasn't all that difficult or painful, though it had quite a few rough spots. (Such as a nasty bug where the installer's FDISK mixed up the device names, causing me to nuke the wrong partition.
This was 3 years ago. The screenshots in the article show an installer that's almost identical to the one I remember. Honestly, couldn't they have made SOME advances? The installer is simply a disgrace, and needs to be 10x easier!
As for me, I'll stick with my mac. I like an OS that doesn't have to be reinstalled regularly.
One thing I never got though... On the installers for OS 9 and below (and most classic apps), once the program had been completely installed, it would give you a message:
"Installation successful. Would you like to continue or quit?"
With two buttons, Continue and Quit.
Clicking continue would run the installer again from the beginning, and install the product you just installed all over again. Quit, the logical choice, would bring you to the desktop with your new program.
Why on earth would anybody want to reinstall something they just installed? (Especially an ENTIRE OS??) (windows being the exception here... but they don't make it for macs, making it a moot point)
Plus, from the appearance of the dialog box, it looked as though clicking quit would harm your system, though clicking continue would lead you to an infinite loop of frustration.
That being said, the Mac OS installers work exactly like every other installer on the system. If you can install photoshop or MS Office, you can do a clean install of any version of Mac OS.
Think of it this way... The xserve is small, just 1U. An 8-way system will probably be 4U at the minimum, especially with the additional power/cooling requirments.
Plus, you have the issue of cost. Last time I checked, 8-way systems still cost a pretty penny. Far more than 4 dual Xserves (especially when you consider that Pixar is most likely buying cluster node xserves. I'd imagine that most 8-way systems are sold as more 'complete' servers)
You've also got to figure in efficency and redundancy. If the 8-way system dies, you've just lost 8 processors. If one of the 4 dual xserves fails, you're still running at 75%. Plus, I think we can all agree that adding more processors does not linearly increase performance. Adding a second processor will not increase performance by 2x, as all of the processors need to share a common bus. A 3rd has even less of an impact, and so on and so on. Splitting it up among a few machines is much more practical.
Why on earth would this feature be useful to ANYONE.
TV-Tuner functionality is questionable at best in a full-fledged OS. But in a BIOS?? Surly you must be joking!
I love that I can play my CDs and MP3s on my pc... while I work on other things. This monopolizes the whole system and turns it into an expensive DVD player. (Name one thing this can do that a cheap DVD player and a TV can't)
Not to mention that it's an embarrasing waste of resources. A 366mhz G3 could do this and more.
Oh, and hypothetically, I think it would be possible to hack something like this into a machine using openFirmware.
As an aside, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a small OS, deriving bits from Linux or BSD which could do the same thing and only take a few (under 5) seconds to boot (which would be quite plausable as you'd only need to load VERY few drivers). I could boot BeOS on my 750mhz athlon to the desktop in under 10 seconds.
I've got a PCV-120. Actually, I've had it for well over a year and a half (they're not exactly new)
My impressions of it are as follows: It's not a performance-thrilling machine, but makes up for it where it counts. It's small, has DVD/CDRW, and a flash reader, so you shouldn't need any external devices
I really like the fold-up keyboard, though I do wish it were detachable if you ever desired to use a real keyboard, as the built-in one is little more than a laptop keyboard (though it's a pretty damn nice laptop keyboard at that). My favorite part, though, is quite simple... The screen is protected by a 1/4 inch piece of plexiglass! Making it imprevious to liquids and other stuff (though I don't believe the keyboard has any sort of protection which is probably an oversight)
My only practical complaints are that it has intergrated video and the built-in speakers are somewhat tinny. Apart from that, it's a pretty sweet PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Spyware and bloat???
Winamp certianly does not have spyware included in it! Real, MusicMatch and others may, but winamp has a very clean reputation. Since they're owned by AOL, an AOL icon is placed on your desktop (although the last time I used it, the installer actually PROMPTED you if you wanted it there!).
Winamp had bloat problems with version 3. It sucked. Everyone who's involved with winamp, even the developers, acknowledge this. Winamp 5 is MUCH better. With 'new' skins enabled, it takes up slightly more than winamp 2 (which didn't support 'new skins). Disabling the skins results in winamp 5 occupying LESS ram than winamp 2. This is quite an accomplishment, as winamp 2 has been around for many years. Any modern windows PC should be able to run it without a problem. Very few programs can make this claim any more.
If your computer can't spare the 5mb or so that winamp5 takes up, you need to consider an upgrade!
It's really not that expensive.
While I hate to be the apple zealot, it is worth mentioning that the Xserve RAID works out to $3.14 per GB. And you can rest assured that the hardware backing it up is top-notch and redundant to boot.
If you want TRUE redundancy, double the price to $6.28 per GB. Still not a ton of money. Don't forget that a company like Google has tremendous purchasing power, not to mention that they typically have been known to use commodity hardware which is almost always cheaper than Apple's stuff.
I find it hard to believe that a university isn't willing to shell out an additional $5 per student to give them a decent sized quota. At LEAST 200mb...
When I first used gentoo linux, I was most impressed by the quality of the documentation provided.
And then I realized. It wasn't necessarily high qualty nor at the time did it contain better content than the guides for Debian and Red Hat. It was presented in a much cleaner format using CSS and a nice clean layout. Since then, the quality of the gentoo documentation has only improved.
Compare this gentoo page with this TLDP page.
See the difference? They both contain useful information. The TLDP documentation makes me feel like i'm reading a legal document. Blegh! The gentoo document is much less harsh on the user.
This is scary, considering that gentoo is widely considered one of the most difficult of the linuxes to use, as it contains absolutely no installer. Thanks to the clear documentation, I actually perfer the gentoo installation process over fedora's, as it's easy (thanks to the documentation), and gives me a tremendous amount of control. I think this fact can only be capitalized by the fact that I use a mac 95% of the time as my desktop machine.
Please... add some color. It helps. Lots of people are visual learners. It just so happens that most linux users aren't (Reading a monotonous 26-page manpage on ls of all things makes me want to gouge my eyes out)
This is odd, as I've witnessed fusion power being used every day for as long as I can remember.
Same for my parents. And my grandparents. And their grandparents.
This sun thing seems to work much better than that complicaated machine LLNL is trying to build.
BSD has existed as long as if not longer than Microsoft.
According to Wikipedia, it's been around since the early 70's. Back then, AT&T was the big player, not microsoft. If anything, MS was the underdog.
It proved invaluable to the Italian Air Force in World War II.
As I recall, the allies took most of Italy in under 2 months. Unvaluable seems to fit better than invaluable.
German reinforcements were the only reason the rest of Italy managed to stand as long as it did (though they DID surrender 2 months after the invasion, it was a moot point, as the fighting continued)
I honestly don't think that it would have been physically possible for the allies to capture the country any faster. The planes certainly didn't save italy.
BTW, about the paper airplane thing, wouldn't it be easy to attain a realy long flight by hand-launching the thing off of a really tall building or an airplane. Or you could pull a dirty trick and launch it on Nasa's "Vomit Comet" antigravity plane or another suitable gravity-free enviornment)
What you need is a managed switch. They will allow you to limit bandwidth or completely disconnect a specific port. HP's switches are supposed to be particularly good
Be warned... a managed switch WILL cost several times more than a normal switch.
But apart from that, your only other choice is to use some sort of arbitrary setup to limit bandwidth to certain IP addresses and force each user to have one static IP (virtually impossible to enforce with your setup)
It seems as though their server has been reduced to a pile of smoldering embers.
(BTW, how is a mouse made from a dead tree supposed to be nature-friendly?)
Great.... just when the novelty of not having to create 20 floppies to install debian began to wear off...
But, honestly, why can't we use a system like was used in the latter days of the debian floppy installer? The 20 floppies contained a base-install with everything necessary to connect to the internet and download the rest of the system, which was a LOT less than the normal ISO image. This was a godsend for anybody on 56k.
If your company can afford to pay 1000 people and run a T3, they have the money to buy a PROPER Cisco-based setup.
Oh. And hire an experienced professional to install it (i don't dobut that you could manage it, though). I wouldn't trust a job of this size to someone who 'did it once at home and it worked'. The enterprise works much differently than your basement.
If you set it up and something goes wrong, you, my friend, are screwed.
There's also newton's law to consider.
Despite all the fancy physics I see you doing, you have one simple problem.
For every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.
If the rocket goes up, the platform has to absorb the force of the launch. While it'll be much less than a traditional launch, you will still need a pretty big 'push' to get off into space. In other words, it goes down. With the same momentum as the rocket moving up (actually, a little more due to the force of gravity) (actual velocity depends upon the ratio between the mass of the platform and rocket.)
For earth launches, we have the mass of the earth to absorb the force. Unless we build a rocket with a mass in the same league as the mass of earth, the earth's not going to move anywhere.
In order for this to work, the platform would need to be disposable or able to recover from such an enormous downward thrust.
Another similar company i've run across lately has been Liebermann which, among other things, is expensive, and a complete knock-off of Apple.
I find the information presented on their site extremely hard to believe. Has anybody here had any experience in dealing with them?
Already done. It's been enabled by default on every Microsoft OS since Win3.1
Windows 2000/XP: Partially text-mode, and yet, could be easily installed by ANYBODY.
Knoppix - Winner for obvious reasons
RedHat - A bit overcomplicated the last time I used it, but easy nonetheless. The graphical installer is nice, but doesn't always work. If you're lucky, you're sent to the curses-based textmode installer which is lightyears better than debian's. (of course, there are screwups, and videocard detection can crash on exotic hardware)
Gentoo - No installer is a good installer. HONESTLY! If you carefully follow their directions exactly using the examples they give you, a proficent Windows user could get it working. The installation process is incredibly well-documented. As a plus, a quick post to their forum will usually yield a solution in under an hour. I have yet to see another free distro which offers that kind of support. Despite all this, they still need a REAL installer.
Mac OS X : Next, I agree, Next, Yes, Reboot. Done. Enough said.
BeOS: I once accidentally installed this without realizing it (the version that came packaged for windows).
Debian: From the people that brought you EMACS! Debian was my first distro, mostly because it was availible on floppies (my PC at the time wouldn't boot from a CD), and it had a nifty install-on-demand feature which required you to only download the 20mb base (yes, onto floppies), which would then allow you to set up a LAN or PPP connection to download the proper packages (I was on 56k, so the PPP option was a godsend). Needless to say, it wasn't all that difficult or painful, though it had quite a few rough spots. (Such as a nasty bug where the installer's FDISK mixed up the device names, causing me to nuke the wrong partition.
This was 3 years ago. The screenshots in the article show an installer that's almost identical to the one I remember. Honestly, couldn't they have made SOME advances? The installer is simply a disgrace, and needs to be 10x easier!
As for me, I'll stick with my mac. I like an OS that doesn't have to be reinstalled regularly.
Yeah. Us mac users have it rough :)
One thing I never got though... On the installers for OS 9 and below (and most classic apps), once the program had been completely installed, it would give you a message:
"Installation successful. Would you like to continue or quit?"
With two buttons, Continue and Quit.
Clicking continue would run the installer again from the beginning, and install the product you just installed all over again. Quit, the logical choice, would bring you to the desktop with your new program.
Why on earth would anybody want to reinstall something they just installed? (Especially an ENTIRE OS??) (windows being the exception here... but they don't make it for macs, making it a moot point)
Plus, from the appearance of the dialog box, it looked as though clicking quit would harm your system, though clicking continue would lead you to an infinite loop of frustration.
That being said, the Mac OS installers work exactly like every other installer on the system. If you can install photoshop or MS Office, you can do a clean install of any version of Mac OS.
The same reason millions of people continue to use windows and OS X.
Everyone knows how to use it, it's well-documented, It works, and (in the case of OSX), it's pretty damn good at what it does.
I don't know... how big is a basic Fedora installation nowindays? :)
Anyone notice that this story's SID is 100,000? *
Wow. It's pretty amazing that we've managed to produce this many stories in such a short time. Kudos to the editing staff!
*It's only 27 if you don't count the dupes
Yes, but 4 xserves will be far more powerful.
Think of it this way... The xserve is small, just 1U. An 8-way system will probably be 4U at the minimum, especially with the additional power/cooling requirments.
Plus, you have the issue of cost. Last time I checked, 8-way systems still cost a pretty penny. Far more than 4 dual Xserves (especially when you consider that Pixar is most likely buying cluster node xserves. I'd imagine that most 8-way systems are sold as more 'complete' servers)
You've also got to figure in efficency and redundancy. If the 8-way system dies, you've just lost 8 processors. If one of the 4 dual xserves fails, you're still running at 75%. Plus, I think we can all agree that adding more processors does not linearly increase performance. Adding a second processor will not increase performance by 2x, as all of the processors need to share a common bus. A 3rd has even less of an impact, and so on and so on. Splitting it up among a few machines is much more practical.
Thanks to slashdot, they're about to suffer another massive hardware failure.
But, seriously... Until I saw this article, I had honestly thought the MUD scene was dead.
Never really ever did get into muds. Maybe once their HD is back up, I'll create a character... (who in their right mind doesn't use RAID?)
Why on earth would this feature be useful to ANYONE.
TV-Tuner functionality is questionable at best in a full-fledged OS. But in a BIOS?? Surly you must be joking!
I love that I can play my CDs and MP3s on my pc... while I work on other things. This monopolizes the whole system and turns it into an expensive DVD player. (Name one thing this can do that a cheap DVD player and a TV can't)
Not to mention that it's an embarrasing waste of resources. A 366mhz G3 could do this and more.
Oh, and hypothetically, I think it would be possible to hack something like this into a machine using openFirmware.
As an aside, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a small OS, deriving bits from Linux or BSD which could do the same thing and only take a few (under 5) seconds to boot (which would be quite plausable as you'd only need to load VERY few drivers). I could boot BeOS on my 750mhz athlon to the desktop in under 10 seconds.
Thanks to this story the AdWords column is now displaying text ads for Xerox
Ironic, no?
You, my friend, have obviously never been to New York City...
I've got a PCV-120. Actually, I've had it for well over a year and a half (they're not exactly new)
My impressions of it are as follows: It's not a performance-thrilling machine, but makes up for it where it counts. It's small, has DVD/CDRW, and a flash reader, so you shouldn't need any external devices
I really like the fold-up keyboard, though I do wish it were detachable if you ever desired to use a real keyboard, as the built-in one is little more than a laptop keyboard (though it's a pretty damn nice laptop keyboard at that). My favorite part, though, is quite simple... The screen is protected by a 1/4 inch piece of plexiglass! Making it imprevious to liquids and other stuff (though I don't believe the keyboard has any sort of protection which is probably an oversight)
My only practical complaints are that it has intergrated video and the built-in speakers are somewhat tinny. Apart from that, it's a pretty sweet PC.
Way to go! It's great to overcome the material obstacles of life...
But, I find it frustrating in American culture that someone like you has little chance of finding a spouse who accepts your situation...