THANKS MATROX FOR THE BUG IN THE G400 BIOS THAT PREVENTS THE DAMN MACHINE FROM SHUTTING
DOWN WITHOUT A BSOD, I ALWAYS WANTED TO RUN SCANDISK EVERYTIME I REBOOT!
Hmmm. I've had no such problems with my G400, under either
Linux or Windows. Strange...
Well I then went over to the fine folks at
www.megagames.com and did a end run around the copy protection.
On a related note, Epic themselves have realised that they
don't gain anything by having hte CD check there,
and so they removed it from the latest patch version, 436.
Just patch to that version, and you won't need the copy protection
cracks. But yes, I'd say your example falls under fair use,
even if I don't know enough about the DMCA to say
if it's being violated or not.
programme is a common european spelling of the word
No it's not. Even here in the UK, we use "program" to refer to
the things that comuters run. Of course, we use
"programme" for the things you watch on TV, but in the context
of computers, the American spelling is always used
(except, of course, by clueless journalists, but it was The Guardian -- what did you expect?)
tape backup is far too unreliable for our purposes
So use redundancy. RAIT is the tape equivalent of RAID for disks.
Basically, your data is written across an array of tapes with varying amounts
of redundancy (from simple parity, all the way up to mirrored ECC stripes, depending on how much you want to spend:-).
There uses to be a CLARiiON DLT array, but
since EMC's buyouy of Data General, that seems to have been discontinued.
Still, there are plenty of other suppliers of tape arrays.
Here's one from Adic, and
here's one from Compaq.
I really hope this happens. If Windows refuses to run anything but
authorised code, then it'll hasten the end of Windows as a viable platform,
and the world's computers might just switch to more reliable alternatives
that little bit quicker. Given that Bill Gates has always been
a fierce defender of unregulated development (and it's
about the only area where I agree with him), I doubt this
will ever happen, but it's possible. I suspect they
won't take it any further than flagging unsigned code as potentially dangerous,
and letting the users decide whether or not to run it.
Sure, it's nice to have a 'flash/non-flash' option on the first screen, but that means
doing two websites. How many corps want to pay for that?
It all depends on how you look at it. Until last year (by Macromedia's
own statistics) 1 in 6 people were unable to view flash content in their
default configuration. That's a lot of customers to be
turning away, and it makes good business sense to cater
for them as well. Nowadays, Flash is much more
pervasive, and Macromedia claim that figure is now 1 in 27.
Still a resonable number, but no longer quite as
compelling a business case.
You mean an open standard like Macromedia's
Shockwave Flash format,
complete with an open implementation.
It's not a W3C standard, and hence sites shouldn't
use it exclusively (there should always be a non-flash option),
but the specs and a reference implementation are freely available.
Ideally, the W3C would adopt it as an official standard, but
it would need work on accessibility issues first
(e.g., for those using text-only, or
braille or voice browsers).
For stuff that's going to get 1 million Dead Electron (Video) impressions, there's no way
to make sure that the color on your screen is going to be seen exactly the same on another
screen.
Of course there is. That's why graphic formats like TIFF (and nowadays, PNG)
let you include a colour profile, precisely so that the image
does look the same on all screens. Of course, if the target monitor
isn't calibrated in the first place, then no amount of colour
profiling will help, but the intentions are good...
With the world apparently moving towards sRGB, hopefully this
will become less of an issue in the future.
While in general, I agree with that as a rule of thumb, there
are some places where using a goto is better than not using one.
And just as a point of reference:
Right
now the list of places with wonderful governments is down to Iceland, Latvia & Andorra.
Anyone want to post a horror story about one of these & prove me wrong?
Well, there's always the matter of the Icelandic government selling
the country's national genetic database to a biotech company,
and then passing a law preventing anyone else (including the
citizens of Iceland themselves) from having access to the data...
the UNIX boxes run a Citrix client - which we have had good results with
This was the solution that was used at one of the
companies I worked at when management realised that those
of us without a PC on our desks couldn't read email.
Yes, it works OK, but it has one critical flaw. Either you
have the citrix client visible at all times, or you
don't get notification of new mail. That single fault made it effectively unusable,
and we all resorted to having inbox rules that autoforwarded all mail
directly to our Unix boxes. Even that wasn't ideal, 'coz Exchange won't forward the SMTP address of the original sender, only their screen name.
A bit of sed trickery in my.procmailrc let me guess the
address from the name, with about 80% accuracy, but
it's a far from ideal solution.
Not really. The P4 is a consumer chip. Sure, it might be used
in small servers, but that's not where Intel make their money.
You can bet that when Intel release a Xeon version
of the P4, it'll scale to lots of CPUs. The Xeon line is
what Intel expect to go in servers, not the current P4.
Firstly, switching to Exchange means putting a Windows box
on *every* desktop. I've worked at 3 companies now that have gone for Exchange for political
reasons, only to find out, halfway through the rollout, that a small (but definitely non-zero) percentage
of their staff only had a Mac or Unix workstation on their desks (furthermore, they were violently opposed to switching to a Windows machine).
Secondly, Exchange has *huge* hardware requirements. My girlfriend's company had to replace a single Unix server
with 14 quad PPro Windows servers when they switched their European mail system to exchange about 3 years ago, just to support the
same number of users.
Thirdly, Exchange is a complete pig without a very experienced administrator. I don't just
mean a competant Exchange admin -- be prepared to spend significant money to get a decent one, if you want to have any hope
of it being halfway reliable. Also, plan on downtime. Unlike Unix mail systems, Exchange seems to need to be taken down for maintenance every so often. I'm not an Exchange admin, so don't ask me why, but every Exchange site I've worked at has had to do this.
Finally, don't expect to find an exchange solution that comes close to a Sun HA solution in terms of reliability. The closest is probably a Data General Exchange cluster in a box, but if it were my money,
I'd go for the Sun HA system. Since you've already paid
for the Sun system, this should be a no-brainer, but I fully understand that management
really are too dense to see that...
It's got email and browsing and news. What more do you need?
I need a browser without email and news. I have perfectly
good mail programs and news readers already (exmh and trn, if you're interested).
I just wish Galeon was ready. I can't even try out
their development releases without upgrading virtually everything
else on my system...
The
Mozilla RPMs provided by Chris Blizzard (http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/so ftw are/)
work fine together with the Galeon RPMs downloadable from Sourceforge. It's three RPMs you
have to install (mozilla, mozilla-devel, and galeon)
Indeed. I already have Chris' mozilla and mozilla-devel RPMs installed.
I though it would be trivial to then add galeon, but that requires gnome-libs-1.2
(even the -rh6 RPM). A quick trip to rpmfind.net, and I find a newer gnome-libs in Rawhide,
but that in turn depends on glibc-2.2. Short of upgrading to RH7, it's just not worth the hassle.
This is with both galeon 0.7 and 0.8
First impressions:
Yeah, all the bugs aren't fixed
True, but I wasn't expecting them to be. That said, it's actually usable as an everyday browser (which is more than can be said for M18). The main problem with it, though, is that it's slow. Sure, it's much faster than M18, and in normal use, it's fine, but try scrolling down in long document or switching to another virtual desktop for a while, and then switching back. NN4 is significantly faster in both cases.
It also still renders Slashdot's spacer images in the titles of articles with a greenish line around them, so they look like little green squares.
The Linux version doesn't seem to have that bug for me...
Why oh why do they need to do these damn small install files that go out on the 'Net and get everything?
They don't! The installer lets you choose which components it will download. Worked for me, and I didn't get the news, mail, IM or the other useless bits. I would be using Galeon, but until they either provide a complete self-contained RPM or make it an easy compile, I can't be bothered.
I still don't want an installer, though. I want a full install program. Net access from home isn't cheap here in Europe. I want to be able to download the whole thing at work, burn it to CD and take it home. Sigh.
Backup/home,/usr/local,/etc, and some of the directories in/opt if necessary.
A well designed system will have/home,/usr/local and/opt on separate filesystems
anyway, so it's just a matter of mounting them in the appropriate
places after the upgrade. Of course, this doesn't help
newbies suckered into putting everything in one big filesystem
by the CorelLinux install (for example -- there are plenty of other
offenders).
I have been disappointed with RH, and 7.0 with its not-quite
compatible GCC would be very bad for my free-software projects.
How, exactly, is it bad for your free software projects? Do you actually know
what's incompatible about the gcc in RH7? Binaries compiled with RH7 won't work on
earlier versions of RH -- just as RH6 binaries didn't work on RH5, and RH5 binaries didn't work on RH4.
But the reverse is not true. You can run older binaries just fine on RH7. And if you want to compile stuff on RH7 that will
work on older versions, just use kgcc -- it's exactly the same egcs-2.91.66 that was shipped
with RH6. So what, exactly, is the problem? Or are you just
listening to the ill-informed whining on slashdot?
Employees, on the whole, prefer flexitime. It gives them
more control over their lives, and if they have to do something
out of the ordinary one day, it's not a problem -- they can
just make up the time elsewhere.
As any good management team should know, employee morale is the single
most important factor affecting productivity. Flexitime boosts morale,
and hence is inherrently a good thing. Note, however, that completely flexible hours can actually
lower productivity when team members don't choose overlapping hours, and thus don't communicate with each other as effectively.
This is management's main argument against flexitime, but it's misguided. You can work around it by enforcing core hours (say 11:00 - 15:00) for a few (or for the paranoid, all) days a week.
So what your saying is that it's ok for non-english speaking people to try and use our
ASCII system but totally wrong and inappropriate for them to have their own native
language system and for us to to try and learn how to use that?
Yes, that's *exactly* what I'm saying. I'm not saying it because
I happen to use ASCII, but because ASCII is a more natural system for computers
to deal with. If Western European and American languages consisted of 30000+ characters,
and those in the the East consisted of some 100 or so, I'd suggest using the
Eastern system at the drop of a hat, even if it wasn't my native
system. This has nothing to do with whether or not it's my native character set that's chosen, and everything to do with whether a good decision is made from a techincal perspective.
766 MHz is not such a big difference over 733 MHz.
Indeed. I was wondering why anyone would buy the faster chip.
4.5% more clock speed for over 50% more price. They're
both using a 0.18 micron process, and there was no mention of different cache sizes,
so I can't see why anyone would spend the extra.
It's nice
to see that the global part of the Internet is still spreading...
No, it's not. This is one of the most brain dead
decisions ever made, in the name of political correctness, with
complete disregard for the practical issues. The effect of this will be to
reduce the global appeal of the web, not increase it. Western surfers will now effectively
be cut off from many far Eastern domains. Sure, there's a reasonable
workaround for entering non-ASCII domains on an ASCII keyboard, but it's too complex for the general
public, and far Eastern companies are unlikely to publish the ASCII-fied domain anyway. This is a very black day for the net...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. I've had no such problems with my G400, under either Linux or Windows. Strange...
On a related note, Epic themselves have realised that they don't gain anything by having hte CD check there, and so they removed it from the latest patch version, 436. Just patch to that version, and you won't need the copy protection cracks. But yes, I'd say your example falls under fair use, even if I don't know enough about the DMCA to say if it's being violated or not.
No it's not. Even here in the UK, we use "program" to refer to the things that comuters run. Of course, we use "programme" for the things you watch on TV, but in the context of computers, the American spelling is always used (except, of course, by clueless journalists, but it was The Guardian -- what did you expect?)
So use redundancy. RAIT is the tape equivalent of RAID for disks. Basically, your data is written across an array of tapes with varying amounts of redundancy (from simple parity, all the way up to mirrored ECC stripes, depending on how much you want to spend :-).
There uses to be a CLARiiON DLT array, but
since EMC's buyouy of Data General, that seems to have been discontinued.
Still, there are plenty of other suppliers of tape arrays.
Here's one from Adic, and
here's one from Compaq.
Anyone know the reason for the name change? In the UK, this is called Scrapheap Challenge.
Perhaps you're unaware of the PNG pHYs chunk, then, which lets you specify the physical resolution of the image.
I really hope this happens. If Windows refuses to run anything but authorised code, then it'll hasten the end of Windows as a viable platform, and the world's computers might just switch to more reliable alternatives that little bit quicker. Given that Bill Gates has always been a fierce defender of unregulated development (and it's about the only area where I agree with him), I doubt this will ever happen, but it's possible. I suspect they won't take it any further than flagging unsigned code as potentially dangerous, and letting the users decide whether or not to run it.
It all depends on how you look at it. Until last year (by Macromedia's own statistics) 1 in 6 people were unable to view flash content in their default configuration. That's a lot of customers to be turning away, and it makes good business sense to cater for them as well. Nowadays, Flash is much more pervasive, and Macromedia claim that figure is now 1 in 27. Still a resonable number, but no longer quite as compelling a business case.
You mean an open standard like Macromedia's Shockwave Flash format, complete with an open implementation. It's not a W3C standard, and hence sites shouldn't use it exclusively (there should always be a non-flash option), but the specs and a reference implementation are freely available. Ideally, the W3C would adopt it as an official standard, but it would need work on accessibility issues first (e.g., for those using text-only, or braille or voice browsers).
Of course there is. That's why graphic formats like TIFF (and nowadays, PNG) let you include a colour profile, precisely so that the image does look the same on all screens. Of course, if the target monitor isn't calibrated in the first place, then no amount of colour profiling will help, but the intentions are good... With the world apparently moving towards sRGB, hopefully this will become less of an issue in the future.
While in general, I agree with that as a rule of thumb, there are some places where using a goto is better than not using one. And just as a point of reference:
Well, there's always the matter of the Icelandic government selling the country's national genetic database to a biotech company, and then passing a law preventing anyone else (including the citizens of Iceland themselves) from having access to the data...
This was the solution that was used at one of the companies I worked at when management realised that those of us without a PC on our desks couldn't read email. Yes, it works OK, but it has one critical flaw. Either you have the citrix client visible at all times, or you don't get notification of new mail. That single fault made it effectively unusable, and we all resorted to having inbox rules that autoforwarded all mail directly to our Unix boxes. Even that wasn't ideal, 'coz Exchange won't forward the SMTP address of the original sender, only their screen name. A bit of sed trickery in my .procmailrc let me guess the
address from the name, with about 80% accuracy, but
it's a far from ideal solution.
Not really. The P4 is a consumer chip. Sure, it might be used in small servers, but that's not where Intel make their money. You can bet that when Intel release a Xeon version of the P4, it'll scale to lots of CPUs. The Xeon line is what Intel expect to go in servers, not the current P4.
Secondly, Exchange has *huge* hardware requirements. My girlfriend's company had to replace a single Unix server with 14 quad PPro Windows servers when they switched their European mail system to exchange about 3 years ago, just to support the same number of users.
Thirdly, Exchange is a complete pig without a very experienced administrator. I don't just mean a competant Exchange admin -- be prepared to spend significant money to get a decent one, if you want to have any hope of it being halfway reliable. Also, plan on downtime. Unlike Unix mail systems, Exchange seems to need to be taken down for maintenance every so often. I'm not an Exchange admin, so don't ask me why, but every Exchange site I've worked at has had to do this.
Finally, don't expect to find an exchange solution that comes close to a Sun HA solution in terms of reliability. The closest is probably a Data General Exchange cluster in a box, but if it were my money, I'd go for the Sun HA system. Since you've already paid for the Sun system, this should be a no-brainer, but I fully understand that management really are too dense to see that...
I need a browser without email and news. I have perfectly good mail programs and news readers already (exmh and trn, if you're interested). I just wish Galeon was ready. I can't even try out their development releases without upgrading virtually everything else on my system...
Indeed. I already have Chris' mozilla and mozilla-devel RPMs installed. I though it would be trivial to then add galeon, but that requires gnome-libs-1.2 (even the -rh6 RPM). A quick trip to rpmfind.net, and I find a newer gnome-libs in Rawhide, but that in turn depends on glibc-2.2. Short of upgrading to RH7, it's just not worth the hassle. This is with both galeon 0.7 and 0.8
Yeah, all the bugs aren't fixed
True, but I wasn't expecting them to be. That said, it's actually usable as an everyday browser (which is more than can be said for M18). The main problem with it, though, is that it's slow. Sure, it's much faster than M18, and in normal use, it's fine, but try scrolling down in long document or switching to another virtual desktop for a while, and then switching back. NN4 is significantly faster in both cases.
It also still renders Slashdot's spacer images in the titles of articles with a greenish line around them, so they look like little green squares.
The Linux version doesn't seem to have that bug for me...
Why oh why do they need to do these damn small install files that go out on the 'Net and get everything?
They don't! The installer lets you choose which components it will download. Worked for me, and I didn't get the news, mail, IM or the other useless bits. I would be using Galeon, but until they either provide a complete self-contained RPM or make it an easy compile, I can't be bothered. I still don't want an installer, though. I want a full install program. Net access from home isn't cheap here in Europe. I want to be able to download the whole thing at work, burn it to CD and take it home. Sigh.
I've never yet seen a flexitime scheme that prevented people working 9-5 if they so wished...
A well designed system will have /home, /usr/local and /opt on separate filesystems
anyway, so it's just a matter of mounting them in the appropriate
places after the upgrade. Of course, this doesn't help
newbies suckered into putting everything in one big filesystem
by the CorelLinux install (for example -- there are plenty of other
offenders).
How, exactly, is it bad for your free software projects? Do you actually know what's incompatible about the gcc in RH7? Binaries compiled with RH7 won't work on earlier versions of RH -- just as RH6 binaries didn't work on RH5, and RH5 binaries didn't work on RH4. But the reverse is not true. You can run older binaries just fine on RH7. And if you want to compile stuff on RH7 that will work on older versions, just use kgcc -- it's exactly the same egcs-2.91.66 that was shipped with RH6. So what, exactly, is the problem? Or are you just listening to the ill-informed whining on slashdot?
As any good management team should know, employee morale is the single most important factor affecting productivity. Flexitime boosts morale, and hence is inherrently a good thing. Note, however, that completely flexible hours can actually lower productivity when team members don't choose overlapping hours, and thus don't communicate with each other as effectively. This is management's main argument against flexitime, but it's misguided. You can work around it by enforcing core hours (say 11:00 - 15:00) for a few (or for the paranoid, all) days a week.
Yes, that's *exactly* what I'm saying. I'm not saying it because I happen to use ASCII, but because ASCII is a more natural system for computers to deal with. If Western European and American languages consisted of 30000+ characters, and those in the the East consisted of some 100 or so, I'd suggest using the Eastern system at the drop of a hat, even if it wasn't my native system. This has nothing to do with whether or not it's my native character set that's chosen, and everything to do with whether a good decision is made from a techincal perspective.
Indeed. I was wondering why anyone would buy the faster chip. 4.5% more clock speed for over 50% more price. They're both using a 0.18 micron process, and there was no mention of different cache sizes, so I can't see why anyone would spend the extra.
No, it's not. This is one of the most brain dead decisions ever made, in the name of political correctness, with complete disregard for the practical issues. The effect of this will be to reduce the global appeal of the web, not increase it. Western surfers will now effectively be cut off from many far Eastern domains. Sure, there's a reasonable workaround for entering non-ASCII domains on an ASCII keyboard, but it's too complex for the general public, and far Eastern companies are unlikely to publish the ASCII-fied domain anyway. This is a very black day for the net...