I saw that and my reaction was, didn't we already know this? Is this a news flash for some reason?
I'm pretty sure I've heard this about him for some time now. The interesting thing is the "sometime in his lifetime" part. It would be news if he was making a comitment to do this by the end of the year or something. He's not. He's going to do what a lot of super-wealthy do, move it to charitable foundations to keep the government from getting 40% of it when he dies.
How much of $100 billion do you need to leave to your wife kids, etc when you pass on. $10 billion ought to be enough. So the other $90 billion gets put in a foundation to be doled out for cancer, aids research, feeding the hungry, etc. Wow, imagine that! Now Gates' legacy is that of the largest benefactor of all time, rather than the greedy opressive slaughterer of competitors richest billionaire of the 20th century.
Well, that's a good point and it would carry more weight (for me) if you ran out of valid work units and your machine powered down. But it looks like seti may be just sending old wu's again to keep people running it, which I agree is a waste.
So, I don't disagree that efficiency is a good thing and that un-optimized clients is a bad thing. I didn't mean to (and I don't think I did) imply otherwise.
I guess I'm just thick because I still don't see how that article hopes to accomplish that. If a 3dnow optimized client appears tomorrow, everyone would still leave their machines on the same amount of time, no? If seti ran out of work units they would likely send out January again. What did I miss?
Uh, there was a probe? I have to go back and re-read that because I only read about the Keck reflector in Hawaii being used.
Oh, ok.. Cassini will drop a probe when it gets there in 2004. That's in the last paragraph. Its a little misleading then that the top of the article shows an artists' impression of a probe making you think that they confirmed 'oil' on the surface when, in reality, they *think* some dark spots on an earth-observatory image might be hydrocarbon seas.
Sheesh. I'm dissapointed. Guess I'll have to scrap my idea for an interplanetary pipeline to bring crude oil to Earth. Had a name picked out for the company and everything, "Titanic Intra-solar Transportation Systems (TITS)".:-D
Well, good - its not just me that had this reaction as well. I mean really, this was all speculation. It could very well be that seti is concentrating more on how to cope with the 10x volunteers they got (if they expected 100,000 and got a million) than optimizing the clients. But, they didn't say so, directly or otherwise. Whare's the proof?
Besides, what real purpose does it serve to spend any time doing 3dnow optimization of the seti clients when there are more volunteers than they can handle now anyway? I didn't get the point of this article (assuming the premise is true) as to how this would help anyone but the 3dnow bunch. Sure, they have a worthy cause, I would love to have 3dnow in more applications for my AMD, but I don't get how this does that, or how it helps seti.
To be honest, it makes 3dnow.org look a lot less credible than it attempts to make seti look (IMHO).
>Remember, there is a buyer for every person selling (they just might not be willing to pay as much).
I don't think I'd say that. There are companies that "make a market" in certain stocks ( I think this is called arbitrage ). That is, they buy up shares when there are more sellers than buyers, hold an inventory and then sell to meet demand when there are more buyers than sellers.
At least, this is how I thought I understood that this works.
Yep, I remember being introduced to one of the M-16 models at my college graduation party in '86. My best friend was hosting this party and his snotty little brother was taking pot-shots at us from various vantage points. We were so hammered it took a while to figure out where the water was coming from. Little bastard was doing things like belly-crawling under a picnic bench and releasing a few quick bursts before retreating to refill.
God that thing was cool once we busted him and confiscated it. It looked like the real thing from far enough away and in the twlight lighting. I can see why cops didn't want punks running around with these, they looked real as hell. You could put a pretty good bead of water where you wanted it too, nothing like the volume that you can dispense from a supersoaker, tho. But for stealthy, accurate sniping, this was the sh*t.
er, I guess I could, couldn't I? Didn't really look into anything along those lines since this was intended to be primarily a windows-centric solution for my son to use for his school projects. In fact, this has sat on his desk for the most part where he's scanned pictures and drag-dropped them into his word reports.
I've used this exactly twice in the month that we've had this. The first time was when I lugged it upstairs to install the software on my windows partition and do a test scan with a couple wedding album shots. The second time I wanted to scan in a couple "refrigerator art" drawings my daughter had done. I got on my son's PC while he wasn't using it and just dropped the image file onto the Samba share I've set up on our server.
I'll have to look into this. I'm not sure this would be the best solution for a couple reasons which really don't have anything to do with the suitability of SANE or anything.
1) My son has lots more desk space than I do and he is using it more right now anyway.
2) I'm a SCSI 'virgin' so I'm not sure I have the time right now to take the plunge, esp since my son is using it daily right now.
3) The scanner didn't come with any SCSI hardware, I'd have to buy something.
4) So far, the USB seems plenty fast for scanning purposes. I'm sure the SCSI is faster, but it ain't broke right now with USB.
5) I'm wondering how well this would integrate with the windows scanning software that came with the unit (its nice, it does a preview, allows you to select a region for scanning, select the output format, scan straight to the printer - copier mode - or to a file.)
So, yeah I could probably get by without USB, but it is a pretty damn convenient setup for now.
Scanner. I bought a HP scanjet for my family, it has USB out of the box and can be made to do SCSI. I wanted the USB because between me, my kids and my wife, we can move the unit around as needed.
When Linux has good support for USB, I'll be set. In the mean time, I either boot Winblows when I need to scan, or scan from my kid's machine and then put it onto my server with Samba.
I can see the same thing happening with a digital camera or some other USB interface device (mice, keyboard, bah).
Really. The Sam's teach yourself C in 21 days (chuckle) comes with 3.1 which is pretty worthless for anything beyond "hello world" so I can't imagine 2.x is all that useful (hell, it wants windows 3.1 to intstall, thats got to tell you right there).
This would be kinda like Microsoft giving away Windows 3.1 (whoop1):-P
How do you figure that? They didn't change any policies or procedures, did they? They are just letting people have another shot at *beating* the form with the 'right' answers. The only thing that is significant is that they are willing to look the other way to let people misrepresent themselves on the questionaire so they can get past the established policies. To me this just seems like damage control since they were in the midst of a huge PR backlash. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't see where the magic of the OSS community broke down any barriers or that any "silly or irrelevant" practices have been abandoned as a result. The questions and screening criteria are the same, you just have a second chance to change your answers to get past the 'cut'.
I hope this IPO goes well and a lot of people aren't burned. But, in reality, this is very risky (as are most IPO's) and a lot of people could really lose out. Me, I plan to wait for a couple weeks and see where the market prices this. If it goes to $50 an stays up, oh well - I missed out. If it goes to $50 in the first day, then settles back to $20 over the next week, I'll grab some and hold it for the long term. If it tanks to $8 after two weeks, I'll avoid/. completely so I don't have to see all the bitter complaining from everyone who sold their VW bug to scrape up $2000 to get in on the IPO only to watch it lose 50% of its value overnight (biting my tongue, hope it doesn't happen, but it *could*).
I saved my metal erector-set for my son, he is 6 now and isn't very interested. They have a plactic "equivalent" called K'nex that he is really into. He builds some neat stuff, and the parts are a lot lighter and flexible than the old metal kits. It goes together a lot faster than the metal nuts and bolts. He can put together a huge crane in an afternoon where I would have taken the better part of a week to make the same size thing if I had even had enough parts back then.
I too was kind of resistant to the 'tinker toys' sets that are made of plastic. But I have to admit, my kids do a lot of neat stuff with them that we could never have done with the wood ones (the bendable plastic rods open up a whole new dimension.
The only thing I don't really care for is the proliferation of the Lego theme-kits (although I love the star wars stuff). The effect this seems to have is that the kids want the next set so they can make whatever the kit is designed for (space vehicles, pirate sips, subs)instead of using generic parts they already have and using their imagination to make something original.
Then the parts get all mixed together and they get real frustrated when they pull out the plans and try to rebuild a specific kit. But, still a cool toy and my kids (and I:-) ) still love playing with them together.
Heh, this is one of the great pleasures in being a parent. I can buy my son all the cool toys I don't have any more like Lego and spend "quality time" with him playing.:-)
Re:Another spurious Star Trek reference
on
Beaming Money
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· Score: 2
Ah yes, but family-friendly harassment lawsuits are not so nearly expensive as sexual-harassment suits.;-)
DISCLAIMER: I do not support the use of blocking software in a general sense.
But, here we run a business. We're in it to make money. We make money by charging our customers for services. We pay employees salaries and we pay expenses like renting the building, paying the electric bill, taxes, etc. Whatever is left over is profit for our shareholders.
We have a responsibility to our employees to keep the business profitable so we don't lay them off. We have a responsibility to our sharholders to maximize their stock value by not running the company into the ground, and keep profit margins as high as possible. A sexual harassment lawsuit is *really* expensive and can torpedo a small company like ours. If we don't take "reasonable" measures to prevent things like fire, flood, lawsuits and other preventable expenses, we are being negligent (sp?) to our employees and shareholders.
It sucks that we have to use filtering software. It sucks that a few employees can't use good judgement in how they use the 'net connection during work. It sucks that companies live in fear of big lawsuits (remember Mitsubishi?) because some employees don't know how to treat their co-workers with respect. We have laws and big penalties to make sure that employees are protected from harassment.
At our company we do a lot of things to minimize the risk that we will have a sexual harassment problem. We have training classes for all the managers so they understand the law. We have policies to keep the workplace free of potentially offensive materials (no hooters calendars:-( ). We have filtering software in place to prevent employees from having pornography on their monitors that came through our network that someone else might see. (yeah, they can still bring in a porno CD, but that's less under our control than filtering the connection).
These are all "reasonable" measures that we have taken to reduce the risks to our business that an expensive sexual harassment lawsuit would pose. I wish we could all live and work in a world where this wasn't a problem, but we don't so this is how we deal with the problem.
>they have trouble accepting the lack of a management structure.
Well, that's really the problem that we have around here where I work and it'll just take time to overcome it. They are so used to vendors in suits driving BMW's taking them out to lunch that its really hard for them to adjust to anything else.
Our PHB's have their well-worn paths when it comes to dealing with IT management. You shake-down the vendors and play them off each other to get the deal you want. You get them to buy you lunch, dinners and golf rounds. You get them on the phone and scream bloody murder when something goes south (even if its not their problem). You get SLA's and hold them to the wall when they don't deliver. This is just the corporate culture that is so ingrained in how these weasels conduct their daily business.
So Linux/Free Software/Open Source/Call-it-what-you-will is a baffling concept to them. It is going to basically take a generational changing of the guard to get us out of this cycle. The best way I can see to move this along is to give up on the sodgy PHB in charge and work on the heir-apparent so that when he takes over for the PHB when he moves out, we may have a change for the better.
Oh man, that's funny. When that series of strips came out we were ROTFLOAO because we had a consultant that looked and talked *exactly* like the unix guy in Dilbert. White beard, bald, fat, suspenders.
"Oh no, you're one of those condescending unix guys!"
"Here kid, here's a nickel. Go buy yourself a *real* OS"
This guy was sharp as a tack, no doubt. But he looked the part and had the same attitude as Scott Adam's character!
Maybe on a 386, but on my 486 its fine. I'm connected to a cable modem and the 10BT NIC's run at full speed, the cpu barely ever breaks over 10%, even when holding up a quake3 game with 8 players (no the game doesn't run on the 486, I'm just talking about the network traffic).
Hmmm, what's the minimum hardware setup for running a W98 SE box to do NAT? P133 w/ 32 meg - I would probably guess. Nice thing about doing this with Linux is that you can dust off that 486 and put it to use.
My masq/portfw/gateway/firewall is a 486/100 with 16m running a 2.0.36 kernel on a 202 Mb hard drive. I laid hands on a couple SMC ISA NICs and an ATI mach 8 at a swap-meet and I was in business for about $30. Before I set this up, I was using a PPro 200 with 64mb to run Win98 and Sygate. This did actually work ok, except for having to reboot it when it froze every couple days. (now the ppro is running Debian doing Q2 server duty). Its a real shame you have to run an OS with an integrated GUI and web browser just to do a simple chore like NAT.
And the only real shortcoming I have with my setup is ICQ file transfers, but what I do anyway is set up FTP access for friends that need to send files. Granted, I don't do this very often and it wouldn't be practical for someone trading pr0n with strangers they meet on ICQ.;-)
Hmm, I'm running a RH 5.2 install on a 486 that I use for a masq firewall. I've had pretty good success with only two real exceptions:
ICQ file transfers. FTP with some *cough* windows clients.
I am able to play any net multiplayer game I want, I run a Q3Test server from behind the 486 using port-forwarding. Works great. Only issue I had was registering my game server with the id master.
Masquerading gets the registration packets, and masqs them out, except it changes the source port. This fouls up the works since game ports are expected to be 27960 and I show up with 62345 or some other randome port number generated by masquerading. To get around this, I use a helper that runs on the firewall that sniffs for the registration packets then writes out a copy from the correct port.
When I got the program, it was set up for half-life. I made a couple quick changes to get it to work for Q3Test, but it probably could be easilty converted for any game server that sends out similar registration packets (Quake2, Sin, Blood, Shogo, etc.)
'70 Camaro Z28 (when real men had real cars):P Its real cool that you can quarter that fast, that way you can't hear the hysterical laughter as you leave the line.:P
God my sides hurt from laughing at the mental image of some dork dropping a blower into a little sh*tbox Honda CRX. Reminds me of the lard-ass jerk who works in my building with a Mitsu Eclipse that thinks he is Mario F-ing Andretti with his little pip-squeak 4-banger rice-propelled POS.
Get a Mustang or a Firebird that has some real displacement if you want to feel some acceleration torque (and not have all the girls laugh at you as you peel out of the parking lot at Denny's at 2am!)
I would think the G forces would be more of a limiting factor? This thing drops 300 feet at an 80 degree angle (I assume this is where the 92mph top speed is reached), how many G's are exerted on the riders when that thing bottoms out?
I have no real information about what current coasters dish out, but I would guess its in the 2-3 G range, no? I've felt 4.5 G's when in a friend's private plane, I can pretty much guess that most thrill-seeking coaster riders would be satisfied with that G Load (read, not ready for much more:-) ). A fighter pilot can supposedly stand 9G in a sustained turn, but they have to do special breathing and leg muscle flexes to keep from blacking out.
So, the sensations that thrill a rider are the weightless drop (300 feet has to be one *hell* of a rush, I like the last car the best!), and then the G forces as you bottom out, turn and loop. I would guess that you wouldn't have to build a coaster too much higher than 300 feet before you start getting speeds and G loads that are going to be too much for the average coaster rider to enjoy.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw that and my reaction was, didn't we already know this? Is this a news flash for some reason?
I'm pretty sure I've heard this about him for some time now. The interesting thing is the "sometime in his lifetime" part. It would be news if he was making a comitment to do this by the end of the year or something. He's not. He's going to do what a lot of super-wealthy do, move it to charitable foundations to keep the government from getting 40% of it when he dies.
How much of $100 billion do you need to leave to your wife kids, etc when you pass on. $10 billion ought to be enough. So the other $90 billion gets put in a foundation to be doled out for cancer, aids research, feeding the hungry, etc. Wow, imagine that! Now Gates' legacy is that of the largest benefactor of all time, rather than the greedy opressive slaughterer of competitors richest billionaire of the 20th century.
Sheesh.
Nope, the link was just borked, evidenced by the floating /a tag that shows up in the status window when you hover mouse over link.
;-)
"Use the preview button, and check those links!"
truly words to live by.
this is an EX-parrot!
...have you got any cheddar? Not much call for it in these parts, sir.
...I'd like a license for my pet fish named abdul. This is a dog license with the word dog scratched out and the word hamster written in.
...that was *never* five minutes just now! I could be just arguing on my own time.
Cleese and Palin were my favorite combo, they had a magic all their own.
Well, that's a good point and it would carry more weight (for me) if you ran out of valid work units and your machine powered down. But it looks like seti may be just sending old wu's again to keep people running it, which I agree is a waste.
So, I don't disagree that efficiency is a good thing and that un-optimized clients is a bad thing. I didn't mean to (and I don't think I did) imply otherwise.
I guess I'm just thick because I still don't see how that article hopes to accomplish that. If a 3dnow optimized client appears tomorrow, everyone would still leave their machines on the same amount of time, no? If seti ran out of work units they would likely send out January again. What did I miss?
Uh, there was a probe? I have to go back and re-read that because I only read about the Keck reflector in Hawaii being used.
:-D
Oh, ok.. Cassini will drop a probe when it gets there in 2004. That's in the last paragraph. Its a little misleading then that the top of the article shows an artists' impression of a probe making you think that they confirmed 'oil' on the surface when, in reality, they *think* some dark spots on an earth-observatory image might be hydrocarbon seas.
Sheesh. I'm dissapointed. Guess I'll have to scrap my idea for an interplanetary pipeline to bring crude oil to Earth. Had a name picked out for the company and everything, "Titanic Intra-solar Transportation Systems (TITS)".
Well, good - its not just me that had this reaction as well. I mean really, this was all speculation. It could very well be that seti is concentrating more on how to cope with the 10x volunteers they got (if they expected 100,000 and got a million) than optimizing the clients. But, they didn't say so, directly or otherwise. Whare's the proof?
Besides, what real purpose does it serve to spend any time doing 3dnow optimization of the seti clients when there are more volunteers than they can handle now anyway? I didn't get the point of this article (assuming the premise is true) as to how this would help anyone but the 3dnow bunch. Sure, they have a worthy cause, I would love to have 3dnow in more applications for my AMD, but I don't get how this does that, or how it helps seti.
To be honest, it makes 3dnow.org look a lot less credible than it attempts to make seti look (IMHO).
>Remember, there is a buyer for every person selling (they just might not be willing to pay as much).
I don't think I'd say that. There are companies that "make a market" in certain stocks ( I think this is called arbitrage ). That is, they buy up shares when there are more sellers than buyers, hold an inventory and then sell to meet demand when there are more buyers than sellers.
At least, this is how I thought I understood that this works.
Yep, I remember being introduced to one of the M-16 models at my college graduation party in '86. My best friend was hosting this party and his snotty little brother was taking pot-shots at us from various vantage points. We were so hammered it took a while to figure out where the water was coming from. Little bastard was doing things like belly-crawling under a picnic bench and releasing a few quick bursts before retreating to refill.
God that thing was cool once we busted him and confiscated it. It looked like the real thing from far enough away and in the twlight lighting. I can see why cops didn't want punks running around with these, they looked real as hell. You could put a pretty good bead of water where you wanted it too, nothing like the volume that you can dispense from a supersoaker, tho. But for stealthy, accurate sniping, this was the sh*t.
er, I guess I could, couldn't I? Didn't really look into anything along those lines since this was intended to be primarily a windows-centric solution for my son to use for his school projects. In fact, this has sat on his desk for the most part where he's scanned pictures and drag-dropped them into his word reports.
I've used this exactly twice in the month that we've had this. The first time was when I lugged it upstairs to install the software on my windows partition and do a test scan with a couple wedding album shots. The second time I wanted to scan in a couple "refrigerator art" drawings my daughter had done. I got on my son's PC while he wasn't using it and just dropped the image file onto the Samba share I've set up on our server.
I'll have to look into this. I'm not sure this would be the best solution for a couple reasons which really don't have anything to do with the suitability of SANE or anything.
1) My son has lots more desk space than I do and he is using it more right now anyway.
2) I'm a SCSI 'virgin' so I'm not sure I have the time right now to take the plunge, esp since my son is using it daily right now.
3) The scanner didn't come with any SCSI hardware, I'd have to buy something.
4) So far, the USB seems plenty fast for scanning purposes. I'm sure the SCSI is faster, but it ain't broke right now with USB.
5) I'm wondering how well this would integrate with the windows scanning software that came with the unit (its nice, it does a preview, allows you to select a region for scanning, select the output format, scan straight to the printer - copier mode - or to a file.)
So, yeah I could probably get by without USB, but it is a pretty damn convenient setup for now.
Scanner. I bought a HP scanjet for my family, it has USB out of the box and can be made to do SCSI. I wanted the USB because between me, my kids and my wife, we can move the unit around as needed.
When Linux has good support for USB, I'll be set. In the mean time, I either boot Winblows when I need to scan, or scan from my kid's machine and then put it onto my server with Samba.
I can see the same thing happening with a digital camera or some other USB interface device (mice, keyboard, bah).
Really. The Sam's teach yourself C in 21 days (chuckle) comes with 3.1 which is pretty worthless for anything beyond "hello world" so I can't imagine 2.x is all that useful (hell, it wants windows 3.1 to intstall, thats got to tell you right there).
:-P
This would be kinda like Microsoft giving away Windows 3.1 (whoop1)
How do you figure that? They didn't change any policies or procedures, did they? They are just letting people have another shot at *beating* the form with the 'right' answers. The only thing that is significant is that they are willing to look the other way to let people misrepresent themselves on the questionaire so they can get past the established policies. To me this just seems like damage control since they were in the midst of a huge PR backlash. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't see where the magic of the OSS community broke down any barriers or that any "silly or irrelevant" practices have been abandoned as a result. The questions and screening criteria are the same, you just have a second chance to change your answers to get past the 'cut'.
/. completely so I don't have to see all the bitter complaining from everyone who sold their VW bug to scrape up $2000 to get in on the IPO only to watch it lose 50% of its value overnight (biting my tongue, hope it doesn't happen, but it *could*).
I hope this IPO goes well and a lot of people aren't burned. But, in reality, this is very risky (as are most IPO's) and a lot of people could really lose out. Me, I plan to wait for a couple weeks and see where the market prices this. If it goes to $50 an stays up, oh well - I missed out. If it goes to $50 in the first day, then settles back to $20 over the next week, I'll grab some and hold it for the long term. If it tanks to $8 after two weeks, I'll avoid
I saved my metal erector-set for my son, he is 6 now and isn't very interested. They have a plactic "equivalent" called K'nex that he is really into. He builds some neat stuff, and the parts are a lot lighter and flexible than the old metal kits. It goes together a lot faster than the metal nuts and bolts. He can put together a huge crane in an afternoon where I would have taken the better part of a week to make the same size thing if I had even had enough parts back then.
:-) ) still love playing with them together.
I too was kind of resistant to the 'tinker toys' sets that are made of plastic. But I have to admit, my kids do a lot of neat stuff with them that we could never have done with the wood ones (the bendable plastic rods open up a whole new dimension.
The only thing I don't really care for is the proliferation of the Lego theme-kits (although I love the star wars stuff). The effect this seems to have is that the kids want the next set so they can make whatever the kit is designed for (space vehicles, pirate sips, subs)instead of using generic parts they already have and using their imagination to make something original.
Then the parts get all mixed together and they get real frustrated when they pull out the plans and try to rebuild a specific kit. But, still a cool toy and my kids (and I
Heh, this is one of the great pleasures in being a parent. I can buy my son all the cool toys I don't have any more like Lego and spend "quality time" with him playing. :-)
... and don't forget the "phaser"!
Ah yes, but family-friendly harassment lawsuits are not so nearly expensive as sexual-harassment suits. ;-)
:-( ). We have filtering software in place to prevent employees from having pornography on their monitors that came through our network that someone else might see. (yeah, they can still bring in a porno CD, but that's less under our control than filtering the connection).
DISCLAIMER: I do not support the use of blocking software in a general sense.
But, here we run a business. We're in it to make money. We make money by charging our customers for services. We pay employees salaries and we pay expenses like renting the building, paying the electric bill, taxes, etc. Whatever is left over is profit for our shareholders.
We have a responsibility to our employees to keep the business profitable so we don't lay them off. We have a responsibility to our sharholders to maximize their stock value by not running the company into the ground, and keep profit margins as high as possible. A sexual harassment lawsuit is *really* expensive and can torpedo a small company like ours. If we don't take "reasonable" measures to prevent things like fire, flood, lawsuits and other preventable expenses, we are being negligent (sp?) to our employees and shareholders.
It sucks that we have to use filtering software. It sucks that a few employees can't use good judgement in how they use the 'net connection during work. It sucks that companies live in fear of big lawsuits (remember Mitsubishi?) because some employees don't know how to treat their co-workers with respect. We have laws and big penalties to make sure that employees are protected from harassment.
At our company we do a lot of things to minimize the risk that we will have a sexual harassment problem. We have training classes for all the managers so they understand the law. We have policies to keep the workplace free of potentially offensive materials (no hooters calendars
These are all "reasonable" measures that we have taken to reduce the risks to our business that an expensive sexual harassment lawsuit would pose. I wish we could all live and work in a world where this wasn't a problem, but we don't so this is how we deal with the problem.
>they have trouble accepting the lack of a management structure.
Well, that's really the problem that we have around here where I work and it'll just take time to overcome it. They are so used to vendors in suits driving BMW's taking them out to lunch that its really hard for them to adjust to anything else.
Our PHB's have their well-worn paths when it comes to dealing with IT management. You shake-down the vendors and play them off each other to get the deal you want. You get them to buy you lunch, dinners and golf rounds. You get them on the phone and scream bloody murder when something goes south (even if its not their problem). You get SLA's and hold them to the wall when they don't deliver. This is just the corporate culture that is so ingrained in how these weasels conduct their daily business.
So Linux/Free Software/Open Source/Call-it-what-you-will is a baffling concept to them. It is going to basically take a generational changing of the guard to get us out of this cycle. The best way I can see to move this along is to give up on the sodgy PHB in charge and work on the heir-apparent so that when he takes over for the PHB when he moves out, we may have a change for the better.
Oh man, that's funny. When that series of strips came out we were ROTFLOAO because we had a consultant that looked and talked *exactly* like the unix guy in Dilbert. White beard, bald, fat, suspenders.
"Oh no, you're one of those condescending unix guys!"
"Here kid, here's a nickel. Go buy yourself a *real* OS"
This guy was sharp as a tack, no doubt. But he looked the part and had the same attitude as Scott Adam's character!
Maybe on a 386, but on my 486 its fine. I'm connected to a cable modem and the 10BT NIC's run at full speed, the cpu barely ever breaks over 10%, even when holding up a quake3 game with 8 players (no the game doesn't run on the 486, I'm just talking about the network traffic).
Hmmm, what's the minimum hardware setup for running a W98 SE box to do NAT? P133 w/ 32 meg - I would probably guess. Nice thing about doing this with Linux is that you can dust off that 486 and put it to use.
;-)
My masq/portfw/gateway/firewall is a 486/100 with 16m running a 2.0.36 kernel on a 202 Mb hard drive. I laid hands on a couple SMC ISA NICs and an ATI mach 8 at a swap-meet and I was in business for about $30. Before I set this up, I was using a PPro 200 with 64mb to run Win98 and Sygate. This did actually work ok, except for having to reboot it when it froze every couple days. (now the ppro is running Debian doing Q2 server duty). Its a real shame you have to run an OS with an integrated GUI and web browser just to do a simple chore like NAT.
And the only real shortcoming I have with my setup is ICQ file transfers, but what I do anyway is set up FTP access for friends that need to send files. Granted, I don't do this very often and it wouldn't be practical for someone trading pr0n with strangers they meet on ICQ.
Hmm, I'm running a RH 5.2 install on a 486 that I use for a masq firewall. I've had pretty good success with only two real exceptions:
ICQ file transfers.
FTP with some *cough* windows clients.
I am able to play any net multiplayer game I want, I run a Q3Test server from behind the 486 using port-forwarding. Works great. Only issue I had was registering my game server with the id master.
Masquerading gets the registration packets, and masqs them out, except it changes the source port. This fouls up the works since game ports are expected to be 27960 and I show up with 62345 or some other randome port number generated by masquerading. To get around this, I use a helper that runs on the firewall that sniffs for the registration packets then writes out a copy from the correct port.
When I got the program, it was set up for half-life. I made a couple quick changes to get it to work for Q3Test, but it probably could be easilty converted for any game server that sends out similar registration packets (Quake2, Sin, Blood, Shogo, etc.)
Who said I have a mustang?
:P :P
'70 Camaro Z28 (when real men had real cars)
Its real cool that you can quarter that fast, that way you can't hear the hysterical laughter as you leave the line.
God my sides hurt from laughing at the mental image of some dork dropping a blower into a little sh*tbox Honda CRX. Reminds me of the lard-ass jerk who works in my building with a Mitsu Eclipse that thinks he is Mario F-ing Andretti with his little pip-squeak 4-banger rice-propelled POS.
Get a Mustang or a Firebird that has some real displacement if you want to feel some acceleration torque (and not have all the girls laugh at you as you peel out of the parking lot at Denny's at 2am!)
:-p
>Actually, I'm surprised I haven't been moderated down as flamebait yet...
That's because all the moderators used up all their points on the bad Kennedy jokes in the Katz thread. =)
I would think the G forces would be more of a limiting factor? This thing drops 300 feet at an 80 degree angle (I assume this is where the 92mph top speed is reached), how many G's are exerted on the riders when that thing bottoms out?
:-) ). A fighter pilot can supposedly stand 9G in a sustained turn, but they have to do special breathing and leg muscle flexes to keep from blacking out.
I have no real information about what current coasters dish out, but I would guess its in the 2-3 G range, no? I've felt 4.5 G's when in a friend's private plane, I can pretty much guess that most thrill-seeking coaster riders would be satisfied with that G Load (read, not ready for much more
So, the sensations that thrill a rider are the weightless drop (300 feet has to be one *hell* of a rush, I like the last car the best!), and then the G forces as you bottom out, turn and loop. I would guess that you wouldn't have to build a coaster too much higher than 300 feet before you start getting speeds and G loads that are going to be too much for the average coaster rider to enjoy.