Buy a cheap large USB disk. Sort the files by creation time, remove the ones in your list of files already backed up (empty at start) and fill your USB disk using the oldest files first. Add list of backed up files to your collection of disk indexes, (excluding files that you want the backup to process again). Label the disk as "files from xxx to yyy" Repeat until you're duplicating current files into a current disk.
If the data is sensitive then truecrypt the disks before writing the data, being aware that losing your password would also lose your backup and be prepared to wait days building the encrypted container.
I wrote an awk script to do this, though at the time I was writing 4Gb DVDs rather than multi-terabyte USB disks.
At some point in the future, when disk sizes have grown you can copy multiple old smaller disks into larger ones to avoid being stuck with old technology. I expect after the submitter has moved to a 100Tb NAS in 2018 they'll be using the 20 as a backup.
I have acquired a "ScreenPlay(TM) TV Link, Director Edition" to replace my old Emprex-1 which was nice but not perfectly reliable. It plays music (MP3) and videos (AVI or ISO) from SMB shares It also handles Mythtv streams allowing me to provide recorded programs over UPNP. When appliances like this fetch data from a network share you have a risk whether it will support your data format but the ScreenPlay seems to be sufficiently capable for my purposes.
I recommend this over many of the other suggestions for the following reasons:
1. cheap - £80.
2. Small - about 1cm high (smaller than a DVD case), slides in next to my V+ box.
3. energy efficient, I think about 10 watts.
Whitelisting applications would work if this could control what is run on your system. Variously implemented by either looking up a hash (e.g. md5) or signing the code. Unfortunately we can make the following observations which indicate this does not provide total protection:
By Design:
Some applications allow interpreted code (macros, visual basic inside documents, perl/java etc.).
Some applications are inherantly data (excel spreadsheet etc.).
Some applications change their behaviour dependant on libraries and plugins which may not be checked against a whitelist (e.g. activex, greasemonkey).
Some applications self-modify (maybe to try and prevent software theft).
Flaws:
Some applications have flaws that allow code injection (buffer overflows etc.).
Some features can be used for inappropriate purposes (updater that can be fooled into downloading the wrong files).
Sometimes signing keys are reverse engineered or leaked, allowing malware to be whitelisted.
List or key management requires ongoing maintenance and if it goes wrong can mount a denial of service attack on your customers.
Lack of omniscience:
Some people can use a secure application in a secure OS and still do something insecure (phishing etc.).
As new attacks are found, old protections become ineffective.
There is a chance that malware could be whitelisted.
You have to update your whitelist for every update by every vendor.
It is really really hard to be sure that the application does what you are told it does - either deliberately to produce trojan horses or accidentally (see above).
Each user may require a different whitelist as they have different requirements - some may wish to run p2p data sharing wheras others may regard this as a huge security risk.
Lack of omnipotence:
Some flaws are not in the applications - they may be in a hypervisor, loaded onto network cards, on routers, hosted remotely.
I agree about the benefits, and the hidden costs due to externalities. I'm afraid there are some flaws in the plan:
1. Even a patched antivirus is not full protection - oddly enough the virus writers also have copies of recent antivirus software and if their virus is spotted they tweak it until it goes undetected.
2. Patching is not full protection - Ever heard of zero day exploits and social engineering?
3. The historical codebase of Windows applications can significantly affect how tightly you can lock down permissions whilst keeping functionality. Of course, locking down an operating system not only requires skill and effort but can have an adverse effect in itself.
4. Some attacks arrive via trusted routes (e.g. media or websites from well respected companies).
5. Is it fair to throw money at people who deliberately use insecure operating systems. A flat fee could allow securer operating systems a financial benefit for the work they do protecting their users.
I agree more with Landsburg and Esther Dyson, but perhaps you should pre-emptively pay for your system to be cleaned (or de-virused) up as part of the cost of connecting to the Internet. In the event that you are infected you have a visit from a support engineer to fix the issue and you then put down another deposit against next time before being allowed to reconnect.
Interesting quote.. Usually you hear it the other way around - where people hate what they don't understand.
I've had a unixish system at home for the last 20 years and managed to score full marks on my RHCE so you could assume I understand unix and I do not feel I'm about to hate it!
One of the strengths of unixish systems is that skills are transferable. The ideas of processes with a parent of "init", a path, shells, forked tasks, everything a socket lets you understand how things work together which helps you program or administer them using your shared skills.
Whilst some things about AIX were good (e.g. backup to tape allowed restore soley from that tape) smit and the horrible AIX-specific databases meant that there was always extra time costs needed to maintain these systems. Now, don't get me wrong... SCO also had weird nonunixish ways of doing things, and Solaris and HPUX also have their share of peculiarities but AIX seemed not to have been designed by people who appreciated unix for its simplicity.
A redeeming feature about smit was being able to hit Esc-8 and see the real command that was hidden behind the menu option.
You will have to enable the tickbox for binary blobs before the Nvidia drivers are installed but that is a philosophical point rather than a technical issue.
Having used SunOS/Solaris since 1986 I no longer do so. I found their short-sightedness and arrogance impacting the ability of our department to meet our service level agreements. Now, it is very possible that we could also find our current OS vendor lacking but that was no reason to stay in a dysfunctional relationship.
My experiences are the opposite to that listed above. RedHat have been more forgiving and sensible supporting live production systems than my experiences from SUN or Veritas. Both experiences were for mega billion-dollar companies.
Luckily you can easily see if the number is divisible by 2, 3 or 5[*] so you can start checking at 7 and work up to the square root of the number you're searching. You'll find that much faster.
* with 2 or 5 you can look at the last digit. with 3 you add all the digits together and see if they're divisible by 3.
[for all other readers, I apologise for feeding the troll, but I felt I should offer my personal observations on the points raised above.]
I had all sorts of grief trying to make a vista monitor work at its native resolution (it had black bars up the sides). I succeeded in the end by doing something non-intuitive that I've now forgotten, but it took me an hour to find and had certainly foxed the neighbours to the point that they had to ask me round to fix it. You could not just set the resolution in Display->Properties because Vista thought it knew better and didn't provide that option.
Compare with adding a monitor to linux was simply choosing "System" -> "Adminstration" -> "Display" and ticking the box in the dual monitor tab. Beyond confirming the use of an admin tool with the root password there is no typing required.
gnome with 256mb of memory should be fine. A view of my desktop (up for 67 days so it should be in a steady state) shows it using about 40Mb resident. If you're having speed issues I suggest you've loaded your system down with lots of applications. I've seen firefox take up a fair amount of memory, but thats an application not operating system issue.
When I plug a disk onto my XP machine it allocates a drive letter behind one of my network drives and I therefore have to visit the administrative tools to remap it before it can be accessed (though I seriously hope this is fixed in Vista - can anyone confirm?). Compare this with my linux systems that just present it on the desktop labelled with the filesystem label from the media.
Your comment about computer requirements are unfair because you fail to mention the minimum recommended equivalent for Vista (home premium because you mentioned compiz, which give roughly equivalent eye candy) is 1GHz processor and 1Gb ram. These exceed those you mention for Panther and Ubuntu.
Full points for mentioning pack.google.com. Most of the same applications are availble for MacOS and Linux.
I grant you the observation that kernel-mode closed source commercial applications have a hard time with Linux, and that a fixed ABI would encourate some vendors. However, most commerical software are "ELF 32-bit i386" that use standard C library calls and are thus broadly compatible with most versions of linux released in the last 10 years. A big problem that commercial outfits have with linux support is the hurdle of selling software for £100,000 on a platform that costs £3000. The issue is mainly of marketing rather than technical difficulty.
I acknowledge that playing Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) usually requires some tricky configuration, and my favourite media portal (mythtv) installs easiest when you are using an approved set of hardware.
However, your final comment is the trollish bait that caused me to respond.
Linux already exceeds most operating systems in its support of hardware, reliability and usability; requiring a magic "Done" label makes the conversation pointless. In a commercial society companies are always bolting things in to try and keep their revenue stream. Also, hardware and security risks evolve over time. Moores Law also observes that computers can do more whilst maintaining the same illusion of responsiveness. For linux in addition, software developers look for projects that interest them and a some choose to enhance the linux kernel or applications. For these reasons and many more I expect to see software continuing to evolve and improve over the years until I'm too grey and senile to notice. You have to make a personal choice when its "Good enough". I reckoned NT3.51 was "Good enough" for writing documents and network access at the time. I also got along ok with XP when SP2 came out, but my current experiences of malware and fighting with Vista has moved it out of my "Good enough" category at a time when I can support all the nice eye candy, multimedia streaming, large disk volumes, hardware support and office tools on Linux. Being able to do it at a fraction of the cost and actually not having control of my computer taken away from me by the operating system is just a bonus.
If you find yourself out of quests, move to a different zone. Each of the starting areas should keep you busy through your teens, and each continent has content that can keep you in quests all the way up to 60.
Actually, SCO had already paid their lawyers so they would work for a fixed fee in the IBM case.
This means that however different each parties funding happened to be, SCO had guaranteed it would not have to concede the case because they ran out of money.
Also, there is a bit of confusion here - SCO and Novell are more fairly matched, and this was a MUCH quicker trial so would have been way cheaper.
You are incorrect flinging the insult "wow fanboy" at the previous poster.
Any game that REQUIRES groups for progression also therefore requires enough players that have the inclination, abilities and time to get together and make a group to progress. As your world gets bigger and the number of levels increase you dilute your player base to the point that people are unable to get a group and therefore unable to progress and therefore drop out of the game from frustration.
e.g. me.
I play WoW because some days I can solo, some days I can get involved with other people (from 2 to 39). I can do what I want and enjoy myself rather than sit folornly trying to get a group together. Oh, and if I get fed up and try something that gets my character killed I dont lose 3 weeks of xp.
Yeah, lets have none of that Misogyny, us straight dudes much prefer philogyny.
I think political parties should be much more disturbed by misanthropy personally.
No knifes (or knives) in songs, regardless of the most dangerous weapon in widescale use across the UK being the car; it sounds like you're hip and trendy picking on something in the news at the moment and anyway, you dont need them because its finger licking good down at the KFC!!
What next? No sticks or bricks? that'll help the UK economy immensely as we all live in holes after deforesting the whole country.
Perhaps the press release was put together by a summer work placement, rather than by a possible leader of the country. One hopes...
Well, considering he was at the British Phonographic Industry trying to drum up votes any politician worth his salt would tell them what they want to hear and therefore why they should vote for his party.
I hope he's lying to them as usual as per UK ministers' standard operating procedures. If this makes it into the manifesto then I cannot support the party, and if there are enough likeminded people that will cost them more votes than pandering to the racket.
Apologies if I come over as a bit bitter and twisted, but a poll of my peers (8 of us, professional, 40 years old-ish) has indicated that none of us believe either of the two main parties represent our wishes.
Heres a critic who got fed up of EQ. I put up with them for about 6 years and having tasted the breath of fresh air that other companies provide, will not return.
--- These comments are aimed at why I dont want SOE supporting my MMORPG...
SOE only listened to the hard-core vocal players, leaving the casual players without a game - did you ever try soloing past 60 with any non-kiting class? I had 2 accounts going so that I could make headway with tank/healer combo.
They had games masters who interfered, on self-important power trips. One changed my character name for no good reason.
Got an issue? raise a ticket and stay online till they get round to it. Unfortunately some people have to sleep. WoW tickets remain in the system and you get an email when its been attended to - which is fairly quickly. I suspect either the WoW GMs are more efficient, the game is less buggy, or have a better ratio of GM to customer.
They don't listen to their customers - and are arrogant whilst at it. They KNEW that EQ was a unique proposition at the time and treated customers like dirt.
They take money for playing the game twice - once as a high monthly fee, and once again on too-frequent updates.
--- I have these issues about EQ:
Extremely casual unfriendly to the point of becoming frustrating and impossible.
Poorly coded - inefficient use of 3d modelling, bugs in client and server code.
Since there had been so many expansions, and I was a casual player and thus not able to reach the powergamer zones, the game world had become so large and players so diffuse that I was frequently alone in a zone. This is not good if the monsters are too hard to solo.
Oh, I could go on... the auction house system, feign death griefers, xp loss on death, loss of equipment, quest management, overpowered monsters, poor treasure, worthless crafting system, long corpse runs.
You must all be laughing at me now for spending so many years on something that obviously wound me up.... but there were good things too (scenery, grouping, quests, exploring).
As a systems administrator I appreciate two interfaces to my data - one through a filesystem (and I really dont mind which one as long as it follows the usual semantics), and one that relates to the raw data as written to the spinning magnetic media.
When I copy all my raw devices I am confident that I have captured the full state of my machine, and I know exactly how much space and time that copy will take.
Whilst the ideas proposed may work in an academic way, I worry that the side effects will damage reliability. We're used to thinking about raw devices and filesystems, and to extend this to pondering filesystems as seen at certain points in time complicates disk usage because you can now no longer look at the size of data that you are storing and know how large a physical volume is needed to store it.
If you can write to a snapshot, then you will use up your physical storage in a manner that is invisible to the standard view of the filesystem.
We already have a way to implement this as seen using the layered filesystem in Knoppix, where the basic copying on writing goes on in a separate file. Maybe allocating storage sizes for changes when the snapshot is turned into a writable area could provide the same protection.
I'm not convinced that making this integrated any closer with block devices will bring more benefits (probably speed) than it may cause confusion (darn, I've got lots fo disk space, why can't I write this file). Computers dont just run the operating system - they run applications. Indeed, their very purpose is to run applications since all the operating system does is to provide the interface between the application and hardware. If changes in the operating system trigger application failures then you're heading in the wrong direction, and if you are optimistic enough to suppose all application developers test for all error codes and handle them sanely and correctly I've got some lottery numbers for you.
Your posts have food for thought, and you often seem insightful... but you present a very different view of the two different licensing schemes than the way I and many other people understand them. This could label you a subtle troll, using fear, derogatory labels such as "fanboy" with a warped interpretation of the GNU license but I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt and reply in the hope that my observations may be helpful.
You worry that someone wants to destroy BSD. Fear not... the core code is immortal as long as it is able to be ported to some sort of computing platform. However, it may become irrelevant or too slow to adapt to new hardware. I believe the biggest risk of this happening lies through hardware vendors not enabling timely support from open source software, and as such you should appreciate the efforts of all the open source groups working out how things work regardless of ideology.
You worry about the GPL preventing the release of software that was licensed as BSD from still being licensed under the BSD rules. Nothing relicenses the code. The original licenses still hold. BSD code can happily be included in a GPL system whilst adhering to the license requirements. If someone else (not necessarily a company) modified the BSD code and redistributed the product then you have no right to view the changes they made. You seem to be very happy with the idea of a strings free gift culture, however, me and a whole load of other developers believe that it is unfair and whilst we do not control who (for example, all companies, including Microsoft is fully able to use GPL code if it wishes) uses the code we have seen enough "embrace, extend and extinguish" methods over the years for us to want to protect ourselves.
The discrimination that you mention is not aimed at any particular company, it defends against abuse of the principles that the code was released under.
It took perhaps 20 years of being a developer for me to come fully to the side of preferring GPL code. I've dabbled in public domain, BSD and various other licenses but the GPL fosters a preference for fair practices and public release of fixes that I believe both allows software to evolve to fit its requirements and also encourages a basic human nature to work for the benefit of the needy.
It is not right to say corporations are evil or needy, you are placing emotions on something that is obviously non-human. They are driven by different desires. I submit that my opinion is not based upon reflexive, anti-capitalist terror but instead, regard my stance as a reaction to how I have been treated over the last 40 years.
A central entertainment system that needs to earn valuable space in the living room should provide more entertainment than just providing television.
My mythtv box does a few things that I believe makes it more useful to me than a Tivo.
1. I play World of Warcraft on my MythTV. Its hooked up to a HDMI flat screen TV so the resolution is ok. The play speed is similar to my laptop. This is very handy for hosting a WoW party where real live friends come round to play and eat pizza.
2. DSmyth lets me watch my recorded shows from any Windows PC in the house whenever I wish. Of course, this is provided wirelessly and works over 802.11b with no lag/stuttering because the bandwidth is reduced by transcoding.
3. Saves DVDs and CDs to disk, which protects them from the kids losing or breaking the original media.
4. Transcode ability lets MythTV automatically duplicate files into a format suitable for other devices (Ipaq or phone)
I assume the Tivo may have a web browser, for news and weather, since everything seems to nowadays, and that you can just open a file share and pull your shows onto a laptop for keeping the kids entertained in the car.
To prove I'm not just a fanboy, There are some areas which would benefit from development and bugfixes - MythArchive seems unreliable with transcoded shows, Hardware support for some devices (such as USB tuner sticks) is still at the "coming soon" stage which means you have to be a little careful which devices you purchase and scheduling does not automagically allow for overruns and cancellations. Unfortunately, the biggest pain in the rear that I have to deal with is due to the unfortunate state of dependencies that bite me when I try and update my Fedora underlying operating system, but that is a self-inflicted problem and irrelevent to the Tivo/MythTV comparison.
Computers have an understanding of what time it is separate to that shown to people visiting web pages, looking at the clock in the task bar etc... Well-written programs store time in its universal format, and convert the actual figures that you see depending on the viewers time zone.
This means that people who change the underlying clock to make the screen numbers look right will be causing more damage than good, Interesting effects can happen when the computer's internal clock goes backwards.
Of course, some programmers do not think outside of a simple computer, and just store information as they see it. The mixture of these two different ways of treating time may cause some odd effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a cheap large USB disk.
Sort the files by creation time, remove the ones in your list of files already backed up (empty at start) and fill your USB disk using the oldest files first.
Add list of backed up files to your collection of disk indexes, (excluding files that you want the backup to process again).
Label the disk as "files from xxx to yyy"
Repeat until you're duplicating current files into a current disk.
If the data is sensitive then truecrypt the disks before writing the data, being aware that losing your password would also lose your backup and be prepared to wait days building the encrypted container.
I wrote an awk script to do this, though at the time I was writing 4Gb DVDs rather than multi-terabyte USB disks.
At some point in the future, when disk sizes have grown you can copy multiple old smaller disks into larger ones to avoid being stuck with old technology. I expect after the submitter has moved to a 100Tb NAS in 2018 they'll be using the 20 as a backup.
I have acquired a "ScreenPlay(TM) TV Link, Director Edition" to replace my old Emprex-1 which was nice but not perfectly reliable. It plays music (MP3) and videos (AVI or ISO) from SMB shares It also handles Mythtv streams allowing me to provide recorded programs over UPNP. When appliances like this fetch data from a network share you have a risk whether it will support your data format but the ScreenPlay seems to be sufficiently capable for my purposes.
I recommend this over many of the other suggestions for the following reasons:
1. cheap - £80.
2. Small - about 1cm high (smaller than a DVD case), slides in next to my V+ box.
3. energy efficient, I think about 10 watts.
FAQ below:
https://iomega-eu-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/iomega_eu_en.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=22760
One recommendation I would offer if you bought one - put something over the activity LED as it is bright enough to read by.
Whitelisting applications would work if this could control what is run on your system. Variously implemented by either looking up a hash (e.g. md5) or signing the code. Unfortunately we can make the following observations which indicate this does not provide total protection:
By Design:
Some applications allow interpreted code (macros, visual basic inside documents, perl/java etc.).
Some applications are inherantly data (excel spreadsheet etc.).
Some applications change their behaviour dependant on libraries and plugins which may not be checked against a whitelist (e.g. activex, greasemonkey).
Some applications self-modify (maybe to try and prevent software theft).
Flaws:
Some applications have flaws that allow code injection (buffer overflows etc.).
Some features can be used for inappropriate purposes (updater that can be fooled into downloading the wrong files).
Sometimes signing keys are reverse engineered or leaked, allowing malware to be whitelisted.
List or key management requires ongoing maintenance and if it goes wrong can mount a denial of service attack on your customers.
Lack of omniscience:
Some people can use a secure application in a secure OS and still do something insecure (phishing etc.).
As new attacks are found, old protections become ineffective.
There is a chance that malware could be whitelisted.
You have to update your whitelist for every update by every vendor.
It is really really hard to be sure that the application does what you are told it does - either deliberately to produce trojan horses or accidentally (see above).
Each user may require a different whitelist as they have different requirements - some may wish to run p2p data sharing wheras others may regard this as a huge security risk.
Lack of omnipotence:
Some flaws are not in the applications - they may be in a hypervisor, loaded onto network cards, on routers, hosted remotely.
IMHO whitelisting requires reducing the functionality of applications (e.g. no java) and adds hoops/costs to professional developers and upsets users but unfortunately malware writers will focus on the easiest route using what they can get. c.f. http://www.securecomputing.net.au/News/161167,analysis-iphone-malware-evolution-on-overdrive.aspx
I agree about the benefits, and the hidden costs due to externalities. I'm afraid there are some flaws in the plan:
1. Even a patched antivirus is not full protection - oddly enough the virus writers also have copies of recent antivirus software and if their virus is spotted they tweak it until it goes undetected.
2. Patching is not full protection - Ever heard of zero day exploits and social engineering?
3. The historical codebase of Windows applications can significantly affect how tightly you can lock down permissions whilst keeping functionality. Of course, locking down an operating system not only requires skill and effort but can have an adverse effect in itself.
4. Some attacks arrive via trusted routes (e.g. media or websites from well respected companies).
5. Is it fair to throw money at people who deliberately use insecure operating systems. A flat fee could allow securer operating systems a financial benefit for the work they do protecting their users.
I agree more with Landsburg and Esther Dyson, but perhaps you should pre-emptively pay for your system to be cleaned (or de-virused) up as part of the cost of connecting to the Internet. In the event that you are infected you have a visit from a support engineer to fix the issue and you then put down another deposit against next time before being allowed to reconnect.
Interesting quote.. Usually you hear it the other way around - where people hate what they don't understand.
I've had a unixish system at home for the last 20 years and managed to score full marks on my RHCE so you could assume I understand unix and I do not feel I'm about to hate it!
One of the strengths of unixish systems is that skills are transferable. The ideas of processes with a parent of "init", a path, shells, forked tasks, everything a socket lets you understand how things work together which helps you program or administer them using your shared skills.
Whilst some things about AIX were good (e.g. backup to tape allowed restore soley from that tape) smit and the horrible AIX-specific databases meant that there was always extra time costs needed to maintain these systems. Now, don't get me wrong... SCO also had weird nonunixish ways of doing things, and Solaris and HPUX also have their share of peculiarities but AIX seemed not to have been designed by people who appreciated unix for its simplicity.
A redeeming feature about smit was being able to hit Esc-8 and see the real command that was hidden behind the menu option.
OK Troll, I'll bite...
Games only end to make you buy the next one. See Rogue/Moria/Angband/sudoku for an alternative.
The point of playing is not to reach the end, but to enjoy playing.
I do admit that enjoyment does seem to elude a lot of gamers, but that is their problem not the game.
Rootkitted to the hilt and hosting pr0n.
Security moves. Keep up or sink.
I believe Ubuntu will meet your requirements.
You will have to enable the tickbox for binary blobs before the Nvidia drivers are installed but that is a philosophical point rather than a technical issue.
Having used SunOS/Solaris since 1986 I no longer do so. I found their short-sightedness and arrogance impacting the ability of our department to meet our service level agreements. Now, it is very possible that we could also find our current OS vendor lacking but that was no reason to stay in a dysfunctional relationship.
My experiences are the opposite to that listed above. RedHat have been more forgiving and sensible supporting live production systems than my experiences from SUN or Veritas. Both experiences were for mega billion-dollar companies.
Changing solder does not prove a chip is faulty. The parts obviously work to the point that everyone testing them had one that functioned correctly.
There are plenty of reasons (e.g. cost, RoHS) that the change could be made.
Changing solder does not mean parts are defective.
Luckily you can easily see if the number is divisible by 2, 3 or 5[*] so you can start checking at 7 and work up to the square root of the number you're searching. You'll find that much faster.
* with 2 or 5 you can look at the last digit. with 3 you add all the digits together and see if they're divisible by 3.
You can write the 44th prime out as (2^32582657)-1. I don't think this 45th is much longer. That's 98 bits in 7-bit ascii.
[for all other readers, I apologise for feeding the troll, but I felt I should offer my personal observations on the points raised above.]
I had all sorts of grief trying to make a vista monitor work at its native resolution (it had black bars up the sides). I succeeded in the end by doing something non-intuitive that I've now forgotten, but it took me an hour to find and had certainly foxed the neighbours to the point that they had to ask me round to fix it. You could not just set the resolution in Display->Properties because Vista thought it knew better and didn't provide that option.
Compare with adding a monitor to linux was simply choosing "System" -> "Adminstration" -> "Display" and ticking the box in the dual monitor tab. Beyond confirming the use of an admin tool with the root password there is no typing required.
gnome with 256mb of memory should be fine. A view of my desktop (up for 67 days so it should be in a steady state) shows it using about 40Mb resident. If you're having speed issues I suggest you've loaded your system down with lots of applications. I've seen firefox take up a fair amount of memory, but thats an application not operating system issue.
When I plug a disk onto my XP machine it allocates a drive letter behind one of my network drives and I therefore have to visit the administrative tools to remap it before it can be accessed (though I seriously hope this is fixed in Vista - can anyone confirm?). Compare this with my linux systems that just present it on the desktop labelled with the filesystem label from the media.
Your comment about computer requirements are unfair because you fail to mention the minimum recommended equivalent for Vista (home premium because you mentioned compiz, which give roughly equivalent eye candy) is 1GHz processor and 1Gb ram. These exceed those you mention for Panther and Ubuntu.
Full points for mentioning pack.google.com. Most of the same applications are availble for MacOS and Linux.
I grant you the observation that kernel-mode closed source commercial applications have a hard time with Linux, and that a fixed ABI would encourate some vendors. However, most commerical software are "ELF 32-bit i386" that use standard C library calls and are thus broadly compatible with most versions of linux released in the last 10 years.
A big problem that commercial outfits have with linux support is the hurdle of selling software for £100,000 on a platform that costs £3000. The issue is mainly of marketing rather than technical difficulty.
I acknowledge that playing Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) usually requires some tricky configuration, and my favourite media portal (mythtv) installs easiest when you are using an approved set of hardware.
However, your final comment is the trollish bait that caused me to respond.
Linux already exceeds most operating systems in its support of hardware, reliability and usability; requiring a magic "Done" label makes the conversation pointless. In a commercial society companies are always bolting things in to try and keep their revenue stream. Also, hardware and security risks evolve over time. Moores Law also observes that computers can do more whilst maintaining the same illusion of responsiveness. For linux in addition, software developers look for projects that interest them and a some choose to enhance the linux kernel or applications. For these reasons and many more I expect to see software continuing to evolve and improve over the years until I'm too grey and senile to notice. You have to make a personal choice when its "Good enough". I reckoned NT3.51 was "Good enough" for writing documents and network access at the time. I also got along ok with XP when SP2 came out, but my current experiences of malware and fighting with Vista has moved it out of my "Good enough" category at a time when I can support all the nice eye candy, multimedia streaming, large disk volumes, hardware support and office tools on Linux. Being able to do it at a fraction of the cost and actually not having control of my computer taken away from me by the operating system is just a bonus.
If you find yourself out of quests, move to a different zone. Each of the starting areas should keep you busy through your teens, and each continent has content that can keep you in quests all the way up to 60.
Actually, SCO had already paid their lawyers so they would work for a fixed fee in the IBM case.
This means that however different each parties funding happened to be, SCO had guaranteed it would not have to concede the case because they ran out of money.
Also, there is a bit of confusion here - SCO and Novell are more fairly matched, and this was a MUCH quicker trial so would have been way cheaper.
You are incorrect flinging the insult "wow fanboy" at the previous poster.
Any game that REQUIRES groups for progression also therefore requires enough players that have the inclination, abilities and time to get together and make a group to progress. As your world gets bigger and the number of levels increase you dilute your player base to the point that people are unable to get a group and therefore unable to progress and therefore drop out of the game from frustration.
e.g. me.
I play WoW because some days I can solo, some days I can get involved with other people (from 2 to 39). I can do what I want and enjoy myself rather than sit folornly trying to get a group together. Oh, and if I get fed up and try something that gets my character killed I dont lose 3 weeks of xp.
Sadly I have commented, so cannot mod you up.
I am sorrowful that this is presented by the leader of the opposition, who look to me like they may only be in opposition for a long long time yet.
Yeah, lets have none of that Misogyny, us straight dudes much prefer philogyny.
I think political parties should be much more disturbed by misanthropy personally.
No knifes (or knives) in songs, regardless of the most dangerous weapon in widescale use across the UK being the car; it sounds like you're hip and trendy picking on something in the news at the moment and anyway, you dont need them because its finger licking good down at the KFC!!
What next? No sticks or bricks? that'll help the UK economy immensely as we all live in holes after deforesting the whole country.
Perhaps the press release was put together by a summer work placement, rather than by a possible leader of the country. One hopes...
Well, considering he was at the British Phonographic Industry trying to drum up votes any politician worth his salt would tell them what they want to hear and therefore why they should vote for his party.
I hope he's lying to them as usual as per UK ministers' standard operating procedures. If this makes it into the manifesto then I cannot support the party, and if there are enough likeminded people that will cost them more votes than pandering to the racket.
Apologies if I come over as a bit bitter and twisted, but a poll of my peers (8 of us, professional, 40 years old-ish) has indicated that none of us believe either of the two main parties represent our wishes.
Heres a critic who got fed up of EQ. I put up with them for about 6 years and having tasted the breath of fresh air that other companies provide, will not return.
--- These comments are aimed at why I dont want SOE supporting my MMORPG...
SOE only listened to the hard-core vocal players, leaving the casual players without a game - did you ever try soloing past 60 with any non-kiting class? I had 2 accounts going so that I could make headway with tank/healer combo.
They had games masters who interfered, on self-important power trips. One changed my character name for no good reason.
Got an issue? raise a ticket and stay online till they get round to it. Unfortunately some people have to sleep. WoW tickets remain in the system and you get an email when its been attended to - which is fairly quickly. I suspect either the WoW GMs are more efficient, the game is less buggy, or have a better ratio of GM to customer.
They don't listen to their customers - and are arrogant whilst at it. They KNEW that EQ was a unique proposition at the time and treated customers like dirt.
They take money for playing the game twice - once as a high monthly fee, and once again on too-frequent updates.
--- I have these issues about EQ:
Extremely casual unfriendly to the point of becoming frustrating and impossible.
Poorly coded - inefficient use of 3d modelling, bugs in client and server code.
Since there had been so many expansions, and I was a casual player and thus not able to reach the powergamer zones, the game world had become so large and players so diffuse that I was frequently alone in a zone. This is not good if the monsters are too hard to solo.
Oh, I could go on... the auction house system, feign death griefers, xp loss on death, loss of equipment, quest management, overpowered monsters, poor treasure, worthless crafting system, long corpse runs.
You must all be laughing at me now for spending so many years on something that obviously wound me up.... but there were good things too (scenery, grouping, quests, exploring).
As a systems administrator I appreciate two interfaces to my data - one through a filesystem (and I really dont mind which one as long as it follows the usual semantics), and one that relates to the raw data as written to the spinning magnetic media.
When I copy all my raw devices I am confident that I have captured the full state of my machine, and I know exactly how much space and time that copy will take.
Whilst the ideas proposed may work in an academic way, I worry that the side effects will damage reliability. We're used to thinking about raw devices and filesystems, and to extend this to pondering filesystems as seen at certain points in time complicates disk usage because you can now no longer look at the size of data that you are storing and know how large a physical volume is needed to store it.
If you can write to a snapshot, then you will use up your physical storage in a manner that is invisible to the standard view of the filesystem.
We already have a way to implement this as seen using the layered filesystem in Knoppix, where the basic copying on writing goes on in a separate file. Maybe allocating storage sizes for changes when the snapshot is turned into a writable area could provide the same protection.
I'm not convinced that making this integrated any closer with block devices will bring more benefits (probably speed) than it may cause confusion (darn, I've got lots fo disk space, why can't I write this file). Computers dont just run the operating system - they run applications. Indeed, their very purpose is to run applications since all the operating system does is to provide the interface between the application and hardware. If changes in the operating system trigger application failures then you're heading in the wrong direction, and if you are optimistic enough to suppose all application developers test for all error codes and handle them sanely and correctly I've got some lottery numbers for you.
Petrus4,
Your posts have food for thought, and you often seem insightful... but you present a very different view of the two different licensing schemes than the way I and many other people understand them. This could label you a subtle troll, using fear, derogatory labels such as "fanboy" with a warped interpretation of the GNU license but I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt and reply in the hope that my observations may be helpful.
You worry that someone wants to destroy BSD. Fear not... the core code is immortal as long as it is able to be ported to some sort of computing platform. However, it may become irrelevant or too slow to adapt to new hardware. I believe the biggest risk of this happening lies through hardware vendors not enabling timely support from open source software, and as such you should appreciate the efforts of all the open source groups working out how things work regardless of ideology.
You worry about the GPL preventing the release of software that was licensed as BSD from still being licensed under the BSD rules. Nothing relicenses the code. The original licenses still hold. BSD code can happily be included in a GPL system whilst adhering to the license requirements. If someone else (not necessarily a company) modified the BSD code and redistributed the product then you have no right to view the changes they made. You seem to be very happy with the idea of a strings free gift culture, however, me and a whole load of other developers believe that it is unfair and whilst we do not control who (for example, all companies, including Microsoft is fully able to use GPL code if it wishes) uses the code we have seen enough "embrace, extend and extinguish" methods over the years for us to want to protect ourselves.
The discrimination that you mention is not aimed at any particular company, it defends against abuse of the principles that the code was released under.
It took perhaps 20 years of being a developer for me to come fully to the side of preferring GPL code. I've dabbled in public domain, BSD and various other licenses but the GPL fosters a preference for fair practices and public release of fixes that I believe both allows software to evolve to fit its requirements and also encourages a basic human nature to work for the benefit of the needy.
It is not right to say corporations are evil or needy, you are placing emotions on something that is obviously non-human. They are driven by different desires. I submit that my opinion is not based upon reflexive, anti-capitalist terror but instead, regard my stance as a reaction to how I have been treated over the last 40 years.
A central entertainment system that needs to earn valuable space in the living room should provide more entertainment than just providing television.
My mythtv box does a few things that I believe makes it more useful to me than a Tivo.
1. I play World of Warcraft on my MythTV. Its hooked up to a HDMI flat screen TV so the resolution is ok. The play speed is similar to my laptop. This is very handy for hosting a WoW party where real live friends come round to play and eat pizza.
2. DSmyth lets me watch my recorded shows from any Windows PC in the house whenever I wish. Of course, this is provided wirelessly and works over 802.11b with no lag/stuttering because the bandwidth is reduced by transcoding.
3. Saves DVDs and CDs to disk, which protects them from the kids losing or breaking the original media.
4. Transcode ability lets MythTV automatically duplicate files into a format suitable for other devices (Ipaq or phone)
I assume the Tivo may have a web browser, for news and weather, since everything seems to nowadays, and that you can just open a file share and pull your shows onto a laptop for keeping the kids entertained in the car.
To prove I'm not just a fanboy, There are some areas which would benefit from development and bugfixes - MythArchive seems unreliable with transcoded shows, Hardware support for some devices (such as USB tuner sticks) is still at the "coming soon" stage which means you have to be a little careful which devices you purchase and scheduling does not automagically allow for overruns and cancellations. Unfortunately, the biggest pain in the rear that I have to deal with is due to the unfortunate state of dependencies that bite me when I try and update my Fedora underlying operating system, but that is a self-inflicted problem and irrelevent to the Tivo/MythTV comparison.
Computers have an understanding of what time it is separate to that shown to people visiting web pages, looking at the clock in the task bar etc... Well-written programs store time in its universal format, and convert the actual figures that you see depending on the viewers time zone.
This means that people who change the underlying clock to make the screen numbers look right will be causing more damage than good, Interesting effects can happen when the computer's internal clock goes backwards.
Of course, some programmers do not think outside of a simple computer, and just store information as they see it. The mixture of these two different ways of treating time may cause some odd effects.