This should be affordable. I know of a group that wanted a self serving exemption to a politically inevitable law. They pooled resources, hired the right sort of lawyer, and $50k later they have their own little sentence enshrined in the US laws.
I don't know what the readership of slashdot is these days, but surely it can produce 10,000 readers willing to pay $5 for a particular freedom.
The trick is to for someone to become a credible focal point. Someone who will be trusted by the donors to make the best use of the funds.
Even the link into everything2 is wrong. `Kadinsky' is apparently some dope smoking coffee house in Amsterdam. Maybe they paint there, maybe not. everything2 is silent on the matter.
Pretty sorry excuse for a review.
on
ZDNet Reviews KOffice
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The article is more of a cursory glance through the programs. To summarize...
RPM installation works
KWord can import Microsoft formats, the other programs do not. Some try and fail.
KWord uses a frame model for document layout rather than whatever Microsoft Word uses.
KWord does not have live spell and grammar checking.
KSpread doesn't have as many built in functions as Excel.
KSpread is case sensitive on function names, and maybe column names, I can't quite tell from the `review'.
KPresenter is `pretty basic'. He then describes it as having every feature I ever needed in a slide making package. No word of what is missing except presenter notes.
Kivio is python scriptable, contains built in stencils and more can designed or purchased. (From whom?)
KOffice is faster than StarOffice.
KOffice does not have VBA macros. He seemed to think this was a limitation.:-) Star Office does.
KOffice does not have a database application.
Thats about all there is in the article. If it took the author more than 4 hours to produce this I would be surprised. Fortunately, the geeks can now read this synopsis instead of reading the author's wordy version. This way we will save hundreds of geek hours.
Sorry I slept too late and didn't get this in until the wastelands of the later articles, but...
Any decent programmer can write their own encryption in a matter of minutes. Go look at the CipherSaber home page.
In George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy, Jedi Knights were expected to make their own light sabers. The message was clear: a warrior confronted by a powerful empire bent on totalitarian control must be self-reliant. As we face a real threat of a ban on the distribution of strong cryptography, in the United States and possibly world-wide, we should emulate the Jedi masters by learning how to build strong cryptography programs all by ourselves. If this can be done, strong cryptography will become
impossible to suppress.
So get out there and write build yourself a saber. Then use it to encrypt a short reply to this article with the key freedom.
I'm not sure where you block quote comes from, I assume from the indictment text?
If so, it appears that the prosecutor is deliberatly casting the case in terms that will allow the defense to challenge and break the DMCA.
The law will stand until a judge declares it invalid. The first step in that process is for the prosecutor to charge someone with the law. Dmitry is being charged in a very favorable light. No emphasis about how the unprotected books could then be published illegally. Equal weight is given to the three legitimate uses. (copying, printing, and text to speech.)
Someone with a very fine sense of how that district works should read that indictment and see what is between the lines.
Why would you assume the words in a slashdot article were spelled correctly? He probably did what any sensible slashdot reader does. Look at the hard words in the article and just assume they are wrong so he picked a different spelling.:-)
Re:Sigh - of course it is Adobe's fault
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 2
Of course it is Adobe's fault. They requested that he be arrested but not be prosecuted. Unfortunately they can't stop the government, Dmitry will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Adobe should at least accept responibility for their actions and pay Sklyarov's legal bills.
Yes, I said that. Adobe intended to slap his wrist and instead dropped him into the meat grinder. He is suffering more hardship than they intended. They are at the very least responsible for his legal bills and some sort of compensation for his detention in the US. (I assume Dmitry is not allowed to work to support his family while he in the US.)
I have both a clamshell ibook and a new ibook. The clamshell is a tank. The battery lasts long enough that I never take a charger, so I never had a case. Just grab the computer by the handle and go. I forget how long I've owned it (it is one of the first) and it has never been damaged by being handled and carried naked.
I miss my handle on the new iBook. I understand that the display hinge precludes one, and given the choice I'll take the extra 1" the hinge gets me, but I still miss the handle.
I would gladly pay for an AppleWorks for OS-X that didn't explode violently destroying my work. Oh wait, I already paid...
As much as the AppleWorks dev group iritates me for leaving me without a decent office suite for OS-X, I feel only pity for them. Remember, these poor coders f*cked up Steve Job's big rollout during a time when his stock options are down. That can't be healthy.
(For the non-Mac folk, Apple writes AppleWorks, their office suite. It doesn't have the feature list of Microsoft Office, but does most everything many people need and is quite simple. Unfortunately the dev group dropped the ball on OS-X. The software was late and then only barely works. It is prone to random and non-random instant death. Stupid things that should never have gotten out the door. e.g. in a spreadsheet when you select the `number format' menu item BAAAAAM, your process is dead. How could that get by testing?)
In other news, thinksecret is reporting that CNET (which owns ZDNet) is closing ZDNet's macintosh coverage section.
So, its a nice OS, we like it, be we won't cover it.
Maybe it was redundant with another CNET news page or maybe they just couldn't compete with the other Mac news sites. I always thought ZDNet was a purely windows organization and never went there for Mac news.
Re:AuDSL is more modem than DSL
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 4
Leased lines still have crosstalk and generate crosstalk. They run in the same bundles with all the other lines. They have the same restrictions on power spectrum as anything else in the bundle.
They cost more (a LOT more where I am, not much more across the river from me) and they don't have the filters that make long analog phone lines more tolerable, but they still have all the crosstalk and noise problems of regular lines.
You can run many models of DSL modems back-to-back over them. I don't do this, but you can read about it on the web then buy the modems cheap on ebay. (Might take a while to collect proper models.)
In my experience leased lines have one unique property. Testing them fixes them. Your critical line goes out (several times a year in some cases), you call the carrier, they `test' the line, and then it works again. I suppose that helps their stats for the PSC.
AuDSL is more modem than DSL
on
DSLBlaster?
·
· Score: 2
Sure they put DSL in the name, but they operate at 96kbps, or a bit less than twice modem speed wire. My little DSL line is pluggin along at 12 times that rate.
That 96kbps is over a spool of wire. You can not get more than 64kbps through any POTS line that goes through the 8KHz, 8bit conversion in a digital telephone switching system. (If you think you can, then I suggest you find a more lucrative use for breaking the laws of mathematics.)
Further, they make no mention of cross talk sensitivity or generation. Remember that in the US our modems are only 53kbps anyway because of frequency limitations.
I give it an A for inspiration and a D for utility. The FCC will likely give it an F for violating power spectrum limitations on a phone line. (Putting DSL in the name was pure marketing genius! AuModem would never have gotten on slashdot)
That USB is a `B' type connector. In other words you can plug it into your host computer as a peripheral. You can not plug USB devices into it. It is not a simple wiring difference.
That will rule out all those nifty USB peripherals that you might want to plug into this device. So long to cameras, printers, audio devices, keyboards, controllers....
I suppose it could be useful for initial programming, but I suspect the only reason it is there is that it is on the SA1110 chipset (which is aimed at handhelds). I also recall that the USB implementation on the SA1110 has (or had) some sort of congenital problem. I believe you would find more in the LART archives. (Which is also available now, but at something like twice this price and no cool aluminium box, but a fully open sourced hardware design.)
(Ok, against all slashdot culture, I have done my own research and looked up the aforementioned USB problem. It is the SA1100 which could only be used as a slave, and it had to be the only device on the bus for it to work as documented in the errata. I don't know if the SA1110 has this problem or not. Intel app note here.)
Re:Lousy numbers... (ok in some cases)
on
Flywheel UPS
·
· Score: 2
Reading between the lines of their web site, I believe they intend these to be useful in places where the cost of replacing batteries is significant. Even if the batteries are only a couple hundred dollars, getting a crew to the location with the batteries could cost many times more.
I have supported sites where onsite maintanence cost $7,000 per incident (and just wasn't possible for parts of the year). Sure makes you think twice before typing each remote command.:-)
Maybe these things will be common someday, not soon. Railroad crossing lights in the US used to be powered by large buried batteries. Periodicly trains would come by, hoist out the old one and put in a new one then haul the old one back for recharging. Maybe 40 years from now using chemical batteries in UPSs will seem just as silly.
I noticed that there is still a sentence of the original article that hasn't been refuted...
Apple will continue to sell CRT monitors. They will not have little Apple logos stuck on them and they won't have custom plastics, but the AppleStore will have monitors from an as yet un-named monitor manufacturer as an option on purchases. Just like they sell things like external disks, tape drives, mp3 players, hubs, UPSs, and such.
The Apple LCDs have always been noted for scaling well. The old analog ones have convolution filters and do no display chunkiness lower resolutions. I have played hundreds of hours of TeamFortress on an original Apple LCD. (It is also gorgeous when displaying NTSC video.) I prefer to use my original iBook at 640x480 for games that have smallish displays (like Snood).
The new digital interfaces use filtering in the video card, I'm told it is good.
One of those little features that a company can build in when they have a few extra dollars built in to the margins.
(As long as I'm countering CmdrTaco's unfounded steering statements... I fail to see how the price of the very high end display is going to turn off the price concious buyer. The price concious buyer is getting an iMac for $899 and not spending anything on a montior. 22" LCD@$2500 is a damn good buy (if you need it). Nec 20" is $3500, I'd quote other prices, but I can't find anything else of 18" at uvision.com)
You mean we haven't already signed onesided contracts? My tiny little band makes nice music, but nothing that will ever be popular. Let's see what MP3.com has in their contract bag...
mp3.com routinely sends us email telling us the rules have changed and these are the new rules.
the pay-for-play program divides a pot of money between the artists, but mp3.com refuses to state the formula for the payout.
if they believe you are attempting to trick the formula you will not be paid.
a month or so ago the bands were unilaterally notified that if they wanted to earn money, they must pay mp3.com $20/month in order to be elligible to be paid. How about if your employer serves you with a $20/mo paycheck-privelege-fee?
bands which are not paying their $20/mo still deplete the pay-for-play pot of money, except mp3.com keeps instead of accrueing it to the bands.
it is right at impossible to get a straight answer from them on any matter.
if you watch closely the song play statistics (that govern your pay through the mysterious, but presumably monatonically increasing function) will sporadically change and reduce your plays. No explanation.
despite mp3.com's denials, artists complain that their band contact email addresses are used to direct marketing.
Remember, the bands are all paying their own production costs up front. There is no mysterious development costs for guiding the bands into success. mp3.com is just a distribution chain and they manage to screw the artists at every turn.
That all said, I still like the concept. I don't make music for money. If someone can enjoy my music, then great, go to it. mp3.com is just a nice distribution channel where I don't have to pay for the bandwidth.
Sorry, I got ranty on this. To summarize, the parent article makes some good points, the previous replies are too extreme in their criticism. I supply better anecdotal evidence than them.:-)
For CFD the altivec units will be heavily used, it is correct to use them for comparing speed to PIIIs. There may be a case where it matches 50 dual PIIs, but that sounds extreme.
I just bought three lowend Gateway 2U rackmount boxes. They come in at ~$2200 for a single 800MHz PIII which will be slower than the dual 533MHz mac at ~$2500. That certainly meets `almost comparable'.
Neither of these machines are very cheap computers. There definately is a quality problem when you get into very cheap computers. There are applications for them, but if your diagnostic time is worth much, then I believe it pays to buy better hardware. (Plus you don't bleed when you have to open them up and add memory or drives. Once you get above the nasty low end machines they take time to deburr the stampings. My brother runs a metal working factory and their worst injury this year has been an IT guy that stumbled while holding a cheap PC and sliced several fingers to the bone.)
The new Macs do come with gigabit ethernet (although I don't think those old 450s had gigabit) and an OS. That gateway price is a bare machine. I put Linux on `for free', but the 2.4 kernel series (which I needed for iptables) had bugs in the interrupt routing for the chipset and it took me weeks of effort to get it all worked out into a stable configuration (manifested as a AIC-7xxx problem, took a while to find the interrupt controller problem). I knew I should have bought a 4th scratch box.
Gigabit ethernet hubs are still $250/port, but that will come down quickly. I remember when I bought a Powermac and thought it was just plain silly to put a 10/100 adapter in it, only servers could afford to have 100mbit ports. In 12 months all my new hubs where 100mbit.
I've got loads of Apples and loads of PCs. The apple hardware failure rate is less than half our PC hardware failure rate. Depending on the cost of a failure (in terms of ruined work, lost work, diagnosis, and repair) I do lean toward Macs because of their better reliability. (And before we get into a flame war on your reliable PC... I'm sure there are reliable models of PCs, but I need a vendor I can count on to make every model I might buy reliable. I can't look at historical data and say "look, here is a model that was made two years ago that was a good one" because I can't buy that anymore. (And yes, I own a PB5300, I know the counter argument, but Apple fixes it for free whenever it breaks so thats not so bad.))
I'm glad someone finally had the courage to stand up and reveal that the output of all 22 million taiwanese should be suspect because someone got a quirky motherboard, here is further proof of their inability to produce non-buggy products...
Re:I hope they don't make fridge magnets
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 5
You would probably not want one as a fridge magnet. It would probably bend the front of your fridge as you pry it off.
If you ever have a hard drive go bad, you should get yourself a set of tiny torx drivers and disassemble it. You will find a pair of insanely strong magnets around the head positioning coil.
Watch your fingers, when those magnets take a notion to slam together they will pinch through your flesh.
note: the preceding should not be construed as instructions to bang your office mates computer up and down while operating in order to acquire a bad hard drive.
Well, not as complete and not as a transparent etherenet level device. We don't do reordering
or packet multiplication and the linux box functions as a router.
The relevant piece you want to use is the `packet scheduler'. There are a variety of scheduling algorithms in there. You might use a command like...
... to throttle your network to T1 speeds. Note that you have to do both interfaces as the scheduler works on outgoing packets only.
I used to have a custom scheduler module that was a packet loser. It turns out to be a bad idea for tcp analysis. (Consider, most of the overloaded routers we meet are running some sort of fair queueing. They are deliberately causing loss to achieve a rate limitation. When you observe packet loss, it is not the loss that causes the limitation, it is the limitation causing the loss.)
For the industrious, as of linux 2.4 I believe a packet loser is much better to implement as a firewall module. Its on my `someday when I have time' list. I also plan a latency module. Nothing like latency to expose chatty network protocols. (cough sqlnet cough, "it worked fine in the development building, I don't know why your global users are complaining":-)
People who write software and release it under the BSD license expect that it can be used by anyone. That is intent of that license.
If the author's wanted it to be GPL they would release it under GPL.
It still behooves Apple to feed improvements back upstream to simplify merging with the next upstream release. Its too soon for that with OS-X, maybe in a couple of months when they can stop and breath.
PS. I don't see any Open Source software written or maintained by Evan Leibovitch. Maybe he has, I didn't look too long.
That message usually means you have a `reviewer' copy of the tape or dvd. The studios send out dumptruck loads of tapes to newpapers, tv news shows, and basically any creature that might generate some press for them. In order to keep these from dilluting sales they mark them.
Slashdot Mirror
This should be affordable. I know of a group that wanted a self serving exemption to a politically inevitable law. They pooled resources, hired the right sort of lawyer, and $50k later they have their own little sentence enshrined in the US laws.
I don't know what the readership of slashdot is these days, but surely it can produce 10,000 readers willing to pay $5 for a particular freedom.
The trick is to for someone to become a credible focal point. Someone who will be trusted by the donors to make the best use of the funds.
Even the link into everything2 is wrong. `Kadinsky' is apparently some dope smoking coffee house in Amsterdam. Maybe they paint there, maybe not. everything2 is silent on the matter.
Wassily Kandinsky was a painter. Check him out over at Thinker.org, this link ought to get you some of his works. Thinker will probably die under the load. You should also look at This guy's kandinsky page.
Thats about all there is in the article. If it took the author more than 4 hours to produce this I would be surprised. Fortunately, the geeks can now read this synopsis instead of reading the author's wordy version. This way we will save hundreds of geek hours.
f5f28d82f3af0045004a6cf216cac7677a45c73def76b08122 7f0162e2a3867a
e 34 b012dbae8958ba
4 1f fb57bdae0cdb30
0 7f dfcd2208fde22b
1 c0 29f2cdb05bced9
0 73 e6b9c2923f90eb
3 a1 a155c1f4bb243f
0 92 7a015426fe54e6
7 9a 35e52c6b763ffd
d d1 9ff76a7de8c77c
f 05 40cbd7fa462d45
5 5e 4ea5f57eef7fa9
711c00e97f155aae88b8246ee26f308a0fe94f1943b0d60
1889a6a2e340f38dd583b4f02174df09543fcd9df63ae6f
0d9476ffd1a70dfaca52d991d4830a6e68332782f586fa4
56c3d55faed4378c979f3a0e7228348ffd2500e23cbad97
1b2c201e51e7c35ce2883ca08356869d9b34c915e120bf4
f7521ffe9fc8b6c78fac71d15f81ded586eaf81dd56a54c
7a9a40c248f9cf4d3c3aa2f664b900c1abd01ccd1b1b325
76f58286b7554a0c45ea33937d0e11a4fa48ed1dd2f55bc
9e6d8024c3f068242154cc85a90dce0b456816d22c95870
793fcb41da013be4b979cbb60f1c72a8d4192b43d429364
2cc3227190f263fcb1a477637c9bdaef4341f1904781175
93e00874c9c88895594b70f05ca1d1d659f9
Any decent programmer can write their own encryption in a matter of minutes. Go look at the CipherSaber home page.
So get out there and write build yourself a saber. Then use it to encrypt a short reply to this article with the key freedom.
I'm not sure where you block quote comes from, I assume from the indictment text?
If so, it appears that the prosecutor is deliberatly casting the case in terms that will allow the defense to challenge and break the DMCA.
The law will stand until a judge declares it invalid. The first step in that process is for the prosecutor to charge someone with the law. Dmitry is being charged in a very favorable light. No emphasis about how the unprotected books could then be published illegally. Equal weight is given to the three legitimate uses. (copying, printing, and text to speech.)
Someone with a very fine sense of how that district works should read that indictment and see what is between the lines.
Why would you assume the words in a slashdot article were spelled correctly? He probably did what any sensible slashdot reader does. Look at the hard words in the article and just assume they are wrong so he picked a different spelling. :-)
Of course it is Adobe's fault. They requested that he be arrested but not be prosecuted. Unfortunately they can't stop the government, Dmitry will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Adobe should at least accept responibility for their actions and pay Sklyarov's legal bills.
Yes, I said that. Adobe intended to slap his wrist and instead dropped him into the meat grinder. He is suffering more hardship than they intended. They are at the very least responsible for his legal bills and some sort of compensation for his detention in the US. (I assume Dmitry is not allowed to work to support his family while he in the US.)
I have both a clamshell ibook and a new ibook. The clamshell is a tank. The battery lasts long enough that I never take a charger, so I never had a case. Just grab the computer by the handle and go. I forget how long I've owned it (it is one of the first) and it has never been damaged by being handled and carried naked.
I miss my handle on the new iBook. I understand that the display hinge precludes one, and given the choice I'll take the extra 1" the hinge gets me, but I still miss the handle.
I would gladly pay for an AppleWorks for OS-X that didn't explode violently destroying my work. Oh wait, I already paid...
As much as the AppleWorks dev group iritates me for leaving me without a decent office suite for OS-X, I feel only pity for them. Remember, these poor coders f*cked up Steve Job's big rollout during a time when his stock options are down. That can't be healthy.
(For the non-Mac folk, Apple writes AppleWorks, their office suite. It doesn't have the feature list of Microsoft Office, but does most everything many people need and is quite simple. Unfortunately the dev group dropped the ball on OS-X. The software was late and then only barely works. It is prone to random and non-random instant death. Stupid things that should never have gotten out the door. e.g. in a spreadsheet when you select the `number format' menu item BAAAAAM, your process is dead. How could that get by testing?)
In other news, thinksecret is reporting that CNET (which owns ZDNet) is closing ZDNet's macintosh coverage section.
So, its a nice OS, we like it, be we won't cover it.
Maybe it was redundant with another CNET news page or maybe they just couldn't compete with the other Mac news sites. I always thought ZDNet was a purely windows organization and never went there for Mac news.
Leased lines still have crosstalk and generate crosstalk. They run in the same bundles with all the other lines. They have the same restrictions on power spectrum as anything else in the bundle.
They cost more (a LOT more where I am, not much more across the river from me) and they don't have the filters that make long analog phone lines more tolerable, but they still have all the crosstalk and noise problems of regular lines.
You can run many models of DSL modems back-to-back over them. I don't do this, but you can read about it on the web then buy the modems cheap on ebay. (Might take a while to collect proper models.)
In my experience leased lines have one unique property. Testing them fixes them. Your critical line goes out (several times a year in some cases), you call the carrier, they `test' the line, and then it works again. I suppose that helps their stats for the PSC.
Sure they put DSL in the name, but they operate at 96kbps, or a bit less than twice modem speed wire. My little DSL line is pluggin along at 12 times that rate.
That 96kbps is over a spool of wire. You can not get more than 64kbps through any POTS line that goes through the 8KHz, 8bit conversion in a digital telephone switching system. (If you think you can, then I suggest you find a more lucrative use for breaking the laws of mathematics.)
Further, they make no mention of cross talk sensitivity or generation. Remember that in the US our modems are only 53kbps anyway because of frequency limitations.
I give it an A for inspiration and a D for utility. The FCC will likely give it an F for violating power spectrum limitations on a phone line. (Putting DSL in the name was pure marketing genius! AuModem would never have gotten on slashdot)
That USB is a `B' type connector. In other words you can plug it into your host computer as a peripheral. You can not plug USB devices into it. It is not a simple wiring difference.
That will rule out all those nifty USB peripherals that you might want to plug into this device. So long to cameras, printers, audio devices, keyboards, controllers....
I suppose it could be useful for initial programming, but I suspect the only reason it is there is that it is on the SA1110 chipset (which is aimed at handhelds). I also recall that the USB implementation on the SA1110 has (or had) some sort of congenital problem. I believe you would find more in the LART archives. (Which is also available now, but at something like twice this price and no cool aluminium box, but a fully open sourced hardware design.)
(Ok, against all slashdot culture, I have done my own research and looked up the aforementioned USB problem. It is the SA1100 which could only be used as a slave, and it had to be the only device on the bus for it to work as documented in the errata. I don't know if the SA1110 has this problem or not. Intel app note here.)
Reading between the lines of their web site, I believe they intend these to be useful in places where the cost of replacing batteries is significant. Even if the batteries are only a couple hundred dollars, getting a crew to the location with the batteries could cost many times more.
:-)
I have supported sites where onsite maintanence cost $7,000 per incident (and just wasn't possible for parts of the year). Sure makes you think twice before typing each remote command.
Maybe these things will be common someday, not soon. Railroad crossing lights in the US used to be powered by large buried batteries. Periodicly trains would come by, hoist out the old one and put in a new one then haul the old one back for recharging. Maybe 40 years from now using chemical batteries in UPSs will seem just as silly.
For those of you wondering what a CDSA might really be, you can read all about it here at the opengroup.
Good stuff.
I noticed that there is still a sentence of the original article that hasn't been refuted...
Apple will continue to sell CRT monitors. They will not have little Apple logos stuck on them and they won't have custom plastics, but the AppleStore will have monitors from an as yet un-named monitor manufacturer as an option on purchases. Just like they sell things like external disks, tape drives, mp3 players, hubs, UPSs, and such.
The Apple LCDs have always been noted for scaling well. The old analog ones have convolution filters and do no display chunkiness lower resolutions. I have played hundreds of hours of TeamFortress on an original Apple LCD. (It is also gorgeous when displaying NTSC video.) I prefer to use my original iBook at 640x480 for games that have smallish displays (like Snood).
The new digital interfaces use filtering in the video card, I'm told it is good.
One of those little features that a company can build in when they have a few extra dollars built in to the margins.
(As long as I'm countering CmdrTaco's unfounded steering statements... I fail to see how the price of the very high end display is going to turn off the price concious buyer. The price concious buyer is getting an iMac for $899 and not spending anything on a montior. 22" LCD@$2500 is a damn good buy (if you need it). Nec 20" is $3500, I'd quote other prices, but I can't find anything else of 18" at uvision.com)
Remember, the bands are all paying their own production costs up front. There is no mysterious development costs for guiding the bands into success. mp3.com is just a distribution chain and they manage to screw the artists at every turn.
That all said, I still like the concept. I don't make music for money. If someone can enjoy my music, then great, go to it. mp3.com is just a nice distribution channel where I don't have to pay for the bandwidth.
Sorry, I got ranty on this. To summarize, the parent article makes some good points, the previous replies are too extreme in their criticism. I supply better anecdotal evidence than them. :-)
For CFD the altivec units will be heavily used, it is correct to use them for comparing speed to PIIIs. There may be a case where it matches 50 dual PIIs, but that sounds extreme.
I just bought three lowend Gateway 2U rackmount boxes. They come in at ~$2200 for a single 800MHz PIII which will be slower than the dual 533MHz mac at ~$2500. That certainly meets `almost comparable'.
Neither of these machines are very cheap computers. There definately is a quality problem when you get into very cheap computers. There are applications for them, but if your diagnostic time is worth much, then I believe it pays to buy better hardware. (Plus you don't bleed when you have to open them up and add memory or drives. Once you get above the nasty low end machines they take time to deburr the stampings. My brother runs a metal working factory and their worst injury this year has been an IT guy that stumbled while holding a cheap PC and sliced several fingers to the bone.)
The new Macs do come with gigabit ethernet (although I don't think those old 450s had gigabit) and an OS. That gateway price is a bare machine. I put Linux on `for free', but the 2.4 kernel series (which I needed for iptables) had bugs in the interrupt routing for the chipset and it took me weeks of effort to get it all worked out into a stable configuration (manifested as a AIC-7xxx problem, took a while to find the interrupt controller problem). I knew I should have bought a 4th scratch box.
Gigabit ethernet hubs are still $250/port, but that will come down quickly. I remember when I bought a Powermac and thought it was just plain silly to put a 10/100 adapter in it, only servers could afford to have 100mbit ports. In 12 months all my new hubs where 100mbit.
I've got loads of Apples and loads of PCs. The apple hardware failure rate is less than half our PC hardware failure rate. Depending on the cost of a failure (in terms of ruined work, lost work, diagnosis, and repair) I do lean toward Macs because of their better reliability. (And before we get into a flame war on your reliable PC... I'm sure there are reliable models of PCs, but I need a vendor I can count on to make every model I might buy reliable. I can't look at historical data and say "look, here is a model that was made two years ago that was a good one" because I can't buy that anymore. (And yes, I own a PB5300, I know the counter argument, but Apple fixes it for free whenever it breaks so thats not so bad.))
You would probably not want one as a fridge magnet. It would probably bend the front of your fridge as you pry it off.
If you ever have a hard drive go bad, you should get yourself a set of tiny torx drivers and disassemble it. You will find a pair of insanely strong magnets around the head positioning coil.
Watch your fingers, when those magnets take a notion to slam together they will pinch through your flesh.
note: the preceding should not be construed as instructions to bang your office mates computer up and down while operating in order to acquire a bad hard drive.
Well, not as complete and not as a transparent etherenet level device. We don't do reordering
:-)
or packet multiplication and the linux box functions as a router.
The relevant piece you want to use is the `packet scheduler'. There are a variety of scheduling algorithms in there. You might use a command like...
tc qdisc add dev eth0 root tbf rate 1500Kbit buffer 15Kb/8 limit 100Kb
tc qdisc add dev eth1 root tbf rate 1500Kbit buffer 15Kb/8 limit 100Kb
... to throttle your network to T1 speeds. Note that you have to do both interfaces as the scheduler works on outgoing packets only.
I used to have a custom scheduler module that was a packet loser. It turns out to be a bad idea for tcp analysis. (Consider, most of the overloaded routers we meet are running some sort of fair queueing. They are deliberately causing loss to achieve a rate limitation. When you observe packet loss, it is not the loss that causes the limitation, it is the limitation causing the loss.)
For the industrious, as of linux 2.4 I believe a packet loser is much better to implement as a firewall module. Its on my `someday when I have time' list. I also plan a latency module. Nothing like latency to expose chatty network protocols. (cough sqlnet cough, "it worked fine in the development building, I don't know why your global users are complaining"
People who write software and release it under the BSD license expect that it can be used by anyone. That is intent of that license.
If the author's wanted it to be GPL they would release it under GPL.
It still behooves Apple to feed improvements back upstream to simplify merging with the next upstream release. Its too soon for that with OS-X, maybe in a couple of months when they can stop and breath.
PS. I don't see any Open Source software written or maintained by Evan Leibovitch. Maybe he has, I didn't look too long.
That message usually means you have a `reviewer' copy of the tape or dvd. The studios send out dumptruck loads of tapes to newpapers, tv news shows, and basically any creature that might generate some press for them. In order to keep these from dilluting sales they mark them.