So why do many people think that China is the worst place on earth?
Oh, just because they kill people who disagree with the government, especially those that spread "subversive" ideas like Chrisitianity. There is no real religious or political freedom possible in China right now, despite the Chinese government's propaganda to the contrary. China is the world's worst offender in human rights, outdone in degree to be sure by atrocious places like Sudan, but far and away the world leader in bringing misery to human lives in volume.
China should not be treated as a respectable member of the international comunity until it begins to act respectably. (And, yes, I think we should never have granted PNR to the Chinese.)
Actually, I'd be more than willing to trade off CPU for battery life in a device like this. Get real - what are you likely to need more tha 300Mhz worth of CPU for on a machine like this?
(BTW: I'm writing this from my primary laptop, which is still in daily service and runs at a screaming 133 MHz. CPU is not the bottleneck: RAM, Disk, and network are.
You can get an epods one for around $200, hack it back to plain Windows CE, and add a 802.11b hub and card for cheaper than that!
I suppose you don't actually *have* an Epods One... I do, and once you've done that, you've still got something that's effectively terminally brain-dead because it's not only stuck with WinCE (Yuck, really) but stuck, in fact, with an even more brain-dead subset of WinCE, one that does not properly run over half of the WinCE/MIPS programs out there. (Remember, this isn't Java-land, so you'll need to get WinCE binaries for not only your arch. type, but as a practical matter, for the specific WinCE box you have, especially if it's a bit "odd" in having a full 640x480 screen, as the Epods does.
I've played extensively with both the Epods and the FrontPath. Trust me, the price difference is *more* than justified.
Actually, there are millions of us that want touchscreen computers. The problem is that the marketdroids that figure out what we want don't have the vision to picture a Linux-based PDA on steroids.
BTW: I played with both early and late prototype FrontPath units, and they are really just laptop PCs: You can easily load Red Hat, Debian, or Slack on them - I know because I've run them on this device.
A real SuperPad would encompass all PDA functionality (and do it as well as a Palm, which is a tall order); interface *seamlessly* with PDAs, cellphones, and desktop computers; have reasonable support (handwriting recognition AND virtual keyboard support preferably in the BIOS) for keyboardless input, good wireless support, and most importantly, be designed to be hackable, since the simple fact is that neither the marketdroids nor anyone else really knows what applicaitons for such a beast will take off - it needs to be open enough to let people try, just like they did with the original (Palm) Pilot 1000: people wound up using it for things Palm never dreamed of.
(This raises interesting questions about architecture and design for such things, and points out some problems: Even if it makes sense to put some new functionality in the BIOS, you can't do it, because MS excercises absolute control over PC architecture via the PC9X and related standards - they wield their club over the OEMs more heavily in this area than any other. Compliance with their architecture dictates is "voluntary", but you will find yourself paying MUCH more than your competitors if you don't dance the MS tune. This is a REAL example of how MS PREVENTS innovation.
Tablet computers are desperately needed, though, and would be wildly successful if they were designed as above. Somethign at a laptop price point that's locked down to being only a bad web surfing device will fail, as we've seen over and over again from companies like Netpliance, Epods, etc.
People desperately want tablets or full-function webpads, they just don't want supid ones, and since the technologies they use are on the expensive side anyway, manufacturers will need to go out of their way to make them attractive. I'm available for consulting.
Your opinions seem to be rather disconnected with what I see in the real world. I talk with CxO-types nearly every day, and one thing that is a nearly constant theme right now is that they're *MAD* about Microsoft's attempt to force them into XP and a two-year upgrade cycle for both the OS and Office. I've spoken with one CEO and two CFOs in the last week that have decided to pass on Microsofts XP licensing "offer" to upgrade everything by October, because they did enough research to realize that the cost down the road *substantially* outwieghs the apprent short term "savings". Interestingly, these are mostly shops that had "little to no interest" in Linux previously, but are now seriously investigating how much of their server infrastructure can be moved to Linux, and how quickly!
*Most* corporate app projects I know of are being written in Java (esp. J2EE). Good Java programmers are NOT having a hard time finding employment, even in what looks to become a serious downturn.
Interestingly enough, it looks as though Microsoft itself may be the most powerful force in making the platform of the future Java on Linux. That would be a very good thing, indeed, as Java and Linux are quite complementary, and Java (despite what you read here from the GNU-only Java-bashers) really does finally deliver on what it promised five or six years ago. The really good news abou this is that almost everyone now will be using *real* JVMs (i.e., Sun's or IBM's) rather than the putrid excuse MS has been foisting off on people for years in an attempt to undermine the entire Java concept.
To the skeptics: If you haven't looked seriously at Java in the past year or so, go back do your homework, paying particular attention to what J2EE, EJB, etc. have added to the entire Java world. I think you'll be impressed. (Of course Java isn't perfect - but it's the best thing out there that can do the job - best by a long, long, way. Oh, and it's really our only hope in containing.NET, so you better either get behind it or sign up now for those XP subscriptions for mandatory 2-year upgrades...)
FWIW, here are some links to chat interviews with the Cathy Rogers and Robert Llewellyn about Junk Yard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge and how they set things up, how the heap is seeded, whether the teams even find all the good stuff, and the flexibility of "the last hour". These chats answer almost all of the questions and accusations thrown around elsewhere in this topic...
I still don't see the difference between what is described and what a well-administered UNIX computer lab on a private network should be, with PVM installed, consoles removed, and login authorized only on a single node.
In truth, there really isn't any difference. Beowulf is the name of a concept, not a product, package, or even method. (Beowulf clusters can be based on PVM, MPI, or other message backbones, for instance - although PVM is probably the most common, there's no standard for Beowulf clusters.)
BTW, this stuff works - I replaced a Cray with a cluster of FDDI-connected RS/6000's nearly a decade ago and today, we use Intel boxes or an IBM 390 CMOS mainframe, depending on the job to be done. (You'd never know I'm a Sun bigot from reading that last sentence...)
There is indeed a dearth of good e-mail hosting services. Here's what I do know:
I've used Burlee.com with good success for both web and mail hosting. They're not fancy (in fact, their web mail interface is downright ugly), but they are reliable, very competitively priced, professional, and offer good tech support on those occasions when you need it. If you need a better webmail interface, use one of the many good free ones, like Eudoramail or even (ack!) Hotmail.
There are several other companies trying to make a go of this sort of thing. Critical Path (I think at www. criticalpath.com) is one of them. No idea what their rates are.
Finally, you may want to reevaluate the do-it-yourself option. All-in-one, pre-cooked packages such as the e-smith server and gateway solution could be a good option here that would keep you from having to dive under the hood. I'm not generally in favor of appliance-type distros, but this one is *very* good, and deserving of the great reviews it's been getting lately. Check it out at www.e-smith.com (commercial site - they'll send you a CD for free, if you ask nicely) and www.e-smith.org (the developer site.) It looks like more coolness is in the works, too...
PPP is notoriously heavy - that's why many of us (when we were unfortunate enough to have to dial into the net) refused to use PPP, but insisted on ISPs that supported CSLIP instead. It's a little less common, but CSLIP (also known as SLIP with Van Jacobsen (VJ) header compression) is quite a bit more efficient than PPP - do the math for yourself to see the reduced overhead...
FWIW, I love VNC and use it nearly every day, but if you're trying to remotely control a Windows machine and it's running W2K server or better, I'd stick with the Terminal Services stuff, which is quite a bit faster than any VNC. Also, the VNC clients for some platforms (CE is one notable example) are terrible, while there are pretty good TS clients available (surprise, surprise...)
FWIW, VNC is very good software, even if it's not the fastest thing out there. I used to work for Tivoli, which sells a really expensive remote control product as part of its management solution. When I showed VNC to the RC team (this was 2-3 years ago), they were amazed, impressed, and recoiled in horror once they realized that there was a completely free solution that worked better than the one we charged megabucks for. (But then that sort of thing was, sadly, true of most all of Tivoli's software...)
I prefer the Tridia VNC to other VNC "distros", but YMMV, especially if you want Constantin's latest Tight encodings, on which Tridia seems to lag a bit.
I'm not familiar enough with this audio-mangling technique to know for sure (and possibly not interested enough to hunt down the answer myself) so I'll just ask the question:
Is this technique only effective when a disk is encoded as an MP3 or other lower bitrate format, or does it corrupt the actual raw CDA audio stream?
The difference is important, because with storage becoming so much cheaper over the next few years, I expect more and more people will simply either copy the CDA files, or "rip" to WAV format anyway, eliminating the MP3/vorbis/whatever encoding step entirely. Would that buy you anything in this circumstance?
Yeah! And then we could run the original Berkeley Softworks GEOS to get a real non-MS office suite on the thing, with plenty of storage and all.:-)
For those that don't know, GEOS (yep, ancestor to the GEOS still showing up occasionally in cellphones and the like) started life as a GUI office suite for the C-64. That's 64 *kilobytes* total RAM, folks (and you didn't even get to use it all.) Truly, one of the most impressive hacks of the 20th century.
I sometimes wonder how Commodore might have fared if they had abandoned their attachmnent to those glacially slow 1542 serial disk drives in favor of something capable of file i/o at a more usable speed... Hmm, does anyone make an ethernet adapter for a c-64?
Agreed. From all evidences, the show isn't fixed, but the junkpile is seeded to allow the show to concentrate more on *making* the gadget than hunting down the pieces for it, which would be pretty darn boring.
In fact, I strongly suspect that in a couple of cases, the teams have wound up building something pretty much unanticipated by the experts, sometimes against their advice - Bowser's miserable rugby-ball launcher comes to mind.
BTW, a smaller scale version is a good idea - my son started doing this a few weeks ago with a bunch of popsicle sticks, wire, and bits of Lego Technic stuff. He wants a bag of surplus toy electric motors for his birthday next month. A Dad's *gotta* be proud of a son like that! (I do hope they do a kids version of the show, although I think they'd probably have a tough time dealing with 7-year olds, even if they do have a lot of bodging experience under their belts. (Oh, and thanks to the JYW/SHC crew for bringing that excellent word, "bodge" into American English.)
I've spent plenty of time crawling around junk yards looking for elusive parts (like the suspension bits off a 78-83 Pontiac Grand Am, which had the coveted Delrin bushings that were unavailable otherwise, and usable Weber 40 DCNFs for a modified Fiat X1/9 and a stock Ferrari 308 gt4.)
I've found that running engines aren't all that common, although I admit I passed by the mundane stuff looking for the exotic...
I discovered Junk Yard Wars earlier this year, and it has since become a family favorite. Such a favorite, in fact, that my children (a boy, almost 7, and a girl, almost 10) both insisted that I set the VCR to record the JYW 4th of July US vs. UK challenge. Then when we began watching over at my folks' house and realized it was a *two* hour special edition, all plans for watching fireworks went right out the window, and we stayed put to see who could smash that Jetta the flattest.
The show is very well-done, and I think it's not only entertaining and funny, but one of the most educational shows on TV, teching basic physical and mechnical principles and reasoning seamlessly as an adjunct to the competition. Sure, the yard is occasionally seeded with stuff that would not typically be in a junkyard (propellers and a surprising number of running engines, for example), but that really doesn't detract from the incredible feat of inventing and fabricating a usable machine in only 10 hours. More incredible to me is how often very different approaches turn out to be quite closely matched when they compete.
This is truly one of the best shows on TV, and the only one my family watches on a regular basis! If you haven't checked it out, you owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you've ever harbored any leanings to be a mech hacker..
Right now, the web is littered with references to tablet computer devices that apparently aren't going to see the light of day, or will be hopelessly obsolescent by the time they do. (Epods' cool but CE-crippled pad is gone, and I don't suppose anyone's actually *seen* an FIC Aqua or ProView iWeb in the real world? See http://netappliances.about.com/cs/padstablets/inde x.htm?once=true& for a run-down of what's out there...)
It came as a pleasant surprise then, to see those denizens of LCD affordability at ViewSonic take on this market with a choice of CE-based (but possibly hackable) or "vanilla x86" pad/tablet computers: http://www.viewsonic.com/productwizard/superpda_ta bletpc.htm (warning: this site will wedge all your netscape windows momentarily while it loads, but they'll respond again once it's all there.)
It would be nice to see some real hackable tablet hardware that could jump-start the next wave of innovation in really personal computing, bridging the gap between PDAs and PCs.
I can see toasters and coffepot weeb cams with IP numbers. but light bulbs? Like we can't run out of IPV6 space fast enough already.
Uh, 2^128 = 3.4 x 10^38: IPv6 address space is BIG. We're not gonna run out of IPv6 addrs anytime soon. (Someone pointed out back in an early IETF meeting on the subject that this is enough to address every particle in the solar system. I haven't verified that math myself.)
I've had a Toshiba Libretto running continuously as a server for a couple of years now. As I remark elsewhere, I find laptop hardware to be *more* reliable than desktop hardware by a considerable margin. It pretty much has to be, if you think about it.
Heat isn't that much of a problem if you avoid a few of the worst pre-Mobile Pentium room heaters, since laptops are expected to work out on oil rigs in the summer heat of the Amazon, west Texas, or worse yet, southern Louisiana. I find most desktop hardware problems are related to flakey connectors/connections - that doesn't happen nearly as often in laptop hardware, since they're designed to withstand reasonable mechanical abuse. The only real downside is if you need to plug in PCI cards, although a surprising number of the "name brand" laptops offer docking stations that make this an option. A few are even reasonably priced.
I've used laptops in co-lo facilities to save $$$ back before 1U servers were common - the "real estate" savings more than offset the incremental cost, and gave me an effective density about twice that of 1U servers. The packets really don't care if it's a laptop, and you've got the added benefit of a console for each unit when you actually need to lay hands on the hardware. (Granted, this was driven by a rock-bottom budget, but it worked so well I'd consider the approach in other circumstances now - especially now that 100 Mb Ethernet is so widely available on the motherboard.)
Think twice before you write laptops off for this sort of thing - they may work out much better than you think...
Although the packaging is impressive, it's not a very good deal, especially considering that you can buy a more capable laptop for less money, and get the LCD screen and a 3-hour UPS in the bargain.
I've working in the laptop business, and despite what some here have said, the good ones are indeed built for 24x7 use. I began putting servers on laptop hardware with Novell back in 1994, and for light duty server use, I still prefer laptop hardware to "regular" PC servers. Let's face it folks, it just doesn't take much horsepower to run a basic firewall, file server, mail server, and DNS server. (I recommend e-smith for this sort of thing if you want a good open-source "appliance" approach to the basic office server needs.)
I've run several laptop and laptop-derived servers for years now (I have an old Toshiba Libretto hopped up with a 6.4 GB disk that I use as a portable file server), and they are invariably *more* reliable than the desktop PC hardware I have, which tends to flake out every few months due to bad connections or the phase of the moon.
I like this box, it just doesn't make much sense to buy one, given that you can get a comparable laptop (and probably, an extra hard disk to go with it, so you can turn it back into a "regular" laptop for trips in a minute or two) for about the same money. And don't underestimate the importance of that built-in UPS if you're looking to use it as a server of any kind...
Not only is it not well-equipped for this sort of thing, but it's nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than some of the small embedded boards that have multiple Ethernets. This sort of thing is available from several SBC vendors for $200-$600, with two or three Ethernets thrown into the bargain. (Sorry, don't have the URLs handy now, but they're out there - look around...)
And, of course, most USB Ethernet adapters don't perform all that well, which could make them OK for connecting to the Ethernet port on your Cable or DSL box, but not much else.
Those are the original series. All were product of the Stratemeyer syndicate, which also created the Hardy Boys, Nanacy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and many others.
There was a second series of Tom Swift books by "Appleton" published in the 50's and 60's - those are the stories of Tom Swift *Jr.*, and are likely the ones more familiar to/. readers. (After all, what self-respecting technologist in training could pass up reading about "Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Cycloplane"?)
Try asking a Sun rep why a 18GB drive that can be ordered at CDW for $500 and the 'Sun OEM'd' model costs $1300. They'll say "We only select the
best quality drives and test them further to make sure they are stronger, faster and blah blah blah."
You may or may not agree that that cost difference is worth it, but Sun is telling the truth. I used to work for them, and AFAIK, there is no other OEM that is nearly as tough on drive vendors as Sun.
Sun *insists* that a representative sample of documented production runs for Sun pass their reliability tests - if they don't, they're rejected. And they've been known to reject entire 18-wheel trucks full of disk drives if the test units aren't up to spec - ouch, that's gotta hurt if you're the drive vendor...
Go back and read the decision. It was Florida's electroal process, but a national election hanging in the balance with the results becoming less and less certain and reliable with each successive recount. The SC should never have been involved in that case, I agree, but Gore's unwillingness to admit defeat after repeated recounts (all of which have upheld Bush even after the fact) forced the issue there.
Scalia is the most consistent strict constructionist on the court, but even he has his bad days from time to time...
If this doesn't highlight the importance of strict constructionists on the Supreme Court, I don't know what does.
Scalia is absolutely right here, as usual: any other decision would result in our rights being quickly eroded away by advances in technology.
It's too bad the Democrats are already planning to "fight dirty" to prevent another legal mind like Scalia's from sitting on the court. (Of course, that presupposes that Bush has the cojones to nominate someone of that caliber, a very iffy proposition given his demonstrated invertebrate nature to date...)
It's not fair to represent this as "the conservative position" on drugs. I consider myself a conservative (but not a Republican, since the GOP has completely abandoned the priciples of limited government), but this is one area where Buckley and his crew are just plain flat WRONG. (That's worth remarking for the simple reason that Buckley is so seldom wrong that many of his backers look the other way when his logic becomes terribly fallacious, as in this case.)
Buckley & Co. are only right on this issue in that they recognize that prohibition never works well - a sad fact of life. But they fail to acknowledge that legalizing drugs *requires* writing off an entire generation to the newly "OK" drugs - a horrendous human misery cost that we could never afford, especially now. Further, there is the continuing cost of ongoing hordes of people that will continue to destroy themsleves even once the dangers of even really destructive drugs have been amply demonstrated. The Netherlands is a good example - there are many reasons that the nation that was once the most powerful trading nation of the face of the earth has become nearly irrelevant in the modern world, but recent drug policy is certainly one reason to expect it will never reclaim that lost glory.
The simple fact is that it *is* reasonable to draw a line somewhere bewteen "soft drugs" like tobacco, alcohol, and *possibly* marijuana (all of which have a demonstrated ability to cause immense human suffering through their abuse) and "hard drugs" (LSD, herion, etc.) which have a much higher probability of destroying their users and inciting them to harm others. That line has to be drawn somewhere, and it should not be fluid. That said, it is far better to leave the line where it is now than to eliminate it entirely, something we could not do without the blood of drug victims on our hands.
Although my conservatism (like Buckley's) is rooted in libertarian principles, this is one area where the libertarian argument fails to hold water, and always will.
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So why do many people think that China is the worst place on earth?
Oh, just because they kill people who disagree with the government, especially those that spread "subversive" ideas like Chrisitianity. There is no real religious or political freedom possible in China right now, despite the Chinese government's propaganda to the contrary. China is the world's worst offender in human rights, outdone in degree to be sure by atrocious places like Sudan, but far and away the world leader in bringing misery to human lives in volume.
China should not be treated as a respectable member of the international comunity until it begins to act respectably. (And, yes, I think we should never have granted PNR to the Chinese.)
Actually, I'd be more than willing to trade off CPU for battery life in a device like this. Get real - what are you likely to need more tha 300Mhz worth of CPU for on a machine like this?
(BTW: I'm writing this from my primary laptop, which is still in daily service and runs at a screaming 133 MHz. CPU is not the bottleneck: RAM, Disk, and network are.
You can get an epods one for around $200, hack it back to plain Windows CE, and add a 802.11b hub and card for cheaper than that!
I suppose you don't actually *have* an Epods One... I do, and once you've done that, you've still got something that's effectively terminally brain-dead because it's not only stuck with WinCE (Yuck, really) but stuck, in fact, with an even more brain-dead subset of WinCE, one that does not properly run over half of the WinCE/MIPS programs out there. (Remember, this isn't Java-land, so you'll need to get WinCE binaries for not only your arch. type, but as a practical matter, for the specific WinCE box you have, especially if it's a bit "odd" in having a full 640x480 screen, as the Epods does.
I've played extensively with both the Epods and the FrontPath. Trust me, the price difference is *more* than justified.
Actually, there are millions of us that want touchscreen computers. The problem is that the marketdroids that figure out what we want don't have the vision to picture a Linux-based PDA on steroids.
BTW: I played with both early and late prototype FrontPath units, and they are really just laptop PCs: You can easily load Red Hat, Debian, or Slack on them - I know because I've run them on this device.
A real SuperPad would encompass all PDA functionality (and do it as well as a Palm, which is a tall order); interface *seamlessly* with PDAs, cellphones, and desktop computers; have reasonable support (handwriting recognition AND virtual keyboard support preferably in the BIOS) for keyboardless input, good wireless support, and most importantly, be designed to be hackable, since the simple fact is that neither the marketdroids nor anyone else really knows what applicaitons for such a beast will take off - it needs to be open enough to let people try, just like they did with the original (Palm) Pilot 1000: people wound up using it for things Palm never dreamed of.
(This raises interesting questions about architecture and design for such things, and points out some problems: Even if it makes sense to put some new functionality in the BIOS, you can't do it, because MS excercises absolute control over PC architecture via the PC9X and related standards - they wield their club over the OEMs more heavily in this area than any other. Compliance with their architecture dictates is "voluntary", but you will find yourself paying MUCH more than your competitors if you don't dance the MS tune. This is a REAL example of how MS PREVENTS innovation.
Tablet computers are desperately needed, though, and would be wildly successful if they were designed as above. Somethign at a laptop price point that's locked down to being only a bad web surfing device will fail, as we've seen over and over again from companies like Netpliance, Epods, etc.
People desperately want tablets or full-function webpads, they just don't want supid ones, and since the technologies they use are on the expensive side anyway, manufacturers will need to go out of their way to make them attractive. I'm available for consulting.
Your opinions seem to be rather disconnected with what I see in the real world. I talk with CxO-types nearly every day, and one thing that is a nearly constant theme right now is that they're *MAD* about Microsoft's attempt to force them into XP and a two-year upgrade cycle for both the OS and Office. I've spoken with one CEO and two CFOs in the last week that have decided to pass on Microsofts XP licensing "offer" to upgrade everything by October, because they did enough research to realize that the cost down the road *substantially* outwieghs the apprent short term "savings". Interestingly, these are mostly shops that had "little to no interest" in Linux previously, but are now seriously investigating how much of their server infrastructure can be moved to Linux, and how quickly!
.NET, so you better either get behind it or sign up now for those XP subscriptions for mandatory 2-year upgrades...)
*Most* corporate app projects I know of are being written in Java (esp. J2EE). Good Java programmers are NOT having a hard time finding employment, even in what looks to become a serious downturn.
Interestingly enough, it looks as though Microsoft itself may be the most powerful force in making the platform of the future Java on Linux. That would be a very good thing, indeed, as Java and Linux are quite complementary, and Java (despite what you read here from the GNU-only Java-bashers) really does finally deliver on what it promised five or six years ago. The really good news abou this is that almost everyone now will be using *real* JVMs (i.e., Sun's or IBM's) rather than the putrid excuse MS has been foisting off on people for years in an attempt to undermine the entire Java concept.
To the skeptics: If you haven't looked seriously at Java in the past year or so, go back do your homework, paying particular attention to what J2EE, EJB, etc. have added to the entire Java world. I think you'll be impressed. (Of course Java isn't perfect - but it's the best thing out there that can do the job - best by a long, long, way. Oh, and it's really our only hope in containing
FWIW, here are some links to chat interviews with the Cathy Rogers and Robert Llewellyn about Junk Yard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge and how they set things up, how the heap is seeded, whether the teams even find all the good stuff, and the flexibility of "the last hour". These chats answer almost all of the questions and accusations thrown around elsewhere in this topic...
Channel 4 chat session with Cathy Rogers
Channel 4 chat session with Robert Llewellyn
There's even a Scrapheap Challenge video, for those of you in the UK, or with access to a PAL VCR. It reportedly contains some amusing out-takes.
I still don't see the difference between what is described and what a well-administered UNIX computer lab on a private network should be, with PVM installed, consoles removed, and login authorized only on a single node.
In truth, there really isn't any difference. Beowulf is the name of a concept, not a product, package, or even method. (Beowulf clusters can be based on PVM, MPI, or other message backbones, for instance - although PVM is probably the most common, there's no standard for Beowulf clusters.)
BTW, this stuff works - I replaced a Cray with a cluster of FDDI-connected RS/6000's nearly a decade ago and today, we use Intel boxes or an IBM 390 CMOS mainframe, depending on the job to be done. (You'd never know I'm a Sun bigot from reading that last sentence...)
There is indeed a dearth of good e-mail hosting services. Here's what I do know:
I've used Burlee.com with good success for both web and mail hosting. They're not fancy (in fact, their web mail interface is downright ugly), but they are reliable, very competitively priced, professional, and offer good tech support on those occasions when you need it. If you need a better webmail interface, use one of the many good free ones, like Eudoramail or even (ack!) Hotmail.
There are several other companies trying to make a go of this sort of thing. Critical Path (I think at www. criticalpath.com) is one of them. No idea what their rates are.
Finally, you may want to reevaluate the do-it-yourself option. All-in-one, pre-cooked packages such as the e-smith server and gateway solution could be a good option here that would keep you from having to dive under the hood. I'm not generally in favor of appliance-type distros, but this one is *very* good, and deserving of the great reviews it's been getting lately. Check it out at www.e-smith.com (commercial site - they'll send you a CD for free, if you ask nicely) and www.e-smith.org (the developer site.) It looks like more coolness is in the works, too...
PPP is notoriously heavy - that's why many of us (when we were unfortunate enough to have to dial into the net) refused to use PPP, but insisted on ISPs that supported CSLIP instead. It's a little less common, but CSLIP (also known as SLIP with Van Jacobsen (VJ) header compression) is quite a bit more efficient than PPP - do the math for yourself to see the reduced overhead...
FWIW, I love VNC and use it nearly every day, but if you're trying to remotely control a Windows machine and it's running W2K server or better, I'd stick with the Terminal Services stuff, which is quite a bit faster than any VNC. Also, the VNC clients for some platforms (CE is one notable example) are terrible, while there are pretty good TS clients available (surprise, surprise...)
FWIW, VNC is very good software, even if it's not the fastest thing out there. I used to work for Tivoli, which sells a really expensive remote control product as part of its management solution. When I showed VNC to the RC team (this was 2-3 years ago), they were amazed, impressed, and recoiled in horror once they realized that there was a completely free solution that worked better than the one we charged megabucks for. (But then that sort of thing was, sadly, true of most all of Tivoli's software...)
I prefer the Tridia VNC to other VNC "distros", but YMMV, especially if you want Constantin's latest Tight encodings, on which Tridia seems to lag a bit.
I'm not familiar enough with this audio-mangling technique to know for sure (and possibly not interested enough to hunt down the answer myself) so I'll just ask the question:
Is this technique only effective when a disk is encoded as an MP3 or other lower bitrate format, or does it corrupt the actual raw CDA audio stream?
The difference is important, because with storage becoming so much cheaper over the next few years, I expect more and more people will simply either copy the CDA files, or "rip" to WAV format anyway, eliminating the MP3/vorbis/whatever encoding step entirely. Would that buy you anything in this circumstance?
Any insights?
Yeah! And then we could run the original Berkeley Softworks GEOS to get a real non-MS office suite on the thing, with plenty of storage and all. :-)
For those that don't know, GEOS (yep, ancestor to the GEOS still showing up occasionally in cellphones and the like) started life as a GUI office suite for the C-64. That's 64 *kilobytes* total RAM, folks (and you didn't even get to use it all.) Truly, one of the most impressive hacks of the 20th century.
I sometimes wonder how Commodore might have fared if they had abandoned their attachmnent to those glacially slow 1542 serial disk drives in favor of something capable of file i/o at a more usable speed... Hmm, does anyone make an ethernet adapter for a c-64?
Agreed. From all evidences, the show isn't fixed, but the junkpile is seeded to allow the show to concentrate more on *making* the gadget than hunting down the pieces for it, which would be pretty darn boring.
In fact, I strongly suspect that in a couple of cases, the teams have wound up building something pretty much unanticipated by the experts, sometimes against their advice - Bowser's miserable rugby-ball launcher comes to mind.
BTW, a smaller scale version is a good idea - my son started doing this a few weeks ago with a bunch of popsicle sticks, wire, and bits of Lego Technic stuff. He wants a bag of surplus toy electric motors for his birthday next month. A Dad's *gotta* be proud of a son like that! (I do hope they do a kids version of the show, although I think they'd probably have a tough time dealing with 7-year olds, even if they do have a lot of bodging experience under their belts. (Oh, and thanks to the JYW/SHC crew for bringing that excellent word, "bodge" into American English.)
I've spent plenty of time crawling around junk yards looking for elusive parts (like the suspension bits off a 78-83 Pontiac Grand Am, which had the coveted Delrin bushings that were unavailable otherwise, and usable Weber 40 DCNFs for a modified Fiat X1/9 and a stock Ferrari 308 gt4.)
I've found that running engines aren't all that common, although I admit I passed by the mundane stuff looking for the exotic...
I discovered Junk Yard Wars earlier this year, and it has since become a family favorite. Such a favorite, in fact, that my children (a boy, almost 7, and a girl, almost 10) both insisted that I set the VCR to record the JYW 4th of July US vs. UK challenge. Then when we began watching over at my folks' house and realized it was a *two* hour special edition, all plans for watching fireworks went right out the window, and we stayed put to see who could smash that Jetta the flattest.
The show is very well-done, and I think it's not only entertaining and funny, but one of the most educational shows on TV, teching basic physical and mechnical principles and reasoning seamlessly as an adjunct to the competition. Sure, the yard is occasionally seeded with stuff that would not typically be in a junkyard (propellers and a surprising number of running engines, for example), but that really doesn't detract from the incredible feat of inventing and fabricating a usable machine in only 10 hours. More incredible to me is how often very different approaches turn out to be quite closely matched when they compete.
This is truly one of the best shows on TV, and the only one my family watches on a regular basis! If you haven't checked it out, you owe it to yourself to do so, especially if you've ever harbored any leanings to be a mech hacker..
Right now, the web is littered with references to tablet computer devices that apparently aren't going to see the light of day, or will be hopelessly obsolescent by the time they do. (Epods' cool but CE-crippled pad is gone, and I don't suppose anyone's actually *seen* an FIC Aqua or ProView iWeb in the real world? See http://netappliances.about.com/cs/padstablets/inde x.htm?once=true& for a run-down of what's out there...)
a bletpc.htm (warning: this site will wedge all your netscape windows momentarily while it loads, but they'll respond again once it's all there.)
It came as a pleasant surprise then, to see those denizens of LCD affordability at ViewSonic take on this market with a choice of CE-based (but possibly hackable) or "vanilla x86" pad/tablet computers: http://www.viewsonic.com/productwizard/superpda_t
It would be nice to see some real hackable tablet hardware that could jump-start the next wave of innovation in really personal computing, bridging the gap between PDAs and PCs.
I can see toasters and coffepot weeb cams with IP numbers. but light bulbs? Like we can't run out of IPV6 space fast enough already.
Uh, 2^128 = 3.4 x 10^38: IPv6 address space is BIG. We're not gonna run out of IPv6 addrs anytime soon. (Someone pointed out back in an early IETF meeting on the subject that this is enough to address every particle in the solar system. I haven't verified that math myself.)
I've had a Toshiba Libretto running continuously as a server for a couple of years now. As I remark elsewhere, I find laptop hardware to be *more* reliable than desktop hardware by a considerable margin. It pretty much has to be, if you think about it.
Heat isn't that much of a problem if you avoid a few of the worst pre-Mobile Pentium room heaters, since laptops are expected to work out on oil rigs in the summer heat of the Amazon, west Texas, or worse yet, southern Louisiana. I find most desktop hardware problems are related to flakey connectors/connections - that doesn't happen nearly as often in laptop hardware, since they're designed to withstand reasonable mechanical abuse. The only real downside is if you need to plug in PCI cards, although a surprising number of the "name brand" laptops offer docking stations that make this an option. A few are even reasonably priced.
I've used laptops in co-lo facilities to save $$$ back before 1U servers were common - the "real estate" savings more than offset the incremental cost, and gave me an effective density about twice that of 1U servers. The packets really don't care if it's a laptop, and you've got the added benefit of a console for each unit when you actually need to lay hands on the hardware. (Granted, this was driven by a rock-bottom budget, but it worked so well I'd consider the approach in other circumstances now - especially now that 100 Mb Ethernet is so widely available on the motherboard.)
Think twice before you write laptops off for this sort of thing - they may work out much better than you think...
Although the packaging is impressive, it's not a very good deal, especially considering that you can buy a more capable laptop for less money, and get the LCD screen and a 3-hour UPS in the bargain.
I've working in the laptop business, and despite what some here have said, the good ones are indeed built for 24x7 use. I began putting servers on laptop hardware with Novell back in 1994, and for light duty server use, I still prefer laptop hardware to "regular" PC servers. Let's face it folks, it just doesn't take much horsepower to run a basic firewall, file server, mail server, and DNS server. (I recommend e-smith for this sort of thing if you want a good open-source "appliance" approach to the basic office server needs.)
I've run several laptop and laptop-derived servers for years now (I have an old Toshiba Libretto hopped up with a 6.4 GB disk that I use as a portable file server), and they are invariably *more* reliable than the desktop PC hardware I have, which tends to flake out every few months due to bad connections or the phase of the moon.
I like this box, it just doesn't make much sense to buy one, given that you can get a comparable laptop (and probably, an extra hard disk to go with it, so you can turn it back into a "regular" laptop for trips in a minute or two) for about the same money. And don't underestimate the importance of that built-in UPS if you're looking to use it as a server of any kind...
Not only is it not well-equipped for this sort of thing, but it's nearly an order of magnitude more expensive than some of the small embedded boards that have multiple Ethernets. This sort of thing is available from several SBC vendors for $200-$600, with two or three Ethernets thrown into the bargain. (Sorry, don't have the URLs handy now, but they're out there - look around...)
And, of course, most USB Ethernet adapters don't perform all that well, which could make them OK for connecting to the Ethernet port on your Cable or DSL box, but not much else.
Those are the original series. All were product of the Stratemeyer syndicate, which also created the Hardy Boys, Nanacy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and many others.
/. readers. (After all, what self-respecting technologist in training could pass up reading about "Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Cycloplane"?)
There was a second series of Tom Swift books by "Appleton" published in the 50's and 60's - those are the stories of Tom Swift *Jr.*, and are likely the ones more familiar to
Try asking a Sun rep why a 18GB drive that can be ordered at CDW for $500 and the 'Sun OEM'd' model costs $1300. They'll say "We only select the
best quality drives and test them further to make sure they are stronger, faster and blah blah blah."
You may or may not agree that that cost difference is worth it, but Sun is telling the truth. I used to work for them, and AFAIK, there is no other OEM that is nearly as tough on drive vendors as Sun.
Sun *insists* that a representative sample of documented production runs for Sun pass their reliability tests - if they don't, they're rejected. And they've been known to reject entire 18-wheel trucks full of disk drives if the test units aren't up to spec - ouch, that's gotta hurt if you're the drive vendor...
Someone using the term 'loosing' properly! Not a mistaken spelling for 'losing'! On the Internet! On Slashdot, no less! Yikes!
This is truly frightening. Perhaps something terrible is about to happen. Death awaits us all with sharp pointy teeth...
Go back and read the decision. It was Florida's electroal process, but a national election hanging in the balance with the results becoming less and less certain and reliable with each successive recount. The SC should never have been involved in that case, I agree, but Gore's unwillingness to admit defeat after repeated recounts (all of which have upheld Bush even after the fact) forced the issue there.
Scalia is the most consistent strict constructionist on the court, but even he has his bad days from time to time...
If this doesn't highlight the importance of strict constructionists on the Supreme Court, I don't know what does.
Scalia is absolutely right here, as usual: any other decision would result in our rights being quickly eroded away by advances in technology.
It's too bad the Democrats are already planning to "fight dirty" to prevent another legal mind like Scalia's from sitting on the court. (Of course, that presupposes that Bush has the cojones to nominate someone of that caliber, a very iffy proposition given his demonstrated invertebrate nature to date...)
It's not fair to represent this as "the conservative position" on drugs. I consider myself a conservative (but not a Republican, since the GOP has completely abandoned the priciples of limited government), but this is one area where Buckley and his crew are just plain flat WRONG. (That's worth remarking for the simple reason that Buckley is so seldom wrong that many of his backers look the other way when his logic becomes terribly fallacious, as in this case.)
Buckley & Co. are only right on this issue in that they recognize that prohibition never works well - a sad fact of life. But they fail to acknowledge that legalizing drugs *requires* writing off an entire generation to the newly "OK" drugs - a horrendous human misery cost that we could never afford, especially now. Further, there is the continuing cost of ongoing hordes of people that will continue to destroy themsleves even once the dangers of even really destructive drugs have been amply demonstrated. The Netherlands is a good example - there are many reasons that the nation that was once the most powerful trading nation of the face of the earth has become nearly irrelevant in the modern world, but recent drug policy is certainly one reason to expect it will never reclaim that lost glory.
The simple fact is that it *is* reasonable to draw a line somewhere bewteen "soft drugs" like tobacco, alcohol, and *possibly* marijuana (all of which have a demonstrated ability to cause immense human suffering through their abuse) and "hard drugs" (LSD, herion, etc.) which have a much higher probability of destroying their users and inciting them to harm others. That line has to be drawn somewhere, and it should not be fluid. That said, it is far better to leave the line where it is now than to eliminate it entirely, something we could not do without the blood of drug victims on our hands.
Although my conservatism (like Buckley's) is rooted in libertarian principles, this is one area where the libertarian argument fails to hold water, and always will.