I thought you/.ers might be interested in that it seems that while ADSL service might be affected by this, not all Telus customers are.
My company has (what I think is) a T1 connection through Telus, and I've found that I can still access the web site in question.
I do find their behaviour disgusting, however, and I do plan on writing them a letter to that effect (and possibly threatening to cancel my cell service that I get through them).
My service was so much better in the Clearnet days anyway.
That annoys me too at times. Our firewall blocks all traffic that's not on the normal http(s), ftp or ssh ports.
Solution? Install ProxyButton extension. Whenever I encounter a site I can't reach (like the Coral cache, for example), I SSH into my home machine, which is running a proxy server (forwarding my proxy port), hit ProxyButton, and browse away.
(in case you were wondering, I run my proxy on a port other than 80 because there is a web site running on it)
I know some of these exist in some form, but I'd like to see this on every machine.
1 - built-in mini-UPS. Something to even out the power and give the equipment a decent approximation of a sine wave and maybe 5 minutes spare power. It'll reduce crashes and dataloss a great deal.
2 - Expansion cards that can be added without opening the case. I want to be able to add or replace my NIC, Sound, Video in/out, hard disks, memory, etc by just plugging them into the case like a PCMCIA card. It doesn't have to be as small as that, but I'd love for the PC to act more or less like a blade where the average user can throw the components in as they please. Maybe even let me upgrade the processor that way too.
3 - reduce excess heat and power consumption. Yeah, yeah, I know. But today's machines are more than fast enough for the average user, so concentrate on making them *better*, not faster.
4 - decent/easy backup method. I haven't found an easy or reliable way to back up my data. Can't find a tape drive that's fast enough or with enough capacity, CDs/DVDs are not reliable enough, and hard drives are cumbersome to work with (most of the time). External USB hard drives are an improvement, but surely there must be a better way.
5 - 3D Scanning/Printing. I'd like to take an object, be able to take pictures of it from all angles, and easily model it. Then I'd love to be able to print one out of that weird epoxy stuff I keep hearing about. At home. This would be an excellent way for budding inventors to create molds quickly and easily (and hopefully cheaply).
You have to have it installed by a Canon service agent
Eh? When I brought my Canon printer home, the print head came in a separate package. I installed it myself. Why would it take an agent to replace something I installed myself in the first place?
I'm glad you like Java servlet coding. (Do you have a resume somewhere? I'm frequently asked to refer people.)
Presently I don't have it online, as I've been in a steady job for 6 years and haven't had a need to update it. But you've just provided me with a good reminder that I really should touch it up and make it available.
Wow. You just convinced me to give it a try myself.
Just received a T42 last week. Just installed the software now. Took a total of about 5 minutes to install the IBM software, which replaces the Windows Login Screen (so it does require one reboot).
Next thing you select your account (and input your password), tell it which fingers you wish to enroll to link to that account, and presto. It seems to shave a second or two off whenever I need to unlock my workstation after the screen saver comes on. Nice!
What the heck does Java have to do with anything? We're still running Apache 1.3 in production (it seems like there's fewer security issues and whatnot) and it's working just fine.
Maybe not in Vancouver. But in Toronto there's definitely a selection of theatres that charge $13.50. And what's not going to help is that Cineplex is buying Famous Players, effectively removing any real competition around here (AMC does not count - they are too small).
I guess that would explain why it runs like lightening on my Linux box with 1.5G of memory.
The thing is, I should have mentioned that I have FF installed on my wife's machine which is even lower-end than mine (P2/350/64M/Win98). She seems happy enough with it, although she doesn't do much on her machine besides browse a little with Winamp in the background (and maybe sometimes MS Word), so I suppose that's not a good test for what you're talking about.
I can imagine that if I were compiling something in the background, FF would grind to a halt. On my previously-mentioned testing WinNT machine I simply don't do that. It's usually just Outlook and Firefox running. Sometimes Photoshop too. But never anything particularly CPU-intensive at any point.
Interesting discussion. I'd definitely like to see it faster, at any rate. I'm just saying that in my particular case I haven't had any complaints. There's always room for improvement however, and I'll always be open to seeing that.
Right now I'm typing on my "testing" machine at work, which is an old HP Kayak running WinNT 4, P2/450mhz with 256M of memory. I have Firefox open (with between 4 and 8 tabs, usually) and I also have Outlook open (yeah, I know - my office uses Exchange and IMAP isn't open).
Suffice it to say, it works well enough that I never asked to upgrade this particular box. Granted, I do all my *real* work on my up-to-date speedy Linux machine (P4/2.8GHz/1.5GB memory), but I never had a problem with FF on this slower box. In fact, it runs significantly better than IE seems to.
My home machine is also pretty low-end, an old Athlon 700mhz with 256M of memory running Windows 98 (again, I know. I just use it for browsing and email and it's good enough). Again, it runs fine there too.
So basically I'm saying that I have three very different machines running different OSs, and I've honestly never seen an issue running Firefox. I do have issues running IE (though, interestingly it seems more stable when I run it using Wine on my Linux box than on the two Windows machines, but that could be because I appreciate that if it dies it doesn't take out the OS with it).
Sadly, the company I work for still has a handful of SCO servers in our server room (fortunately I'm not responsible for any of them). We've been replacing what we could, but it's quite the project to migrate our legacy mission-critical systems (which have been running fine) to Linux.
At least from us, they are still getting something. But it's getting less and less with every passing quarter, I would think. The main reason to migrate off the platform, ethical issues aside, is the concern about the future of SCO and continued availability of support for these systems.
Seems to me that you can distribute the JVM without difficulty from Sun. To quote:
The J2SE platform and the JRE are free to download and to use for commercial programming. They are also free to redistribute, if distributed with a value-add application or applet.
Seems to me that OpenOffice.org qualifies for that.
Right. Then there's some that use other packages, like Gentoo, where we get the source via portage.
Same thing - even if you counted the number of times the mirror served us you'd only count 1 - we run a mirror internally so every package is only downloaded once.
I pay $44.95 a month to Rogers for my highspeed internet access in Canada, and I get my bandwidth reduced, and even DNS resolution problems while trying to download stuff off bittorrent
There might be other culprits besides Rogers. I connect via Rogers as well, and I have the occasional issue, but often it seems the problem is on my end.
1 - try capping the number of connections BT is using. You might be exhausting the capabilities of your machine (particularly if you're on Windows) and/or your router
2 - try capping your bandwidth, particularly upstream. Rogers has a fairly low upstream rate, and BT has a habit of easily consuming all of it if you're not careful (and thus, your DNS requests will fail to make it through)
3 - look into your router too. I find after I've run BT for some heavy transfers, I've had my Linksys go into some weird state where everything was slow for a while. Eventually it recovered (or I can hit that reset button to make it better).
Generally speaking, though, doing #1 and #2 was sufficient for me, and this kind of slowdown is now rare on my end where it used to happen pretty consistently.
Maybe I should patent this. Ah well, I figure if I mention it now it should prevent someone else from doing so...
I was thinking - I know how Ghost supports multicasting and such. I was thinking about how to take that to the next level. Something like Ghost meets BitTorrent.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to image a drive, use multicast to get the data to as many machines as possible, but then use BitTorrent to get pieces to any machines that weren't able to listen to the multicast (ie it's on another subnet or something) and to pick up any pieces that were missed in the broadcast, or get the rest of the disk image if that particular machine joined in the session a little late and missed the first part?
I think that would really rock if someone wanted to image hundreds of machines quickly and reliably.
I'm thinking it'd be pretty cool to have that server set up, and find a way to cram the client onto a floppy or some sort of custom Knoppix. Find server, choose image, and now you're part of both the multicast AND the torrent. That should take care of error checking too, I guess.
Anybody care to take thus further and/or shoot down the idea?:)
They can either do proper MD5/SHA1 collisions with unchanged filesize, or they can't. My guess is, they can't.
I would tend to agree. Imagine the panic it would cause. SSL Certificates and signatures in PDF documents would suddenly become worthless (until we find a better hash algorithm). I'm pretty sure this would cause quite a stir.
You're aware that IBM uses linux on every one of it's programmer's boxes and ships mostly linux servers, right?
Careful there. That's fairly broad. My best friend works at the IBM Software Lab (in Markham, Ontario, Canada). He's on the DB2 team, and I don't believe he ever mentioned using Linux. As far as I know his team is all using Windows (not that he's happy about that - I somehow doubt that because he's a Mac guy).
A better statement might be that IBM uses linux a lot internally. Sure, they do.
NoMachine NX can do that. There's even a free NX server out there (I'm using it now - it's in the Gentoo portage tree even).
NX compresses the X protocol and works some magic so it's usable over even slow links (9600bps even, apparantly). NoMachine has a free client available for download.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought you /.ers might be interested in that it seems that while ADSL service might be affected by this, not all Telus customers are.
My company has (what I think is) a T1 connection through Telus, and I've found that I can still access the web site in question.
I do find their behaviour disgusting, however, and I do plan on writing them a letter to that effect (and possibly threatening to cancel my cell service that I get through them).
My service was so much better in the Clearnet days anyway.
That annoys me too at times. Our firewall blocks all traffic that's not on the normal http(s), ftp or ssh ports.
Solution? Install ProxyButton extension. Whenever I encounter a site I can't reach (like the Coral cache, for example), I SSH into my home machine, which is running a proxy server (forwarding my proxy port), hit ProxyButton, and browse away.
(in case you were wondering, I run my proxy on a port other than 80 because there is a web site running on it)
I know some of these exist in some form, but I'd like to see this on every machine.
1 - built-in mini-UPS. Something to even out the power and give the equipment a decent approximation of a sine wave and maybe 5 minutes spare power. It'll reduce crashes and dataloss a great deal.
2 - Expansion cards that can be added without opening the case. I want to be able to add or replace my NIC, Sound, Video in/out, hard disks, memory, etc by just plugging them into the case like a PCMCIA card. It doesn't have to be as small as that, but I'd love for the PC to act more or less like a blade where the average user can throw the components in as they please. Maybe even let me upgrade the processor that way too.
3 - reduce excess heat and power consumption. Yeah, yeah, I know. But today's machines are more than fast enough for the average user, so concentrate on making them *better*, not faster.
4 - decent/easy backup method. I haven't found an easy or reliable way to back up my data. Can't find a tape drive that's fast enough or with enough capacity, CDs/DVDs are not reliable enough, and hard drives are cumbersome to work with (most of the time). External USB hard drives are an improvement, but surely there must be a better way.
5 - 3D Scanning/Printing. I'd like to take an object, be able to take pictures of it from all angles, and easily model it. Then I'd love to be able to print one out of that weird epoxy stuff I keep hearing about. At home. This would be an excellent way for budding inventors to create molds quickly and easily (and hopefully cheaply).
You have to have it installed by a Canon service agent
Eh? When I brought my Canon printer home, the print head came in a separate package. I installed it myself. Why would it take an agent to replace something I installed myself in the first place?
I'm glad you like Java servlet coding. (Do you have a resume somewhere? I'm frequently asked to refer people.)
Presently I don't have it online, as I've been in a steady job for 6 years and haven't had a need to update it. But you've just provided me with a good reminder that I really should touch it up and make it available.
Wow. You just convinced me to give it a try myself.
Just received a T42 last week. Just installed the software now. Took a total of about 5 minutes to install the IBM software, which replaces the Windows Login Screen (so it does require one reboot).
Next thing you select your account (and input your password), tell it which fingers you wish to enroll to link to that account, and presto. It seems to shave a second or two off whenever I need to unlock my workstation after the screen saver comes on. Nice!
What the heck does Java have to do with anything? We're still running Apache 1.3 in production (it seems like there's fewer security issues and whatnot) and it's working just fine.
Yes. I code Servlets for a living. And I like it.
Shouldn't the summary read 11:59pm aka 23:59?
Maybe not in Vancouver. But in Toronto there's definitely a selection of theatres that charge $13.50. And what's not going to help is that Cineplex is buying Famous Players, effectively removing any real competition around here (AMC does not count - they are too small).
I guess that would explain why it runs like lightening on my Linux box with 1.5G of memory.
The thing is, I should have mentioned that I have FF installed on my wife's machine which is even lower-end than mine (P2/350/64M/Win98). She seems happy enough with it, although she doesn't do much on her machine besides browse a little with Winamp in the background (and maybe sometimes MS Word), so I suppose that's not a good test for what you're talking about.
I can imagine that if I were compiling something in the background, FF would grind to a halt. On my previously-mentioned testing WinNT machine I simply don't do that. It's usually just Outlook and Firefox running. Sometimes Photoshop too. But never anything particularly CPU-intensive at any point.
Interesting discussion. I'd definitely like to see it faster, at any rate. I'm just saying that in my particular case I haven't had any complaints. There's always room for improvement however, and I'll always be open to seeing that.
How come I've never run into this problem?
Right now I'm typing on my "testing" machine at work, which is an old HP Kayak running WinNT 4, P2/450mhz with 256M of memory. I have Firefox open (with between 4 and 8 tabs, usually) and I also have Outlook open (yeah, I know - my office uses Exchange and IMAP isn't open).
Suffice it to say, it works well enough that I never asked to upgrade this particular box. Granted, I do all my *real* work on my up-to-date speedy Linux machine (P4/2.8GHz/1.5GB memory), but I never had a problem with FF on this slower box. In fact, it runs significantly better than IE seems to.
My home machine is also pretty low-end, an old Athlon 700mhz with 256M of memory running Windows 98 (again, I know. I just use it for browsing and email and it's good enough). Again, it runs fine there too.
So basically I'm saying that I have three very different machines running different OSs, and I've honestly never seen an issue running Firefox. I do have issues running IE (though, interestingly it seems more stable when I run it using Wine on my Linux box than on the two Windows machines, but that could be because I appreciate that if it dies it doesn't take out the OS with it).
Sadly, the company I work for still has a handful of SCO servers in our server room (fortunately I'm not responsible for any of them). We've been replacing what we could, but it's quite the project to migrate our legacy mission-critical systems (which have been running fine) to Linux.
At least from us, they are still getting something. But it's getting less and less with every passing quarter, I would think. The main reason to migrate off the platform, ethical issues aside, is the concern about the future of SCO and continued availability of support for these systems.
Is there anything on your side besides a single Google ad box? Are you offering anything of your own?
Seems to me that you can distribute the JVM without difficulty from Sun. To quote:
The J2SE platform and the JRE are free to download and to use for commercial programming. They are also free to redistribute, if distributed with a value-add application or applet.
Seems to me that OpenOffice.org qualifies for that.
They're doing it for the babes.
Run that by me again. Marketing made a decision that XP Starter Edition... shouldn't start?
(head explodes)
Right. Then there's some that use other packages, like Gentoo, where we get the source via portage.
Same thing - even if you counted the number of times the mirror served us you'd only count 1 - we run a mirror internally so every package is only downloaded once.
Riiiiight. And he ALSO said flat out some time ago that Star Wars will never be released on DVD. So do you really believe anything he says?
I pay $44.95 a month to Rogers for my highspeed internet access in Canada, and I get my bandwidth reduced, and even DNS resolution problems while trying to download stuff off bittorrent
There might be other culprits besides Rogers. I connect via Rogers as well, and I have the occasional issue, but often it seems the problem is on my end.
1 - try capping the number of connections BT is using. You might be exhausting the capabilities of your machine (particularly if you're on Windows) and/or your router
2 - try capping your bandwidth, particularly upstream. Rogers has a fairly low upstream rate, and BT has a habit of easily consuming all of it if you're not careful (and thus, your DNS requests will fail to make it through)
3 - look into your router too. I find after I've run BT for some heavy transfers, I've had my Linksys go into some weird state where everything was slow for a while. Eventually it recovered (or I can hit that reset button to make it better).
Generally speaking, though, doing #1 and #2 was sufficient for me, and this kind of slowdown is now rare on my end where it used to happen pretty consistently.
Maybe I should patent this. Ah well, I figure if I mention it now it should prevent someone else from doing so...
:)
I was thinking - I know how Ghost supports multicasting and such. I was thinking about how to take that to the next level. Something like Ghost meets BitTorrent.
Wouldn't it be great to be able to image a drive, use multicast to get the data to as many machines as possible, but then use BitTorrent to get pieces to any machines that weren't able to listen to the multicast (ie it's on another subnet or something) and to pick up any pieces that were missed in the broadcast, or get the rest of the disk image if that particular machine joined in the session a little late and missed the first part?
I think that would really rock if someone wanted to image hundreds of machines quickly and reliably.
I'm thinking it'd be pretty cool to have that server set up, and find a way to cram the client onto a floppy or some sort of custom Knoppix. Find server, choose image, and now you're part of both the multicast AND the torrent. That should take care of error checking too, I guess.
Anybody care to take thus further and/or shoot down the idea?
Catwoman was hot, what's wrong with you? :)
:)
Uh huh. And how long until you realized that you were checking out a GUY most of the time (ie her stunt double - look it up).
I always enjoyed watching people's faces when I told them that one
And a year (and many complaints/jokes) later, Slashdot Admin Still Lacking too...
Nothing to see here. Please move along.
They can either do proper MD5/SHA1 collisions with unchanged filesize, or they can't. My guess is, they can't.
I would tend to agree. Imagine the panic it would cause. SSL Certificates and signatures in PDF documents would suddenly become worthless (until we find a better hash algorithm). I'm pretty sure this would cause quite a stir.
You're aware that IBM uses linux on every one of it's programmer's boxes and ships mostly linux servers, right?
Careful there. That's fairly broad. My best friend works at the IBM Software Lab (in Markham, Ontario, Canada). He's on the DB2 team, and I don't believe he ever mentioned using Linux. As far as I know his team is all using Windows (not that he's happy about that - I somehow doubt that because he's a Mac guy).
A better statement might be that IBM uses linux a lot internally. Sure, they do.
NoMachine NX can do that. There's even a free NX server out there (I'm using it now - it's in the Gentoo portage tree even).
NX compresses the X protocol and works some magic so it's usable over even slow links (9600bps even, apparantly). NoMachine has a free client available for download.
It can save your desktop too.