This makes no sense. All it takes is one ISO to get on a newsgroup and the world has it. Why inconvenience people just because of the stupid notion that people will only install from original CDs.
> The Linksys thing may be router but how
> configurable it? If it can be reconfigured, it
> can be broken, look at the SNMP problems even
> on the big routers.
Anything can be broken if you toy with it enough. The thing about the Linksys box is that most people won't need to do anything except plug it in. And if you really screw up, it's a reset away from being just like it was when it shipped.
> With LRP or one of the other baby distributions
> you can configure and monitor much as you want.
The linksys boxes can monitor anything you want. They can be configured to send to a box running syslogd if you really need to.
> OTOH, it is a computer and it can even run some
> other small stuff too.
What else would you WANT to run on a firewall? A firewall should be a dedicated box. The less it runs, the more control you have. Any additional services could totally defeat the purpose of a firewall. If there are any services that you want to be accessable from the Internet, you put them on a machine in your DMZ and have the firewall route packets to them based on service requested.
When talking about Linux on old hardware everybody always says, "Run a firewall on it!" Why? Is this the only thing that they are good for? Likely, except for those that just can't possibly afford anything better, but that's not the point I'm going after here.
Why run a firewall off of an old 486 when you could go down to CompUSA and buy a Linksys router for $69 plus a $10 mail in rebate? "Because I already OWN the 486!" they scream. That's stupid. The electricity savings alone in one year would pay for the router, even without a hard drive. Not to mention that the linksys boxes are super easy and fast to configure and offer a lot of simple features for port forwarding to other boxes, etc. They take up almost no space and make no noise at all. No worries about keeping the kernel or anything else used on it updated and secure.
Now if you want to do something like this simply for the experience, more power to you. That's a great way to learn. But otherwise, why?
Can you really read it outside with bright sunlight? This has been a problem for me with trying to do something outside with a laptop. Totally unusable...
Trust me, electronic petitions mean nothing. I have had opprotunity to work with a couple of large institutions that have had web based petitions submitted to them for one thing or another (political). They aren't even looked at. It's too easy and the chance of fraud is huge. Even if they try to do email validation, etc., you just can't trust them. It's one man one vote, not one email address one vote.
If you only care enough to fill in a couple of form fields and hit submit instead of taking the time to send an actual letter, you must not care very much at all.
This is exactly the reason why I like Best Buy. Now I know I'm probably not the common customer, but I probably know more about what I'm interested in purchasing than any sales person ever would having done most of my research on the web before stepping foot in the store. I go in Best Buy and don't have to worry about being hassled by people working on commision. They are always polite and offer to help, but I just say I'm just looking and they leave me alone.
Radio Shack used to be a great place when they weren't trying to be a mainstream consumer electronics store. I worked there for 3 years way back when. We used to have a group of electronics freak guys (building, not pluging in) who used to hang out there. They'd bring in projects they were putting together to show off and buy parts for. They even helped a lot of other customers who came in looking for just the right resistor or something. Even though I was doing computer support, I learned a lot about the bits and pieces that the stores sold.
Maybe so, but would Google be willing to give you the 5 minutes of processing time this exhaustive search takes? Get 20 or 30 thousand people doing it at once and that would require some heavy duty hardware upgrades.
What I did was to set the right side button (not the right button) on my Intellimouse as a shift button. It defaults to Forward, but I rarely used that; I use the left side button for back constantly.
This works especially well in combination with Pop-Up Stopper. It stops all popups, but if you want to temporarily override it, you hit shift as you click. Kill two birds with one stone!
Does Moz reload the page when you want to view the source now? This always bugged me while trying to troubleshoot pages that where generated by a form. Don't reload the page, just show me the source. Geez.
Regular people don't want to go find a compatible version of ispell that will work on their system and get it all configured (I doubt it uses Installshield). That's too much work.
So where's the Windows version of Galeon? Seriously, I'd like a smaller, faster browser based on Mozilla for Windows. Is there something out there like this?
Yes, but I can imagine a day when a network produces 4 times the amount of programming that they do now and targets different segments of the population. If there where more shows on that I would be interested in, I'd probably watch more TV. I don't now because I'm apparently just not interested in the same things as the average American. Along with targeted advertising, they could more than afford to do this.
They don't do this now because they can't. Current broadcasting doesn't allow for customized programming. If a program or commercial is scheduled to occur at a particular time, select the one I will see based on my preferences and start streaming it to me.
Watching more television wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, depending on the type of shows that you like. I've learned a lot from TV. While overdoing anything is bad, it's the quality of the shows you watch that can really turn an "idiot box" into something worthwhile. Now some will get more stupid sitcoms that have no value whatsoever, but they're already lost so it really doesn't matter.;)
Program comes from the Latin word programma, which means a public notice. I would guess that a bunch of Roman guys going to listen to somebody give a speech or something would say they were watching a programma.
This is basically a "me too" post, but I must agree. I'd much rather see ads for Cisco and ThinkGeek than for tampons. I don't mind anyone knowing this. Those targeted ads would certainly have a better chance of not getting fast forwarded through if it was something I was interested in. And, smaller companies like ThinkGeek could have national advertising at a tiny fraction of the cost if they were only broadcast to those in the target market.
Now we really can't do this right now because you can't tailor the commercials for each household on a standard broadcast network. However, this is all groundwork that has to be done so when we can do this we'll be ready for it.
You're not buying the right to keep the movie. What are the chances that they will go out of business within the 3 day period you purchased your movie? And if they do, so what? How many movies would you have selected at once? Chances are that you would pick a movie right before you watched it anyway.
Also, I'm not putting much stock in this venture. My points would hold up just fine if some major studio or other company did this, and without a lot of the uncertainty that surrounds this.
What I meant was that they are doing things that would be illegal in America, and there's not a whole lot our Government can do about it. So, who is going to be able to regulate how they use my credit card? If it was a large company that I had heard of before then no problem, but giving my credit card number to someone I don't know who doesn't have to respect our laws is scarey.
What do you mean by poor? Is it skipping frames or having to rebuffer often, or is it just the quality of the video. If it's the latter, remember that the max stream they offer is 300k. No matter how fast your connection is you won't get any better quality than that.
If it's the former, then yes, I could see your point. But with a 512k cable connection you shouldn't have this problem unless the bottleneck is somewhere between the other end and your ISP.
Modem and slower broadband users? Well, everyone knows there are advantages to having a fat pipe, and they do offer a 100k stream. Not many people would bother to attempt this with a modem... they know their limitations.
Maybe when someone legitimate does this they will make a way to download for play later. Some kind of codec with a key exchange for authorization. They could offer a higher quality feed than would be possible in live streaming with a bit of an increase in cost to cover bandwidth.
I'd pay the same as I would for a rental in that case. No going to the video store, thousands of titles available all the time, no out of stocks, no trying to get it back on time, no late fees. Perfect.
Someone will crack it, but like I said, why bother? If they keep the prices very low, it's not worth the wasted disk space to keep around. We've just got to get into this mindset.
Or possibly we're seeing the latency because of a satellite connection or something? Once the connection is established it's fast. I see this quite often at sites where our clients have satellite Internet access. Pages take a good while to come up, and running ssh over them is horrible, but once a download starts they are great.
What would be cool is to have something like TotalRecorder for video. For those that don't know, TotalRecorder acts as an audio device driver in Windows. You set it as the default device and play whatever you want on your computer. When it's told to, the device driver encodes everything that is sent through it to a file on the drive based on your compression settings and algorithm of choice, then passes the audio on to the real driver for it to be played.
TR is great for unencrypting all those Audible files, etc. so you can save them out as a standard mp3 or whatever. I just set it up and start playing the encrypted file before I go to bed. Next morning I have an mp3. I also record several radio shows this way. A cron job launches TotalRecorder about a minute before the show comes on. When the show is about to start it launches a url to the streaming audio of the radio station. It only writes to the file when there is audio to play, so no problems.
Why not have something that did the same thing for the video card when in full screen mode? Combine the two and you're set.
Because it's too much of a pain to download movies. It's worth a buck to not have to try to find somebody with a copy of a movie I want to see, try to download it, get interrupted, dealing with different versions, downloading a Gig file and finding the quality sucks,...
The biggest question for me is should I trust these guys with my credit card information. I mean, you must admit that the whole concept of their business is a bit shady. I don't know if I feel comfortable with doing that.
Now if some major company started offering a service like this, I'd jump on it. Bigger selection, quicker response times, legal, and a lot more comfortable to do business with.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a truely great idea. Has this been implemented anywhere?
.
This makes no sense. All it takes is one ISO to get on a newsgroup and the world has it. Why inconvenience people just because of the stupid notion that people will only install from original CDs.
.
> The Linksys thing may be router but how
> configurable it? If it can be reconfigured, it
> can be broken, look at the SNMP problems even
> on the big routers.
Anything can be broken if you toy with it enough. The thing about the Linksys box is that most people won't need to do anything except plug it in. And if you really screw up, it's a reset away from being just like it was when it shipped.
> With LRP or one of the other baby distributions
> you can configure and monitor much as you want.
The linksys boxes can monitor anything you want. They can be configured to send to a box running syslogd if you really need to.
> OTOH, it is a computer and it can even run some
> other small stuff too.
What else would you WANT to run on a firewall? A firewall should be a dedicated box. The less it runs, the more control you have. Any additional services could totally defeat the purpose of a firewall. If there are any services that you want to be accessable from the Internet, you put them on a machine in your DMZ and have the firewall route packets to them based on service requested.
.
When talking about Linux on old hardware everybody always says, "Run a firewall on it!" Why? Is this the only thing that they are good for? Likely, except for those that just can't possibly afford anything better, but that's not the point I'm going after here.
Why run a firewall off of an old 486 when you could go down to CompUSA and buy a Linksys router for $69 plus a $10 mail in rebate? "Because I already OWN the 486!" they scream. That's stupid. The electricity savings alone in one year would pay for the router, even without a hard drive. Not to mention that the linksys boxes are super easy and fast to configure and offer a lot of simple features for port forwarding to other boxes, etc. They take up almost no space and make no noise at all. No worries about keeping the kernel or anything else used on it updated and secure.
Now if you want to do something like this simply for the experience, more power to you. That's a great way to learn. But otherwise, why?
.
Can you really read it outside with bright sunlight? This has been a problem for me with trying to do something outside with a laptop. Totally unusable...
Trust me, electronic petitions mean nothing. I have had opprotunity to work with a couple of large institutions that have had web based petitions submitted to them for one thing or another (political). They aren't even looked at. It's too easy and the chance of fraud is huge. Even if they try to do email validation, etc., you just can't trust them. It's one man one vote, not one email address one vote.
If you only care enough to fill in a couple of form fields and hit submit instead of taking the time to send an actual letter, you must not care very much at all.
.
This is exactly the reason why I like Best Buy. Now I know I'm probably not the common customer, but I probably know more about what I'm interested in purchasing than any sales person ever would having done most of my research on the web before stepping foot in the store. I go in Best Buy and don't have to worry about being hassled by people working on commision. They are always polite and offer to help, but I just say I'm just looking and they leave me alone.
Radio Shack used to be a great place when they weren't trying to be a mainstream consumer electronics store. I worked there for 3 years way back when. We used to have a group of electronics freak guys (building, not pluging in) who used to hang out there. They'd bring in projects they were putting together to show off and buy parts for. They even helped a lot of other customers who came in looking for just the right resistor or something. Even though I was doing computer support, I learned a lot about the bits and pieces that the stores sold.
Those were the good times.
.
Maybe so, but would Google be willing to give you the 5 minutes of processing time this exhaustive search takes? Get 20 or 30 thousand people doing it at once and that would require some heavy duty hardware upgrades.
One feature that MUST be added before 1.0 is vi keybindings in textareas! Seriously. I'd never go back.
.
What I did was to set the right side button (not the right button) on my Intellimouse as a shift button. It defaults to Forward, but I rarely used that; I use the left side button for back constantly.
This works especially well in combination with Pop-Up Stopper. It stops all popups, but if you want to temporarily override it, you hit shift as you click. Kill two birds with one stone!
.
Does Moz reload the page when you want to view the source now? This always bugged me while trying to troubleshoot pages that where generated by a form. Don't reload the page, just show me the source. Geez.
.
People started having to pay bills...
.
Regular people don't want to go find a compatible version of ispell that will work on their system and get it all configured (I doubt it uses Installshield). That's too much work.
.
So where's the Windows version of Galeon? Seriously, I'd like a smaller, faster browser based on Mozilla for Windows. Is there something out there like this?
.
Yes, but I can imagine a day when a network produces 4 times the amount of programming that they do now and targets different segments of the population. If there where more shows on that I would be interested in, I'd probably watch more TV. I don't now because I'm apparently just not interested in the same things as the average American. Along with targeted advertising, they could more than afford to do this.
;)
They don't do this now because they can't. Current broadcasting doesn't allow for customized programming. If a program or commercial is scheduled to occur at a particular time, select the one I will see based on my preferences and start streaming it to me.
Watching more television wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, depending on the type of shows that you like. I've learned a lot from TV. While overdoing anything is bad, it's the quality of the shows you watch that can really turn an "idiot box" into something worthwhile. Now some will get more stupid sitcoms that have no value whatsoever, but they're already lost so it really doesn't matter.
.
You're using the wrong sense of the word program.
Program comes from the Latin word programma, which means a public notice. I would guess that a bunch of Roman guys going to listen to somebody give a speech or something would say they were watching a programma.
This is basically a "me too" post, but I must agree. I'd much rather see ads for Cisco and ThinkGeek than for tampons. I don't mind anyone knowing this. Those targeted ads would certainly have a better chance of not getting fast forwarded through if it was something I was interested in. And, smaller companies like ThinkGeek could have national advertising at a tiny fraction of the cost if they were only broadcast to those in the target market.
Now we really can't do this right now because you can't tailor the commercials for each household on a standard broadcast network. However, this is all groundwork that has to be done so when we can do this we'll be ready for it.
You're not buying the right to keep the movie. What are the chances that they will go out of business within the 3 day period you purchased your movie? And if they do, so what? How many movies would you have selected at once? Chances are that you would pick a movie right before you watched it anyway.
Also, I'm not putting much stock in this venture. My points would hold up just fine if some major studio or other company did this, and without a lot of the uncertainty that surrounds this.
.
What I meant was that they are doing things that would be illegal in America, and there's not a whole lot our Government can do about it. So, who is going to be able to regulate how they use my credit card? If it was a large company that I had heard of before then no problem, but giving my credit card number to someone I don't know who doesn't have to respect our laws is scarey.
.
What do you mean by poor? Is it skipping frames or having to rebuffer often, or is it just the quality of the video. If it's the latter, remember that the max stream they offer is 300k. No matter how fast your connection is you won't get any better quality than that.
If it's the former, then yes, I could see your point. But with a 512k cable connection you shouldn't have this problem unless the bottleneck is somewhere between the other end and your ISP.
Modem and slower broadband users? Well, everyone knows there are advantages to having a fat pipe, and they do offer a 100k stream. Not many people would bother to attempt this with a modem... they know their limitations.
Maybe when someone legitimate does this they will make a way to download for play later. Some kind of codec with a key exchange for authorization. They could offer a higher quality feed than would be possible in live streaming with a bit of an increase in cost to cover bandwidth.
I'd pay the same as I would for a rental in that case. No going to the video store, thousands of titles available all the time, no out of stocks, no trying to get it back on time, no late fees. Perfect.
Someone will crack it, but like I said, why bother? If they keep the prices very low, it's not worth the wasted disk space to keep around. We've just got to get into this mindset.
.
Or possibly we're seeing the latency because of a satellite connection or something? Once the connection is established it's fast. I see this quite often at sites where our clients have satellite Internet access. Pages take a good while to come up, and running ssh over them is horrible, but once a download starts they are great.
.
What would be cool is to have something like TotalRecorder for video. For those that don't know, TotalRecorder acts as an audio device driver in Windows. You set it as the default device and play whatever you want on your computer. When it's told to, the device driver encodes everything that is sent through it to a file on the drive based on your compression settings and algorithm of choice, then passes the audio on to the real driver for it to be played.
TR is great for unencrypting all those Audible files, etc. so you can save them out as a standard mp3 or whatever. I just set it up and start playing the encrypted file before I go to bed. Next morning I have an mp3. I also record several radio shows this way. A cron job launches TotalRecorder about a minute before the show comes on. When the show is about to start it launches a url to the streaming audio of the radio station. It only writes to the file when there is audio to play, so no problems.
Why not have something that did the same thing for the video card when in full screen mode? Combine the two and you're set.
It does appear to be quite slow navigating the site, but the streaming seems very solid.
.
Because it's too much of a pain to download movies. It's worth a buck to not have to try to find somebody with a copy of a movie I want to see, try to download it, get interrupted, dealing with different versions, downloading a Gig file and finding the quality sucks, ...
.
The biggest question for me is should I trust these guys with my credit card information. I mean, you must admit that the whole concept of their business is a bit shady. I don't know if I feel comfortable with doing that.
Now if some major company started offering a service like this, I'd jump on it. Bigger selection, quicker response times, legal, and a lot more comfortable to do business with.
.