I like the "Speedup Cheat" in the original Pac-Man game. I flip that switch in MAME and have a blast. It's actually harder, in some respects, than at normal speed because it's a real bitch to control.
3. Major brand. I can build and support my own machines, but don't want the hastle with this one.
Great Googly Moogly! When did not wanting to hassle with building your own box start equating to "major brand"?
Look, I'm well past the stage in my life where I can afford to piss away a weekend putting a box of parts together (though fun it may be). However, I haven't bought brand-name in years. My last 3 PC purchases (and those of a couple of clients) were spec'ed out by myself and built/certified by a local PC shop that I've come to trust over the years.
These guys are great, can acquire any parts I request, have a generous support/replacement policy (I know I can walk in with a flakey piece of hardware and they'll give me a new one on the spot), and they sell at a fair price. Sure, they can't compete price-point wise with Dell or hand-building parts from Pricewatch, but I try to support the local guys, and these guys reward my loyalty with solid machines and great service.
So let me get this straight... If I sell my 350-cd collection to Second Spin for, say, $1050 (based on a $3 per cd average), but keep my FLAC archives of said CDs, that's perfectly legal?
Well I'll be damned.
I've got a new plan for aquiring music: 1) Purchase used CDs from Second Spin (no money to the RIAA); 2) rip and save in lossless format; 3) sell CD back to local used CD chain (or a friend). The net result is a perfect copy of the music for little or no money.
Tell me again how this is legal? Simply because I own the physical media of my backups and there's no requirement for me to destroy it?
So how about ripping copies of rental DVDs? Gotta make sure my kids don't scratch those fragile DVDs.:)
Not much there to get excited about (at least for the NES). I was hoping to pick up some games for my kids' NES system (found at a thrift shop for $10).
And since I'm griping... can you get carts for the original NES with multiple games on them? There was this Chineese guy in my dorm during my freshman year at college. All he did was play console games. I vividly remember that he had this NES-looking thing that, upon powering on, had a menu of hundreds of NES games. Can you still get things like that?
Cite? I have a LaserJet 1100. The original toner cart that came with the thing 4.5 years ago is going strong (yeah, I don't kill trees unless I need to).
Of course, this may be a recent development in HP laser printers. However, I'd appreciate a source to your claim.
with those http servers written in bash, awk, or sed (browse freshmeat while you're bored). While this may be proof that we have too many CPU cycles to spare these days, or that people have too much time on their hands, I heartily support the "because I can" justification for things like this.
It's cool just because it is, usefulness be damned.
I've been a Linux user for close to 10 years. I dabbled with it in college for a few years. I started looking at it seriously for use at the office about 7 years ago. Four years ago I switched jobs to a large university where Linux was very big (clusters, desktops), where I dual-booted for about a year, then made the leap to full-time, using VMWare as a crutch for a few things (tax software & MS Streets).
For the past month or so, I've been toying with all three free BSDs (Net, Open, and Free), first within VMWare, then on a few small test machines. This was mainly to enlighten myself to a foreign OS, a fun diversion.
I liked FreeBSD a lot, so I converted my office wokstation (which was Solaris for 1 year, RH Linux for 3). I'm still getting used to some things, but I like it a lot. This machine is using 4.8-STABLE.
I have plans to convert my home machine eventually. I'll likely use 5.1 (or 5.2 when released) so I can use "pf" and VMWare.
I've never used Gentoo or Debian, though I've toyed with apt under Redhat. I thought it was pretty cool. However, ports under FreeBSD seems so much better. I can't quantify how or why, but it just "feels" more polished. Between "cvsup" and "portinstall/portupgrade", system maintenance is pure joy compared to the (Redhat) Linux method.
My only major turn-off will be needing to use Linux emulation for running VMWare (seems "unpure" to use binary emulation). I wish there was a more up-to-date binary packages repository than the packages tree on the freebsd.org site (the OpenOffice 1.1 build is a nightmare, thanks to Java licensing stuff, and to it being such a huge project), but running a source update on 99% of the ports I use isn't so bad. What good is "portupgrade -arRP" if 95% of the latest ports aren't in binary format?
Those rare, obscure programs I use which aren't in ports (the nutrition program "nut" is one) seem to compile fine manually. There are some linux-only things I'll miss. It seems that "dd_recover" (a rather robust recovery tool) is one such tool.
Overall, I'm sold. It's only a matter of time.
Re:this benchmark was performed using a 200Mhz CPU
on
Linux File System Shootout
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How true a difference the hardware makes.
I took an old PII-350 w/ 128MB RAM and benchmarked ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, and xfs on an old 5GB IDE drive. ext2 was the winner by a margin (raw throughput).
Now I'm beating up various hardware and software RAID configs on a dual Athlon MP 2200+ system w/ 2GB RAM and dual 3ware 8-port 7500 controllers w/ 180GB WD drives. JFS rises above the rest in terms of throughput (I didn't test XFS on this new machine), and, of course, reiserfs simply spanks everything in terms of file creation/deletions. The thing I noticed was the JFS had much lower CPU utilization for file creations/deletions and was twice as fast at it than the ext2/3 filesystems (it still got spanked by reiserfs, though).
If anyone's interested, the "best" overall was reiser w/ the mount options noatime,notail,nodiratimeall. Also, if anyone cares, on this machine, the Linux software RAID code at no less than twice the performance numbers over the 3Ware hardware RAID. Running RH9 with all RH updates applied.
A statement I read on on of the VMWare newsgroups led me to the conclusion of mine you quote above. Someone was bitching "why can't XYZ OS run under VMWare if it runs perfectly well under generic PC hardware". Someone responded to the effect that VMWare was tuned to make certain concessions for the OSs they supported. My foggy memory tells me it was an actual VMWare employeer.
Though many unsupported OSs do in fact work (I have all 3 of the free BSDs running at once in VMWare, though only FreeBSD is officially supported), some just don't work. Back in VMWare 2.x days, I could get one version of Solaris/86 to work, but not another.
Maybe it is the guest OS's fault for not handing the virutal hardware correctly, I don't know for sure. But it's by no means a guarantee that all PC-based OS's will "just work" under VMWare.
Yes, but VMWare still needs to make concessions for each supported OS. Yes, you can install and run Solaris/86, pre-v6 Netware versions, plan9, and BeOS under VMWare (with varying success), but they're not supported. They need to tweak VMWare for each OS. A true emulator, like bochs, doesn't need this tweaking.
I'm unsure why Xen needs guest OS mods, vs the way VMWare and Plex86 do things. I only skimmed the paper, so I might have missed something.
I, too, was excited until I read the "porting" part. I guess free Linux and *BSD virtualization is better than nothing. But it'll be nowhere near as comprehensive as VMWare (too bad -- I want to ditch the over-priced beast) and plex86. However, kudos to the Xen team, as it really is a cool project.
Isn't IBM porting their hardware partitioning stuff to linux, too?
Yup -- that was it. Thanks! That's been bugging me for a while.
I contacted them and got a demo copy (sheesh -- must've been '97 or '98). OpenNT was pretty nice, but it was way too expensive for what it was (at least for the little shop I worked for at the time). We had fun playing with it, though.
I compared these two along time ago, along with a similar toolkit (U/WIN) written by David Korn (author of the Korn shell). I was of the opinion that the Cygwin version ranked last. I liked the one MS ended up buying -- but not enough to pay money for it.
I think I was impressed with the suite's ability to deal with hard links and case under Windows (which Cygwin didn't). I know NTFS can deal with these, but none of the MS-provided tools can.
Off topic: Wasn't it called something before Interix? I think i had "NT" in name, but they changed it due to MS's "NT" trademark pressure.
Check out www.tomax.com (i know a few people who work there) with a browser without flash. Completely and totally useless.
I think it's things like this that turn off people to flash. I refuse to install the plugin for Mozilla, as a site as bad as this one (without a non-Flash option) doesn't deserve my traffic.
At least some sites offer a more vanilla version of their site.
That sounds right. But wasn't that whole PGP source code being OCR'ed from hard copy a end-run around for a set of laws? Or did those laws specifically exempt printed ("published") material?
Just playing devil's advocate here. Loopholes are ways to get around the "intent and result" you mention. And ideas like the grandparent post may be valid loopholes.
I was doing this for a while. Then I realized I was using the public OpenNIC servers (which I didn't want to tax too much), so I quit. It works nicely, though:
while : ; do lynx --dump www.`ps -ef | md5sum | cut -c -32`.com >/dev/null; done
This should be pretty damned unique amongst everyone who uses it. Imagine when the logs fill up with sites like www.4799c5892e25189b9d8a83ee3752a303.com over and over again. Each request returns about 16KB of source HTML. Millions of these running might chew up some bandwidth and CPU time of their servers.:)
Yeah, I think the version detection is based on the service cooperating. I just scanned a test machine, and postfix wouldn't return a version.
I remember playing with a tool (whose name escapes me) that tried to identify what version of SMTP server you were running. It would run through all the commands, note the responses, etc. and then tell you what you were running. Seemed to work fairly well.
Maybe a more generic version could be incorperated into nmap, for all services (not just SMTP) when the server didn't simply volunteer its version.
Ironically, months later, they signed up for Habeas signatures on their emails.
Is it me, or does the whole Habeas thing sound like snake oil?
From the FAQ:
"Through the licensing of a set of headers, Habeas enables senders to warrant that their email is "not spam". Habeas is then able to enforce that warrant by prosecuting spammers for violation of both copyright and trademark law."
and
"When spammers inevitably misappropriate the Warrant Mark to get around recipients' anti-spam filters, Habeas can now leverage the powerful tools available for copyright and trademark protection to prosecute them, including the use of injunctions, penalties of a million dollars or more, and even criminal charges. In addition to prosecutions, Habeas will place IP addresses of computers, from which the Warrant Mark has been misappropriated, on its Habeas Infringers List, a legally unassailable DNS-distributed list of sites."
I mean, we already have laws, and that doesn't deter spammers. And hell, this whole system makes the assumption that foreign spammers will (or are evefn obliged to) abide by US copyright laws. Yeah, those spammers are quaking in their boots, Habeas. How long before I need to add
"/^X-Habeas-SWE[1-9]/"
into my postfix header checks to reduce spam?
Seems more like a scam, to me. Maybe it's effective, but I'm not convinced.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for that whole visual, generic crypto cracker. Like that was believeable. :)
Still, much better than Antitrust, Swordfish, or (sigh) Hackers. Gawd! -- I can't believe a wasted a Netflix rental on Antitrust.
Well, at least it gets you out in the open air.
I like the "Speedup Cheat" in the original Pac-Man game. I flip that switch in MAME and have a blast. It's actually harder, in some respects, than at normal speed because it's a real bitch to control.
Great Googly Moogly! When did not wanting to hassle with building your own box start equating to "major brand"?
Look, I'm well past the stage in my life where I can afford to piss away a weekend putting a box of parts together (though fun it may be). However, I haven't bought brand-name in years. My last 3 PC purchases (and those of a couple of clients) were spec'ed out by myself and built/certified by a local PC shop that I've come to trust over the years.
These guys are great, can acquire any parts I request, have a generous support/replacement policy (I know I can walk in with a flakey piece of hardware and they'll give me a new one on the spot), and they sell at a fair price. Sure, they can't compete price-point wise with Dell or hand-building parts from Pricewatch, but I try to support the local guys, and these guys reward my loyalty with solid machines and great service.
Well I'll be damned.
I've got a new plan for aquiring music: 1) Purchase used CDs from Second Spin (no money to the RIAA); 2) rip and save in lossless format; 3) sell CD back to local used CD chain (or a friend). The net result is a perfect copy of the music for little or no money.
Tell me again how this is legal? Simply because I own the physical media of my backups and there's no requirement for me to destroy it?
So how about ripping copies of rental DVDs? Gotta make sure my kids don't scratch those fragile DVDs. :)
You sure about that? I'd love it if it were true, but I'm skeptical about this.
No, this was 1990 -- way before PCs had the power to emulate that well and before decent emulators were around.
And since I'm griping... can you get carts for the original NES with multiple games on them? There was this Chineese guy in my dorm during my freshman year at college. All he did was play console games. I vividly remember that he had this NES-looking thing that, upon powering on, had a menu of hundreds of NES games. Can you still get things like that?
Of course, this may be a recent development in HP laser printers. However, I'd appreciate a source to your claim.
It's cool just because it is, usefulness be damned.
For the past month or so, I've been toying with all three free BSDs (Net, Open, and Free), first within VMWare, then on a few small test machines. This was mainly to enlighten myself to a foreign OS, a fun diversion.
I liked FreeBSD a lot, so I converted my office wokstation (which was Solaris for 1 year, RH Linux for 3). I'm still getting used to some things, but I like it a lot. This machine is using 4.8-STABLE.
I have plans to convert my home machine eventually. I'll likely use 5.1 (or 5.2 when released) so I can use "pf" and VMWare.
I've never used Gentoo or Debian, though I've toyed with apt under Redhat. I thought it was pretty cool. However, ports under FreeBSD seems so much better. I can't quantify how or why, but it just "feels" more polished. Between "cvsup" and "portinstall/portupgrade", system maintenance is pure joy compared to the (Redhat) Linux method.
My only major turn-off will be needing to use Linux emulation for running VMWare (seems "unpure" to use binary emulation). I wish there was a more up-to-date binary packages repository than the packages tree on the freebsd.org site (the OpenOffice 1.1 build is a nightmare, thanks to Java licensing stuff, and to it being such a huge project), but running a source update on 99% of the ports I use isn't so bad. What good is "portupgrade -arRP" if 95% of the latest ports aren't in binary format?
Those rare, obscure programs I use which aren't in ports (the nutrition program "nut" is one) seem to compile fine manually. There are some linux-only things I'll miss. It seems that "dd_recover" (a rather robust recovery tool) is one such tool.
Overall, I'm sold. It's only a matter of time.
I took an old PII-350 w/ 128MB RAM and benchmarked ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs, and xfs on an old 5GB IDE drive. ext2 was the winner by a margin (raw throughput).
Now I'm beating up various hardware and software RAID configs on a dual Athlon MP 2200+ system w/ 2GB RAM and dual 3ware 8-port 7500 controllers w/ 180GB WD drives. JFS rises above the rest in terms of throughput (I didn't test XFS on this new machine), and, of course, reiserfs simply spanks everything in terms of file creation/deletions. The thing I noticed was the JFS had much lower CPU utilization for file creations/deletions and was twice as fast at it than the ext2/3 filesystems (it still got spanked by reiserfs, though).
If anyone's interested, the "best" overall was reiser w/ the mount options noatime,notail,nodiratimeall. Also, if anyone cares, on this machine, the Linux software RAID code at no less than twice the performance numbers over the 3Ware hardware RAID. Running RH9 with all RH updates applied.
Though many unsupported OSs do in fact work (I have all 3 of the free BSDs running at once in VMWare, though only FreeBSD is officially supported), some just don't work. Back in VMWare 2.x days, I could get one version of Solaris/86 to work, but not another.
Maybe it is the guest OS's fault for not handing the virutal hardware correctly, I don't know for sure. But it's by no means a guarantee that all PC-based OS's will "just work" under VMWare.
When I last read up on bochs, he stated he was shooting for 100% IBM-PC emulation. If acheived, my original would be true.
They specifically compare the 2 in the paper they link to.
I'm unsure why Xen needs guest OS mods, vs the way VMWare and Plex86 do things. I only skimmed the paper, so I might have missed something.
I, too, was excited until I read the "porting" part. I guess free Linux and *BSD virtualization is better than nothing. But it'll be nowhere near as comprehensive as VMWare (too bad -- I want to ditch the over-priced beast) and plex86. However, kudos to the Xen team, as it really is a cool project.
Isn't IBM porting their hardware partitioning stuff to linux, too?
I contacted them and got a demo copy (sheesh -- must've been '97 or '98). OpenNT was pretty nice, but it was way too expensive for what it was (at least for the little shop I worked for at the time). We had fun playing with it, though.
I think I was impressed with the suite's ability to deal with hard links and case under Windows (which Cygwin didn't). I know NTFS can deal with these, but none of the MS-provided tools can.
Off topic: Wasn't it called something before Interix? I think i had "NT" in name, but they changed it due to MS's "NT" trademark pressure.
Or maybe this is a setup to bash the BSD license. The GPL wouldn't allow such horrible things to happen. :)
I think it's things like this that turn off people to flash. I refuse to install the plugin for Mozilla, as a site as bad as this one (without a non-Flash option) doesn't deserve my traffic.
At least some sites offer a more vanilla version of their site.
Just playing devil's advocate here. Loopholes are ways to get around the "intent and result" you mention. And ideas like the grandparent post may be valid loopholes.
Sorry. Should I have used "ps aux" for the BSD crowd? :)
I remember playing with a tool (whose name escapes me) that tried to identify what version of SMTP server you were running. It would run through all the commands, note the responses, etc. and then tell you what you were running. Seemed to work fairly well.
Maybe a more generic version could be incorperated into nmap, for all services (not just SMTP) when the server didn't simply volunteer its version.
Is it me, or does the whole Habeas thing sound like snake oil?
From the FAQ:
"Through the licensing of a set of headers, Habeas enables senders to warrant that their email is "not spam". Habeas is then able to enforce that warrant by prosecuting spammers for violation of both copyright and trademark law."
and
"When spammers inevitably misappropriate the Warrant Mark to get around recipients' anti-spam filters, Habeas can now leverage the powerful tools available for copyright and trademark protection to prosecute them, including the use of injunctions, penalties of a million dollars or more, and even criminal charges. In addition to prosecutions, Habeas will place IP addresses of computers, from which the Warrant Mark has been misappropriated, on its Habeas Infringers List, a legally unassailable DNS-distributed list of sites."
I mean, we already have laws, and that doesn't deter spammers. And hell, this whole system makes the assumption that foreign spammers will (or are evefn obliged to) abide by US copyright laws. Yeah, those spammers are quaking in their boots, Habeas. How long before I need to add
into my postfix header checks to reduce spam?Seems more like a scam, to me. Maybe it's effective, but I'm not convinced.