Or can you? Enter the linksys WRT54G. It's a tiny little box with no moving parts. It essentially has 5 nics which can be grouped into switches. It has a 802.11g interface and allows easy connection of big antennas. But most importantly, it runs linux. It runs linux, iptables, tc etc very well, and all the diagnostic tools I wanted to have are still available. This thing has easily paid for itself in power saved.
I had one of those, and it burned out after a couple of years. OK, so I bought another one. It burned out after a couple of years. Meanwhile, my FreeBSD box had been running for 6? A long time, anyway. I've become really pissed off at linksys. I know a lot of people love those boxes - I used to. Maybe I had bad luck - I dunno, but it'll be a while before I buy anything from them again.
I bought a damn netgear (dumb - not linux) router. Damn thing will lock up on me every once in a while, so I have it hooked up to a christmas light timer that shuts it off at 3am for about 15 minutes. Has been no trouble since - if you can call that no trouble.
Bottom line: I'm sick to death of these cheap little wireless routers. Emphasis on cheap. So I'll probably end up with another PC as a router sooner or later. I sure wish my Mac Mini had 2 real 100baseT ports.
... So combining the two by installing the power supply in the case with an exhaust fan makes sense. Just like how Apple puts the power supplies in the cases of their PowerMacs.
But I expect that the trend will be away from fans in general. With more and more PC sales being laptops (not to mention handhelds), heat dissipation is becoming even more important. Yes, there will still be towers and racks, but I imagine more and more PCs will move toward having external power supplies. It seems especially obvious to me that this would be a great boon for rack systems, where it seems like it would be ideal to keep the power supply some distance from the CPU, and just wire in the power - since rack cooling is also becoming a big issue.
Unfortunately I know virtually nothing at all about electrical engineering, so I really can't say anything more meaningful on the subject.
Back in the day, Compaq built an reverse-engineered BIOS in order to run IBM-DOS on Compaq systems. They won the legal fight, and it opened up a new era in computing.
They also took the legal approach: 2 team cleanroom engineering. Legal then, and probably legal today. While I have not looked at the OSX hack sites, I doubt that's what they're doing. They're probably taking the OS, disasembling it, patching it, and releasing the patches.
The correct approach would be to start from scratch and write an OS that could load and execute OSX programs (which would be similar to the WINE project, I imagine), or load the whole OS without modifying it.
I'm not a shrink, but I think you missed the point. There is almost certainly a difference between viewing/reading (thus the reference to Tom Sawyer) about racism, and using a vid game to re-enact it.
It is their server. All your datas are belong to them. You won't work there for ever. They will decide they no longer can afford to have people freeload on their server. Someone will buy them out, and decide that they can't affort to...
I host my own because that's the kind of thing I do. I've done it since the late 80's, when it was UUCP. I'll probably continue to do it for a long time. But if all you want is email, I'd use Google. If you want to blog, I dunno - plenty of people let you do that cheap/free.
If you want to host a website, maybe you want to run a webserver and use dyndns (supposing you can't get a static).
But hosting mail can sure be a lot of work. All the spam, and the multitude of painful spam protection software. dynamic IP blocking, ISP policies, and the fact that you're going to change ISPs every few years makes it all even more troublesome. But it can be done if you want to.
No. you've got that backwards. It's well known that NeXT bought Apple. For -$400 million.
Hah! While it's true that I referred to Apple folks as being "ex-Apple" after the "acquisition", the direction that money changed hands is certainly important.
I might be willing to say that NeXT bought Apple for -$400M:-)
OpenStep [wikipedia.org] was the result of a collaboration of NeXT and Sun to create an object oriented API based on NeXTSTEP. It ran on NeXTs Mach/BSD OS and Solaris. After the NeXT takeover by Apple in 1996 OpenStep became what today is known as MacOS X, still running on Mach/BSD.
It is worth noting that OpenStep also ran on windows. In the Apple era, this was briefly known as "Yellow Box".
I haven't worked there in a few years, but that was the goal. It doesn't quite work out that way, however. Most people do have their own office, but there are a few cubie farms - mostly in "off campus" buildings, but it happens on campus to a lesser extent.
Re:Why is Vivendi/Blizzard worthy of Slashdot?
on
Blizzcon Writeup
·
· Score: 1
FFXI recently had their own open media event (in the U.S. no less) last August yet that went unreported.
Why not report Lineage 2 news? They have an even bigger playerbase. Or why not City of Villians news?...
I'll make this multiple choice: A. WoW has (by far) the biggest MMO player base in America, check the Korean/. for Lineage 2 news. B. Nobody submitted news on any of these other events. C. People at/. play WoW, not these other games D. Vivendi owns/. E. It's a conspiracy. Against you. F. All the above. G. Some of the above. H. Cowboy Neal
Re:Why is Vivendi/Blizzard worthy of Slashdot?
on
Blizzcon Writeup
·
· Score: 1
WHAT protection and of WHAT work? What work does bnet allows you to copy or access through circumventing any protection? What it do is provide an alternative server for you to connect to. There is nothing copied or accessed that would not be so without bnetd, so I fail to see the circumvention of a protection for any work.
Refresh my memory, here - it's been a LONG time.
Battlenet does or does not require you to log in, using a unique name/password that guarantees you paid admission? Doesn't it require the CD key? Battlenet does or does not require the client checksum itself, verifying it is not hacked?
bnetd does or does not fail to implement these [and other features].
Exactly WHAT did they copy? And what do you mean by IP?
bnetd copied the battlenet protocol. Which is also blizzard's IP.
Are you talking about any patents copied? Did they copy any trademark? Did they copy any copyright? Or if you want to be a bit loose about "copying IP", did they copy anything that was protected by a patent? A trademark? A copyright? In all cases I would answer no, so what do you mean? Actually the case has nothing about copying anything at all.
I bet they infringed on a copyright, but IANAL.
But let's turn this on it's head: if blizzard was selling the battlenet service for $5/month, and someone wrote bnetd, would anyone be surprised they got shut down? Would you? If so, we can just agree to disagree now.
As it turns out, blizzard IS selling battlenet. The price is $0/month. That makes it a little more surprising that they're getting shut down, but the rules are the same.
Re:Why is Vivendi/Blizzard worthy of Slashdot?
on
Blizzcon Writeup
·
· Score: 1
I remember the lead developer of Bnetd saying the same thing as the freecraft maintainer, he was done with supporting blizzard products.
You're using "supporting" in a funny way here. It seems to mean "impelenting some portion of the game so as to circumvent some part of blizzard's system". I call BS.
... So it's all about being backstabbed by twelve year olds who think they should be proactive and over protective of a company they idolize, and the rest of us are doing it for fun, but suddenly there is no fun it it...
It's about protecting your IP to the extent allowable by law in this country. It is about protecting your assets and income. Because they don't do this for fun, as it were. Everything they do costs money, and if they didn't think it mattered, they wouldn't do it.
(PS Bnetd is not a mechanism to playing pirated games. You can play online all you want using a tunnel (which zone, heat, kali, won, all used, legally), which is much simpler and requires no reverse engineering.
Which is to say, the IP travels over networks. ie. you said nothing.
All the bnetd people wanted was an alternative to/battle.net/ when it was always laggy *and* have the same match-making services. The copy protection is already broken anyway when some one can run the game, so bnetd broke no protection. CD-KEYs are a joke, and installers fail to be strict about them anyways.
You talk about protection a lot for something that is "not an issue". That makes me think it is an issue. That and the fact that you *can* use bnetd to circumvent the copy protection. Not to mention the fact that if all the traffic travels through blizzard, they can *at the very least* get some info on who is playing network.
You could argue that it was against EULA, but really think, if you had the game, does it matter? It doesn't!)
Which is to say "yeah, they're in the rights, but it sucks." Sure - I can buy that. bnetd (and freecraft) were both interesting projects. Admirable in scale, and all that. But they were copying blizzard's IP. They gotta expect to be shot down. They were. Get over it.
Re:Why is Vivendi/Blizzard worthy of Slashdot?
on
Blizzcon Writeup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Could someone explain why Slashdot did not declaired a boycott on all things related to Blizzard and Vivendi long ago?
Failing to anticipate how many copies would be sold hardly seems to qualify as a mortal sin.
But, really, one of the newest and most popular MMO's just did their first con. Even if the company running it were complete assholes, it'd still be newsworthy.
I just finished a 3 month consulting gig. I worked for the first 4 weeks onsite (I firmly believe that you have to get to know folks to start off).
Everyone must be able to VPN into the central office. Cisco, OpenVPN, whatever. But everyone must be able to connect.
For keeping code sync'd: CVS or svn. We used CVS because we all know it. Also it was in place already, but terribly underused and mismanaged.
For tracking bugs and issues: Bugzilla. There are others. There was one in place there, already, but virtually unused, and really mis-configured (we tripled the number of bugs opened and closed in the system in the 3 months I was there).
For information management: A wiki. We installed TWiki, but I'd use mediawiki if I had to do it again. Nice clean openldap integration, which is nice. We put things like coding conventions, instructions for checking code out in CVS, doing builds, doing installs (webapp), finding bugs. Basically it was our process doc repository.
For discussions about important issues: Email. Set up a list server. Mailman or Majordomo - something with a web interface and that does archiving. You can do with an email interface, but web is really handy for archiving and managing. I failed to convince the jobsite that they had to do this. If I was staying any longer, I would have set up a grey box and installed it myself - but for just 3 months I couldn't be bothered.
For trivial discussions: IM. Set up a jabber server that requires security.
For scheduling we used whatever M$ provides. The Apple folks (including me) used iCal, and that integrates just fine.
The right tool for the right job: Don't discuss bugs via email. That's what the bug tracker is for. Email conversations about bugs mean you're losing information. Don't discuss anything important using IM. Email is for important issues. If you use IM for that, it is hard[er] to start including more people in the discussion, and you often have to re-explain something that was decided in an IM to the new party members. Don't mail out process docs. Put them in the twiki and email references to them. etc.
But the minds behind it are not. If Oracle snaps up key talent behind innodb, it could mean a big slowdown for that aspect of MySQL.
Oracle isn't stupid. They didn't want the InnoDB buildings. They didn't even really want InnoDB itself - that's in the wild. They probably DID want the brains behind it, or the tech they were about to release.
I wouldn't do it that way, and the company I work for now (though I'm just a temp contractor) does not do it that way.
When we need something done with one of our server, our datacenter takes care of it. They are the admins for those machines, and they have the passwords - not us. When something goes wrong, they deal with it because it is their problem.
For some other boxes that we have on a rack somewhere, we are responsible for those. If a drive fails, we might be able to get a monkey to put a new one in - but there is NO WAY we give out passwords to monkeys. We have systems that let you configure the disks remotely.
For significant system upgrades, we send our folks out there to touch the hardware. But that's all planned in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
Or can you? Enter the linksys WRT54G. It's a tiny little box with no moving parts. It essentially has 5 nics which can be grouped into switches. It has a 802.11g interface and allows easy connection of big antennas. But most importantly, it runs linux. It runs linux, iptables, tc etc very well, and all the diagnostic tools I wanted to have are still available. This thing has easily paid for itself in power saved.
I had one of those, and it burned out after a couple of years. OK, so I bought another one. It burned out after a couple of years. Meanwhile, my FreeBSD box had been running for 6? A long time, anyway. I've become really pissed off at linksys. I know a lot of people love those boxes - I used to. Maybe I had bad luck - I dunno, but it'll be a while before I buy anything from them again.
I bought a damn netgear (dumb - not linux) router. Damn thing will lock up on me every once in a while, so I have it hooked up to a christmas light timer that shuts it off at 3am for about 15 minutes. Has been no trouble since - if you can call that no trouble.
Bottom line: I'm sick to death of these cheap little wireless routers. Emphasis on cheap. So I'll probably end up with another PC as a router sooner or later. I sure wish my Mac Mini had 2 real 100baseT ports.
Pretty sure you answered your own question there...
... So combining the two by installing the power supply in the case with an exhaust fan makes sense. Just like how Apple puts the power supplies in the cases of their PowerMacs.
But I expect that the trend will be away from fans in general. With more and more PC sales being laptops (not to mention handhelds), heat dissipation is becoming even more important. Yes, there will still be towers and racks, but I imagine more and more PCs will move toward having external power supplies. It seems especially obvious to me that this would be a great boon for rack systems, where it seems like it would be ideal to keep the power supply some distance from the CPU, and just wire in the power - since rack cooling is also becoming a big issue.
Unfortunately I know virtually nothing at all about electrical engineering, so I really can't say anything more meaningful on the subject.
Apple doesn't make PCs, they make Macs. You know - single-source, limited configuration, with custom cases?
Blah blah blah flamebait.
Why is it that none of your wonderful customizable computer makers seem to make a case that dosn't require a built in power supply.
None but Apple, anyway.
(ok, there are probably a few, but doesn't it seem like there should be more?)
A PC PSU must coexist with other components that can't be re-specified
Maybe you should tell that to Apple, who seem to disagree with you.
Just move the power supply outside the PC (like the mini), already.
Back in the day, Compaq built an reverse-engineered BIOS in order to run IBM-DOS on Compaq systems. They won the legal fight, and it opened up a new era in computing.
http://www.jmusheneaux.com/01.htm#1
They also took the legal approach: 2 team cleanroom engineering. Legal then, and probably legal today. While I have not looked at the OSX hack sites, I doubt that's what they're doing. They're probably taking the OS, disasembling it, patching it, and releasing the patches.
The correct approach would be to start from scratch and write an OS that could load and execute OSX programs (which would be similar to the WINE project, I imagine), or load the whole OS without modifying it.
It sounds like their chips in 2007 may be just about as fast as intels in 2007, and consume about the same power.
If Apple hadn't started to switch, 2006 would have been the year their notebook line died a horrible, slow death.
I'm not a shrink, but I think you missed the point. There is almost certainly a difference between viewing/reading (thus the reference to Tom Sawyer) about racism, and using a vid game to re-enact it.
This guy appears to work for ITS at UT-Austin
Yup. And next week UT is going to decide to outsource their IT to India. Or secede from the union. Or become a subdivision of Halliburton.
You never know.
Never trust work's server.
It is their server. All your datas are belong to them. ...
You won't work there for ever.
They will decide they no longer can afford to have people freeload on their server.
Someone will buy them out, and decide that they can't affort to
I host my own because that's the kind of thing I do. I've done it since the late 80's, when it was UUCP. I'll probably continue to do it for a long time. But if all you want is email, I'd use Google. If you want to blog, I dunno - plenty of people let you do that cheap/free.
If you want to host a website, maybe you want to run a webserver and use dyndns (supposing you can't get a static).
But hosting mail can sure be a lot of work. All the spam, and the multitude of painful spam protection software. dynamic IP blocking, ISP policies, and the fact that you're going to change ISPs every few years makes it all even more troublesome. But it can be done if you want to.
No. you've got that backwards. It's well known that NeXT bought Apple. For -$400 million.
:-)
Hah! While it's true that I referred to Apple folks as being "ex-Apple" after the "acquisition", the direction that money changed hands is certainly important.
I might be willing to say that NeXT bought Apple for -$400M
OpenStep [wikipedia.org] was the result of a collaboration of NeXT and Sun to create an object oriented API based on NeXTSTEP. It ran on NeXTs Mach/BSD OS and Solaris. After the NeXT takeover by Apple in 1996 OpenStep became what today is known as MacOS X, still running on Mach/BSD.
It is worth noting that OpenStep also ran on windows. In the Apple era, this was briefly known as "Yellow Box".
Not to mention Apple DID NOT invent WebObjects, they BOUGHT WebObjects.
They invented WO in the same way they got their OS. They bought NeXT.
Could we have a "Everyone needs a hobby" section for this kind of thing? Then I could just ignore that.
Isn't that what http://tomshardware.com/ is [supposed to be]?
OK, they're monitoring the movements of vehicles on public roads. Exactly what privacy do you think is being violated?
You mis-parsed the article. It was 100 miles off the coast. It doesn't really say how far apart the ships were.
I haven't worked there in a few years, but that was the goal. It doesn't quite work out that way, however. Most people do have their own office, but there are a few cubie farms - mostly in "off campus" buildings, but it happens on campus to a lesser extent.
FFXI recently had their own open media event (in the U.S. no less) last August yet that went unreported.
...
/. for Lineage 2 news. /. play WoW, not these other games /.
Why not report Lineage 2 news? They have an even bigger playerbase. Or why not City of Villians news?
I'll make this multiple choice:
A. WoW has (by far) the biggest MMO player base in America, check the Korean
B. Nobody submitted news on any of these other events.
C. People at
D. Vivendi owns
E. It's a conspiracy. Against you.
F. All the above.
G. Some of the above.
H. Cowboy Neal
WHAT protection and of WHAT work? What work does bnet allows you to copy or access through circumventing any protection? What it do is provide an alternative server for you to connect to. There is nothing copied or accessed that would not be so without bnetd, so I fail to see the circumvention of a protection for any work.
Refresh my memory, here - it's been a LONG time.
Battlenet does or does not require you to log in, using a unique name/password that guarantees you paid admission? Doesn't it require the CD key?
Battlenet does or does not require the client checksum itself, verifying it is not hacked?
bnetd does or does not fail to implement these [and other features].
Exactly WHAT did they copy? And what do you mean by IP?
bnetd copied the battlenet protocol. Which is also blizzard's IP.
Are you talking about any patents copied? Did they copy any trademark? Did they copy any copyright? Or if you want to be a bit loose about "copying IP", did they copy anything that was protected by a patent? A trademark? A copyright? In all cases I would answer no, so what do you mean? Actually the case has nothing about copying anything at all.
I bet they infringed on a copyright, but IANAL.
But let's turn this on it's head: if blizzard was selling the battlenet service for $5/month, and someone wrote bnetd, would anyone be surprised they got shut down? Would you? If so, we can just agree to disagree now.
As it turns out, blizzard IS selling battlenet. The price is $0/month. That makes it a little more surprising that they're getting shut down, but the rules are the same.
I remember the lead developer of Bnetd saying the same thing as the freecraft maintainer, he was done with supporting blizzard products.
... So it's all about being backstabbed by twelve year olds who think they should be proactive and over protective of a company they idolize, and the rest of us are doing it for fun, but suddenly there is no fun it it...
/battle.net/ when it was always laggy *and* have the same match-making services. The copy protection is already broken anyway when some one can run the game, so bnetd broke no protection. CD-KEYs are a joke, and installers fail to be strict about them anyways.
You're using "supporting" in a funny way here. It seems to mean "impelenting some portion of the game so as to circumvent some part of blizzard's system". I call BS.
It's about protecting your IP to the extent allowable by law in this country. It is about protecting your assets and income. Because they don't do this for fun, as it were. Everything they do costs money, and if they didn't think it mattered, they wouldn't do it.
(PS Bnetd is not a mechanism to playing pirated games. You can play online all you want using a tunnel (which zone, heat, kali, won, all used, legally), which is much simpler and requires no reverse engineering.
Which is to say, the IP travels over networks. ie. you said nothing.
All the bnetd people wanted was an alternative to
You talk about protection a lot for something that is "not an issue". That makes me think it is an issue. That and the fact that you *can* use bnetd to circumvent the copy protection. Not to mention the fact that if all the traffic travels through blizzard, they can *at the very least* get some info on who is playing network.
You could argue that it was against EULA, but really think, if you had the game, does it matter? It doesn't!)
Which is to say "yeah, they're in the rights, but it sucks." Sure - I can buy that. bnetd (and freecraft) were both interesting projects. Admirable in scale, and all that. But they were copying blizzard's IP. They gotta expect to be shot down. They were. Get over it.
Could someone explain why Slashdot did not declaired a boycott on all things related to Blizzard and Vivendi long ago?
How about a reasonable complaint?
Honestly,
Original link dead.
what does
Hard to believe they shut down Freecraft - golly...
it take
Follow the clearly stated rules?
for them
Return the box, eh?
to be
Who'd have thunk they'd shut down bnetd - golly.
labeled as worthless
Software shipped and was not bug/issue free! Now there's a shocker.
assholes?
Failing to anticipate how many copies would be sold hardly seems to qualify as a mortal sin.
But, really, one of the newest and most popular MMO's just did their first con. Even if the company running it were complete assholes, it'd still be newsworthy.
I just finished a 3 month consulting gig. I worked for the first 4 weeks onsite (I firmly believe that you have to get to know folks to start off).
Everyone must be able to VPN into the central office. Cisco, OpenVPN, whatever. But everyone must be able to connect.
For keeping code sync'd:
CVS or svn. We used CVS because we all know it. Also it was in place already, but terribly underused and mismanaged.
For tracking bugs and issues:
Bugzilla. There are others. There was one in place there, already, but virtually unused, and really mis-configured (we tripled the number of bugs opened and closed in the system in the 3 months I was there).
For information management:
A wiki. We installed TWiki, but I'd use mediawiki if I had to do it again. Nice clean openldap integration, which is nice. We put things like coding conventions, instructions for checking code out in CVS, doing builds, doing installs (webapp), finding bugs. Basically it was our process doc repository.
For discussions about important issues:
Email. Set up a list server. Mailman or Majordomo - something with a web interface and that does archiving. You can do with an email interface, but web is really handy for archiving and managing. I failed to convince the jobsite that they had to do this. If I was staying any longer, I would have set up a grey box and installed it myself - but for just 3 months I couldn't be bothered.
For trivial discussions:
IM. Set up a jabber server that requires security.
For scheduling we used whatever M$ provides. The Apple folks (including me) used iCal, and that integrates just fine.
The right tool for the right job:
Don't discuss bugs via email. That's what the bug tracker is for. Email conversations about bugs mean you're losing information.
Don't discuss anything important using IM. Email is for important issues. If you use IM for that, it is hard[er] to start including more people in the discussion, and you often have to re-explain something that was decided in an IM to the new party members.
Don't mail out process docs. Put them in the twiki and email references to them.
etc.
Why? InnoDB is GPL'ed.
But the minds behind it are not. If Oracle snaps up key talent behind innodb, it could mean a big slowdown for that aspect of MySQL.
Oracle isn't stupid. They didn't want the InnoDB buildings. They didn't even really want InnoDB itself - that's in the wild. They probably DID want the brains behind it, or the tech they were about to release.
I wouldn't do it that way, and the company I work for now (though I'm just a temp contractor) does not do it that way.
When we need something done with one of our server, our datacenter takes care of it. They are the admins for those machines, and they have the passwords - not us. When something goes wrong, they deal with it because it is their problem.
For some other boxes that we have on a rack somewhere, we are responsible for those. If a drive fails, we might be able to get a monkey to put a new one in - but there is NO WAY we give out passwords to monkeys. We have systems that let you configure the disks remotely.
For significant system upgrades, we send our folks out there to touch the hardware. But that's all planned in advance.