"Criminals want any and all information to strike as well. Have no locks on the doors to make it easier for police to do their duty, but it makes it a cinch for crooks to do a heist too."
From this I conclude that the two are functionally identical.
That's true, but even when a distro or app has PAID those fees, there are always some users and some coders who consider anything non-free heresy or even treason to the cause. I just lumped it all together for convenience of the typist.:)
"But on the flip side, you have a lot more power to make the machine do what you actually want... 15 different media players depending on what format you want to play,..."
And there's part of the problem. In linux, you might HAVE to install 15 different players to get around the political incorrectness of some format being under patent, or just because whoever coded App A doesn't like Format B and refuses to support it.
Which is all dandy if you have all the time and energy in the world, but the average person just wants one app to play all 15 formats, and not have to be aware that Encoding A won't work on Player B without Plugin C, let alone waste time doing the research to discover why that opensource media player won't play half his music library.
That sort of thing is why people use crap like Windows Media Player -- it does 'em all good enough, and the user isn't expected to become an expert on formats just to listen to his tunes.
Now, if you want to have to scrounge up a different player for each format on YOUR setup, that's cool by me, but don't expect average users to accept that as normal. And don't expect average users to flock to linux until you're willing to make the experience as COMFORTABLE as Windows has, even for all its flaws.
Right, and that's what I was getting at -- in a shared environment, everyone should contribute according to what they use. Keep your tourists "at home" and its solely your business and your budget/finances. As soon as they impact the "international" areas, you should have to pay something into the common pot, proportional to how much you're making and how much you're using.
Gad, now I sound like a communist -- "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." (as stated by Vladimir Posner on Radio Moscow, ca. 1971)
If PAYING TOURISTS are using the station, why shouldn't each nation's space program get a percentage of the take, depending on how much they've invested in the station AND on tourist use? That would be fair to everyone.
For the same of that same argument [g] Kids could later regret saying stupid things on Slashdot that a million people might read, too, but I don't think that makes allowing people to post stupid comments a crime.
Nor should it make *reading* those comments, perhaps years later, a crime -- which is what "any viewing of CP is a crime" laws do.
We're not guaranteed to never have regrets, and crime shouldn't be defined as "what causes regret". If it were, there'd be a lot of CEOs with their balls held to a federal fire right now, because I regret having invested in the stock market!
I'd guess "harm" is already codified in law, but I'd define it as anything that causes unjustifiable trauma, physically or mentally.
So spanking your naughty kid would be justifiable trauma; raping your innocent kid would not be.
But I can't see how a child is "harmed" by someone merely taking photos of their nude body, however racily posed. I see even less how someone LOOKING at such photos, perhaps years later, harms the child.
But yeah, I did get the idea that she wanted something SIMPLE, and wiring the barn for internet radio, as you say, isn't exactly normal procedure.
The licensing agencies think they have everyone by the balls, and that they can squeeze even the smallest "public performances" for a royalty payment. But it's not worth the money, even to big business -- that's why most use CANNED music that they buy as a package, and DON'T pipe in RADIO for their customers to listen to. If even big business can't justify the royalty costs of using radio (a nominally free source of music), how on earth do they think small business can manage it??
Yes, I agree there is no restriction on anyone's right to investigate anything they wish, through ordinary lawful channels (breaking into accounts wouldn't qualify), and if they HAPPEN to identify an anonymous poster, oh well. The freedom to speak anonymously does NOT confer the requirement that everyone else look away so they can't tell who is speaking.
BUT -- they don't have the right to use *government resources* or their *political power* to out anyone -- legally, that's no different from having your pet cops break into a house without a warrant.
My solution would be (since the other reply is right -- your personal CDs are the same as a radio for lic. purposes) to find a radio station that played ONLY royalty-free music, and make sure everyone knew WHY I chose that.
Tho the only one I can think of offhand plays decidedly unrestful music:)
And what about the reviewers' own cultural and religious biases?? how many reviewers do you need to get a consensus that's NOT based on some such bias? dozens? hundreds??
Nope, it just doesn't wash. The only thing that should be a criterion is "was an actual living breathing child HARMED by this".
"The Florida DA LITERALLY said that teens taking nude pics could have their camera stolen, then their pics on the internet, then later in a job interview they could not get the job because the interviewer saw them naked on the internet. And that's why he HAD to push for a 10 year sentance and putting them on the sex offender list for life, to protect them from such hardships later in life."
So in other words, he HAD to ruin their lives, because of HYPOTHETICALLY, *someone else* MIGHT commit an UNRELATED crime, that of stealing a cellphone.
Man, that's some twisted logic. But I think the real intent was simply to maintain that "tough on crime" image that's required now to get elected. ANY deformation of justice is now okay, so long as it maintains that image.
But with today's digital art capabilities, no one need even involve children at all. Yonder CGI can invent them for you.
In which case, where is the harm? which children were damaged? (do pixels suffer??)
But in our zeal for burning witches, even a CARTOON of the wrong subject is now illegal in some jurisdictions.
Occurs to me that since CGI apps can be used to create kiddie porn images, under the current legal trend, such CGI apps are "enabling the crime" and are therefore illegal.
You won't hear any disagreement from me!! Except that I don't think there *needs* to be a disconnect between home and office OSs (when there is, you get crap like XPHome, which rather than being a lesser OS, is a BROKEN version of XPPro... hence Pro runs about 3x as fast on the SAME hardware.)
Except for a few kids who still love shiny and bling over functionality, everyone I know and support would prefer a simpler OS on their home machine, rather than the current trend toward a 3-ring circus. The #1 complaint among people who didn't grow up wired to a PC is "I just want to do this simple task, but there's so much STUFF here that I can't figure it out!"
But it's not just about Windows (or OSX, or whatever.. personally I detest the Apple Way) being bloated. It's about their hardware partners like Dell, who can't sell nearly as many new machines if the ones you paid for 3 years ago aren't rendered useless by an OS they can't run. Don't think Dell (in particular) isn't egging M$ on with this ever-larger OS thing.
Only reason I prefer XP to W2K is because when I'm on a W2K system, I keep running into little "what do you mean I can't do that??" issues, nothing showstopping, but annoying after I got used to XP. But W2K will run on some mighty minimal hardware (oooh, no new money for Dell!) and that's a big plus over the long view, especially when businesses are trying to economize. It might be more cost-effective for big business to just chuck everything and start over every 3 years, but that's not the case for smaller businesses that lack a multimillion dollar dedicated IT budget. Friend here does office LANs for a lot of small businesses in L.A., and the average age of their discards is 8 to 10 years.
Here's how minimal W2K can do: I keep a 486DX4-100 for the sole purpose of being a RAM tester for 72pin sticks, because being a true 486 board, it can take one at a time (anything newer needs pairs), and it will accept any type. One day I had an 8mb stick in it, and was using it to test old HDs... accidentally hooked up the wrong one, and found myself watching W2K boot up. It took about 3 minutes to come up, but once fully loaded it was actually usable, if sluggish. On a 486DX4-100 with a mere EIGHT megs of RAM!! (Yeah, it won't *install* on that level of hardware. But I assure you, it WILL run!!)
And as to Ballmer, he's an embarrassment (yeah, I've seen the videos), and from everything I've heard is the #1 reason for discontent within M$ itself.
Now, now... WinME is just fine if you turn off system restore and apply 98Lite in default mode. Did that to mine (test box) and it never crashed again (and it ran 24/7 for a couple years, rebooted once in a blue moon, before that box got XP as its main OS). ME's resource management still sucks, but that's largely IE5.5's fault. IE5.5 will fuck up Win98 too. (And try opening about 10 Nero windows on XP, and watch it zero out the resource heap...)
As to Vista... oh yeah, the topic!! They hung themselves with that one. You can't use ordinary terms as weasel words and not expect it won't come back to bite you.
I still want to see a truly modular Windows -- a naked OS with only about the same included apps as Win9x had, and let everything else be optional -- selling Plus Packs for Win9x worked fine in the past, why not now?? those who want integrated bells and whistles would be happy after a single gang install, and those of us who prefer to pick and choose and keep the OS lean and slick are also happy. But selling a broken OS like the cheap versions of Vista... that doesn't cut it.
Thanks for the info on Puppy -- saved for reference. I still have a few intact sub-200MHz systems laying around doing nothing useful; would be good testbeds for the light-duty setups. (I start hoarding the nice ones for myself as of about the P233 range... I gotta have my DOOM, which means I gotta have a system with ISA slots and a hardware-IRQ sound card.)
Gotta agree with you about Ubuntu. I tried really hard to like it, but... geez, is it really necessary to load everything known to man at startup?? I don't know how people here can claim it runs good on old hardware, unless they mean hardware from last week. My old linux test box was a P3-800/512mb RAM, and it was okay, if not slick, up thru MDK7 and whatever else was current then. (WinXP runs very nicely on it.) It was unbearably slow with the last bunch of distros I tried, about 3 years ago, and really slogged with Ubuntu 5. At which point I finally broke down and cobbled together the P4-2GHz to replace it, which was a lot better but still not crisp.
Yeah, I do have some sub-1GB HDs... if a WD makes it past 6 years (most go at least to age 5) and doesn't get headcrashed by misadventure, it almost never dies. In fact I still have a 20MB IDE... worthless, but I like it as a novelty, and besides, it still works 100% perfect.:)
Ya know where the user group has been getting most of those 15" monitors that no one wants, and some of the older PCs as well? GOODWILL! they can't even give 'em away, so one of our members hauls them off. Usually the monitors wind up over at the recycler.:( I did manage to give away all the P150 systems that we got from a school, mostly to random passersby.
The P150s were actually very nice machines in their day, and not a thing wrong with 'em as everyday Win95 email/light-office setups, either. Same SuperMicro motherboard as my P233 -- can take up to 450MHz in an AMD CPU, but I too have become an Intel bigot. Some years back AMD screwed over one of my customers on a fatally-buggy CPU (K6-2 that wouldn't do 32bit, and they wouldn't warranty it), and I never forgave 'em... their errata list is always 3x as long as Intel's. Also, I dislike instability, and seems to me the chipsets that support AMD are never as solid ans the Intel chipsets, and the overall quality of the mobos is often not as good either. Didn't thrill me when I noticed an AMD64 causing lockups either (yes, we traced it to the CPU). -- Now, if I were building space-heaters, I might prefer AMD.;)
Placing old hardware in loving homes is probably a lot easier away from metro areas, where computers are not yet ubiquitous. Here, an hour from L.A., there are so many machines cast off by business, and often only a few years old, that frankly any small outfit that wants one can get a 4 or 5 year old machine for nothing. But I'll bet if it were, say, Havre Montana, a lot of small businesses and individuals would be happy to take what they could get, cuz the budget doesn't allow it otherwise.
I used a nice Enermax PSU in the "new" P4 that I should finish up Real Soon Now... for a while it was the power unit for testing stuff, and it sometimes had all of one system, part of another, and half a dozen drives of various sorts attached to it, and all was fine, so it surely should suffice for a mere ONE system:) IIRC it's a 450W but has a good efficiency rating (almost 90%).
I use the grapefruit rule myself: the more it weighs the juicier it is:) Good ones weigh 6 lbs. or so and have more wires than an octopus. Crappy ones are more like 3 lbs. and have only a couple connectors. The difference in true output, per all the serious evaluations I've seen, seems to go right along with that.
I know a guy who likes to have two PSUs in his boxen -- one for the mainboard and cards and such, the other for the drives. Probably not a bad idea, but logistically difficult (you want to cram HOW much crap into a standard full tower case??!)
Speaking of old OSs and fond yesterdays, my good buddy here still runs a Netware 3 setup in his house.. sometimes has a dozen machines hooked to it. It ran the BBS for 12 years, until he finally shut that down a year ago.
Wow. So, keeping things in proportion here... you're saying 18-wheelers could affect far solar systems, and railroad locomotives might even affect other galaxies?? And what about jumbo jets -- might they even affect other universes??
I've noticed that most "alt-energy" tech has the same drawback: it costs more than it saves, usually in terms of scarce resources (frex, rare metals required for solar panels). Furthermore, funny how each restriction on our use of some resource is coupled with an equal and opposite subsidy for an alt-energy company that couldn't make it in the open market.
We get a lot of voter propositions on the California ballot about such things, and being a reader of fine print, I've noticed that in every case, some special interest was served first and foremost, and that the NET savings of resources was often negative.
So, yeah, I've become downright cynical about the motivations here... especially after hearing about the "subsidies" Mr.Gore has gotten from alt-energy interests.
I haven't had time to look into this yet, but I found the following interesting in light of the religious fervor surrounding global warming -- explain how the activities of Earth-bound humans affect these other planets? Or is there a colonization program already in operation that none of us here on Earth know about??
========= http://blog.tommcclintock.com/2009/03/10/the-radical-policies-of-the-global-warm-mongers/ ========= First, if global warming is caused by your SUV, why is it that we're seeing global warming on every other body in the solar system? For the last decade or so, the Martian south polar ice cap has conspicuously receded. Pluto is warming - about two degrees Celsius over the past 14 years. Jupiter is showing dramatic climate change by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Even Neptune's moon, Triton, has warmed five percent on the absolute temperature scale - the equivalent of a 22 degrees Fahrenheit increase on Earth - from 1989 to 1998. ========
Wow, that was one dirty job:) The most buried machine I've seen belonged to my realtor... she had it sitting by the window and the desert sand had blown in and half-filled the case. It weighed about 10 pounds less when I got done shovelling it out.:)
I hadn't looked at Puppy so thanks for the info. When I Get More Disk Space[tm] I'll download a bunch and give 'em a whirl. I do keep hoping to find a linux I can love (so far MDK 7.2 has come closest)... will be interesting to see how Puppy performs, since so far I've found that to perform on a par with the concurrent Windows, desktop linux needs about twice the hardware.:( Which is why the newest complete rig in the house has become the linux test box... a P4-2GHz (built mostly from salvage). Positively newfangled by my standards.:) -- Current Ubuntu won't install on it, seems to not like the merely middle-aged video card (probably the newest part in the whole box).
Thanks for the PSU doodad link -- seems I've been guessing in the right ballpark. It informed me that what I think of as a mature system (maxed out) would need in the 300W to 500W range depending on how hard it's working. Of course a more efficient PSU has gotta help... I like Enermax if I'm paying money for a new one. Yeah, those OEM PSUs are the shits.
The PSU that came with this machine when it was a brand new 486 was only 200W, which wasn't so bad in 1994. But I added one too many HDs and it refused to turn on, which IMO is good behaviour -- if you're overloaded, DON'T damage stuff by trying to run anyway! Replaced it with a 300W server PSU (which back then was pricey and tough to find) and it's still doing its job 14 years later.
I like reliable. Reliable good. Surprises bad!
Public service orgs around here are the worst for not wanting "old" hardware. Often they've got to justify their tech budget by spending ALL of it. -- The user group collected all those P2s (most of which CAME from schools and public service groups who were throwing away money, er, upgrading) to GIVE to the Senior Center, we were going to set up a network with internet access, basic office apps, and everything people might need, and the County stepped in and said NO because the rigs were "too old and we don't want to maintain them". (What's to maintain? The idea was to make it all set-and-forget!)
Ah, well... at least I'll never run out of computers for my own use:)
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And this probably won't end until NK *does* nuke someone, and the rest of the world bombs NK into oblivion.
I don't see any better end for this so long as the current regime is in power.
"Criminals want any and all information to strike as well. Have no locks on the doors to make it easier for police to do their duty, but it makes it a cinch for crooks to do a heist too."
From this I conclude that the two are functionally identical.
(And I'm not sure that's a joke anymore, either :(
That's true, but even when a distro or app has PAID those fees, there are always some users and some coders who consider anything non-free heresy or even treason to the cause. I just lumped it all together for convenience of the typist. :)
"But on the flip side, you have a lot more power to make the machine do what you actually want ...
15 different media players depending on what format you want to play,..."
And there's part of the problem. In linux, you might HAVE to install 15 different players to get around the political incorrectness of some format being under patent, or just because whoever coded App A doesn't like Format B and refuses to support it.
Which is all dandy if you have all the time and energy in the world, but the average person just wants one app to play all 15 formats, and not have to be aware that Encoding A won't work on Player B without Plugin C, let alone waste time doing the research to discover why that opensource media player won't play half his music library.
That sort of thing is why people use crap like Windows Media Player -- it does 'em all good enough, and the user isn't expected to become an expert on formats just to listen to his tunes.
Now, if you want to have to scrounge up a different player for each format on YOUR setup, that's cool by me, but don't expect average users to accept that as normal. And don't expect average users to flock to linux until you're willing to make the experience as COMFORTABLE as Windows has, even for all its flaws.
Haven't you heard? Pants are still optional, but recommended for you. Taco says so!
Right, and that's what I was getting at -- in a shared environment, everyone should contribute according to what they use. Keep your tourists "at home" and its solely your business and your budget/finances. As soon as they impact the "international" areas, you should have to pay something into the common pot, proportional to how much you're making and how much you're using.
Gad, now I sound like a communist -- "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." (as stated by Vladimir Posner on Radio Moscow, ca. 1971)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Posner if you're curious :)
If you have a puppy, you learn to keep the roll on the back of the toilet, at which point over/under becomes irrelevant.
Gah, now I suppose people will fight over whether the roll end should face right or left!!
If PAYING TOURISTS are using the station, why shouldn't each nation's space program get a percentage of the take, depending on how much they've invested in the station AND on tourist use? That would be fair to everyone.
For the same of that same argument [g] Kids could later regret saying stupid things on Slashdot that a million people might read, too, but I don't think that makes allowing people to post stupid comments a crime.
Nor should it make *reading* those comments, perhaps years later, a crime -- which is what "any viewing of CP is a crime" laws do.
We're not guaranteed to never have regrets, and crime shouldn't be defined as "what causes regret". If it were, there'd be a lot of CEOs with their balls held to a federal fire right now, because I regret having invested in the stock market!
I'd guess "harm" is already codified in law, but I'd define it as anything that causes unjustifiable trauma, physically or mentally.
So spanking your naughty kid would be justifiable trauma; raping your innocent kid would not be.
But I can't see how a child is "harmed" by someone merely taking photos of their nude body, however racily posed. I see even less how someone LOOKING at such photos, perhaps years later, harms the child.
Well, I'm in my 50s, so don't let that stop ya :)
But yeah, I did get the idea that she wanted something SIMPLE, and wiring the barn for internet radio, as you say, isn't exactly normal procedure.
The licensing agencies think they have everyone by the balls, and that they can squeeze even the smallest "public performances" for a royalty payment. But it's not worth the money, even to big business -- that's why most use CANNED music that they buy as a package, and DON'T pipe in RADIO for their customers to listen to. If even big business can't justify the royalty costs of using radio (a nominally free source of music), how on earth do they think small business can manage it??
Yes, I agree there is no restriction on anyone's right to investigate anything they wish, through ordinary lawful channels (breaking into accounts wouldn't qualify), and if they HAPPEN to identify an anonymous poster, oh well. The freedom to speak anonymously does NOT confer the requirement that everyone else look away so they can't tell who is speaking.
BUT -- they don't have the right to use *government resources* or their *political power* to out anyone -- legally, that's no different from having your pet cops break into a house without a warrant.
My solution would be (since the other reply is right -- your personal CDs are the same as a radio for lic. purposes) to find a radio station that played ONLY royalty-free music, and make sure everyone knew WHY I chose that.
Tho the only one I can think of offhand plays decidedly unrestful music :)
And what about the reviewers' own cultural and religious biases?? how many reviewers do you need to get a consensus that's NOT based on some such bias? dozens? hundreds??
Nope, it just doesn't wash. The only thing that should be a criterion is "was an actual living breathing child HARMED by this".
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
"The Florida DA LITERALLY said that teens taking nude pics could have their camera stolen, then their pics on the internet, then later in a job interview they could not get the job because the interviewer saw them naked on the internet. And that's why he HAD to push for a 10 year sentance and putting them on the sex offender list for life, to protect them from such hardships later in life."
So in other words, he HAD to ruin their lives, because of HYPOTHETICALLY, *someone else* MIGHT commit an UNRELATED crime, that of stealing a cellphone.
Man, that's some twisted logic. But I think the real intent was simply to maintain that "tough on crime" image that's required now to get elected. ANY deformation of justice is now okay, so long as it maintains that image.
But with today's digital art capabilities, no one need even involve children at all. Yonder CGI can invent them for you.
In which case, where is the harm? which children were damaged? (do pixels suffer??)
But in our zeal for burning witches, even a CARTOON of the wrong subject is now illegal in some jurisdictions.
Occurs to me that since CGI apps can be used to create kiddie porn images, under the current legal trend, such CGI apps are "enabling the crime" and are therefore illegal.
You won't hear any disagreement from me!! Except that I don't think there *needs* to be a disconnect between home and office OSs (when there is, you get crap like XPHome, which rather than being a lesser OS, is a BROKEN version of XPPro... hence Pro runs about 3x as fast on the SAME hardware.)
Except for a few kids who still love shiny and bling over functionality, everyone I know and support would prefer a simpler OS on their home machine, rather than the current trend toward a 3-ring circus. The #1 complaint among people who didn't grow up wired to a PC is "I just want to do this simple task, but there's so much STUFF here that I can't figure it out!"
But it's not just about Windows (or OSX, or whatever.. personally I detest the Apple Way) being bloated. It's about their hardware partners like Dell, who can't sell nearly as many new machines if the ones you paid for 3 years ago aren't rendered useless by an OS they can't run. Don't think Dell (in particular) isn't egging M$ on with this ever-larger OS thing.
Only reason I prefer XP to W2K is because when I'm on a W2K system, I keep running into little "what do you mean I can't do that??" issues, nothing showstopping, but annoying after I got used to XP. But W2K will run on some mighty minimal hardware (oooh, no new money for Dell!) and that's a big plus over the long view, especially when businesses are trying to economize. It might be more cost-effective for big business to just chuck everything and start over every 3 years, but that's not the case for smaller businesses that lack a multimillion dollar dedicated IT budget. Friend here does office LANs for a lot of small businesses in L.A., and the average age of their discards is 8 to 10 years.
Here's how minimal W2K can do: I keep a 486DX4-100 for the sole purpose of being a RAM tester for 72pin sticks, because being a true 486 board, it can take one at a time (anything newer needs pairs), and it will accept any type. One day I had an 8mb stick in it, and was using it to test old HDs... accidentally hooked up the wrong one, and found myself watching W2K boot up. It took about 3 minutes to come up, but once fully loaded it was actually usable, if sluggish. On a 486DX4-100 with a mere EIGHT megs of RAM!! (Yeah, it won't *install* on that level of hardware. But I assure you, it WILL run!!)
And as to Ballmer, he's an embarrassment (yeah, I've seen the videos), and from everything I've heard is the #1 reason for discontent within M$ itself.
Now, now... WinME is just fine if you turn off system restore and apply 98Lite in default mode. Did that to mine (test box) and it never crashed again (and it ran 24/7 for a couple years, rebooted once in a blue moon, before that box got XP as its main OS). ME's resource management still sucks, but that's largely IE5.5's fault. IE5.5 will fuck up Win98 too. (And try opening about 10 Nero windows on XP, and watch it zero out the resource heap...)
As to Vista... oh yeah, the topic!! They hung themselves with that one. You can't use ordinary terms as weasel words and not expect it won't come back to bite you.
I still want to see a truly modular Windows -- a naked OS with only about the same included apps as Win9x had, and let everything else be optional -- selling Plus Packs for Win9x worked fine in the past, why not now?? those who want integrated bells and whistles would be happy after a single gang install, and those of us who prefer to pick and choose and keep the OS lean and slick are also happy. But selling a broken OS like the cheap versions of Vista... that doesn't cut it.
Thanks for the info on Puppy -- saved for reference. I still have a few intact sub-200MHz systems laying around doing nothing useful; would be good testbeds for the light-duty setups. (I start hoarding the nice ones for myself as of about the P233 range... I gotta have my DOOM, which means I gotta have a system with ISA slots and a hardware-IRQ sound card.)
Gotta agree with you about Ubuntu. I tried really hard to like it, but ... geez, is it really necessary to load everything known to man at startup?? I don't know how people here can claim it runs good on old hardware, unless they mean hardware from last week. My old linux test box was a P3-800/512mb RAM, and it was okay, if not slick, up thru MDK7 and whatever else was current then. (WinXP runs very nicely on it.) It was unbearably slow with the last bunch of distros I tried, about 3 years ago, and really slogged with Ubuntu 5. At which point I finally broke down and cobbled together the P4-2GHz to replace it, which was a lot better but still not crisp.
Yeah, I do have some sub-1GB HDs... if a WD makes it past 6 years (most go at least to age 5) and doesn't get headcrashed by misadventure, it almost never dies. In fact I still have a 20MB IDE... worthless, but I like it as a novelty, and besides, it still works 100% perfect. :)
Ya know where the user group has been getting most of those 15" monitors that no one wants, and some of the older PCs as well? GOODWILL! they can't even give 'em away, so one of our members hauls them off. Usually the monitors wind up over at the recycler. :( I did manage to give away all the P150 systems that we got from a school, mostly to random passersby.
The P150s were actually very nice machines in their day, and not a thing wrong with 'em as everyday Win95 email/light-office setups, either. Same SuperMicro motherboard as my P233 -- can take up to 450MHz in an AMD CPU, but I too have become an Intel bigot. Some years back AMD screwed over one of my customers on a fatally-buggy CPU (K6-2 that wouldn't do 32bit, and they wouldn't warranty it), and I never forgave 'em... their errata list is always 3x as long as Intel's. Also, I dislike instability, and seems to me the chipsets that support AMD are never as solid ans the Intel chipsets, and the overall quality of the mobos is often not as good either. Didn't thrill me when I noticed an AMD64 causing lockups either (yes, we traced it to the CPU). -- Now, if I were building space-heaters, I might prefer AMD. ;)
Placing old hardware in loving homes is probably a lot easier away from metro areas, where computers are not yet ubiquitous. Here, an hour from L.A., there are so many machines cast off by business, and often only a few years old, that frankly any small outfit that wants one can get a 4 or 5 year old machine for nothing. But I'll bet if it were, say, Havre Montana, a lot of small businesses and individuals would be happy to take what they could get, cuz the budget doesn't allow it otherwise.
I used a nice Enermax PSU in the "new" P4 that I should finish up Real Soon Now... for a while it was the power unit for testing stuff, and it sometimes had all of one system, part of another, and half a dozen drives of various sorts attached to it, and all was fine, so it surely should suffice for a mere ONE system :) IIRC it's a 450W but has a good efficiency rating (almost 90%).
I use the grapefruit rule myself: the more it weighs the juicier it is :) Good ones weigh 6 lbs. or so and have more wires than an octopus. Crappy ones are more like 3 lbs. and have only a couple connectors. The difference in true output, per all the serious evaluations I've seen, seems to go right along with that.
I know a guy who likes to have two PSUs in his boxen -- one for the mainboard and cards and such, the other for the drives. Probably not a bad idea, but logistically difficult (you want to cram HOW much crap into a standard full tower case??!)
Speaking of old OSs and fond yesterdays, my good buddy here still runs a Netware 3 setup in his house.. sometimes has a dozen machines hooked to it. It ran the BBS for 12 years, until he finally shut that down a year ago.
Ha, our local desert got two whole inches this year. More than in the previous 10 years COMBINED. My yard already looks like Jurassic Weedpark!!
Wow. So, keeping things in proportion here... you're saying 18-wheelers could affect far solar systems, and railroad locomotives might even affect other galaxies?? And what about jumbo jets -- might they even affect other universes??
Damn, I had no idea we made such powerful shit!
I've noticed that most "alt-energy" tech has the same drawback: it costs more than it saves, usually in terms of scarce resources (frex, rare metals required for solar panels). Furthermore, funny how each restriction on our use of some resource is coupled with an equal and opposite subsidy for an alt-energy company that couldn't make it in the open market.
We get a lot of voter propositions on the California ballot about such things, and being a reader of fine print, I've noticed that in every case, some special interest was served first and foremost, and that the NET savings of resources was often negative.
So, yeah, I've become downright cynical about the motivations here... especially after hearing about the "subsidies" Mr.Gore has gotten from alt-energy interests.
I haven't had time to look into this yet, but I found the following interesting in light of the religious fervor surrounding global warming -- explain how the activities of Earth-bound humans affect these other planets? Or is there a colonization program already in operation that none of us here on Earth know about??
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http://blog.tommcclintock.com/2009/03/10/the-radical-policies-of-the-global-warm-mongers/
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First, if global warming is caused by your SUV, why is it that we're seeing global warming on every other body in the solar system? For the last decade or so, the Martian south polar ice cap has conspicuously receded. Pluto is warming - about two degrees Celsius over the past 14 years. Jupiter is showing dramatic climate change by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Even Neptune's moon, Triton, has warmed five percent on the absolute temperature scale - the equivalent of a 22 degrees Fahrenheit increase on Earth - from 1989 to 1998.
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Wow, that was one dirty job :) The most buried machine I've seen belonged to my realtor... she had it sitting by the window and the desert sand had blown in and half-filled the case. It weighed about 10 pounds less when I got done shovelling it out. :)
I hadn't looked at Puppy so thanks for the info. When I Get More Disk Space[tm] I'll download a bunch and give 'em a whirl. I do keep hoping to find a linux I can love (so far MDK 7.2 has come closest) ... will be interesting to see how Puppy performs, since so far I've found that to perform on a par with the concurrent Windows, desktop linux needs about twice the hardware. :( Which is why the newest complete rig in the house has become the linux test box... a P4-2GHz (built mostly from salvage). Positively newfangled by my standards. :) -- Current Ubuntu won't install on it, seems to not like the merely middle-aged video card (probably the newest part in the whole box).
Thanks for the PSU doodad link -- seems I've been guessing in the right ballpark. It informed me that what I think of as a mature system (maxed out) would need in the 300W to 500W range depending on how hard it's working. Of course a more efficient PSU has gotta help... I like Enermax if I'm paying money for a new one. Yeah, those OEM PSUs are the shits.
The PSU that came with this machine when it was a brand new 486 was only 200W, which wasn't so bad in 1994. But I added one too many HDs and it refused to turn on, which IMO is good behaviour -- if you're overloaded, DON'T damage stuff by trying to run anyway! Replaced it with a 300W server PSU (which back then was pricey and tough to find) and it's still doing its job 14 years later.
I like reliable. Reliable good. Surprises bad!
Public service orgs around here are the worst for not wanting "old" hardware. Often they've got to justify their tech budget by spending ALL of it. -- The user group collected all those P2s (most of which CAME from schools and public service groups who were throwing away money, er, upgrading) to GIVE to the Senior Center, we were going to set up a network with internet access, basic office apps, and everything people might need, and the County stepped in and said NO because the rigs were "too old and we don't want to maintain them". (What's to maintain? The idea was to make it all set-and-forget!)
Ah, well... at least I'll never run out of computers for my own use :)