When I first skimmed the headline for this story, I was saying to myself: "Wow, cool! They have iPod tools for Linux? Maybe I can get them to compile under Mac OS X!"
Ditto. I got into a really bad accident on a preschool playground when I was 3. The handle of a Radio Flyer wagon came down on my nose -- this was before they made them out of plastic -- and chopped it in half. I got fourteen stitches, seven on the inside and seven on the out. I remember distinctly the trip back from the hospital, and specifically stopping off at the drug store. The guy behind the counter was so horrified by my appearance that he gave me a quarter.
They are client/server combos which happen to be separated into two apps which focus on wither managing files on your cmoputer, or accessing those on others. Other P2P software such as Gnutella, WinMX, Kazaa and others are just combined client/server apps, but they work the same way, except that you can search for files on all servers on the network, as their is no authentication control. These are all 'P2P', but just work in different ways, all person to person; from the person running the server to you being a client on that server, or vice-versa. P2P usually refers to the clients and servers being end-users on the internet, vs. commercial servers hosted on guaranteed bandwidth.
OK, great. Mind you, your explanation is complete bullshit -- but I'll play along. Here, I'll give you one, too: RAM and hard drive space are all "memory," it's just that one is inside your computer and the other isn't. Sounds good to me, what about you?
My own SF Bay Area DSL horror story
on
DSL Amidst Phone Wars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My own personal SF Bay Area DSL horror story:
I went with Earthlink, who (in my area) gets their DSL service through Covad.
I had fine service for a long time. Then, one day, it stopped working. Completely. Dead line.
After many calls in to Earthlink, I finally got them to escalate it to the network level (and then, to Covad). I get a phone message saying "my problem has been fixed." It isn't fixed. It hasn't changed at all. Repeat process.
Eventually I am told that my line tests to the same levels it was at when Covad first turned it up. In other words, there's nothing wrong. Earthlink would not roll a truck to see what was wrong -- it wasn't worth the expense to them. When I asked what I should do -- "Do I cancel my Earthlink and get cable?" -- they said that, yes, that was an option, or I could investigate their satellite service. BTW, because I had been a customer for so long (over a year), there would "of course" be no cancellation charge on my "service."
I was about to go completely fscking ballistic when one guy at the Earthlink NOC made a little suggestion. I decided to take his advice.
I took my DSL modem out to my demarc box in the side yard with an extension cord and a "red box" cable (basically, a phone cable with the red and green pair stripped and attached to alligator clips). I plugged the modem into each pair at the box and cycled the power, until I got a circuit that looped up. Sure enough, my DSL line was, in fact, active.
What was the trouble? The wires had been cut.
I'm not kidding here -- the ends of the red and green wires were absolutely clean, and they were about an inch shorter than the other wires in the cable. It was quite plain that somebody had snipped them. I pulled out a wire tool, stripped the ends, tied them down to the pair I traced back to my DSL jack, went back into the house, and plugged in the DSL. Voila! It looped up right away. I "dialed out" with my PPPoE username/password, and I was online again at full speed, as if nothing had ever happened.
Thinking about this, I realized that my DSL outage had coincided with my new upstairs neighbors moving in. They would have ordered new phones with SBC Pac Bell. A little too much of a fscking coincidence for my likes.
I asked a few people about it, and a couple of them told me they'd heard the same thing: SBC techs don't like seeing Covad lines in the field, and they're fond of disabling them -- apparently, to achieve the same results I got (Covad, Earthlink, or whomever else telling the customer that they'd have to switch service.)
We may witness the birth of Agent Smith's (of Matrix fame) Ancestors.
If you had even watched the first movie, you'd know that in the Middle-Earth universe, Agent Smith is already here. In fact, he's been around since back when Elendil was still battling Sauron with a sword.
Palm applications, in particular, are designed around the idea of "forms" -- you put a form up on the screen, and then you sit there waiting for the user to do something. You don't run a constant loop listening to a microphone every minute, because that sucks up the battery like crazy. The Palm programming philosophy says that 99% of the machine's time should be, essentially, idle. Voice recognition, on the other hand, is very processor-intensive -- probably too much so for a pair of AAA's.
It means the BBC Unions went on strike during the original filming. They never completed the episode, though a restored version was produced for home video with Tom Baker narrating the missing bits.
Following several false starts in attempting to bring it back, the drama will finally be premièred in a webcast on BBCi in the spring... Produced by the Big Finish company, it stars Fox in the role of Professor Chronotis, with Sachs as the evil Skagra.
For those who don't know, Big Finish has been producing a series of audio dramas starring various incarnations of the Doctor. They use the original actors (Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Peter Davidson, and some of the companions, among others) and they have access to some of the original theme music, sound effects, etc. There's nothing in this article to make me believe this is anything else but another in the series. If the BBC was really going to produce a video version of the Doctor -- with all the budgetary concerns that entails (no snickers from the Doctor Who haters out there, please) -- do you really think they'd premiere it as a Webcast? No, expect this one coming your way via MP3 or RealAudio sometime soon.
They'll assume you're talking about switching to Windows XP, which doesn't help. I agree with the earlier guy: call it Agile Programming, or Agile Methods. Way more touchy-feely.
Microsoft will never give away the crown jewels to save the application side of the house.
I guess that all depends on what you mean by "crown jewels." Office has long been more profitable for Microsoft than Windows has. Makes sense, if you think about it. Most copies of Windows sold come as a bundle with new hardware, which means they were licensed in volume to the manufacturer at a deep discount. If you want to install Office on the same machine, however, you often have to buy it separately. A lot of the time they only bundle a stripped down office suite (Microsoft Works?)
If they were foolish enough to open their Windows source, all the links and hooks for Office would be out for everyone to integrate into Open Office. That would kill their app business within a couple of years.
I didn't see anybody mention opening the source to Windows. They just said "give away" the OS. Free beer.
It's true you can't buy an Xserve without paying for Mac OS X. But at least you can buy one and run Linux on it immediately, without paying any extra (installation labor included).
Re:My brother built several lab machines
on
Build Your Own PowerPC?
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· Score: 5, Informative
He had a dozen or so free copies of Mac OS X (10.1 I believe) but no hardware onto which to place this neat new OS...He told me the only real hard part was finding cases.
Pardon me for saying so, but I'm pretty skeptical of this comment. Knocking together PPC hardware isn't necessarily going to get you a machine that can run Mac OS X. Just the fact that you say he used SCSI hard drives makes me suspicious. Early versions of Mac OS X were known to choke on Adaptec SCSI cards -- you might have to pull the card, then install the OS (on your internal IDE drive), then put the card back in and install drivers. What's more, Mac OS X still relies on some proprietary Apple chips/firmware. If you're saying your brother went and found old Macintosh motherboards etc., then it sounds a little more likely... but considering the difficulty a lot of people have running Mac OS X on stock, store-bought G3 towers, let alone older motherboards, I doubt people will want to get any big ideas based on your post.
It kind of depends... If... it is possable that this could be done... However I think it is far more likely... It's kinda like... Now I don't know for sure... I was unable to access the information... but I suspect... I could be wrong though.
+5 Informative? Yeah, pretty thorough analysis for a guy who has absolutely no real information whatsoever.
Re:I don't really get blogs...
on
Blogger Hacked
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· Score: 1, Redundant
Well, personally, I don't care if any of my readers know who I'm talking about. I really use a weblog to keep track of my state at any given time. This lets me look back and say "oh, that's what I was thinking." I mean, I don't care if I'm the only person in the world who reads my weblog.
This is the first time I've really read a discussion of CD-RWs and whether there's a purpose to them. I've always been under the impression that CD-Rs were so cheap and CD-RWs were so unreliable after a few erasures that it wasn't really worth using them. You guys seem to pretty much confirm that.
But on the other hand, has anyone done any of the same tests with DVD-RW media?
I just made a back-up of the Documents and Users folders of my Mac OS X box to a DVD-RW blank. It's sort of a "low priority" backup... I doubt any of that stuff would be completely unretrievable if my hard drive died. But better to have more copies than less, right?
Right now I'm storing that disc in a plastic "keep case" (like the kind DVD movies come in). It sits on my desk, and I have no reason to take it out or carry it around unless my hard disk dies.
When the contents of my hard drive change sufficiently to warrant it, I plan to erase the DVD-RW and write a new back-up from scratch.
The thing is, DVD-Rs are getting cheaper, and DVD-RWs are notoriously unstable (meaning, high failure during writes, and the impression I'm given is that after it fails once, it's a coaster for good.)
In other news, the independent journalism group Reporters Without Incident announced today that Canada had yet again ranked #1 on a list of nations ordered by inoffensiveness.
"This recognition is a great honor," Prime Minister Jean Chrtien said in a statement, "but in truth it only confirms what we, as Canadians have always known: That never, in the entire history of our country, have we ever done anything that has caused other nations to pay undue notice or attention.
"Today, the world has finally recognized that Canada is the nation, above all others, that incites little or no reaction from the rest of the world whatsoever. Today, Canadians everywhere can take pride in their timid, mousy anonymity, assured that their presence on the world political stage bothers nobody."
That doesn't look like the type of standard they're talking about. The argument is that Southwest should have designed its Web page to be more accessible to the disabled. The W3C standard suggests guidelines for user agents -- that is, the browser itself.
From the W3C site:
This document provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities (visual, hearing, physical, cognitive, and neurological). User agents include HTML browsers and other types of software that retrieve and render Web content. A user agent that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility through its own user interface and through other internal facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies (especially assistive technologies).
In addition to helping
developers of HTML browsers and media players...
And with DVD-R media at about 3,- EUR and DVD-RW at 6,- it also becomes a feasible alternative to CD-R/RW.
In the United States, at least, you can actually get media even cheaper than that.
NOTE: I do not work for Meritline, but I have ordered DVD-R/RW media from them several times in the past and have always received prompt shipment of working media, generic brand or otherwise.
Consider two people. The first person invests $100 a month from the time he's 20 until he's thirty. Then he stops and doesn't withdraw until he's 60. The second person invests $100 a month from the time he's 30 until he's 60. Now, which person has more money at age 60? The first person, although he invest a whole lot less. That's the issue with getting your finances in order as young as possible.
I hear this kind of argument all the time, but everybody I see with money invested is watching it all get flushed down the toilet right now. The assumption seems to be that "having money invested" will give you money later on. What do you do when the market's for crap and the corporations you're supposed to be investing in are all crooks?
When I used RedHat, I always bought a CD for each upgrade (from 5.0 to 5.1, to 5.2, to 6.0 etc). The reason: upgrading meant manually download individual packages and installing them in the right order.
But wouldn't you agree that this makes Debian a better distro for people who want to learn any kind of serious syadmin chops vs. something like Red Hat?
Speaking as somebody who upgraded a production Red Hat 4.2 box to glibc2 by hand, I still cringe every time I overhear somebody asking for help with their Linux problems, and the first thing out of the "guru's" mouth is, "Which version of Linux are you using?" Not kernel version, not software versions -- Linux version. And of course they mean which version of Red Hat is installed.
To me, Red Hat version numbers are almost completely meaningless -- unless you're not actually using your box.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first skimmed the headline for this story, I was saying to myself: "Wow, cool! They have iPod tools for Linux? Maybe I can get them to compile under Mac OS X!"
Ditto. I got into a really bad accident on a preschool playground when I was 3. The handle of a Radio Flyer wagon came down on my nose -- this was before they made them out of plastic -- and chopped it in half. I got fourteen stitches, seven on the inside and seven on the out. I remember distinctly the trip back from the hospital, and specifically stopping off at the drug store. The guy behind the counter was so horrified by my appearance that he gave me a quarter.
My own personal SF Bay Area DSL horror story:
I went with Earthlink, who (in my area) gets their DSL service through Covad.
I had fine service for a long time. Then, one day, it stopped working. Completely. Dead line.
After many calls in to Earthlink, I finally got them to escalate it to the network level (and then, to Covad). I get a phone message saying "my problem has been fixed." It isn't fixed. It hasn't changed at all. Repeat process.
Eventually I am told that my line tests to the same levels it was at when Covad first turned it up. In other words, there's nothing wrong. Earthlink would not roll a truck to see what was wrong -- it wasn't worth the expense to them. When I asked what I should do -- "Do I cancel my Earthlink and get cable?" -- they said that, yes, that was an option, or I could investigate their satellite service. BTW, because I had been a customer for so long (over a year), there would "of course" be no cancellation charge on my "service."
I was about to go completely fscking ballistic when one guy at the Earthlink NOC made a little suggestion. I decided to take his advice.
I took my DSL modem out to my demarc box in the side yard with an extension cord and a "red box" cable (basically, a phone cable with the red and green pair stripped and attached to alligator clips). I plugged the modem into each pair at the box and cycled the power, until I got a circuit that looped up. Sure enough, my DSL line was, in fact, active.
What was the trouble? The wires had been cut.
I'm not kidding here -- the ends of the red and green wires were absolutely clean, and they were about an inch shorter than the other wires in the cable. It was quite plain that somebody had snipped them. I pulled out a wire tool, stripped the ends, tied them down to the pair I traced back to my DSL jack, went back into the house, and plugged in the DSL. Voila! It looped up right away. I "dialed out" with my PPPoE username/password, and I was online again at full speed, as if nothing had ever happened.
Thinking about this, I realized that my DSL outage had coincided with my new upstairs neighbors moving in. They would have ordered new phones with SBC Pac Bell. A little too much of a fscking coincidence for my likes.
I asked a few people about it, and a couple of them told me they'd heard the same thing: SBC techs don't like seeing Covad lines in the field, and they're fond of disabling them -- apparently, to achieve the same results I got (Covad, Earthlink, or whomever else telling the customer that they'd have to switch service.)
Of course, this is all hearsay (from me to you).
Better solution is probably to just not host child pornography -- cuz, after all, it's pretty messed up.
Palm applications, in particular, are designed around the idea of "forms" -- you put a form up on the screen, and then you sit there waiting for the user to do something. You don't run a constant loop listening to a microphone every minute, because that sucks up the battery like crazy. The Palm programming philosophy says that 99% of the machine's time should be, essentially, idle. Voice recognition, on the other hand, is very processor-intensive -- probably too much so for a pair of AAA's.
They'll assume you're talking about switching to Windows XP, which doesn't help. I agree with the earlier guy: call it Agile Programming, or Agile Methods. Way more touchy-feely.
It's true you can't buy an Xserve without paying for Mac OS X. But at least you can buy one and run Linux on it immediately, without paying any extra (installation labor included).
This is the first time I've really read a discussion of CD-RWs and whether there's a purpose to them. I've always been under the impression that CD-Rs were so cheap and CD-RWs were so unreliable after a few erasures that it wasn't really worth using them. You guys seem to pretty much confirm that.
... I doubt any of that stuff would be completely unretrievable if my hard drive died. But better to have more copies than less, right?
But on the other hand, has anyone done any of the same tests with DVD-RW media?
I just made a back-up of the Documents and Users folders of my Mac OS X box to a DVD-RW blank. It's sort of a "low priority" backup
Right now I'm storing that disc in a plastic "keep case" (like the kind DVD movies come in). It sits on my desk, and I have no reason to take it out or carry it around unless my hard disk dies.
When the contents of my hard drive change sufficiently to warrant it, I plan to erase the DVD-RW and write a new back-up from scratch.
The thing is, DVD-Rs are getting cheaper, and DVD-RWs are notoriously unstable (meaning, high failure during writes, and the impression I'm given is that after it fails once, it's a coaster for good.)
What do you guys think? Dumb idea?
"This recognition is a great honor," Prime Minister Jean Chrtien said in a statement, "but in truth it only confirms what we, as Canadians have always known: That never, in the entire history of our country, have we ever done anything that has caused other nations to pay undue notice or attention.
"Today, the world has finally recognized that Canada is the nation, above all others, that incites little or no reaction from the rest of the world whatsoever. Today, Canadians everywhere can take pride in their timid, mousy anonymity, assured that their presence on the world political stage bothers nobody."
From the W3C site:
NOTE: I do not work for Meritline, but I have ordered DVD-R/RW media from them several times in the past and have always received prompt shipment of working media, generic brand or otherwise.
Hunh! And all this time I've been wondering why Lucas only puts his crappy movies out on DVD. I guess this explains it.
Don't you figure that he/she might just be the freelance writer ... that Microsoft hired to write this advertising copy?
I love it!
Speaking as somebody who upgraded a production Red Hat 4.2 box to glibc2 by hand, I still cringe every time I overhear somebody asking for help with their Linux problems, and the first thing out of the "guru's" mouth is, "Which version of Linux are you using?" Not kernel version, not software versions -- Linux version. And of course they mean which version of Red Hat is installed.
To me, Red Hat version numbers are almost completely meaningless -- unless you're not actually using your box.