You can get hosting for a lot less than $20 a month, but I guess that wasn't the point.
I said "virtual server." That means I have full root access to my own server (actually user mode Linux, but it looks and acts exactly like a dedicated server - I can install whatever services I like, I have a static IP, a few gigs of disk space, etc). I also said "on a high speed backbone." How high speed? I don't know, but it's faster than work, and we have an OC-12.
If you can get that for less than $20 a month, I'd love to know how.:)
[quote]It would add a lot of time to the flight, but you would save all the fuel needed to get up through the first 50K or so, without having to piggyback off a 747.[/quote] Seems like a waste of money to me. White Knight is essentially a normal aircraft. The fuel required to fly this vehicle to a medium altitude where Space Ship One is then released isn't that much. In fact, I doubt White Knight burns more than a hundred bucks in fuel on it's quickie trip to drop off the spacecraft.
Getting a balloon that high, carrying such a large payload, would require a significant amount of gas. Much more spendy, I'd imagine, than the standard jet fuel that powers White Knight.
Real ISPs come and go, you are not in college forever, and you dont keep the same job forever. However, you CAN keep one of these "second-rate" email addresses indefinitely.
Private domain: $8 a year. Virtual server on a high speed backbone: $20 a month. Having unlimited email addresses you can keep for the rest of your life: Priceless.
Get letters to your state and local representitives, read their responses, and figure out who to vote for that way.
That's a good idea except for one problem:
I've written dozens of letters to my reps on these issues. Do you know what their response is? It's the same crap every time: "Rest assured that I fully understand your feelings on this matter. This is an important issue to me, and blah blah blah blah." They refuse to take sides. They refuse to say, "I support" or "I do not support" this legislation. They have forked tongues: In the end I have no damn idea which side these snakes stand on. They keep neutral on everything in the interest of getting more votes.
So I tell her, "What if my camera is defective and I just need a replacement?" She replies, "Oh, there's no stocking fee for that." I said, "And if I return an unopened camera for a refund?" She says, "No stocking fee." I say, "Do you see where I'm going with this?"
So return it saying that it doesn't play, and get a replacement. Don't open the replacement. Return the replacement. Pretty simple...
LOL! I had a situation like this once, too. I'd bought a digital camera at Best Buy. A week later I get a coupon for a free battery ($80 value) with purchase of a camera. So I take it in and they say, "Sorry, this must be presented at the time of purchase." So I say, "OK, I'd like to return my camera." They say, "Since it's opened, there is a 15% restocking fee." (on a $1000 camera, that's a chunk of change)
So I tell her, "What if my camera is defective and I just need a replacement?" She replies, "Oh, there's no stocking fee for that." I said, "And if I return an opened camera for a refund?" She says, "No stocking fee." I say, "Do you see where I'm going with this?"
She thinks for a minute, then frowns and hands me my free battery.
You can get a refund on almost anything. Simply be firm, but polite. If they continue to refuse, tell them, "Look, I don't care what your policies are, this is DEFECTIVE. I'm not leaving until I get a refund." Then stand there and stare at them.
I've never had someone call me on this yet. Cashiers are making minimum wage and they don't want to deal with potentially volatile situations like this, so they just give you whatever you want. To add to it, the customers behind you start to get mad at the store because they're reasonable people as well, and the cashier is wasting their time (keeping them in line longer) by arguing with you. Cashiers recognize this and will usually give you whatever you want just so you'll go away.
Worst case, go back later and try again with a different cashier. I've done this many times. People are different - if you get a stubborn one, go find someone else. Preferably a young lady with a pleasant smile. They're nice people and aren't looking for a conflict, so they usually just smile and give you your money back.
But there's also an argument that there's a responsibility of the consumer to fully inspect the merchandise. The best legal thing (ob. IANAL) for the consumer to do is simply ask the merchant "Will this work in all my standard CD players?". If the merchant says yes, you now have grounds to return it when it doesn't.
By selling it in a CD store alongside other CDs, making it look exactly like a CD, and not labeling it otherwise, they have already implied to their customers that it is, indeed, a CD. "Buyer beware" doesn't apply in the United States. We don't have to ask that question: If there is a reasonable assumption that the answer is "yes", as there is in this case, then the courts will agree the answer is "yes" whether they say so or not.
If they borrow it and can't copy/ rip it, they will go out and buy it.
No they won't. Almost everyone who is really into music these days has an MP3 player. They won't borrow it from their friend because when they ask, the friend will say, "Oh, this piece of shit? I can't rip it to my iPod."
Unfortunately for the bastard copyright owners, that friend is also likely to continue with, "So I took it back and downloaded it instead. Here, I'll make you a copy..."
Lets overflow landfill after landfill with disposable view-once or twice DVDs, and use up those fossil fuel supplies even faster making these disposable frisbees.
Not to worry; people like me will just quit buying DVDs. No doubt they will want to increase the price of "forever DVDs" to $30-$40. So instead of filling landfills, we'll just fill our broadband pipes as we download instead.
The combinatiom of these things does nothing to stop piracy, it may even increase it.
Of course it will increase it. If you try to screw the consumer, the consumer will screw back. If my 3 day Blockbuster rental only lasts 8 hours, you're darn right I'm going to copy it in case I don't get to watching it right away. But at that point I'm now an Evil Pirate(TM), so I might as well just save myself the whole hassle of driving to Blockbuster, ripping, etc, and just download the thing.
Believe it or not, these cheapies from Compgeeks. ATA66-133 drive bay for less than $7.00. They work great.
Only thing is, they only power up when they're locked. I didn't like this, as I leave my server on 24/7 and if I need to yank a drive out because the house is on fire I won't have time to search for the key. The little metal piece that prevents you from removing the drive when it's powered up is screwed into the key mechanism. I unscrewed it and pulled it out. Now I can "lock" the case, which gives power to the drive, and still pull the drive out without unlocking it if I have to.
Also makes normal operations convenient because I don't need the key to change drives.
The OS, I'm sorry to admit, is Windows 2000 Server. It was necessary for many of the home automation apps I run. Software RAID 1. The script that backs up my documents is just a batch file executing out of Windows' scheduler. It's a simple routine that takes as input the day of the month. It then wipes that directory, recreates it, and copies my \documents directory tree into it.
The sync to the third drive is via rsync on Linux and an smbmount of the Windows volume.
I need to amend this, in case it wasn't perfectly clear:
DO NOT RELY ON RAID TO PROTECT YOUR DATA. If you do, you will lose it some day. Raid only protects against hardware failure. There are plenty of other ways you can lose data and one of them will catch up to you eventually.
If you can't afford to lose it, back it up to another drive on another computer. If you really can't afford to lose it no matter what, store your backup drive with a friend.
Software raid is plenty fast for a personal fileserver. It's not like you'll have a hundred users on it at a time. Unless you have an ancient CPU, you'll be fine.
The really best way is RAID 1 + a third drive for backups, on another system. If you can afford to pay 3 times the normal cost to store your data, this will virtually guarantee you'll never lose it.
My fileserver has a mirrored pair of drives in front mounted, hot-swap bays. I have a third drive on my workstation and I sync to that every time I add significant amounts of data to my server. The mirroring protects against drive failure and the third drive protects against server failure, operator error, filesystem corruption or other problems that can wipe out a RAID array.
Lastly, the stuff that changes often and is worth the most to me - small documents and other things I create - gets a nightly sync to the server's boot drive and I keep a month's worth of revisions. This lets me "go back in time" to retrieve things if I need to. Considering the relatively small size of this type of material, this doesn't take up a lot of space. I think the whole month's worth of revisions only takes up 10GB or so.
The hot swap bays let me yank a drive out on my way out of the house if the place catches on fire. Yes, I know I should be storing that third drive at a friend's house, but it's too inconvenient to retrieve it every time I want to backup my array. So a fire may destroy everything if I'm not home or can't safely pull a drive on my way out. I'm comfortable with that.
The hardware bought for the most part weren't just generic smart card readers/writers, they were specially designed to be able to deal with DirecTV access cards.
Let me enlighten you: DTV access cards use ASICs. It's a standard chip. I have the samn damn thing on my American Express card, for crying out loud. Nothing was "specially designed to be able to deal with DirecTV access cards", they were designed to read & write ASICs. End of story.
Just because someone wants to read and write a commodity chip, and just because that someone happens to buy from a less than reputable dealer, does not mean company x that happens to use those same commodity chips should be able to come along and say, "Har har har, you evil pirate. Bend over while our lawyers lube you up, sweet cheeks."
Something tells me that smuggling isn't that easy. I'm certain that you have to go through customs in one way or another to legally get back into the states.
I doubt it. Granted, I don't own a big yacht, but somehow I doubt rich folks like Bill Gates are boarded and searched every time they return home after venturing into international waters. Now, if you're constantly meeting up with other vessels, or taking trips to certain nations, they may target you for a search. But getting a load of Nintendos on a one-time trip? Somehow I can't see there being a problem.
Also transoceanic trips in a yacht aren't so easy as they might seem.
If you can drop $100k+ on old gaming machines, chances are your yacht is plenty big enough to handle such trips.
Customs will put a stop to this so fast, it will make your head spin.
Not really. If I had $100k to blow on a bunch of old consoles, it's a safe bet I could load the stuff up on my private yacht and sail it straight to my waterfront mansion in Seattle. Screw customs.
(and it's going to be a b**ch to get some of this stuff cleared by customs in the first place)
Not really. If I had $100k to blow on a bunch of old consoles, it's a safe bet I could load the stuff up on my private yacht and sail it straight to my waterfront mansion in Seattle. Screw customs.
This seems to be just one more underhanded tactic being utilized by the record labels these days.
I've already heard this stupid tactic. They're playing the songs on AM radio where I live between talk show segments. I cruise the AM dial for talk shows to escape the terrible music today. Then afterward, "To hear more of this great music, visit Clear Channel's 98.3FM!"
What's worse is I can't do a darn thing about it. Complaining to the station doesn't work because Clear Channel owns my AM stations, too.
Slashdot Mirror
without disclosing the transfers to travelers or asking their permission
Don't you mean terrorists? You can't tell citiz..-err, terrorists, that you're going to investigate them.
Welcome to the United States, where any random citizen is an enemy of the state.
You can get hosting for a lot less than $20 a month, but I guess that wasn't the point.
:)
I said "virtual server." That means I have full root access to my own server (actually user mode Linux, but it looks and acts exactly like a dedicated server - I can install whatever services I like, I have a static IP, a few gigs of disk space, etc). I also said "on a high speed backbone." How high speed? I don't know, but it's faster than work, and we have an OC-12.
If you can get that for less than $20 a month, I'd love to know how.
[quote]It would add a lot of time to the flight, but you would save all the fuel needed to get up through the first 50K or so, without having to piggyback off a 747.[/quote]
Seems like a waste of money to me. White Knight is essentially a normal aircraft. The fuel required to fly this vehicle to a medium altitude where Space Ship One is then released isn't that much. In fact, I doubt White Knight burns more than a hundred bucks in fuel on it's quickie trip to drop off the spacecraft.
Getting a balloon that high, carrying such a large payload, would require a significant amount of gas. Much more spendy, I'd imagine, than the standard jet fuel that powers White Knight.
Real ISPs come and go, you are not in college forever, and you dont keep the same job forever. However, you CAN keep one of these "second-rate" email addresses indefinitely.
Private domain: $8 a year.
Virtual server on a high speed backbone: $20 a month.
Having unlimited email addresses you can keep for the rest of your life: Priceless.
But I charge mine to American Express.
Get letters to your state and local representitives, read their responses, and figure out who to vote for that way.
That's a good idea except for one problem:
I've written dozens of letters to my reps on these issues. Do you know what their response is? It's the same crap every time: "Rest assured that I fully understand your feelings on this matter. This is an important issue to me, and blah blah blah blah." They refuse to take sides. They refuse to say, "I support" or "I do not support" this legislation. They have forked tongues: In the end I have no damn idea which side these snakes stand on. They keep neutral on everything in the interest of getting more votes.
Oops. That last paragraph should read:
So I tell her, "What if my camera is defective and I just need a replacement?" She replies, "Oh, there's no stocking fee for that." I said, "And if I return an unopened camera for a refund?" She says, "No stocking fee." I say, "Do you see where I'm going with this?"
So return it saying that it doesn't play, and get a replacement. Don't open the replacement. Return the replacement. Pretty simple...
LOL! I had a situation like this once, too. I'd bought a digital camera at Best Buy. A week later I get a coupon for a free battery ($80 value) with purchase of a camera. So I take it in and they say, "Sorry, this must be presented at the time of purchase." So I say, "OK, I'd like to return my camera." They say, "Since it's opened, there is a 15% restocking fee." (on a $1000 camera, that's a chunk of change)
So I tell her, "What if my camera is defective and I just need a replacement?" She replies, "Oh, there's no stocking fee for that." I said, "And if I return an opened camera for a refund?" She says, "No stocking fee." I say, "Do you see where I'm going with this?"
She thinks for a minute, then frowns and hands me my free battery.
I love working stores over on their policies.
You can get a refund on almost anything. Simply be firm, but polite. If they continue to refuse, tell them, "Look, I don't care what your policies are, this is DEFECTIVE. I'm not leaving until I get a refund." Then stand there and stare at them.
I've never had someone call me on this yet. Cashiers are making minimum wage and they don't want to deal with potentially volatile situations like this, so they just give you whatever you want. To add to it, the customers behind you start to get mad at the store because they're reasonable people as well, and the cashier is wasting their time (keeping them in line longer) by arguing with you. Cashiers recognize this and will usually give you whatever you want just so you'll go away.
Worst case, go back later and try again with a different cashier. I've done this many times. People are different - if you get a stubborn one, go find someone else. Preferably a young lady with a pleasant smile. They're nice people and aren't looking for a conflict, so they usually just smile and give you your money back.
But there's also an argument that there's a responsibility of the consumer to fully inspect the merchandise. The best legal thing (ob. IANAL) for the consumer to do is simply ask the merchant "Will this work in all my standard CD players?". If the merchant says yes, you now have grounds to return it when it doesn't.
By selling it in a CD store alongside other CDs, making it look exactly like a CD, and not labeling it otherwise, they have already implied to their customers that it is, indeed, a CD. "Buyer beware" doesn't apply in the United States. We don't have to ask that question: If there is a reasonable assumption that the answer is "yes", as there is in this case, then the courts will agree the answer is "yes" whether they say so or not.
If they borrow it and can't copy/ rip it, they will go out and buy it.
No they won't. Almost everyone who is really into music these days has an MP3 player. They won't borrow it from their friend because when they ask, the friend will say, "Oh, this piece of shit? I can't rip it to my iPod."
Unfortunately for the bastard copyright owners, that friend is also likely to continue with, "So I took it back and downloaded it instead. Here, I'll make you a copy..."
That's a mono dubbing cord. You won't get a nice stereo signal out of that.
Lets overflow landfill after landfill with disposable view-once or twice DVDs, and use up those fossil fuel supplies even faster making these disposable frisbees.
Not to worry; people like me will just quit buying DVDs. No doubt they will want to increase the price of "forever DVDs" to $30-$40. So instead of filling landfills, we'll just fill our broadband pipes as we download instead.
The combinatiom of these things does nothing to stop piracy, it may even increase it.
Of course it will increase it. If you try to screw the consumer, the consumer will screw back. If my 3 day Blockbuster rental only lasts 8 hours, you're darn right I'm going to copy it in case I don't get to watching it right away. But at that point I'm now an Evil Pirate(TM), so I might as well just save myself the whole hassle of driving to Blockbuster, ripping, etc, and just download the thing.
Believe it or not, these cheapies from Compgeeks. ATA66-133 drive bay for less than $7.00. They work great.
Only thing is, they only power up when they're locked. I didn't like this, as I leave my server on 24/7 and if I need to yank a drive out because the house is on fire I won't have time to search for the key. The little metal piece that prevents you from removing the drive when it's powered up is screwed into the key mechanism. I unscrewed it and pulled it out. Now I can "lock" the case, which gives power to the drive, and still pull the drive out without unlocking it if I have to.
Also makes normal operations convenient because I don't need the key to change drives.
The OS, I'm sorry to admit, is Windows 2000 Server. It was necessary for many of the home automation apps I run. Software RAID 1. The script that backs up my documents is just a batch file executing out of Windows' scheduler. It's a simple routine that takes as input the day of the month. It then wipes that directory, recreates it, and copies my \documents directory tree into it.
The sync to the third drive is via rsync on Linux and an smbmount of the Windows volume.
No, I don't work from home, but my much of day job is maintaining a quarter petabyte archive. So I'm very careful to protect my own data. :)
No offense intended, but why didn't you just do a google search rather than asking 1.5million slashdotters?
Holy crap! There are 1.5 million of us? Now I know what to say the next time a bully asks me, "You and what army?" THE SLASHDOT ARMY!!!
I need to amend this, in case it wasn't perfectly clear:
DO NOT RELY ON RAID TO PROTECT YOUR DATA. If you do, you will lose it some day. Raid only protects against hardware failure. There are plenty of other ways you can lose data and one of them will catch up to you eventually.
If you can't afford to lose it, back it up to another drive on another computer. If you really can't afford to lose it no matter what, store your backup drive with a friend.
Software raid is plenty fast for a personal fileserver. It's not like you'll have a hundred users on it at a time. Unless you have an ancient CPU, you'll be fine.
The really best way is RAID 1 + a third drive for backups, on another system. If you can afford to pay 3 times the normal cost to store your data, this will virtually guarantee you'll never lose it.
My fileserver has a mirrored pair of drives in front mounted, hot-swap bays. I have a third drive on my workstation and I sync to that every time I add significant amounts of data to my server. The mirroring protects against drive failure and the third drive protects against server failure, operator error, filesystem corruption or other problems that can wipe out a RAID array.
Lastly, the stuff that changes often and is worth the most to me - small documents and other things I create - gets a nightly sync to the server's boot drive and I keep a month's worth of revisions. This lets me "go back in time" to retrieve things if I need to. Considering the relatively small size of this type of material, this doesn't take up a lot of space. I think the whole month's worth of revisions only takes up 10GB or so.
The hot swap bays let me yank a drive out on my way out of the house if the place catches on fire. Yes, I know I should be storing that third drive at a friend's house, but it's too inconvenient to retrieve it every time I want to backup my array. So a fire may destroy everything if I'm not home or can't safely pull a drive on my way out. I'm comfortable with that.
The hardware bought for the most part weren't just generic smart card readers/writers, they were specially designed to be able to deal with DirecTV access cards.
Let me enlighten you: DTV access cards use ASICs. It's a standard chip. I have the samn damn thing on my American Express card, for crying out loud. Nothing was "specially designed to be able to deal with DirecTV access cards", they were designed to read & write ASICs. End of story.
Just because someone wants to read and write a commodity chip, and just because that someone happens to buy from a less than reputable dealer, does not mean company x that happens to use those same commodity chips should be able to come along and say, "Har har har, you evil pirate. Bend over while our lawyers lube you up, sweet cheeks."
Congratulations on working in a completely irrelevant and off-topic Windows bash, and actually getting some crackhead to mod it up as "Interesting."
/., I see...
Bill? Is that you? Still trolling
Something tells me that smuggling isn't that easy. I'm certain that you have to go through customs in one way or another to legally get back into the states.
I doubt it. Granted, I don't own a big yacht, but somehow I doubt rich folks like Bill Gates are boarded and searched every time they return home after venturing into international waters. Now, if you're constantly meeting up with other vessels, or taking trips to certain nations, they may target you for a search. But getting a load of Nintendos on a one-time trip? Somehow I can't see there being a problem.
Also transoceanic trips in a yacht aren't so easy as they might seem.
If you can drop $100k+ on old gaming machines, chances are your yacht is plenty big enough to handle such trips.
Customs will put a stop to this so fast, it will make your head spin.
Not really. If I had $100k to blow on a bunch of old consoles, it's a safe bet I could load the stuff up on my private yacht and sail it straight to my waterfront mansion in Seattle. Screw customs.
(and it's going to be a b**ch to get some of this stuff cleared by customs in the first place)
Not really. If I had $100k to blow on a bunch of old consoles, it's a safe bet I could load the stuff up on my private yacht and sail it straight to my waterfront mansion in Seattle. Screw customs.
This seems to be just one more underhanded tactic being utilized by the record labels these days.
I've already heard this stupid tactic. They're playing the songs on AM radio where I live between talk show segments. I cruise the AM dial for talk shows to escape the terrible music today. Then afterward, "To hear more of this great music, visit Clear Channel's 98.3FM!"
What's worse is I can't do a darn thing about it. Complaining to the station doesn't work because Clear Channel owns my AM stations, too.