I find that the faster you burn CD's at, the more regular CDROM drives have issues reading them. And this isnt with cheap media either - I always use Sony or TDK or similar.
We have a nice 30 something speed plextor CDRW at work, but whenever I burn something there, I set it down to about 12 or 16 speed to make sure its going to work ok on my Pioneer DVD drive at home.
Heres what I dont understand..
on
Mandrake News
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I understand that the old business method for Linux companies of offering their full products for download, and selling box retail copies for like $29.99 is not the best one... so I understand the need for them to branch out into these more specialist versions of their OS.
But why the hell do they charge so much? The cost of that firewall package was 1,999 Euro. We bought a PIX firewall and it cost like 3,000 Euros. Considering the PIX is actually a hardware appliance as well, I dont think its that bad a deal.
The whole point about Linux distributions (for me at least) was that they undercut the opposition by being either free or ridiculously cheap.. but now they are releasing products that are priced so highly, there is hardly anything in it. Why the huge mark up?
I was looking at the very cool looking SuSE OpenExchange which is designed to compete with Exchange.. and I seriously think after looking at the web demo that it really could.. but it again is priced so damn high, its actually cheaper for us to buy MS Exchange 2000 on our educational license than it is to buy that.
..if Intel and AMD hadn't got locked into that stupid GHz battle and instead concentrated on optimizing their CPU design (rather than just ramping up the speed silly amounts) then there might have still be a few more years left before it became such a problem.
Maybe thats the way forward? Optimisations and improvements on the chips instead of raw clock speed....?
Nope - as a 'senior' support technician who manages a number of Linux boxes for a college, I am paid no more than the other technicians who admin Windows 2000 boxes, or those who manage no servers.
I agree.. well, not about it being gay, but the fact that its ugly.
After getting pretty used to Linux and a few of its WM's, I bought myself a secondhand SGI Indy (and subsequently an Indigo2) to learn a little Irix - despite the front end being a little basic looking, I found Irix a very cool system. It was easy to use, surprisingly quick even on old hardware, and very functional.
I then persuaded my boss to buy me a new Sun Blade 100 system - it came preloaded with Solaris 8. And what a dissapointment it was. Yes, I was prepared to go without eye candy and all the other toys I was used to, but CDE was just so goddamn ugly and stubborn. In this day and age there is really no excuse for such a dated and unfriendly front end to a system..
I implemented a Web Mail system where I work this year for students - downloaded for free from horde.org. Its a very powerful system and is currently serving 30,000 student accounts on a mid priced Dell server.
But back onto the topic, I have tried quite a few email applications in my time - the college where I work has recently just phased out out old POP3 Linux mail server in favour of an Exchange 2000 server. To be fair, it has been pretty good so far.
But Pine has to be one of my very favourite email apps - small, quick, and very easy to use. I even found that Windows users with no experience of *nix could get to grips with Pine pretty quickly, which is no mean feat.
Well many people were interested to see what elements of 3Dfx might show up in Nvidias latest design..
The result seems to be making bloody huge cards! I think they need to concentrate on finding ways to keep these cards SENSIBLY cool - not bolting on huge copper coolers, which expand onto a 2nd PCI slot, just to keep the GPU cool.
"The analysis was done by the CTO of an 802.11b startup called Cirond and a white paper with all the details should be posted to their site later today.."
I have just checked around some of the well known UK suppliers (Maplin Electronics and RS Electronics) to find these ultra bright LED's in blue, but I will be damned if I can find em.
The very brightest I saw was 2000MCD - and that was being sold as the highest brightness at nearly $7US for a single LED.
I have had pretty good experience using many different operating systems.. I use Linux & Windows on a daily basis, and I have had experience with a few different versions of MacOS and a few different flavours of UNIX.
I think it has improved with age.. my opinion comes in three parts.
My first experiences with OSX were with when it was still relatively new.. I remeber getting my hands on a Titanium iBook with an earlier version of OSX on it, and I absolutely loathed it. I had a little click around, enjoying the eye candy.. but then I tried to play a DVD on this fresh out of the box system and I was getting locks and freezes, the system was slow and unresponsive - I was really let down as I had been looking forward to trying OSX for a long time.
Since then, I was given the task of putting OSX on some more Titanium iBooks - I believe it was at revision 10.1 then... I pretty much decided after installing a few of them that OSX was a fantastic operating system - it was vastly improved in so many ways. Faster, more reliable, and even DVD player worked properly. The downside was that even with 512MB of RAM, the system still struggled from time to time - and I even got an out of memory error.
Most recently I got a chance to use a Dual G4 system stacked with 1GB of RAM, preloaded with 10.2 Jaguar.. this seemed to be the best version yet. Very quick, very flexible, and very stable..
Though my biggest concern was that it took that much horse power to make OSX run nicely - I wonder how it performs on lower models?
I think its the 'anal' Linux zealots who ultimately stop Linux from moving forward because they are so stuck in their ways.
If you dont like what Red Hat do then don't use their sodding distribution. There are plenty of other people out there who appreciate that Red Hat are interested in making the Linux experience as easy as possible for newer users, rather than confusing the hell out of them.
Lord knows they pump enough cash & resources into the community, and all people do is bitch about em.
You ass... why is it so many people keep making this same comment.
No, it DOESNT run at 20fps on a brand new machine - on a modest GeForce4 Ti4400 & Athlon XP2000+ the game runs perfectly (40fps+) with 4x antialias. This is not a 'new' machine by any stretch of the imagination, but it still works just fine.
I dont see how you are trying to make judgements based on this leaked code... the game is still alpha - it is NOT FINISHED YET. SO ITS HARDLY GOING TO RUN LIKE A FINAL RELEASED GAME! Optimisations have not been added - the code was designed to run on a fast platform, built specifically for E3.
Sheesh... >:|
Some performance tweaks.....
on
Doom 3 Alpha Leaked
·
· Score: 5, Informative
These are linked on some of the many different threads relating to this story, but for those of you in a rush and not wanting to look around.
Admittedly this will make the game look nowhere as amazing as it currently does, but these two tweaks (which you can enter on the console) worked wonders for me...
r_useStandardGL 1 - the default is set to '0' - using this toggle will disable the bump mapping.
r_shadows 0 - the default is set to '1' - using this toggle will disable the dynamic shadows which, whilst looking amazing, melt your computer.
Some other things worth noting that I have discovered... if you edit the 'runact.cfg' (which if you have downloaded this leaked copy, you will know you have to exec - and it takes about 5 minutes loading up textures and stuff) - if you comment out the bottom three of the top 4 'exec' statements to read like:
That 'exec runact.cfg' takes a hella lot less time and the game seems to run as normal.
One last thing.. should we even be talking about this? I know that John Carmack reads/. - I am sure it must be reassuring for him and the id team to see how much people are wanting (and enjoying) this game but he must be pretty pissed about the whole affair!
considering how much the Red Hat installer sucks (especially for inexperienced users).
Eh? You are kidding me right? I started off with Red Hat back when it was at version 5.0 - and even then I could work out the installer having come fresh from Windows.
The Red Hat installer is now easier than ever.. in fact I would probably consider it easier to use than the Windows installer! Whats so tough about it?
Pick your keyboard + mouse, pick a place to install to, pick your timezone + location, pick the type of install you want (server, workstation, etc) and off you go! It ain't exactly rocket science!
I know when we chuck a load of our old kit away in the summer break, we typically fill up a skip of old 14" monitors and crappy & dead base units - been more than a few injuries where the razor like case edging slices down your finger as you launch a unit from the back of the truck - still, its all good fun:)
Did any one else feel a little disturbed by the mac porn though..
I work as a technician / 'network engineer' at a college... We have spent a LOT of time trying to prevent our fantastic (mutter) students from getting on p2p networks but it is very difficult.
We have tried many different things, including:
* Recent installation of a firewall - it has helped a little, but some p2p apps go out on 'safe' ports like 80.. we haven't quite got to the packet filtering stage though.. this might help.
* Using some of the tools on the quite amazing Trinux security tool kit.. on our switched network, we set up a port span between the router, and a port in our office - we could then run utilites like ntop to identify who was hogging bandwith, or tcpkill all data on, for example, port 1214 (Kazaa). Very cool, very powerful, and of course it is free - I think if they have a donations page though, we should be paying a visit.
* Installing policies and software on client machines to attempt to block students from installing things like Kazaa.. has helped a great deal, but those determined enough seem to be able to circumvent it.
Maybe the RIAA need to be a little more sympathetic.. yes, in some situations companies can be using file sharing apps quite happily breaking the law. But in situations like ours, where we have spent bloody weeks of time trying to find solutions to stop it, they need to be a little more easy going! Our network has 1,500+ client workstations and only 15 or so technicicans to police it.. can be pretty tough to identify those abusing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that the faster you burn CD's at, the more regular CDROM drives have issues reading them. And this isnt with cheap media either - I always use Sony or TDK or similar.
We have a nice 30 something speed plextor CDRW at work, but whenever I burn something there, I set it down to about 12 or 16 speed to make sure its going to work ok on my Pioneer DVD drive at home.
I understand that the old business method for Linux companies of offering their full products for download, and selling box retail copies for like $29.99 is not the best one... so I understand the need for them to branch out into these more specialist versions of their OS.
But why the hell do they charge so much? The cost of that firewall package was 1,999 Euro. We bought a PIX firewall and it cost like 3,000 Euros. Considering the PIX is actually a hardware appliance as well, I dont think its that bad a deal.
The whole point about Linux distributions (for me at least) was that they undercut the opposition by being either free or ridiculously cheap.. but now they are releasing products that are priced so highly, there is hardly anything in it. Why the huge mark up?
I was looking at the very cool looking SuSE OpenExchange which is designed to compete with Exchange.. and I seriously think after looking at the web demo that it really could.. but it again is priced so damn high, its actually cheaper for us to buy MS Exchange 2000 on our educational license than it is to buy that.
..if Intel and AMD hadn't got locked into that stupid GHz battle and instead concentrated on optimizing their CPU design (rather than just ramping up the speed silly amounts) then there might have still be a few more years left before it became such a problem.
Maybe thats the way forward? Optimisations and improvements on the chips instead of raw clock speed....?
You missed the other favourite...
:)
A link to a mirror!
Nope - as a 'senior' support technician who manages a number of Linux boxes for a college, I am paid no more than the other technicians who admin Windows 2000 boxes, or those who manage no servers.
I would imagine I am pretty unique there though..
I agree.. well, not about it being gay, but the fact that its ugly.
After getting pretty used to Linux and a few of its WM's, I bought myself a secondhand SGI Indy (and subsequently an Indigo2) to learn a little Irix - despite the front end being a little basic looking, I found Irix a very cool system. It was easy to use, surprisingly quick even on old hardware, and very functional.
I then persuaded my boss to buy me a new Sun Blade 100 system - it came preloaded with Solaris 8. And what a dissapointment it was. Yes, I was prepared to go without eye candy and all the other toys I was used to, but CDE was just so goddamn ugly and stubborn. In this day and age there is really no excuse for such a dated and unfriendly front end to a system..
Thank god for GNOME is all I can say.
Its an interesting point you put across - and I just blew all my mod points as well so I cant bump it up.
I just dont know how easy it would be to merge Solaris & MacOS - would certainly be a killer company though!
Hmmm....
Indeed...
:)
I implemented a Web Mail system where I work this year for students - downloaded for free from horde.org. Its a very powerful system and is currently serving 30,000 student accounts on a mid priced Dell server.
But back onto the topic, I have tried quite a few email applications in my time - the college where I work has recently just phased out out old POP3 Linux mail server in favour of an Exchange 2000 server. To be fair, it has been pretty good so far.
But Pine has to be one of my very favourite email apps - small, quick, and very easy to use. I even found that Windows users with no experience of *nix could get to grips with Pine pretty quickly, which is no mean feat.
I'll make sure I download this version
Well many people were interested to see what elements of 3Dfx might show up in Nvidias latest design..
The result seems to be making bloody huge cards! I think they need to concentrate on finding ways to keep these cards SENSIBLY cool - not bolting on huge copper coolers, which expand onto a 2nd PCI slot, just to keep the GPU cool.
Its crazy I tells ya!
And you see, thats why I love it when people make assumptions about people based on only a single post which they made on a boring Sunday afternoon.
I have never used the cash cow saying before - it just seemed appropriate here. And believe me.. spending money has never been a problem for me.
Anonymous loser.
Thats the sound of the cash cow, getting milked for all its worth.
If they make a Star Wars cartoon, they can make a whole new range of merchandise to keep em going until Ep3 comes out..
I wish they weren't so bloody obvious about it though.
"The analysis was done by the CTO of an 802.11b startup called Cirond and a white paper with all the details should be posted to their site later today.."
/. has anything to do with it ;)
Not if
Longhorn = Windows.NET Server? The one thats currently into Release Candidate stage? And they are scrapping despite it being so near to release?
That cannot be right, surely.. unless Longhorn is the one AFTER the first Windows.NET server releases..
http://www.thinknerd.de.ad
:)
Sorry
Excellent.. thanks for those links. I have a friend in the USA so I will ask him nicely to post me a few over!
Cheers!
I have just checked around some of the well known UK suppliers (Maplin Electronics and RS Electronics) to find these ultra bright LED's in blue, but I will be damned if I can find em.
The very brightest I saw was 2000MCD - and that was being sold as the highest brightness at nearly $7US for a single LED.
Suggestions on where to buy from please?
Thanks!
I have had pretty good experience using many different operating systems.. I use Linux & Windows on a daily basis, and I have had experience with a few different versions of MacOS and a few different flavours of UNIX.
I think it has improved with age.. my opinion comes in three parts.
My first experiences with OSX were with when it was still relatively new.. I remeber getting my hands on a Titanium iBook with an earlier version of OSX on it, and I absolutely loathed it. I had a little click around, enjoying the eye candy.. but then I tried to play a DVD on this fresh out of the box system and I was getting locks and freezes, the system was slow and unresponsive - I was really let down as I had been looking forward to trying OSX for a long time.
Since then, I was given the task of putting OSX on some more Titanium iBooks - I believe it was at revision 10.1 then... I pretty much decided after installing a few of them that OSX was a fantastic operating system - it was vastly improved in so many ways. Faster, more reliable, and even DVD player worked properly. The downside was that even with 512MB of RAM, the system still struggled from time to time - and I even got an out of memory error.
Most recently I got a chance to use a Dual G4 system stacked with 1GB of RAM, preloaded with 10.2 Jaguar.. this seemed to be the best version yet. Very quick, very flexible, and very stable..
Though my biggest concern was that it took that much horse power to make OSX run nicely - I wonder how it performs on lower models?
I think its the 'anal' Linux zealots who ultimately stop Linux from moving forward because they are so stuck in their ways.
If you dont like what Red Hat do then don't use their sodding distribution. There are plenty of other people out there who appreciate that Red Hat are interested in making the Linux experience as easy as possible for newer users, rather than confusing the hell out of them.
Lord knows they pump enough cash & resources into the community, and all people do is bitch about em.
I dunno... sounds cool, but I can't help but think of the 'F-Ray' bit on a Futurama episode :
Fry: Ow, my sperm!
Bender: Wow, neat. Mind if I try that again? [he does so]
Fry: Huh! Didn't hurt that time.
You ass... why is it so many people keep making this same comment.
No, it DOESNT run at 20fps on a brand new machine - on a modest GeForce4 Ti4400 & Athlon XP2000+ the game runs perfectly (40fps+) with 4x antialias. This is not a 'new' machine by any stretch of the imagination, but it still works just fine.
I dont see how you are trying to make judgements based on this leaked code... the game is still alpha - it is NOT FINISHED YET. SO ITS HARDLY GOING TO RUN LIKE A FINAL RELEASED GAME! Optimisations have not been added - the code was designed to run on a fast platform, built specifically for E3.
Sheesh... >:|
These are linked on some of the many different threads relating to this story, but for those of you in a rush and not wanting to look around.
:
/. - I am sure it must be reassuring for him and the id team to see how much people are wanting (and enjoying) this game but he must be pretty pissed about the whole affair!
Admittedly this will make the game look nowhere as amazing as it currently does, but these two tweaks (which you can enter on the console) worked wonders for me...
r_useStandardGL 1 - the default is set to '0' - using this toggle will disable the bump mapping.
r_shadows 0 - the default is set to '1' - using this toggle will disable the dynamic shadows which, whilst looking amazing, melt your computer.
Some other things worth noting that I have discovered... if you edit the 'runact.cfg' (which if you have downloaded this leaked copy, you will know you have to exec - and it takes about 5 minutes loading up textures and stuff) - if you comment out the bottom three of the top 4 'exec' statements to read like
exec activate_demo1
#exec activate_demo2
#exec activate_demo3
#exec activate_intro
That 'exec runact.cfg' takes a hella lot less time and the game seems to run as normal.
One last thing.. should we even be talking about this? I know that John Carmack reads
considering how much the Red Hat installer sucks (especially for inexperienced users).
Eh? You are kidding me right? I started off with Red Hat back when it was at version 5.0 - and even then I could work out the installer having come fresh from Windows.
The Red Hat installer is now easier than ever.. in fact I would probably consider it easier to use than the Windows installer! Whats so tough about it?
Pick your keyboard + mouse, pick a place to install to, pick your timezone + location, pick the type of install you want (server, workstation, etc) and off you go! It ain't exactly rocket science!
On the 'new' server, I have five Moderator points which I actually spent this morning on this server :)
Ch-ching!
I wonder how many bandaids they got through?
:)
I know when we chuck a load of our old kit away in the summer break, we typically fill up a skip of old 14" monitors and crappy & dead base units - been more than a few injuries where the razor like case edging slices down your finger as you launch a unit from the back of the truck - still, its all good fun
Did any one else feel a little disturbed by the mac porn though..
I speak from experience here.
:
I work as a technician / 'network engineer' at a college... We have spent a LOT of time trying to prevent our fantastic (mutter) students from getting on p2p networks but it is very difficult.
We have tried many different things, including
* Recent installation of a firewall - it has helped a little, but some p2p apps go out on 'safe' ports like 80.. we haven't quite got to the packet filtering stage though.. this might help.
* Using some of the tools on the quite amazing Trinux security tool kit.. on our switched network, we set up a port span between the router, and a port in our office - we could then run utilites like ntop to identify who was hogging bandwith, or tcpkill all data on, for example, port 1214 (Kazaa). Very cool, very powerful, and of course it is free - I think if they have a donations page though, we should be paying a visit.
* Installing policies and software on client machines to attempt to block students from installing things like Kazaa.. has helped a great deal, but those determined enough seem to be able to circumvent it.
Maybe the RIAA need to be a little more sympathetic.. yes, in some situations companies can be using file sharing apps quite happily breaking the law. But in situations like ours, where we have spent bloody weeks of time trying to find solutions to stop it, they need to be a little more easy going! Our network has 1,500+ client workstations and only 15 or so technicicans to police it.. can be pretty tough to identify those abusing it.