I keep seeing this line parroted on Slashdot, but I don't understand it. Almost every CD I buy is enjoyable from start to finish. I may have a couple of songs that I like better than the rest, but generally I rip the entire CD, put it on my iPod and/or car MP3/CD player, and listen to the album from start to finish.
If I ever really wanted to hear only one specific song I could buy it on iTunes for $0.99, but I've never done that because pretty much all the music I like to listen to comes in the form of a CD full of music that I like.
Perhaps if you're finding that you don't like the CDs you buy, you're simply buying the wrong CDs.
That's correct for any responsibly run business. Unfortunately that isn't all of them, but there are some.
I'm on the board of a non-profit community theatre and we haven't advertised in years, but we know we need to. The problem is that every penny counts and we can't afford to spend money on advertising to people who aren't interested. We can only afford to advertise if the advertisement is actually going to bring in enough additional money in ticket sales to cover the cost of the ad. (On average at least, obviously you can't predict the exact response to an ad down to the dollar.)
Sure, if a company has a multi-million or multi-billion dollar advertising budget and only loose controls on how the money is spent then self-satisfied advertising execs can generate crap ads that just piss people off. But overall companies hate wasting money, so it just comes down to control and feedback. I'm sure the advertising and marketing people love controlling a large budget with no accountability, but the top level management of the company would love to have accountability and prevent the advertising and marketing people from spending any dime that doesn't generate revenue. The problem is there isn't much ability for top management to do that.
There's this thing that businesses do, called "make a profit." I think you're confusing "make a profit" with "be my friend" or "give me some cool stuff for free/at a discount."
Please explain why you won't buy the season on DVD at full price. You're a loyal fan, are you not?
Nope, I'm not a loyal fan. Maybe I'm not doing my duty, but I never signed a contract, so screw'em. I like many shows, but I don't feel any obligation to fill their coffers with my hard earned cash unless the cost falls within my target price range.
Many's the time I've been in a Borders or Barnes and Noble and I've wandered over to the DVD TV shows section with the thought of buying a series I enjoyed that I haven't seen in a while. I very rarely complete the purchase, though. Once I see the price tag the momentary urge to re-watch that show I enjoyed fades.
You're right that businesses are trying to "make a profit" but you've overlooked the fact that price influences demand and the highest price does not necessarily equal the highest profit. Perhaps I'm unique and nobody else ever gets the urge to buy a DVD then decides against it based on price. But if by chance I'm not unique, then there's a certain segment of the population that would be handing over money if and only if the producers can get the price into our "impulse buy" range.
Whether or not we're a big enough group to justify winning us over is a question that neither you nor I can definitively answer.
No, the ISPs are creating two (or more) classes of users because of money. NAT is completely independent of this. Do you think that an ISP that bans servers in its TOS or caps bandwidth based on capricious and unpublished policies is suddenly change its stripes just because of IPv6?
NAT isn't the greatest thing in the universe, but it's hardly evil and it isn't the root cause of any major problems. Problems may exist in circumstances where NAT is commonly found, but in general if using RFC1918 addresses causes you problems it's because you didn't plan sufficiently or because you aren't using the appropriate hardware, software, and/or service for your needs. IPv6 is hardly going to help you in that case.
Ok, the posts by other folks above clearly explain it, but I'll take a swing at it since people are still missing it.
NAT meant translating an IP address to another IP address.
PAT means translating a TCP (or I suppose UDP) port to another TCP (or UDP) port.
You can do one, the other, or both, depending on the capabilities of the software doing the translating. Obviously the cababilities of a sub $100 home router may not be the same as a custom configured Linux/BSD/Windows firewall/routing stack or a dedicated $10000+ firewall or load balancer.
If you want two web servers behind a NAT device to both run on port 80 then you need two public IPs... duh! That's hardly a showstopper. Some consumer/home ISPs won't provide multiple IPs, but some will and absolutely all business class ISPs will provide multiple IPs. You may have to pay extra for the extra IPs.
Any halfway decent firewall or router will have absolutely no difficulty translating 2 or 20 or 200 registered IP addresses into 2, 20, or 200 unregistered addresses of servers on your privately addressed network.
Need more power? Load balancers (available as both software and dedicated hardware) will take incoming requests to a single virtual IP and dole them out to hundreds of machines with private IPs and they use NAT to do it.
I can even distribute requests to servers based on any portion of the URL if I want to. Not just hostname, but any pattern anywhere within the full URL can be used to distribute requests to different servers.
I can put a dozen different machines on a dozen different IP addresses while simultaneously having half of them plus a separate bunch of fifty other machines all appear as a single high capacity server on a single other IP address. On top of that I can allow all of them to run their web server on a high numbered port so that the httpd doesn't need to run as root (great security enhancement) while appearing to the public Internet that all my servers are running on port 80 or any other port I choose. Nobody will ever know or care that all those machines have 10.0.0.0/8 addresses unless some developer is stupid enough to embed the machine's IP address in dynamically generated content. Any developer who does that needs to rethink the design because there's never any real need to do that; there's always a better alternative.
There is nothing wrong with NAT or PAT. You're just upset about the limitations of consumer grade hardware and consumer ISP service levels.
I'm guessing you've never used Outlook. Meeting notices work fine. It's a heck of a lot easier to add a meeting to my calendar by clicking one button in the meeting notice than by copying and pasting meeting details from an email app to a separate calendar app.
I'm sure there are other ways to achieve this now, but Outlook has been doing it for at least 5 years. Probably longer, I don't remember when my company rolled out Outlook.
I'm not sure if you're talking about equipment that has been donated to you or if you're talking about buying equipment that you are going to donate. If the later, you might consider Telco equipment designed to run on -48V DC power. It's going to be more expensive than a cheap Dell, but they're built to more demanding standards. A quick Google turned up a couple of links:
Alternatively, you could look at products geared for automotive use. Look at what people are using for in car computers running directly off of a 12V supply. They should also be pretty robust, although I think the Telco standards are probably more demanding (though buying NEBS3 certified equipment will really cost you.)
By running off a DC battery directly you provide a buffer against the flaky AC power distribution while saving the complexity of a UPS doing AC-DC-AC.
One 50 cent cost isn't going to break anybody, but is this the only 50 cent cost? How many government regulations are you willing to justify on the basis that it's "only 50 cents"?
One hundred government regulations could cost me $50/month. One thousand - $500/month. How can I even begin to estimate how much of my monthly budget is being eaten by government regulations? Sure, I can look at my income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes, but it's much harder to estimate what percentage of the purchase price of things I buy is due to the vendor (or upstream providers) covering costs of government regulations.
Considering pharma only, what percentage of a drug's cost is due to a myriad of FDA regulations that only amount to 50 cents individually?
Well, if he works for Apple and used his office address to register his personal web site (perhaps to avoid publishing his home address) then that might explain why he had a bunch of 15" LCDs without bezels or power supplies. He says in the article that he had a bunch of unwanted LCDs from work. Now that Apple doesn't make iMacs with anything smaller than a 17" LCD they may well have leftover 15" models that they can't use and can't resell.
I want a DIVX to TV playback device and I have a VIA Eden based PC in a tiny case too small to hold a TV capture card. MythTV won't install because the only options are "back end" which requires a capture card and "front end" which requires a separate back end box. I haven't found a way to use MythTV as a playback only box.
My plan was to have a back end box, but knoppmyth wouldn't boot on one machine I had available and on the other machine it boots, proceeds through much of the install and then the install simply stops without error and drops to a command prompt. The command prompt is functional, but the machine won't boot when I restart it.
I tried to install it using based on Debian, but the apt source that was recommended didn't exist. I tried the Gentoo based install which is claimed to be very easy (although slow) but Gentoo wouldn't boot on the box I tried so I reinstalled Win2K which is working fine.
My MythTv plans are on hold for now. I've invested at least 20 or 30 hours with absolutely zero to show for it. My Tivo has been working great for several years and less that 2 hours worth of "maintenance" in that time and part of that was testing its dialup over AT&T CallVantage VoIP when I switched off my POTS line.
If my Series 1 Tivo were to die of a hardware problem I would not hesitate to buy a new Series 2 Tivo. I haven't looked closely at Tivo's home media option since it doesn't apply to my old Tivo, but if I got a new Tivo I probably wouldn't hesitate to spend the extra money. MythTV has cost me $1000-2000 in time and underutilized hardware. (That's just MythTV. I've done lots of experimentation with Linux over the years and most of that taught me useful things. My MythTV installs just failed without teaching me much of anything so I have to call that a waste of time).
I think there's an element of luck in the "I installed MythTV in an hour" stories. There's lots of hardware out there that won't run MythTV and you won't know whether yours will unless you invest time either trying to install or researching hardware.
Buying a Hauppage 350 card (definitely listed as supported) was a waste of money unless I identify what other component is preventing me from installing MythTV.
I bought the Hauppage specifically because the ATI All In Wonder in my Windows box is not supported by MythTV.
What tools are popular for IP address management? Most of what I've seen is pretty basic. Are there any tools that are good at combining device inventory managment with address management and assigning addresses to new devices according to configurable rules?
For example, if I need to add 50 new web servers and each web server needs a redundant pair of NICs sharing one IP plus. Plus allowing multiple IPs per device or multiple devices per IP (e.g. VRRP, HSRP).
Spreadsheets seem faster than web based systems if it takes multiple queries to get all the info you need. A flexible query system and integration of address management with server monitoring seems like it would be very useful, but I haven't come found anything yet.
I thought I'd give "good enough" a try. I wish I hadn't.
I hate my Sony T616 phone and miss my Nokia 8260.
SMS on the T616 is so slow and hourglass-ridden as to be almost unusable. My old Nokia 8260 was much much faster. The $80 bluetooth adapter was a waste of money. Syncing my T616 to Outlook just sucks compared to syncing my Palm to Palm Desktop. The camera in the T616 was a neat gimmick, but it's worthless. If it's worth taking a picture of and all I've got is the T616 I don't even bother taking the picture because I know it's going to suck.
I just don't buy the argument. "Good enough" isn't.
I have a couple of domains registered and pointed at a cheap shared host. I generally send mail using either Mutt over ssh or Mozilla via several different SMTP servers (cablem modem ISP, web host ISP, work SMTP server) and I routinely edit my from address to use whatever userid and whichever of my domains is relevant.
I guess this change means that hotmail users won't be able to receive mail from me unless I read up on SPF and figure out how to get the appropriate configurations into my bargain basement DNS and hosting configs. I hope this doesn't require any administrative privliges since I don't run my own DNS or mail servers for my domains. You can't do that sort of thing for less than $20/month.
Has anyone had any experience with software media front ends?
I'm pretty happy with my current means of recording but I would really like to have a diskless VIA EPIA based machine that provided a nice GUI using TV output and IR remote input to browse all the video files on other networked machines (SMB, NFS, etc.) Right now, video playback involves VNC and a keyboard/mouse.
The problem with MythTV is that it REQUIRES a capture card in the backend box. You allegedly can create front end boxes without a capture card, but you must have at least one backend with a capture card. I'd like to have just a media front end, not necessarily a Myth front end.
I thought that happened years ago. When I was using Linux on my desktop I used WindowMaker because both KDE and Gnome were so much more bloated than Microsoft Windows.
Nowadays I use Win2K Pro as my main desktop and use putty to access Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris machines via ssh. I also have a Debian machine hooked up to my KVM, but there's no X on that box, only virtual consoles.
I'm trying to build a MythTV box but KnoppMyth crashes halfway through the install and Gentoo won't recognize the Ethernet NIC. Debian runs fine, so I guess I'm going to try manually installing MythTV on Debian. I assume MythTV uses a lightweight streamlined GUI. I certainly wouldn't want KDE or Gnome on my TV.
I just haven't found any need to use KDE or Gnome. They're bad Microsoft clones from what I've seen. Linux and Unix have many benefits, but I wouldn't consider KDE or Gnome to be all that important to me.
Can any of these firmware replacements provide a solid DMZ yet? I looked at the SVEA site and it looks like it's problematic. The default is to bridge the wireless and wired segment and things don't necessarily work if you break that bridge.
In my opinion, this is critical. You never want to bridge your wired and wireless segments unless you're sure that no one else is in radio range.
I have a Sony T616 which probably doesn't quite qualify as the original poster's definition of "smart phone" but I use the calendar feature extensively (as well as 2 way text messaging and the contact list)
My only complaint is that the Bluetooth sync capabilities aren't as useful to me as I would like. At work I am limited to Windows and it seems that the only two choices for Bluetooth sync are Outlook and Outlook Express.
Searching Google for PIM and Bluetooth or calendar and Bluetooth doesn't turn up much useful.
I'd like to be able to view and add appointments to my phone using my computer monitor and keyboard, but I don't want to badly enough to sync my phone to Outlook.
Searching Google for PIM and Bluetooth or calendar and Bluetooth doesn't turn up much useful.
Runs Windows NT speedily. Startup times for Office apps and Visio are a bit slow, but everything is responsive once it's running. Mozilla is a dog, it hangs the machine for 5-10 seconds whenever I minimize. But as long as I don't click the minimize button Mozilla is completely usable.
I have a 1.4GHz AMD machine at home, but at work I'm stuck with the Pentium 866 MHz.
KDE and GNOME were also dog slow on the VIA EPIA system I tried them on. It's been relegated to firewall duty and doesn't even have X11 installed anymore. It ran Windows 2000 pretty well as an experiment before I wiped it and did a minimal Debian install.
I submitted a comment on the FCC page concerning the constitutional purpose of copyright.
I am not in favor of copyright violation. I do think unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material should be illegal. However, the US Constitution clearly intends for all copyrighted material to eventually enter the public domain.
Current lengths of copyright are too long in my opinion. Technological mechanisms that prevent copying altogether are simply unconstitutional. That is fact, not opinion. All copyrighted material must allow the recipient to retain a persistant copy so that they may excercise their constitutional right to distribute copies after the copyright expires.
Other countries may vary, but permanent copyright is clearly unconstitutional in the United States.
Your problem is Csoft. I have an account with them too. They offer a decent service at a good price, but they do enjoy their BOFH status. They're quick to blame their customers for problems. Because their prices are low, I don't think they give a damn about losing individual customers.
I think the suggestion mentioned elsewhere about setting up a subdomain is best.
I'm one of the non-believers, I guess. I'm often in situations (theatre usually) where I don't want my phone making noise. My phone is on vibrate only mode nearly 24x7.
Also, I often let calls go to voice mail if it isn't a convenient time to talk. I do this not only when I need to be silent, but also when I'm just in the middle of something and don't want to be interupted.
Finally, I work in a building that shields cell phone transmissions. Several times a day I will get close to a window and my voice mail indicator will let me know how many people left messages and I can call them back.
How would PTT deal with any of these, quite common, situations?
Wow, using Mozilla 1.4, sure enough all I get is a flat out IE required message. The URL that I get redirected to is even called http://www.buymusic.com/ierequired.htm
It's not even a.html file, it's.htm so I guess they're hosting the site on a DOS machine.
I'm not an AOL user, but I find the term "blog" stupid, not confusing.
It's a freaking diary, keep it under your bed. What makes you thing the rest of the world gives a damn. And if you're too stupid or lazy to say "weblog" and have to save two characters, then I guess it makes sense that you're too stupid and lazy to learn something as simple as HTML.
Wake me when I can get affordable IP to my laptop
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't even care about high bandwidth, wireless broadband, 3G, 4G, 6G, whatever.
If I could get a modem speed connection to my laptop for a reasonable price (i.e. $30/month for 10-20 hours/month of web browsing) I'd buy it. More than that I just couldn't justify unless I had a business need for it.
Just because you can SSH doesn't necesarily mean the problem is solved. If your firewall at work is restrictive, it may allow port 22 outbound but nothing else. In particular, ports 80 and 443 may be proxied rather than permitted through the firewall.
If you are on a typical residential ISP you may not have the option of obtaining multiple IP addresses. This means that from work your only IP connectivity to home is a single IP address and a single port.
If this is the case, you can either forward this port or use it for interactive SSH, but not both.
All the SSH port forwarding docs I've read assume you can choose an arbitrary unused port for forwarding. That's fine, but when you're behind a firewall you don't control you may not be able to initiate connections to arbitrary ports.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep seeing this line parroted on Slashdot, but I don't understand it. Almost every CD I buy is enjoyable from start to finish. I may have a couple of songs that I like better than the rest, but generally I rip the entire CD, put it on my iPod and/or car MP3/CD player, and listen to the album from start to finish.
If I ever really wanted to hear only one specific song I could buy it on iTunes for $0.99, but I've never done that because pretty much all the music I like to listen to comes in the form of a CD full of music that I like.
Perhaps if you're finding that you don't like the CDs you buy, you're simply buying the wrong CDs.
That's correct for any responsibly run business. Unfortunately that isn't all of them, but there are some.
I'm on the board of a non-profit community theatre and we haven't advertised in years, but we know we need to. The problem is that every penny counts and we can't afford to spend money on advertising to people who aren't interested. We can only afford to advertise if the advertisement is actually going to bring in enough additional money in ticket sales to cover the cost of the ad. (On average at least, obviously you can't predict the exact response to an ad down to the dollar.)
Sure, if a company has a multi-million or multi-billion dollar advertising budget and only loose controls on how the money is spent then self-satisfied advertising execs can generate crap ads that just piss people off. But overall companies hate wasting money, so it just comes down to control and feedback. I'm sure the advertising and marketing people love controlling a large budget with no accountability, but the top level management of the company would love to have accountability and prevent the advertising and marketing people from spending any dime that doesn't generate revenue. The problem is there isn't much ability for top management to do that.
There's this thing that businesses do, called "make a profit." I think you're confusing "make a profit" with "be my friend" or "give me some cool stuff for free/at a discount."
Please explain why you won't buy the season on DVD at full price. You're a loyal fan, are you not?
Nope, I'm not a loyal fan. Maybe I'm not doing my duty, but I never signed a contract, so screw'em. I like many shows, but I don't feel any obligation to fill their coffers with my hard earned cash unless the cost falls within my target price range.
Many's the time I've been in a Borders or Barnes and Noble and I've wandered over to the DVD TV shows section with the thought of buying a series I enjoyed that I haven't seen in a while. I very rarely complete the purchase, though. Once I see the price tag the momentary urge to re-watch that show I enjoyed fades.
You're right that businesses are trying to "make a profit" but you've overlooked the fact that price influences demand and the highest price does not necessarily equal the highest profit. Perhaps I'm unique and nobody else ever gets the urge to buy a DVD then decides against it based on price. But if by chance I'm not unique, then there's a certain segment of the population that would be handing over money if and only if the producers can get the price into our "impulse buy" range.
Whether or not we're a big enough group to justify winning us over is a question that neither you nor I can definitively answer.
No, the ISPs are creating two (or more) classes of users because of money. NAT is completely independent of this. Do you think that an ISP that bans servers in its TOS or caps bandwidth based on capricious and unpublished policies is suddenly change its stripes just because of IPv6?
NAT isn't the greatest thing in the universe, but it's hardly evil and it isn't the root cause of any major problems. Problems may exist in circumstances where NAT is commonly found, but in general if using RFC1918 addresses causes you problems it's because you didn't plan sufficiently or because you aren't using the appropriate hardware, software, and/or service for your needs. IPv6 is hardly going to help you in that case.
Ok, the posts by other folks above clearly explain it, but I'll take a swing at it since people are still missing it.
... duh! That's hardly a showstopper. Some consumer/home ISPs won't provide multiple IPs, but some will and absolutely all business class ISPs will provide multiple IPs. You may have to pay extra for the extra IPs.
NAT meant translating an IP address to another IP address.
PAT means translating a TCP (or I suppose UDP) port to another TCP (or UDP) port.
You can do one, the other, or both, depending on the capabilities of the software doing the translating. Obviously the cababilities of a sub $100 home router may not be the same as a custom configured Linux/BSD/Windows firewall/routing stack or a dedicated $10000+ firewall or load balancer.
If you want two web servers behind a NAT device to both run on port 80 then you need two public IPs
Any halfway decent firewall or router will have absolutely no difficulty translating 2 or 20 or 200 registered IP addresses into 2, 20, or 200 unregistered addresses of servers on your privately addressed network.
Need more power? Load balancers (available as both software and dedicated hardware) will take incoming requests to a single virtual IP and dole them out to hundreds of machines with private IPs and they use NAT to do it.
I can even distribute requests to servers based on any portion of the URL if I want to. Not just hostname, but any pattern anywhere within the full URL can be used to distribute requests to different servers.
I can put a dozen different machines on a dozen different IP addresses while simultaneously having half of them plus a separate bunch of fifty other machines all appear as a single high capacity server on a single other IP address. On top of that I can allow all of them to run their web server on a high numbered port so that the httpd doesn't need to run as root (great security enhancement) while appearing to the public Internet that all my servers are running on port 80 or any other port I choose. Nobody will ever know or care that all those machines have 10.0.0.0/8 addresses unless some developer is stupid enough to embed the machine's IP address in dynamically generated content. Any developer who does that needs to rethink the design because there's never any real need to do that; there's always a better alternative.
There is nothing wrong with NAT or PAT. You're just upset about the limitations of consumer grade hardware and consumer ISP service levels.
I'm guessing you've never used Outlook. Meeting notices work fine. It's a heck of a lot easier to add a meeting to my calendar by clicking one button in the meeting notice than by copying and pasting meeting details from an email app to a separate calendar app.
I'm sure there are other ways to achieve this now, but Outlook has been doing it for at least 5 years. Probably longer, I don't remember when my company rolled out Outlook.
I'm not sure if you're talking about equipment that has been donated to you or if you're talking about buying equipment that you are going to donate. If the later, you might consider Telco equipment designed to run on -48V DC power. It's going to be more expensive than a cheap Dell, but they're built to more demanding standards. A quick Google turned up a couple of links:
w are/tour/briefs/telco_server.html
x -48v-dc/
http://www.angstrom.com/products/viper.htm
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hard
Or just a -48V power supply.
http://www.zantech.com.au/zantech/power-supply-at
Alternatively, you could look at products geared for automotive use. Look at what people are using for in car computers running directly off of a 12V supply. They should also be pretty robust, although I think the Telco standards are probably more demanding (though buying NEBS3 certified equipment will really cost you.)
By running off a DC battery directly you provide a buffer against the flaky AC power distribution while saving the complexity of a UPS doing AC-DC-AC.
One 50 cent cost isn't going to break anybody, but is this the only 50 cent cost? How many government regulations are you willing to justify on the basis that it's "only 50 cents"?
One hundred government regulations could cost me $50/month. One thousand - $500/month. How can I even begin to estimate how much of my monthly budget is being eaten by government regulations? Sure, I can look at my income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes, but it's much harder to estimate what percentage of the purchase price of things I buy is due to the vendor (or upstream providers) covering costs of government regulations.
Considering pharma only, what percentage of a drug's cost is due to a myriad of FDA regulations that only amount to 50 cents individually?
Well, if he works for Apple and used his office address to register his personal web site (perhaps to avoid publishing his home address) then that might explain why he had a bunch of 15" LCDs without bezels or power supplies. He says in the article that he had a bunch of unwanted LCDs from work. Now that Apple doesn't make iMacs with anything smaller than a 17" LCD they may well have leftover 15" models that they can't use and can't resell.
I want a DIVX to TV playback device and I have a VIA Eden based PC in a tiny case too small to hold a TV capture card. MythTV won't install because the only options are "back end" which requires a capture card and "front end" which requires a separate back end box. I haven't found a way to use MythTV as a playback only box.
My plan was to have a back end box, but knoppmyth wouldn't boot on one machine I had available and on the other machine it boots, proceeds through much of the install and then the install simply stops without error and drops to a command prompt. The command prompt is functional, but the machine won't boot when I restart it.
I tried to install it using based on Debian, but the apt source that was recommended didn't exist. I tried the Gentoo based install which is claimed to be very easy (although slow) but Gentoo wouldn't boot on the box I tried so I reinstalled Win2K which is working fine.
My MythTv plans are on hold for now. I've invested at least 20 or 30 hours with absolutely zero to show for it. My Tivo has been working great for several years and less that 2 hours worth of "maintenance" in that time and part of that was testing its dialup over AT&T CallVantage VoIP when I switched off my POTS line.
If my Series 1 Tivo were to die of a hardware problem I would not hesitate to buy a new Series 2 Tivo. I haven't looked closely at Tivo's home media option since it doesn't apply to my old Tivo, but if I got a new Tivo I probably wouldn't hesitate to spend the extra money. MythTV has cost me $1000-2000 in time and underutilized hardware. (That's just MythTV. I've done lots of experimentation with Linux over the years and most of that taught me useful things. My MythTV installs just failed without teaching me much of anything so I have to call that a waste of time).
I think there's an element of luck in the "I installed MythTV in an hour" stories. There's lots of hardware out there that won't run MythTV and you won't know whether yours will unless you invest time either trying to install or researching hardware.
Buying a Hauppage 350 card (definitely listed as supported) was a waste of money unless I identify what other component is preventing me from installing MythTV.
I bought the Hauppage specifically because the ATI All In Wonder in my Windows box is not supported by MythTV.
What tools are popular for IP address management? Most of what I've seen is pretty basic. Are there any tools that are good at combining device inventory managment with address management and assigning addresses to new devices according to configurable rules?
For example, if I need to add 50 new web servers and each web server needs a redundant pair of NICs sharing one IP plus. Plus allowing multiple IPs per device or multiple devices per IP (e.g. VRRP, HSRP).
Spreadsheets seem faster than web based systems if it takes multiple queries to get all the info you need. A flexible query system and integration of address management with server monitoring seems like it would be very useful, but I haven't come found anything yet.
I thought I'd give "good enough" a try. I wish I hadn't.
I hate my Sony T616 phone and miss my Nokia 8260.
SMS on the T616 is so slow and hourglass-ridden as to be almost unusable. My old Nokia 8260 was much much faster. The $80 bluetooth adapter was a waste of money. Syncing my T616 to Outlook just sucks compared to syncing my Palm to Palm Desktop. The camera in the T616 was a neat gimmick, but it's worthless. If it's worth taking a picture of and all I've got is the T616 I don't even bother taking the picture because I know it's going to suck.
I just don't buy the argument. "Good enough" isn't.
I have a couple of domains registered and pointed at a cheap shared host. I generally send mail using either Mutt over ssh or Mozilla via several different SMTP servers (cablem modem ISP, web host ISP, work SMTP server) and I routinely edit my from address to use whatever userid and whichever of my domains is relevant.
I guess this change means that hotmail users won't be able to receive mail from me unless I read up on SPF and figure out how to get the appropriate configurations into my bargain basement DNS and hosting configs. I hope this doesn't require any administrative privliges since I don't run my own DNS or mail servers for my domains. You can't do that sort of thing for less than $20/month.
Has anyone had any experience with software media front ends?
I'm pretty happy with my current means of recording but I would really like to have a diskless VIA EPIA based machine that provided a nice GUI using TV output and IR remote input to browse all the video files on other networked machines (SMB, NFS, etc.) Right now, video playback involves VNC and a keyboard/mouse.
The problem with MythTV is that it REQUIRES a capture card in the backend box. You allegedly can create front end boxes without a capture card, but you must have at least one backend with a capture card. I'd like to have just a media front end, not necessarily a Myth front end.
I thought that happened years ago. When I was using Linux on my desktop I used WindowMaker because both KDE and Gnome were so much more bloated than Microsoft Windows.
Nowadays I use Win2K Pro as my main desktop and use putty to access Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris machines via ssh. I also have a Debian machine hooked up to my KVM, but there's no X on that box, only virtual consoles.
I'm trying to build a MythTV box but KnoppMyth crashes halfway through the install and Gentoo won't recognize the Ethernet NIC. Debian runs fine, so I guess I'm going to try manually installing MythTV on Debian. I assume MythTV uses a lightweight streamlined GUI. I certainly wouldn't want KDE or Gnome on my TV.
I just haven't found any need to use KDE or Gnome. They're bad Microsoft clones from what I've seen. Linux and Unix have many benefits, but I wouldn't consider KDE or Gnome to be all that important to me.
Can any of these firmware replacements provide a solid DMZ yet? I looked at the SVEA site and it looks like it's problematic. The default is to bridge the wireless and wired segment and things don't necessarily work if you break that bridge.
In my opinion, this is critical. You never want to bridge your wired and wireless segments unless you're sure that no one else is in radio range.
I have a Sony T616 which probably doesn't quite qualify as the original poster's definition of "smart phone" but I use the calendar feature extensively (as well as 2 way text messaging and the contact list)
My only complaint is that the Bluetooth sync capabilities aren't as useful to me as I would like. At work I am limited to Windows and it seems that the only two choices for Bluetooth sync are Outlook and Outlook Express.
Searching Google for PIM and Bluetooth or calendar and Bluetooth doesn't turn up much useful.
I'd like to be able to view and add appointments to my phone using my computer monitor and keyboard, but I don't want to badly enough to sync my phone to Outlook.
Searching Google for PIM and Bluetooth or calendar and Bluetooth doesn't turn up much useful.
PIII-866, 384MB RAM (maxed out), 15GB drive.
Runs Windows NT speedily. Startup times for Office apps and Visio are a bit slow, but everything is responsive once it's running. Mozilla is a dog, it hangs the machine for 5-10 seconds whenever I minimize. But as long as I don't click the minimize button Mozilla is completely usable.
I have a 1.4GHz AMD machine at home, but at work I'm stuck with the Pentium 866 MHz.
KDE and GNOME were also dog slow on the VIA EPIA system I tried them on. It's been relegated to firewall duty and doesn't even have X11 installed anymore. It ran Windows 2000 pretty well as an experiment before I wiped it and did a minimal Debian install.
I submitted a comment on the FCC page concerning the constitutional purpose of copyright.
I am not in favor of copyright violation. I do think unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material should be illegal. However, the US Constitution clearly intends for all copyrighted material to eventually enter the public domain.
Current lengths of copyright are too long in my opinion. Technological mechanisms that prevent copying altogether are simply unconstitutional. That is fact, not opinion. All copyrighted material must allow the recipient to retain a persistant copy so that they may excercise their constitutional right to distribute copies after the copyright expires.
Other countries may vary, but permanent copyright is clearly unconstitutional in the United States.
Your problem is Csoft. I have an account with them too. They offer a decent service at a good price, but they do enjoy their BOFH status. They're quick to blame their customers for problems. Because their prices are low, I don't think they give a damn about losing individual customers.
I think the suggestion mentioned elsewhere about setting up a subdomain is best.
I'm one of the non-believers, I guess. I'm often in situations (theatre usually) where I don't want my phone making noise. My phone is on vibrate only mode nearly 24x7.
Also, I often let calls go to voice mail if it isn't a convenient time to talk. I do this not only when I need to be silent, but also when I'm just in the middle of something and don't want to be interupted.
Finally, I work in a building that shields cell phone transmissions. Several times a day I will get close to a window and my voice mail indicator will let me know how many people left messages and I can call them back.
How would PTT deal with any of these, quite common, situations?
Wow, using Mozilla 1.4, sure enough all I get is a flat out IE required message. The URL that I get redirected to is even called http://www.buymusic.com/ierequired.htm
It's not even a .html file, it's .htm so I guess they're hosting the site on a DOS machine.
Oh well, cheap-cds.com
I'm not an AOL user, but I find the term "blog" stupid, not confusing.
It's a freaking diary, keep it under your bed. What makes you thing the rest of the world gives a damn. And if you're too stupid or lazy to say "weblog" and have to save two characters, then I guess it makes sense that you're too stupid and lazy to learn something as simple as HTML.
I don't even care about high bandwidth, wireless broadband, 3G, 4G, 6G, whatever.
If I could get a modem speed connection to my laptop for a reasonable price (i.e. $30/month for 10-20 hours/month of web browsing) I'd buy it. More than that I just couldn't justify unless I had a business need for it.
Just because you can SSH doesn't necesarily mean the problem is solved. If your firewall at work is restrictive, it may allow port 22 outbound but nothing else. In particular, ports 80 and 443 may be proxied rather than permitted through the firewall.
If you are on a typical residential ISP you may not have the option of obtaining multiple IP addresses. This means that from work your only IP connectivity to home is a single IP address and a single port.
If this is the case, you can either forward this port or use it for interactive SSH, but not both.
All the SSH port forwarding docs I've read assume you can choose an arbitrary unused port for forwarding. That's fine, but when you're behind a firewall you don't control you may not be able to initiate connections to arbitrary ports.