Sending back a dead drive once in a while and extrapolating that the manufacturer produces shitty drives is one thing. Getting three bad drives in a row from one manufacturer and having them all fail after a month or two, OTOH...I think that's reasonable justification for swearing off of that supplier.
From your story it sounds like all three 5.1GB Maxtors were the same model (since they were replacements for each other). Part of my point is that every manufacturer is going to produce bad drives and bad models of drives. Why make the leap from the bad experience with a particular model of Maxtor drive to a conclusion about Maxtor drives in general?
Those three were all the same model...but they're not the only Maxtors that have croaked on me. A couple of years ago, a 20GB drive went tits-up after about a month...just like the 5.1s. (I would never have bought it in the first place if PC Club had had another brand in stock at the time...when I took it back, they had WD in stock.) More recently, I just RMA'd an 80GB drive that started developing a high-pitched seek noise after 9 months. When you consider that no other brand has that poor a track record in my experience (other drives are usually good for at least a couple of years), I think you can see why you couldn't pay me to take a Maxtor. (I'm not even sure I'd take a one of their relabled Quantums, as there's no telling what corners Maxtor has cut with those drives...and Quantum used to be one of the better drives you could get.)
What's weird about this is that people who are otherwise rational will take a single experience with a bad drive and use it to justify an opinion that all drives from that manufacturer are unreliable. It reminds me of D&D players who will, after rolling a d20 four or five times, decide that it "rolls high."
Sending back a dead drive once in a while and extrapolating that the manufacturer produces shitty drives is one thing. Getting three bad drives in a row from one manufacturer and having them all fail after a month or two, OTOH...I think that's reasonable justification for swearing off of that supplier.
I haven't had Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, or IBM fail like that on me. I did go through a string of three 5.1GB Maxtors that died a month or two apart before having the store switch the drive to a WD (which still works four years later).
If, sometime in the near future, someone tells me not to buy a cheap-ass OEM IBM IDE drive to use in a critical server, saying "remember the 120GXP?", I'll probably listen to them.
If it's a "critical server," an IDE drive doesn't belong in it. You spend the extra $$$ for SCSI. (Hell, my home server uses a pair of Barracuda 4s (ST15150W), and while it'd suck if it crashed, it's not what most people would call "critical.")
Ick...it's a wonder they're still in business. While the 130MB Maxtor in my parents' ten-year-old PS/1 still works, I have yet to see a newer Maxtor last a year. An 80GB drive in one of my work machines held out for 9 months before it started making weird head noises. A 20GB drive purchased a couple of years ago and a string of three 5.1GB drives purchased four years ago all crapped out after 1-3 months.
By comparison, I haven't had an IBM go bad on me. I've had a 45GB 75GXP at home for a little over a year and a couple of 60GB 60GXPs at work for the past few months. I just added a couple of 60GB 120GXPs to a machine at home (the same machine with the 75GXP) in RAID-0 to speed up video editing.
I suspect that most of the problems people see with IBM drives are brought on by inadequate cooling (stacking several drives with little or no separation and no forced-air cooling), crappy power supplies, or overclocking. The drives in the home machine have an 80mm fan in front of them to force air through the stack and are powered by a 330W Enermax. The work machines have only one drive each, installed in the lowest drive bay. (The power supplies are whatever was in the case...if it helps, they're AMD-certified for the 1.4-GHz Athlon XPs that they power.)
Of course, one of the best had to have been the Deathtongue album in one of the Bloom County books - Opus on Tuba, and Bill on the Electric Tongue. Cool stuff. I've long since lost the album - I wonder if gnutella has it...
Billy and the Boingers Bootleg...still have mine, but I haven't had access to a turntable since '92. The track names you want to locate are "I'm A Boinger" and "U-Stink-But-I--U." (Hmm..Konqueror doesn't want to render the heart character. Maybe IE will.)
Maybe it's time to see what's available cheap at the local used-stereo-gear shop...
I wonder what they think of people using SSH to remotely log-in to a windows box. I believe that the openssh daemon compiles natively under cygwin.
You don't even have to compile it...you can install it as you install Cygwin. If you copy ssh.exe and cygwin1.dll to a {floppy|Zip|DiskOnKey|etc.}, you can run it on a machine that doesn't have Cygwin installed (works fine in cmd.exe).
To borrow another program's catchphrase, VNC really whips the llama's ass.:-) I've even switched people away from pcAnywhere to VNC...combine it with an SSH client that can do port forwarding and you can establish a secure connection to any machine behind a firewall. I use it all the time to talk to my Win2K box at home from my Win2K boxen at work, both of which sit behind Linux firewalls. I've never been able to get pcAnywhere to do that. (VNC doesn't do file transfers...but that's why you have scp.)
I had WinXP up and running for a short time at home. VNC worked well enough, but some of the CD-burning and video-editing apps that I've used forever under Win2K started to fall apart under XP. Win2K is back on that machine, but now I've slapped another couple of hard drives into the machine. It's running SuSE 7.3 off a FireWire drive right now so I can build up an LFS system, as I'd like to see if Linux will handle the video capture and editing stuff that I'd like to do. If the software is out there, this might be the time to try kicking the Windows "habit" again.
(I know this is veering offtopic, but does anyone have experience with video capture, editing, and encoding under Linux? I have an All-In-Wonder Radeon and a Philips HDR112 with TiVoNET, and I'd like to make SVCDs under Linux...that involves capture, conversion to a lossless format for editing, encoding to MPEG-2, mastering, and burning. I know the software for the last two steps exists (I've been using VCDImager for mastering under Win2K, and cdrecord ought to handle burning), but what about the other stuff?)
Since anti-virus software doesn't seem to scan for these, perhaps someone should create a product which operates similar to antivirus software but instead scans for a dictionary of scumware?
It's an alternate DNS that works by installing a DLL that hijacks all name-resolution requests. If some software needs to know the address of foobar.com, the DLL checks first to see what address info new.net has on hand. If new.net can resolve foobar.com, it returns the address. If it can't, it passes the request on to whatever was previously configured for DNS. Removing it is a pain in the ass; the procedure involves fairly involved registry editing (let's just say it's more involved than getting your Windows box to talk to your Samba server).
Theoretically, there's no reason why they couldn't make it so that what looks like a link to Best Buy takes you to Circuit City's website instead. I had to tweak the Best Buy URL so that it became a username fed to Circuit City's server (which presumably ignored it). With new.net, you could do the same by linking your IP address to your competitor's domain name. A 404 handler on your webserver that knows the general layout of your competitor's website would redirect people to the appropriate page on your site, so that just trying to go to one site's homepage takes you to something completely different, no matter what you do.
(Dammit...looks like/. filters out anything between "http://" and "@". The first link is supposed to be http://www.bestbuy.com%2fHomeAudioVideo%2fDVDPlaye rs%2findex.asp%3fm=1%26cat=32@www.circuitcity.com/ ewebIMa/frame1.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0243569614.101 6223317@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccedadcejfdehhhcfngcfkmdff hdffg.0&upper=head.jsp&lower=frame2.jsp&left=leftc hildcat.jsp&department=TV+Video+and+Camcorders&cat egory=DVD&right=productsearch.jsp. Must've been too many idiots tacking on goatse.cx to the end of CNET URLs or something.)
I believe tachometers work by getting a 12v pulse from the distributor every time cylinder 1 fires. So all you need to do is up the voltage from the serial port a little and send bits at a frequency proportional to the CPU usage.
If it's RS-232, a serial port should be spitting out a 12V (±12V, actually) signal already. IIRC, a serial signal can go up to ±30V.
RPM's is more correct that RPMs, but yeah both are wrong.
If you're going to be a grammar/spelling Nazi, at least get it right. "RPM's" is a possessive form which doesn't make any sense at all in this context. "RPMs" is a plural form...still incorrect in this context, but at least it doesn't shout "ignoramus" as loudly as "RPM's."
Waaaaah...get over it already. The only reason the election dragged on forever was that Algore dragged it out, looking for any means possible to get a vote count that would change in his favor. It didn't matter to him whether it was a fair and accurate count, just as long as it stood a chance of putting him in the lead. As it turned out, there was no legal standard by which he could get the results he wanted.
The reason cable is big right now and will still be big in the near future is because there are lots of people that are in the boon-docks and are not near a wireless access point or can't get DSL.
...and even if DSL is available, in some cases cable-modem service is cheaper and/or better. I have cable-modem service at home and use DSL at work. Sprint can't keep a DSL connection up to save itself; it's not unusual to have to reset the DSL modem once or twice a day to get it to reestablish its connection. By comparison, Cox doesn't have nearly as much trouble keeping its network running.
For about the same amount of money, I can get 1.5 Mbps downstream via cable or 512 kbps downstream via DSL. Do the math. The one advantage of the DSL line is the faster upstream speed...it's SDSL. Upstream on the cable-modem line is 128 kbps...not blazing fast, but it's enough for a personal webserver that sees low-4-digit traffic every month and a personal mail server.
(Yes, I can run whatever services on the cable-modem link that I want. Port 25 is blocked if you have a dynamic IP address, but static IPs are only $10 more. Basically, I have a fat pipe with a Supernews subscription thrown in for free...and that's all I want. Cox also runs mail servers, but the only mail I get through lvcm.com is the occasional message from dyndns.org.)
It's quite easy to get your site rated high: Create a hundred free web sites on geocities and post a page full of nothing but links to the site you want to pump up. You'll get rated "10/10" in no time.
You probably don't even need Geocities to astroturf your site...configure Apache for virtual hosting, grab a bunch of names from dyndns.org or whatever, and assign those names to the different "slots" on your server. Depending on how Google is set up, you might not even need a bunch of different names; take advantage of subdomain delegation to create alpha.foo.dyndns.org, bravo.foo.dyndns.org, charlie.foo.dyndns.org, etc. and use those for the massive cross-linking. One link from your site (if Google has already indexed it) into the ratsnest ought to set the whole thing in motion.
It's like the tivo debate... sure you can hack something together that does it all, but a tivo looks nice, works nice, and is already set up for you.
Your analogy is slightly flawed...a TiVo does considerably more than you would likely bother to hack together. Anybody can throw an All-In-Wonder into a computer and tell it to record a certain channel at a certain time of the week. It takes a bit more ingenuity to get it to track down every episode of Star Trek wherever/whenever it might be showing and record all of them. It takes more still for it to figure out what stuff you might like, record it without any intervention on your part, and make it available.
I've heard of PVR software that works with your TV-tuner card to provide basic recording functionality, but they usually do little more than turn your computer into a VCR. I haven't heard of PVR software that can do what a TiVo does.
Because some people don't want a big ugly beige box sitting next to their stereo rack?
A can of Krylon will fix that.
Because some people have $1500 but not the skills to assemble, configure, and install their own components, OS, and software?
I'd think that the number of/.ers who fall into that category is fairly small. As for the blinking-12:00 crowd, I don't think they've even heard of MP3s.
It's broken. The better option is to turn off JavaScript. There's a script near the beginning that, when combined with my ad-blocking proxy, produces a blank page. (Adding Salon to IE's list of "restricted sites" will block their scripts.)
At my old job we used to name all of our servers after Star Wars planets... I think there is an encyclopedia somewhere that has a couple hundred.
Heck, you could even name one "death-star" since that was sort of an artificial planet (moon, I know).
That would've been really appropriate for an AT&T 3B1...how old was that job?:-)
Personally, I'm impressed with the numbers that the DVD+R/W format has been putting up, the problem seems to be compatibility, where less-advanced and older players are unable to read the format. I'm seeing the same type of compatibility issues that CDR/W had when it first came out.
I took a look at the DVD-player compatibility chart in the Tech Report article mentioned yesterday. A couple of years ago, I snagged an Apex AD600A. The one Apex model in their list didn't fare so well (neither did most of the others), but most of the DVD-ROM drives took anything you threw at them. If I were to get a DVD burner and my DVD player were to have trouble with the type of media produced by the burner, what are the odds that the problem would be solved by swapping out the DVD-ROM mechanism in the player with a newer one? (It would be nice if they had tested the different media against an AD600A, given how many of them got snapped up back when.)
Re:I've written my representatives
on
SSSCA Editorials
·
· Score: 2
Have you?
Just got a reply today via snail mail from one of my senators. The message I got back from John Ensign's office, while a bit more than a quick note (it spilled over onto a second page), seemed a bit noncommittal. While I doubt that he's in Hollyweird's pocket (Republicans tend to not have much use for those types), I would've liked a more forceful response. (It was mainly a rehash of the DMCA, SSSCA, and similar measures...stuff I already knew, and the letter even acknowledged that.)
All I've seen from Harry Reid's office so far, OTOH, is an auto-response from the mail server that they received a message. Given that Ensign is on the commerce committee and Reid isn't, that might not be too big a deal at this point. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a favorable reply, though, given that he's the #2 Democrat in the Senate. I'm sure that when the time comes, the Hollyweird types will be all over him to get him to do their bidding...just as they've already bought Fritz Hollings.
(I blame Vermont for this mess. If Jumpin' Jim Jeffords had stayed with the people who put him in the Senate, we wouldn't have an idiot like Hollings in a position to introduce such a crappy piece of legislation as the SSSCA.)
For god's sake, all I want to do is backup my DVD's so that my I don't have to buy it again after my kid scratches it up.
If you haven't already, try this. Your kid won't notice the difference, and CD-Rs are dirt cheap. You also get to cut out the spam^H^H^H^Hpromos that Di$ney likes to put at the beginning of each DVD.
(Odds are you'd need the same techniques to rip the source DVD and reencode it to fit on a burnable DVD (assuming the original is >4.7GB...maybe stripping out extra languages and such would reduce the size enough for some movies).)
Um...because that's the way nearly every package that uses zlib links it? For instance, OpenSSH AFAIK will only statically link it (so if you rebuilt OpenSSH last week to fix this hole, you get to rebuild it again:-) ).
(I'm rebuilding OpenSSH on the work machines right now...I checked to see if it would link to libz.so, but it seems to only want libz.a.)
From now on, for a website to be defined as "AOL friendly", they will need to be "mozilla friendly". If they are not (now they only need to be "designed for IExplorer"), AOL viewers will complaint about those "pesky webpages makers that cannot get a webpage done right" and will not use them (hint: think web-commerce, web-services....)
FWIW, the last time I reworked a website, there was no difference between IE and Mozilla that needed to be handled. Nutscrape 4 had major problems with CSS, but the beta Mozilla that was available at the time rendered the site nearly identically to IE.
(If an AOLer whines about my site, I'd be inclined to tell him to bugger off and get a real Internet connection. Then again, I'm not running a site that tries to make money.)
Take technical books/papers - how cool would it be to just "grep" the doc for the keywords you want instead of hoping they are in the index?
This works sometimes...but, for instance, if I can't remember a particular format-string option for printf, I can look it up in K&R in less time than it takes to dig through VC++ help. (I suppose man 3 printf would be faster, but most of what I do at work is for Win32...and K&R has a nice table in it with all the options which is still easier to use than the manpage.)
Maybe I'm just weird that way, but I like my documentation in dead-tree form. MSDN is OK, but that didn't stop me from buying Petzold, Prosise, and other Win32-oriented programming books when I needed to get serious about coding in that environment. (BTW, those books come with CDs that include the full text, so you can have it both ways. My first instinct is usually to pull the book down from the shelf, though, rather than look it up in the computer.)
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Those three were all the same model...but they're not the only Maxtors that have croaked on me. A couple of years ago, a 20GB drive went tits-up after about a month...just like the 5.1s. (I would never have bought it in the first place if PC Club had had another brand in stock at the time...when I took it back, they had WD in stock.) More recently, I just RMA'd an 80GB drive that started developing a high-pitched seek noise after 9 months. When you consider that no other brand has that poor a track record in my experience (other drives are usually good for at least a couple of years), I think you can see why you couldn't pay me to take a Maxtor. (I'm not even sure I'd take a one of their relabled Quantums, as there's no telling what corners Maxtor has cut with those drives...and Quantum used to be one of the better drives you could get.)
Sending back a dead drive once in a while and extrapolating that the manufacturer produces shitty drives is one thing. Getting three bad drives in a row from one manufacturer and having them all fail after a month or two, OTOH...I think that's reasonable justification for swearing off of that supplier.
I haven't had Western Digital, Quantum, Seagate, or IBM fail like that on me. I did go through a string of three 5.1GB Maxtors that died a month or two apart before having the store switch the drive to a WD (which still works four years later).
If it's a "critical server," an IDE drive doesn't belong in it. You spend the extra $$$ for SCSI. (Hell, my home server uses a pair of Barracuda 4s (ST15150W), and while it'd suck if it crashed, it's not what most people would call "critical.")
Ick...it's a wonder they're still in business. While the 130MB Maxtor in my parents' ten-year-old PS/1 still works, I have yet to see a newer Maxtor last a year. An 80GB drive in one of my work machines held out for 9 months before it started making weird head noises. A 20GB drive purchased a couple of years ago and a string of three 5.1GB drives purchased four years ago all crapped out after 1-3 months.
By comparison, I haven't had an IBM go bad on me. I've had a 45GB 75GXP at home for a little over a year and a couple of 60GB 60GXPs at work for the past few months. I just added a couple of 60GB 120GXPs to a machine at home (the same machine with the 75GXP) in RAID-0 to speed up video editing.
I suspect that most of the problems people see with IBM drives are brought on by inadequate cooling (stacking several drives with little or no separation and no forced-air cooling), crappy power supplies, or overclocking. The drives in the home machine have an 80mm fan in front of them to force air through the stack and are powered by a 330W Enermax. The work machines have only one drive each, installed in the lowest drive bay. (The power supplies are whatever was in the case...if it helps, they're AMD-certified for the 1.4-GHz Athlon XPs that they power.)
The Dragon book isn't the only one. IIRC, K&R was also done with troff & friends...mine's at work, or I'd double-check to make sure,
Billy and the Boingers Bootleg...still have mine, but I haven't had access to a turntable since '92. The track names you want to locate are "I'm A Boinger" and "U-Stink-But-I--U." (Hmm..Konqueror doesn't want to render the heart character. Maybe IE will.)
Maybe it's time to see what's available cheap at the local used-stereo-gear shop...
You don't even have to compile it...you can install it as you install Cygwin. If you copy ssh.exe and cygwin1.dll to a {floppy|Zip|DiskOnKey|etc.}, you can run it on a machine that doesn't have Cygwin installed (works fine in cmd.exe).
I had WinXP up and running for a short time at home. VNC worked well enough, but some of the CD-burning and video-editing apps that I've used forever under Win2K started to fall apart under XP. Win2K is back on that machine, but now I've slapped another couple of hard drives into the machine. It's running SuSE 7.3 off a FireWire drive right now so I can build up an LFS system, as I'd like to see if Linux will handle the video capture and editing stuff that I'd like to do. If the software is out there, this might be the time to try kicking the Windows "habit" again.
(I know this is veering offtopic, but does anyone have experience with video capture, editing, and encoding under Linux? I have an All-In-Wonder Radeon and a Philips HDR112 with TiVoNET, and I'd like to make SVCDs under Linux...that involves capture, conversion to a lossless format for editing, encoding to MPEG-2, mastering, and burning. I know the software for the last two steps exists (I've been using VCDImager for mastering under Win2K, and cdrecord ought to handle burning), but what about the other stuff?)
It's an alternate DNS that works by installing a DLL that hijacks all name-resolution requests. If some software needs to know the address of foobar.com, the DLL checks first to see what address info new.net has on hand. If new.net can resolve foobar.com, it returns the address. If it can't, it passes the request on to whatever was previously configured for DNS. Removing it is a pain in the ass; the procedure involves fairly involved registry editing (let's just say it's more involved than getting your Windows box to talk to your Samba server).
Theoretically, there's no reason why they couldn't make it so that what looks like a link to Best Buy takes you to Circuit City's website instead. I had to tweak the Best Buy URL so that it became a username fed to Circuit City's server (which presumably ignored it). With new.net, you could do the same by linking your IP address to your competitor's domain name. A 404 handler on your webserver that knows the general layout of your competitor's website would redirect people to the appropriate page on your site, so that just trying to go to one site's homepage takes you to something completely different, no matter what you do.
(Dammit...looks like /. filters out anything between "http://" and "@". The first link is supposed to be http://www.bestbuy.com%2fHomeAudioVideo%2fDVDPlaye rs%2findex.asp%3fm=1%26cat=32@www.circuitcity.com/ ewebIMa/frame1.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0243569614.101 6223317@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccedadcejfdehhhcfngcfkmdff hdffg.0&upper=head.jsp&lower=frame2.jsp&left=leftc hildcat.jsp&department=TV+Video+and+Camcorders&cat egory=DVD&right=productsearch.jsp. Must've been too many idiots tacking on goatse.cx to the end of CNET URLs or something.)
PC Club was selling those the last time I built a couple of machines...they might still have 'em. Wocka wocka wocka wocka...
If it's RS-232, a serial port should be spitting out a 12V (±12V, actually) signal already. IIRC, a serial signal can go up to ±30V.
If you're going to be a grammar/spelling Nazi, at least get it right. "RPM's" is a possessive form which doesn't make any sense at all in this context. "RPMs" is a plural form...still incorrect in this context, but at least it doesn't shout "ignoramus" as loudly as "RPM's."
Algore lost. Dubya won. Deal with it.
For about the same amount of money, I can get 1.5 Mbps downstream via cable or 512 kbps downstream via DSL. Do the math. The one advantage of the DSL line is the faster upstream speed...it's SDSL. Upstream on the cable-modem line is 128 kbps...not blazing fast, but it's enough for a personal webserver that sees low-4-digit traffic every month and a personal mail server.
(Yes, I can run whatever services on the cable-modem link that I want. Port 25 is blocked if you have a dynamic IP address, but static IPs are only $10 more. Basically, I have a fat pipe with a Supernews subscription thrown in for free...and that's all I want. Cox also runs mail servers, but the only mail I get through lvcm.com is the occasional message from dyndns.org.)
You probably don't even need Geocities to astroturf your site...configure Apache for virtual hosting, grab a bunch of names from dyndns.org or whatever, and assign those names to the different "slots" on your server. Depending on how Google is set up, you might not even need a bunch of different names; take advantage of subdomain delegation to create alpha.foo.dyndns.org, bravo.foo.dyndns.org, charlie.foo.dyndns.org, etc. and use those for the massive cross-linking. One link from your site (if Google has already indexed it) into the ratsnest ought to set the whole thing in motion.
Your analogy is slightly flawed...a TiVo does considerably more than you would likely bother to hack together. Anybody can throw an All-In-Wonder into a computer and tell it to record a certain channel at a certain time of the week. It takes a bit more ingenuity to get it to track down every episode of Star Trek wherever/whenever it might be showing and record all of them. It takes more still for it to figure out what stuff you might like, record it without any intervention on your part, and make it available.
I've heard of PVR software that works with your TV-tuner card to provide basic recording functionality, but they usually do little more than turn your computer into a VCR. I haven't heard of PVR software that can do what a TiVo does.
A can of Krylon will fix that.
I'd think that the number of /.ers who fall into that category is fairly small. As for the blinking-12:00 crowd, I don't think they've even heard of MP3s.
It's broken. The better option is to turn off JavaScript. There's a script near the beginning that, when combined with my ad-blocking proxy, produces a blank page. (Adding Salon to IE's list of "restricted sites" will block their scripts.)
That would've been really appropriate for an AT&T 3B1...how old was that job? :-)
I took a look at the DVD-player compatibility chart in the Tech Report article mentioned yesterday. A couple of years ago, I snagged an Apex AD600A. The one Apex model in their list didn't fare so well (neither did most of the others), but most of the DVD-ROM drives took anything you threw at them. If I were to get a DVD burner and my DVD player were to have trouble with the type of media produced by the burner, what are the odds that the problem would be solved by swapping out the DVD-ROM mechanism in the player with a newer one? (It would be nice if they had tested the different media against an AD600A, given how many of them got snapped up back when.)
Just got a reply today via snail mail from one of my senators. The message I got back from John Ensign's office, while a bit more than a quick note (it spilled over onto a second page), seemed a bit noncommittal. While I doubt that he's in Hollyweird's pocket (Republicans tend to not have much use for those types), I would've liked a more forceful response. (It was mainly a rehash of the DMCA, SSSCA, and similar measures...stuff I already knew, and the letter even acknowledged that.)
All I've seen from Harry Reid's office so far, OTOH, is an auto-response from the mail server that they received a message. Given that Ensign is on the commerce committee and Reid isn't, that might not be too big a deal at this point. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a favorable reply, though, given that he's the #2 Democrat in the Senate. I'm sure that when the time comes, the Hollyweird types will be all over him to get him to do their bidding...just as they've already bought Fritz Hollings.
(I blame Vermont for this mess. If Jumpin' Jim Jeffords had stayed with the people who put him in the Senate, we wouldn't have an idiot like Hollings in a position to introduce such a crappy piece of legislation as the SSSCA.)
If you haven't already, try this. Your kid won't notice the difference, and CD-Rs are dirt cheap. You also get to cut out the spam^H^H^H^Hpromos that Di$ney likes to put at the beginning of each DVD.
(Odds are you'd need the same techniques to rip the source DVD and reencode it to fit on a burnable DVD (assuming the original is >4.7GB...maybe stripping out extra languages and such would reduce the size enough for some movies).)
Um...because that's the way nearly every package that uses zlib links it? For instance, OpenSSH AFAIK will only statically link it (so if you rebuilt OpenSSH last week to fix this hole, you get to rebuild it again :-) ).
(I'm rebuilding OpenSSH on the work machines right now...I checked to see if it would link to libz.so, but it seems to only want libz.a.)
FWIW, the last time I reworked a website, there was no difference between IE and Mozilla that needed to be handled. Nutscrape 4 had major problems with CSS, but the beta Mozilla that was available at the time rendered the site nearly identically to IE.
(If an AOLer whines about my site, I'd be inclined to tell him to bugger off and get a real Internet connection. Then again, I'm not running a site that tries to make money.)
This works sometimes...but, for instance, if I can't remember a particular format-string option for printf, I can look it up in K&R in less time than it takes to dig through VC++ help. (I suppose man 3 printf would be faster, but most of what I do at work is for Win32...and K&R has a nice table in it with all the options which is still easier to use than the manpage.)
Maybe I'm just weird that way, but I like my documentation in dead-tree form. MSDN is OK, but that didn't stop me from buying Petzold, Prosise, and other Win32-oriented programming books when I needed to get serious about coding in that environment. (BTW, those books come with CDs that include the full text, so you can have it both ways. My first instinct is usually to pull the book down from the shelf, though, rather than look it up in the computer.)