Not to mention that, inevitably, the two versions will go out of sync.
The only reason to maintain two versions is to deal with shitty browsers that don't implement reasonably current standards, and you're better off using server-parsed HTML or CGI to modify your site on-the-fly to present itself in different browsers. This keeps you from having to maintain two site trees, and it also makes it easier to incorporate common sitewide elements (navigation bars and such) into your design. Browse this site with IE, Konqueror, Lynx, Mozilla, and Nutscrape 4.x, and watch how each browser keeps up. (The server generates two types of code: proper HTML 4 and CSS for browsers that can hack it, bastardized HTML for Nutscrape 4.x and earlier. Note that the W3C's HTML 4 and CSS buttons don't show up if you use Nutscrape 4.)
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
Ummm..No. The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS).
Considering that cable's been around longer than HBO and such, I don't think that was the motivation behind setting up the first cable systems. I thought it was more about being able to supply a better signal than you would be able to get yourself...the cable company would set up several antennas in a central location, each aimed at a different transmitting tower, and put the received signals out on its own network. It saved you the fuss of making sure your antenna was pointed in the right direction and could sometimes snag extra channels that you couldn't reliably pull in on your own. (The "CA" in "CATV" means "community antenna," not "cable.")
It also made subscription-based TV possible, but that didn't happen until later.
And 25MpH... That's about twice the average speed of a bus in most cities. Seriously - look it up. In Oxford, where I came from, they did a survey in the mid eighties and found that busses there were driving at an average 8-15MpH while in service!
I outran this bus one day while biking home from work. We started nearly even at timepoint C (Lake Mead and Rainbow) and went south. By the time I had to turn eastward halfway between timepoints G and H (Tropicana and Rainbow), I was barely ahead of the bus. I made all the stops the lights imposed; the bus made the stops it needed to pick up and drop off passengers. I'm not exactly in the best shape (kinda overweight, actually) and my bike isn't a racing bike (it's a six-speed cruiser), but I didn't have to work too hard at keeping up with the bus. I think I did somewhere around 25 km/h (give or take a bit) most of the way, IIRC.
You can't go on forever throwing things in landfill, your country will fill up.
I'm sure there is an obvious answer for this, but how can a country fill up due to landfills? The law of conservation says you have to be getting it from somewhere, this stuff isn't just being made out of nothing. So why not put it back where it came from originally?
In a similar vein, I read something once to the effect that all the trash the United States would produce in 300 years would fit in a landfill measuring 30 miles per side and 30 feet deep. We're not exactly in danger of running out of space.
I'm wondering if there's a method of rerouting incoming connections to port 25. Say if someone from a specific host tries to connect to port 25, your server acts as a transparent redirect, reconnecting them to their own mailserver so that they end up overloading themsleves.
This sounds evil.
I like it.:-)
I've used netfilter to redirect inbound traffic on a particular port to a different host, usually to let traffic through a firewall to a webserver behind the firewall. I think you could create a rule that would take inbound traffic from a particular host and send it back...will have to play with that idea and see what happens.
I've just rented a dedicated server running freebsd, and I get messages of relay denied daily, now I need to accept relay for my users... so i've been reading about pop before smpt, thats a good solution, since I am not used to sendmail, it has been very difficult to configure it for me...
I've handled local relaying by just adding IP addresses and/or address blocks to the server config. It works as long as nobody has a dynamic IP address...since the addresses that are let through are all private-subnet addresses (people behind the firewall), this isn't a problem. Their mail gets out, but spammers in search of an open relay are cut off.
You might also want to look into qmail...it's much simpler to get going than sendmail, and IIRC no security holes have been found yet.
Somebody linked to this article on using Apache to find the bots that swipe email addresses from websites. While you're waiting for the bots to respond to their suggested changes, you might also consider searching your logs for other attempts at sending mail through your system. Searching all the logged 404s on my server turned up 91 attempts at exploiting webmail systems. Some were the result of Nessus scans I had aimed at my server, but filtering those out left 36 confirmed attempts.
Here are the user-agents that turned up:
EmailSiphon
Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8862
Gozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; windows 2000)
...and here are the addresses of the spammers (get a load of the last one on the list):
I know there are hundreds of episodes I haven't seen... as a history buff I'm looking to see the anti-Nazi/Japanese propaganda WB cartoon made during the height of the second world war.
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips should be available through Morpheus. I don't know what anti-Nazi titles were available, though...names, anyone?
I always wondered why anyone would trust EBay auctioneers with large amounts of money. I mean, it gets to a point where a few negative feedbacks aren't going to make up for loss of any serious dough. Anyone else have scam stories?
The worst that's happened to me on eBay was when a hard drive I bought from someone was DOA and the seller refused to replace it. (A word of advice: don't buy hard drives from eBay vendors, as IME the vast majority don't have a fscking clue how to pack them so they'll survive shipment. A typical pack-job might involve putting the drive in an anti-static bag and then putting the bagged drive in a Priority Mail shipping box with no padding or minimal padding.) At least I was only out about $20.
A worse scam was back in '96 when I found a Usenet seller who had a better price than nearly anyone else on memory. I forked over $350 for a 32-meg FPM SIMM to a slimeball named Chris Dawson. I ended up with bugger-all. Postings in the relevant misc.forsale.computers.* newsgroup indicated that I wasn't the only one.
There needs to be some type of HTML standard for printed documents.
Repeat after me:
HTML is not a "page-design" language." HTML is not a "page-design" language." HTML is not a "page-design" language."
CSS, OTOH, does provide for specifying the positioning, style, etc. of printed documents as well as stuff viewed in a browser. In fact, with software that supports it, you could have one document with a completely different appearance on-screen and on-paper, each optimized for the characteristics of the medium. (You wouldn't need "click here for the print-optimized version of this page" links on a page.) It's anybody's guess, though, as to how well the printing-oriented features of CSS are implemented in current browsers.
That was soooo a fuck-up on Sony's pary. They made the 'V' in Vega shadowed, but the shadow 'V' was too far from the actual letter, so it looked like a stylized 'W.'
Maybe they wanted something that only German-speakers would be likely to pronounce correctly.:-) Then again, I'm not sure it was smart of them to take the same name as a car that tended to trash its engine after about a year...
Re:Crap (You aren't looking hard enough)
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Conversely if you watch HD programming on CBS the shows look much better and there is definitely that HD 3d effect but the network has chosen to use filters or a process to make the image look like a film, i.e. a softer less defined image.
I suspect the "filter" involved here is the film on which the show is shot...AFAIK, news, sports, and soaps are the only things that get shot with video cameras instead of motion-picture cameras (news and sports because they're live, soaps because they're cheap). If a show does a live episode (like ER did a couple of years or so ago), the difference is blatantly obvious since they have to use video cameras for anything that's live. Everything else gets shot on film and is then telecined to bring the framerate up. (Film is typically 24 fps. NTSC is 29.97 fps. What's the framerate for ATSC?)
FWIW, I've had fairly decent luck with VIA chipsets. They had a problem for a while with their IDE drivers that would keep my tape drive from working, but sticking with the Microsoft-supplied drivers worked well enough until VIA could get its act together. Other than that, I've run everything AMD from the K6 to the Athlon on various VIA chipsets, and I've worked with a few Intel-processor systems with VIA chipsets. Nothing's acted squirelly on me.
That said, the machine I'm typing on now uses a "hybrid" AMD 761/VIA 686B chipset, and it's run Win2K flawlessly. I built a couple of Athlon XP boxen for work that use the nVidia nForce 420D chipset; the idea of an integrated-everything chipset where the integrated stuff doesn't suck was appealing. One runs Win2K; the other runs Linux From Scratch. The home server is a dual P!!! on one of Intel's 440BX server boards; it works well enough, but about the only real problem I've had with anybody's chipset has been with the IDE controller in some of Intel's 430?X chipsets...hook up a hard drive as primary master and a CD-ROM as secondary master, and it might not see the CD-ROM under Win9x. Figure that one out.
The networks are losing money on this, and that's why they're upset. They don't care if you watch it, they only care if you watch it with the commercials in.
I haven't paid any attention to TV ads in years. Even before I got my TiVo, I used VCRs to timeshift everything I watched...and I buzzed right past all of the ads. What makes the network execs think anybody is watching the ads at all?
So how is Movie88 a pirate site if it attempts to prevent downloading of the videos? (Yes, I know Real Video can be downloaded with some utilities, but then again, you could copy rental video tapes/DVDs with the right hardware too)
Movie88 served up movies with Apache, not RealServer. This made downloading/saving almost trivial. I used FlashGet, with Muffin in front of it to rewrite the user-agent string to make FlashGet appear to the server as RealPlayer 8 instead.
Everything they had that was (probably) ripped from DVD had captions, though...stuff like American History X or eXistenZ, not just foreign-language stuff where subtitles would be useful. Given that adding captions back into the video involves extra work when you're transcoding from DVD (the captions are stored as overlay graphics in the MPEG program stream), you have to wonder why they did this.
The left/right split on this will be interesting. The conservatives could cop out and claim they don't want to mess with Congress. Or they could draw an original intent line in the sand.
Considering that the Eagle Forum (a conservative think tank) and the Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank) have filed an amicus brief in this case in support of the petitioner, it wouldn't be unreasonable to draw the conclusion that a principled conservative and/or libertarian position would run against the concept of perpetual copyright. After all, a plain reading of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution indicates that copyright granted to a work should be extended for a limited time only. (You mentioned this in a different way in material I didn't quote.)
Whoa, could you tell me more? You are just about to sell me a TiVo.
Acutally, I got email today from someone who saw my page on ripping TiVo video that suggests newer, easier-to-use software than what I described (plus I've been using different methods for my own rips lately)...but the page will give you some idea of what's involved and what you need.
Lately, I've been using ExtractStream and netcat to dump the audio and video streams to my Win2K box, as it's the one with the fastest processor and most storage. The webpage mentions using netmplex to combine the audio and video streams into an MPEG-2 program stream; this isn't necessary for my purposes and isn't even desirable as separate programs are needed to decode audio and video.
What quality does the TiVo capture at?
Best quality is 2/3 D1 (480x480) at 5.8 Mbps CBR MPEG-2 for video and 32 kHz stereo at 192 kbps MPEG-1 Layer 2 for audio. Lower-bitrate modes are available, but you don't really want to use them if you're interested in editing & archiving video. Note that the resolution is the same as SVCD, though you'd need to reduce the video bitrate and adjust the audio sample rate to burn an SVCD. To burn a VCD or DVD, some additional conversions would be necessary.
The hacks to hook the pvr to my pc make the pvr a much more attractive buy. All I'd have to do is run some cabling to the computer when I wanted to store something permanently.
I added TiVoNET, so I hooked up the Cat 5 run that I had been using previously with a computer under the TV. That puts it on my LAN 24/7. It grabs guide data through the cable-modem connection, and I can use netcat and ExtractStream to (usually) get a TV show onto one of my computers for editing and reencoding.
But from the looks of the links, it's not quite there yet.
It is a bit rough around the edges, but it usually works as long as you're not afraid of shell prompts and batch files (and if you're here, you probably aren't). There are some shows that I'd like to keep around (I'm currently archiving Enterprise), and SVCDs take up much less space than tapes. Editing and reencoding is the most time-consuming part, but that's nothing that faster hardware won't cure. (Somewhere, an Asus A7M266-D is calling to me...:-) )
the TiVo will scan the listings for stuff that it thinks you'll like and then record it.
This is really simple to emulate. Every movie has like 100 topics. Each movie falls under certain topics with certain weights. From there, its a simple neural net.
The hard part? The person that has to put the "topic wieghts" on each movie + show.
...and that is why TiVo got my $200. I used to pore over the TV listings in the Sunday paper, but finding stuff you might like by that method is a mind-numbing task. (Some might say TV itself is mind-numbing, but that depends on how much your viewing preferences lean toward drek such as pro wrestling, Jerry Springer-type talk, or so-called "reality" shows like Survivor.) You also tend to not catch everything. TiVo fixes both of those problems for a reasonable (IMHO) fee.
The Tivo has a 30 second commercial skip feature too, contrary to popular opinion. SELECT-PLAY-SELECT-3-0-SELECT.
This also is deceptive. You are just fast forwarding for 30 secs.
Wrong. There is a backdoor code (given by the original poster) that enables 30-second skip. I've tried it; it works. I found high-speed scanning at medium speed works better for me, though...there's no correction for overshoot with 30-second skip.
Where the original poster was wrong was in saying that TiVo gets its guide info over-the-air. Since there's no TV station that provides this service, that's impossible. TiVo phones home for its guide info, just as ReplayTV presumably does.
This is a typical response to a person without a PVR. The biggest advantage of the TiVo is downloading the channel lineups.
It's more than just that. I have a TiVo and an All-In-Wonder Radeon. Both will download program information, but only the TiVo will scan the listings for stuff that it thinks you'll like and then record it. The software for the AIW Radeon lets you pick stuff to record from the listing, but that's as far as it goes. (Gemstar also has had trouble keeping the server running that provides the listings...with the download speeds I've gotten sometimes, you'd think they were using a VIC-20 and an acoustic coupler. AFAIK, TiVo has never had these problems.)
My first PC was a non-portable version of the Trash 80, the Tandy Color Computer 3. The CoCo 3, as it was lovingly called came with a new fangled version of the Tandy/MS BASIC called Extended Color Basic, with advanced features such as color output, lowercase characters (WOW NOW I CAN WRITE BASIC THAT WILL OUTPUT IN LOWERCASE TOO?!?! W00T!) and a
eye-killing nuclear green screen with a unique, wild cursor. Very wild layout compared with the calm CLIs of today.
I liked the dual-monitor CoCo that was linked on your page...now that's a hack. The choice of graphics chip was interesting (said by someone who has a TI-99/4A and a CoCo 2, among other machines). Who says you need new hardware to do that?:-)
(Yes, I know I'm responding to a troll...bite me.:-) )
And that brings us to my point: making software compatible with older hardware shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. Why? One need only to venture over to Pricewatch to see that an AMD 1800+ mobo/CPU combo sells for under $300.
True, but if that system is extreme overkill for the task at hand and you have some old bits that you can lash together into something that will get the job done, why not take advantage of the capability?
I needed to set up a print server at work not too long ago. I threw together a system using nothing but junkbox parts: a 486DX2-66 on a VLB motherboard, ISA VGA card and IDE controller, a couple of ISA NICs (it needs to handle jobs from two networks), 32 megs (or was it 16?) of FPM DRAM, a 340MB hard drive, an AT minitower case with power supply, and a downloaded copy of the latest version of Slackware (hadn't installed Slackware on a machine in ages, but it seemed appropriate here). A couple or three hours later, it was up and running. The next day, it took an hour or so to set up print queues and get all the machines in the office set up to print to it.
Total cost to get it running? $1.00, and that was for a CMOS battery from the local surplus shop since the NiCd on the motherboard wasn't keeping a charge. The print-server boxes you can get for $50 won't do what this server does, and why should I have blown upward of $500 on even a "low-end" computer that would've been way more than what was needed?
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason to maintain two versions is to deal with shitty browsers that don't implement reasonably current standards, and you're better off using server-parsed HTML or CGI to modify your site on-the-fly to present itself in different browsers. This keeps you from having to maintain two site trees, and it also makes it easier to incorporate common sitewide elements (navigation bars and such) into your design. Browse this site with IE, Konqueror, Lynx, Mozilla, and Nutscrape 4.x, and watch how each browser keeps up. (The server generates two types of code: proper HTML 4 and CSS for browsers that can hack it, bastardized HTML for Nutscrape 4.x and earlier. Note that the W3C's HTML 4 and CSS buttons don't show up if you use Nutscrape 4.)
Considering that cable's been around longer than HBO and such, I don't think that was the motivation behind setting up the first cable systems. I thought it was more about being able to supply a better signal than you would be able to get yourself...the cable company would set up several antennas in a central location, each aimed at a different transmitting tower, and put the received signals out on its own network. It saved you the fuss of making sure your antenna was pointed in the right direction and could sometimes snag extra channels that you couldn't reliably pull in on your own. (The "CA" in "CATV" means "community antenna," not "cable.") It also made subscription-based TV possible, but that didn't happen until later.
I outran this bus one day while biking home from work. We started nearly even at timepoint C (Lake Mead and Rainbow) and went south. By the time I had to turn eastward halfway between timepoints G and H (Tropicana and Rainbow), I was barely ahead of the bus. I made all the stops the lights imposed; the bus made the stops it needed to pick up and drop off passengers. I'm not exactly in the best shape (kinda overweight, actually) and my bike isn't a racing bike (it's a six-speed cruiser), but I didn't have to work too hard at keeping up with the bus. I think I did somewhere around 25 km/h (give or take a bit) most of the way, IIRC.
It appears to be taking it better than cr.yp.to, at least. :-)
In a similar vein, I read something once to the effect that all the trash the United States would produce in 300 years would fit in a landfill measuring 30 miles per side and 30 feet deep. We're not exactly in danger of running out of space.
This sounds evil.
I like it. :-)
I've used netfilter to redirect inbound traffic on a particular port to a different host, usually to let traffic through a firewall to a webserver behind the firewall. I think you could create a rule that would take inbound traffic from a particular host and send it back...will have to play with that idea and see what happens.
I've handled local relaying by just adding IP addresses and/or address blocks to the server config. It works as long as nobody has a dynamic IP address...since the addresses that are let through are all private-subnet addresses (people behind the firewall), this isn't a problem. Their mail gets out, but spammers in search of an open relay are cut off.
You might also want to look into qmail...it's much simpler to get going than sendmail, and IIRC no security holes have been found yet.
Somebody linked to this article on using Apache to find the bots that swipe email addresses from websites. While you're waiting for the bots to respond to their suggested changes, you might also consider searching your logs for other attempts at sending mail through your system. Searching all the logged 404s on my server turned up 91 attempts at exploiting webmail systems. Some were the result of Nessus scans I had aimed at my server, but filtering those out left 36 confirmed attempts.
Here are the user-agents that turned up:
Sounds like Monty Python's lethal-joke research project...
Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips should be available through Morpheus. I don't know what anti-Nazi titles were available, though...names, anyone?
Nice shot, troll, but guess again...last time I checked, IE wasn't the only browser that supports JavaScript.
The worst that's happened to me on eBay was when a hard drive I bought from someone was DOA and the seller refused to replace it. (A word of advice: don't buy hard drives from eBay vendors, as IME the vast majority don't have a fscking clue how to pack them so they'll survive shipment. A typical pack-job might involve putting the drive in an anti-static bag and then putting the bagged drive in a Priority Mail shipping box with no padding or minimal padding.) At least I was only out about $20.
A worse scam was back in '96 when I found a Usenet seller who had a better price than nearly anyone else on memory. I forked over $350 for a 32-meg FPM SIMM to a slimeball named Chris Dawson. I ended up with bugger-all. Postings in the relevant misc.forsale.computers.* newsgroup indicated that I wasn't the only one.
Repeat after me:
HTML is not a "page-design" language."
HTML is not a "page-design" language."
HTML is not a "page-design" language."
CSS, OTOH, does provide for specifying the positioning, style, etc. of printed documents as well as stuff viewed in a browser. In fact, with software that supports it, you could have one document with a completely different appearance on-screen and on-paper, each optimized for the characteristics of the medium. (You wouldn't need "click here for the print-optimized version of this page" links on a page.) It's anybody's guess, though, as to how well the printing-oriented features of CSS are implemented in current browsers.
Maybe they wanted something that only German-speakers would be likely to pronounce correctly. :-) Then again, I'm not sure it was smart of them to take the same name as a car that tended to trash its engine after about a year...
I suspect the "filter" involved here is the film on which the show is shot...AFAIK, news, sports, and soaps are the only things that get shot with video cameras instead of motion-picture cameras (news and sports because they're live, soaps because they're cheap). If a show does a live episode (like ER did a couple of years or so ago), the difference is blatantly obvious since they have to use video cameras for anything that's live. Everything else gets shot on film and is then telecined to bring the framerate up. (Film is typically 24 fps. NTSC is 29.97 fps. What's the framerate for ATSC?)
That said, the machine I'm typing on now uses a "hybrid" AMD 761/VIA 686B chipset, and it's run Win2K flawlessly. I built a couple of Athlon XP boxen for work that use the nVidia nForce 420D chipset; the idea of an integrated-everything chipset where the integrated stuff doesn't suck was appealing. One runs Win2K; the other runs Linux From Scratch. The home server is a dual P!!! on one of Intel's 440BX server boards; it works well enough, but about the only real problem I've had with anybody's chipset has been with the IDE controller in some of Intel's 430?X chipsets...hook up a hard drive as primary master and a CD-ROM as secondary master, and it might not see the CD-ROM under Win9x. Figure that one out.
I haven't paid any attention to TV ads in years. Even before I got my TiVo, I used VCRs to timeshift everything I watched...and I buzzed right past all of the ads. What makes the network execs think anybody is watching the ads at all?
Movie88 served up movies with Apache, not RealServer. This made downloading/saving almost trivial. I used FlashGet, with Muffin in front of it to rewrite the user-agent string to make FlashGet appear to the server as RealPlayer 8 instead.
Everything they had that was (probably) ripped from DVD had captions, though...stuff like American History X or eXistenZ, not just foreign-language stuff where subtitles would be useful. Given that adding captions back into the video involves extra work when you're transcoding from DVD (the captions are stored as overlay graphics in the MPEG program stream), you have to wonder why they did this.
Considering that the Eagle Forum (a conservative think tank) and the Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank) have filed an amicus brief in this case in support of the petitioner, it wouldn't be unreasonable to draw the conclusion that a principled conservative and/or libertarian position would run against the concept of perpetual copyright. After all, a plain reading of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution indicates that copyright granted to a work should be extended for a limited time only. (You mentioned this in a different way in material I didn't quote.)
Acutally, I got email today from someone who saw my page on ripping TiVo video that suggests newer, easier-to-use software than what I described (plus I've been using different methods for my own rips lately)...but the page will give you some idea of what's involved and what you need.
Lately, I've been using ExtractStream and netcat to dump the audio and video streams to my Win2K box, as it's the one with the fastest processor and most storage. The webpage mentions using netmplex to combine the audio and video streams into an MPEG-2 program stream; this isn't necessary for my purposes and isn't even desirable as separate programs are needed to decode audio and video.
Best quality is 2/3 D1 (480x480) at 5.8 Mbps CBR MPEG-2 for video and 32 kHz stereo at 192 kbps MPEG-1 Layer 2 for audio. Lower-bitrate modes are available, but you don't really want to use them if you're interested in editing & archiving video. Note that the resolution is the same as SVCD, though you'd need to reduce the video bitrate and adjust the audio sample rate to burn an SVCD. To burn a VCD or DVD, some additional conversions would be necessary.
I added TiVoNET, so I hooked up the Cat 5 run that I had been using previously with a computer under the TV. That puts it on my LAN 24/7. It grabs guide data through the cable-modem connection, and I can use netcat and ExtractStream to (usually) get a TV show onto one of my computers for editing and reencoding.
It is a bit rough around the edges, but it usually works as long as you're not afraid of shell prompts and batch files (and if you're here, you probably aren't). There are some shows that I'd like to keep around (I'm currently archiving Enterprise), and SVCDs take up much less space than tapes. Editing and reencoding is the most time-consuming part, but that's nothing that faster hardware won't cure. (Somewhere, an Asus A7M266-D is calling to me...:-) )
Wrong. There is a backdoor code (given by the original poster) that enables 30-second skip. I've tried it; it works. I found high-speed scanning at medium speed works better for me, though...there's no correction for overshoot with 30-second skip.
Where the original poster was wrong was in saying that TiVo gets its guide info over-the-air. Since there's no TV station that provides this service, that's impossible. TiVo phones home for its guide info, just as ReplayTV presumably does.
It's more than just that. I have a TiVo and an All-In-Wonder Radeon. Both will download program information, but only the TiVo will scan the listings for stuff that it thinks you'll like and then record it. The software for the AIW Radeon lets you pick stuff to record from the listing, but that's as far as it goes. (Gemstar also has had trouble keeping the server running that provides the listings...with the download speeds I've gotten sometimes, you'd think they were using a VIC-20 and an acoustic coupler. AFAIK, TiVo has never had these problems.)
I liked the dual-monitor CoCo that was linked on your page...now that's a hack. The choice of graphics chip was interesting (said by someone who has a TI-99/4A and a CoCo 2, among other machines). Who says you need new hardware to do that? :-)
True, but if that system is extreme overkill for the task at hand and you have some old bits that you can lash together into something that will get the job done, why not take advantage of the capability?
I needed to set up a print server at work not too long ago. I threw together a system using nothing but junkbox parts: a 486DX2-66 on a VLB motherboard, ISA VGA card and IDE controller, a couple of ISA NICs (it needs to handle jobs from two networks), 32 megs (or was it 16?) of FPM DRAM, a 340MB hard drive, an AT minitower case with power supply, and a downloaded copy of the latest version of Slackware (hadn't installed Slackware on a machine in ages, but it seemed appropriate here). A couple or three hours later, it was up and running. The next day, it took an hour or so to set up print queues and get all the machines in the office set up to print to it.
Total cost to get it running? $1.00, and that was for a CMOS battery from the local surplus shop since the NiCd on the motherboard wasn't keeping a charge. The print-server boxes you can get for $50 won't do what this server does, and why should I have blown upward of $500 on even a "low-end" computer that would've been way more than what was needed?