According to some correspondence I had this weekend, the IBM Model M is what to look for, although I'm not sure where - EBay I guess.
They've got several Model Ms available. I just snagged one a few hours ago; with shipping, it should still be under $20, which is less than you'd pay for a reasonably good keyboard most places (PC Club and similar places usually have some under-$10 keyboards, but I wouldn't want to type on one for an extended time...the one I have is plugged into the server in the coat closet.)
...maybe the story should've been filed under "Microsoft." Given the intro that won the science-fiction category, who's to say Kirk's blue-screen woes weren't some sort of Borg plot?
...I thought that after the Atari 400, everybody swore off those things. Hell, the HP Pavilion keyboard with the extra buttons all around that I'm using at work right now is bad enough...it gets the job done, but the extra buttons that I'll never use get in the way.
Give me a nice, clicky keyboard any day. I have a Focus 2001 at home, and I put in a bid on eBay for an IBM Type M...that one's coming to work when it arrives.
Interesting to note that Kuro5hin.org has started a "pay for no ads" version of their site. I doubt it is going to be very succesfull though: most people don't really mind banner ads that much.
...and those of us who are sufficiently annoyed by banner ads to do something about it have already taken measures to blockthem anyway
Philip Rosedale, CTO of RealNetworks, says "We are very excited about this new technology. It makes a lot of sense to serve very different content to someone connecting from a T1 (which indicates they're at work)
Time to get a T1 in here to throw off their stats...
(Any chance the 1.5 Mbps downstream speed my cable modem delivers would count? That's like having half of a T1, isn't it?)
I will give you that IE doesn't crash much, but I won't give you that it's stable-- since I cannot count the times that 5 or 5.5 have completely misdrawn pages. I think my favorite is when I've gotten moderator points on Slashdot and I go to scroll down, instead of the form elements moving with the text the text scrolls and the form elements are sticky.
FWIW, getting mod points on/. is the only time IE has spazzed out on me...and that seems to only happen under Win98. I've gotten mod points a couple of times since switching to Win2K, and the problem you describe has never happened.
The only current-version browser I've run across that consistently has rendering problems is Nutscrape 4.x. Its CSS implementation is effed up pretty badly; sites that render just fine in IE, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. sometimes come up as a total jumble in Nutscrape. Even Lynx does a better job with some of these sites. (Want an example? Try http://www.thejewelers.com/store01.html, a page on a site I redesigned a while back. It validates properly for HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2. It renders fine in every browser I've thrown at it...except Nutscrape. For their broke-ass browser, there's http://www.thejewelers.com/nsstore01.html. It renders OK on Nutscrape and other graphical browsers (looks nasty under Lynx), but pays no heed to standards or principles of good design.)
Once, I asked one of my instructors about their policy regarding programmable calculators and exams. He said if one understands a concept well enough to program it into a calculator, then one's grasp of that concept is such that the presence or absence of a programmable calculator isn't going to make a great deal of difference. I thought that was a cool attitude.
I wasn't given any grief when I pulled out my Palm III to grind through some arithmetic on one of my finals...and that's a device intended to hold notes and such (even took all my notes one semester with it, though I switched back to dead trees this past semester as entering equations into Memo Pad is cumbersome). I might've had the first week's notes in there...but since we were allowed both sides of a page to set up as a crib sheet (mine done in 4-point text in Word with so many equations on the page that it started screwing up), the presence or absence of notes in the Palm wouldn't have made much of a difference.
(All I used was the calculator. I don't carry a separate calculator anymore as a Palm does all that a calculator will, and then some. I've never had a graphing calculator...got through math and physics with a TI-68.)
My office has these thermos-based coffee brewers - they work pretty well but you never know how much coffee is actually left in the pot! Now if only I could get them to use a better quality coffee:-( I am sure you can get purchase such coffee makers in North America although I have to admit that I haven't seen them in the retail stores.
No boiling water, huh? I use those coffee bags for ultimate convenience
Coffee bags? What kind of philistine are you?:-) I tried those once...they're hella nasty. (You are talking about the ones you brew like tea, right?)
There's no substitute for proper brewing (drip) of freshly-ground beans. Ideally, you use a coffee maker that takes a cone-shaped filter (nearly the only kind you'll find in Europe; the inferior basket-type coffee makers are much more common in the States), and a permanent filter (one of the gold-plated thingies) won't impart flavors in the way that paper filters can. With the same beans (Colombian supremos), I noticed a big difference going from a 4-cup Mr. Coffee with paper filters to a regular-sized Krups with a permanent filter; the latter rig produces a smoother cup.
I highly doubt that the additions are "backdoors" put in by the government. O/S allows you to look at the code and see what's inside. Why the hell would the Chinese add shit only to have their people get the "virgin" copy?
What makes you think the powers-that-be in Red China would let their people have access to unadulterated Linux? You're forgetting that they control the horizontal and the vertical...nothing gets past their "Great Firewall" that Mao wouldn't approve. The few people who get to travel outside the country might be able to snag a regular Linux distro in their travels, but the only people who would have that opportunity would be those who have already proven themselves loyal to the current regime.
...I just upgraded the home server from 2.4.3 to 2.4.5 last night while trying to figure out what the hell was going on with masquerading (turned out to be an error in the script that enables/disables masquerading). Oh well, the uptime isn't even to 24 hours yet...
(Yes, I checked for a newer version first, as I downloaded the 2.4.[45] patches a while back. This probably would've happened around 2200 PDT, and it was ftp.us.kernel.org that I checked.)
...and about almost any other _decent_ mailers, is that you can not edit/read more than one message in the same time. Heck, if you want to edit one message and read another (to copy/paste text, for instance), you can't.
Here's what I do with mutt:
save message to a scratch file
create a reply or new message, as appropriate
get dumped from mutt into joe (emacs would probably work here as well)
open scratch file in joe (^K-e filename)
tell joe to display both files (^K-i)
edit one message while reading the other, copy from one message to another, etc.:-)
This seems to be more a function of the editor you use than your mail client. If your mail client only lets you use a built-in editor and its editor doesn't let you open multiple files, it's borken. mutt, OTOH, uses whatever is in $EDITOR (or is it $VISUAL?). I happen to have that set to joe, but you could set it to emacs, vi, or whatever floats your boat.
Naw, there's something just odd about mutt. I don't know what it is. I suppose it's just that I'm so used to pine I've never bothered looking into configuring mutt that much. Now, with that in mind, I have to rely on the default config of mutt as packaged by my distribution. From that it just seems clumsy and difficult to use. Pine is easy to add things like display filters for PGP and such. I'm sure you can do this all in mutt as well, but like I said, that'd be a new system to learn and pine works just fine.:-)
I think I picked mutt more-or-less at random a few years back. Maybe some distros do a better job than others of configuring mutt (my experience in the past few years has been with Slackware and SuSE), but I've never had problems with mutt. Even integrating GPG with it was fairly simple; config blocks for GPG and PGP are included, making mutt-GPG integration nearly as easy as getting PGP and Outlook Express on speaking terms. The biggest problem I've run across is with users of Outlook Express getting confused by the way signatures are created by mutt. Other than that, mutt rocks!:-)
Re:If these guys had any sense at all...
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 2
There hasn't been any freon in cars for a while. All new cars are freon-free. They use something else that works just a well, but without killing the ozone.
Actually, in a strict quantitative sense, the replacements don't work as well. Modern A/C systems were redesigned to accomodate larger quantities of R-134a at higher pressures in order to achieve the same results possible with smaller amounts of R-12 at lower pressures. Try retrofitting an older car to take R-134a; either you live with reduced performance or you replace the condenser and evaporator with larger units (and maybe the compressor, if it won't handle the higher pressure) to make up the difference.
(Some people have replaced R-12 with propane or other hydrocarbon mixes. These are supposed to work better than R-12 ever did, but they're also highly flammable. God help you if you stick propane in your A/C system and it develops a leak.)
Re:Radical actions ...
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
I think you are missing the point entirely. Increases in engine efficiency, which everyone agrees are good, are not the issue here. The issue is that some Americans, to flaunt their wealth, decide to buy huge cars which they really don't need at all.
...and who the hell are you to decide what people need? Personally, I don't particularly want an SUV for myself (my next vehicle will more than likely be a smaller car or a pickup, as feeding a '77 Cutlass Supreme at $1.50/gallon for a 30-mile daily commute is kinda spendy), but if someone has the money to blow on a Suburban or an Excursion (and on the gas it'll suck down), what business is it of yours?
If the busses in your city go mostly unused, you must live in a rich suburb or something, because I live in Cleveland, and our busses are always full during the day. It is the same in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, and any other real city. Public transportation really is a good idea, and your comparions are silly.
Wow...aren't you so 31337? Here's a clue: not everybody wants to live like you. I lived in an urban area for a while. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as I could walk or bike to classes, but the crime situation eventually got to where I had to move to an outlying area (and this is only Las Vegas, not some stinking, crime-ridden cesspool of a city like Los Angeles, New York, or Washington). Maybe you would be more at home in some country like China or Cuba, where everybody is told what to do all the time under penalty of death or other deprivation.
I don't particularly care much for abortion advocates (the reasons are beyond the scope of this argument), but I'll borrow one of the phrases they like to toss around: If you don't like SUVs, don't buy one.
I started with MCC, went to SLS, because all the docs seemed to assume you were running SLS. When SLS died I moved to Slackware. I think I cut over to RedHat around version 4, and jumped to Debian when RH broke the compiler. Somewhere in the middle of that I played with SuSE a little.
I started with SLS eons ago...probably stuck with it longer than most, well into the "Slackware era." I even had a BBS (with some gateway software between smail, cnews, and the local Fidonet) running on it for a time, on a 386SX-25 with 4 megs of RAM and 120 megs of disk. Eventually I moved to Slackware, then to SuSE when a somewhat long-running Slackware setup got eaten by some code I'd written which tried to malloc() way too much memory (hosed the filesystem somehow...maybe the swap was misconfigured). I run LFS on my home server nowadays, but I keep SuSE on other people's systems.
I used to have a bunch of 5.25" floppies with SLS in a three-ring binder (the thing that kept me away from Slackware for a long time was that it was only installable from 3.5" floppies, which my machine didn't accept). I suspect they were tossed out before the last move, though.
It's pretty likely that his 486 had a non-functional Turbo button. I think he brought it up because do-nothing Turbo buttons and little LEDs that told you the CPU speed are classic bits of old skool PC cheeze.
There was even a computer I ran across once that had a "MIPS meter" on it...instead of the two- or three-digit clock-speed display, it counted instruction fetches (usually available from a pin on the processor) and displayed that information. With most processors carrying a significant amount of cache today, though, you probably couldn't do this now.
I don't remember who did this, though. I don't think it was one of the major manufacturers...certainly not an IBM or Compaq. I don't think it was something you'd find at the average screwdriver shop, however.
FWIW, I've never used Napster. Its continuance as a going concern means little to me. The alt.binaries.sounds.mp3* groups on Usenet get a fair amount of traffic, and the particular groups I've checked have usually had a fair variety of stuff in them. Usenet has always been a decentralized, distributed message network with no controlling authority, so there's no single choke point through which a newsgroup can be cut off. (A particular service provider might decide to stop carrying a few newsgroups, but there are thousands more servers worldwide that continue to carry those groups.)
Sure, it takes a little more knowledge to post and retrieve large binaries, but I don't see that as doing much more than keeping the AOLers and other lamers away. I'd like to see the RIAA just try to shut down the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3* hierarchy worldwide. They might roll a few weak-kneed domestic ISPs, but it'd be funny to see the reaction from some ISP in Bumfuckistan to an RIAA C&D.
I tried this approach. I registered a domain name. I figured out how host that domain name on my dynamic IP address (assigned via PPPoE). I downloaded, installed and learnt about Debian.
Within a month my ISP had started deploying a port 25 filter:(. They claim it's to combat SPAM originating from their network. It seems that this is a popular tactic of many large ISPs. What BS. Like many other people, I'm looking for an alternative ISP.
Assuming that you're on some sort of broadband connection, see if you can get a static IP address. You might need to switch from residential to commercial service, but you can generally do what you want with a static IP.
I set up a mail server on a dynamic IP through Cox about a year and a half ago. It worked fine on that until they rolled out DOCSIS service for residential users. At that time, they blocked inbound port 25 to dynamic IPs; I learned of it when I stopped receiving email one day.:-P Previously, both residential and commercial users were issued COM21 modems...now COM21 modems are only issued to commercial users, though residential users who already had them were grandfathered in. In any case, there's no difference in cost at the lowest service levels between residential and commercial accounts, but static IPs ($10 each) are only available for commercial accounts. If the difference in cost isn't outrageous in your area, it's an option to consider.
@home users can always use an alternate news server. The @home groups have a habit of not having good retention time anyway. Supernews is pretty good, from what I hear.
Cox outsources to Supernews for its Usenet service. Yes, it's pretty decent...retention in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, for instance, currently has 64175 articles going back 2.3 days (I've seen it higher before, but alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 is one of the highest-volume newsgroups, if not the highest). Before I signed up for cable-modem service, I used Supernews with a cheap dial-up ISP to bypass their crappy news server.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't like them...they wet their nests.
They've got several Model Ms available. I just snagged one a few hours ago; with shipping, it should still be under $20, which is less than you'd pay for a reasonably good keyboard most places (PC Club and similar places usually have some under-$10 keyboards, but I wouldn't want to type on one for an extended time...the one I have is plugged into the server in the coat closet.)
...maybe the story should've been filed under "Microsoft." Given the intro that won the science-fiction category, who's to say Kirk's blue-screen woes weren't some sort of Borg plot?
Give me a nice, clicky keyboard any day. I have a Focus 2001 at home, and I put in a bid on eBay for an IBM Type M...that one's coming to work when it arrives.
The reply was tongue-in-cheek. Who is it that's not able to grok humor, Scheißekopf?
Time to get a T1 in here to throw off their stats...
(Any chance the 1.5 Mbps downstream speed my cable modem delivers would count? That's like having half of a T1, isn't it?)
FWIW, getting mod points on /. is the only time IE has spazzed out on me...and that seems to only happen under Win98. I've gotten mod points a couple of times since switching to Win2K, and the problem you describe has never happened.
The only current-version browser I've run across that consistently has rendering problems is Nutscrape 4.x. Its CSS implementation is effed up pretty badly; sites that render just fine in IE, Opera, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. sometimes come up as a total jumble in Nutscrape. Even Lynx does a better job with some of these sites. (Want an example? Try http://www.thejewelers.com/store01.html, a page on a site I redesigned a while back. It validates properly for HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS 2. It renders fine in every browser I've thrown at it...except Nutscrape. For their broke-ass browser, there's http://www.thejewelers.com/nsstore01.html. It renders OK on Nutscrape and other graphical browsers (looks nasty under Lynx), but pays no heed to standards or principles of good design.)
I wasn't given any grief when I pulled out my Palm III to grind through some arithmetic on one of my finals...and that's a device intended to hold notes and such (even took all my notes one semester with it, though I switched back to dead trees this past semester as entering equations into Memo Pad is cumbersome). I might've had the first week's notes in there...but since we were allowed both sides of a page to set up as a crib sheet (mine done in 4-point text in Word with so many equations on the page that it started screwing up), the presence or absence of notes in the Palm wouldn't have made much of a difference.
(All I used was the calculator. I don't carry a separate calculator anymore as a Palm does all that a calculator will, and then some. I've never had a graphing calculator...got through math and physics with a TI-68.)
Coffee bags? What kind of philistine are you? :-) I tried those once...they're hella nasty. (You are talking about the ones you brew like tea, right?)
There's no substitute for proper brewing (drip) of freshly-ground beans. Ideally, you use a coffee maker that takes a cone-shaped filter (nearly the only kind you'll find in Europe; the inferior basket-type coffee makers are much more common in the States), and a permanent filter (one of the gold-plated thingies) won't impart flavors in the way that paper filters can. With the same beans (Colombian supremos), I noticed a big difference going from a 4-cup Mr. Coffee with paper filters to a regular-sized Krups with a permanent filter; the latter rig produces a smoother cup.
What makes you think the powers-that-be in Red China would let their people have access to unadulterated Linux? You're forgetting that they control the horizontal and the vertical...nothing gets past their "Great Firewall" that Mao wouldn't approve. The few people who get to travel outside the country might be able to snag a regular Linux distro in their travels, but the only people who would have that opportunity would be those who have already proven themselves loyal to the current regime.
Maybe that's the real difference between "humor" and "humour."
(Yes, I checked for a newer version first, as I downloaded the 2.4.[45] patches a while back. This probably would've happened around 2200 PDT, and it was ftp.us.kernel.org that I checked.)
Here's what I do with mutt:
-
save message to a scratch file
-
create a reply or new message, as appropriate
-
get dumped from mutt into joe (emacs would probably work here as well)
-
open scratch file in joe (^K-e filename)
-
tell joe to display both files (^K-i)
-
edit one message while reading the other, copy from one message to another, etc.
:-)
This seems to be more a function of the editor you use than your mail client. If your mail client only lets you use a built-in editor and its editor doesn't let you open multiple files, it's borken. mutt, OTOH, uses whatever is in $EDITOR (or is it $VISUAL?). I happen to have that set to joe, but you could set it to emacs, vi, or whatever floats your boat.I think I picked mutt more-or-less at random a few years back. Maybe some distros do a better job than others of configuring mutt (my experience in the past few years has been with Slackware and SuSE), but I've never had problems with mutt. Even integrating GPG with it was fairly simple; config blocks for GPG and PGP are included, making mutt-GPG integration nearly as easy as getting PGP and Outlook Express on speaking terms. The biggest problem I've run across is with users of Outlook Express getting confused by the way signatures are created by mutt. Other than that, mutt rocks! :-)
Actually, in a strict quantitative sense, the replacements don't work as well. Modern A/C systems were redesigned to accomodate larger quantities of R-134a at higher pressures in order to achieve the same results possible with smaller amounts of R-12 at lower pressures. Try retrofitting an older car to take R-134a; either you live with reduced performance or you replace the condenser and evaporator with larger units (and maybe the compressor, if it won't handle the higher pressure) to make up the difference.
(Some people have replaced R-12 with propane or other hydrocarbon mixes. These are supposed to work better than R-12 ever did, but they're also highly flammable. God help you if you stick propane in your A/C system and it develops a leak.)
Wow...aren't you so 31337? Here's a clue: not everybody wants to live like you. I lived in an urban area for a while. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as I could walk or bike to classes, but the crime situation eventually got to where I had to move to an outlying area (and this is only Las Vegas, not some stinking, crime-ridden cesspool of a city like Los Angeles, New York, or Washington). Maybe you would be more at home in some country like China or Cuba, where everybody is told what to do all the time under penalty of death or other deprivation.
I don't particularly care much for abortion advocates (the reasons are beyond the scope of this argument), but I'll borrow one of the phrases they like to toss around: If you don't like SUVs, don't buy one.
I started with SLS eons ago...probably stuck with it longer than most, well into the "Slackware era." I even had a BBS (with some gateway software between smail, cnews, and the local Fidonet) running on it for a time, on a 386SX-25 with 4 megs of RAM and 120 megs of disk. Eventually I moved to Slackware, then to SuSE when a somewhat long-running Slackware setup got eaten by some code I'd written which tried to malloc() way too much memory (hosed the filesystem somehow...maybe the swap was misconfigured). I run LFS on my home server nowadays, but I keep SuSE on other people's systems.
I used to have a bunch of 5.25" floppies with SLS in a three-ring binder (the thing that kept me away from Slackware for a long time was that it was only installable from 3.5" floppies, which my machine didn't accept). I suspect they were tossed out before the last move, though.
I don't remember who did this, though. I don't think it was one of the major manufacturers...certainly not an IBM or Compaq. I don't think it was something you'd find at the average screwdriver shop, however.
Sure, it takes a little more knowledge to post and retrieve large binaries, but I don't see that as doing much more than keeping the AOLers and other lamers away. I'd like to see the RIAA just try to shut down the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3* hierarchy worldwide. They might roll a few weak-kneed domestic ISPs, but it'd be funny to see the reaction from some ISP in Bumfuckistan to an RIAA C&D.
Assuming that you're on some sort of broadband connection, see if you can get a static IP address. You might need to switch from residential to commercial service, but you can generally do what you want with a static IP.
I set up a mail server on a dynamic IP through Cox about a year and a half ago. It worked fine on that until they rolled out DOCSIS service for residential users. At that time, they blocked inbound port 25 to dynamic IPs; I learned of it when I stopped receiving email one day. :-P Previously, both residential and commercial users were issued COM21 modems...now COM21 modems are only issued to commercial users, though residential users who already had them were grandfathered in. In any case, there's no difference in cost at the lowest service levels between residential and commercial accounts, but static IPs ($10 each) are only available for commercial accounts. If the difference in cost isn't outrageous in your area, it's an option to consider.
Everything looks OK from here. They are using CSS, though, so Nutscrape might not like it too much. (I wouldn't know, as I use IE.)
Cox outsources to Supernews for its Usenet service. Yes, it's pretty decent...retention in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3, for instance, currently has 64175 articles going back 2.3 days (I've seen it higher before, but alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 is one of the highest-volume newsgroups, if not the highest). Before I signed up for cable-modem service, I used Supernews with a cheap dial-up ISP to bypass their crappy news server.