Before email , there was Netmail. Anyone here who used FidoNet ? Ex - 2:291/1933.12
Yep...and the local net even had a Usenet/email gateway. Toward the end, I was running my BBS (Skunk Works BBS, 1:209/263) on Linux and had fidogate (or was it some other package?) translating FidoNet traffic back to Internet-standard forms that could be handled by cnews and smail.
At EIVD, Switzerland, we use OSP for our Operating systems courses. But we're only on our second assignment and we're already running into a lot of dead ends because we don't have any documentation on it and can't find any on the web.
I'm not sure if it's still used, but when I took Operating Systems (CSC 370) at UNLV, OSP was the framework within which we wrote a memory manager and a process scheduler. As I recall, documentation for OSP was a thin staple-bound book in a dark blue cover; it couldn't have been much more than 50 or 60 pages. Since I took this course back in '92 or '93, it's definitely a fairly old product by now. I don't know if there ever would've been a website associated with it as almost nobody had heard of the Web or was using it in any serious way at the time.
Remember back in the K6-2 days when everyone and their mother was building Super 7 chipsets? There was AMD, ALi, VIA, ETEQ, and SiS, just to name a few. This hodgepodge of chipsets led to incompatibilities that later branded the K6-2 as the cheap-ass chip that we know it as right now.
"inexpensive" != "cheap-ass"
Put them on decent motherboards and they deliver sufficient performance for most people's needs. I have a gang of K6-x processors at home (K6-200, K6-2-300, K6-III-450) that have done a great job under Win9x and Linux. At the time, they were decent buys (mostly...the K6-III was a little bit spendy, but it was still cheaper than forking out for an Athlon, which would've also needed a new motherboard and a new case, as my K6-III is on a VA-503+ in an AT full-tower case). More importantly (at least to me), they weren't from Intel, home of the processor serial number.
It is, but I've already posted in this thread. Besides, I don't moderate anymore as/. has idiots for metamoderators nowadays.
This reminds me of when the Mac came out. The biggest whiners were the Apple ][ users.
I resemble that remark!:-| You would've complained too if, aside from the occasional OS tweak, you were told (maybe in slightly more polite terms) to FOAD. Apple today seems to revel in making as much of its legacy equipment obsolete as possible. First it was Apple IIs. After that, 68K Macs. After that, people with tons of ADB and/or SCSI peripherals that wouldn't hook into the new Macs like they would hook into the old ones. There's no reason for that to have happened (especially the last bit about ADB and SCSI devices), other than that Steve Jobs seems to not be happy unless he can piss off as many people as possible. He's little more than a marketdroid. Woz was the genius who designed the machines that put Apple on the map. Jobs nearly destroyed the company before he was booted out. As for his current success...maybe he got lucky.
(Yes, I have a handful of Apple IIs (a "stealth IIGS," a IIe, and a II+. Lest you think I'm an inveterate Mac-basher, I snagged an old Quadra 610 recently, mainly for fooling around. They're supposed to make good Apple II peripherals.:-) It's also a different platform on which to play with Linux, though I might keep MacOS on it as well. With the changes Jobs likes to make seemingly at whim, I don't know if I'd want to fork over money for a current-model Mac, not knowing if whatever $$$ was sunk into add-ons for it would end up wasted in a couple years' time. At least x86 clones don't leave you beholden to one vendor, and you know going in that Apple's older stuff isn't in flux.)
My god, you're actually complaining about a legacy dos menu UI style not being implemented on Macs in the year 2000.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why force users to throw out everything they already know? There has to be a study out there showing that people who stick to the keyboard as much as possible get stuff done more quickly than those who keep having to switch back and forth between keyboard and mouse. I know I'm faster that way. (Hell, I have four boxen running Linux at home, and only one has X installed.)
Given that the underpinnings of MacOS X have a 30-year lineage behind them (older than Apple itself, and older than the DOS that you denigrate), it seems absurd that you would be sniping at any kind of "legacy presence."
infinite height refers to Fitt's Law. This is a User Interface principle that states, in short,
"The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target."
In terms of menus, this means that it's easier to hit a menu if it is placed at an edge of the screen. In Windows apps, there is a space above the menus, so you have to be more precise with the mouse. It's a subtle difference, but it makes a difference in daily usage of the OS.
Keyboard shortcuts are your friend...they're even faster to get at than having to grab the mouse and point it at some part of the screen (even if that part of the screen is along the top). MacOS (at least the versions I've used, which are a bit old) doesn't provide a consistent way to open and browse menus with the keyboard. Some shortcuts are consistent across applications (Open-Apple-C to copy, for instance), but to do something as basic as shut the machine down, you need to hit the mouse (or the power switch, but that's a Bad Idea). By comparison, I can get around in Win9x/NT/2K almost entirely without a mouse. KDE comes close, though it's still too dependent on the mouse.
(The really weird thing is that GS/OS, the MacOS-derived operating system for the Apple IIGS, has more keyboard shortcuts than MacOS. It's been around for about 12 years; the last version was released maybe 7 years ago. MacOS has borrowed some things that were introduced in GS/OS (like installable filesystems), but it hasn't picked up on keyboard shortcuts.)
I remember them. You could supposedly drop one off the roof of a building in the middle of a read/write operation and not loose any data or damage the media from the impact.
A few years ago (probably '91 or '92), an Iomega rep brought a Bernoulli drive and some disks to a user-group meeting. He took the disk (with his demo) out of the drive and tossed it out into the audience, and encouraged the audience to throw it around for about a minute (in which time it hit the floor and bounced off the walls a few times) before asking for the disk to be returned. Once he had it back, he popped it back in the drive...and it still worked.
Doesn't VoiceStream already offer this service in many markets?
Not here (Las Vegas), at least...the local GSM service provider is Nevada Bell, which is related somehow (subsidiary, maybe?) of Pacific Bell.
I had GSM through them a while back...it's good stuff. The only reason I dropped it is that my employer provides me with a phone and service for free. (That service is Nextel, which has its advantages and disadvantages.) Why pay for something you can get for free?:-)
At this point, I'm not aware of anybody who offers GSM on a national basis. PacBell/Nevada Bell's network covers only California and southern Nevada (maybe the Reno/Carson City area by now as well; it has been a while), but most providers have roaming agreements with each other. On a trip a while back to Arizona, the phone worked between Phoenix and Tucson once roaming was enabled. (Between Las Vegas and Phoenix? No service, and that's somewhere around 270 miles.) You still need AMPS compatibility if you want your phone to work as close to anywhere as possible. (AFAIK, no phone combines GSM and AMPS. Plenty of phones offer TDMA and AMPS or CDMA and AMPS.)
I dunno, seems like Lynx is a pretty decent browser to me. I've only had one crash while using it, and that was when the power went out.
I must've forgotten that, or maybe I should've clarified IE as being a graphical browser. I occasionally fire up Lynx to view sites that I know aren't too f*cked-up to not display properly in Lynx (my site is standards-compliant and Lynx-friendly, FWIW), though I more often use Lynx as the retrieval part of a screen-scraper application to pull data off of websites. (I'm currently working on something that'll merge price information from Price Watch and vendor ratings from ResellerRatings so that you can find the best price for computer equipment without getting burned by the bottom-feeders who post lowball prices. I have the retrieval part figured out for both sites; now I just need to merge the two together. I could use MySQL, but that seems like overkill...)
Most people have machines that come pre-installed with Internet Explorer. Most Linux machines come pre-installed with Netscape, but for how long?
I suspect that most Linux users didn't have it preloaded...sure, VA Linux, Penguin Computing et al. are probably getting a few sales, but most of us are either building our own boxen or blowing Win9x off of a machine that had that preinstalled. (Put me in the former category...the only prebuilt x86 box I've ever had is an IBM PC/XT given to me a few years ago in non-working order. It now has DR DOS 6.0 and the MS Networking client installed so it can talk to my Samba server.)
When I install Linux on a machine, Netscrape doesn't get on there at all. On the last few Linux installs I've done, one of the things I've done is make sure Netscrape is deselected for installation. I don't want it on any computer that I have to use, whether under Linux or Win9x/NT/2K. On my home workstation, I have VMware and Win98 installed so I can run IE (which I'm using right now to punch this in). At work, I recently put SuSE 7.0 on a spare partition. When the system agrees to talk to the proxy (an NT4 server running MS Proxy Server 2, which sometimes crashes when Dante tries to talk to it), Konqueror looks like it ought to be a decent Linux-native browser, even if it's not out of beta yet. I've even been known to use Lynx from time to time (we don't need no steenking graphics!).
Nearly anything is better than taking AOHell's blue pill known as Netscape.
<sarcasm>
Well, that's not really an option, unless you know something I don't. Since when did M$ port IE to Linux/FreeBSD?
</sarcasm>
VMware is your friend.:-) It's the only way to get a decent web browser (read: IE) running under Linux. (Well, the Win16 flavor of IE might run under Wine, but I've never tried Wine and don't know how well it works. I also need to be able to run pcAnywhere at home, so it's not like I only use VMware for IE.)
I suppose it'd be better than a straight popular vote, though...anything would be better than having the morons in NYC and LA determing the course of the nation all by themselves.
So you don't fancy the US being run as a democracy then?
Considering that, contrary to popular misconception, the United States is not and was never intended to be a democracy...no. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
However, the fact that you say that shows that you believe that the
Electoral College is still important than the voice of the people.
Hmm...
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
-- Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 2
I don't see anything in the above paragraph that pertains to any "voice of the people." In fact, there's nothing in there that says ordinary people are to be involved in the election of the President at all. Your state's legislature could just as soon name the electors itself and it would be within the bounds of the Constitution. (Whether it would satisfy your state's laws is another matter, but that is beyond the scope of this argument.)
The people have spoken nationwide, and it has been in favor of Gore.
See above. What "the people" think is irrelevant, as far as the Constitution is concerned. Don't like it? Try to have it changed if you must, but it is the law of the land and is to be followed if it has any meaning at all.
The only honorable thing for Bush to do is politely step down and
awknowledge what the people want.
Repeat after me: "'What the people want' is irrelevant. 'What the people want' is unconstitutional." Hell, over half of the voters didn't vote for Clinton in '92 and '96. Does that mean he shouldn't have been in office? (If you asked me, yes, but not on account of the election results.) As flawed a character as he is, he won the electoral vote. I sure as hell didn't like it, but them's the breaks. Now that the election isn't going your way, the Constitution is to be thrown out the window? I would reply to that with some rather choice words describing what you can go do with yourself, but that would only succeed in some bonehead moderator marking this down to -1, Flamebait.
I personally like the electorial votes because it gives the
smaller states a little more weight in the election, but I don't like
that a single party gets all the votes in a state.
Not all states are like that. Maine and Nebraska (I think those are the two) allocate two votes to the statewide winner and one vote to each congressional district, or something like that. For a while, Maine's electoral vote was split 3-1 (I think it's 4-0 now, though). I'm not sure that it would be that bright an idea, though, as it would tend to make the votes of a smaller state even more irrelevant than they seem to have already become. I suppose it'd be better than a straight popular vote, though...anything would be better than having the morons in NYC and LA determing the course of the nation all by themselves.:-P
There is a tremendous rejection rate from the machines (I heard around
5%). That's 5% of ballots that are NOT counted by these machines. Some
of those are for Bush, some for Gore. But if you can hold a ballot,
look at it and see that the chad is detached at two corners, it's a
frigging vote.
Umm...not exactly. The voting instructions, which were mailed to voters with their sample ballots and posted in all polling places, advised voters to check the ballot to make sure there were no hanging chads. This is common sense if you're still using punched-card ballots, and according to this morning's Fox News Sunday it was part of the instructions.
If a voter is too stupid to read and follow instructions, tough sh*t. Checking a punched card to make sure all of the appropriate chads are punched out takes what, 5 seconds?
Another consideration that has been advanced is that punched-card ballots aren't intended to be fed through the mechanical counting machines zillions of times. The sensing mechanism could very well have been responsible for the so-called "dimpled chads" and "pregnant chads" that Algore's team wanted to claim as votes. MSNBC's Brian Williams tried to create a dimpled chad himself with a sample ballot and was unable to do so; the least amount of pressure he could apply caused the chad to pop right out.
Still, maybe I shouldn't complain too much. Even with the playing field tilted so obviously toward Algore, even with Algore winning nearly all the concessions he sought, Dubya still came out the winner. The only thing left now is if Algore is willing to just walk away as the loser, or if he will insist on having the adjective "sore" added to that label. I suspect that when this is all over, if he keeps behaving like he has, he wouldn't be able to win a race for county dogcatcher in the future. Hell, even Ralph Nader can make a comeback, but Algore's political future is toast.
Now a little over a year later they've managed to look less like a Geo ("It'll get you there and back, but don't expect too much.") into more of a Chevorlet ("Quality, full featured automobile at a fair price."). Now with their recent development of dual processor capable motherboards they may be approaching something on the lines of a Pontiac ("Good performance, quality machine, low cost."). While Intel is starting to look more and more like an Oldsmobile ("A nice comfortable car for fuddy-duddies.")
Hey, don't knock Olds...back in the day, they developed most of the new stuff (automatic transmissions, front-wheel drive, etc.) that eventually appeared in other GM divisions' products. Especially in the era of the Rocket V8s, Olds engines were a Good Thing (TM) to have, used to some extent by everybody but Chevy (an Olds engine would've been too expensive to put in a Chevy, but Pontiac, Buick, and Cadillac used a few).
If I had to compare processors to cars, the P4 would be a Cimarron (a J-car from Cadillac is still a J-car) and the Athlon would be more like a 442 (lots of power for a not-unreasonable price).:-)
Don't knock "your father's Oldsmobile.":-) (Hell, mine isn't all that different from his...a '77 vs. his '73.)
one of the biggest advantages of "normal" routers is that they're solid state. there aren't any moving parts (fans/spindles/etc) to wear out.
Hmm...
Most 486-class CPUs are adequately cooled with just a heatsink (an i486DX4-100 might need a fan, but <=66-MHz and/or 3.3-volt (Cyrix/AMD) CPUs often don't; my firewall uses a Cyrix 5x86-120 and it only has a smallish heatsink epoxied to the processor).
If your router setup will fit on a floppy, you can set things up so the floppy is only accessed at bootup. If more space is required, you could get one of those CompactFlash-to-IDE adapters and an appropriately-sized CF card and use it in place of the usual spinning-metal contraption.
Once you've gotten the overall power consumption down low enough, if you're a little daring you could try removing the power supply fan. With an old, slow processor and no HD, power consumption should be a small fraction of what the power supply can deliver.
Do that and you'll have no moving parts to wear out, and it'll still run Linux.:-)
(Mod this as offtopic if you must, but somebody has to say something and there's really no place to discuss it. At the time I read the post that follows, its score was 2, Troll.)
No. I haven't been asked to buy software under UCITA rules. But I have been asked to do something that's similar, in a frightening sort of way.
My company recently enacted a "code of conduct", under which "software piracy" is not allowed. My section manager requested me to "buy a licence" for a Linux server I had installed. No matter how I tried to explain the GPL to him, he wouldn't budge, so I had to order a Linux distro. I hope he's satisfied now.
How on God's green earth is this a troll? It makes a legitimate point about the PHB-like idiocy that exists in some companies. It's on-topic and doesn't have any of the "bait" that usually marks a troll. (Yes, I know that posts can be modded up and down to arrive at scores such as "4, Offtopic" or "0, Insightful," but it seems somebody doesn't have a bleeding clue what "troll" means.)
Overall, the quality of moderation and metamoderation on/. has been on a downward spiral lately. I used to be willing to moderate, but a few morons who like to abuse metamoderation put an end to that. I doubt that I'm the only one, which would lead to the quality of moderation slipping as well as the inDUHviduals who mod good posts down aren't going to attack each other in metamoderation.
Hell, it seems that more than a few people are more interested in attacking people's sigs than engaging in rational dialogue. Maybe it's no wonder that moderation/metamoderation are also slipping.
...and took the idea a bit further. (The IDE cables inside a TiVo are split into groups of four or five (can't remember) wires each, which allow them to be neatly routed in a fairly confined area.)
It depends on what you're serving. I have most of one company's email going through a cast-off P5-166. It has only about a gig of storage (and that's split between two smaller HDs), but that was enough for SuSE 6.3 with the usual stuff needed to serve up email to about 40-50 addresses via POP3. The only time we've had a problem was when dyndns.org went down a couple of months ago, and that was beyond our control. The machine's been up nearly eight months now without a reboot and shows no sign of trouble. (When it's not shuffling mail, it's crunching primes...the load average is always >=1.00.)
95 just sucks. No Windows 98 user would go back to 95 just for increased stability
I don't know why any (informed) 95 user would upgrade to 98
FAT32, perhaps? Partitions >2GB with reasonable cluster sizes are a Good Thing, and Win95 didn't implement FAT32 (well, pre-OSR2 Win95 didn't anyway).
I'll allow that if you already had Win95 OSR2.x, IE4 and a few other downloads would get you 95%+ of the way to Win98, but there were more than a few things (FAT32 being the most significant) that Microsoft never saw fit to make available to people running the original Win95.
Look here, chaps, the problem with the voting in Florida was that it used a complicated mechanical system.
One of the gripes raised in Florida was that about 19k ballots in Palm Beach County (not Broward County, as Jon Katz stated) were thrown out because of a double-vote...someone punched a candidate, realized he made a mistake--and then failed to get a new ballot and proceeded to screw up his vote altogether by punching another candidate.
The electronic voting machines used here in Nevada (or at least in Clark County; I'm not sure about the rest of the state) since 1996 or so keep this from happening. When you step into the booth, an arrow shows up for each candidate/question for which you can vote (since one booth can serve multiple precincts). When you press a button for a candidate, the arrow moves to that candidate. If you then try to select another candidate, the machine won't allow it until you press the button for your first selection to deselect it. Double-voting is impossible with this system. Once all your choices are made, you hit a big "cast vote" button and your ballot is recorded in a memory cartridge. At the end of the vote, all of the cartridges are read into the tabulating system, which then spits out the vote. There's much less room for monkeying with the vote. About the only thing that can happen is an electronic or mechanical failure of the equipment, and that isn't as likely or as prone to fraud or manipulation as looking at a punchcard and determining if a bit of chad is or isn't punched out.
i don't get it.. is this so you can move stufdf recorded on your TiVO to your computer?
what would this do that an s-video jack on your video card doesn't?
It's the same difference as between copying a CD by sampling it in with a soundcard from an audio CD player and copying a CD by using a ripper to get the digital data off of the original. It removes an unnecessary, signal-degrading digital->analog->digital conversion.
Of course, it's pretty useless for that purpose at this point since nobody but TiVo knows the format in which MPEG streams are saved, but if (more likely when) that format is cracked, it'd be nice to slurp some digital video out of the TiVo and burn it onto some VCDs for archival purposes (the letterbox presentation of Babylon 5 that the Sci-Fi Channel is running would be a good candidate for this). VCDs take up much less space than tapes.
I guess they don't make any money on me then, since when I signed up they had the $100 or $200 lifetime subscription fee.
It was $200 when I signed up...are you saying they no longer have this option? (I don't think I've checked TiVo's website in ages, and since I'm not paying monthly charges, a policy/pricing change like that would be an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of thing.:-) )
Checking the updated TiVo FAQ linked in the add-a-NIC page turned up some interesting stuff, like the hidden diagnostic system. I have a computer (diskless workstation running SuSE 6.4) sitting less than a foot above the TiVo...time to see if I installed minicom and start playing around...anybody port mprime to the TiVo?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yep...and the local net even had a Usenet/email gateway. Toward the end, I was running my BBS (Skunk Works BBS, 1:209/263) on Linux and had fidogate (or was it some other package?) translating FidoNet traffic back to Internet-standard forms that could be handled by cnews and smail.
I'm not sure if it's still used, but when I took Operating Systems (CSC 370) at UNLV, OSP was the framework within which we wrote a memory manager and a process scheduler. As I recall, documentation for OSP was a thin staple-bound book in a dark blue cover; it couldn't have been much more than 50 or 60 pages. Since I took this course back in '92 or '93, it's definitely a fairly old product by now. I don't know if there ever would've been a website associated with it as almost nobody had heard of the Web or was using it in any serious way at the time.
"inexpensive" != "cheap-ass"
Put them on decent motherboards and they deliver sufficient performance for most people's needs. I have a gang of K6-x processors at home (K6-200, K6-2-300, K6-III-450) that have done a great job under Win9x and Linux. At the time, they were decent buys (mostly...the K6-III was a little bit spendy, but it was still cheaper than forking out for an Athlon, which would've also needed a new motherboard and a new case, as my K6-III is on a VA-503+ in an AT full-tower case). More importantly (at least to me), they weren't from Intel, home of the processor serial number.
Wasn't there a scene in The Wrath of Khan about why it's a Good Thing to know how/why things work? :-)
It is, but I've already posted in this thread. Besides, I don't moderate anymore as /. has idiots for metamoderators nowadays.
I resemble that remark! :-| You would've complained too if, aside from the occasional OS tweak, you were told (maybe in slightly more polite terms) to FOAD. Apple today seems to revel in making as much of its legacy equipment obsolete as possible. First it was Apple IIs. After that, 68K Macs. After that, people with tons of ADB and/or SCSI peripherals that wouldn't hook into the new Macs like they would hook into the old ones. There's no reason for that to have happened (especially the last bit about ADB and SCSI devices), other than that Steve Jobs seems to not be happy unless he can piss off as many people as possible. He's little more than a marketdroid. Woz was the genius who designed the machines that put Apple on the map. Jobs nearly destroyed the company before he was booted out. As for his current success...maybe he got lucky.
(Yes, I have a handful of Apple IIs (a "stealth IIGS," a IIe, and a II+. Lest you think I'm an inveterate Mac-basher, I snagged an old Quadra 610 recently, mainly for fooling around. They're supposed to make good Apple II peripherals. :-) It's also a different platform on which to play with Linux, though I might keep MacOS on it as well. With the changes Jobs likes to make seemingly at whim, I don't know if I'd want to fork over money for a current-model Mac, not knowing if whatever $$$ was sunk into add-ons for it would end up wasted in a couple years' time. At least x86 clones don't leave you beholden to one vendor, and you know going in that Apple's older stuff isn't in flux.)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why force users to throw out everything they already know? There has to be a study out there showing that people who stick to the keyboard as much as possible get stuff done more quickly than those who keep having to switch back and forth between keyboard and mouse. I know I'm faster that way. (Hell, I have four boxen running Linux at home, and only one has X installed.)
Given that the underpinnings of MacOS X have a 30-year lineage behind them (older than Apple itself, and older than the DOS that you denigrate), it seems absurd that you would be sniping at any kind of "legacy presence."
Keyboard shortcuts are your friend...they're even faster to get at than having to grab the mouse and point it at some part of the screen (even if that part of the screen is along the top). MacOS (at least the versions I've used, which are a bit old) doesn't provide a consistent way to open and browse menus with the keyboard. Some shortcuts are consistent across applications (Open-Apple-C to copy, for instance), but to do something as basic as shut the machine down, you need to hit the mouse (or the power switch, but that's a Bad Idea). By comparison, I can get around in Win9x/NT/2K almost entirely without a mouse. KDE comes close, though it's still too dependent on the mouse.
(The really weird thing is that GS/OS, the MacOS-derived operating system for the Apple IIGS, has more keyboard shortcuts than MacOS. It's been around for about 12 years; the last version was released maybe 7 years ago. MacOS has borrowed some things that were introduced in GS/OS (like installable filesystems), but it hasn't picked up on keyboard shortcuts.)
A few years ago (probably '91 or '92), an Iomega rep brought a Bernoulli drive and some disks to a user-group meeting. He took the disk (with his demo) out of the drive and tossed it out into the audience, and encouraged the audience to throw it around for about a minute (in which time it hit the floor and bounced off the walls a few times) before asking for the disk to be returned. Once he had it back, he popped it back in the drive...and it still worked.
I had GSM through them a while back...it's good stuff. The only reason I dropped it is that my employer provides me with a phone and service for free. (That service is Nextel, which has its advantages and disadvantages.) Why pay for something you can get for free? :-)
At this point, I'm not aware of anybody who offers GSM on a national basis. PacBell/Nevada Bell's network covers only California and southern Nevada (maybe the Reno/Carson City area by now as well; it has been a while), but most providers have roaming agreements with each other. On a trip a while back to Arizona, the phone worked between Phoenix and Tucson once roaming was enabled. (Between Las Vegas and Phoenix? No service, and that's somewhere around 270 miles.) You still need AMPS compatibility if you want your phone to work as close to anywhere as possible. (AFAIK, no phone combines GSM and AMPS. Plenty of phones offer TDMA and AMPS or CDMA and AMPS.)
I must've forgotten that, or maybe I should've clarified IE as being a graphical browser. I occasionally fire up Lynx to view sites that I know aren't too f*cked-up to not display properly in Lynx (my site is standards-compliant and Lynx-friendly, FWIW), though I more often use Lynx as the retrieval part of a screen-scraper application to pull data off of websites. (I'm currently working on something that'll merge price information from Price Watch and vendor ratings from ResellerRatings so that you can find the best price for computer equipment without getting burned by the bottom-feeders who post lowball prices. I have the retrieval part figured out for both sites; now I just need to merge the two together. I could use MySQL, but that seems like overkill...)
I suspect that most Linux users didn't have it preloaded...sure, VA Linux, Penguin Computing et al. are probably getting a few sales, but most of us are either building our own boxen or blowing Win9x off of a machine that had that preinstalled. (Put me in the former category...the only prebuilt x86 box I've ever had is an IBM PC/XT given to me a few years ago in non-working order. It now has DR DOS 6.0 and the MS Networking client installed so it can talk to my Samba server.)
When I install Linux on a machine, Netscrape doesn't get on there at all. On the last few Linux installs I've done, one of the things I've done is make sure Netscrape is deselected for installation. I don't want it on any computer that I have to use, whether under Linux or Win9x/NT/2K. On my home workstation, I have VMware and Win98 installed so I can run IE (which I'm using right now to punch this in). At work, I recently put SuSE 7.0 on a spare partition. When the system agrees to talk to the proxy (an NT4 server running MS Proxy Server 2, which sometimes crashes when Dante tries to talk to it), Konqueror looks like it ought to be a decent Linux-native browser, even if it's not out of beta yet. I've even been known to use Lynx from time to time (we don't need no steenking graphics!).
Nearly anything is better than taking AOHell's blue pill known as Netscape.
VMware is your friend. :-) It's the only way to get a decent web browser (read: IE) running under Linux. (Well, the Win16 flavor of IE might run under Wine, but I've never tried Wine and don't know how well it works. I also need to be able to run pcAnywhere at home, so it's not like I only use VMware for IE.)
Considering that, contrary to popular misconception, the United States is not and was never intended to be a democracy...no. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.
Hmm...
I don't see anything in the above paragraph that pertains to any "voice of the people." In fact, there's nothing in there that says ordinary people are to be involved in the election of the President at all. Your state's legislature could just as soon name the electors itself and it would be within the bounds of the Constitution. (Whether it would satisfy your state's laws is another matter, but that is beyond the scope of this argument.)
See above. What "the people" think is irrelevant, as far as the Constitution is concerned. Don't like it? Try to have it changed if you must, but it is the law of the land and is to be followed if it has any meaning at all.
Repeat after me: "'What the people want' is irrelevant. 'What the people want' is unconstitutional." Hell, over half of the voters didn't vote for Clinton in '92 and '96. Does that mean he shouldn't have been in office? (If you asked me, yes, but not on account of the election results.) As flawed a character as he is, he won the electoral vote. I sure as hell didn't like it, but them's the breaks. Now that the election isn't going your way, the Constitution is to be thrown out the window? I would reply to that with some rather choice words describing what you can go do with yourself, but that would only succeed in some bonehead moderator marking this down to -1, Flamebait.
Bush won. Gore lost. Get used to it.
Not all states are like that. Maine and Nebraska (I think those are the two) allocate two votes to the statewide winner and one vote to each congressional district, or something like that. For a while, Maine's electoral vote was split 3-1 (I think it's 4-0 now, though). I'm not sure that it would be that bright an idea, though, as it would tend to make the votes of a smaller state even more irrelevant than they seem to have already become. I suppose it'd be better than a straight popular vote, though...anything would be better than having the morons in NYC and LA determing the course of the nation all by themselves. :-P
Umm...not exactly. The voting instructions, which were mailed to voters with their sample ballots and posted in all polling places, advised voters to check the ballot to make sure there were no hanging chads. This is common sense if you're still using punched-card ballots, and according to this morning's Fox News Sunday it was part of the instructions. If a voter is too stupid to read and follow instructions, tough sh*t. Checking a punched card to make sure all of the appropriate chads are punched out takes what, 5 seconds?
Another consideration that has been advanced is that punched-card ballots aren't intended to be fed through the mechanical counting machines zillions of times. The sensing mechanism could very well have been responsible for the so-called "dimpled chads" and "pregnant chads" that Algore's team wanted to claim as votes. MSNBC's Brian Williams tried to create a dimpled chad himself with a sample ballot and was unable to do so; the least amount of pressure he could apply caused the chad to pop right out.
Still, maybe I shouldn't complain too much. Even with the playing field tilted so obviously toward Algore, even with Algore winning nearly all the concessions he sought, Dubya still came out the winner. The only thing left now is if Algore is willing to just walk away as the loser, or if he will insist on having the adjective "sore" added to that label. I suspect that when this is all over, if he keeps behaving like he has, he wouldn't be able to win a race for county dogcatcher in the future. Hell, even Ralph Nader can make a comeback, but Algore's political future is toast.
Hey, don't knock Olds...back in the day, they developed most of the new stuff (automatic transmissions, front-wheel drive, etc.) that eventually appeared in other GM divisions' products. Especially in the era of the Rocket V8s, Olds engines were a Good Thing (TM) to have, used to some extent by everybody but Chevy (an Olds engine would've been too expensive to put in a Chevy, but Pontiac, Buick, and Cadillac used a few).
If I had to compare processors to cars, the P4 would be a Cimarron (a J-car from Cadillac is still a J-car) and the Athlon would be more like a 442 (lots of power for a not-unreasonable price). :-)
Don't knock "your father's Oldsmobile." :-) (Hell, mine isn't all that different from his...a '77 vs. his '73.)
Hmm...
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Most 486-class CPUs are adequately cooled with just a heatsink (an i486DX4-100 might need a fan, but <=66-MHz and/or 3.3-volt (Cyrix/AMD) CPUs often don't; my firewall uses a Cyrix 5x86-120 and it only has a smallish heatsink epoxied to the processor).
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If your router setup will fit on a floppy, you can set things up so the floppy is only accessed at bootup. If more space is required, you could get one of those CompactFlash-to-IDE adapters and an appropriately-sized CF card and use it in place of the usual spinning-metal contraption.
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Once you've gotten the overall power consumption down low enough, if you're a little daring you could try removing the power supply fan. With an old, slow processor and no HD, power consumption should be a small fraction of what the power supply can deliver.
Do that and you'll have no moving parts to wear out, and it'll still run Linux.How on God's green earth is this a troll? It makes a legitimate point about the PHB-like idiocy that exists in some companies. It's on-topic and doesn't have any of the "bait" that usually marks a troll. (Yes, I know that posts can be modded up and down to arrive at scores such as "4, Offtopic" or "0, Insightful," but it seems somebody doesn't have a bleeding clue what "troll" means.)
Overall, the quality of moderation and metamoderation on /. has been on a downward spiral lately. I used to be willing to moderate, but a few morons who like to abuse metamoderation put an end to that. I doubt that I'm the only one, which would lead to the quality of moderation slipping as well as the inDUHviduals who mod good posts down aren't going to attack each other in metamoderation.
Hell, it seems that more than a few people are more interested in attacking people's sigs than engaging in rational dialogue. Maybe it's no wonder that moderation/metamoderation are also slipping.
...and took the idea a bit further. (The IDE cables inside a TiVo are split into groups of four or five (can't remember) wires each, which allow them to be neatly routed in a fairly confined area.)
It depends on what you're serving. I have most of one company's email going through a cast-off P5-166. It has only about a gig of storage (and that's split between two smaller HDs), but that was enough for SuSE 6.3 with the usual stuff needed to serve up email to about 40-50 addresses via POP3. The only time we've had a problem was when dyndns.org went down a couple of months ago, and that was beyond our control. The machine's been up nearly eight months now without a reboot and shows no sign of trouble. (When it's not shuffling mail, it's crunching primes...the load average is always >=1.00.)
A dual-Xeon would've been overkill.
FAT32, perhaps? Partitions >2GB with reasonable cluster sizes are a Good Thing, and Win95 didn't implement FAT32 (well, pre-OSR2 Win95 didn't anyway).
I'll allow that if you already had Win95 OSR2.x, IE4 and a few other downloads would get you 95%+ of the way to Win98, but there were more than a few things (FAT32 being the most significant) that Microsoft never saw fit to make available to people running the original Win95.
One of the gripes raised in Florida was that about 19k ballots in Palm Beach County (not Broward County, as Jon Katz stated) were thrown out because of a double-vote...someone punched a candidate, realized he made a mistake--and then failed to get a new ballot and proceeded to screw up his vote altogether by punching another candidate.
The electronic voting machines used here in Nevada (or at least in Clark County; I'm not sure about the rest of the state) since 1996 or so keep this from happening. When you step into the booth, an arrow shows up for each candidate/question for which you can vote (since one booth can serve multiple precincts). When you press a button for a candidate, the arrow moves to that candidate. If you then try to select another candidate, the machine won't allow it until you press the button for your first selection to deselect it. Double-voting is impossible with this system. Once all your choices are made, you hit a big "cast vote" button and your ballot is recorded in a memory cartridge. At the end of the vote, all of the cartridges are read into the tabulating system, which then spits out the vote. There's much less room for monkeying with the vote. About the only thing that can happen is an electronic or mechanical failure of the equipment, and that isn't as likely or as prone to fraud or manipulation as looking at a punchcard and determining if a bit of chad is or isn't punched out.
It's the same difference as between copying a CD by sampling it in with a soundcard from an audio CD player and copying a CD by using a ripper to get the digital data off of the original. It removes an unnecessary, signal-degrading digital->analog->digital conversion.
Of course, it's pretty useless for that purpose at this point since nobody but TiVo knows the format in which MPEG streams are saved, but if (more likely when) that format is cracked, it'd be nice to slurp some digital video out of the TiVo and burn it onto some VCDs for archival purposes (the letterbox presentation of Babylon 5 that the Sci-Fi Channel is running would be a good candidate for this). VCDs take up much less space than tapes.
It was $200 when I signed up...are you saying they no longer have this option? (I don't think I've checked TiVo's website in ages, and since I'm not paying monthly charges, a policy/pricing change like that would be an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of thing. :-) )
Checking the updated TiVo FAQ linked in the add-a-NIC page turned up some interesting stuff, like the hidden diagnostic system. I have a computer (diskless workstation running SuSE 6.4) sitting less than a foot above the TiVo...time to see if I installed minicom and start playing around...anybody port mprime to the TiVo? :-)