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  1. Re:Why is this news? on Tivo Hacking A-OK - Says Tivo · · Score: 2
    "Why would TiVo be concerned what you do with your box once you buy it?" Maybe you should ask the same question of Netpliance. The article on cnet refers to an earlier article describing Netpliance's efforts to thwart hardware hackers who'd convert their i-openers into ordinary PCs. I think it's a good thing that TiVo is keeping a more open mind about this. (I suppose it also helps that TiVo isn't the actual hardware manufacturer. Maybe they'd take a different view if they were in the hardware business instead of the software-and-service business. Then again, if they're using Linux as the foundation of their system, maybe their view is sufficiently enlightened that even if they were producing the hardware, they still really couldn't care less if people hacked their boxes to add more storage.) As long as people don't crack their system to get the programming-guide service for free, TiVo ought to be happy.

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  2. Re:Well, DUH! on Tivo Hacking A-OK - Says Tivo · · Score: 3
    Speaking of warranties and that sticker, I just snagged a TiVo (the 14-hour Philips model) a little bit ago (someone in the other recent TiVo thread mentioned that these were $200 after rebate at a certain electronics retailer). The back of the box has one of those "warranty void if removed" stickers on it. I thought it was going to be like those stickers I used to see on Packard Bells and such that left behind a silvery "VOID" when you removed it. However, the sticker actually came off pretty cleanly. If you open the case slowly enough, you can remove the sticker in one piece and put it back if you have to take the box in for service. Nothing will look amiss. You could probably even stick the sticker on some wax paper to keep it fresh, so that if you're constantly monkeying with the box, you won't have to continuallly remove/replace the sticker. I don't have a second drive to install in it right now (the drive that's in the TiVo is bigger than any of the drives in any of my computers :-) ), but I wanted to make a "virginal" backup of what's on the drive...the TiVo hacking FAQ sez this is a good idea if the thought of running afoul of warranties doesn't scare you too much, as it'll be the smallest backup possible.

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  3. Re:Hashed to death on gnu.misc.discuss on More Tivo Hacking · · Score: 1
    Are you trying to tell me it costs 25$ to make a CD? Umm, CD-R's are about 1$US; it takes 5 minutes (if that) to burn one; and USPS Priority Mail is about 3$ to anywhere in the TiVo serviced area. CD mastering houses make CDs for pennies -- I know because I've ordered custom pressed CDs.

    So, please justify the 25$ "media cost"? Just how much is that intern being paid to burn CDs?

    Last time I checked, the FSF was charging a small fortune for media packs. It's one of the ways they make the money they need to stay afloat. Remember, "free software" only implies free as in "free speech," not necessarily "free beer" (though the free-beer part is handled by dozens of FTP sites and websites).

    If you don't want to fork over $25 for the TiVo CD, the same stuff is available on their website.

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  4. Re:Great resource! on Classic Browsers Given New Life · · Score: 1
    I'm not a pro, but I have become more and more inclined to write pages that actually conforms with the standards, most notably HTML 4.01 Strict and CSS1, and go on to validate the stuff. If the browsers can't handle that, *$%^#* them. And, browsers can't handle that...

    For my personal site, this is the approach I took. I tried doing this with a company site, but Netscrape's f*cked-up handling of CSS (even in v4.x, which is inexcusable) necessitated the creation of a second, parallel site that would display acceptably in Netscrape. (How many sites do you know that are perfectly viewable in Lynx, but give Netscrape fits? To see how an HTML 4.01- and CSS1-compliant site looks in Netscrape, try this link.)

    Fortunately, a makefile and some sed and awk scripts do the conversion automatically...I still have only one source tree to maintain for the site.

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  5. Re:Those K6-III's were pretty cool on Yet Another K6 Series From AMD · · Score: 1
    but for some reason they stopped making them for PC'c?

    Yields on the K6-III were never particularly high, mainly because the L2 cache increased the die size considerably (IIRC). This also tended to keep the price up a bit.

    It didn't stop me from snagging a 450-MHz K6-III shortly before the end, though...ended up paying a little under $200 for it back in February, but it is letting me squeeze some more life out of a VA-503+ that originally held a 300-MHz K6-2 (that, and 256 megs of PC133 SDRAM purchased more recently).

    (The 650-MHz Duron I recently built into a customer's system, though, was only $110. Definitely more bang for the buck, and it'd be the way to upgrade today. AMD didn't have these back in February, though.)

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  6. Re:Absolutely agree!! on SuSE 7.0 · · Score: 1
    Yeah, sure, you can say they have cheap software only version, or it's free for download - but that's just not it. Besides it's not really all that black and white, suse comes out on ftp almost a month after it's released and is about 20% of the full distro size (just one CD usually)), so I always buy it.

    The "eval-version" ISO only has whatever would fit on a single CD, but if you install or update from their FTP site, you can, AFAIK, get all of the stuff that's on the shrinkwrapped CDs. You can also install from the CD and add packages from the FTP site. The only downside with installing from the FTP site is having to wait a few minutes when you want to add/remove packages while YaST grabs package info. I suppose that if you mirrored the distro on a local FTP server or NFS server, this problem wouldn't be as bad.

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  7. Re:Exactly. on Cobalt Networks Could Sue Apple Over Cube Design · · Score: 2
    The thing I don't get is this: Cobalt got sued by Cube Computer Corp and settled, this would imply that Cube Computer Corp has some kind of trademark rights to cube shaped computers... so how come Cube Computer Corp is not now also suing Apple? Unless of course the NeXT cube predates the founding of Cube Comp. Corp.

    I've never even heard of Cube Computer so I have no idea how long they've been around, but I was using '030 NeXTcubes as far back as 1990 (first one was, IIRC, mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu...unlimited time on the system was a wonderful thing to have when the main public-access system there (uxa?) limited you to seven hours a week). I have a hunch that that predates Cube Computer by some amount. It also predates Cobalt, and since Apple bought NeXT, Apple ought to tell Cobalt what it can go do with itself.

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  8. Re:Do we want the government regulating this? on Advertisers Agree To Privacy Restrictions - Kinda · · Score: 1
    Don't get me wrong, I'm sensitive about privacy too, which is why I have doubleclick.net cookies blocked.

    Merely denying cookies, I suspect, isn't going to hit anybody's wallet. It's still a good idea from a standpoint of them not being able to follow you as you move about the Web, but the people who make money from banner ads are probably counting the number of downloads of a particular banner. As long as your browser is still grabbing the ads, all they need to do is crunch their server logs to determine who gets paid.

    To stop this, you'll need an ad filter. Squid-redir works well under anything that can run Squid. If you're looking for something a little easier to set up and you're running Win9x, there's WebWasher.

    (I have a more comprehensive list of sites for squid-redir to block here.)

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  9. Re:Porn link Alert! on Civil Disobedience and DeCSS · · Score: 1
    The actual links of interest are

    http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00-14001-fil ed or

    http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00-14001-fil ed.pdf

    (Stupid /. insists on inserting blanks in the URLs. Remove them.)

    If you provided them as links instead of just text, the links would work, regardless of how /. ends up displaying them. Try these:

    http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&docid=00 -14001-filed

    http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=2000_register&doci d=00-14001-filed.pdf

    (Looks like they've been /.'d already.)

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  10. Re:I've sort of felt this way for a loong time on The Myth Of The Borg · · Score: 1
    The difficulty of keeping something secret is EXPONENTIALLY proportional to the number of folks who know about it.

    ...or, put another way, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.

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  11. Re:I think we all know the truth. on The Myth Of The Borg · · Score: 1
    Evidence: Notice the sharp increase in bright, flashing advertising recently? Like the "B12" ad I am viewing right now...

    Actually, I hadn't. Ad-blocking software is a wonderful thing. :-) (Here's a list of sites to block with the aforementioned software.)

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  12. What a concept... on Intel Reacts to AMD · · Score: 1
    Looks like Coppermine might actually end up being produced with copper interconnect after all. Who'd'a thunk it? No more "Aluminummine!"

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  13. Re:Diagnostics with a simple multi-meter on Connecting To An Automotive Diagnostic Computer? · · Score: 1
    Might not even need the meter... seem to remember that on one car we had, you could get the error codes to flash on one of the indicators on the dash by doing something odd while turning the key.

    With most (all?) computer-equipped GM vehicles, if you short the appropriate terminals on the ALDL (Assembly Line Diagnostic Link) connector and switch the ignition on, the "Check Engine" light will start blinking out any stored trouble codes. A decent aftermarket manual will tell you which terminals to short and what the different trouble codes mean for your vehicle. (At least the Haynes manual for the '83 Celebrity I used to drive has this info.)

    Car-parts stores also sell a gadget that hooks into the ALDL and blinks out the trouble codes, but why spend the $20-$30 they're asking when a two-cent chunk of wire will do the same job?

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  14. Re:Javascript redirects on Web Standards Project Blasts Netscape · · Score: 1
    Why did you use Javascript for the redirects anyhow? I know it's Netscape and all, but from the comments of people who turn off Javascript to avoid pr0n redirects and popups, it's not going to work for quite a few people...

    If JavaScript is disabled or not available, a page comes up which allows the user to pick which tree to use.

    Why didn't you check the browser version on the server and dump the right code accordingly that way?

    I don't know if IIS can do that or not, and I wouldn't know how to set it up if it did. (We don't run the server ourselves; it's run by a local ISP. I had the site running on my personal server (which uses Apache) for testing purposes, but any server-side stuff done under Apache would more than likely not work too well under IIS. :-) Just getting the JavaScript code to work under Netscrape was hassle enough (had an HTML "-->" end-comment mark on a line by itself at the end, but Netscrape wouldn't run unless that mark was escaped by Java's "//" comment mark). If it were up to me, I would've said "screw the Netscrape users; they can get a browser that works," but that wouldn't have gone over too well with the boss. (For some inexplicable reason, he thinks Netscrape's the best thing since sliced bread.) For that matter, I've never even done much web-related scripting of any kind, and wouldn't have done this little bit if it could've been avoided. (The script was cribbed from some JavaScript info sites; I had never done anything with JavaScript before, but figured it's as close to cross-platform as anything else.)

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  15. Re:Sigh.. on Web Standards Project Blasts Netscape · · Score: 2
    (I probably shouldn't respond to this, but here goes anyway...)
    Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.

    Great, if you want to waste your time catering to less than 1% of the web sufing [sic] public, well that's your business, but I find it hard to belive you couldn't come up with a better use of your time.

    Um...I figured it was more than "catering to less than 1% of the web sufing [sic] public," as you put it. Consider these points:

    • Accessibility. As it originally stood, our site was a mess from the viewpoint (pardon the pun) of someone with a visual handicap. You might see a text image with a paragraph describing a product perfectly well, but a text-reading program that simply spits out "PRODDESC.JPG" isn't terribly descriptive. If your site looks OK in Lynx, there's a pretty good chance that text readers and other adaptive technologies will be able to grok it too.
    • Handheld Devices. Most PDAs and wireless phones capable of web-browsing either (1) don't display graphics at all or (2) do a lousy job of handling graphics. They also tend to be bandwidth-constrained. If your site looks OK in Lynx, it should be usable from a wireless phone or PDA.

    It's called "thinking outside the box." It's called "not being yet another FrontPage-generated piece-of-garbage corporate site." I'm surprised to see a response such as yours on /. (Then again, there are rumored to be some people here whose only exposure to computers is Win9x/NT/2K, who never learned that there's another way.)

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    (IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
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  16. Re:Sigh.. on Web Standards Project Blasts Netscape · · Score: 4
    And as a designer, getting pages to look right in both IE and NS while trying to remain W3C 100% valid is a nightmare.

    I just went through this with the conversion of a customer's website. Whoever had done the site before designed it with frames, lots of text images, and not an ALT tag in sight. It was pretty scary, especially if you tried browsing it with Lynx.

    I downloaded and printed out the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 specs and went to town over the weekend, redesigning the site with standards compliance in mind. It looked pretty good in IE 4, IE 5, Mozilla M16, and even Lynx...but Netscrape 4.x completely botched the interpretation of the style information. I ended up rejiggering the makefile for the site and cobbling together some awk and sed scripts to convert the entire site from a style-sheet-based, standards-compliant design to a table-based design that Netscrape would display acceptably. Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.

    (If you want to check out my handiwork, it's at http://www.thejewelers.com. You can also use this link to go straight to the standards-compliant site or this link to go to the lobotomized site. It's not 100% where I want it (no robot food, for instance), but it duplicates the original site's look and feel in a more standards-compliant (and faster-loading, too) way.) All this is just one more reason why I use Internet Explorer, even under Linux (thank $DEITY for VMware...). Say what you want about Microsoft, but they did a much better job of sticking to standards than Netscape.

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  17. Re:Yay, Woz! on Wozniak Interview In Failure · · Score: 1
    And I think that's what Apple has never really understood. They make quality products, but people pay an unreasonable premium for that; and their OS has always sucked, except perhaps for MacOS X.

    That's funny...of the OSen that run on the different computers I have, ProDOS on my Apple IIs has never crashed in the 15 years I've used it. Never. You can't say that for Win9x or NT...hell, you can't even say that for Linux (my Linux server once ate itself in a really weird way when a program I was writing malloc'd way too much memory). The worst that's happened is a date-rollover problem once every seven years with certain hardware combinations (specifically, 8-bit IIs with Thunderclock-compatible clock cards). Apple used to fix that with new releases; now, there are patch programs to deal with it. The IIGS (that's the 16-bit model, for those of you in Rio Linda) was even Y2K-ready, despite the last one having been made about eight years ago and the last OS upgrade having been released not too long after that.

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  18. Re:CSS on Microsoft's IE 5.5 Flouts Industry Standards · · Score: 1
    W3C is not always too slow. Take CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). How many browsers even implement CSS2, never mind extending it?

    I think I'm running into this problem right now with a website that I'm reworking to be more standards-compliant. (It was originally created with frames for formatting and lots of text-containing graphics with no ALT tags. Browsing it with Lynx shows just how woefully deficient it is.) I have a reworked (but still not finished) main page up (if you want to see what I'm doing, check out http://salfter.dyndn s.org/www.thejewelers.com/index-html4.html that works fine in IE 5.01, but Navigator 4.7 completely ignores the associated CSS positioning info. W3C's HTML and CSS validators say the page is OK, and some other HTML validators (such as NetMechanic and even the Netscape-controlled Web Site Garage) have said the same thing. Web Site Garage's browser-compatibility check even said the design was OK for Navigator 4.x. Actually viewing it with the different browsers says something different.

    (Just got Mozilla M16 installed under Win98...it renders things a little differently than IE, but it's comparable to IE. Much better than Navigator 4.7. I tried installing Mozilla under Linux to get it running on the metal instead of under VMware (which is where I run Win98 and IE), but the installer segfaulted. The box is a 450-MHz K6-III with 256 megs of RAM and SuSE Linux 6.3, which ought to be enough to run anything.)

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  19. Re:My Computer Firsts on Grosse Pointe Quickies · · Score: 1
    First computer was a Radio shack (TM) Tandy Color Computer...We didn't overclock!! We didn't need it!

    IIRC, there was a POKE that would double the execution speed of your programs. The disk controller didn't like it much, though...as soon as you used it while the disk controller was plugged in, it either locked up or rebooted.

    (The first computer I had at home was a TI-99/4A. Before that, there was my grandfather's CoCo, and before that, a TAG program I was in had some TRS-80 Model Is and an Apple II+. My current collection of old computers consists of three Apple IIs (IIGS, IIe, II+), an IBM PC/XT (it talks to my Samba servers through a 8-bit Ethernet NIC I tracked down in a used-parts store), a Tandy Color Computer 2, and a Commodore VIC-20. The one I've had longest is the IIGS, which started life back in '85 as a IIe (with 128K, a DuoDisk, and an Imagewriter).)

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  20. Re:Very simply. If it could work. on AMD Stops Overclockers Dream Motherboard · · Score: 1
    Very simply. You make your CPUs so they announce to the world at bootup

    AMD-K7-Athelon-500MHz Running at 800MHz.

    There are 2 reasons AMD and iNTEL don't and won't do that however.

    Reason Number 1. It would mean having different CPU dies for each chip they sell. They aren't going to do that. They prefer to simply build a batch of chips and depending on how clean they come out you put a label on to claim a specific clock speed. Yes. Specific clock speeds are determined after the fact before labeling is done, not before.

    Not necessarily...you either provide some extra connections at the edge of the die that either (1) allow for some configuration PROM space to be accessed to write in the correct speed or (2) hardwire the desired speed before the die is packaged. (Isn't Intel already using approach #1 to burn serial #s into the P!!!? I think they have some kind of CPU-id utility that's supposed to be able to read out the "advertised speed" of the processor. I thought they did this so that (l)users could check and make sure they got what they thought they bought.)

    Reason Number 2. Any Information the CPU issues about itself must go through the BIOS 1st. The problem is that someone with the resources of a 2 bit 10 box a day CPU manufacturer can arrange to have the BIOS altered so the quote above would say nice things like.

    AMD-K7-Athelon-800MHz Running at 800MHz.

    This is probably beyond the capabilities of the average screwdriver shop, but I'll admit that PCChips did something similar in the past with 486 motherboards with fake L2 cache. The possibility is there...but since motherboard makers usually don't ship processors with their products, what incentive would they have to do this? (The fake cache on those PCChips motherboards was an integral part of the motherboard, so they h4x0red their BIOS to always display "256K L2 cache" (or something to that effect) at boot-up.)

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  21. Re:Probably more than you suspect on Future Of Internet-Based Distributed Computing · · Score: 1
    Here's a "AskSlashDot" question. Should you turn off your PC when not in use? In the olden days it seemed like it was better to leave them on, but maybe that is not true anymore.

    If you use your computer regularly, leave it on, but switch the monitor off. (If you don't use your computer regularly, what are you doing on /.? :-) ) Somebody else mentioned thermal cycling; that's a possible source of damage in the computer, but a more likely problem is that the hard drive will eventually conk out from being spun up/spun down all the time. (Make sure your power-management settings aren't set to spin the HD down, too.)

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  22. Re:There goes freedom of speech... on Corporations Fight Online Anticorporate Statements · · Score: 1
    How is it ...another instance of our first admentment rights getting trashed for a company (or for that matter an individual) to want to know what's being said about it?

    How does the First Amendment enter into the equation? It is, after all, a restriction on government power, not a statement of the rights of individuals (or of corporations, which have most of the status and rights of people).

    That's neither here nor there, though...the negative PR that would be generated when it becomes known that Acme Widget Co. is building an "enemies list" is something that they'd want to take into account before engaging in such an endeavor.

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  23. Re:not so easy on Who Reads Your @nospam Mail? · · Score: 1
    Well, most of the "Bulk Mail" filters work by assuming all mail without your email address in the To: or Cc: field is spam.

    However, often legitimate mailing lists don't put your email address in To: or Cc:. I subscribe to several.

    Most mailing lists include a Sender: line in outgoing messages, so you can filter for something like Sender:apex600a-bounce@nerd-out.com or Sender:oldsmobile-owner@chebucto.ns.ca (real examples from my .procmail directory) to make sure your mailing-list traffic doesn't end up in the Spam Can.

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  24. Re:So don't do that. on Who Reads Your @nospam Mail? · · Score: 1
    And I thought I was creative using 'president@whitehouse.gov' all this time.

    I thought "billc@whitehouse.com" was more appropriate, given his proclivities...

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  25. Re:Why OC? Why not buy the next speed grade? on ABIT KT7 With Built-In CPU Multiplier Adjustment · · Score: 1
    1. Using a propane torch to sweat soldered-in 256Kx1 DRAM chips out of scrapped non-PC memory boards so you can get all 640K on your motherboard for cheap.

    256K? I've swiped 16K chips off of boards! (Used a solder sucker to pull 'em off an Atari 5200...haven't used them for anything yet, but they ought to be usable as spares for my Apple II+ if any of its memory goes tango-uniform.)

    6. Fitting a standard-spacing motherboard into a case that started out with a different motherboard with non-standard spacing for expansion cards.

    I had to trim a memory-expansion card with a Dremel once to get it to fit...does this count? :-)

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