Well, you might try using the Nvidia binary drivers (or the native X drivers, whichever you aren't using). Also, if the blitting is too much for your machine, you can switch it to wireframe drag mode, which should pose no challenge to any video card these days.
Ugh, X10. I've used a fair bit of X10 stuff in my lifetime, and I'm quite convinced that they need to fire their current quality control people. Here's a list of the components and their reliability:
Transciever modules, these are basically appliance modules with an antenna to recieve RF commands and a transmitter to relay them through the power lines. These are generally fairly reliable, although you need one for both phases of the power in your house, and they can act screwey (like not working when you plug in an extension cord). There is no way to make it not device 1 however, which is annoying since you need 2 of them in the house. The maximum power spec is rather low to boot.
Appliance modules, simple on/off that accepts commands through the power line: pretty reliable, I've not had much trouble with these.
Lamp modules, has circutry for dimming as well as on/off. Not designed to be used with anything but incandescent light bulbs: Completely unreliable. Lamps come on at random, the modules will stop responding to commands, etc... Usually it takes less than a week or two before the thing fails on me, and I've had a least half a dozen of these things over the years.
Slimline switchs: The buttons wear out in about 2 months. Eats batteries like crazy.
Regular big old white remotes: extremely reliable (havn't had a problem with one yet!), sips battery power (but it does need quite a few AAs). I've mounted these on the walls instead of the slimline switches
Bottlerockets: Sometimes they don't like certain machines. I can't get it to work at all on a couple of my machines, but when they do work they're extremely reliable.
Motion sensor: Failed within a month, lousy range.
Replacement Wall Switch: About as reliable as a lamp module
To be fair, a lot of my X10 hardware has come from those free starter packs, but other than the lamp modules, that starter pack seems to include all of the reliable equipment. My opinion of X10 is that their stuff is good for demos, but not really ready for full time use.
For the life of me I can't figure out how 9 prevents spamming.
I'm a little confused by 10 too. Are you suggesting that he should disconnect anybody not running a virus scanner? Isn't this a little harsh for people running Linux/BSD/Amiga/etc...? IMHO, virus scanners are less important than Firewalls these days. You can avoid viruses with a little common sense, but you cannot avoid unknown remote exploits in your OS.
Also, with 4 are you talking about the physical ports, or TCP/UDP ports?
One final note. When you write up the rules for your tenants, I'd try to avoid the tone this guy has. While most of his suggestions are quite sane, the tone is very authoritarian, which will turn off some people. People will think you're some BOFH type and might start looking elsewhere for someplace with friendlier service. But I'm sure you know all of this already.
Try resizing your window, does the toolkit follow instantly? or does it lag?
No, and X has never done this (all the way back to my Pentium 75 with a S3 Trio64 video card).
Try moving your window fast around the screen... any update lag? ie. 'white/black' trail?
Nope, although my old P75 would lag a bit when moving around big windows. Windows was worse in this regard (although it was Windows 3.1 at the time). Once I upgraded to my PII-400, this wasn't an issue anymore. Granted I run a fairly small desktop (1280x1024x24), so it's not so hard to blit the stuff through the AGP bus.
Now, if I set up the windowmanger to have the position display in the center of the window and drag the window around, that position display will leave a trail.
However, I do not believe that having applications control their own window is a good idea. In fact I consider it to be the #2 boneheaded decision Microsoft made (#1 being the VM swapping behavior). How many times have you wanted to move an application, out of the way of something but found you can't because the application is busy? How many times have you tried to resize the window of a busy app and realized you couldn't? That drives me nuts.
Overclocking is another metric though. How far you can overclock a processer gives you an idea of how the processor line is going to perform in the future. Processors that are hard to overclock are tuned up closer to the limits of the design, because of that, it will probably take longer to come down in price (because the yields won't be quite as high).
So the solution is obvious: find a cable company that only offers the 3 channels you care about. Wait, that doesn't work because everyone's tastes are different. While I've always wanted a cable company that just let you choose which channels you want (it's technically easy if you have one of those decoder boxes), but cable companies don't work that way. If you want Scifi, you have to buy E, Home and Garden, the Travel channel, and dozens of other channels you'll never watch, but your 60 year old neighbor will never turn on Scifi either.
Besides, the primary way cable companies make money is to artificially restrict their service in as many ways as possible and then offer to remove (or relax) the restrictions for a fee. Look at how they handle broadband for instance. Why would they do something so radically different than the way they know works?
I think more of it is the Trolls who love to come out on topics that have rabid fanbases (Amiga, BSD, Anime, OGG). One of your replies is such a blatent troll that I doubt you'll even see it before it hits -1 land, but it is definatly representative of the kind of traffic Slashdot sees on these articles.
Actually, I think you'll find that making a blade out of common steel that can retain sharpness for at lest some period of time (but not too long--they want to sell a lot of them) is a rather complex affair, especially when it has to be made cheaply. Plus you have to get the springs and other components right to make a flexible, sharp, long lasting, and safe blade. The handle is pretty much copied from one design to the next, there is not a lot of engineering work from one handle to the next. Have you looked at it? It's pretty much just a generic swivel clip on a bent piece of plastic.
I'd suspect Gillette hires a fair number of metalurgists [sp?].
You aren't supposed to be using a hammer to get the paste out of the tube. A nice even gentle squeeze is all you need to get a nice slow flow out of the tube. I've never had more paste on the processor than I wanted. The tricky part is finding a space that the paste doesn't stick to so you can evenly spread it across the CPU's surface.
If there were only 1 person in this world, he could not damage the earth regardless of how stupid his decisions might be.
I think you underestimate the power of human ingenuity. It only takes one person to set of an atomic bomb, and that single person would have noone to stop him.
National Parks are not public property. They are owned by the US Government, which tightly controls all logging (and other) activity inside of the parks. You may have heard of Forest Rangers, these are the people the US Government employs to insure (among other things) that no private companies can come in and steal the resources from the park.
The original poster's point was that as long as there is somebody responsible for land, and that responsability is spread across many people, then it is very difficult to destroy the entire ecosystem, because some people (we would hope most) would be adverse to the destruction of the part of the ecosystem they are responsible for. If nobody owns anything, or if a small group of people own everything, then even a small group of people can destroy the ecosystem, since there will be no effective resitance to their actions. "Because it will make Mother Earth cry" has never stopped a logger.
Well, that's not full true. Although the people who bought the cheaper 68k machines were ultimatly out of luck, during the transition years everybody either built both a 68k and PPC version, or compiled it as a "fatbinary" which worked on both architectures. Metroworks had a compiler flag to choose which mode you wanted. It wasn't until the PPC603s came out and most of the market had switched that software houses started releasing only PPC versions of their apps. Usually it was for applications that wouldn't run acceptably on the old 68k machines anyway.
That depends how "offsite" you want it to be. A fiber run across campus (say about a mile away) isn't too bad and can easily be Gigabit speeds.
I've been using HDDs for backup for awhile now. Tapes were just way too much hassle, too expensive, and too fragile for my daily backups. I don't have protection against fire, but the whole setup can backup 650GB (usable) of data, survive disk failure, and cost me $1500, and I built this a year and a half ago with 80GB drives. My nightly backups are fully automated, and I never have to worry about swapping out tapes or having one streach on me, and it was far cheaper than the equivelent tape based system.
I'm not a big fan of Comcast either, but this is pretty one sided.
Disclaimer: I'm using Comcast Cable Modem service (because I'm 13km from my CO).
Cable:
a. How many DSL providers let you run servers? My friend's DSL connection doesn't allow for servers or VPNs. Granted you can buy DSL from competing companies (which is the #1 reason it is more attractive to me than Cable, where you have to deal with your local monopoly), but the "default" service from most places disallows uploads.
b. Not yet, but soon.
c. I don't really see this myself. Maybe my area isn't so bad. I've not really heard of people complaining about this recently, alhough it was a big problem when Cable was first coming out.
d. Yep, that horrible 128k cap. Compared to DSL, which usually has a 128k/256k upload cap.
e. There is security built into the cablemodem, but the cable company doesn't really seem to keen on actually turning it on. OTOH, the packets that you can "sniff" off of the cablemodem (not easy) are the packets you were sending out to the internet anyway. If you were expecting your traffic to be secure I have news for you.
DSL:
a. Not with the plans I've seen unless you're buying from Speakeasy or some other "premium" DSL provider.
b. True, but not really an issue
c. Neither does Cable Modem....yet, at least in the states. I've had a sinking feeling that it's only a matter of time until we get hit with bandwidth caps though.
d. You know, I don't usually see many DSL connections that advertise 1.5M down. Usually I see 786/128 or 786/256. Maybe you live in an area where they are more generous with the bandwidth?
Where are you buying your bandwidth? Lord and Taylor? Even ISDN isn't this expensive. Heck, palm.net isn't this expensive. Large ISPs often times pay basically nothing for their bandwidth if they can get peering agreements with their competitors.
Er, finding a new broadband ISP (at least if you're outside DSL range like 75% of the US) involves actually physically moving to a new location. Most Cable companies have local monopolies and don't allow alternate ISPs to use their networks. That's pretty extreme just to get an extra machine allowed in your TOS.
That fourth question seems to involve a bit of luck. People who religiously stick to stable compilers and try to avoid doing exceptionally bizarre things are unlikely to ever trigger bugs. I know the only time I've ever seen compiler "bugs" (when the compiler actually crashes or produces something you didn't want) was when I had a bug in my code that confused the compiler slightly. The only true bugs I've found have been in "toy" compilers, and I doubt you want to hear about bugs in Scheme.
You can have my MS Natural v1 keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands. I've never found a keyboard with better response (even those IBM keyboards feel too bouncy) in my life. Sure it takes up an enormous amount of desk space and I've worn off half of the plastic on the keys, but my wrists have never hurt on it, no matter how much I type.
It also doesn't drive me nuts with clicking, and has the backslash key where God intended. Nothing drives me nuts faster than those keyboards that move the backslash key to the bottom right of the keyboard just so they can make the already-easy-to-hit Enter key even bigger. It's so annoying to be setting up a nice long pipe in the shell and accidentally hit Enter because your keyboard is braindead so get a bunch of binary garbage spewed out on the terminal. Worse is when you're writing a multi-line pipe and hit the Enter instead of the \.
It's not like you copy the whole thing over the link each time, only the changes. It might be rather annoying if you work with lots of digital video and have 10GB of changes every day and you work from a modem at home, but for the average user it shouldn't be too bad. Of course if you have 10GB of files in 1 billion 10Kb files, that might still take a while to sync. Hopefully apple figures out some sort of directory cacheing system to prevent this from being a problem.
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Well, you might try using the Nvidia binary drivers (or the native X drivers, whichever you aren't using). Also, if the blitting is too much for your machine, you can switch it to wireframe drag mode, which should pose no challenge to any video card these days.
- Transciever modules, these are basically appliance modules with an antenna to recieve RF commands and a transmitter to relay them through the power lines. These are generally fairly reliable, although you need one for both phases of the power in your house, and they can act screwey (like not working when you plug in an extension cord). There is no way to make it not device 1 however, which is annoying since you need 2 of them in the house. The maximum power spec is rather low to boot.
- Appliance modules, simple on/off that accepts commands through the power line: pretty reliable, I've not had much trouble with these.
- Lamp modules, has circutry for dimming as well as on/off. Not designed to be used with anything but incandescent light bulbs: Completely unreliable. Lamps come on at random, the modules will stop responding to commands, etc... Usually it takes less than a week or two before the thing fails on me, and I've had a least half a dozen of these things over the years.
- Slimline switchs: The buttons wear out in about 2 months. Eats batteries like crazy.
- Regular big old white remotes: extremely reliable (havn't had a problem with one yet!), sips battery power (but it does need quite a few AAs). I've mounted these on the walls instead of the slimline switches
- Bottlerockets: Sometimes they don't like certain machines. I can't get it to work at all on a couple of my machines, but when they do work they're extremely reliable.
- Motion sensor: Failed within a month, lousy range.
- Replacement Wall Switch: About as reliable as a lamp module
To be fair, a lot of my X10 hardware has come from those free starter packs, but other than the lamp modules, that starter pack seems to include all of the reliable equipment. My opinion of X10 is that their stuff is good for demos, but not really ready for full time use.For the life of me I can't figure out how 9 prevents spamming.
I'm a little confused by 10 too. Are you suggesting that he should disconnect anybody not running a virus scanner? Isn't this a little harsh for people running Linux/BSD/Amiga/etc...? IMHO, virus scanners are less important than Firewalls these days. You can avoid viruses with a little common sense, but you cannot avoid unknown remote exploits in your OS.
Also, with 4 are you talking about the physical ports, or TCP/UDP ports?
One final note. When you write up the rules for your tenants, I'd try to avoid the tone this guy has. While most of his suggestions are quite sane, the tone is very authoritarian, which will turn off some people. People will think you're some BOFH type and might start looking elsewhere for someplace with friendlier service. But I'm sure you know all of this already.
Now, if I set up the windowmanger to have the position display in the center of the window and drag the window around, that position display will leave a trail.
However, I do not believe that having applications control their own window is a good idea. In fact I consider it to be the #2 boneheaded decision Microsoft made (#1 being the VM swapping behavior). How many times have you wanted to move an application, out of the way of something but found you can't because the application is busy? How many times have you tried to resize the window of a busy app and realized you couldn't? That drives me nuts.
Wow, when did Archer Daniels Midland get into the Processer biz? Pretty big jump for an agricultural company.
Overclocking is another metric though. How far you can overclock a processer gives you an idea of how the processor line is going to perform in the future. Processors that are hard to overclock are tuned up closer to the limits of the design, because of that, it will probably take longer to come down in price (because the yields won't be quite as high).
I don't know about you, but I find the PR numbers to be quite handy for comparison purposes. It's certainly a better metric than Mhz.
So the solution is obvious: find a cable company that only offers the 3 channels you care about. Wait, that doesn't work because everyone's tastes are different. While I've always wanted a cable company that just let you choose which channels you want (it's technically easy if you have one of those decoder boxes), but cable companies don't work that way. If you want Scifi, you have to buy E, Home and Garden, the Travel channel, and dozens of other channels you'll never watch, but your 60 year old neighbor will never turn on Scifi either.
Besides, the primary way cable companies make money is to artificially restrict their service in as many ways as possible and then offer to remove (or relax) the restrictions for a fee. Look at how they handle broadband for instance. Why would they do something so radically different than the way they know works?
I think more of it is the Trolls who love to come out on topics that have rabid fanbases (Amiga, BSD, Anime, OGG). One of your replies is such a blatent troll that I doubt you'll even see it before it hits -1 land, but it is definatly representative of the kind of traffic Slashdot sees on these articles.
Actually, I think you'll find that making a blade out of common steel that can retain sharpness for at lest some period of time (but not too long--they want to sell a lot of them) is a rather complex affair, especially when it has to be made cheaply. Plus you have to get the springs and other components right to make a flexible, sharp, long lasting, and safe blade. The handle is pretty much copied from one design to the next, there is not a lot of engineering work from one handle to the next. Have you looked at it? It's pretty much just a generic swivel clip on a bent piece of plastic. I'd suspect Gillette hires a fair number of metalurgists [sp?].
You aren't supposed to be using a hammer to get the paste out of the tube. A nice even gentle squeeze is all you need to get a nice slow flow out of the tube. I've never had more paste on the processor than I wanted. The tricky part is finding a space that the paste doesn't stick to so you can evenly spread it across the CPU's surface.
National Parks are not public property. They are owned by the US Government, which tightly controls all logging (and other) activity inside of the parks. You may have heard of Forest Rangers, these are the people the US Government employs to insure (among other things) that no private companies can come in and steal the resources from the park.
The original poster's point was that as long as there is somebody responsible for land, and that responsability is spread across many people, then it is very difficult to destroy the entire ecosystem, because some people (we would hope most) would be adverse to the destruction of the part of the ecosystem they are responsible for. If nobody owns anything, or if a small group of people own everything, then even a small group of people can destroy the ecosystem, since there will be no effective resitance to their actions. "Because it will make Mother Earth cry" has never stopped a logger.
Well, that's not full true. Although the people who bought the cheaper 68k machines were ultimatly out of luck, during the transition years everybody either built both a 68k and PPC version, or compiled it as a "fatbinary" which worked on both architectures. Metroworks had a compiler flag to choose which mode you wanted. It wasn't until the PPC603s came out and most of the market had switched that software houses started releasing only PPC versions of their apps. Usually it was for applications that wouldn't run acceptably on the old 68k machines anyway.
Wow, he's going to die some time in the future!?! What a newsflash!
This just in: Skreuzer expected to die in future. More on this story as it develops.
You'd better be careful about making wild predictions like that, you never know when someone is going to turn out to be an immortal.
I wish I had government subsidized bandwidth. :(
That depends how "offsite" you want it to be. A fiber run across campus (say about a mile away) isn't too bad and can easily be Gigabit speeds.
I've been using HDDs for backup for awhile now. Tapes were just way too much hassle, too expensive, and too fragile for my daily backups. I don't have protection against fire, but the whole setup can backup 650GB (usable) of data, survive disk failure, and cost me $1500, and I built this a year and a half ago with 80GB drives. My nightly backups are fully automated, and I never have to worry about swapping out tapes or having one streach on me, and it was far cheaper than the equivelent tape based system.
I'm not a big fan of Comcast either, but this is pretty one sided.
Disclaimer: I'm using Comcast Cable Modem service (because I'm 13km from my CO).
Cable:
a. How many DSL providers let you run servers? My friend's DSL connection doesn't allow for servers or VPNs. Granted you can buy DSL from competing companies (which is the #1 reason it is more attractive to me than Cable, where you have to deal with your local monopoly), but the "default" service from most places disallows uploads.
b. Not yet, but soon.
c. I don't really see this myself. Maybe my area isn't so bad. I've not really heard of people complaining about this recently, alhough it was a big problem when Cable was first coming out.
d. Yep, that horrible 128k cap. Compared to DSL, which usually has a 128k/256k upload cap.
e. There is security built into the cablemodem, but the cable company doesn't really seem to keen on actually turning it on. OTOH, the packets that you can "sniff" off of the cablemodem (not easy) are the packets you were sending out to the internet anyway. If you were expecting your traffic to be secure I have news for you.
DSL:
a. Not with the plans I've seen unless you're buying from Speakeasy or some other "premium" DSL provider.
b. True, but not really an issue
c. Neither does Cable Modem....yet, at least in the states. I've had a sinking feeling that it's only a matter of time until we get hit with bandwidth caps though.
d. You know, I don't usually see many DSL connections that advertise 1.5M down. Usually I see 786/128 or 786/256. Maybe you live in an area where they are more generous with the bandwidth?
Er, finding a new broadband ISP (at least if you're outside DSL range like 75% of the US) involves actually physically moving to a new location. Most Cable companies have local monopolies and don't allow alternate ISPs to use their networks. That's pretty extreme just to get an extra machine allowed in your TOS.
WTF does the XQR operator do?
That fourth question seems to involve a bit of luck. People who religiously stick to stable compilers and try to avoid doing exceptionally bizarre things are unlikely to ever trigger bugs. I know the only time I've ever seen compiler "bugs" (when the compiler actually crashes or produces something you didn't want) was when I had a bug in my code that confused the compiler slightly. The only true bugs I've found have been in "toy" compilers, and I doubt you want to hear about bugs in Scheme.
You can have my MS Natural v1 keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands. I've never found a keyboard with better response (even those IBM keyboards feel too bouncy) in my life. Sure it takes up an enormous amount of desk space and I've worn off half of the plastic on the keys, but my wrists have never hurt on it, no matter how much I type.
It also doesn't drive me nuts with clicking, and has the backslash key where God intended. Nothing drives me nuts faster than those keyboards that move the backslash key to the bottom right of the keyboard just so they can make the already-easy-to-hit Enter key even bigger. It's so annoying to be setting up a nice long pipe in the shell and accidentally hit Enter because your keyboard is braindead so get a bunch of binary garbage spewed out on the terminal. Worse is when you're writing a multi-line pipe and hit the Enter instead of the \.
Wait...the parent was complaining that the movements were too smooth and fluid to be natural. Now I'm confused.
That'd be super, but what about all of the metadata you have to deal with?
It's not like you copy the whole thing over the link each time, only the changes. It might be rather annoying if you work with lots of digital video and have 10GB of changes every day and you work from a modem at home, but for the average user it shouldn't be too bad. Of course if you have 10GB of files in 1 billion 10Kb files, that might still take a while to sync. Hopefully apple figures out some sort of directory cacheing system to prevent this from being a problem.