After the switchover we noticed a big hit too. I suspect it might have something to do with the usenet servers now being outside of the network. Usenet seems to consume an enormous amount of bandwidth at Comcast, and since you have to jump completely out of their network now, I suspect their backbone connections are saturated.
This might be "fixed" once they either kill the usenet servers entirely or set up new ones inside their network like a sane ISP. Most people on the net are assuming the former will happen (which won't save as much bandwidth, since the heavy usenet users are likely to get external services).
Your best bet at this point seems to be to pray that Comcast sees the light with Usenet and just buys the old servers from @home. If you've lead a clean life they might even announce something one way or the other before the switch off date (coming RSN).
IMHO, Kohan is the most deserving of mention in the "Future Evolution" category. It's an RTS that finally lets you actually build a real strategy and maintain an economy (you have to pay for your unit's upkeep) while making your armies. Destroy an opponents economy and his armies will soon fall into disrepair and eventually disband. Formations factor heavily into gameplay as different formations affect the strength of your attacks and the rate at which you can move (if you choose a strong defensive stance, you will only be able to plod across the battlefield, if you choose a superfast pressed move your troops will make it to their destination fast, but be completely exausted and useless for battle.) Kohan also prevents you from micromanaging much of the game. Your control happens at the company level, and the computer controlls the individual units in battle, even the spellcasters. The AI's are programmable (well tweakable) to allow you to build up stronger opponents for single or multiplayer.
Additionally, Kohan is available for Linux if you look around, and there's a dedicated online community of Linux gamers that are great to play with. I can't reccomend this game enough, I havn't played a game this much since Starcraft. It is well worth the $50 sticker price.
Recycled? Or an old lost article
on
HIstory of RTS Games
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A lot of these "fallacies" are the types of things I see in joke emails. The problem is they're simply not true.
Lets run down them quick:
True, computing is not easy, especially if you are a programmer. However, for user applications it's frequently easy enough. How long did it take your mother to lean how to type a letter in Word? I bet it was less than a few minutes. More complex things may be beyond her, but for what she wants to do it's easy enough.
False, but he's in the wrong context. Ask a meterologist if he'd like to run those weather simulations without a computer. As another poster noted, we are about twice as productive now as we were back in the 1940s.
Vague. I'm not sure exactly what he's getting at here. I think he's talking about how software companies are unfriendly to their consumers by requiring them to buy upgrade products by not making their software forward compatable (IE you can't open a Word2000 document in Word 3). The software industry is somewhat unique in this field , so the comparision is not completely fair.
True. GUI's do not make everything easier automatically, however a well designed gui will tend to be more intuitive than a well designed text interface, because we can pack more precise contextual information (make the widget buttons look like real life buttons for instance) into the graphical representation of the concepts we are trying to convay. They make ergonomic pointing devices.
False. Even when you upgrade your software, it's generally faster than it was 10 years ago. People look through the past with rose colored glasses and forget that you had to wait half a second for the stupid menu to draw. Booting time is largely a function of how long you need to probe all that new hardware you didn't have 10 years ago, and to load a real operating system instead of DOS (which is no doubt what the speaker is referring to). The webpage example is particularly bad, as 10 years ago there was no such thing, and 5 years ago pretty much the entire web was slow (and your slow computer took forever to render even the simplist page). Compiling is definatly faster than it used to be too, but I havn't changed my compiler much over the years (still gcc).
False, you may not need to animate fonts (what dose that even mean?), but my productivity is much better when I'm using vim instead of ed. Sure we don't have to create a pie chart, but it sure helps make the meeting go faster when you don't have to run through the major numbers and have something to point at. Where does that 99% statistic come from anyway? I havn't printed a document for work in ages. Nobody wants to get a paper copy of anything short anymore, they want it emailed to them the instant it's ready. Nobody reads long documents unless they really really have to, so there is little need to print out your documents. Caveat: I'm an engineer and write fairly techincal documents ment mostly for other engineers, I don't spend a lot of time "prettying up" my documents because it's useless.
Kinda True, but the programmers don't have to be as "good" anymore. There are a lot of tasks out there that are execllent for mediocre programmers and their elite VB skills. Because our development environments (and laguages to a certain extent) have gotten so much better, we don't have to worry so much about hiring the rocket scientest types to design the "save as" dialog or the disk IO routines. This isn't to say there aren't a lot of really talented programmers out there, but there are more "fillers" as well. I'd say the average programmer talent is higher than it was a few years ago, simply because more people ARE taking formal education on programming. A few years ago it seemed like every other developer I met graduated with some weird degree like animal husbandry and then got a job programming. Also, experiance is the best teacher, and many of the beforementioned people are the master programmers of today.
True. Data structures havn't changed much, because they do their job. People aren't really interested in fixing the array because it isn't broken. Also, some algorithms are about as good as they are going to get (and have been proven so), such as sorting, searching, etc... Was the speaker expecting someone to come up with a better Traveling Salesman by now? I think most great programmers have written assembly at some point because the great programmers are the old ones with lots of experiance. The old ones wrote assembly because that's all they had back then (or they come from a time where structured languages were still in their infantcy).
False, I'd say most modern programmers can say Yes to the first one because they did it in school, but once they graduated they immediatly started using the toolkit like any normal person. I'd say yes to the second only if they're programming in C++ (not a safe assumption speaker!). What does HCI have to do with data structures and algorithms? Wouldn't the interface programmers be more interested in that? We were tought when to return bools and ints in school, thank you very much. Granted, C programmers have it easy (or hard depending on how you look at it) since they have no native bool type.
False, Without open source practically none of my projects would have gotten anywhere (since I tend to work on nonstandard routing protocols and testing them in embedded enviornments). The Economic Model is doubtful in many ways (if you are going to try to make money off of open source at least), but you don't write open source software to make money. Having the source code has saved my butt a couple of times when tracking down very obscure bugs only brought forth by running nonstandard protocols (although they SHOULD work, sometimes they don't). The Nerd culture comment is too vague for me to say anything about.
False, without standards we are left with the connector conspiracy everywhere. For many things, (networking, communication, HCI!) standards are they key to making the whole thing work. The last part is just a random insult.
False, Progress in many areas is fast, other areas slow. You can't single out a few examples and say that everything is slow. PC OSes have become much much better in the past few years (especially on the Windows side). PC hardware is much easier to work with than it used to be (remember when you had to configure IO and IRQs manually and when you could accidentally fry the Motherboard by plugging in the power connectors backwards?). Remember when MacOS had no memory management to speak of? Remember when it was hard to network computers with TCP/IP? Remember when everyone was using their own standard for everything and nothing ever worked right if it wasn't plugged into the same brand of machine? Remeber when programmers had to write in assembly or even toggle the bootloader in on the front of the machine? Do you remember when the weatherman wasn't able to accuratly predict more than a few hours into the future? Remember carbourators? Don't you like your Tivo? Just because we don't write newer and better sort routines every year doesn't mean there isn't progress.
True. The computing industry is very hard to predict. A lot of people were broadsided by the Web for instance.
I have no idea what the 'Progress' is at the end. Apparently it's quite different from Progress? I guess I had to be there.
I think the designers should focus on design and let everybody else do their job.
Very very true that we need realistic growth expectations. Especially for startups. I remember an anecdote were AOL had figured a certain growth rate not factoring any sort of slowdown as they reach critical mass. They intened to account for something like 15% of the nations GNP by 2010.
Geez. Nobody ever said life was fair. Maybe we should all just give up our computers since the poor and uneducated don't have access to them? Wait! I'm College educated, I should get a lobotomy so I don't trample the rights of the uneducated?
Plus the local non-computer owners can go to the library to cast their vote. I saw this as a chance to avoid having to go to the elementary school (especially since it's several miles out of my way and has exactly enough parking for the teacher, and nowhere near enough for voters) to cast my vote. Also, it involves standing in line for over an hour if try to go before work. Voting is already pretty darn inconvienent for everyone involved, and I'm not going to complain if someone figures out a way to make it much more convienent.
I never noticed much difference between the two settings actually.
You must not run Win2k with very large (40-200MB resident) applications that get sent to the background much do you? Even Mozilla triggers this behavior on a consistant basis.
And don't get me started on the sounds in Win2k. Every time that stupid beep plays the kernel chugs for a moment to read in the sound effect, slaughtering any hope you have of maintaining say a bitstream to a CD-Burner.
The VM is one area where MS really pooched Win2k IMHO.
IIRC, most biometric systems won't accept a finger that isn't alive. Worse, some of them will trigger a silent alarm if someone attempts to use a severed finger.
Cutting off someone's finger is a pretty drastic action. If you are going to that much trouble, you cannot assume that a password would be too hard to obtain. At that point you can't assume they aren't just going to wire the access device (door/safe/etc...) with a bunch of C4 and bypass your security entirely.
That's just awful. That means if you download nothing but a couple of ISOs (maybe you want a Redhat set), you're already out an extra $60!
What's the point of having broadband if you're not allowed to use it? They had better have had a super cheap monthly fee, or I would have just gone back to modem.
If someone were to DoS you for the entire month (how would you be able to tell? It's not like you're using the bandwidth!), you would have racked up a $100,000 bill. You can't tell me that's what the provider was paying for bandwidth.
Interestingly, this is why I hate Win2k. Win2k seems to always want to swap background apps out, even if you have plent of ram available. This is beyond irritating when I minimize netscape to work in a text editor, then bring it back to the front, only to have to wait 2 minutes for the thing to swap back in (I'm on a laptop--slow HD).
A friend of mine actually forced Win2k down to the minimum amount of swap allowed (2MB IIRC) to avoid this problem.
In contrast, my FreeBSD box (my home desktop machine) feels much snappier (although I use Windowmaker and no desktop) and the cacheing works wonderfully. I've noticed the cache helping me along on several occasions (generally when I'm organizing directories or programming and lots of things start happening instantaniously as the files are still in cache).
Or maybe the Slashdot regulars (not the people who hang out at 0 and -1) will look at the piece calmly and discover other very valid flaws with the study. If they don't it will likely lead to an active discussion on bug fixing and exploits. This will happen mostly in the 3+ moderated posts.
I shouldn't even have to moderate you, but it seems like sometimes anybody who critisizes Slashdot (however unfounded it may be) gets automatic mod points these days. Sad.
Fibre Channel hardware tends to be a little too expensive for the $5k crowd. This guy is using commodity hardware, and that generally doesn't include fibre channel. Even if he bought the hardware, the driver support for something like a SAN just doesn't exist in Windows/Linux/BSD yet.
The FAQ suggested that the machine needs to be reliable. I don't think an Italian tank from the 1940s is going to cut it. I'd be amazed if you managed to keep the thing running long enough to snap a picture.
Talk about weird urban legends indeed. I can say for certain that the cell phones locking onto cell antennas as you fly over is false.
Two pieces of evidence:
Put your cell phone next to a radio and wait for someone to call (or call someone). That pop you hear is the interference on the radio.
Go to your nearest microwave tower. It should have little dishes on three sides pointing more or less horizontal. Cell phone towers are designed to keep most of their radiated energy pointed at the earth (where most cell phone users are), not up in the air where the airplanes are. Your cell phone won't work anyway, so there's no point wasting the batteries on it by leaving it on. Worse, most cell phones go into "high power search" mode when they lose signal, draining your batteries for no useful reason.
That gas tank thing is very dubious. I don't think I've ever seen a cell phone spark, and most of the voltages in there are very small (3v range or so).
Cable splitters CAN release excess interference, but it won't cause airplanes to fall out of the sky (although it may reduce the effective range of their radios if you raise the noise floor too much). It will give you crappy signal and interfere with every other wireless device you have. Also, there are rumors around (probably false) that some people were sued for having leaky cables that let their neighbors steal cable with bunny ears.
"Most vendors" assuming most vendors are IBM. AFAIK, the only company with CTQ on ATA drives is IBM (and this is on the ill fated DeskStar line). Additionally, the CTQ on the ATA devices is not as sophisticated as it is on the SCSI (shallow queues ar e common), but it should be only a matter of time before this is resolved.
Be careful with those Promise controllers. Promise only supports 1 controller in a system. With the (not Fasttrak) 100TX2s, I can max the system out with only two contollers and 8 drives.
BTW 5400 RPM has several side benefits for a design like this.
You're likely saturating the PCI bus anyway, so anything faster is likely wasted
5400RPM drives draw less power (unless you're comparing them to 4800 RPM drives) than most other drives, alleviating strain on your power supply.
5400RPM drives generate less heat, and are easier to keep cool.
Because they are running at lower speeds, lower performance drives tend to last longer than their equivelent faster drives (the 7200 or 10000RPM equivelent Maxtors), although this is highly dependant on the particular drive.
Remember when you're planning on exceeding the design specifications of your system to account for all of the side effects, or you are likely to end up with fried power supplies and overheating prematurely dying drives.
You've just stumbled across one of the main concepts behind the Storage Area Network. The biggest problem you have is bandwidth. Your average local disk bus (ATA100, or LVD SCSI3) blows away Fast Ethernet, and with RAID3 or RAID5 you need to access multiple machines to do a single write (write the actual data and write the parity data).
The other problems with your scheme are:
Cost, That's a lot of machines to buy for a single storage array
Admin time. Upgrading the OS for a bug fix is a much bigger pain when you have 8 machines instead of 1
Space. You're building a rack for these machines and they're eating up at least 8U of space, probably more if you want to keep the cost down to Earth
Software. All SAN solutions I know about are proprietary. Nobody builds RAID code that runs over a network.
It's not a bad idea, but certainly not something that can be done for $5k. I'd think there must be a breakpoint somewhere where it makes sense to build stuff in multiple machines (instead of cramming tons of disks into a single machine), but I think it's not at 1 disk/machine.
How much uptime you need is purely dependant on you. Since my array is for personal use, I don't mind a bit of downtime when a component fails (since I'm working on the problem myself anyway, it's not like I'd get much use out of it when it was partially down anyway!). If you really really need multi-9 uptime, $5k IDE storage solutions really aren't the way to go.
I always figued that all of the Stormtroopers were cloned from the same guy. Unfortunatly the Empire choose a severly retarded guy to clone, who was a terrible shot to boot.
Remember in episode 4 where Obi-Wan talks about how the blaster marks are "too precise" for sand people, they had to be imperial stormtroopers? Either Sand People don't believe in actually pointing their blasters at anything, or Obi-Wan was making an ironic observation about all of the blaster marks spread all across the landscape (off frame:)
Hmm, that's odd. Did you try sending your problem to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list? This sort of hardware problem might be the symptom of something else you didn't notice (broken MII bus?). FreeBSD has support for the SIS 900 and SiS 7016 fast ethernet chipsets. FreeBSD also support the ReakTek 8139, even though it's a festering pile of crap. Either way, the 8139 should have worked (even if the onboard NIC is nonstandard). A quick mail to the list might have saved you a bad experiance here.
Ironically, I just built something very similar to this a few weeks ago (it runs great BTW), but I spent <$1500US on all the components. The biggest thing you have to watch out for is the Hard Drives. I went for the ones with the best bang/buck ratio at the time (Maxtor 80GB 5400RPM drives). This let me build a system with well over 1/2 a Terabyte of usable space at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, the slower drives require less power and less cooling, making them easier to fit in a standard full tower case with a merely beefy (as opposed to server-class) power supply. I think the processor requirements he stated were a little overboard as well. I've found that disk access tends to be limited by the PCI bus (it doesn't help that I used an older motherboard with 33 Mhz 32bit PCI), especially on
writes where you can spread data across the write cache on the drives. Be careful when you build an array like this, ATA *hates* having access to both a master and a slave drive at the same time. Be sure to avoid having two disks on the same plex
on the same controller. This was natural for me fortunatly, since I was building two plexes, a "backup" and a "media" plex.
A final word of warning: Promise ATA100 TX2 controllers may look like a natural choice for a server like this, but they only support UDMA on up to 8 drives at once, and Promise's tech support only supports a maximum of 1 (one!) of their cards in any system.
Amen to that. I remember salesdroids harping the values of DSL when we got our phone line (and we live too far from the CO to even get it!), only to learn later that there was a 2 month waiting list to get DSL and the service was a nightmare.
Good thing this isn't priced like a professional kit. The Sonifex Courier is a nice bit of kit, but it will set you back ~$3000us retail. I bet this is aimed at the people who don't spend >$1,000US on every piece of audio equiptment they buy (even the cables!).
Maybe it's just me, but the audiophiles on Slashdot never seem to have a sense of "good enough," and many of them have trouble with the concept of a price/performance tradeoff.
I know it's bad form, but I have to post my number one annoyance with palm.net as a followup to my own post.
So far I have been completely unable to find a way to get your current kb usage statistics through the palm. I woudln't mind even blowing a few bytes to check it. The only way to see how many kb you have remaning is to go to palm's website (which requires a recent IE) and drill down to your account statistics.
Heck, I use the $10/month 50kb plan myself (on a Palm VII work bought me). Honestly, if you don't go nuts it's pretty easy to stay within the limit. For instance, reading Slashdot (just the headlines, then the writeups for a couple of articles, then maybe a comment or two) eats up about 4-5kb of data traffic (depending on the length of the writeup and the comment). You also generally don't compose a magnum opus on your palm when sending via email either, so the email data traffic is pretty reasonable. I've got about 100 different web clipping apps installed, all of which are optimized for low bandwith.
It's not as flexible as a real web browser (although I do have the google app installed...), but it has generally been sufficent. Strangely, I actually used less bandwidth in the first few months I had it before I realized that I wasn't using half of my 50kb a month and began to loosen up a bit.
Hmm, looking at the service plans listed I appear to be grandfathered. My old $10/month plan isn't even listed anymore. That's a shame, since I think the casual users of the service really appreciated the limited (cheap!) version.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget about the increasing number of DVDs released in Japan (region 2) with English subtitles already included. Example: the last 5 FLCL DVDs.
After the switchover we noticed a big hit too. I suspect it might have something to do with the usenet servers now being outside of the network. Usenet seems to consume an enormous amount of bandwidth at Comcast, and since you have to jump completely out of their network now, I suspect their backbone connections are saturated.
This might be "fixed" once they either kill the usenet servers entirely or set up new ones inside their network like a sane ISP. Most people on the net are assuming the former will happen (which won't save as much bandwidth, since the heavy usenet users are likely to get external services). Your best bet at this point seems to be to pray that Comcast sees the light with Usenet and just buys the old servers from @home. If you've lead a clean life they might even announce something one way or the other before the switch off date (coming RSN).
IMHO, Kohan is the most deserving of mention in the "Future Evolution" category. It's an RTS that finally lets you actually build a real strategy and maintain an economy (you have to pay for your unit's upkeep) while making your armies. Destroy an opponents economy and his armies will soon fall into disrepair and eventually disband. Formations factor heavily into gameplay as different formations affect the strength of your attacks and the rate at which you can move (if you choose a strong defensive stance, you will only be able to plod across the battlefield, if you choose a superfast pressed move your troops will make it to their destination fast, but be completely exausted and useless for battle.) Kohan also prevents you from micromanaging much of the game. Your control happens at the company level, and the computer controlls the individual units in battle, even the spellcasters. The AI's are programmable (well tweakable) to allow you to build up stronger opponents for single or multiplayer.
Additionally, Kohan is available for Linux if you look around, and there's a dedicated online community of Linux gamers that are great to play with. I can't reccomend this game enough, I havn't played a game this much since Starcraft. It is well worth the $50 sticker price.
...including the upcoming Black & White.
Er, exactly how recent is this article?
Lets run down them quick:
I have no idea what the 'Progress' is at the end. Apparently it's quite different from Progress? I guess I had to be there.
I think the designers should focus on design and let everybody else do their job.
Very very true that we need realistic growth expectations. Especially for startups. I remember an anecdote were AOL had figured a certain growth rate not factoring any sort of slowdown as they reach critical mass. They intened to account for something like 15% of the nations GNP by 2010.
Geez. Nobody ever said life was fair. Maybe we should all just give up our computers since the poor and uneducated don't have access to them? Wait! I'm College educated, I should get a lobotomy so I don't trample the rights of the uneducated?
Plus the local non-computer owners can go to the library to cast their vote. I saw this as a chance to avoid having to go to the elementary school (especially since it's several miles out of my way and has exactly enough parking for the teacher, and nowhere near enough for voters) to cast my vote. Also, it involves standing in line for over an hour if try to go before work. Voting is already pretty darn inconvienent for everyone involved, and I'm not going to complain if someone figures out a way to make it much more convienent.
I never noticed much difference between the two settings actually.
You must not run Win2k with very large (40-200MB resident) applications that get sent to the background much do you? Even Mozilla triggers this behavior on a consistant basis.
And don't get me started on the sounds in Win2k. Every time that stupid beep plays the kernel chugs for a moment to read in the sound effect, slaughtering any hope you have of maintaining say a bitstream to a CD-Burner.
The VM is one area where MS really pooched Win2k IMHO.
IIRC, most biometric systems won't accept a finger that isn't alive. Worse, some of them will trigger a silent alarm if someone attempts to use a severed finger.
Cutting off someone's finger is a pretty drastic action. If you are going to that much trouble, you cannot assume that a password would be too hard to obtain. At that point you can't assume they aren't just going to wire the access device (door/safe/etc...) with a bunch of C4 and bypass your security entirely.
That's just awful. That means if you download nothing but a couple of ISOs (maybe you want a Redhat set), you're already out an extra $60!
What's the point of having broadband if you're not allowed to use it? They had better have had a super cheap monthly fee, or I would have just gone back to modem.
If someone were to DoS you for the entire month (how would you be able to tell? It's not like you're using the bandwidth!), you would have racked up a $100,000 bill. You can't tell me that's what the provider was paying for bandwidth.
Interestingly, this is why I hate Win2k. Win2k seems to always want to swap background apps out, even if you have plent of ram available. This is beyond irritating when I minimize netscape to work in a text editor, then bring it back to the front, only to have to wait 2 minutes for the thing to swap back in (I'm on a laptop--slow HD).
A friend of mine actually forced Win2k down to the minimum amount of swap allowed (2MB IIRC) to avoid this problem.
In contrast, my FreeBSD box (my home desktop machine) feels much snappier (although I use Windowmaker and no desktop) and the cacheing works wonderfully. I've noticed the cache helping me along on several occasions (generally when I'm organizing directories or programming and lots of things start happening instantaniously as the files are still in cache).
That's because by the time you hear about them they are old security holes.
MS isn't quite as vigilent about releasing announcements of security vulnerabilities to BugTrack as the general Linux community.
Or maybe the Slashdot regulars (not the people who hang out at 0 and -1) will look at the piece calmly and discover other very valid flaws with the study. If they don't it will likely lead to an active discussion on bug fixing and exploits. This will happen mostly in the 3+ moderated posts.
I shouldn't even have to moderate you, but it seems like sometimes anybody who critisizes Slashdot (however unfounded it may be) gets automatic mod points these days. Sad.
Fibre Channel hardware tends to be a little too expensive for the $5k crowd. This guy is using commodity hardware, and that generally doesn't include fibre channel. Even if he bought the hardware, the driver support for something like a SAN just doesn't exist in Windows/Linux/BSD yet.
The FAQ suggested that the machine needs to be reliable. I don't think an Italian tank from the 1940s is going to cut it. I'd be amazed if you managed to keep the thing running long enough to snap a picture.
Two pieces of evidence:
That gas tank thing is very dubious. I don't think I've ever seen a cell phone spark, and most of the voltages in there are very small (3v range or so).
Cable splitters CAN release excess interference, but it won't cause airplanes to fall out of the sky (although it may reduce the effective range of their radios if you raise the noise floor too much). It will give you crappy signal and interfere with every other wireless device you have. Also, there are rumors around (probably false) that some people were sued for having leaky cables that let their neighbors steal cable with bunny ears.
"Most vendors" assuming most vendors are IBM. AFAIK, the only company with CTQ on ATA drives is IBM (and this is on the ill fated DeskStar line). Additionally, the CTQ on the ATA devices is not as sophisticated as it is on the SCSI (shallow queues ar e common), but it should be only a matter of time before this is resolved.
BTW 5400 RPM has several side benefits for a design like this.
Remember when you're planning on exceeding the design specifications of your system to account for all of the side effects, or you are likely to end up with fried power supplies and overheating prematurely dying drives.
The other problems with your scheme are:
It's not a bad idea, but certainly not something that can be done for $5k. I'd think there must be a breakpoint somewhere where it makes sense to build stuff in multiple machines (instead of cramming tons of disks into a single machine), but I think it's not at 1 disk/machine.
How much uptime you need is purely dependant on you. Since my array is for personal use, I don't mind a bit of downtime when a component fails (since I'm working on the problem myself anyway, it's not like I'd get much use out of it when it was partially down anyway!). If you really really need multi-9 uptime, $5k IDE storage solutions really aren't the way to go.
I always figued that all of the Stormtroopers were cloned from the same guy. Unfortunatly the Empire choose a severly retarded guy to clone, who was a terrible shot to boot.
:)
Remember in episode 4 where Obi-Wan talks about how the blaster marks are "too precise" for sand people, they had to be imperial stormtroopers? Either Sand People don't believe in actually pointing their blasters at anything, or Obi-Wan was making an ironic observation about all of the blaster marks spread all across the landscape (off frame
Hmm, that's odd. Did you try sending your problem to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list? This sort of hardware problem might be the symptom of something else you didn't notice (broken MII bus?). FreeBSD has support for the SIS 900 and SiS 7016 fast ethernet chipsets. FreeBSD also support the ReakTek 8139, even though it's a festering pile of crap. Either way, the 8139 should have worked (even if the onboard NIC is nonstandard). A quick mail to the list might have saved you a bad experiance here.
Ironically, I just built something very similar to this a few weeks ago (it runs great BTW), but I spent <$1500US on all the components. The biggest thing you have to watch out for is the Hard Drives. I went for the ones with the best bang/buck ratio at the time (Maxtor 80GB 5400RPM drives). This let me build a system with well over 1/2 a Terabyte of usable space at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, the slower drives require less power and less cooling, making them easier to fit in a standard full tower case with a merely beefy (as opposed to server-class) power supply. I think the processor requirements he stated were a little overboard as well. I've found that disk access tends to be limited by the PCI bus (it doesn't help that I used an older motherboard with 33 Mhz 32bit PCI), especially on writes where you can spread data across the write cache on the drives. Be careful when you build an array like this, ATA *hates* having access to both a master and a slave drive at the same time. Be sure to avoid having two disks on the same plex on the same controller. This was natural for me fortunatly, since I was building two plexes, a "backup" and a "media" plex.
A final word of warning: Promise ATA100 TX2 controllers may look like a natural choice for a server like this, but they only support UDMA on up to 8 drives at once, and Promise's tech support only supports a maximum of 1 (one!) of their cards in any system.
Amen to that. I remember salesdroids harping the values of DSL when we got our phone line (and we live too far from the CO to even get it!), only to learn later that there was a 2 month waiting list to get DSL and the service was a nightmare.
Warning Rant ahead
Good thing this isn't priced like a professional kit. The Sonifex Courier is a nice bit of kit, but it will set you back ~$3000us retail. I bet this is aimed at the people who don't spend >$1,000US on every piece of audio equiptment they buy (even the cables!).
Maybe it's just me, but the audiophiles on Slashdot never seem to have a sense of "good enough," and many of them have trouble with the concept of a price/performance tradeoff.
End of rant
I know it's bad form, but I have to post my number one annoyance with palm.net as a followup to my own post.
So far I have been completely unable to find a way to get your current kb usage statistics through the palm. I woudln't mind even blowing a few bytes to check it. The only way to see how many kb you have remaning is to go to palm's website (which requires a recent IE) and drill down to your account statistics.
Heck, I use the $10/month 50kb plan myself (on a Palm VII work bought me). Honestly, if you don't go nuts it's pretty easy to stay within the limit. For instance, reading Slashdot (just the headlines, then the writeups for a couple of articles, then maybe a comment or two) eats up about 4-5kb of data traffic (depending on the length of the writeup and the comment). You also generally don't compose a magnum opus on your palm when sending via email either, so the email data traffic is pretty reasonable. I've got about 100 different web clipping apps installed, all of which are optimized for low bandwith.
It's not as flexible as a real web browser (although I do have the google app installed...), but it has generally been sufficent. Strangely, I actually used less bandwidth in the first few months I had it before I realized that I wasn't using half of my 50kb a month and began to loosen up a bit.
Hmm, looking at the service plans listed I appear to be grandfathered. My old $10/month plan isn't even listed anymore. That's a shame, since I think the casual users of the service really appreciated the limited (cheap!) version.