I'm sorry, I absolutely hate these minimalist "what we have is good enough" attitudes. Is what we have functional? sure? should it be forever white text on a black screen? fucking hell no. I have an SGI 320, which has a completely GUI PROM, and you know what? I really like it. Maybe you want to live in a dull world with ASCII terminals and Lynx as your web-browser, backing your data up to punch-cards and riding your 1971 Scwinn bicycle to work, but the some of us like cool shit.
By the way, ever seen the blank stare on an average computer user's face when you tell them "Oh, you can fix that in the BIOS, just hit the F2 key once you hear the POST beep, use the tab and +/- keys to navigate around and set the AGP aperature setting to 64MB, then hit F10 to Save and Exit." - yea, we can do better than this.
And let me be the first to say, Praise Jesus for Knoppix. I had a pair of mirrored disks created in Win2K Server. After the server exploded I put them into an XP Box (NTFS is NTFS right? Wrong.) - I used XP's disk admin to "reactivate disks", as soon as I did that, they became completely unreadable with either XP, or even in a different 2000 server at that point. Many various attempts at various things basically left me with NTFS disks I simply couldnt read with Win2000 or XP.
I booted Knoppix. It saw the NTFS partitions fine. The disks appeared on the Knoppix desktop. I opened an FTP connection to another machine, copied off the important files, and was done.
Seriously, if your mail server has that, turn it on. It means no one can relay mail through your server, unless their IP has made a successful mail-check. Some mail servers let you "authenticate" by checking to see that the reply-to address is valid on the local server, that, as you can see, does nothing and can be spoofed easily. Pop-before-send is quite a bit stronger and doesnt really require the clients to do anything. No, its not perfect, Im not saying it is, but it will help 99% of the time.
The average power user has no use for RAID. -
Really? That's funny, with drives growing exponentially in size and little to no way to back them up, as well as reliability going down, I'm starting to recommend and am seeing others implement RAID in their standard PC. In fact, last month's Computer Shopper had a 1-2-3 Step Guide on how to install a Promise Fasttrack. It's easy, and they demonstrated it. I think it will get more common. Drives are cheap, and no one wants to lose all of their porno in a drive failure.
RAID 0 is pointless - gosh, I wish all the video editing studios out there knew this. They've been duped into believing 150 megs a second sustained has value. What morons.
Too bad cheap RAID5 cards don't exist.
- Hmm, you mean like the Promise SX4000 that costs $150?
Over-reactors suck. Last I heard the most dangerous job in America was still those lobster (or something) fisherman in Maine or whatever. I dont have any statistics, but I would venture to guess working for NASA is still wayyyy down on the list of moste dangerous jobs. Last I checked as well, everyone employed at NASA and setting foot into a space shuttle was aware of the risks and chose to accept them. So what's the problem? Who cares what you or I think anyway, it's a legal job with pretty low risks, and those doing it want to do it. Doesn't death come as one of the risks for Indy car driver, Military officer, powerline repairer, volcano explorer, and millions of other jobs? I know of someone who was killed by a giant press machine at a water heater plant (ugh), so should we all re-evaluate our need to continue water-heater development? Whatever. Make it safer when you can, but don't over-react and start thinking it should be dismanteled just because there are accidents.
If you have to block net access, or monitor everyone's every move, your business is set up wrong. Try a little something like this...
Hire decent, reliable people. (seriously, who can't point to half the people they work with and go, "why were they hired in the first place?") You should be able to tell based on their interview, credentials, past performance, etc, if you are about to hire a responsible person, or a day-trading addict. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't be the one hiring people. Find someone who can.
Give people work to do, and expect it gets done on time. If you have an employee that CAN piss away 7 hours reading Slashdot, then you should probably "down-size" them. How about assign projects, give them a reasonable time to do it, and let them do it. If they can do the work well, and give themselves some free-time to surf, hey, whatever. If they surf the whole time, and the deadline rolls around and nothing is done or the work is shoddy. "goodbye".
Check on your employees once in awhile. Do managers just have teams they never talk to? Yes, probably, the manager himself is probably in his office beating off to goatce.sx. How about hire managers that round robin their employees, staying in touch with them, checking on them, helping them. You'll find those idiots that always seem to have Minesweeper on the screen when you walk in, real fast. No need for Big Brother.
You shouldnt be hiring humans if you want robotic fixed patterns of movements and actions. I dont know about everyone else, but very much of the time Im staring off into space or glancing at CNN.com, the problems at hand are bubbling around in my head, imaginging the scenarios out, taking in the big picture of the project... then when I lay hands to keyboard, I do it once, and I do it right. It just seems to me, it should never have to get as far as this elementary school spy bullshit.
The object of doing business is not to avoid paying people, but to make a profit. If your employee shows up, spends 7 of 8 hours working, you pay them $300 and you make $500 off them, you are making a profit. If your employee doesn't show up, you pay them nothing, and they earn you nothing, you are not making a profit. Which would you rather have?
Well dummy, its like this. The higher resolution the display you get, the finer detail images and video (some day) can get. Buuuut... the harder it is to see windows elements of fixed size. (icons) I run 1920x1200 on a flat panel, and when my father sits down in front of it, he has to squint to read the text and see the icons on the desktop. Ever seen 1600x1200 on a Dell Latitude notebook? Go find the IBM QUXGA 22" LCD panel that does something like 5000x3000 and tell me how big the icons on the desktop are. Its like clicking on dust.
SGI's Indigo Magic desktop has done scalable vector icons forever, and its beautiful. Not only can you set the standard icon size but they put a handy thumbwheel in the "explorer" window to let you zoom in and out of your files.
Not intending to start a Holy War, I realize the 64 CPU monsters have their place but their workstations are just ignorant (this is coming from a previous SGI only owner)...
"These systems were around $40,000 when first released. Each R12000 400MHz has a SpecFP2000 of around 350-360 and so it's approximately equal to an Athlon 1.2GHz. The caveat is that the SpecFP2000 benchmark is actually made up of a bunch of other, smaller, tests. For computational fluid dynamics or neural network image recognition, the 400MHz SGI CPU is 2.5 to 5 times faster than the Athlon!"
WOW! 2.5 times faster than a 1.2Ghz Athlon!? Man, you'd almost need a $168 2.4 Ghz Athlon to keep up! I wish they made them!
P.S. The 3.06 Ghz P4 is just under 1000 on the SpecFP benchmark.
Can someone tell me why ECC memory is a good idea? I don't think I can remember in all my years of computing a machine crashing due to a memory error, or a machine not crashing because ECC memory saved it. Maybe I wouldnt know if it did, but, I've always felt like ECC memory was slow, more expensive, and necessary about like UFO insurance. Personally Id rather have regular memory, that taco's the machine completely when there's a problem, so I know there's a problem, than I would ECC constantly correcting memory errors without my knowing, untill I go to leave on vacation, then the whole DIMM gives out.
I know. My main workstation was an SGI INDY for 2-3 years. IRIX is like that, and I loved it. I could start up 3-4 big render jobs and they'd run in the background, yet you'd not even feel it in the interactive desktop. I loved that. The only real let-down going to WindowsNT (for me) at the time, was that smoothness. Which is why I ended up going dual CPUs.
As a user of exclusively dual CPU PC's since the P2-300, I have decided I will switch to HyperThreaded single CPUs now that the 3ghz HT is out. People dont understand the benefit of dual untill they use one for awhile. Even a dual 500Mhz PC is far smoother and more productive in general than a single 2.4Ghz proc, unless all you do is play games. On a single proc PC, using one application that requires some CPU attention just brings the whole machine to it's knees. If you haven't seen it yet, check out Tom's Hardware video showing HT vs non-HT head-to-head. It's really enlightened alot of friends and family as to the value of 2 CPUs or HT vs 1. Well worth the extra cost, though I am patiently waiting for the 3Ghz to drop from its excessive $650 for just the CPU.
Chances are Slashdot's opinion will be heavily biased because the readership is heavily weighted in favor of the out of work and people who have the time to read and post all day long because theyre not doing much else. I know a lot of people who are very successful in the IT industry and have been for years, and as long as their are "systems" to maintain will be there maintaining them. They're too busy to come to Slashdot and tell you their positive stories, so yea, youll probably just see a lot of "IT Sucks" on here.
I havent seen the list of 10,000 titles as the site is/.'ed But, um, is it crap we really want to keep anyway? I mean, history and time has a way of filtering crap out that isnt worth much and preserving that which is. The worthy will stay, the unworth won't. It may seem noble to try to preserve EVERYTHING, but whats really the point? When was the last time you REALLY needed AutoDesk Animator Pro v1.0 for DOS? Im sure some jackass will try to prove me wrong with an anecdote of how his lucky copy of OS/2 2.1 on 5.25" floppies saved a business, but generally speaking, maybe they should work to preseve 50 of the titles, rather than 10,000. There will be some loss, but we'll get over it.
This is why Ive always loved and bought into the concept of VMWare (or similar) virtual machines. Software is pretty immortal, as the turing machine principle pretty much says any one turing machine can emulate another, so making sure the entire PC and OS can be emulated in software makes the software that runs within it immortal as well. The fact that you can run Linux and Windows entirely as self contained software as long as you can emulate the BIOS means they shouldb e around for a very long time, just keep porting the emulator to new hardware. I fear that Palladium and crap like it will bring this down though, as it starts to tie software to very specific hardware that yes, will crumble to worthless ashes quickly.
Besides, who says making music is worthy of a full time employment salary anyway? Very few people make a full time job and salary out of Mexican Hat Dancing, maybe music is the same way. Im tired of the teeny pop wonders that barely sing 1 song, which wasnt written or arranged by them, gets completely reworked digitally so its not even them singing again, but they just get up and shake their ass and tits and get Pepsi contracts, limosine service, and would be appalled to have to wear the same thing twice in their life. The same goes for their handlers. That's not music, its pimping and prostitution, which last I checked was illegal in most places. If you want to make money making music, perform and get paid for the performance. Personally I just think it's pretty arrogant to think that just because you can hold a tune and put melody on paper you're deservant of a celebrity salary and treatment. I wont cry if it all goes away.
Youre confusing 2 issues. I dont think youll find too many people that think its 100% right that Kazaa is a vehicle to illegally share and pirate content. The trouble is, the "concept" of file sharing for free, is a good one. It ought not be killed. I should have the right to make available to you and everyone else whatever I wish so long as it doesnt infringe on somene elses copyrights. What I believe the powers that be want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. You SHOULD be concerned that a commercial / political entity is stepping in and attempting to block not just song swapping but a free, unruled, communication system. And therein lies the problem. How do you make legal a system that lets "the people" share data however they please with no registering to a higher authority, or monitoring by Big Brother, yet at the same time make sure it's not just massive copyright infringment masquerading as a good idea?
When it comes to stopping Kazaa, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, and a whole lot more control given to the coroporate and political entities than you intended.
Re:Better place sto donate
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Dear Troll,
I hate when some bleeding heart socialist steps in and says money could be better spent "on the needy" in cases like this. Almost everyone reading slashdot has some kind of discretionary income. For some it's $5 a month, for other's its $500 a day. Either way, part of enjoying life is spending what you have (cash, time, knowledge) you things you enjoy. Are there other people out there who "need" things. Yes. Does that mean we should give every spare dollar to them? No.
Unless you live in a grass hut you made with your own 2 hands, dress in recycled fig leaves, give back to the land more than you consume, and produce more food personally than you consume, shut the hell up. If someone wants to spend money on the development of open source software, they should have that right without being accosted by some hippocrite. Now take the PC you used to post on Slashdot offline, sell it on Ebay, and give the money to the "needy".
Okay bunghole. I sold my 24" Sony CRT for the Sun 24.1" LCD. And my opionion goes a little something like this...
PRAISE JESUS
I love this thing. Seriously. The 24" Sony CRT's are fine, but at the highest resolution it was only 80Hz. I can't handle 80Hz. 85 is the minimum for a CRT. The monitor was nice, don't get me wrong. But analog just sucks. There was still a slight difference in the convergence at the outer corners. It poured out heat like a fucking oven on self-clean and it broke my back to move it around to clean. It was just like a bastardization of technology. So I ditched it, and bought the Sun, and I will NEVER look back. 1920x1200 perfectly accurate pixels. The panel weighs nothing, generates almost no heat.
It has been my experience that people that bash LCDs don't own a good one, and secretly wish they did.
Your eye can't pick up more than 60 fps anyway. If you think it can, you're high on crack. Film is 20, TV is 30. The only reason people like video cards that get 150 fps in "Quake", is because that means at the "tough spots" they still stay above 30. Pretty sad if you trash a technology because it doesnt get more than 65 fps. I suppose all cars that have a top speed under 220 mph suck too.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, ever seen the blank stare on an average computer user's face when you tell them "Oh, you can fix that in the BIOS, just hit the F2 key once you hear the POST beep, use the tab and +/- keys to navigate around and set the AGP aperature setting to 64MB, then hit F10 to Save and Exit." - yea, we can do better than this.
I booted Knoppix. It saw the NTFS partitions fine. The disks appeared on the Knoppix desktop. I opened an FTP connection to another machine, copied off the important files, and was done.
I will ALWAYS have a copy of Knoppix around.
Am I the only one that thought deserts were made of sand? All 4 screencaps on their front page show grass.
BEFORE
SEND
Seriously, if your mail server has that, turn it on. It means no one can relay mail through your server, unless their IP has made a successful mail-check. Some mail servers let you "authenticate" by checking to see that the reply-to address is valid on the local server, that, as you can see, does nothing and can be spoofed easily. Pop-before-send is quite a bit stronger and doesnt really require the clients to do anything. No, its not perfect, Im not saying it is, but it will help 99% of the time.
RAID 0 is pointless - gosh, I wish all the video editing studios out there knew this. They've been duped into believing 150 megs a second sustained has value. What morons.
Too bad cheap RAID5 cards don't exist. - Hmm, you mean like the Promise SX4000 that costs $150?
Over-reactors suck. Last I heard the most dangerous job in America was still those lobster (or something) fisherman in Maine or whatever. I dont have any statistics, but I would venture to guess working for NASA is still wayyyy down on the list of moste dangerous jobs. Last I checked as well, everyone employed at NASA and setting foot into a space shuttle was aware of the risks and chose to accept them. So what's the problem? Who cares what you or I think anyway, it's a legal job with pretty low risks, and those doing it want to do it. Doesn't death come as one of the risks for Indy car driver, Military officer, powerline repairer, volcano explorer, and millions of other jobs? I know of someone who was killed by a giant press machine at a water heater plant (ugh), so should we all re-evaluate our need to continue water-heater development? Whatever. Make it safer when you can, but don't over-react and start thinking it should be dismanteled just because there are accidents.
- Hire decent, reliable people. (seriously, who can't point to half the people they work with and go, "why were they hired in the first place?") You should be able to tell based on their interview, credentials, past performance, etc, if you are about to hire a responsible person, or a day-trading addict. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't be the one hiring people. Find someone who can.
- Give people work to do, and expect it gets done on time. If you have an employee that CAN piss away 7 hours reading Slashdot, then you should probably "down-size" them. How about assign projects, give them a reasonable time to do it, and let them do it. If they can do the work well, and give themselves some free-time to surf, hey, whatever. If they surf the whole time, and the deadline rolls around and nothing is done or the work is shoddy. "goodbye".
- Check on your employees once in awhile. Do managers just have teams they never talk to? Yes, probably, the manager himself is probably in his office beating off to goatce.sx. How about hire managers that round robin their employees, staying in touch with them, checking on them, helping them. You'll find those idiots that always seem to have Minesweeper on the screen when you walk in, real fast. No need for Big Brother.
You shouldnt be hiring humans if you want robotic fixed patterns of movements and actions. I dont know about everyone else, but very much of the time Im staring off into space or glancing at CNN.com, the problems at hand are bubbling around in my head, imaginging the scenarios out, taking in the big picture of the project... then when I lay hands to keyboard, I do it once, and I do it right. It just seems to me, it should never have to get as far as this elementary school spy bullshit.The object of doing business is not to avoid paying people, but to make a profit. If your employee shows up, spends 7 of 8 hours working, you pay them $300 and you make $500 off them, you are making a profit. If your employee doesn't show up, you pay them nothing, and they earn you nothing, you are not making a profit. Which would you rather have?
Pointless unless you like crystal clear pictures and razor sharp text. Compare a 1600x1200 monitor with laser printed paper sometime.
SGI's Indigo Magic desktop has done scalable vector icons forever, and its beautiful. Not only can you set the standard icon size but they put a handy thumbwheel in the "explorer" window to let you zoom in and out of your files.
Don't knock it till you've tried it. :)
"These systems were around $40,000 when first released. Each R12000 400MHz has a SpecFP2000 of around 350-360 and so it's approximately equal to an Athlon 1.2GHz. The caveat is that the SpecFP2000 benchmark is actually made up of a bunch of other, smaller, tests. For computational fluid dynamics or neural network image recognition, the 400MHz SGI CPU is 2.5 to 5 times faster than the Athlon!"
WOW! 2.5 times faster than a 1.2Ghz Athlon!? Man, you'd almost need a $168 2.4 Ghz Athlon to keep up! I wish they made them!
P.S. The 3.06 Ghz P4 is just under 1000 on the SpecFP benchmark.
I Am Not A Memory Expert though.
I know. My main workstation was an SGI INDY for 2-3 years. IRIX is like that, and I loved it. I could start up 3-4 big render jobs and they'd run in the background, yet you'd not even feel it in the interactive desktop. I loved that. The only real let-down going to WindowsNT (for me) at the time, was that smoothness. Which is why I ended up going dual CPUs.
As a user of exclusively dual CPU PC's since the P2-300, I have decided I will switch to HyperThreaded single CPUs now that the 3ghz HT is out. People dont understand the benefit of dual untill they use one for awhile. Even a dual 500Mhz PC is far smoother and more productive in general than a single 2.4Ghz proc, unless all you do is play games. On a single proc PC, using one application that requires some CPU attention just brings the whole machine to it's knees. If you haven't seen it yet, check out Tom's Hardware video showing HT vs non-HT head-to-head. It's really enlightened alot of friends and family as to the value of 2 CPUs or HT vs 1. Well worth the extra cost, though I am patiently waiting for the 3Ghz to drop from its excessive $650 for just the CPU.
Chances are Slashdot's opinion will be heavily biased because the readership is heavily weighted in favor of the out of work and people who have the time to read and post all day long because theyre not doing much else. I know a lot of people who are very successful in the IT industry and have been for years, and as long as their are "systems" to maintain will be there maintaining them. They're too busy to come to Slashdot and tell you their positive stories, so yea, youll probably just see a lot of "IT Sucks" on here.
I havent seen the list of 10,000 titles as the site is /.'ed But, um, is it crap we really want to keep anyway? I mean, history and time has a way of filtering crap out that isnt worth much and preserving that which is. The worthy will stay, the unworth won't. It may seem noble to try to preserve EVERYTHING, but whats really the point? When was the last time you REALLY needed AutoDesk Animator Pro v1.0 for DOS? Im sure some jackass will try to prove me wrong with an anecdote of how his lucky copy of OS/2 2.1 on 5.25" floppies saved a business, but generally speaking, maybe they should work to preseve 50 of the titles, rather than 10,000. There will be some loss, but we'll get over it.
This is why Ive always loved and bought into the concept of VMWare (or similar) virtual machines. Software is pretty immortal, as the turing machine principle pretty much says any one turing machine can emulate another, so making sure the entire PC and OS can be emulated in software makes the software that runs within it immortal as well. The fact that you can run Linux and Windows entirely as self contained software as long as you can emulate the BIOS means they shouldb e around for a very long time, just keep porting the emulator to new hardware. I fear that Palladium and crap like it will bring this down though, as it starts to tie software to very specific hardware that yes, will crumble to worthless ashes quickly.
Besides, who says making music is worthy of a full time employment salary anyway? Very few people make a full time job and salary out of Mexican Hat Dancing, maybe music is the same way. Im tired of the teeny pop wonders that barely sing 1 song, which wasnt written or arranged by them, gets completely reworked digitally so its not even them singing again, but they just get up and shake their ass and tits and get Pepsi contracts, limosine service, and would be appalled to have to wear the same thing twice in their life. The same goes for their handlers. That's not music, its pimping and prostitution, which last I checked was illegal in most places. If you want to make money making music, perform and get paid for the performance. Personally I just think it's pretty arrogant to think that just because you can hold a tune and put melody on paper you're deservant of a celebrity salary and treatment. I wont cry if it all goes away.
When it comes to stopping Kazaa, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it, and a whole lot more control given to the coroporate and political entities than you intended.
I hate when some bleeding heart socialist steps in and says money could be better spent "on the needy" in cases like this. Almost everyone reading slashdot has some kind of discretionary income. For some it's $5 a month, for other's its $500 a day. Either way, part of enjoying life is spending what you have (cash, time, knowledge) you things you enjoy. Are there other people out there who "need" things. Yes. Does that mean we should give every spare dollar to them? No.
Unless you live in a grass hut you made with your own 2 hands, dress in recycled fig leaves, give back to the land more than you consume, and produce more food personally than you consume, shut the hell up. If someone wants to spend money on the development of open source software, they should have that right without being accosted by some hippocrite. Now take the PC you used to post on Slashdot offline, sell it on Ebay, and give the money to the "needy".
Love, Proc6
I installed the SQL Service Pack 3 on a 450mhz P3, it took maybe 3-5 minutes.
HTML email with images in it. Most HTML email has source like...
<img src="http://www.spam.com/ads/viagra.jpg">
And when the email client goes to retrieve the image, what port does it use? You guessed it... 80.
PRAISE JESUS
I love this thing. Seriously. The 24" Sony CRT's are fine, but at the highest resolution it was only 80Hz. I can't handle 80Hz. 85 is the minimum for a CRT. The monitor was nice, don't get me wrong. But analog just sucks. There was still a slight difference in the convergence at the outer corners. It poured out heat like a fucking oven on self-clean and it broke my back to move it around to clean. It was just like a bastardization of technology. So I ditched it, and bought the Sun, and I will NEVER look back. 1920x1200 perfectly accurate pixels. The panel weighs nothing, generates almost no heat.
It has been my experience that people that bash LCDs don't own a good one, and secretly wish they did.
Your eye can't pick up more than 60 fps anyway. If you think it can, you're high on crack. Film is 20, TV is 30. The only reason people like video cards that get 150 fps in "Quake", is because that means at the "tough spots" they still stay above 30. Pretty sad if you trash a technology because it doesnt get more than 65 fps. I suppose all cars that have a top speed under 220 mph suck too.