The price must of changed since I last looked though, then the cheapest mobo was about $80, cpu I don't recall for sure but I think $100 and the last tyme I bought 128M of ram was about $100. That was two or three years ago and I'd want at least 512 preferably 1 GB ram.
That was awhile ago. If you live near a Fry's (many big cities in the U.S.) you can buy a combo with a motherboard, CPU & fan for as little as $50, though the cheapo combo this week is a lordly $80 for an AMD A64 3000+ CPU and an ECS Nforce3A board. Look on pricewatch.com and you can find 512 MB of PC3200 RAM for as little as about $43 and a gig is maybe $54. But you'll need a new power supply and that will run you about $30 for a decent one.
But it still may not make much sense to upgrade your current rig.
What are you going to do with your old "perfectly adequate until 10 minutes ago" mobo, PS and CPU? Put 'em in a drawer until you throw them away? E-Bay them for not much more than the transaction cost? Resell them to various recyclers? The boards are worth 80 cents a pound, CPUs used to get a pretty penny, like $18 a pound, but the vast majority of a PII CPU is fan, casing, etc. The power supply is just scrap metal, a few cents a pound.
Even if wait until you can get the best possible deals on the parts, maybe $110 after a Mail In Rebate on 512 MB of RAM, you still have to pull the old stuff, screw the new stuff in, hoping you didn't short anything out, and then reinstall Windows (or at least reconfigure X and your sound card for Linux, not, I'll admit, a big deal).
In the mean time you could buy a whole new system with a legal copy of Windows XP and a new 17" CRT monitor for less than $300 after MIR. Then sell your old rig for $75. Buy a cheap PCI video card for $14 and you are good to go with a dual monitor rig using Xinerama. Use QTPARTED to shrink the XP partition to 30 gigs or so, so you can dual boot, then blow on your favorite distro.
The motherboard for the computer has a number of things built onto it, the graphics is though I installed a second one.
Actually, if your second video card is PCI, you can run a dual monitor rig now, either in Win or Lin. Unfortunately, onboard video tends to be on the AGP bus, so if you have an AGP card you can either us it or the onboard. All new motherboards come with USB 2.0, you can buy a cheap firewire card for $10-15.
I wouldn't worry too much about exactly which CPU to buy. Practically anything you buy these days will have plenty of pop for most purposes. Maybe you should take that statement with a grain of saltpeter, since my primary machine benchmarks, according to KBoincSpy, a Dhrystone of 309 MIPS and a Whetstone of 110 MFLOPS, and I'm reasonably happy with it.
Mel isn't looney, he's just drunk out of his gourd much of the time. When he sobers up he generally apologizes, like he did yesterday after a drunk driving arrest where he claimed "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" & that he owned Malibu. He even asked forgiveness for shouting at a female cop (sow?) "What do you think you are looking at sugartits?" Class act, all the way.
I was using the official 1.5.0.4 tar.gz Firefox & Thunderbird binaries on Debian Sarge, otherwise I'd probably still be mucking with some stripe of FF 1.04 and TB 1.02 which I believe are still in the Stable repositories. And I was rather surprised to see that 1.5.0.5 was installed on both programs this morning.
As root I decompressed the installation files in to/usr/local/ subdirectories and I don't use any programs that automagically update the system every night like YUM can or whatever (U)buntu uses. I'm running these Mozilla programs as a regular user. How can they just update themselves without even asking me for a / password? If I've monkied with the preferences to allow the programs to update themselves I certainly didn't do it as SuperUser. I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight.
Ummm, you obviously didn't care or you would have realized that Maoists ARE Stalinists. MouseyDung and his acolytes never had a problem with ol' Uncle Joe, just with the Social Imperialists who rose to the leadership a few years after he died. The CCP still trots out a portrait of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on the side of the Great Hall Of The People on ceremonial occasions. Speaking of trots, it is probably the Trotskyites/ists that you are thinking of, not the Maoists feuding with Stalinists. As I said to a Sparticist buddy of mine "Sects, sects, sects, that's all you ever talk about."
Actually, the Stalinist iconography has always been a bit of an embarassment to Western Maoists. I remember a Maoist bookstore in Berkeley in the seventies (now a Fish'N'Chips shop, I believe) where if you bought four portraits of the great socialist leaders (Marx, Engels, Lenin & Mao, presumably) they'd throw in a fifth poster of the Late, Great Man Of Steel for free (a 50 cent value!) A bargain at half the price.
Right, apparently a SEP field can run for 100 years on a single battery because it is largely powered by the natural human propensity not to see what one doesn't want to see. George Bush's electoral success is due to just such an attribute (well, that and Diebold voting machine fraud and assorted other chicanery).
I have to agree, Xandros as a server makes me cringe a bit. I'm just a regular Linux user, not a guru, and I am using Desktop 3.02 on the machine I'm composing this on and Samba is just a mess. Xandros File Manager is flakey at best and doesn't let me write to shares on other machines, either Linux or Windows. Using smb:// from Konqueror lists share on other machines, but I am denied permission to actually read them. Some dependency problem prevented me from apt-getting smb4k, LinNeighborhood refused to work properly (at least as a regular user despite mucking around with chmod to smbmount). The Forum wasn't too helpful, neither were the Wikis. I just use fish with Linux shares with Konqueror and VNC in to Windows boxes and copy files to my Xandros shares. A kludge, but it works and I don't feel like installing another distro on this box or spending too much time screwing around with smb.conf (I looked it over and didn't immediately see a problem). But no other modern distro gave me anything like this much grief dealing with something as basic as Samba, and Xandros is supposed to be an easy beginner's distribution.
I haven't noticed the machine slowing to a crawl, though. Maybe because I reboot on a regular basis...
Obviously, few (if any) business users need anything more than a Pentium III running at 500 MHz. That processor is perfectly acceptable for business applications like OpenOffice.
I dunno, if you are running Windows 2000/XP a 500 MHz processor is frustratingly slow if you have a firewall and antivirus (and maybe antispy stuff) running in the background. Even with 256 MB of RAM it is jerky & annoying. Windows 98 running all the updates and background services seems really painful to me even on much faster hardware, say a Duron 1.2 GHz with a half gig of RAM. It just seems to stutter and freeze all the time, especially doing file management, to say nothing of its pathetic stability.
On the other hand I have a 366 MHz Celeron with 320 MB of PC133 RAM running Vectorlinux Soho (KDE) and it is just fine. It routinely runs dozens of Mozilla tabs, my email and IM programs, music in the background, a downloader, maybe an FTP client and a html editor, Streamtuner, kjots, 3-4 shell sessions, maybe a little VNC, some SSH, perhaps GIMP for image processing, OpenOffice once in a while, or Abiword & Gnumeric. Really, it isn't that much worse than my machines with 5 times the CPU speed and 3 times the memory. Slackware seems even faster on similar hardware. On the other paw, my old 233 MHz Cyrix PR300 with 192 MB of PC100 really is too slow, even with Wolvix (a stripped down Slackware with XFCE and Fluxbox). I suppose if I used Dillo or Lynx & Pine instead of Firefox, Mozilla & Thunderbird I'd find even this old box adequate.
Consider the case of memory modules. 5 years ago, 64MB PC100 SODIMMs were plentiful. Now, they are virtually extinct.
Funny, I just bought 20 sticks of that very stuff Tuesday for $43. Sure, it was system pulls, but it was Micron, double sided for your pleasure. Besides, RAM rarely goes tits up (although I've seen it happen). Much more likely you'll have a power supply or hard drive die and those components are easily replaceable and much cheaper today than those parts were when your museum piece was new. If your motherboard blows a capacitor, on the other hand, then you will have more work to do, but you don't necessarily need to start over. You can either spend $50 for a Slot 1 or Socket 370 motherboard or you can buy an Nvidia Nforce3A motherboard and a retail A64 AMD Sempr0n 2800+ CPU for only $80 on sale if you live near a Fry's. http://www.netaffilia.com/ad/electronics/frys/i/20 06/03/22/15890.html/
And if you replace your CPU/Mobo you'll need to upgrade to DDR RAM, but these days you can find 512 MB for only $30 on sale. And you can probably keep your old ATX case, video card, optical drive, power supply (if it was decent when it was new), even your hard drive, if you haven't already upgraded it to accomodate your collection of art photos from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality.hamster.
You can log in to a root console session in (x)buntu with the command:
sudo -s -H
At least I think you can. I'm not sure I remember the syntax exactly since I have an line in my.bashrc that enables me to create a 'su' session with only two characters and my password.
Of course, this sort of cosmetic product differentiation works best when your target demographic is a group of status-conscious nescient twits, like, say, oh, U.S. SUV buyers.
I understand the Lincoln Navigator is just a Ford Explorer with a different grill and panels (and a little sound insulation) marked up ten grand or so. And the Hummer H2 is merely a Chevy Tahoe with a body made to look like a Hummvee.
Except that in reality, the US is not a direct democracy, and the peoples' votes don't really have any power....Too damn bad, that's how our government has been since it was formed.
It is too damn bad that the United States isn't a democracy and was never intended to be. Read the Federalist Papers written by framers of the document, Madison, Hamilton & Jay during the Constitutional Convention. They thought that in a real democracy the masses would rage for paper money, abolish debt and demand an equal distribution of private property. That is why the franchise was initially only extended to about 7% of the population and institutions like the Electoral College were devised.
Even disregarding the problem of faithless electors, the Electoral College gives disproportianate weight to smaller, largely more conservative constituencies. Each state, no matter how small, gets at least three electoral votes, two for its senators and one for its member of the House Of Representatives. Hence, a citizen of the urban and relatively progressive state of California finds that his vote only counts about a fifth as much as a vote caste in Cheney's home state of Wyoming.
The other major effective institutional check to democratic tendencies of the U.S. republic is single member constituency elections. Whichever candidate gets the plurality of the vote in a given geographic constituency gets all of the representation for that area. This gives rise to two more-or-less centrist coalitions, both of which de-emphasize ideology in the general elections and depend upon buckets of dollars contributed by wealthy interests to blanket the airwaves with inoffensive pap promising the moon at no cost. In plurality voting systems if you vote for a third party you are effectively voting for the centrist coalition that is further from your end of the political spectrum. The first-past-the-post electoral system is the reason no strong third party arose in the U.S. to broaden the scope of electoral debate over the last century or so. This lack of ideological alternatives has contributed to the apathy and ignorance of the American electorate and the comparatively low voter turnout witnessed in U.S. elections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout/
Proportional representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_represen tation/ (which implies abolishing the electoral college) would lead to the demise of the two-party system and representation for currently marginalized ideologies (socialist, green, clerical, neo-fascist) and even threaten the control that the neoliberal 'Washington Consensus' has over the American government.
I''ve got one of them there fancy self-cleaning bathrooms. At least I think I do 'cause my wife is always saying that I think the bathroom cleans itself.
Actually, the Venice core is s939, not s754. And an A64 3000+ Venice core starts at about $149 on Pricewatch. That said, a Venice s939 3000+ is apparently a good choice for overclockers.
I'm not sure how useful the term reptile still is, at least to scientists in determining common descent, since as I recall from grammer school it applied to all cold blooded vertebrates with eggs with shells. The class reptilia is composed of four orders, squmata (lizards & snakes), crocodilia (crocs & gators), Rhynchocephalia (tuataras) and turtles (testudines).
But these don't seem to be products of a single lineage other than being members of microphylum amniota. Back in the late paleozoic this group diverged into anapsids (turtles), diapsids (lizards and snakes, tuataras, as well as archosaurs, which includes crocadilians, dinosaurs and birds), and synapsids (mammal-like reptiles, which lead to mammals). In other words, the group repitiles is paraphyletic, that is, it contains the most recent
common ancestor of the group but not all the descendants of the common
ancestor.
There are something like 150 ISPs in the US that offer dialup for $10 or less (some as little as $4-5 with no setup fee and no long-term contracts).
Many of these ISPs are MUCH better than Earthstink. Call the Georgia scientologists over at Earthlink for tech-support and you'll be treated to tedious voice mail and long wait times on hold, vs. my $8 per month dial up ISP where you get a helpful human being on the second ring. You can find the dialup numbers and server settings within a click or two on my ISP's home page; you really have to dig for that stuff on Earthlink.com.
If you use Earthlink's TotalExcess Windows 'installer' it basically takes over your computer, starting up every time you boot Windows, replacing your IE Favorites with its own hidden ones, & disabling IE's location bar search, in favor of its own search (and no, customizing IE's searches did not give me a Google search back, I would have had to much around with the Registry). I didn't bother to sort it out, just switched my buddy over to Mozilla & Firefox. Their software really fought me, locking up the system when I tried to uninstall it, requiring a reboot & Scandisk.
Earthfink only offers you only 10 MB of space on their email server and if you fill it up I've observed them disabling your email account without even sending you a courtesy email telling you how to clear it up (heck, even free Netzero does that). After a friend couldn't get his email for a few days he finally got a message saying he could purchase more storage space for only an extra $2 per month. Well, you can buy an 80 GB drive for only $20 after MIR. In other words for your $22 per month Earthlink offers you a generous ¼ cent of storage for your email while Gmail gives you 2.2+ GB (220 times as much) for free. And then Earthlink has the effrontery to spam you with commerical email, eating up your tiny quota.
A few years ago I even had Mindspring (same outfit, different name) abruptly cancel a dialup account with them without notice just because I was online all night for a week or two, downloading distros, yah, that's the story.
So basically, you are paying at least $168 over a year more than comparable dialup service would cost, but at least you get a bargain on a machine, right? Wrong, that $69 doesn't include a $50 shipping fee, so its real price is about $120. In the meantime the Friday before last local retailer Fry's was offering basically the same machine with Linspire instead of Xandros for $100. (OK, the Fry's box only has 128 MB, but you can buy an extra 256 MB for about $20 these days.) Feh.
Of course not. Because of the U.S. embargo Cuba couldn't legally buy Windows even if it had the hard currency and wanted to spend it that way.
In fact, as an American you can't even give a 'free-as-in-love' Linux distro to a Cubano friend because parts of the CD contain encryption technology and Cuba is classified by the State Department as a "terrorist" nation. This from a country whose leadership thinks that it is our "destiny" to spend $1.3 trillion building a U.S. monopoly on space-based "death star" weapons to give "us" "space control" and "freedom to attack." I better pipe down before my government "renders" me to Uzbekistan for torture.
Strangely enough, the way the U.S. Department of Commerce interprets its export controls, it is legal for Microsoft to sell its proprietary operating system to Iraqis despite the inclusion of encryption technology, but it is illegal for an American citizen to give an Iraqi a Linux distro. When a Merkin politician uses the terms "freedom" and "democracy" they are just code words for corporate domination and U.S. hegemony.
Hey, lay off the libertarians. Deregulation of the state electrical grid has been a tremendous success. Sure, we went from a high-reliability/low cost scenario to a low-reliability/high cost situation, but that is only because we haven't deregulated enough. Anyone want to buy a nice deregulated bridge?
Besides, introducing "competition" in the electrical market has been a great boon to folks like the Enron employees and their pension funds. If only we could introduce a similar scheme for Social Security (luckily our president is working on it).
Re:not surprising...
on
Hacking Vodka
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The U.S. government, which as we all know, is always right, defines vodka in its regulations as "neutral spirits distilled from any material, at or above 190 proof, reduced to not more than 110 proof and not less than 80 proof and after such reduction in proof...(with vegetable charcoal for at least 8 hours)...as to be without distinctive character, aroma, or taste."
In other words, vodka has already been filtered far more effectively than a Brita could manage & there ain't a lick of difference between the cheapest swill on the market and the most expensive imported luxury "little water", other than the fact that the expensive stuff comes in a glass bottle (which I think would be less likely to impart flavor). When liquor comes off a column still that highly fractionated it has no distinctiveness, regardless whether it is made from rye and potatoes or from byproducts of oil refinery or wood pulp (which, BTW, does happen). Generally, at least in the U.S. market, vodka is subsequently cut with distilled water, which also lacks much character. Unless there is something seriously wrong with the manufacturer's equipment (in which case the taste is probably the least of your worries), vodka is vodka.
High end vodkas are a perfect example of a Veblen Good, a commodity whose demand increases as its prices increases because of the band wagon effect, snob appeal and people's erroneous assumption that if something is more expensive it must be better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Vodka is just an ethanol delivery vehicle. It is best consumed in large gulps straight out of the freezer, as it is in Russia, to minimize the nasty flavor inherent in ethanol and maximize its medicinal properties.
Unlike these folks, I have done double blind tests on repeated occasions with vodka and drinks made with vodka and NO ONE has ever been able to distinguish the Stoly from the 'Park & Shop' vodka. With one exception. We were making vodka & tonics once and a friend accidentally swallowed the lemon wedge in his haste to consume the vodka. He said that particular belt was somewhat less good, even though it was made from the expensive vodka.
Personally, my days of 'drinking-for-effect' are largely numbered (unless my liver enzyme levels decrease), so I stick to single malt Scotch whisky and an occasional Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster to clear the cobwebs out of my skull.
Those bastards at Arbeit Macht Fry's. There's a MSI logo on the ad in the papers, but when I went to the Concord Fry's today they said it was a print mistake and wouldn't honor it. They wanted to hawk that combo of $260 and pawn off some ECS POS for $190.
Frankly, though, I agree that $200 is no longer budget combo territory. Besides, unless you are a Gentoo user, what the heck do you need that much CPU for anyway? I did some updates for a friend with a PIV 3.08 CPU lappie yesterday and it seemed to take forever, much longer than on my humble boxes with half that much horsepower. Then I realized that I was only using 8-12% of the processor and that the 4200 RPM hard drive was slowing down progress.
Not nearly as cool as my Barbie computer...
on
Hip-e All-In-One PC
·
· Score: 1
Agreed this is marketed more at pre-adolescents, but if that is your target audience, why buy a Barbie Computer for $70?
I love mine. I paid $60 for it several years ago and slapped in a $20 stick of 256 MB SDRAM and a 30 GB hard drive. It still has the flower decals and everything. Plus, it has a nifty handle and lightening-fast onboard i810 video and modem. It works fine for email and light web surfing. Its hostname is Klaus (as in Klaus Barbie).
Klaus doesn't have any PCI slots, though. I have to use a USB ethernet adapter. Does this rig have an PCI slots?
I think you may be missing the point. This is a distro for all them southern Yellow Dog Democrats what that would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Repugnican.
Personally, I have enough trouble telling the difference between Demublicans & Republocrats, so my distro of choice is the more ideologically correct Red Flag Linux from the People's Republic of China. Rather than bark I prefer to Mao...
It appears to be a disk geometry issue and effects mostly Fedora and Mandrake, from what I've read. There is a Slashdot thread
(here) .
I understand if you hand feed your kernel your disk geometry when you install you can overcome this problem, though I misremember exactly where I read this.
I installed Fedora 2 to dual boot off a single drive and it wouldn't boot itself or W2K. The fdisk/mbr and the Windows recovery console commands fixmbr and fixboot didn't help boot Windows (I'd given up on Fedora). Then I noticed that the drive was booting as CHS, despite the BIOS being rigged to automatically detect the proper setting. I made the BIOS detect the drive as LBA only and Windows booted right up.
Then I got a second hard drive, made the Windows disk the slave and installed Fedora to the master drive, which worked, sorta. I have to use the BIOS to boot whichever OS I choose rather than the a more convenient boot loader. Disks are cheap, but its a kludge.
I
want to be able to separate out the e-mail from various sources.
Well you can always sort your email by accounts if that is handy,
even
if all you email is in one Inbox.
I've accumulated something like 9 POP3 accounts over the years and in
Moz Mail each one had its own Inbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent &
Trash folder, so to keep them all
expanded (so I didn't have to click
on the account and click on the Inbox to read my mail), I had to scroll
down to check all my accounts, and even further if I wanted to have my
own mail 'sort & store' folders. Plus, I had to click on 9
separate Inboxes to see my mail.
I used to try a complex system of filters to dump everything in a
single Inbox. It was a pain to set up and didn't always
work. Plus I had all those useless folders, including the 'Local
Folders' folders. I just ended up using Outlook Express, Kmail or
Evolution, depending on OS.
The 'all in one folder' option is also available in the Mozilla 1.8PR
branch, by the way. It works pretty well, but one caveat.
If you store your email on the server for a time, disable the "Leave on
Server: Until I Delete Or Remove From The Inbox" option, or you'll find
your mail removed from the server prematurely when you reorganize your
mail folders.
I
suspect you might be in a minority as far as people wanting that
feature goes.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. Microsoft extensively tests for UI, and they obviously concluded that most people would prefer a single Inbox.
But even if it is a minority of actual Mozilla/Thunderbird users, it is a fairly substantial minority, and for those
that want
it, its not really negotiable. It is long since past time that
this feature was available, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
But it still may not make much sense to upgrade your current rig.
What are you going to do with your old "perfectly adequate until 10 minutes ago" mobo, PS and CPU? Put 'em in a drawer until you throw them away? E-Bay them for not much more than the transaction cost? Resell them to various recyclers? The boards are worth 80 cents a pound, CPUs used to get a pretty penny, like $18 a pound, but the vast majority of a PII CPU is fan, casing, etc. The power supply is just scrap metal, a few cents a pound.
Even if wait until you can get the best possible deals on the parts, maybe $110 after a Mail In Rebate on 512 MB of RAM, you still have to pull the old stuff, screw the new stuff in, hoping you didn't short anything out, and then reinstall Windows (or at least reconfigure X and your sound card for Linux, not, I'll admit, a big deal).
In the mean time you could buy a whole new system with a legal copy of Windows XP and a new 17" CRT monitor for less than $300 after MIR. Then sell your old rig for $75. Buy a cheap PCI video card for $14 and you are good to go with a dual monitor rig using Xinerama. Use QTPARTED to shrink the XP partition to 30 gigs or so, so you can dual boot, then blow on your favorite distro.
Actually, if your second video card is PCI, you can run a dual monitor rig now, either in Win or Lin. Unfortunately, onboard video tends to be on the AGP bus, so if you have an AGP card you can either us it or the onboard. All new motherboards come with USB 2.0, you can buy a cheap firewire card for $10-15.
I wouldn't worry too much about exactly which CPU to buy. Practically anything you buy these days will have plenty of pop for most purposes. Maybe you should take that statement with a grain of saltpeter, since my primary machine benchmarks, according to KBoincSpy, a Dhrystone of 309 MIPS and a Whetstone of 110 MFLOPS, and I'm reasonably happy with it.
Mel isn't looney, he's just drunk out of his gourd much of the time. When he sobers up he generally apologizes, like he did yesterday after a drunk driving arrest where he claimed "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" & that he owned Malibu. He even asked forgiveness for shouting at a female cop (sow?) "What do you think you are looking at sugartits?" Class act, all the way.
I was using the official 1.5.0.4 tar.gz Firefox & Thunderbird binaries on Debian Sarge, otherwise I'd probably still be mucking with some stripe of FF 1.04 and TB 1.02 which I believe are still in the Stable repositories. And I was rather surprised to see that 1.5.0.5 was installed on both programs this morning.
/usr/local/ subdirectories and I don't use any programs that automagically update the system every night like YUM can or whatever (U)buntu uses. I'm running these Mozilla programs as a regular user. How can they just update themselves without even asking me for a / password? If I've monkied with the preferences to allow the programs to update themselves I certainly didn't do it as SuperUser. I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight.
As root I decompressed the installation files in to
Actually, the Stalinist iconography has always been a bit of an embarassment to Western Maoists. I remember a Maoist bookstore in Berkeley in the seventies (now a Fish'N'Chips shop, I believe) where if you bought four portraits of the great socialist leaders (Marx, Engels, Lenin & Mao, presumably) they'd throw in a fifth poster of the Late, Great Man Of Steel for free (a 50 cent value!) A bargain at half the price.
Right, apparently a SEP field can run for 100 years on a single battery because it is largely powered by the natural human propensity not to see what one doesn't want to see. George Bush's electoral success is due to just such an attribute (well, that and Diebold voting machine fraud and assorted other chicanery).
I have to agree, Xandros as a server makes me cringe a bit. I'm just a regular Linux user, not a guru, and I am using Desktop 3.02 on the machine I'm composing this on and Samba is just a mess. Xandros File Manager is flakey at best and doesn't let me write to shares on other machines, either Linux or Windows. Using smb:// from Konqueror lists share on other machines, but I am denied permission to actually read them. Some dependency problem prevented me from apt-getting smb4k, LinNeighborhood refused to work properly (at least as a regular user despite mucking around with chmod to smbmount). The Forum wasn't too helpful, neither were the Wikis. I just use fish with Linux shares with Konqueror and VNC in to Windows boxes and copy files to my Xandros shares. A kludge, but it works and I don't feel like installing another distro on this box or spending too much time screwing around with smb.conf (I looked it over and didn't immediately see a problem). But no other modern distro gave me anything like this much grief dealing with something as basic as Samba, and Xandros is supposed to be an easy beginner's distribution.
I haven't noticed the machine slowing to a crawl, though. Maybe because I reboot on a regular basis...
Of course, this sort of cosmetic product differentiation works best when your target demographic is a group of status-conscious nescient twits, like, say, oh, U.S. SUV buyers.
I understand the Lincoln Navigator is just a Ford Explorer with a different grill and panels (and a little sound insulation) marked up ten grand or so. And the Hummer H2 is merely a Chevy Tahoe with a body made to look like a Hummvee.
I''ve got one of them there fancy self-cleaning bathrooms. At least I think I do 'cause my wife is always saying that I think the bathroom cleans itself.
Actually, the Venice core is s939, not s754. And an A64 3000+ Venice core starts at about $149 on Pricewatch. That said, a Venice s939 3000+ is apparently a good choice for overclockers.
I'm not sure how useful the term reptile still is, at least to scientists in determining common descent, since as I recall from grammer school it applied to all cold blooded vertebrates with eggs with shells. The class reptilia is composed of four orders, squmata (lizards & snakes), crocodilia (crocs & gators), Rhynchocephalia (tuataras) and turtles (testudines).
But these don't seem to be products of a single lineage other than being members of microphylum amniota. Back in the late paleozoic this group diverged into anapsids (turtles), diapsids (lizards and snakes, tuataras, as well as archosaurs, which includes crocadilians, dinosaurs and birds), and synapsids (mammal-like reptiles, which lead to mammals). In other words, the group repitiles is paraphyletic, that is, it contains the most recent common ancestor of the group but not all the descendants of the common ancestor.
Ow, my head hurts. Can I have a drink now?
There are something like 150 ISPs in the US that offer dialup for $10 or less (some as little as $4-5 with no setup fee and no long-term contracts).
Many of these ISPs are MUCH better than Earthstink. Call the Georgia scientologists over at Earthlink for tech-support and you'll be treated to tedious voice mail and long wait times on hold, vs. my $8 per month dial up ISP where you get a helpful human being on the second ring. You can find the dialup numbers and server settings within a click or two on my ISP's home page; you really have to dig for that stuff on Earthlink.com.
If you use Earthlink's TotalExcess Windows 'installer' it basically takes over your computer, starting up every time you boot Windows, replacing your IE Favorites with its own hidden ones, & disabling IE's location bar search, in favor of its own search (and no, customizing IE's searches did not give me a Google search back, I would have had to much around with the Registry). I didn't bother to sort it out, just switched my buddy over to Mozilla & Firefox. Their software really fought me, locking up the system when I tried to uninstall it, requiring a reboot & Scandisk.
Earthfink only offers you only 10 MB of space on their email server and if you fill it up I've observed them disabling your email account without even sending you a courtesy email telling you how to clear it up (heck, even free Netzero does that). After a friend couldn't get his email for a few days he finally got a message saying he could purchase more storage space for only an extra $2 per month. Well, you can buy an 80 GB drive for only $20 after MIR. In other words for your $22 per month Earthlink offers you a generous ¼ cent of storage for your email while Gmail gives you 2.2+ GB (220 times as much) for free. And then Earthlink has the effrontery to spam you with commerical email, eating up your tiny quota.
A few years ago I even had Mindspring (same outfit, different name) abruptly cancel a dialup account with them without notice just because I was online all night for a week or two, downloading distros, yah, that's the story.
So basically, you are paying at least $168 over a year more than comparable dialup service would cost, but at least you get a bargain on a machine, right? Wrong, that $69 doesn't include a $50 shipping fee, so its real price is about $120. In the meantime the Friday before last local retailer Fry's was offering basically the same machine with Linspire instead of Xandros for $100. (OK, the Fry's box only has 128 MB, but you can buy an extra 256 MB for about $20 these days.) Feh.
No, but you can buy a T-Shirt with Tux wearing a tie with a hammer and sickle on it.
Of course not. Because of the U.S. embargo Cuba couldn't legally buy Windows even if it had the hard currency and wanted to spend it that way.
In fact, as an American you can't even give a 'free-as-in-love' Linux distro to a Cubano friend because parts of the CD contain encryption technology and Cuba is classified by the State Department as a "terrorist" nation. This from a country whose leadership thinks that it is our "destiny" to spend $1.3 trillion building a U.S. monopoly on space-based "death star" weapons to give "us" "space control" and "freedom to attack." I better pipe down before my government "renders" me to Uzbekistan for torture.
Strangely enough, the way the U.S. Department of Commerce interprets its export controls, it is legal for Microsoft to sell its proprietary operating system to Iraqis despite the inclusion of encryption technology, but it is illegal for an American citizen to give an Iraqi a Linux distro. When a Merkin politician uses the terms "freedom" and "democracy" they are just code words for corporate domination and U.S. hegemony.
Hey, lay off the libertarians. Deregulation of the state electrical grid has been a tremendous success. Sure, we went from a high-reliability/low cost scenario to a low-reliability/high cost situation, but that is only because we haven't deregulated enough. Anyone want to buy a nice deregulated bridge?
Besides, introducing "competition" in the electrical market has been a great boon to folks like the Enron employees and their pension funds. If only we could introduce a similar scheme for Social Security (luckily our president is working on it).
The U.S. government, which as we all know, is always right, defines vodka in its regulations as "neutral spirits distilled from any material, at or above 190 proof, reduced to not more than 110 proof and not less than 80 proof and after such reduction in proof...(with vegetable charcoal for at least 8 hours)...as to be without distinctive character, aroma, or taste."
In other words, vodka has already been filtered far more effectively than a Brita could manage & there ain't a lick of difference between the cheapest swill on the market and the most expensive imported luxury "little water", other than the fact that the expensive stuff comes in a glass bottle (which I think would be less likely to impart flavor). When liquor comes off a column still that highly fractionated it has no distinctiveness, regardless whether it is made from rye and potatoes or from byproducts of oil refinery or wood pulp (which, BTW, does happen). Generally, at least in the U.S. market, vodka is subsequently cut with distilled water, which also lacks much character. Unless there is something seriously wrong with the manufacturer's equipment (in which case the taste is probably the least of your worries), vodka is vodka.
High end vodkas are a perfect example of a Veblen Good, a commodity whose demand increases as its prices increases because of the band wagon effect, snob appeal and people's erroneous assumption that if something is more expensive it must be better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
Vodka is just an ethanol delivery vehicle. It is best consumed in large gulps straight out of the freezer, as it is in Russia, to minimize the nasty flavor inherent in ethanol and maximize its medicinal properties.
Unlike these folks, I have done double blind tests on repeated occasions with vodka and drinks made with vodka and NO ONE has ever been able to distinguish the Stoly from the 'Park & Shop' vodka. With one exception. We were making vodka & tonics once and a friend accidentally swallowed the lemon wedge in his haste to consume the vodka. He said that particular belt was somewhat less good, even though it was made from the expensive vodka.
Personally, my days of 'drinking-for-effect' are largely numbered (unless my liver enzyme levels decrease), so I stick to single malt Scotch whisky and an occasional Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster to clear the cobwebs out of my skull.
Those bastards at Arbeit Macht Fry's. There's a MSI logo on the ad in the papers, but when I went to the Concord Fry's today they said it was a print mistake and wouldn't honor it. They wanted to hawk that combo of $260 and pawn off some ECS POS for $190.
Frankly, though, I agree that $200 is no longer budget combo territory. Besides, unless you are a Gentoo user, what the heck do you need that much CPU for anyway? I did some updates for a friend with a PIV 3.08 CPU lappie yesterday and it seemed to take forever, much longer than on my humble boxes with half that much horsepower. Then I realized that I was only using 8-12% of the processor and that the 4200 RPM hard drive was slowing down progress.
Agreed this is marketed more at pre-adolescents, but if that is your target audience, why buy a Barbie Computer for $70?
I love mine. I paid $60 for it several years ago and slapped in a $20 stick of 256 MB SDRAM and a 30 GB hard drive. It still has the flower decals and everything. Plus, it has a nifty handle and lightening-fast onboard i810 video and modem. It works fine for email and light web surfing. Its hostname is Klaus (as in Klaus Barbie).
Klaus doesn't have any PCI slots, though. I have to use a USB ethernet adapter. Does this rig have an PCI slots?
I think you may be missing the point. This is a distro for all them southern Yellow Dog Democrats what that would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Repugnican.
Personally, I have enough trouble telling the difference between Demublicans & Republocrats, so my distro of choice is the more ideologically correct Red Flag Linux from the People's Republic of China. Rather than bark I prefer to Mao...
Beg to differ, it isn't limited to the Nforce2 chipset. My board is a VIA KT333.
It appears to be a disk geometry issue and effects mostly Fedora and Mandrake, from what I've read. There is a Slashdot thread (here) .
/mbr and the Windows recovery console commands fixmbr and fixboot didn't help boot Windows (I'd given up on Fedora). Then I noticed that the drive was booting as CHS, despite the BIOS being rigged to automatically detect the proper setting. I made the BIOS detect the drive as LBA only and Windows booted right up.
I understand if you hand feed your kernel your disk geometry when you install you can overcome this problem, though I misremember exactly where I read this.
I installed Fedora 2 to dual boot off a single drive and it wouldn't boot itself or W2K. The fdisk
Then I got a second hard drive, made the Windows disk the slave and installed Fedora to the master drive, which worked, sorta. I have to use the BIOS to boot whichever OS I choose rather than the a more convenient boot loader. Disks are cheap, but its a kludge.
Well you can always sort your email by accounts if that is handy, even if all you email is in one Inbox.
I've accumulated something like 9 POP3 accounts over the years and in Moz Mail each one had its own Inbox, Drafts, Templates, Sent & Trash folder, so to keep them all expanded (so I didn't have to click on the account and click on the Inbox to read my mail), I had to scroll down to check all my accounts, and even further if I wanted to have my own mail 'sort & store' folders. Plus, I had to click on 9 separate Inboxes to see my mail.
I used to try a complex system of filters to dump everything in a single Inbox. It was a pain to set up and didn't always work. Plus I had all those useless folders, including the 'Local Folders' folders. I just ended up using Outlook Express, Kmail or Evolution, depending on OS.
The 'all in one folder' option is also available in the Mozilla 1.8PR branch, by the way. It works pretty well, but one caveat. If you store your email on the server for a time, disable the "Leave on Server: Until I Delete Or Remove From The Inbox" option, or you'll find your mail removed from the server prematurely when you reorganize your mail folders.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. Microsoft extensively tests for UI, and they obviously concluded that most people would prefer a single Inbox. But even if it is a minority of actual Mozilla/Thunderbird users, it is a fairly substantial minority, and for those that want it, its not really negotiable. It is long since past time that this feature was available, IMO.