My Son has a GBA, GBA SP and GBA DS. They all still work despite being dropped, crushed in backpacks, and having been loaned to a two year old nephew. Pretty hard to beat that sort of treatment.
With the exception of the absolutely completely f9(^*(%'n useless screen on the GBA, I've been very impressed with Nintendo game machines.
I don't buy from mainstream records companies much anymore. They're assholes and there are plenty of talented artists who's music is available from other outlets. CD-Baby and Magnatune are just two examples.
I've been buying more music lately than any other time in my life. In the last twos weeks I've purchased: 2 CDs from CD Baby, three used CDs and 2 new albums that happen to come from Columbia Records (I hope Sony doesn't own them nowadays). I'm planning on purchasing two more from Magnatune tonight. My friends have more of their purchases going this way as well and I can tell you that plenty of my friends are buying lots of music.
Lets see, that means that only 22% of my music dollar is going to a major label and the rest of my Music dollar is probably not tracked by these statistics. I think the music industry is healthier than ever and by that I mean that the big companies are losing. I really hope the process accelerates.
My new-years wish is that in ten years we will regard the current music industry and their lobby with the same reaction as we currently have for McCarthyism.
Re:Very bad reviewer
on
Decipher
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Having a second network available as a backup has several problems:
One) How do you connect it to the systems? Move the wires? Impractical. The edge devices that actually connect to the systems have to be part of both networks.
Two) Who's to say that it will not have the same design flaw as the primary? Have the second network be designed by a different individual, AND with different design goals. Similar goals can produce similar results. Have the second network be designed strictly as a backup.
Anyway, in the vast majority of cases, rather than having a second network, you're probably better off having that second person review the work of the main person. Having and MAINTAINING a second network is only valid under a narrow range of situations. OTOH, perhaps a hospital is a high risk enough environment to warrant that.
Personally, I think having a backup paper/whiteboard/people system (which they appeared to have), is the right solution, as this is also useful under emergency situations (earthquake, extended power outage, war, etc).
My two-bits worth (was there ever a coin in America called a bit?)
Whoops, I should have through thru my network comment better. Doh!
Switched 10Mb to the CLIENT is fine, but as a previous poster pointed out, the server better have a good fast connection to support all of those switched 10 users.
One advantage that I havn't seen mentioned, is that you can have WinNT4, Win2K, Solaris AND Linux servers for your lab. Then, as long as you get a thin client that can access Citrix and VNC sessions, then a user can connect to any of the above OS's.
Don't listen to the whiners that say the Citrix/Windows solution is unreliable. I use both Citrix on NT Terminal server and Citrix on Win2k every day, works great, requires a reboot every month or two. Personally I prefer Unix, but a college needs to be able to provide Win32 environments as well.
I'm a senior SysAdmin at an Engineering firm, for me the advantage is flexibility. My office PC runs Linux, but I don't really use it except as a thin client. I have Virtual Desktops open to Linux, Solaris and Win2k.
So why use a Linux thin client to access a Linux Server? Because I can bring up that virtual desktop from anywhere in the building. If I'm at a user's desk, I can simply bring up my virtual desktop and have all of my task programs open and ready to go. Likewise if I'm spending time in the computer room. Way Cool...
The only downside is that multimedia sucks on a thin client. Otherwise, as long as the network is reasonably fast (switched 10Mb is fine), then performance is very usable.
Good luck, Brad
Oh come on, I laughed myself silly.
on
Review: Kung Pow
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, this movie is not a contender for a Comedy Oscar, but I thought it delivered on what it advertised....
I mean, if you watched the adds, you should have known it wasn't going to be a high dollar flick.
I thought it was one of the best silly films made in a long time. The silly film genre is one of the most overlooked in the history of Hollywood. When have they ever had a "Best Silly Film" award? When has the silly film ever gotten listed as a valid subcategory of Comedy? Granted that most people do not appreciate the wonderful humor in a silly film, but not being one of those people is no reason to criticize.
Shame on you Jon, you should have simply said "the movie is not for me" and gone on with your life.
This is a movie for those of us that are fans of things like MontyPython, The Hitchhikers Guide (the videos), Some of Mel Brooks more offbeat stuff, etc.
If you fit in that group, go see it, If you want to see a spoiler for my favorite gag, scroll down. When you see the spoiler, you'll understand why some people simply can't handle this movie.
Brad
.
.
.
We've all poked fun at the old dubbed japanese movies, where the sound is out of sync with the mouth movements, and this movies pokes fun at that. My favorite gag is a part where the dog barks, but the bark is obviously dubbed and is out of sync.
Not everyone would find that funny, and far too many people would let themselves be put off by its obvious and simple nature. Their loss.
Speaking as someone who has worked for an IT department in a local government; Do your people a favor and don't make this a campaign issue unless it is already.
The IT department should be free to choose the software and hardware tools that meet their budget and technical needs as well as solving the problem at hand.
I'm a Unix administrator with 14 years experience and a major proponent of Linux. The last three companies I've worked for have all wound up with at least part of their infrastructure based on Linux by the time I left. But this was all done because Linux was the right tool for the job, not because it was mandated.
However, in one case, what I recommended caused a bit of a stir. Why? Because as my position of head of the IT department for Engineering, I recommended NT4. It was the right tool for that particular situation and while I would have prefered a Unix based solution, it would of sucked to use and it would have sucked to support. And, it would have cost the company way more in time for both my staff and for Engineering.
If you would like to have a compaign issue mandating that open-source solutions be considered along with proprietary ones, good. My feeling is that this is similar in nature to requiring government contracts be placed out to bid. Open source solutions should be given the chance to be put forth, even though they may not have a salesperson pushing them.
Before you get too far along the road to SysAdmin-hood, ask yourself these questions;
1) Can I handle high stress? Or, am I willing to trade frequent moments of high stress for moments of huge job satisfaction and the ability to play with tech toys?
2) Are you someone who likes order to your day? As a SysAdmin, even if you are a highly organized person yourself, your day tends to be very fractured. You are having a good day when you come in the morning with five things you would like to work on, and actually get to work on two of them.
3) Are you a 8-5 person? The pro here, is that I can come in anywhere from 6am to 10am, and with arrangement with my boss, even later than that, or like today, I'm leaving at three. The con is, I'm on call 24-7, I'm working tomorrow rebuilding the filesystem on a production server and I rarely work a 40 hour week.
4) Can you handle people getting in your face, being pissed at you, yelling at you, etc. Can you tell a VP, "NO" and make it stick? One problem with being a SysAdmin, is that one day you're a star, the next you're an asshole.
If you can handle all of that you're probably well suited to being a SysAdmin. Learn how to accumulate browny points with upper management and spend them on pay-raises and trips to LISA and InterOp. Become intimately familiar with the O'Reilly book catalog, because you never know when you'll be told: We need this "insert technology here" next week (next week if you're lucky). Also, not something all SysAdmin's do, but one of my preferences; Make friends of other SysAdmin's, don't worry about calling for advice on situations you've never encountered before, and be willing to accept panic'd calls from friends on how to handle various problems.
Because, while I've worked in a lot of tech jobs before I became a SysAdmin (I've been one for eight years now), I've never had a job with more job satisfaction and less boredom. But it's not easy.
My workstation is RedHat 7.2, My general purpose servers are either Solaris 7 or RedHat 6.2.
However, when it comes to building a simple machine for a particular use, nothing beats Slackware. Shoot, just try and install RedHat 7.2 on a machine with a 540MB disk, it can't be done. You can barely install it in 800MB, but what you wind up with isn't very useable.
There are specific purpose Distros that work well for thier intended use. But if I try and do anything beyond what they are built for, things get diffecult very quickly. Slackware has all of the pieces you would expect in a modern distro, and a better ability to pick and choose what pieces get installed. When I need an OS to install on a Laptop to turn the Laptop into a network monitor, or I need to build a DNS server, etc, Slackware Rules!
This may have changed in the last couple of months, but one of the bigest objections to the FSF, and one I aggree with, is that you do not appear to have ever published your financials.
Has this changed? If not, do you intend to or why not?
Hmmm... I think I might agree with some of the posters that this story was not worthy of being posted. But not becaused:
"But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here."
I feel that Slashdot should be a perfect forum for the discussion of the subtle implications of the GPL. I say "should" because there are some topics that seem to bring out the immaturity of the crowd, and as has been commented elsewere, critisisim of any of the core elements of OSS seems to do it in spades.
The GPL is certainly a cornerstone of our world, in my opinion, it is one of the two or three most important documents of the 20th century. The Internet and Linux would certainly not be what they are today without it. But it is not perfect, and there have come to be other good licenses (including the LGPL), that fill in the gaps for areas where the GPL is not the best choice.
Rob, I don't accept your appology. Maybe this story wasn't right, but because of the content itself, not because of the nature of what was being discussed. I hope that as Slashdot (and it's community) matures, that the knee-jerk reactions to any critisim of OSS or anything else for that matter, fades away. I hope that you will continue to present stories that do bring out that imperfections in the GPL, Linux, Apache, Perl, etc... Without honest opinions regarding their weaknesses, they WILL stagnate and will wind up being no better than anything else that has come before.
At first when I'd heard that RedHat had purchased Cygnus, I boggled. Then it occured to me that not only had RedHat purchased a profitable company that had been around for (I believe) about ten years, this company makes money supporting open source products! Not only did RedHat get some good programmers, they got a management team that has years of experience making money at open source.
I've dealt with Cygnus, they are a professional group of people and I've never felt that they've compromised OSS principles by their contributions to GCC.
This purchase, more than anything else, leads me to believe that RedHat just might make it in the long run.
The best (funny, thought-provoking) hack that I'm aware of is the MCI hack on AT&T regarding "1-800-OPERATOR".
Remember that? AT&T spent MILLIONS of dollars advertising their new collect calling system, then suddenly dumped it, changing the name to "1-800-CALL-ATT".
Millions of dollars of wasted advertising money, even more millions lost to MCI's "1-800-COLLECT". Why?
The story I heard is that some bright boy at MCI realized that some percentage of the American public is unable to spell "operator". MCI went off and got the phone number "1-800-OPERATER", routed that number to "1-800-COLLECT" and quietly stole 14% of AT&T's business.
I vote this story as the "Best Corporate Hack of All Time" and hope the guy at MCI got a fat bonus. Not because I have anything against AT&T, just because I laughed for ten minutes when I heard about it.
Slashdot Mirror
My Son has a GBA, GBA SP and GBA DS. They all still work despite being dropped, crushed in backpacks, and having been loaned to a two year old nephew. Pretty hard to beat that sort of treatment.
With the exception of the absolutely completely f9(^*(%'n useless screen on the GBA, I've been very impressed with Nintendo game machines.
Seriously, what idiot released the original GBA?
Brad
I don't buy from mainstream records companies much anymore. They're assholes and there are plenty of talented artists who's music is available from other outlets. CD-Baby and Magnatune are just two examples.
I've been buying more music lately than any other time in my life. In the last twos weeks I've purchased: 2 CDs from CD Baby, three used CDs and 2 new albums that happen to come from Columbia Records (I hope Sony doesn't own them nowadays). I'm planning on purchasing two more from Magnatune tonight. My friends have more of their purchases going this way as well and I can tell you that plenty of my friends are buying lots of music.
Lets see, that means that only 22% of my music dollar is going to a major label and the rest of my Music dollar is probably not tracked by these statistics. I think the music industry is healthier than ever and by that I mean that the big companies are losing. I really hope the process accelerates.
My new-years wish is that in ten years we will regard the current music industry and their lobby with the same reaction as we currently have for McCarthyism.
What is this! Constructive Critisism on Slashdot!
Go away!
That's not true if you have load on the line. Once you place load (that is referenced to ground), the voltage will drop closer to the ground voltage.
The situation you describe is only true when the current through the two resistors is equal, which is rarely true.
Brad
Having a second network available as a backup has several problems:
One) How do you connect it to the systems? Move the wires? Impractical. The edge devices that actually connect to the systems have to be part of both networks.
Two) Who's to say that it will not have the same design flaw as the primary? Have the second network be designed by a different individual, AND with different design goals. Similar goals can produce similar results. Have the second network be designed strictly as a backup.
Anyway, in the vast majority of cases, rather than having a second network, you're probably better off having that second person review the work of the main person. Having and MAINTAINING a second network is only valid under a narrow range of situations. OTOH, perhaps a hospital is a high risk enough environment to warrant that.
Personally, I think having a backup paper/whiteboard/people system (which they appeared to have), is the right solution, as this is also useful under emergency situations (earthquake, extended power outage, war, etc).
My two-bits worth (was there ever a coin in America called a bit?)
Brad
Whoops, I should have through thru my network comment better. Doh!
Switched 10Mb to the CLIENT is fine, but as a previous poster pointed out, the server better have a good fast connection to support all of those switched 10 users.
Brad
One advantage that I havn't seen mentioned, is that you can have WinNT4, Win2K, Solaris AND Linux servers for your lab. Then, as long as you get a thin client that can access Citrix and VNC sessions, then a user can connect to any of the above OS's.
Don't listen to the whiners that say the Citrix/Windows solution is unreliable. I use both Citrix on NT Terminal server and Citrix on Win2k every day, works great, requires a reboot every month or two. Personally I prefer Unix, but a college needs to be able to provide Win32 environments as well.
I'm a senior SysAdmin at an Engineering firm, for me the advantage is flexibility. My office PC runs Linux, but I don't really use it except as a thin client. I have Virtual Desktops open to Linux, Solaris and Win2k.
So why use a Linux thin client to access a Linux Server? Because I can bring up that virtual desktop from anywhere in the building. If I'm at a user's desk, I can simply bring up my virtual desktop and have all of my task programs open and ready to go. Likewise if I'm spending time in the computer room. Way Cool...
The only downside is that multimedia sucks on a thin client. Otherwise, as long as the network is reasonably fast (switched 10Mb is fine), then performance is very usable.
Good luck,
Brad
Sure, this movie is not a contender for a Comedy Oscar, but I thought it delivered on what it advertised....
I mean, if you watched the adds, you should have known it wasn't going to be a high dollar flick.
I thought it was one of the best silly films made in a long time. The silly film genre is one of the most overlooked in the history of Hollywood. When have they ever had a "Best Silly Film" award? When has the silly film ever gotten listed as a valid subcategory of Comedy? Granted that most people do not appreciate the wonderful humor in a silly film, but not being one of those people is no reason to criticize.
Shame on you Jon, you should have simply said "the movie is not for me" and gone on with your life.
This is a movie for those of us that are fans of things like MontyPython, The Hitchhikers Guide (the videos), Some of Mel Brooks more offbeat stuff, etc.
If you fit in that group, go see it, If you want to see a spoiler for my favorite gag, scroll down. When you see the spoiler, you'll understand why some people simply can't handle this movie.
Brad
.
.
.
We've all poked fun at the old dubbed japanese movies, where the sound is out of sync with the mouth movements, and this movies pokes fun at that. My favorite gag is a part where the dog barks, but the bark is obviously dubbed and is out of sync.
Not everyone would find that funny, and far too many people would let themselves be put off by its obvious and simple nature. Their loss.
Speaking as someone who has worked for an IT department in a local government; Do your people a favor and don't make this a campaign issue unless it is already.
The IT department should be free to choose the software and hardware tools that meet their budget and technical needs as well as solving the problem at hand.
I'm a Unix administrator with 14 years experience and a major proponent of Linux. The last three companies I've worked for have all wound up with at least part of their infrastructure based on Linux by the time I left. But this was all done because Linux was the right tool for the job, not because it was mandated.
However, in one case, what I recommended caused a bit of a stir. Why? Because as my position of head of the IT department for Engineering, I recommended NT4. It was the right tool for that particular situation and while I would have prefered a Unix based solution, it would of sucked to use and it would have sucked to support. And, it would have cost the company way more in time for both my staff and for Engineering.
If you would like to have a compaign issue mandating that open-source solutions be considered along with proprietary ones, good. My feeling is that this is similar in nature to requiring government contracts be placed out to bid. Open source solutions should be given the chance to be put forth, even though they may not have a salesperson pushing them.
M2cW.
Brad
Before you get too far along the road to SysAdmin-hood, ask yourself these questions;
1) Can I handle high stress? Or, am I willing to trade frequent moments of high stress for moments of huge job satisfaction and the ability to play with tech toys?
2) Are you someone who likes order to your day? As a SysAdmin, even if you are a highly organized person yourself, your day tends to be very fractured. You are having a good day when you come in the morning with five things you would like to work on, and actually get to work on two of them.
3) Are you a 8-5 person? The pro here, is that I can come in anywhere from 6am to 10am, and with arrangement with my boss, even later than that, or like today, I'm leaving at three. The con is, I'm on call 24-7, I'm working tomorrow rebuilding the filesystem on a production server and I rarely work a 40 hour week.
4) Can you handle people getting in your face, being pissed at you, yelling at you, etc. Can you tell a VP, "NO" and make it stick? One problem with being a SysAdmin, is that one day you're a star, the next you're an asshole.
If you can handle all of that you're probably well suited to being a SysAdmin. Learn how to accumulate browny points with upper management and spend them on pay-raises and trips to LISA and InterOp. Become intimately familiar with the O'Reilly book catalog, because you never know when you'll be told: We need this "insert technology here" next week (next week if you're lucky). Also, not something all SysAdmin's do, but one of my preferences; Make friends of other SysAdmin's, don't worry about calling for advice on situations you've never encountered before, and be willing to accept panic'd calls from friends on how to handle various problems.
Because, while I've worked in a lot of tech jobs before I became a SysAdmin (I've been one for eight years now), I've never had a job with more job satisfaction and less boredom. But it's not easy.
Good Luck,
Brad
My workstation is RedHat 7.2, My general purpose servers are either Solaris 7 or RedHat 6.2.
However, when it comes to building a simple machine for a particular use, nothing beats Slackware. Shoot, just try and install RedHat 7.2 on a machine with a 540MB disk, it can't be done. You can barely install it in 800MB, but what you wind up with isn't very useable.
There are specific purpose Distros that work well for thier intended use. But if I try and do anything beyond what they are built for, things get diffecult very quickly. Slackware has all of the pieces you would expect in a modern distro, and a better ability to pick and choose what pieces get installed. When I need an OS to install on a Laptop to turn the Laptop into a network monitor, or I need to build a DNS server, etc, Slackware Rules!
_____________________
Dum Vivamus, Vivamus! (sp?)
This may have changed in the last couple of months, but one of the bigest objections to the FSF, and one I aggree with, is that you do not appear to have ever published your financials.
Has this changed? If not, do you intend to or why not?
"But I was wrong to post this to Slashdot, which is obviously not an appropriate forum for discussion of subtle ethical matters, and it is apparent that any mention of even a hint of a possible tiny imperfection in the GPL does not belong here."
I feel that Slashdot should be a perfect forum for the discussion of the subtle implications of the GPL. I say "should" because there are some topics that seem to bring out the immaturity of the crowd, and as has been commented elsewere, critisisim of any of the core elements of OSS seems to do it in spades.
The GPL is certainly a cornerstone of our world, in my opinion, it is one of the two or three most important documents of the 20th century. The Internet and Linux would certainly not be what they are today without it. But it is not perfect, and there have come to be other good licenses (including the LGPL), that fill in the gaps for areas where the GPL is not the best choice.
Rob, I don't accept your appology. Maybe this story wasn't right, but because of the content itself, not because of the nature of what was being discussed. I hope that as Slashdot (and it's community) matures, that the knee-jerk reactions to any critisim of OSS or anything else for that matter, fades away. I hope that you will continue to present stories that do bring out that imperfections in the GPL, Linux, Apache, Perl, etc... Without honest opinions regarding their weaknesses, they WILL stagnate and will wind up being no better than anything else that has come before.
Brad Silva
I've dealt with Cygnus, they are a professional group of people and I've never felt that they've compromised OSS principles by their contributions to GCC.
This purchase, more than anything else, leads me to believe that RedHat just might make it in the long run.
The best (funny, thought-provoking) hack that I'm aware of is the MCI hack on AT&T regarding "1-800-OPERATOR".
Remember that? AT&T spent MILLIONS of dollars advertising their new collect calling system, then suddenly dumped it, changing the name to "1-800-CALL-ATT".
Millions of dollars of wasted advertising money, even more millions lost to MCI's "1-800-COLLECT". Why?
The story I heard is that some bright boy at MCI realized that some percentage of the American public is unable to spell "operator". MCI went off and got the phone number "1-800-OPERATER", routed that number to "1-800-COLLECT" and quietly stole 14% of AT&T's business.
I vote this story as the "Best Corporate Hack of All Time" and hope the guy at MCI got a fat bonus. Not because I have anything against AT&T, just because I laughed for ten minutes when I heard about it.
Brad Silva