The puff of flour sounds like a dust explosion. I don't know the exact dynamics, but large surface area (fine grains of flour) and lots of oxygen (the cloud is not very dense) and high temperature (the flame) combine to very rapidly combust the flour practically instantaneously creating a dust explosion. For this to occur there's probably a 'sweet spot' in the ratio of flour:air:heat, if either is out of balance nothing happens or individual grains just burn up individually as they hit the flame. Someone who actually does know physics could probably tell you much more, and correct this explanation.. it's been a while since I did that editing job on a fire control training booklet.;o)
The resolution of celluloid film remains the same whether it's 8mm, 35mm, 70mm or the size of highway billboards. If I'm not mistaken it's about 4000lpi for quality photographic film.
Increasing size would only help when the optical systems to record the film would be precise enough to actually project at least 4000lpi onto the film. That's the reason why medium format photo camera's are so much more expensive than 35mm. SLR's.
This condition will be true for most cinema films, and certainly hollywood productions. They use _EXPENSIVE_ camera's. Now a show like Friends, aimed at a TV audience watching through analog cable, doesn't need such $$$ camera equipment. It's perfectly ok for them not to use the full potential of a 35mm film, as long as it looks good on TV.
Repurposing the series to DVD media doesn't make the publisher hardly as much money as they would lose on a considerably more high-tech studio environment. The DVD's are a bonus for both you and the publisher. And with Friends being a TV series, it's ok for it to look just like it does on TV when you buy the DVD, you're used to it that way.
In the case of X-Men you can go see it at the cinema, and a DVD of that had better approach that quality as closely as possible on your TV or consumers won't buy it.
Yet here the same limit applies. Your TV can only display so many lines on its screen, so it's pointless to go any higher on DVD just yet. However with films it is much easier to bump the quality up when home theater systems improve since the original film has this utterly extreme panavision cam quality.
Besides, I'd be very surprised if the big studios didn't immediately digitise every film they make at the highest resolution available and just archive it like that next to the reel. Then it'd only be a matter of downsampling the digital archival copy to the consumer format-du-jour. That hardly costs any money, and takes care of decaying analog film.
I'd say there would be enough problems keeping the general population alive after a destructive war. Focus on that first! I don't think you'll find a single Iraqi who gives a shit about the internet at present..
That'd be cool inside my cell phone. Finally a way to keep track of where my money is flowing between the calls, sms, mms, wap, gprs and what other cruft is on the thing.
Czech beers are the root of all the Buds, Heinekens, Warsteiners and other pilsener/lager-like beers in the world. Budweis is even a Czech town, als is Pilzen (gee, makes you wonder where 'pilsener' comes from). They know how to make beer over there, IMHO better than the Germans.
That said, the most tasty beers come from Belgium. They also contain a fair load of alcohol too (10.5% is not uncommon). Not what I'd call 'wussy beer'.. Guinness is nice though;-)
Re:Source won't help decrypt the files
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 1
I'm not _that_ well versed in things DRM, but isn't it a public-key like system? I imagine it works like this: publisher encrypts with private key, distributes licenses (public key) for a fee. Of course there'd have to be modifications to this to prevent users from trading these public keys, something to tie their license to their own machine, user account or something like that.. It just seems counter intuitive to me that encryption would be so easy to break when you have access to the source. Smells more like something is wrong with a particular business model if this doesnt work.
My big issue with M$'s DRM solutions is the fact that they are closed source. This means that I can't check what happens to my personal information or whether the system contains any hidden "features" that I don't like.
Open source DRM enables digital publishing for profit AND the user gets the peace of mind that there is NO SPYWARE or other fishy stuff going on in the background.
Source won't help decrypt the files
on
Open Source DRM
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A look at the source doesn't mean that you can simply defeat the encryption. Just like you can't r00t someone's ssh server by looking at the source of their version of OpenSSH.
Of course you could trojanize the source and try to get a limp version of the binaries to proliferate, but the chances of that working are very close to zero. If I were a publisher I'd test whether the encoding and DRM encryption worked before I were to sell my media to the world.
All you need is a single vindictive employee inside your company, one with moderate computer skills, and they could screw over your NT boxes without you knowing who did it? Internal firewalls/IDS are just as important as external firewalls. No need to tap fibres, just an angry user with his own proper account.
I run a much smaller network myself (small design/media firm, not exactly a corp), and it's got packet filtering on every server to prevent or at least log unusual behavior from any otherwise legitimate clients. For example connections from server A to server B and vice versa are never needed. I block any traffic between them from both sides. If one of the servers gets compromised, it can't be used as a launchpad to attack the others. I've seen too many cases where the threat (and successful breakin) came from the inside. This is especially true for schools/colleges, but I've also seen interns at corps "explore" the network and get to places they never should have been able to get to.
Remember how NT only got its C2 certification when it's not connected to any network at all? That way you could just as well cast your server in concrete and lower it to the bottom of the ocean. It won't get hacked, but it won't get used either. Networked computers are a risk, both from the outside and the inside. The inside risk just gets overlooked much too often.
Just a question about your scanning procedure. Do you know in advance what an MS patch will do without applying it to some test server? The difference between a patch and a virus are very small, and I'm not trying to bash MS here.. it just that patches, like viruses, alter existing binaries.
What does the firm you got the system from do when MS decides it won't patch NT anymore? The OS is closed source, no matter what other merit it has for you, the IT-firm you bought it through can not patch it on its own. Support is therefore limited to maintenance until something weird happens on the network and your NT4 servers aren't prepared.
Of course these cash cows are behing a proper firewall, so getting to them would be hard, but still.. running a closed source OS that the original manufacturer has stopped supporting doesn't sound very clever to me.
Also, I imagine that your servers are somehow clustered to provide failover. What keeps you from adding a new machine to the cluster to absorb load while you take the others down in sequence to upgrade them (either to Win2K (3 years old, still supported, and by now quite proven) or maybe even Linux (2.2-kernels are rock-solid, RedHat will support them)?
I'm not bashing NT because of its merits as an OS, I just think it's not very clever for any company to put all their eggs in a basket the original basket-maker won't vouch for anymore, won't fix if it breaks, and won't supply you with the needed tools to fix it yourself. I'd say that is a very strong reason, and rushing is never good. Just plan ahead and draft proper upgrade procedures, build a test lab setting to see if what you're planning will work, then carefully roll out the upgrade gradually.
This is _NOT_ a troll, I would seriously like to know what the problem is in producing blue/violet or maybe even ultraviolet lasers. I know (vaguely) about the advantages of shorter wavelength of blue light compared to red, but nothing really in depth. Could someone enlighten me?
1. UN Doc. Sym.: S/20151
Issuing Body/Session: Issuing Body: S/ Session: 43
Modtitle: Draft resolution [on chemical weapons use in the conflict between Iran
(Islamic Republic of) and Iraq]
Title: Draft resolution / Germany, Federal Republic of, Italy, Japan and United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Imprint: [New York] : UN, 26 Aug. 1988.
Description: 2 p.
Author/Contributors: Germany, Federal Republic of
Italy
Japan
United Kingdom
Notes: Concerns chemical weapons use in the conflict between Iraq and the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
Subjects: ARMED CONFLICTS
IRAN (ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF)
IRAQ
CHEMICAL WEAPONS USE
CHEMICAL WEAPONS
CHEMICALS
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
TOXIC SUBSTANCES
EXPORT RESTRICTIONS
INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATIONS
DISARMAMENT AGREEMENTS
INTERNATIONAL LAW
Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous
or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (1925)
Agenda Info.: Agenda: S/43 Item: [8] -- IRAN (ISLAMIC
REPUBLIC OF)--IRAQ - Type of Material: Resolutions and decisions (UN) -- Draft B02
Distribution: GEN
Location: Dag Hammarskjöld Library
Collection: UN docs (English)-symbol
Call No.: S/20151
Status: Checked In
You yourself are a 'customer' too many times probably. You shouldn't be "unhappy" either when you get crappy documents that contain a bunch of gibberish when you open them in OpenOffice.org. You, as a customer, should demand open formats.
I did this at my college. They always sent out Excel-files when they wanted to distribute timetables to students and Word documents for newsletters and the like. Those files opened quite nicely (most of the time), but still I demanded an open format. I kept hammering the IS department, and now they publish the timetables in HTML too. Other documents come as plain text and occasionally a PDF (which is an open standard, just controlled by Adobe).
FreeBSD has a very solid and well documented filesystem hierarchy. Also it has a very easy init sequence, which is also well documentented. FreeBSD installs without any bloat, if you want it to.. or it installs with a full working X desktop.. if you want that.
Another big plus for (Free)BSD is the ports collection. This is a collection of directories that contain scripts from which you can automatically download and compile thousands of applications. By setting options in make.conf you can optimize these ports-builds for your system's processor, making them highly efficient. Much like Gentoo's Portage system on the Linux side of the world.
For me, the mail "selling" point for FreeBSD is it's rock solid stability. I've had servers fry harddrives and _STILL_ continue to work while actual smoke was coming out of the case. I received an email from my server that there was a hardware failure and that it had stopped the failed drive. I simply swapped out the defective drive. Downtime: 10 minutes (since the drives weren't hot-swappable). In the course of over a year and a half there were probably 10 reboots due to security patches to the kernel and that was it. Before I ran FreeBSD I used SuSE Linux which crashed sometimes, and before that I evaluated Win2K Advanced Server but that had much too high a price tag for me.. and also caused data loss during the 120 days trial. (it was not a beta!)
Also, please DO read the handbook. It's a very good piece of documentation and gets you started much quicker than the community can. Also, the community will most likely not be very helpful in answering questions that are plain and easy to find in the handbook. The handbook covers everything from filesystem setup and user administration to setting up robust RAID arrays and secure VPN tunnels all using tools from the OS itself.
I can also reccommend the book "FreeBSD Unleashed" by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann. It's more or less an extended version of the handbook in printed form. When I bought it, it came with version 4.4 but that's easily upgraded.
FreeBSD would seem to me the best starting place to learn UNIX because of its very clearly defined procedures and its option to install just the bare-bones minimum, unlike RedHat (which is aimed to replace Win2K on corporate desktops mostly.. I think).
5 rem first we clear the screen
10 PRINTCHR$(147)
11 rem store old values
12 A=PEEK 53281:B=PEEK 53280:C=PEEK 646
15 rem set screen to black
20 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0:POKE 646,0
25 rem check for keypress
30 GET A$:IF A$="" GOTO 30
35 rem restore old values
40 POKE 53281,A:POKE 53280,B: POKE 646,C
45 rem retun key pressed just for the heck of it.
50 PRINT"You pressed";A$;" to get your screen back!"
I'm not sure about the syntax of the PEEK command nor about the PRINT statement on line 50. As you can probably see, this 'screensaver' has been through some editing during previous discussions about it. Funny how so many people respond to my sig! Originally it just started out as 53281,0 and 53280,0 to create some quick black. Sadly the BASIC program is too long for my sig. Oh, and I as yet refuse to create a full-blown subroutine using GOSUB/RETURN just for to check for a pressed key but you're welcome to submit a patch and add features.. the thing is GPL'ed but adding the GPL in REM statements seemed a bit over the top;-))
Umm.. just out of curiosity.. twenty gigs a day of what do you download?? Also, at such rates, I'm sure you don't have a regular DSL or cable link right? That'd get you in serious trouble with your ISP. Personally I'm a pretty active Linux user, but I think I grab about 5 distributions (ISO's) per month if not less.
Indeed I found mediaplayer to be uninstallable from Windows XP Pro. I didn't give it quite as much time as I did back when Win98 included IE and I wanted to rip it out so it might be possible, but it's certainly far from simple. I remember Win95 having an explorer.exe replacement built in, something really innovative called progman.exe;-))
Sure but don't you _EVER_ try to play it back! That'd be circumvention and a serious DMCA violation! The RIAA would be dragging your ass to court before you even finish remembering Britney's latest master*cough*crap*cough*piece..
In my college (journalism) we had Macs. I had hardly ever seen a Mac before my first day there and neither had any of my classmates. Four years later I've become very productive on the Mac platform as well as Windows. I already knew a lot about how 'computers' tend to work, so that may have given me a headstart but any student is up and running on this unfamiliar platform (to them) within 3 months. There are only 3 people maintaining the _whole_ network there by the way (500 Macs for students, 200 Wintel boxes for staff, and I estimate a dozen or so servers). Seems like they know what they're doing, which probably also helps a lot.
GNU/Linux bundles these packages as.. yes.. packages, and they can be uninstalled. With Linux you also have a choice to roll your own without anything preinstalled. Things like Gentoo Linux come close, and Linuxfromscratch is the ultimate down this lane. However with Windows, I get everything except the kitchen sink (because mozilla already has that) and can't uninstall most of it. It does allow me to delete calc.exe and erase its icon, but who cares about calculators? The really important bits that rake in the $$$ are hooked and bolted onto the OS and I haven't managed to erase them without seriously destabilizing the OS. Now if I can't do that, how will Joe Sixpack do it? Of course, Joe Sixpack doesn't care.. *sighs melodramatically*
I switched to FreeBSD the moment I tried RedHat 6.0. Redhat seemed spartan, unfinished, and tried to do way too many things automatically for me that it just wasn't very good at. Also bloat was already quite abundant in the default install. FreeBSD doesn't give me all this trouble. The ports system is wonderful. make world compiles the whole system, make kernel finishes it off. All clean and optimized binaries including every port I intend to run and nothing more. Clean and simple init process too. I now have Gentoo on my desktop (like so many distro's before it) to check it out, and I like it so far. But for my servers I pick FreeBSD 4.x over any Linux 2.2.xx kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
The BSD license permits him to do this already.
1. Download freebsd ISO-file
2. rename to MS_BSD.ISO
3. Profit?
The puff of flour sounds like a dust explosion. I don't know the exact dynamics, but large surface area (fine grains of flour) and lots of oxygen (the cloud is not very dense) and high temperature (the flame) combine to very rapidly combust the flour practically instantaneously creating a dust explosion. For this to occur there's probably a 'sweet spot' in the ratio of flour:air:heat, if either is out of balance nothing happens or individual grains just burn up individually as they hit the flame. Someone who actually does know physics could probably tell you much more, and correct this explanation.. it's been a while since I did that editing job on a fire control training booklet. ;o)
The resolution of celluloid film remains the same whether it's 8mm, 35mm, 70mm or the size of highway billboards. If I'm not mistaken it's about 4000lpi for quality photographic film.
Increasing size would only help when the optical systems to record the film would be precise enough to actually project at least 4000lpi onto the film. That's the reason why medium format photo camera's are so much more expensive than 35mm. SLR's.
This condition will be true for most cinema films, and certainly hollywood productions. They use _EXPENSIVE_ camera's. Now a show like Friends, aimed at a TV audience watching through analog cable, doesn't need such $$$ camera equipment. It's perfectly ok for them not to use the full potential of a 35mm film, as long as it looks good on TV.
Repurposing the series to DVD media doesn't make the publisher hardly as much money as they would lose on a considerably more high-tech studio environment. The DVD's are a bonus for both you and the publisher. And with Friends being a TV series, it's ok for it to look just like it does on TV when you buy the DVD, you're used to it that way.
In the case of X-Men you can go see it at the cinema, and a DVD of that had better approach that quality as closely as possible on your TV or consumers won't buy it.
Yet here the same limit applies. Your TV can only display so many lines on its screen, so it's pointless to go any higher on DVD just yet. However with films it is much easier to bump the quality up when home theater systems improve since the original film has this utterly extreme panavision cam quality.
Besides, I'd be very surprised if the big studios didn't immediately digitise every film they make at the highest resolution available and just archive it like that next to the reel. Then it'd only be a matter of downsampling the digital archival copy to the consumer format-du-jour. That hardly costs any money, and takes care of decaying analog film.
I'd say there would be enough problems keeping the general population alive after a destructive war. Focus on that first! I don't think you'll find a single Iraqi who gives a shit about the internet at present..
That'd be cool inside my cell phone. Finally a way to keep track of where my money is flowing between the calls, sms, mms, wap, gprs and what other cruft is on the thing.
Czech beers are the root of all the Buds, Heinekens, Warsteiners and other pilsener/lager-like beers in the world. Budweis is even a Czech town, als is Pilzen (gee, makes you wonder where 'pilsener' comes from). They know how to make beer over there, IMHO better than the Germans.
;-)
That said, the most tasty beers come from Belgium. They also contain a fair load of alcohol too (10.5% is not uncommon). Not what I'd call 'wussy beer'.. Guinness is nice though
I'm not _that_ well versed in things DRM, but isn't it a public-key like system? I imagine it works like this: publisher encrypts with private key, distributes licenses (public key) for a fee. Of course there'd have to be modifications to this to prevent users from trading these public keys, something to tie their license to their own machine, user account or something like that.. It just seems counter intuitive to me that encryption would be so easy to break when you have access to the source. Smells more like something is wrong with a particular business model if this doesnt work.
Great, open source DRM! At last!
My big issue with M$'s DRM solutions is the fact that they are closed source. This means that I can't check what happens to my personal information or whether the system contains any hidden "features" that I don't like.
Open source DRM enables digital publishing for profit AND the user gets the peace of mind that there is NO SPYWARE or other fishy stuff going on in the background.
A look at the source doesn't mean that you can simply defeat the encryption. Just like you can't r00t someone's ssh server by looking at the source of their version of OpenSSH.
Of course you could trojanize the source and try to get a limp version of the binaries to proliferate, but the chances of that working are very close to zero. If I were a publisher I'd test whether the encoding and DRM encryption worked before I were to sell my media to the world.
If you're referring to the heat generated by Athlons.. Intel overtook AMD recently and the P4 now radiates more heat, it just dissipates it better.
Dubya Dubya III
Man.. that'll be a blast.. but erm.. hasn't this already started?
All you need is a single vindictive employee inside your company, one with moderate computer skills, and they could screw over your NT boxes without you knowing who did it? Internal firewalls/IDS are just as important as external firewalls. No need to tap fibres, just an angry user with his own proper account.
I run a much smaller network myself (small design/media firm, not exactly a corp), and it's got packet filtering on every server to prevent or at least log unusual behavior from any otherwise legitimate clients. For example connections from server A to server B and vice versa are never needed. I block any traffic between them from both sides. If one of the servers gets compromised, it can't be used as a launchpad to attack the others. I've seen too many cases where the threat (and successful breakin) came from the inside. This is especially true for schools/colleges, but I've also seen interns at corps "explore" the network and get to places they never should have been able to get to.
Remember how NT only got its C2 certification when it's not connected to any network at all? That way you could just as well cast your server in concrete and lower it to the bottom of the ocean. It won't get hacked, but it won't get used either. Networked computers are a risk, both from the outside and the inside. The inside risk just gets overlooked much too often.
Just a question about your scanning procedure. Do you know in advance what an MS patch will do without applying it to some test server? The difference between a patch and a virus are very small, and I'm not trying to bash MS here.. it just that patches, like viruses, alter existing binaries.
What does the firm you got the system from do when MS decides it won't patch NT anymore? The OS is closed source, no matter what other merit it has for you, the IT-firm you bought it through can not patch it on its own. Support is therefore limited to maintenance until something weird happens on the network and your NT4 servers aren't prepared.
Of course these cash cows are behing a proper firewall, so getting to them would be hard, but still.. running a closed source OS that the original manufacturer has stopped supporting doesn't sound very clever to me.
Also, I imagine that your servers are somehow clustered to provide failover. What keeps you from adding a new machine to the cluster to absorb load while you take the others down in sequence to upgrade them (either to Win2K (3 years old, still supported, and by now quite proven) or maybe even Linux (2.2-kernels are rock-solid, RedHat will support them)?
I'm not bashing NT because of its merits as an OS, I just think it's not very clever for any company to put all their eggs in a basket the original basket-maker won't vouch for anymore, won't fix if it breaks, and won't supply you with the needed tools to fix it yourself. I'd say that is a very strong reason, and rushing is never good. Just plan ahead and draft proper upgrade procedures, build a test lab setting to see if what you're planning will work, then carefully roll out the upgrade gradually.
This is _NOT_ a troll, I would seriously like to know what the problem is in producing blue/violet or maybe even ultraviolet lasers. I know (vaguely) about the advantages of shorter wavelength of blue light compared to red, but nothing really in depth. Could someone enlighten me?
1. UN Doc. Sym.: S/20151
Issuing Body/Session: Issuing Body: S/ Session: 43
Modtitle: Draft resolution [on chemical weapons use in the conflict between Iran (Islamic Republic of) and Iraq]
Title: Draft resolution / Germany, Federal Republic of, Italy, Japan and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Imprint: [New York] : UN, 26 Aug. 1988.
Description: 2 p.
Author/Contributors: Germany, Federal Republic of Italy Japan United Kingdom
Notes: Concerns chemical weapons use in the conflict between Iraq and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Subjects: ARMED CONFLICTS IRAN (ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF) IRAQ CHEMICAL WEAPONS USE CHEMICAL WEAPONS CHEMICALS BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TOXIC SUBSTANCES EXPORT RESTRICTIONS INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATIONS DISARMAMENT AGREEMENTS INTERNATIONAL LAW Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (1925)
Agenda Info.:
Agenda: S/43 Item: [8] - - IRAN (ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF)--IRAQ -
Type of Material: Resolutions and decisions (UN) -- Draft B02
Distribution: GEN
Location: Dag Hammarskjöld Library
Collection: UN docs (English)-symbol
Call No.: S/20151
Status: Checked In
You yourself are a 'customer' too many times probably. You shouldn't be "unhappy" either when you get crappy documents that contain a bunch of gibberish when you open them in OpenOffice.org. You, as a customer, should demand open formats.
I did this at my college. They always sent out Excel-files when they wanted to distribute timetables to students and Word documents for newsletters and the like. Those files opened quite nicely (most of the time), but still I demanded an open format. I kept hammering the IS department, and now they publish the timetables in HTML too. Other documents come as plain text and occasionally a PDF (which is an open standard, just controlled by Adobe).
When I execute your command I only get about 1.5MB of random data instead of 32MB. I'm running Gentoo Linux on this box.
FreeBSD has a very solid and well documented filesystem hierarchy. Also it has a very easy init sequence, which is also well documentented. FreeBSD installs without any bloat, if you want it to.. or it installs with a full working X desktop.. if you want that.
Another big plus for (Free)BSD is the ports collection. This is a collection of directories that contain scripts from which you can automatically download and compile thousands of applications. By setting options in make.conf you can optimize these ports-builds for your system's processor, making them highly efficient. Much like Gentoo's Portage system on the Linux side of the world.
For me, the mail "selling" point for FreeBSD is it's rock solid stability. I've had servers fry harddrives and _STILL_ continue to work while actual smoke was coming out of the case. I received an email from my server that there was a hardware failure and that it had stopped the failed drive. I simply swapped out the defective drive. Downtime: 10 minutes (since the drives weren't hot-swappable). In the course of over a year and a half there were probably 10 reboots due to security patches to the kernel and that was it. Before I ran FreeBSD I used SuSE Linux which crashed sometimes, and before that I evaluated Win2K Advanced Server but that had much too high a price tag for me.. and also caused data loss during the 120 days trial. (it was not a beta!)
Also, please DO read the handbook. It's a very good piece of documentation and gets you started much quicker than the community can. Also, the community will most likely not be very helpful in answering questions that are plain and easy to find in the handbook. The handbook covers everything from filesystem setup and user administration to setting up robust RAID arrays and secure VPN tunnels all using tools from the OS itself.
I can also reccommend the book "FreeBSD Unleashed" by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann. It's more or less an extended version of the handbook in printed form. When I bought it, it came with version 4.4 but that's easily upgraded.
FreeBSD would seem to me the best starting place to learn UNIX because of its very clearly defined procedures and its option to install just the bare-bones minimum, unlike RedHat (which is aimed to replace Win2K on corporate desktops mostly.. I think).
good luck!
5 rem first we clear the screen
;-))
10 PRINTCHR$(147)
11 rem store old values
12 A=PEEK 53281:B=PEEK 53280:C=PEEK 646
15 rem set screen to black
20 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0:POKE 646,0
25 rem check for keypress
30 GET A$:IF A$="" GOTO 30
35 rem restore old values
40 POKE 53281,A:POKE 53280,B: POKE 646,C
45 rem retun key pressed just for the heck of it.
50 PRINT"You pressed";A$;" to get your screen back!"
I'm not sure about the syntax of the PEEK command nor about the PRINT statement on line 50. As you can probably see, this 'screensaver' has been through some editing during previous discussions about it. Funny how so many people respond to my sig! Originally it just started out as 53281,0 and 53280,0 to create some quick black. Sadly the BASIC program is too long for my sig. Oh, and I as yet refuse to create a full-blown subroutine using GOSUB/RETURN just for to check for a pressed key but you're welcome to submit a patch and add features.. the thing is GPL'ed but adding the GPL in REM statements seemed a bit over the top
Umm.. just out of curiosity.. twenty gigs a day of what do you download?? Also, at such rates, I'm sure you don't have a regular DSL or cable link right? That'd get you in serious trouble with your ISP.
Personally I'm a pretty active Linux user, but I think I grab about 5 distributions (ISO's) per month if not less.
Indeed I found mediaplayer to be uninstallable from Windows XP Pro. I didn't give it quite as much time as I did back when Win98 included IE and I wanted to rip it out so it might be possible, but it's certainly far from simple. I remember Win95 having an explorer.exe replacement built in, something really innovative called progman.exe ;-))
Sure but don't you _EVER_ try to play it back! That'd be circumvention and a serious DMCA violation! The RIAA would be dragging your ass to court before you even finish remembering Britney's latest master*cough*crap*cough*piece..
In my college (journalism) we had Macs. I had hardly ever seen a Mac before my first day there and neither had any of my classmates. Four years later I've become very productive on the Mac platform as well as Windows. I already knew a lot about how 'computers' tend to work, so that may have given me a headstart but any student is up and running on this unfamiliar platform (to them) within 3 months. There are only 3 people maintaining the _whole_ network there by the way (500 Macs for students, 200 Wintel boxes for staff, and I estimate a dozen or so servers). Seems like they know what they're doing, which probably also helps a lot.
GNU/Linux bundles these packages as.. yes.. packages, and they can be uninstalled. With Linux you also have a choice to roll your own without anything preinstalled. Things like Gentoo Linux come close, and Linuxfromscratch is the ultimate down this lane.
However with Windows, I get everything except the kitchen sink (because mozilla already has that) and can't uninstall most of it. It does allow me to delete calc.exe and erase its icon, but who cares about calculators? The really important bits that rake in the $$$ are hooked and bolted onto the OS and I haven't managed to erase them without seriously destabilizing the OS. Now if I can't do that, how will Joe Sixpack do it? Of course, Joe Sixpack doesn't care.. *sighs melodramatically*
I switched to FreeBSD the moment I tried RedHat 6.0. Redhat seemed spartan, unfinished, and tried to do way too many things automatically for me that it just wasn't very good at. Also bloat was already quite abundant in the default install.
FreeBSD doesn't give me all this trouble. The ports system is wonderful. make world compiles the whole system, make kernel finishes it off. All clean and optimized binaries including every port I intend to run and nothing more. Clean and simple init process too.
I now have Gentoo on my desktop (like so many distro's before it) to check it out, and I like it so far. But for my servers I pick FreeBSD 4.x over any Linux 2.2.xx kernel.