A few years ago VIA developed the MBIOS for their Mini-ITX based systems that allowed for much the same functionality. Their bios was limited (if you can call it a limitation) to just playing DVDs, audio CDs and if I remember correctly mp3 and CDs filled with images.
At the time I was working with VIA and had the opportunity to talk to one of the techs about it. I remember him saying that it was actually fairly simple to only activate the pieces of the motherboard that were required for playback.
It still sounds like a fun engineering problem, and I hope that more companies add this functionality. I do a lot of movie watching on my machine (I have no standalone TV or DVD player) and would highly value the ability to watch movies without the burden of an OS.
Whichever program is responsible (there are so many) for removing windows from my machine. No single piece of software has ever made me feel so good about life.
Oddly enough, at one point in time it was actually one of my real email addresses. (I registered god.net and death.org back a few months before the Internic started charging for domain registrations) I used that email address specifically to see how many people actually sent random email to that address...
Of course this was back before spam was a problem. A much simpler time... *sniff* memories:)
1) If you're dragging a bunch of equipment to (or through) a questionable location, you need to have your head examined.
2) Yeah yeah, it's all well and fine to be a geek, but try being realistic too. How much of that crap do you *really* need? The reason people carry a PDA is because it contains an important subset of the information contained on your laptop or main machine. Meaning that you don't need to bring a laptop with you.
3) Swap out the iPod for an MP3 CD player, how much music do you really need? If you're carrying around a laptop, you're already carrying around a bunch of CDs as well. In fact it will probably weigh a lot less than dragging around an iPod. MP3 CD players are really cheap these days as well.
4) If you *really* must take a laptop with you, buy a beater laptop, cover it in bumper stickers. I've got a really nice Vaio that stays at home, for those times I feel like writing code in a coffee shop, I take my old linux based Thinkpad, which underneath the dust has "Got Root?" and "I am a bad ass" stickers on it. Nobody gives it the slightest notice because it looks like a piece of crap.
5) Learn to do without. If you're dragging all this stuff around with you for sheer entertainment value, bring a book instead. If you're not sealed away behind a mask of your own music, you might just be able to take part in a conversation with other live flesh and blood humans. In the long run, humans are more interesting anyway.
This is actually a really cool bios update for the VIA chipset(s). VIA demonstrated it at the Lunch @ Pierro's event at COMDEX (and CES for that matter) in Las Vegas a year or two ago. It was designed originally for the EPIA boards, and makes an excellent "brainless" media center. I was lucky enough to be working with several of the folks at VIA during this time, and I have to say they did a damn good job with this BIOS.
Okay, so there isn't a patch, but there should be.
To keep myself from turning into a raving lunatic without my coffee, I make a point of drinking one less cup of coffee a day for a week. Saturday night I take an ibuprofin, and sunday I go without coffee (or other stimulating beverages) completely. No withdrawls.
Besides the fact that I'm incredibly poor and have a tendency to run out of coffee at the worst times, this is a habit I picked up when I was working 80 hour weeks. It had the added benefit of making the effects of my monday morning coffee all that much more stimulating. And of course, mondays were when I needed it the most.
The magic key to success here is to drink lots of water. The best habit I have is to keep a 1 liter bottle of water with me at all times. It helps a lot with caffeine withdrawls, but only if you start drinking the water well before you start getting headaches. (I'm talking days before hand)
I can understand EMCs thinking...
on
EMC To Acquire VMware
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
At least from an abstract point of view. The VMWare people obviously have some people and technology that are good at dealing with multiple filesystem types and operating systems co-existing.
A few years ago when I was specing new TB sized storage arrays, I wanted an affordable way to allow directly connected access to the same data to multiple operating systems, but allowing for each OS to make native FS calls to get that data. Nobody really had a gracefull solution. Most required isolated partitions, and those that provided a high level emulation layer either had no drivers for Linux, or the cost was in 6 figures for them to even consider developing something.
Needless to say, the cheapest solution was going with a network based access system to that data, which unfortunately meant that I had to spend more money making an isolated high speed network just for FS data, and popping two NICs in everything that was serving that data. Once again, not the most gracefull of solutions.(in fact one of the companies we looked at was EMC, and they were quickly excluded from our list because of their pricing and lack of features)
I've been out of that realm for some time now, so I'm not exactly up to date on advances in that arena. However I'm hoping that by EMC grabbing VMWare that this is one of the things they think they can address with VMWare's intimate knowledge of multiple operating systems peacefully co-existing.
On another note, I've been a huge fan of VMWare, and still use it for dev on a daily basis. If the pricing for VMWare reaches the point of EMCs pricing it will be a very sad day for me.
I sincerly hope that EMC is after the brains at VMWare, and not just the technology. Many companies these days think it's enough just to buy the tech, without its creators, and that's a horrible travesty.
When The Elegant Universe aired here locally, PBS followed it by another noteworthy program called Einstein's Wife, which questions wether Einstein was alone in his creation of the Theory of Relativity as well as several other papers, or if he was in fact aided by his first wife Mileva who was as insightful into the universe as Einstein himself.
This program gives an interesting look into the human side of Einstein (never imagined him as a romantic), as well as a lot of issues of the day. While it doesn't delve into the physics, it does serve to illustrate Einstein's life in a much different manner than I've previously seen. It's a fascinating program and well worth a look. Einstein's Wife
That's a good one. Tandem mainframes as well have had a similar feature for (IIRC) just about as long as they've been manufactured. I can't remember if this predates 1984, but coupled with your prior art, the fact that IBM mainframes have done this for a bloody long time, and of course with Tandem systems there should be enough prior art out there to overwhelmingly destroy this stupid patent.
I wish I had the time and money to patent everything I come across or "create", there's gotta be a few million dollar patent lawsuits sitting around my house somewhere...
Hughes is doing pretty much all the 2-way sat stuff these days.
If you're looking for *Mobile* satellite Internet, check out Motosat. The Motosat equipment is designed to be attached to the roof of an RV or truck, and while it doesn't work while you're driving the system is nice enough to set itself up when you've parked.
Motosat covers north america, and mexico, but seeing as how it's using Hughes birds and technology I'm sure that there is an alternative for Europe and err, more remote locations.
Come to think of it, the Motosat software uses GPS coordinates from a builtin GPS reciever to help pick the birds out of the sky. At least in an abstract sense it shouldn't be difficult for them to adjust things to work elsewhere in the world.
Now for the sticky part. In the US you *have* to be certified to set up satellite transmitting equipment. For the Motosat systems you "have" to be certified with Motosat, and Hughes. Neither Motosat or Hughes will talk to you about certain things if you are not certified with them, so setting up a Motosat yourself is out of the question. I know all this because I had the pleasure of assisting a Motosat installer for a few days. Impressed the hell out of me with his working knowledge of satellite technology.
The hardware itself is a bit tricky to install physically, there's a lot of drilling that goes on as the entire dish is motorized on a set of rails. However, they've done a pretty damn good job with the firmware and setting that portion up is a breeze.
The downside? MotoSat has some very strange ideas about how LANs should connect to WANs. They make you use an XP box with Internet Connection Sharing to connect to the net. I didn't have the system long enough to get it hacked apart with Linux, but it should be doable.
Complete rewrite. As a side-effect, no longer refuses to startup when run by root.
Okay, okay, I know, root bad, now shut up. I don't know how many freakin times I've been hacking away at a perl script, as root and had to actually log in as a different user just to read the damn documentation. Thank Wall for small miracles.
You're right, there is no definite answer to this question, however there are some ways to create a balance.
Keep in mind, this works best if you have a good dev team, a bit longer of a development timeline, and have management that understands the Q&D vs proper arguement. Or at least can be made to agree to it.
First off take the time to sit down with the development team, and make a project timeline. Use Gannt charts, management loves that, and it adds a real sense of professionalism to your dev schedule.
In developing your timeline, identify the "low hanging fruit" (a term I despise) which can be quickly adapted from existing code, as well as the items that both can, and cannot be written Q&D. Next, add in re-engineering of the Q&D sections of code to the timeline. Make sure that you find a balance where you have enough items developed early on that the PHBs have something to sell and boast about. It also helps if you make sure you don't do everything Q&D.
Stick to the timeline
If for some reason you can't, bring it up with the PHB and adjust the timeline.
A realllllly good way to make this work is to set out a bonus schedule for completion of certain phases of development before a certain time. This takes having a cool PHB, but it's a great way to keep motivated.
This is the way my last major dev project worked. And it worked *Very* well. Every phase of the project resulted in something the PHBs were happy with and could sell. As a developer and team leader I got a bonus for making sure my code was delivered on time. We even had a discretionary bonus pool that we could use to reward people who made an outstanding contribution to the project.
The real key here is to communicate with the PHBs, using their language (gannt charts), make sure you keep control of the development timeline, and most of all, stick to that timeline.
Thank dog for this review, it really confirms my worst fears.
It was the fear that they would hose a perfectly good universe that stopped me from going out and buying this game the day it was released. I had a sinking feeling that the egos of SOE and Lucas would clash, and push out yet another vapid piece of eye candy. Not that eye candy is a bad thing, but at least with the SW prequels I only had to shell out $9 bucks to get my fix.
Fortunately I decided to go out and buy AC2. They at least already have a fair body of content, and are continuing to add more every month. Yeah, they tweak the skill trees every month, which has a habit of completely crippling certain classes, but at least there is something to do.
These days, I rarely buy a non-MMO game. You see, I have to have my gaming fix, but being unemployed I have to stretch my crack as far as possible. I would much rather pay $50 bucks once, and $15/mo for 2 months, giving me 3 months of entertainment, than $50 for maybe 2 weeks of entertainment. There are some games which I exclude of course based upon their replay value, such as WC3, but I've managed to take a $1800/yr habit, and turn it into a $320/yr habit.
Needless to say, I'm pretty carefull about the MMO's I pick. I just hope that when I'm finally bored with AC2 that SWG will be worth the money, because I *really* wanna play a Wookie named Stinky.
Actually I think this is a pretty fair idea. Nobel prizes have been awarded to groups of people as well as individuals, and there are certainly a number of people who have contributed as much to modern linux kernel development as Linus has. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe that Nobel winners also get an monetary award, which could either go a long way towards keeping Linus focused on kernel dev.
While the peace prize isn't appropriate here, he has made a substantial contribution to the world, that shouldn't be overlooked.
Got a couple rolls of it too. Cute little yellow ducky on the inside of the roll.
Of course rather than buy the "Pocket Duct" just wait until you've used up most of the roll, and flatten it. Fits in your back pocket like it was worthy of a patent.
I'm definately a Thinkpad guy, for 2 reasons. 1) They last forever, 2) I can run linux on them.
In fact, I'm currently using a Thinkpad 600X to type this message that just happens to have linux installed on it.
Now I haven't installed linux on every single thinkpad out there, but I've had much better luck getting it running on thinkpads than I have on the two different Toshiba models I attempted it on.
I also have a Sony GRX560 laptop, which I purchased because it has a very large 16.1" display on it. Nice thing about it is I can run it at 1600x1200, and still see it comfortably. And while the laptop is a lot larger than my thinkpad, it doesn't look like that fugly monstrosity that Toshiba is trying to cram down peoples throats.
If you're looking for a laptop with a better display, check out the Sony's, their GRV (or is it GRZ) series which has the large displays. Another little tidbit I like about the GRX is it has USB in three different locations, right, left and rear of the machine. While Sony is no Apple when it comes to cool factor for laptops, they are certainly up there in my book.
Sony put a few of these in their clearance section a while back. The GRV is a slight step down from the GRX, but it's much better than that Toshiba monstrosity.
FYI, the Sony is my gaming/graphics machine, so I don't know how/if it runs Linux. Although I tried VMWare and it really didn't like things very much. (Although I was using an old version of VMWare)
Robert Mirelson Headquarters, Washington Feb. 1, 2003 (Phone: 202/358-1600) 5 p.m. EST
Eileen Hawley Johnson Space Center, Houston (Phone: 281-483-5111)
RELEASE: 03-033
NASA ASKS FOR HELP WITH COLUMBIA INVESTIGATION
NASA has established a telephone hotline and electronic mail address for the public to use for reporting information that may help investigators studying today's Space Shuttle mishap.
Anyone who discovers debris from the accident or who has film or video evidence that may be of value to the investigation team is urged to use these contacts. Please avoid contact with any debris, because it may be hazardous as a result of toxic propellants aboard the Shuttle.
Telephone reports should be directed to the following number:
281/483-3388
Text reports and images should be e-mailed to:
nasamitimages@jsc.nasa.gov
The e-mail address is: columbiaimages@nasa.gov
All debris is U.S. Government property and is critical to the investigation of the mishap. All debris from the accident is to be left alone and reported to Government authorities. Unauthorized persons found in possession of accident debris will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
1) Write code
2) Avoid commenting your code at *all* costs
3) Obfuscate code, heavily and often.
4) Make sure everyone sees your code. This will culture a sense of fear and awe in your coworkers. Particularly if you can make your Perl code look like assembler.
With these 4 easy steps, you too can be one of the last people to be laid by your employer!
While not having strong security out of the box is by no means acceptable for any hardware (or software for that matter) it's not altogether difficult to secure a wireless network given an intermediate level of networking experience. You can even do some really cool stuff with this setup if you have some programming skills.
My 802.11b network terminates directly into a linux firewall running freeswan with the Checkpoint client I stole from an old job. I understand that the ebootis package will also work.
I also run tinydns, dhcp, a transparent web cache/proxy and a webserver on the firewall.
Everyone is allowed access to the ipsec interface. People who are not authorized against the firewall who try to browse the net are directed to a page that asks for a password, which I freely give out to friends and neighbors. A cookie gets dropped on their browser to verify that they're authenticated for web browsing.
Anyone that remains unathenticated for more than 5 minutes gets their DHCP lease nuked, and they're blocked at the firewall.
It may sound overly complex, but the original basic system took about a weekend to get setup. The spiffy web authentication system took another couple of days fiddling around in the evenings.
The latest version of this system uses a fanless mini-itx motherboard and a 64M flash disk running the FW off of ramdisk. I used PeeWee Linux to get the basic system set up. I've taken my Linksys wireless unit apart, and crammed it into the same box as the Firewall, and with a little creative use of Big Red Buttons (tm) in the event of a FW compromise, I can reboot the entire thing and I'm back up and running with the clean ramdisk image. No fuss, no muss.
Client security on the XP and linux laptops floating around on the wireless network is left as an exercise to the user. (A mostly futile one in the case of XP)
Of course this obviously isn't a solution for everyone. My network consists of a whopping three internal machines (between the internet and the wireless firewalls), 2 firewalls (one internet facing, the other wireless facing) and 3 laptops. Certainly not a complex network by any stretch of the imagination. However there's not a chance in hell that my father would be able to pull something like this off. But, with a little creativity and a few skills, it's not too difficult to achieve a fair level of security.
This simplest excuse is because it came loaded on my laptop. But it's not the honest reason. My 2 primary machines are windows boxes for ease of interoperability, games, and productivity. There's something to be said for being able to simply install a program and be able to use it.
I've been using linux since pre-1.0 kernels, and I always have a linux box around. While there are 3 windows boxes on my network, I also have an additional 3 linux boxes. One acts as a firewall, dhcp, web cache, dns cache for my wireless network, one as an internal fileserver and web server, and one for my primary development station.
One windows box is for my financial stuff, one is my wifes laptop, and the other is my main laptop for everything work and dev. For development, I frequently go back and forth from my windows laptop, to my primary linux dev station, and even to a vmware session on my laptop. I've created as much of a hybrid working environment as I can on my windows laptop using Cygwin. I cannot cope without a good CLI.
What it really boils down to, is that in my computing life, I unfortunately have to deal with a lot of people who just aren't computer savvy. To make both my life, and theirs easier, I have to be able to demonstrate how things are done, and give people a quick, simple resolution to their problems.
When an ideal hybrid comes along that allows my wife to handle doing semi-complex tasks easily, I'll jump all over it. Lindows is a step in the right direction, and Transgamer is coming along very nicely.
IMHO we're still 3 to 5 years away from having a great, easy to use interface (and I'm not talking just GUI) that any idiot can pick up. Until that time, I have to (begrudgingly) stick with the lowest common denominator.
I have to agree. First time I saw the show was channel flipping, and I noticed a quite sexy woman, and lots of power tools, dirt, and strange pieces of scrap metal.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago VIA developed the MBIOS for their Mini-ITX based systems that allowed for much the same functionality. Their bios was limited (if you can call it a limitation) to just playing DVDs, audio CDs and if I remember correctly mp3 and CDs filled with images.
At the time I was working with VIA and had the opportunity to talk to one of the techs about it. I remember him saying that it was actually fairly simple to only activate the pieces of the motherboard that were required for playback.
It still sounds like a fun engineering problem, and I hope that more companies add this functionality. I do a lot of movie watching on my machine (I have no standalone TV or DVD player) and would highly value the ability to watch movies without the burden of an OS.
Whichever program is responsible (there are so many) for removing windows from my machine. No single piece of software has ever made me feel so good about life.
Oddly enough, at one point in time it was actually one of my real email addresses. (I registered god.net and death.org back a few months before the Internic started charging for domain registrations) I used that email address specifically to see how many people actually sent random email to that address...
:)
Of course this was back before spam was a problem. A much simpler time... *sniff* memories
Leave your gear at home.
1) If you're dragging a bunch of equipment to (or through) a questionable location, you need to have your head examined.
2) Yeah yeah, it's all well and fine to be a geek, but try being realistic too. How much of that crap do you *really* need? The reason people carry a PDA is because it contains an important subset of the information contained on your laptop or main machine. Meaning that you don't need to bring a laptop with you.
3) Swap out the iPod for an MP3 CD player, how much music do you really need? If you're carrying around a laptop, you're already carrying around a bunch of CDs as well. In fact it will probably weigh a lot less than dragging around an iPod. MP3 CD players are really cheap these days as well.
4) If you *really* must take a laptop with you, buy a beater laptop, cover it in bumper stickers. I've got a really nice Vaio that stays at home, for those times I feel like writing code in a coffee shop, I take my old linux based Thinkpad, which underneath the dust has "Got Root?" and "I am a bad ass" stickers on it. Nobody gives it the slightest notice because it looks like a piece of crap.
5) Learn to do without. If you're dragging all this stuff around with you for sheer entertainment value, bring a book instead. If you're not sealed away behind a mask of your own music, you might just be able to take part in a conversation with other live flesh and blood humans. In the long run, humans are more interesting anyway.
This is actually a really cool bios update for the VIA chipset(s). VIA demonstrated it at the Lunch @ Pierro's event at COMDEX (and CES for that matter) in Las Vegas a year or two ago. It was designed originally for the EPIA boards, and makes an excellent "brainless" media center. I was lucky enough to be working with several of the folks at VIA during this time, and I have to say they did a damn good job with this BIOS.
Okay, so there isn't a patch, but there should be.
To keep myself from turning into a raving lunatic without my coffee, I make a point of drinking one less cup of coffee a day for a week. Saturday night I take an ibuprofin, and sunday I go without coffee (or other stimulating beverages) completely. No withdrawls.
Besides the fact that I'm incredibly poor and have a tendency to run out of coffee at the worst times, this is a habit I picked up when I was working 80 hour weeks. It had the added benefit of making the effects of my monday morning coffee all that much more stimulating. And of course, mondays were when I needed it the most.
The magic key to success here is to drink lots of water. The best habit I have is to keep a 1 liter bottle of water with me at all times. It helps a lot with caffeine withdrawls, but only if you start drinking the water well before you start getting headaches. (I'm talking days before hand)
At least from an abstract point of view. The VMWare people obviously have some people and technology that are good at dealing with multiple filesystem types and operating systems co-existing.
A few years ago when I was specing new TB sized storage arrays, I wanted an affordable way to allow directly connected access to the same data to multiple operating systems, but allowing for each OS to make native FS calls to get that data. Nobody really had a gracefull solution. Most required isolated partitions, and those that provided a high level emulation layer either had no drivers for Linux, or the cost was in 6 figures for them to even consider developing something.
Needless to say, the cheapest solution was going with a network based access system to that data, which unfortunately meant that I had to spend more money making an isolated high speed network just for FS data, and popping two NICs in everything that was serving that data. Once again, not the most gracefull of solutions.(in fact one of the companies we looked at was EMC, and they were quickly excluded from our list because of their pricing and lack of features)
I've been out of that realm for some time now, so I'm not exactly up to date on advances in that arena. However I'm hoping that by EMC grabbing VMWare that this is one of the things they think they can address with VMWare's intimate knowledge of multiple operating systems peacefully co-existing.
On another note, I've been a huge fan of VMWare, and still use it for dev on a daily basis. If the pricing for VMWare reaches the point of EMCs pricing it will be a very sad day for me.
I sincerly hope that EMC is after the brains at VMWare, and not just the technology. Many companies these days think it's enough just to buy the tech, without its creators, and that's a horrible travesty.
When The Elegant Universe aired here locally, PBS followed it by another noteworthy program called Einstein's Wife, which questions wether Einstein was alone in his creation of the Theory of Relativity as well as several other papers, or if he was in fact aided by his first wife Mileva who was as insightful into the universe as Einstein himself.
This program gives an interesting look into the human side of Einstein (never imagined him as a romantic), as well as a lot of issues of the day. While it doesn't delve into the physics, it does serve to illustrate Einstein's life in a much different manner than I've previously seen. It's a fascinating program and well worth a look.
Einstein's Wife
Yes, but in Soviet Russia, the Tomacco eats you :)
I wish I had the time and money to patent everything I come across or "create", there's gotta be a few million dollar patent lawsuits sitting around my house somewhere...
If you're looking for *Mobile* satellite Internet, check out Motosat. The Motosat equipment is designed to be attached to the roof of an RV or truck, and while it doesn't work while you're driving the system is nice enough to set itself up when you've parked.
Motosat covers north america, and mexico, but seeing as how it's using Hughes birds and technology I'm sure that there is an alternative for Europe and err, more remote locations.
Come to think of it, the Motosat software uses GPS coordinates from a builtin GPS reciever to help pick the birds out of the sky. At least in an abstract sense it shouldn't be difficult for them to adjust things to work elsewhere in the world.
Now for the sticky part. In the US you *have* to be certified to set up satellite transmitting equipment. For the Motosat systems you "have" to be certified with Motosat, and Hughes. Neither Motosat or Hughes will talk to you about certain things if you are not certified with them, so setting up a Motosat yourself is out of the question. I know all this because I had the pleasure of assisting a Motosat installer for a few days. Impressed the hell out of me with his working knowledge of satellite technology.
The hardware itself is a bit tricky to install physically, there's a lot of drilling that goes on as the entire dish is motorized on a set of rails. However, they've done a pretty damn good job with the firmware and setting that portion up is a breeze.
The downside? MotoSat has some very strange ideas about how LANs should connect to WANs. They make you use an XP box with Internet Connection Sharing to connect to the net. I didn't have the system long enough to get it hacked apart with Linux, but it should be doable.
Complete rewrite. As a side-effect, no longer refuses to startup when run by root.
Okay, okay, I know, root bad, now shut up. I don't know how many freakin times I've been hacking away at a perl script, as root and had to actually log in as a different user just to read the damn documentation. Thank Wall for small miracles.
Not that I often read documentation, but anyway.
Keep in mind, this works best if you have a good dev team, a bit longer of a development timeline, and have management that understands the Q&D vs proper arguement. Or at least can be made to agree to it.
First off take the time to sit down with the development team, and make a project timeline. Use Gannt charts, management loves that, and it adds a real sense of professionalism to your dev schedule.
In developing your timeline, identify the "low hanging fruit" (a term I despise) which can be quickly adapted from existing code, as well as the items that both can, and cannot be written Q&D. Next, add in re-engineering of the Q&D sections of code to the timeline. Make sure that you find a balance where you have enough items developed early on that the PHBs have something to sell and boast about. It also helps if you make sure you don't do everything Q&D.
Stick to the timeline
If for some reason you can't, bring it up with the PHB and adjust the timeline.
A realllllly good way to make this work is to set out a bonus schedule for completion of certain phases of development before a certain time. This takes having a cool PHB, but it's a great way to keep motivated.
This is the way my last major dev project worked. And it worked *Very* well. Every phase of the project resulted in something the PHBs were happy with and could sell. As a developer and team leader I got a bonus for making sure my code was delivered on time. We even had a discretionary bonus pool that we could use to reward people who made an outstanding contribution to the project.
The real key here is to communicate with the PHBs, using their language (gannt charts), make sure you keep control of the development timeline, and most of all, stick to that timeline.
It was the fear that they would hose a perfectly good universe that stopped me from going out and buying this game the day it was released. I had a sinking feeling that the egos of SOE and Lucas would clash, and push out yet another vapid piece of eye candy. Not that eye candy is a bad thing, but at least with the SW prequels I only had to shell out $9 bucks to get my fix.
Fortunately I decided to go out and buy AC2. They at least already have a fair body of content, and are continuing to add more every month. Yeah, they tweak the skill trees every month, which has a habit of completely crippling certain classes, but at least there is something to do.
These days, I rarely buy a non-MMO game. You see, I have to have my gaming fix, but being unemployed I have to stretch my crack as far as possible. I would much rather pay $50 bucks once, and $15/mo for 2 months, giving me 3 months of entertainment, than $50 for maybe 2 weeks of entertainment. There are some games which I exclude of course based upon their replay value, such as WC3, but I've managed to take a $1800/yr habit, and turn it into a $320/yr habit.
Needless to say, I'm pretty carefull about the MMO's I pick. I just hope that when I'm finally bored with AC2 that SWG will be worth the money, because I *really* wanna play a Wookie named Stinky.
While the peace prize isn't appropriate here, he has made a substantial contribution to the world, that shouldn't be overlooked.
Of course rather than buy the "Pocket Duct" just wait until you've used up most of the roll, and flatten it. Fits in your back pocket like it was worthy of a patent.
In fact, I'm currently using a Thinkpad 600X to type this message that just happens to have linux installed on it.
Now I haven't installed linux on every single thinkpad out there, but I've had much better luck getting it running on thinkpads than I have on the two different Toshiba models I attempted it on.
I also have a Sony GRX560 laptop, which I purchased because it has a very large 16.1" display on it. Nice thing about it is I can run it at 1600x1200, and still see it comfortably. And while the laptop is a lot larger than my thinkpad, it doesn't look like that fugly monstrosity that Toshiba is trying to cram down peoples throats.
If you're looking for a laptop with a better display, check out the Sony's, their GRV (or is it GRZ) series which has the large displays. Another little tidbit I like about the GRX is it has USB in three different locations, right, left and rear of the machine. While Sony is no Apple when it comes to cool factor for laptops, they are certainly up there in my book.
Sony put a few of these in their clearance section a while back. The GRV is a slight step down from the GRX, but it's much better than that Toshiba monstrosity.
FYI, the Sony is my gaming/graphics machine, so I don't know how/if it runs Linux. Although I tried VMWare and it really didn't like things very much. (Although I was using an old version of VMWare)
1) Write code
2) Avoid commenting your code at *all* costs
3) Obfuscate code, heavily and often.
4) Make sure everyone sees your code. This will culture a sense of fear and awe in your coworkers. Particularly if you can make your Perl code look like assembler.
With these 4 easy steps, you too can be one of the last people to be laid by your employer!
Yes, actually you can, but you still have issues with condensation in your walls :)
While not having strong security out of the box is by no means acceptable for any hardware (or software for that matter) it's not altogether difficult to secure a wireless network given an intermediate level of networking experience. You can even do some really cool stuff with this setup if you have some programming skills.
My 802.11b network terminates directly into a linux firewall running freeswan with the Checkpoint client I stole from an old job. I understand that the ebootis package will also work.
I also run tinydns, dhcp, a transparent web cache/proxy and a webserver on the firewall.
Everyone is allowed access to the ipsec interface. People who are not authorized against the firewall who try to browse the net are directed to a page that asks for a password, which I freely give out to friends and neighbors. A cookie gets dropped on their browser to verify that they're authenticated for web browsing.
Anyone that remains unathenticated for more than 5 minutes gets their DHCP lease nuked, and they're blocked at the firewall.
It may sound overly complex, but the original basic system took about a weekend to get setup. The spiffy web authentication system took another couple of days fiddling around in the evenings.
The latest version of this system uses a fanless mini-itx motherboard and a 64M flash disk running the FW off of ramdisk. I used PeeWee Linux to get the basic system set up. I've taken my Linksys wireless unit apart, and crammed it into the same box as the Firewall, and with a little creative use of Big Red Buttons (tm) in the event of a FW compromise, I can reboot the entire thing and I'm back up and running with the clean ramdisk image. No fuss, no muss.
Client security on the XP and linux laptops floating around on the wireless network is left as an exercise to the user. (A mostly futile one in the case of XP)
Of course this obviously isn't a solution for everyone. My network consists of a whopping three internal machines (between the internet and the wireless firewalls), 2 firewalls (one internet facing, the other wireless facing) and 3 laptops. Certainly not a complex network by any stretch of the imagination. However there's not a chance in hell that my father would be able to pull something like this off. But, with a little creativity and a few skills, it's not too difficult to achieve a fair level of security.
Oh man, I laughed so hard when I read that. Maybe it's time I dusted off my TurboGFX 16 and ported linux to it :)
This simplest excuse is because it came loaded on my laptop. But it's not the honest reason. My 2 primary machines are windows boxes for ease of interoperability, games, and productivity. There's something to be said for being able to simply install a program and be able to use it.
I've been using linux since pre-1.0 kernels, and I always have a linux box around. While there are 3 windows boxes on my network, I also have an additional 3 linux boxes. One acts as a firewall, dhcp, web cache, dns cache for my wireless network, one as an internal fileserver and web server, and one for my primary development station.
One windows box is for my financial stuff, one is my wifes laptop, and the other is my main laptop for everything work and dev. For development, I frequently go back and forth from my windows laptop, to my primary linux dev station, and even to a vmware session on my laptop. I've created as much of a hybrid working environment as I can on my windows laptop using Cygwin. I cannot cope without a good CLI.
What it really boils down to, is that in my computing life, I unfortunately have to deal with a lot of people who just aren't computer savvy. To make both my life, and theirs easier, I have to be able to demonstrate how things are done, and give people a quick, simple resolution to their problems.
When an ideal hybrid comes along that allows my wife to handle doing semi-complex tasks easily, I'll jump all over it. Lindows is a step in the right direction, and Transgamer is coming along very nicely.
IMHO we're still 3 to 5 years away from having a great, easy to use interface (and I'm not talking just GUI) that any idiot can pick up. Until that time, I have to (begrudgingly) stick with the lowest common denominator.
I've been trying to get ahold of him for weeks now.
I have to agree. First time I saw the show was channel flipping, and I noticed a quite sexy woman, and lots of power tools, dirt, and strange pieces of scrap metal.
How can you not pause for that?