Those of you looking for an affordable mp3 player might want to check out the X-drive:
http://www.xs-drive.com/
It's pretty much what I've been waiting for - mp3 player, external hard disk which uses standard 2.5" IDE so upgrading is easy, and card readers to boot. iPods are nifty, look better, and probably taste better if ye swab 'em with strawberry sauce, but these have pretty compeditive pricing;)
I'm one of those lucky lads who have an hereditary bipolar disorder and, during my later teens, a marijuana-induced semipsychotic stupor (I smoked weed chronically). During that time I manifested many of the common schitzo reactions, and this only abated after I had quit.
Up to this day I'm not sure whether it was the weed or true schitzophrenia, though I suspect the latter. And while I have been tested, tried, drugged and shrinked from childhood for my bipolar disorder, I had/have never been tested for schitzophrenia. I would guess that, if it IS the case, it is simply difficult to detect since I'm already eccentric by myself. I also feel no need to find out because whatever the case, I've learned to deal with it insofar as possible. I also have tolerant friends who don't freak out if one of my colorful observations are off the mark in whichever way. But I DO remember clearly that during my stoning times, I was in my own hell where I trusted almost no-one out of pure paranoia and had plenty of delusions to go with it. My bipolar disorder in manic phase was, ironically, the only time that I functioned well; I had the energy to have a normal life and it sharpened my wit far enough that it compensated for the inevitable slowdown that weed gives you.
These days I've given up on drugs (except for beer and the occasional cigar), including perscription drugs. My bipolar disorder is mild enough that I can control it by simply keeping an eye on myself - eating and sleeping habits, spending tendencies, etcetera - and compensate by applying the brakes wherever necessary; also, under certain conditions, you can keep yourself slightly manic without danger of the fallback into depression by not overworking.
I suspect that the backslide into depression is caused by heaping up too much work on your plate when you're manic; by keeping yourself in shape, getting plenty of sleep and decent meals, and knowing when/how to give your brain a break - and that means something which requires little thought, such as reordering your baseball card collection, or ironing, or cleaning up, or going for a walk or jog (NO tv, no internet!) - you can keep yourself an a heightened mentally active state indefinitely. I suspect that bipolar disorder may have been an evolutionary advantage once, and that due to social pressures and/or the differences in our modern ways of living compared to, say the stone age, it became a liability rather than a bonus. It might even be that depression wasn't always a necessary component, I don't know.
The delusional aspects from the schitzo-like affliction from my teens (I am now 27) gradually faded through time; one thing that really helped was writing down my delusions and seeing if they stood any statistic chance of being true. For example, when I was convinced I could control stoplights mentally; I simply drove around and compared how often it worked to how often I thought it worked. Needless to say, there were a few discrepancies;) In this manner it's possible to set up logical bulwarks vs. some of the problems that come with the territory, at least. I know a few other tricks which I'll jot down for you later if there is sufficient interest and when I have a little more time. Hope this semicoherent brain-fart helps;)
I've got a gigabit network set up based on an 8-port Ovislink Gigabit Switch and Ovislink Gigabit NIC's. After one bad toss with a faulty NIC, everything works fine now. We have a RAID0 server and several machines, and seeing as we tend to download a lot as well as watch a lot of movies, the GE pays off. The speeds are high enough that I wouldn't even bother worrying about tweaking unless you really need it; you're only going to notice the difference if you need to shovel over vast amounts of data from one comp to the other on a daily basis.
Also, unless you have SCSI's, I think GBE is still marginally faster than most EIDE setups (they pull what, 150mb/s? As opposed to full duplex 2Gb/s, divided by ten for easy math, makes around 200mb/s?) So it may also be pointless to tweak.
On the other hand, a GBE NIC costs 20 bucks or so, so upgrading the whole house in one go isn't the colossal investment it was a year ago, either. Sticking to all the same manufacturer and setting jumbo frames on will probably already get the most out of your setup already. Just juggle your variables and see which come out on top:)
.... check out Red vs. Blue (www.redvsblue.com). A really funny series written with the Tribes 2 engine. It's not exactly a movie, maybe it's best comparable with Friends - only then for males. (What? humor? for US???)
And tell him there's hyenas chewing on the power cables again!
Somehow I don't think that watching hyenas glow in the dark is what African IT experts thought their teachers meant when they were learning about Shockwave Flash.
A few other absolute musts (yeah yeah they're DOS:P):
- DosDiag - great tool for checking your hardware. Simple, safe, and loaded. http://www.5star-shareware.com/Utilities/Diagnosti cs/bcm-diagnostics.html - Memtest86 or similar - for when you don't believe your kids when they say they didn't open the computer. http://www.memtest86.com/ - The new FDisk for large partitions. - OpenOffice. Ye wouldn't believe how many poeple have illegal office installed - and are screwed when they crash. http://www.openoffice.org/ - Hard disk checking utilities from Maxtor, Seagate etcetera. - Mozilla's Phoenix browser. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/ - Mozilla. (Get those people AWAY from virusfriendly Outlook!) http://www.mozilla.org/ - Undelete. People are clumsy, stupid animals and you know it. A good and free version can be found at http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/ - Antivirus. http://www.free-av.com is a good one. - The Win98 cabs. - A pack of coffee. - A LOT of fewkin' patience.
That's my toolkit at current. My company does this for a living;)
After the "Hello, maybeworlds" jokes/programs trundle down, well start sifting through Qubits running Q-Bert. These will be linked to cubicles and Dilbert almost immediately after that. From there, it's an easy downhill slide to memory banks which are and aren't running proprietary software, illegal music coexisting with Bach, cybermaybewarfare and a whole new dimensional lattice of blonde jokes. I wonder if anyone will understand them anymore? Superimposition of superintendants! Double Dragon like you never may have played it before! No more uncertainty about whether you've lost your car keys! Stand up and smile, gentles all. The lawyers are finally screwed six states from Sunday.
The Dutch taxing system holds that all computer components have to be sold with "recycling tax" included. And I was so looking forward to a Dell truck dropping by at my doorstep, too.
I personally don't have the time for it, but what might be an idea is to set up a website where people can blacklist the top spammers. Then every day, a number of sites - both of the spammers and of those who gave the order to spam - are hit with a DDOS attack by this anti-spam website's regulars. I know I wouldn't mind having a little program open in the background sending 64 kb pings if it means I can hurt a company in the very online wallet it's trying to fill by filling my personal mailbox with trash.
The advantages are that first off, it doesn't take all that many DDOS'ers to bring down a website. Also they can hardly sue anyone because 1) people from all over the world are involved and international law is a bitch, and 2) It would be more than mildly hypocritical. And who knows? Maybe all those trojan script kiddies would finally do something useful for a change. You could furthermore set it up with increasing returns - e.g. 1st time offenders are hit for an hour, 2nd timers for 12 hours, etcetera. Who knows? We might even beat the bastards at their own game - after all, there's more of us than there are of them.
But maybe something like this already exists? If anyone knows an URL, I for one, would sign right up. If not, maybe others have good extra ideas and tips for the design of such a site? Sooner or later some enterprising php'er is bound to come along, pick this up and spin it into a site... I hope.
But I turned it inside out and use it to keep the universe at a steady 2 degrees Kelvin. Well, it hasn't reached that point yet, but nor does coffee when you've just poured it into a mug.
Jynx
Oh, er... technology? Try wristwatches. Those things have been around for ever. Remember Pulp Fiction.
Not really. You can compensate this rather easily with - you guessed it - a brutal gfx card. I play NWN on 1280x1024 with all the graphics set to ridiculous, but it only shudders if a large battle is fought near water; then I'm forced to turn down the detail. I've plugged the GeForce 4 into an AMD 1300 with almost the same results. Granted, it helps a bit, but not by enough to justify the price as far as I'm concerned. I'm curious, however, if the memory pipe improvement could/would be a bigger gain.
Processors that can move at such speeds - and, incidentally, keep requiring larger and larger heatsinks - only have practical applications on high-performance server (clusters). The average desktop user simply doesn't need all that, even for gaming; if you go to the store it's rare that you'll find a game that also requires you to have a computer with over a Ghz of computing power. Unless you're toying with some seriously heavy graphic or music manipulation software, it's next to useless.
So why is the hype aimed at so many desktop users? Simple: it's the largest market. Do we, the endusers, need it? No. Are we going to buy it, with the economy in the tight spot it's in? Nope. We're going to upgrade their memory sticks and leave it at that. I've got a trusty P3 600 which works fine with my GeForce 4 to run NWN at awe-inspiring resolutions and graphics, it's got 512mb so it's smoother than a narwhal, and I for one see no need to buy a new one anytime soon. The net result is that the intel/amd power struggle has been so intense that there's no point to it anymore. My system is still configured for gaming, but a lot of people - in companies as well as at home - only use their computers to email and write letters and maybe listen to some music. Like as not they'd much rather save for a 19" TFT than another tower. I own my own little IT company and generally advise my clients to stick to their 450mhz machines and upgrade a few choice parts.
The only thing I'm wondering is how big is the group that seriously uses such powerful machines? I can understand major websites or software companies will have clusters, but that can't be much more than a few percent can it? Anyone have an idea?
It's not exactly training, but it IS a job: set up your own company. It is difficult in the IT world, no doubt - but if you can analyse your local market and find the right niche, you will not only be able to bring bread on your own table but potentially also those of future employers. Setting up a company is 90% "just get out there and start doing it"-balls and 10% common sense. Good luck:)
She wrote a nine-book cyclic epic (The Exile, Intervention and Galactic Milieu series) and I've yet to run into a better-described world. Also an excellent construction and unification of a lot of folklore and myth.
Jynx
When a decent-sized company proposes change, there's seldom just one reason for it. No doubt they're also interested in the bandwidth, but they'd be fools not to consider all aspects of their options to see if they can't make an extra buck; I know I would. That's what they do in those impressive-looking meetings where everyone wears ties, drinks water and snorts coke during toilet breaks. Maybe, maybe not.
I'm beginning to wonder if the RIAA and the MPAA might be behind this in exchange for filling some fat director's chair with wads of dough - the fact that this will skim down P2P sources can't have been overlooked, and I'm sure the RIAA loves the smell of that. Time will tell, but if other ISP's adopt this method we may be looking at the recording industry's first real pokes below the belt.
Slashdot Mirror
Those of you looking for an affordable mp3 player might want to check out the X-drive:
;)
http://www.xs-drive.com/
It's pretty much what I've been waiting for - mp3 player, external hard disk which uses standard 2.5" IDE so upgrading is easy, and card readers to boot. iPods are nifty, look better, and probably taste better if ye swab 'em with strawberry sauce, but these have pretty compeditive pricing
- Jynx
I'm one of those lucky lads who have an hereditary bipolar disorder and, during my later teens, a marijuana-induced semipsychotic stupor (I smoked weed chronically). During that time I manifested many of the common schitzo reactions, and this only abated after I had quit.
;) In this manner it's possible to set up logical bulwarks vs. some of the problems that come with the territory, at least. I know a few other tricks which I'll jot down for you later if there is sufficient interest and when I have a little more time. Hope this semicoherent brain-fart helps ;)
Up to this day I'm not sure whether it was the weed or true schitzophrenia, though I suspect the latter. And while I have been tested, tried, drugged and shrinked from childhood for my bipolar disorder, I had/have never been tested for schitzophrenia. I would guess that, if it IS the case, it is simply difficult to detect since I'm already eccentric by myself. I also feel no need to find out because whatever the case, I've learned to deal with it insofar as possible. I also have tolerant friends who don't freak out if one of my colorful observations are off the mark in whichever way. But I DO remember clearly that during my stoning times, I was in my own hell where I trusted almost no-one out of pure paranoia and had plenty of delusions to go with it. My bipolar disorder in manic phase was, ironically, the only time that I functioned well; I had the energy to have a normal life and it sharpened my wit far enough that it compensated for the inevitable slowdown that weed gives you.
These days I've given up on drugs (except for beer and the occasional cigar), including perscription drugs. My bipolar disorder is mild enough that I can control it by simply keeping an eye on myself - eating and sleeping habits, spending tendencies, etcetera - and compensate by applying the brakes wherever necessary; also, under certain conditions, you can keep yourself slightly manic without danger of the fallback into depression by not overworking.
I suspect that the backslide into depression is caused by heaping up too much work on your plate when you're manic; by keeping yourself in shape, getting plenty of sleep and decent meals, and knowing when/how to give your brain a break - and that means something which requires little thought, such as reordering your baseball card collection, or ironing, or cleaning up, or going for a walk or jog (NO tv, no internet!) - you can keep yourself an a heightened mentally active state indefinitely. I suspect that bipolar disorder may have been an evolutionary advantage once, and that due to social pressures and/or the differences in our modern ways of living compared to, say the stone age, it became a liability rather than a bonus. It might even be that depression wasn't always a necessary component, I don't know.
The delusional aspects from the schitzo-like affliction from my teens (I am now 27) gradually faded through time; one thing that really helped was writing down my delusions and seeing if they stood any statistic chance of being true. For example, when I was convinced I could control stoplights mentally; I simply drove around and compared how often it worked to how often I thought it worked. Needless to say, there were a few discrepancies
Jynx
I've got a gigabit network set up based on an 8-port Ovislink Gigabit Switch and Ovislink Gigabit NIC's. After one bad toss with a faulty NIC, everything works fine now. We have a RAID0 server and several machines, and seeing as we tend to download a lot as well as watch a lot of movies, the GE pays off. The speeds are high enough that I wouldn't even bother worrying about tweaking unless you really need it; you're only going to notice the difference if you need to shovel over vast amounts of data from one comp to the other on a daily basis.
:)
Also, unless you have SCSI's, I think GBE is still marginally faster than most EIDE setups (they pull what, 150mb/s? As opposed to full duplex 2Gb/s, divided by ten for easy math, makes around 200mb/s?) So it may also be pointless to tweak.
On the other hand, a GBE NIC costs 20 bucks or so, so upgrading the whole house in one go isn't the colossal investment it was a year ago, either. Sticking to all the same manufacturer and setting jumbo frames on will probably already get the most out of your setup already. Just juggle your variables and see which come out on top
- Jynx
...you insensitive clod!
So much for my game knowledge reputation :) I think I'll go molest a cobra now.
- El Jynx
.... check out Red vs. Blue (www.redvsblue.com). A really funny series written with the Tribes 2 engine. It's not exactly a movie, maybe it's best comparable with Friends - only then for males. (What? humor? for US???)
:P
- El Jynx
And tell him there's hyenas chewing on the power cables again!
Somehow I don't think that watching hyenas glow in the dark is what African IT experts thought their teachers meant when they were learning about Shockwave Flash.
check DosDiag, I mentioned it in a post further up somewhere, along with an URL.
Jynx
This little program allows you to boot just about anything. http://btmgr.gnuchina.org/
Jynx
A few other absolute musts (yeah yeah they're DOS :P):
i cs/bcm-diagnostics.html
;)
- DosDiag - great tool for checking your hardware. Simple, safe, and loaded. http://www.5star-shareware.com/Utilities/Diagnost
- Memtest86 or similar - for when you don't believe your kids when they say they didn't open the computer. http://www.memtest86.com/
- The new FDisk for large partitions.
- OpenOffice. Ye wouldn't believe how many poeple have illegal office installed - and are screwed when they crash. http://www.openoffice.org/
- Hard disk checking utilities from Maxtor, Seagate etcetera.
- Mozilla's Phoenix browser. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/phoenix/
- Mozilla. (Get those people AWAY from virusfriendly Outlook!) http://www.mozilla.org/
- Undelete. People are clumsy, stupid animals and you know it. A good and free version can be found at http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/
- Antivirus. http://www.free-av.com is a good one.
- The Win98 cabs.
- A pack of coffee.
- A LOT of fewkin' patience.
That's my toolkit at current. My company does this for a living
- Jynx
After the "Hello, maybeworlds" jokes/programs trundle down, well start sifting through Qubits running Q-Bert. These will be linked to cubicles and Dilbert almost immediately after that. From there, it's an easy downhill slide to memory banks which are and aren't running proprietary software, illegal music coexisting with Bach, cybermaybewarfare and a whole new dimensional lattice of blonde jokes. I wonder if anyone will understand them anymore? Superimposition of superintendants! Double Dragon like you never may have played it before! No more uncertainty about whether you've lost your car keys! Stand up and smile, gentles all. The lawyers are finally screwed six states from Sunday.
El Jynx
The Dutch taxing system holds that all computer components have to be sold with "recycling tax" included. And I was so looking forward to a Dell truck dropping by at my doorstep, too.
Jynx
I personally don't have the time for it, but what might be an idea is to set up a website where people can blacklist the top spammers. Then every day, a number of sites - both of the spammers and of those who gave the order to spam - are hit with a DDOS attack by this anti-spam website's regulars. I know I wouldn't mind having a little program open in the background sending 64 kb pings if it means I can hurt a company in the very online wallet it's trying to fill by filling my personal mailbox with trash.
The advantages are that first off, it doesn't take all that many DDOS'ers to bring down a website. Also they can hardly sue anyone because 1) people from all over the world are involved and international law is a bitch, and 2) It would be more than mildly hypocritical. And who knows? Maybe all those trojan script kiddies would finally do something useful for a change. You could furthermore set it up with increasing returns - e.g. 1st time offenders are hit for an hour, 2nd timers for 12 hours, etcetera. Who knows? We might even beat the bastards at their own game - after all, there's more of us than there are of them.
But maybe something like this already exists? If anyone knows an URL, I for one, would sign right up. If not, maybe others have good extra ideas and tips for the design of such a site? Sooner or later some enterprising php'er is bound to come along, pick this up and spin it into a site... I hope.
Jynx
But I turned it inside out and use it to keep the universe at a steady 2 degrees Kelvin. Well, it hasn't reached that point yet, but nor does coffee when you've just poured it into a mug.
Jynx
Oh, er... technology? Try wristwatches. Those things have been around for ever. Remember Pulp Fiction.
...the interactive NWN toolset?
if {
website==/.'ed,
then FindBetterHost=True;
}
or something.
Not really. You can compensate this rather easily with - you guessed it - a brutal gfx card. I play NWN on 1280x1024 with all the graphics set to ridiculous, but it only shudders if a large battle is fought near water; then I'm forced to turn down the detail. I've plugged the GeForce 4 into an AMD 1300 with almost the same results. Granted, it helps a bit, but not by enough to justify the price as far as I'm concerned. I'm curious, however, if the memory pipe improvement could/would be a bigger gain.
Jynx
Processors that can move at such speeds - and, incidentally, keep requiring larger and larger heatsinks - only have practical applications on high-performance server (clusters). The average desktop user simply doesn't need all that, even for gaming; if you go to the store it's rare that you'll find a game that also requires you to have a computer with over a Ghz of computing power. Unless you're toying with some seriously heavy graphic or music manipulation software, it's next to useless.
So why is the hype aimed at so many desktop users? Simple: it's the largest market. Do we, the endusers, need it? No. Are we going to buy it, with the economy in the tight spot it's in? Nope. We're going to upgrade their memory sticks and leave it at that. I've got a trusty P3 600 which works fine with my GeForce 4 to run NWN at awe-inspiring resolutions and graphics, it's got 512mb so it's smoother than a narwhal, and I for one see no need to buy a new one anytime soon. The net result is that the intel/amd power struggle has been so intense that there's no point to it anymore. My system is still configured for gaming, but a lot of people - in companies as well as at home - only use their computers to email and write letters and maybe listen to some music. Like as not they'd much rather save for a 19" TFT than another tower. I own my own little IT company and generally advise my clients to stick to their 450mhz machines and upgrade a few choice parts.
The only thing I'm wondering is how big is the group that seriously uses such powerful machines? I can understand major websites or software companies will have clusters, but that can't be much more than a few percent can it? Anyone have an idea?
- Jynx
Iek... that should be employees, not employers.
Jynx
I drink, therefore I spam.
It's not exactly training, but it IS a job: set up your own company. It is difficult in the IT world, no doubt - but if you can analyse your local market and find the right niche, you will not only be able to bring bread on your own table but potentially also those of future employers. Setting up a company is 90% "just get out there and start doing it"-balls and 10% common sense. Good luck :)
She wrote a nine-book cyclic epic (The Exile, Intervention and Galactic Milieu series) and I've yet to run into a better-described world. Also an excellent construction and unification of a lot of folklore and myth. Jynx
When a decent-sized company proposes change, there's seldom just one reason for it. No doubt they're also interested in the bandwidth, but they'd be fools not to consider all aspects of their options to see if they can't make an extra buck; I know I would. That's what they do in those impressive-looking meetings where everyone wears ties, drinks water and snorts coke during toilet breaks. Maybe, maybe not.
Jynx
I'm beginning to wonder if the RIAA and the MPAA might be behind this in exchange for filling some fat director's chair with wads of dough - the fact that this will skim down P2P sources can't have been overlooked, and I'm sure the RIAA loves the smell of that. Time will tell, but if other ISP's adopt this method we may be looking at the recording industry's first real pokes below the belt.
Jynx
"Almathea is one of the most unusual moons in the solar system, because it gives off more heat than it ceives from the Sun."
Funny. My girl does the same thing during the more active cycles.
That bloody orang-utan is just about the 133735t librarian that exists. Masters of knowledge they are, yesss preciousss! Jynx
Kali? Heh. I've got three words for her.
"Can't touch this."
- Jynx