Heck, feel glad that the "U Bend" (a.k.a. trap) had a water faucet. when maintenance boxed in our sink they took off the spigots off the mop sink, but left the drain functional. Then they boxed it in plywood. After the A/C was installed (and had dehumidified the room) - and the building's humidified air was shut off to the room.. no more humidity for us, and the drain dried out.
Hmmm.. ugly hacks?
How about a Netware 3.x server stuck in a closet between two 10base2 (coax) runs, connecting one segment with another (glorified IPX router).
How about a 395 foot run of BNC... that someone stuck a 10base-T hub on at 200 feet (give or take) because the hub actually strengthened the signal? Then they filled the hub with 8 10baseT computers..
How about a 450 foot run of BNC with old, frayed screw on ends. That ohmed out at about 76 ohms. And they wondered why the network was slow.. (I re-crimped all the ends and cut the wire approximately in half, and used a second NIC in the seerver). In that same place, one of the workers figured out that if they took one of the BNC connectors off the T in the back of the PC, the network would go down and they could just sit there and do nothing...
The company that had a 1000 foot run, so instead of buying ARCNet wire.. they put in BNC.. then ran ARCNet over it (averaged about 300kbit/sec). Then complained it was too slow (well no kidding!!)
The BNC wire I saw that someone had repaired with a paper clip and electrical tape... after they'd sliced through it moving office furniture... (yeah, it kinda worked)..
And we won't even talk about how many networks I ran into that looked like
Server ----- hub ----- hub ----- hub ----- hub
and they wondered why the people on the 4th hub would lose server connections randomly..
I used to create Netware 3.x servers with a DOS boot disk with the netware netx drivers, fdisk and format...
boot, fdisk make 20 meg part, reboot, format 20 meg part, login to the server, copy the c:\netware directory to the C: drive, reboot, load server.exe (the lan drivers were in the c:\netware directory, as were most of the (at the time) recent SCSI drivers I needed..
Then once the server comes up, create SYS: (which made the bindery), hit it from remote and copy in the SYS: stuff. Took longer for me to type it than it did to create it;)
I find XP Wireless unpredictable, unreliable and mostly cumbersome. You gotta love how XP will randomly switch APs even if your "default" AP has the best signal. My personal favorite is how XP randomly loses WEP/WPA keys
Not sure what you're talking about..
I maintain 30+ corporate Windows laptops.. none of them have ever lost a WPA key...
i have a dell latitude d610 that sleeps / wakes consistently every time in winxp. the only trouble i have with that laptop is if I reboot from winxp to linux (currently ubuntu-edgy) I need to physically power the machine OFF or the sound won't init..
I worked at a regional hospital chain for 2 years.
What really blew was that they expected you in your seat.. 8 hours a day. Didn't matter if you worked or not -- you just had to be there.
Some weeks I worked 40 hours. Some weeks I worked closer to 65. Nights, weekends. Anything to get the projects / fixes / whatever done.
Problem was, in my 40 hour week, there were times that I only WORKED 15-20 hours. The rest of the time was walking from place to place, moving candy from a dish in one department to another, playing on the 'net, or just doing nothing at all and trying to keep from falling asleep.
Towards the end, I started coming in when I wanted. I still got ALL my projects finished on time, helped my co-workers on stuff - and only worked 15-20 hours a week.
Boss called me in and fired me.. Why? Because I wasn't there. No matter that I started being 65% more productive working FEWER hours..
Aah well he was a jerk (still is, from what I hear)..
Like it or not, I'd wager that we'll be seeing more companies using technology that will either be like Steam, or will be Steam or a variant/offshoot of.. Right now it's a game deployment platform, but why would M$ not salivate over being able to offer Office xx - on a platform THEY control, you run it WHEN they want you to run it, and they can ship updates to you as they see fit. DRM. Anti-piracy.
Free-download and they can to technology previews, or even offer 30 day limited free-trials that expire, and do so as instructed (instead some stupid registry hack).
Then they wouldn't need Genuine Advantage. Free stuff is, well, free. And stuff that isn't free can be tried out, then expires. It would sure kill a lot of the M$ piracy...
Interesting viewpoint - and one I highly agree with.
I wouldn't care so much about DRM - because I don't re-share files. If I purchase music, I'd like the opportunity to do with it as I see fit - and might even put the digital music on a family member's computer/music player.
Take Peanut Press for example. They encrypt(ed?) their books with your full name and credit card #. I didn't mind putting that on a few trusted friend's PDA's - but I'm not going to re-distribute it across hell and back.
I wouldn't even mind some kind of secure but un-protected form of music / content.
The digital content I purchased is watermarked in some un-removable way. If I share that music, then I'm liable in some form. Or I lose my ability to purchase more. That would work even better than losing my rights to what I already have. I'd be careful about my files if that were the case..
Isn't the GPL just a "Click Through EULA", except for the fact that you don't "Click Through" it?
Same, really, if you ask me.
We want our cake (GPL, OSS, etc) but we wanna eat it too (i.e. all EULA's are invalid, thus don't bind us or count).
If EULA's aren't enforcable, then why would the GPL be the same?
"In general, a user is not obligated to read, let alone consent to any literature or envelope packaging that may be contained inside a product; otherwise such transactions would unduly burden users who have no notice of the terms and conditions of their possession of the object purchased, or the blind, or those unfamiliar with the language in which such terms are provided, etc."
So, a Linux company makes a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft will agree to not sue the pants off of Novell. Novell licenses Microsoft tech. Why is everyone complaining. They made a deal, but I'd wager that there's more to it right now than meets the eye...
The only thing I can say is maybe Novell is licensing some tech to make Windows Apps run better on Linux through, maybe, say, Wine.
Oh, no, no they can't do that you'll yell.
Cedega does. There are parts of Wine that Cedega doesn't open source. I.E. the proprietary libraries.
Novell for a long time has asked which apps users want to see run on Linux. I'd wager that this "deal" that people are whining about will actually HELP the adoption of Linux versions of software, if Novell is going down this path.
I, for one, welcome our new Microvell overlords. Or is that Novesoft?
I gotta duck 'cos Ballmer is throwing a chair my way..
In all seriousness, though...
MS Office is where it is. It's standard corporate feed. OOo is ok, but only ok. It's a clone of Word. But it's a LOT slower and doesn't support everything that Word does (Try to open a complex doc in OOo that Word saved). Oh, and it's not compatible with ALL documents. Try a seriously complex spreadsheet that uses ODBC to talk to a Faircomm database server and uses VB based macros to compute things that would normally be done by hand. Oh yeah, and there are 15 worksheets in this spreadsheet. OOo wouldn't get anywhere CLOSE..
Why do all the computer companies answer the "How many servers do you run?" question with "I can't tell you, that's classified."
People want to be impressed.
People aren't impressed when you show them a single mid-tower server on the floor/shelf.. because they had a tower under their desk that was 2x that 10 years ago..
They're impressed when you show them a rack full of 1 or 2U servers, or many many racks of them... Or you tell them "Yeah, we have around 2900 servers running this thing"...
I haven't had a CRASH as it were, yet. But I HAVE noticed it slows down really bad on BIG pages with lots of pictures on it... And then after I went back to Google's page.. it was still slow.
I did have a crash, but it was related to Media Player Classic...
I had the (mis)fortune to work a day volunteer style in an inner city computer lab.
All of the computers needed a re-install of Windows for Workgroups (oh, yeah, it was a long time ago) - almost ALL of the mouse balls were gone (we superglued the mice closed so they'd have to be broken to get into), several of the machines has BIOS passwords (erm, jumper) and a couple of them had been re-programmed via bios to not boot..
I left and they all had pristine Windows installs, they all had bios passwords (and the cases were locked), the mice were glued together, and the server that had been donated? We couldn't get it to boot (something about one of the kids had broken the card slot at the motherboard somehow).
And don't think for a second that some kid who is smarter than the educated IT guru... will bring in a CD-ROM or USB KEY or d/l a.EXE file that will run on the PC (even as a limited user) to VPN out of the school network, to his home machine, where he will instantly have.. full pr0n access again...
Could ALL be spyware-in-disguise. We don't know. How could we?
It's not just Vista's WGA we need to worry about. I mean, what better way to take over the world. Develop some cool little free app that EVERYONE starts using. Get it installed on a bajillion computers, then it grabs an auto-update and WHAMMO! You've got... "DUN DUN DUN!!!" SKYNET...
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Heck, feel glad that the "U Bend" (a.k.a. trap) had a water faucet. when maintenance boxed in our sink they took off the spigots off the mop sink, but left the drain functional. Then they boxed it in plywood. After the A/C was installed (and had dehumidified the room) - and the building's humidified air was shut off to the room .. no more humidity for us, and the drain dried out.
.. ugly hacks?
... that someone stuck a 10base-T hub on at 200 feet (give or take) because the hub actually strengthened the signal? Then they filled the hub with 8 10baseT computers..
.. they put in BNC .. then ran ARCNet over it (averaged about 300kbit/sec). Then complained it was too slow (well no kidding!!)
... after they'd sliced through it moving office furniture ... (yeah, it kinda worked)..
Hmmm
How about a Netware 3.x server stuck in a closet between two 10base2 (coax) runs, connecting one segment with another (glorified IPX router).
How about a 395 foot run of BNC
How about a 450 foot run of BNC with old, frayed screw on ends. That ohmed out at about 76 ohms. And they wondered why the network was slow.. (I re-crimped all the ends and cut the wire approximately in half, and used a second NIC in the seerver). In that same place, one of the workers figured out that if they took one of the BNC connectors off the T in the back of the PC, the network would go down and they could just sit there and do nothing...
The company that had a 1000 foot run, so instead of buying ARCNet wire
The BNC wire I saw that someone had repaired with a paper clip and electrical tape
And we won't even talk about how many networks I ran into that looked like
Server ----- hub ----- hub ----- hub ----- hub
and they wondered why the people on the 4th hub would lose server connections randomly..
I used to create Netware 3.x servers with a DOS boot disk with the netware netx drivers, fdisk and format ...
;)
boot, fdisk make 20 meg part, reboot, format 20 meg part, login to the server, copy the c:\netware directory to the C: drive, reboot, load server.exe (the lan drivers were in the c:\netware directory, as were most of the (at the time) recent SCSI drivers I needed..
Then once the server comes up, create SYS: (which made the bindery), hit it from remote and copy in the SYS: stuff. Took longer for me to type it than it did to create it
Not sure what you're talking about ..
I maintain 30+ corporate Windows laptops .. none of them have ever lost a WPA key...
i have a dell latitude d610 that sleeps / wakes consistently every time in winxp. the only trouble i have with that laptop is if I reboot from winxp to linux (currently ubuntu-edgy) I need to physically power the machine OFF or the sound won't init..
sleeping under linux even works pretty well
I worked at a regional hospital chain for 2 years.
.. 8 hours a day. Didn't matter if you worked or not -- you just had to be there.
.. Why? Because I wasn't there. No matter that I started being 65% more productive working FEWER hours..
What really blew was that they expected you in your seat
Some weeks I worked 40 hours. Some weeks I worked closer to 65. Nights, weekends. Anything to get the projects / fixes / whatever done.
Problem was, in my 40 hour week, there were times that I only WORKED 15-20 hours. The rest of the time was walking from place to place, moving candy from a dish in one department to another, playing on the 'net, or just doing nothing at all and trying to keep from falling asleep.
Towards the end, I started coming in when I wanted. I still got ALL my projects finished on time, helped my co-workers on stuff - and only worked 15-20 hours a week.
Boss called me in and fired me
Aah well he was a jerk (still is, from what I hear)..
my only issue with pfsense is that if you don't have 128mb of ram, it constantly complains at you ...
I use smoothwall ..
isn't that what http://www.pfsense.com/ is for?
Like it or not, I'd wager that we'll be seeing more companies using technology that will either be like Steam, or will be Steam or a variant/offshoot of.. Right now it's a game deployment platform, but why would M$ not salivate over being able to offer Office xx - on a platform THEY control, you run it WHEN they want you to run it, and they can ship updates to you as they see fit. DRM. Anti-piracy.
Free-download and they can to technology previews, or even offer 30 day limited free-trials that expire, and do so as instructed (instead some stupid registry hack).
Then they wouldn't need Genuine Advantage. Free stuff is, well, free. And stuff that isn't free can be tried out, then expires. It would sure kill a lot of the M$ piracy...
Interesting viewpoint - and one I highly agree with.
I wouldn't care so much about DRM - because I don't re-share files. If I purchase music, I'd like the opportunity to do with it as I see fit - and might even put the digital music on a family member's computer/music player.
Take Peanut Press for example. They encrypt(ed?) their books with your full name and credit card #. I didn't mind putting that on a few trusted friend's PDA's - but I'm not going to re-distribute it across hell and back.
I wouldn't even mind some kind of secure but un-protected form of music / content.
The digital content I purchased is watermarked in some un-removable way. If I share that music, then I'm liable in some form. Or I lose my ability to purchase more. That would work even better than losing my rights to what I already have. I'd be careful about my files if that were the case..
Isn't the GPL just a "Click Through EULA", except for the fact that you don't "Click Through" it?
Same, really, if you ask me.
We want our cake (GPL, OSS, etc) but we wanna eat it too (i.e. all EULA's are invalid, thus don't bind us or count).
If EULA's aren't enforcable, then why would the GPL be the same?
"In general, a user is not obligated to read, let alone consent to any literature or envelope packaging that may be contained inside a product; otherwise such transactions would unduly burden users who have no notice of the terms and conditions of their possession of the object purchased, or the blind, or those unfamiliar with the language in which such terms are provided, etc."
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract
So, a Linux company makes a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft will agree to not sue the pants off of Novell. Novell licenses Microsoft tech. Why is everyone complaining. They made a deal, but I'd wager that there's more to it right now than meets the eye...
The only thing I can say is maybe Novell is licensing some tech to make Windows Apps run better on Linux through, maybe, say, Wine.
Oh, no, no they can't do that you'll yell.
Cedega does. There are parts of Wine that Cedega doesn't open source. I.E. the proprietary libraries.
Novell for a long time has asked which apps users want to see run on Linux. I'd wager that this "deal" that people are whining about will actually HELP the adoption of Linux versions of software, if Novell is going down this path.
I, for one, welcome our new Microvell overlords. Or is that Novesoft?
I gotta duck 'cos Ballmer is throwing a chair my way..
In all seriousness, though...
MS Office is where it is. It's standard corporate feed. OOo is ok, but only ok. It's a clone of Word. But it's a LOT slower and doesn't support everything that Word does (Try to open a complex doc in OOo that Word saved). Oh, and it's not compatible with ALL documents. Try a seriously complex spreadsheet that uses ODBC to talk to a Faircomm database server and uses VB based macros to compute things that would normally be done by hand. Oh yeah, and there are 15 worksheets in this spreadsheet. OOo wouldn't get anywhere CLOSE..
it was on supersize me .. and something about they died early or at least had bypasses at an early age
Why do all the computer companies answer the "How many servers do you run?" question with "I can't tell you, that's classified."
.. because they had a tower under their desk that was 2x that 10 years ago..
People want to be impressed.
People aren't impressed when you show them a single mid-tower server on the floor/shelf
They're impressed when you show them a rack full of 1 or 2U servers, or many many racks of them...
Or you tell them "Yeah, we have around 2900 servers running this thing"...
I haven't had a CRASH as it were, yet. But I HAVE noticed it slows down really bad on BIG pages with lots of pictures on it ... And then after I went back to Google's page .. it was still slow.
I did have a crash, but it was related to Media Player Classic...
I installed Ubuntu 6.06, and the next day after, they released Edgy.
I went to the upgrade tool at my work (laptop on a secondary table) and told it to upgrade.
The Internet connection there is WAY overloaded, and I would have only gotten 20k/sec there.
Took the laptop home, upgraded to Edgy on my cable modem.
Took a while (as the average download was a blazing 75k/sec) but overall it worked beautifully.
I'd installed FF2.0 before the upgrade, and after the upgrade, Firefox shows the Mozilla branding again (and not the Debian branding).
I'm not discounting anyone else's problems but it worked great!!! for me..
Do I wrap my laptop in tinfoil yet, or not?
Mod me down for my opinion??
..
Sweet!
Welcome to Slashdot!
Mod this one down, too...
This one is "OFFTOPIC"
But "FUNNY" would be ok, too..
This is 2006.
I think Stallman is proving himself more and more irrelevant as time goes by.
I think overall, he is actually now hurting the revolution he started.
Souther than texas or florida..
.. have responsibilities here
norther than antarctica
and not for a while
I've had it crash twice or so on me now.
Both times, it was watching a video clip embedded in the browser (I think it's Media Player Classic).
So probably not FF fault..
case in point :)
I had the (mis)fortune to work a day volunteer style in an inner city computer lab.
All of the computers needed a re-install of Windows for Workgroups (oh, yeah, it was a long time ago) - almost ALL of the mouse balls were gone (we superglued the mice closed so they'd have to be broken to get into), several of the machines has BIOS passwords (erm, jumper) and a couple of them had been re-programmed via bios to not boot..
I left and they all had pristine Windows installs, they all had bios passwords (and the cases were locked), the mice were glued together, and the server that had been donated? We couldn't get it to boot (something about one of the kids had broken the card slot at the motherboard somehow).
And don't think for a second that some kid who is smarter than the educated IT guru ... will bring in a CD-ROM or USB KEY or d/l a .EXE file that will run on the PC (even as a limited user) to VPN out of the school network, to his home machine, where he will instantly have .. full pr0n access again...
I own a Sony Wega TV .. love it .. one works, one does not (something about lightning striking the tree outside)
.. I'd buy another. I couldn't care less about video games :)
2 Sony receivers
Sony DVD players
They do all of the above fairly well...
And
Even though he's occasionally mis-aligned himself, he DOES have a very valid point.
.. it's OSS .. but closed source stuff, why not)
... "DUN DUN DUN!!!" SKYNET...
But to what end? Why couldn't any kind of software do this?
Free anti-virus..(not Clam
SpyBot S&D
Ad-Aware
Hi-Jack This!
Could ALL be spyware-in-disguise. We don't know. How could we?
It's not just Vista's WGA we need to worry about. I mean, what better way to take over the world. Develop some cool little free app that EVERYONE starts using. Get it installed on a bajillion computers, then it grabs an auto-update and WHAMMO! You've got