For Something Positive, I think that this strip sums it up nicely... There was another one that I wanted to post, but it's too far back and I'm too lazy to look for it.
I don't know where you live, but where I hail from (across the Sound from Seattle), even my tiny town has a hardware store. I went there for Torx driver bits and they had them all the way down to T1 (smallest, REALLY tiny) at $0.99 each. Next time you see them, pick some up; you won't have to worry about being beat by a screw (screwed?) again.
Arrggghhhh... leave it to me to be the first not to use the preview button on the new server. Also, I like the backwards < and > on the simpsons html tag... that's some great work there, self.
Hey, this does sound interesting. I have a few spare computers around and a little knowledge of PERL... I think that I'll look into this tomorrow. That would be _really_ neat. If I do manage to get something working, I (of course) will insure that it won't remain that way for long by posting it back up here...
It really shouldn't be too hard. I've been staring at your post thinking for a bit, and the best way to do it that I can think of is to read in the config template file from the kernel source tree (have several selectable versions) and generate a huge page full of radio-select buttons. Once that is submitted, an MD5 hash is applied to the generated config file. If it matches an existing
package (unlikely at best), simply serve that up.
Otherwise, make a new build tree named "builds/$VERSION/$MDSUM" and copy the config file into it. Build the kernel, tar.gz the resulting modules and kernel image, and email the links to the person.
This would require quite a bit of CPU horsepower, but it would make for a nice, small kernel download and a sort of set-and-forget build. Set the options and press the button on your lunch break, and have the link sitting in your inbox when you get home (unless it's slashdotted, in which case I'll come home to a hole melted in my floor where a server and accompanying cable modem used to be).
Hey, sounds like what I did. My last school had 2 labs, one downstairs and one upstairs. The downstairs lab ("business lab") was run by an incompetent moron. Well, I did NET SEND * (insert inside joke here) and the results were interesting, seeing as how that was the first time I used it. All 30-odd computers beeped simultaneously, then silence... and the phone rang. Oops, forgot that it goes upstairs to the more-comptetent-administrator's lab, too. Good thing it was like 5 days from the end of that school year!
I can encode a DVD down to a single byte! Yes, that's right, stream a single 8-bit byte from the internet to your computer and watch a DVD! However, the media cartels have already gotten to this one, so it requires a copy of the DVD in your drive for "verification" purposes. People will definately pay for this invention!
Seriously, though, I think this is great. Now I'll be able to store all of my porn, I mean movies in less disk space - a valuable commodity when your main computer is a laptop with a 20gb drive.
I don't suppose you want to sell a copy of x86 Rhapsody? I've been looking all over the place for it... Email me at sniffers2k1 @ yahoo.com, please. (Remove spaces around the @ sign, obviously)
Finally, a use for goatse. (No link provided, we all know it already.) I'm sure that some Nigerian 419er would be happy to get a hello.jpg-renamed-to-passport.jpg in their email:-P
Never. The things you own end up owning you.
</fightclub>
Anyways, the best time to buy new stuff is not during a major sale, amazingly enough. If you track a tech product from release to deprecation/obsolecense [I probably just spelled both of those words wrong], You'll see that the lifecycle goes like this:
1) Introduction - high price
2) Slight price drop, to account for novelty factor
3) Steady price for most of the rest of its life at the top
4) Rebate, or sudden price drop to make room for the next product
5) Price drop as a new product to replace it is released.
The best time to buy, if you're really set on one model, is at stage 5. The new thing is out and the older one is dropped somewhat in price. If you buy during stage 4, as many people do, you'll probably get burned, because it can drop an additional $100 or more (depending on its original price) between 4 and 5. Look at what happens with the G4 towers: You get discounts for a while, then a new one comes out at (usually) somewhere close to the original price of the previous model. The previous model drops a few hundred dollars. Rinse and repeat.
Also, when a new model comes up, look on eBay. You can get a good deal on a slightly used one, because the techies who want to upgrade and have the latest one will be putting their stuff up to finance the purchase.
Well, they plan on powering a future version with a fuel cell, right? Those require hydrogen. Hydrogen is lighter than air, right? Well, if they fill the plane with enough hydrogen, who needs wings? It can just float into the sky! And to power it, it can still just burn the hydrogen!
Case modding is fun. I stuffed my last PC into an old SGI Iris Indigo that I was getting pissed at (blew up my KVM switch before I realized that the keyboard port is a few pins away from standard PS/2...). However, watch what you're stuffing that motherboard-of-the-week into. I don't care if you rip up a Sega Saturn, a Sony PlayStation, an old SPARC, or an Iris Indigo - those were all mass-produced systems. (With the exception of the Indigo, these were all on the mini-itx.com site.) No one is going to miss that old tape deck, and making your own case out of plexiglass is just cool.
What I don't want to see is someone ripping up a piece of history for 15 minutes of fame. I'm donning my flame suit already, but just give me a chance here. Stuffing an Eden mini-itx into a 1/10 size Beetle is just cool. However, if you rip up an old NeXT Cube, or an Apple III, I'll be forced to kill you. Old hardware is cool and useless; old, rare hardware is to be kept around by any means. Go ahead and rip apart that old boat-anchor XT you have lying around for a new bullet-proof (literally) box, but if you put a cutting wheel through a rare piece of hardware, you deserve to have your guts ripped out and a new motherboard sewn into place, just like the antique that you destroyed.
So go ahead and stuff a micro-pc in that old 80's toploader VCR, or a PS1. Just stay away from the truly rare, cool stuff - it needs no modifications to be neat and interesting.
Unfortunately, Fibre Channel is expensive. It requires expensive host bus adapters and even more expensive switches. And of course it runs over fiber optic cable, which isn't exactly penny kit. So the industry decided to try running it over Ethernet.
I beg to differ. I built a Fibre Channel storage array with 9x 9.1gb 10,000RPM Seagate drives, an HP
fibre HBA, and copper cabling (CAT-5e) for $250 (but the enclosure was extra). I designed and built the interface cards for the drives for $9 each, including parts. The drives were $11 each through an eBay seller. The HBA was $20 (I got a package of 2 for $40) and supports Fiber (SM and MM) and
copper through a GBIC module. I just soldered the CAT-5e cable directly to the PCI board (64-bit 66mhz, backwards compatible to 32bit 33mhz) and ran it out the backplate to the array, which is built on metal shelf pieces from the local hardware store. It looks crazy, works great, and is super fast. The capacity isn't great (80gb), but $250 is cheap considering that it sustains 100mb/sec reads and writes (try that on a SCSI drive that costs anywhere less than $500!).
Sure, that isn't an enterprise level setup - I doubt that the sysadmin will sit down to design and troubleshoot fibre interface cards in his spare time, but it does show you that fibre can be cheap.
Speaking of which, does anyone want to buy a Fibre Channel array? I'll throw in a HBA for free. Works great!
Your device already exists, and they can be purchased at any respectable ham radio outlet. It's an RF frequency counter with attached antenna. It's about the size of a small paperback with a 6" antenna coming off the top. It displays the frequency (and signal strength on the high-end models) of the highest-strengh signal that the antenna picks up. Just wave it over each seat, and if a critical frequency band shows up, or the signal is above some arbitrary strength, it must be a terrorist! (or just tell them to turn off the @#$%ing laptop, that works too)
Ocean water is drinkable, and it can sustain you for the rest of your life!
Humor aside, desalinazation (i'm sure I spelled that wrong) does work - it's just expensive. Get a copy of your local sailing magazine, and look at water purification systems. These will go for years without maintenance, and require only a 12v power source.
All that Quartz Extreme does to your GPU is to have it push a few textured polygons around. The window manager "renders" each window as a bitmapped texture and pushes it to the graphics card attached to a flat 2d polygon. The only reasons you need a good graphics card are:
* Those textures are pretty big, so you need video RAM to handle it.
* Some older video cards might not be able to handle constantly-changing textures.
That's it. Your GeForce4 (or Radeon 8500)'s power is being used to render a whole 4 (or so) textured polygons. (Admittedly, the textures are complex, but it should be able to handle that just great.) Drop that to 2 or 3 polygons when you're in Bryce, as it's a fullscreen app (Menubar, black background which may not even be a separate polygon, main window). Considering that a moderately complex scene in Bryce will have tens of thousands of polygons textured very complexly, I think that 2 or 3 more won't slow you down too much...
Look at the picture at the top of page 3 for the review, along the left edge of the chip. Some idiot bent a pin! I'd think they'd be a little less "extreme" with a top-of-the-line, unreleased processor...
I know that I'm going somewhat offtopic here (it's only karma), but here goes:
IPTables is a horrible system, in my opinion. IPChains is far easier to use. Make sure it's enabled in your kernel and that ipv4 forwarding is enabled (something in/proc/net or thereabouts, I haven't used either system in a while). Then:
ipchains -A input --source-address 192.168.0.0/24 --destination-address *your-dsl-modem* -J masq
Slashdot Mirror
Gah! Intel makes PC Chips products? Now I know why the rest of their products suck so hard!
Yes, this was a joke. PC Chips motherboards are the worst pieces of junk ever. Never buy them. That will be all.
Yes, that may be true. However, no amount of thermal diodes on-die will help a burning processor if the motherboard doesn't bother to read them!
For Something Positive, I think that this strip sums it up nicely... There was another one that I wanted to post, but it's too far back and I'm too lazy to look for it.
I don't know where you live, but where I hail from (across the Sound from Seattle), even my tiny town has a hardware store. I went there for Torx driver bits and they had them all the way down to T1 (smallest, REALLY tiny) at $0.99 each. Next time you see them, pick some up; you won't have to worry about being beat by a screw (screwed?) again.
Arrggghhhh... leave it to me to be the first not to use the preview button on the new server. Also, I like the backwards < and > on the simpsons html tag... that's some great work there, self.
>simpsons/simpsons<
Anyways, I think that the Exodus West cluster, which has served us so faithfully, should get a good send-off - say, one last surge of traffic to permanently melt the last remining servers to the rack posts.
Hey, this does sound interesting. I have a few spare computers around and a little knowledge of PERL... I think that I'll look into this tomorrow. That would be _really_ neat. If I do manage to get something working, I (of course) will insure that it won't remain that way for long by posting it back up here...
It really shouldn't be too hard. I've been staring at your post thinking for a bit, and the best way to do it that I can think of is to read in the config template file from the kernel source tree (have several selectable versions) and generate a huge page full of radio-select buttons. Once that is submitted, an MD5 hash is applied to the generated config file. If it matches an existing package (unlikely at best), simply serve that up. Otherwise, make a new build tree named "builds/$VERSION/$MDSUM" and copy the config file into it. Build the kernel, tar.gz the resulting modules and kernel image, and email the links to the person.
This would require quite a bit of CPU horsepower, but it would make for a nice, small kernel download and a sort of set-and-forget build. Set the options and press the button on your lunch break, and have the link sitting in your inbox when you get home (unless it's slashdotted, in which case I'll come home to a hole melted in my floor where a server and accompanying cable modem used to be).
Hey, sounds like what I did. My last school had 2 labs, one downstairs and one upstairs. The downstairs lab ("business lab") was run by an incompetent moron. Well, I did NET SEND * (insert inside joke here) and the results were interesting, seeing as how that was the first time I used it. All 30-odd computers beeped simultaneously, then silence... and the phone rang. Oops, forgot that it goes upstairs to the more-comptetent-administrator's lab, too. Good thing it was like 5 days from the end of that school year!
I can encode a DVD down to a single byte! Yes, that's right, stream a single 8-bit byte from the internet to your computer and watch a DVD! However, the media cartels have already gotten to this one, so it requires a copy of the DVD in your drive for "verification" purposes. People will definately pay for this invention!
Seriously, though, I think this is great. Now I'll be able to store all of my porn, I mean movies in less disk space - a valuable commodity when your main computer is a laptop with a 20gb drive.
Very offtopic - but I have to ask:
I don't suppose you want to sell a copy of x86 Rhapsody? I've been looking all over the place for it... Email me at sniffers2k1 @ yahoo.com, please. (Remove spaces around the @ sign, obviously)
Finally, a use for goatse. (No link provided, we all know it already.) I'm sure that some Nigerian 419er would be happy to get a hello.jpg-renamed-to-passport.jpg in their email :-P
Never. The things you own end up owning you.
</fightclub>
Anyways, the best time to buy new stuff is not during a major sale, amazingly enough. If you track a tech product from release to deprecation/obsolecense [I probably just spelled both of those words wrong], You'll see that the lifecycle goes like this:
1) Introduction - high price
2) Slight price drop, to account for novelty factor
3) Steady price for most of the rest of its life at the top
4) Rebate, or sudden price drop to make room for the next product
5) Price drop as a new product to replace it is released.
The best time to buy, if you're really set on one model, is at stage 5. The new thing is out and the older one is dropped somewhat in price. If you buy during stage 4, as many people do, you'll probably get burned, because it can drop an additional $100 or more (depending on its original price) between 4 and 5. Look at what happens with the G4 towers: You get discounts for a while, then a new one comes out at (usually) somewhere close to the original price of the previous model. The previous model drops a few hundred dollars. Rinse and repeat.
Also, when a new model comes up, look on eBay. You can get a good deal on a slightly used one, because the techies who want to upgrade and have the latest one will be putting their stuff up to finance the purchase.
Follow the reasoning carefully, now...
Well, they plan on powering a future version with a fuel cell, right? Those require hydrogen. Hydrogen is lighter than air, right? Well, if they fill the plane with enough hydrogen, who needs wings? It can just float into the sky! And to power it, it can still just burn the hydrogen!
Oh, damn. Never mind.
Case modding is fun. I stuffed my last PC into an old SGI Iris Indigo that I was getting pissed at (blew up my KVM switch before I realized that the keyboard port is a few pins away from standard PS/2...). However, watch what you're stuffing that motherboard-of-the-week into. I don't care if you rip up a Sega Saturn, a Sony PlayStation, an old SPARC, or an Iris Indigo - those were all mass-produced systems. (With the exception of the Indigo, these were all on the mini-itx.com site.) No one is going to miss that old tape deck, and making your own case out of plexiglass is just cool.
What I don't want to see is someone ripping up a piece of history for 15 minutes of fame. I'm donning my flame suit already, but just give me a chance here. Stuffing an Eden mini-itx into a 1/10 size Beetle is just cool. However, if you rip up an old NeXT Cube, or an Apple III, I'll be forced to kill you. Old hardware is cool and useless; old, rare hardware is to be kept around by any means. Go ahead and rip apart that old boat-anchor XT you have lying around for a new bullet-proof (literally) box, but if you put a cutting wheel through a rare piece of hardware, you deserve to have your guts ripped out and a new motherboard sewn into place, just like the antique that you destroyed.
So go ahead and stuff a micro-pc in that old 80's toploader VCR, or a PS1. Just stay away from the truly rare, cool stuff - it needs no modifications to be neat and interesting.
I beg to differ. I built a Fibre Channel storage array with 9x 9.1gb 10,000RPM Seagate drives, an HP fibre HBA, and copper cabling (CAT-5e) for $250 (but the enclosure was extra). I designed and built the interface cards for the drives for $9 each, including parts. The drives were $11 each through an eBay seller. The HBA was $20 (I got a package of 2 for $40) and supports Fiber (SM and MM) and copper through a GBIC module. I just soldered the CAT-5e cable directly to the PCI board (64-bit 66mhz, backwards compatible to 32bit 33mhz) and ran it out the backplate to the array, which is built on metal shelf pieces from the local hardware store. It looks crazy, works great, and is super fast. The capacity isn't great (80gb), but $250 is cheap considering that it sustains 100mb/sec reads and writes (try that on a SCSI drive that costs anywhere less than $500!).
Sure, that isn't an enterprise level setup - I doubt that the sysadmin will sit down to design and troubleshoot fibre interface cards in his spare time, but it does show you that fibre can be cheap.
Speaking of which, does anyone want to buy a Fibre Channel array? I'll throw in a HBA for free. Works great!
Your device already exists, and they can be purchased at any respectable ham radio outlet. It's an RF frequency counter with attached antenna. It's about the size of a small paperback with a 6" antenna coming off the top. It displays the frequency (and signal strength on the high-end models) of the highest-strengh signal that the antenna picks up. Just wave it over each seat, and if a critical frequency band shows up, or the signal is above some arbitrary strength, it must be a terrorist! (or just tell them to turn off the @#$%ing laptop, that works too)
Ocean water is drinkable, and it can sustain you for the rest of your life!
Humor aside, desalinazation (i'm sure I spelled that wrong) does work - it's just expensive. Get a copy of your local sailing magazine, and look at water purification systems. These will go for years without maintenance, and require only a 12v power source.
Furbies come to mind... They don't say anything meaningful either. However, furbies are far more fun to destroy
I was under the impression that the four cycles were:
12341234...
_|-|_|-|
1 = low (0)
2 = rising edge
3 = high (1)
4 = falling edge
I am probably wrong about this, but I thought I might as well throw it out there.
Proprietary
Stuff makes me want to vomit
God damn Sony junk
All that Quartz Extreme does to your GPU is to have it push a few textured polygons around. The window manager "renders" each window as a bitmapped texture and pushes it to the graphics card attached to a flat 2d polygon. The only reasons you need a good graphics card are:
* Those textures are pretty big, so you need video RAM to handle it.
* Some older video cards might not be able to handle constantly-changing textures.
That's it. Your GeForce4 (or Radeon 8500)'s power is being used to render a whole 4 (or so) textured polygons. (Admittedly, the textures are complex, but it should be able to handle that just great.) Drop that to 2 or 3 polygons when you're in Bryce, as it's a fullscreen app (Menubar, black background which may not even be a separate polygon, main window). Considering that a moderately complex scene in Bryce will have tens of thousands of polygons textured very complexly, I think that 2 or 3 more won't slow you down too much...
Look at the picture at the top of page 3 for the review, along the left edge of the chip. Some idiot bent a pin! I'd think they'd be a little less "extreme" with a top-of-the-line, unreleased processor...
I know that I'm going somewhat offtopic here (it's only karma), but here goes:
/proc/net or thereabouts, I haven't used either system in a while). Then:
IPTables is a horrible system, in my opinion. IPChains is far easier to use. Make sure it's enabled in your kernel and that ipv4 forwarding is enabled (something in
ipchains -A input --source-address 192.168.0.0/24 --destination-address *your-dsl-modem* -J masq
Or something like that.
But what if they sent color faxes? I hear you can do that now. Then, I suppose the 'fax' of the case wouldn't be so black and white...