If I was a betting man I would bet that the only similarity between the old Napster and the new Napster will be the name and the logo.
Odds are it will be (no, I didn't RTFA) a streaming media subscription where the company has almost enough servers and almost enough bandwidth to provide you with streaming audio that you can listen to as often as you like, any song on their list, 24x7. Some kind of propriatary player (no, can't download them to your Rio or iPod) program on your Windows 2000/XP computer that has your unique ID. Possibly caching (encrypted) them client-side to make future authorized re-listenings possible without soaking up the same bandwidth. Possibly in some wonk ass compression algorythm that nobody has ever heard of, not that that is a bad thing.
I have this sneaking feeling that it is going to have no P2P whatsoever, but that's just a guess.
And when it comes to money, odds are it will be less complicated than having a recurring monthly payment taken directly from your credit card, similar to AOL and all those MMORPGs, etc.
The upside? If you find a song on there that has the same title and artist as a song in your head, odds are it will be the same song and won't be incomplete, compressed to like 64kBits/s or worse, recorded with the bass/treble settings horribly munged, recorded analog from a cassette tape, or a loop of Madonna saying 'What the hell are you doing?' It will be a fairly clean recreation of what you think it should be.
The first thought when I read the OP header was 'somebody needs to get laid.' I was even going to post that, but I know one of you clowns would follow up with 'You're new here, aren't you?'
I addressed this as a response to the first reply to that message ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98803&cid=8431 772 ) - we may be in violent agreement.
-Yea, RedHat's whole purpose is to bleed Microsoft of money.
That was a misinterpretation of what I said. What I meant by 'put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut' was 'gain market share in the corporate workplace' (emphesis on juggernaut, not on Microsoft) which is pretty much what RH wants as a business objective.
By bleeding cash I meant that RedHat was spending gobs more on the development and support of their free distro of Linux than it was bringing in as revenue. As I understand it, that is exactly why RH9 is their last free desktop distro and that support on that ends in April.
You had guessed it right - I was hitting System Settings - Mouse each time and didn't even realize the other one was there. Thanks by the way, as small an issue as that may seem, needing to drag my mouse all over my desk to do things was the subtle thorn in my side that kept pushing me back out of RH9 into (the other OS.)
Maybe I just need to make my own class, suck up my pride and invite some college kid over to tutor me in Linux. A couple of hours each weekend and I will (hopefully) move from inept punk user to someone that knows what is really happening under the hood.
-IMO free software creates more jobs than it destroys.
The actual free software creates jobs. The continual hammering of the mantra 'software wants to be free' destroys jobs. The question becomes which is more powerful, a tool or a theology?
If a tool is more powerful then the free software creating jobs will win. If a theology is more powerful then corporate America is going to outsource the jobs faster than free software can create them.
Ghandi suggested that theology is stronger than tools (actually I have no idea what he suggested, but I'm going to gamble here and go with it.)
I hate to bury it so deep, but I think I have the answer for F/OSS to catch on, the catalyst that has the potential to set the movement on fire (in a good way.)
Forget coding for free - TEACH for free. Yes it is possible to learn on your own, read the books, install it on your own, come up to speed on your own - if you know what tools, resources, books, and install scripts to run in the first place, if you know where to find the instructions in the first place. Google helps, but there is no substitute for having someone walk you through it, explain the upside and downside to doing stuff, let you experiment and when you get off track quickly put you back on track. Instead of spending 10 hours a week haxoring OSS code, spend 10 hours a week offering small workgroup sized sessions of simply messing around with Linux. Finding RPMs on the net, checking dependancies, messing with video drivers, adding new programs, shell scripts, different shells, XServer tricks, remote desktops, setting up services like FTP, security issues, patching their kernel, compiling their kernel, CVS - all that stuff.
Yea it is all pretty simple once you are familiar with it, but it is all pretty well hidden and obscure until you know where to look. You won't get credit for it in the source code and you can't put it on your resume, but those 10 hours a week will go a LOT farther to the movement than writing a new optimized driver for an obscure network card on a certain chipset in a 7 year old laptop.
Oh yea, and start now : how the hell do I tweak the mouse movement speed and acceleration in Gnome on RH9? I need it to move across the screen FASTER when I move my mouse - ARG!
I agree, what I meant by 'put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut' was 'gain market share in the corporate workplace.'
Overall the numbers of OSS developers with regard to consumers is analogous to two stewardesses on a transAtlantic 747-400. Serving drinks to 600 people. Twice. Those two can argue about whether bottled water is better because it is free and everybody knows what is in it, or Pepsi is better because of all the R&D that goes into it, or Jack Daniels is better because it is America's favorite and Pepsi is an evil corporation... but the 600 consumers could give a fsck about the refreshment 'holy war' going on between the two stew's - they just want something to drink with ice in it.
IBM, Novell, Apple, and to a lesser extend RedHat - what these companies are offering is not OSS for the emotional well being of the customers, nor OSS so the customer can have the source, nor even a PR boost with the OSS crowd. IBM, Novell, to a lesser extent Apple and to a much lesser extent RH are offering a complete end to end business solution that a company can implement, satisfy 100% of their business needs, run the software they need to run in order to run a business. A chunk of that is the desktop and Linux on the desktop with OpenOffice is something they can directly make changes to (ie, have source to) in order to be a best fit solution for a large company's needs. In is only part of the solution, however, with big back ends supplied by IBM or Novell doing back end processing of business stuff (this is where they make the big bucks, IBM in particular.)
In addition to shaving $500 a seat (bulk subscription costs of MS operating system and office suite) in order to move those funds into the development and implementation of a customer's back office, if I had to guess they are going with Linux as the desktop component (Novell, IBM) because they will then have control front to back of the entire business environment in order to better make a complete solution work. And that is what they are betting corporate America (etc..) will pay big money for down the road.
Since when was Netware either open source or free? Effective April 2004 RedHat has dropped their Linux desktop as an unviable product (their support revenue in no way covered their expenses.)
That is an amazing list of high quality companies, but to suggest that the OSS/free software available from Apple, IBM, Novell, or RedHat are driving business units that are making massive profits is simply insane. All of those companies are bankrolling OSS/free software from their existing mountains of cash with the hopes that by offering it at a loss they can put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut, and I would wager that each of them is hemmoraging cash from the business unit in the process.
The long term view is that eventually by reclaiming the desktop they will be able to provide services, support, and administrative tools that will be profitable, but in the past 3 years and for the immediate future RedHat is spelling it out loud and clear : OSS on the desktop is not a profit driven business venture.
Even funner is when one of the clients 'adopt' some of the existing codes but neglects to tell the new partner what they changed the meaning to... nothing like getting a purchase order for seven train-car loads of pork bellies to make life fun for a computer part supplier.
For the record I think that all the folks that invented COBOL realized that nobody was taking their threat serious, so they upped the ante and invented ANSI/x.12 EDI.
Good God - it is surely a good thing that they are going to use that new-fangled XML encryption and encoding. I feel sorry for the poor fuckers that have to try and hack XML - I mean what mortal human could comprehend, much less spoof headers written in PURE ASCII.
Rearrange your work schedule so you start at 7am and get off at 3pm or 4pm. By hitting the streets at semi- off hours you will cut your commute time by possibly half (less traffic.) Time saved : 1 hour per day on the average.
By hitting your seat at 7am when the office is empty and quiet you can get more productive sooner, and get more done between 7am and 9am than most people have done by noon.
Let a woman take you clothes shopping, throw out everything in your closet and replace it with whatever she suggests. Make sure everything matches everything else. Time saved : none, but nobody will know you got dressed in the dark before you had caffeine in your system.
Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day. God I love to sleep in so I hate this one.
Get your news from FARK (www.fark.com) In the hour it takes to watch the news on TV you could have a synopsis of the important events around the globe from a hundred different news sources. If it is newsworthy, it's on FARK.
Cancel your MMORPG accounts (stop playing Everquest). This will give you back 1000 hours per year. Maybe more.
-Anyone who hooks up through Slashdot Personals -- you **MUST** post about it! Karma be damned!
Well I hooked up (and GOOD) via Craigslist (www.craigslist.org - pick a city)... does that count? I'm talking some freaky shit too, not your run of mill freaky but some stack overflowing, buffer overrunning, illegal exception throwing, divide by zero at runtime kind of freaky.
I would give details but it has absolutely nothing to do with college kids sharing P2P files - too bad. As for the OP: Ever consider setting up a massive archive of ripped music on a server in the Library, access limited to IP addresses within the university subnet? Limit access to each individual file one person at a time, just like the library. Buy a copy of each CD before ripping it to the server, just like the library. Go talk to your librarian, get her in the loop and make her feel like a hero, important - she may not get freaky like the one I met on Craigs but odds are she will figure out a way to make your fileshare on campus a viable project. Think the Gutenburg project, of music.
I agree with you. And neither of us has addressed the OP's question.
Want to come up to speed fast in a Windows environment? Go to the local white-box clone builder shop in your city, one that has a repair shop / build shop in the back, and talk to the big dog. Explain that you are a long time Unix hacker for a local ISP and as they are converting to Windows on the desktop you need to come up to speed in a hurry. Tell him you will eagerly come in on weekends, work a full shift doing whatever shit jobs the other techs don't want to do, help build computers, as long as you get to participate in the stuff you want to learn. Help him pull cables if you have to in order to participate in the configuration, installation, security, Active Directory stuff, users, rights, administration, etc... If he says that 'nothing is free' and can't understand why you would offer free labor, tell him that you will work for minimum wage and he can pay you in hardware.
Those guys see some of the most fuxored systems on the planet, support some of the lamest users in corporate America, and if you are in a hurry to come up to speed the other techs will happily trade you in exchange for sharing your experience with them.
Granted - but in this specific case this guy is the sys/admin (or one of them.) Seriously - on a technical scale is there anybody watching over the sys/admins, or maybe he isn't that far up the food chain of sys/admins being one of the 'outsiders'.
As for MAC addresses, bring in a Linksys cablemodem router and clone the MAC address of the original work machine. This stops being funny of course when someone up the food chain tries to access the original box via IP and finds nothing but a firewall, of course.
I used to be afraid of dust, etc on drives and wouldn't have even considered running one with the case open - so my boss took an old MFM drive (ok this was a long time ago), took out the screws, popped off the case top, put it in a machine, started it up. We used it for a while watching the head arms swing back and forth, continued to use it for a while until that was boring and reassembled it and continued to use it as a regular machine.
I was amazed at first like some sort of magic trick, but in the office it wasn't a dust storm or smokey environment to begin with... then again it wasn't mission critical data - just two sys/admins fuxoring around.
Another way to do this is to put it on a piece of paper on hardwood desk (the paper to glossy wood friction is fairly low, improvise here) and tap the drive on one corner so as to spin it around in a circle. Use a big desk so it doesn't fly off onto the floor.
Doing it this way can give you a little more instantaneous torque (which is what unsticks the bearings.)
OP: If you get it started even once, get all your data off right then and there - don't think you are going to get another chance because you might not.
-What I had to do to get a linux development box you wouldn't believe. Of course this wasted countless hours but that was of course not managements fault.
Actually rephrased this could read 'What I had to do to get *the company to buy me* a linux development box you wouldn't believe.'
There is plenty of security to keep you from walking out with a machine, and almost zero security to keep you from bringing one in. Any Linux hacker can build a nice box that looks exactly like the corporate boxes for under $500, install whatever OS and tools on it he wants at home, and walk it right in the front door back to his desk on a Saturday when all the suits are at home. Get a nice Linksys KVM (the one with the integrated cables, cost about $40) and a cheap 10/100 switch and slide em both under the desk with the other machine. Name the new machine according to the naming conventions so it doesn't stick out on the DHCP server and don't do anything stupid like surf porn and you are golden. Get used to hitting the scroll lock key twice real fast to swap between machines. Voila! Nerdvana.
Note that this is pretty much a bridge machine to help him be productive and get work done while he ramps up in the new environment.
Crayola crayons (wax, not colored markers or colored pencils or anything fancy - regular old 64 in a box crayons.)
I'm serious - web UI / front end design isn't about technical issues, it is about color, texture, artistic expression, symmetry and synergy - it is about expressing yourself and getting across an idea or group of ideas in an organized coherent manner.
Crayola crayons on regular copier paper are best. The resolution of a crayola keeps you from cramming entirely too much crap on one page, the size of a piece of paper pretty closely represents the form factor of your average user's monitor, you can quickly (very quickly) storyboard all kinds of ideas and spread them all out on the table showing your hierarchy, you can use one page to draw your more complicated layouts... and when you are done you can tape them to the walls as a roadmap of where you are going.
Web front end design is artistic in nature and if you can't do it on copier paper with crayons, you can't do it (not because you lack the technical resouces, but because you lack the artistic vision of what you what - which is not a bad thing, most true hackers are artistically deficient.)
Actually the two second rule at 70mph is about 200 feet, if your car is 17 feet long that IS a 12 car-length gap. Perfectly within the guidelines, and as you said that would be enough to do the turnaround-look and still brake to avoid him. Two second rule - keep you alive.
Honestly - tailgating is a crime punishable by death.
Re:Woohoo! Being on the collision avoidance system
on
Radar For Safer Driving
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Tips from an old rider:
Don't ride next to cars. Don't ride in a car's blind spot. Don't tailgate. For damn sure don't ride next or or in the blind spot of a bus or big rig. If somebody wants past you, let them.
83 quadrillion miles of roads on the planet, most of which don't have a car in either direction for half a mile. In a pack of cars? Speed up or slow down until you are pretty much by yourself. Most of the time cars travel in herds, with lots of space between them. Get in that open space, and enjoy the ride.
Other tips: Helmets suck. Wear it anyways. Leather jacket and leather boots. Denim pants. No shorts or short sleeves or tank tops.
There is nothing out there that you can safely hit on a motorcycle and win. In Darwin's terms, you lose 100% of the accidents you participate in on a motorcycle.
If you tailgate someone, you deserve whatever you get. If you tailgate me (when I am in my car) you will soon participate in the challenge of your reflexes and ability to keep your bike upright in a panic stop vs. my ABS and back bumper. And you will probably lose.
More tips: Girls care less what kind of car a guy drives, but somehow can't resist a guy on a bike. Keep riding, it gets you laid. You can probably outrun most city cops on your bike, but I don't suggest it. I double don't suggest it unless you have a full tank of gas. If they catch you after you run, they will beat you. Don't drink and drive until you have at least 2 years and 25,000 miles of motorcycle riding. If you have ridden 25,000 miles on the same bike over the course of 2-3 years, feel free (riding the bike has become instinctual and muscle memory makes the bike an extension of your body and is about as safe as walking. If you can't walk, don't ride.) If you know a dog is going to chase you in traffic, try and time it so he gets hit by a nearby car. If you are an hour from home and it got surprisingly cold, buy a newspaper and stuff crumpled sheets into your jacket and pants. If it is really, really cold, luckily you are wearing the leather jacket and jeans I recommended.
Final tip : Going on an hour long ride? Get a steak, season it, put it in two layers of that really really good aluminum foil. Crimp the edges all the way around to insure nothing leaks out. Put it on your engine, secure so it doesnt flop around. Most bike engines run about 180-200 degrees on the outside of the block, test it with a meat thermometer. Plug in the temperature into a cookbook to see how long you should go before stopping to eat it. If you time it just right you will find a rest stop and while everybody else is eating vending machine food you are wolfing down a killer steak.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was a betting man I would bet that the only similarity between the old Napster and the new Napster will be the name and the logo.
Odds are it will be (no, I didn't RTFA) a streaming media subscription where the company has almost enough servers and almost enough bandwidth to provide you with streaming audio that you can listen to as often as you like, any song on their list, 24x7. Some kind of propriatary player (no, can't download them to your Rio or iPod) program on your Windows 2000/XP computer that has your unique ID. Possibly caching (encrypted) them client-side to make future authorized re-listenings possible without soaking up the same bandwidth. Possibly in some wonk ass compression algorythm that nobody has ever heard of, not that that is a bad thing.
I have this sneaking feeling that it is going to have no P2P whatsoever, but that's just a guess.
And when it comes to money, odds are it will be less complicated than having a recurring monthly payment taken directly from your credit card, similar to AOL and all those MMORPGs, etc.
The upside? If you find a song on there that has the same title and artist as a song in your head, odds are it will be the same song and won't be incomplete, compressed to like 64kBits/s or worse, recorded with the bass/treble settings horribly munged, recorded analog from a cassette tape, or a loop of Madonna saying 'What the hell are you doing?' It will be a fairly clean recreation of what you think it should be.
The first thought when I read the OP header was 'somebody needs to get laid.'
I was even going to post that, but I know one of you clowns would follow up with 'You're new here, aren't you?'
I addressed this as a response to the first reply to that message ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98803&cid=8431 772 ) - we may be in violent agreement.
-Yea, RedHat's whole purpose is to bleed Microsoft of money.
That was a misinterpretation of what I said. What I meant by 'put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut' was 'gain market share in the corporate workplace' (emphesis on juggernaut, not on Microsoft) which is pretty much what RH wants as a business objective.
By bleeding cash I meant that RedHat was spending gobs more on the development and support of their free distro of Linux than it was bringing in as revenue. As I understand it, that is exactly why RH9 is their last free desktop distro and that support on that ends in April.
You had guessed it right - I was hitting System Settings - Mouse each time and didn't even realize the other one was there. Thanks by the way, as small an issue as that may seem, needing to drag my mouse all over my desk to do things was the subtle thorn in my side that kept pushing me back out of RH9 into (the other OS.)
Maybe I just need to make my own class, suck up my pride and invite some college kid over to tutor me in Linux. A couple of hours each weekend and I will (hopefully) move from inept punk user to someone that knows what is really happening under the hood.
San Andreas is ok, but it does have its faults.
-IMO free software creates more jobs than it destroys.
The actual free software creates jobs. The continual hammering of the mantra 'software wants to be free' destroys jobs. The question becomes which is more powerful, a tool or a theology?
If a tool is more powerful then the free software creating jobs will win.
If a theology is more powerful then corporate America is going to outsource the jobs faster than free software can create them.
Ghandi suggested that theology is stronger than tools (actually I have no idea what he suggested, but I'm going to gamble here and go with it.)
I hate to bury it so deep, but I think I have the answer for F/OSS to catch on, the catalyst that has the potential to set the movement on fire (in a good way.)
Forget coding for free - TEACH for free. Yes it is possible to learn on your own, read the books, install it on your own, come up to speed on your own - if you know what tools, resources, books, and install scripts to run in the first place, if you know where to find the instructions in the first place. Google helps, but there is no substitute for having someone walk you through it, explain the upside and downside to doing stuff, let you experiment and when you get off track quickly put you back on track. Instead of spending 10 hours a week haxoring OSS code, spend 10 hours a week offering small workgroup sized sessions of simply messing around with Linux. Finding RPMs on the net, checking dependancies, messing with video drivers, adding new programs, shell scripts, different shells, XServer tricks, remote desktops, setting up services like FTP, security issues, patching their kernel, compiling their kernel, CVS - all that stuff.
Yea it is all pretty simple once you are familiar with it, but it is all pretty well hidden and obscure until you know where to look. You won't get credit for it in the source code and you can't put it on your resume, but those 10 hours a week will go a LOT farther to the movement than writing a new optimized driver for an obscure network card on a certain chipset in a 7 year old laptop.
Oh yea, and start now : how the hell do I tweak the mouse movement speed and acceleration in Gnome on RH9? I need it to move across the screen FASTER when I move my mouse - ARG!
I agree, what I meant by 'put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut' was 'gain market share in the corporate workplace.'
... but the 600 consumers could give a fsck about the refreshment 'holy war' going on between the two stew's - they just want something to drink with ice in it.
Overall the numbers of OSS developers with regard to consumers is analogous to two stewardesses on a transAtlantic 747-400. Serving drinks to 600 people. Twice. Those two can argue about whether bottled water is better because it is free and everybody knows what is in it, or Pepsi is better because of all the R&D that goes into it, or Jack Daniels is better because it is America's favorite and Pepsi is an evil corporation
IBM, Novell, Apple, and to a lesser extend RedHat - what these companies are offering is not OSS for the emotional well being of the customers, nor OSS so the customer can have the source, nor even a PR boost with the OSS crowd. IBM, Novell, to a lesser extent Apple and to a much lesser extent RH are offering a complete end to end business solution that a company can implement, satisfy 100% of their business needs, run the software they need to run in order to run a business. A chunk of that is the desktop and Linux on the desktop with OpenOffice is something they can directly make changes to (ie, have source to) in order to be a best fit solution for a large company's needs. In is only part of the solution, however, with big back ends supplied by IBM or Novell doing back end processing of business stuff (this is where they make the big bucks, IBM in particular.)
In addition to shaving $500 a seat (bulk subscription costs of MS operating system and office suite) in order to move those funds into the development and implementation of a customer's back office, if I had to guess they are going with Linux as the desktop component (Novell, IBM) because they will then have control front to back of the entire business environment in order to better make a complete solution work. And that is what they are betting corporate America (etc..) will pay big money for down the road.
Since when was Netware either open source or free?
Effective April 2004 RedHat has dropped their Linux desktop as an unviable product (their support revenue in no way covered their expenses.)
That is an amazing list of high quality companies, but to suggest that the OSS/free software available from Apple, IBM, Novell, or RedHat are driving business units that are making massive profits is simply insane. All of those companies are bankrolling OSS/free software from their existing mountains of cash with the hopes that by offering it at a loss they can put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut, and I would wager that each of them is hemmoraging cash from the business unit in the process.
The long term view is that eventually by reclaiming the desktop they will be able to provide services, support, and administrative tools that will be profitable, but in the past 3 years and for the immediate future RedHat is spelling it out loud and clear : OSS on the desktop is not a profit driven business venture.
My fondest memory of that era : jobs.
Please God let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to piss it all away this time.
I didn't say that we get dressed in the dark.
I said that we LOOK like we get dressed in the dark.
Big difference.
That line had nothing to do with time savings, it just looked like a good place to sneak it in.
Us techs need all the fashion help we can get.
Even funner is when one of the clients 'adopt' some of the existing codes but neglects to tell the new partner what they changed the meaning to ... nothing like getting a purchase order for seven train-car loads of pork bellies to make life fun for a computer part supplier.
For the record I think that all the folks that invented COBOL realized that nobody was taking their threat serious, so they upped the ante and invented ANSI/x.12 EDI.
Good God - it is surely a good thing that they are going to use that new-fangled XML encryption and encoding.
I feel sorry for the poor fuckers that have to try and hack XML - I mean what mortal human could comprehend, much less spoof headers written in PURE ASCII.
Rearrange your work schedule so you start at 7am and get off at 3pm or 4pm. By hitting the streets at semi- off hours you will cut your commute time by possibly half (less traffic.) Time saved : 1 hour per day on the average.
By hitting your seat at 7am when the office is empty and quiet you can get more productive sooner, and get more done between 7am and 9am than most people have done by noon.
Let a woman take you clothes shopping, throw out everything in your closet and replace it with whatever she suggests. Make sure everything matches everything else. Time saved : none, but nobody will know you got dressed in the dark before you had caffeine in your system.
Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day. God I love to sleep in so I hate this one.
Get your news from FARK (www.fark.com) In the hour it takes to watch the news on TV you could have a synopsis of the important events around the globe from a hundred different news sources. If it is newsworthy, it's on FARK.
Cancel your MMORPG accounts (stop playing Everquest). This will give you back 1000 hours per year. Maybe more.
-Anyone who hooks up through Slashdot Personals -- you **MUST** post about it! Karma be damned!
... does that count?
Well I hooked up (and GOOD) via Craigslist (www.craigslist.org - pick a city)
I'm talking some freaky shit too, not your run of mill freaky but some stack overflowing, buffer overrunning, illegal exception throwing, divide by zero at runtime kind of freaky.
I would give details but it has absolutely nothing to do with college kids sharing P2P files - too bad. As for the OP: Ever consider setting up a massive archive of ripped music on a server in the Library, access limited to IP addresses within the university subnet? Limit access to each individual file one person at a time, just like the library. Buy a copy of each CD before ripping it to the server, just like the library. Go talk to your librarian, get her in the loop and make her feel like a hero, important - she may not get freaky like the one I met on Craigs but odds are she will figure out a way to make your fileshare on campus a viable project. Think the Gutenburg project, of music.
I agree with you. And neither of us has addressed the OP's question.
Want to come up to speed fast in a Windows environment? Go to the local white-box clone builder shop in your city, one that has a repair shop / build shop in the back, and talk to the big dog. Explain that you are a long time Unix hacker for a local ISP and as they are converting to Windows on the desktop you need to come up to speed in a hurry. Tell him you will eagerly come in on weekends, work a full shift doing whatever shit jobs the other techs don't want to do, help build computers, as long as you get to participate in the stuff you want to learn. Help him pull cables if you have to in order to participate in the configuration, installation, security, Active Directory stuff, users, rights, administration, etc... If he says that 'nothing is free' and can't understand why you would offer free labor, tell him that you will work for minimum wage and he can pay you in hardware.
Those guys see some of the most fuxored systems on the planet, support some of the lamest users in corporate America, and if you are in a hurry to come up to speed the other techs will happily trade you in exchange for sharing your experience with them.
Granted - but in this specific case this guy is the sys/admin (or one of them.) Seriously - on a technical scale is there anybody watching over the sys/admins, or maybe he isn't that far up the food chain of sys/admins being one of the 'outsiders'.
As for MAC addresses, bring in a Linksys cablemodem router and clone the MAC address of the original work machine. This stops being funny of course when someone up the food chain tries to access the original box via IP and finds nothing but a firewall, of course.
I used to be afraid of dust, etc on drives and wouldn't have even considered running one with the case open - so my boss took an old MFM drive (ok this was a long time ago), took out the screws, popped off the case top, put it in a machine, started it up. We used it for a while watching the head arms swing back and forth, continued to use it for a while until that was boring and reassembled it and continued to use it as a regular machine.
... then again it wasn't mission critical data - just two sys/admins fuxoring around.
I was amazed at first like some sort of magic trick, but in the office it wasn't a dust storm or smokey environment to begin with
Another way to do this is to put it on a piece of paper on hardwood desk (the paper to glossy wood friction is fairly low, improvise here) and tap the drive on one corner so as to spin it around in a circle. Use a big desk so it doesn't fly off onto the floor.
Doing it this way can give you a little more instantaneous torque (which is what unsticks the bearings.)
OP: If you get it started even once, get all your data off right then and there - don't think you are going to get another chance because you might not.
-What I had to do to get a linux development box you wouldn't believe. Of course this wasted countless hours but that was of course not managements fault.
Actually rephrased this could read 'What I had to do to get *the company to buy me* a linux development box you wouldn't believe.'
There is plenty of security to keep you from walking out with a machine, and almost zero security to keep you from bringing one in. Any Linux hacker can build a nice box that looks exactly like the corporate boxes for under $500, install whatever OS and tools on it he wants at home, and walk it right in the front door back to his desk on a Saturday when all the suits are at home. Get a nice Linksys KVM (the one with the integrated cables, cost about $40) and a cheap 10/100 switch and slide em both under the desk with the other machine. Name the new machine according to the naming conventions so it doesn't stick out on the DHCP server and don't do anything stupid like surf porn and you are golden. Get used to hitting the scroll lock key twice real fast to swap between machines. Voila! Nerdvana.
Note that this is pretty much a bridge machine to help him be productive and get work done while he ramps up in the new environment.
Crayola crayons (wax, not colored markers or colored pencils or anything fancy - regular old 64 in a box crayons.)
... and when you are done you can tape them to the walls as a roadmap of where you are going.
I'm serious - web UI / front end design isn't about technical issues, it is about color, texture, artistic expression, symmetry and synergy - it is about expressing yourself and getting across an idea or group of ideas in an organized coherent manner.
Crayola crayons on regular copier paper are best. The resolution of a crayola keeps you from cramming entirely too much crap on one page, the size of a piece of paper pretty closely represents the form factor of your average user's monitor, you can quickly (very quickly) storyboard all kinds of ideas and spread them all out on the table showing your hierarchy, you can use one page to draw your more complicated layouts
Web front end design is artistic in nature and if you can't do it on copier paper with crayons, you can't do it (not because you lack the technical resouces, but because you lack the artistic vision of what you what - which is not a bad thing, most true hackers are artistically deficient.)
Interesting combination - the most intelligent response I have ever read, in the most ignorant thread I have ever seen.
If ever there was a time I needed mod points, today is the day.
The speed cameras - do they take the picture from the front, or from the back? If from the front, you are home free on a motorcycle.
And yes, drinking and driving is the second stupidest thing I have ever done.
Actually the two second rule at 70mph is about 200 feet, if your car is 17 feet long that IS a 12 car-length gap. Perfectly within the guidelines, and as you said that would be enough to do the turnaround-look and still brake to avoid him. Two second rule - keep you alive.
Honestly - tailgating is a crime punishable by death.
Tips from an old rider :
:
:
Don't ride next to cars.
Don't ride in a car's blind spot.
Don't tailgate.
For damn sure don't ride next or or in the blind spot of a bus or big rig.
If somebody wants past you, let them.
83 quadrillion miles of roads on the planet, most of which don't have a car in either direction for half a mile. In a pack of cars? Speed up or slow down until you are pretty much by yourself. Most of the time cars travel in herds, with lots of space between them. Get in that open space, and enjoy the ride.
Other tips
Helmets suck. Wear it anyways.
Leather jacket and leather boots.
Denim pants.
No shorts or short sleeves or tank tops.
There is nothing out there that you can safely hit on a motorcycle and win. In Darwin's terms, you lose 100% of the accidents you participate in on a motorcycle.
If you tailgate someone, you deserve whatever you get. If you tailgate me (when I am in my car) you will soon participate in the challenge of your reflexes and ability to keep your bike upright in a panic stop vs. my ABS and back bumper. And you will probably lose.
More tips
Girls care less what kind of car a guy drives, but somehow can't resist a guy on a bike. Keep riding, it gets you laid.
You can probably outrun most city cops on your bike, but I don't suggest it. I double don't suggest it unless you have a full tank of gas. If they catch you after you run, they will beat you.
Don't drink and drive until you have at least 2 years and 25,000 miles of motorcycle riding. If you have ridden 25,000 miles on the same bike over the course of 2-3 years, feel free (riding the bike has become instinctual and muscle memory makes the bike an extension of your body and is about as safe as walking. If you can't walk, don't ride.)
If you know a dog is going to chase you in traffic, try and time it so he gets hit by a nearby car.
If you are an hour from home and it got surprisingly cold, buy a newspaper and stuff crumpled sheets into your jacket and pants. If it is really, really cold, luckily you are wearing the leather jacket and jeans I recommended.
Final tip : Going on an hour long ride? Get a steak, season it, put it in two layers of that really really good aluminum foil. Crimp the edges all the way around to insure nothing leaks out. Put it on your engine, secure so it doesnt flop around. Most bike engines run about 180-200 degrees on the outside of the block, test it with a meat thermometer. Plug in the temperature into a cookbook to see how long you should go before stopping to eat it. If you time it just right you will find a rest stop and while everybody else is eating vending machine food you are wolfing down a killer steak.