Oh, trust me... I ain't shellin' out 800 clams for a CPU for my 14 year old machine, no matter how much I love it. Thanks to your information, I am definitely leaning towards an A1 purchase by year's end. All I need is a PPTP VPN client, and I can completely replace my Windows XP office machine.
Not too shabby, either. Non of my systems are in towers. A bit too pricey all at once for my tastes. And "collectors" are making it nearly impossible for me to get equipment at reasonable prices on eBay... what I find generally are hard-buys, and require sniping (ARGH! I *hate* snipers!)
I have a question about PPC accelerators with 68k processors. I have been kinda holding out on getting a PPC accelerator for my 4000 unless I can find one with an 060 on board. I see a lot with 040's, and wonder if there is enough legacy code running on the system to make a difference if I get a PPC with 040 or 060. I have no experience what-so-ever with PPC AmigaOS (WarpOS?) so I am kinda flipping around on the idea.
Of course, another point is that such an accelerator would cost between $600 and $800 used, and I *could* get me a new AmigaOne system for a little more. One day, perhaps not soon, but sometime in the future I will let go of my Classic Amiga systems and move on.
Which bring up another question, about OS4. Would it benefit the community more (and hence hasten a release) if I buy an A1 system now, or wait until OS4 is ready for release? I already have planned to sell blood plasma to buy an OS4 system, so which would drain me more to do?
All but one of the big-box (the slower 2000) have CD-ROMs, a few have SCSI ZIPs, and one of the 2000's has a HD floppy.
I love my 'Miggies'. With my networked units I can SSH and Remote Desktop into servers as needed. They could literally replace my office PC desktops.
I like Miami as a TCP/IP stack, unfortunately you cannot seem to buy new registrations from Holger Kruse. I've tried BSD5 on the 33MHz 2000, and it was pretty nice. I'm considering taking one of the 2000 boxes and making it a small server, just so people can look in the colo room and say "WTF is that?!":)
Clovis, NM. We participated in the First Annual New Mexico High School Super-Computer Challenge. Unfortunately, our team fell apart shortly after we started. The school ill-equiped us, one team member dropped, one turned out to be a coming-of-age criminal, and I got banned from the computer lab partly because of the second mentioned. We did have fun in Albequerque, though.
Primarily, I got in trouble in the computer lab because I stood up to the administration. We were given an unused office in the lab and a phone line to dial in to LANL. We found out that we shared a fax line with the guidance office, and that we weren't to use it during school hours, or the hours we were allowed to use it did not coincide with our time in the office. They would not allow us to adjust our schedules so we could work together. Instead, we were told we could only work on the project before and after school. The problem with that was the instructor refused to come to school early since she didn't have a first period class, and she hardly ever stayed late. So, we figured out how to break in so we could do our work. Got busted for that twice. Finally I went to the associate principal's office and started shouting about how if we were the football team we would have the school eating out of our hands. That did not go over very well.
Ah, but another story of teenage angst. When I started at the school there was a guy that helped the computer lab instructor run the S/34s as an operator. He was a senior and began teaching me how to work as an operator as well. I got curious, set up my own library, and started writing my own menus and programs, and even gave some friends user accounts into my library. The next year I found someone with interest like myself and took him on to teach him as I was taught. But he turned to the dark side. He began giving students access to my programs, hiding some of the messaging scripts in menus so they could send each other graphical fingers (multiple messages, made the solednoids in the keyboards go absolutely mad for several seconds.) So, when he was cornered he told them that I showed him how to do it, and I got busted. Not technically inaccurate, but definitely not what I had intended for him to do with his new-found knowledge. Little bastard.
All of that combined lead to my expulsion from the computer lab. *sigh* Ah, well.
Without resorting to Google just yet, I'm curious how JCL compares to OCL I used on the System/34.
We had two of 'em at my high school in NM. I had fun programming RPG-II, COBOL, and working down to OCL and making menus on these beasts. I think I still have my library dump on 8" floppy, though it's probably useless these days -- it has been 15 years, after all.
Someone mentioned "Amiga," so here's my obligatory response. I'm just curious why I should upgrade my BSD5 Amiga?
Here's another random thought: since the word "of" is considered of low importance when included in titles and not capitalized, and when used in acronyms the "o" is usually just dropped, shouldn't a "Blue Screen of Death" technically be termed a BSD? And would that have cost Microsoft another lawsuit?
I'm going to give my ametuer review (or really, my gripes and some niceties) about my new PalmOne LifeDrive.
When deciding whether to stay Palm when ready to dump my old Palm IIIx, I looked at the money and policy invested in Palm software for my business -- contact management software, mileage tracking, and this really damn neat Planetarium program. Then I looked up a few things that I knew I would need: SSH, Terminal Services, and a PPTP VPN client. I found all of them, so I stuck with Palm.
Originally I purchased a T5. It was very slim and sleek, and with a 1GB SD card, this was a perfect mate to go with my latop and desktop systems. However, it did not have built in WiFi, and the only WiFi card I could find is by PalmOne and doesn't support WPA, which is in use at 95% of my 802.11 installations.
As an aside, I called SanDisk who makes an SD WiFi card for the Zire which DOES support WPA. They told me that Palm has refused to respond to their request for documentation on the WiFi API for PalmOS Garnet 5.4.x, so they will not support this OS. Shame. When I called Palm, they told me I should drop an extra clam on the LifeDrive.
I looked at it. It's pretty cool with a 4GB CF microdrive. It's slower than its RAM-based compatriots in openning applications and loading associate databases, but it's not so much to be a big problem. One thing I notice about the LifeDrive is that PalmOne touts it as a mobile manager perfect for business, but none of the quick buttons are business: by default you have Homes, Files, Media, and Favorites. Now, the favorites menu is pretty cool, and I could easily put my business apps on the first screen on the favorites. However, I'm a bit old-fashioned and like my ability to call up my contacts and calendar with a single button press. I redefined the buttons and so now I am there again.
A GREAT feature is the ability to give access to the 4GB hard drive to a connected computer via USB Drive Mode. I can copy music, documents, or anything I want or need to the 4GB hard drive with the USB cable. However, I don't find this confusing or cumbersome as the article says. It seems pretty straight-forward to me.
Oh, and I am fine with the UI and fonts. And if you don't like either, there are plenty of launch-replacements and skins for download. Personally, I haven't tried them because I was more interested in gaining basic stability:)
Poor tech support certainly is a problem. This is my third unit, the previosus suffering some kind of software problem which put it into a reboot-cycle. I asked Palm if there was some way to glean useful information from the unit, like a memory dump, or if I could just send them a dump of my profile so they could determine the problem. No such utilities or abilities exist for the LifeDrive, and I find it a little irritating that they would release something without having good diagnostic tools available. How do they expect to fix things based on user reports if they can't get usable technical information?
I finally got this unit working, then found that my headphone jack was broken. A quick trip to Staples and that was replaced (again.) (A BIG thumbs-up to Staples: I had my T5 for a week and based on Palm's treatment of the situation, they traded me up to the LifeDrive, then replaced several LifeDrives for me while we troubleshot the problems I was having.)
I have purchased MMPlayer to watch DivX, Xvid, and some other formats, Kinoma Player and Kinoma Producter to port my DVDs (requires additional DVD ripping software) to MP4 format perfect for viewing on the LD. It's not a nice distraction from work. RealPlayer is available for Palm, but it does not support video (BOOO!)
For my work I use pSSH (free,) Mergic VPN, and Remote Plus (RDP/TS client.) These also all work great, and I suspect that pSSH will be much more fun once I get my Bluetooth keyboard.
Conceptually, this unit is fantastic. However, it has numerous issues which I find quite annoy
Case in point, QuickBooks 2005 has required that all of my customers run it in Administrator mode. I tried Power User, but even that failed.
Like you, I have several sites in which the users require Administrative access to the desktops because of software which does not follow Microsoft's best practices for software development (admittedly, Office 2000 first-run and even SBS2003 application installation fail this) which have been documented in MSDN for several years.
(Side rant on SBS2003 APPLAUNCH: I can push applications to a workstation, but the user cannot run the application installations and the APPLAUNCH utility won't run in a Remote Desktop session... so I have to make a physical appearance which costs my clients more, and costs me available time. Of course, I might be missing something. GPs are nice, especially since you can have MSI run at elevated priveleges. Why doesn't APPLAUNCH do this? Blah.)
Administratively, it's a headache. But since I am contract IT for these sites, it's money in my pocket every time a user ignores company policy and installs a free screen saver.
I first started tabbed browsing with Netscape. It was/is the one big feature I have always felt was lacking in IE. I have to agree that until you've tried it, you don't know what you're missing... "Open in New Window" just doesn't cut it anymore.
Actually, I absolutely LOVE BSG. It's the only show that I will chase everyone away to watch. I missed a few episodes, so I'm trying to fill in the gaps. I don't mind SG1, though I came in a bit late in the series and need to catch up to really enjoy it. I mean, c'mon, it's got McGyver for cryin' out loud!:)
I'm looking forward to some more DVD releases of TV shows. A friend of mine told me the same thing about NetFlix... I might try out their free month.
I have to agree with the parent, and think it should be moded up. This isn't a tin-foil hat situation, this is political economics, pure and simple.
However, I think about stories a friend of mine tells me of days he worked as an installer for Cox Communications... going into trailer homes which were missing floors to install digital cable. So you take away analogue transmissions; rabbit ears and roof-top antennaes no longer work. That's okay, because the poor will still believe they NEED television, for whatever reason. Be it to escape the ugly reality of class-separation induced poverty or whatever, they won't be able to subside without the daily drama of someone else's life which is better or worse than their's; without the daily cramming of horrible news from around the world; without the daily reminder that their country is the greatest on Earth, so says the President. So on and so forth.
So, they'll spend whatever little money they can scrape together to buy the three main necessities: cigarettes, alcohol, and TV. Food, shelter, transportation -- those all come into the view later on. But by God, it's down-right un-American not to have TV.
That's enough of my un-thought-out rant.
Personally, I'll be fine with no longer being able to use my analogue TV one day in the far future. (2006 affects over-the-air, right? When does analogue cable go the way-side?) I have stayed away from digital cable because I don't want another friggin' box on my entertainment stand, and another piece of equipment complicating my already complex system (select VCR, then put the TV to Input 1, but you can't use the TV volume here unless you actually use it as a tuner, but if you select DVD, you have to...)
But aside from that, which is really a minor issue, I consider getting rid of cable every time the bill comes due. I don't watch any prime-time network shows because I just can't handle the brain-rot. Phuqn "reality" shows just annoy the hell out of me, and I just can't bring myself to follow any of the shows currently running. I enjoy well-written shows which make me think, all across the board of drama to comedy, investigatory society, etc. Well, I have to admit that some of these real-life video shows (read that as unscripted reality, I guess) do provide some entertainment, but I could easily, and happily, live without them.
ComCast used to call me every so often to pitch digital cable. I'd ask why I would want it, and hear "well, it adds two hundred channels!" Great, that's 195 new channels that I won't watch, so why in the hell would I want to pay for service, installation, set-top decoder, etc.?
Perhaps I am robbing myself of some great experiences and entertainment, but it just doesn't seem that way. Blah.
I agree, and was actually looking for a post like this so I did not sound redundant.
If Bad Things (tm) are winding up in the dump, then start educating those who discard them, even offering some kind of incentive.
My city has a solid waste recycling facility just outside of the city limits. For the last two years I have taken everything electronic which needs disposal to this site. Interestingly, all electronics go into the "hazardous waste" section. I have explained the reasoning to a number of people.
I do not get paid for doing this, but I feel better that I am not adding to the "balooning" growth of lead in our landfill. Especially considering I take about a trunk-full of stuff up there once a month (I have even begun collecting things from other people.) In that small of a quantity the city, or at least the workers, does not require me to weigh-in.
I feel this is no different than other recycling programs in the past. Some cities now will actually charge you extra on your waste management bill if you discard recyclables in your regular garbage. Then again, some places really do it half-assed -- for instance, there is a residential recycling program where my parents live which only takes certain glasses, plastics, and NO PAPER.
In my home I have gotten pretty anal about it. Since our local recycling program will take ANY plastic, EVERYTHING plastic goes in the recycle bin; same with glass.
So, start explaining to people living in complexes with dumpsters that TVs should not go in the dumpsters. Same with old computers and electronics. Recently we had an "e-Day" sponsored by a grant from Dell. Everyone was encouraged to bring electronics for disposal. That is a start.
Many people may be surprised to learn that Freon is actually still used in a lot of systems. However, there are now strict regulations in effect which govern its sale and use, including documentation of every bit that is used and the requirement that a leaking system be fixed or replaced. Leaded electronics could be just as simple, especially if, as stated in the parent, incentives are offered to consumers for compliance.
I think it was third grade that our elementary school in North Dakota (circa 1982-1983) had a small lab of Apple ][, maybe//e's. We played the heck out of Oregon Trail... or rather the class did. I used to stop the program to see what was happening behind the scenes. Eventually I understood enough about the program to change some of the variables around and continue the run. That was fine until I got bored and started "selling" my talents to other students to allow them to have nearly unlimited moral, supplies, etc. Usually the sale involved something from the lunch line. (I think in today's mentality I would have begun receiving C&D orders for my activities:P )
To think, I was a consultant at age 9 and became one again at age 28! hehehehe Anyway, I was eventually prohibited from playing the games and extolling my expertise and instead became a lab monitor, during which time I was allowed to program for fun.
Eh, it was fun. I think I'm going to answer the actual article later when I have some more time to articulate my entire computer career. I realized that along the way I always knew that computers would make me money, and I had several money-making ventures throughout my young life. Again, I'll detail that later... so if you're interested, check me out tomorrow night.
I'll look into this a little bit more in the coming days, but it appears that the user directive only affects CGI programs run via suEXEC. I am using PHP as an Apache module, so this doesn't appear to help me. I will look at the other links you have sent, thank you.
One thing that I find attractive about Apache 2 is the ability to run VirtualHosts as a specific user:group.
I like this idea as all files uploaded to the server are owned by the user and group of the Apache daemon, which doesn't do much to help me control user quotas.
This is such an important issue that if I cannot find a module for Apache 1.3 or another easy way (aside from a cron'ed chown -R) to accomplish this, I will begin experimenting with A2/PHP5.
I bend to the idea of stealing once you have exactly copied the expected experience being sold. I have absolutely no problem with the idea that these conterfeit Nintendo consoles are using stolen games, considering that the gameplay experience is, at the very least, MEANT to be identical and SOLD as being identical.
That's because sharing music and movies cannot duplicate the experience of the genuine article. The only way to do that is to produce exact copies of the original CD or DVD, but such copies are a rarity on the P2P networks.
When you buy a ticket to a theater, or you buy the DVD to watch on your system at home, you are getting a specific experience. Same with CDs. These copies you download, even really good screners, just cannot compare to the original. The compression makes movies look blocky and grainy, and music sound more tin-canny.
But the majority of these things being reported are exact copies of the original ROMs. You then take them and connect them to a TV or monitor, just like the original. Ergo, the experience has now been duplicated, and hence stolen.
There was a site which allowed you to legally purchase ROMs, but I cannot remember what it was (or maybe still is.) Everybody got caught up in the dot-com fever of "everything on the Internet should be free," which then translated to "everything which CAN be put on the Internet should be free." This just is not so, and should not be so. And to hell with the law, the issue is that of ethics and morals (and we often find the law conflicting with the later two.)
As I have stated plenty of times before, I download movies (I even made a shirt which says so which I wear to the theater,) and I download music. If the preview is good enough, I will buy a ticket or the DVD. If it sucks, then I have lost nothing but time and do not have to try to return this unpleasing product -- which cannot be done anyway.
ROM images, and now XBox rips and the like, are a completely different story. There just is no way to get a reduced quality copy of these -- you get the real deal, the genuine article, the real action and feel of the original game, even if it is Tinky Winky replacing Mario. And this should not be free, and should not be profited from by anyone other than the original producer, not unscrupulous scum that produce the clones.
What has been happening now is that because of the freebie revolution many companies are realizing that the market which they abandoned years ago is still viable. We said "if you won't give us what we want, then we will take it." So, now they are giving us (albeit rather highly priced... $20 for a single "classic" retro!) what we wanted, and in return they are telling us to stop giving away their swag. Seems a reasonable compromise to me.
Even parts of the music industry has conceded to this new medium by offering legally licensed, lower quality downloadable music. But even that is encumbered by damnedable rights management. Sure, DRM is really all about the Evil Corp, Inc. controlling what we do, but we do not have a leg to stand on in the fight against it because time and time again, the majority of file traders have proven themselves not trustworthy -- and that affects us all.
So, coming full circle, if we report Abdul, Sheehaba, Big Tony, and Mr. Earl for profiting on illegitimately gained product which gives the exact same experience as the original, then we are saying "hey, your argument that all we want to do is steal is wrong."
When I look at the video from the TI on a Commodore 2002 monitor, or even an original 10" TI monitor, it appears a bit pixelated -- kinda grainy. The actually worked pretty well when designing graphics.
Now, on a TV set, the graphics were great. In fact, the ColecoVision used the same graphics chip (or a relative to the TMS 9918A, anyway.) (Tech note, the 99/4 had the 9918, the 4A had the 9918A, which IIRC had an additional bitmap mode lacking in the original chip.)
Another poster made a comment above about programs recorded on tape. I have seen emulators for the TI, VIC20, and C64 which can "listen" to a.wav file or from the line in of a sound card. It's been quite a few years since I saw them, and I hope they're still around. Seems a pretty damn useful feature.
Now if I can just get a drive and software that will read my personal libraries from my old System/34 8" floppies!
Something which really irks me is how many of my accounts require that I provide my SSAN over the phone as proof of my identity. My SSAN appears on countless documents throughout my life, most of which have passed through insecure hands, and some probably misplaced or lost so others can read them. Primarily this includes my military medical documentation (as my sponsor, my father's information is more prominent on these, though my SSAN is used in documents from my early 20's,) and my college documentation.
I deal with a number of companies which use my SSAN as the "key" to my account, some which (supposedly) supplant it with a passphrase -- though a representative of one company told me that if I couldn't remember my passphrase she would accept my SSAN! This completely goes against my reason for having a passphrase on the account in the first place! I will not go into detail about with which companies I have accounts covered by this policity, but suffice to say that just about every service I am provided suffers in this way.
Like the parent, I cannot myself come up with a feasible system for replacement. I even had one company rep ask me what I would prefer to use, I answered "I don't care, just not my [SSAN]." Not necessarily true, since some companies ask for information which can be read directly off a stolen or misdirected envelope.
None-the-less, the current system IS broken and IS too easy to subvert. I find that too many entities look to the end user for solutions to their problems, as illustrated by the above question posed to me. I am sorry, but it is not the customer's responsibility to provide a fix to a company's broken procedures; the company itself should invest whatever it takes to ensure its customer/client safety, regardless of the cost.
Personally, I would opt to pay more for a service which made it more difficult to access my account information. If more companies provided a service like this, eventually it would become the norm and the price of such secure service would settle back down due to competition.
I do feel the need to address something I provided in my introduction: college documentation. Something as simple as classroom roll sheets is a problem. In more than one class I have attended a sheet of paper was passed around the class (proof of attendance, clarification of class enrollment, or whatever) on which a student was to print his or her name, SSAN, and then sign. Need I say more? Put all of these elements together and think about our personal security. Even I wrote my SSAN on such documents until later in my college life when I thought better of this practice. Only once did my refusal cause a problem, and I ultimately won the argument in front of college administration.
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Oh, trust me... I ain't shellin' out 800 clams for a CPU for my 14 year old machine, no matter how much I love it. Thanks to your information, I am definitely leaning towards an A1 purchase by year's end. All I need is a PPTP VPN client, and I can completely replace my Windows XP office machine.
Not too shabby, either. Non of my systems are in towers. A bit too pricey all at once for my tastes. And "collectors" are making it nearly impossible for me to get equipment at reasonable prices on eBay... what I find generally are hard-buys, and require sniping (ARGH! I *hate* snipers!)
I have a question about PPC accelerators with 68k processors. I have been kinda holding out on getting a PPC accelerator for my 4000 unless I can find one with an 060 on board. I see a lot with 040's, and wonder if there is enough legacy code running on the system to make a difference if I get a PPC with 040 or 060. I have no experience what-so-ever with PPC AmigaOS (WarpOS?) so I am kinda flipping around on the idea.
Of course, another point is that such an accelerator would cost between $600 and $800 used, and I *could* get me a new AmigaOne system for a little more. One day, perhaps not soon, but sometime in the future I will let go of my Classic Amiga systems and move on.
Which bring up another question, about OS4. Would it benefit the community more (and hence hasten a release) if I buy an A1 system now, or wait until OS4 is ready for release? I already have planned to sell blood plasma to buy an OS4 system, so which would drain me more to do?
I can't help it. It calls to me. hehehe
:)
I still use my Amigas. My main system these days is an Amiga 4000, and I have a nicely accelerated 1200 as well. Dig these pages:
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a1200flash
http://alan2.rateliff.us/a4000flash
http://df0.info/
http://dh0.info/
Anyway, my systems these days:
A1000, 40MHz '030, 8MB FastRAM, FastPALs, 1GB HDD
A2000, 33MHz '040, 64MB FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 9GB HDD, XSurf II
A2000, 28MHz '040, 12MB FastRAM, 1MB ChipRAM, 512MB HDD, Ariadne II
A4000, 40MHz '040, 128MB FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 18GB HDD, XSurf III
A500, 50MHz '030 w/'882, 32MB FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 1GB CF
A1200, 60MHz '060, 48MHz FastRAM, 2MB ChipRAM, 1GB CF, LinkSys PCMCIA network
All but one of the big-box (the slower 2000) have CD-ROMs, a few have SCSI ZIPs, and one of the 2000's has a HD floppy.
I love my 'Miggies'. With my networked units I can SSH and Remote Desktop into servers as needed. They could literally replace my office PC desktops.
I like Miami as a TCP/IP stack, unfortunately you cannot seem to buy new registrations from Holger Kruse. I've tried BSD5 on the 33MHz 2000, and it was pretty nice. I'm considering taking one of the 2000 boxes and making it a small server, just so people can look in the colo room and say "WTF is that?!"
Clovis, NM. We participated in the First Annual New Mexico High School Super-Computer Challenge. Unfortunately, our team fell apart shortly after we started. The school ill-equiped us, one team member dropped, one turned out to be a coming-of-age criminal, and I got banned from the computer lab partly because of the second mentioned. We did have fun in Albequerque, though.
Primarily, I got in trouble in the computer lab because I stood up to the administration. We were given an unused office in the lab and a phone line to dial in to LANL. We found out that we shared a fax line with the guidance office, and that we weren't to use it during school hours, or the hours we were allowed to use it did not coincide with our time in the office. They would not allow us to adjust our schedules so we could work together. Instead, we were told we could only work on the project before and after school. The problem with that was the instructor refused to come to school early since she didn't have a first period class, and she hardly ever stayed late. So, we figured out how to break in so we could do our work. Got busted for that twice. Finally I went to the associate principal's office and started shouting about how if we were the football team we would have the school eating out of our hands. That did not go over very well.
Ah, but another story of teenage angst. When I started at the school there was a guy that helped the computer lab instructor run the S/34s as an operator. He was a senior and began teaching me how to work as an operator as well. I got curious, set up my own library, and started writing my own menus and programs, and even gave some friends user accounts into my library. The next year I found someone with interest like myself and took him on to teach him as I was taught. But he turned to the dark side. He began giving students access to my programs, hiding some of the messaging scripts in menus so they could send each other graphical fingers (multiple messages, made the solednoids in the keyboards go absolutely mad for several seconds.) So, when he was cornered he told them that I showed him how to do it, and I got busted. Not technically inaccurate, but definitely not what I had intended for him to do with his new-found knowledge. Little bastard.
All of that combined lead to my expulsion from the computer lab. *sigh* Ah, well.
Without resorting to Google just yet, I'm curious how JCL compares to OCL I used on the System/34.
We had two of 'em at my high school in NM. I had fun programming RPG-II, COBOL, and working down to OCL and making menus on these beasts. I think I still have my library dump on 8" floppy, though it's probably useless these days -- it has been 15 years, after all.
Someone mentioned "Amiga," so here's my obligatory response. I'm just curious why I should upgrade my BSD5 Amiga?
Here's another random thought: since the word "of" is considered of low importance when included in titles and not capitalized, and when used in acronyms the "o" is usually just dropped, shouldn't a "Blue Screen of Death" technically be termed a BSD? And would that have cost Microsoft another lawsuit?
I'm going to give my ametuer review (or really, my gripes and some niceties) about my new PalmOne LifeDrive.
:)
When deciding whether to stay Palm when ready to dump my old Palm IIIx, I looked at the money and policy invested in Palm software for my business -- contact management software, mileage tracking, and this really damn neat Planetarium program. Then I looked up a few things that I knew I would need: SSH, Terminal Services, and a PPTP VPN client. I found all of them, so I stuck with Palm.
Originally I purchased a T5. It was very slim and sleek, and with a 1GB SD card, this was a perfect mate to go with my latop and desktop systems. However, it did not have built in WiFi, and the only WiFi card I could find is by PalmOne and doesn't support WPA, which is in use at 95% of my 802.11 installations.
As an aside, I called SanDisk who makes an SD WiFi card for the Zire which DOES support WPA. They told me that Palm has refused to respond to their request for documentation on the WiFi API for PalmOS Garnet 5.4.x, so they will not support this OS. Shame. When I called Palm, they told me I should drop an extra clam on the LifeDrive.
I looked at it. It's pretty cool with a 4GB CF microdrive. It's slower than its RAM-based compatriots in openning applications and loading associate databases, but it's not so much to be a big problem. One thing I notice about the LifeDrive is that PalmOne touts it as a mobile manager perfect for business, but none of the quick buttons are business: by default you have Homes, Files, Media, and Favorites. Now, the favorites menu is pretty cool, and I could easily put my business apps on the first screen on the favorites. However, I'm a bit old-fashioned and like my ability to call up my contacts and calendar with a single button press. I redefined the buttons and so now I am there again.
A GREAT feature is the ability to give access to the 4GB hard drive to a connected computer via USB Drive Mode. I can copy music, documents, or anything I want or need to the 4GB hard drive with the USB cable. However, I don't find this confusing or cumbersome as the article says. It seems pretty straight-forward to me.
Oh, and I am fine with the UI and fonts. And if you don't like either, there are plenty of launch-replacements and skins for download. Personally, I haven't tried them because I was more interested in gaining basic stability
Poor tech support certainly is a problem. This is my third unit, the previosus suffering some kind of software problem which put it into a reboot-cycle. I asked Palm if there was some way to glean useful information from the unit, like a memory dump, or if I could just send them a dump of my profile so they could determine the problem. No such utilities or abilities exist for the LifeDrive, and I find it a little irritating that they would release something without having good diagnostic tools available. How do they expect to fix things based on user reports if they can't get usable technical information?
I finally got this unit working, then found that my headphone jack was broken. A quick trip to Staples and that was replaced (again.) (A BIG thumbs-up to Staples: I had my T5 for a week and based on Palm's treatment of the situation, they traded me up to the LifeDrive, then replaced several LifeDrives for me while we troubleshot the problems I was having.)
I have purchased MMPlayer to watch DivX, Xvid, and some other formats, Kinoma Player and Kinoma Producter to port my DVDs (requires additional DVD ripping software) to MP4 format perfect for viewing on the LD. It's not a nice distraction from work. RealPlayer is available for Palm, but it does not support video (BOOO!)
For my work I use pSSH (free,) Mergic VPN, and Remote Plus (RDP/TS client.) These also all work great, and I suspect that pSSH will be much more fun once I get my Bluetooth keyboard.
Conceptually, this unit is fantastic. However, it has numerous issues which I find quite annoy
Case in point, QuickBooks 2005 has required that all of my customers run it in Administrator mode. I tried Power User, but even that failed.
Like you, I have several sites in which the users require Administrative access to the desktops because of software which does not follow Microsoft's best practices for software development (admittedly, Office 2000 first-run and even SBS2003 application installation fail this) which have been documented in MSDN for several years.
(Side rant on SBS2003 APPLAUNCH: I can push applications to a workstation, but the user cannot run the application installations and the APPLAUNCH utility won't run in a Remote Desktop session... so I have to make a physical appearance which costs my clients more, and costs me available time. Of course, I might be missing something. GPs are nice, especially since you can have MSI run at elevated priveleges. Why doesn't APPLAUNCH do this? Blah.)
Administratively, it's a headache. But since I am contract IT for these sites, it's money in my pocket every time a user ignores company policy and installs a free screen saver.
Balance, Daniel-San!
I first started tabbed browsing with Netscape. It was/is the one big feature I have always felt was lacking in IE. I have to agree that until you've tried it, you don't know what you're missing... "Open in New Window" just doesn't cut it anymore.
Thanks. Throw-back to my BBS days. Yeah, a duck's a duck even if you don't call it that, but I kinda like the way it looks :)
I follow your point, and can't say that I disagree much.
Actually, I absolutely LOVE BSG. It's the only show that I will chase everyone away to watch. I missed a few episodes, so I'm trying to fill in the gaps. I don't mind SG1, though I came in a bit late in the series and need to catch up to really enjoy it. I mean, c'mon, it's got McGyver for cryin' out loud! :)
I'm looking forward to some more DVD releases of TV shows. A friend of mine told me the same thing about NetFlix... I might try out their free month.
I have to agree with the parent, and think it should be moded up. This isn't a tin-foil hat situation, this is political economics, pure and simple.
However, I think about stories a friend of mine tells me of days he worked as an installer for Cox Communications... going into trailer homes which were missing floors to install digital cable. So you take away analogue transmissions; rabbit ears and roof-top antennaes no longer work. That's okay, because the poor will still believe they NEED television, for whatever reason. Be it to escape the ugly reality of class-separation induced poverty or whatever, they won't be able to subside without the daily drama of someone else's life which is better or worse than their's; without the daily cramming of horrible news from around the world; without the daily reminder that their country is the greatest on Earth, so says the President. So on and so forth.
So, they'll spend whatever little money they can scrape together to buy the three main necessities: cigarettes, alcohol, and TV. Food, shelter, transportation -- those all come into the view later on. But by God, it's down-right un-American not to have TV.
That's enough of my un-thought-out rant.
Personally, I'll be fine with no longer being able to use my analogue TV one day in the far future. (2006 affects over-the-air, right? When does analogue cable go the way-side?) I have stayed away from digital cable because I don't want another friggin' box on my entertainment stand, and another piece of equipment complicating my already complex system (select VCR, then put the TV to Input 1, but you can't use the TV volume here unless you actually use it as a tuner, but if you select DVD, you have to...)
But aside from that, which is really a minor issue, I consider getting rid of cable every time the bill comes due. I don't watch any prime-time network shows because I just can't handle the brain-rot. Phuqn "reality" shows just annoy the hell out of me, and I just can't bring myself to follow any of the shows currently running. I enjoy well-written shows which make me think, all across the board of drama to comedy, investigatory society, etc. Well, I have to admit that some of these real-life video shows (read that as unscripted reality, I guess) do provide some entertainment, but I could easily, and happily, live without them.
ComCast used to call me every so often to pitch digital cable. I'd ask why I would want it, and hear "well, it adds two hundred channels!" Great, that's 195 new channels that I won't watch, so why in the hell would I want to pay for service, installation, set-top decoder, etc.?
Perhaps I am robbing myself of some great experiences and entertainment, but it just doesn't seem that way. Blah.
/. bro... that's not how things work.
"Real programmers do not comment... if it was difficult to program, it should be difficult to understand."
:)
I wish I knew the source of this one
I agree, and was actually looking for a post like this so I did not sound redundant.
If Bad Things (tm) are winding up in the dump, then start educating those who discard them, even offering some kind of incentive.
My city has a solid waste recycling facility just outside of the city limits. For the last two years I have taken everything electronic which needs disposal to this site. Interestingly, all electronics go into the "hazardous waste" section. I have explained the reasoning to a number of people.
I do not get paid for doing this, but I feel better that I am not adding to the "balooning" growth of lead in our landfill. Especially considering I take about a trunk-full of stuff up there once a month (I have even begun collecting things from other people.) In that small of a quantity the city, or at least the workers, does not require me to weigh-in.
I feel this is no different than other recycling programs in the past. Some cities now will actually charge you extra on your waste management bill if you discard recyclables in your regular garbage. Then again, some places really do it half-assed -- for instance, there is a residential recycling program where my parents live which only takes certain glasses, plastics, and NO PAPER.
In my home I have gotten pretty anal about it. Since our local recycling program will take ANY plastic, EVERYTHING plastic goes in the recycle bin; same with glass.
So, start explaining to people living in complexes with dumpsters that TVs should not go in the dumpsters. Same with old computers and electronics. Recently we had an "e-Day" sponsored by a grant from Dell. Everyone was encouraged to bring electronics for disposal. That is a start.
Many people may be surprised to learn that Freon is actually still used in a lot of systems. However, there are now strict regulations in effect which govern its sale and use, including documentation of every bit that is used and the requirement that a leaking system be fixed or replaced. Leaded electronics could be just as simple, especially if, as stated in the parent, incentives are offered to consumers for compliance.
Bah. That's all I got right now.
I think it was third grade that our elementary school in North Dakota (circa 1982-1983) had a small lab of Apple ][, maybe //e's. We played the heck out of Oregon Trail... or rather the class did. I used to stop the program to see what was happening behind the scenes. Eventually I understood enough about the program to change some of the variables around and continue the run. That was fine until I got bored and started "selling" my talents to other students to allow them to have nearly unlimited moral, supplies, etc. Usually the sale involved something from the lunch line. (I think in today's mentality I would have begun receiving C&D orders for my activities :P )
To think, I was a consultant at age 9 and became one again at age 28! hehehehe Anyway, I was eventually prohibited from playing the games and extolling my expertise and instead became a lab monitor, during which time I was allowed to program for fun.
Eh, it was fun. I think I'm going to answer the actual article later when I have some more time to articulate my entire computer career. I realized that along the way I always knew that computers would make me money, and I had several money-making ventures throughout my young life. Again, I'll detail that later... so if you're interested, check me out tomorrow night.
I'll look into this a little bit more in the coming days, but it appears that the user directive only affects CGI programs run via suEXEC. I am using PHP as an Apache module, so this doesn't appear to help me. I will look at the other links you have sent, thank you.
One thing that I find attractive about Apache 2 is the ability to run VirtualHosts as a specific user:group.
I like this idea as all files uploaded to the server are owned by the user and group of the Apache daemon, which doesn't do much to help me control user quotas.
This is such an important issue that if I cannot find a module for Apache 1.3 or another easy way (aside from a cron'ed chown -R) to accomplish this, I will begin experimenting with A2/PHP5.
"Duplicating is *not* stealing"
I bend to the idea of stealing once you have exactly copied the expected experience being sold. I have absolutely no problem with the idea that these conterfeit Nintendo consoles are using stolen games, considering that the gameplay experience is, at the very least, MEANT to be identical and SOLD as being identical.
"Downloading a cd you don't own not stealing."
I did not say that it is.
"Exact DVD copies are all over Emule and Bittorrent."
;)
Guess I've been looking in all the wrong places
That's because sharing music and movies cannot duplicate the experience of the genuine article. The only way to do that is to produce exact copies of the original CD or DVD, but such copies are a rarity on the P2P networks.
When you buy a ticket to a theater, or you buy the DVD to watch on your system at home, you are getting a specific experience. Same with CDs. These copies you download, even really good screners, just cannot compare to the original. The compression makes movies look blocky and grainy, and music sound more tin-canny.
But the majority of these things being reported are exact copies of the original ROMs. You then take them and connect them to a TV or monitor, just like the original. Ergo, the experience has now been duplicated, and hence stolen.
There was a site which allowed you to legally purchase ROMs, but I cannot remember what it was (or maybe still is.) Everybody got caught up in the dot-com fever of "everything on the Internet should be free," which then translated to "everything which CAN be put on the Internet should be free." This just is not so, and should not be so. And to hell with the law, the issue is that of ethics and morals (and we often find the law conflicting with the later two.)
As I have stated plenty of times before, I download movies (I even made a shirt which says so which I wear to the theater,) and I download music. If the preview is good enough, I will buy a ticket or the DVD. If it sucks, then I have lost nothing but time and do not have to try to return this unpleasing product -- which cannot be done anyway.
ROM images, and now XBox rips and the like, are a completely different story. There just is no way to get a reduced quality copy of these -- you get the real deal, the genuine article, the real action and feel of the original game, even if it is Tinky Winky replacing Mario. And this should not be free, and should not be profited from by anyone other than the original producer, not unscrupulous scum that produce the clones.
What has been happening now is that because of the freebie revolution many companies are realizing that the market which they abandoned years ago is still viable. We said "if you won't give us what we want, then we will take it." So, now they are giving us (albeit rather highly priced... $20 for a single "classic" retro!) what we wanted, and in return they are telling us to stop giving away their swag. Seems a reasonable compromise to me.
Even parts of the music industry has conceded to this new medium by offering legally licensed, lower quality downloadable music. But even that is encumbered by damnedable rights management. Sure, DRM is really all about the Evil Corp, Inc. controlling what we do, but we do not have a leg to stand on in the fight against it because time and time again, the majority of file traders have proven themselves not trustworthy -- and that affects us all.
So, coming full circle, if we report Abdul, Sheehaba, Big Tony, and Mr. Earl for profiting on illegitimately gained product which gives the exact same experience as the original, then we are saying "hey, your argument that all we want to do is steal is wrong."
I wrote BASIC on the Atari 2600 :)
.wav file or from the line in of a sound card. It's been quite a few years since I saw them, and I hope they're still around. Seems a pretty damn useful feature.
When I look at the video from the TI on a Commodore 2002 monitor, or even an original 10" TI monitor, it appears a bit pixelated -- kinda grainy. The actually worked pretty well when designing graphics.
Now, on a TV set, the graphics were great. In fact, the ColecoVision used the same graphics chip (or a relative to the TMS 9918A, anyway.) (Tech note, the 99/4 had the 9918, the 4A had the 9918A, which IIRC had an additional bitmap mode lacking in the original chip.)
Another poster made a comment above about programs recorded on tape. I have seen emulators for the TI, VIC20, and C64 which can "listen" to a
Now if I can just get a drive and software that will read my personal libraries from my old System/34 8" floppies!
Something which really irks me is how many of my accounts require that I provide my SSAN over the phone as proof of my identity. My SSAN appears on countless documents throughout my life, most of which have passed through insecure hands, and some probably misplaced or lost so others can read them. Primarily this includes my military medical documentation (as my sponsor, my father's information is more prominent on these, though my SSAN is used in documents from my early 20's,) and my college documentation.
I deal with a number of companies which use my SSAN as the "key" to my account, some which (supposedly) supplant it with a passphrase -- though a representative of one company told me that if I couldn't remember my passphrase she would accept my SSAN! This completely goes against my reason for having a passphrase on the account in the first place! I will not go into detail about with which companies I have accounts covered by this policity, but suffice to say that just about every service I am provided suffers in this way.
Like the parent, I cannot myself come up with a feasible system for replacement. I even had one company rep ask me what I would prefer to use, I answered "I don't care, just not my [SSAN]." Not necessarily true, since some companies ask for information which can be read directly off a stolen or misdirected envelope.
None-the-less, the current system IS broken and IS too easy to subvert. I find that too many entities look to the end user for solutions to their problems, as illustrated by the above question posed to me. I am sorry, but it is not the customer's responsibility to provide a fix to a company's broken procedures; the company itself should invest whatever it takes to ensure its customer/client safety, regardless of the cost.
Personally, I would opt to pay more for a service which made it more difficult to access my account information. If more companies provided a service like this, eventually it would become the norm and the price of such secure service would settle back down due to competition.
I do feel the need to address something I provided in my introduction: college documentation. Something as simple as classroom roll sheets is a problem. In more than one class I have attended a sheet of paper was passed around the class (proof of attendance, clarification of class enrollment, or whatever) on which a student was to print his or her name, SSAN, and then sign. Need I say more? Put all of these elements together and think about our personal security. Even I wrote my SSAN on such documents until later in my college life when I thought better of this practice. Only once did my refusal cause a problem, and I ultimately won the argument in front of college administration.