"doesn't fry's sell cases,motheboards,cpu's etc? why would you have to DEMAND to get a machine w/o windows?
That's for people that buy machines already assembled. I've never bought an assembled PC.
also, a true linux zelot does not notify the manager about the misabled display, he simply fixes it himself.:-)"
I did last week. I took boxes of Linux and sprinkled them all through the XP display. I put them in front, in back, in between the XP boxes so that as people take down XP boxes they would reveal Linux boxes behind. I put at least a dozen and a half like that then left.
I'll be back there in a few weeks and I'll just do it again. And again. And again..
Originally my post was directed to users that would have the techincal ability to do this on their own and would do so for their own use.
Even so, my original suggestion, an old pc with two nics is not power hungry or noisy or unreliable. "Clunker" is used to refer to an OLD pc that is too slow for Windows use.
Small businesses can work great with an old PC as a router, better so than with a Cisco, which is a PC running a FLAWED operating system that is EASY to hack and break.
Cisco is a POOR choice for any size business, small or large. For a LARGE business I would not consider selling them a refurbished PC, I would sell them a brand new PC, which is massive overkill for the job, and install Linux on it so that it can operate as the router.
A PC with Linux on it is much cheaper and FAR more reliable than a "box" from Cisco that a script kiddie can crack in 2 minutes or less.
One last thing. Larger businesses have their own tech people on staff and in house. If their tech people can't handle such trival things as discussed, they don't belong there..
First, my neighbor bought one of their low end, very cheap PC's loaded with ThizLinux.
What total crap. ThizLinux is sucky at best. We'll skip the bottom of the bargain barrel PC and get to the Linux.
I went over and took one look at ThizLinux and popped in a Mandrake CD. Problem solved.
Fry's does NOT support Linux. They sell it but they do NOT support it.
I've been in Fry's *many* times and the knotheads that work there can't find their own ass with both hands and a flashlight.
However, in the software section they did have SUSE 8.2 and Redhat 9 for sale. **--BUT--**, they had ALL the Linux boxes in the section displayed as "UTILITIES".... That was right next to the display "OPERATING SYSTEMS" that was loaded to the gills with XP boxes. So, they are misleading people by the way they present the product. People that have no knowledge of Linux, and most people fall into this category, would not look at the Linux boxes because they are mislabeled as "utilities" rather than as a operating system, which it *IS*..
Fry's is guilty of something here, I would wager that they did this under the direction of an M$ memo... I pointed out the misleading displays to a manager and got a shrug and a dumb look. A month later nothing had changed.
If you want to buy a machine without M$ on it from Fry's you have to DEMAND it, they will resist but they will cave in if you hammer the shit out of them. They'll give you ThizLinux, you can Thiz it out the window or Thiz it across the room into the circular file and load a good distro of your choice. But don't let them BS you into XP..
And if you want a boxed, retail distro, get Suse or Redhat there. I just wish they would put Mandrake on the shelf too, I would buy it.
Hmmmph! And who is modding these fact filled posts down??
I would say that the only people that would mod such posts down are those that are afraid that the truth be exposed. Agents of the communist Chinese government in the midst of/. ???
The only people afraid of the truth are those that have something to hide.
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared."
PROVE that stuff from China is high quality and not total crap. You can't because it is crap. The only quality products ever to come from China where silk and chinaware a few hundred years ago. Now they just crank out cheap crap to flood Wally World with so they can the Chinese communist military machine running..
A HUGE percentage of the "goods" made in China are made by prison labor, namely political prisoners, I.E. those dissidents that oppose the State.
The communist government is murderous. Ever seen the video of Tiananmen square butchery??
How about Tibet? Or those people that just want to do that exercise thing in the park??
Boy, if you think that China is anything other than a murderous, oppressive country, you live in a bubble.
When you buy crap from China you HELP keep that system running. Every TV you buy made in China or Tiawan puts another AK-47 in the hands of a Chinese soldier that will use that AK-47 against his own people and will gladly use it against Americans if told to do so.
The Chinese are spoiling for war, they support North Korea, they've been caught RED handed stealing nuclear weapons secrets (W88 come to mind eh?), missle secrets, they are forever spying on America.
They even threatened to wipe California off the map with nuclear weapons if we interfered with them when they were reclaiming Tiawan and again if they weren't granted MFN trade status.
And we gave in to those terrorist threats. What's wrong with that picture eh??
You folks better come out of mommies basement and wake up! Turn off the Sci-fi channel and take the red pill. Or just take the blue pill and be happy..
I don't buy name brand stuff. I don't buy "fashion" clothes or "fashion" shoes.
I pay attention to where things are made and I buy American made products if there is anyway possible. In cases where it's not possible to buy an American made product, I try to buy the product that's made in a country that supports freedom and not tyranny.
In every computer that I've seen since the implementation of BIOS based setups, IE 386 and up have the option to ignore errors such as no keyboard.
A stripped out PC doesn't get very hot so you can either slow down the fans or replace them with large heat sinks.
I UNDERCLOCK them on purpose so that the CPU doesn't need a fan, such as a pentium 100mhz underclocked to 75mhz barely gets warm to the touch so a small, cheapo heatsink is plenty.
Most older machines are rock solid. They've already passed the burn in period long ago. People toss them out because they are too slow to run the latest version of windows, much less any other version of windows. They were born of the DOS days. They run Linux just fine.
I've picked up countless PC's from the side of the road that people tossed out that there was nothing at all wrong with them, they were just old and slow.
And for a business user, I don't sell junk or problem machines to anyone. When I sell a refurbed box as a firewall to someone, it's running Linux and it's guaranteed. I back my work and my word with a 100% ONE YEAR warranty. I deliver a working system to my customer and my customers are happy. I go the extra mile to make sure of it.
Some people may fly by night, I don't. I'm a professional. I've been working on computers since the late 70's.
Take an old clunker, two nics and go to http://smoothwall.org/beta/ and download the latest package, smoothwall 2.0 Orient.
It's free. It works. You can find clunkers everywhere for free.
I refurb old clunkers and load smoothy on them. I resell them and make a few $$$ for my pocket, keep stuff out of the land fill and make some customer very happy for saving them BIG $$$$....
"or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron"
You mean you haven't done that??
Damn newbies.. Back in the good old days you couldn't buy computer stuff in stores, you built it from kits you ordered from magazines and all the goodies had to be built too.
I remember when they came out with 8" floppy disk drives, man that was earth shaking news.
I posted a follow up right after I post that. Read down. I meant to say 10 MEGABYTE not 10 gigabyte. I typo'd
I was opening up IBM 10 meg full height drives and replacing platters then, in my shop, sans clean room. I wouldn't send the drives out as repaired that way, I would retrieve data from damaged drives and then replace the drive with a new one. I was the only one around in my area that could/would do it without sending it to a lab for major $$$$...
Labs were charging thousands of dollars where I was charging hundreds of dollars and people were thrilled to no end to get their data back at such a low price. This was before the days of tape backup (for PC's) and most people were too lazy or dumb to back up to 5 1/4" floppy.
I even had a Seagate 1/2 height 20meg drive that I ran OPEN, no cover, bare, naked platters. I hooked it up to a pc and was reading and writing data to/from it. People were even blowing cigarette smoke on it directly while it was operating. The wind from the Bernoulli effect blew the smoke and dust away as it spun and kept it clean. Not to mention the tolerances were quite large.
Older stuff was more fault tolerant than new stuff. New stuff just has a MUCH longer MTBF..
Yeah, it was Frankenstein repairs but I got people's data back and was very successful at it. Now I don't bother. It's not worth the trouble to go through all that.
If what they have is important, they'll either back up frequently or they'll run RAID and back those up frequently. If they aren't doing that then their data is not that important..
As for the data packs, I personally owned and kept in my home, a Burroughs B700 and a B730, both of them fully intact and fully operational. I finally got rid of them in the mid 90's but I did strip all the capacitors (freaking huge!) and kept them, along with ONE disc pack, the operations manuals and a few of the old electric bills..
I've tried to convince a few people to convert but when I find out that they have all that wintel crap, well...
Setup of winmodems. Currently that's a hellish task. I went through a dozen of them trying to build a box for my dad until I found one that worked.
There's tons of this cheap shit out there but people do NOT want to be told that they have to buy new hardware. They bought a Dell or whatever and the video card, modem, etc. that came with it, well, they expect it to work. "it worked under M$, why the hell should it not work with Linux?" You can't tell them, "Sorry pal, your modem (and or video) is a piece of shit and you'll have to replace them, despite the fact that they work just fine under M$.. Yeah, that's a no starter. The Linux for free concept just got a $150+ price tag nailed onto it.
cut/copy/paste is pretty sucky. They really need to work this out. I'm no big fan of "klipper" but there has to be a better way.
In M$ you can do like codes to get foreign characters. For the most part I do not want to totally switch my keyboard from English to German to type a simple letter when I only occasionaly need to use a German character. That's just silly. It was easy to do with M$, not easy to do with Linux. There may be a better way to do it but I've not found it yet.
Nicer people. I've found that Linux people are brutal and ruthless when it comes to help.
It usually goes something like this, nube: Hi, how do I install a winmodem? I'm brand new to Linux.
vet: RTFM!! RTFM!! modprobe !! Damn dude!
nube: Uh, I can't understand all this modprobe stuff, I'm NEW to linux.
vet: RTFM DAMNIT!!
nube: I'm still confused.
vet: man modprobe !!! Do we have to hold your damn hand?!!
nube: Jeez, with windows I just turned it on and hardware wizard
installed everything for me. Maybe I'll just stick with MS..
vet: Well, if he was too stupid to understand man modprobe then he doesn't
need to use Linux. Jeez! Dumb ass newbies..
That's the sort of bullshit that makes potential converts turn away and stay in la la land and crayolas..
Either Linux needs to get better at hardware handling or the people that want to convert others need to get off their high horses..
to send a letter to a friend? Or to subscribe to a "subversive" newsletter?
Everything going to your house will be machine readable which means that machines WILL read who gets what and store that information in a database.
Admiral P0intyhead is having wet dreams over this. TIA dead?? Think again.
They just keep throwing all these schemes out, like trolling. They see who squeals, how many squeal and how loud. After awhile people get numb to all the numbskull schemes and they just begin to ignore them. That's when they quietly implement them..
Watch for some doubleplusgood input on this idea from Professor Warwick..
I would say more like "damning!" This is some serious shit you've given us. Thank you sir! I'll be filing a complaint with the SEC myself.
These "people" are going to do some looooooong time. Darl (and friends) will find out just how long that Hershy Highway is. Darl will be Bubba's beatch.
happened to the SCUM at sCOX I would not shed a tear.
They have moved to the top of the worlds most hated list, eclipsing Bill Gate$ and M$, Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as the number one most hated organization and group of individuals in all of recorded history..
I wouldn't piss on McBride if he was on fire, unless I drank some gasoline first..
Slashdot Mirror
"doesn't fry's sell cases,motheboards,cpu's etc? why would you have to DEMAND to get a machine w/o windows?
:-)"
That's for people that buy machines already assembled. I've never bought an assembled PC.
also, a true linux zelot does not notify the manager about the misabled display, he simply fixes it himself.
I did last week. I took boxes of Linux and sprinkled them all through the XP display. I put them in front, in back, in between the XP boxes so that as people take down XP boxes they would reveal Linux boxes behind. I put at least a dozen and a half like that then left.
I'll be back there in a few weeks and I'll just do it again. And again. And again..
This is war baby!
Originally my post was directed to users that would have the techincal ability to do this on their own and would do so for their own use.
Even so, my original suggestion, an old pc with two nics is not power hungry or noisy or unreliable. "Clunker" is used to refer to an OLD pc that is too slow for Windows use.
Small businesses can work great with an old PC as a router, better so than with a Cisco, which is a PC running a FLAWED operating system that is EASY to hack and break.
Cisco is a POOR choice for any size business, small or large. For a LARGE business I would not consider selling them a refurbished PC, I would sell them a brand new PC, which is massive overkill for the job, and install Linux on it so that it can operate as the router.
A PC with Linux on it is much cheaper and FAR more reliable than a "box" from Cisco that a script kiddie can crack in 2 minutes or less.
One last thing. Larger businesses have their own tech people on staff and in house. If their tech people can't handle such trival things as discussed, they don't belong there..
First, my neighbor bought one of their low end, very cheap PC's loaded with ThizLinux.
What total crap. ThizLinux is sucky at best.
We'll skip the bottom of the bargain barrel PC and get to the Linux.
I went over and took one look at ThizLinux and popped in a Mandrake CD. Problem solved.
Fry's does NOT support Linux.
They sell it but they do NOT support it.
I've been in Fry's *many* times and the knotheads that work there can't find their own ass with both hands and a flashlight.
However, in the software section they did have SUSE 8.2 and Redhat 9 for sale.
**--BUT--**, they had ALL the Linux boxes in the section displayed as "UTILITIES"....
That was right next to the display "OPERATING SYSTEMS" that was loaded to the gills with XP boxes. So, they are misleading people by the way they present the product. People that have no knowledge of Linux, and most people fall into this category, would not look at the Linux boxes because they are mislabeled as "utilities" rather than as a operating system, which it *IS*..
Fry's is guilty of something here, I would wager that they did this under the direction of an M$ memo... I pointed out the misleading displays to a manager and got a shrug and a dumb look. A month later nothing had changed.
If you want to buy a machine without M$ on it from Fry's you have to DEMAND it, they will resist but they will cave in if you hammer the shit out of them. They'll give you ThizLinux, you can Thiz it out the window or Thiz it across the room into the circular file and load a good distro of your choice. But don't let them BS you into XP..
And if you want a boxed, retail distro, get Suse or Redhat there. I just wish they would put Mandrake on the shelf too, I would buy it.
Hmmmph! And who is modding these fact filled posts down??
/. ???
I would say that the only people that would mod such posts down are those that are afraid that the truth be exposed. Agents of the communist Chinese government in the midst of
The only people afraid of the truth are those that have something to hide.
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys,
heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims,
and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city,
he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.
A murderer is less to be feared."
TROLL? FLAMEBAIT?? Are you kidding me??
All the things I said are documented fact.
PROVE that stuff from China is high quality and not total crap. You can't because it is crap.
The only quality products ever to come from China where silk and chinaware a few hundred years ago. Now they just crank out cheap crap to flood Wally World with so they can the Chinese communist military machine running..
A HUGE percentage of the "goods" made in China are made by prison labor, namely political prisoners, I.E. those dissidents that oppose the State.
The communist government is murderous. Ever seen the video of Tiananmen square butchery??
How about Tibet? Or those people that just want to do that exercise thing in the park??
Boy, if you think that China is anything other than a murderous, oppressive country, you live in a bubble.
When you buy crap from China you HELP keep that system running. Every TV you buy made in China or Tiawan puts another AK-47 in the hands of a Chinese soldier that will use that AK-47 against his own people and will gladly use it against Americans if told to do so.
The Chinese are spoiling for war, they support North Korea, they've been caught RED handed stealing nuclear weapons secrets (W88 come to mind eh?), missle secrets, they are forever spying on America.
They even threatened to wipe California off the map with nuclear weapons if we interfered with them when they were reclaiming Tiawan and again if they weren't granted MFN trade status.
And we gave in to those terrorist threats. What's wrong with that picture eh??
You folks better come out of mommies basement and wake up!
Turn off the Sci-fi channel and take the red pill. Or just take the blue pill and be happy..
Your choice. No troll, no flaimbait, just truth..
I don't buy name brand stuff.
I don't buy "fashion" clothes or "fashion" shoes.
I pay attention to where things are made and I buy American made products if there is anyway possible. In cases where it's not possible to buy an American made product, I try to buy the product that's made in a country that supports freedom and not tyranny.
More crap from China.
They make crap. The quality of EVRYTHING from China is crap.
You just can't get good slave labor anymore..
And everything that China sells goes to prolong the murderous, oppressive, communist government.
In every computer that I've seen since the implementation of BIOS based setups, IE 386 and up have the option to ignore errors such as no keyboard.
A stripped out PC doesn't get very hot so you can either slow down the fans or replace them with large heat sinks.
I UNDERCLOCK them on purpose so that the CPU doesn't need a fan, such as a pentium 100mhz underclocked to 75mhz barely gets warm to the touch so a small, cheapo heatsink is plenty.
Most older machines are rock solid. They've already passed the burn in period long ago.
People toss them out because they are too slow to run the latest version of windows, much less any other version of windows. They were born of the DOS days. They run Linux just fine.
I've picked up countless PC's from the side of the road that people tossed out that there was nothing at all wrong with them, they were just old and slow.
And for a business user, I don't sell junk or problem machines to anyone. When I sell a refurbed box as a firewall to someone, it's running Linux and it's guaranteed.
I back my work and my word with a 100% ONE YEAR warranty. I deliver a working system to my customer and my customers are happy. I go the extra mile to make sure of it.
Some people may fly by night, I don't. I'm a professional.
I've been working on computers since the late 70's.
Your analasis is flawed.
Take an old clunker, two nics and go to
http://smoothwall.org/beta/
and download the latest package, smoothwall 2.0 Orient.
It's free. It works. You can find clunkers everywhere for free.
I refurb old clunkers and load smoothy on them.
I resell them and make a few $$$ for my pocket,
keep stuff out of the land fill and make some
customer very happy for saving them BIG $$$$....
"or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron"
You mean you haven't done that??
Damn newbies.. Back in the good old days you couldn't buy computer stuff in stores, you built it from kits you ordered from magazines and all the goodies had to be built too.
I remember when they came out with 8" floppy disk drives, man that was earth shaking news.
I posted a follow up right after I post that.
Read down. I meant to say 10 MEGABYTE not 10 gigabyte. I typo'd
I was opening up IBM 10 meg full height drives and replacing platters then, in my shop, sans clean room. I wouldn't send the drives out as repaired that way, I would retrieve data from damaged drives and then replace the drive with a new one. I was the only one around in my area that could/would do it without sending it to a lab for major $$$$...
Labs were charging thousands of dollars where I was charging hundreds of dollars and people were thrilled to no end to get their data back at such a low price. This was before the days of tape backup (for PC's) and most people were too lazy or dumb to back up to 5 1/4" floppy.
I even had a Seagate 1/2 height 20meg drive that I ran OPEN, no cover, bare, naked platters.
I hooked it up to a pc and was reading and writing data to/from it. People were even blowing cigarette smoke on it directly while it was operating. The wind from the Bernoulli effect blew the smoke and dust away as it spun and kept it clean.
Not to mention the tolerances were quite large.
Older stuff was more fault tolerant than new stuff. New stuff just has a MUCH longer MTBF..
Yeah, it was Frankenstein repairs but I got people's data back and was very successful at it. Now I don't bother. It's not worth the trouble to go through all that.
If what they have is important, they'll either back up frequently or they'll run RAID and back those up frequently. If they aren't doing that then their data is not that important..
As for the data packs, I personally owned and kept in my home, a Burroughs B700 and a B730, both of them fully intact and fully operational.
I finally got rid of them in the mid 90's but I did strip all the capacitors (freaking huge!) and kept them, along with ONE disc pack, the operations manuals and a few of the old electric bills..
Shit. I meant 10 *MEG* drives, not 10 gig...
Sorry....
I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..
you're not a real man.
Real men build their own shit from scratch and troubleshoot/repair it themselves.
Tech support?? I *AM* tech support!
to getting acceptance.
I've tried to convince a few people to convert but
when I find out that they have all that wintel crap, well...
Setup of winmodems. Currently that's a hellish task.
I went through a dozen of them trying to build a box
for my dad until I found one that worked.
There's tons of this cheap shit out there but people
do NOT want to be told that they have to buy new hardware.
They bought a Dell or whatever and the video card, modem, etc.
that came with it, well, they expect it to work.
"it worked under M$, why the hell should it not work with Linux?"
You can't tell them, "Sorry pal, your modem (and or video) is a
piece of shit and you'll have to replace them, despite the
fact that they work just fine under M$..
Yeah, that's a no starter.
The Linux for free concept just got a $150+ price tag nailed onto it.
cut/copy/paste is pretty sucky. They really need to work this out.
I'm no big fan of "klipper" but there has to be a better way.
In M$ you can do like codes to get foreign characters.
For the most part I do not want
to totally switch my keyboard from English to German to type a
simple letter when I only occasionaly need to use a German character.
That's just silly. It was easy to do with M$, not easy to do
with Linux. There may be a better way to do it but I've not
found it yet.
Nicer people. I've found that Linux people are brutal and ruthless
when it comes to help.
It usually goes something like this,
nube: Hi, how do I install a winmodem? I'm brand new to Linux.
vet: RTFM!! RTFM!! modprobe !! Damn dude!
nube: Uh, I can't understand all this modprobe stuff, I'm NEW to linux.
vet: RTFM DAMNIT!!
nube: I'm still confused.
vet: man modprobe !!! Do we have to hold your damn hand?!!
nube: Jeez, with windows I just turned it on and hardware wizard
installed everything for me. Maybe I'll just stick with MS..
vet: Well, if he was too stupid to understand man modprobe then he doesn't
need to use Linux. Jeez! Dumb ass newbies..
That's the sort of bullshit that makes potential converts turn away and
stay in la la land and crayolas..
Either Linux needs to get better at hardware handling or the people
that want to convert others need to get off their high horses..
to send a letter to a friend?
Or to subscribe to a "subversive" newsletter?
Everything going to your house will be machine readable which
means that machines WILL read who gets what and store that information in a database.
Admiral P0intyhead is having wet dreams over this. TIA dead?? Think again.
They just keep throwing all these schemes out, like trolling.
They see who squeals, how many squeal and how loud.
After awhile people get numb to all the numbskull schemes and
they just begin to ignore them. That's when they quietly implement them..
Watch for some doubleplusgood input on this idea from Professor Warwick..
3. Sploit is "other"
I'm taking bets. $2 to play
1. The sploit is M$
2. The sploit is *nix
"J-Lo's there"
Uh, no. I wouldn't touch that piece of filth to save my life. *YOU* can have *it* if you want *it*....
Thanks, but no thanks, I'll pass...
If SAIC gives it a clean bill of health then I'll KNOW 100% that everything is totally on the level.
I really trust SAIC..
www.tubdarl.com
Damn! I actually tried that link. I really expected it to work..
Well then, how about darl.goatse.cx ??
"are they really trying to make money, or just to piss us all off?"
Yes..
I would say more like "damning!"
This is some serious shit you've given us.
Thank you sir! I'll be filing a complaint with the SEC myself.
These "people" are going to do some looooooong time.
Darl (and friends) will find out just how long that Hershy Highway is.
Darl will be Bubba's beatch.
Because IBM is OMNIPRESENT..
IBM is *everywhere*
Come on, didn't you know that??
happened to the SCUM at sCOX I would not shed a tear.
They have moved to the top of the worlds most hated list, eclipsing Bill Gate$ and M$, Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as the number one most hated organization and group of individuals in all of recorded history..
I wouldn't piss on McBride if he was on fire, unless I drank some gasoline first..