Exactly! I even once read a story about a laptop that got stolen and was found because the original owner had installed a distributed.net client on it and the thief hadn't even bothered reformatting the PC.
It's still lacking WinMX (speaking of 'popular' P2P networks) but apart from that I like it very much. Been using it since v2.01 and it's one of the stablest ed2k clients that I know of under Linux (unlike the official client).
A friend of mine had his PC connected to the phone line during a thunderstorm and lightning struck it. The result:
- black phone jack on the wall - melted soundcard and internal modem - a hole in one of the Winbond ICs on the mainboard - all SCSI drives (CD-ROM, Writer): dead - all IDE drives (HDDs): dead - Cannon BJC Color Printer: dead - external SCSI scanner: dead - PSU: dead
Not wanting to throw away anything still working we went through rigorous testing of ALL the components... for fun we even tested CPU and RAM and to our great astonishment THEY WORKED! Everything in his PC was dead and exhibiting physical signs of burning, melting or explosions... except what I consider the 2 most 'electricity sensitive' parts of a PC which worked perfectly (and were promptly integrated into the replacement system we scrounged up from spare parts).
My CD-Writer wouldn't work any more, simply didn't get detected while booting. My first guess was a firmware problem (it was still blinking and tray ejects worked too) so I wanted to re-flash the firmware on there: No go, the flasher first scans for the drive and then allows you to select and flash it... no way to override that.
So I went to the next PC which had the exact same drive, powered it up, loaded the flashing tool and let it detect the Writer, unhooked the latter (first power, then IDE cable) with the PC still running, connected my 'defect' one and clicked on 'Flash' (yes, that thing only had a Windows GUI Flash utility available)... Nothing happened for about a minute and then the writer's LED started blinking and the flasher said 'Flash complete'.
Rebooted and my drive was working again (and has been doing its job happily ever since)
Problem is: Some people can't buy ATI cards (Radeon 9700 Pros only exist as 'powered by' here in Europe) but at least for me (using a HIS card) the driver worked fine.
Also note that you can hex edit the Linux drivers to work... no need to flash the BIOS.
Couldn't agree more... in addition to that, there are only 'powered by ATI' cards on the European market so we couldn't get real ATI cards even if we wanted to (except maybe by importing them from the US).
And the problem stated here is most probably a bug because I own a 'powered by' Radeon 9700 card from HIS and it's working perfectly with the drivers.
I would also like to note that my card does work and it's not 'made by' ATI. It's a HIS 'powered by' Radeon 9700 and has been working flawlessly with the new drivers from day one.
There also is a patch that you can apply to the drivers that will make them work with other cards without having to flash around with the BIOS. (See my other posting on this page for the link)
Here's a thread where people asked the same question on running 'powered by' cards and it contains a link that we found which seems to solve the problem. (Requires hex editing a file and the 'powered by' restriction is gone)
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&th re adid=33648944&perpage=20&pagenumber=4
SES-Global also has a press release on the Astra site:
"SES ASTRA has full insurance coverage for the ASTRA 1K programme and the launch failure will not affect existing services at 19.2 East. Furthermore, ASTRA 2C, already operational at 19.2 East, offers comprehensive back-up for the ASTRA low-bands at this slot and will remain there until further notice."
Note that the ASTRA 2C sat should actually be at 28.2 but got launched to 19.2 initially to have enough capacity until they could launch 1K. According to this site it was scheduled to take its final position once 1K was in operation but I guess that won't be anywhere near now.
If I am not mistaken the first Ariane 5 launch failed because they had tried to squeeze in the Ariane 4 software with a few adaptations. Turns out that at a certain point in time, the on-board systems had some wrong assumtions on the nature of the whole craft and miscalculated a course correction... the result was that the whole thing went completely off course and got blown to pieces by the fail-safe systems.
I just happen to have seen a bit in the news yesterday that they will be setting up a license plate registration on one of the German borders. It's purpose is to scan the license plates of the passing cars and double check them against a police database, allowing them to find stolen cars of criminals...
Take that system, link the license plates to real names, hook up the whole thing to those billboards et voila.
I remember these worked in Win95 for skipping ALL the notifications, the latter doesn't even format correctly in a sense that it puts a filesystem back there.
As far I as remember you only had to beat game mode B with speed 9 and high 5 (half the screen filled at start) to win. (or get that high score in mode A)
It's weird to see how many people still don't know or forget about this setting. Every time we're doing a bigger LAN party we're hosting people's dedicated gameservers in a separate (lockable) room where we connect them to the backbone. Of course we don't have 20 screens, keyboards and mice lying around so we tell them to make sure their machines run without any of that equipment.
Anyway no matter how often we tell them, we still get people coming up with 'you've got networking problems in the server room because I can't contact my server but it worked when I tested it at my seat'. So I move one of the rare screens we've got up there, connect it to their box and sure enough the darn thing is stuck in the BIOS displaying "Keyboard error, press F1 to continue". (That's usually the part where I give off a snobby remark like "Networking problems, huh?")
Still, the worst case in this area must be Netfinity servers because if you don't set them to 'Halt on: No errors' they will even complain about a missing mouse!
As for weird error messages, I encountered one just a few days ago. Trying to open Internet Explorer just came up with a box titled 'Error!' and containing that yellow exclamation mark sign plus an 'OK' button. Now that one won't get a '+1 Informative' from me!;)
Just invent a meta tag that specifically allows slashdot to cache the site. Put it into the FAQ under 'How do I allow Slashdot to cache my site?' and note that 'By including this Tag on your pages you specifically allow us to fetch your website and host a copy of it on our own servers in the event that a link to your site is posted to our front page.' (Maybe even make that a license agreement...)
That would at least allow caching for the webmasters who specifically want it.
To be honest: I almost never download the WHQL drivers, at least not when I've got a choice because usually there's newer drivers which are (not yet) WHQL certified. (I NEVER got a WHQL certified driver from Matrox's Website) In addition to that, most users either:
- never update their drivers - know that they need to download the drivers from the manufacturer (and they don't care about WHQL or not) because usually they aren't available on 'Windows Update'
The only problem with that is that M$ will start preventing people to install non-signed drivers, first by setting it as a default option (What to do with non-signed drivers? Install, Warn and ask, don't install) and then by forcing it onto people in future versions or updates. And that's exactly where most inexperienced users will stop bothering and go for the WHQL drivers instead.
The only example that you could even use the same files for was Q3, and even that didn't come in the same box.
AFAIK that is not true. All the UT Linux installer needed was about 5MB of own files and it got the rest from the original Windows CD. (Much like Q3A except Q3A for Linux expected you to copy over the files yourself whereas UT had the installer do it for you.) So actually both Q3A's and UT's Linux versions worked similarily: Use the same data files and add some specific Linux code for the core.
Helping them improve ...
on
Tiny Boxen
·
· Score: 1
... could be done here:
http://www.openbrick.org/wiki/ng/FrontPage
At least I guess that would be more useful to them because they might miss some of the comments among the Slashdot mass.
Just FYI there's a little spelling mistake: The 'Astra Broadband Interactive Hub' is probably in Betzdorf, Luxembourg (http://www.ses-astra.com/tools/contact/index.shtm l) rather than in 'Bexdorf'. To be exact it's at the 'Château de Betzdorf' which can be seen here: http://be.sun.com/aboutsun/ezine/library/images/in stallation.jpg (Link taken from this article http://be.sun.com/aboutsun/ezine/library/ses_astra.html on Sun's site).
For those who don't know Astra, they're one of the largest (if the the largest) satellite operators here in Europe doing mostly TV broadcasting. They've also got a picture gallery showing the NOC and the sats on their site: http://www.astra.lu/press-info/documentation/galle ry/index.php
Exactly what I thought: Just invent a mirror.txt system which lets people to define who may cache what. Or just use the existing robots.txt system (after all the Slashdot caching crawler coming in to get the content would be just that).
In addition to the above allow webmasters to manually remove their site from the cache again (via a form or something similar). That's what web.archive.org are doing: Their bot crawls the site (unless you don't allow it to by blocking out ia_archiver in robots.txt) and then stores it in the archive. If at one point of time a webmaster discovers he doesn't want his site in the archive he can still request removal.
About the price: I think six times the price (take 1Mbit/s in Belgium and do the same in LU) of what our neighbours have is pretty expensive. If it weren't for my extensive Internet usage I'd never have taken DSL.
The uplink is definitely not capped at 64kbps. I've seen this on my line, with friends and I've even had a P&T technician confirm that it's rather capped around 192kbps than 64. (I do have constant upload rates of 20k/sec which would never be possilbe with 64kbps.)
As for the need for broadband: Sure it's not that high but gamers like me have to download patches, drivers updates etc... downloading a 20MB nVidia Detonator driver is definitely stressing the patience of most 56k users and I'm not even speaking about the 200MB Half-Life and Counter-Strike updates each time those change to a new version. For chatting, 56k is OK... e-mail already started getting difficult, especially if people send you jokes in form of MPG and PPT files. (I just hate that, any e-mail over 500k gets automatically removed from my POP3 server before even downloading it.) Web browsing is getting worse too: I've had sites with Flash intros (even some sites completely done in Flash) as big as 800k which takes ages to load on a 56k line.
As for the price: In Germany and Belgium, DSL is not that expensive. Everybody can afford it and just be online when they want for how long they want. Only in Luxembourg we've got those absurd prices which really require you to be online many hours per day to pay off.
As for ISDN: I never moved to it. It's not that much faster and I've never had any problems with reliability using my 56k modem. (That probably doesn't apply to those standard PCI software crap modems which come built-in with modern PCs) In addition to that, ISDN hardware (especially internal cards) sucks without end. Running anything like that would mean trashing your Windows 95/98 installation with packet drivers, CAPI drivers, NDISWAN drivers, modem emulation drivers and god knows what else. (They've improved by now but in the beginning it was a plain nightmare)
As for not seeing ads: That's not what brought me to that conclusion (I don't even watch French or Belgian TV so how could I base anything on the ads they show there?). I spend a lot of time on Quakenet IRC where I see a lot of gamers from the surrounding countries and they were all complaining that DSL was just not available and according to their telco company would not be within months. They had pretty much the same situation that I had about a year ago, which is why I remember them.
Anyway, I've still got my good old analogue line which is now equiped with DSL (even less expensive than ISDN+DSL) and due to me being nearly 'always on' I even pay less now than what I paid for dial-up access before. I don't care for the speed (heck I'm always online and have got plenty of time to leave downloads in the background) but comparing speed/price to Belgium or Germany I think I am entitled to a little ranting.
Hmm... sure, the nordic countries seem to be far faster in adopting new technologies than we are. (no wonder all the cell phone manufacturers are based there)
Uh, don't even start with that 5LUF/min access, it was expensive as hell! (I used to do way more FidoNet in those days)
Still I'm astonished that our neighbours got broadband that early because everybody I meet online is still complaining that they just can't get it. This is the first time that I hear stuff like "we've had it for years".
I am aware that LU is a special case, we've practically still got our monopoly in place (deregulation or not) and we're not big enough to have any other telco company survive. However I thought that neighbouring countries weren't too much ahead of us and I still have people complaining that they just can't get DSL in their region in Belgium and Germany. (Maybe they just live in a rural area like me)
An der Post hier DSL Leitung ass wierklech ^%#@(* deier, daat eenzegt gudd drun ass dass den Uplink net sou limiteiert ass (64k? Dei iwwertreffen ech labber ouni iergendeppes gemach ze hun.) an dass et keen DL Quota gett. (An hoffentlech bleiwt daat och nach laang esou)
In addition to that, I know that Germany and Belgium also didn't have DSL until a few months ago and that they still have serious problems with it's deployment. IMHO Germany should have tried to move forward to something like DSL instead of going to ISDN.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! I even once read a story about a laptop that got stolen and was found because the original owner had installed a distributed.net client on it and the thief hadn't even bothered reformatting the PC.
l
Actually I just googled for it and I found the article right here on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/26/112245.shtm
It's still lacking WinMX (speaking of 'popular' P2P networks) but apart from that I like it very much. Been using it since v2.01 and it's one of the stablest ed2k clients that I know of under Linux (unlike the official client).
A friend of mine had his PC connected to the phone line during a thunderstorm and lightning struck it. The result:
... for fun we even tested CPU and RAM and to our great astonishment THEY WORKED! Everything in his PC was dead and exhibiting physical signs of burning, melting or explosions ... except what I consider the 2 most 'electricity sensitive' parts of a PC which worked perfectly (and were promptly integrated into the replacement system we scrounged up from spare parts).
- black phone jack on the wall
- melted soundcard and internal modem
- a hole in one of the Winbond ICs on the mainboard
- all SCSI drives (CD-ROM, Writer): dead
- all IDE drives (HDDs): dead
- Cannon BJC Color Printer: dead
- external SCSI scanner: dead
- PSU: dead
Not wanting to throw away anything still working we went through rigorous testing of ALL the components
I had to do something similar once:
... no way to override that.
... Nothing happened for about a minute and then the writer's LED started blinking and the flasher said 'Flash complete'.
My CD-Writer wouldn't work any more, simply didn't get detected while booting. My first guess was a firmware problem (it was still blinking and tray ejects worked too) so I wanted to re-flash the firmware on there: No go, the flasher first scans for the drive and then allows you to select and flash it
So I went to the next PC which had the exact same drive, powered it up, loaded the flashing tool and let it detect the Writer, unhooked the latter (first power, then IDE cable) with the PC still running, connected my 'defect' one and clicked on 'Flash' (yes, that thing only had a Windows GUI Flash utility available)
Rebooted and my drive was working again (and has been doing its job happily ever since)
Problem is: Some people can't buy ATI cards (Radeon 9700 Pros only exist as 'powered by' here in Europe) but at least for me (using a HIS card) the driver worked fine.
Also note that you can hex edit the Linux drivers to work... no need to flash the BIOS.
Couldn't agree more... in addition to that, there are only 'powered by ATI' cards on the European market so we couldn't get real ATI cards even if we wanted to (except maybe by importing them from the US).
And the problem stated here is most probably a bug because I own a 'powered by' Radeon 9700 card from HIS and it's working perfectly with the drivers.
We've managed to get an ENMIC 8500 Pro to work with that as well. (see mutombo's posts in this thread)
I would also like to note that my card does work and it's not 'made by' ATI. It's a HIS 'powered by' Radeon 9700 and has been working flawlessly with the new drivers from day one.
There also is a patch that you can apply to the drivers that will make them work with other cards without having to flash around with the BIOS. (See my other posting on this page for the link)
Here's a thread where people asked the same question on running 'powered by' cards and it contains a link that we found which seems to solve the problem. (Requires hex editing a file and the 'powered by' restriction is gone)
h re adid=33648944&perpage=20&pagenumber=4
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&t
SES-Global also has a press release on the Astra site:
"SES ASTRA has full insurance coverage for the ASTRA 1K programme and the launch failure will not affect existing services at 19.2 East. Furthermore, ASTRA 2C, already operational at 19.2 East, offers comprehensive back-up for the ASTRA low-bands at this slot and will remain there until further notice."
Note that the ASTRA 2C sat should actually be at 28.2 but got launched to 19.2 initially to have enough capacity until they could launch 1K. According to this site it was scheduled to take its final position once 1K was in operation but I guess that won't be anywhere near now.
If I am not mistaken the first Ariane 5 launch failed because they had tried to squeeze in the Ariane 4 software with a few adaptations. Turns out that at a certain point in time, the on-board systems had some wrong assumtions on the nature of the whole craft and miscalculated a course correction... the result was that the whole thing went completely off course and got blown to pieces by the fail-safe systems.
All the above IIRC of course.
I just happen to have seen a bit in the news yesterday that they will be setting up a license plate registration on one of the German borders. It's purpose is to scan the license plates of the passing cars and double check them against a police database, allowing them to find stolen cars of criminals...
Take that system, link the license plates to real names, hook up the whole thing to those billboards et voila.
/U /AUTOTEST
/U /SELECT?
or
I remember these worked in Win95 for skipping ALL the notifications, the latter doesn't even format correctly in a sense that it puts a filesystem back there.
As far I as remember you only had to beat game mode B with speed 9 and high 5 (half the screen filled at start) to win. (or get that high score in mode A)
It's weird to see how many people still don't know or forget about this setting. Every time we're doing a bigger LAN party we're hosting people's dedicated gameservers in a separate (lockable) room where we connect them to the backbone. Of course we don't have 20 screens, keyboards and mice lying around so we tell them to make sure their machines run without any of that equipment.
;)
Anyway no matter how often we tell them, we still get people coming up with 'you've got networking problems in the server room because I can't contact my server but it worked when I tested it at my seat'. So I move one of the rare screens we've got up there, connect it to their box and sure enough the darn thing is stuck in the BIOS displaying "Keyboard error, press F1 to continue". (That's usually the part where I give off a snobby remark like "Networking problems, huh?")
Still, the worst case in this area must be Netfinity servers because if you don't set them to 'Halt on: No errors' they will even complain about a missing mouse!
As for weird error messages, I encountered one just a few days ago. Trying to open Internet Explorer just came up with a box titled 'Error!' and containing that yellow exclamation mark sign plus an 'OK' button. Now that one won't get a '+1 Informative' from me!
This idea has been proposed before as well:
...)
Just invent a meta tag that specifically allows slashdot to cache the site. Put it into the FAQ under 'How do I allow Slashdot to cache my site?' and note that 'By including this Tag on your pages you specifically allow us to fetch your website and host a copy of it on our own servers in the event that a link to your site is posted to our front page.' (Maybe even make that a license agreement
That would at least allow caching for the webmasters who specifically want it.
To be honest: I almost never download the WHQL drivers, at least not when I've got a choice because usually there's newer drivers which are (not yet) WHQL certified. (I NEVER got a WHQL certified driver from Matrox's Website) In addition to that, most users either:
- never update their drivers
- know that they need to download the drivers from the manufacturer (and they don't care about WHQL or not) because usually they aren't available on 'Windows Update'
The only problem with that is that M$ will start preventing people to install non-signed drivers, first by setting it as a default option (What to do with non-signed drivers? Install, Warn and ask, don't install) and then by forcing it onto people in future versions or updates. And that's exactly where most inexperienced users will stop bothering and go for the WHQL drivers instead.
The only example that you could even use the same files for was Q3, and even that didn't come in the same box.
AFAIK that is not true. All the UT Linux installer needed was about 5MB of own files and it got the rest from the original Windows CD. (Much like Q3A except Q3A for Linux expected you to copy over the files yourself whereas UT had the installer do it for you.) So actually both Q3A's and UT's Linux versions worked similarily: Use the same data files and add some specific Linux code for the core.
... could be done here:
http://www.openbrick.org/wiki/ng/FrontPage
At least I guess that would be more useful to them because they might miss some of the comments among the Slashdot mass.
Just FYI there's a little spelling mistake: The 'Astra Broadband Interactive Hub' is probably in Betzdorf, Luxembourg (http://www.ses-astra.com/tools/contact/index.shtm l) rather than in 'Bexdorf'. To be exact it's at the 'Château de Betzdorf' which can be seen here: http://be.sun.com/aboutsun/ezine/library/images/in stallation.jpg (Link taken from this article http://be.sun.com/aboutsun/ezine/library/ses_astra .html on Sun's site).
e ry/index.php
For those who don't know Astra, they're one of the largest (if the the largest) satellite operators here in Europe doing mostly TV broadcasting. They've also got a picture gallery showing the NOC and the sats on their site: http://www.astra.lu/press-info/documentation/gall
Exactly what I thought: Just invent a mirror.txt system which lets people to define who may cache what. Or just use the existing robots.txt system (after all the Slashdot caching crawler coming in to get the content would be just that).
In addition to the above allow webmasters to manually remove their site from the cache again (via a form or something similar). That's what web.archive.org are doing: Their bot crawls the site (unless you don't allow it to by blocking out ia_archiver in robots.txt) and then stores it in the archive. If at one point of time a webmaster discovers he doesn't want his site in the archive he can still request removal.
About the price: I think six times the price (take 1Mbit/s in Belgium and do the same in LU) of what our neighbours have is pretty expensive. If it weren't for my extensive Internet usage I'd never have taken DSL.
The uplink is definitely not capped at 64kbps. I've seen this on my line, with friends and I've even had a P&T technician confirm that it's rather capped around 192kbps than 64. (I do have constant upload rates of 20k/sec which would never be possilbe with 64kbps.)
As for the need for broadband: Sure it's not that high but gamers like me have to download patches, drivers updates etc... downloading a 20MB nVidia Detonator driver is definitely stressing the patience of most 56k users and I'm not even speaking about the 200MB Half-Life and Counter-Strike updates each time those change to a new version. For chatting, 56k is OK... e-mail already started getting difficult, especially if people send you jokes in form of MPG and PPT files. (I just hate that, any e-mail over 500k gets automatically removed from my POP3 server before even downloading it.) Web browsing is getting worse too: I've had sites with Flash intros (even some sites completely done in Flash) as big as 800k which takes ages to load on a 56k line.
As for the price: In Germany and Belgium, DSL is not that expensive. Everybody can afford it and just be online when they want for how long they want. Only in Luxembourg we've got those absurd prices which really require you to be online many hours per day to pay off.
As for ISDN: I never moved to it. It's not that much faster and I've never had any problems with reliability using my 56k modem. (That probably doesn't apply to those standard PCI software crap modems which come built-in with modern PCs) In addition to that, ISDN hardware (especially internal cards) sucks without end. Running anything like that would mean trashing your Windows 95/98 installation with packet drivers, CAPI drivers, NDISWAN drivers, modem emulation drivers and god knows what else. (They've improved by now but in the beginning it was a plain nightmare)
As for not seeing ads: That's not what brought me to that conclusion (I don't even watch French or Belgian TV so how could I base anything on the ads they show there?). I spend a lot of time on Quakenet IRC where I see a lot of gamers from the surrounding countries and they were all complaining that DSL was just not available and according to their telco company would not be within months. They had pretty much the same situation that I had about a year ago, which is why I remember them.
Anyway, I've still got my good old analogue line which is now equiped with DSL (even less expensive than ISDN+DSL) and due to me being nearly 'always on' I even pay less now than what I paid for dial-up access before. I don't care for the speed (heck I'm always online and have got plenty of time to leave downloads in the background) but comparing speed/price to Belgium or Germany I think I am entitled to a little ranting.
Hmm... sure, the nordic countries seem to be far faster in adopting new technologies than we are. (no wonder all the cell phone manufacturers are based there)
Uh, don't even start with that 5LUF/min access, it was expensive as hell! (I used to do way more FidoNet in those days)
Still I'm astonished that our neighbours got broadband that early because everybody I meet online is still complaining that they just can't get it. This is the first time that I hear stuff like "we've had it for years".
I am aware that LU is a special case, we've practically still got our monopoly in place (deregulation or not) and we're not big enough to have any other telco company survive. However I thought that neighbouring countries weren't too much ahead of us and I still have people complaining that they just can't get DSL in their region in Belgium and Germany. (Maybe they just live in a rural area like me)
An der Post hier DSL Leitung ass wierklech ^%#@(* deier, daat eenzegt gudd drun ass dass den Uplink net sou limiteiert ass (64k? Dei iwwertreffen ech labber ouni iergendeppes gemach ze hun.) an dass et keen DL Quota gett. (An hoffentlech bleiwt daat och nach laang esou)
... I clicked on Submit too early (stupid me)
In addition to that, I know that Germany and Belgium also didn't have DSL until a few months ago and that they still have serious problems with it's deployment. IMHO Germany should have tried to move forward to something like DSL instead of going to ISDN.