Many times I've been with some people in the hallway of a convention, and someone needs a CD duplicated, or wants to swipe some MP3s, or whatever. Normally it's the people with Apple laptops who get to do this chore, because 1) ripping and burning CDs and DVDs actually works under MacOS, and 2) everybody else left their optical drive at home. I even duplicated some guy's WinXP install CD the other day, because he had the ISO but needed to boot the CD. I wrote "Made with a Mac" on the face of the CD;)
The best part of the 12" is it has a DVD burner (or CD burner, depending) permanently installed, and it has the wireless and bluetooth built-in. On so many other compact laptops you either have a dongle-attached CD-ROM puck, or a CD-ROM in a device bay that you can swap out for a battery, but without the extra battery you get shitty battery life. The Powerbooks gets good life with the optical drive installed, and you don't need a lot of optional junk for wireless comms.
I once watched "The Thin Red Line" DVD on a cross-country airplane trip, so I know the PowerBook gets at least three hours from the battery even with the optical drive, the backlight, and the sound running. Of course I had the wireless devices disabled and the CPU speed set to the minimum.
The 3Ware SATA controllers work great. I have the same setup as the upthread: supermicro case, 8 hot-swap SATA bays, and the 3Ware 8506 in a dual Opteron rig. Never had the first problem, even the 3Ware management software works, hot swapping is no problem, SMART monitoring works. It's much better than the Adjile Systems SCSI-SATA RAID it replaced.
The Hohokam had a peak population of less than 50,000 people, and their society collapsed. Some people think the Hohokam society collapsed because their irrigation technology overextended the population, which was then wiped out by drought and poor soil management. I see a parallel with Maricopa County. Yes, technology allows 4 million people to live in the desert. But in adverse conditions, the Maricopa County society is just as apt to evaporate as the Hohokam did 600 years ago.
Yes, I am painfully aware of the agriculture practiced in Arizona. My tax dollars are subsidizing it to the tune of about $1000 per dollar of produced crop, mostly in the form of water projects.
Here's some stats for you on Maricopa County's water supply. The basins and aquifers contain about 175 million acre-feet of water. This is the bit the county has rights to. The county's water use is over 2 million acre-feet per year. The groundwater recharge rate is a pathetic 150,000 acre-feet per year, on average. The aquifer will be depleted in 60 years, according to Maricopa County's own, very optimistic estimates.
Now, riddle me this. Is it wise to invest in real estate in an area that will have pissed away its water supply in less than a century?
Furthermore I'd like to point out that much of Maricopa's and Arizona's surface water supply, for the bastardization of agriculture they tend to practice in that region, is piped in from the Colorado River, which aquatic system had to be ruined to support ambitious Arizona land owners, at the expense of everyone else.
Maricopa County is only "well-run" if you think it's a good idea to build a city of millions in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from the nearest renewable source of water and sustainable agriculture. If you consider those minor matters of survival, it's a fucking disaster.
Let Maricopa County have advertisers on their real estate website. That will distract people from the fact that they're buying land in the desert
Sure, anything has side effects. But SPF just happens to be the most popular *and* most broken spam countermeasure, at the same time.
Side-effect free sender verification: sign all outgoing mails with private key, publish sender public keys in DNS.
Nobody wants crappy vendor drivers anyway, open source or otherwise. They should just open up the hardware documentation and let the community grow their own.
100% agreed. I would (and do) buy damn near any old vid card, as long as I have a reasonable belief that open source programmers have the docs they need from the manufacturer to produce a good driver. Cards like the Rage128 and Millenium II are good (old) examples. The driver ATI puts out is not a useful product and while nVidia produces a fairly high quality driver, they don't cover all the platforms I might care to use.
95% of the slashbots responding to this thread are jerking off at work. But if the employer wants you to pay for your own home broadband, fuck 'em, right?
So, do you really think there is a significant difference between the optimum gcc-compiled output on a P2 and an AthlonXP? Why don't you just save yourself a LOT of time and electricity by transferring the binaries from the fast machine to the slower one?
Re:What out for Michael Moore lawsuits through....
on
Fahrenheit 9/11 Discussion
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a very interesting social comment you have unwittingly made against yourself. You have not yet seen, you imply, any "clear, concise, and truthful rebuttal" to Moore's film. You hope someone makes one soon. However, you have already decided we are being "manipulated, misled, and lied to."
That's really interesting to me. In the absence of evidence against Moore's film, you assume it is misleading and untruthful. That's just not rational.
Look, I know the manufacturers claim the FCC is lording over them, and I know Alan Cox has said the manufacturers have said this, and I fully believe that the manufacturers told Alan that story. But there's no getting around the physics of the situation. Every one of these 802.11b and 802.11a wireless networking cards that I've pried the case from includes a hardware bandpass filter. This is true even for the manufacturers who refused (at first) to repease drivers or specs.
I don't care if you can program the Frob Industries Mk. III wireless radio to broadcast on the KA satellite bands. It's going to be driving a 2.4GHz bandpass filter and a seriously detuned antenna, meaning its emissions will amount to jack shit.
Now, having said all that, there was a chipset, the Atheros "madwifi" chipset, which allowed its power level (in-band) to be increased in excess of the level allowed by any regulator agency on this planet, and also allowed its center frequence to be set out of the ISM band. Naughty. The combination of power level and frequence control allows you to radiate serious power near the ISM band. In my view this is a defective piece of hardware which the FCC should simply have banned. Radios without hardware filters and slew rate control should not be approved.
But, this situation does not apply to all the other manufacturers for which this FCC story is generally pitched (which is to say, any manufacturer who doesn't support Linux). Note this was initially an argument for why Intel couldn't support Linux with their Centrino radio, but lo and behold eventually they did support it. Did Congress pass a law? Was an official bribed? Did they rev the hardware? No, none of these things. The real answer is the story was fiction to begin with. Don't spread it and don't allow manufacturers to hide behind it.
Sorry, that's absolutely false. Even if you could reprogram the radio to use frequencies way out of the ISM band, your antenna would be massively detuned for such frequencies. People forget that these network cards still have transistors and filters at the end of the signal chain, and there's no register you can program that will change the center frequency of a bandpass filter. The meme of the evil hax0r interfering with cuddly bunny radio traffic was started by wireless hardware manufacturers groping for some excuse to not support Linux. It has no basis in physical reality.
Well, the answer is don't get cutting-edge hardware. You can get excellent, servicable wireless 802.11b hardware from several years ago, and that is the golden era for open drivers. Something like a Cisco Aironet 352 is perfect, with excellent drivers and support from all layers of the operating system (linux, bsd, win32, macos,...). Not surprisingly this is also the interviewee's recommended hardware.
As far as headaches, I think you'll find more headaches in the peripheral support infrastructure than in the wireless hardware and drivers. If you are going to use PCMCIA/PC Card wireless adapters I think you'll discover the Linux PCMCIA drivers have a habit of panicking. With any hardware you'll need to do a lot of manual configuration hacking before your computer will perform useful functions like automatically roaming to available SSIDs (something windows and mac os do automatically). You'll be installing packages and editing/etc files for the next month, but eventually you'll have something that works 62% of the time.
There's nothing in BeFS that would prevent you from organizing your files in folders in whatever way you like. But queries give you the ability to see cross-sections of your hierarchy that youotherwise wouldn't get.
Fuck, I'd settle for viruses smaller than 400K! Of all things, you'd expect a virus to be lean and mean, but I guess the latest crops were made with Visual Virus.NET or something to that effect.
Er, if 72 and 100 are the only working settings, why are most windows installs configured for 96?
Also I'm wonder about your definition of "absolutely sucks" is. When you start X, it reads the physical size of the monitor and configures the dpi setting correctly. You can see the result in the output of xdpyinfo. If your monitors are old or defective, you can always start X with -dpi 96 or any other appropriate setting. Neither of these methods sucks, they are both serviceable and accurate.
I don't know what candy-ass systems you people are using, but the X I'm using right now gets point sizes absolutely dead-on, within ±1px (which error, btw, is caused by grid fitting).
You gotta be kidding me. Windows probably has the WORST typography system of any current OS. You can't get a font in the right size. People resort to lying about their display's DPI to get the fonts sized properly, and even then the DPI setting has the opposite effect of what you would expect. Windows typography is fucking stupid, and FreeType looks every bit as good as ClearType (better, IMHO, than MacOS X's on-screen type).
I saw that too, but based on the fact that it's using WDS for wireless bridging, I'd tend to think it should work with the linksys WRT54G. Anyway we'll see in a few weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Many times I've been with some people in the hallway of a convention, and someone needs a CD duplicated, or wants to swipe some MP3s, or whatever. Normally it's the people with Apple laptops who get to do this chore, because 1) ripping and burning CDs and DVDs actually works under MacOS, and 2) everybody else left their optical drive at home. I even duplicated some guy's WinXP install CD the other day, because he had the ISO but needed to boot the CD. I wrote "Made with a Mac" on the face of the CD ;)
I once watched "The Thin Red Line" DVD on a cross-country airplane trip, so I know the PowerBook gets at least three hours from the battery even with the optical drive, the backlight, and the sound running. Of course I had the wireless devices disabled and the CPU speed set to the minimum.
The 3Ware SATA controllers work great. I have the same setup as the upthread: supermicro case, 8 hot-swap SATA bays, and the 3Ware 8506 in a dual Opteron rig. Never had the first problem, even the 3Ware management software works, hot swapping is no problem, SMART monitoring works. It's much better than the Adjile Systems SCSI-SATA RAID it replaced.
The Hohokam had a peak population of less than 50,000 people, and their society collapsed. Some people think the Hohokam society collapsed because their irrigation technology overextended the population, which was then wiped out by drought and poor soil management. I see a parallel with Maricopa County. Yes, technology allows 4 million people to live in the desert. But in adverse conditions, the Maricopa County society is just as apt to evaporate as the Hohokam did 600 years ago.
Here's some stats for you on Maricopa County's water supply. The basins and aquifers contain about 175 million acre-feet of water. This is the bit the county has rights to. The county's water use is over 2 million acre-feet per year. The groundwater recharge rate is a pathetic 150,000 acre-feet per year, on average. The aquifer will be depleted in 60 years, according to Maricopa County's own, very optimistic estimates.
Now, riddle me this. Is it wise to invest in real estate in an area that will have pissed away its water supply in less than a century?
Furthermore I'd like to point out that much of Maricopa's and Arizona's surface water supply, for the bastardization of agriculture they tend to practice in that region, is piped in from the Colorado River, which aquatic system had to be ruined to support ambitious Arizona land owners, at the expense of everyone else.
Here's a nice book to read: Cadilalc Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Let Maricopa County have advertisers on their real estate website. That will distract people from the fact that they're buying land in the desert
No, 1 PGP key per user. There are already systems for publishing public keys in DNS. The additional load on the DNS system would be trivial.
Sure, anything has side effects. But SPF just happens to be the most popular *and* most broken spam countermeasure, at the same time. Side-effect free sender verification: sign all outgoing mails with private key, publish sender public keys in DNS.
Nobody wants crappy vendor drivers anyway, open source or otherwise. They should just open up the hardware documentation and let the community grow their own.
100% agreed. I would (and do) buy damn near any old vid card, as long as I have a reasonable belief that open source programmers have the docs they need from the manufacturer to produce a good driver. Cards like the Rage128 and Millenium II are good (old) examples. The driver ATI puts out is not a useful product and while nVidia produces a fairly high quality driver, they don't cover all the platforms I might care to use.
So I second that. S3: steal this market!
no, but you might exit(EXIT_FAILURE); instead
95% of the slashbots responding to this thread are jerking off at work. But if the employer wants you to pay for your own home broadband, fuck 'em, right?
So, do you really think there is a significant difference between the optimum gcc-compiled output on a P2 and an AthlonXP? Why don't you just save yourself a LOT of time and electricity by transferring the binaries from the fast machine to the slower one?
This is a very interesting social comment you have unwittingly made against yourself. You have not yet seen, you imply, any "clear, concise, and truthful rebuttal" to Moore's film. You hope someone makes one soon. However, you have already decided we are being "manipulated, misled, and lied to."
That's really interesting to me. In the absence of evidence against Moore's film, you assume it is misleading and untruthful. That's just not rational.
I don't care if you can program the Frob Industries Mk. III wireless radio to broadcast on the KA satellite bands. It's going to be driving a 2.4GHz bandpass filter and a seriously detuned antenna, meaning its emissions will amount to jack shit.
Now, having said all that, there was a chipset, the Atheros "madwifi" chipset, which allowed its power level (in-band) to be increased in excess of the level allowed by any regulator agency on this planet, and also allowed its center frequence to be set out of the ISM band. Naughty. The combination of power level and frequence control allows you to radiate serious power near the ISM band. In my view this is a defective piece of hardware which the FCC should simply have banned. Radios without hardware filters and slew rate control should not be approved.
But, this situation does not apply to all the other manufacturers for which this FCC story is generally pitched (which is to say, any manufacturer who doesn't support Linux). Note this was initially an argument for why Intel couldn't support Linux with their Centrino radio, but lo and behold eventually they did support it. Did Congress pass a law? Was an official bribed? Did they rev the hardware? No, none of these things. The real answer is the story was fiction to begin with. Don't spread it and don't allow manufacturers to hide behind it.
Sorry, that's absolutely false. Even if you could reprogram the radio to use frequencies way out of the ISM band, your antenna would be massively detuned for such frequencies. People forget that these network cards still have transistors and filters at the end of the signal chain, and there's no register you can program that will change the center frequency of a bandpass filter. The meme of the evil hax0r interfering with cuddly bunny radio traffic was started by wireless hardware manufacturers groping for some excuse to not support Linux. It has no basis in physical reality.
As far as headaches, I think you'll find more headaches in the peripheral support infrastructure than in the wireless hardware and drivers. If you are going to use PCMCIA/PC Card wireless adapters I think you'll discover the Linux PCMCIA drivers have a habit of panicking. With any hardware you'll need to do a lot of manual configuration hacking before your computer will perform useful functions like automatically roaming to available SSIDs (something windows and mac os do automatically). You'll be installing packages and editing /etc files for the next month, but eventually you'll have something that works 62% of the time.
There's nothing in BeFS that would prevent you from organizing your files in folders in whatever way you like. But queries give you the ability to see cross-sections of your hierarchy that youotherwise wouldn't get.
Fuck, I'd settle for viruses smaller than 400K! Of all things, you'd expect a virus to be lean and mean, but I guess the latest crops were made with Visual Virus .NET or something to that effect.
And, if my the fonts I get from an X11/GTK setup weren't dead on, I'd still not go back to Windows, I'd just fix it.
Also I'm wonder about your definition of "absolutely sucks" is. When you start X, it reads the physical size of the monitor and configures the dpi setting correctly. You can see the result in the output of xdpyinfo. If your monitors are old or defective, you can always start X with -dpi 96 or any other appropriate setting. Neither of these methods sucks, they are both serviceable and accurate.
I don't know what candy-ass systems you people are using, but the X I'm using right now gets point sizes absolutely dead-on, within ±1px (which error, btw, is caused by grid fitting).
You gotta be kidding me. Windows probably has the WORST typography system of any current OS. You can't get a font in the right size. People resort to lying about their display's DPI to get the fonts sized properly, and even then the DPI setting has the opposite effect of what you would expect. Windows typography is fucking stupid, and FreeType looks every bit as good as ClearType (better, IMHO, than MacOS X's on-screen type).
I saw that too, but based on the fact that it's using WDS for wireless bridging, I'd tend to think it should work with the linksys WRT54G. Anyway we'll see in a few weeks.