of those SysAdmins who feel it necessary to snoop on people? If you're bored, get out of Admin Pack and head over to/. or Technet (if you are of the MS persuasion) and learn something new. I don't care who you are or how good you are, you don't know EVERYTHING...
Maybe it's just me, but I just don't get it...
I probably have access to more account information and networked shared space than most people, but I have no urge, need, or desire to see what's in their accounts or shares. (Beyond making sure private data is secured and there isn't pornography or other bad files out there using up all our networked drives. That's one of my monthly chores)
Only reason I'm here right now posting is because I'm in the middle of a scan. Our scans take 6-7 hours to run (with the process set to realtime priority) so about the only thing my computer is able to do is browse the web (slowly, I might add)
"Could" I snoop? Sure. "Would" I? Never. That's one of the reasons why I have this job.
That said, the article seems to be hosted on his own site where, conceivably, he has posted his resume. Couldnt someone simply research the companies listed against the article me mentions here and arrive at a pretty good idea just which company is being discussed in gory detail here?
Anyone know when the new ATI card will be released?
Based on the information I've seen on it, it will be pretty comparable in terms of performance, but at a far cheaper price.
I'm hoping that the new ATI card performs within 10% - 15% or so of the GTX280 because I'm getting a bit tired of the issues I have with my current nVidia 8800GTS cards. (SLI)
I cannot set the fanspeed in a manner that will "stay" after a reboot.
My game of choice actually has some moderate-sever issues with nVidia cards and crashes at least a couple times a week due to some issue with nvcpl which I have bugged for 10 different versions of drivers and they never fix
My last ATI Card was their 9700Pro. I switched to nVidia because, while their drivers are closed source, the installation in Linux is far easier and their performance was pretty top-notch. Now I'm considering switching back to ATI if they can deliver a decent competitor.
Let's be honest here. We all know the reason Pluto was re-classified to throw off the Tom Tom of our, now lost, Galactic Overlords.
Galactic Overlords: "Tom Tom! Where is this "Earth"?!" Tom Tom: "Make a left at the 9th Planet." Galactic Overlord: "WTF?!?! There IS NO NINTH PLANET, Tom Tom!" Galactic Overlord's Mother-in-law: "I told you, Rory! You should have made a right at Uranus! If you can't find a PLANET, HTF were you able to find my daughter's birth tube?!" Galactic Overlord Jr.: "Are we there yet?" Galactic Overlord: "Dammit! Don't make me pull over this Star Destroyer!" Galactic Overlord Jr.: "I gotta pee!"
I can definately see the reasoning behind AMDs push to get this investigation underway.
I used Intel when they were fastest and AMD when they were, and now I am using Intel Chips again.
If Intel used its position to force vendor lock-in and exclude AMD, and AMD can prove they lost a healthy chunk of market for the Athlon 64 that, most likely, would have went to resolve the teething problems with Phenom so that it made its original launch date and frequency...then Intel is going to have to break out the checkbook and make sure they got a lotta ink in the pen, cause it's gonna cost them a LOT.
If it's proven that actions resulted in events like this, you can bet Intel will settle all allegations before a final finding of fact is ever released...and pay a healthy sum to AMD to just shut up.
I just hope that, if these allegations are true, they are forced to pay an equitable amount to AMD and not fight it for years because these two companies vying for my business keep prices low enough for us to get some great gear these days...
When the inevitable happens and a disgruntled former employee goes berzerk when told he is laid off and is then shot by a security guard, you can bet George Lucas will edit the security cam footage to make it appear disgruntled worker shot first.
What's so hard to understand? I'm not interested in maintaining 99.999999999999999999999999999% uptime. I am not a web hosting facility. RAID 0 is for speed, therefore, I need reliable backups in case the raid goes to hell.
In response, proponents of Intelligent Design, created a BiPolar bot that alternates between shouting "Then End is Near" and denying any scientific data it observes.
TFA clearly mentions a 1TB disc. That is the minimum I need for backups/archives.
You offer half that in a bulky, heavy item that is suceptible to moistire or stray magnetic field from the guitar speaker/amp in my closet.
My main box has (2) 1TB drives in RAID 0 so easily managed and reliable backups. I'm not ripping my computer apart to add hard drives to do backups with every week.
Tape? Expensive, slow, and unreliable != an option
I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?
Zip Drive was a high-priced novelty that achieved just enough marketshare to ruin a lot of people's day with the "click-of-death" issue.
It's taken years for CDR/DVDR media to become reliable and cheap enough for commonplace usage.
As has been previously mentioned, reliability is also a major factor to take into account. I want a backup that I can rely on should I need to retrieve information from 10 years ago (at a minimum)
I have some CDRs that I wrote to in the late 90's (around 1998) that are now becoming unreadable due to "whatever". They are not scratched, nor is the aluminum layer at the top flaking off, yet they are simply unreadable now, so I find myself duplicating CDRs that are still readable "just in case"
If reliability ratings for the media can surpass normal CDRs by a significant amount, I may be interested in this format, even if the price tag on media is steeper, once mainstream acceptance is achieved.
Right now though, It's little more than reading a/. blurb and saying, "Hmm...Interesting."
I understand that each person may view the lighting issue in D3 differently, but I have to disagree that it added anything to the "atomosphere" of the game. In fact, it's the reason I uninstalled it without completing it. In the end, D3 remains one of only 2 games I've bought that I did not complete.
To date, there has been no game that gave me the creepy feeling like the first level of the original Unreal.
F.E.A.R. came close, but that was mainly due to the way the soundtrack set the "mood".
Unreal accomplished the "creep out" factor without using nearly the same amount of "There's so little light that I can't see crap!" programming. That was a level that was coded perfectly.
I debated using the flashlight mod in D3 but, I am a video came purist in most respects, so in the end I tried to play the full game without resorting to hacks or "cheats".
Eventually, I uninstalled the game and moved on to other, more enjoyable games.
I am still waiting for the day where a game encompasses the creep factor of Unreal (level 1) and the sound of F.E.A.R.
That's a game that'll be worth playing. (with the lights on, I might add)
So, could they say no fat people not wearing pants can use their software? How about nobody under the age of 30? Black people? White people? Brown people?
At what point, does their assertion they can control "how it is used" completely break down and be outside of the realm of copyright law, beyond what you can do in an EULA, and just plain silly.
I would say they've basically gone into the plain silly category. But, who knows. Courts have upheld the damnedest things.
Cheers The day after they receive that kind of authority over their software, the headlines would read, "World of Warcraft loses 4 MILLION Subscriptions!"
What's this, "...fail to communicate properly with the computer" thing?
I use Seagate exclusively, after having had 8 (yes, 8) different WD hard drives fail, and I have experienced no problems in Ubuntu, XP Home, XP Pro 64, and Vista Premium.
Not saying you haven't experienced problems, mind you; just asking what they were because I don't seem to be experiencing any thus far...
Okay for the latest on my misadventures with Vista SP1
When I initially installed Vista Home Premium with Media Center (pre-sp1) it worked surprisingly well on my HTPC
After installing SP1, Media Center would no longer start. It displayed an error dialog saying there was a missing file or service.
I troubleshot it for about an hour yesterday and got the Media Center operational again.
Since the machine it was on was quite modest in hardware terms, I threw some extra stuff in it and ordered some stuff.
I upgraded from 1.25GB RAM to 2GB of RAM I disabled the AC97 sound on my Biostar Geforce 6100-M9 and installed the PCI-Express x1 Creative X-Fi card I disabled the onboard video and threw in a spare GeForce 8800GTS 640MB card (G90) I had left over from a build
My Vista Experience score went from 2 to 4.2 and Media Center seemed to be far more snappy and responsive...until...
it suddenly slows down for about a minute and then my mouse cursor disappears and I cant do anything other than hit the power button.
I can't Alt-Tab out of Media Center I can't Alt-F4 It won't even let me do a CTRL-SHIFT-Esc to call up Task Manager to see WTF is happening...
I used this system (when it was far less capable, hardware-wise) for about 10 days pre-SP1 and had no issues with it.
I think it's time to pick up a copy of XP Home Media Center with SP2 from the local Sam's Club or somewhere because the more I use Vista, the more F$CKED it is.
This reminds me of the old SNL (first cast) parody of a commercial from Texxon (read Texaco and Exxon) where Dan Ackroyd sums it up by saying, "Just buy our oil and no one gets hurt"
There are some nice batch files there that trim the fat from the services that start up so Vists is not using as many resources when it boots up.
Supposedly, they work pretty good...My friend ran those on his computers and he said the results were darned nice.
I combed through the bat file for the "tweaked" setting and it seems to leave some eye candy (themes) while disabling most of the resource hogs like Superfetch, Indexing and most of the other more resource intensive services.
I'm looking forward to the SP 1 release as well since the problem with moving/copying large files across the network is supposed to be corrected. (This machine is serving nearly 2TB of multimedia to the other computers on my home network and I move/copy stuff all over the place)
My first 3 experiences with Windows Vista (In the form of Vista Home Premium upgrade) were disasters.
First time it wouldn't install due to me either having 4 DIMMS present or the fact they totaled 4GB (not sure which caused the issue)
Second time wiped a RAID 0 array and took out my Windows XP Pro 64bit install
Third time, I had a hard drive crash.
Since persistance tends to pay off, I decided to throw it on another system. This time, the experience was far more enjoyable.
The system I installed it on is comprised of:
Biostar GeForce 6100 M9 motherboard AMD Athlon64 4000+ 1.25GB RAM (which I will be upgrading this week) Integrated GeForce 6100 Integrated Sound Integrated Network Card Memorex DVD+-RW (4) Seagate 500GB HDDs Hauppauge Win-TV card (1600 model with QCAM and all that crap)
For those interested, this used to be my SAMBA Box. I used to have Ubuntu 7.10 on it and I used this system as my File Server to store my MP3s and Movies and stuff...
I originally wanted to use Ubuntu and MythTV, but I couldn't get any of the distros to boot up and install.
I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10, 8 (alpha), Mythbuntu 7.10 and Mythbuntu 8, and none of these would load up for some reason...
I can replace the current Windows Vista drive with the one containing my old Ubuntu install, and the system no longer boots up into Ubuntu.
Mythbuntu 7.10 will not boot the LiveCD unless I use safe mode graphics, and then the desktop display is distorted.
Mythbuntu 8 sits at the main menu and I am unable to even choose anything (like it isn't detecting my USB keyboard)
I replaced my USB keyboard with a PS2 IBM and there is no difference. The only configuration change between my working Ubuntu install and this Live CD was the addition of my TV Card.
It would seem to me that there is some sort of resource conflict between the TV Card but I can't see it using lspci
With Vista Home Premium, install went smooth, to a point.
Since my last install of this software was on my main gaming system I couldn't automatically activate it because it had been previously activated on another system.
I called the toll-free number, talked to the nice Indian woman (Manu, who spoke surprisingly good english) explained that I had to move the install to another hardware platform, and she gave me the numbers to activate it.
It's been working for the better part of 10 days now and Vista Media Center actually works better than the Hauppauge software did under Windows XP Home.
Previously, I could record any TV program I wanted but, when I clicked the STOP button, the software would lock up and I had to end the process.
In Vista Media Center it was easy to set up the Channel Guide and TV Listings, and it all works quite well.
I'm hoping SP1 doesn't cause more problems than it resolves, and will give it a shot when its released.
Note to any Linux gurus out there...
I'd still like to run MythTV on Ubuntu 7.10 so if you have any suggestions how to get rid of the conflict that prevents me from booting the new or old versions correctly, lemme know.
Slashdot Mirror
of those SysAdmins who feel it necessary to snoop on people? If you're bored, get out of Admin Pack and head over to /. or Technet (if you are of the MS persuasion) and learn something new. I don't care who you are or how good you are, you don't know EVERYTHING...
Maybe it's just me, but I just don't get it...
I probably have access to more account information and networked shared space than most people, but I have no urge, need, or desire to see what's in their accounts or shares. (Beyond making sure private data is secured and there isn't pornography or other bad files out there using up all our networked drives. That's one of my monthly chores)
Only reason I'm here right now posting is because I'm in the middle of a scan. Our scans take 6-7 hours to run (with the process set to realtime priority) so about the only thing my computer is able to do is browse the web (slowly, I might add)
"Could" I snoop? Sure. "Would" I? Never. That's one of the reasons why I have this job.
That said, the article seems to be hosted on his own site where, conceivably, he has posted his resume. Couldnt someone simply research the companies listed against the article me mentions here and arrive at a pretty good idea just which company is being discussed in gory detail here?
Anyone know when the new ATI card will be released?
Based on the information I've seen on it, it will be pretty comparable in terms of performance, but at a far cheaper price.
I'm hoping that the new ATI card performs within 10% - 15% or so of the GTX280 because I'm getting a bit tired of the issues I have with my current nVidia 8800GTS cards. (SLI)
I cannot set the fanspeed in a manner that will "stay" after a reboot.
My game of choice actually has some moderate-sever issues with nVidia cards and crashes at least a couple times a week due to some issue with nvcpl which I have bugged for 10 different versions of drivers and they never fix
My last ATI Card was their 9700Pro. I switched to nVidia because, while their drivers are closed source, the installation in Linux is far easier and their performance was pretty top-notch. Now I'm considering switching back to ATI if they can deliver a decent competitor.
Let's be honest here. We all know the reason Pluto was re-classified to throw off the Tom Tom of our, now lost, Galactic Overlords.
Galactic Overlords: "Tom Tom! Where is this "Earth"?!"
Tom Tom: "Make a left at the 9th Planet."
Galactic Overlord: "WTF?!?! There IS NO NINTH PLANET, Tom Tom!"
Galactic Overlord's Mother-in-law: "I told you, Rory! You should have made a right at Uranus! If you can't find a PLANET, HTF were you able to find my daughter's birth tube?!"
Galactic Overlord Jr.: "Are we there yet?"
Galactic Overlord: "Dammit! Don't make me pull over this Star Destroyer!"
Galactic Overlord Jr.: "I gotta pee!"
I can definately see the reasoning behind AMDs push to get this investigation underway.
I used Intel when they were fastest and AMD when they were, and now I am using Intel Chips again.
If Intel used its position to force vendor lock-in and exclude AMD, and AMD can prove they lost a healthy chunk of market for the Athlon 64 that, most likely, would have went to resolve the teething problems with Phenom so that it made its original launch date and frequency...then Intel is going to have to break out the checkbook and make sure they got a lotta ink in the pen, cause it's gonna cost them a LOT.
If it's proven that actions resulted in events like this, you can bet Intel will settle all allegations before a final finding of fact is ever released...and pay a healthy sum to AMD to just shut up.
I just hope that, if these allegations are true, they are forced to pay an equitable amount to AMD and not fight it for years because these two companies vying for my business keep prices low enough for us to get some great gear these days...
When the inevitable happens and a disgruntled former employee goes berzerk when told he is laid off and is then shot by a security guard, you can bet George Lucas will edit the security cam footage to make it appear disgruntled worker shot first.
What's so hard to understand? I'm not interested in maintaining 99.999999999999999999999999999% uptime. I am not a web hosting facility. RAID 0 is for speed, therefore, I need reliable backups in case the raid goes to hell.
In response, proponents of Intelligent Design, created a BiPolar bot that alternates between shouting "Then End is Near" and denying any scientific data it observes.
Not an option.
TFA clearly mentions a 1TB disc. That is the minimum I need for backups/archives.
You offer half that in a bulky, heavy item that is suceptible to moistire or stray magnetic field from the guitar speaker/amp in my closet.
My main box has (2) 1TB drives in RAID 0 so easily managed and reliable backups. I'm not ripping my computer apart to add hard drives to do backups with every week.
Tape? Expensive, slow, and unreliable != an option
I'm interested in. How reliable and/or affordable will these things become, should the product achieve decent market penetration?
/. blurb and saying, "Hmm...Interesting."
Zip Drive was a high-priced novelty that achieved just enough marketshare to ruin a lot of people's day with the "click-of-death" issue.
It's taken years for CDR/DVDR media to become reliable and cheap enough for commonplace usage.
As has been previously mentioned, reliability is also a major factor to take into account. I want a backup that I can rely on should I need to retrieve information from 10 years ago (at a minimum)
I have some CDRs that I wrote to in the late 90's (around 1998) that are now becoming unreadable due to "whatever". They are not scratched, nor is the aluminum layer at the top flaking off, yet they are simply unreadable now, so I find myself duplicating CDRs that are still readable "just in case"
If reliability ratings for the media can surpass normal CDRs by a significant amount, I may be interested in this format, even if the price tag on media is steeper, once mainstream acceptance is achieved.
Right now though, It's little more than reading a
AVG Free.
AVG Free.
AVG Free.
You should start to feel better soon.
I understand that each person may view the lighting issue in D3 differently, but I have to disagree that it added anything to the "atomosphere" of the game. In fact, it's the reason I uninstalled it without completing it. In the end, D3 remains one of only 2 games I've bought that I did not complete.
To date, there has been no game that gave me the creepy feeling like the first level of the original Unreal.
F.E.A.R. came close, but that was mainly due to the way the soundtrack set the "mood".
Unreal accomplished the "creep out" factor without using nearly the same amount of "There's so little light that I can't see crap!" programming. That was a level that was coded perfectly.
I debated using the flashlight mod in D3 but, I am a video came purist in most respects, so in the end I tried to play the full game without resorting to hacks or "cheats".
Eventually, I uninstalled the game and moved on to other, more enjoyable games.
I am still waiting for the day where a game encompasses the creep factor of Unreal (level 1) and the sound of F.E.A.R.
That's a game that'll be worth playing. (with the lights on, I might add)
At what point, does their assertion they can control "how it is used" completely break down and be outside of the realm of copyright law, beyond what you can do in an EULA, and just plain silly.
I would say they've basically gone into the plain silly category. But, who knows. Courts have upheld the damnedest things.
Cheers The day after they receive that kind of authority over their software, the headlines would read, "World of Warcraft loses 4 MILLION Subscriptions!"
You fail it
O
-|- - You o-- - *whoosh*
/ \
welcome our F7 Key-less overlords and wish them well.
but does it ru... nm.
In Soviet Russia, Creative stays away from you.
(someone had to do it)
What's this, "...fail to communicate properly with the computer" thing?
I use Seagate exclusively, after having had 8 (yes, 8) different WD hard drives fail, and I have experienced no problems in Ubuntu, XP Home, XP Pro 64, and Vista Premium.
Not saying you haven't experienced problems, mind you; just asking what they were because I don't seem to be experiencing any thus far...
Okay for the latest on my misadventures with Vista SP1
When I initially installed Vista Home Premium with Media Center (pre-sp1) it worked surprisingly well on my HTPC
After installing SP1, Media Center would no longer start. It displayed an error dialog saying there was a missing file or service.
I troubleshot it for about an hour yesterday and got the Media Center operational again.
Since the machine it was on was quite modest in hardware terms, I threw some extra stuff in it and ordered some stuff.
I upgraded from 1.25GB RAM to 2GB of RAM
I disabled the AC97 sound on my Biostar Geforce 6100-M9 and installed the PCI-Express x1 Creative X-Fi card
I disabled the onboard video and threw in a spare GeForce 8800GTS 640MB card (G90) I had left over from a build
My Vista Experience score went from 2 to 4.2 and Media Center seemed to be far more snappy and responsive...until...
it suddenly slows down for about a minute and then my mouse cursor disappears and I cant do anything other than hit the power button.
I can't Alt-Tab out of Media Center
I can't Alt-F4
It won't even let me do a CTRL-SHIFT-Esc to call up Task Manager to see WTF is happening...
I used this system (when it was far less capable, hardware-wise) for about 10 days pre-SP1 and had no issues with it.
I think it's time to pick up a copy of XP Home Media Center with SP2 from the local Sam's Club or somewhere because the more I use Vista, the more F$CKED it is.
This reminds me of the old SNL (first cast) parody of a commercial from Texxon (read Texaco and Exxon) where Dan Ackroyd sums it up by saying, "Just buy our oil and no one gets hurt"
On Vista: Have you been to speedyvista dot com?
There are some nice batch files there that trim the fat from the services that start up so Vists is not using as many resources when it boots up.
Supposedly, they work pretty good...My friend ran those on his computers and he said the results were darned nice.
I combed through the bat file for the "tweaked" setting and it seems to leave some eye candy (themes) while disabling most of the resource hogs like Superfetch, Indexing and most of the other more resource intensive services.
I'm looking forward to the SP 1 release as well since the problem with moving/copying large files across the network is supposed to be corrected. (This machine is serving nearly 2TB of multimedia to the other computers on my home network and I move/copy stuff all over the place)
But, does it run Linux?
Except that the doors to the Penguin tavern won't open for you...
My first 3 experiences with Windows Vista (In the form of Vista Home Premium upgrade) were disasters.
First time it wouldn't install due to me either having 4 DIMMS present or the fact they totaled 4GB (not sure which caused the issue)
Second time wiped a RAID 0 array and took out my Windows XP Pro 64bit install
Third time, I had a hard drive crash.
Since persistance tends to pay off, I decided to throw it on another system. This time, the experience was far more enjoyable.
The system I installed it on is comprised of:
Biostar GeForce 6100 M9 motherboard
AMD Athlon64 4000+
1.25GB RAM (which I will be upgrading this week)
Integrated GeForce 6100
Integrated Sound
Integrated Network Card
Memorex DVD+-RW
(4) Seagate 500GB HDDs
Hauppauge Win-TV card (1600 model with QCAM and all that crap)
For those interested, this used to be my SAMBA Box. I used to have Ubuntu 7.10 on it and I used this system as my File Server to store my MP3s and Movies and stuff...
I originally wanted to use Ubuntu and MythTV, but I couldn't get any of the distros to boot up and install.
I downloaded Ubuntu 7.10, 8 (alpha), Mythbuntu 7.10 and Mythbuntu 8, and none of these would load up for some reason...
I can replace the current Windows Vista drive with the one containing my old Ubuntu install, and the system no longer boots up into Ubuntu.
Mythbuntu 7.10 will not boot the LiveCD unless I use safe mode graphics, and then the desktop display is distorted.
Mythbuntu 8 sits at the main menu and I am unable to even choose anything (like it isn't detecting my USB keyboard)
I replaced my USB keyboard with a PS2 IBM and there is no difference. The only configuration change between my working Ubuntu install and this Live CD was the addition of my TV Card.
It would seem to me that there is some sort of resource conflict between the TV Card but I can't see it using lspci
With Vista Home Premium, install went smooth, to a point.
Since my last install of this software was on my main gaming system I couldn't automatically activate it because it had been previously activated on another system.
I called the toll-free number, talked to the nice Indian woman (Manu, who spoke surprisingly good english) explained that I had to move the install to another hardware platform, and she gave me the numbers to activate it.
It's been working for the better part of 10 days now and Vista Media Center actually works better than the Hauppauge software did under Windows XP Home.
Previously, I could record any TV program I wanted but, when I clicked the STOP button, the software would lock up and I had to end the process.
In Vista Media Center it was easy to set up the Channel Guide and TV Listings, and it all works quite well.
I'm hoping SP1 doesn't cause more problems than it resolves, and will give it a shot when its released.
Note to any Linux gurus out there...
I'd still like to run MythTV on Ubuntu 7.10 so if you have any suggestions how to get rid of the conflict that prevents me from booting the new or old versions correctly, lemme know.