...because games from Bethesda have great plot and wonderful atmosphere (plus great gfx). In the other, I deeply hope it won't be as bug-ridden as, say, Morrowind...
The hardware may work or may fail, workarounds for errors may be found or not, things may be fixed, with cautious use the rovers may last for years...
Until a storm comes.
Martian dust storms come with wind at 200km/h or faster, carrying sand and smaller rocks, picking anything that isn't attached to the ground and carrying it for hours. One storm, and the rover is past, pieces of it scattered over several thousands of kilometers. And a storm will come sooner or later.
That's why there was a design of "tumbleweed" style rovers: they never deflate the airbags and let the storm carry them, letting them travel for half the planet in random direction, gathering data, until the storm weakens and leaves the "tumbleweed" in place until the next storm comes.
Current design... may live until 2005 or longer... if the storm doesn't come.
Not to stay completely offtopic: I always carried some sugar cubes for horses with me, and after some time the plastic bag rubbed through, the sugar dust rubbed off the cubes got into floppies. Ah, the fun cleaning them. Despite the efforts they didn't work.
Quite a few nowadays keyboards have this protective construction, where the hole with key shaft is surrounded with a cyllinder extending a few mm above the layer of plastic, so quite a puddle can gather inside the keyboard before the liquid level gets over the cyllinder edge and leak inside. And of course it won't leak in directly from above because the keys work as umbrellas:)
On the other hand, I don't give warranty to any OS I had installed without being at least slightly drunk. There's that bit of art required in the trade to get it done right, and it's the kind that can't be achieved while sober.
Well, SIMM memory math is strange. I had 2 4M SIMMs (same), 2 8M SIMMs (different) and 1 16M SIMM. I was placing them in random order in a PC, trying to achieve maximum RAM capacity. Conclusions? 4M+4M=1M, 8M+4M+4M=12M, 8M+8M=8M, 8M+16M=20M, 16M+4M+4M=a violent burst of flame from the motherboard.
a simple mkswap'ed file. It worked for me:) You just use swapfile instead of swap partition and the OS doesn't care what FS the file resides on as long as it's RW.
Dumb terminal is pretty easy. But diskless - *shrug* Clusterknoppix is a pretty much a fixed config and (been there done that quite recently) remastering Knoppix CD takes quite a bit of time (even if not as much work...) too - especially if you need to remaster it 9-10 times trying to troubleshoot and debug your modifications.
With team of, say, 20 people it would be possible. There are already multiple webcast radios like that. For now the technology is the worst barrier for moving from sound to video, but it seems like the most obvious next step. Work? Sure. Start lower profile, 3-4h once a week, gain some fans, more people will join in, extend it, get sponsors, maybe grow into a real station...
Cheaper - possibly, though not necessarily. Though attach 30 Xterms to one box and with enough RAM and CPU horsepower it all works. With gfx cards you're limited to number of PCI slots. Commercially available - here's the problem - not anymore. Out of production for some 10 or 20 years already. Only second-hand now. Simply all the "multiple users on one machine" solutions were replaced with The Only OS (which can't do security or multiuser stuff correctly yet, so forget about multisessioning - and why build hardware if The Software doesn't support it) - the article is about a rather ugly cludge abusing abilities of hardware that wasn't meant to do this in the first place, thanks to robustness of a system which could but wasn't asked to do this for quite a while now.
I wonder if, when the net broadcast and broadband technologies grow some more popular, people will start 'en masse' their own homebrew TV channels. Say, a team of 10 ppl team up, and every sunday and thursday from 1PM till midnight broadcast their own TV over the net.
1PM-2:30 - Jam Session - our band. Good non-commercial rock 2:30-3:00 - Gamer's Box. Something about cool games we've played recently. 3:00-3:30 - Best of Demos - our best games of the week recorded. Also tricks and tutorials. 3:30 - 4:00 - Website Picks. Some of our favourite newly-found. 4:00 - 5:00 - The Board! - Skateboarding on the backyard. New tricks. 5:00 - 6:00 - Random Weirdness. (interesting stuff caught on camera by one of the guys who walks around the town with the camera a lot) 6:00 - 6:30 - Theatre of Madness. (a show) 6:30 - 7:00 - 20 questions. Talk show. 7:00 - 7:30 - By Kids For Kids. 7:30 - 8:00 - News. 8:00 - 9:30 - Best Picks Of Old Movies (abandonware style) 9:30 - 11:00 - More Rock 11:00 - 12:00 - Adult Talk And More. (say, a dare to the best sluts of the school to show their stuff on TV:)
yes, but what about the dedicated hardware to -attach- the keyboards and monitors? The tricky part is that an xterminal provides quite a bit more than keyboard and monitor. GFX card, some networking stuff, basic ROM... If you'd replace the ROM with your custom one, you'd get a neat little computer:) Without all the mainframe horsepower though - obviously.
Yes, convincing the users... or admins for that matter. If there was a sensible distro with "out of box" set of tools to set up diskless terminals (poor CPU, some RAM, network card, a gfx card, mouse, keyboard, monitor and no "mass storage" - really cheap setup) it would be fine. But it's TFTP, BOOTP, separate dedicated kernel, NFS, swap space over the network, initrd-style boot image, and quite a few cludges to separate "common stuff" (/usr,/home) from "machine-specific stuff" (/etc,/var, swap) to set it up.
Are Furries nerds or what? I'm on mailing list about Furry, with maybe 30 users. 5 use Amiga. About 8 use Linux. Over 70% don't use MSIE. Maybe 3 use Outlook. I don't see any reasons behind that other than obvious (but so inefficient) "the alternative products -are- superior"..
multiple comments that mention this was being done for years are all true - for Linux. Serial terminals, remote X access, VNC, network boot, diskless workstations, all that stuff depended on ancient (though still great) UNIX multi-user multi-session framework - multiple users work on the same machine at the same time.
And now Microsoft woke up.
After NEXT, GECOS and a couple others, PC has a GUI! Windows 1.0! Years after Amiga with real multitasking introduces Task Switching and later ('95) first Multitasking. Then the puny '98 "multi-user" (Amiga had that some 5 years earlier, UNIX machines way before that). And now, in 2004 we hear that after users of XP are tired of the pseudo-multisession of Switch User, SP2 is to include REAL MULTISESSIONING! Yeah, right! Two users can work on the same computer at the same time! Yay! Noticed the catch? The keyword is "two". Yeah. Two sessions ought to be enough...
How old are you, kid? We are far past this era. Heard about VT100, diskless workstations, glass tty, do you know what "mainframe" meant originally? They are were replaced with "individual boxes" because hardware got cheaper and setting this all up to work correctly costs a lot of effort. (try to set up a diskless network-bootable linux box and you'll see what I mean)
Attach 10 X-terminals (based on some microcontroller or such) or 40 VT100's...
I don't see anything new - been possible for years. It's just some new fancy hardware to plug more of the same stuff into one PC.
As to displays you're limited with number of gfx cards you can plug in and heads in each card. Mice can work easily on multi-input serial ports. Getting multiple keyboards that don't act as "serial terminals" may be slightly trickier...
I've personally learned Linux in a computer lab with 20 terminals and 1 Linux PC. No problem here.
That's why Intel develops new CPU mounting that works just by pressing the CPU on contacts. Too many tiny extremally sharp pins, dangerous thing! Smash such one into someone's face and they'll bleed to death! That kind of CPU not only should be considered a weapon but banned by Geneva convence as inhumane one!
Three nines is not difficult to achieve. Really? Eight hours downtime a year? I think you misunderstood. I think he meant 3/9 that is 33%. That would be 4 months downtime a year.
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...because games from Bethesda have great plot and wonderful atmosphere (plus great gfx).
In the other, I deeply hope it won't be as bug-ridden as, say, Morrowind...
The hardware may work or may fail, workarounds for errors may be found or not, things may be fixed, with cautious use the rovers may last for years...
Until a storm comes.
Martian dust storms come with wind at 200km/h or faster, carrying sand and smaller rocks, picking anything that isn't attached to the ground and carrying it for hours. One storm, and the rover is past, pieces of it scattered over several thousands of kilometers. And a storm will come sooner or later.
That's why there was a design of "tumbleweed" style rovers: they never deflate the airbags and let the storm carry them, letting them travel for half the planet in random direction, gathering data, until the storm weakens and leaves the "tumbleweed" in place until the next storm comes.
Current design... may live until 2005 or longer... if the storm doesn't come.
Yes, I do. Any problem about that?
Not to stay completely offtopic:
I always carried some sugar cubes for horses with me, and after some time the plastic bag rubbed through, the sugar dust rubbed off the cubes got into floppies. Ah, the fun cleaning them. Despite the efforts they didn't work.
Quite a few nowadays keyboards have this protective construction, where the hole with key shaft is surrounded with a cyllinder extending a few mm above the layer of plastic, so quite a puddle can gather inside the keyboard before the liquid level gets over the cyllinder edge and leak inside. And of course it won't leak in directly from above because the keys work as umbrellas :)
On the other hand, I don't give warranty to any OS I had installed without being at least slightly drunk.
There's that bit of art required in the trade to get it done right, and it's the kind that can't be achieved while sober.
That's why you should use Nutrasweet-based sugar substitutes :) Got that in several electronic and such things already, all they work okay :)
Well, SIMM memory math is strange.
I had 2 4M SIMMs (same), 2 8M SIMMs (different) and 1 16M SIMM. I was placing them in random order in a PC, trying to achieve maximum RAM capacity. Conclusions? 4M+4M=1M, 8M+4M+4M=12M, 8M+8M=8M, 8M+16M=20M, 16M+4M+4M=a violent burst of flame from the motherboard.
I never tried to plug more than 1 keyb and mouse into a 'doze box but I'm pretty sure it's not a good idea.
a simple mkswap'ed file. It worked for me :) You just use swapfile instead of swap partition and the OS doesn't care what FS the file resides on as long as it's RW.
Dumb terminal is pretty easy. But diskless - *shrug* Clusterknoppix is a pretty much a fixed config and (been there done that quite recently) remastering Knoppix CD takes quite a bit of time (even if not as much work...) too - especially if you need to remaster it 9-10 times trying to troubleshoot and debug your modifications.
We're not talking "has to". We're talking "wants".
You can't hand out LARTs to everyone, they don't work that way.
umount ; mount and you have access to that guy's drive.
Security is a tricky business.
With team of, say, 20 people it would be possible.
There are already multiple webcast radios like that. For now the technology is the worst barrier for moving from sound to video, but it seems like the most obvious next step. Work? Sure. Start lower profile, 3-4h once a week, gain some fans, more people will join in, extend it, get sponsors, maybe grow into a real station...
Cheaper - possibly, though not necessarily. Though attach 30 Xterms to one box and with enough RAM and CPU horsepower it all works. With gfx cards you're limited to number of PCI slots. Commercially available - here's the problem - not anymore. Out of production for some 10 or 20 years already. Only second-hand now. Simply all the "multiple users on one machine" solutions were replaced with The Only OS (which can't do security or multiuser stuff correctly yet, so forget about multisessioning - and why build hardware if The Software doesn't support it) - the article is about a rather ugly cludge abusing abilities of hardware that wasn't meant to do this in the first place, thanks to robustness of a system which could but wasn't asked to do this for quite a while now.
I wonder if, when the net broadcast and broadband technologies grow some more popular, people will start 'en masse' their own homebrew TV channels. Say, a team of 10 ppl team up, and every sunday and thursday from 1PM till midnight broadcast their own TV over the net.
:)
1PM-2:30 - Jam Session - our band. Good non-commercial rock
2:30-3:00 - Gamer's Box. Something about cool games we've played recently.
3:00-3:30 - Best of Demos - our best games of the week recorded. Also tricks and tutorials.
3:30 - 4:00 - Website Picks. Some of our favourite newly-found.
4:00 - 5:00 - The Board! - Skateboarding on the backyard. New tricks.
5:00 - 6:00 - Random Weirdness. (interesting stuff caught on camera by one of the guys who walks around the town with the camera a lot)
6:00 - 6:30 - Theatre of Madness. (a show)
6:30 - 7:00 - 20 questions. Talk show.
7:00 - 7:30 - By Kids For Kids.
7:30 - 8:00 - News.
8:00 - 9:30 - Best Picks Of Old Movies (abandonware style)
9:30 - 11:00 - More Rock
11:00 - 12:00 - Adult Talk And More. (say, a dare to the best sluts of the school to show their stuff on TV
yes, but what about the dedicated hardware to -attach- the keyboards and monitors? The tricky part is that an xterminal provides quite a bit more than keyboard and monitor. GFX card, some networking stuff, basic ROM... If you'd replace the ROM with your custom one, you'd get a neat little computer :) Without all the mainframe horsepower though - obviously.
Yes, convincing the users... or admins for that matter. /home) from "machine-specific stuff" (/etc, /var, swap) to set it up.
If there was a sensible distro with "out of box" set of tools to set up diskless terminals (poor CPU, some RAM, network card, a gfx card, mouse, keyboard, monitor and no "mass storage" - really cheap setup) it would be fine. But it's TFTP, BOOTP, separate dedicated kernel, NFS, swap space over the network, initrd-style boot image, and quite a few cludges to separate "common stuff" (/usr,
Are Furries nerds or what?
I'm on mailing list about Furry, with maybe 30 users. 5 use Amiga. About 8 use Linux. Over 70% don't use MSIE. Maybe 3 use Outlook.
I don't see any reasons behind that other than obvious (but so inefficient) "the alternative products -are- superior"..
multiple comments that mention this was being done for years are all true - for Linux. Serial terminals, remote X access, VNC, network boot, diskless workstations, all that stuff depended on ancient (though still great) UNIX multi-user multi-session framework - multiple users work on the same machine at the same time.
And now Microsoft woke up.
After NEXT, GECOS and a couple others, PC has a GUI! Windows 1.0! Years after Amiga with real multitasking introduces Task Switching and later ('95) first Multitasking. Then the puny '98 "multi-user" (Amiga had that some 5 years earlier, UNIX machines way before that). And now, in 2004 we hear that after users of XP are tired of the pseudo-multisession of Switch User, SP2 is to include REAL MULTISESSIONING! Yeah, right! Two users can work on the same computer at the same time! Yay!
Noticed the catch? The keyword is "two". Yeah. Two sessions ought to be enough...
How old are you, kid?
We are far past this era.
Heard about VT100, diskless workstations, glass tty, do you know what "mainframe" meant originally?
They are were replaced with "individual boxes" because hardware got cheaper and setting this all up to work correctly costs a lot of effort.
(try to set up a diskless network-bootable linux box and you'll see what I mean)
And what if one person writes an important document and another wants to press reset?
;)
I suggest 4 CD-ROM drives and correct permissions set in fstab so everyone can use -their own- drive only
Attach 10 X-terminals (based on some microcontroller or such) or 40 VT100's...
I don't see anything new - been possible for years. It's just some new fancy hardware to plug more of the same stuff into one PC.
As to displays you're limited with number of gfx cards you can plug in and heads in each card. Mice can work easily on multi-input serial ports. Getting multiple keyboards that don't act as "serial terminals" may be slightly trickier...
I've personally learned Linux in a computer lab with 20 terminals and 1 Linux PC. No problem here.
$1-$2/h depending on location, quality of computers and connection, time you pay for (1h cheaper than 2x30min) etc.
That's why Intel develops new CPU mounting that works just by pressing the CPU on contacts. Too many tiny extremally sharp pins, dangerous thing! Smash such one into someone's face and they'll bleed to death! That kind of CPU not only should be considered a weapon but banned by Geneva convence as inhumane one!
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We've slashdotted Microsoft!
Three nines is not difficult to achieve.
Really? Eight hours downtime a year?
I think you misunderstood. I think he meant 3/9 that is 33%. That would be 4 months downtime a year.