I just set a customer up with a USB 3G adapter from AT&T, and I don't remember the Connection Manager install being as bad as I expected, although it did take awhile. Since the connection was for a small office in a rural area (no cable or DSL, so 3G, satellite, and dialup were the only options), I set them up with a Netgear 3G router. No more AT&T software needed, and the owner can use his laptop on the wireless network, in addition to the desktop computer it was originally intended for.
I actually saw this problem myself just the other day, but didn't know that it came from the stealth update before seeing this article. Ironically, I had actually convinced my parents to buy a legitimate copy of Windows XP Pro. They were using the infamous Corporate Edition, and I was tired of having to work around the product key changes and other bullshit like WGA, plus every time it came to install updates they would whine to me because they forgot what not to install (WGA). I did a repair install so they could keep all their programs and settings. After that, no updates would install. The help on the Windows Update site actually suggested the same fix to the problem explained in the linked articles (and it works).
Anyway, I am royally pissed off at Microsoft because the move from a bootleg install to a legitimate one broke Windows because of Microsoft's malice and stupidity. Fuck you, Bill. This is how you repay me for going legit? I have already tried a move to Ubuntu (bad support for laptop docking stations, funky video settings, and wireless networks) and Mac (way too restrictive, few hardware choices), but maybe I should try again. I already have Debian on my file and backup servers, plus Ubuntu on my test-bed computer. Microsoft does not deserve any more of my money.
Anyone who's more than mildly in to DDR must eventually hook a PC up to their TV and start using Stepmania or something similar. Hundreds of songs available online (all illegally, I'm sure, but oh well), no more swapping discs in and out of the PS2 to play this song or that one.
I used to do that all the time when I went to the local community college and had a friend who lived in the dorms. I would bring my laptop and PS2 controller to USB adapter, and another friend would bring his metal DDR pads. We plugged the laptop and pads into the big screen TV in the dorm lounge and play DDR until 10pm when non-residents had to leave. We met lots of people there, and I met my current girlfriend -- yes, I'm posting on/. and have a girlfriend that I met playing DDR;-P. Stepmania rules!
Anyway, like the parent said, what makes Stepmania much, much better than any of the official Konami releases is that you can add all the official DDR songs and make custom ones. The only limit to the number of songs is my laptop's 20GB hard drive. With the official releases, different mixes have different songs, some songs are only on consoles, only on arcade machines, only in Japan/Korea/Europe/whatever, and there is no way to get every song. It's rediculous, as if Konami is trying its best to not make money.
No, they don't lose the data, just its backup. The original data is still intact wherever it was backed up from.
I agree with the phrase "RAID is not backup" if that's what you're trying to say, but in this case the OP isn't pretending that a single RAID array counts as backup. That's why it's backed up onto this other RAID array (so there are now two copies on two separate machines) and then onto DVD.
If you're running Linux or a BSD, BIOS hard drive size limits mean nothing. It's something about how it doesn't rely nearly as much on the BIOS as Windows. For instance, I have an old Pentium 133MHz (non-MMX) running Debian Woody with an 80GB hard drive and a 160GB hard drive, and it sees all the space on each one. It currently serves as my backup server running rsback nightly. Note that I had to patch the kernel to see past 137GB because Woody uses an older kernel, but the kernels that most distros (including Sarge) include don't have this problem.
Most Windows users won't switch to open source software if they have to throw out their existing operating system and switch cold turkey. Even if it's on a live CD such as Knoppix, that's a lot of unnecessary rebooting and confusion. Besides, if someone eventually wants to switch to an open source OS such as GNU/Linux or *BSD, it's much easier when they have already been using cross-platform OSS applications already and don't have to switch those.
One step at a time is much, much easier than all at once. And since Free Software is about freedom and choice, the user always has the choice to stay with OSS, go back to proprietary software, or some combination of the two.
The deaf people I know just use regular computers like hearing people -- they just don't bother to plug in the speakers on their own machines. There's just a few things that need to be changed, like beep codes, although some manufacturers like EPoX and MSI use LEDs instead. Videos and flash animations need to have subtitles as an option (maybe some do already; i don't know). Some game cutscenes I've noticed are already subtitled by default -- Grand Theft Auto and Zero Wing (heh) come to mind immediately -- but sometimes gameplay requires the player to know where sounds such as gunfire are coming from (which is why I wear headphones for FPS games). Maybe a Halo-style radar would be useful to show where sounds are coming from as an option.
The real challenge is making computers for blind users. From what I hear, current screen readers and such hardware is rediculously overpriced and awkward to use. On the web, there are way too many stupid people making websites that don't conform to W3C specifications and misuse structural elements like
, , and especially . One of the major reasons to use HTML only for document structure and CSS for layout is so that the HTML doesn't get cluttered with layout elements that a screen reader has to read. Webmasters all too often forget to include alternate text with images -- how else is a blind user going to know what your pretty graphical buttons say? Personally, I make sure all my sites render well in Lynx, so I can see if it's possible to navigate with text only, as well as run every page through the W3C validator.
Wow, someone else in Eureka! I was just in ACS (overpriced local shop) today. Their prices are at least 50% higher than you can get online. I only use them and other local shops for small stuff like fans, or for emergencies. I'm also pissed that you can't get simple things like cables at a reasonable price anywhere in town. Sometimes one store will have something decent (like Costco with a 3-pack of USB cables for $10), but there's a whole lot of driving around town involved to find them. I'd kill for a Fry's or a CompUSA.
If you want a used floppy drive or something like that, try Boneyard Computers on 5th Street. It's on the left a couple blocks from where Broadway splits into 4th and 5th Streets at the end of a small industrial-looking parking lot, so you may have to hunt a little for it. Operating hours are very sporadic, so call before going there (it's in the phone book) to see if they're open. Floppy drives are $5, plus there's all sorts of other cheap parts.
Another good place to get used parts is bsmall.com. It's a local tech that sells used hardware out of his house and a good place to get deals. IIRC, he'll ship things smaller than a motherboard to anywhere in the 48 United States.
Oh, and there's a WalMart in Crescent City. It's less than 100 miles away, but still a 1.5 hour drive.
If anyone knows of a good place like NewEgg to buy parts from that has a warehouse on the west coast, but NOT in California (sales tax sucks), post it! Please! My favorite right now is Directron in Texas, which seems like a good compromise between low prices, no tax, and semi-low shipping time.
No, you need new glasses. The AC said that the grandparent's (great-grandparent's?) post should not have had plus signs. The numbers 1, 3, 3, and 7 written closely together as 1337 with nothing in between implies multiplication, not addition. Therefore, 1337 = 1*3*3*7 = 63, and 1337 != 1+3+3+7.
The earthquake was very small here in Eureka (1.5 hours south of Crescent City, 2 hours south of Oregon), to the point where some people didn't even feel it. It made my big metal shelves sqeak a little and I could feel a little shaking (it felt more like a slight swinging), but that's it. There was a tsunami warning, but it was short lived and no wave came. Go back to your lives; nothing even remotely important happened. I'm very surprised to see this show up on Slashdot.
It sounds like an extension or theme that didn't support the new release broke Firefox. It's happened to me before. To fix it, start Firefox in safe mode and disable extensions and/or change back to the default theme until it starts again in normal mode.
Personally, I think that the way Firefox extensions and themes are tied to a specific revision is rediculous. The way the browser interacts with addons shouldn't change with every little revision. On Linux in particular, plugins like Java are broken with each upgrade. Also, there needs to be some sort of easy, clean upgrade/patch mechanism, rather than simply installing the latest version on top of the previous one. I completely understand why you were turned off by Firefox and went back to IE.
However, I still use Firefox as my main browser in Windows and Linux, with Opera as a secondary browser. To each his/her own.
Last month I sat through a presentation of that same comparison you linked to at the local LUG. It looks like students tended to prefer Moodle slightly over Blackboard. IIRC, HSU (where the comparison was done) seems to want to ditch Blackboard because of high prices and lack of features in the basic version they're using.
Right now, I'm attending the community college down the road from HSU, which uses Blackboard. It's slow and clunky IMHO, and isn't used very much. Also, the two (?!?) pages leading up to the login page prominently and strongly recommend Internet Explorer (complete with big fancy IE logo), which leads me to believe that Blackboard doesn't really care about making web pages correctly. This is also a huge stumbling block to an effort I've heard about to ditch IE for Firefox at the college.
iantri: "BTW, do you know if there is a Firefox extension to prevent stuff from opening in new windows? (opening as tabs instead, like Opera)"
Yes, there is: Single Window 1.0. It doesn't catch things that the browser wants to open in a new window like the "get more extensions/themes" links, and Ctrl+N still opens a new window. However, things that websites want to open in a new window using "target=_blank" or similar open in new tabs and not new windows.
That kind of reminds me of the old 3Dfx commercials where they go on and on about how this amazing new chip can be used to make life better; they show clips of medical stuff, etc. etc. and then they stop and say, "hey, we can use this for games!"
It's kinda weird and really cool to see gaming hardware used for medical stuff in real life. Thanks for pointing it out.
I doubt you'd need encryption to get around a music fingerprinting scheme. Just a compression method that takes lots of CPU time to decompress would cost the RIAA, etc. too much in CPU horsepower to bother with.
While we're at it, let's throw a few files onto the P2P networks made up of terabytes of one character, compressed to a few bytes. Audio fingerprint servers should have fun with those.;-) (Yeah, I'm sure a decompressor could check the uncompressed file length before decompression, so that exploit probably won't do much.)
You're right, Windows really eats ram, especially 2000 and XP. You can cut down the memory usage by a few megabytes by disabling some of the useless services, but it doesn't go down far.
When I was in high school, they bought some Celeron 400 systems with 64MB of RAM. They ran either Windows 98 or NT4, and were reasonably fast for regular school stuff like writing essays and web browsing. Shortly after they bought them, they "upgraded" every one of them to Win2K and from that day forward they were dog-ass slow. Windows 2000, plus McAfee VirusScan and Novell NetWare client, would fill all the RAM at bootup and then some. By the time they finished booting (4-5 minutes to a usable desktop, and I'm not exaggerating), there would already be a good-sized swapfile and every program would crawl. I hated those machines. Did I mention that the idiot(s) who set them up set nearly every monitor to 60Hz, then locked us out from the Display control panel so I couldn't set it to something that didn't hurt my eyes?
On the other hand, I had (and still have) a K6-2 300MHz with 256MB of RAM that ran Win2K (and now XP) quite nicely. Older computers can run modern desktop programs if they have enough RAM.
This seems to me like an unencrypted password. Anyone with a packet sniffer who knows about port knocking can see that you're making connections to ports x and y before connecting to port z. Hopefully it will be seen as security through obscurity: a way to slow down, but not stop, attacks.
I actually don't mind helping people and answering their stupid questions and fixing the problems they cause. As long as they pay me $40/hour with a minimum of an hour.
Long ago I realized that I can't stop the lusers from bugging me. So I charge them.:-)
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I just set a customer up with a USB 3G adapter from AT&T, and I don't remember the Connection Manager install being as bad as I expected, although it did take awhile. Since the connection was for a small office in a rural area (no cable or DSL, so 3G, satellite, and dialup were the only options), I set them up with a Netgear 3G router. No more AT&T software needed, and the owner can use his laptop on the wireless network, in addition to the desktop computer it was originally intended for.
So, you don't always need the dumb software.
I actually saw this problem myself just the other day, but didn't know that it came from the stealth update before seeing this article. Ironically, I had actually convinced my parents to buy a legitimate copy of Windows XP Pro. They were using the infamous Corporate Edition, and I was tired of having to work around the product key changes and other bullshit like WGA, plus every time it came to install updates they would whine to me because they forgot what not to install (WGA). I did a repair install so they could keep all their programs and settings. After that, no updates would install. The help on the Windows Update site actually suggested the same fix to the problem explained in the linked articles (and it works).
Anyway, I am royally pissed off at Microsoft because the move from a bootleg install to a legitimate one broke Windows because of Microsoft's malice and stupidity. Fuck you, Bill. This is how you repay me for going legit? I have already tried a move to Ubuntu (bad support for laptop docking stations, funky video settings, and wireless networks) and Mac (way too restrictive, few hardware choices), but maybe I should try again. I already have Debian on my file and backup servers, plus Ubuntu on my test-bed computer. Microsoft does not deserve any more of my money.
Does it really matter? Either way, CuriHP's mom quit asking stupid questions. ;-)
Anyone who's more than mildly in to DDR must eventually hook a PC up to their TV and start using Stepmania or something similar. Hundreds of songs available online (all illegally, I'm sure, but oh well), no more swapping discs in and out of the PS2 to play this song or that one.
I used to do that all the time when I went to the local community college and had a friend who lived in the dorms. I would bring my laptop and PS2 controller to USB adapter, and another friend would bring his metal DDR pads. We plugged the laptop and pads into the big screen TV in the dorm lounge and play DDR until 10pm when non-residents had to leave. We met lots of people there, and I met my current girlfriend -- yes, I'm posting on /. and have a girlfriend that I met playing DDR ;-P. Stepmania rules!
Anyway, like the parent said, what makes Stepmania much, much better than any of the official Konami releases is that you can add all the official DDR songs and make custom ones. The only limit to the number of songs is my laptop's 20GB hard drive. With the official releases, different mixes have different songs, some songs are only on consoles, only on arcade machines, only in Japan/Korea/Europe/whatever, and there is no way to get every song. It's rediculous, as if Konami is trying its best to not make money.
No, they don't lose the data, just its backup. The original data is still intact wherever it was backed up from.
I agree with the phrase "RAID is not backup" if that's what you're trying to say, but in this case the OP isn't pretending that a single RAID array counts as backup. That's why it's backed up onto this other RAID array (so there are now two copies on two separate machines) and then onto DVD.
And the hard drive. And anything else that responds badly to repeated expansion and contraction from such a drastic temperature change.
If you're running Linux or a BSD, BIOS hard drive size limits mean nothing. It's something about how it doesn't rely nearly as much on the BIOS as Windows. For instance, I have an old Pentium 133MHz (non-MMX) running Debian Woody with an 80GB hard drive and a 160GB hard drive, and it sees all the space on each one. It currently serves as my backup server running rsback nightly. Note that I had to patch the kernel to see past 137GB because Woody uses an older kernel, but the kernels that most distros (including Sarge) include don't have this problem.
Most Windows users won't switch to open source software if they have to throw out their existing operating system and switch cold turkey. Even if it's on a live CD such as Knoppix, that's a lot of unnecessary rebooting and confusion. Besides, if someone eventually wants to switch to an open source OS such as GNU/Linux or *BSD, it's much easier when they have already been using cross-platform OSS applications already and don't have to switch those.
One step at a time is much, much easier than all at once. And since Free Software is about freedom and choice, the user always has the choice to stay with OSS, go back to proprietary software, or some combination of the two.
The real challenge is making computers for blind users. From what I hear, current screen readers and such hardware is rediculously overpriced and awkward to use. On the web, there are way too many stupid people making websites that don't conform to W3C specifications and misuse structural elements like
, , and especially . One of the major reasons to use HTML only for document structure and CSS for layout is so that the HTML doesn't get cluttered with layout elements that a screen reader has to read. Webmasters all too often forget to include alternate text with images -- how else is a blind user going to know what your pretty graphical buttons say? Personally, I make sure all my sites render well in Lynx, so I can see if it's possible to navigate with text only, as well as run every page through the W3C validator.
Wow, someone else in Eureka! I was just in ACS (overpriced local shop) today. Their prices are at least 50% higher than you can get online. I only use them and other local shops for small stuff like fans, or for emergencies. I'm also pissed that you can't get simple things like cables at a reasonable price anywhere in town. Sometimes one store will have something decent (like Costco with a 3-pack of USB cables for $10), but there's a whole lot of driving around town involved to find them. I'd kill for a Fry's or a CompUSA.
If you want a used floppy drive or something like that, try Boneyard Computers on 5th Street. It's on the left a couple blocks from where Broadway splits into 4th and 5th Streets at the end of a small industrial-looking parking lot, so you may have to hunt a little for it. Operating hours are very sporadic, so call before going there (it's in the phone book) to see if they're open. Floppy drives are $5, plus there's all sorts of other cheap parts.
Another good place to get used parts is bsmall.com. It's a local tech that sells used hardware out of his house and a good place to get deals. IIRC, he'll ship things smaller than a motherboard to anywhere in the 48 United States.
Oh, and there's a WalMart in Crescent City. It's less than 100 miles away, but still a 1.5 hour drive.
If anyone knows of a good place like NewEgg to buy parts from that has a warehouse on the west coast, but NOT in California (sales tax sucks), post it! Please! My favorite right now is Directron in Texas, which seems like a good compromise between low prices, no tax, and semi-low shipping time.
No, you need new glasses. The AC said that the grandparent's (great-grandparent's?) post should not have had plus signs. The numbers 1, 3, 3, and 7 written closely together as 1337 with nothing in between implies multiplication, not addition. Therefore, 1337 = 1*3*3*7 = 63, and 1337 != 1+3+3+7.
Deae people, of course!
The earthquake was very small here in Eureka (1.5 hours south of Crescent City, 2 hours south of Oregon), to the point where some people didn't even feel it. It made my big metal shelves sqeak a little and I could feel a little shaking (it felt more like a slight swinging), but that's it. There was a tsunami warning, but it was short lived and no wave came. Go back to your lives; nothing even remotely important happened. I'm very surprised to see this show up on Slashdot.
It sounds like an extension or theme that didn't support the new release broke Firefox. It's happened to me before. To fix it, start Firefox in safe mode and disable extensions and/or change back to the default theme until it starts again in normal mode.
Personally, I think that the way Firefox extensions and themes are tied to a specific revision is rediculous. The way the browser interacts with addons shouldn't change with every little revision. On Linux in particular, plugins like Java are broken with each upgrade. Also, there needs to be some sort of easy, clean upgrade/patch mechanism, rather than simply installing the latest version on top of the previous one. I completely understand why you were turned off by Firefox and went back to IE.
However, I still use Firefox as my main browser in Windows and Linux, with Opera as a secondary browser. To each his/her own.
Last month I sat through a presentation of that same comparison you linked to at the local LUG. It looks like students tended to prefer Moodle slightly over Blackboard. IIRC, HSU (where the comparison was done) seems to want to ditch Blackboard because of high prices and lack of features in the basic version they're using.
Right now, I'm attending the community college down the road from HSU, which uses Blackboard. It's slow and clunky IMHO, and isn't used very much. Also, the two (?!?) pages leading up to the login page prominently and strongly recommend Internet Explorer (complete with big fancy IE logo), which leads me to believe that Blackboard doesn't really care about making web pages correctly. This is also a huge stumbling block to an effort I've heard about to ditch IE for Firefox at the college.
iantri: "BTW, do you know if there is a Firefox extension to prevent stuff from opening in new windows? (opening as tabs instead, like Opera)"
Yes, there is: Single Window 1.0. It doesn't catch things that the browser wants to open in a new window like the "get more extensions/themes" links, and Ctrl+N still opens a new window. However, things that websites want to open in a new window using "target=_blank" or similar open in new tabs and not new windows.
Couldn't you have just restored their backup to a different drive? They did have a backup of their payroll info, riiiiiiiiight?
That kind of reminds me of the old 3Dfx commercials where they go on and on about how this amazing new chip can be used to make life better; they show clips of medical stuff, etc. etc. and then they stop and say, "hey, we can use this for games!"
It's kinda weird and really cool to see gaming hardware used for medical stuff in real life. Thanks for pointing it out.
You do know that 83% of statistics are made up on the spot, right?
I doubt you'd need encryption to get around a music fingerprinting scheme. Just a compression method that takes lots of CPU time to decompress would cost the RIAA, etc. too much in CPU horsepower to bother with.
;-) (Yeah, I'm sure a decompressor could check the uncompressed file length before decompression, so that exploit probably won't do much.)
While we're at it, let's throw a few files onto the P2P networks made up of terabytes of one character, compressed to a few bytes. Audio fingerprint servers should have fun with those.
...that I saw an MSN ad alongside that article?
All versions of Windows with an NT kernel have a partitioning step in their installs. So, yes, Windows installs do include partitioning.
You're right, Windows really eats ram, especially 2000 and XP. You can cut down the memory usage by a few megabytes by disabling some of the useless services, but it doesn't go down far.
When I was in high school, they bought some Celeron 400 systems with 64MB of RAM. They ran either Windows 98 or NT4, and were reasonably fast for regular school stuff like writing essays and web browsing. Shortly after they bought them, they "upgraded" every one of them to Win2K and from that day forward they were dog-ass slow. Windows 2000, plus McAfee VirusScan and Novell NetWare client, would fill all the RAM at bootup and then some. By the time they finished booting (4-5 minutes to a usable desktop, and I'm not exaggerating), there would already be a good-sized swapfile and every program would crawl. I hated those machines. Did I mention that the idiot(s) who set them up set nearly every monitor to 60Hz, then locked us out from the Display control panel so I couldn't set it to something that didn't hurt my eyes?
On the other hand, I had (and still have) a K6-2 300MHz with 256MB of RAM that ran Win2K (and now XP) quite nicely. Older computers can run modern desktop programs if they have enough RAM.
This seems to me like an unencrypted password. Anyone with a packet sniffer who knows about port knocking can see that you're making connections to ports x and y before connecting to port z. Hopefully it will be seen as security through obscurity: a way to slow down, but not stop, attacks.
I actually don't mind helping people and answering their stupid questions and fixing the problems they cause. As long as they pay me $40/hour with a minimum of an hour.
:-)
Long ago I realized that I can't stop the lusers from bugging me. So I charge them.