and at the time of the last test, OpenBSD's attach feasibility was 5%, an order of magnitude worse.
No, the original article states that the release of OpenBSD tested at the time (2.8), had an attack feasibility of 3.05%. It also states that OpenBSD -current had an attack feasibility of 0.00%.
The level of bandwidth and time required to pull off a sub-0.05% feasability attack is so ridiculous that it it is completely impractical in the real world.
But increasing bandwidth and processor speed will eventually make brute force guessing of 32-bit ISNs feasible for the average attacker.
Linux is only 24bits wide. Thats a 128 times smaller area to guess than OpenBSD's and 3GHz P4's, broadband WAN's and Gigabit+ LAN's are upon us.
He was in bed with 3Dfx, so proclaimed with supposed evidence that AGP gave no benefits over PCI. Then when he jumped out of their bed and into nVidia's, suddenly this was no longer an issue and he no longer ran benchmarks designed specifically to work within the SEVERE on board memory and PCI bandwidth constraints of 3Dfx products at the time (Voodoo2).
His site, even showed a Matrox G200 running much faster than a dual Voodoo2 setup (during his 3Dfx days), with a benchmark that used textures too big for the Voodoo2's to handle without using the PCI bus. A MATROX G200 BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF DUAL VOODOO2'S?!?! If that's not AGP coming to the rescue, then what is it? Of course, he conveniently ignored that minor little detail.
Anyone else know of any examples where Tom has made a sudden 180 degree turn in strong opinion immediately following a change in advertiser?
Then again, could it just be that he is a complete moron? He certainly would appear to not grasp even the basics of CS, the good articles are written by others.
Tom wouldn't know computer science if he was drowning in a Cray.
I remember back when the Voodoo2 reined supreme and he was in bed with 3Dfx, he claimed that AGP did not give any performance benefits over PCI, which is of course a great big pile of steaming horse shit.
He had some article written by some supposed CS expert that tried to state just that, but without any technical merit at all.
I thought it was pretty funny though, that on his own site, was a texture heavy benchmark showing a slow Matrox G200 AGP card running many many times faster than a system with dual Voodoo2's! This being due to the fact that the Voodoo2's could not cache enough of the textures locally and had to rely on the comparatively SLOW PCI bus.
A performance hit so severe, that a slow G200 was even able to run much faster due to it's AGP bus.
Of course, when Tom suddenly became an "Official nVidia review site! ", AGP was also suddenly much faster than PCI.
I have always been able to easily tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, since the 80's. Blind fold or not.
Pepsi is currently a kind of sickening sweet flavour that I cannot tolerate.
BTW, consumers always picked Pepsi? No, Pepsi would film shit loads of people doing the Pepsi Challenge, discard every bit of footage that showed Coke being chosen, and then sort through the coolest looking people choosing Pepsi to put into their adverts.
; ) Audiophiles on the whole, are usually morons with inflated egos.
I remember seeing a "flagship" Meridian CD player that was going for $50,000 au, which was EASILY beaten to death by a $300 Marantz.
They're idiots who make decisions based solely on name and high price. They see gold-like anodized plastic and go oooohhhh, but ignore tests done with proper testing equipment (with names like Tektronics and HP, the type of stuff top military and NASA relies on) by people who know physics, as "non-real World" tests.
NAD is another brand that has a prestigious name, yet does not live up to it. I can design an amp around some affordable MOSFETS that does better for a fraction of NAD prices.
I remember years ago seeing a bunch of audiophuckwits on TV who were doing an A/B listening test of audio CD's that were and were not placed in a freezer. They claimed that during the mfg process, the plastic would change shape as it cooled or heated, causing cracks in the aluminium data layer. The freezing apparently brought the aluminium cracks back together to "rectify" the "problem".
I wish I could have been there to point out that if their completely ridiculous theory was true, then the success of the CDROM revolution has been a complete imagination by billions, since a single bit error on an audio CD could go unnoticed yet a single bit error on a CDROM could cause a complete failure.
The kind of people who covet stuff that is NOT a part of the music, which was put there with valves for example.
The fact is, that the highest frequency a human can hear is approx a 20kHz Sine wave and a 44.1kHz sample can reproduce a 22kHz Sine wave!
I agree that 24bit/96kHz is fantastic for recording and mixing, since it largely allows the elimination of errors [1] introduced from math done on the samples. But bringing 24bit/96kHz all the way to the listeners output is complete overkill.
Anyway, I agree, get some good headphones and enjoy your LAME and Ogg music!
[1] When I say elimination of errors, I mean that although math done on 24bit/96kHz will also result in errors, the errors are confined to the lower order bits, which are discarded at the point where it is all brought back to 16bit/44.1kHz. Thus the whole reason higher sample rates and bit depths are often used for recording and mixing. Practical elimination of errors in the final product.
So stick with Mac OS 9.2 then. The OS with the Worlds most bandaids! And I say that affectionately, since I think it's fairly more stable than the Win9x's, considering they're both sans memory protection.
For Apple to advance, they had to make major changes, and if they're going to do that, they may as well improve everything along with the kernel changes. OSX is my main OS now, it's not perfect sure, but what is? It certainly appears to have the most incredible potential. I'm finding OSX to be as stable as any of the most stable Linux or *BSD systems and by far the most capable GUI I've ever used.
Don't like it? Then stick with what works for you now and move over to OSX when you need to.
Note the capital H. Brings up a question, which way is correct? I've always done Ghz, but have seen GHz also.
Since Hertz is a unit of measurement named after the German physicist who was the first to produce electromagnetic waves artificially, it should be capitalized.
And I really hate with a passion, seeing m where M should be, considering m is 1,000,000,000 times smaller than M.
Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
From your MIT link... We have run benchmarks to measure filesystem performances. Benchmarks have been made on a middle-end PC, based on a i486DX2 processor, using 16 MB of memory and two 420 MB IDE disks. The tests were run on Ext2 fs and Xia fs (Linux 1.1.62) and on the BSD Fast filesystem in asynchronous and synchronous mode (FreeBSD 2.0 Alpha--based on the 4.4BSD Lite distribution).
Hey! Way to beat us BSD fans senseless with modern benchmarks! You must have looked around a fair bit to come up with this golden oldie!
I can't be bothered looking at the postscript if it's anything as compelling as you're first effort at this Troll disguised as information.
OS: OSX 10.1.5 (started with 10.1.3). HW: Clamshell iBook, 300MHz G3, 128MB CAS2. Notes: Using OSX every day for many months now, NEVER has the Kernel or GUI crashed. Sometimes Opera or IE will suddenly disappear with a crashed app dialog, but re-starting the offending app always works perfectly with no side effects within that app or any other. Being a desktop I run it as need be, so uptime is never more than days due to being powered off intentionally when it isn't required.
My guess is, you don't even own a Mac, much less have OSX. If you do, and you actually have real GUI or Kernel crashes, can you reproduce them? What are they? And have you informed Apple?
I'm finding the stability of OSX right up there with FreeBSD+WindowMaker, only OSX is a super pleasure to use with an application base that has no shortcomings that I can see.
Win2k and WinXP (and I speak as someone who has these along with OpenBSD, Solaris, Unixware, OS9+X machines at home) is FAR FAR more stable than Windows 95, but not quite as stable as the rest that I mention in this paragraph. I wouldn't be putting MacOSX stability into the same basket as Microsoft stability.
You've got it backwards. You are paying $129 for an upgrade. Apple doesn't sell full versions.
Oh yes they do. I can say that with 100% certainty and authority. I purchased a second hand Mac that was in another language as OS9 and I could not set it to English (English was not an option amongst all the langs).
I purchased the boxed Mac OSX 10.1.3, which came with bootable OS9.2 and OSX.1.3 CD's and I have even installed it onto a brand new, zeroed UDMA HDD for which I upgraded the machine.
(OSX is way too slow now, maybe it just needs a couple of procs for "eye-candy"...)
I'm getting sick of hearing people say OSX is slow. I run OSX on an old 300MHz G3 iBook with 128MB ram. I find it more than usable.
OSX 10.1.5 gave hardware accelerated support for my ATI video which made it suddenly much quicker visually. 10.1.5 is much quicker than the 10.1.3 I have on CD.
OSX keeps getting quicker and plenty of RAM helps too, which is why I'll be upgrading this old machine to 320MB soon. Jaguar should be even quicker again.
Now having said all this, I imagine running Jaguar with RAM maxed out on any high end G3 or G4 should be very nice.
Coming from a Lintel/Wintel background, I am loving the combination of excellent stability and extreme intuitive usability.
(it will take a while to transition my mum to Linux but it will be done for performance and stability reasons)
Ahh yes, the most excellent Mum Linux 2000. I hear it is highly compatible with most Mum's and will easily install over the old Mum OS via UCB (Universal Cerebral Bus).
Anyone know what percent of our national power is used on computers? Should we be thinking wireless on laptops?
Huh?
I would put in a vote for ppc notebooks, for low power. Plus, when your batteries die during the night, you'll know about it but your notebook with then keep running for 2-5 hours depending. ppc desktops are low power too. If you have to use x86, I'm sure Intel and Transmetta can help.
No fancy directional antenna, regardless of how high the Effective Radiated Power, is going to beat the energy efficiency of a cable directed to the other end. : )
Because Aussie gaols can give them what some of them deserve...
A favorite trick in Aussie gaols, involving a victims anus (a favorite target in any gaol/jail I guess:), is to insert pvc tubing into the victim, then insert barbed wire into the pvc tubing.... then the tubing gets removed, leaving behind the bare barbed wire inside the execs arse. At which time, the barbed wire is absolutely wrenched outa there with all the force required, with the aim of ultimately causing a condition where a bodily organ exits the body through an orifice (I forget what this is called). Of course, the givers of pain will always settle for just extreme pain. ; )
I rekon this could be just retribution for trying to fuck over young Jon for "hacking", then turning around and doing the real thing.
So please, hack, and come over and throw a shimp on an Aussie barbie.
What's a good laser printer that has cheap toner/drum replacements?
How hard does this printer need to work? I purchased a Xerox P8ex about a year ago, which is just a little 600dpi (true) 8ppm laser. The cart you get with it is only half full of toner, but I got almost 3000 A4 pages out of it.
It has never jammed once either.
Cost me less than $400 Australian and I recently purchased a 5000 page toner cart for $220 Australian.
It's a nice little unit that is NOT one of those God awful WinPrinters, so it interprets PCL5 and 6 with an onboard StrongARM CPU motherboard that can be upgraded to 36MB via an older style SIMM socket. It does parallel and USB and works in Linux really nicely or under any other OS as a HP4 PCL printer.
It's not often that I rave about a product and I think this little printer is great. Cheap, fast enough, and excellent quality output. It has pseudo 1200dpi which only serves to make either the text or the vector graphics look worse, so ignore the 1200dpi hype thats placed on this printer and switch that off in the driver. 600dpi is very sharp anyway and on this printer its a real 600 dots-as-in-pixels per inch and not a fake dots-as-in-dithered-spots-of-colour which bubble/ink jet makers use to artifically make their printers sound far better than they actually are.
I know of one pub in Sydney and have heard about some more night clubs which have PC's set up playing huge MP3 play lists over and over off of MP3's on removable hard drives.
DJ at home mixes music until his removable hdd is full, then takes it to the night club, swaps hdd's, goes home and does it all again to keep the mixes fresh.
Should not be a prerequisit for getting an OS to work or do what you want it too.
Spinning down hard drives hardly seems to me to be "getting an OS to work". I prefer to have my spindles spinning to avoid placing the hdds under their maximum load too often or without good cause.
For fucks sake folks, it is computer. It is the culmination of all of mankinds current technological acheivements, why the hell can't we make it work out of the box?
Why have we not a simple cure for cancer, AIDS or the common flu? Computers are very complex beasts. Designs are rarely perfect. When I started getting into computing seriously almost 15 years ago, dead tree docco suggested calling BBS' for software, driver and firmware updates.
The internet just makes it easier to deploy this kind of stuff to the masses and at the same time is supposed to make it easier for the masses to find it! The weak link here, is the users.
For a user who wants to know how to spin down his hard drive under Linux, searching for "Linux hard drive spin down" in a search engine is not an unrealistic expectation. For the user who does not like this, there is always Mac OS X or Windows XP. Seriously, what is a user like that doing using Linux and complaining about it?
Slashdot Mirror
That's less than 0.05%, to be accurate.
Correct.
and at the time of the last test, OpenBSD's attach feasibility was 5%, an order of magnitude worse.
No, the original article states that the release of OpenBSD tested at the time (2.8), had an attack feasibility of 3.05%. It also states that OpenBSD -current had an attack feasibility of 0.00%.
The level of bandwidth and time required to pull off a sub-0.05% feasability attack is so ridiculous that it it is completely impractical in the real world.
But increasing bandwidth and processor speed will eventually make brute force guessing of 32-bit ISNs feasible for the average attacker.
Linux is only 24bits wide. Thats a 128 times smaller area to guess than OpenBSD's and 3GHz P4's, broadband WAN's and Gigabit+ LAN's are upon us.
Why the hell not fix it?
Tom is a heel. I once admired him.
Tom, is a FILTHY WHORE.
He was in bed with 3Dfx, so proclaimed with supposed evidence that AGP gave no benefits over PCI. Then when he jumped out of their bed and into nVidia's, suddenly this was no longer an issue and he no longer ran benchmarks designed specifically to work within the SEVERE on board memory and PCI bandwidth constraints of 3Dfx products at the time (Voodoo2).
His site, even showed a Matrox G200 running much faster than a dual Voodoo2 setup (during his 3Dfx days), with a benchmark that used textures too big for the Voodoo2's to handle without using the PCI bus. A MATROX G200 BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF DUAL VOODOO2'S?!?! If that's not AGP coming to the rescue, then what is it? Of course, he conveniently ignored that minor little detail.
Anyone else know of any examples where Tom has made a sudden 180 degree turn in strong opinion immediately following a change in advertiser?
Then again, could it just be that he is a complete moron? He certainly would appear to not grasp even the basics of CS, the good articles are written by others.
satisfactory ISN generator
If Linux having an attack feasibility of 0.05% is satisfactory, compared with OpenBSD's 0.00% for example.
Tom wouldn't know computer science if he was drowning in a Cray.
I remember back when the Voodoo2 reined supreme and he was in bed with 3Dfx, he claimed that AGP did not give any performance benefits over PCI, which is of course a great big pile of steaming horse shit.
He had some article written by some supposed CS expert that tried to state just that, but without any technical merit at all.
I thought it was pretty funny though, that on his own site, was a texture heavy benchmark showing a slow Matrox G200 AGP card running many many times faster than a system with dual Voodoo2's! This being due to the fact that the Voodoo2's could not cache enough of the textures locally and had to rely on the comparatively SLOW PCI bus.
A performance hit so severe, that a slow G200 was even able to run much faster due to it's AGP bus.
Of course, when Tom suddenly became an " Official nVidia review site! ", AGP was also suddenly much faster than PCI.
Oh what power Tom wields! The power of ignorance.
Bugger, I hope this doesn't mean I won't be able to boot 64bit OpenBSD on some nice new 64bit Mac hardware!?
Whilst avoiding your possibly crappy sound card...
* Rip as best you can you favorite song.
* Encode it with a few encoders with what you believe to be the best quality settings.
* Decode them back into raw wav's and burn them onto a CDR.
* Listen to that CDR in your stereo, noting which tracks were encoded with which encoder.
I have always been able to easily tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, since the 80's. Blind fold or not.
Pepsi is currently a kind of sickening sweet flavour that I cannot tolerate.
BTW, consumers always picked Pepsi? No, Pepsi would film shit loads of people doing the Pepsi Challenge, discard every bit of footage that showed Coke being chosen, and then sort through the coolest looking people choosing Pepsi to put into their adverts.
"overpriced audiophile extreme"
; ) Audiophiles on the whole, are usually morons with inflated egos.
I remember seeing a "flagship" Meridian CD player that was going for $50,000 au, which was EASILY beaten to death by a $300 Marantz.
They're idiots who make decisions based solely on name and high price. They see gold-like anodized plastic and go oooohhhh, but ignore tests done with proper testing equipment (with names like Tektronics and HP, the type of stuff top military and NASA relies on) by people who know physics, as "non-real World" tests.
NAD is another brand that has a prestigious name, yet does not live up to it. I can design an amp around some affordable MOSFETS that does better for a fraction of NAD prices.
I remember years ago seeing a bunch of audiophuckwits on TV who were doing an A/B listening test of audio CD's that were and were not placed in a freezer. They claimed that during the mfg process, the plastic would change shape as it cooled or heated, causing cracks in the aluminium data layer. The freezing apparently brought the aluminium cracks back together to "rectify" the "problem".
I wish I could have been there to point out that if their completely ridiculous theory was true, then the success of the CDROM revolution has been a complete imagination by billions, since a single bit error on an audio CD could go unnoticed yet a single bit error on a CDROM could cause a complete failure.
The kind of people who covet stuff that is NOT a part of the music, which was put there with valves for example.
The fact is, that the highest frequency a human can hear is approx a 20kHz Sine wave and a 44.1kHz sample can reproduce a 22kHz Sine wave!
I agree that 24bit/96kHz is fantastic for recording and mixing, since it largely allows the elimination of errors [1] introduced from math done on the samples. But bringing 24bit/96kHz all the way to the listeners output is complete overkill.
Anyway, I agree, get some good headphones and enjoy your LAME and Ogg music!
[1] When I say elimination of errors, I mean that although math done on 24bit/96kHz will also result in errors, the errors are confined to the lower order bits, which are discarded at the point where it is all brought back to 16bit/44.1kHz. Thus the whole reason higher sample rates and bit depths are often used for recording and mixing. Practical elimination of errors in the final product.
Just because something is written in an article, does not make it correct.
His conclusions are flawed at best.
Exactly. I thought up this brilliant idea about 20 years ago, when I was about 10 and into electronics.
Get any LCD screen, remove the polarizing film and use some "special" glasses.
I have a nice pair of "special" glasses, they're called Bolle.
I am a bitter old man. I hate change.
So stick with Mac OS 9.2 then. The OS with the Worlds most bandaids! And I say that affectionately, since I think it's fairly more stable than the Win9x's, considering they're both sans memory protection.
For Apple to advance, they had to make major changes, and if they're going to do that, they may as well improve everything along with the kernel changes. OSX is my main OS now, it's not perfect sure, but what is? It certainly appears to have the most incredible potential. I'm finding OSX to be as stable as any of the most stable Linux or *BSD systems and by far the most capable GUI I've ever used.
Don't like it? Then stick with what works for you now and move over to OSX when you need to.
Note the capital H. Brings up a question, which way is correct? I've always done Ghz, but have seen GHz also.
Since Hertz is a unit of measurement named after the German physicist who was the first to produce electromagnetic waves artificially, it should be capitalized.
And I really hate with a passion, seeing m where M should be, considering m is 1,000,000,000 times smaller than M.
Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Quick, better tell this guy!
From your MIT link... We have run benchmarks to measure filesystem performances. Benchmarks have been made on a middle-end PC, based on a i486DX2 processor, using 16 MB of memory and two 420 MB IDE disks. The tests were run on Ext2 fs and Xia fs (Linux 1.1.62) and on the BSD Fast filesystem in asynchronous and synchronous mode (FreeBSD 2.0 Alpha--based on the 4.4BSD Lite distribution).
Hey! Way to beat us BSD fans senseless with modern benchmarks! You must have looked around a fair bit to come up with this golden oldie!
I can't be bothered looking at the postscript if it's anything as compelling as you're first effort at this Troll disguised as information.
I guess we can expect a dead Jaguar real soon then?
And lots of banks and network security companies will just drop what has been working great for them for years now.
Wow. I really didn't realize that a sense of humor could be surgically removed. Did it hurt much?
I actually opted for the full labotomy, so nothing hurts any more. Not ever the memory of all the electric shock treatment!
Well, it still does crash occasionally
Anecdotal evidence provider #0000001, issue #0001:
OS: OSX 10.1.5 (started with 10.1.3).
HW: Clamshell iBook, 300MHz G3, 128MB CAS2.
Notes: Using OSX every day for many months now, NEVER has the Kernel or GUI crashed. Sometimes Opera or IE will suddenly disappear with a crashed app dialog, but re-starting the offending app always works perfectly with no side effects within that app or any other. Being a desktop I run it as need be, so uptime is never more than days due to being powered off intentionally when it isn't required.
My guess is, you don't even own a Mac, much less have OSX. If you do, and you actually have real GUI or Kernel crashes, can you reproduce them? What are they? And have you informed Apple?
I'm finding the stability of OSX right up there with FreeBSD+WindowMaker, only OSX is a super pleasure to use with an application base that has no shortcomings that I can see.
Win2k and WinXP (and I speak as someone who has these along with OpenBSD, Solaris, Unixware, OS9+X machines at home) is FAR FAR more stable than Windows 95, but not quite as stable as the rest that I mention in this paragraph. I wouldn't be putting MacOSX stability into the same basket as Microsoft stability.
You've got it backwards. You are paying $129 for an upgrade. Apple doesn't sell full versions.
Oh yes they do. I can say that with 100% certainty and authority. I purchased a second hand Mac that was in another language as OS9 and I could not set it to English (English was not an option amongst all the langs).
I purchased the boxed Mac OSX 10.1.3, which came with bootable OS9.2 and OSX.1.3 CD's and I have even installed it onto a brand new, zeroed UDMA HDD for which I upgraded the machine.
I would most certainly call that, full version!
(OSX is way too slow now, maybe it just needs a couple of procs for "eye-candy"...)
I'm getting sick of hearing people say OSX is slow. I run OSX on an old 300MHz G3 iBook with 128MB ram. I find it more than usable.
OSX 10.1.5 gave hardware accelerated support for my ATI video which made it suddenly much quicker visually. 10.1.5 is much quicker than the 10.1.3 I have on CD.
OSX keeps getting quicker and plenty of RAM helps too, which is why I'll be upgrading this old machine to 320MB soon. Jaguar should be even quicker again.
Now having said all this, I imagine running Jaguar with RAM maxed out on any high end G3 or G4 should be very nice.
Coming from a Lintel/Wintel background, I am loving the combination of excellent stability and extreme intuitive usability.
(it will take a while to transition my mum to Linux but it will be done for performance and stability reasons)
Ahh yes, the most excellent Mum Linux 2000. I hear it is highly compatible with most Mum's and will easily install over the old Mum OS via UCB (Universal Cerebral Bus).
Plus, it's Debian based!!! Yeah!! dpkg -i breakfast.deb !!
Anyone know what percent of our national power is used on computers? Should we be thinking wireless on laptops?
Huh?
I would put in a vote for ppc notebooks, for low power. Plus, when your batteries die during the night, you'll know about it but your notebook with then keep running for 2-5 hours depending. ppc desktops are low power too. If you have to use x86, I'm sure Intel and Transmetta can help.
No fancy directional antenna, regardless of how high the Effective Radiated Power, is going to beat the energy efficiency of a cable directed to the other end. : )
Because Aussie gaols can give them what some of them deserve...
A favorite trick in Aussie gaols, involving a victims anus (a favorite target in any gaol/jail I guess:), is to insert pvc tubing into the victim, then insert barbed wire into the pvc tubing.... then the tubing gets removed, leaving behind the bare barbed wire inside the execs arse. At which time, the barbed wire is absolutely wrenched outa there with all the force required, with the aim of ultimately causing a condition where a bodily organ exits the body through an orifice (I forget what this is called). Of course, the givers of pain will always settle for just extreme pain. ; )
I rekon this could be just retribution for trying to fuck over young Jon for "hacking", then turning around and doing the real thing.
So please, hack, and come over and throw a shimp on an Aussie barbie.
What's a good laser printer that has cheap toner/drum replacements?
How hard does this printer need to work? I purchased a Xerox P8ex about a year ago, which is just a little 600dpi (true) 8ppm laser. The cart you get with it is only half full of toner, but I got almost 3000 A4 pages out of it.
It has never jammed once either.
Cost me less than $400 Australian and I recently purchased a 5000 page toner cart for $220 Australian.
It's a nice little unit that is NOT one of those God awful WinPrinters, so it interprets PCL5 and 6 with an onboard StrongARM CPU motherboard that can be upgraded to 36MB via an older style SIMM socket. It does parallel and USB and works in Linux really nicely or under any other OS as a HP4 PCL printer.
It's not often that I rave about a product and I think this little printer is great. Cheap, fast enough, and excellent quality output. It has pseudo 1200dpi which only serves to make either the text or the vector graphics look worse, so ignore the 1200dpi hype thats placed on this printer and switch that off in the driver. 600dpi is very sharp anyway and on this printer its a real 600 dots-as-in-pixels per inch and not a fake dots-as-in-dithered-spots-of-colour which bubble/ink jet makers use to artifically make their printers sound far better than they actually are.
I know of one pub in Sydney and have heard about some more night clubs which have PC's set up playing huge MP3 play lists over and over off of MP3's on removable hard drives.
DJ at home mixes music until his removable hdd is full, then takes it to the night club, swaps hdd's, goes home and does it all again to keep the mixes fresh.
Should not be a prerequisit for getting an OS to work or do what you want it too.
Spinning down hard drives hardly seems to me to be "getting an OS to work". I prefer to have my spindles spinning to avoid placing the hdds under their maximum load too often or without good cause.
For fucks sake folks, it is computer. It is the culmination of all of mankinds current technological acheivements, why the hell can't we make it work out of the box?
Why have we not a simple cure for cancer, AIDS or the common flu? Computers are very complex beasts. Designs are rarely perfect. When I started getting into computing seriously almost 15 years ago, dead tree docco suggested calling BBS' for software, driver and firmware updates.
The internet just makes it easier to deploy this kind of stuff to the masses and at the same time is supposed to make it easier for the masses to find it! The weak link here, is the users.
For a user who wants to know how to spin down his hard drive under Linux, searching for "Linux hard drive spin down" in a search engine is not an unrealistic expectation. For the user who does not like this, there is always Mac OS X or Windows XP. Seriously, what is a user like that doing using Linux and complaining about it?
might it be better to have a lower MTBF and the ability to repair the damage than a system that rarely breaks but when it does its catastrophic.
Exactly.
If you don't need super performance, can't tolerate loss and can afford it, just mirror across some good drives.
SCSI drives seem to have higher MTBF's and longer warrantees, so after a bit of research amongst them you should be able to find some reliable drives.
If you need performance and cannot tolerate loss, RAID5 or RAID0+1 could be good for you.
But regardless of your disk system choices, choose a backup method that has a reliable restore feature. ; )