I have trouble coming up with any good reason to use RAR anymore, and I know from experience that a high proportion of usage is totally inappropriate (segmenting torrent files, for example).
First, Windows doesn't provide support any compression formats except those used by Windows itself. ZIP was added only recently (IIRC, with one of the XP service packs). Second, there is no 'tar' format for packaging things up, with or without compression. And third, if you add the lack of cat and split (among any number of other utilities found on by default any *nix distribution), what options left for the average user?
Let's put aside the general reliance on WinRAR (and related utilities) and consider, the all those "split RAR files". An idiotic construct, to be sure, given that RAR natively supports multipart archives, and a 2GB download of parts requires the user to join them in to a single 2GB file before being able to use what was downloaded, yielding 4GB of stuff. Why do people do that? Simple. Because they don't understand any part of what they're doing!
That fact, IMHO, goes a long way to explain why people insist that All Singing All Dancing commercial apps are necessary, and OSS apps are deficient. They don't want to understand, don't want to learn, and demand that their use of a program (or their computer, generally) consist of an easy-to-remember set of steps that involve nothing more than clicking and pointing. The criteria for an application's usefulness then becomes a measure of "polish" (a hand-wavy term, at best), and the discussion devolves into petty objections of "sane defaults", text on menu items, and radio box placements.
IIS is cited as easy to use, and has sane defaults. Apache, by contrast, uses an "obscure text file" for configuration, and requires similary "obscure" utilities to use. Never mind that the terms "obscure" and "technical" are rarely synomymous, or that understanding or managing web servers is, by its very nature, an entirely "technical" activity.
I'd sum up the state of things as follow:
I want to do things like the pros do, but I don't want to have to think or put in any work aside from clicking a few buttons from time to time. The program should know what I want, and just do it. If all my conditions aren't met, I'll look elsewhere. I get bored easily, so I'll probably look elsewhere anyway.
Damn inflation, I remember when you used to be able to give an opinion for 2 cents!
I take it you've never studied economics. Instead of boring you with lots of technical terminology and theory, I'll restrict my comments to real world transactions and use commonly understood terms.
In the marketplace of ideas, opinions typically come in two forms. The first is worth 5 cents (as in "Not worth a plug nickel"), and the latter is a premium product valued at 10 cents ("I wish I had a dime for every time..."). And like in all markets, there are "wholesale" prices and "retail" prices. Those numbers represent the retail prices.
When exchanging goods or services, there is an underlying cost for each transaction that must be bourne by one or more of the participants. The difference between 10 cents and your two cent idea is, of course eight cents. This is the "markup" or "overhead".
Put simply, when you manufacture your idea, its wholesale price is two cents, but is sold in the marketplace at either 5 or 10 cents. Small amounts, to be sure, but that doesn't prevent entrepreneurial resellers from making much more, or for those with sufficient legal resources, from securing a patent and making millions!
My idea (for this post) was similarly worth two cents. That's not to say, however, that in the marketplace of ideas known as Slashdot, the laws of supply and demand don't apply. That means that there's high probability it will end up being worth zero cents. Or to use the English formative of Latin origin, nonsense.
Think of all the corporate money that is being thrown at killing healthcare reform in all it's different guises...
Money that's most commonly used to fund television commercials designed to sway public opinion.
and then multiply it by 200.
How so? Patents may be a concern for businesses in numerous segments of the economy, but those concerns are hardly universal. And the public? I don't see how they could be convinced to care, so the targeted commercial idea provides no benefits
Granted, money is a factor, but it's disingenuous to overstate it. Those companies for which patents are a primary concern employ people (who are both "people" and "voters") and pay taxes (which fund the government before trickling back to the people). Any sane politician with common sense is going to think twice before enacting reforms which may have a negative effect, or otherwise risk causing widespread confusion across parts of the economy.
If you're looking for a bogey man, look in the mirror. The corrupting influence of money occurs at election time, long before any legislation is written or considered. If you refuse to be informed and/or don't participate, there's nothing but TV commercials to fill the gap. And everyone watches TV.
Patent reform is obviously needed, but it's not bogeymen who are the problem. If it doesn't happen, it will be because it's a bitch to figure out how to do it right. In that sense, it's not unlike tax reform. A messy, intolerable system that no one really understands, and changes to which cause problems no one can anticipate.
The upside to all this, and going back to your health care debate analogy, is that we, the general public, won't be subjected to absurd television commercials, or equally absurd news coverage arising out of the impact of those commercials.
Nothing to wonder about. Because Apple understands design and focuses on it. The have GUI design docs and the follow them and enforce them stringently. Windows and Microsoft isn't about design; they are about marketing and mass consumption. They are Wal-Mart. And have you been inside a Wal-mart lately?
What I find interesting is that your comments with respect to the Apple site also apply to websites run by Mac users. Ever see an ugly website run by a Mac user? Hell, has anyone seen an ugly Mac user?
By contrast, websites run by typical Linux users adhere to the It's All About The Tools guidelines. The majority, unsurpringly, adopt the aesthetic as found in the loose nuts and bolts section of a hardware store. Neither bad, nor good, but when you're looking for a certain size screw, what else really matters? Basement chic, if you will.
FreeBSD pages, of course, tend to be organised and consistent, if not identical (docbook), while sites run by OpenBSD users proudly eschew all notions of style, preferring instead, I assume, to concentrate the security of their HTML.;-)
That leaves Microsoft. And Walmart it is. While Microsoft doesn't mandate that their MCSE professionals wear those crappy red shirts and name badges, I'd guess there's unwritten policy that everyone offers the requisite "greetings" that Walmart employees are required to offer. An exaggeration?
$ ftp ftp.microsoft.com Connected to ftp.microsoft.com. 220 Microsoft FTP Service Name (ftp.microsoft.com:value_added): anonymous 331 Anonymous access allowed, send identity (e-mail name) as password. Password: 230-Welcome to FTP.MICROSOFT.COM. Also visit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads. 230 User logged in. Remote system type is Windows_NT. ftp> quit 221 Thank you for using Microsoft products.
Well, in their defense, they were a bit late, but they eventually released real mode Windows for Workgroups (at least for those of us who had NetBEUI installed), didn't they? Oh, wait...
LCDs don't give people eye strain anymore than books or eInk displays... If anything, due to their lower contrast, eInk displays are worse than LCDs in terms of eye strain.
You're asserting that eInk displays are the same as LCDs? And what evidence do you have to back that up?
Oh, look a Wiki link. Let's see what it says...
On a computer, a CRT with a low refresh rate (less than 70 Hz) can cause similar problems because of the flickering image. Aging CRTs also often go slightly out of focus, and this can also cause eye strain. LCDs do not go out of focus and are less susceptible to visible flicker.
Putting aside the fact that CRT have more problems for the user than just flicker, and that 85Hz (on a CRT) is a more reasonable standard for the absence of "perceived" flicker, I don't see much, if anything, in that quote (or the rest of the short article) that says anything about eInk displays.
I'd suggest that if you really believe that LCDs and eInk displays are the same, you'll have to better than offer up an unrelated Wiki article to validate your opinion. As for opinions, have you considered the possibility that just about every buyer of an Amazon kindle would disagree with you?
In the late 1970s I took a typing class in junior high school. Boys were actually discouraged from taking typing, so there were only a few other boys in the class. Despite the speed and accuracy requirements to pass the class being quite low, I barely passed, and the teacher advised me that I should never take a job requiring typing skills.
I learned about the same time, but my experience was a bit different. I opted to take a typing class that was advertised as "business somethingorother" to prepare girls for future careers as secretaries. My reasons for taking the class were twofold. First, that's where the girls were, so what better place to meet one? Second, certain classes required that term papers be typed and not hand-written. I wasn't about to sit at home and do the hunt and peck routine so typing class it was.
I met lots of girls, of course. The problem was I typed faster than most of them, so they resented me. The more "interesting" girls were hanging around outside smoking cigarettes, anyway.;-)
When computers came along, I felt right at home. My typing, same as you, has gotten better over the years. Funny how far learning proper technique can take you.
Best class I ever took? Absolutely. And seeing how poorly people type on keyboards today, and listening to all the "ergonomic" complaints and excuses, I'd suggest that all kids be forced to take a typing class (and preferrably on a manual typewriter where they can discover the value of technique). Whether they grow up to work as secretaries or programmers, doesn't matter. Most all jobs (auto mechanics included) involve using a keyboard for part of the work day. And for non-working hours, how can anyone find or get porn effectively without being able to type?
I guess the subject of Robin William's routine (a drunken Scottsman's invention of golf), or the thick Scottish brogue, wasn't enough of a hint for the OP.
Truth is, a little harmless digital stereotyping never hurt anybody. I look forward to living in a future where the advertisements on the street are video screens and they adapt their message to who they think is walking by.
A proud whore.
I look forward to a future where public spaces aren't blemished by the vulgarity of advertising, arenas and stadiums bear the name of the city and not the name of a corporation, bus benches are attractive places to sit, the notion of wearing clothing and accessories adorned with corporate logos is dismissed as absurd, and all of us can celebrate with pride the world we've made for ourselves.
Foolish notions? Perhaps. But the way I see it, better to aspire to something than wallow in the shamelessness of an idiocracy... oh, fuck it. Enjoy your electrolytes.
I'm running a small SoHo router/server on a first generation Soekris net4801 with FreeBSD, and a 2.5" HDD. The machine runs PPPoE, pf, postfix, imapd, lighttpd, etc... very well. I also used it as NFS, DHCP and TFTP server in addition to that, but I turned off NFS later for soekris-unrelated reasons... A net5501 would be a dream, as far as I'm concerned.
Indeed. It's not unusual for a server (at home, or otherwise) to sit there and do nothing for most of its uptime. When people say "I want something beefy" I'm left wondering if they really know what they want. Or need.
To help put things into perspective, those ubiquitous blue plastic boxes running Linux (DD-WRT) off camera-grade flash are running at what, 233MHz?
If I had a choice between a used PIII, or a PIV box, I'd opt for the PIII. But because I want the advantages of Soekris boxes (low power, no noise, BIOS over serial, etc.), I'm only too happy to compromise a bit on performance and get something more suitable. Yeah, those little fuckers do cost a bit more, but so does my time.
Knowing your hardware "just works" means no checking compatibility lists and none of the dicking around associated with consumer-grade computers.
A serial console. As far as I know, this is what serial ports were actually put into computers for in the first place.
Sigh. I wish more people (the home user Slashdot types) would just go buy a serial cable (and/or serial+USB adapter) and see for themselves how trivial it is to set up, and how valuable that setup can be. There's plenty of reasons why one would *want* to rely on serial, aside from the usual "What if the network is down?" scenario.
For added fun (when there's more than one computer involved), consider something like this
The question about bios settings is a good one though, and I don't know.
For the OP and most of us, that's a noop. What I would have suggested instead of a powerhungry P4 (or even PIII), is a soekris box. There's no VGA at all, so the BIOS (and everything else) is accessible via serial only. My "headless" VIA boxes are a PIA by comparison.
Granted, Soekris boxes are typically used to perform networking functions, but setting one up with a hard drive (laptop or SSD ideally) and running a web, IMAP, NFS, Samba, etc. server is common enough and performance is perfectly adequate. A few bucks more, but hey, they're rackmountable so you can impress your friends and neighbours.:-)
Oh dear, I don't understand what this means. Luckily my son, who got sick of me ringing him for computer help, told me what to do whenever I encounter a box I don't understand; click the X, or click cancel, or ignore. Now back to clicking on every ad I see.
How the fuck does a post that consists of incoherent rambling get modded up?
The above pseudo anecdote may have been funny if the fine article involved Firefox opening dialog boxes, but that's not the case. Either the OP either didn't read the article, or notice bit about the "landing page".
I'd add that the unrelated comment about IE (a non sequitor, actually) is even less funny, but I can't figure out WTF he was trying to say. Or what any of it has to do with... anything.
Next up, an excerpt from a Beavis and Butthead script that gets modded both insightful and funny:
Popup windows. You said popup. Ha ha ha. Just click the X stupid. Ha ha ha. Internet Explorer is teh suck. Ha ha ha.
Pedant note: although "all the time" or "always on" have more letters than "24x7", they are quicker to say and more meaningful. Why do we have this horrible cypher?
Pedant note: The term "cypher" is not a meaningful synonym for argot, cliche, neologism, colloquialism, expression, jargon, localism, newspeak, parlance, phrase, or vernacular (among others).
That's not to say slipping in other people's mud isn't forgivable.;-)
A: They couldn't figure out a way to make it leak oil.
And that's a bad thing?
My first car was a 2-seater Triumph convertible. It suffered from electrical system problems, leaking hydraulics, and when it rained, the top would leak (even if you managed to snap all the buttons downs correctly). But was it fun! Wind through my hair, wet shoulders, the smell of hydraulic fluid dripping on my left shoe, being pulled over and cited for "overcrowding" when I had more than 3 passengers in the car...
The cars I've owned since have all been what you'd call dependable if not "top of the line", but I can't remember a single interesting about them.
I think many vacuum tubes are being manufactured in Russia right now, I know this from buying guitar amplifier tubes so I suspect that is where they will be sourced.
That does raise the question of whether a computer built with vacuum tubes gives mp3 files a warmer sound.
The granting of legal monopolies in the production of something is just bound to lead to an explosion in innovation.
I know you're trying to be funny, but words have meaning and legal terms doubly so. Mixing technical terms with their colloquial counterparts yields a curious but not uncommon situation in which people talk past one another, unable to agree on WTF they're really talking about.
Put another way, if "patent" was synonymous with "legal monopoly", how would you explain the successes of Bell Labs?
The "browser snub" headline is just an attention grabber by the Register (go figure).
That would be like saying, "Rush Limbaugh uses provocative and inflammatory rhetoric (go figure)", or "Stephen Colbert poses disingenuous questions to his guests (go figure)".
Maybe you don't get the style of el Reg? I prefer to think of it as the difference between American and English humour: apart from the spellings, only one of them is funny.
The story submission just disappeared from the Firehose before I could link to it there, so this a message from the PAST FUTURE. Or something like that.
Alcohol is a depressant. Now we can conclude that alcohol helps us solve complex problems! Bonus!
Normal, healthy people enjoy poisons. Listening to sad or depressing music makes us feel better. Tales of tragedy are inspiring. Confident, happy people seek out danger.
Life is full of ironies and paradoxes. What confounds me is that our modern view of such things is so narrow that instead of celebrating life as it is, we insist on classifying non-productive or poorly understood aspects as an illness as though the "good" could exist without the "bad". And illnesses, we all know, requires treatment.
Depressed? Sucks to be have to be at work in the morning, but by all means, indulge yourself with your favourite poison, put on some blues music, share depressing stories, and if needed, go start a fight or do something reckless. Chances are you'll be a healthier and happier person for it. And maybe, according to the article, smarter.
An internet provider should no more be police for content than the postal services, who don't open and read every letter or packet to see if there's something incriminating in it.
Dunno about the UK, but in the US, the post office does have an inspection service that does just that. Not routinely (I'd hope), but they routinely cooperate with other branches of law enforcement, and IIRC, are authorised to carry guns and make arrests, and regularly do so.
Put another way, if you want to advocate ISP neutrality, I'd suggest something other than a metaphor that elicits the image of an armed BOFH.
Covering CO2 under the Clean Air Act would completely hamstring American businesses...
So your argument is that environmental regulations of this sort cost more money for business?
To the extent that's true, I'd characterise the thinking as somewhere between overly narrow and absurd. The government has an obligation to do what's best for the entire country. The costs to business may be real enough, but the costs to society are enormous, and are conveniently left uncounted. And yes, I'm talking real dollars here.
LOL. I do appreciate the followup, so here's what I discovered since my last post.
I'm using FreeBSD, and have the same or similar tools (dtrace included), but I've never been able to track the problem down without losing interest and patience.
Turns out that stopping cron and syslogd wasn't enough. I modified my mounts to use the noatime option (which worked until I started X), so then I reconfigured/var and/tmp as md (memory) devices and...
Now my drive stays spun down!
Fucking hell. I use my notebook far more than any desktop system, and I've been putting up with an overly "warm" keyboard and unecessarily spinning drive for years. The CPU I can throttle or adjust dynamically, but the drive? That required me reading a random post on Slashdot to fix.
Can't thank you enough!
I'll have to look into the Firefox issues you mentioned, of course. More importantly, I'll have to find a solution to having the contents of/var disappearing with every boot.
Slashdot Mirror
Or goddamned secretary day, for that matter.
Oh wait...
So if the CEO walks in and announces a Programers Day, instead of flowers, you'd expect what?
Great job! Here's a USB stick. Everyone's signed the card!
Good thing you skipped the 0th day. I'd be expect the conversations with the folks in HR would be less than productive.
I have trouble coming up with any good reason to use RAR anymore, and I know from experience that a high proportion of usage is totally inappropriate (segmenting torrent files, for example).
First, Windows doesn't provide support any compression formats except those used by Windows itself. ZIP was added only recently (IIRC, with one of the XP service packs). Second, there is no 'tar' format for packaging things up, with or without compression. And third, if you add the lack of cat and split (among any number of other utilities found on by default any *nix distribution), what options left for the average user?
Let's put aside the general reliance on WinRAR (and related utilities) and consider, the all those "split RAR files". An idiotic construct, to be sure, given that RAR natively supports multipart archives, and a 2GB download of parts requires the user to join them in to a single 2GB file before being able to use what was downloaded, yielding 4GB of stuff. Why do people do that? Simple. Because they don't understand any part of what they're doing!
That fact, IMHO, goes a long way to explain why people insist that All Singing All Dancing commercial apps are necessary, and OSS apps are deficient. They don't want to understand, don't want to learn, and demand that their use of a program (or their computer, generally) consist of an easy-to-remember set of steps that involve nothing more than clicking and pointing. The criteria for an application's usefulness then becomes a measure of "polish" (a hand-wavy term, at best), and the discussion devolves into petty objections of "sane defaults", text on menu items, and radio box placements.
IIS is cited as easy to use, and has sane defaults. Apache, by contrast, uses an "obscure text file" for configuration, and requires similary "obscure" utilities to use. Never mind that the terms "obscure" and "technical" are rarely synomymous, or that understanding or managing web servers is, by its very nature, an entirely "technical" activity.
I'd sum up the state of things as follow:
Damn inflation, I remember when you used to be able to give an opinion for 2 cents!
I take it you've never studied economics. Instead of boring you with lots of technical terminology and theory, I'll restrict my comments to real world transactions and use commonly understood terms.
In the marketplace of ideas, opinions typically come in two forms. The first is worth 5 cents (as in "Not worth a plug nickel"), and the latter is a premium product valued at 10 cents ("I wish I had a dime for every time ..."). And like in all markets, there are "wholesale" prices and "retail" prices. Those numbers represent the retail prices.
When exchanging goods or services, there is an underlying cost for each transaction that must be bourne by one or more of the participants. The difference between 10 cents and your two cent idea is, of course eight cents. This is the "markup" or "overhead".
Put simply, when you manufacture your idea, its wholesale price is two cents, but is sold in the marketplace at either 5 or 10 cents. Small amounts, to be sure, but that doesn't prevent entrepreneurial resellers from making much more, or for those with sufficient legal resources, from securing a patent and making millions!
My idea (for this post) was similarly worth two cents. That's not to say, however, that in the marketplace of ideas known as Slashdot, the laws of supply and demand don't apply. That means that there's high probability it will end up being worth zero cents. Or to use the English formative of Latin origin, nonsense.
Think of all the corporate money that is being thrown at killing healthcare reform in all it's different guises...
Money that's most commonly used to fund television commercials designed to sway public opinion.
and then multiply it by 200.
How so? Patents may be a concern for businesses in numerous segments of the economy, but those concerns are hardly universal. And the public? I don't see how they could be convinced to care, so the targeted commercial idea provides no benefits
Granted, money is a factor, but it's disingenuous to overstate it. Those companies for which patents are a primary concern employ people (who are both "people" and "voters") and pay taxes (which fund the government before trickling back to the people). Any sane politician with common sense is going to think twice before enacting reforms which may have a negative effect, or otherwise risk causing widespread confusion across parts of the economy.
If you're looking for a bogey man, look in the mirror. The corrupting influence of money occurs at election time, long before any legislation is written or considered. If you refuse to be informed and/or don't participate, there's nothing but TV commercials to fill the gap. And everyone watches TV.
Patent reform is obviously needed, but it's not bogeymen who are the problem. If it doesn't happen, it will be because it's a bitch to figure out how to do it right. In that sense, it's not unlike tax reform. A messy, intolerable system that no one really understands, and changes to which cause problems no one can anticipate.
The upside to all this, and going back to your health care debate analogy, is that we, the general public, won't be subjected to absurd television commercials, or equally absurd news coverage arising out of the impact of those commercials.
What I find interesting is that your comments with respect to the Apple site also apply to websites run by Mac users. Ever see an ugly website run by a Mac user? Hell, has anyone seen an ugly Mac user?
By contrast, websites run by typical Linux users adhere to the It's All About The Tools guidelines. The majority, unsurpringly, adopt the aesthetic as found in the loose nuts and bolts section of a hardware store. Neither bad, nor good, but when you're looking for a certain size screw, what else really matters? Basement chic, if you will.
FreeBSD pages, of course, tend to be organised and consistent, if not identical (docbook), while sites run by OpenBSD users proudly eschew all notions of style, preferring instead, I assume, to concentrate the security of their HTML. ;-)
That leaves Microsoft. And Walmart it is. While Microsoft doesn't mandate that their MCSE professionals wear those crappy red shirts and name badges, I'd guess there's unwritten policy that everyone offers the requisite "greetings" that Walmart employees are required to offer. An exaggeration?
Well, in their defense, they were a bit late, but they eventually released real mode Windows for Workgroups (at least for those of us who had NetBEUI installed), didn't they? Oh, wait ...
I want my life back Bill Gates!
There already is 3d entertainment, its not doing too hot. It's called plays.
Err .. maybe I suggest that Slashdot isn't the most appropriate audience for that comment?
Plays, BTW, are very much 2D. Theatre, by contrast ... ;-)
LCDs don't give people eye strain anymore than books or eInk displays ... If anything, due to their lower contrast, eInk displays are worse than LCDs in terms of eye strain.
You're asserting that eInk displays are the same as LCDs? And what evidence do you have to back that up?
Oh, look a Wiki link. Let's see what it says ...
Putting aside the fact that CRT have more problems for the user than just flicker, and that 85Hz (on a CRT) is a more reasonable standard for the absence of "perceived" flicker, I don't see much, if anything, in that quote (or the rest of the short article) that says anything about eInk displays.
I'd suggest that if you really believe that LCDs and eInk displays are the same, you'll have to better than offer up an unrelated Wiki article to validate your opinion. As for opinions, have you considered the possibility that just about every buyer of an Amazon kindle would disagree with you?
In the late 1970s I took a typing class in junior high school. Boys were actually discouraged from taking typing, so there were only a few other boys in the class. Despite the speed and accuracy requirements to pass the class being quite low, I barely passed, and the teacher advised me that I should never take a job requiring typing skills.
I learned about the same time, but my experience was a bit different. I opted to take a typing class that was advertised as "business somethingorother" to prepare girls for future careers as secretaries. My reasons for taking the class were twofold. First, that's where the girls were, so what better place to meet one? Second, certain classes required that term papers be typed and not hand-written. I wasn't about to sit at home and do the hunt and peck routine so typing class it was.
I met lots of girls, of course. The problem was I typed faster than most of them, so they resented me. The more "interesting" girls were hanging around outside smoking cigarettes, anyway. ;-)
When computers came along, I felt right at home. My typing, same as you, has gotten better over the years. Funny how far learning proper technique can take you.
Best class I ever took? Absolutely. And seeing how poorly people type on keyboards today, and listening to all the "ergonomic" complaints and excuses, I'd suggest that all kids be forced to take a typing class (and preferrably on a manual typewriter where they can discover the value of technique). Whether they grow up to work as secretaries or programmers, doesn't matter. Most all jobs (auto mechanics included) involve using a keyboard for part of the work day. And for non-working hours, how can anyone find or get porn effectively without being able to type?
That was a Scottish Golfer not Irish ...
LOL.
I guess the subject of Robin William's routine (a drunken Scottsman's invention of golf), or the thick Scottish brogue, wasn't enough of a hint for the OP.
Truth is, a little harmless digital stereotyping never hurt anybody. I look forward to living in a future where the advertisements on the street are video screens and they adapt their message to who they think is walking by.
A proud whore.
I look forward to a future where public spaces aren't blemished by the vulgarity of advertising, arenas and stadiums bear the name of the city and not the name of a corporation, bus benches are attractive places to sit, the notion of wearing clothing and accessories adorned with corporate logos is dismissed as absurd, and all of us can celebrate with pride the world we've made for ourselves.
Foolish notions? Perhaps. But the way I see it, better to aspire to something than wallow in the shamelessness of an idiocracy... oh, fuck it. Enjoy your electrolytes.
I'm running a small SoHo router/server on a first generation Soekris net4801 with FreeBSD, and a 2.5" HDD. The machine runs PPPoE, pf, postfix, imapd, lighttpd, etc... very well. I also used it as NFS, DHCP and TFTP server in addition to that, but I turned off NFS later for soekris-unrelated reasons ... A net5501 would be a dream, as far as I'm concerned.
Indeed. It's not unusual for a server (at home, or otherwise) to sit there and do nothing for most of its uptime. When people say "I want something beefy" I'm left wondering if they really know what they want. Or need.
To help put things into perspective, those ubiquitous blue plastic boxes running Linux (DD-WRT) off camera-grade flash are running at what, 233MHz?
If I had a choice between a used PIII, or a PIV box, I'd opt for the PIII. But because I want the advantages of Soekris boxes (low power, no noise, BIOS over serial, etc.), I'm only too happy to compromise a bit on performance and get something more suitable. Yeah, those little fuckers do cost a bit more, but so does my time.
Knowing your hardware "just works" means no checking compatibility lists and none of the dicking around associated with consumer-grade computers.
A serial console. As far as I know, this is what serial ports were actually put into computers for in the first place.
Sigh. I wish more people (the home user Slashdot types) would just go buy a serial cable (and/or serial+USB adapter) and see for themselves how trivial it is to set up, and how valuable that setup can be. There's plenty of reasons why one would *want* to rely on serial, aside from the usual "What if the network is down?" scenario.
For added fun (when there's more than one computer involved), consider something like this
The question about bios settings is a good one though, and I don't know.
For the OP and most of us, that's a noop. What I would have suggested instead of a powerhungry P4 (or even PIII), is a soekris box. There's no VGA at all, so the BIOS (and everything else) is accessible via serial only. My "headless" VIA boxes are a PIA by comparison.
Granted, Soekris boxes are typically used to perform networking functions, but setting one up with a hard drive (laptop or SSD ideally) and running a web, IMAP, NFS, Samba, etc. server is common enough and performance is perfectly adequate. A few bucks more, but hey, they're rackmountable so you can impress your friends and neighbours. :-)
Oh dear, I don't understand what this means. Luckily my son, who got sick of me ringing him for computer help, told me what to do whenever I encounter a box I don't understand; click the X, or click cancel, or ignore. Now back to clicking on every ad I see.
How the fuck does a post that consists of incoherent rambling get modded up?
The above pseudo anecdote may have been funny if the fine article involved Firefox opening dialog boxes, but that's not the case. Either the OP either didn't read the article, or notice bit about the "landing page".
I'd add that the unrelated comment about IE (a non sequitor, actually) is even less funny, but I can't figure out WTF he was trying to say. Or what any of it has to do with ... anything.
Next up, an excerpt from a Beavis and Butthead script that gets modded both insightful and funny:
Popup windows.
You said popup.
Ha ha ha.
Just click the X stupid.
Ha ha ha.
Internet Explorer is teh suck.
Ha ha ha.
Pedant note: although "all the time" or "always on" have more letters than "24x7", they are quicker to say and more meaningful. Why do we have this horrible cypher?
Pedant note: The term "cypher" is not a meaningful synonym for argot, cliche, neologism, colloquialism, expression, jargon, localism, newspeak, parlance, phrase, or vernacular (among others).
That's not to say slipping in other people's mud isn't forgivable. ;-)
A: They couldn't figure out a way to make it leak oil.
And that's a bad thing?
My first car was a 2-seater Triumph convertible. It suffered from electrical system problems, leaking hydraulics, and when it rained, the top would leak (even if you managed to snap all the buttons downs correctly). But was it fun! Wind through my hair, wet shoulders, the smell of hydraulic fluid dripping on my left shoe, being pulled over and cited for "overcrowding" when I had more than 3 passengers in the car ...
The cars I've owned since have all been what you'd call dependable if not "top of the line", but I can't remember a single interesting about them.
I think many vacuum tubes are being manufactured in Russia right now, I know this from buying guitar amplifier tubes so I suspect that is where they will be sourced.
That does raise the question of whether a computer built with vacuum tubes gives mp3 files a warmer sound.
Or maybe not. ;-)
The granting of legal monopolies in the production of something is just bound to lead to an explosion in innovation.
I know you're trying to be funny, but words have meaning and legal terms doubly so. Mixing technical terms with their colloquial counterparts yields a curious but not uncommon situation in which people talk past one another, unable to agree on WTF they're really talking about.
Put another way, if "patent" was synonymous with "legal monopoly", how would you explain the successes of Bell Labs?
The "browser snub" headline is just an attention grabber by the Register (go figure).
That would be like saying, "Rush Limbaugh uses provocative and inflammatory rhetoric (go figure)", or "Stephen Colbert poses disingenuous questions to his guests (go figure)".
Maybe you don't get the style of el Reg? I prefer to think of it as the difference between American and English humour: apart from the spellings, only one of them is funny.
Oh my ${deity}, six hours !!! That's like AGES ago !
LOL. If that throws you, how about a somewhat related message from the FUTURE:
The story submission just disappeared from the Firehose before I could link to it there, so this a message from the PAST FUTURE. Or something like that.
Alcohol is a depressant. Now we can conclude that alcohol helps us solve complex problems! Bonus!
Normal, healthy people enjoy poisons. Listening to sad or depressing music makes us feel better. Tales of tragedy are inspiring. Confident, happy people seek out danger.
Life is full of ironies and paradoxes. What confounds me is that our modern view of such things is so narrow that instead of celebrating life as it is, we insist on classifying non-productive or poorly understood aspects as an illness as though the "good" could exist without the "bad". And illnesses, we all know, requires treatment.
Depressed? Sucks to be have to be at work in the morning, but by all means, indulge yourself with your favourite poison, put on some blues music, share depressing stories, and if needed, go start a fight or do something reckless. Chances are you'll be a healthier and happier person for it. And maybe, according to the article, smarter.
An internet provider should no more be police for content than the postal services, who don't open and read every letter or packet to see if there's something incriminating in it.
Dunno about the UK, but in the US, the post office does have an inspection service that does just that. Not routinely (I'd hope), but they routinely cooperate with other branches of law enforcement, and IIRC, are authorised to carry guns and make arrests, and regularly do so.
Put another way, if you want to advocate ISP neutrality, I'd suggest something other than a metaphor that elicits the image of an armed BOFH.
Help! I'm in BT/Virgin Media/Comcast Jail! ;-)
Covering CO2 under the Clean Air Act would completely hamstring American businesses ...
So your argument is that environmental regulations of this sort cost more money for business?
To the extent that's true, I'd characterise the thinking as somewhere between overly narrow and absurd. The government has an obligation to do what's best for the entire country. The costs to business may be real enough, but the costs to society are enormous, and are conveniently left uncounted. And yes, I'm talking real dollars here.
LOL. I do appreciate the followup, so here's what I discovered since my last post.
I'm using FreeBSD, and have the same or similar tools (dtrace included), but I've never been able to track the problem down without losing interest and patience.
Turns out that stopping cron and syslogd wasn't enough. I modified my mounts to use the noatime option (which worked until I started X), so then I reconfigured /var and /tmp as md (memory) devices and ...
Now my drive stays spun down!
Fucking hell. I use my notebook far more than any desktop system, and I've been putting up with an overly "warm" keyboard and unecessarily spinning drive for years. The CPU I can throttle or adjust dynamically, but the drive? That required me reading a random post on Slashdot to fix.
Can't thank you enough!
I'll have to look into the Firefox issues you mentioned, of course. More importantly, I'll have to find a solution to having the contents of /var disappearing with every boot.