Find me a mobo manufacturer or a second-tier OEM that ships systems with PCI-64. Or a fuzzy SMP board like Olivetti used to make. Or will give me a nice soft BIOS like Compaq, allowing me to override the onboard BIOS on some expansion cards.
Not going to happen.
But convenience and hardware support are the major reasons. If my mobo starts flaking when I add a second processor, I don't want to have to play phone and email tag with Asus or Abit for weeks to be told there's a BIOS issue.. I want to be able to call the manufacturer and say 'this is fucked, this is the configuration, now unfuck it.'
Nuff said.
I too have some pirate software, and prolly all of it is MS.
I look at it this way: Do you know how much friggin' money they've extorted from me through the OEM? "No sir, we will not ship this system without Windows 3.11/95/98/NT. In fact, your particular configuration comes with Office 95/97/2000 pre-installed at no extra charge. No, you can't change that either." So what do I get? Stacks of worthless copies of NT Workstation.
They owe me enough money through their predatory practices with OEMs and through their insane 'We will not refund money, even as prescribed by the EULA' policy that I don't have any qualms about my piracy. I like to look at it as 'seizure of goods for nonpayment of monies due'.
We have several three pot Bunn machines (eight or so) and a company of 200 people. Up until a year ago, we had good fresh coffee all the time. Pick the location nearest you, go to it. If the pot wasn't fresh and 3/4 full, it was a good sign you showed up for work two hours early. These days, you end up fighting with the machines over every cup, waiting for the pot to brew and then hot-swapping the pots to get some early.
What changed? Well, they decided that departmental secretaries and assistants were a waste of funds. Everyone was forced to take their own calls, busy or not, or let voice mail deal with it. We lost quite a bit of timelyness to the prodding recieved from the secretaries, now that we were all managing our own appointments, meetings, and calls.
Screw spending money on new restaraunt machines, the coffee service, the bullshit. Hire one half-competant secretary/assistant for the lot of you. She/he'll come cheap. Shit, grab a college kid from the local liberal arts college. Either way, you're not going to shell out more than say $13/hour. Not only will you have fresh coffee when you need it, you'll get the bonus of having someone who's only job is to make life for everyone else easier. Think of it as grease for the corporate wheels..
Reading your post, I nodding to myself in agreement. Until I got to the actual time quote.
Considering I can restore my old NCR 486-66 from a parallel port 2x CDROM drive (image is 685M, gzipped) plus install Windows 95 manually in a little under two hours, I'd say it came down to either operator incompetance or a CDROM drive banging against bad media.
Yes, but what will happen when Israel takes Ebay or Yahoo to court over allowing their citizens to view auctions of verboten 'pornography'? You don't think your favorite online smut shack won't be the next one dragged to court?? Once the big names fall, the little ones are a cease and desist away. And once the precident has been set, what is to stop them from going after places that do catalog sales, on the logic that some Israli citizen might be able get such an item mailed to them, and from there to brick and morter shops, including the one that used to sell you your copy of 'Debbie does Dallas', on the logic that some Israli citizen in the US might be able to smuggle said 'pornography' through customs himself?
Mein Kampf had little real effect. A fake autobiography of Adolph Hitler, which never saw any real dissemination outside of the Fascist ranks until the 1960's really had little effect on governments..
Perhaps 'Das Kapital' or 'The Communist Manifesto' would be better choices..
That would be like saying a particular copy of Trachiniae is eligible for best book of the decade because it was translated from a manuscript discovered in 1991!
Besides, The Bible is only a revised edition of the Torah; It hasn't been eligible for best book of the last thousand years since man invented bronze.
You don't have to have a PC. Pipe Festival to a file, chunk the file, burn the files to audio CD. Hell, pop a tape in the old cassette deck, slap a patch cable to the sound card and let it go until the tape stops. Stop the Festival process, switch tapes.
My only fear is how I'm going to handle hearing....evalevalq.q>trd!Uj:%L>061:%C>cnsvo:.... when Festival starts breaking into the Perl sample code.
Heh.. I don't think they'd have any monetary value, really.. If I were to receive, say a nicely lithographed Intel stock cert, it would go in a frame. Serve as a reminder saying 'Hey, people really appreciated me fixing that timeout problem on the new Intel Pro II 10/100. That feels good.'
Plus it would have great geek value. "Hey, Jim. Why do you have a single share of IBM stock hanging in your cube?" "Fixed a really gnarly bug in the virtual network drivers for the 390."
parts and stuff still puts money in the companies pocket
Sure, if the guy down the street is a total dumb ass, and takes his used Celica to the dealer for service. There's a good reason aftermarket and remanufactured parts are pretty much all you find in the DIY/indie garage market; OEM parts are way too fucking expensive, and offer little or no qualitative distinction. I might buy an OEM fender for my semi-classic and pay the extra markup over buying a aftermarket clone or hunting junkyards for weeks, but I'm sure not going to pay $42 for OEM asbestos brake shoes when I can go down the street to Pep Boys and get a set of nicer semi-metal for $18.
instead of buying a new book and giving my money to the author I am in fact giving it to Amazon.com
First off, you are giving most of that money to the publisher or the guy who sold Amazon the book. Authors get a pittance. Second, If the used book market is anything like the used CD market, Amazon isn't getting too much more money selling the used copy. It's consumer choice, really. Consumers wanted a lower-cost book, so Amazon decided to offer used books. W00p.
I have a few of those mono-vga monsters.. They do 640x480 and (I think) 800x600 at low sync rates, but you'll have to alias ls to ls -color=0, else the console is useless. I was lucky enough to pick up slightly used units from FedEx (The Powership model that used them is being phased out.) They sell their return stuff in quantity, 5-10 bucks a pop, untested. I think the smallest lot you can snag is 50, but still.. You could prolly get $15 a pop for whatever you didn't keep on the junk show circuit easily..
You can get them new for under sixty bucks, if memory serves me. Hit up google with the search 'mono vga 9" POS'.
Speaking of which.. How can I agree to his TOS if he is too young to enter into the hosting contract anyway? According to a blurb on the Minnesota Bar Association's page, he is unable to enter into any contracts (His parents may, on his behalf). In addition, he shouldn't be able to charge against your credid card..
Heh... Every time I hear Windows 2000 I have this little mental voice whispering 'Remember Linux 2.3.48?? For the love of gawd, wait a few months for another patchlevel!'
I've tried em all (with the exception of the Wave) and frankly none of them is good all the time. They'll do the job right 20% of the time and barely cut it another 50%.. The remaining 30% you're either dead in the water or you broke something trying to get by.
Now this may be a verbatim parrot of another gentleman, but it's what I've found to be the most versatile.
Ratcheting screwdriver: I like the small 'thumbwheel' ones with a pair of extensions in hex and 1/4. Add a nice compliment of bits and a couple sockets and it'll still fit into a package about as big as your wallet. I don't do 'flexible' extensions, they just get in my way. I do keep a 1/4 swivel in there though..
Needlenose: One good pair of needlenose. Small enough to get between a jumper block and its neighbor, but long enough to use as a lever on those PITA heatsinks. If it has an integrated wirecutter/wirestripper, it's a small plus.
Knife: I carry a nice big Gerber Gatorback in 60/40 serrate; Holds an edge well, fits your hand, and beefy enough to handle whatever cable you throw at it. Spyderco also makes some very nice (and pretty) knives, but I find the blades to be a little thin and breakable, especially when you're buying the longer blades. The serrated edge on the Spyderco seem to last a bit longer against abuse. The Gerber has the added bonus of scaring people; It's rather thick and wide for its length.
Flashlight: Get a 2 cell AA Maglight and a one cell AAA Maglight. The slip on fiber optic deals always struck me as cheesy, and there isn't any place you can't fit a single cell AAA Mag anyway.
Mirror: I got tired of lugging around a telescopic mechanics mirror; There are cases where you need it, but they are few and far between.. A small dental mirror cuts it for the majority of cases anyway.
Errata: I keep a small (1.5cm x 20cm) stainless steel rule around. It's great for stuck connectors, bent pins, and general prying. Also, a small donut magnet on braid fishing line, for those "I dropped the clip/screw/nut behind/under the rack/desk/bench" events.
only because there is a wrapper around the Win32 codec.
Windows media codecs are DLLs that all implement the same set of compression / decompression calls, per se. Once the codec wrapper is written, you can substitute the codec of your choice. Reading a Sorenson stream is no different than reading a DivX stream, or a MS MPEG-4 stream. Please see http://divx.euro.ru for the tool, called avifile, that drives pretty much every decoder/encoder for Linux. It uses the native Win32 DLLs to provide all of the real functionality.
MPEG is the Motion Pictures Expert Group. They sit around and think of newer, better ways to present movies.
MPEG-4 is a standard for compression of movies, much in the same way MPEG-2 is used for DVD and MPEG-1 was used for VideoCD. It supports less resolutions, but a much lower bitrate and is a much more lossy format. It was designed for video streaming.
DivX is a binary hack of an unreleased Microsoft 'MPEG-4' codec. I have that in quotes because it isn't exactly MPEG-4; Hard to conform to a standard that doesn't really exist, so they made a bit of it up as they went. There are other hack codecs, such as the Angelpotion codec, as well.
Microsoft has since released a 'MPEG-4' version (Again, quotes) from the same heritage as the DivX codec, but with additional tweaks, mainly to make it stream better. A newer, better version is expected to be released with Media Player 8.
Well, at least that's how I understand it, but I may be wrong.
The catch is this: what if we're dealing with HONEST politicians?
I thought honesty and politics were mutually exclusive. I'd like to meet an honest politician. Unfortunatly my chances of it are roughly equivalent to.. Ummm. My chances of winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning the same day? 1 in 36,028,797,018,963,968?
$120,000 goes a long way. Rent an apartment at home / pay the mortgage, say $16,000 a year. $1,300 a month will get you a livable place anywhere save Silicon Valley. Rent a place in DC, $24,000. The real estate situation around DC can't be that bad, so I figure you ought to do nicely on $2,000 a month. Fly home ten times a year, coach, $6,000. Before incidentals but after a simple tax calculation, etc, you have $40,000 a year to play with!
Whoa, there pardner. If these assholes can come up with the hundreds of thousands of dollars it requires to campaign to put their butts in office, they can certainly scrape up enough to live comfortably.
Please! Do not play Tetrinet! We're losing people right and left to this awful addiction! It ruins your life in ways EverCrack never could!
It is even begun to creep into the Slashdot Community!! Our very own CmdrTaco (#62 and falling) started playing, and the number of reposts on Slashdot jumped by a factor of three that very day. Rumour has it he has since quit cold-turkey, but the effects will linger for years!
Closer to home, a freind of mine from Wales has had Tetrinet ruin his sex life, he has gained ten pounds from between match snacking, and when he rarely gets sleep (usually collapsing on the floor next to his computer, quivering from the caffeine that drove him through the last fifteen matches) he has nightmares of Baal himself coming to punish him for the dust gathering on his Diablo II CDs.
Incredible scope? Incredible scope?!?! Damn, that's an understatement. It requires five pages of genealogical charts, a pronunciation guide, dozens of pages of glossary, a fold out map, an index, and footnotes every other page just to make heads or tails of it.
For comparison, I've never seen a history textbook with that much scope, nor that much detail.
No. Intent and event are balanced. Say I want to kill my high school gym coach. I go out to the local gun shop, and purchase a handgun to shoot them with. If only intent counted, I should be arrested the moment I forked over the money for the weapon on charges of 1st degree murder. I intend to kill him, I have the means to kill him. Do they? Nope.. Even if the cops are watching me like a hawk, 24/7/365, they can't do squat until I actually kill Mr. Stevenson..
I can port scan all day long, check for sendmail hacks all day long, but until I actually hit cr/lf after dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 it ain't squat.
No, only binary. What it comes down to is there are only two states of the sounder or key that matter: On or off. You're thinking of Morse code. Morse code is a trinary system, but it was transmitted over binary telegraph lines using time-keyed encoding.
Slashdot Mirror
ever think that maybe people can do legitimate legal work that involves suing people?
Theoretically, yes.
In this case, they're lawyers. So the answer is no.
Find me a mobo manufacturer or a second-tier OEM that ships systems with PCI-64. Or a fuzzy SMP board like Olivetti used to make. Or will give me a nice soft BIOS like Compaq, allowing me to override the onboard BIOS on some expansion cards. Not going to happen. But convenience and hardware support are the major reasons. If my mobo starts flaking when I add a second processor, I don't want to have to play phone and email tag with Asus or Abit for weeks to be told there's a BIOS issue.. I want to be able to call the manufacturer and say 'this is fucked, this is the configuration, now unfuck it.' Nuff said.
I too have some pirate software, and prolly all of it is MS.
I look at it this way: Do you know how much friggin' money they've extorted from me through the OEM? "No sir, we will not ship this system without Windows 3.11/95/98/NT. In fact, your particular configuration comes with Office 95/97/2000 pre-installed at no extra charge. No, you can't change that either." So what do I get? Stacks of worthless copies of NT Workstation.
They owe me enough money through their predatory practices with OEMs and through their insane 'We will not refund money, even as prescribed by the EULA' policy that I don't have any qualms about my piracy. I like to look at it as 'seizure of goods for nonpayment of monies due'.
We have several three pot Bunn machines (eight or so) and a company of 200 people. Up until a year ago, we had good fresh coffee all the time. Pick the location nearest you, go to it. If the pot wasn't fresh and 3/4 full, it was a good sign you showed up for work two hours early. These days, you end up fighting with the machines over every cup, waiting for the pot to brew and then hot-swapping the pots to get some early.
What changed? Well, they decided that departmental secretaries and assistants were a waste of funds. Everyone was forced to take their own calls, busy or not, or let voice mail deal with it. We lost quite a bit of timelyness to the prodding recieved from the secretaries, now that we were all managing our own appointments, meetings, and calls.
Screw spending money on new restaraunt machines, the coffee service, the bullshit. Hire one half-competant secretary/assistant for the lot of you. She/he'll come cheap. Shit, grab a college kid from the local liberal arts college. Either way, you're not going to shell out more than say $13/hour. Not only will you have fresh coffee when you need it, you'll get the bonus of having someone who's only job is to make life for everyone else easier. Think of it as grease for the corporate wheels..
Reading your post, I nodding to myself in agreement. Until I got to the actual time quote.
Considering I can restore my old NCR 486-66 from a parallel port 2x CDROM drive (image is 685M, gzipped) plus install Windows 95 manually in a little under two hours, I'd say it came down to either operator incompetance or a CDROM drive banging against bad media.
Yes, but what will happen when Israel takes Ebay or Yahoo to court over allowing their citizens to view auctions of verboten 'pornography'? You don't think your favorite online smut shack won't be the next one dragged to court?? Once the big names fall, the little ones are a cease and desist away. And once the precident has been set, what is to stop them from going after places that do catalog sales, on the logic that some Israli citizen might be able get such an item mailed to them, and from there to brick and morter shops, including the one that used to sell you your copy of 'Debbie does Dallas', on the logic that some Israli citizen in the US might be able to smuggle said 'pornography' through customs himself?
Mein Kampf had little real effect. A fake autobiography of Adolph Hitler, which never saw any real dissemination outside of the Fascist ranks until the 1960's really had little effect on governments..
Perhaps 'Das Kapital' or 'The Communist Manifesto' would be better choices..
That would be like saying a particular copy of Trachiniae is eligible for best book of the decade because it was translated from a manuscript discovered in 1991!
Besides, The Bible is only a revised edition of the Torah; It hasn't been eligible for best book of the last thousand years since man invented bronze.
You don't have to have a PC. Pipe Festival to a file, chunk the file, burn the files to audio CD. Hell, pop a tape in the old cassette deck, slap a patch cable to the sound card and let it go until the tape stops. Stop the Festival process, switch tapes.
....evalevalq.q>trd!Uj:%L>061:%C>cnsvo:.... when Festival starts breaking into the Perl sample code.
My only fear is how I'm going to handle hearing
There is..
/usr/src/linux/*
grep -cir [your name]
Heh.. I don't think they'd have any monetary value, really.. If I were to receive, say a nicely lithographed Intel stock cert, it would go in a frame. Serve as a reminder saying 'Hey, people really appreciated me fixing that timeout problem on the new Intel Pro II 10/100. That feels good.'
Plus it would have great geek value. "Hey, Jim. Why do you have a single share of IBM stock hanging in your cube?" "Fixed a really gnarly bug in the virtual network drivers for the 390."
parts and stuff still puts money in the companies pocket
Sure, if the guy down the street is a total dumb ass, and takes his used Celica to the dealer for service. There's a good reason aftermarket and remanufactured parts are pretty much all you find in the DIY/indie garage market; OEM parts are way too fucking expensive, and offer little or no qualitative distinction. I might buy an OEM fender for my semi-classic and pay the extra markup over buying a aftermarket clone or hunting junkyards for weeks, but I'm sure not going to pay $42 for OEM asbestos brake shoes when I can go down the street to Pep Boys and get a set of nicer semi-metal for $18.
instead of buying a new book and giving my money to the author I am in fact giving it to Amazon.com
First off, you are giving most of that money to the publisher or the guy who sold Amazon the book. Authors get a pittance. Second, If the used book market is anything like the used CD market, Amazon isn't getting too much more money selling the used copy. It's consumer choice, really. Consumers wanted a lower-cost book, so Amazon decided to offer used books. W00p.
I have a few of those mono-vga monsters.. They do 640x480 and (I think) 800x600 at low sync rates, but you'll have to alias ls to ls -color=0, else the console is useless. I was lucky enough to pick up slightly used units from FedEx (The Powership model that used them is being phased out.) They sell their return stuff in quantity, 5-10 bucks a pop, untested. I think the smallest lot you can snag is 50, but still.. You could prolly get $15 a pop for whatever you didn't keep on the junk show circuit easily..
You can get them new for under sixty bucks, if memory serves me. Hit up google with the search 'mono vga 9" POS'.
"ALL CUSTOMERS MUST BE AT LEAST 18 YEARS OF AGE"
Speaking of which.. How can I agree to his TOS if he is too young to enter into the hosting contract anyway? According to a blurb on the Minnesota Bar Association's page, he is unable to enter into any contracts (His parents may, on his behalf). In addition, he shouldn't be able to charge against your credid card..
Heh... Every time I hear Windows 2000 I have this little mental voice whispering 'Remember Linux 2.3.48?? For the love of gawd, wait a few months for another patchlevel!'
I've tried em all (with the exception of the Wave) and frankly none of them is good all the time. They'll do the job right 20% of the time and barely cut it another 50%.. The remaining 30% you're either dead in the water or you broke something trying to get by.
Now this may be a verbatim parrot of another gentleman, but it's what I've found to be the most versatile.
Ratcheting screwdriver: I like the small 'thumbwheel' ones with a pair of extensions in hex and 1/4. Add a nice compliment of bits and a couple sockets and it'll still fit into a package about as big as your wallet. I don't do 'flexible' extensions, they just get in my way. I do keep a 1/4 swivel in there though..
Needlenose: One good pair of needlenose. Small enough to get between a jumper block and its neighbor, but long enough to use as a lever on those PITA heatsinks. If it has an integrated wirecutter/wirestripper, it's a small plus.
Knife: I carry a nice big Gerber Gatorback in 60/40 serrate; Holds an edge well, fits your hand, and beefy enough to handle whatever cable you throw at it. Spyderco also makes some very nice (and pretty) knives, but I find the blades to be a little thin and breakable, especially when you're buying the longer blades. The serrated edge on the Spyderco seem to last a bit longer against abuse. The Gerber has the added bonus of scaring people; It's rather thick and wide for its length.
Flashlight: Get a 2 cell AA Maglight and a one cell AAA Maglight. The slip on fiber optic deals always struck me as cheesy, and there isn't any place you can't fit a single cell AAA Mag anyway.
Mirror: I got tired of lugging around a telescopic mechanics mirror; There are cases where you need it, but they are few and far between.. A small dental mirror cuts it for the majority of cases anyway.
Errata: I keep a small (1.5cm x 20cm) stainless steel rule around. It's great for stuck connectors, bent pins, and general prying. Also, a small donut magnet on braid fishing line, for those "I dropped the clip/screw/nut behind/under the rack/desk/bench" events.
No. Wrong. I said, and I quote:
only because there is a wrapper around the Win32 codec.
Windows media codecs are DLLs that all implement the same set of compression / decompression calls, per se. Once the codec wrapper is written, you can substitute the codec of your choice. Reading a Sorenson stream is no different than reading a DivX stream, or a MS MPEG-4 stream. Please see http://divx.euro.ru for the tool, called avifile, that drives pretty much every decoder/encoder for Linux. It uses the native Win32 DLLs to provide all of the real functionality.
MPEG is the Motion Pictures Expert Group. They sit around and think of newer, better ways to present movies.
MPEG-4 is a standard for compression of movies, much in the same way MPEG-2 is used for DVD and MPEG-1 was used for VideoCD. It supports less resolutions, but a much lower bitrate and is a much more lossy format. It was designed for video streaming.
DivX is a binary hack of an unreleased Microsoft 'MPEG-4' codec. I have that in quotes because it isn't exactly MPEG-4; Hard to conform to a standard that doesn't really exist, so they made a bit of it up as they went. There are other hack codecs, such as the Angelpotion codec, as well.
Microsoft has since released a 'MPEG-4' version (Again, quotes) from the same heritage as the DivX codec, but with additional tweaks, mainly to make it stream better. A newer, better version is expected to be released with Media Player 8.
Well, at least that's how I understand it, but I may be wrong.
DivX ;-) is NOT cross platform. Sure, you can play the movies under Linux, BeOS, blah, but only because there is a wrapper around the Win32 codec.
All the players that will play DivX will also play Windows Media 7 MPEG4 as a result. Sorensen too, CmdrTaco.
There are even compression tools for all of the Windows formats, courtesy of avifile as well..
The catch is this: what if we're dealing with HONEST politicians?
I thought honesty and politics were mutually exclusive. I'd like to meet an honest politician. Unfortunatly my chances of it are roughly equivalent to.. Ummm. My chances of winning the lottery and getting struck by lightning the same day? 1 in 36,028,797,018,963,968?
$120,000 goes a long way. Rent an apartment at home / pay the mortgage, say $16,000 a year. $1,300 a month will get you a livable place anywhere save Silicon Valley. Rent a place in DC, $24,000. The real estate situation around DC can't be that bad, so I figure you ought to do nicely on $2,000 a month. Fly home ten times a year, coach, $6,000. Before incidentals but after a simple tax calculation, etc, you have $40,000 a year to play with!
Whoa, there pardner. If these assholes can come up with the hundreds of thousands of dollars it requires to campaign to put their butts in office, they can certainly scrape up enough to live comfortably.
:)
That said, which reps?
Please! Do not play Tetrinet! We're losing people right and left to this awful addiction! It ruins your life in ways EverCrack never could!
It is even begun to creep into the Slashdot Community!! Our very own CmdrTaco (#62 and falling) started playing, and the number of reposts on Slashdot jumped by a factor of three that very day. Rumour has it he has since quit cold-turkey, but the effects will linger for years!
Closer to home, a freind of mine from Wales has had Tetrinet ruin his sex life, he has gained ten pounds from between match snacking, and when he rarely gets sleep (usually collapsing on the floor next to his computer, quivering from the caffeine that drove him through the last fifteen matches) he has nightmares of Baal himself coming to punish him for the dust gathering on his Diablo II CDs.
Please! Do not give in to Tetrinet!!
Incredible scope? Incredible scope?!?! Damn, that's an understatement. It requires five pages of genealogical charts, a pronunciation guide, dozens of pages of glossary, a fold out map, an index, and footnotes every other page just to make heads or tails of it.
For comparison, I've never seen a history textbook with that much scope, nor that much detail.
No. Intent and event are balanced. Say I want to kill my high school gym coach. I go out to the local gun shop, and purchase a handgun to shoot them with. If only intent counted, I should be arrested the moment I forked over the money for the weapon on charges of 1st degree murder. I intend to kill him, I have the means to kill him. Do they? Nope.. Even if the cops are watching me like a hawk, 24/7/365, they can't do squat until I actually kill Mr. Stevenson..
I can port scan all day long, check for sendmail hacks all day long, but until I actually hit cr/lf after dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 it ain't squat.
No, only binary. What it comes down to is there are only two states of the sounder or key that matter: On or off. You're thinking of Morse code. Morse code is a trinary system, but it was transmitted over binary telegraph lines using time-keyed encoding.