Win2K?! Why not put WinXP on it... Oh yeah, 'cause that 700Mhz PIII with 64MB of PC133 RAM is TEH SUCK . Running anything more than Win98, or Linux + Xfce on there would be pure evil.
Yeah, everyone's bitching how the mini doesn't have enough grunt to play Doom 3, or playback 1080i HDTV streams; Just wait 'till they get their hands on the awesome power that is the 700MHz PIII and 64MB of RAM Xbox for $300.
Tell me what "multimedia possibilites" would the Xbox have? If Microsoft tried to sell the current spec Xbox for $300 a pop, I'm pretty sure it would get ignored, and laughed at hard around here.
Now, throw a centrino chipset (Minus it's shitty video), 256MB of DDR, and decent video in something a bit smaller than the Xbox, for $150 less than the mini (With Windows), now that would have the potential to compete with the mini. I'll believe it when I see it. If it has a PCI slot for a tuner card, and is available without windows, for $75 less, I'll buy one.
Let the Xbox stick to what it's good at, being a game console.
You know about exposé right? I think it's a pretty damn innovative and efficient way to deal with windows, Instead of the function keys I bind "All Windows" to my scroll wheel button, "Application Windows" to ctrl+click, and "Desktop" to option+click; plus you have alt+tab to cycle through and between progams of course, and alt+~ to cycle through the windows in the current application. I never close, or minimize windows any more.
Remember, the short lived PowerPC versions of Windows NT ran on OpenFirmware based Mac clones from IBM, Motorolla, Power Computing, etc... Pretty much all of 'em except the machines from Apple, only due to lack of chipset drivers for the Apple hardware.
As for the people who are squaking about PCI, AGP, etc. cards not working with the new bios. Usually all it takes is a firmware update for those. I've bought PCI SCSI cards, video cards, both AGP and PCI that only needed a flash to go from PC to Mac, and some cards like USB and FireWire cards work in either Mac or PC without a firmware change. Of course you have to motivate the manufacturer for that firmware somehow.
Palladium, which is of Microsoft's most interest lately, seems to be the complete opposite concept compared to OpenFirmware or Free BIOS. Oh yeah! I just realized, who cares if it can run Windows, back to work.
In that case he would want a PeeCee with one of
these in it. They could connect the CPU via heat pipe to a griddle on the top of the box. Mmmmm.... hope you like your bacon crispy!
That damn cable was the best purchase ever, BitPim rocks, it's written in Python and runs on Winblows, Mac, and Linux. I use it to grab all my pics, and my contacts, and backup everything else. That cable is useful for much more than taking pictures off the phone.
Also, few people know, but you can play MP3 ringtones on the VX-6000, it's very picky about the format of them though, it's been a while since I've done it, I think they have to be 65 Kbit/sec, mono, less than 60 seconds length, 22000 KHz, with a.mid extension instead of.mp3. I used http://audacity.sf.net/ to encode them because they didn't work from iTune's encoder.
Also, the USB cable can be used with the phone as a 90K internet connection in a pinch, and yes it works on Mac and Linux too. It comes out of your airtime so you get free internet access on nights and weekends.
Somehow Apple did it with OS9 back in the day, you could buy Power Mac's w/ dual G4's, and all you needed was the "Multiprocessing Extension" in your extensions folder to utilize the extra CPU. That OS was co-op multi-tasking.
Be had multiproc machines too, I don't recall if that OS was preemptive or not though.
I seem to remember PC manufacturers doing the exact same thing, selling 1.8GHz P4 systems with 128MB of Rambus. No thanks, all the while 1.3GHz Duron systems with 256MB of cheap DDR 200 were rocking these ridiculously priced, under RAM'ed, Rambus systems.
Now PCs are being sold with 256MB minimum. While running XP with only 256MB of RAM is doable, all the shit that Hpaq/Dell/eGateway bundle on the machines they sell; with 50 different "helper" applications running in the background, and the Go Slow and Waste Disk Space feature (System Restore) turned on by default, anything less than 512MB is evil.
Uh, yeah, that's what I'm up against now, I pulled the drive that had Gentoo and MythTV on it out and installed *shudder* Win2K on another drive so I can at least use the damn thing in the mean time. But it locks up sometimes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H often, and I have to check up on it and make sure it actually records the programs that I've asked it to, it pops some stupid ass cryptic error message up about 60% of the time instead of recording the damn program. Monday night I sat down on the couch with my nachos and a long-neck, expecting to watch last Sunday's episode of Arrested Development, but no, it decided not to record it. GRRRRR!
Don't do what I did and buy the cheaper functional equivalent of the PVR 250. I bought the PVR-150 two months ago and there's still no fully functional drivers for linux yet.
I might be wrong, but I don't think the elimination of the VHF and UHF spectrums will affect terrestrial analog cable. At least the FCC has no control over what's sent over a shielded copper cable, there's standards, but that's about it.
So that leaves it in the cable company's hands, personally, if my cable company ends analog service, and forces me to purchase a cable box for each of my analog TVs, for anything more than $1 a month additional, they lose their appeal compared to satellite TV, and I'll be switching to satellite at that point.
On the topic of tuner cards, don't do what I did and buy the damn Hauppauge PVR-150 if you plan to use it in Linux. There's no fully functional drivers available for it yet. There's a group working on drivers but last I heard (last week) one guy on the team disappeared, so they're stuck right now on the development. The PVR-250 is identical in functionality to the PVR-150, it just has more chips and costs more to manufacture, it's being replaced by the cheaper 150, the 250 supposedly works great in Linux.
This is an excellent article, it's nice to see some processor history that's not dominated/biased by x86 content; good to hear about some of the underdogs and where they are now. These are all the things I wondered about as I looked at processor timelines in the not-so-informative text books through high school and college; every single book hyped Intel as the sole creator of every single processor innovation. The truth is that Intel was very innovative in the beginning, then slowly became fat and MHz-marketing driven, then had a chance to redeem themselves, and learn great lessons from the engineers acquired from the DEC Alpha team, but cranked out the piece of crap Itanic instead.
We do owe Intel for the proliferation of the PC, and the Centrino and Pentium M are good technology, but now they have to copy pages from AMD's book to bring 64 bit to the mainstream, just like they did back with the superscalar Pentium and Pentium Pro. The P4, though competitive, and good enough for most folks, is not so great technology compared to what AMD and the various PowerPC processors have. It's sad how marketing forces drive the industry more than value, speed (not MHz but instructions per clock), and power/thermal advantages. The Celeron derivative of the P4 is udder crap though, the P4's performance is heavily dependent upon lot's of cache, which the Celeron does not have enough of.
Actually, it's not invisible if you view the file with ResEdit. And yes, it is neat IMHO. Mac OS can also decipher file types via filename extensions the traditional Unix and Windows way.
The problem is that if Micros~1 had done it, it would have most likely been in a way that would intent~1 ensure it to not work with other OS's right out of the box, and it would be depend~1 on some propri~1, highly temper~1, and convol~1 database. It would also be in the least aesthe~1 pleasing, quick and dirty way, that's how Micros~2 would do it; ie our friend the registry.
If you have some type of directory services set up, that's how it works. Either an Open Directory server, or Active Directory (ugh, still better than NT4 authentication though).
We have Active Directory on 2K3 servers, and my macs are all bound (or is it binded?) to the directory; when we cruise the network and open SMB shares, no authentication. Now, M$ hosted AFP shares are another story, they totally blow for too many reasons to mention, including they require separate authentication. Services for Macintosh actually got worse in 2003, it worked better in NT4.
This is totally off topic but, my boss hates Linux (actually fears it would be more accurate), and says "Lets face it, we're an M$ shop, we need to get rid of this kludgey Linux shit!" all the time. We replaced our decrepit NT4 SFM server and moved it all onto the shiny new SAN hosted via SFM on 2K3 and it's actually less reliable then before! My macs get kicked off of the shares whilst copying files repeatedly, filenames now have to follow both OS9 and NTFS naming conventions, and the performance just generally sucks ass!! So I'm about to break it to him, we need to replace this kludgey M$ services for mac shit with a real Mac OS X server plugged into the SAN via Fibre Channel. I was telling him about the file naming issue and how we have so many licensors and press companies to work with that use all kinds of wacky characters in their filenames that OSX allows; he just thought everyone was crazy for using filenames more than eight characters with spaces etc. What gets me is this is a former NeXT guy, he always talks of the glory days of NeXT, but he just doesn't dig OS X for some reason, he's hopelessly stuck on M$ products, like this whole company.
A Root Kit is a set of tools used after cracking a system that hide logins, processes, and logs as well as usually sniff terminals, connections, and the keyboard.
Malware is any software developed for the purpose of doing harm to a computer system.
Lots of people misnamed the "Opener" root kit for Mac OS X as "The First Virus for Mac OS X", when in fact it had no way of spreading itself, and the script needed to be executed with root privileges.
Step 1: Take their postage paid envelopes. Stuff ads that don't have your information on them, coupons, etc. into the other's envelope (I'm sure Bank 1 loves credit card offers from Discover).
Step 2: Put some heavy stuff in the envelopes to run up their postal charge.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Laugh all the way to the mailbox. MUHAHAHA
First, it requires a windows machine (NT,2K,XP) using the NTFS filesystem. FAT32 won't work because it don't do ACLs
1. Create a new local administrative account to work under (this is important read the whole thing here!)
2. Run Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and Hijack This, under this new admin account keep all the directories the spyware created, or make note of them so you can re-create them later.
3. Now, delete everything contained in these folders, then you start changing permissions on all these folders to deny Everyone access (including administrators), and take ownership of all these directories, when spyware trys to re-install itself it will fail. This method works real well when nuisance kids come back and try to re-install kaazaa, iMesh, etc. If you deny access to the kaazaa folder it won't come back unless they're smart enough to take ownership back and change permissions, or install it in a different directory.
4. This is the kicker: Install Firefox to replace IE, and Firebird to replace Outlook/Outlook Express. Run a search (F3) for iexplore.exe and msimn.exe and change permissions on them just like we did with the spyware folders.
5. This is my favorite: Now delete the IE icon and Outlook icons and change the Firefox and Firebird Icons to look just like IE and OE (MUHAHAHA).
6. Now login as Administrator and delete the user account we just created to do all this stuff.
If nuisance user must have IE to access a dumb banking website that's coded in shitty client side ASP or something like that; write a VB script, or batch file or whatever to use the runas command (similar to sudo in unix) to launch iexplore.exe under a less privileged account; point this back to the normal IE icon and it becomes seamless for the user.
You can take it even farther and deny write access to all the Run keys in the registry to keep crap from getting loaded in the System Tray. You can also deny write access to the Root of the Program Files folder, if you deny access to the whole folder including subdirectories and files it will break a number of applications that love to write metadata, temp files and such in the Program Files folder, like Microsoft Office 2000 (let's not even get started on how many Microsoft developers don't know where temp files and metadata belong). Of course if you do these things the user won't be able to install programs. If the user isn't running as an administrator they won't be able to write to the root of Program Files anyways, but they still can put stuff in their own Run key and the global Run key!
Sorry this is so hacked together, I'm in a hurry, want to go eat lunch NOW...
Right on man, I did the same thing. Found a nice house at an affordable price. I live on the edge of a small town right on the other side of the state border line; I used to live in Ohio with my parents in a suburban area. I moved 25 miles away from that shit-hole city, I pay waaay lower taxes than I would've there, we have way nicer schools, almost every high school graduate here gets a college scholarship (payed by the riverboat gambling), the crime rate is lower, I don't have to worry about stuff being stolen out of my garage anymore, I leave my vehicles unlocked at night. I have cable TV and internet access (albeit slower than most cable, but way faster than dialup).
There's plenty of entertainment here, I live right down the road from riverboat casinos (who I thank for the low taxes and nice schools), and there's a ski slope right down the road, and a handful variety of nice restaurants and bars. My neighborhood is built around a man made lake, there's a private beach and a golf course. I don't mind the rednecks sprinkled around here, they're a hell of a lot nicer than the gang members, and wanabe mini-thugs back home.
Now if I could only find a job here closer to home, there's a few large companies, I haven't really tried yet. I drive 80 miles a day to and from work, my co-workers think I'm crazy, but it's worth it to me to live in the nice country instead of the shithole suburbs. I should stop elaborating now, I don't want tons of people moving here and turning it into the fucked up place I moved away from!
Actually AMF hasn't owned Harley since '86, the AMF bikes were the worst quality Harleys ever made, and knowledgeable harley shoppers avoid them like the plague. AMF didn't rescue Harley Davidson either, they almost ran them into the ground farther. AMF didn't know shit about manufacturing internal combustion engines, let alone motorcycles, and ramped production up high, and quality went down; a small group of investors bought the company back in the late eighties and focused on the retro appeal of the bikes and brought the production rate down, but the quality back up, these are the people that rescued HD. Now HD is a very successful American company that makes more money off of licensing their name to be put on other products than the sales of their own motorcycles. Harley Davidson bikes, excluding the AMFs, also hold their resale value extremely well compared to other motorcycles.
I do believe that Buell also had the fastest production bike made in the mid to late nineties, until Suzuki's Hayabusa came along.
I also want to add that I have a 1GHz PIII system at work with 512MB of RAM running win2k which is a turd, I rarely use this machine anymore because my mac covers almost everything I need to do my job, the only thing I keep the PC for is the occasional use of 3Com's network management tools, and software testing.
I use an old 500MHz Power Mac G4 at work with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 9000 Pro, it's plenty spunky for what I do, mostly net admin stuff. I always have iTunes, Mail, TextEdit, iCal, Activity Monitor, Terminal, Safari/or Firefox, VNC, and Terminal Services Client running. OSX does an amazing job of memory managment, you can have all your apps that you frequently use open at startup. I also occasionally do some work in iMovie getting movie trailers in VHS or DVD format ready for sales dept.'s presentations.
My home machine is a 450MHz Power Mac G4 with 640MB of RAM, and a self installed SuperDrive, I still have the original Rage Pro 128 in there though, which makes the work machine w/the radeon doing quartz extreme way more responsive. I do mostly iMovie and iDVD home movie stuff, which surprisingly isn't too bad on this machine; and the usual browsing, email, iTunes, remote admin from home stuff.
The most important thing is at least 512MB RAM, then a Quartz Extreme capable video card, and OS 10.3 is much snappier than 10.2. I wouldn't buy a machine slower than a 733MHz G4, or a refurb'd emac wouldn't be a bad idea either.
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Win2K?! Why not put WinXP on it... Oh yeah, 'cause that 700Mhz PIII with 64MB of PC133 RAM is TEH SUCK . Running anything more than Win98, or Linux + Xfce on there would be pure evil.
Yeah, everyone's bitching how the mini doesn't have enough grunt to play Doom 3, or playback 1080i HDTV streams; Just wait 'till they get their hands on the awesome power that is the 700MHz PIII and 64MB of RAM Xbox for $300.
Tell me what "multimedia possibilites" would the Xbox have? If Microsoft tried to sell the current spec Xbox for $300 a pop, I'm pretty sure it would get ignored, and laughed at hard around here.
Now, throw a centrino chipset (Minus it's shitty video), 256MB of DDR, and decent video in something a bit smaller than the Xbox, for $150 less than the mini (With Windows), now that would have the potential to compete with the mini. I'll believe it when I see it. If it has a PCI slot for a tuner card, and is available without windows, for $75 less, I'll buy one.
Let the Xbox stick to what it's good at, being a game console.
You know about exposé right? I think it's a pretty damn innovative and efficient way to deal with windows, Instead of the function keys I bind "All Windows" to my scroll wheel button, "Application Windows" to ctrl+click, and "Desktop" to option+click; plus you have alt+tab to cycle through and between progams of course, and alt+~ to cycle through the windows in the current application. I never close, or minimize windows any more.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/
Remember, the short lived PowerPC versions of Windows NT ran on OpenFirmware based Mac clones from IBM, Motorolla, Power Computing, etc... Pretty much all of 'em except the machines from Apple, only due to lack of chipset drivers for the Apple hardware.
As for the people who are squaking about PCI, AGP, etc. cards not working with the new bios. Usually all it takes is a firmware update for those. I've bought PCI SCSI cards, video cards, both AGP and PCI that only needed a flash to go from PC to Mac, and some cards like USB and FireWire cards work in either Mac or PC without a firmware change. Of course you have to motivate the manufacturer for that firmware somehow.
Palladium, which is of Microsoft's most interest lately, seems to be the complete opposite concept compared to OpenFirmware or Free BIOS. Oh yeah! I just realized, who cares if it can run Windows, back to work.
Naah, the G4 won't get hot enough for that...
In that case he would want a PeeCee with one of these in it. They could connect the CPU via heat pipe to a griddle on the top of the box. Mmmmm.... hope you like your bacon crispy!
I also have a VX-6000 and the radio shack cable.
.mid extension instead of .mp3. I used http://audacity.sf.net/ to encode them because they didn't work from iTune's encoder.
That damn cable was the best purchase ever, BitPim rocks, it's written in Python and runs on Winblows, Mac, and Linux. I use it to grab all my pics, and my contacts, and backup everything else. That cable is useful for much more than taking pictures off the phone.
Also, few people know, but you can play MP3 ringtones on the VX-6000, it's very picky about the format of them though, it's been a while since I've done it, I think they have to be 65 Kbit/sec, mono, less than 60 seconds length, 22000 KHz, with a
Also, the USB cable can be used with the phone as a 90K internet connection in a pinch, and yes it works on Mac and Linux too. It comes out of your airtime so you get free internet access on nights and weekends.
Somehow Apple did it with OS9 back in the day, you could buy Power Mac's w/ dual G4's, and all you needed was the "Multiprocessing Extension" in your extensions folder to utilize the extra CPU. That OS was co-op multi-tasking.
Be had multiproc machines too, I don't recall if that OS was preemptive or not though.
I seem to remember PC manufacturers doing the exact same thing, selling 1.8GHz P4 systems with 128MB of Rambus. No thanks, all the while 1.3GHz Duron systems with 256MB of cheap DDR 200 were rocking these ridiculously priced, under RAM'ed, Rambus systems.
Now PCs are being sold with 256MB minimum. While running XP with only 256MB of RAM is doable, all the shit that Hpaq/Dell/eGateway bundle on the machines they sell; with 50 different "helper" applications running in the background, and the Go Slow and Waste Disk Space feature (System Restore) turned on by default, anything less than 512MB is evil.
Uh, yeah, that's what I'm up against now, I pulled the drive that had Gentoo and MythTV on it out and installed *shudder* Win2K on another drive so I can at least use the damn thing in the mean time. But it locks up sometimes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H often, and I have to check up on it and make sure it actually records the programs that I've asked it to, it pops some stupid ass cryptic error message up about 60% of the time instead of recording the damn program. Monday night I sat down on the couch with my nachos and a long-neck, expecting to watch last Sunday's episode of Arrested Development, but no, it decided not to record it. GRRRRR!
Apple's keychain always performed the same functionality, all while being more secure, and not requiring any special coding on behalf of the websites.
I already have one password for everything.
Don't do what I did and buy the cheaper functional equivalent of the PVR 250. I bought the PVR-150 two months ago and there's still no fully functional drivers for linux yet.
see: http://www.poptix.net/ivtv/Dec-2004/msg00324.html
I might be wrong, but I don't think the elimination of the VHF and UHF spectrums will affect terrestrial analog cable. At least the FCC has no control over what's sent over a shielded copper cable, there's standards, but that's about it.
So that leaves it in the cable company's hands, personally, if my cable company ends analog service, and forces me to purchase a cable box for each of my analog TVs, for anything more than $1 a month additional, they lose their appeal compared to satellite TV, and I'll be switching to satellite at that point.
On the topic of tuner cards, don't do what I did and buy the damn Hauppauge PVR-150 if you plan to use it in Linux. There's no fully functional drivers available for it yet. There's a group working on drivers but last I heard (last week) one guy on the team disappeared, so they're stuck right now on the development. The PVR-250 is identical in functionality to the PVR-150, it just has more chips and costs more to manufacture, it's being replaced by the cheaper 150, the 250 supposedly works great in Linux.
>kick the cat
Gwydion kicks the cat... the cat screeches and runs up the stairs.
>kick manannan
Now, that wouldn't be very wise Gwydion. Would it?
Ahh, classic...
VW is supposed to do this:
? artid=30458&pg=1
http://www.auto123.com/en/info/news/news,view.spy
Isn't Centrino, a Pentium M with 802.11, ethernet, and video adaptors on the same die as the processor, to conserve energy and space?
This is an excellent article, it's nice to see some processor history that's not dominated/biased by x86 content; good to hear about some of the underdogs and where they are now. These are all the things I wondered about as I looked at processor timelines in the not-so-informative text books through high school and college; every single book hyped Intel as the sole creator of every single processor innovation. The truth is that Intel was very innovative in the beginning, then slowly became fat and MHz-marketing driven, then had a chance to redeem themselves, and learn great lessons from the engineers acquired from the DEC Alpha team, but cranked out the piece of crap Itanic instead.
We do owe Intel for the proliferation of the PC, and the Centrino and Pentium M are good technology, but now they have to copy pages from AMD's book to bring 64 bit to the mainstream, just like they did back with the superscalar Pentium and Pentium Pro. The P4, though competitive, and good enough for most folks, is not so great technology compared to what AMD and the various PowerPC processors have. It's sad how marketing forces drive the industry more than value, speed (not MHz but instructions per clock), and power/thermal advantages. The Celeron derivative of the P4 is udder crap though, the P4's performance is heavily dependent upon lot's of cache, which the Celeron does not have enough of.
Actually, it's not invisible if you view the file with ResEdit. And yes, it is neat IMHO. Mac OS can also decipher file types via filename extensions the traditional Unix and Windows way.
The problem is that if Micros~1 had done it, it would have most likely been in a way that would intent~1 ensure it to not work with other OS's right out of the box, and it would be depend~1 on some propri~1, highly temper~1, and convol~1 database. It would also be in the least aesthe~1 pleasing, quick and dirty way, that's how Micros~2 would do it; ie our friend the registry.
If you have some type of directory services set up, that's how it works. Either an Open Directory server, or Active Directory (ugh, still better than NT4 authentication though).
We have Active Directory on 2K3 servers, and my macs are all bound (or is it binded?) to the directory; when we cruise the network and open SMB shares, no authentication. Now, M$ hosted AFP shares are another story, they totally blow for too many reasons to mention, including they require separate authentication. Services for Macintosh actually got worse in 2003, it worked better in NT4.
This is totally off topic but, my boss hates Linux (actually fears it would be more accurate), and says "Lets face it, we're an M$ shop, we need to get rid of this kludgey Linux shit!" all the time. We replaced our decrepit NT4 SFM server and moved it all onto the shiny new SAN hosted via SFM on 2K3 and it's actually less reliable then before! My macs get kicked off of the shares whilst copying files repeatedly, filenames now have to follow both OS9 and NTFS naming conventions, and the performance just generally sucks ass!! So I'm about to break it to him, we need to replace this kludgey M$ services for mac shit with a real Mac OS X server plugged into the SAN via Fibre Channel. I was telling him about the file naming issue and how we have so many licensors and press companies to work with that use all kinds of wacky characters in their filenames that OSX allows; he just thought everyone was crazy for using filenames more than eight characters with spaces etc. What gets me is this is a former NeXT guy, he always talks of the glory days of NeXT, but he just doesn't dig OS X for some reason, he's hopelessly stuck on M$ products, like this whole company.
We're macs living in a peecee world; end rant.
A Root Kit is a set of tools used after cracking a system that hide logins, processes, and logs as well as usually sniff terminals, connections, and the keyboard.
Malware is any software developed for the purpose of doing harm to a computer system.
Lots of people misnamed the "Opener" root kit for Mac OS X as "The First Virus for Mac OS X", when in fact it had no way of spreading itself, and the script needed to be executed with root privileges.
My favorite way to stick it to da man:
Step 1: Take their postage paid envelopes. Stuff ads that don't have your information on them, coupons, etc. into the other's envelope (I'm sure Bank 1 loves credit card offers from Discover).
Step 2: Put some heavy stuff in the envelopes to run up their postal charge.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Laugh all the way to the mailbox. MUHAHAHA
Here's what I do in these situations...
First, it requires a windows machine (NT,2K,XP) using the NTFS filesystem. FAT32 won't work because it don't do ACLs
1. Create a new local administrative account to work under (this is important read the whole thing here!)
2. Run Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and Hijack This, under this new admin account keep all the directories the spyware created, or make note of them so you can re-create them later.
3. Now, delete everything contained in these folders, then you start changing permissions on all these folders to deny Everyone access (including administrators), and take ownership of all these directories, when spyware trys to re-install itself it will fail. This method works real well when nuisance kids come back and try to re-install kaazaa, iMesh, etc. If you deny access to the kaazaa folder it won't come back unless they're smart enough to take ownership back and change permissions, or install it in a different directory.
4. This is the kicker: Install Firefox to replace IE, and Firebird to replace Outlook/Outlook Express. Run a search (F3) for iexplore.exe and msimn.exe and change permissions on them just like we did with the spyware folders.
5. This is my favorite: Now delete the IE icon and Outlook icons and change the Firefox and Firebird Icons to look just like IE and OE (MUHAHAHA).
6. Now login as Administrator and delete the user account we just created to do all this stuff.
If nuisance user must have IE to access a dumb banking website that's coded in shitty client side ASP or something like that; write a VB script, or batch file or whatever to use the runas command (similar to sudo in unix) to launch iexplore.exe under a less privileged account; point this back to the normal IE icon and it becomes seamless for the user.
You can take it even farther and deny write access to all the Run keys in the registry to keep crap from getting loaded in the System Tray. You can also deny write access to the Root of the Program Files folder, if you deny access to the whole folder including subdirectories and files it will break a number of applications that love to write metadata, temp files and such in the Program Files folder, like Microsoft Office 2000 (let's not even get started on how many Microsoft developers don't know where temp files and metadata belong). Of course if you do these things the user won't be able to install programs. If the user isn't running as an administrator they won't be able to write to the root of Program Files anyways, but they still can put stuff in their own Run key and the global Run key!
Sorry this is so hacked together, I'm in a hurry, want to go eat lunch NOW...
Right on man, I did the same thing. Found a nice house at an affordable price. I live on the edge of a small town right on the other side of the state border line; I used to live in Ohio with my parents in a suburban area. I moved 25 miles away from that shit-hole city, I pay waaay lower taxes than I would've there, we have way nicer schools, almost every high school graduate here gets a college scholarship (payed by the riverboat gambling), the crime rate is lower, I don't have to worry about stuff being stolen out of my garage anymore, I leave my vehicles unlocked at night. I have cable TV and internet access (albeit slower than most cable, but way faster than dialup).
There's plenty of entertainment here, I live right down the road from riverboat casinos (who I thank for the low taxes and nice schools), and there's a ski slope right down the road, and a handful variety of nice restaurants and bars. My neighborhood is built around a man made lake, there's a private beach and a golf course. I don't mind the rednecks sprinkled around here, they're a hell of a lot nicer than the gang members, and wanabe mini-thugs back home.
Now if I could only find a job here closer to home, there's a few large companies, I haven't really tried yet. I drive 80 miles a day to and from work, my co-workers think I'm crazy, but it's worth it to me to live in the nice country instead of the shithole suburbs. I should stop elaborating now, I don't want tons of people moving here and turning it into the fucked up place I moved away from!
Actually AMF hasn't owned Harley since '86, the AMF bikes were the worst quality Harleys ever made, and knowledgeable harley shoppers avoid them like the plague. AMF didn't rescue Harley Davidson either, they almost ran them into the ground farther. AMF didn't know shit about manufacturing internal combustion engines, let alone motorcycles, and ramped production up high, and quality went down; a small group of investors bought the company back in the late eighties and focused on the retro appeal of the bikes and brought the production rate down, but the quality back up, these are the people that rescued HD. Now HD is a very successful American company that makes more money off of licensing their name to be put on other products than the sales of their own motorcycles. Harley Davidson bikes, excluding the AMFs, also hold their resale value extremely well compared to other motorcycles.
I do believe that Buell also had the fastest production bike made in the mid to late nineties, until Suzuki's Hayabusa came along.
I also want to add that I have a 1GHz PIII system at work with 512MB of RAM running win2k which is a turd, I rarely use this machine anymore because my mac covers almost everything I need to do my job, the only thing I keep the PC for is the occasional use of 3Com's network management tools, and software testing.
I use an old 500MHz Power Mac G4 at work with 512MB of RAM and a Radeon 9000 Pro, it's plenty spunky for what I do, mostly net admin stuff. I always have iTunes, Mail, TextEdit, iCal, Activity Monitor, Terminal, Safari/or Firefox, VNC, and Terminal Services Client running. OSX does an amazing job of memory managment, you can have all your apps that you frequently use open at startup. I also occasionally do some work in iMovie getting movie trailers in VHS or DVD format ready for sales dept.'s presentations.
My home machine is a 450MHz Power Mac G4 with 640MB of RAM, and a self installed SuperDrive, I still have the original Rage Pro 128 in there though, which makes the work machine w/the radeon doing quartz extreme way more responsive. I do mostly iMovie and iDVD home movie stuff, which surprisingly isn't too bad on this machine; and the usual browsing, email, iTunes, remote admin from home stuff.
The most important thing is at least 512MB RAM, then a Quartz Extreme capable video card, and OS 10.3 is much snappier than 10.2. I wouldn't buy a machine slower than a 733MHz G4, or a refurb'd emac wouldn't be a bad idea either.