1)Are you going to have a choice? 2) doesn't matter what DMCA laws you have if the hardware available can lock you out. 3)you want high end systems in 10 years time there will be no alternative. 4)All hardware breaks or goes obsolete eventually.
I don't like this either but lets be realistic here its going to get progresively more difficult to beat Microsoft, I would love to see an organised defence against Microsoft but I haven't seen anything yet.
All manufacturers are going to be faced with the choice manufacture what MS wants or risk being locked out of that market place. It stinks to high heaven but I don't see a way round this MS will control precisely what will run on its operating system and will ensure its operating system is the only one for PC hardware.
The only hope is the courts and even then you can't make a manufacturer provide any kind of support for an operating system they do not want to support.
Streaming audio files depends on downloading a stubfile. A stubfile is a text file containing a link to another file sometimes the actual sound file or with real audio maybe to another text file
file.ram -> file.smi -> file.rm
file.ram is a small text file containing a link to file.smi or file.rm if the link is to file.smi your going to have to fetch that stubfile too Easy! create a webpage and put a link to the smi file.
with frontpage and a text editor its as simple as copying the address given in the ram file from the text file and creating a hyperlink in front page giving this as the destination.
in frontpage in preview mode you can right click this link and download the smi stubfile (or stick it on a website or open the page in your favourite web browser).
you can just create a html page full of links to your favourite audio streams but eventually some of them will cease to work!
if you take a look inside the smi file you will find something which looks like a http link but isnt quite.
rtsp://somesite.com/foo/bar/dtfdstgwe/file.rm
note rtsp: is the protocol used by a real server maybe some browsers support it? the random letters makes it a little more work for downloading a series of rm files even if the files you want are called file1.rm file2.rm the random directory name will change each time.
There was a program called streambox vcr which would download and save the.rm file but thats not being developed anymore since the author got sued by real I think you will find a few alternatives.
you can figure out how to find these right?
converting RA format to something more flexable like MP3
converting RA can be slow some converters work at a 1 to 1 speed winamp is an interesting one you need a realaudio input plugin (real16.exe is one) and lame encoder output plugin. (out_lame.binf_v161.exe)
getting the realaudio plugin for winamp can be difficult unless you are a timetraveller since the original authors website has gone. Incidently winamp works fastest in its 2.xx incarnation while the plugins work in version 5 they are noticably slower.
realaudio seems to be a very compact format a half hour real audio file might be as small as 8 to 9 meg in size.
streaming mp3 files are pretty much the same just the stubfile contains the location of the MP3 file which sits on a normal webserver somewhere.
Stubfiles are great you can create a link to a stubfile on one webserver which links to an mp3 file on another webserver or just write a stubfile and store it on your own website.
creating a local html page also works so you could make your own list of mp3 files located elsewhere and stream them whenever you want to listen to them. just by loading the html file in your browser and clicking on the link.
this little line will let you embed an mp3 file from somewhere on a webpage
It works with firefox and IE with the quicktime plugin installed. change (- -)for left and right triangles and make your own link.
this post is a howto not a haveto some parts of the world might bust your ass for downloading copyrighted materials Stub files are probably legal The actual stream files less so.
British Teletext has always been pretty good in terms of subtitling even live broadcasts. Always on page 888 whichever provider.
It would be nice if there was some conformity with TV guide pages, now and next is quite useful usually for answering the question " what the... am I watching".
I always thought that the subtitles should be extended to cover non English speakers maybe digital services might do so at some point.
As an educational tool subtitles are very useful it is often easier to understand a broadcast in a non native language when it is written down. Do any of the satellite broadcasters provide subtitles on a standard channel? and or in more than one language.
With the number of film releases available on dvd with multilingual subtitles I am surprised that the digital services do not appear to make available the other language content or do they use specially created mpeg streams?
Who here thinks that they have the knowledge to do what he did?
I believe a large proportion of the readership here would claim to have some coding ability maybe have programed some big complex products but who knows where the weaknesses are what routines are going to lead to security holes and exploits.
who took hacking/cracking 101?
someone mentioned 5000 exploits and maybe being able to close down half of them, Isn't the focus of most software projects to achieve the desired result. the vunerability left in software are from minds focused on achieving that result.
I would think his unique viewpoint on code is perhaps a valuble asset. Showing the main coding staff where thier code is weak could be a valuble learning experience for them.
maybe some of the white hats are afraid that someone like him could show how poor thier coding practices are?
of course his exploit may not have been hard to impliment and he might have been following a reciepe, I don't know him or the skill needed to achieve what he did.
I looked at a few of these systems, generally speaking you can get on them for free to start with.
however once you fly around play with a few of the toys guess what happens the avatars stop moving and it's back to text based chat. Admitedly with an avatar which you can move around but don't because there is no point.
so 3d chat sounds like a good idea but it gets boring very quickly and when the option is pay a monthly sub or go with a free service, its a no brainer
If all you learn in your first week at college is how to maintain your PC then surely this is a valuble lesson worth the inconvenience, maybe when they return home wiser for the experience they might take care of their family PC's too.
most half decent camera's allow you to take a photo using a remote flash so being essentially a switch it shouldnt be too difficult to use this as a trigger signal "picture taken" to trigger the collection of time stamped gps data.
HardOCP won a battle against infinium in court. Ok whats the battle about? stolen from CNN
(CNN) -- A few weeks ago a new game console was unveiled on the Web called Phantom.
Its developer, Infinium Labs, promises it will be the "must-have high performance game console," and that the Phantom will provide "more access to more games of every genre than any competing product," all "with blazing speed."
Six months ago, it was only a rumor among hardcore gamers. In fact, it seemed Phantom was, as the American Heritage dictionary put it, "an image that appears only in the mind; an illusion."
The juiciest rumor was that there never would be a console called Phantom. The conspiracy theory went that the whole thing was a hoax, concocted as a PR stunt.
Looks like Hardocp called bullshit and now a judge is agreeing with them and infinium is getting slapped. now read on...
I think sometimes we forget that hardware is evolving too just as we don't use 286's and 386's is there any guarantee present versions of windows will run on a dual or quad processor PC
well not win98SE 32 bit processors are its finish. Maybe WinXP to a degree and that already contains a lot of DRM already. lockhorn however may be the only Microsoft choice.
But theres still Linux,yes but how is it going to be developed for these new systems if everything keeps infringing on microsoft patents?
It's not quite a monopoly if open source will not pay for using microsofts patents or agree to the liciencing terms.
Perhaps it will not happen, but it is a possibilty that needs to be thought about now and blocked from ever becoming a reality.
just for historys sake the spectrum was designed with 32 k ram chips which were actually failed 64k ram chips I think a jumper decided if the top half was good or the lower. in later times the spectrum got working 64k ram chips still for use as 32k.
There are two problems with open office, 1) being the file requester interface it is ugly and scary to a lot of users.
This is probably the first thing people see and it scares them word is like an old friend, even with clippy, they are familiar with it.
2) Less than perfect conversion of word documents into and out of OpenOffice. word is a defacto standard, people see word compatability as essential since thats what is most commonly used.
As long as word format import and export is less than perfect Openoffice is always going to be on the losing side.
Microsoft are well aware the small problems with using anything other than their products keeps their user base. Should OpenOffice finally manage 100% word compatable import and export then there is certain to be a microsoft patient which can be used to hit openoffice and if there isn't they can just change the word document format just enough using incorperating a patented concept and then beat them with a big stick.
Perhaps the only way to beat this is if openoffice kept its import and export filters as plugins and perfect word format conversion would be an unknown 3rd party written plugin.
However even this might not be possible with DRM incorperated into Windows XP and Longhorn. Just as media player recognises infringing audio files it is probably no great leap to being able to isolate a patent infringing plugin. Windows update will be able to ensure that Microsofts patents can be protected
Can Microsoft do this almost certainly, will they do this what do you think?
Mac ownership use isn't that around 5%? and thats compared to windows yes ? so how many mac's does that equate to ? A million nah too low must be more than 20 million Pc's maybe 10 Million about 200 Million Pc's ? probably still way too low but 10 million users is too small a market to address? of course a small vocal minority of mac users hate real. More of them than Pc owners that hate real?
I don't use a Mac but I still think there is a significant number of mac owners out there, wonder how many Ipods are owned by mac users 50% 20% 70% ? so the iPod markets worth cracking for real but not to cater for the Mac using Ipod owners.
so has real changed? now knowledgeable about their user base, potential markets?
who pays real users or content providers? so perhaps thats why they ignore users.
To be honest to give real credibility with most of us cynics they will have to be accessable to mac users and linux users and why is that so difficult can't they port their own code?
The thing is its not about buying old Pc's its basically a form of recycling old Pc's.
your home environment probably didn't start with those two nice powerful systems there will have been a few systems along the way.
for me I am a windows user wanting to migrate to Linux. My dual head windows box can give me a linux desktop on one of my monitors anytime I want via vnc.
The linux box runs a webserver on my lan gives me a chance to play with software that I wouldnt normally get a chance too and gives me experience which will probably help me earn money in the future.
yes I could dual boot linux but why put up with rebooting everytime i want to swop environments.
I can be on my linux system inside a few seconds initially dump the screen to my secondary monitor and use both windows and linux even share the clipboard. just by moving my mouse.
finally take the african poorly resourced school example they get donated a bunch of old low end systems give them one high end system and now they could have 4, 6 children getting the advantage of the high end system at the same time. or maybe more if they are just watching a teacher giving a demo of how to do something.
you see its something from nothing and for some of us thats useful.
I have been trying a few experiments on my Lan. with different systems of remote connection, realvnc, tightvnc and Remote desktop for windows Xp.
My linux pc has real multiuser capabilitys since each user gets a seperate desktop. With the majority of actual processing carried out on the superior host machine, very weak clients can be supported.
With Remotedesktop for instance I had a P166 laptop running 98 se in 48 meg of ram connected to an XP1600 pc running XP pro across a wireless lan.
The response of the 98 terminal seemed better than running applications locally with little use of the swop file. that underpowered laptop was practically reborn and almost as capable as the remote controlled XP Pc doing most of the work.
with linux a kde desktop being served (via a realvnc client) to a windows Pc ran smoothly and still allowed a local user at the linux pc but then linux is a proper muliuser environment.
The practical limitation is the bandwidth of the Lan and the power of the server Pc.
Someone said whats the point your just spliting a powerful machine in half or quarters or what ever.
thing is to run a word processor or any other number of other tasks doesn't take a huge amount of processing power a lot of the time a pc is waiting for you.
As single users we often leave tasks running in the background and hardly miss the resources on a powerful system. Sharing the CPu cycles with another user is not much worse than that.
Yes with windows program you probably do need to pay for multiuser to be legal but not so much with linux.
in a home environment do you really need to buy a top pc for everyone or run linux on 1 good one and have a few low powered boxes around the house where your family can log on and use the powerful system while dad sits on it locally reading slashdot.
I like his reciepe's although with my weight last thing i need is to be cooking more. His layout makes sense to me very similar to N/S diagrams.
It is refreshing to see a webpage developer that wants to serve his pages in a standards compliant way instead of an IE complient way.
Stating the obvious it appears to be a microsoft policy to break open standards when ever possible so the only certain way to be sure of no annoying problems is to use the microsoft product.
For once on this site, It's IE that is the exception and hopefully more webpage developers will start realising that content needs to be written to the open standards not microsoft standards.
For Firefox and other standards complient browsers to succeed there needs to be an opensource standards compliant page editor.
Too many sites are written using Frontpage which produces broken html and I still don't know of a free alternative that will produce compliant pages.
I hope some one will reply with a +5 informative post recomending such a program. I think we are winning with firefox; now we need to make life easy for people to produce compliant pages.
I want my freedom of choice back and I am sick of Microsoft doing all it can to make it difficult for me to choose anything other than Microsoft. Micosoft isn't the only company doing this, and I dislike these companies just as much.
Open standards are for everyone to be able to use the best solution they can afford. I have far more respect for a company prepared to support an open standard than one which trys all it can to lock me into their solution because no matter how soft the handcuffs I will always want my freedom.
still useful to boot a computer, run an antivirus program. load a network card driver My laptop network modem card came on floppy i had to burn a cd just to get it connected. some computers still dont boot from cd. norton ghost boot disk when all else fails and there is no room for the virtual partition. running fdisk and format. geting a pc up and running enough to backup the data sure floppys are not great not fast and pretty small, but wouldnt you prefer to keep that term paper somewhere else other than on a hard drive or on a cd sure usb is geting better and more useful but if the computer is not runing xp then it needs drivers. good luck with a usb key drive which is unlabeled. still ideal for documents that are still changing.
Linux is quite hard to get used to and I think putting an older Base unit to work as a webserver is a pretty good introduction to Linux, putting webpages into htdocs isn't difficult. I first ran apache under windows but found the box would crash regularly linux is much more stable.
Stage2 into introducing linux has to be vnc (get realvnc and play with 2 windows boxes first) however configuring it isn't that easy with linux which is where I recomend this book as a step by step guide to a lot of things, chapter 4.5 tells you how to set up VNC.
now you have access to your linux box from your windows machine 24/7 without a second mouse keyboard and monitor. just run the vnc client its easy. and if you get confused fed up or just had enough close the window and forget about it for a while. Oh and check out the book reference I gave earlier as it explains clearly how to achieve specific tasks.
before I get modded off topic consider that there are 1000's of people reading slashdot who are at the point of trying linux and give up because they "don't get it" so a simpleweb server project justifys having the machine running and remote desktop access makes it easy to play with. maybe some experienced linux users might even be willing to provide a url where anybody can access a linux desktop and let people try it out without installing anything.
Is microsoft counting these small servers when it's counting percentage server share, I doubt it.
so hopefully interesting and informative rather than offtopic and that pdf file is gold. It's the most informative file on linux i have found to date.
I think there are better solutions than this device on the market as far as I can tell there is no compression built into this card so If you want to capture your looking at the power of your processor to convert this to a useable form.
If you compare against adaptec's videoh or haupages hardware encoder then this is just another tv card.
However the best thing about the article is that it has inspired me to try an experiment. My main system is away from my living room and will remain so mainly because pc towers are so ugly and I prefer to work at my desk:) however I do have a laptop with USB and a wireless network card.
In my living room I have a digital satellite decoder. hopefully 54g wireless is fast enough to allow me to mount one of my main systems hard drives as a network drive and store to that. So essentially creating a hard drive video recorder capturing in mpeg2.
The videoh even comes with a remote capable of starting the software on the host Pc.
In theory there is no reason why it will not work however the laptop is rather underpowered which is where this idea may fail.
With USB there are things like adaptec's Videoh (which is an MpegII hardware encoder with an analogue TV tuner and composite Tv and Svideo ports).
Right now Adaptec don't support the MAC but there is no reason why they shouldnt later it's the software which is missing. (if they would only open up the API for this device they would sell to linux and Mac users too)
The new G5 looks to be something which will sit comfortably in anybodys living room. Although if I had one I could see either lots of cables running off it or maybe a wireless 54g network card linking it to a fileserver somewhere else.
Ok tell me I am wrong and tell me why I am wrong please, as I want to learn!
wouldn't a hardware router such as a linksys usrobotics , belkin protect a win98 system from getting owned since to get to the pc port forwarding must be turned on.
Ok you need antivirus and spybot s&d and adaware as well.
secondly for all those people saying install xp dont run an old o/s i must point out win98 is a good operating system for old hardware and you are not going to put xp on a p133 p200 system and have it work.
take most games out the picture and a p200 running 98 is a useful system. I have a cafe full of 98se machines they get abused a lot but get a restore about once a month followed by updates to windows and the antivirus and they all have firefox, open office and gimp as standard along with yahoo aim and msn and icq. running xp on them isnt an option.
without the router i guess they would be owned but they are not and even virus infections are getting rare since i created disk images to restore from. instead of running AV and spyware checks which was how they used to be managed.
Slashdot Mirror
1)Are you going to have a choice?
2) doesn't matter what DMCA laws you have if the hardware available can lock you out.
3)you want high end systems in 10 years time there will be no alternative.
4)All hardware breaks or goes obsolete eventually.
I don't like this either but lets be realistic here its going to get progresively more difficult to beat Microsoft, I would love to see an organised defence against Microsoft but I haven't seen anything yet.
All manufacturers are going to be faced with the choice manufacture what MS wants or risk being locked out of that market place. It stinks to high heaven but I don't see a way round this MS will control precisely what will run on its operating system and will ensure its operating system is the only one for PC hardware.
The only hope is the courts and even then you can't make a manufacturer provide any kind of support for an operating system they do not want to support.
Streaming audio files depends on downloading a stubfile.
.rm file but thats not being developed anymore since the author got sued by real
A stubfile is a text file containing a link to another file sometimes the actual
sound file or with real audio maybe to another text file
file.ram -> file.smi -> file.rm
file.ram is a small text file containing a link to file.smi or file.rm
if the link is to file.smi
your going to have to fetch that stubfile too
Easy! create a webpage and put a link to the smi file.
with frontpage and a text editor its as simple as copying the address given in the ram file from the text file and creating a hyperlink in front page giving this as the destination.
in frontpage in preview mode you can right click this link and download the smi stubfile (or stick it on a website or open the page in your favourite web browser).
you can just create a html page full of links to your favourite audio streams
but eventually some of them will cease to work!
if you take a look inside the smi file you will find something which looks like a http link but isnt quite.
rtsp://somesite.com/foo/bar/dtfdstgwe/file.rm
note
rtsp: is the protocol used by a real server maybe some browsers support it?
the random letters makes it a little more work for downloading a series of rm files even if the files you want are called file1.rm file2.rm the random directory name will change each time.
There was a program called streambox vcr which would download and save the
I think you will find a few alternatives.
you can figure out how to find these right?
converting RA format to something more flexable like MP3
converting RA can be slow some converters work at a 1 to 1 speed
winamp is an interesting one you need a realaudio input plugin (real16.exe is one) and lame encoder output plugin. (out_lame.binf_v161.exe)
getting the realaudio plugin for winamp can be difficult unless you are a timetraveller since the original authors website has gone.
Incidently winamp works fastest in its 2.xx incarnation while the plugins work in version 5 they are noticably slower.
realaudio seems to be a very compact format a half hour real audio file might be as small as 8 to 9 meg in size.
streaming mp3 files are pretty much the same just the stubfile contains the location of the MP3 file which sits on a normal webserver somewhere.
Stubfiles are great you can create a link to a stubfile on one webserver which links to an mp3 file on another webserver or just write a stubfile and store it
on your own website.
creating a local html page also works so you could make your own list of mp3 files located elsewhere and stream them whenever you want to listen to them.
just by loading the html file in your browser and clicking on the link.
this little line will let you embed an mp3 file from somewhere on a webpage
(- embed src="http://some site.bar/some.mp3" width="200" height="16" loop="FALSE" align="centre" -)
It works with firefox and IE with the quicktime plugin installed.
change (- -)for left and right triangles and make your own link.
this post is a howto not a haveto some parts of the world might bust your ass for downloading copyrighted materials Stub files are probably legal
The actual stream files less so.
You should have got modded up as informative, good system :)
Incidently the subtitles on european tv should generally be found on 777
from what I found on google
British Teletext has always been pretty good in terms of subtitling even live
... am I watching".
broadcasts. Always on page 888 whichever provider.
It would be nice if there was some conformity with TV guide pages, now and next
is quite useful usually for answering the question " what the
I always thought that the subtitles should be extended to cover non English speakers maybe digital services might do so at some point.
As an educational tool subtitles are very useful it is often easier to understand a broadcast in a non native language when it is written down.
Do any of the satellite broadcasters provide subtitles on a standard channel?
and or in more than one language.
With the number of film releases available on dvd with multilingual subtitles I am surprised that the digital services do not appear to make available the other
language content or do they use specially created mpeg streams?
Who here thinks that they have the knowledge to do what he did?
I believe a large proportion of the readership here would claim to have some coding ability maybe have programed some big complex products but who knows where the weaknesses are what routines are going to lead to security holes and exploits.
who took hacking/cracking 101?
someone mentioned 5000 exploits and maybe being able to close down half of them, Isn't the focus of most software projects to achieve the desired result.
the vunerability left in software are from minds focused on achieving that result.
I would think his unique viewpoint on code is perhaps a valuble asset. Showing the main coding staff where thier code is weak could be a valuble learning experience for them.
maybe some of the white hats are afraid that someone like him could show how poor thier coding practices are?
of course his exploit may not have been hard to impliment and he might have been following a reciepe, I don't know him or the skill needed to achieve what he did.
hopefully the person hiring him does
I looked at a few of these systems, generally speaking you can get on them for free to start with.
however once you fly around play with a few of the toys guess what happens
the avatars stop moving and it's back to text based chat. Admitedly with an avatar
which you can move around but don't because there is no point.
so 3d chat sounds like a good idea but it gets boring very quickly and when the option is pay a monthly sub or go with a free service, its a no brainer
Isn't college all about education anyway?
If all you learn in your first week at college is how to maintain your PC then surely this is a valuble lesson worth the inconvenience, maybe when they return home wiser for the experience they might take care of their family PC's too.
most half decent camera's allow you to take a photo using a remote flash so
being essentially a switch it shouldnt be too difficult to use this as a trigger
signal "picture taken" to trigger the collection of time stamped gps data.
just a thought
HardOCP won a battle against infinium in court.
Ok whats the battle about?
stolen from CNN
(CNN) -- A few weeks ago a new game console was unveiled on the Web called Phantom.
Its developer, Infinium Labs, promises it will be the "must-have high performance game console," and that the Phantom will provide "more access to more games of every genre than any competing product," all "with blazing speed."
Six months ago, it was only a rumor among hardcore gamers. In fact, it seemed Phantom was, as the American Heritage dictionary put it, "an image that appears only in the mind; an illusion."
The juiciest rumor was that there never would be a console called Phantom. The conspiracy theory went that the whole thing was a hoax, concocted as a PR stunt.
Looks like Hardocp called bullshit and now a judge is agreeing with them and infinium is getting slapped.
now read on...
I think sometimes we forget that hardware is evolving too just as we don't use 286's and 386's is there any guarantee present versions of windows will run on a dual or quad processor PC
well not win98SE 32 bit processors are its finish. Maybe WinXP to a degree and that already contains a lot of DRM already. lockhorn however may be the only Microsoft choice.
But theres still Linux,yes but how is it going to be developed for these new systems if everything keeps infringing on microsoft patents?
It's not quite a monopoly if open source will not pay for using microsofts patents or agree to the liciencing terms.
Perhaps it will not happen, but it is a possibilty that needs to be thought about now and blocked from ever becoming a reality.
just for historys sake the spectrum was designed with 32 k ram chips which were actually failed 64k ram chips I think a jumper decided if the top half was good or the lower. in later times the spectrum got working 64k ram chips still for use as 32k.
There are two problems with open office,
1) being the file requester interface it is ugly and scary to a lot of users.
This is probably the first thing people see and it scares them word is like an old friend, even with clippy, they are familiar with it.
2) Less than perfect conversion of word documents into and out of OpenOffice.
word is a defacto standard, people see word compatability as essential since thats what is most commonly used.
As long as word format import and export is less than perfect Openoffice is always going to be on the losing side.
Microsoft are well aware the small problems with using anything other than their products keeps their user base. Should OpenOffice finally manage 100% word compatable import and export then there is certain to be a microsoft patient which can be used to hit openoffice and if there isn't they can just change the word document format just enough using incorperating a patented concept and then beat them with a big stick.
Perhaps the only way to beat this is if openoffice kept its import and export filters as plugins and perfect word format conversion would be an unknown 3rd party written plugin.
However even this might not be possible with DRM incorperated into Windows XP and Longhorn. Just as media player recognises infringing audio files it is probably no great leap to being able to isolate a patent infringing plugin.
Windows update will be able to ensure that Microsofts patents can be protected
Can Microsoft do this almost certainly, will they do this what do you think?
Mac ownership use isn't that around 5%?
and thats compared to windows yes ?
so how many mac's does that equate to ?
A million nah too low must be more than 20 million Pc's
maybe 10 Million about 200 Million Pc's ?
probably still way too low
but 10 million users is too small a market to address?
of course a small vocal minority of mac users hate real.
More of them than Pc owners that hate real?
I don't use a Mac but I still think there is a significant number of mac owners
out there, wonder how many Ipods are owned by mac users 50% 20% 70% ?
so the iPod markets worth cracking for real but not to cater for the Mac using
Ipod owners.
so has real changed? now knowledgeable about their user base, potential markets?
who pays real users or content providers?
so perhaps thats why they ignore users.
To be honest to give real credibility with most of us cynics they will have to
be accessable to mac users and linux users and why is that so difficult can't they port their own code?
The thing is its not about buying old Pc's its basically a form of recycling old Pc's.
your home environment probably didn't start with those two nice powerful systems there will have been a few systems along the way.
for me I am a windows user wanting to migrate to Linux. My dual head windows box
can give me a linux desktop on one of my monitors anytime I want via vnc.
The linux box runs a webserver on my lan gives me a chance to play with software that I wouldnt normally get a chance too and gives me experience which will probably help me earn money in the future.
yes I could dual boot linux but why put up with rebooting everytime i want to swop environments.
I can be on my linux system inside a few seconds initially dump the screen to my secondary monitor and use both windows and linux even share the clipboard. just by moving my mouse.
finally take the african poorly resourced school example they get donated a bunch of old low end systems give them one high end system and now they could have 4, 6 children getting the advantage of the high end system at the same time. or maybe more if they are just watching a teacher giving a demo of how to do something.
you see its something from nothing and for some of us thats useful.
I have been trying a few experiments on my Lan. with different systems of remote connection, realvnc, tightvnc and Remote desktop for windows Xp.
My linux pc has real multiuser capabilitys since each user gets a seperate desktop. With the majority of actual processing carried out on the superior host machine, very weak clients can be supported.
With Remotedesktop for instance I had a P166 laptop running 98 se in 48 meg of ram connected to an XP1600 pc running XP pro across a wireless lan.
The response of the 98 terminal seemed better than running applications locally with little use of the swop file. that underpowered laptop was practically reborn and almost as capable as the remote controlled XP Pc doing most of the work.
with linux a kde desktop being served (via a realvnc client) to a windows Pc ran smoothly and still allowed a local user at the linux pc but then linux is a proper muliuser environment.
The practical limitation is the bandwidth of the Lan and the power of the server Pc.
Someone said whats the point your just spliting a powerful machine in half or quarters or what ever.
thing is to run a word processor or any other number of other tasks doesn't take a huge amount of processing power a lot of the time a pc is waiting for you.
As single users we often leave tasks running in the background and hardly miss the resources on a powerful system. Sharing the CPu cycles with another user is not much worse than that.
Yes with windows program you probably do need to pay for multiuser to be legal but not so much with linux.
in a home environment do you really need to buy a top pc for everyone or run linux on 1 good one and have a few low powered boxes around the house where your family can log on and use the powerful system while dad sits on it locally reading slashdot.
I like his reciepe's although with my weight last thing i need is to be cooking more. His layout makes sense to me very similar to N/S diagrams.
It is refreshing to see a webpage developer that wants to serve his pages in a standards compliant way instead of an IE complient way.
Stating the obvious it appears to be a microsoft policy to break open standards when ever possible so the only certain way to be sure of no annoying problems is to use the microsoft product.
For once on this site, It's IE that is the exception and hopefully more webpage developers will start realising that content needs to be written to the open standards not microsoft standards.
For Firefox and other standards complient browsers to succeed there needs to be an opensource standards compliant page editor.
Too many sites are written using Frontpage which produces broken html and I still don't know of a free alternative that will produce compliant pages.
I hope some one will reply with a +5 informative post recomending such a program. I think we are winning with firefox; now we need to make life easy for people to produce compliant pages.
I want my freedom of choice back and I am sick of Microsoft doing all it can to make it difficult for me to choose anything other than Microsoft. Micosoft isn't the only company doing this, and I dislike these companies just as much.
Open standards are for everyone to be able to use the best solution they can afford. I have far more respect for a company prepared to support an open standard than one which trys all it can to lock me into their solution because no matter how soft the handcuffs I will always want my freedom.
still useful to boot a computer,
run an antivirus program.
load a network card driver
My laptop network modem card came on floppy i had to burn a cd just to get it connected.
some computers still dont boot from cd.
norton ghost boot disk when all else fails and there is no room for the virtual
partition. running fdisk and format.
geting a pc up and running enough to backup the data
sure floppys are not great not fast and pretty small, but wouldnt you prefer to keep that term paper somewhere else other than on a hard drive or on a cd
sure usb is geting better and more useful but if the computer is not runing xp then it needs drivers. good luck with a usb key drive which is unlabeled.
still ideal for documents that are still changing.
That an article reporting on a mathematical problem being solved
= 85 7&ncid=757&e=10&u=/nm/20040906/od_uk_nm/oukoe_scie nce_maths
equates 1 million dollars = 560 Million pounds!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid
Linux is quite hard to get used to and I think putting an older Base unit to work as a webserver is a pretty good introduction to Linux, putting webpages into htdocs isn't difficult. I first ran apache under windows but found the box would crash regularly linux is much more stable.
6 21 .pdf
Stage2 into introducing linux has to be vnc (get realvnc and play with 2 windows boxes first) however configuring it isn't that easy with linux which is where I recomend this book as a step by step guide to a lot of things, chapter 4.5 tells you how to set up VNC.
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg246
now you have access to your linux box from your windows machine 24/7 without a second mouse keyboard and monitor. just run the vnc client its easy.
and if you get confused fed up or just had enough close the window and forget about it for a while. Oh and check out the book reference I gave earlier as it explains clearly how to achieve specific tasks.
before I get modded off topic consider that there are 1000's of people reading slashdot who are at the point of trying linux and give up because they "don't get it" so a simpleweb server project justifys having the machine running and remote desktop access makes it easy to play with. maybe some experienced linux users might even be willing to provide a url where anybody can access a linux desktop and let people try it out without installing anything.
Is microsoft counting these small servers when it's counting percentage server share, I doubt it.
so hopefully interesting and informative rather than offtopic and that pdf file is gold. It's the most informative file on linux i have found to date.
I think there are better solutions than this device on the market as far as I can tell there is no compression built into this card so If you want to capture your looking at the power of your processor to convert this to a useable form.
If you compare against adaptec's videoh or haupages hardware encoder then this is just another tv card.
However the best thing about the article is that it has inspired me to try an experiment.
My main system is away from my living room and will remain so mainly because pc towers are so ugly and I prefer to work at my desk:) however I do have a laptop with USB and a wireless network card.
In my living room I have a digital satellite decoder. hopefully 54g wireless is fast enough to allow me to mount one of my main systems hard drives as a network drive and store to that. So essentially creating a hard drive video recorder capturing in mpeg2.
The videoh even comes with a remote capable of starting the software on the host Pc.
In theory there is no reason why it will not work however the laptop is rather underpowered which is where this idea may fail.
or just using mysearchbar. I think one of the kids must of installed it anyway googles down isn't it can't seem to be able to get to it.
didn't you ever watch space 1999
where the moon got ripped out of orbit and sent hurtling through space
after nuclear waste exploded.
It might have been more interesting to note most of the links to on site extensions are now broken (had to go to the home pages for nearly every one)
Yes a TV Card could have been nice to include.
With USB there are things like adaptec's Videoh (which is an MpegII hardware encoder with an analogue TV tuner and composite Tv and Svideo ports).
Right now Adaptec don't support the MAC but there is no reason why they shouldnt later it's the software which is missing. (if they would only open up the API for this device they would sell to linux and Mac users too)
The new G5 looks to be something which will sit comfortably in anybodys living room. Although if I had one I could see either lots of cables running off it or maybe a wireless 54g network card linking it to a fileserver somewhere else.
Ok tell me I am wrong and tell me why I am wrong please, as I want to learn!
wouldn't a hardware router such as a linksys usrobotics , belkin protect a win98 system from getting owned since to get to the pc port forwarding must be turned on.
Ok you need antivirus and spybot s&d and adaware as well.
secondly for all those people saying install xp dont run an old o/s i must point out
win98 is a good operating system for old hardware and you are not going to put xp on a p133 p200 system and have it work.
take most games out the picture and a p200 running 98 is a useful system.
I have a cafe full of 98se machines they get abused a lot but get a restore about once a month followed by updates to windows and the antivirus and they all have firefox, open office and gimp as standard along with yahoo aim and msn and icq. running xp on them isnt an option.
without the router i guess they would be owned but they are not and even virus infections are getting rare since i created disk images to restore from. instead of running AV and spyware checks which was how they used to be managed.