Bah high horse? Sorry, US beer (particularly Bud and Miller) is crap compared to practically everything else. The only examples of beers around the same standard I can think of are Fosters and VB.
There are plenty of American (not from the US) beers. Please be careful in your terminology. Some of the South American and beers are great - I tried some years ago.
Your comment shows you to be very American. I know plenty of Europeans who wouldn't dare touch US beer on account of it's overpriced muddy water.
their sales would plummet in the world, especially in europe.
Why would Europeans drink Bud? Got to be the worst beer in the world - something like sex in a canoe. The only people in Europe that would regularly consume Bud would be USians visiting there - same as here in Aust where bugger-all people drink it because the local beers are so much better.
Europe has hundreds of better (and funnily enough, cheaper) beers to choose from and any of them is better than the overpriced Bud.
I can't see Bud sales in Europe dropping except from the USians that visit europe and don't drink it because it's got GM bits in it.
Because the sort of people who are likely to get shafted by bigpong (telstra) are the orts of people who should generally be beaten into a coma with their computers... "login? that's to hard", "firewall, that just pops up lots of warnings and i click allow for them all blindly",etc.
The users from sector L that are on Bigpong have heaps of problems. I regularly remove spyware/viri/trojans from these idiot's machines, and I see a 300-400 meg in a month of scans from machines that are r00ted... data that costs me $$$. I say it's news because it might make some of them learn how to keep their machines secure lest they be cut off.
That's not quite the answer. Loading up the CPU to 100% won't guarantee it gets as hot as you would like it too. You need to run CPU instructions that use the most power (floating point, SIMD type instructions, preferably.
Try seti@home or something similar. That would do much more than just a tight - relatively efficient loop.
what's fair price on a working c64 with a tuned 1541?
Well, to the sorts of people that buy them, quite a lot. The shop can ask practically anything up to $100(AU) and most likely still sell the thing. Over the $100 mark it just starts getting stupid, even though there are people that pay more - look on Ebay for C64 packs some time.
As I said, they know that collectors find these things valuable, and ask a lot more than is reasonable given the state of most of the vintage hardware I've looked at...
I used to shop at Tr(C)ash Converters for stuff. It is amazing how often you'd find old units there that people just didn't want anymore. My mate got a Vectrex (yes a vectrex) and a pile of stuff for it for $40 a few years back.
I grabbed a pile of Atari 2600 games, some with boxes and original manuals for abour $2-3 each.
The newer, common stuff (mostly SNES and N64) are there, but they're still way over prices ($20 for a copy of Mario Bros on SNES... bugger that.
Occasionally that have a C64 or an Amiga come by, usually with a stack of pirated disks in a box for a good price. Shops generally know the value of those to collectors though.
If you're after not-quite "popular" stuff (Vic20, Atari PCs, Megadrive, old PC games etc) then go to a Trash Converters or equivalent store. If you want more "popular" stuff then you're going to need to shop around to get it in good condition and affordable. I put popular in quotes meaning stuff that everyone knows like the Amiga500, C64, Atari2600, Nintendo, etc, over the stuff that less people are aware of like Dreamcast, Vectrex, etc.
If you want really rare stuff, you have to shop everywhere. I have only seen one Dreamcast, also at Trashies, but I have never seen any DC games anywhere but on Ebay.
I say - I think I might change my Ph.D topic to study that chemmical. Write it in your thesis a few times and there is a two-volume manuscript that is full mostly of a few instances of one chemical name. I bet that's why the name is so long... whoever discovered it decided that he needed a space filler for his thesis...
It worked here by enabling that, allowing port xdmcp (can't remember the number) through the firewall and then adding kdm to hosts.allow to let anything on my local network connect to my machine.
I don't know how it works with VNC, because I have been using a real X server on the remote end...
KDE's ARTS has network transparency built into it, and because of the way it uses named pipes in each user's home dir it can work with remote sound hardware. I have never had any success getting it to work reliably but I have heard others have while I was Googling for an answer.
There is also NAS that has Windows compatibility but is (AFIK) more difficult to configure and use on a per-user/per-login basis. I'm sure it's possible to do, again I gave up and went for ARTS, which sort of does work. NAS is a bit more generic and had/dev/dsp compatibility - so practically everything would work. Arts requires support from your audio software (Which most of the more popular packages do provide).
You could go one further than BlueSocket (Which requires client-side software installs and the OP didn't want to do that). I think BlueSocket is poo. They use it at my uni as well. IT farked up my Windows install and didn't work real well (read: at all) with Linux.
Just set up a PPTP server (VPN) and have username/passwords randomly added to the chap-secrets list with a timestamp in a comment for each one. Just configure a cron job every 10 minutes or so to remove old timestamped entries and kick off the usernames that it removed. Not exactly trivial, but it would work.
Force all users to log onto the VPN using your firewall (ie they get an IP through DHCP then can't see anything except the PPTP port on the gateway) and bam. You need-not enable VPN encryption if you're worried about performance with a lot of clients. Just make sure you clearly state that data transmitted over wireless is easily accessible by others and security is their responsibility... yadda yadda yadda.
THe advantage of PPTP is that it's already in Windows (and AFIK, Mac) so most of your userbase would be covered with minimal configuration. Linux/BSD has support but usually you need to install extra software. All you need to do is show them how to add a VPN connection to Windows...
I run that way and have an open AP at my place. Friends can come by even when I'm not home and log onto my VPN and access my (soon to be upgraded to 12MBPS) Internet connection by sitting on the front lawn. Of course they have to ask for access and they're given a quota on account of I have a download quota... but it seems to work OK.
It's a dynamic range control on mine (and actually called that, except in the advertising) - just flattens out the levels so you can hear people talking at a reasonable volume and when explosions and other loud parts of movies happen they are dropped back to "people talking" level so they don't make a racket. It's described in the book for my receiver.
I guess it probably depends on the receiver as well.
All these technofangle solutions so far - isn't it easier to get a CD player with a dynamic range compressor? I have one in my portable. It works a treat. My expensive HIFI receiver has a dynamic range mode as well - max, normal, low. That works quite well but it's very noticible when it starts playing with the level. They advertise it as "night mode" in a lot of cases.
You used to be able to buy little analog boxes that you plugged between the output of the player and your preferred electro-mechanical acoustic actuator to achieve the same task. I don't know if you still can.
You could digitise all your CDs, pass them through CoolEdit (or Audacity, or other audio software) and use their dynamic range compression. CoolEdit had a graphical tool last time I used it - you could manually define the compression curves to suit your taste. Just save the.wav files and burn them back to CD. Bam - compressed (dynamic range) audio.
The IRS (or tax man for those who live in the real world and not the US) is probably the place to ask.
I'd just go and pay a good accountant for an hour of their time and get them to help you out. They know what is and what isn't deductable as business-related expenses and can help with deciding on what to charge the company for the use of space within your home for their gain.
There are very location specific taxation rules about how much space and what level of working from home you must do for it to be considered a legitimite business related expense. You'd have to include details for all that stuff.
Budget for a new PC - something reasonably modern. Budget for a broadband internet connection - you'll need a decent bandwidth back to the office to be truly productive these days; even M$ Word files crank in at over a meg for simple documents.
Don't forget to budget for high quality office furniture if you need it - a good, large desk and a VERY high quality and comfortable chair. You'll want a filing cabinet, stationary - some notebooks, pens, blank CDs, post-it notes, etc.
Do you need a printer, scanner, photocopier, fax machine, extra phone line, mobile telephone, etc to do your job. Price them and include them if you do.
Remember that all the computer equipment and lighting will use power. Work out roughly how much power (my power bill very literally doubles if I run my machine 24x7.
There are lots of things - it comes down to what equipment you realy need to successfully perform your job. If they want a budget to set you up at home, then give them a detailed breakdown of costs involved. They'll tell you if it' too fat and you can trim it until they're happy with it.
Wasn't it Thomas Edison who tried to prove that Tesla's 3 phase AC power distribution was dangerous by electrocuting frogs with it and showing how they thrash about vioilently before they died?
*tongue firmly in cheek* Perhaps DC power distribution is the best after all.
That said, you could easily build a device to power all those said gizmos. You'd really need a quite large multi-tap transformer with appropriate ratings, and a set of voltage regulators for the various voltages... 5, 6, 9, 12, 13.8, possibly a couple of adjustable ones for those pesky items that insist on odd voltages.
I had a similar (homebuilt) device with 6 outputs, all individually regulated.
This is a good excuse for a PIC-type project to set the ouput for each port... It could adjust the regulator to get the right voltage and also toggle relays for each port to get the right transformer tap (so as to avoid dissipating too much energy in the little regulators) for any given voltage.
Don't forget that their idea of being "attacked" included regular-old port scans and pings. Looks like they they just plum configured the network badly...
Or it means that RH9 wasn't logging portscans and pings... which, AFIK, it didn't do with any of the default firewalls. It is only newer distros that log potentially malicious traffic.
I have a Leatherman PST-something. It has locking tools. It takes a bit to snap them out of the lock and close them.
The body folds open and you select the tool of choice. For most of the tools you can close it back up with the tool extended so they don't snap shut on you and cause oh-so-painful hurting.
Here in the land down-under we are required to show ID to board a plane. The problem is with the electronic ticketing. You buy your ticket online and you can't pick it up until you arrive at the airport.
Of course, they do it here under the guise of making sure that they don't give my expensive boarding pass to someone who is not me and didn't pay for it. I'm sure they have other reasons as well but they certainly keep them under wraps...
Game review scores don't matter. I really think they are usually written by idiots who focus more on graphics and special effects than actual gameplay.
Read the reviews of the game but in the end don't read the scores they are given, because if the game doesn't require a computer faster than has ever been built to render it will not display well.
This post is a gift to Slashdot. I hereby own and retain all copyright on it. I have exclusive rights to authorise copies and derivative works. I hereby revoke all rights.
Slasdot may only use and retain the original copy of this post. Tremble at my wrath if you make a backup of it!!!
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Bah high horse? Sorry, US beer (particularly Bud and Miller) is crap compared to practically everything else. The only examples of beers around the same standard I can think of are Fosters and VB.
There are plenty of American (not from the US) beers. Please be careful in your terminology. Some of the South American and beers are great - I tried some years ago.
Your comment shows you to be very American. I know plenty of Europeans who wouldn't dare touch US beer on account of it's overpriced muddy water.
their sales would plummet in the world, especially in europe.
Why would Europeans drink Bud? Got to be the worst beer in the world - something like sex in a canoe. The only people in Europe that would regularly consume Bud would be USians visiting there - same as here in Aust where bugger-all people drink it because the local beers are so much better.
Europe has hundreds of better (and funnily enough, cheaper) beers to choose from and any of them is better than the overpriced Bud.
I can't see Bud sales in Europe dropping except from the USians that visit europe and don't drink it because it's got GM bits in it.
Because the sort of people who are likely to get shafted by bigpong (telstra) are the orts of people who should generally be beaten into a coma with their computers... "login? that's to hard", "firewall, that just pops up lots of warnings and i click allow for them all blindly",etc.
The users from sector L that are on Bigpong have heaps of problems. I regularly remove spyware/viri/trojans from these idiot's machines, and I see a 300-400 meg in a month of scans from machines that are r00ted... data that costs me $$$. I say it's news because it might make some of them learn how to keep their machines secure lest they be cut off.
That's not quite the answer. Loading up the CPU to 100% won't guarantee it gets as hot as you would like it too. You need to run CPU instructions that use the most power (floating point, SIMD type instructions, preferably.
Try seti@home or something similar. That would do much more than just a tight - relatively efficient loop.
A
what's fair price on a working c64 with a tuned 1541?
Well, to the sorts of people that buy them, quite a lot. The shop can ask practically anything up to $100(AU) and most likely still sell the thing. Over the $100 mark it just starts getting stupid, even though there are people that pay more - look on Ebay for C64 packs some time.
As I said, they know that collectors find these things valuable, and ask a lot more than is reasonable given the state of most of the vintage hardware I've looked at...
I used to shop at Tr(C)ash Converters for stuff. It is amazing how often you'd find old units there that people just didn't want anymore. My mate got a Vectrex (yes a vectrex) and a pile of stuff for it for $40 a few years back.
I grabbed a pile of Atari 2600 games, some with boxes and original manuals for abour $2-3 each.
The newer, common stuff (mostly SNES and N64) are there, but they're still way over prices ($20 for a copy of Mario Bros on SNES... bugger that.
Occasionally that have a C64 or an Amiga come by, usually with a stack of pirated disks in a box for a good price. Shops generally know the value of those to collectors though.
If you're after not-quite "popular" stuff (Vic20, Atari PCs, Megadrive, old PC games etc) then go to a Trash Converters or equivalent store. If you want more "popular" stuff then you're going to need to shop around to get it in good condition and affordable. I put popular in quotes meaning stuff that everyone knows like the Amiga500, C64, Atari2600, Nintendo, etc, over the stuff that less people are aware of like Dreamcast, Vectrex, etc.
If you want really rare stuff, you have to shop everywhere. I have only seen one Dreamcast, also at Trashies, but I have never seen any DC games anywhere but on Ebay.
If you don't like living in the United STATES then LEAVE
If you don't like living in the United States you still need to pay their taxes when you have left! Poopy kook.
I say - I think I might change my Ph.D topic to study that chemmical. Write it in your thesis a few times and there is a two-volume manuscript that is full mostly of a few instances of one chemical name. I bet that's why the name is so long... whoever discovered it decided that he needed a space filler for his thesis...
It worked here by enabling that, allowing port xdmcp (can't remember the number) through the firewall and then adding kdm to hosts.allow to let anything on my local network connect to my machine.
I don't know how it works with VNC, because I have been using a real X server on the remote end...
KDM responds beautifully to XDMCP requests. I use it here. I can't remember the line I changed but it was only one line to change in the config file.
The kdmconfig tool also lets you enable XDMCP. Remember to allow XDMCP into your firewall from trusted machines as well; don't want to block it.
You probably want hosts.allow as well to make kdm accept connections from hosts - but I don't know... I never had to do that.
Yes!!!
/dev/dsp compatibility - so practically everything would work. Arts requires support from your audio software (Which most of the more popular packages do provide).
KDE's ARTS has network transparency built into it, and because of the way it uses named pipes in each user's home dir it can work with remote sound hardware. I have never had any success getting it to work reliably but I have heard others have while I was Googling for an answer.
There is also NAS that has Windows compatibility but is (AFIK) more difficult to configure and use on a per-user/per-login basis. I'm sure it's possible to do, again I gave up and went for ARTS, which sort of does work. NAS is a bit more generic and had
No fair, he compressed my lunch to a singularity.
You could go one further than BlueSocket (Which requires client-side software installs and the OP didn't want to do that). I think BlueSocket is poo. They use it at my uni as well. IT farked up my Windows install and didn't work real well (read: at all) with Linux.
Just set up a PPTP server (VPN) and have username/passwords randomly added to the chap-secrets list with a timestamp in a comment for each one. Just configure a cron job every 10 minutes or so to remove old timestamped entries and kick off the usernames that it removed. Not exactly trivial, but it would work.
Force all users to log onto the VPN using your firewall (ie they get an IP through DHCP then can't see anything except the PPTP port on the gateway) and bam. You need-not enable VPN encryption if you're worried about performance with a lot of clients. Just make sure you clearly state that data transmitted over wireless is easily accessible by others and security is their responsibility... yadda yadda yadda.
THe advantage of PPTP is that it's already in Windows (and AFIK, Mac) so most of your userbase would be covered with minimal configuration. Linux/BSD has support but usually you need to install extra software. All you need to do is show them how to add a VPN connection to Windows...
I run that way and have an open AP at my place. Friends can come by even when I'm not home and log onto my VPN and access my (soon to be upgraded to 12MBPS) Internet connection by sitting on the front lawn. Of course they have to ask for access and they're given a quota on account of I have a download quota... but it seems to work OK.
Just go back in time by about 20,000 years. Invent everything. Bam - prior art. Now the whole stupid patent system is invalid.
It's a dynamic range control on mine (and actually called that, except in the advertising) - just flattens out the levels so you can hear people talking at a reasonable volume and when explosions and other loud parts of movies happen they are dropped back to "people talking" level so they don't make a racket. It's described in the book for my receiver.
I guess it probably depends on the receiver as well.
All these technofangle solutions so far - isn't it easier to get a CD player with a dynamic range compressor? I have one in my portable. It works a treat. My expensive HIFI receiver has a dynamic range mode as well - max, normal, low. That works quite well but it's very noticible when it starts playing with the level. They advertise it as "night mode" in a lot of cases.
.wav files and burn them back to CD. Bam - compressed (dynamic range) audio.
You used to be able to buy little analog boxes that you plugged between the output of the player and your preferred electro-mechanical acoustic actuator to achieve the same task. I don't know if you still can.
You could digitise all your CDs, pass them through CoolEdit (or Audacity, or other audio software) and use their dynamic range compression. CoolEdit had a graphical tool last time I used it - you could manually define the compression curves to suit your taste. Just save the
I wish I had modpoints - that is something that effects me, where I live (blasted local council) but that I didn't even think of. Very insightful.
The IRS (or tax man for those who live in the real world and not the US) is probably the place to ask.
I'd just go and pay a good accountant for an hour of their time and get them to help you out. They know what is and what isn't deductable as business-related expenses and can help with deciding on what to charge the company for the use of space within your home for their gain.
There are very location specific taxation rules about how much space and what level of working from home you must do for it to be considered a legitimite business related expense. You'd have to include details for all that stuff.
Budget for a new PC - something reasonably modern. Budget for a broadband internet connection - you'll need a decent bandwidth back to the office to be truly productive these days; even M$ Word files crank in at over a meg for simple documents.
Don't forget to budget for high quality office furniture if you need it - a good, large desk and a VERY high quality and comfortable chair. You'll want a filing cabinet, stationary - some notebooks, pens, blank CDs, post-it notes, etc.
Do you need a printer, scanner, photocopier, fax machine, extra phone line, mobile telephone, etc to do your job. Price them and include them if you do.
Remember that all the computer equipment and lighting will use power. Work out roughly how much power (my power bill very literally doubles if I run my machine 24x7.
There are lots of things - it comes down to what equipment you realy need to successfully perform your job. If they want a budget to set you up at home, then give them a detailed breakdown of costs involved. They'll tell you if it' too fat and you can trim it until they're happy with it.
Wasn't it Thomas Edison who tried to prove that Tesla's 3 phase AC power distribution was dangerous by electrocuting frogs with it and showing how they thrash about vioilently before they died?
*tongue firmly in cheek*
Perhaps DC power distribution is the best after all.
That said, you could easily build a device to power all those said gizmos. You'd really need a quite large multi-tap transformer with appropriate ratings, and a set of voltage regulators for the various voltages... 5, 6, 9, 12, 13.8, possibly a couple of adjustable ones for those pesky items that insist on odd voltages.
I had a similar (homebuilt) device with 6 outputs, all individually regulated.
This is a good excuse for a PIC-type project to set the ouput for each port... It could adjust the regulator to get the right voltage and also toggle relays for each port to get the right transformer tap (so as to avoid dissipating too much energy in the little regulators) for any given voltage.
Don't forget that their idea of being "attacked" included regular-old port scans and pings. Looks like they they just plum configured the network badly...
Or it means that RH9 wasn't logging portscans and pings... which, AFIK, it didn't do with any of the default firewalls. It is only newer distros that log potentially malicious traffic.
I have a Leatherman PST-something. It has locking tools. It takes a bit to snap them out of the lock and close them.
The body folds open and you select the tool of choice. For most of the tools you can close it back up with the tool extended so they don't snap shut on you and cause oh-so-painful hurting.
Here in the land down-under we are required to show ID to board a plane. The problem is with the electronic ticketing. You buy your ticket online and you can't pick it up until you arrive at the airport.
Of course, they do it here under the guise of making sure that they don't give my expensive boarding pass to someone who is not me and didn't pay for it. I'm sure they have other reasons as well but they certainly keep them under wraps...
*grubmels* "meant to say if a game doesn't require a a computer faster than has ever been build it will not score well"..
Moral to this story: don't post from work!!!
Game review scores don't matter. I really think they are usually written by idiots who focus more on graphics and special effects than actual gameplay.
Read the reviews of the game but in the end don't read the scores they are given, because if the game doesn't require a computer faster than has ever been built to render it will not display well.
This post is a gift to Slashdot. I hereby own and retain all copyright on it. I have exclusive rights to authorise copies and derivative works. I hereby revoke all rights.
Slasdot may only use and retain the original copy of this post. Tremble at my wrath if you make a backup of it!!!