If the police have to alter my property in order to enter it then I am entitled to compensation. A warrant generally says they are allowed to enter the property, but if they have to smash down the door they'd better have a damned good reason (ie, not just suspect that I might have downloaded a couple of copyrighted movies one time).
The same goes with my computer though. By installing software on it they are performing a modification to my property. The very act of modifying my property can be used against them as far as the fact that if they can add a spybot to my computer they have the ability to plant evidence on my computer fraudulently. They have the ability to trash my system too.
As I said, if they change my property (kick in the door) by entering on suspicion of something that I didn't do then they have broken the law.
This is one of those knee-jerk reactions of the gumbiment in response to the "terrorist" threat. There is no major threat.
Probably already been said, but just because they copyright their crap doesn't mean you _have_ to have it installed. It's like the RIAA coming up to me and FORCING me to take a pile of their shit CDs and listen to them. It's my computer and I'm allowed to uninstall any damn software that's on it; no matter who installed it.
Circumventing the protection involved breaking encryption, illegal copying and breaking measures designed to stop you using the software without paying it. It can not possibly extent to removing a piece of software that has been installed on your computer (possibly illegally).
How does that stand legally? Just because they can get a warrant to install this software doesn't make it legal? They are by definition changing my property by installing it. It is a very rare case when it is legal for the police to forcefully enter a property. The same should go for computers.
What if they circumvent my firewall and special protection measures? Are they then breaking the law?
Them forcefully installing software may overwrite a file that I accidently just deleted and make it impossible to recover. If they do it while I have a disk error they could possibly trash even more.
What if their software isn't compatible with my system (for whatever reason) and it crashes (or worse causes it to trash all my data)?
If I lose valuable data as a result of their actions then am I entitled to compensation for the loss of $10bn worth of income because my new blockbuster invention that was going to change the world went missing when they broke my computer?
This isn't as simple as simply coming into your house and snooping about. It has more implications because computers are complex, tempremental things. If they seized the computer, did a bitwise copy of the hard disk and returned it then I can't claim they hosed my data.
Remind me to sue the govt if they ever install this in my computer. I'm sure I had some files that went missing when they did it;)
This is fucked. Fucked I tell you. Warrant or no there is too much they can do wrong and easily get away with. Let them snoop, but let them do it non-invasively. If they want the information let them knock on my door and bloody well sieze it like they used to.
I am a Mandrake user, and I paid the momeny to get an early copy of 10.1, based on their fabled support of wireless and notebooks.
I was sorely disappointed when I installed it and their configuration tools did not understand WPA out of the box, even though it is practically everywhere now. I had to go and get wpa_supplicant (which I couldn't find on the install CDs) and install that. I still haven't actually got WPA stable yet.
I also had a killer of a time with my synaptics pad when I plugged in a USB mouse and my external USB keyboard wouldn't work without some tweaking - it kept using the internal keyboard.
The only other problem I had was it bollocksed up the URPMI config for my CDs. That may have been caused by trying to add my locally mirrored updates as a URPMI source though. A couple of the discs were referenced incorrectly and I couldn't install files from them. It seems to work after tweaking the config file.
I must say that 10.1 is certainly impressive though, if you discount the few obvious flaws above. I have the PowerPack release, and "urpmi package" usually finds the package in my local copy of the CDs. The default install is simple enough for newbies to pick up and run with. There are enough tools and functionalty provided that advanced users (like me) can feel mostly confortable as well.
It was brand new when his 2 year old thought it would be a good idea to play hide and seek with his USB mouse; while it was still plugged into the computer. She went screaming across the room and tore the port out of the back of the computer when she ran out of cable! How the whole mess didn't come down off the desk nobody knows.
Good thing it had a few more USB ports and the shock didn't cause any other damage (at least none that's manifested itself).
The wireless mouse and keyboard suggestion does make some sort of sense in this case. It's probably cheaper to replace a mouse than it is to repair your computer.
I do, however, agree with all the posts earlier; just theach your kid that the computer is off-limits. Simple explanations are often very helpful (even to 1-year-olds) at communicating why it is a bad idea to play with daddy's computer.
I'm not looking forward to when my little tacker is running about... I'll have to secure the cable jungle then.
Who said anything about high power? They only need a low power transmitter and a fairly basic receiver that understands how to activate the wireless transponder in the passport.
That said, there was talk of the US allowing a thin metal lining in the passport cover that only allows reading the passport when the cover is open; effectively voiding the requirement for wireless, because the person processing you now has to receive and open your passport to process it! Bah!
Given that Australia (well the government, not the general populous) is so keen to become yet another US state, I would expect the thin metal lining idea to flow down under as well.
There are some very objective fields in the GBOWR - they reward absent-minded and even plain stupid achievements (the most people in a phone booth, for example; even though there is no world standard size person or phone booth) but will not reward intelligence.
There is no real way to say, however, whether this guy cheated or not. It wouldn't be hard to pre-arrange the number with whomever was generating the 100 digit number in the first place, go and calculate the 13th root and memorise it before you are "told" the number and asked to calculate the 13th root. I am not implying that he did cheat, however, just that it is possible if you _really_ wanted to.
It is, on the other hand, hard to cheat when you're shoving pencils in your nose or people in a phone box. They're either in there or they're not.
Which is a right bugger... And here I was hoping to see something. Good thing a particularly nasty coding problem kept me locked indoors and not outside wasting my time.
Well, for what it's worth, the one time I might actually be able to see an aurora, I'm happily located in the said Southern Australian region;)
I'll tell you all how great it was tomorrow...
But that said, this is the kind of news that makes reading slashdot worthwhile. I wouldn't have even known about this otherwise, until it was all over and the pictures were on the 5pm news (which I always miss), or my HF radio stopped working.
Mandrake does seem painfully slow, even though they claim to have speed optimisations. I gather from what I have seen that they use the --march=i586 option on the X86 builds, whereas other distros don't.
MDK puts a lot of guff in to try and keep your machine running smoothly. Msec is the one thing that springs immediately to mind. It runs once a minute and does a lot of security related checks (including firewalling newly installed network cards if you're in the higher security modes). It can become annoying.
I have contemplated 10.1 for its (claimed) Centrino support on my laptop. If it can support the wireless, the bluetooth and the Lan in the lappy I might even have an excuse to draw the blinds on Windows.
I concede on one point - the newbie would have to know enough to become root to install the "patch".
Some know how, some don't.
I remember in my young days (by young, I came in at Red Hat 5). I knew how to become root by the end of the first day, but didn't know anything about this "monster" called RPM. If someone had offered me a "patch" in the form of a TGZ file along with instructions on how to "install" it, I probably would have done it.
It takes a while to learn about RPMs and package signing and things like that, and most newbies learn how to become root LONG before they learn any of those things... Most new Linux users would see that site (fedora-redhat...) as legitimate and follow blindly.
They don't have to fool everyone, just a bunch of select, clueless newbies. There were very complete instructions to build the "patch".
Us educated users know you don't patch like that (along with all the other warning signs), and would think twice about it.
Clueless newbies would just follow the link, get the file and enter the commands verbatim, thus getting "patched". There are a lot of people who don't stop to think at all.
Has anyone looked in the source to see what it actually does?
This sounds similar to how Gmail stores mail with tags instead of folders. I wonder how long until Google cotton on and offer a service that's compatible with the googlebar extensions available...
I had Elite for the Amiga and that was about it. The 3D graphics were better than the C64 because they were "shaded" and filled instead of wireframe. I tried the C64 version a bit after I started the Amiga version... I didn't even know it existed until I saw the Amiga version... It was just as great - specially for such a low power machine to do such cool 3d.
It was just a cool game that never seems to wear out. It was simple, had great graphics for its time and required a little bit of skill to get past the first hyperspace jump.
Elite is still one of my fav games, and I keep it inside UAE on my laptop so I can play it anywhere. Admittedly it's a bit slow in the emulator 'cos the laptop isn't the fastest machine, but it's great none-the-less.
I can't wait to see the latest and greatest sequel to it. I don't think they'll ever be able to hold up to the quality and gameplay of the original though. As with many games, much of the design effort now goes into the graphics, sound and cut scene videos. Nowhere near as much goes into the gameplay as it used to, or (IMHO) needs to.
All that said, I'm still waiting for it; I really hope it can be as great as the original.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 1
What are these features you speak of?
I count the render text model, the online spell checker, the online gramatical checker, the paperclip daemon, the "you appear to be writing a letter even though it's 400 pages long and looks like a thesis" daemon, the thing to decide whether you're making a numbered list and automatically turn on numbered/list mode, etc.
Most of those features work incorrectly most of the time. The auto-number mode is awful and the grammar checker has less gramatical sense than my 4 month old son!
I turn all of the bloat off except for the online spell checker - and even then I turn that off most of the time becuase in my profession I use a lot of words that are not in the common english dictionaries (Gaussian being one). The custom dictionary is machine local, so if I move machine I have to retrain the dictionary on every document that I use.
You have to stop and look at what Joe-sixpack does with his word processor; not what us geeks do. Joe six-pack loads it up... and types. Then he clicks on all the fancy formatting buttons that are on the toolbar to make his composition look pretty. He doesn't go into the menus, and he probably runs it in the default dumb menu mode where all the options are hidden anyway.
Sure, he probably loves the online spelling checker and edits his document until the online grammar checker tells him that it's perfect (even though it now reads like it was written by my 4 month old). But he doesn't care that it can be scripted, do mail merges, format your document as a template so you dont have to manually format each block or do the rest of the things that Word is apparantly capable of.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't believe that my example was faulty. In fact, you have just reinforced my argument. Software is now a LOT more bloated.
First, why does your word processor run half-a-dozen processes in the background? How much does it really need to do?
Second, the document model is now overly complex. I can cite some examples where a WordXP document would load one one computer but not another. There is too much machine specific information in the the document these days, including information about the installed printers on every machine the document has been edited on.
Third, this thread wasn't about how much more stable word XP is over word 2 (or the other way about if you live in the real world). It was about how software has become more bloated as computing power has increased.
Word 2 ran just as fast as Word XP. Word 2 had all the features that probably 95% of the population would have ever needed (let-alone used). The software just became more bloated because the hardware could handle the bloat and the only way to sell a new version is add some feature and push the issue.
It is important to keep in mind how much of the bloat that your average user really uses. Much of it is eye candy; 3d rendered buttons, anti-aliassed text, fancy window decorations, annoying paperclips that watch what you do and pop up at most inconvenient times (same sort of thing is in Office, and Open/Star office, alike), graded title bars, drop shadows in menus, etc.
Sure, it all adds up to a prettier desktop, but it doesn't increase the functionality at all, and it slows down the general operation of larger tasks.
I've had enough. I'm off to the pub!
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life"
on
Less Might Be More
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It comes down to software bloat, really.
Joe-sixpack wants the latest and greatest blinding fast computer now. The problem is that with all the increases in speeds and capability in general of computers, software doesn't really run any better than it did 1, 2, 10, etc years ago.
Software expands to fill the available hardware capacity. I still remember running Word 2 on Windows 3.11 on a 386/40 with 8M RAM. It was just as quick for most things as Word XP on Windows XP. Just Word/windowsXP is so much more bloated that it needs more computing power than my old 386 had just to run the OS and draw all the eye candy they've added.
The only place where modern computers excel now is high resolution graphics, video, and high quality audio processing. We can do all these at almost real-time on current commodity hardware. I would never have thought of doing them back in the days of old. But Joe six-pack doesn't _need_ to do these things. He only does them because he can now.
I pine (also my usual mail reader) for the days of slow hardware. The only thing my 386 had to set it apart was a "blazingly fast" Paradise video card with 1MB (yes, one) of memory on it. The only reason I had that was for CAD work. As most people know, CAD work requires a lot of redrawing of a lot of primative elements, regularly. That really was painful on large designs. The Paradise card took care of drawing lines, circles, curves and other simple primatives and all was well.
I still have that old 386. It has finally failed. I tried to get it to power up, but the ISA-bus IDE controller is no longer operational. It may be the 80M IDE disk that has failed. I am not sure, and the availability of suitable replacement parts is very limited these days so I'm giving up on it finally.
What's with all this switch business? I can sell you a few rolls of RG58 and a stack of BNC end and T-pieces.
The configuration is a breeze - you jsut plug it in and it works. Truly plug and play, as opposed to these expensive "switches" that need hours of configuration;)
Slashdot Mirror
Do embedded help options (ls --help) count as reading the instructions?
Are there devices out there which are not operated by a hammer?
There are a few devices that are not operated by hammer. My hammer is actually operated by the liberal application of some device ;)
If the police have to alter my property in order to enter it then I am entitled to compensation. A warrant generally says they are allowed to enter the property, but if they have to smash down the door they'd better have a damned good reason (ie, not just suspect that I might have downloaded a couple of copyrighted movies one time).
The same goes with my computer though. By installing software on it they are performing a modification to my property. The very act of modifying my property can be used against them as far as the fact that if they can add a spybot to my computer they have the ability to plant evidence on my computer fraudulently. They have the ability to trash my system too.
As I said, if they change my property (kick in the door) by entering on suspicion of something that I didn't do then they have broken the law.
This is one of those knee-jerk reactions of the gumbiment in response to the "terrorist" threat. There is no major threat.
Anywho. It still makes me angry.
Probably already been said, but just because they copyright their crap doesn't mean you _have_ to have it installed. It's like the RIAA coming up to me and FORCING me to take a pile of their shit CDs and listen to them. It's my computer and I'm allowed to uninstall any damn software that's on it; no matter who installed it.
;)
Circumventing the protection involved breaking encryption, illegal copying and breaking measures designed to stop you using the software without paying it. It can not possibly extent to removing a piece of software that has been installed on your computer (possibly illegally).
How does that stand legally? Just because they can get a warrant to install this software doesn't make it legal? They are by definition changing my property by installing it. It is a very rare case when it is legal for the police to forcefully enter a property. The same should go for computers.
What if they circumvent my firewall and special protection measures? Are they then breaking the law?
Them forcefully installing software may overwrite a file that I accidently just deleted and make it impossible to recover. If they do it while I have a disk error they could possibly trash even more.
What if their software isn't compatible with my system (for whatever reason) and it crashes (or worse causes it to trash all my data)?
If I lose valuable data as a result of their actions then am I entitled to compensation for the loss of $10bn worth of income because my new blockbuster invention that was going to change the world went missing when they broke my computer?
This isn't as simple as simply coming into your house and snooping about. It has more implications because computers are complex, tempremental things. If they seized the computer, did a bitwise copy of the hard disk and returned it then I can't claim they hosed my data.
Remind me to sue the govt if they ever install this in my computer. I'm sure I had some files that went missing when they did it
This is fucked. Fucked I tell you. Warrant or no there is too much they can do wrong and easily get away with. Let them snoop, but let them do it non-invasively. If they want the information let them knock on my door and bloody well sieze it like they used to.
*grumbles*
s/momeny/money
s/confortable/comfortable
I am a Mandrake user, and I paid the momeny to get an early copy of 10.1, based on their fabled support of wireless and notebooks.
I was sorely disappointed when I installed it and their configuration tools did not understand WPA out of the box, even though it is practically everywhere now. I had to go and get wpa_supplicant (which I couldn't find on the install CDs) and install that. I still haven't actually got WPA stable yet.
I also had a killer of a time with my synaptics pad when I plugged in a USB mouse and my external USB keyboard wouldn't work without some tweaking - it kept using the internal keyboard.
The only other problem I had was it bollocksed up the URPMI config for my CDs. That may have been caused by trying to add my locally mirrored updates as a URPMI source though. A couple of the discs were referenced incorrectly and I couldn't install files from them. It seems to work after tweaking the config file.
I must say that 10.1 is certainly impressive though, if you discount the few obvious flaws above. I have the PowerPack release, and "urpmi package" usually finds the package in my local copy of the CDs. The default install is simple enough for newbies to pick up and run with. There are enough tools and functionalty provided that advanced users (like me) can feel mostly confortable as well.
Also, did they ever fix the problem with Fedora and Windows running on the same drive? Did FC3 correct that?
So it clobbered all your windows installs. Where is the problem?
FC2 to Windows:
"All of your partition are mine!"
I have a friend with a $4000 toshiba laptop.
It was brand new when his 2 year old thought it would be a good idea to play hide and seek with his USB mouse; while it was still plugged into the computer. She went screaming across the room and tore the port out of the back of the computer when she ran out of cable! How the whole mess didn't come down off the desk nobody knows.
Good thing it had a few more USB ports and the shock didn't cause any other damage (at least none that's manifested itself).
The wireless mouse and keyboard suggestion does make some sort of sense in this case. It's probably cheaper to replace a mouse than it is to repair your computer.
I do, however, agree with all the posts earlier; just theach your kid that the computer is off-limits. Simple explanations are often very helpful (even to 1-year-olds) at communicating why it is a bad idea to play with daddy's computer.
I'm not looking forward to when my little tacker is running about... I'll have to secure the cable jungle then.
Who said anything about high power? They only need a low power transmitter and a fairly basic receiver that understands how to activate the wireless transponder in the passport.
That said, there was talk of the US allowing a thin metal lining in the passport cover that only allows reading the passport when the cover is open; effectively voiding the requirement for wireless, because the person processing you now has to receive and open your passport to process it! Bah!
Given that Australia (well the government, not the general populous) is so keen to become yet another US state, I would expect the thin metal lining idea to flow down under as well.
There are some very objective fields in the GBOWR - they reward absent-minded and even plain stupid achievements (the most people in a phone booth, for example; even though there is no world standard size person or phone booth) but will not reward intelligence.
There is no real way to say, however, whether this guy cheated or not. It wouldn't be hard to pre-arrange the number with whomever was generating the 100 digit number in the first place, go and calculate the 13th root and memorise it before you are "told" the number and asked to calculate the 13th root. I am not implying that he did cheat, however, just that it is possible if you _really_ wanted to.
It is, on the other hand, hard to cheat when you're shoving pencils in your nose or people in a phone box. They're either in there or they're not.
Which is a right bugger... And here I was hoping to see something. Good thing a particularly nasty coding problem kept me locked indoors and not outside wasting my time.
Well, for what it's worth, the one time I might actually be able to see an aurora, I'm happily located in the said Southern Australian region ;)
I'll tell you all how great it was tomorrow...
But that said, this is the kind of news that makes reading slashdot worthwhile. I wouldn't have even known about this otherwise, until it was all over and the pictures were on the 5pm news (which I always miss), or my HF radio stopped working.
Yay!!!
Mandrake does seem painfully slow, even though they claim to have speed optimisations. I gather from what I have seen that they use the --march=i586 option on the X86 builds, whereas other distros don't.
MDK puts a lot of guff in to try and keep your machine running smoothly. Msec is the one thing that springs immediately to mind. It runs once a minute and does a lot of security related checks (including firewalling newly installed network cards if you're in the higher security modes). It can become annoying.
I have contemplated 10.1 for its (claimed) Centrino support on my laptop. If it can support the wireless, the bluetooth and the Lan in the lappy I might even have an excuse to draw the blinds on Windows.
I concede on one point - the newbie would have to know enough to become root to install the "patch".
Some know how, some don't.
I remember in my young days (by young, I came in at Red Hat 5). I knew how to become root by the end of the first day, but didn't know anything about this "monster" called RPM. If someone had offered me a "patch" in the form of a TGZ file along with instructions on how to "install" it, I probably would have done it.
It takes a while to learn about RPMs and package signing and things like that, and most newbies learn how to become root LONG before they learn any of those things... Most new Linux users would see that site (fedora-redhat...) as legitimate and follow blindly.
They don't have to fool everyone, just a bunch of select, clueless newbies. There were very complete instructions to build the "patch".
Us educated users know you don't patch like that (along with all the other warning signs), and would think twice about it.
Clueless newbies would just follow the link, get the file and enter the commands verbatim, thus getting "patched". There are a lot of people who don't stop to think at all.
Has anyone looked in the source to see what it actually does?
It's not a thing you build in. You have to offer a service......
But we'll build in a browser, mail client, media player, etc to hold on to our monopoly.
This sounds similar to how Gmail stores mail with tags instead of folders. I wonder how long until Google cotton on and offer a service that's compatible with the googlebar extensions available...
I had Elite for the Amiga and that was about it. The 3D graphics were better than the C64 because they were "shaded" and filled instead of wireframe. I tried the C64 version a bit after I started the Amiga version... I didn't even know it existed until I saw the Amiga version... It was just as great - specially for such a low power machine to do such cool 3d.
It was just a cool game that never seems to wear out. It was simple, had great graphics for its time and required a little bit of skill to get past the first hyperspace jump.
Elite is still one of my fav games, and I keep it inside UAE on my laptop so I can play it anywhere. Admittedly it's a bit slow in the emulator 'cos the laptop isn't the fastest machine, but it's great none-the-less.
I can't wait to see the latest and greatest sequel to it. I don't think they'll ever be able to hold up to the quality and gameplay of the original though. As with many games, much of the design effort now goes into the graphics, sound and cut scene videos. Nowhere near as much goes into the gameplay as it used to, or (IMHO) needs to.
All that said, I'm still waiting for it; I really hope it can be as great as the original.
What are these features you speak of?
I count the render text model, the online spell checker, the online gramatical checker, the paperclip daemon, the "you appear to be writing a letter even though it's 400 pages long and looks like a thesis" daemon, the thing to decide whether you're making a numbered list and automatically turn on numbered/list mode, etc.
Most of those features work incorrectly most of the time. The auto-number mode is awful and the grammar checker has less gramatical sense than my 4 month old son!
I turn all of the bloat off except for the online spell checker - and even then I turn that off most of the time becuase in my profession I use a lot of words that are not in the common english dictionaries (Gaussian being one). The custom dictionary is machine local, so if I move machine I have to retrain the dictionary on every document that I use.
You have to stop and look at what Joe-sixpack does with his word processor; not what us geeks do. Joe six-pack loads it up... and types. Then he clicks on all the fancy formatting buttons that are on the toolbar to make his composition look pretty. He doesn't go into the menus, and he probably runs it in the default dumb menu mode where all the options are hidden anyway.
Sure, he probably loves the online spelling checker and edits his document until the online grammar checker tells him that it's perfect (even though it now reads like it was written by my 4 month old). But he doesn't care that it can be scripted, do mail merges, format your document as a template so you dont have to manually format each block or do the rest of the things that Word is apparantly capable of.
I don't believe that my example was faulty. In fact, you have just reinforced my argument. Software is now a LOT more bloated.
First, why does your word processor run half-a-dozen processes in the background? How much does it really need to do?
Second, the document model is now overly complex. I can cite some examples where a WordXP document would load one one computer but not another. There is too much machine specific information in the the document these days, including information about the installed printers on every machine the document has been edited on.
Third, this thread wasn't about how much more stable word XP is over word 2 (or the other way about if you live in the real world). It was about how software has become more bloated as computing power has increased.
Word 2 ran just as fast as Word XP. Word 2 had all the features that probably 95% of the population would have ever needed (let-alone used). The software just became more bloated because the hardware could handle the bloat and the only way to sell a new version is add some feature and push the issue.
It is important to keep in mind how much of the bloat that your average user really uses. Much of it is eye candy; 3d rendered buttons, anti-aliassed text, fancy window decorations, annoying paperclips that watch what you do and pop up at most inconvenient times (same sort of thing is in Office, and Open/Star office, alike), graded title bars, drop shadows in menus, etc.
Sure, it all adds up to a prettier desktop, but it doesn't increase the functionality at all, and it slows down the general operation of larger tasks.
I've had enough. I'm off to the pub!
It comes down to software bloat, really.
Joe-sixpack wants the latest and greatest blinding fast computer now. The problem is that with all the increases in speeds and capability in general of computers, software doesn't really run any better than it did 1, 2, 10, etc years ago.
Software expands to fill the available hardware capacity. I still remember running Word 2 on Windows 3.11 on a 386/40 with 8M RAM. It was just as quick for most things as Word XP on Windows XP. Just Word/windowsXP is so much more bloated that it needs more computing power than my old 386 had just to run the OS and draw all the eye candy they've added.
The only place where modern computers excel now is high resolution graphics, video, and high quality audio processing. We can do all these at almost real-time on current commodity hardware. I would never have thought of doing them back in the days of old. But Joe six-pack doesn't _need_ to do these things. He only does them because he can now.
I pine (also my usual mail reader) for the days of slow hardware. The only thing my 386 had to set it apart was a "blazingly fast" Paradise video card with 1MB (yes, one) of memory on it. The only reason I had that was for CAD work. As most people know, CAD work requires a lot of redrawing of a lot of primative elements, regularly. That really was painful on large designs. The Paradise card took care of drawing lines, circles, curves and other simple primatives and all was well.
I still have that old 386. It has finally failed. I tried to get it to power up, but the ISA-bus IDE controller is no longer operational. It may be the 80M IDE disk that has failed. I am not sure, and the availability of suitable replacement parts is very limited these days so I'm giving up on it finally.
Somebody made a musical based on that:
http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/musical/
I don't know how well it went though.
So that's where all the bees went!@!@!
What's with all this switch business? I can sell you a few rolls of RG58 and a stack of BNC end and T-pieces.
;)
The configuration is a breeze - you jsut plug it in and it works. Truly plug and play, as opposed to these expensive "switches" that need hours of configuration