Of course, it needs to be Open source, that's the catch.
Does it really?
Yeah, to get included, probably*. But if I was going to release Photoshop for Linux, damned if I would release the source. (See also proprietary nature of CMYK standard noted above.) There are applications that make sense to market and sell closed source - usually ones built around selling shrinkwrapped boxes. The OP is just asking for a dirt simple devkit that lets him squeeze out linux binaries that can be installed without editing sources.list. You know, like that double-clicky, drag-n-droppy thing that Apple does.
*for reals? Is my understanding of how distros and synaptic/etc work flawed? Feel free to correct me.
The mac pricing is pretty simple: you pay a small to mid size premium over the value of the hardware as individual parts. The tradeoff buys you quality control of the individual components, some thoughtfulness in case/motherboard design for heat dissapation/physical durability, more accurate matching of PSU to load, and better than average windows drivers. This assumes that you are comparing mac hardware to equivalent pc hardware, and intend on running bootcamp, or using bootcamp to get the drivers needed to run xp efficiently.
The size of the premium shifts quite a bit over time, and is difficult to estimate correctly. For example, at the end of a model update cycle, you may have to buy a box with an older video card, but the video card may perform more reliably compared to its cheaper OEM counterpart. Hard to weigh that, given that the performance difference between an older video card (that is still in production) and the latest cutting edge card usually isn't that dramatic. (Tends to be kinda binary, actually. It will/won't run program x, it will/won't draw shiny water, etc,
If you actually like the mac GUI, included apps, etc, the price premium is likely to be worth it, arguably that's what Apple is selling. Given the time/money arguement, my gut feeling is that the price premium is worth it, but this is slashdot, so I'm too lazy to check.
Anyway, have a good day, and thanks for posting something smart to slashdot - it does my heart good to see someone write something worth replying to.
First tip would be to check to make sure you've got a good bit of metal underneath your magnetic mount antenna. The roof or trunk act as a radio frequency reflector (ground), effectively doubling the length of your vertical antenna.
Second tip would be to check out the threads and connections to your current antenna, and make sure that they are clean. No loc-tite, no oil, dirt, grease, etc.
Sure, longer is better. But only the right kind of long.
Here's a few things you should know. You can calculate how long an ideal antenna should be really easily:
Length = 468/Freq, which for CB works out to be: length = 468/27.2 = 17 feet, 2-1/2 inches. That makes little difference, because a half-wavelength (half height) vertical antenna works out to have the same characteristics at about 8.8 feet long. Still pretty big, so you can "electrically" shorten it using a coil, where you trade off reception on some bands for others. (5/8's of a full wavelength is a pretty good tradeoff also, for other reasons, and 1/4 wavelength is also good enough for practical use.)
Here's a good general reference from Radio Shack:
http://support.radioshack.com/support_tutorials/co mmunications/67159.htm
Brand makes little difference, despite people's prejudices. Obviously, don't buy generic.
This guy:
http://signalengineering.com/ultimate/mobile_anten nas.html
has the real deal on why certain antennas work the way they do, and what to look for. (Plus some tips on how to make it work right.) He's of the opinon that all coiled antennas work about the same. (There's some difference of opinion there.)
This link is okay, even though its a manufacturer's site. They make things pretty clear. http://www.firestik.com/Tech_Docs.htm
Skip the linear amps. Seriously. If you pipe more power into a bad antenna, you'll be a little louder, sure. But it won't make anyone else louder. It won't improve reception. Only a better antenna will improve reception.
Meanwhile, as you are pumping more power into that bad antenna, you are increasing the range at which you can kinda-sorta be heard. In other words, you are creating interference for some other guy out there. Don't do that either. You don't want to be that guy annoying people in New Jersey when you live in Connecticut.
A good antenna gets you more dB's (more power in/out) for less dollars per dB than you can afford to buy in an amplifier. There's even a bunch of free antenna designs you can build out there on the net. Go look for them, and have some fun playing with radios.
Possible solutions: Easy, focused: Buy a small, but efficient window airconditioner for your bedroom, put it on a digital appliance timer (not a cheap one, not an mechanical one) to come on when you come home so your bedroom is comfortable when you sleep. Reasoning: your bedroom is likely to be upstairs, you only need to get it cold enough to comfortably sleep from 7pm-8am. Ceiling fans are an asset here - cheap, and lower the percieved temperature a few degrees.
More complicated: Get an HVAC contractor out and see if he can put in a bigger/more powerful blower. If you don't have enough air being pushed into your upstairs, you'll have problems. You might want to check to make sure all the vents in the basement are switched to "on". Weird stuff can happen with back pressure if you shut off parts of the house. You may also want to check to see if the stale air return vents are real. (No kidding, the contractors who built my house "forgot" to put ducts behind the return vent.)
Easy, but expensive: Buy a second AC system and split the ductwork 60/40 downstairs/upstairs.
More complex, slightly less expensive: Look into getting awnings. Yeah, they look aweful, and need to be replaced/pulled up/down often, but if you don't have direct sunlight shining into your upstairs rooms every afternoon, it will get a lot less hot.
One way to solve this is to establish if your problem with radiation (direct sunglight/greenhouse effects), conduction (hot attic next to cold room) or convection (blower not workin so good)? If you live in Arizona, chances are lots of it is radiation (its a dry heat...), if Florida, radiation plus conduction (humid air holds heat good).
I've had good luck with the compact fluorecents in ouside (enclosed) fixtures. No heating/cooling cycles on a fragile bit of filiment has meant no bulb replacements in 1.5 years, as opposed to every 3-4 months.
The light quality (color) is kinda iffy, but I'm willing to use them in the garage, basement, and kitchen. Heat dissapation is a bigger issue, the sockets in most of the fixtures in the house are cheap, and can't hold more than a 60w incandecent. This means that I can put the equivalent of 200w in an enclosed fixture in my kitchen, and I can cheat with y-socket adaptors in the basement without worrying about things melting. Definitely cheaper than upgrading sockets, let me tell you.
Granted, I have pretty clean power where I live.
If you like, I'll send you a pile of broken, newish MS keyboards/mice.
Hey, I actually could use those for a project if they are only mechanically busted. How many do you have? (You can email me at my slashdot username at gmail.com)
-r.
First, a question,
You wrote: Because of policy, it's not possible to redirect their network traffic to another box for filtering, but they are NATed.
Policy? As in "active directory/groups policy"? Or "management policy"? Or "the University/Corporate IT department policy"?
Anyway as the above poster has said (among many others), if you have access to the NAT box, do it there, if you don't ask IT to do it there. Any protective software on the boxen themselves can be comprimised by stuff that isn't deterred by audit trails (spyware, worms, virii, etc) so I wouldn't bother.
As an interim solution, buy a pair of d-link 604's (35$ +tax/ea) and put them inline, and set rules on them - don't forget to clone the mac addresses. (Yes, technically a lan isn't a wan, and weird stuff could happen, test it at home first, etc etc.)
Alternatively, if you are worried about idle websurfing and you think directives/audits might be a deterrent, find a pair of older computers* you can put next to the lab computers that you can set for websurfing. If you can't afford another monitor, get a cheap KVM switch.
-r.
*blah blah linux blah blah live-cd blah blah won't run flash blah blah firefox etc etc.
Besides, I would love to be able to control my music, videos and games through one interface so I have one less damn thing to hook up to the montior/stereo. I'm not talking hackability for hax sake, I'm just interested in playing files in open, well documented formats through my stereo without having to mess with yet another set top box or physical interconnect. Lord knows Sony isn't going to let you do that, and it's not like my TV is going to magically grow another video input.
And I agree, hackability certainly doesn't sell consoles. (At least, not so far.) But it doesn't change the fact that I can't put a harddrive in my ps2 and use it as an mp3 jukebox, even though the hardware to do so is sitting right there in my living room mocking me. Curse you o IDE interface! Blast you o molex connector! A pox be on you, o empty hard-drive shaped space collecting dust!
Hyperbole aside, I'd like a litte convergence please.
So if your preferences don't show Scuttle Monkey's reviews, why are you posting in one of his reviews? Did you seek it out? Did the filter not work? I don't get it.
A useful shorthand is that a "Law" is a theory expressed in a useful, compact mathematical formula.*
In other words,
Pascal's Law is a tidy way to talk about pressures in confined fluids, since there is a simple equation you can plug things into: P = F1/A1 = F2/A2.
For a while "Law" was used interchangably with "Proven Theory", especially during the 19th and early 20th century. That definition still lingers in some textbooks.
I'd speculate that not using the term with relativity or quantum physics is probably due to the fact that those theories don't crunch down into nice three variable equations very easily, AND that they aren't commonly used outside those fields, so people don't need a shorthand to refer to them. ("Hey, Ralph, what's the formula for Feynmann's Law?" "Err, ah. Let me look that up.")
I'll go a little further and speculate that the use of the term "Law" is an artifact of usage by mechanical and electrical engineers, and was adopted as a term of convenience by science philosophers. "Principle" seems to have gained some ground over time, e.g. "Pareto Principle", "Peter Principle", etc.
-r
*that is demonstrably true under given, common conditions.
I saw a demo of someone who was using the webcam feed as their desktop. (Complete with a nifty photograph of their desktop blending into the background!) I think it may have been an experimental window interface hacked into OSX? Have you heard of this one, or can you think of some google search terms that might find it? My google-fu is weak today.
A secondary advantage of a mirror, is that when you look into it, you shift the focal length in your eye compared to staring at the monitor, which helps reduce eyestrain.
Altenatively, you could get a cheap webcam to point over your shoulder, and monitor the video in a window. But that seems like overkill. (But this is Slashdot, so who knows?)
I've used nlite. It is free as in beer, and worked well for me.
Three good things the previous poster didn't mention:
1. Nlite is menu driven. You can configure almost every aspect of the install, including which services are set to run manual or automatic. No funny stuff with regedit, no hexediting etc.
2. You can bypass the check for adequate memory/hd space to install xp on systems that shouldn't be able to run it.
3. If you are comfortable editing install exe's (or trust other people's edits) you can slipstream in applications. (Though you'll need to have the cd keys on hand when the system first starts up.)
The reason why kids do this is simple.
The nerves that do "position sensing" in their fingers are the last to develop.* The ones that operate their fingers, the ones that do sense of touch come in first, naturally, so they are left with figuring out feedback from how much pressure they are experiencing at their knuckles, finger joints and fingertips.
Every watch a grade schooler or middle schooler write? See those callouses on their middle fingers? The white knuckles? The crappy handwriting? That's why. (Possibly this is why young teens kick ass at FPS's and other types of twitch gaming - once their bodies finally start obeying them in detail, they get pretty excited about getting good.)
-r.
*there's more technical explanations out there than this, but basically the nervous system develops from the center out to the furthest points, in this case, literally the fingertips and toes.
Makes it easy to move not just/My_Documents/ to another drive/folder, but also/Program_Files/.
You want to move/Program_Files/ to your D: drive (big IDE drive.) Photoshop will thank you btw, it creates its own magic swap file, and prefers it to not be on the same disk as window's swap.*
If you want to trim up windows, investigate nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html). It is a menu-driven program for making windows install cd's, which you can use to tweak almost every parameter, down to which services are disabled/manual when it is installed. It will slipstream in hotfixes, and you can in fact slipstream in applications, should you wish to do so. (The last requires hacking the installers for those apps with a hex editor. Not for the fainthearted.) nLite does NOT remove the requirement for authentication or for product keys, so no free lunch to you warez folk.
-r.
*allegedly making window's swap a constant size also improves performance/prevents fragmentation. To fix it on an existing install, create a new swapfile on D:, remove swap from C:, reboot, defrag C:, create a new swapfile on C:, get rid of swap on D: Given a constant size, it shouldn't spill all over you harddisk. See WindowsXP Annoyances, 3rd ed.
If you are fanatical about performance, move the applications to another HD on a different ide channel (not slave) or onto a scsi or SATA channel that is separate from the OS. If you are really fanatical, put the os and swapfile on a SATA raid 0 configuration, and separte data and programs as suggested. None of these last solutions have been tested by me, your milage may vary.
Re:Spam is dead for me.
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
I have had good luck with this approach, actually. Spam does get through...to my "spam box" in gmail. Marking it with spamassasin before forwarding did seem to help.
-r.
sadly, I had a really intelligent and witty reply to your reply, but I accidentally closed the window after I previewed it instead of submitting it, so it's gone now.
Anyway, you are basically right, and I appreciate your response.
Last time I checked the railroad business is still there. Passenger service? No. Not profitable.* Speedy delivery? Others can do it better.**
But if you need tens, hundreds or thousands of metric tons of stuff delivered to your factory, rail is the answer.
Also note, that they do know they are in the transport business. Google "CSX Intermodal". Guess what the "intermodal" is for. Guess how some of those shipping containers from.jp get to remote places like, I dunno, Las Vegas. (Mind you, they have screwed up the "vision thing" a number of times in the recent past. One of the improvements they've made is going from "leave the railyard when there are enough boxcars to justify the cost" to "leave on time, no matter what". Welcome to the "Just In Time" paradigm.)
Rail isn't particularly short sighted either. Guess who laid down the first network of interconnected nodes passing packets of information via wire? Yeah, those guys.***
-r.
*almost never is. Check out the accounting for public transportation sometimes. Heck, check out how frequently airlines file bankruptcy. You saw levels of churn and mergers like that in the rail business when it was new. It's a "mature industry" now. "Mature" meaning "you won't lose your shirt if you invest in it. Kinda the opposite of Bubble 2.0
Reading some of the responses in the thread, I have to say that a number of people missed the point of what Tycho was saying. Here's the cliffnotes version:
1. It wasn't obvious that Wikipedia was a serious enterprise when he came upon it. (due to content)
2. The Wikipeidans see themselves as being involved in " the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working." This is unlikely to be the case.
3. 'You can fix it yourself' is an inadaquate solution because "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions."
4. The fluid nature of the Wikipedia undermines its usefulness as a reference.
I'll second Wordpress.
1. It's free.
2. It's fast and simple to set up. (You don't have to spend all day tweaking it, unless you want to.)
2. The stuff under the hood is both simple and elegant for nerds like us. (If you know how to write for...while loops, you can customize the behavior of wordpress in excruciationg detail. Note that the html templates use php inline.)
3. The management interface is dead simple for total n00bz - anyone can make a blog out of it, and almost anyone can make it look pretty with different themes (skins).
Con:
It doesn't generate static pages.
But if you are using cheap shared hosting, the account is probably "virtual" anyway, and performance benefits from static-page caching and tweaking aren't an issue. If you are running your own server, there are some cacheing tweaks* you could probably use, but that's beyond the scope of my expertise.
*the most heinous tweak would be crawling your own site and constructing a mirror every time something changed. _That_ is one hell of a kludge.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it really?
Yeah, to get included, probably*. But if I was going to release Photoshop for Linux, damned if I would release the source. (See also proprietary nature of CMYK standard noted above.) There are applications that make sense to market and sell closed source - usually ones built around selling shrinkwrapped boxes. The OP is just asking for a dirt simple devkit that lets him squeeze out linux binaries that can be installed without editing sources.list. You know, like that double-clicky, drag-n-droppy thing that Apple does.
*for reals? Is my understanding of how distros and synaptic/etc work flawed? Feel free to correct me.
The mac pricing is pretty simple: you pay a small to mid size premium over the value of the hardware as individual parts. The tradeoff buys you quality control of the individual components, some thoughtfulness in case/motherboard design for heat dissapation/physical durability, more accurate matching of PSU to load, and better than average windows drivers. This assumes that you are comparing mac hardware to equivalent pc hardware, and intend on running bootcamp, or using bootcamp to get the drivers needed to run xp efficiently.
The size of the premium shifts quite a bit over time, and is difficult to estimate correctly. For example, at the end of a model update cycle, you may have to buy a box with an older video card, but the video card may perform more reliably compared to its cheaper OEM counterpart. Hard to weigh that, given that the performance difference between an older video card (that is still in production) and the latest cutting edge card usually isn't that dramatic. (Tends to be kinda binary, actually. It will/won't run program x, it will/won't draw shiny water, etc,
If you actually like the mac GUI, included apps, etc, the price premium is likely to be worth it, arguably that's what Apple is selling. Given the time/money arguement, my gut feeling is that the price premium is worth it, but this is slashdot, so I'm too lazy to check.
Anyway, have a good day, and thanks for posting something smart to slashdot - it does my heart good to see someone write something worth replying to.
Brief summary of mac pricing:
mini, 600, 800 (1.66, 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo)
imac, 1000, 1200, 1500, 2000 (1.83GHz & 17", 2.0 & 17", 2.16 & 20", 2.16 & 24")
Mac Pro, 2500$ (Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" )
First tip would be to check to make sure you've got a good bit of metal underneath your magnetic mount antenna. The roof or trunk act as a radio frequency reflector (ground), effectively doubling the length of your vertical antenna. Second tip would be to check out the threads and connections to your current antenna, and make sure that they are clean. No loc-tite, no oil, dirt, grease, etc. Sure, longer is better. But only the right kind of long. Here's a few things you should know. You can calculate how long an ideal antenna should be really easily: Length = 468/Freq, which for CB works out to be: length = 468/27.2 = 17 feet, 2-1/2 inches. That makes little difference, because a half-wavelength (half height) vertical antenna works out to have the same characteristics at about 8.8 feet long. Still pretty big, so you can "electrically" shorten it using a coil, where you trade off reception on some bands for others. (5/8's of a full wavelength is a pretty good tradeoff also, for other reasons, and 1/4 wavelength is also good enough for practical use.) Here's a good general reference from Radio Shack: http://support.radioshack.com/support_tutorials/co mmunications/67159.htm
Brand makes little difference, despite people's prejudices. Obviously, don't buy generic.
This guy:
http://signalengineering.com/ultimate/mobile_anten nas.html
has the real deal on why certain antennas work the way they do, and what to look for. (Plus some tips on how to make it work right.) He's of the opinon that all coiled antennas work about the same. (There's some difference of opinion there.)
This link is okay, even though its a manufacturer's site. They make things pretty clear. http://www.firestik.com/Tech_Docs.htm
Skip the linear amps. Seriously.
If you pipe more power into a bad antenna, you'll be a little louder, sure. But it won't make anyone else louder. It won't improve reception. Only a better antenna will improve reception.
Meanwhile, as you are pumping more power into that bad antenna, you are increasing the range at which you can kinda-sorta be heard. In other words, you are creating interference for some other guy out there. Don't do that either. You don't want to be that guy annoying people in New Jersey when you live in Connecticut.
A good antenna gets you more dB's (more power in/out) for less dollars per dB than you can afford to buy in an amplifier. There's even a bunch of free antenna designs you can build out there on the net. Go look for them, and have some fun playing with radios.
Possible solutions:
Easy, focused:
Buy a small, but efficient window airconditioner for your bedroom, put it on a digital appliance timer (not a cheap one, not an mechanical one) to come on when you come home so your bedroom is comfortable when you sleep. Reasoning: your bedroom is likely to be upstairs, you only need to get it cold enough to comfortably sleep from 7pm-8am. Ceiling fans are an asset here - cheap, and lower the percieved temperature a few degrees.
More complicated:
Get an HVAC contractor out and see if he can put in a bigger/more powerful blower. If you don't have enough air being pushed into your upstairs, you'll have problems. You might want to check to make sure all the vents in the basement are switched to "on". Weird stuff can happen with back pressure if you shut off parts of the house. You may also want to check to see if the stale air return vents are real. (No kidding, the contractors who built my house "forgot" to put ducts behind the return vent.)
Easy, but expensive:
Buy a second AC system and split the ductwork 60/40 downstairs/upstairs.
More complex, slightly less expensive:
Look into getting awnings. Yeah, they look aweful, and need to be replaced/pulled up/down often, but if you don't have direct sunlight shining into your upstairs rooms every afternoon, it will get a lot less hot.
One way to solve this is to establish if your problem with radiation (direct sunglight/greenhouse effects), conduction (hot attic next to cold room) or convection (blower not workin so good)? If you live in Arizona, chances are lots of it is radiation (its a dry heat...), if Florida, radiation plus conduction (humid air holds heat good).
I've had good luck with the compact fluorecents in ouside (enclosed) fixtures. No heating/cooling cycles on a fragile bit of filiment has meant no bulb replacements in 1.5 years, as opposed to every 3-4 months. The light quality (color) is kinda iffy, but I'm willing to use them in the garage, basement, and kitchen. Heat dissapation is a bigger issue, the sockets in most of the fixtures in the house are cheap, and can't hold more than a 60w incandecent. This means that I can put the equivalent of 200w in an enclosed fixture in my kitchen, and I can cheat with y-socket adaptors in the basement without worrying about things melting. Definitely cheaper than upgrading sockets, let me tell you. Granted, I have pretty clean power where I live.
AC is right, grandparent comment is really rather good. Er, I mean, nifticated.
If you like, I'll send you a pile of broken, newish MS keyboards/mice.
Hey, I actually could use those for a project if they are only mechanically busted. How many do you have? (You can email me at my slashdot username at gmail.com)
-r.
You wrote:
Because of policy, it's not possible to redirect their network traffic to another box for filtering, but they are NATed.
Policy? As in "active directory/groups policy"? Or "management policy"? Or "the University/Corporate IT department policy"?
Anyway as the above poster has said (among many others), if you have access to the NAT box, do it there, if you don't ask IT to do it there. Any protective software on the boxen themselves can be comprimised by stuff that isn't deterred by audit trails (spyware, worms, virii, etc) so I wouldn't bother.
As an interim solution, buy a pair of d-link 604's (35$ +tax/ea) and put them inline, and set rules on them - don't forget to clone the mac addresses. (Yes, technically a lan isn't a wan, and weird stuff could happen, test it at home first, etc etc.)
Alternatively, if you are worried about idle websurfing and you think directives/audits might be a deterrent, find a pair of older computers* you can put next to the lab computers that you can set for websurfing. If you can't afford another monitor, get a cheap KVM switch.
-r. *blah blah linux blah blah live-cd blah blah won't run flash blah blah firefox etc etc.
Besides, I would love to be able to control my music, videos and games through one interface so I have one less damn thing to hook up to the montior/stereo. I'm not talking hackability for hax sake, I'm just interested in playing files in open, well documented formats through my stereo without having to mess with yet another set top box or physical interconnect. Lord knows Sony isn't going to let you do that, and it's not like my TV is going to magically grow another video input.
And I agree, hackability certainly doesn't sell consoles. (At least, not so far.) But it doesn't change the fact that I can't put a harddrive in my ps2 and use it as an mp3 jukebox, even though the hardware to do so is sitting right there in my living room mocking me. Curse you o IDE interface! Blast you o molex connector! A pox be on you, o empty hard-drive shaped space collecting dust!
Hyperbole aside, I'd like a litte convergence please.
No, the phrase you are looking for is:
If they can attach a DVD player we can attach a hard drive.
So if your preferences don't show Scuttle Monkey's reviews, why are you posting in one of his reviews? Did you seek it out? Did the filter not work? I don't get it.
A useful shorthand is that a "Law" is a theory expressed in a useful, compact mathematical formula.*
In other words,
Pascal's Law is a tidy way to talk about pressures in confined fluids, since there is a simple equation you can plug things into:
P = F1/A1 = F2/A2.
For a while "Law" was used interchangably with "Proven Theory", especially during the 19th and early 20th century. That definition still lingers in some textbooks.
I'd speculate that not using the term with relativity or quantum physics is probably due to the fact that those theories don't crunch down into nice three variable equations very easily, AND that they aren't commonly used outside those fields, so people don't need a shorthand to refer to them. ("Hey, Ralph, what's the formula for Feynmann's Law?" "Err, ah. Let me look that up.")
I'll go a little further and speculate that the use of the term "Law" is an artifact of usage by mechanical and electrical engineers, and was adopted as a term of convenience by science philosophers. "Principle" seems to have gained some ground over time, e.g. "Pareto Principle", "Peter Principle", etc.
-r
*that is demonstrably true under given, common conditions.
I saw a demo of someone who was using the webcam feed as their desktop. (Complete with a nifty photograph of their desktop blending into the background!) I think it may have been an experimental window interface hacked into OSX? Have you heard of this one, or can you think of some google search terms that might find it? My google-fu is weak today.
-r.
A secondary advantage of a mirror, is that when you look into it, you shift the focal length in your eye compared to staring at the monitor, which helps reduce eyestrain.
Altenatively, you could get a cheap webcam to point over your shoulder, and monitor the video in a window. But that seems like overkill. (But this is Slashdot, so who knows?)
I've used nlite. It is free as in beer, and worked well for me.
.NET ver 2.
Three good things the previous poster didn't mention:
1. Nlite is menu driven. You can configure almost every aspect of the install, including which services are set to run manual or automatic. No funny stuff with regedit, no hexediting etc.
2. You can bypass the check for adequate memory/hd space to install xp on systems that shouldn't be able to run it.
3. If you are comfortable editing install exe's (or trust other people's edits) you can slipstream in applications. (Though you'll need to have the cd keys on hand when the system first starts up.)
Con:
Nlite uses
The reason why kids do this is simple.
The nerves that do "position sensing" in their fingers are the last to develop.* The ones that operate their fingers, the ones that do sense of touch come in first, naturally, so they are left with figuring out feedback from how much pressure they are experiencing at their knuckles, finger joints and fingertips.
Every watch a grade schooler or middle schooler write? See those callouses on their middle fingers? The white knuckles? The crappy handwriting? That's why. (Possibly this is why young teens kick ass at FPS's and other types of twitch gaming - once their bodies finally start obeying them in detail, they get pretty excited about getting good.)
-r.
*there's more technical explanations out there than this, but basically the nervous system develops from the center out to the furthest points, in this case, literally the fingertips and toes.
Try the Windows Powertoys TweakUI.
/My_Documents/ to another drive/folder, but also /Program_Files/.
/Program_Files/ to your D: drive (big IDE drive.) Photoshop will thank you btw, it creates its own magic swap file, and prefers it to not be on the same disk as window's swap.*
Makes it easy to move not just
You want to move
If you want to trim up windows, investigate nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html). It is a menu-driven program for making windows install cd's, which you can use to tweak almost every parameter, down to which services are disabled/manual when it is installed. It will slipstream in hotfixes, and you can in fact slipstream in applications, should you wish to do so. (The last requires hacking the installers for those apps with a hex editor. Not for the fainthearted.) nLite does NOT remove the requirement for authentication or for product keys, so no free lunch to you warez folk.
-r.
*allegedly making window's swap a constant size also improves performance/prevents fragmentation. To fix it on an existing install, create a new swapfile on D:, remove swap from C:, reboot, defrag C:, create a new swapfile on C:, get rid of swap on D: Given a constant size, it shouldn't spill all over you harddisk. See WindowsXP Annoyances, 3rd ed.
If you are fanatical about performance, move the applications to another HD on a different ide channel (not slave) or onto a scsi or SATA channel that is separate from the OS. If you are really fanatical, put the os and swapfile on a SATA raid 0 configuration, and separte data and programs as suggested. None of these last solutions have been tested by me, your milage may vary.
I have had good luck with this approach, actually. Spam does get through...to my "spam box" in gmail. Marking it with spamassasin before forwarding did seem to help. -r.
sadly, I had a really intelligent and witty reply to your reply, but I accidentally closed the window after I previewed it instead of submitting it, so it's gone now.
Anyway, you are basically right, and I appreciate your response.
-r.
Last time I checked the railroad business is still there. Passenger service? No. Not profitable.* Speedy delivery? Others can do it better.**
.jp get to remote places like, I dunno, Las Vegas. (Mind you, they have screwed up the "vision thing" a number of times in the recent past. One of the improvements they've made is going from "leave the railyard when there are enough boxcars to justify the cost" to "leave on time, no matter what". Welcome to the "Just In Time" paradigm.)
1 94285-4968852?v=glance&n=283155
Not an affiliate link.
But if you need tens, hundreds or thousands of metric tons of stuff delivered to your factory, rail is the answer.
Also note, that they do know they are in the transport business. Google "CSX Intermodal". Guess what the "intermodal" is for. Guess how some of those shipping containers from
Rail isn't particularly short sighted either. Guess who laid down the first network of interconnected nodes passing packets of information via wire? Yeah, those guys.***
-r.
*almost never is. Check out the accounting for public transportation sometimes. Heck, check out how frequently airlines file bankruptcy. You saw levels of churn and mergers like that in the rail business when it was new. It's a "mature industry" now. "Mature" meaning "you won't lose your shirt if you invest in it. Kinda the opposite of Bubble 2.0
**DHL, FedEx, et. al.
***slightly exaggerated. See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0425171698/002-9
Reading some of the responses in the thread, I have to say that a number of people missed the point of what Tycho was saying. Here's the cliffnotes version:
1. It wasn't obvious that Wikipedia was a serious enterprise when he came upon it. (due to content)
2. The Wikipeidans see themselves as being involved in " the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working." This is unlikely to be the case.
3. 'You can fix it yourself' is an inadaquate solution because "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions."
4. The fluid nature of the Wikipedia undermines its usefulness as a reference.
that is all.
Excellent! Thank you! Have you used it? How heavy a bandwith load does it take to notice a difference?
I'll second Wordpress.
1. It's free.
2. It's fast and simple to set up. (You don't have to spend all day tweaking it, unless you want to.)
2. The stuff under the hood is both simple and elegant for nerds like us. (If you know how to write for...while loops, you can customize the behavior of wordpress in excruciationg detail. Note that the html templates use php inline.)
3. The management interface is dead simple for total n00bz - anyone can make a blog out of it, and almost anyone can make it look pretty with different themes (skins).
Con:
It doesn't generate static pages.
But if you are using cheap shared hosting, the account is probably "virtual" anyway, and performance benefits from static-page caching and tweaking aren't an issue. If you are running your own server, there are some cacheing tweaks* you could probably use, but that's beyond the scope of my expertise.
*the most heinous tweak would be crawling your own site and constructing a mirror every time something changed. _That_ is one hell of a kludge.
Holy buckets! This is the most insightful comment I've seen on slashdot...ever. Is the world ending? Is this really Slashdot?!?
... screwballicus
...
Wait... the poster's name is
Yup, it's slashdot.