I wish you would explain that to the Corps of Engineers! At least, the a$$holes I have to deal with... We use "commercially available" products to install our HVAC systems (they could go down and buy them from most any parts house themselves), but we certainly DO have to comply with Buy American when doing the job. Or so they say, and since they control the purse strings...
This leaves us in a bit of a bind. Most foreign-made items we use DO have an American made option, but it is - horrors! - an INFERIOR option. One we would never use otherwise. Luckily, the more critical components are made by companies that the DOD has on their exceptions list, but it still means we have to deal with the paperwork verifying that.
If it's like DOD / Corps of Engineers contracts, the penalty is you don't get paid. When we do a Corps job, it states in the specifications you must meet the "Buy American" act. If I install foreign-made items, I have to either produce documentation confirming that the vendor is on the "exceptions" list the DOD has (which won't work for this case) or I have to replace the items.
Otherwise, the Corps won't sign off on the job and we don't get paid.
You have a good point. And this is a "complaint" I have heard a number of times against VoIP. Problem is, nearly everyone I know who has a regular landline now uses a cordless phone. Many of them don't have a regular "corded" phone. So they are just as dead in the water with the landline as they would be with VoIP.
I, on the other hand, being the geek I am, have an entire walk-in closet dedicated to servers, cable modem, VoIP adapter, WAP and a big UPS! I can have my cordless phone plugged into the VoIP, and so long as the cable company stays up I could still be yakking on the cordless phone and browsing the web on my laptop even during a power outage!:)
Unfortunately, if my experience at my last residence is any indication, the cable company doesn't have (very good) battery backup on their gear. When the power went out at my apartment, I lost the cable too. Haven't had an outage at my new house to know yet...
I "administer" (if you can call it that) two WLANs. One at home, one at work. The one at work is NOT the company's LAN, it is a separate DSL line we use for our remote monitoring contracts because the corporate LAN firewall is way too strict...!
At home, all I do in the AP is filter MACs. That's just to keep the random neighbor from taking advantage of an opportunity. The AP plugs straight into a separate NIC on my firewall machine, and all you can get is an IP. From there, you have to run a VPN. For my home network I use OpenVPN, since it's so easy to set up. I also pass the Cisco VPN for my work laptop straight out the cable modem.
At work, I don't even filter MACs on the access point. Due to our building's construction, I'm doing good to get a usable signal near the outside walls IN the building. The minute I walk outside I get nothing. (My office where the AP is sits dead center.) Granted, someone with a high gain antenna could probably get a signal. The AP plugs into a Linux firewall box that MAC filters. To be honest, we aren't all that concerned about someone managing to use it for anything. It's just a mostly-unused DSL line!
Having had such success using OpenVPN at home, I am considering implementing it at the office as well. I would *like* to be able to instead just open up access so visitors could use it, but I can't even allow just anyone in my office to. Several were already caught with porn on their work machines. Whatever you may feel about that, I won't condone it. (Especially since the company certainly doesn't.) I have to wonder when people can't abstain for eight hours until they get home...
This is one thing I'm a bit irritated with Vonage about. I asked if I could use a modem on my line, and they said yes. No mention of qualifiers. While my connection is rock solid (some people wonder if I'm still there when I'm listening, it's so quiet and clear) I have yet to get a modem to even sync up let alone connect and transfer data. This is on automation systems that only require 1200-9600 bps connections.
I also noticed Vonage will give me a "fax line" for more money. They didn't mention that bit...
Oh well, I just VPN into the office and use VNC to control the monitoring computer there that has a regular phone line!;)
A person at my office uses Autocad 2000 to make Win2K or XP crash! He has figured out exactly what process it is that causes the crash, so he can avoid it. He is therefore also able to give the sales department heart tremors if he feels like it too...;)
As I recall, it has something to do with changing filenames or moving files in the File Open or File Save dialogs. Something like that. Long as he stays away from that, everything is fine.
What got us was that it ran rock solid on Win2K on his previous computer. He got a new computer, and this problem started. We tried both 2K and XP, same result, so started suspecting it was hardware but Dell wouldn't trade it out. He finally figured out the trigger, and we quit trying to fix it.
I've set them off occasionally, and have even gotten so I can anticipate it. It has almost always been the cashier not deactivating something. A couple of times, the deactivator just didn't work. I now just keep on walking too. Especially in the really big stores, they don't seem to be sure just *which* detector is going off, so I just act like I never heard anything. Never had anyone come after me, either.
If you do this, be sure to check for unexpected shorts. A piece of equipment we install at work has a big warning to only use it with its own power supply. Of course, it's so much easier to tie it to the beefier supply running the other panels it associates with, so many techs do just that. And it works just fine. Until...
Turns out, due to some wierd design decision, the common pin for the serial port isn't really "common". If we plug into it with our laptops, and then plug the laptop into AC power (with ground pin intact on the PS) it shorts the power supply through the serial port, the laptop ground, back to the grounded power supply on the main panel. (This little panel "doesn't require" grounding - wonder why...)
So, if your devices all connect to each other in some way make sure this sort of loop doesn't occur. Especially if you use a single beefy supply - you might be in for fireworks!
I'll second Brother lasers. I have an HL-5040, bought it over 1 1/2 years ago and never had a problem with it. Still on the original toner cartridge too, although I don't print a whole lot. The price was quite low for this one, too.
It only has USB or parallel, so I put it on a print server and it sits over in an out of the way corner.
I wouldn't say it's shady business practices. Unless you lump just about any business into it. I work in construction, and our vendors do this company-by-company. Each year they update our "multiplier" that gives us the price we end up paying off list. It is usually based on the volume you do, I'm in a huge company so ours is pretty low (one place we're at 0.291 of list).
What's odd with Dell's pricing, though, is they are inverted. The bigger the customer, the more they charge! But then I've seen some big organizations pay what I thought were incredible prices for things without batting an eye. Government stuff gets really wierd, with GSA contracts. Those prices can be all over the map at times.
As for Dell's tech support, IMHO it sucks. I have flat told them I refuse to let another of their idiot monkeys touch my computer again. They are to send all parts to me and I'll install them. So far, they have. I've never seen much competence from their field techs (BancTec around here) but the last time I called them, the cooling fans on my laptop had died. The monkey who showed up forgot to plug them in when reassembling the case. This required gutting EVERYTHING out of the laptop to get at the plugs. When I got down to them, I noticed the fans were dirty. He hadn't even CHANGED the fans! His excuse was that he wasn't feeling well that day.
Another of their techs showed up two days later to work on a desktop computer whose motherboard had smoked at the office. Interestingly, he too forgot to plug in the CPU fan! The BIOS warned of it on first booting, though. My laptop didn't, I noticed because the thing got r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w as the P4 CPU throttled to keep from frying... (At least it does that!)
I have yet to see anyone's mouse/keyboard "package" that I liked. I'd much rather buy them separately!
I plugged my Happy Hacking II keyboard into my Mini and it's just fine. Since I'm already used to the layout, no adjustment was required. The "Windows" keys (diamond character on the HH kbd) are the Apple keys now. I also plugged my Logitech trackball in. Not only do both buttons work, the little up/down arrow buttons that Logitech put on in place of a scroll wheel now work too! (Never managed that on the Linux box.)
If you think Apple's prices are high, what I paid must be in the stratosphere. The HHKB was around $70, I think, and the trackball $20. I don't remember specifically, because it didn't matter - they were what I wanted!
My aunt sent me a cheque once. She's in Canada, I'm in the US. My bank took a fair bite of it as a "handling fee" just because it wasn't drawn on US funds. I've never tried depositing foreign currency, so I don't know if they charge a fee for that. I wouldn't think so, although considering how banks operate nowadays... If not, it seems the recipient would be better off getting cash and depositing that, if it is coming from another country.
For the small amounts most sites typically ask for ($25 or so) why not send cash? If I had to pay before receiving a product, or if the price were much higher I would want something more secure, but in this case it isn't that big of a deal to me. Fold it inside of a letter, so it isn't obvious, and it's likelier to just get lost in the mail than stolen.
Most houses in the US (can't say for anywhere else) have a box that is the demarc, everything up to one side is the phone company's responsibility, the other side on is the homeowner's. It will be located wherever the phone line enters the house, frequently outside on the back wall of the house, since the phone company wants to be able to charge you if any wire beyond their drop to the house goes bad. They'd probably put it on the pole, if they could get away with it.
I have phone via cable, and their demarc is a box that their cable line (complete with 90V power) connects to. The filters for the premium channels are located after it. They put that box right next to the phone company's box and moved the house's phone wires over to it.
I don't know if I qualify for "average/. reader", but I for one have already placed an order for one of these. I have two servers, two laptops, and a desktop all running Linux, but what I wanted most was a very quiet, low power computer that could sit in the corner always on and ready. (Preferably with a sleep mode it would wake from instantly.) I also wanted to play with OSX, but wasn't quite ready to shell for a laptop and didn't want Yet Another monitor. Thus the mini fits my needs perfectly. I was rather shocked at the prices for the add-ons. That is definitely where they get you, especially for the 1GB RAM!
I used both for a while, but the problem of keeping track of the WEP key was annoying. And I didn't care for using MAC addresses, since I had to then get into my AP's configuration and add/remove computers as needed. I also wanted something more secure at home (for liability reasons), so now the AP uses neither, it's wide open. But it is on its own NIC in my firewall, and the only way to do anything at all with it is to use VPN. I chose OpenVPN since it was vastly easier (for me, anyway) to figure out, and supports all the OSes I use. (I never could get IPSec working on the Win2K work laptop...)
I also have an AP at work, tied to our DSL line. (This is NOT the corporate network, we got it because the corporate network was too restrictive for some of our needs.) That AP is also "wide open". If you associate, you get an IP and can resolve domain names all day long. But by default you can't go anywhere, except VPN to our corporate network. I add MAC addresses to the firewall rules for those who are allowed to have open access. I'd be more concerned about it here, but I've done some checking, and I can hardly get to all parts of the building wirelessly, and there is no signal outside the building.
Considering the ease with which WEP keys are crackable nowadays, I wouldn't bother with them anywhere. But I also am unwilling to leave a wide open connection anywhere, at least not permanently. At home, setting up an OpenVPN client takes a bit of time, but once it's done it's done. And it is unique to that computer/individual, so if necessary I can revoke their access easily without having to reconfigure all my other machines (like I would when changing WEP keys).
Only problem I've found is you apparently have to have identical versions of GCC available. The Gentoo docs state you just need to have the same major version, which my systems all do, but I ran into occasional problems. The Slackware boxes would occasionally give errors, complaining that they didn't understand a flag that was being thrown at them.
I also had one program - later in the Gentoo compile, can't remember which one - that kept failing due to something not being declared. But when I readjusted distcc to only use a single machine, it worked fine. I guess something wasn't properly marked with dependencies, and the file needed first was going off to one machine while another compiled the next piece? Dunno...
Anyway, it is definitely a sweet thing to be able to do, in spite of the quirks. And odds are someone will tell me what I have to do to fix these problems...;-) (No, I haven't gone to the distcc site and read extensively. Perhaps it has the answer too!)
The only effect I've noticed is when I forget to tell my firewall to let BitTorrent connects through to my computer. Then I see a HUGE decrease in speed. Other than that, adjusting the upload bandwidth seldom seems to make a difference. I have a cable connection, 4Mb/512kb, and even throttled down to 50-100kb outbound I'd still frequently see the incoming connection at 2.5-3Mb. On the occasions when torrents were slow, cranking it all the way up (minus a bit for overhead) didn't help speed it up any. In fact, then I would often see my outbound be 2-3 times my incoming speeds.
Note for the militant: I don't throttle down like that as a rule. When I was first playing with BT I did for each stream when I would have 3-4 running at a time. Now I just do one at a time, and play with the settings because I get bored and want to see what happens.
That link would roughly be right. It was basically the phone they installed in a car, but instead placed inside of a bag. The company I work for had a couple back when I first started, that were in a nice leather case, not canvas. They used what was basically a camcorder SLA type battery (12V, 1 or 2AH) and had a built-in cigarette lighter plug for when you were actually in the car. The ones we had were analog, don't know if that style survived long enough for digital versions to exist...
In reality, except for the portability issue - they were certainly bulky to just carry around everywhere - I far preferred using them over these miniscule things you get nowadays.
Some of the oldest ones, that's quite probable. I don't remember now. But the last few of them definitely did have LiIon, which was why I was so disappointed with the lifetime. And the Dell 233 was a year or two older than the newest of the IBMs we had.
I now recall noticing a (perceived?) difference in how the two brands charged the battery. The IBMs all seemed to go to "charge" (the LED changed to orange) every single time they were plugged in and stay that way a while, even if they hadn't been run on battery. The Dells won't show a solid battery light (indicating "charging") unless the unit had been run for some time on battery. Perhaps the IBM charging strategy was just harder on the battery. Of course this has probably changed by now, it's been a few years.
I've seen this great appreciation for Thinkpads frequently, and I always wanted to ask - so now I will. At work we used to get Thinkpads in my department, until Corporate came along and mandated Dells for everyone. While the Thinkpads were great computers, the batteries positively stank. Not a one of them lasted more than a year, after which we were lucky to get more than 5 minutes run time.
Contrast that with a 233MHz Dell Latitude I bought after it went off lease (other departments had them long before we did), and the battery in it STILL lasts a good 1 1/2 hours today. And this appears to be a common trend, as more and more of the Dells are getting bought and kept after the lease is up. We've had one or two completely bad batteries, but that's out of dozens throughout the office.
So, does Dell just have some voodoo magic with their C-series batteries, or did we really manage to get nothing but bad IBM batteries in our Thinkpads?!? Or do most people just replace their laptop batteries yearly and not think twice?
I've seen the same thing lately. Where I work (HVAC controls), the "learning culture" for the newly-hired has always been one where you learn by doing, figuring it out for yourself. We are often out in the field solo, and when I first started we didn't even have cell phones, so it kind of forced this mindset. If you really had trouble, you could call someone else for some quick pointers, then back to it.
The past couple of years have been very difficult, trying to find new hires. I even ran one off the first day when he tagged along for the day while I went about doing my thing. And that day wasn't even very demanding! He called in the next morning, said we worked too hard.
Of the ones who do stay, very few have any creativity or self-motivation. Most want us to spoon-feed them every single thing they need to do. And when we do that, of course, they have no comprehension of what they are doing. If they run into trouble with the script, they call again. Which makes for some very surly attitudes among those of us who learned "the hard way". (My attitude is much as yours, "What's so hard about this? I can't believe they pay me to do this!")
A couple of them have started to get the message, and are doing better, but it is clearly a struggle for them. From talking with them, I get the impression that schools (in particular - of all places - colleges and trade schools) have gone more and more from a culture of teaching through experimentation to more of a "plug into your seat, and download this information I have for you" atmosphere. When I was taking my EE classes, we spent a lot of time in the lab actually figuring out how to make various circuits and devices work, and understanding WHY they work. One of the people we hired who went through the same program a few years later said he had very little of it.
Or maybe they are having to do that because they can't get the students to think a bit either... Dunno, but it is definitely getting bad. We have managed to find a couple of very good people, out of maybe 15 hires lately. There are only eight of us total in my department.
It will definitely be interesting - and perhaps a bit depressing, if the trend I've seen continues - to see what develops.
I use a Dell C840 in that setup. Not even a Pentium-M (darn it), but a P4m, at 1.2GHz. It has two cooling fans on the back, and when I am doing heavy processing or playing games, they definitely both run. But, the temperature stabilizes out at about the same temp every time and doesn't go higher. (Around 155 deg.F!)
They've redesigned the docking stations for the newer D series, hopefully for the better. The fans on this laptop blow out the back, right on the dock. I removed the plastic cover so the air winds up blowing across the PCB of the dock. Reduced temps by about 20 degrees just with that, since it can now breathe. So it would be beneficial to check for things like that, if possible.
Yep, powernowd is sweet. My server (which sits idle most of the time) runs at 300MHz. Until I finally come home and make it do something, kicking up to 2.4GHz.
On my laptop, I noticed the cpufreq driver was recommending I use speedstep_ich instead. I did, and although I can't get the processor all the way down to 200MHz, the computer actually runs cooler. I guess because the voltage gets dropped as well. The only thing I wondered, is if I actually save more power by running the CPU at 400MHz (realistically the slowest I wanted) most of the time using cpufreq, or if having the voltage drop makes up the difference even though the slowest speed is only 1.2GHz. (The CPU is 1.8GHz.)
I was going to test it, but decided the cooler running - up to 20 degrees cooler! - was more important to me and stuck with speedstep_ich.
It is a WHOLE lot easier! Reading the discussions, I was wondering if anyone else had comments on it. I was originally trying to set up IPSec for home, but had the dual problem of figuring out how to get my work (Win2K) laptop using it (while not messing up the VPN client my company had set up), and just plain figuring IPSec out in the first place. What a mess... I could get there, but next time I needed to do it (very seldom) I was learning all over again. (Yeah, take notes, I'm bad about that...)
I then tried OpenVPN, and without much difficulty at all have set up connections for both wireless access at home, and remote from work to the house, on both my Linux laptop and the work Win2K laptop. The connections on the work laptop were set up probably 2 months after the Linux one, and it only took me a few minutes to remember how to do it. (Using RSA keys, not preshared keys.)
I'm no security expert, so I have to rely on what is said on the OpenVPN site and elsewhere. Is this pretty trustworthy? I now have it setup so NOTHING happens over wireless unless you VPN somewhere. Either OpenVPN to my home network, or the work laptop can VPN (Cisco client) to the corporate office. Remote access is the same way, and limited to certain IPs that I'm likely to be at.
Having done this, I also don't bother with WEP/WPA, but do put the MACs in the AP. Yes, they can be spoofed, but then they hit a blank, unresponsive wall, except for the OpenVPN port. My firewall is not "standards compliant" - I just DROP undesired packets from WLAN or Inet. Fun to see those "test your IP" sites asking if I'm sure the computer is on!;-)
You could do one big partition, but I made three. I didn't want the system partition to be filled up if I accidentally recorded too much with MythTV or something, and the drives I happened to wind up with made a better fit this way too.
I have two 160G, and two 120G drives. The system partition is a RAID 1 set, 30G each on the two 160s, along with a RAID 1 set for swap (1G, thereabouts). I then made four 120G partitions and made them the RAID 5 set for data.
I had actually considered not doing the mirroring for the system and swap, but especially when the drive sizes worked out this way, it seemed silly not to protect that too.
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I wish you would explain that to the Corps of Engineers! At least, the a$$holes I have to deal with... We use "commercially available" products to install our HVAC systems (they could go down and buy them from most any parts house themselves), but we certainly DO have to comply with Buy American when doing the job. Or so they say, and since they control the purse strings...
This leaves us in a bit of a bind. Most foreign-made items we use DO have an American made option, but it is - horrors! - an INFERIOR option. One we would never use otherwise. Luckily, the more critical components are made by companies that the DOD has on their exceptions list, but it still means we have to deal with the paperwork verifying that.
If it's like DOD / Corps of Engineers contracts, the penalty is you don't get paid. When we do a Corps job, it states in the specifications you must meet the "Buy American" act. If I install foreign-made items, I have to either produce documentation confirming that the vendor is on the "exceptions" list the DOD has (which won't work for this case) or I have to replace the items.
Otherwise, the Corps won't sign off on the job and we don't get paid.
You have a good point. And this is a "complaint" I have heard a number of times against VoIP. Problem is, nearly everyone I know who has a regular landline now uses a cordless phone. Many of them don't have a regular "corded" phone. So they are just as dead in the water with the landline as they would be with VoIP.
:)
I, on the other hand, being the geek I am, have an entire walk-in closet dedicated to servers, cable modem, VoIP adapter, WAP and a big UPS! I can have my cordless phone plugged into the VoIP, and so long as the cable company stays up I could still be yakking on the cordless phone and browsing the web on my laptop even during a power outage!
Unfortunately, if my experience at my last residence is any indication, the cable company doesn't have (very good) battery backup on their gear. When the power went out at my apartment, I lost the cable too. Haven't had an outage at my new house to know yet...
I "administer" (if you can call it that) two WLANs. One at home, one at work. The one at work is NOT the company's LAN, it is a separate DSL line we use for our remote monitoring contracts because the corporate LAN firewall is way too strict...!
At home, all I do in the AP is filter MACs. That's just to keep the random neighbor from taking advantage of an opportunity. The AP plugs straight into a separate NIC on my firewall machine, and all you can get is an IP. From there, you have to run a VPN. For my home network I use OpenVPN, since it's so easy to set up. I also pass the Cisco VPN for my work laptop straight out the cable modem.
At work, I don't even filter MACs on the access point. Due to our building's construction, I'm doing good to get a usable signal near the outside walls IN the building. The minute I walk outside I get nothing. (My office where the AP is sits dead center.) Granted, someone with a high gain antenna could probably get a signal. The AP plugs into a Linux firewall box that MAC filters. To be honest, we aren't all that concerned about someone managing to use it for anything. It's just a mostly-unused DSL line!
Having had such success using OpenVPN at home, I am considering implementing it at the office as well. I would *like* to be able to instead just open up access so visitors could use it, but I can't even allow just anyone in my office to. Several were already caught with porn on their work machines. Whatever you may feel about that, I won't condone it. (Especially since the company certainly doesn't.) I have to wonder when people can't abstain for eight hours until they get home...
This is one thing I'm a bit irritated with Vonage about. I asked if I could use a modem on my line, and they said yes. No mention of qualifiers. While my connection is rock solid (some people wonder if I'm still there when I'm listening, it's so quiet and clear) I have yet to get a modem to even sync up let alone connect and transfer data. This is on automation systems that only require 1200-9600 bps connections.
;)
I also noticed Vonage will give me a "fax line" for more money. They didn't mention that bit...
Oh well, I just VPN into the office and use VNC to control the monitoring computer there that has a regular phone line!
A person at my office uses Autocad 2000 to make Win2K or XP crash! He has figured out exactly what process it is that causes the crash, so he can avoid it. He is therefore also able to give the sales department heart tremors if he feels like it too... ;)
As I recall, it has something to do with changing filenames or moving files in the File Open or File Save dialogs. Something like that. Long as he stays away from that, everything is fine.
What got us was that it ran rock solid on Win2K on his previous computer. He got a new computer, and this problem started. We tried both 2K and XP, same result, so started suspecting it was hardware but Dell wouldn't trade it out. He finally figured out the trigger, and we quit trying to fix it.
I've set them off occasionally, and have even gotten so I can anticipate it. It has almost always been the cashier not deactivating something. A couple of times, the deactivator just didn't work. I now just keep on walking too. Especially in the really big stores, they don't seem to be sure just *which* detector is going off, so I just act like I never heard anything. Never had anyone come after me, either.
If you do this, be sure to check for unexpected shorts. A piece of equipment we install at work has a big warning to only use it with its own power supply. Of course, it's so much easier to tie it to the beefier supply running the other panels it associates with, so many techs do just that. And it works just fine. Until...
Turns out, due to some wierd design decision, the common pin for the serial port isn't really "common". If we plug into it with our laptops, and then plug the laptop into AC power (with ground pin intact on the PS) it shorts the power supply through the serial port, the laptop ground, back to the grounded power supply on the main panel. (This little panel "doesn't require" grounding - wonder why...)
So, if your devices all connect to each other in some way make sure this sort of loop doesn't occur. Especially if you use a single beefy supply - you might be in for fireworks!
I'll second Brother lasers. I have an HL-5040, bought it over 1 1/2 years ago and never had a problem with it. Still on the original toner cartridge too, although I don't print a whole lot. The price was quite low for this one, too.
It only has USB or parallel, so I put it on a print server and it sits over in an out of the way corner.
I wouldn't say it's shady business practices. Unless you lump just about any business into it. I work in construction, and our vendors do this company-by-company. Each year they update our "multiplier" that gives us the price we end up paying off list. It is usually based on the volume you do, I'm in a huge company so ours is pretty low (one place we're at 0.291 of list).
What's odd with Dell's pricing, though, is they are inverted. The bigger the customer, the more they charge! But then I've seen some big organizations pay what I thought were incredible prices for things without batting an eye. Government stuff gets really wierd, with GSA contracts. Those prices can be all over the map at times.
As for Dell's tech support, IMHO it sucks. I have flat told them I refuse to let another of their idiot monkeys touch my computer again. They are to send all parts to me and I'll install them. So far, they have. I've never seen much competence from their field techs (BancTec around here) but the last time I called them, the cooling fans on my laptop had died. The monkey who showed up forgot to plug them in when reassembling the case. This required gutting EVERYTHING out of the laptop to get at the plugs. When I got down to them, I noticed the fans were dirty. He hadn't even CHANGED the fans! His excuse was that he wasn't feeling well that day.
Another of their techs showed up two days later to work on a desktop computer whose motherboard had smoked at the office. Interestingly, he too forgot to plug in the CPU fan! The BIOS warned of it on first booting, though. My laptop didn't, I noticed because the thing got r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w as the P4 CPU throttled to keep from frying... (At least it does that!)
I have yet to see anyone's mouse/keyboard "package" that I liked. I'd much rather buy them separately!
I plugged my Happy Hacking II keyboard into my Mini and it's just fine. Since I'm already used to the layout, no adjustment was required. The "Windows" keys (diamond character on the HH kbd) are the Apple keys now. I also plugged my Logitech trackball in. Not only do both buttons work, the little up/down arrow buttons that Logitech put on in place of a scroll wheel now work too! (Never managed that on the Linux box.)
If you think Apple's prices are high, what I paid must be in the stratosphere. The HHKB was around $70, I think, and the trackball $20. I don't remember specifically, because it didn't matter - they were what I wanted!
My aunt sent me a cheque once. She's in Canada, I'm in the US. My bank took a fair bite of it as a "handling fee" just because it wasn't drawn on US funds. I've never tried depositing foreign currency, so I don't know if they charge a fee for that. I wouldn't think so, although considering how banks operate nowadays... If not, it seems the recipient would be better off getting cash and depositing that, if it is coming from another country.
For the small amounts most sites typically ask for ($25 or so) why not send cash? If I had to pay before receiving a product, or if the price were much higher I would want something more secure, but in this case it isn't that big of a deal to me. Fold it inside of a letter, so it isn't obvious, and it's likelier to just get lost in the mail than stolen.
Most houses in the US (can't say for anywhere else) have a box that is the demarc, everything up to one side is the phone company's responsibility, the other side on is the homeowner's. It will be located wherever the phone line enters the house, frequently outside on the back wall of the house, since the phone company wants to be able to charge you if any wire beyond their drop to the house goes bad. They'd probably put it on the pole, if they could get away with it.
I have phone via cable, and their demarc is a box that their cable line (complete with 90V power) connects to. The filters for the premium channels are located after it. They put that box right next to the phone company's box and moved the house's phone wires over to it.
I don't know if I qualify for "average /. reader", but I for one have already placed an order for one of these. I have two servers, two laptops, and a desktop all running Linux, but what I wanted most was a very quiet, low power computer that could sit in the corner always on and ready. (Preferably with a sleep mode it would wake from instantly.) I also wanted to play with OSX, but wasn't quite ready to shell for a laptop and didn't want Yet Another monitor. Thus the mini fits my needs perfectly. I was rather shocked at the prices for the add-ons. That is definitely where they get you, especially for the 1GB RAM!
I used both for a while, but the problem of keeping track of the WEP key was annoying. And I didn't care for using MAC addresses, since I had to then get into my AP's configuration and add/remove computers as needed. I also wanted something more secure at home (for liability reasons), so now the AP uses neither, it's wide open. But it is on its own NIC in my firewall, and the only way to do anything at all with it is to use VPN. I chose OpenVPN since it was vastly easier (for me, anyway) to figure out, and supports all the OSes I use. (I never could get IPSec working on the Win2K work laptop...)
I also have an AP at work, tied to our DSL line. (This is NOT the corporate network, we got it because the corporate network was too restrictive for some of our needs.) That AP is also "wide open". If you associate, you get an IP and can resolve domain names all day long. But by default you can't go anywhere, except VPN to our corporate network. I add MAC addresses to the firewall rules for those who are allowed to have open access. I'd be more concerned about it here, but I've done some checking, and I can hardly get to all parts of the building wirelessly, and there is no signal outside the building.
Considering the ease with which WEP keys are crackable nowadays, I wouldn't bother with them anywhere. But I also am unwilling to leave a wide open connection anywhere, at least not permanently. At home, setting up an OpenVPN client takes a bit of time, but once it's done it's done. And it is unique to that computer/individual, so if necessary I can revoke their access easily without having to reconfigure all my other machines (like I would when changing WEP keys).
Only problem I've found is you apparently have to have identical versions of GCC available. The Gentoo docs state you just need to have the same major version, which my systems all do, but I ran into occasional problems. The Slackware boxes would occasionally give errors, complaining that they didn't understand a flag that was being thrown at them.
;-) (No, I haven't gone to the distcc site and read extensively. Perhaps it has the answer too!)
I also had one program - later in the Gentoo compile, can't remember which one - that kept failing due to something not being declared. But when I readjusted distcc to only use a single machine, it worked fine. I guess something wasn't properly marked with dependencies, and the file needed first was going off to one machine while another compiled the next piece? Dunno...
Anyway, it is definitely a sweet thing to be able to do, in spite of the quirks. And odds are someone will tell me what I have to do to fix these problems...
The only effect I've noticed is when I forget to tell my firewall to let BitTorrent connects through to my computer. Then I see a HUGE decrease in speed. Other than that, adjusting the upload bandwidth seldom seems to make a difference. I have a cable connection, 4Mb/512kb, and even throttled down to 50-100kb outbound I'd still frequently see the incoming connection at 2.5-3Mb. On the occasions when torrents were slow, cranking it all the way up (minus a bit for overhead) didn't help speed it up any. In fact, then I would often see my outbound be 2-3 times my incoming speeds.
Note for the militant: I don't throttle down like that as a rule. When I was first playing with BT I did for each stream when I would have 3-4 running at a time. Now I just do one at a time, and play with the settings because I get bored and want to see what happens.
That link would roughly be right. It was basically the phone they installed in a car, but instead placed inside of a bag. The company I work for had a couple back when I first started, that were in a nice leather case, not canvas. They used what was basically a camcorder SLA type battery (12V, 1 or 2AH) and had a built-in cigarette lighter plug for when you were actually in the car. The ones we had were analog, don't know if that style survived long enough for digital versions to exist...
In reality, except for the portability issue - they were certainly bulky to just carry around everywhere - I far preferred using them over these miniscule things you get nowadays.
Some of the oldest ones, that's quite probable. I don't remember now. But the last few of them definitely did have LiIon, which was why I was so disappointed with the lifetime. And the Dell 233 was a year or two older than the newest of the IBMs we had.
I now recall noticing a (perceived?) difference in how the two brands charged the battery. The IBMs all seemed to go to "charge" (the LED changed to orange) every single time they were plugged in and stay that way a while, even if they hadn't been run on battery. The Dells won't show a solid battery light (indicating "charging") unless the unit had been run for some time on battery. Perhaps the IBM charging strategy was just harder on the battery. Of course this has probably changed by now, it's been a few years.
I've seen this great appreciation for Thinkpads frequently, and I always wanted to ask - so now I will. At work we used to get Thinkpads in my department, until Corporate came along and mandated Dells for everyone. While the Thinkpads were great computers, the batteries positively stank. Not a one of them lasted more than a year, after which we were lucky to get more than 5 minutes run time.
Contrast that with a 233MHz Dell Latitude I bought after it went off lease (other departments had them long before we did), and the battery in it STILL lasts a good 1 1/2 hours today. And this appears to be a common trend, as more and more of the Dells are getting bought and kept after the lease is up. We've had one or two completely bad batteries, but that's out of dozens throughout the office.
So, does Dell just have some voodoo magic with their C-series batteries, or did we really manage to get nothing but bad IBM batteries in our Thinkpads?!? Or do most people just replace their laptop batteries yearly and not think twice?
I've seen the same thing lately. Where I work (HVAC controls), the "learning culture" for the newly-hired has always been one where you learn by doing, figuring it out for yourself. We are often out in the field solo, and when I first started we didn't even have cell phones, so it kind of forced this mindset. If you really had trouble, you could call someone else for some quick pointers, then back to it.
The past couple of years have been very difficult, trying to find new hires. I even ran one off the first day when he tagged along for the day while I went about doing my thing. And that day wasn't even very demanding! He called in the next morning, said we worked too hard.
Of the ones who do stay, very few have any creativity or self-motivation. Most want us to spoon-feed them every single thing they need to do. And when we do that, of course, they have no comprehension of what they are doing. If they run into trouble with the script, they call again. Which makes for some very surly attitudes among those of us who learned "the hard way". (My attitude is much as yours, "What's so hard about this? I can't believe they pay me to do this!")
A couple of them have started to get the message, and are doing better, but it is clearly a struggle for them. From talking with them, I get the impression that schools (in particular - of all places - colleges and trade schools) have gone more and more from a culture of teaching through experimentation to more of a "plug into your seat, and download this information I have for you" atmosphere. When I was taking my EE classes, we spent a lot of time in the lab actually figuring out how to make various circuits and devices work, and understanding WHY they work. One of the people we hired who went through the same program a few years later said he had very little of it.
Or maybe they are having to do that because they can't get the students to think a bit either... Dunno, but it is definitely getting bad. We have managed to find a couple of very good people, out of maybe 15 hires lately. There are only eight of us total in my department.
It will definitely be interesting - and perhaps a bit depressing, if the trend I've seen continues - to see what develops.
I use a Dell C840 in that setup. Not even a Pentium-M (darn it), but a P4m, at 1.2GHz. It has two cooling fans on the back, and when I am doing heavy processing or playing games, they definitely both run. But, the temperature stabilizes out at about the same temp every time and doesn't go higher. (Around 155 deg.F!)
They've redesigned the docking stations for the newer D series, hopefully for the better. The fans on this laptop blow out the back, right on the dock. I removed the plastic cover so the air winds up blowing across the PCB of the dock. Reduced temps by about 20 degrees just with that, since it can now breathe. So it would be beneficial to check for things like that, if possible.
Yep, powernowd is sweet. My server (which sits idle most of the time) runs at 300MHz. Until I finally come home and make it do something, kicking up to 2.4GHz.
On my laptop, I noticed the cpufreq driver was recommending I use speedstep_ich instead. I did, and although I can't get the processor all the way down to 200MHz, the computer actually runs cooler. I guess because the voltage gets dropped as well. The only thing I wondered, is if I actually save more power by running the CPU at 400MHz (realistically the slowest I wanted) most of the time using cpufreq, or if having the voltage drop makes up the difference even though the slowest speed is only 1.2GHz. (The CPU is 1.8GHz.)
I was going to test it, but decided the cooler running - up to 20 degrees cooler! - was more important to me and stuck with speedstep_ich.
It is a WHOLE lot easier! Reading the discussions, I was wondering if anyone else had comments on it. I was originally trying to set up IPSec for home, but had the dual problem of figuring out how to get my work (Win2K) laptop using it (while not messing up the VPN client my company had set up), and just plain figuring IPSec out in the first place. What a mess... I could get there, but next time I needed to do it (very seldom) I was learning all over again. (Yeah, take notes, I'm bad about that...)
;-)
I then tried OpenVPN, and without much difficulty at all have set up connections for both wireless access at home, and remote from work to the house, on both my Linux laptop and the work Win2K laptop. The connections on the work laptop were set up probably 2 months after the Linux one, and it only took me a few minutes to remember how to do it. (Using RSA keys, not preshared keys.)
I'm no security expert, so I have to rely on what is said on the OpenVPN site and elsewhere. Is this pretty trustworthy? I now have it setup so NOTHING happens over wireless unless you VPN somewhere. Either OpenVPN to my home network, or the work laptop can VPN (Cisco client) to the corporate office. Remote access is the same way, and limited to certain IPs that I'm likely to be at.
Having done this, I also don't bother with WEP/WPA, but do put the MACs in the AP. Yes, they can be spoofed, but then they hit a blank, unresponsive wall, except for the OpenVPN port. My firewall is not "standards compliant" - I just DROP undesired packets from WLAN or Inet. Fun to see those "test your IP" sites asking if I'm sure the computer is on!
You could do one big partition, but I made three. I didn't want the system partition to be filled up if I accidentally recorded too much with MythTV or something, and the drives I happened to wind up with made a better fit this way too.
I have two 160G, and two 120G drives. The system partition is a RAID 1 set, 30G each on the two 160s, along with a RAID 1 set for swap (1G, thereabouts). I then made four 120G partitions and made them the RAID 5 set for data.
I had actually considered not doing the mirroring for the system and swap, but especially when the drive sizes worked out this way, it seemed silly not to protect that too.