I have never been much of a TV watcher but I find that between Netflix, local broadcast (over the air) tv, and the 4 sports bars within 5 miles of my house I am just fine without cable.
Netflix and before that blockbuster (rip bb) lets me watch a movie at home once in a while.
Sports...There are 3 teams I care about and two of them are local and likely to be on ota tv; plus sports are much more fun to watch at a sport bar with a bunch of people around you cheering, then they are to watch at home by yourself.
I go to the theater once in a great while if there is something that I really want to see on a big screen but those are few and far between. It is a shame really because I used to love going to the movies but they have ruined the experience between the price and the crappy remakes and reboots of old movies. Is there no one left in Hollywood capable of an original idea?
By the way, over the air tv has a MUCH better high def signal then the local cable company. When I watch something at any of my friends houses I always notice how bad the cable signal is in my area. I don't think they will be getting my money any time soon.
I guess I expect more intellegence from slashdot readers, it used to be that way any way.
Comments about "Gates selling shit" and "its faked" do nothing except show that you are ignorant and childish. What comes out of that unit is both distilled and then filtered (probably some sort of reverse osmosis filter that could do an ok job of cleaning the water on its own.) Since it is distilled there is no bacteria in it unless it it has been recontaminated further down the line.
The whole point of this is that there are plenty of places in the world with not much in the line of clean drinkable water. People live in those places. Poor people living in poor countries that can't afford (or chose not to) provide clean drinking water to thier people. Those peoples health and well being would be greatly improved by having safe clean water available. Their lifestyle and economic well being would be greatly improved if that water was available somewhere close to where they live.
Here is a solution that will take something that is found in abundance everywhere humans and their animals live and turn it in to something that is needed and desired enough that a person may be able to make a living running the thing. It is a solution that a small company (or village) could afford, as opposed to something costing tens of millions of dollars.
Here is a link to the web site of a small town in the US that just spent $21 million on a treatment plant plus another 30 million on sewage lines:
This makes sense. In the US the posted speed limits seem to be 10 or 15 miles below what most drivers would deem a "safe" speed on that road. More then likely this is because the authorities expect that people will be 5 or 10 mph over. I have previously argued that there would be a push to raise the speed limit on some roads when self driving cars became common. It is quite annoying and somewhat dangrous when a car is actually doing the speed limit on some of the roads around here.
Some of the limits also seem to be designed purely to generate tickets. There is one four lane road near my house that is posted 25 mph. This is a silly posting for this road and there is often a speed trap set up on it.
There are exceptins of course. I don't think anyone would argue that the speed limit in residential areas should be raised.
soapbox warning: Creating laws that people will ignore or "bend" on purpose is bad for a society. Once people get used to breaking this law or that law because it is stupid or it "doesn't really matter" it fosters a general disrespect for authority and law. They start to select which laws they will obey and which don't apply to them.
Yes I predict that will become a major annoyance and discussion topic where local governments will be forced to raise the speed limits (at least for autonomous cars) on some roads. The speed limits are currently somewhat lower then they need to be as it is assumed that drivers will go 10 or so mph over. When autonomous cars start creating rolling road blocks because they actually drive 55 in a 55 zone or 35 in a 35 zone there will be pressure to raise the limits for them.
1) Most of the stuff on my computers could be replaced. 2) The one thing I would really, really hate to loose are family photo's. 3) Hard drives WILL fail sooner or later. 4) Tapes are reliable for a while but even in a climate controlled vault I have had tapes at work end up bad after a couple of years. (not to mention the pain in the neck it is to find a working legacy tape drive after 10 years) 5) DVD's will probably have the same issues.
My solution for now is redundancy.
Digital photos get offloaded to my Linux pc. I use a program called Digicam. I have a bash script that syncs the new photos to a Windows share on my wifes pc. My wife has one of those.5T USB external disk drives with the "one button backup" program that is set to run nightly. When I have a couple of new directories of photos I run another script that compresses the whole directory and splits the output into a bunch of 45 megabyte rar archives. I then upload them to Microsoft's free "Skydrive". Microsoft just upped their free disk storage to 25GB. I also have some documents saved on the free AOL Xdrive.
I figure in a couple of years there will be a better long term storage option. It will probably be something like a solid state drive that lasts for two hundred years. At that point I will save everything to that and store it in my safety deposit box at my bank.
The magician has learned by rote, a series of complex steps that he may or may not understand the reason for. These steps have to be followed in exact order and with exact detail to make something happen. This "knowledge" is passed down from one magician to another in a "cookbook" style.
Finally, if one part of the recipe fails he is lost and must start over from the begining.
The scientist looks for clues about how something works, forms a theory, figures out a way to test the theory, modifies that theory, tests again...(etc., etc.)... until he understands the basic underlying function of the thing.
From that point on he can manipulate it however he wants to make it do exactly what he wants with predictable, repeatable results.
When he wants to pass the knowledge down to the next scientist he gives them the theory of how it works but not necessarily the steps to follow.
The difference between a Windows SysAdmin and a Unix SysAdmin is...
Hummm... the only reason y2k turned out to be a joke was because a lot of people like me put in long hours upgrading systems and rewriting programs.
By the way two months before y2k I got a new job. I spent about 60 hours a week for those whole two months planning for and fixing y2k problems on servers that probably have at least a little of _your_ financial data on them.
Happily y2k came and went in my data center without incident.
I can live without tabs in IE; if I want to browse the web for personal reading I'll use FF anyway.
We have several internal comapany k-bases and wikis and ticket systems that have "quirks" it you use any browser other then IE. I personally don't like IE very much but I have found the perfect solution in the IE Tabs extention for Firefox. I just do my work with Firefox and if I run into an internal page or site that doesn't work or display right I just set that one to use the IE rendering engine. This gives me tabs for multiple IE's in the same window, plus all the usual Firefox goodness.
``All you'll get is a stripped down KDE or GNOME environment with Firefox/Konqueror and Kopete/Gaim (I'm assuming so much at least).''
Firefox, Abiword, Gnumeric, MPlayer, some mail client, spam filter, Ekiga softphone, and some unspecified, custom-built MSN client.
``You couldn't even have space for documents.''
You can get all of the above in well under 512 MB, leaving plenty of space for documents. Multimedia would be a different story, of course, but you should be able to get a nice collection of songs on it.
No.
I suspect that what you will get is a browser in "kiosk mode" that connects you to your aol start page. You will be able to sign in to access "premium" content, chat clients, your aol serviced webmail and a news portal. They will probably also include some online storage and maybe even a word processer. You will also be able to surf the web.
The premium content will include streaming music and video that looks like the current video that you can play if you go to www.aol.com. There may even be on demand tv or movies.
With a usb port they may have plans for a webcam add on and ip video phones.
The 512MB of flash will probably be used to cache content. There may be tie in's to music devices that will allow you to purchase music from the online music store and download it through the usb port to your mp3 player. The interface will probably not look anything like gnome or kde.
The French Linux hackers will have a blast making it do all kinds of cool other things. (lucky dogs)
I hate people sit around and pronounce that they KNOW that something without even trying it.
(Brain calcification has set in.)
If you read the article it says that he has been documenting this whole thing very carefully.
I don't know enough about physics to know if this is posssible or not, but if he has documented it, someone else should be able to build one and see if it does what he says it does.
I can't recall the last time I saw a Microsoft OS crash where I was convinced it was the OS and not a hardware problem
At my last job I was able to make WinXP bluescreen at least once a day. All I had to do was start up SalesLogix, Outlook, and Shoretell and then spend a couple of hours working (and switching back and forth between the programs)
Four hours or so into my day and Bam! there it is, the BSOD.
I suspect that the combination of Outlook and SalesLogixs was the main culprit. Either one seemed to run ok by itself.
I can't blame MS for crapware from another company but I DO blame them for allowing a user application to crash the whole system.
This was on a brand new company imaged machine that I deliberatly did not make any changes to.
However, Vista has yet to offer me one compelling reason to upgrade. The new network stack sounds intriguing, but not for $200 plus the huge performance hit because I don't have 2GB of RAM. If I upgrade anything, I'll move to Linux and run Windows 2000 in a VM for those apps I can't live without.
Vmware is the way to go. I have a Win2000 VM set up on my home machine that I start up about once a month when I get a word doc that has some really weird formating that OpenOffice just can't display right.
You WILL experience a disk crash. Don't kid yourself, it will happen. I have had several crash on me over the years.
Currently my wife has about 3GB of stuff on her WinXP PC that she doesn't want to loose.
I have about 30GB of stuff on my SuSE Linux PC that I don't want to loose. These are mostly family photos and several "reference" VMWare machines that I clone every time I want to create a working VMWare machine for my test lab.
My kids have about 3GB of stuff spread across both PC's that they don't want to loose.
I also have an old Compaq server with about a half of a T of SCSI disks. I picked this up for free because it is a PPro 200 and considered worthless. It runs CentOS (based on RedHat) just fine.
First off, there is no point in saving the OS or the programs. Everything on the XP machine is licensed and I made sure to save the install CD's. Everything on the SuSE and CentOS machines is of course avalable on-line. I do keep a fairly recent set of install disks and do a test install on a VMWare machine just to be sure that they are good. Reinstalling is a pain in the neck but really it only takes a day or so.(including updates and such)
The XP machine has a single 120GB disk.
The SuSE machine has 2 disks. This is not RAID, / is on a 250GB disk and/home is on a 350GB disk.
THE CURRENT SOLUTION:
All family members have a "network drive" configured on the XP machine. This is actually just a SAMBA mounted directory under their home dir on the SuSE machine. They have been drilled to put everything they value on the XP machine into their "Network Documents" folder. (Since I don't trust them to remember this, I also go through their home dir's on the XP machine and copy things over for them about once a week.)
I sync the/home partition on the SuSE machine nightly with the PPRO using cron and rsync. The PPRO has a backup_user with ssh set to use an ssh key that the backup_user on the SuSE pc owns. The backup_user on the SuSE machine runs one of two very simple scripts depending on what day it is:
The first time this runs it takes a LOONNNNGGG time (100mb network) but after that it only takes a minute to update files that have been added or changed. User content is actually a very small part of the stuff we save on our PC's. Even if you type all day you have only created a couple of MB's of new files.
THE FUTURE:
If my house burns down I will still loose everything. I have about 100MB of on-line disk space that my ISP gave me but this is not enough. My current plan is to either rent several GB of on-line storage or to put a linux storage server at my brother-in-laws house. I have already put a linux firewall in for him. He is willing to let me store stuff there as long as I set backup space for him and his family. I will probably also rsync his stuff back to my network. I have already tried a small test backup to my ISP. Rsync across the internet is slow but if it happens automatically at 2:00am it doesn't matter and as I said earlier there really isn't that much of a change from day to day. If I do the first rsync on my network and then take the server to his it will be just fine.
A few years ago someone broke into my rental car while it was sitting in a motel parking lot in Portland. They didn't steal anything but they messed up the door so it wouldn't open and close right. When I called the police I got an answering machine! I left all the info. They never even called me back.
When I returned the car I told the guy at the counter what had happened. His response was "Ha! They won't do anything." I guess the lesson here is if you are going to break into cars, Portland is your town.
The sad thing is that it was probably some kids that got away with it over and over until they got into something really bad. When I hear arguments that the police need to work on violent crimes my response is that if you catch and punish the smaller things it will help prevent the violent crimes.
I have been trying to restrain myself from getting involved in this discusion but... Oh well!
Companys are not good or evil. People in the company (including the top guy) may be sleazy or crooked or stupid or brilliant or kind or lazy or generious or whatever. But a company is NOT a person. It does not think. It does not have motives. It is just a group of people and some stuff that they need to do their job.
If you want to fault the decision makers there for stupid or greedy or unethical or smart or kind or brilliant or lazy or generious or whatever actions then go ahead but STOP TRYING TO MAKE MICROSOFT OR SCO OR IBM OR REDHAT OUT AS A PERSON. THEY ARE NOT!
For what it is worth I have a friend who is a programer at MS and he is not an evil person. He is a nice guy. He just wants to write games. He does gripe once in a while about stupid middle managers, and their hair brained meddling though.
(Typed on Firefox on my nice reliable, stable, secure, linux computer while waiting for Spybot Search and Destroy to churn through the disk on one of my wife's friend's Dell laptop. God! I hate windows, anyone know how to get rid of pop ups from some company called outerinfo?)
I sometimes hoped that if I were in freefall, I could at the LAST second (if I could calculate that final few seconds) JUMP into the air, negating the acceleration and hoping the top of the elevator didn't break my neck when the bottom hit the shaft bottom.
Mythbusters tried this. It didn't work. The elevator is falling too fast. You can't get anywhere near the speed you need from human legs. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was something like elevator=40mph vs. legs=3.5mph. Not even close.
After reading the description was anybody else's response "What the freak does that mean?"
When I talk about snap-in's(tm) I am referring to a new paradigm of holistic.NET(tm) applications and tools that click in to our LIVE(tm) systems in a synergistic way to provide a seamless E-interface(tm) that addresses "Middleware to Middleware Conversations"(tm) and allows the developer and the E-developer to leverage the.NET(tm) platform and the LIVE(tm) platform to their fullest extent therefore improving productivity fully and reducing TCO to a level well below Linux(tm).
This a a beta software that uses a combination of RSS and bittorrent to help you find and download video. Even better they also have a piece of software to help you publish your video content.
Broadcast Machine, which is designed to dovetail with Democracy player. Broadcast Machine allows anyone to publish video affordably using BitTorrent or HTTP, with an easy, blogging-like interface. Broadcast Machine is software for websites, so you'll need your own web server on which to install it.
This is a piece of beta software so it is still a little rough but already there is some suprisingly good content (and some real junk). This is public access TV for a world wide audience that is open for anyone that wants to use it to create and broadcast video. It also can be either "corporate" or "artistic." It is only a matter of time before you start seeing product placement or maybe a small "sponsered by..." on the bottom of the screen.
One other feature that I like about it is that you can set it up to check your favorite feeds on a regular basis and download new content.
I would really like to see this player integrated into MythTV.
Can you Ghost it? I know that you can make a bootable ghost floppy disk, boot a pc and make a bit for bit image copy of the hard disk over the network to another machine. (Of course you have to have a floppy disk and a network connection on the phone system).
Another thing you can consider is temporarily moving the hard disk to an other PC (windows or linux)as a second disk and copying stuff off it. Seems to me that copying the whole partition with dd might work.
PCAnywhere may also work.
I had a similar problem on with an old Executone phone system that was running MSDOS with a 386 chip on the main board. I could hear the disk drive make noises once in a while that I didn't like the sounds of. I looked at the board and noticed that there was a floppy connector and a db25 serial connector on it. I went to the local Half Priced Bookstore and bought an old,old DOS version of PCAnywhere. I hooked up a floppy drive, figured out how to shut down the phone and voicemail programs and get a DOS prompt. I then made myself a DB25 TO DB9 adapter cable, loaded pcanywhere onto the phone system, connected a spare PC via the serial ports. I created a small FAT partition on the spare PC's disk drive, booted to MSDOS, installed the DOS PCAnywhere, and copied everything that looked useful to the spare PC hard drive. From there I booted the PC back to Windows and copied everything over to the Novell server for backup into the normal tape rotation. Since all this took a while I ended up only doing it once a week.
I actually had to restore this system, and it worked! The disk drive crashed late one Sunday night about a year and a half later. I got a phone call at about 5:30AM that Monday morning, we had no phone system and no voicemail. Happy Monday to me! I put a new disk drive in, loaded MSDOS from floppy (save those old DOS floppys!!!) loaded PCanywhere, copied the latest backup down to my admin PC and restored the whole stinking mess. The users lost a day or two of voicemail messages but things could have been a whole lot worse! (shudders thinking about having to figure out what ports were connected to what exensions company wide.)
When I am stuck using a windows machine I generally turn all of the XP interface crap off. Even through the "win2000 look" is kind of drab I want every bit of speed I can get out of a machine.
I just got my $47/month DSL bill reduced to $14 a month by signing up for a minimum 1 year contract. (not a problem as I hate the local cable company even more then Verizon)
It took sitting on hold and getting transfered around several times to do it. When I finally did get someone he told me that he couldn't transfer my account to the $14 one without shutting off my DSL for a minimum of 10 days and then opening a new account. I was politely persistent and asked to speak to his supervisor. I made a show of writing down both his and his supervisors names.
He argued some more and told me that the supervisor could not change things so I told him that was OK I after I spoke to his supervisor I would speak to his supervisors supervisor
Long story short, after more holding he agreed to change my rate to $14 a month.
Be persistent when you call the sales droids are told not to let existing customers change to the lower rate if they can help it.
Actually this is another glimpse into the Verizon mentality. If you had a customer that was a longterm/ loyal customer wouldn't you call them up to tell them how you were going to reward them by giving them a special rate? This is a great chance to do a little cross selling. I would. Stroking your best customers is always a great way to get more business out of them. But, that is not how Verizon does things. Their attitude is screw the good customers, they are not going anywhere anyway.
Here's the biggest reason people aren't switching to the Mac: They don't think they can. After spending thousands of dollars on proprietary Windows-only software, they think their locked in without a choice.
Well in my case it the choice was more price then anything else. Apple hardware is just too overpriced for what you get. I paid about $800 for parts to build a kickass athlon system and $0 to install OpenSuSE 10. Is my system as fast as a G5? I don't know...but it is pretty darn fast.
Where am I going to get a top of the line Apple for $800? The Apple GUI is pretty but not pretty enough to pay $1999 for. (cheapest G5 on Apples web site) SuSE also looks pretty good and found all my hardware with no fuss. There are also thousands of free programs I can download and install with a few clicks. My kids also love SuSE. They are both under 10 and have their own login's, passwords and desktops which they have no problem customizing and setting up they way they like. They use OpenOffice and Firefox, and are hooked on SuperTUX and Neverball.
I also get a "talked down to" feel whenever I deal with Apple. To me they seem to treat their users like a bunch of idiots that are too stupid to know how they want to do things and have to be led around by the nose in the "one true way."
Just for example my daughter got an IPOD Shuffle for Christmas. We were at her Grandmothers house when she got it so I installed ITUNES on Grandmas PC, purchased a Hilery Duff album, Downloaded and reflashed the OS on the shuffle because it was horked from the store, and put the music on the Shuffle for her. So far so good, everything working fine. When we get home I figured that I would be able to just plug the IPOD into my wife's windows PC and move the music to her disk drive for playing on ITUNES there. No. The IPOD is already "associated" with another pc, do I want to wipe it and "associate" it with this one? NO. I don't want to associate it with anything, I just want to drag and drop the music that I payed $10 for onto my wifes pc so I can burn it to cd. After fiddling around for a while I just said "forget this" and plugged the IPOD into my SuSE machine. "ding" USB stick pops up on the desktop, double click, drag files from USB stick to SMB share on wifes PC., DONE!
THAT is what I call a user friendly machine.
I then plugged the IPOD back into my wifes pc, opened ITUNES, "associated" it ( it did wipe the music) imported c:\shared the directory that had the music in it, (AFTER IT HAD TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET AND MAKE ME VERIFY THAT I WANTED THE MUSIC I HAD ALREADY PAYED FOR TO PLAY ON THIS PC!!!!!!!!!!!!) and drag the music back onto the IPOD along with some other songs I ripped from CD for her. I don't know, I have a bad taste about the whole thing. My daughter is happy since she is now in the "in crowd" that has an IPOD but if I ever get around to buying an MP3 player for myself it will be something else. Probably something that plays both MP3 and Vorbis but even if it just plays MP3 it will not be an IPOD. Like everything else from Apple they are overpriced and too restricted. Without any research a quick look on the CompUSA web site shows Shuffles starting at $99 and other brands starting at $49.
ssuming that your browser is exclusively for displaying and navigating pages on the World Wide Web, then yes, the "http://" is redundant.,
Not that I want to start a "my browser is better then your browser" pissing contest but one really nice thing about Konqueror is that you can type things like :
and KDE will understand what you are trying to do, choose the right connection type, and connect (using your kde wallet so you don't have to keep retyping passwords).
Even nicer, if you have more then one window open, (or have done shift control l to spit your window) you can drag back and forth between smb, sftp,/home/share etc. This is handy.
It may just be me, but once you Buy something you ought to be able to do with it as you wish.
The key word here is ought. I agree with you that once I buy something it ought to be mine to do with as I please. The same way I feel that the trees and buildings sitting on my property are mine to do with as I please. (why is it always OUR trees when they are on someone else's property)
However, there are several companys and more then a few politicians that don't seem to feel the same way.
The worst part of is that by making such stupid, unpopular, and unenforcable laws they destroy respect for the law. Face it, most people really don't think that it is wrong to copy media that they have purchased. If they really think about it they may agree that it is wrong to give out copies but if it is "just a copy for their friend" they can rationalize it as not really doing any harm. "After all they payed for it once, and the record companys have more money then GOD anyway..."
The result is that they have deceided not to respect or obey that law. From there it becomes easier to pick and choose which laws to obey and which to break.
The end result is a general breakdown in respect for the law. People no longer feel that they are "UNDER" the law but that they are equal to it and have the right to choose which laws to obey and which to disobey.
Someone with an agenda then steps in and more stupid laws are passed. (see hate crimes... the crime is beating someone up, and you SHOULD be punished for it, not what you thought about while you were doing it)
Soon we get to the point we are at now where most of us are technically criminals and will break any "minor/stupid" law as long as we think we won't get caught. More and more lawyers are needed to keep from getting caught and there is no longer any right or wrong. Caos in the streets, dogs and cats sleeping together,....
I don't know what the best solution is.
I suspect that it may be to wipe most of the laws off of the books and start over with a simpler set that has some kind of rational structure to it. (Good luck trying to get people to agree on what that structure is.)
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't had cable in years.
I have never been much of a TV watcher but I find that between Netflix, local broadcast (over the air) tv, and the 4 sports bars within 5 miles of my house I am just fine without cable.
Netflix and before that blockbuster (rip bb) lets me watch a movie at home once in a while.
Sports...There are 3 teams I care about and two of them are local and likely to be on ota tv; plus sports are much more fun to watch at a sport bar with a bunch of people around you cheering, then they are to watch at home by yourself.
I go to the theater once in a great while if there is something that I really want to see on a big screen but those are few and far between. It is a shame really because I used to love going to the movies but they have ruined the experience between the price and the crappy remakes and reboots of old movies. Is there no one left in Hollywood capable of an original idea?
By the way, over the air tv has a MUCH better high def signal then the local cable company. When I watch something at any of my friends houses I always notice how bad the cable signal is in my area. I don't think they will be getting my money any time soon.
I guess I expect more intellegence from slashdot readers, it used to be that way any way.
Comments about "Gates selling shit" and "its faked" do nothing except show that you are ignorant and childish. What comes out of that unit is both distilled and then filtered (probably some sort of reverse osmosis filter that could do an ok job of cleaning the water on its own.) Since it is distilled there is no bacteria in it unless it it has been recontaminated further down the line.
The whole point of this is that there are plenty of places in the world with not much in the line of clean drinkable water. People live in those places. Poor people living in poor countries that can't afford (or chose not to) provide clean drinking water to thier people. Those peoples health and well being would be greatly improved by having safe clean water available. Their lifestyle and economic well being would be greatly improved if that water was available somewhere close to where they live.
Here is a solution that will take something that is found in abundance everywhere humans and their animals live and turn it in to something that is needed and desired enough that a person may be able to make a living running the thing. It is a solution that a small company (or village) could afford, as opposed to something costing tens of millions of dollars.
Here is a link to the web site of a small town in the US that just spent $21 million on a treatment plant plus another 30 million on sewage lines:
https://www.gocolumbiamo.com/P...
How many little third world villages do you suppose can raise $51 million?
Way to go Mr Gates!
This makes sense. In the US the posted speed limits seem to be 10 or 15 miles below what most drivers would deem a "safe" speed on that road. More then likely this is because the authorities expect that people will be 5 or 10 mph over. I have previously argued that there would be a push to raise the speed limit on some roads when self driving cars became common. It is quite annoying and somewhat dangrous when a car is actually doing the speed limit on some of the roads around here.
Some of the limits also seem to be designed purely to generate tickets. There is one four lane road near my house that is posted 25 mph. This is a silly posting for this road and there is often a speed trap set up on it.
There are exceptins of course. I don't think anyone would argue that the speed limit in residential areas should be raised.
soapbox warning:
Creating laws that people will ignore or "bend" on purpose is bad for a society. Once people get used to breaking this law or that law because it is stupid or it "doesn't really matter" it fosters a general disrespect for authority and law. They start to select which laws they will obey and which don't apply to them.
"...autonomous cars stick to the speed limit."
Yes I predict that will become a major annoyance and discussion topic where local governments will be forced to raise the speed limits (at least for autonomous cars) on some roads. The speed limits are currently somewhat lower then they need to be as it is assumed that drivers will go 10 or so mph over. When autonomous cars start creating rolling road blocks because they actually drive 55 in a 55 zone or 35 in a 35 zone there will be pressure to raise the limits for them.
There really isn't a good solution right now.
After thinking about it a while I realized that:
1) Most of the stuff on my computers could be replaced.
2) The one thing I would really, really hate to loose are family photo's.
3) Hard drives WILL fail sooner or later.
4) Tapes are reliable for a while but even in a climate controlled vault I have had tapes at work end up bad after a couple of years. (not to mention the pain in the neck it is to find a working legacy tape drive after 10 years)
5) DVD's will probably have the same issues.
My solution for now is redundancy.
Digital photos get offloaded to my Linux pc. I use a program called Digicam. .5T USB external disk drives with the "one button backup" program that is set to run nightly.
I have a bash script that syncs the new photos to a Windows share on my wifes pc.
My wife has one of those
When I have a couple of new directories of photos I run another script that compresses the whole directory and splits the output into a bunch of 45 megabyte rar archives.
I then upload them to Microsoft's free "Skydrive". Microsoft just upped their free disk storage to 25GB.
I also have some documents saved on the free AOL Xdrive.
I figure in a couple of years there will be a better long term storage option. It will probably be something like a solid state drive that lasts for two hundred years. At that point I will save everything to that and store it in my safety deposit box at my bank.
The difference between magic and science.
... until he understands the basic underlying function of the thing.
...
The magician has learned by rote, a series of complex steps that he may or may not understand the reason for. These steps have to be followed in exact order and with exact detail to make something happen. This "knowledge" is passed down from one magician to another in a "cookbook" style.
Finally, if one part of the recipe fails he is lost and must start over from the begining.
The scientist looks for clues about how something works, forms a theory, figures out a way to test the theory, modifies that theory, tests again...(etc., etc.)
From that point on he can manipulate it however he wants to make it do exactly what he wants with predictable, repeatable results.
When he wants to pass the knowledge down to the next scientist he gives them the theory of how it works but not necessarily the steps to follow.
The difference between a Windows SysAdmin and a Unix SysAdmin is
Hummm... the only reason y2k turned out to be a joke was because a lot of people like me put in long hours upgrading systems and rewriting programs.
By the way two months before y2k I got a new job. I spent about 60 hours a week for those whole two months planning for and fixing y2k problems on servers that probably have at least a little of _your_ financial data on them.
Happily y2k came and went in my data center without incident.
We have several internal comapany k-bases and wikis and ticket systems that have "quirks" it you use any browser other then IE. I personally don't like IE very much but I have found the perfect solution in the IE Tabs extention for Firefox. I just do my work with Firefox and if I run into an internal page or site that doesn't work or display right I just set that one to use the IE rendering engine. This gives me tabs for multiple IE's in the same window, plus all the usual Firefox goodness.
This is one of the most usefull things out there.
Thanks IETab guys!
No.
I suspect that what you will get is a browser in "kiosk mode" that connects you to your aol start page. You will be able to sign in to access "premium" content, chat clients, your aol serviced webmail and a news portal. They will probably also include some online storage and maybe even a word processer. You will also be able to surf the web.
The premium content will include streaming music and video that looks like the current video that you can play if you go to www.aol.com. There may even be on demand tv or movies.
With a usb port they may have plans for a webcam add on and ip video phones.
The 512MB of flash will probably be used to cache content. There may be tie in's to music devices that will allow you to purchase music from the online music store and download it through the usb port to your mp3 player. The interface will probably not look anything like gnome or kde.
The French Linux hackers will have a blast making it do all kinds of cool other things. (lucky dogs)
I hate people sit around and pronounce that they KNOW that something without even trying it.
(Brain calcification has set in.)
If you read the article it says that he has been documenting this whole thing very carefully.
I don't know enough about physics to know if this is posssible or not, but if he has documented it, someone else should be able to build one and see if it does what he says it does.
At my last job I was able to make WinXP bluescreen at least once a day. All I had to do was start up SalesLogix, Outlook, and Shoretell and then spend a couple of hours working (and switching back and forth between the programs)
Four hours or so into my day and Bam! there it is, the BSOD.
I suspect that the combination of Outlook and SalesLogixs was the main culprit. Either one seemed to run ok by itself.
I can't blame MS for crapware from another company but I DO blame them for allowing a user application to crash the whole system.
This was on a brand new company imaged machine that I deliberatly did not make any changes to.
Vmware is the way to go. I have a Win2000 VM set up on my home machine that I start up about once a month when I get a word doc that has some really weird formating that OpenOffice just can't display right.
THE SITUATION:
/home is on a 350GB disk.
/home partition on the SuSE machine nightly with the PPRO using cron and rsync. The PPRO has a backup_user with ssh set to use an ssh key that the backup_user on the SuSE pc owns. The backup_user on the SuSE machine runs one of two very simple scripts depending on what day it is:
/home ./ backup_user@192.168.1.50:/home/backups/backup_1
/home ./ backup_user@192.168.1.50:/home/backups/backup_2
You WILL experience a disk crash. Don't kid yourself, it will happen. I have had several crash on me over the years.
Currently my wife has about 3GB of stuff on her WinXP PC that she doesn't want to loose.
I have about 30GB of stuff on my SuSE Linux PC that I don't want to loose. These are mostly family photos and several "reference" VMWare machines that I clone every time I want to create a working VMWare machine for my test lab.
My kids have about 3GB of stuff spread across both PC's that they don't want to loose.
I also have an old Compaq server with about a half of a T of SCSI disks. I picked this up for free because it is a PPro 200 and considered worthless. It runs CentOS (based on RedHat) just fine.
First off, there is no point in saving the OS or the programs. Everything on the XP machine is licensed and I made sure to save the install CD's. Everything on the SuSE and CentOS machines is of course avalable on-line. I do keep a fairly recent set of install disks and do a test install on a VMWare machine just to be sure that they are good. Reinstalling is a pain in the neck but really it only takes a day or so.(including updates and such)
The XP machine has a single 120GB disk.
The SuSE machine has 2 disks. This is not RAID, / is on a 250GB disk and
THE CURRENT SOLUTION:
All family members have a "network drive" configured on the XP machine. This is actually just a SAMBA mounted directory under their home dir on the SuSE machine. They have been drilled to put everything they value on the XP machine into their "Network Documents" folder. (Since I don't trust them to remember this, I also go through their home dir's on the XP machine and copy things over for them about once a week.)
I sync the
#!/bin/bash
cd
rsync -avz
or
#!/bin/bash
cd
rsync -avz
The first time this runs it takes a LOONNNNGGG time (100mb network) but after that it only takes a minute to update files that have been added or changed. User content is actually a very small part of the stuff we save on our PC's. Even if you type all day you have only created a couple of MB's of new files.
THE FUTURE:
If my house burns down I will still loose everything. I have about 100MB of on-line disk space that my ISP gave me but this is not enough. My current plan is to either rent several GB of on-line storage or to put a linux storage server at my brother-in-laws house. I have already put a linux firewall in for him. He is willing to let me store stuff there as long as I set backup space for him and his family. I will probably also rsync his stuff back to my network. I have already tried a small test backup to my ISP. Rsync across the internet is slow but if it happens automatically at 2:00am it doesn't matter and as I said earlier there really isn't that much of a change from day to day. If I do the first rsync on my network and then take the server to his it will be just fine.
The police in Portland OR. are worthless.
A few years ago someone broke into my rental car while it was sitting in a motel parking lot in Portland. They didn't steal anything but they messed up the door so it wouldn't open and close right. When I called the police I got an answering machine! I left all the info. They never even called me back.
When I returned the car I told the guy at the counter what had happened. His response was "Ha! They won't do anything." I guess the lesson here is if you are going to break into cars, Portland is your town.
The sad thing is that it was probably some kids that got away with it over and over until they got into something really bad. When I hear arguments that the police need to work on violent crimes my response is that if you catch and punish the smaller things it will help prevent the violent crimes.
Are you eating calcium or some other mineral supplements?
I have been trying to restrain myself from getting involved in this discusion but... Oh well!
Companys are not good or evil. People in the company (including the top guy) may be sleazy or crooked or stupid or brilliant or kind or lazy or generious or whatever. But a company is NOT a person. It does not think. It does not have motives. It is just a group of people and some stuff that they need to do their job.
If you want to fault the decision makers there for stupid or greedy or unethical or smart or kind or brilliant or lazy or generious or whatever actions then go ahead but STOP TRYING TO MAKE MICROSOFT OR SCO OR IBM OR REDHAT OUT AS A PERSON. THEY ARE NOT!
For what it is worth I have a friend who is a programer at MS and he is not an evil person. He is a nice guy. He just wants to write games. He does gripe once in a while about stupid middle managers, and their hair brained meddling though.
(Typed on Firefox on my nice reliable, stable, secure, linux computer while waiting for Spybot Search and Destroy to churn through the disk on one of my wife's friend's Dell laptop. God! I hate windows, anyone know how to get rid of pop ups from some company called outerinfo?)
Mythbusters tried this. It didn't work. The elevator is falling too fast. You can't get anywhere near the speed you need from human legs. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was something like elevator=40mph vs. legs=3.5mph. Not even close.
When I talk about snap-in's(tm) I am referring to a new paradigm of holistic
Now I feel dirty... I think I need a shower.
http://www.getdemocracy.com/
This a a beta software that uses a combination of RSS and bittorrent to help you find and download video. Even better they also have a piece of software to help you publish your video content.
This is a piece of beta software so it is still a little rough but already there is some suprisingly good content (and some real junk). This is public access TV for a world wide audience that is open for anyone that wants to use it to create and broadcast video. It also can be either "corporate" or "artistic." It is only a matter of time before you start seeing product placement or maybe a small "sponsered by..." on the bottom of the screen.
One other feature that I like about it is that you can set it up to check your favorite feeds on a regular basis and download new content.
I would really like to see this player integrated into MythTV.
Real Player plays them just fine on my machine.
Ghost?
Can you Ghost it? I know that you can make a bootable ghost floppy disk, boot a pc and make a bit for bit image copy of the hard disk over the network to another machine. (Of course you have to have a floppy disk and a network connection on the phone system).
Another thing you can consider is temporarily moving the hard disk to an other PC (windows or linux)as a second disk and copying stuff off it. Seems to me that copying the whole partition with dd might work.
PCAnywhere may also work.
I had a similar problem on with an old Executone phone system that was running MSDOS with a 386 chip on the main board. I could hear the disk drive make noises once in a while that I didn't like the sounds of. I looked at the board and noticed that there was a floppy connector and a db25 serial connector on it. I went to the local Half Priced Bookstore and bought an old,old DOS version of PCAnywhere. I hooked up a floppy drive, figured out how to shut down the phone and voicemail programs and get a DOS prompt. I then made myself a DB25 TO DB9 adapter cable, loaded pcanywhere onto the phone system, connected a spare PC via the serial ports. I created a small FAT partition on the spare PC's disk drive, booted to MSDOS, installed the DOS PCAnywhere, and copied everything that looked useful to the spare PC hard drive. From there I booted the PC back to Windows and copied everything over to the Novell server for backup into the normal tape rotation. Since all this took a while I ended up only doing it once a week.
I actually had to restore this system, and it worked! The disk drive crashed late one Sunday night about a year and a half later. I got a phone call at about 5:30AM that Monday morning, we had no phone system and no voicemail. Happy Monday to me! I put a new disk drive in, loaded MSDOS from floppy (save those old DOS floppys!!!) loaded PCanywhere, copied the latest backup down to my admin PC and restored the whole stinking mess. The users lost a day or two of voicemail messages but things could have been a whole lot worse! (shudders thinking about having to figure out what ports were connected to what exensions company wide.)
When I am stuck using a windows machine I generally turn all of the XP interface crap off. Even through the "win2000 look" is kind of drab I want every bit of speed I can get out of a machine.
Well in my case it the choice was more price then anything else. Apple hardware is just too overpriced for what you get. I paid about $800 for parts to build a kickass athlon system and $0 to install OpenSuSE 10. Is my system as fast as a G5? I don't know...but it is pretty darn fast.
Where am I going to get a top of the line Apple for $800? The Apple GUI is pretty but not pretty enough to pay $1999 for. (cheapest G5 on Apples web site) SuSE also looks pretty good and found all my hardware with no fuss. There are also thousands of free programs I can download and install with a few clicks. My kids also love SuSE. They are both under 10 and have their own login's, passwords and desktops which they have no problem customizing and setting up they way they like. They use OpenOffice and Firefox, and are hooked on SuperTUX and Neverball.
I also get a "talked down to" feel whenever I deal with Apple. To me they seem to treat their users like a bunch of idiots that are too stupid to know how they want to do things and have to be led around by the nose in the "one true way."
Just for example my daughter got an IPOD Shuffle for Christmas. We were at her Grandmothers house when she got it so I installed ITUNES on Grandmas PC, purchased a Hilery Duff album, Downloaded and reflashed the OS on the shuffle because it was horked from the store, and put the music on the Shuffle for her. So far so good, everything working fine. When we get home I figured that I would be able to just plug the IPOD into my wife's windows PC and move the music to her disk drive for playing on ITUNES there. No. The IPOD is already "associated" with another pc, do I want to wipe it and "associate" it with this one? NO. I don't want to associate it with anything, I just want to drag and drop the music that I payed $10 for onto my wifes pc so I can burn it to cd. After fiddling around for a while I just said "forget this" and plugged the IPOD into my SuSE machine. "ding" USB stick pops up on the desktop, double click, drag files from USB stick to SMB share on wifes PC., DONE!
THAT is what I call a user friendly machine.
I then plugged the IPOD back into my wifes pc, opened ITUNES, "associated" it ( it did wipe the music) imported c:\shared the directory that had the music in it, (AFTER IT HAD TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET AND MAKE ME VERIFY THAT I WANTED THE MUSIC I HAD ALREADY PAYED FOR TO PLAY ON THIS PC!!!!!!!!!!!!) and drag the music back onto the IPOD along with some other songs I ripped from CD for her. I don't know, I have a bad taste about the whole thing. My daughter is happy since she is now in the "in crowd" that has an IPOD but if I ever get around to buying an MP3 player for myself it will be something else. Probably something that plays both MP3 and Vorbis but even if it just plays MP3 it will not be an IPOD. Like everything else from Apple they are overpriced and too restricted. Without any research a quick look on the CompUSA web site shows Shuffles starting at $99 and other brands starting at $49.
Not that I want to start a "my browser is better then your browser" pissing contest but one really nice thing about Konqueror is that you can type things like :
/
www.slashdot.org
http://slashdot.org/
ftp://mirrors.kernel.org
smb://(wifescomputer.lan)
sftp://secureworkserver.com
and KDE will understand what you are trying to do, choose the right connection type, and connect (using your kde wallet so you don't have to keep retyping passwords).
Even nicer, if you have more then one window open, (or have done shift control l to spit your window) you can drag back and forth between smb, sftp,
This is handy.
The key word here is ought. I agree with you that once I buy something it ought to be mine to do with as I please. The same way I feel that the trees and buildings sitting on my property are mine to do with as I please. (why is it always OUR trees when they are on someone else's property)
However, there are several companys and more then a few politicians that don't seem to feel the same way.
The worst part of is that by making such stupid, unpopular, and unenforcable laws they destroy respect for the law. Face it, most people really don't think that it is wrong to copy media that they have purchased. If they really think about it they may agree that it is wrong to give out copies but if it is "just a copy for their friend" they can rationalize it as not really doing any harm. "After all they payed for it once, and the record companys have more money then GOD anyway..."
The result is that they have deceided not to respect or obey that law. From there it becomes easier to pick and choose which laws to obey and which to break.
The end result is a general breakdown in respect for the law. People no longer feel that they are "UNDER" the law but that they are equal to it and have the right to choose which laws to obey and which to disobey.
Someone with an agenda then steps in and more stupid laws are passed. (see hate crimes... the crime is beating someone up, and you SHOULD be punished for it, not what you thought about while you were doing it)
Soon we get to the point we are at now where most of us are technically criminals and will break any "minor/stupid" law as long as we think we won't get caught. More and more lawyers are needed to keep from getting caught and there is no longer any right or wrong. Caos in the streets, dogs and cats sleeping together,
I don't know what the best solution is.
I suspect that it may be to wipe most of the laws off of the books and start over with a simpler set that has some kind of rational structure to it. (Good luck trying to get people to agree on what that structure is.)