...when one of the "upcoming events" that was in FidoNet's FidoNews was "August 24 1989: Voyager 2 passes Neptune." Scary to think it was that long ago - it seems like only yesterday.
It seems that they're now directly interfering with the connections, above and beyond sending RST packets. If I stop my client and then restart it, it will send for a while, then quit, even with the RST packets being dropped. I tested this by running a client on a backbone-connected server that I have. Aside from dropping the RST packets, I've been logging them as well, and they are being dropped. Since my server doesn't have any arbitrary restrictions or throttling, it's clearly something being done by or on behalf of Comcast.
My choices: - Only seed torrents from my server - Switch to AT&T (yuck, and they'll no doubt be doing the same crap) - Switch to Speakeasy (the Best Buy deal gives me the creeps) - Switch to Covad (expensive) - Switch to a local fixed wireless provider (my employer has this, and it sucks for VoIP) - More cat & mouse games with Comcast
2027 ON JVERB GOTO 9000,5066,3000,5031,2009,5031,9404,9406,5081,5200, 5200,5300,5506,5502,5504,5505
i.e. a multiple-branch GOTO where the destination depends on the value of JVERB. That extra "1" on the second line indicatates that line 2027 got split over two physical lines; FORTRAN dates back to the days of 80-column punch cards.
Tales of Cisco-induced semi-psychotic fits are common. Often, people on a Cisco binge end up curled into a fetal ball, shuddering and muttering paranoid rants. Nudity and violence may well be involved too.
Of course, that's a different Cisco we're talking about, but still...
My Sharp Aquos set has a QAM tuner for cable, as well as an ATSC tuner for over-the-air reception; also, I have a pcHDTV HD-5500 in one of my systems, and it also works with both QAM and ATSC. Both work just fine on the unencrypted local HD broadcast channels. I'm on Comcast in the Chicago area (Romeoville front-end).
When I was shopping for the HD set, I specifically made sure that what I was buying had a QAM tuner. I was not about to take a salesman's word for it.
My worst experience has been with Western Digital. I have a large stack of dead WD drives where I work; one of them went blooey just after its one-year warranty expired.
More recently at home, one of four Samsung 120GB SATA drives in a Linux software RAID-5 array bit the dust. Hmm... just after the three-year warranty expired. What a coincidence! Fortunately, the array kept on chugging along in degraded mode without skipping a beat, and I quickly took the opportunity to back it up - restoring the contents onto a 3x500GB RAID-5 array of Seagate drives.
For huge storage, I'll stick with three or four disks in a RAID-5 rather than buy one giant drive. A small number of drives in RAID-5 give enough redundancy to provide time to replace a drive or migrate the data.
By default, I let ads through. However, the instant $AD_NETWORK serves up an abusive ad, such as a fake dialog box, or circumventing Firefox's popup blocker, or playing audio by default, or anything else obnoxious (see also: Intellitxt, Rovion), said network goes into my blocklist. Needless to say, blocking the bad guys makes the browsing experience a whole lot nicer.
Google ads don't really bother me - they're text ads, rasy enough to ignore.
Last week, I heard a muffled "pop" coming from my server, followed by it powering off. Sure enough, after six years, the PSU had finally succumbed to Bad Capacitor Syndrome. I picked a new PSU that had active power factor correction and a high-efficiency design - and found that my UPS was reporting about 40% less load, in spite of the only change being the power supply.
Switching from a CRT monitor to an LCD made another big difference. It's surprising how much of a power hog a CRT can be. The 22" widescreen I have now uses less than half the power of my old 17" CRT!
Note that OpenVPN can be set up to use a TCP connection instead of a UDP connection, and it uses SSL. No need for weird things like GRE that might not make it through.
You could always put OpenVPN on a port other than 1194 if you think you might run into port blocking, too.
As I understand it, the Nikon DSLR bodies will accept old F-series lenses, but they will require manual focusing. Canon EF-series lenses for the EOS system will work on the Canon DSLR bodies. Older third-party EOS system lenses (e.g. Tamron) may need to be rechipped for use in Canon DSLRs.
Canon's.CRW format includes a large JPEG "thumbnail" in addition to the raw image dump. This can be useful as a rough guide during postprocessing.
Dave Coffin's dcraw program will decode a wide variety of raw image formats, including Canon, Nikon, and Pentax. It is also used within the ufraw package, which can operate in a standalone mode or as a GIMP plugin.
Before I went digital, I shot a lot of Kodachrome and loved it. However, I was recently on a steam train excursion in Iowa, and a discussion of photography naturally ensued. One of my fellow passengers said that he threw his last unexposed rolls of Kodachrome in the trash, because it was a cheaper and more efficient way to dispose of it than to shoot it, send it out for processing, and never see it again.
I have few regrets about going to digital - my first-generation DRebel takes lovely pics, offers all sorts of flexibility (no more "oops! wrong film for the scene!"), allows me to judge exposures with a histogram, and doesn't burn up $$$ on film (which means I can burn up $$$ on lenses and accessories instead).
However, there are still times when I miss shooting Kodachrome 64 with a Minolta SRT-202...
Perhaps the "rigidity" is that image sensors tend to have a relatively narrow exposure latitude. If you're used to shooting slide film, this isn't a problem, but if you normally shoot negatives, it can trip you up.
One thing that can help is to shoot in RAW mode. With the Canon DSLRs, RAW will capture 36-bit color rather than 24-bit. The disadvantage is that you then need to postprocess the images to get decent results - but you can bring out details that would be lost in the shadows if you were shooting in JPEG mode.
All things considered, the 18-55 that came with my first-generation Digital Rebel is not a bad lens at all. I do more shooting with a Canon 28-135 IS/USM lens, but when I need the wider angle, the 18-55 fills the bill quite nicely.
The cheap 50mm 1.8 prime offers some major bang-for-the-buck, so get one. It makes a great portrait lens with the smaller-than-35mm-film frame size.
Of course, if you have a Nikon film SLR and a bunch of lenses for it, get a Nikon instead. If you're just dipping your toes into SLR photography, get the one that you like best.
Such functionality is already available in Knoppix. Not only can you store your configuration and updates on a USB thumb drive or HD, but the OS itself is portable, too.
I have a RAID5 array of 4 Samsung SP1213C (120 GB) SATA drives on one of my systems, which has been truckin' along for two-and-a-half years of 24/7 operation without a hiccup. These are running off generic SiI PCI adapters, with Linux software RAID. No errors logged in the SMART error logs, either.
I've since put SP2504C single drives (250 GB) in a couple of my desktop boxen. They're too new (oldest=5 months) to assess long-term reliability, but I've had no trouble with them so far.
There are plenty of places offering refurbished Thinkpads at bargain prices. I got both my T22 and T30 via that route, and they've been solid performers.
You read a scroll titled BOOBIE FLETCH. --More-- This is a scroll of pr0n. Read? [y/n] y You think impure thoughts, and start fapping. --More-- Suddenly, a bolt of lightning hits the kitten! The kitten is killed!
However, said keys better be passphrase- (NOT password-) protected! After all, if, let's say, $DEVELOPER's laptop gets stolen and it has a non-passphrase-protected ssh key, then going to the effort of using keys for authentication will be for naught.
FWIW, I recently ditched Debian for a completely unrelated reason (see also, CVE-2006-1173).
Slashdot Mirror
...when one of the "upcoming events" that was in FidoNet's FidoNews was "August 24 1989: Voyager 2 passes Neptune." Scary to think it was that long ago - it seems like only yesterday.
It seems that they're now directly interfering with the connections, above and beyond sending RST packets. If I stop my client and then restart it, it will send for a while, then quit, even with the RST packets being dropped. I tested this by running a client on a backbone-connected server that I have. Aside from dropping the RST packets, I've been logging them as well, and they are being dropped. Since my server doesn't have any arbitrary restrictions or throttling, it's clearly something being done by or on behalf of Comcast.
My choices:
- Only seed torrents from my server
- Switch to AT&T (yuck, and they'll no doubt be doing the same crap)
- Switch to Speakeasy (the Best Buy deal gives me the creeps)
- Switch to Covad (expensive)
- Switch to a local fixed wireless provider (my employer has this, and it sucks for VoIP)
- More cat & mouse games with Comcast
2027 ON JVERB GOTO 9000,5066,3000,5031,2009,5031,9404,9406,5081,5200, 5200,5300,5506,5502,5504,5505
i.e. a multiple-branch GOTO where the destination depends on the value of JVERB. That extra "1" on the second line indicatates that line 2027 got split over two physical lines; FORTRAN dates back to the days of 80-column punch cards.
So maybe the inspiration for the "maze of twisty little passages, all alike" wasn't Mammoth Cave, it was the code itself.
My Sharp Aquos set has a QAM tuner for cable, as well as an ATSC tuner for over-the-air reception; also, I have a pcHDTV HD-5500 in one of my systems, and it also works with both QAM and ATSC. Both work just fine on the unencrypted local HD broadcast channels. I'm on Comcast in the Chicago area (Romeoville front-end).
When I was shopping for the HD set, I specifically made sure that what I was buying had a QAM tuner. I was not about to take a salesman's word for it.
My worst experience has been with Western Digital. I have a large stack of dead WD drives where I work; one of them went blooey just after its one-year warranty expired.
More recently at home, one of four Samsung 120GB SATA drives in a Linux software RAID-5 array bit the dust. Hmm... just after the three-year warranty expired. What a coincidence! Fortunately, the array kept on chugging along in degraded mode without skipping a beat, and I quickly took the opportunity to back it up - restoring the contents onto a 3x500GB RAID-5 array of Seagate drives.
For huge storage, I'll stick with three or four disks in a RAID-5 rather than buy one giant drive. A small number of drives in RAID-5 give enough redundancy to provide time to replace a drive or migrate the data.
By default, I let ads through. However, the instant $AD_NETWORK serves up an abusive ad, such as a fake dialog box, or circumventing Firefox's popup blocker, or playing audio by default, or anything else obnoxious (see also: Intellitxt, Rovion), said network goes into my blocklist. Needless to say, blocking the bad guys makes the browsing experience a whole lot nicer.
Google ads don't really bother me - they're text ads, rasy enough to ignore.
Set you system to run on UTC. No daylight savings hassles to worry about.
Last week, I heard a muffled "pop" coming from my server, followed by it powering off. Sure enough, after six years, the PSU had finally succumbed to Bad Capacitor Syndrome. I picked a new PSU that had active power factor correction and a high-efficiency design - and found that my UPS was reporting about 40% less load, in spite of the only change being the power supply.
Switching from a CRT monitor to an LCD made another big difference. It's surprising how much of a power hog a CRT can be. The 22" widescreen I have now uses less than half the power of my old 17" CRT!
"Would you like some Space Spuds with that?"
First parsed as "Moloko." Just the sort of phone to take to the Korova Milkbar...
And here I thought that SED stood for "Smoke Emitting Diode." I don't think those would make very good displays, though.
Note that OpenVPN can be set up to use a TCP connection instead of a UDP connection, and it uses SSL. No need for weird things like GRE that might not make it through.
You could always put OpenVPN on a port other than 1194 if you think you might run into port blocking, too.
As I understand it, the Nikon DSLR bodies will accept old F-series lenses, but they will require manual focusing. Canon EF-series lenses for the EOS system will work on the Canon DSLR bodies. Older third-party EOS system lenses (e.g. Tamron) may need to be rechipped for use in Canon DSLRs.
Canon's .CRW format includes a large JPEG "thumbnail" in addition to the raw image dump. This can be useful as a rough guide during postprocessing.
Dave Coffin's dcraw program will decode a wide variety of raw image formats, including Canon, Nikon, and Pentax. It is also used within the ufraw package, which can operate in a standalone mode or as a GIMP plugin.
Before I went digital, I shot a lot of Kodachrome and loved it. However, I was recently on a steam train excursion in Iowa, and a discussion of photography naturally ensued. One of my fellow passengers said that he threw his last unexposed rolls of Kodachrome in the trash, because it was a cheaper and more efficient way to dispose of it than to shoot it, send it out for processing, and never see it again.
I have few regrets about going to digital - my first-generation DRebel takes lovely pics, offers all sorts of flexibility (no more "oops! wrong film for the scene!"), allows me to judge exposures with a histogram, and doesn't burn up $$$ on film (which means I can burn up $$$ on lenses and accessories instead).
However, there are still times when I miss shooting Kodachrome 64 with a Minolta SRT-202...
One thing that can help is to shoot in RAW mode. With the Canon DSLRs, RAW will capture 36-bit color rather than 24-bit. The disadvantage is that you then need to postprocess the images to get decent results - but you can bring out details that would be lost in the shadows if you were shooting in JPEG mode.
All things considered, the 18-55 that came with my first-generation Digital Rebel is not a bad lens at all. I do more shooting with a Canon 28-135 IS/USM lens, but when I need the wider angle, the 18-55 fills the bill quite nicely.
The cheap 50mm 1.8 prime offers some major bang-for-the-buck, so get one. It makes a great portrait lens with the smaller-than-35mm-film frame size.
Of course, if you have a Nikon film SLR and a bunch of lenses for it, get a Nikon instead. If you're just dipping your toes into SLR photography, get the one that you like best.
There is a lot of C code out there that makes incorrect assumptions about sizeof(pointer) and sizeof(int). In the AMD64 world, the two are not equal.
Such functionality is already available in Knoppix. Not only can you store your configuration and updates on a USB thumb drive or HD, but the OS itself is portable, too.
Disclaimer: this is just one person's experience.
I have a RAID5 array of 4 Samsung SP1213C (120 GB) SATA drives on one of my systems, which has been truckin' along for two-and-a-half years of 24/7 operation without a hiccup. These are running off generic SiI PCI adapters, with Linux software RAID. No errors logged in the SMART error logs, either.
I've since put SP2504C single drives (250 GB) in a couple of my desktop boxen. They're too new (oldest=5 months) to assess long-term reliability, but I've had no trouble with them so far.
There are plenty of places offering refurbished Thinkpads at bargain prices. I got both my T22 and T30 via that route, and they've been solid performers.
You read a scroll titled BOOBIE FLETCH. --More--
This is a scroll of pr0n. Read? [y/n] y
You think impure thoughts, and start fapping. --More--
Suddenly, a bolt of lightning hits the kitten! The kitten is killed!
Uh, maybe because I was using sendmail instead of exim?
FWIW, I switched over to CentOS - which had a fix for the sendmail bug the same day it was announced.
However, said keys better be passphrase- (NOT password-) protected! After all, if, let's say, $DEVELOPER's laptop gets stolen and it has a non-passphrase-protected ssh key, then going to the effort of using keys for authentication will be for naught.
FWIW, I recently ditched Debian for a completely unrelated reason (see also, CVE-2006-1173).