I remember quite a few years ago, slashdot having this almost exact same discussion of ways of making your PC quieter.
One lad suggested running some kind of hose (think of the hose on household canister vacuums) from the power supply fan to somewhere else like under the bed or into a closet. I can't remember if anyone said whether it works or would work or not, but it seemed like a cool "thinking outside of the box" type of solution.
Alternatively, you could drop the temperature of the ambient intake air so that less would be needed to cool the CPU and drives.
I do this, though mainly just for keeping my CPU cooler. My room is a constant 70 degrees fahrenheit. With 9 fans total, my box is loud and I like it that way.
Perhaps a chilled-water heat exchanger construction would suit.
I would almost bet that something like this would actually be louder, since you have to have a pump motor of some sort. Also a fan on the "radiator" if you ever want full advantage of a water cooled system.
While I like the idea of the Cube very much (except the fact that it's actually shaped like a cube), it had numerous flaws resulting from that design. If I were ever to have one given to me (or bought at an insanely low price), the most important modification for me would be to hack a fan into the top hole.
Why? Well I was checking one out at CompUSA and remembered several tales about people waving their hand across the hole and watching the machine crash instantly. So I swiped my hand across the hole, watched nothing happen, and started to walk away. When I looked over my shoulder, sure enough, the thing was rebooting...
I guess you have a point about the ability to install the different components.
I guess what I disagree with is the fact that the framework for Mozilla (and components) is just proportionally huge compared to the parts that actually "do stuff".
I realize they did it this way on purpose so that they could have a common development environment for all components and make it more or less cross-platform at the same time, but I wish they would have postponed the idea until they could figure out a way to do it without bloat and without slowness, which are my ONLY TWO GRIPES about Mozilla.
Hey thanks! I'd been looking for something like this that was "free." The closest I got was a (very nice) app called CyptoPad which is just like Palm's MemoPad except it's got really decent encryption.
Someone else mentioned that it's got GCC 3.0. Alas, I can't verify this anymore than you can at the moment, what with the entire/.ed slackware domain...
On a side note, I thought I read that GCC 3.0 actually can't compile glibc... if this is true, how did the Slackware folks do it?:P
Re:Slackware is the best Linux distribution. Perio
on
Slackware 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3
Once you save your tagfiles, it's an unintended install
An unintended install? Whoops, I didn't mean to installed Slackware 8.0, it just happened! Honest!
But.. hmmm... hey, this operating system ain't so bad....
My main complaint about modern package management systems and dependencies is the fact that modern distributions always want the latest and greatest software, regardless of whether the older stuff still works fine or not.
As a fictitious but relevant example, let's say it's 2003 and I have Mandrake 7.2 on my desktop. There's a new version of Mini-Commander that has a feature I can't live without, so I get the RPM. When I go to install it, the RPM cites about 12 packages that need updating. And then *those* packages have their own set of things that need newer version.
Mini-Commander would probably compile and/or run just fine with any old version of those packages, but the people who built the distribution picked the newest versions versions available and listed them as dependencies in the.spec file.
The only options I have are to try forcing the install (which might work and which *will* result in broken dependencies in the RPM database) or to compile from source. Both options lead to inconsistencies in the RPM data relative to what's actually on my disk.
Now, if the person who *created* the package would have simply compiled Mini-Commander against the lowest versions of dependency packages possible (while still retaining all functionality), then there would be no problem such as this. I have actually come to the conclusion that distribution developers do this intentionally to keep people buying every new release.
I tried experimenting with the mail client in 0.9.1 (whist 0.9.2 was downloading) and it seems very nice and complete except that it takes *ages* for the damned interface to render.
Click on a message and it takes a second or two to actually display it. Hit Reply and you sit there wondering for awhile if Mozilla actually registered the mouse input....
I would use Mozilla's Mail client if it were just plain faster. I've got an Athlon 750 with loads of memory, so it's not like my machine is too slow.:P Guess I'm still stuck with KMail for awhile.
But that's probably just me. If software doesn't include the kitchen sink today it's not complete.
You'll have to thank jwz for that. During the very initial stages of Mozilla Project planning and development, the Netscape developers were soliciting ideas from people on what they wanted in the new web browser.
More than a couple people announced that they would like to have the browser, mail, composer, etc all as separate programs. We argued that there was no technical reason to lump them all together in one big monolithic program, especially when the users only actually uses one (maybe two) at the same time and the different parts never really talk to each other either.
jwz told us to go to hell, the kitchen sink method was what he wanted and managed to convince everyone else of the same. Enter Mozilla.
Don't forget that Linux has exceedingly powerful disk caching. I've got 384MB of RAM and after I start and application once (including mozilla), it never has to access the disk to load again.
That's what I do at work for all those stupid mandatory 90-day password changes. Of course, being a network run by morons, it keeps a list of ALL YOUR PREVIOUS PASSWORDS to enforce the fact that you your new password must be unique relative to the old ones. In other words, if someone ever cracks the password database, they get not only the current passwords, but the old ones so they can see patterns in the way the user chooses his passwords.
Dumb dumb dumb. I'm a security-conscious fellow alright, but I do the above scheme of password changing simply so that if their systems ever get cracked, they might immediately see how stupid their enforced-password plan really was.
Except that you have to get a PDA password app that sports decent encryption, or else all those passwords are backed up onto your desktop everytime you sync.
I personally store my passwords on my TRGPro with a program called Cryptopad. It has an interface identical to MemoPad except that it uses blowfish encryption.
And, to be on the even-safer side, I went ahead and bought a 32-MB CompactFlash card to back up the PDA so I never have to sync my data to a PC. If I want to add a program to my TRGpro, I simply employ that nifty $10 CompactFlash -> PCMCIA adapter. Long as the OS has PCMCIA support, it looks like a regular IDE drive!:)
If I ever lost the TRGpro itself, well I guess I'd be up a creek. But then, I'd be much more saddened by the lost of my $350 geek toy than a couple dozen seldom-used passwords.
1) Each password must have at least four letters, two numbers and one symbol, or else the system will not accept it as a valid password. Err, maybe I'm not so good on statistics, but doesn't enforcing a policy like this actually make it easier for password scanners?
2) You must change your password every 90 days. That wouldn't be so bad, if not for the fact that:
3) Every time you attempt to change your password, it is checked against a list of your previous passwords. To make sure, of course, that you actually are following the 90-day rule. Mind you that this is on a 100% Windows network, so the relative chance of security intrusions is high enough without storing all current and previous passwords in a database somewhere.
To put it simply: boneheads. Absolute boneheads. As if security weren't awful, the network is usually down anywhere from one to four hours every day, causing a work stoppage for most of us. It might as well be admined by monkeys.
It's nice that someone else seems to agree... I don't like seeing the corporate stuff, (mp3.com? sheesh...) but I don't really agree that it's all that annoying to notice a coder's name after his particular driver has just loaded. He wrote the code that makes my computer work and did it for free. Is it really that much to ask that his name appear next to his driver?
I'm afraid that this is one area where I don't agree with Linus. I *like* to know that my computer is doing something sucessfully. I *like* seeing that my serial drivers, ethernet, ppp, scsi, etc have all been detected by the kernel.
Lets not forget that all the stuff that the kernel outputs normally gets stored in logs. You'd be surprised what problems can be solved by noticing a mundane change in kernel output. Also, much of my important configuration stuff stuff comes from the output of dmesg. When I have a brain fart and can't remember the SCSI ID of my CD burner for cdrecord, I simply take a quick glance at dmesg. Ditto for pretty much every other device on my system. dmesg sure beats the hell out of spending 10 minutes searching/proc (which may or may not actually have the information).
Please no one take this as flamebait, but the way Linus worded his ultimatum was that he didn't want *any* kernel output except errors. One thing I absolutely hate is operating systems which offer little to no information about what they are doing while booting. This includes Windows and Linux distributions with Aurora installed by default (Mandrake).
I like Linux because it lets me see more of what my system is doing which gives me the opportunity to act when I notice something that I don't like.
PLEASE, at the very least, Linus, if you're going to do this, give your users some option of verbosity. Don't just tell the kernel hackers to get rid of all non-error messages.
but IMHO, hacking is really using technology in a way it wasn't intended to be used, using skills that most people don't have.
This is the precise and exact definition of a hacker, be it a highly skilled programmer or an entrant of restricted systems and everyone that falls in between.
Funny how people forget that when they shout, "NUH UH, IT'S *CRACKER*!"
I've found that by taking an xterm, making the window huge (something on the order of 200x100 chars) and running links, one can get a pretty darn decent text-only web browsing experience. It does tables and formatting very nicely, as opposed to lynx.
Mozilla mail doesn't work for me, period. It sure looks like it would be nice to use, but when I enter my data and hit "check mail" it just sits there and drools. No idea why. Kmail works just fine.
Hmm. Well I remember cruising about the internet on my Pentium 100 with 24 megs of RAM (barely following having my first non-Compuserve type of internet access) and hearing about all this raving of Quake. I downloaded the 9MB demo (on a 14.4 modem, this was an acheivement!) and fired it up. It wasn't too impressive at 320x240@256 on a Pentium 100, so I stashed it away and got hooked on Duke Nukem 3D for a good many months. When I decided to drag Quake back out of the C:\DOWNLOAD directory, I fired it up a second time and began wasting most of my teenage life.:)
See post below about my getting a Canopus Pure3D merely for Quake alone.
The single best multiplayer gaming experience I've ever had to this day were the countless hours spent late at night dodging snipers in Quake TeamFortress.
The Monster card would have been either 4 or 6MB's of RAM, I think. 4 sounds right. I only remember that my friend had a Monster but I got a brand-spanky-new Canopus Pure3D which had 2MB more RAM than the Monster.
Hmm, well I think you're on the right track, but a few details are missing. First, DooM & co had 3D engines, alright (even if the entities were sprites), but most map makers tend to describe DooM and Duke3D engines as 2.5D. You have two whole complete dimensions. The vertical axis was highly simulated. (Somewhat analogous to using animated sprites in a 3D shooter to make them look 3D.) What I mean by simulated is that it was some sort of programming trick. Remember in Hexen where if you looked way up or way down in a corner, the angle of the wall corner (usually 90deg) changes to something like 30deg?
The map-editing program for Doom engines provides more evidence... the map you created was *always* 2D and the engine merely rendered it to approximate the 3rd dimension. The closest you could get to 3D was stairs and platforms, by "raising the floor" those areas in the editor.
but Quake was the first COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFULL 3d shooter,
Most of us go ahead and refer to Doom as a 3D shooter, since it faked it pretty well. But it didn't have a true 3D engine, (like Quake does) as I've been yammering about above. Second, Quake was not the first commercially sucessfull 3D shooter, Doom was, by leagues. Quake just seemed to have a much more dedicated audience among the hardcore gamers.
This is not the extra 24 seconds, but in my official Montry Python and The Holy Grail scriptbook (not an original, but a retail book released after the movie, complete with behind-the-scenes notes) there is an entire scene X'ed out. I'd gladly reproduce it here while we're in the whole Python spirit, but alas, I left the book back home. I seem to remember it had something to do with Arthur and Team going to another kingdom and talking to another king. It didn't seem very funny.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember quite a few years ago, slashdot having this almost exact same discussion of ways of making your PC quieter.
One lad suggested running some kind of hose (think of the hose on household canister vacuums) from the power supply fan to somewhere else like under the bed or into a closet. I can't remember if anyone said whether it works or would work or not, but it seemed like a cool "thinking outside of the box" type of solution.
Alternatively, you could drop the temperature of the ambient intake air so that less would be needed to cool the CPU and drives.
I do this, though mainly just for keeping my CPU cooler. My room is a constant 70 degrees fahrenheit. With 9 fans total, my box is loud and I like it that way.
Perhaps a chilled-water heat exchanger construction would suit.
I would almost bet that something like this would actually be louder, since you have to have a pump motor of some sort. Also a fan on the "radiator" if you ever want full advantage of a water cooled system.
While I like the idea of the Cube very much (except the fact that it's actually shaped like a cube), it had numerous flaws resulting from that design. If I were ever to have one given to me (or bought at an insanely low price), the most important modification for me would be to hack a fan into the top hole.
Why? Well I was checking one out at CompUSA and remembered several tales about people waving their hand across the hole and watching the machine crash instantly. So I swiped my hand across the hole, watched nothing happen, and started to walk away. When I looked over my shoulder, sure enough, the thing was rebooting...
If you'd be so kind...
I guess you have a point about the ability to install the different components.
I guess what I disagree with is the fact that the framework for Mozilla (and components) is just proportionally huge compared to the parts that actually "do stuff".
I realize they did it this way on purpose so that they could have a common development environment for all components and make it more or less cross-platform at the same time, but I wish they would have postponed the idea until they could figure out a way to do it without bloat and without slowness, which are my ONLY TWO GRIPES about Mozilla.
Hey thanks! I'd been looking for something like this that was "free." The closest I got was a (very nice) app called CyptoPad which is just like Palm's MemoPad except it's got really decent encryption.
Someone else mentioned that it's got GCC 3.0. Alas, I can't verify this anymore than you can at the moment, what with the entire
On a side note, I thought I read that GCC 3.0 actually can't compile glibc... if this is true, how did the Slackware folks do it?
Once you save your tagfiles, it's an unintended install
An unintended install? Whoops, I didn't mean to installed Slackware 8.0, it just happened! Honest!
But.. hmmm... hey, this operating system ain't so bad....
Would someone mirror at least the ANNOUNCE and ChangeLog? The entire slackware domain is now officially
My main complaint about modern package management systems and dependencies is the fact that modern distributions always want the latest and greatest software, regardless of whether the older stuff still works fine or not.
As a fictitious but relevant example, let's say it's 2003 and I have Mandrake 7.2 on my desktop. There's a new version of Mini-Commander that has a feature I can't live without, so I get the RPM. When I go to install it, the RPM cites about 12 packages that need updating. And then *those* packages have their own set of things that need newer version.
Mini-Commander would probably compile and/or run just fine with any old version of those packages, but the people who built the distribution picked the newest versions versions available and listed them as dependencies in the
The only options I have are to try forcing the install (which might work and which *will* result in broken dependencies in the RPM database) or to compile from source. Both options lead to inconsistencies in the RPM data relative to what's actually on my disk.
Now, if the person who *created* the package would have simply compiled Mini-Commander against the lowest versions of dependency packages possible (while still retaining all functionality), then there would be no problem such as this. I have actually come to the conclusion that distribution developers do this intentionally to keep people buying every new release.
It's enough to make me want to switch to FreeBSD.
I tried experimenting with the mail client in 0.9.1 (whist 0.9.2 was downloading) and it seems very nice and complete except that it takes *ages* for the damned interface to render.
Click on a message and it takes a second or two to actually display it. Hit Reply and you sit there wondering for awhile if Mozilla actually registered the mouse input....
I would use Mozilla's Mail client if it were just plain faster. I've got an Athlon 750 with loads of memory, so it's not like my machine is too slow.
Mozilla does NOT come with a powerful tool called gcc. Lay off the bong.
But that's probably just me. If software doesn't include the kitchen sink today it's not complete.
You'll have to thank jwz for that. During the very initial stages of Mozilla Project planning and development, the Netscape developers were soliciting ideas from people on what they wanted in the new web browser.
More than a couple people announced that they would like to have the browser, mail, composer, etc all as separate programs. We argued that there was no technical reason to lump them all together in one big monolithic program, especially when the users only actually uses one (maybe two) at the same time and the different parts never really talk to each other either.
jwz told us to go to hell, the kitchen sink method was what he wanted and managed to convince everyone else of the same. Enter Mozilla.
What we really need is -turbo mode for linux
Don't forget that Linux has exceedingly powerful disk caching. I've got 384MB of RAM and after I start and application once (including mozilla), it never has to access the disk to load again.
Gotta love those unix-clone boxen.
That's what I do at work for all those stupid mandatory 90-day password changes. Of course, being a network run by morons, it keeps a list of ALL YOUR PREVIOUS PASSWORDS to enforce the fact that you your new password must be unique relative to the old ones. In other words, if someone ever cracks the password database, they get not only the current passwords, but the old ones so they can see patterns in the way the user chooses his passwords.
Dumb dumb dumb. I'm a security-conscious fellow alright, but I do the above scheme of password changing simply so that if their systems ever get cracked, they might immediately see how stupid their enforced-password plan really was.
Except that you have to get a PDA password app that sports decent encryption, or else all those passwords are backed up onto your desktop everytime you sync.
I personally store my passwords on my TRGPro with a program called Cryptopad. It has an interface identical to MemoPad except that it uses blowfish encryption.
And, to be on the even-safer side, I went ahead and bought a 32-MB CompactFlash card to back up the PDA so I never have to sync my data to a PC. If I want to add a program to my TRGpro, I simply employ that nifty $10 CompactFlash -> PCMCIA adapter. Long as the OS has PCMCIA support, it looks like a regular IDE drive!
If I ever lost the TRGpro itself, well I guess I'd be up a creek. But then, I'd be much more saddened by the lost of my $350 geek toy than a couple dozen seldom-used passwords.
This is similar to what happens where I work...
1) Each password must have at least four letters, two numbers and one symbol, or else the system will not accept it as a valid password. Err, maybe I'm not so good on statistics, but doesn't enforcing a policy like this actually make it easier for password scanners?
2) You must change your password every 90 days. That wouldn't be so bad, if not for the fact that:
3) Every time you attempt to change your password, it is checked against a list of your previous passwords. To make sure, of course, that you actually are following the 90-day rule. Mind you that this is on a 100% Windows network, so the relative chance of security intrusions is high enough without storing all current and previous passwords in a database somewhere.
To put it simply: boneheads. Absolute boneheads. As if security weren't awful, the network is usually down anywhere from one to four hours every day, causing a work stoppage for most of us. It might as well be admined by monkeys.
It's nice that someone else seems to agree... I don't like seeing the corporate stuff, (mp3.com? sheesh...) but I don't really agree that it's all that annoying to notice a coder's name after his particular driver has just loaded. He wrote the code that makes my computer work and did it for free. Is it really that much to ask that his name appear next to his driver?
I'm afraid that this is one area where I don't agree with Linus. I *like* to know that my computer is doing something sucessfully. I *like* seeing that my serial drivers, ethernet, ppp, scsi, etc have all been detected by the kernel.
Lets not forget that all the stuff that the kernel outputs normally gets stored in logs. You'd be surprised what problems can be solved by noticing a mundane change in kernel output. Also, much of my important configuration stuff stuff comes from the output of dmesg. When I have a brain fart and can't remember the SCSI ID of my CD burner for cdrecord, I simply take a quick glance at dmesg. Ditto for pretty much every other device on my system. dmesg sure beats the hell out of spending 10 minutes searching
Please no one take this as flamebait, but the way Linus worded his ultimatum was that he didn't want *any* kernel output except errors. One thing I absolutely hate is operating systems which offer little to no information about what they are doing while booting. This includes Windows and Linux distributions with Aurora installed by default (Mandrake).
I like Linux because it lets me see more of what my system is doing which gives me the opportunity to act when I notice something that I don't like.
PLEASE, at the very least, Linus, if you're going to do this, give your users some option of verbosity. Don't just tell the kernel hackers to get rid of all non-error messages.
but IMHO, hacking is really using technology in a way it wasn't intended to be used, using skills that most people don't have.
This is the precise and exact definition of a hacker, be it a highly skilled programmer or an entrant of restricted systems and everyone that falls in between.
Funny how people forget that when they shout, "NUH UH, IT'S *CRACKER*!"
I've found that by taking an xterm, making the window huge (something on the order of 200x100 chars) and running links, one can get a pretty darn decent text-only web browsing experience. It does tables and formatting very nicely, as opposed to lynx.
Mozilla mail doesn't work for me, period. It sure looks like it would be nice to use, but when I enter my data and hit "check mail" it just sits there and drools. No idea why. Kmail works just fine.
The original to this was a reader's letter submitted to GameFan[1] years ago. Circa 1996, I'd say.
1. The best console gaming mag in existance, until Imagine publishing killed it.
Hmm. Well I remember cruising about the internet on my Pentium 100 with 24 megs of RAM (barely following having my first non-Compuserve type of internet access) and hearing about all this raving of Quake. I downloaded the 9MB demo (on a 14.4 modem, this was an acheivement!) and fired it up. It wasn't too impressive at 320x240@256 on a Pentium 100, so I stashed it away and got hooked on Duke Nukem 3D for a good many months. When I decided to drag Quake back out of the C:\DOWNLOAD directory, I fired it up a second time and began wasting most of my teenage life.
See post below about my getting a Canopus Pure3D merely for Quake alone.
The single best multiplayer gaming experience I've ever had to this day were the countless hours spent late at night dodging snipers in Quake TeamFortress.
The Monster card would have been either 4 or 6MB's of RAM, I think. 4 sounds right. I only remember that my friend had a Monster but I got a brand-spanky-new Canopus Pure3D which had 2MB more RAM than the Monster.
Of course, I bought it specifically for Quake.
Hmm, well I think you're on the right track, but a few details are missing. First, DooM & co had 3D engines, alright (even if the entities were sprites), but most map makers tend to describe DooM and Duke3D engines as 2.5D. You have two whole complete dimensions. The vertical axis was highly simulated. (Somewhat analogous to using animated sprites in a 3D shooter to make them look 3D.) What I mean by simulated is that it was some sort of programming trick. Remember in Hexen where if you looked way up or way down in a corner, the angle of the wall corner (usually 90deg) changes to something like 30deg?
The map-editing program for Doom engines provides more evidence... the map you created was *always* 2D and the engine merely rendered it to approximate the 3rd dimension. The closest you could get to 3D was stairs and platforms, by "raising the floor" those areas in the editor.
but Quake was the first COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFULL 3d shooter,
Most of us go ahead and refer to Doom as a 3D shooter, since it faked it pretty well. But it didn't have a true 3D engine, (like Quake does) as I've been yammering about above. Second, Quake was not the first commercially sucessfull 3D shooter, Doom was, by leagues. Quake just seemed to have a much more dedicated audience among the hardcore gamers.
This is not the extra 24 seconds, but in my official Montry Python and The Holy Grail scriptbook (not an original, but a retail book released after the movie, complete with behind-the-scenes notes) there is an entire scene X'ed out. I'd gladly reproduce it here while we're in the whole Python spirit, but alas, I left the book back home. I seem to remember it had something to do with Arthur and Team going to another kingdom and talking to another king. It didn't seem very funny.