Like the author of the article, I tend to get my arse kicked when I play online. But on the other hand, if I have a few mates over with their machines and we have a go at my favourite games on the LAN, I tend to kick arse. It's hard to find a combination of people to play against where I'm vaguely in the same ballpark skill wise, which is why I tend to just play against the bots in UT and crank their skill up if I'm starting to beat them too easily.
Durability. The faster the drive is spinning, the more strain on the bearings if your laptop (I'm assuming laptops are the biggest use for these right now) is moving around at all.
I'm afraid I'd rather a slow drive that'll take all sorts of abuse - using my laptop on the bus, shuffling it around on my lap, turning it around to show somebody something on the screen etc etc - than a fast one that isn't tough enough.
Not at all. It sold to me, and that's the only sale it needs as far as I'm concerned.:)
As it happens though, quite a few people have expressed interest in borrowing my copy after seeing me play it. I'm as mystified as the story poster about why it isn't more popular.
If you've ever had your GSM phone sitting within a few feet of your stereo when it's contacting the cellsite and heard the horrible electronic noises that come through, or had it next to a monitor and seen the screen jumping, you must be pretty thick if you can't figure out for yourself that maybe, just maybe, your cellphone has the potential to mess with flight systems on an aircraft...
> I've had no luck getting anyone to call me "The > Great and Terrible Root".
Just as well really. Where I come from, root has a rather different meaning to that which it carries in other parts of the world, and to be known as a terrible root is not a good thing.;)
I use rsync over ssh too; I back it up to a machine at work (which I can reach from home). It basically does my whole home directory except for a few excludes for stuff that's a bit sensitive (ssh keys, keychain, ICQ history) which I manually backup to CD now and then. The machine at work is then backed up with TSM.
The rsync over ssh style of backup is so easy it's addictive!
Quote: Then I noticed on the wall he had a PHD in physics. Kind of humbled me right there and I realized he could probably learn my job in a month, where as I probably couldn't do his in a million years. End quote:
I work in a university depertment, so needless to say there are PhDs coming out of the woodwork around here. Some of them already could do my job if they had the time (save for needing to be a fair bit more security conscious). Some of them probably could get the basics down in that period of time.
And a small number of them can't even do their own jobs properly, and even the undergrads laugh at them sometimes.
Quote: Unless you could secure the entire crowssover cable someone could still tap in the middle. My suggestion is to use encryption when the line is not physically contained. End quote
In the case I was talking about, the machines are less than a metre apart and in a locked room. If somebody can get in there, there are worse things they can do than tap a cable.
Where I work we avoided a lot of software complexity (and freed all but one machine from the CPU overhead of encryption) by putting extra NICs in the machines and running unencrypted over crossover cables.
This obviously doesn't scale to large numbers of servers, but it's something to think about for a small implementation.
Since three years warranty on server hardware seems to be not uncommon, possibly this is the thin air Redhat seem to have plucked this number from?
It's nice to know that when you get your shiny new 8-way Xeon with untold amounts of RAM you'll be able to leave it in production for the span of its warranty without having to worry about re-installing due to the OS release on it being EOL'ed.
Where this falls down is twofold: 1) servers are still useful well past three years, whether they're warrantied or not, and 2) some vendors for extra money will extend warranties up to five or so years (my employer has started buying Dell boxes with five year warranties pretty much as standard).
That happened to me once too. I was excited for a minute! Unfortunately both were in 800x600 and when I tried to change the res it went back to mirroring.:(
>It's got a bigger screen (and it's a laptop - you >won't be next to a display all the time will you?
The majority of the time I'm using my iBook, I have an external screen available. When I'm out and about, the ability to fit easily into my pack is more important than the size of the screen (the reduced width of the iBook is more significant than the reduced depth of the Powerbook).
>It can take more RAM.
I don't have my iBook maxed out anyway, so this isn't an issue for me.
>It looks nicer. (ok maybe that's subjective)
It is. I prefer the iBook look, as does my friend with a Powerbook.
>The G4 PowerBook will last you longer
Maybe. But with a laptop half the price, I can afford to replace it a lot sooner.
Was easily done, and now I have monitor spanning enabled and working fine. No obvious problems with apps yet.
I only have a 15" LCD so I can't try what happens when the external screen has higher res than the built-in one, but with both displays in the same res I'm quite happy.
Over the weekend while testing a friend's new PC, I discovered another thing the G4 seems to be astonishingly good at - distributed.net rc5 cracking.
Athlon 1800XP at 1.53GHz - 5.3megakeys/s P4 at 2.74GHz - 3.7megakeys/s G4 at 667MHz - 5.0megakeys/s
It's possible something is screwed up here (6x the performance clock for clock is hard to believe) but at face value this is damned impressive for the G4.
Whoops! Somehow I managed to save that comment early. I'll try again (somebody mod down the parent):
In NZ, real broadband (not the 128Kb/s throttled crap) is so expensive that even the geeks don't go for it.
We pay (at current exchange rates) around $30/US a month for a 128Kb/s connection with 5-10GB of free traffic. Or we can get an unthrottled connection for around $47/US a month with a few hundred MB of included traffic.
Once we go over that limit on either type of account, we get stung for around 9c/US per MB.
I have a Mac SE holding open my office door at work.
At the cafeteria they sell chelsea buns and give you free butter, but the butter comes in little tubs and its rock hard. I sit the tub on the back of my monitor for ten minutes and it's nice and soft.
I also have a friend who reckons the back of a monitor is great for drying weed.
1) key escrow - what about tools that regularly change encryption keys (ie I think ssh session keys?). Would the US government have to be sent a new key for every SSH session every hour? How on earth would they store all this?
2) how on earth do they expect everyone to stop using the old encryption methods without backdoors? Intransigence aside, the same people that support encryption backdoors without understanding the issues are the ones that will still be using their old copy of Win 95 years from now and maybe just wondering why they can't seem to connect to the new SSL sites, assuming the servers have all upgraded to the broken encryption protocols, either that or they'll be blissfully unaware that they're breaking the laws of their country by connecting to a server overseas with strong encryption.
We have a couple of hundred dual-boot workstations
with around 700 total users. So far it's proven to
be *more* reliable than NFS; we've had one
occasion where the server had to be rebooted due
to a non-responsive state. Current uptime is 120
days, with not a hiccup in that time.
Not all of these workstations/users are accessing
the AFS server at once; peak usage is probably
around 100 simultaneous logins, average maybe
20-30 when the whole academic year is taken into
account.
Managing it is much nicer than NFS too. I only
wish we had the budget for a couple more servers
so I can do more with replication and transparent
server upgrades etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the author of the article, I tend to get my arse kicked when I play online. But on the other hand, if I have a few mates over with their machines and we have a go at my favourite games on the LAN, I tend to kick arse. It's hard to find a combination of people to play against where I'm vaguely in the same ballpark skill wise, which is why I tend to just play against the bots in UT and crank their skill up if I'm starting to beat them too easily.
That's the way I do it at work, all the machines boot off the network and pull their entire filesystem down from the server with rsync.
Makes the machines very very easy to keep updated (via chroot on the master image server) and practically indestructible.
The increase in my workload when going from supporting it on around 250 machines to around 400 machines was approximately zero.
Durability. The faster the drive is spinning, the more strain on the bearings if your laptop (I'm assuming laptops are the biggest use for these right now) is moving around at all.
I'm afraid I'd rather a slow drive that'll take all sorts of abuse - using my laptop on the bus, shuffling it around on my lap, turning it around to show somebody something on the screen etc etc - than a fast one that isn't tough enough.
Not at all. It sold to me, and that's the only sale it needs as far as I'm concerned. :)
As it happens though, quite a few people have expressed interest in borrowing my copy after seeing me play it. I'm as mystified as the story poster about why it isn't more popular.
If you've ever had your GSM phone sitting within a few feet of your stereo when it's contacting the cellsite and heard the horrible electronic noises that come through, or had it next to a monitor and seen the screen jumping, you must be pretty thick if you can't figure out for yourself that maybe, just maybe, your cellphone has the potential to mess with flight systems on an aircraft...
> I've had no luck getting anyone to call me "The
;)
> Great and Terrible Root".
Just as well really. Where I come from, root has a rather different meaning to that which it carries in other parts of the world, and to be known as a terrible root is not a good thing.
I use rsync over ssh too; I back it up to a machine at work (which I can reach from home). It basically does my whole home directory except for a few excludes for stuff that's a bit sensitive (ssh keys, keychain, ICQ history) which I manually backup to CD now and then. The machine at work is then backed up with TSM.
The rsync over ssh style of backup is so easy it's addictive!
Quote:
Then I noticed on the wall he had a PHD in physics. Kind of humbled me right there and I realized he could probably learn my job in a month, where as I probably couldn't do his in a million years.
End quote:
I work in a university depertment, so needless to say there are PhDs coming out of the woodwork around here. Some of them already could do my job if they had the time (save for needing to be a fair bit more security conscious). Some of them probably could get the basics down in that period of time.
And a small number of them can't even do their own jobs properly, and even the undergrads laugh at them sometimes.
After all, for half its run Blake's 7 had no Blake in it... ;)
Quote:
Unless you could secure the entire crowssover cable someone could still tap in the middle. My suggestion is to use encryption when the line is not physically contained.
End quote
In the case I was talking about, the machines are less than a metre apart and in a locked room. If somebody can get in there, there are worse things they can do than tap a cable.
Where I work we avoided a lot of software complexity (and freed all but one machine from the CPU overhead of encryption) by putting extra NICs in the machines and running unencrypted over crossover cables.
This obviously doesn't scale to large numbers of servers, but it's something to think about for a small implementation.
Since three years warranty on server hardware seems to be not uncommon, possibly this is the thin air Redhat seem to have plucked this number from?
It's nice to know that when you get your shiny new 8-way Xeon with untold amounts of RAM you'll be able to leave it in production for the span of its warranty without having to worry about re-installing due to the OS release on it being EOL'ed.
Where this falls down is twofold: 1) servers are still useful well past three years, whether they're warrantied or not, and 2) some vendors for extra money will extend warranties up to five or so years (my employer has started buying Dell boxes with five year warranties pretty much as standard).
That happened to me once too. I was excited for a minute! Unfortunately both were in 800x600 and when I tried to change the res it went back to mirroring. :(
(iBook vs Powerbook)
>It's got a bigger screen (and it's a laptop - you
>won't be next to a display all the time will you?
The majority of the time I'm using my iBook, I have an external screen available. When I'm out and about, the ability to fit easily into my pack is more important than the size of the screen (the reduced width of the iBook is more significant than the reduced depth of the Powerbook).
>It can take more RAM.
I don't have my iBook maxed out anyway, so this isn't an issue for me.
>It looks nicer. (ok maybe that's subjective)
It is. I prefer the iBook look, as does my friend with a Powerbook.
>The G4 PowerBook will last you longer
Maybe. But with a laptop half the price, I can afford to replace it a lot sooner.
Was easily done, and now I have monitor spanning enabled and working fine. No obvious problems with apps yet.
I only have a 15" LCD so I can't try what happens when the external screen has higher res than the built-in one, but with both displays in the same res I'm quite happy.
(this is on my 700MHz iBook with Radeon chipset).
Over the weekend while testing a friend's new PC, I discovered another thing the G4 seems to be astonishingly good at - distributed.net rc5 cracking.
Athlon 1800XP at 1.53GHz - 5.3megakeys/s
P4 at 2.74GHz - 3.7megakeys/s
G4 at 667MHz - 5.0megakeys/s
It's possible something is screwed up here (6x the performance clock for clock is hard to believe) but at face value this is damned impressive for the G4.
Anyone else got similar numbers?
Whoops! Somehow I managed to save that comment early. I'll try again (somebody mod down the parent):
In NZ, real broadband (not the 128Kb/s throttled crap) is so expensive that even the geeks don't go for it.
We pay (at current exchange rates) around $30/US a month for a 128Kb/s connection with 5-10GB of free traffic. Or we can get an unthrottled connection for around $47/US a month with a few hundred MB of included traffic.
Once we go over that limit on either type of account, we get stung for around 9c/US per MB.
Sucks.
In NZ, real broadband (not the 128Kb/s throttled crap) is so expensive that even the geeks don't go for it.
Was science fiction: now biology.
Like, nobody who knew both of them could figure out that Clark Kent and Superman are the same guy?
That's not bad science - that's totally re-inventing human powers of observation!
If anything is ported, I'd like to see the Workplace Shell (OS/2's desktop GUI). This is still easily the nicest desktop environment I've ever used.
I have a Mac SE holding open my office door at work.
At the cafeteria they sell chelsea buns and give you free butter, but the butter comes in little tubs and its rock hard. I sit the tub on the back of my monitor for ten minutes and it's nice and soft.
I also have a friend who reckons the back of a monitor is great for drying weed.
1) key escrow - what about tools that regularly change encryption keys (ie I think ssh session keys?). Would the US government have to be sent a new key for every SSH session every hour? How on earth would they store all this?
2) how on earth do they expect everyone to stop using the old encryption methods without backdoors? Intransigence aside, the same people that support encryption backdoors without understanding the issues are the ones that will still be using their old copy of Win 95 years from now and maybe just wondering why they can't seem to connect to the new SSL sites, assuming the servers have all upgraded to the broken encryption protocols, either that or they'll be blissfully unaware that they're breaking the laws of their country by connecting to a server overseas with strong encryption.
> Do the OpenAFS Windows clients work? Work well?
They work, yes.
Whether they work well...I can't testify as to
their reliability yet. I have an aversion to
Windows so haven't gone very in-depth with it.
We have a couple of hundred dual-boot workstations
with around 700 total users. So far it's proven to
be *more* reliable than NFS; we've had one
occasion where the server had to be rebooted due
to a non-responsive state. Current uptime is 120
days, with not a hiccup in that time.
Not all of these workstations/users are accessing
the AFS server at once; peak usage is probably
around 100 simultaneous logins, average maybe
20-30 when the whole academic year is taken into
account.
Managing it is much nicer than NFS too. I only
wish we had the budget for a couple more servers
so I can do more with replication and transparent
server upgrades etc.
I'd *never* go back to NFS.