Another reason to avoid these sites, I guess
on
A New Search for MySpace
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't know about you, but I think that if they're trying to get major search engines – especially Google – to index MySpace, then that's definitely a good reason to avoid those sites (if you don't already). It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into; by combining MySpace's information with Google's search technology – or whoever wins – they'd basically be saying "child stalkers of the world, HERE YOU GO!" and handing the bad guys everything they needed on a silver platter. I can only hope that these people get their act together and realize the threats of social networking sites before something bad happens...
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I personally can't stand MySpace anyway, so there probably is at least some bias here – but either way, those sites definitely aren't doing very much good for society, at least as far as I can tell.
And a lot of third-party developers using Slack as a base for their own distribution also use the -current tree. I've been doing my own distribution lately (yes, you know, I never shut up about it...) and I just base everything on -current, making a few tweaks and changes as I deem necessary – it really is rather nice and stable, and since it's significantly more up-to-date, I see no reason not to use it. As far as I care, the releases are mostly milestones between updates.
Quick tip to any fellow would-be Slack developers, by the way – keep at least one previous version just to be on the safe side, and "torture test" the current one before you release it. This means updating your dev box, preferrably a couple others as well, using it every day, etc., as well as doing an extensive test of everything (my own procedure if anyone's interested). That way, you know for sure if it works – and if it doesn't, you can just go back to one that does. Simple as that.
By the way, just a personal opinion, but I'd rather trust Slackware's "unstable" -current branch than any Microsoft, Fedora, or Ubuntu release – I've had bad experiences with all three, so I may just be biased, but may as well put in my 2 cents anyway.
YOU LUCKY BASTARD! Back in my day, we had a half-finished 40x25 ANSI animation written in QBasic, and we liked that a hell of a lot more than you and your stupid dancing baby! Oh, and that new-fangled IBM PC contraption or whatever it's called? Mark my words, that thing'll never catch on!
A thousand bucks, and there will only be ten titles when it first comes out? Now I can see why only obsessive early adopters would want something like this – quite honestly, I just don't see the point of getting a $1000 device that can only play 10 titles (no matter how high-definition the titles and/or the point may be).
But will it support Linux? No, seriously – specifically, what I mean is, will it support syncing to a Linux desktop, or will Linux only be as far as the phone itself? Because even though I don't have a cell phone, I'm a Linux user, and I suspect that if Linux had more/better official support for "weirder" peripheral devices such as cell phones it might catch on with even more people than are already using it.
(A week or so ago I had to install the software for a Motorola cameraphone onto a friend's [Windows] laptop... didn't work at all, and what was really annoying was that there wasn't any Linux program available that supported his specific phone. Probably wouldn't matter for him, but it really annoys me because there wasn't any way to – even temporarily – set up a Linux system to download the pictures that were on there so we could at least get that done, and worry about the rest later... sorry if it doesn't make any sense to anyone else:-)
My (largest) home directory takes up about 20-40 GB, but the nice thing about it is that it's all software development stuff for my Linux distribution. All the important files I'd need to restore it to another disk or even another machine are burned to CD, because they're a part of the distro, and a lot of the reason it even takes up so much space is because I've got the ISO files as well as the regular, non-ISO-packed ones on there.
Of course, I have a bunch of machines, even more hard disks, and everything's scattered all over the place, so most of my personal files tend to be backed up not to CD's – although I do occassionally move older work to CD to free disk space – but to other hard disks... probably not the best solution, but it's worked so far:-)
Actually, there's exactly two advanced features I need on the Web: Hypertext and the occassional image (e.g., image galleries, screenshots, or other places where text just doesn't work). Everything else – Flash movies, Java applets, client-side scripting, etc. – may be nice to have, let you do more stuff than with raw HTML code, and it may look shiny, but guess what? The most important thing on the Web, and the Internet in general, is actual content, and if a Web site doesn't display in a browser like Lynx or Dillo, either they've really screwed up the code, or else there's no real content.
In other words, I don't care how many Flash movies you have on your homepage, unless there's something worth reading, and that I can read regardless of my brother, there's nothing there. Slashdot is just fine in Dillo, as is Wikipedia, Google, and any other site you care to name – you might not like the way it presents everything without CSS or whatever, but it's still readable, and therefore Dillo is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned.
Besides, I have yet to see Tim Berners-Lee say anything about creating the Web for Flash videos and video games; he created it because he wanted a convenient world-wide method of accessing primarily text and image content, and that's what the Web originally was, still is, and probably will be as long as it's around. Everything else is secondary.
Actually, I have yet to see a site that breaks Dillo, or that's not supported for that matter. As long as it's got reasonably decent-quality code, and doesn't require JavaScript/CSS to be fully functional, I'd say Dillo does just fine. You really just have to be able to deal with the Web without any of the "fancy" stuff like that – and hey, if you don't like Dillo, just don't use it! That's the thing; you have a choice, which is really what alternative browsers are all about.
Lynx is still alive and kickin' – I'm a Linux hacker, so use it all the time myself (great if the latest dev build of X doesn't want to work, or I just need to grab a quick file and don't know the exact URL... plus it's just so much faster than most of the other browsers I know, and I'm always running at least one Eterm window so I like having it run in the terminal). Of course, if you'd rather have a more graphical browser, Dillo (see also another comment I wrote so I don't have to repeat myself) is a really nice one, at least if you run a UNIX-ish operating system – actually, I think there's a Windows port available as well, although I don't remember the site.
Personally, I think the best "power user's browser" is Konqueror – it has tabs and split windows, supports XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, manages my files, can open almost every known filetype embedded within its own program window, – and the rarely-mentioned but highly useful ability to run a terminal emulator inside itself, which is great if you're trying to design a Web site and need to see both the code and preview at the same time.
I will warn you, if you try building native 64-bit, it won't support Flash – the reason Flock's binaries run it so nicely is because Flash is 32-bit, and so's Flock. I'm also maintaining a distro, by the way – and I'd say I prefer the 32-bit Firefox myself.
Oh, and I think my distribution was the first to feature Flock as one of the available Web browsers – not entirely sure, I will admit (their wiki says I am, but I added that myself;-), but the first time they mentioned it on/. I tried it and was instantly hooked. Since gone back to good old Firefox, though, because honestly Flock's just painfully slow – if you tried running it on a P133/80MB laptop you'd understand what I mean.
Actually, a very good point – but quite honestly, it just doesn't make sense to get a fancy 64-bit machine if you aren't going to use all its power to its full potential (insert other favorite marketing doublespeak here), and there are a lot of things which really would benefit from the additional bits. The idea is really not so much to keep those programs 32-bit forever, just to transition things a bit more gently than saying "here, you either have half the power and everything works, or all the power and only half the things work".
The thing is, though, Firefox isn't truly a minimalist browser – even though it looks fairly simple, and it's definitely lightweight compared to the Mozilla suite, it's nonetheless a pretty powerful program with a lot of configuration options, dialogs, features, etc., and not to mention an extremely complex rendering engine. I don't think a "minimalist" Web browser would use heavy-duty cross-platform GUI abstraction layers or take over an hour to build on a fast new Pentium4/Athlon system, either.
Now, if you want a truly minimalist graphical browser, may I suggest Dillo; while it isn't stated outright as one of the design goals, Dillo is definitely a very simple, compact program which does what it needs to, and does it well – but doesn't implement additional bloat. I suggest checking for one of the patched versions, because they add in nice features like tabs and anti-aliasing, but whichever Dillo version you choose, it's guaranteed a tiny little program for the real minimalist!
Honestly, the only reason Flash on AMD64 is so amazing to most people is because most of the other distributions are based on "pure AMD64" code and don't include 32-bit packages and compatibility code by default. And why I can understand why they'd want to do that – considerably cleaner system, etc. – I personally don't like it at all. I've been porting a distribution to AMD64 myself, and the first thing I decided was that packages like Firefox and MPlayer would keep using the 32-bit versions, because honestly, I'd rather a convenient system than a pure 64-bit one.
Speaking of Flock, that reminds me – have to update to the latest version sometime, because it would be kind of stupid if the first distribution to feature Flock as a standard package (mine) wasn't up to date:-)
“3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever”... you mean they've been rushing it this whole time? I'd have never guessed! What are they, sealed in a Slo-Time envelope or something?
Damn, don't tell me you've figured out my FTP habits!:-) That's actually what I've been doing, although even Debian's got a few things missing here and there that cause total hell for me, and since my system's Slackware-based, the sources are easy enough to compile, but finding them can be difficult since Debian's package management system splits everything up into a million little pieces...
Wholeheartedly agree with that one – I much prefer the cartridge system myself, because it's just so much faster, quieter, and much harder to scratch. I find it kind of odd that with computers we want to move to solid-state media such as flash memory, but with game consoles it has to be away from it; while the capacity may be higher for optical discs, the read time is extremely slow... and as Yoda says, "Size matters not." I don't care how big the game is or what kind of graphics it has, I just want actual gameplay. Half the reason retro-gaming is still so popular is because, back before graphics were as powerful as they are today, developers actually focused on creating fun but challenging games that actually were worth playing. Who cares how much detail you can see when there's nothing to see?
Also, one other thing I liked about cartridges is that you could save directly to the cartridge without buying a separate memory card. While this does have the disadvantage that you can't share your data with a friend, etc. unless the game supports saving to either location, it was definitely very convenient back when we first got our N64 and we hadn't yet gotten a memory card for the thing. And maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems faster with that, too.
Personally, I'd rather have my DVD player in a regular desktop computer than a game console – DVD-ROM drives can play both movies and computer discs, and they're dirt cheap (I know a place near where I live that sells the things for $5 each; I've already gotten three;-) And not only that, but with the right software you can rip the DVD's to your hard disk for faster playback later – you only have to hunt for a virtual file, not a physical plastic disc that's probably scratched and covered in dust anyway. Plus computer screens are considerably higher-resolution than TV's anyway.
And one last thing: With the right equipment you can hook your computer up to your TV – I have a TView Micro which I sometimes use with my own machines, which just plugs into the standard monitor port and outputs onto the regular component video jack – and a lot of graphics cards have built-in TV out. If you've got a sufficiently quiet machine [you can get a dead-silent Compaq DeskPro for $55 or so on eBay, that's what I did] you're set to go!
Having said all that, I definitely want Wiin – Whatever It Is Now, may as well prove the name could be worse – once it's here, because screw the DVD player, everyone knows it's about the games anyway!
And that's actually what I was thinking about when I posted that – I've been working on porting my Linux distribution to AMD64 for a few months now, and let me tell you, those embedded assembler routines can be absolute hell, especially when there's no alternative C-based function, no way to disable the assembler, and no easy way to sidestep the problem (e.g., leaving the program out altogether). Trust me, solo AMD64 porting is not a task for the faint of heart...
I refuse to consider any password secure unless it's at least 16 random alpha-numerical characters, uppercase and lowercase, generated via a random password script. My own password on all my machines was generated with this random password generator I wrote in Python, and I've been using it well over a year on every single one of my machines without a single problem. My root password, of course, is 32 characters long, and entirely different altogether.
If it helps, I did write the one password down for the first few months, and after that I managed to memorize it and just threw the paper away altogether. Both the passwords were, of course, saved in a hidden file in my home directory, readable only by me, and protected by at least one of the passwords with the end result that no one would get in without my permission. And eventually, I memorized the root password as well. Took a while, but I did!
The only problem with that is, if you wanted to port to a new system, you'd either need to (a) write a new assembly-language routine for the new platform's CPU architecture, or (b) have a platform-independent C/C++ fallback which you could use on non-native platforms, kind of like a lot of libraries like imlib2 and SDL do for processor-intensive code – sorry if I'm butchering the terminology;-) While assembly language runs code fast, C/C++ makes writing code fast, at least if you know C/C++. It's really the same thing as with X and fancy video drivers – while there's nice direct-renderer drivers for the more popular video cards, there still has to be a basic one that goes through various X calls for the cards which they don't have direct rendering on. Kind of a loose analogy, but I think it makes sense, anyway.
Disclaimer: I know enough C to write a basic "hello world program" and that's about it... I'm a Linux distribution maintainer, so I'm a lot better at building software than writiing it.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'd say that for what I need from an image gallery, tables are acceptable enough, at least for now – rules or not, they work for me, so that's what really matters. (And yes, I know it would make life miserable for Lynx users, but I have yet to see anyone browsing an image gallery in Lynx – and yes, I use Lynx all the time.)
1) If I may gently offer some advice -- being smarter than other people doesn't mean you always have to get your way. I get your technical point, but it's their network, not yours. Honestly, you'd be wise to learn that lesson now before you have to learn it with much more serious consequences in the future.
Trust me, I've heard that one about a million times by now... I actually didn't even bother messing with any of their machines after that, if I needed a computer for something (e.g., class PowerPoint) I just dragged in my laptop, which doesn't have an Internet connection – well, at school, anyway – and used that thing instead. Besides, my laptop has games:-)
I am sure a little command line use doesn't stump them
Hell, I think that if anything, a command line would make things considerably faster – probably redundant, I know, but the guys running these would probably be a lot faster with a console editor like emacs or vi than with the likes of (insert favorite X- or Windows-based editor here), plus the system itself would be faster without the overhead of a graphical interface. And besides, supercomputers and clusters are meant to do computation, not fancy display output.
This actually sounds just like my school district vs. me. This (last) year I had to do a personal project for the IB program, which in my case happened to be maintaining a Linux distribution. And I figured that since I was in the computer lab as a student helper one of the class periods, I'd just borrow one of their machines and create an SSH tunnel to get to my machine at home, then use x0vncserver to forward the desktop so I could tweak stuff and come back right where I left off. [Not the most efficient way, I know...]
Anyway, long story short, they don't really notice until I start checking things on my homepage as well; nothing bad or anything, and not even personal stuff, just the Linux-related parts of it that I'd need for the project. So they block it. So I e-mail them, politely asking to unblock it – and just to be sure, I check their censorware program's homepage, and since they've also got it blocked, I e-mail them.
Couple days later, no response from my own school district – but the censorware people were more than happy to unblock my site.
Few months later, the district people call a bunch of parent-teacher conferences about the whole thing, saying that I was bypassing their proxy server and "compromising system security" – the ironic part was, I was actually safer doing an SSH tunnel, because it was one-way only and the only machine that would be affected by the fatal typo of doom or whatever would be my own at home. But either way, they don't get their way, so a few days later they actually send their people down to personally yell at me. (Talk about wasting taxpayer dollars – these people apparently have enough free time that they can just drop everything else to come yell at a single student in a school of over 1500. And this is a fairly big school district, so there's other schools, too – but no, they have more of a threat coming from some kid using an SSH tunnel than from all the other would-be hackers visiting porn sites, installing spyware, and posting to MySpace.com. I still don't understand their logic...)
But, either way, those school district people, even if their intentions are good – you just have to watch out for those guys. They're kind of like the BOFH, really, only they use expulsion and no graduation rather than killing people – they consider it their job to keep the network running smoothly, and if it means kicking people off and expelling them / denying graduation / etc., they'll do it – because they only need to worry about the network, not the people.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but I think that if they're trying to get major search engines – especially Google – to index MySpace, then that's definitely a good reason to avoid those sites (if you don't already). It's already trivially easy to find all sorts of information on those sites, because so many people just post sensitive personal information without realizing the danger they're putting themselves into; by combining MySpace's information with Google's search technology – or whoever wins – they'd basically be saying "child stalkers of the world, HERE YOU GO!" and handing the bad guys everything they needed on a silver platter. I can only hope that these people get their act together and realize the threats of social networking sites before something bad happens...
DISCLAIMER: I will admit I personally can't stand MySpace anyway, so there probably is at least some bias here – but either way, those sites definitely aren't doing very much good for society, at least as far as I can tell.
And a lot of third-party developers using Slack as a base for their own distribution also use the -current tree. I've been doing my own distribution lately (yes, you know, I never shut up about it...) and I just base everything on -current, making a few tweaks and changes as I deem necessary – it really is rather nice and stable, and since it's significantly more up-to-date, I see no reason not to use it. As far as I care, the releases are mostly milestones between updates.
Quick tip to any fellow would-be Slack developers, by the way – keep at least one previous version just to be on the safe side, and "torture test" the current one before you release it. This means updating your dev box, preferrably a couple others as well, using it every day, etc., as well as doing an extensive test of everything (my own procedure if anyone's interested). That way, you know for sure if it works – and if it doesn't, you can just go back to one that does. Simple as that.
By the way, just a personal opinion, but I'd rather trust Slackware's "unstable" -current branch than any Microsoft, Fedora, or Ubuntu release – I've had bad experiences with all three, so I may just be biased, but may as well put in my 2 cents anyway.
YOU LUCKY BASTARD! Back in my day, we had a half-finished 40x25 ANSI animation written in QBasic, and we liked that a hell of a lot more than you and your stupid dancing baby! Oh, and that new-fangled IBM PC contraption or whatever it's called? Mark my words, that thing'll never catch on!
A thousand bucks, and there will only be ten titles when it first comes out? Now I can see why only obsessive early adopters would want something like this – quite honestly, I just don't see the point of getting a $1000 device that can only play 10 titles (no matter how high-definition the titles and/or the point may be).
Yep – saw that. Guess what? The phone was an e815, so it wouldn't work! :-P
But will it support Linux? No, seriously – specifically, what I mean is, will it support syncing to a Linux desktop, or will Linux only be as far as the phone itself? Because even though I don't have a cell phone, I'm a Linux user, and I suspect that if Linux had more/better official support for "weirder" peripheral devices such as cell phones it might catch on with even more people than are already using it.
:-)
(A week or so ago I had to install the software for a Motorola cameraphone onto a friend's [Windows] laptop... didn't work at all, and what was really annoying was that there wasn't any Linux program available that supported his specific phone. Probably wouldn't matter for him, but it really annoys me because there wasn't any way to – even temporarily – set up a Linux system to download the pictures that were on there so we could at least get that done, and worry about the rest later... sorry if it doesn't make any sense to anyone else
My (largest) home directory takes up about 20-40 GB, but the nice thing about it is that it's all software development stuff for my Linux distribution. All the important files I'd need to restore it to another disk or even another machine are burned to CD, because they're a part of the distro, and a lot of the reason it even takes up so much space is because I've got the ISO files as well as the regular, non-ISO-packed ones on there.
:-)
Of course, I have a bunch of machines, even more hard disks, and everything's scattered all over the place, so most of my personal files tend to be backed up not to CD's – although I do occassionally move older work to CD to free disk space – but to other hard disks... probably not the best solution, but it's worked so far
Actually, there's exactly two advanced features I need on the Web: Hypertext and the occassional image (e.g., image galleries, screenshots, or other places where text just doesn't work). Everything else – Flash movies, Java applets, client-side scripting, etc. – may be nice to have, let you do more stuff than with raw HTML code, and it may look shiny, but guess what? The most important thing on the Web, and the Internet in general, is actual content, and if a Web site doesn't display in a browser like Lynx or Dillo, either they've really screwed up the code, or else there's no real content.
In other words, I don't care how many Flash movies you have on your homepage, unless there's something worth reading, and that I can read regardless of my brother, there's nothing there. Slashdot is just fine in Dillo, as is Wikipedia, Google, and any other site you care to name – you might not like the way it presents everything without CSS or whatever, but it's still readable, and therefore Dillo is perfectly fine as far as I'm concerned.
Besides, I have yet to see Tim Berners-Lee say anything about creating the Web for Flash videos and video games; he created it because he wanted a convenient world-wide method of accessing primarily text and image content, and that's what the Web originally was, still is, and probably will be as long as it's around. Everything else is secondary.
Actually, I have yet to see a site that breaks Dillo, or that's not supported for that matter. As long as it's got reasonably decent-quality code, and doesn't require JavaScript/CSS to be fully functional, I'd say Dillo does just fine. You really just have to be able to deal with the Web without any of the "fancy" stuff like that – and hey, if you don't like Dillo, just don't use it! That's the thing; you have a choice, which is really what alternative browsers are all about.
Lynx is still alive and kickin' – I'm a Linux hacker, so use it all the time myself (great if the latest dev build of X doesn't want to work, or I just need to grab a quick file and don't know the exact URL... plus it's just so much faster than most of the other browsers I know, and I'm always running at least one Eterm window so I like having it run in the terminal). Of course, if you'd rather have a more graphical browser, Dillo (see also another comment I wrote so I don't have to repeat myself) is a really nice one, at least if you run a UNIX-ish operating system – actually, I think there's a Windows port available as well, although I don't remember the site.
Personally, I think the best "power user's browser" is Konqueror – it has tabs and split windows, supports XHTML/CSS/JavaScript, manages my files, can open almost every known filetype embedded within its own program window, – and the rarely-mentioned but highly useful ability to run a terminal emulator inside itself, which is great if you're trying to design a Web site and need to see both the code and preview at the same time.
I will warn you, if you try building native 64-bit, it won't support Flash – the reason Flock's binaries run it so nicely is because Flash is 32-bit, and so's Flock. I'm also maintaining a distro, by the way – and I'd say I prefer the 32-bit Firefox myself.
;-), but the first time they mentioned it on /. I tried it and was instantly hooked. Since gone back to good old Firefox, though, because honestly Flock's just painfully slow – if you tried running it on a P133/80MB laptop you'd understand what I mean.
Oh, and I think my distribution was the first to feature Flock as one of the available Web browsers – not entirely sure, I will admit (their wiki says I am, but I added that myself
Actually, a very good point – but quite honestly, it just doesn't make sense to get a fancy 64-bit machine if you aren't going to use all its power to its full potential (insert other favorite marketing doublespeak here), and there are a lot of things which really would benefit from the additional bits. The idea is really not so much to keep those programs 32-bit forever, just to transition things a bit more gently than saying "here, you either have half the power and everything works, or all the power and only half the things work".
The thing is, though, Firefox isn't truly a minimalist browser – even though it looks fairly simple, and it's definitely lightweight compared to the Mozilla suite, it's nonetheless a pretty powerful program with a lot of configuration options, dialogs, features, etc., and not to mention an extremely complex rendering engine. I don't think a "minimalist" Web browser would use heavy-duty cross-platform GUI abstraction layers or take over an hour to build on a fast new Pentium4/Athlon system, either.
Now, if you want a truly minimalist graphical browser, may I suggest Dillo; while it isn't stated outright as one of the design goals, Dillo is definitely a very simple, compact program which does what it needs to, and does it well – but doesn't implement additional bloat. I suggest checking for one of the patched versions, because they add in nice features like tabs and anti-aliasing, but whichever Dillo version you choose, it's guaranteed a tiny little program for the real minimalist!
Honestly, the only reason Flash on AMD64 is so amazing to most people is because most of the other distributions are based on "pure AMD64" code and don't include 32-bit packages and compatibility code by default. And why I can understand why they'd want to do that – considerably cleaner system, etc. – I personally don't like it at all. I've been porting a distribution to AMD64 myself, and the first thing I decided was that packages like Firefox and MPlayer would keep using the 32-bit versions, because honestly, I'd rather a convenient system than a pure 64-bit one.
:-)
Speaking of Flock, that reminds me – have to update to the latest version sometime, because it would be kind of stupid if the first distribution to feature Flock as a standard package (mine) wasn't up to date
“3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever”... you mean they've been rushing it this whole time? I'd have never guessed! What are they, sealed in a Slo-Time envelope or something?
Damn, don't tell me you've figured out my FTP habits! :-) That's actually what I've been doing, although even Debian's got a few things missing here and there that cause total hell for me, and since my system's Slackware-based, the sources are easy enough to compile, but finding them can be difficult since Debian's package management system splits everything up into a million little pieces...
Wholeheartedly agree with that one – I much prefer the cartridge system myself, because it's just so much faster, quieter, and much harder to scratch. I find it kind of odd that with computers we want to move to solid-state media such as flash memory, but with game consoles it has to be away from it; while the capacity may be higher for optical discs, the read time is extremely slow... and as Yoda says, "Size matters not." I don't care how big the game is or what kind of graphics it has, I just want actual gameplay. Half the reason retro-gaming is still so popular is because, back before graphics were as powerful as they are today, developers actually focused on creating fun but challenging games that actually were worth playing. Who cares how much detail you can see when there's nothing to see?
Also, one other thing I liked about cartridges is that you could save directly to the cartridge without buying a separate memory card. While this does have the disadvantage that you can't share your data with a friend, etc. unless the game supports saving to either location, it was definitely very convenient back when we first got our N64 and we hadn't yet gotten a memory card for the thing. And maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems faster with that, too.
Personally, I'd rather have my DVD player in a regular desktop computer than a game console – DVD-ROM drives can play both movies and computer discs, and they're dirt cheap (I know a place near where I live that sells the things for $5 each; I've already gotten three ;-) And not only that, but with the right software you can rip the DVD's to your hard disk for faster playback later – you only have to hunt for a virtual file, not a physical plastic disc that's probably scratched and covered in dust anyway. Plus computer screens are considerably higher-resolution than TV's anyway.
And one last thing: With the right equipment you can hook your computer up to your TV – I have a TView Micro which I sometimes use with my own machines, which just plugs into the standard monitor port and outputs onto the regular component video jack – and a lot of graphics cards have built-in TV out. If you've got a sufficiently quiet machine [you can get a dead-silent Compaq DeskPro for $55 or so on eBay, that's what I did] you're set to go!
Having said all that, I definitely want Wiin – Whatever It Is Now, may as well prove the name could be worse – once it's here, because screw the DVD player, everyone knows it's about the games anyway!
And that's actually what I was thinking about when I posted that – I've been working on porting my Linux distribution to AMD64 for a few months now, and let me tell you, those embedded assembler routines can be absolute hell, especially when there's no alternative C-based function, no way to disable the assembler, and no easy way to sidestep the problem (e.g., leaving the program out altogether). Trust me, solo AMD64 porting is not a task for the faint of heart...
I refuse to consider any password secure unless it's at least 16 random alpha-numerical characters, uppercase and lowercase, generated via a random password script. My own password on all my machines was generated with this random password generator I wrote in Python, and I've been using it well over a year on every single one of my machines without a single problem. My root password, of course, is 32 characters long, and entirely different altogether.
If it helps, I did write the one password down for the first few months, and after that I managed to memorize it and just threw the paper away altogether. Both the passwords were, of course, saved in a hidden file in my home directory, readable only by me, and protected by at least one of the passwords with the end result that no one would get in without my permission. And eventually, I memorized the root password as well. Took a while, but I did!
The only problem with that is, if you wanted to port to a new system, you'd either need to (a) write a new assembly-language routine for the new platform's CPU architecture, or (b) have a platform-independent C/C++ fallback which you could use on non-native platforms, kind of like a lot of libraries like imlib2 and SDL do for processor-intensive code – sorry if I'm butchering the terminology ;-) While assembly language runs code fast, C/C++ makes writing code fast, at least if you know C/C++. It's really the same thing as with X and fancy video drivers – while there's nice direct-renderer drivers for the more popular video cards, there still has to be a basic one that goes through various X calls for the cards which they don't have direct rendering on. Kind of a loose analogy, but I think it makes sense, anyway.
Disclaimer: I know enough C to write a basic "hello world program" and that's about it... I'm a Linux distribution maintainer, so I'm a lot better at building software than writiing it.
Well, I don't know about you, but I'd say that for what I need from an image gallery, tables are acceptable enough, at least for now – rules or not, they work for me, so that's what really matters. (And yes, I know it would make life miserable for Lynx users, but I have yet to see anyone browsing an image gallery in Lynx – and yes, I use Lynx all the time.)
Trust me, I've heard that one about a million times by now... I actually didn't even bother messing with any of their machines after that, if I needed a computer for something (e.g., class PowerPoint) I just dragged in my laptop, which doesn't have an Internet connection – well, at school, anyway – and used that thing instead. Besides, my laptop has games
Hell, I think that if anything, a command line would make things considerably faster – probably redundant, I know, but the guys running these would probably be a lot faster with a console editor like emacs or vi than with the likes of (insert favorite X- or Windows-based editor here), plus the system itself would be faster without the overhead of a graphical interface. And besides, supercomputers and clusters are meant to do computation, not fancy display output.
This actually sounds just like my school district vs. me. This (last) year I had to do a personal project for the IB program, which in my case happened to be maintaining a Linux distribution. And I figured that since I was in the computer lab as a student helper one of the class periods, I'd just borrow one of their machines and create an SSH tunnel to get to my machine at home, then use x0vncserver to forward the desktop so I could tweak stuff and come back right where I left off. [Not the most efficient way, I know...]
Anyway, long story short, they don't really notice until I start checking things on my homepage as well; nothing bad or anything, and not even personal stuff, just the Linux-related parts of it that I'd need for the project. So they block it. So I e-mail them, politely asking to unblock it – and just to be sure, I check their censorware program's homepage, and since they've also got it blocked, I e-mail them.
Couple days later, no response from my own school district – but the censorware people were more than happy to unblock my site.
Few months later, the district people call a bunch of parent-teacher conferences about the whole thing, saying that I was bypassing their proxy server and "compromising system security" – the ironic part was, I was actually safer doing an SSH tunnel, because it was one-way only and the only machine that would be affected by the fatal typo of doom or whatever would be my own at home. But either way, they don't get their way, so a few days later they actually send their people down to personally yell at me. (Talk about wasting taxpayer dollars – these people apparently have enough free time that they can just drop everything else to come yell at a single student in a school of over 1500. And this is a fairly big school district, so there's other schools, too – but no, they have more of a threat coming from some kid using an SSH tunnel than from all the other would-be hackers visiting porn sites, installing spyware, and posting to MySpace.com. I still don't understand their logic...)
But, either way, those school district people, even if their intentions are good – you just have to watch out for those guys. They're kind of like the BOFH, really, only they use expulsion and no graduation rather than killing people – they consider it their job to keep the network running smoothly, and if it means kicking people off and expelling them / denying graduation / etc., they'll do it – because they only need to worry about the network, not the people.
Just a tip from someone who'd know...