Having been exposed to computers at the ripe old age of 8, I had a great deal of experiance by the time I hit high school. There was one computer teacher who was a former chemistry teacher. I hadn't had much experiance with macs at the time, but by the end of that first semester I learned all the teacher knew and then some about macs and novell networks. The rest of my time there ended up being mostly self study work and support. I was well known around campus for fixing and installing computers and the like. I learned a lot more like that than I could have had I been forced into some project by a teacher. I learned a bit of PERL and Pascal, very basic networking (I helped install network wiring in the school), and all kinds of other things that I take for granted now.
So, my advice is to let the students do what they want. Make them come up with projects to do (or ones that they're already working on). I remember my last project before I left was installing linux and learning how to do everything I have been doing in that environment. I am no longer afraid to install linux in a box that has no easy way to mount the install media:-) My next project is to install gentoo on my 486DX2/50 lappy with no CD-Rom drive and a network card that isn't supported by the default kernel. Doesn't that sound like fun?
Do not add anything to my startup without asking. If I like your program and want it to run automatically at boot then I will either use a checkbox in your config screen or I will put a shortcut in the startup folder.
I cannot tell you how much this annoys me. For the love of doG, if you MUST start your program on startup, please at least put it in the startup folder where I can see it. My mom's work system was lagging like crazy and I went to investigate. I removed about 8 or 10 different programs from the registry that were starting on their own. Yet another reason I use Linux From Scratch. I know wtf my system is doing at least.
At the risk of my precious karma, the 150, 200, 300 etc.-in-one kits from Radio Shack are probably the best thing for kids. I had the 200-in-one kit when I was a kid, and I learned a good deal about analogue electronics from this kit. Even learned to read a schematic from the manual that comes with it. It is reletively simple even for someone that doesn't want to learn the technical stuff to build one of the cool projects. For adults, however, these kits are a little basic. I've built one or two of the kits from Ramsey Electronics and they are pretty easy for someone with a passing interest that is handy with a soldering iron to build. Actually learned a good deal about soldering from their speaker phone kit.:-)
I totally agree with you. I guess I'll relate my personal experiance. I was going to a public elementry school in the mid 80's, and I always hated recess time. There were gang bangers and fights all over the yard. Some would chase after me and my friends. We'd go tell the teacher in charge of watching us and she'd say "just walk away." Well, WTF do you think we were doing?? I was beaten up several times by these bullies, never putting up a fight. I was just one of these quiet kids that the bullies probably thought was asking for a pounding.
So anyway, my parents go and talk to the principal about the situation. Her response: "Oh, we can't do anything to the kids." So my parents say "Maybe I should teach my kid to defend himself." Her response: "I'll have him thrown out of school." The next year, I found myself attending a private school, where I remained until graduation.
So, you think I managed to get away without any confrentation. Wrong. A few years later, one of the bullies who had beaten me up in elementry school came around and started bullying me again. By that time, I had a green belt in Shoulin Kenpo. Being the nonviolent guy that I am, however, I tried talking him down, but it wasn't working. We eventually started fighting. No one got hurt, but after that fight (the only fight I've ever been in thank god) I never had any trouble with that guy again.
So, what's the point I'm trying to make? It's ok to be passive and try to talk your way out of confrentation. However, it certanly helps if you can defend yourself physically. If you know how to defend yourself, it doesn't matter if the guy is twice as big and three times as strong as you (as this guy was). Know how to roll with the punches and life will be a lot easier for you.
Ok, I could have used a select() to get it working instead, but this was just a quick hack to get data through the firewall. It isn't exactly production software. I was simply looking for a quick and dirty hack and that's what I got.
hehe, I got something like this once with a non-threaded C program. I was writing a small little cgi program to grab a file from my webserver, and display it on a page that was publically accesable (damn firewall). So, I'm going along, writing data to a socket, then reading the result. First, it would never exit, so I changed to non-blocking. Then it would never get the data. I added a printf() between the write and read for debugging, and the program worked just fine. Removed it, and the program broke again. I eventually figured that the program was executing the read statement too soon, the server hadn't responded yet. added a sleep(1) in there, and low and behold, the damn thing decided to work. Sorry, I know this has nothing to do with threads, but the above comment reminded me of this situation. I'm done rambling now.
My university implemented a hard nosed firewall late last semester. At the time, I had all my e-mail redirected to my qmail server in my room. I wondered why I hadn't gotten any e-mail in a few days, so I had a friend of mine connect to my server to try and check it out... Connection Refused was the reply. Slowly, I realized why we had a half hour network hiccup a few days earlier. They had put a firewall between me and the outside world.
I did a little bit of testing of the firewall. A portscan from an outside system showed that all 65535 TCP ports were filtered. Great. I now have trouble connecting to things like IRC (can't connect to EFnet at all, because they REQUIRE an ident response). I finally found a way to redirect my campus mail box to my server. I can SSH into my box by hopping through the CS server. That's really all I need. I'm currently talking to administration about getting those three ports opened up, but I haven't heard anything for a couple of weeks now. We shall see what happens.
> Aren't people worried about their computer getting an STD (SMTP-transmitted Disease)??
That's why it's important to use protection. All the ports on my box (must be female) are filtered, so no STDs can get through. All incoming connections are monitored for just that kind of thing. It's also useful in the prevention of unwanted child processes. You know how it is. When two machines get together, they just wanna fork().
I just downloaded GNU Electric a few days ago (I don't remember the URL atm, google found it for me). It looks like some great software. I haven't really had the time to play around with it much. It claims to be able to do PCB design as well as simulation work (which is something that I like as I don't understand verilog simulations very well). If this doesn't work for you, I'd have to agree with the other posts about using DOSemu or WINE to use your existing software.
<bitch>
Thanks, Cliff, for posting this Ask Slashdot now, instead of when I asked the same question a couple of months ago
</bitch>
Upload caps are the worst thing ever. I'm paying twice the monthly I used to and I get about twice the upload speed. Now, I'm not even trying to run any servers. All I want to do is tansfer some large files from my box at home to my box at school (where I have a fractional T3 connection). Instead, I find the file on the net and download it from there... often from 24.* addresses at a descent speed. A friend of mine who's had his cable modem for years used to upload at 5+ Mb/s until they started caping uploads. Now, he can't even play Quake 3 with his friend down the street. If DSL were avalible in my area, I'd get it in a second. Take my advice, stay away from @home in the SF bay area.
hmm... when I went down to LA a few weeks ago, I was surprised at how much better people drive there than they do here in SF bay area. Maybe it's just me, but I think people drive worse up here. Oh well, I hate the way people drive everywhere I go. Just can't win:-(
A few of my friends got together and started planning the protocol for such a beast. My roommate and I actually started implementing parts of this a month or so ago. Unfortunately, with school in the way, we haven't had much time to go very far. If anyone would like to check out what we have going as far as the protocol is conserned, most of our documentation can be found here. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me (my e-mail address is on the above page).
I wrote an article on compiling and installing a new kernel a while back. It can be found here. It outlines the process I use when I build a new kernel
As for the complexity issue, the only hard part is choosing which options you need. There is no way around this. Make needs to know which drivers to compile. There are other ways to make it a little easier (at the expense of time and disk/memory space). IIRC, Solaris uses a completely modular kernel. You could probably get a linux kernel to do this as well. Only thing I can think you'd have to have compiled directly into the kernel is the driver for your hard drive (there may be others, play around with it a bit until you get something that works). Then you could build everything else as a module (say 'm' to everything that will let you). Having never done this before, I have no clue how well it will work. I'm sure there'll be a few replies to this one(hopefully from someone with experiance with this kind of setup), so read those before you try that.
Ok, so we all know that most earth satilites are really old and almost never have any maintenance performed on them. However, there are components in this design that will fail eventually. Namely, the rechargable batteries will not last forever. Granted, this won't be a problem when it is in sunlight, but when it is on the dark side, there will have to be some kind of renewable power source to send telemetry back to earth. Every kind of rechargable battery that I've ever seen can not be recharged an infinite number of times. What happens when these batteries reach the end of their useful lives? We just scrap all of the activity that goes on durring the lunar night and say "shutdown -h now" at the end of the lunar day? I'm sure a mission to replace these would cost more than deploying a new unit.
In addition to the byte=char comment, there are some standards out there that require a char to be one byte. For example, in CGI, all non-alphanumerics are converted into hex, preceded by the % sign (except for the space which is +). This would break every CGI implementation I've seen out there.
A less critical point that I've seen in my own code is some of it will only process data if it is below 0x7f (i.e. first 7 bits). Usually, it processes a subset of these and ignores the rest. While this wouldn't break in Unicode, it would ignore everything but the first 7 bits.
That might not be such a bad idea, but a pentium class laptop could get expensive. I'm typing this on my ThinkPad 360CE (486DX2/50 in case you're wondering), and it cost me about $250 2 months ago. That doesn't include the network card. You might want to consider a small 486 system, since you won't be running any apps locally (other than the X-server of course). You could probably manage to get them to boot over the network, so you'd need only minimal disk space.
Speaking of X-servers, I'd like to get an old Sun 3/60 running as an X-server. Only problem with it is I have no hard disk for it, and I'm not sure if the tape drive works at all. Anyone know if I can get it to boot via over the network, using a linux box as the boot server?
Ok, I came into this conversation late, so it probably won't get moderated up, but here it goes.
I recently got a new dual processor motherboard. I opened the box to grab the manual and see what the jumper settings needed to be, only to find a 3.5" floppy disk instead. This contained the manual I was looking for in PDF format. Talk about a "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation. Thank god I was REPLACING my current motherboard:-)
For other things, online docs are ok. you do have the ability to grep large documents faster than you can large paper manuals. IMO, that's really the only advantage. I prefer the dead tree manual to everything else. have you ever tried reading a hexdump of a binary file while reading the ELF manual at the same time? very difficult when you don't have the space on your screen to display both at a resonable size at the same time.
This all reminds me of that movie on UPN a while back called "Dream House". All of these appliances would most likely be attatched to some central point. First, the toaster burns your toast, you get mad, it tells the server. Next thing you know, doors won't open, knives start flying around the kitchen, all of your food spoils, the toilet won't flush, etc. At least this didn't happen any sooner. Then everyone would be scared of the Y2K bug really doing some damage:-)
I am currently taking a course like this (Systems Programming). We are using Linux as our development OS. The ultimate goal of the course is to write a device driver for a single board computer(m68k) that will communicate back to the desktop via the serial port (ooh... and I get a whole 64k of ram to put the system on the sbc:-)
First, we are learning the internals of the linux OS (fork, exec, malloc, *yawn*) by writing some small C programs. Our textbook is "Beginning Linux Programming Second Edition" (ISBN 1-861002-97-1). It's got some nice programs to start on plus a nice chapter on device drivers. If you want to check out the course, the URL is http://cs.sonoma.edu/~bob/cs_310/310general.html
Re:Best ergonomic keyboard I've used... the MS one
on
Ergonomic Keyboards
·
· Score: 1
I definately agree with this post (except for the taking up smoking part). I bought a generic split keyboard a few years ago, and it's the best thing I've ever done. When I'm in the computer lab here at school, my wrists start to hurt when typing fast, but I can hack code for hours on end with this keyboard. I can even type faster on the natural keyboard than the standard keyboards. The only quirk about this keyboard is the placement of the \ key. It's to the right of the right shift key, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Definately go down to your local computer store and try out different keyboards that they have there. It is a big help to make sure you can type comfortably on it before you buy it.
I also used to use the first MS natural keyboard. It was a pretty good keyboard (still use it when I go back home), but it put the 6 key on the wrong side of the split. It did teach me to hit the b with my left hand tho:-)
One other keyboard that I've seen is the Twiddler (http://www.handkey.com/). I've always wanted to try this one out, but it is a bit expensive at US$200. It's basically a one handed keyboard/mouse. If you get a chance, check it out.
The only two games I've been interested in playing in the last 5 years were Quake II (and now III) and StarCraft. StarCraft got me through my first semester in college (before I switched to linux). Wine simply doesn't do it justice. I've been waiting for this game to come out on linux for the last year and a half. I even e-mailed Blizard about it, though they said they had no plans of porting it. Sounds like a job for Loki:-)
When I can get the damn thing to work, it works great (4 gig native like other TR-4 tapes), but getting it to work is the hard part. I honestly can't understand why it fails (and from what I know of electrical engeneering, it shouldn't in this manner). It just won't work 80% of the time when it's in the drive bay (either 3.5" or 5.25" bays), but when I power down, pull it out, and leave it hanging by the power and IDE cables, it works. Slap it back in and it usually fails again.
Another wierd thing about it is that it has to be secondary master (as per tech support). Won't seem to work as slave at all. Other than that, it works fine in Linux with the IDE Tape driver compiled into the kernel (probably works as a module as well).
Sorry if this sounds picky (read: feel free to moderate this down), but having worked at Radio Snack (glad to finally be out of there) in SF bay area, I do know a good deal about wireless phones. In this area, the only provider I know of that uses GSM is PacBell PCS. Their service is ok, but I got some degree of static when I used their service. Most of the providers of digital cellular service here operate at 800MHz, wether it be TDMA (Cellular One) or CDMA (GTE). This allows them to use Dual Mode (as apposed to Dual Mode/Dual Band) phones for when there is no digital service. You can still use the analog network (which is also at 800MHz). The PCS providers use 1900 MHz for their service (CDMA for Sprint PCS and GSM for PacBell PCS).
Not that anyone here probably cares... I'm done now:-)
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Having been exposed to computers at the ripe old age of 8, I had a great deal of experiance by the time I hit high school. There was one computer teacher who was a former chemistry teacher. I hadn't had much experiance with macs at the time, but by the end of that first semester I learned all the teacher knew and then some about macs and novell networks. The rest of my time there ended up being mostly self study work and support. I was well known around campus for fixing and installing computers and the like. I learned a lot more like that than I could have had I been forced into some project by a teacher. I learned a bit of PERL and Pascal, very basic networking (I helped install network wiring in the school), and all kinds of other things that I take for granted now.
:-) My next project is to install gentoo on my 486DX2/50 lappy with no CD-Rom drive and a network card that isn't supported by the default kernel. Doesn't that sound like fun?
So, my advice is to let the students do what they want. Make them come up with projects to do (or ones that they're already working on). I remember my last project before I left was installing linux and learning how to do everything I have been doing in that environment. I am no longer afraid to install linux in a box that has no easy way to mount the install media
haha, that's exactly where I got it from... wanted to find the original posting though. Thank you Google!
Think again. Don't believe me? Then read this story. A nice hack to say the least.
At the risk of my precious karma, the 150, 200, 300 etc.-in-one kits from Radio Shack are probably the best thing for kids. I had the 200-in-one kit when I was a kid, and I learned a good deal about analogue electronics from this kit. Even learned to read a schematic from the manual that comes with it. It is reletively simple even for someone that doesn't want to learn the technical stuff to build one of the cool projects. For adults, however, these kits are a little basic. I've built one or two of the kits from Ramsey Electronics and they are pretty easy for someone with a passing interest that is handy with a soldering iron to build. Actually learned a good deal about soldering from their speaker phone kit. :-)
I totally agree with you. I guess I'll relate my personal experiance. I was going to a public elementry school in the mid 80's, and I always hated recess time. There were gang bangers and fights all over the yard. Some would chase after me and my friends. We'd go tell the teacher in charge of watching us and she'd say "just walk away." Well, WTF do you think we were doing?? I was beaten up several times by these bullies, never putting up a fight. I was just one of these quiet kids that the bullies probably thought was asking for a pounding.
So anyway, my parents go and talk to the principal about the situation. Her response: "Oh, we can't do anything to the kids." So my parents say "Maybe I should teach my kid to defend himself." Her response: "I'll have him thrown out of school." The next year, I found myself attending a private school, where I remained until graduation.
So, you think I managed to get away without any confrentation. Wrong. A few years later, one of the bullies who had beaten me up in elementry school came around and started bullying me again. By that time, I had a green belt in Shoulin Kenpo. Being the nonviolent guy that I am, however, I tried talking him down, but it wasn't working. We eventually started fighting. No one got hurt, but after that fight (the only fight I've ever been in thank god) I never had any trouble with that guy again.
So, what's the point I'm trying to make? It's ok to be passive and try to talk your way out of confrentation. However, it certanly helps if you can defend yourself physically. If you know how to defend yourself, it doesn't matter if the guy is twice as big and three times as strong as you (as this guy was). Know how to roll with the punches and life will be a lot easier for you.
Ok, I could have used a select() to get it working instead, but this was just a quick hack to get data through the firewall. It isn't exactly production software. I was simply looking for a quick and dirty hack and that's what I got.
hehe, I got something like this once with a non-threaded C program. I was writing a small little cgi program to grab a file from my webserver, and display it on a page that was publically accesable (damn firewall). So, I'm going along, writing data to a socket, then reading the result. First, it would never exit, so I changed to non-blocking. Then it would never get the data. I added a printf() between the write and read for debugging, and the program worked just fine. Removed it, and the program broke again. I eventually figured that the program was executing the read statement too soon, the server hadn't responded yet. added a sleep(1) in there, and low and behold, the damn thing decided to work. Sorry, I know this has nothing to do with threads, but the above comment reminded me of this situation. I'm done rambling now.
My university implemented a hard nosed firewall late last semester. At the time, I had all my e-mail redirected to my qmail server in my room. I wondered why I hadn't gotten any e-mail in a few days, so I had a friend of mine connect to my server to try and check it out... Connection Refused was the reply. Slowly, I realized why we had a half hour network hiccup a few days earlier. They had put a firewall between me and the outside world.
I did a little bit of testing of the firewall. A portscan from an outside system showed that all 65535 TCP ports were filtered. Great. I now have trouble connecting to things like IRC (can't connect to EFnet at all, because they REQUIRE an ident response). I finally found a way to redirect my campus mail box to my server. I can SSH into my box by hopping through the CS server. That's really all I need. I'm currently talking to administration about getting those three ports opened up, but I haven't heard anything for a couple of weeks now. We shall see what happens.
> Aren't people worried about their computer getting an STD (SMTP-transmitted Disease)??
That's why it's important to use protection. All the ports on my box (must be female) are filtered, so no STDs can get through. All incoming connections are monitored for just that kind of thing. It's also useful in the prevention of unwanted child processes. You know how it is. When two machines get together, they just wanna fork().
I just downloaded GNU Electric a few days ago (I don't remember the URL atm, google found it for me). It looks like some great software. I haven't really had the time to play around with it much. It claims to be able to do PCB design as well as simulation work (which is something that I like as I don't understand verilog simulations very well). If this doesn't work for you, I'd have to agree with the other posts about using DOSemu or WINE to use your existing software.
:-)
<bitch>
Thanks, Cliff, for posting this Ask Slashdot now, instead of when I asked the same question a couple of months ago
</bitch>
I'm ok, really
Upload caps are the worst thing ever. I'm paying twice the monthly I used to and I get about twice the upload speed. Now, I'm not even trying to run any servers. All I want to do is tansfer some large files from my box at home to my box at school (where I have a fractional T3 connection). Instead, I find the file on the net and download it from there... often from 24.* addresses at a descent speed. A friend of mine who's had his cable modem for years used to upload at 5+ Mb/s until they started caping uploads. Now, he can't even play Quake 3 with his friend down the street. If DSL were avalible in my area, I'd get it in a second. Take my advice, stay away from @home in the SF bay area.
hmm... when I went down to LA a few weeks ago, I was surprised at how much better people drive there than they do here in SF bay area. Maybe it's just me, but I think people drive worse up here. Oh well, I hate the way people drive everywhere I go. Just can't win :-(
A few of my friends got together and started planning the protocol for such a beast. My roommate and I actually started implementing parts of this a month or so ago. Unfortunately, with school in the way, we haven't had much time to go very far. If anyone would like to check out what we have going as far as the protocol is conserned, most of our documentation can be found here. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me (my e-mail address is on the above page).
I wrote an article on compiling and installing a new kernel a while back. It can be found here. It outlines the process I use when I build a new kernel
As for the complexity issue, the only hard part is choosing which options you need. There is no way around this. Make needs to know which drivers to compile. There are other ways to make it a little easier (at the expense of time and disk/memory space). IIRC, Solaris uses a completely modular kernel. You could probably get a linux kernel to do this as well. Only thing I can think you'd have to have compiled directly into the kernel is the driver for your hard drive (there may be others, play around with it a bit until you get something that works). Then you could build everything else as a module (say 'm' to everything that will let you). Having never done this before, I have no clue how well it will work. I'm sure there'll be a few replies to this one(hopefully from someone with experiance with this kind of setup), so read those before you try that.
Ok, so we all know that most earth satilites are really old and almost never have any maintenance performed on them. However, there are components in this design that will fail eventually. Namely, the rechargable batteries will not last forever. Granted, this won't be a problem when it is in sunlight, but when it is on the dark side, there will have to be some kind of renewable power source to send telemetry back to earth. Every kind of rechargable battery that I've ever seen can not be recharged an infinite number of times. What happens when these batteries reach the end of their useful lives? We just scrap all of the activity that goes on durring the lunar night and say "shutdown -h now" at the end of the lunar day? I'm sure a mission to replace these would cost more than deploying a new unit.
In addition to the byte=char comment, there are some standards out there that require a char to be one byte. For example, in CGI, all non-alphanumerics are converted into hex, preceded by the % sign (except for the space which is +). This would break every CGI implementation I've seen out there.
A less critical point that I've seen in my own code is some of it will only process data if it is below 0x7f (i.e. first 7 bits). Usually, it processes a subset of these and ignores the rest. While this wouldn't break in Unicode, it would ignore everything but the first 7 bits.
That might not be such a bad idea, but a pentium class laptop could get expensive. I'm typing this on my ThinkPad 360CE (486DX2/50 in case you're wondering), and it cost me about $250 2 months ago. That doesn't include the network card. You might want to consider a small 486 system, since you won't be running any apps locally (other than the X-server of course). You could probably manage to get them to boot over the network, so you'd need only minimal disk space.
Speaking of X-servers, I'd like to get an old Sun 3/60 running as an X-server. Only problem with it is I have no hard disk for it, and I'm not sure if the tape drive works at all. Anyone know if I can get it to boot via over the network, using a linux box as the boot server?
Ok, I came into this conversation late, so it probably won't get moderated up, but here it goes.
:-)
I recently got a new dual processor motherboard. I opened the box to grab the manual and see what the jumper settings needed to be, only to find a 3.5" floppy disk instead. This contained the manual I was looking for in PDF format. Talk about a "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" situation. Thank god I was REPLACING my current motherboard
For other things, online docs are ok. you do have the ability to grep large documents faster than you can large paper manuals. IMO, that's really the only advantage. I prefer the dead tree manual to everything else. have you ever tried reading a hexdump of a binary file while reading the ELF manual at the same time? very difficult when you don't have the space on your screen to display both at a resonable size at the same time.
This all reminds me of that movie on UPN a while back called "Dream House". All of these appliances would most likely be attatched to some central point. First, the toaster burns your toast, you get mad, it tells the server. Next thing you know, doors won't open, knives start flying around the kitchen, all of your food spoils, the toilet won't flush, etc. At least this didn't happen any sooner. Then everyone would be scared of the Y2K bug really doing some damage :-)
I am currently taking a course like this (Systems Programming). We are using Linux as our development OS. The ultimate goal of the course is to write a device driver for a single board computer(m68k) that will communicate back to the desktop via the serial port (ooh... and I get a whole 64k of ram to put the system on the sbc :-)
First, we are learning the internals of the linux OS (fork, exec, malloc, *yawn*) by writing some small C programs. Our textbook is "Beginning Linux Programming Second Edition" (ISBN 1-861002-97-1). It's got some nice programs to start on plus a nice chapter on device drivers. If you want to check out the course, the URL is http://cs.sonoma.edu/~bob/cs_310/310general.html
I definately agree with this post (except for the taking up smoking part). I bought a generic split keyboard a few years ago, and it's the best thing I've ever done. When I'm in the computer lab here at school, my wrists start to hurt when typing fast, but I can hack code for hours on end with this keyboard. I can even type faster on the natural keyboard than the standard keyboards. The only quirk about this keyboard is the placement of the \ key. It's to the right of the right shift key, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Definately go down to your local computer store and try out different keyboards that they have there. It is a big help to make sure you can type comfortably on it before you buy it.
:-)
I also used to use the first MS natural keyboard. It was a pretty good keyboard (still use it when I go back home), but it put the 6 key on the wrong side of the split. It did teach me to hit the b with my left hand tho
One other keyboard that I've seen is the Twiddler (http://www.handkey.com/). I've always wanted to try this one out, but it is a bit expensive at US$200. It's basically a one handed keyboard/mouse. If you get a chance, check it out.
The only two games I've been interested in playing in the last 5 years were Quake II (and now III) and StarCraft. StarCraft got me through my first semester in college (before I switched to linux). Wine simply doesn't do it justice. I've been waiting for this game to come out on linux for the last year and a half. I even e-mailed Blizard about it, though they said they had no plans of porting it. Sounds like a job for Loki :-)
When I can get the damn thing to work, it works great (4 gig native like other TR-4 tapes), but getting it to work is the hard part. I honestly can't understand why it fails (and from what I know of electrical engeneering, it shouldn't in this manner). It just won't work 80% of the time when it's in the drive bay (either 3.5" or 5.25" bays), but when I power down, pull it out, and leave it hanging by the power and IDE cables, it works. Slap it back in and it usually fails again.
Another wierd thing about it is that it has to be secondary master (as per tech support). Won't seem to work as slave at all. Other than that, it works fine in Linux with the IDE Tape driver compiled into the kernel (probably works as a module as well).
Sorry if this sounds picky (read: feel free to moderate this down), but having worked at Radio Snack (glad to finally be out of there) in SF bay area, I do know a good deal about wireless phones. In this area, the only provider I know of that uses GSM is PacBell PCS. Their service is ok, but I got some degree of static when I used their service. Most of the providers of digital cellular service here operate at 800MHz, wether it be TDMA (Cellular One) or CDMA (GTE). This allows them to use Dual Mode (as apposed to Dual Mode/Dual Band) phones for when there is no digital service. You can still use the analog network (which is also at 800MHz). The PCS providers use 1900 MHz for their service (CDMA for Sprint PCS and GSM for PacBell PCS).
:-)
Not that anyone here probably cares... I'm done now
-- PC^God --