Until 2005, my Netware servers were an order of magnitude mroe reliable than my Windows servers. Period.
NDS 'worked' when AD was borked. Does no one remember mixed mode, and the joy of early Server 2K? We will leave NTAS out of this, though it was the first competitor to NetWare.
The myth that NetWare is no better or worse than Windows was untrue up till Server '03, and then only barely.
The real reason NetWare failed to survive? Not reliability. Applications. Microsoft built apps on Windows servers that you could program in essentially the same IDE as the client Windows desktop app. NetWare required you learn.NLMs and be in a foreign and not very good IDE. Microsoft salted the community with freebie dev tools, and from there on in, it was over. Of course, hosing the Novell client didn't hurt either. As an example, the Novell client would return a 'not found' in 2 seconds when it had searched the tree and did not find what you were looking for. The Microsoft client would then spend 15 seconds begging for a response from any resource, after it had searched all it knew. Ok, just for grins, why would you ask essentially 'anybody out there got this?' when you have already searched all you know? The fraking MUP drove us crazy. And people blamed Novell. Nice.
Microsoft out smarted Novell. We lost. Darn. But not because they were better.
1. Send up a net to catch the big stuff. The size of the net and opening determines how many nets we send up. throw the net at Earth. Stuff burns up. The final net will probably more like mesh. On to step 2.
2. Send up a disk of Aerogel. We did this on a smaller scale to capture comet debris. We don't need to get this one back, it can burn up when we throw this at Earth also. But if it doesn't burn, just aim it at the Pacific. Or Russia, some if it is their stuff after all. I live to close to the Iridium home, so that's out of the question, right?
3. Mop up the remainder with variations on the theme.
4. Profit!
We're gonna have to do it. Let's do it right. And we will learn a lot about LEO maneuvering, targeting, robotics in space, etc. We can let the Chinese or the Russians, or the Japanese join in, maybe even Canada or India, some nations that wanna learn space stuff. And we could probably get some commercial outfit to bid on it.
This is a tremendous opportunity, actually. A few $B should cover it. We spend that every week on landfills. Let's just do it.
Lots of bands started out with minimal equipment, and their early work was magnificent despite those limitations, even because of them, The Who, Pink Floyd, Beatles, and my favorite garage band Led Zeppelin - squeaky Echoplex and all.
Some bands seem to start off with everything top-shelf, but that's rare.
And you got to be real poor to start up a hip-hop act and can't afford a beat box.
And I asked my buddy who writes *nix disk drivers at a very well-known outfit. He was a little shocked that someone would measure commit time in minutes. He writes mostly RAID drivers now, for server hardware, and thinks in terms of single-digit seconds is chancing it, even with battery-backed cache (which his hardware does NOT have, BTW). He is of the opinion that this is a terrible mistake, and someone should change these defaults and issue the patch, quietly, so no one gets hurt more than they aready have. He says he wouldn't what was done, but then again, he spends his days troubleshooting race conditions and interrupt conflicts, what does he know... And he is getting old before his time. I tell him he oughta go into display drivers and save his life...
But this reminds me of the problems of networked drives - delayed writes on Windows servers often lead to corruption and lost data if the network connection broke and then the server borked. Some legendary fiascos I presided over, and very unhappy people who didn't understand the concepts of networking and Microsoft's brain dead implementations. Lots of lost sleep.
So does this also potentially affect NFS and SAMBA shares? Add in the possibility of network connection dropouts, and this sounds worse than ever.
Low to mid rate MP3s do to cymbals the same thing piezo tweeters do. Reduce the sound to shaped noise. Kinda sad.
And for those trying to figure out what is distortion and what is music, I use a simple standard - what the artist intended is music, anything introduced by the playback mechanism is distortion. MP3 artifacts are distortion, pure and simple. They are the bane of the format, and probably inevitable. Different versions of ATRAC also suffer from this, when the algorithm just gets it wrong.
I'm assuming the mastering process had the artist's approval, in deference to my friend the well-known masterer who nobody knows, in a place nobody goes, unless they want a hit recording.
Ballet Mechanique by George Antheil is almost unbearable, but it is music. Recording it must have been a bitch..
Call me old-fashioned, but in a world where A above middle C is 440, that ain't bass. Sorry. And I am not confusing treble with bass. That's just stupid. Go here or here and listen to an A=440 tone. That's bass? Not. It's more like dial tone.
For me, bass starts around 150 tops. I can't imagine a low freq crossover starting to curve at 400Hz. Maybe 150Hz, but a pretty gradual curve at that. Subwoofers should start no higher than 80Hz, or they aren't subs.
Bass response around 100Hz is responsible for that 'thump' most people think is bass. Try some old Bass305 discs to see how low you can go...
I have a Minidisc portable recorder that is still wonderful, and does such a nice job. ATRAC is superior to MP3 IMHO, but I'm always told different. But the bass response on that player (Sharp MDS-702) is sweet. It still works, but I hardly use it any more. I've given in to MP3s and Ogg.
I grew up through the phonograph era to CDs and now various digital formats.
Remember any of the phonograph expiriments in the 70s? Piling on pennies until the stylus pressure was the better part of a quarter-pound, and skilled listeners unable to hear the difference? The Bose demonstrations pointing out the human ear's sensitivity to distortion that varies with frequency? Actually, AT&T might have more information on this, since they wanted to send only what was needed to be intelligible. But I digress.
I always preferred the 'West Coast' sound, even on LPs. The JBL L100 speakers delivered this sound the best, IMHO, and the more accurate the amp the better. Headroom was my god. But I sacrificed the tube amps for solid-state very early. Warm response = less high-end. While I transcribed LPs onto reel-to-reel, I used Revox decks and usually ran them at 15ips, spewing tape but I saved my LPs. It wasn't about money. I was into heavy metal before it was called that. I also developed a taste for Mahler, but that's another story. And I was a bass freak, not to the exclusion of high frequency response. Tape hiss destroyed it, no matter what flavor or Dolby processing or companding I tried. I wanted it all, defined as everything but mids....
CDs were welcomed by me, first 'cause they didn't wear like LPs, and of course the s/n won me over. No more tapes! I loved the wide response, the cleaner highs, the impossible lows. Platter rumble limits your bass response. At this point I was listening to stuff through 30" EV drivers and eithber Phase Linear or Crown amps, 3-5KW of them(This suited disco). Some of the stuff I fell in love with would be in the 12-18Hz range, impossible with phonographs unless I built a room just for that purpose. I bought CDs instead. Of course, portability won me over too, though there was one big problem with portable CD players - the headphones were generally terrible. My Koss Pro-4AAs fit the bill. And I would never hear that car coming. Instant death, oblivious to all but the music. I survived, of course.
But the headphones I migrated to were all pitiful. Not sealing the ear canal meant no bass response - can't get much out of a.7" open air driver. Think the free air resonance must have been around 300Hz. So CD players were half a loaf.
MP3s offered the future or massive amounts of music in packages even more resilient than portable CD players. Nice! Of course, most of them I first heard on my computer, and the speakers on that were weak, so I upgraded as much as I dared, then plugged it into the stereo. Ick! Tinny, sibilant, bass like mud. I was distraught. this was not an advance.
I learned, of course, about bitrates, and now I listen to nothing below 256kb/s, and usually 320kb/s. I use a lot more space, but it is worth it to me. A while ago I had a revelation - 128kb/s sounded like FM radio, which is usually not that good after the station gets finished limiting/shaping/twisting the audio for their own purposes. I realized shortly thereafter that FM radio is mostly driven by computerized stations now. They use MP3s. FM radio *is* 128kb/s. Sadly, it is ruined, probably forever.
So kids today prefer the sizzle of 128K MP3s? I'm learning to turn down those classic albums I remember, and hear all sorts of amazing stuff going on that would be lost in the din ordinarily. My apologies to all those artists whose work I so diminished for so long.
Of course, popular music today for teens is so electronic that encoding a higher bitrate wouldn't make the same difference as it would for say Mahler, or Glass, or even Pink Floyd. Drum machines aren't the same as animal hides. I doubt I could hear enough difference myself. Kids' ears already ruined by in-ear drivers and iPods with enough power to deafen you (thanks, Steve) are probably already hearing-impaired at 16, if not earlier.
I modify my music a lot, but not having the sound to modify is the real crime of 128kb/s MP3s. It's why I prefer
"I am continually fascinated by the number of "pedals" and "effects" that electronic guitar players apply to the output of their instrument. Why would people prefer that distorted sound?"
Just so we're clear here, those pedals and effects create a new sound. It isn't distorted in the way you seem to mean it. Yes, it distorts the 'original' string sound, but since it's an electric guitar, the pickups already 'distorted' that. 'Rendered' is a better concept.
And the pedals and effects render a new, intentional sound. If you consider this distorted, then syntensizers, most especially in the beginning, when creating new sounds, don't fit into 'distorted' at all. 'Rendered' fits best there as well.
Calling electric guitar distorted cannot easily be considered a criticism or complaint. It is descriptive, but in the perjorative sense. Distortion, in this case, is a tool. Kinda like putting tacks on piano hammers to create a faux harpsichord. Wait...
With a DVR I really don't much care WHEN they schedule a show. It's always showing when I want it to.
I only watch Galactica because of a DVR. Otherwise, I would not bother to stay up. Being in Mountain time zone doesn't help, but it would not be worth my time to wait up late for a show.
Lots of other shows, not just on SciFi, I watch *only* because I can record them. Dancing With the Stars, Big Love, *Apprentice, Biggest Loser, and others too mundane to list here.
Torrents are the equiv. of a DVR, save that the quality is sometimes marginal (yeah, my DVR is NTSC until I spring for the new money sink LCD) and always a pain to find and load unless I do more than push the 3 buttons it takes to schedule a recording. All I need is enough space to save my shows and my wife's month of soaps..
If I wanted to improve the experience, I'd run Boxee or MythTV or something on a leftover PC, and make my life even more miserable tending and feeding the complexity. Do I want my futhre HDTV to just plug into my network and stream? Hell yeah. Will I get that? Nope.
But scheduling? Just shift it. Do we have to write in and tell SciFi we actually *do* watch it?
ps- I think sometimes they cancel a show just to annoy us. When it comes back, we are rabid ferrets for it, and they got us by the eyeballs. Then there are the shows (*cough*Galactica*cough) that get so whack and stupid they have to take half a year off to figure out how to wrap it up. Call it Sopranositis.
1. Most reviews on the Internet are pure crap. Either they are shills, paid and/or unpaid, or they are lifted from and/or linked from other sites related to whatever site you happen to be on at the moment. Search for reviews, and you will find many that are verbatim the same. Either site ops snarf them from wherever to fluff their lame pages, or people mass post, pasting the same thing in over and over. Niiice. I know, there are reputable sources for reviews. At least until they get found out either taking favors for favorables, or being lazy and reviewing products a month before release.
2. I ditched Norton last year at home - all gone. The first time in at least 19 years, I think, that I haven't had a Norton product on at least one of my machines. AVG is doing at least as well, which is to say that if my wife didn't click on those IQ tests and 'vote now' links, my machines would be free of nasties. A pox on their souls.
Picking a review site is my least favorite task. Hate it.
Oh, and I use my Linux boxen to browse 'questionable' sites. Seems they don't get infected. Or, if I'm really scared, my phone. hehe, let them attack that. The G1 Steel browser doesn't seem to get infected either if I set the agent to 'Desktop'. harrr.....
It took this long for for someone to consider SElinux. Sheesh.
When I was dealing with high school students, I resorted to ZENWorks on Windows. Even Group Policies weren't strong enough to keep these little weasels from posting pr0n on their labmate's puter's desktop. The girls get offended at that stuff, usually. Windows couldn't keep them out until some time in 2003. ZENWorks' volatile accounts really solved some problems.
So how would you configure Linux boxen so that the local user account is expunged when the user logs out? How do you let the user log on and then build their account locally, as Windows Group Policies can do.
I get the OP's issues. Keep user options to a minimum. Fewer options in most areas = fewer problems. Control screensavers (less of a problem in *nix, until Webshots comes back with a driver for KDE), printer access (this actually should be doable out of the box), all tha other stuff, but it has to be manageable. Webmin ain't the tool, of course. Oh, and prevent mounting USB sticks other than noexec, for instance.
Depends on the enemy. Maximum range is quoted as 20 miles, which is mighty close for a technologically-equal enemy that can launch anti-ship missles indeed, but the BBs are tough enough to withstand most anything into the hull. A shoot-down would do more damage, and in that case you are looking at defending from shore missles, any number which can reach the 20 miles.
But the BBs take a lot of damage. Their armor may not have been all it was intended to be, but hey, it probably withstands even modern anti-ship missles.
Of course, the BBs can launch Tomahawks, but that's not cost-effective...
That wasn't so long ago. And learning to cast the shells for the BBs is cheaper than lobbing many cruise missles at otherwise accessible targets. So far as I can gather, the Iowa class can still hit targets farther away than anything except a cruise missle or aircraft can reach.
The Iowa and Wisconsin seem to have finally been dropped from the mothball fleet in 2006.
We ought to have kept one wet and ready. You never know...
GM sells the Malibu in a 'hybrid' version. A 'mild hybrid'.
The engine has an oversized starter motor and a 36V battery pack in the spare wheel well. At a stop, the motor shuts down and is restarted in 500ms when the driver presses the acclerator pedal. Apparently, the Belt-Alternator-Starter system also can kick in and add a power boost to help with accleration, and in the city can improve MPG by 10-20% Interesting concept, and saves gas, but hybrid? Not by a mile. At least not IMHO.
But GM will claim it, and plenty of people will buy it. It does save gas, this is good. But it is an example of the slow, painful, scratching-and-clawing approach Detroit is taking towards hybrids.
I'm not very hopeful for an alternative fuel either. My personal choice is some form of ultracapacitor. A capacitor makes a lot more sense than a battery; quick recharge, fewer chemicals hopefully, lots of available current hopefully. Still got the issue of the catastrophic release of energy if the capacitor got damaged, but batteries blow up too.
I'n not hopeful we are gong to see ultracapacitors within 10 years. A long time to wait.
The primary reason GM decided not to go into even limited production came from the dealers who serviced EV1s. They didn't break down. No service revenue during the lease, of course, but the writing was on the wall. EV1s would starve the service department.
Wait until true elecrtics start to gain market share. The service needs will be much lower, and the dealer network will find their service revenue dropping. Unless, of course, the makers install some planned maintenance items.
It was job satisfaction. Not mention the telecom guy was fabulously clueless about networking, and had the odd habit of updating switch firmware on Friday afternoons, and blowing it up regularly. I bet he still thinks TFPT stands for Terminal File Transfer Protocol. He kept trying to use the TFTP process by typing 'tftp' at his terminal session. And then asking me where the documentation was for the process.
And I never even *leaned* against his switch, or messed with his telco stuff. He was the one chewing gum in the machine room and dropping flecks of tinfoil into the server chassis. All that got me was a scornful look and 'it couldn't be me' while he was chawing on another cud of Juicy Fruit.
He didn't have enough to do. I made his work more interesting. Nothing got broken, except *maybe* his heart, and I doubt that. At least he knew Token-Ring before I left.
BOFH. I like that. It sure beats being an AC.
What acronym for 'clueless'?
ps- he would flash anything I might have to fix on a Friday afternoon. He didn't do that to his stuff. Telephones are more important, it seems.
The first time I saw an ethernet MAC address of 02DEADBEEF20 I went on a 20-minute snipe hunt through the switches.
It was the/dev/net0 adapter in the standby member of a Sun cluster.
A month later, I got the inevitable frantic voicemail from the telecom guy, asking what the '^&(*ing 02DEADBEEF20 address' was, and would I pay more attention to these things and secure our network, please and thank you. I told him it belonged to the Teleradiology project, not to worry. He accused me of being an imbecile, that wasn't a legitimate MAC address. I asked him why he hadn't brought this up in any of the weekly meetings for a month, since it was there all along. Hung up on me. I took some time to creat some interesting LAAs for the various minor servers we had, especially the Internet gateway/proxy, and the email server. He was not amused, but his boss was. And told me to stop annoying him. Something about a gun in the monkey cage, if I recall.
I actually liked the created MAC addresses. Easier to trace. Mundane vendor-supplied MACs are just boring. Hopefully, though, other admins didn't start being creative. There are only so many clever permutations. Thank God for NAT and Token-Ring. Those were the days.
"3. YouTube Accounts In order to access some features of the Website, you will have to create a YouTube account."
Some features...
"Account-Related Activity. Certain other activities on YouTube--like uploading videos, posting comments, flagging videos, or watching restricted videos--require you to have a YouTube Account or a Google Account. We ask for some personal information when you create a YouTube Account or a Google Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration."
Certain other activities... I suspect Obama videos never were 'restricted'.
"Usage Information. We may record information about your usage, such as when you use YouTube, the channels, groups, and favorites you subscribe to, the contacts you communicate with, the videos you watch, and the frequency and size of data transfers, as well as information you display or click on in YouTube (including UI elements, settings, and other information). If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. "Web Beacons") in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened by recipients."
This is non-trivial to me. Cookies at least, and of course those precious little beacons. Nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Until 2005, my Netware servers were an order of magnitude mroe reliable than my Windows servers. Period.
NDS 'worked' when AD was borked. Does no one remember mixed mode, and the joy of early Server 2K? We will leave NTAS out of this, though it was the first competitor to NetWare.
The myth that NetWare is no better or worse than Windows was untrue up till Server '03, and then only barely.
The real reason NetWare failed to survive? Not reliability. Applications. Microsoft built apps on Windows servers that you could program in essentially the same IDE as the client Windows desktop app. NetWare required you learn .NLMs and be in a foreign and not very good IDE. Microsoft salted the community with freebie dev tools, and from there on in, it was over. Of course, hosing the Novell client didn't hurt either. As an example, the Novell client would return a 'not found' in 2 seconds when it had searched the tree and did not find what you were looking for. The Microsoft client would then spend 15 seconds begging for a response from any resource, after it had searched all it knew. Ok, just for grins, why would you ask essentially 'anybody out there got this?' when you have already searched all you know? The fraking MUP drove us crazy. And people blamed Novell. Nice.
Microsoft out smarted Novell. We lost. Darn. But not because they were better.
Change to Bluetooth. That'll fix 'em, by gum! Harrr! Can't fool ME that easily!
Wait... Oh, nevermind. The only solution is to shoot people with antennae. Damned criminals...
No, wait... No, wait... No, wait...
Hmm. This is interesting. Get back to you.
...so let's do it right the first few times:
1. Send up a net to catch the big stuff. The size of the net and opening determines how many nets we send up. throw the net at Earth. Stuff burns up. The final net will probably more like mesh. On to step 2.
2. Send up a disk of Aerogel. We did this on a smaller scale to capture comet debris. We don't need to get this one back, it can burn up when we throw this at Earth also. But if it doesn't burn, just aim it at the Pacific. Or Russia, some if it is their stuff after all. I live to close to the Iridium home, so that's out of the question, right?
3. Mop up the remainder with variations on the theme.
4. Profit!
We're gonna have to do it. Let's do it right. And we will learn a lot about LEO maneuvering, targeting, robotics in space, etc. We can let the Chinese or the Russians, or the Japanese join in, maybe even Canada or India, some nations that wanna learn space stuff. And we could probably get some commercial outfit to bid on it.
This is a tremendous opportunity, actually. A few $B should cover it. We spend that every week on landfills. Let's just do it.
Lots of bands started out with minimal equipment, and their early work was magnificent despite those limitations, even because of them, The Who, Pink Floyd, Beatles, and my favorite garage band Led Zeppelin - squeaky Echoplex and all.
Some bands seem to start off with everything top-shelf, but that's rare.
And you got to be real poor to start up a hip-hop act and can't afford a beat box.
And I asked my buddy who writes *nix disk drivers at a very well-known outfit. He was a little shocked that someone would measure commit time in minutes. He writes mostly RAID drivers now, for server hardware, and thinks in terms of single-digit seconds is chancing it, even with battery-backed cache (which his hardware does NOT have, BTW). He is of the opinion that this is a terrible mistake, and someone should change these defaults and issue the patch, quietly, so no one gets hurt more than they aready have. He says he wouldn't what was done, but then again, he spends his days troubleshooting race conditions and interrupt conflicts, what does he know... And he is getting old before his time. I tell him he oughta go into display drivers and save his life...
But this reminds me of the problems of networked drives - delayed writes on Windows servers often lead to corruption and lost data if the network connection broke and then the server borked. Some legendary fiascos I presided over, and very unhappy people who didn't understand the concepts of networking and Microsoft's brain dead implementations. Lots of lost sleep.
So does this also potentially affect NFS and SAMBA shares? Add in the possibility of network connection dropouts, and this sounds worse than ever.
Are we making progress yet?
Low to mid rate MP3s do to cymbals the same thing piezo tweeters do. Reduce the sound to shaped noise. Kinda sad.
And for those trying to figure out what is distortion and what is music, I use a simple standard - what the artist intended is music, anything introduced by the playback mechanism is distortion. MP3 artifacts are distortion, pure and simple. They are the bane of the format, and probably inevitable. Different versions of ATRAC also suffer from this, when the algorithm just gets it wrong.
I'm assuming the mastering process had the artist's approval, in deference to my friend the well-known masterer who nobody knows, in a place nobody goes, unless they want a hit recording.
Ballet Mechanique by George Antheil is almost unbearable, but it is music. Recording it must have been a bitch..
Call me old-fashioned, but in a world where A above middle C is 440, that ain't bass. Sorry. And I am not confusing treble with bass. That's just stupid. Go here or here and listen to an A=440 tone. That's bass? Not. It's more like dial tone.
For me, bass starts around 150 tops. I can't imagine a low freq crossover starting to curve at 400Hz. Maybe 150Hz, but a pretty gradual curve at that. Subwoofers should start no higher than 80Hz, or they aren't subs.
Bass response around 100Hz is responsible for that 'thump' most people think is bass. Try some old Bass305 discs to see how low you can go...
I have a Minidisc portable recorder that is still wonderful, and does such a nice job. ATRAC is superior to MP3 IMHO, but I'm always told different. But the bass response on that player (Sharp MDS-702) is sweet. It still works, but I hardly use it any more. I've given in to MP3s and Ogg.
I grew up through the phonograph era to CDs and now various digital formats.
Remember any of the phonograph expiriments in the 70s? Piling on pennies until the stylus pressure was the better part of a quarter-pound, and skilled listeners unable to hear the difference? The Bose demonstrations pointing out the human ear's sensitivity to distortion that varies with frequency? Actually, AT&T might have more information on this, since they wanted to send only what was needed to be intelligible. But I digress.
I always preferred the 'West Coast' sound, even on LPs. The JBL L100 speakers delivered this sound the best, IMHO, and the more accurate the amp the better. Headroom was my god. But I sacrificed the tube amps for solid-state very early. Warm response = less high-end. While I transcribed LPs onto reel-to-reel, I used Revox decks and usually ran them at 15ips, spewing tape but I saved my LPs. It wasn't about money. I was into heavy metal before it was called that. I also developed a taste for Mahler, but that's another story. And I was a bass freak, not to the exclusion of high frequency response. Tape hiss destroyed it, no matter what flavor or Dolby processing or companding I tried. I wanted it all, defined as everything but mids....
CDs were welcomed by me, first 'cause they didn't wear like LPs, and of course the s/n won me over. No more tapes! I loved the wide response, the cleaner highs, the impossible lows. Platter rumble limits your bass response. At this point I was listening to stuff through 30" EV drivers and eithber Phase Linear or Crown amps, 3-5KW of them(This suited disco). Some of the stuff I fell in love with would be in the 12-18Hz range, impossible with phonographs unless I built a room just for that purpose. I bought CDs instead. Of course, portability won me over too, though there was one big problem with portable CD players - the headphones were generally terrible. My Koss Pro-4AAs fit the bill. And I would never hear that car coming. Instant death, oblivious to all but the music. I survived, of course.
But the headphones I migrated to were all pitiful. Not sealing the ear canal meant no bass response - can't get much out of a .7" open air driver. Think the free air resonance must have been around 300Hz. So CD players were half a loaf.
MP3s offered the future or massive amounts of music in packages even more resilient than portable CD players. Nice! Of course, most of them I first heard on my computer, and the speakers on that were weak, so I upgraded as much as I dared, then plugged it into the stereo. Ick! Tinny, sibilant, bass like mud. I was distraught. this was not an advance.
I learned, of course, about bitrates, and now I listen to nothing below 256kb/s, and usually 320kb/s. I use a lot more space, but it is worth it to me. A while ago I had a revelation - 128kb/s sounded like FM radio, which is usually not that good after the station gets finished limiting/shaping/twisting the audio for their own purposes. I realized shortly thereafter that FM radio is mostly driven by computerized stations now. They use MP3s. FM radio *is* 128kb/s. Sadly, it is ruined, probably forever.
So kids today prefer the sizzle of 128K MP3s? I'm learning to turn down those classic albums I remember, and hear all sorts of amazing stuff going on that would be lost in the din ordinarily. My apologies to all those artists whose work I so diminished for so long.
Of course, popular music today for teens is so electronic that encoding a higher bitrate wouldn't make the same difference as it would for say Mahler, or Glass, or even Pink Floyd. Drum machines aren't the same as animal hides. I doubt I could hear enough difference myself. Kids' ears already ruined by in-ear drivers and iPods with enough power to deafen you (thanks, Steve) are probably already hearing-impaired at 16, if not earlier.
I modify my music a lot, but not having the sound to modify is the real crime of 128kb/s MP3s. It's why I prefer
"I am continually fascinated by the number of "pedals" and "effects" that electronic guitar players apply to the output of their instrument. Why would people prefer that distorted sound?"
Just so we're clear here, those pedals and effects create a new sound. It isn't distorted in the way you seem to mean it. Yes, it distorts the 'original' string sound, but since it's an electric guitar, the pickups already 'distorted' that. 'Rendered' is a better concept.
And the pedals and effects render a new, intentional sound. If you consider this distorted, then syntensizers, most especially in the beginning, when creating new sounds, don't fit into 'distorted' at all. 'Rendered' fits best there as well.
Calling electric guitar distorted cannot easily be considered a criticism or complaint. It is descriptive, but in the perjorative sense. Distortion, in this case, is a tool. Kinda like putting tacks on piano hammers to create a faux harpsichord. Wait...
With a DVR I really don't much care WHEN they schedule a show. It's always showing when I want it to.
I only watch Galactica because of a DVR. Otherwise, I would not bother to stay up. Being in Mountain time zone doesn't help, but it would not be worth my time to wait up late for a show.
Lots of other shows, not just on SciFi, I watch *only* because I can record them. Dancing With the Stars, Big Love, *Apprentice, Biggest Loser, and others too mundane to list here.
Torrents are the equiv. of a DVR, save that the quality is sometimes marginal (yeah, my DVR is NTSC until I spring for the new money sink LCD) and always a pain to find and load unless I do more than push the 3 buttons it takes to schedule a recording. All I need is enough space to save my shows and my wife's month of soaps..
If I wanted to improve the experience, I'd run Boxee or MythTV or something on a leftover PC, and make my life even more miserable tending and feeding the complexity. Do I want my futhre HDTV to just plug into my network and stream? Hell yeah. Will I get that? Nope.
But scheduling? Just shift it. Do we have to write in and tell SciFi we actually *do* watch it?
ps- I think sometimes they cancel a show just to annoy us. When it comes back, we are rabid ferrets for it, and they got us by the eyeballs. Then there are the shows (*cough*Galactica*cough) that get so whack and stupid they have to take half a year off to figure out how to wrap it up. Call it Sopranositis.
Actually, if I bought used media off of eBay or whatever, I would scrub it immediately.
I don't want your stinky, infested data on my machines, thank you.
Come to think of it, this is why I don't buy used media. I got enough problems with trojans, worms, malware of all types without *buying* it.
1. Most reviews on the Internet are pure crap. Either they are shills, paid and/or unpaid, or they are lifted from and/or linked from other sites related to whatever site you happen to be on at the moment. Search for reviews, and you will find many that are verbatim the same. Either site ops snarf them from wherever to fluff their lame pages, or people mass post, pasting the same thing in over and over. Niiice. I know, there are reputable sources for reviews. At least until they get found out either taking favors for favorables, or being lazy and reviewing products a month before release.
2. I ditched Norton last year at home - all gone. The first time in at least 19 years, I think, that I haven't had a Norton product on at least one of my machines. AVG is doing at least as well, which is to say that if my wife didn't click on those IQ tests and 'vote now' links, my machines would be free of nasties. A pox on their souls.
Picking a review site is my least favorite task. Hate it.
Oh, and I use my Linux boxen to browse 'questionable' sites. Seems they don't get infected. Or, if I'm really scared, my phone. hehe, let them attack that. The G1 Steel browser doesn't seem to get infected either if I set the agent to 'Desktop'. harrr.....
It took this long for for someone to consider SElinux. Sheesh.
When I was dealing with high school students, I resorted to ZENWorks on Windows. Even Group Policies weren't strong enough to keep these little weasels from posting pr0n on their labmate's puter's desktop. The girls get offended at that stuff, usually. Windows couldn't keep them out until some time in 2003. ZENWorks' volatile accounts really solved some problems.
So how would you configure Linux boxen so that the local user account is expunged when the user logs out? How do you let the user log on and then build their account locally, as Windows Group Policies can do.
I get the OP's issues. Keep user options to a minimum. Fewer options in most areas = fewer problems. Control screensavers (less of a problem in *nix, until Webshots comes back with a driver for KDE), printer access (this actually should be doable out of the box), all tha other stuff, but it has to be manageable. Webmin ain't the tool, of course. Oh, and prevent mounting USB sticks other than noexec, for instance.
Does SELinux aid this? Whatchathink?
Depends on the enemy. Maximum range is quoted as 20 miles, which is mighty close for a technologically-equal enemy that can launch anti-ship missles indeed, but the BBs are tough enough to withstand most anything into the hull. A shoot-down would do more damage, and in that case you are looking at defending from shore missles, any number which can reach the 20 miles.
But the BBs take a lot of damage. Their armor may not have been all it was intended to be, but hey, it probably withstands even modern anti-ship missles.
Of course, the BBs can launch Tomahawks, but that's not cost-effective...
That wasn't so long ago. And learning to cast the shells for the BBs is cheaper than lobbing many cruise missles at otherwise accessible targets. So far as I can gather, the Iowa class can still hit targets farther away than anything except a cruise missle or aircraft can reach.
The Iowa and Wisconsin seem to have finally been dropped from the mothball fleet in 2006.
We ought to have kept one wet and ready. You never know...
Perhaps...
Perhaps not...
I don't think the Prius is ugly. Nondescript in some ways. The Insight wasn't ugly either.
Springs and shocks are pretty reliable and cheap. I doubt an active suspension will be cost-effective
and an active motor-assisted braking system will suck when the power fails. Give me disc brakes and hydraulics.
yYou don't have to reinvent the wheel to build an EV. Keep what works.
I never bothered to read the comix, just went in a different direction.
But I WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE!!! Hell Yea!
I'll let you know... Don't need to pay me, I can afford my own ticket and popcorn...
GM sells the Malibu in a 'hybrid' version. A 'mild hybrid'.
The engine has an oversized starter motor and a 36V battery pack in the spare wheel well. At a stop, the motor shuts down and is restarted in 500ms when the driver presses the acclerator pedal. Apparently, the Belt-Alternator-Starter system also can kick in and add a power boost to help with accleration, and in the city can improve MPG by 10-20% Interesting concept, and saves gas, but hybrid? Not by a mile. At least not IMHO.
But GM will claim it, and plenty of people will buy it. It does save gas, this is good. But it is an example of the slow, painful, scratching-and-clawing approach Detroit is taking towards hybrids.
I'm not very hopeful for an alternative fuel either. My personal choice is some form of ultracapacitor. A capacitor makes a lot more sense than a battery; quick recharge, fewer chemicals hopefully, lots of available current hopefully. Still got the issue of the catastrophic release of energy if the capacitor got damaged, but batteries blow up too.
I'n not hopeful we are gong to see ultracapacitors within 10 years. A long time to wait.
GM didn't renew any leases on EV1s.
The primary reason GM decided not to go into even limited production came from the dealers who serviced EV1s. They didn't break down. No service revenue during the lease, of course, but the writing was on the wall. EV1s would starve the service department.
Wait until true elecrtics start to gain market share. The service needs will be much lower, and the dealer network will find their service revenue dropping. Unless, of course, the makers install some planned maintenance items.
It was job satisfaction. Not mention the telecom guy was fabulously clueless about networking, and had the odd habit of updating switch firmware on Friday afternoons, and blowing it up regularly. I bet he still thinks TFPT stands for Terminal File Transfer Protocol. He kept trying to use the TFTP process by typing 'tftp' at his terminal session. And then asking me where the documentation was for the process.
And I never even *leaned* against his switch, or messed with his telco stuff. He was the one chewing gum in the machine room and dropping flecks of tinfoil into the server chassis. All that got me was a scornful look and 'it couldn't be me' while he was chawing on another cud of Juicy Fruit.
He didn't have enough to do. I made his work more interesting. Nothing got broken, except *maybe* his heart, and I doubt that. At least he knew Token-Ring before I left.
BOFH. I like that. It sure beats being an AC.
What acronym for 'clueless'?
ps- he would flash anything I might have to fix on a Friday afternoon. He didn't do that to his stuff. Telephones are more important, it seems.
The first time I saw an ethernet MAC address of 02DEADBEEF20 I went on a 20-minute snipe hunt through the switches.
It was the /dev/net0 adapter in the standby member of a Sun cluster.
A month later, I got the inevitable frantic voicemail from the telecom guy, asking what the '^&(*ing 02DEADBEEF20 address' was, and would I pay more attention to these things and secure our network, please and thank you. I told him it belonged to the Teleradiology project, not to worry. He accused me of being an imbecile, that wasn't a legitimate MAC address. I asked him why he hadn't brought this up in any of the weekly meetings for a month, since it was there all along. Hung up on me. I took some time to creat some interesting LAAs for the various minor servers we had, especially the Internet gateway/proxy, and the email server. He was not amused, but his boss was. And told me to stop annoying him. Something about a gun in the monkey cage, if I recall.
I actually liked the created MAC addresses. Easier to trace. Mundane vendor-supplied MACs are just boring. Hopefully, though, other admins didn't start being creative. There are only so many clever permutations. Thank God for NAT and Token-Ring. Those were the days.
True: From YouTube...
"3. YouTube Accounts
In order to access some features of the Website, you will have to create a YouTube account."
Some features...
"Account-Related Activity. Certain other activities on YouTube--like uploading videos, posting comments, flagging videos, or watching restricted videos--require you to have a YouTube Account or a Google Account. We ask for some personal information when you create a YouTube Account or a Google Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration."
Certain other activities... I suspect Obama videos never were 'restricted'.
"Usage Information. We may record information about your usage, such as when you use YouTube, the channels, groups, and favorites you subscribe to, the contacts you communicate with, the videos you watch, and the frequency and size of data transfers, as well as information you display or click on in YouTube (including UI elements, settings, and other information). If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. "Web Beacons") in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened by recipients."
This is non-trivial to me. Cookies at least, and of course those precious little beacons. Nice.
Duh.
The last time I found an account (not on youtube) compromised, I had to change all my passwords. Just the way it is.