Nowhere did I claim to have created the internet, I leave such claims to Al Gore and Bill Gates.[1]
al gore never said he created the internet. he voted repeatedly in favour of continued funding for arpanet. i am sick of people getting this wrong. on the other hand, i'm voting for ralph nader.
If the lights don't dim when you power your baby up, you ain't worthy!
wait, you mean you can turn these things off? i guess that's sorta cool... but why would you want to.:-)
i think people are more impressed that i have my monitors powered by a seperate set of surge surpressors, on an x10 device. i hit a button on my keychain, my NEIBOURGH's lights dim, and the ambient tempurature jumps 10 degrees. we also get our water from a well powered by an electric pump, so when i turn on the monitors, the water pressure drops noticably.
the preceding was an exageration, like you didn't know.
last month, for $30 bucks a friend of mine picked up a machine that sounds like exactly what you're looking for. the guy made sounds to the extent that he had a lot more of them. talk to the guy with like 5 spaces and a white box truck in lot A by the train tracks.
the device is a large (heavy) suitcase with a docking station, printer, and a pad-like device who's markings make me think it's internals are that of a 486 thinkpad.
upside: touchscreen, portable, probably could run linux (how's PS/2 these days?).
downside: 4 pcmcia slots, two of which are for a pcmcia hard drive. it has a floppy connector but no real ide, and in classic ibm style, its unlike any other connector i've ever seen. installation will be difficult. if you already have a laptop running linux, you should be able to mount a pcmcia drive, jam in a filesystem, and hope the boot code in the pad will figure out what to do.
good luck!
by the way, for the uninitiated, the mitflea is a technology fleamarket at MIT, organized by the tech model railroad club and various HAM groups. sorry, west coast.
Re:This is a Big Blow to the Astronomic community
on
Iridium Saved?
·
· Score: 2
that's not the point. the iridium satelites are polluting the range of communications that is otherwise the most quiet, and IIRC the one that the seti project is listening to.
there is an incredible amount of activity in the visual spectrum. that's why eyes have evolved to the sensitive to that range so many times throughout the millenia.
it's long been supposed that the old hydrogen range, because it's so quiet, will be the range in which we will make first contact with an alien signal.
so, down with the satelites. unless of course that their new owners can somehow keep the satelites quiet to the frequencies that radio astronomers are interested in.
Re:To Paraphrase Michael From Good Times...
on
More Napster Updates
·
· Score: 1
that's got to be the funniest thing i've heard in years.
i think, as someone who remembers "napster" asking #couzin-ed for help creating an mp3 search engine a few years back on EdNet, i should set the record straight.
the napster system was created by a kid named sean (sorry dude, i don't remember your last name) who, IIRC, slept alot. he liked to nap. thus, the nickname napster.
at the time he was working for my current employer on a database for a local real estate agency. when sean left megabite to go to school, i took over his position.
he's not by any means a racist. and you, friend, are a terrible satirist.
i got a copy of "The New Way Things Work" a few years ago. this is a new edition of the book that the cd in question is based on. it includes a very easy to understand explanation of binary logic, a few sections on data storage and of course the internet IIRC. this section too is told in a journal-like format, unfortunatly guided by a geek named bill, king of the land of computers. ick.
but all joking aside, this book is really great for explaining the truth to curious youngsters. i'll write a full review if/. is interested.
this would be very (very!) nice indeed, but there are two problems i see with this:
consumers would have far fewer reasons to buy new devices in that line. if we had access to the hardware specs and driver source, we could write workarounds for any shortcomings and defects present in hold hardware. so why would we want to buy the new one? this may not be true for all types of hardware. and products that have been discontinued because their market is dead should be easy.
outsourcing. it's very likely that a dead product line will still contain some components that the company outsourced and does not have the right to open up. patents, intellectual property, etc etc. once again, products that weren't/aren't successful anymore should be easy to get access to.
does anyone else remember something from history class, about the civil rights movement?
it seems to me that when the supreme court finally got around to racially intergrating public schools, the legalleese included the term "in due time," which some schools interperted as "years from now." these schools managed to keep intergration on the bottom of their to-do lists for a very long time.
now don't get me wrong. i'm not saying that this microsoft bull is nearly as important or as vicious as the antiblack sentieent held by the courts and schools of that time, but the tactics imployed certianly do smell familiar.
i had to do just that once for an embedded system. way more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. at one time a few years back this was the way to go. but now with the sheer bulk of software, and complexity inheirent in a modern unix, go with an existing distro.
what exactly do you want to tell the installer to do? do you want a feature that isn't available in any other distro? people who read debian-devel know how i feel about frivilrous project forking, so this answer is not new to them:
if Foobar GNU/Linux doesn't quite do what you want, join their development team and make it do what you want. if it doesn't include Barney, package Barney in their package format! if the installer doesnt give you enough control, send the maintainers a patch! ask for cvs access! contribute!
i found this link a while back but havn't had a chance to check it out fully. it defangs embedded html attacks and buffer overflows. for virii, it requires the use of an external virus scanner. i've tested it briefly with mcafee's vscan for unix, and that seems to work fine.
project forking leads to overlapping effort. overlapping effort leads to incompatible systems. incompatible Systems lead to the Dark Dide.
my plea to the developrs of this system: don't fork Gnome. Gnome already has a huge following and a lot of work has gone into it. it's bad enough having to decide between KDE and Gnome. adding a third will not only make it harder for new users to choose, it will alienate current users.
speaking as an avid gnome user, can honestly say that gnome is a good idea that really needs help. a lot of work should go into unification of design, and i hate to mention it, but speed too.
a powerfull interface is what makes an operating system worth using. unix worked for so many people in the beginning beacase of how easy it was to tell the computer what you want it to do. now that the industry expects you to do this graphically, we need people like you that know how to make powerfull GUIs.
i've never used AOL, but if the number of people that use it is any indication, you folks must know how to make a computer system easy to use. the same could be said for apple, and apple systems are used by the technocrats as well as the grandmothers. kudos to you for that.
bravo to whoever first proposed this idea. i think this is one of the most romantic experiments in recent memory.
i am reminded of those movies about the civil rights movement where a young law student from new york goes down to mississippi to defend a wrongly accused black man. only this time, instead of the student and the drunken public defender, we have hundreds of people throwing coal on the proverbial fire to liberate the rightous.
maybe it won't turn out quite like that, but the idea is still there. i hope the founders of that project have enough technical knowledge to build a forum where this can actually work without turning into a flamewar or something. might i recomend a little perl hack called slash?
as a foaming-at-the-mouth Debian evangelist, i feel compelled to point out that Debian has been running on these processors. the next release (2.2 aka potato) will be the second or third to boot there.
it seems to me that the problem isn't that the admintools don't give enough feedback, but that the programs (and the system itself, let me finish) are doing things the wrong way.
anyone who has ever put a production machine up knows that linux's killer apps need configuration that consists of more than key=value pairs. bind, exim, gnome, apache, even the password system. they all use a different variations on a theme. a tree-like structure with branches that have properties, a heirarchical database.
perhaps what we need is a standard, powerfull way for programs and applications to store their configuration. an extensible database, perhaps something like LDAP. i'm not saying ldap is the solution, but maybe it is.
once we get all of that in place, we can begin to write more comprehensive admin tools. you could throw a command-shell like one on an emergency disk, or a GTK based one on the distro install cd. i don't need to tell you how nice it would be to have some sort of network-wide configuration system for labs and server clusters alike.
the original author makes a good point. the user has to be able to use it, but then so do we. i know from experience that if you make a tool too easy to use, only the inept will want to use it. make it look sexy AND functional, and we get a tool that everyone can use.
get this framework in place, throw in x11r6.4 and a few more months work on Gnome, and the linux community will qualify for a seat at UN Headquarters.
i can't seem to justify in my mind why we would give free tech advise to these hethens. i know, i know: respect DARPA, remember the work militaries have done for cyprtography. somehow the idea of the strongest military in the world being friendly to open source just doesn't make sense. it just doesn't sit right with me. then, and i expect to be flamed for this, shouldn't the government be using OpenBSD for security reasons anyway?
i guess not, since it looks like they are hellbent on linux. now the question is that if the army techs out there decide to patch the kernel or some other system, what are the chances that they will release the improved code?
i can't seem to justify in my mind why we would give free tech advise to these hethens. i know, i know: respect DARPA, remember the work militaries have done for cyprtography. somehow the idea of the strongest military in the world being friendly to open source just doesn't make sends. it just doesn't sit right with me. then, and i expect to be flamed for this, shouldn't the government be using OpenBSD for security reasons anyway?
i guess not, since it looks like they are hellbent on linux. now the question is that if the army techs out there decide to patch the kernel or some other system, what are the chances that they will release the improved code?
i dare you to try and erase a DAT. we use them extensivly for both audio recording and system backups. DATs tend not to fail if treated properly. that just means that, as with any magtape, you need to run a cleaning tape once in a while to remove stale magnetic particals from the heads.
as far as the FUD relating to magnetism, we have a system who's drive is less than a foot from the voice coil of a 22" speaker. aside from the occasional rattle when playing quake at full blast, the machine works fine. granted that it is a win2k box i don't much care about, but it's been in that location for some weeks without the drive suddenly going blank.
there's a huge difference between being a foot away from a huge magnet and being 1 micron away from a r/w head (as in a hard drive or dat).
also, don't forget that DATs are digital. that means a value n 0. given n is a proper value, you can have a lot of varience from the first 0 to the second 0 and it will still read a proper value of 0. a little stray magnatisim wont kill your data.
this is why analog tapes suck, and DAT is the standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Nowhere did I claim to have created the internet, I leave such claims to Al Gore and Bill Gates.[1]
al gore never said he created the internet. he voted repeatedly in favour of continued funding for arpanet. i am sick of people getting this wrong. on the other hand, i'm voting for ralph nader.
If the lights don't dim when you power your baby up, you ain't worthy!
:-)
wait, you mean you can turn these things off? i guess that's sorta cool... but why would you want to.
i think people are more impressed that i have my monitors powered by a seperate set of surge surpressors, on an x10 device. i hit a button on my keychain, my NEIBOURGH's lights dim, and the ambient tempurature jumps 10 degrees. we also get our water from a well powered by an electric pump, so when i turn on the monitors, the water pressure drops noticably.
the preceding was an exageration, like you didn't know.
your average pda doesn't have individual components. theres a mainboard, the memory, the display, maybe a few buttons, and a clip for the stylus.
that's different from the inside of a pc case. you won't see zif sockets in diy pdas. no room.
also consider that pdas (good ones) are going to be small enough that you need percision tools to get them together.
i'm skeptical that diy pdas will ever happen, though i wound not mind being proven wrong. now, back to putting a mp3 player in my car...
don't you all think it's about time that articles about stolen nuclear weapons tech got it's own icon?
last month, for $30 bucks a friend of mine picked up a machine that sounds like exactly what you're looking for. the guy made sounds to the extent that he had a lot more of them. talk to the guy with like 5 spaces and a white box truck in lot A by the train tracks.
the device is a large (heavy) suitcase with a docking station, printer, and a pad-like device who's markings make me think it's internals are that of a 486 thinkpad.
upside: touchscreen, portable, probably could run linux (how's PS/2 these days?).
downside: 4 pcmcia slots, two of which are for a pcmcia hard drive. it has a floppy connector but no real ide, and in classic ibm style, its unlike any other connector i've ever seen. installation will be difficult. if you already have a laptop running linux, you should be able to mount a pcmcia drive, jam in a filesystem, and hope the boot code in the pad will figure out what to do.
good luck!
by the way, for the uninitiated, the mitflea is a technology fleamarket at MIT, organized by the tech model railroad club and various HAM groups. sorry, west coast.
that's not the point. the iridium satelites are polluting the range of communications that is otherwise the most quiet, and IIRC the one that the seti project is listening to.
there is an incredible amount of activity in the visual spectrum. that's why eyes have evolved to the sensitive to that range so many times throughout the millenia.
it's long been supposed that the old hydrogen range, because it's so quiet, will be the range in which we will make first contact with an alien signal.
so, down with the satelites. unless of course that their new owners can somehow keep the satelites quiet to the frequencies that radio astronomers are interested in.
that's got to be the funniest thing i've heard in years.
i think, as someone who remembers "napster" asking #couzin-ed for help creating an mp3 search engine a few years back on EdNet, i should set the record straight.
the napster system was created by a kid named sean (sorry dude, i don't remember your last name) who, IIRC, slept alot. he liked to nap. thus, the nickname napster.
at the time he was working for my current employer on a database for a local real estate agency. when sean left megabite to go to school, i took over his position.
he's not by any means a racist. and you, friend, are a terrible satirist.
anyone who's played civ2:ctp knows that the internet will become obsolete as soon as we discover alient archeology.
i got a copy of "The New Way Things Work" a few years ago. this is a new edition of the book that the cd in question is based on. it includes a very easy to understand explanation of binary logic, a few sections on data storage and of course the internet IIRC. this section too is told in a journal-like format, unfortunatly guided by a geek named bill, king of the land of computers. ick.
/. is interested.
but all joking aside, this book is really great for explaining the truth to curious youngsters. i'll write a full review if
does anyone else remember something from history class, about the civil rights movement?
it seems to me that when the supreme court finally got around to racially intergrating public schools, the legalleese included the term "in due time," which some schools interperted as "years from now." these schools managed to keep intergration on the bottom of their to-do lists for a very long time.
now don't get me wrong. i'm not saying that this microsoft bull is nearly as important or as vicious as the antiblack sentieent held by the courts and schools of that time, but the tactics imployed certianly do smell familiar.
i had to do just that once for an embedded system. way more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. at one time a few years back this was the way to go. but now with the sheer bulk of software, and complexity inheirent in a modern unix, go with an existing distro.
what exactly do you want to tell the installer to do? do you want a feature that isn't available in any other distro? people who read debian-devel know how i feel about frivilrous project forking, so this answer is not new to them:
if Foobar GNU/Linux doesn't quite do what you want, join their development team and make it do what you want. if it doesn't include Barney, package Barney in their package format! if the installer doesnt give you enough control, send the maintainers a patch! ask for cvs access! contribute!
i found this link a while back but havn't had a chance to check it out
fully. it defangs embedded html attacks and buffer overflows. for virii, it
requires the use of an external virus scanner. i've tested it briefly with
mcafee's vscan for unix, and that seems to work fine.
Enhancing E-Mail Security With Procmail
to paraphrase a master:
project forking leads to overlapping effort. overlapping effort leads to
incompatible systems. incompatible Systems lead to the Dark Dide.
my plea to the developrs of this system: don't fork Gnome. Gnome already has
a huge following and a lot of work has gone into it. it's bad enough having
to decide between KDE and Gnome. adding a third will not only make it harder
for new users to choose, it will alienate current users.
speaking as an avid gnome user, can honestly say that gnome is a good idea
that really needs help. a lot of work should go into unification of design,
and i hate to mention it, but speed too.
a powerfull interface is what makes an operating system worth using. unix
worked for so many people in the beginning beacase of how easy it was to
tell the computer what you want it to do. now that the industry expects you
to do this graphically, we need people like you that know how to make
powerfull GUIs.
i've never used AOL, but if the number of people that use it is any
indication, you folks must know how to make a computer system easy to use.
the same could be said for apple, and apple systems are used by the
technocrats as well as the grandmothers. kudos to you for that.
lastly, good luck.
bravo to whoever first proposed this idea. i think this is one of the most romantic experiments in recent memory.
i am reminded of those movies about the civil rights movement where a young law student from new york goes down to mississippi to defend a wrongly accused black man. only this time, instead of the student and the drunken public defender, we have hundreds of people throwing coal on the proverbial fire to liberate the rightous.
maybe it won't turn out quite like that, but the idea is still there. i hope the founders of that project have enough technical knowledge to build a forum where this can actually work without turning into a flamewar or something. might i recomend a little perl hack called slash?
as a foaming-at-the-mouth Debian evangelist, i feel compelled to point out
that Debian has been running on these processors. the next release (2.2 aka
potato) will be the second or third to boot there.
it seems to me that the problem isn't that the admintools don't give enough feedback, but that the programs (and the system itself, let me finish) are doing things the wrong way.
anyone who has ever put a production machine up knows that linux's killer apps need configuration that consists of more than key=value pairs. bind, exim, gnome, apache, even the password system. they all use a different variations on a theme. a tree-like structure with branches that have properties, a heirarchical database.
perhaps what we need is a standard, powerfull way for programs and applications to store their configuration. an extensible database, perhaps something like LDAP. i'm not saying ldap is the solution, but maybe it is.
once we get all of that in place, we can begin to write more comprehensive admin tools. you could throw a command-shell like one on an emergency disk, or a GTK based one on the distro install cd. i don't need to tell you how nice it would be to have some sort of network-wide configuration system for labs and server clusters alike.
the original author makes a good point. the user has to be able to use it, but then so do we. i know from experience that if you make a tool too easy to use, only the inept will want to use it. make it look sexy AND functional, and we get a tool that everyone can use.
get this framework in place, throw in x11r6.4 and a few more months work on Gnome, and the linux community will qualify for a seat at UN Headquarters.
i can't seem to justify in my mind why we would give free tech advise to these hethens. i know, i know: respect DARPA, remember the work militaries have done for cyprtography. somehow the idea of the strongest military in the world being friendly to open source just doesn't make sense. it just doesn't sit right with me. then, and i expect to be flamed for this, shouldn't the government be using OpenBSD for security reasons anyway?
i guess not, since it looks like they are hellbent on linux. now the question is that if the army techs out there decide to patch the kernel or some other system, what are the chances that they will release the improved code?
i can't seem to justify in my mind why we would give free tech advise to these hethens. i know, i know: respect DARPA, remember the work militaries have done for cyprtography. somehow the idea of the strongest military in the world being friendly to open source just doesn't make sends. it just doesn't sit right with me. then, and i expect to be flamed for this, shouldn't the government be using OpenBSD for security reasons anyway?
i guess not, since it looks like they are hellbent on linux. now the question is that if the army techs out there decide to patch the kernel or some other system, what are the chances that they will release the improved code?
i dare you to try and erase a DAT. we use them extensivly for both audio recording and system backups. DATs tend not to fail if treated properly. that just means that, as with any magtape, you need to run a cleaning tape once in a while to remove stale magnetic particals from the heads.
as far as the FUD relating to magnetism, we have a system who's drive is less than a foot from the voice coil of a 22" speaker. aside from the occasional rattle when playing quake at full blast, the machine works fine. granted that it is a win2k box i don't much care about, but it's been in that location for some weeks without the drive suddenly going blank.
there's a huge difference between being a foot away from a huge magnet and being 1 micron away from a r/w head (as in a hard drive or dat).
also, don't forget that DATs are digital. that means a value n 0. given n is a proper value, you can have a lot of varience from the first 0 to the second 0 and it will still read a proper value of 0. a little stray magnatisim wont kill your data.
this is why analog tapes suck, and DAT is the standard.