It's okay, it's only Apple's CIDR.

We should call them 'Stasi' and have done, as that's obviously what they're trying to be.

I've been through this, a few years back when our DSL took a hit and I had to keep our connectivity up anyway.

Living with a slow 56k modem link between your LAN and the Internet will:

- give you a reversible foretaste of what you're planning. Don't like dialup? You'll hate cold-turkey so much that you might not be at all productive.

- highlight your Internet time-waster habits, because the waits for those pages to load will become obvious. This is called "rubbing your nose in it". For anything that's not essential, you *will* find better things to do, or more efficient variants on the familiar. Setting your mail-lists to daily-digest, for instance.

- make it obvious what Internet resources you'll have difficulty doing without. Keep a log of the ones you keep going back to anyway: they're your reasons not to give it all up.

- change some of your Internet habits right there, because there is no instant gratification, instead you have to wait for everything to finishing downloading. You can dovetail some tasks into those waits, such as, getting a cup of coffee while Google News loads, or doing the laundry while waiting for all the new-format Slashdot comments to be visible, or going shopping while a YouTube video is being sucked in for local replay. You'll get impatient and get off your ass just to keep some momentum going because the Internet isn't doing it for you anymore.

You'll get used to prefetching bulky things you really want on hand, and using LAN storage to make it available for browsing. wget will get a lot of scripted use, particularly the "wget -c" option, because it can take most of week to get a CD ISO in. You'll learn to use local tooling to replace online stuff that isn't always there. Early on, for example, I set up a local wiki and a web calendar, to be visible to every machine on the LAN. Then I wrote CGI tooling to fill in my specific blanks. YMMV.

You will likely do a lot of scripting to automate fetching in things you really want or really need, and transferring out your responses. A cron'd mail-check every 5 minutes will keep up a dialup link that idles-out in 15 minutes. This might include bringing the link up in the wee hours to do downloads when nobody's likely to phone, and dropping it again, ready or not, when the phone line needs to have a phone ready for use.

Dialup will have you looking at your computer less as a source of consumed entertainment and more as a creative workspace. If that's what you're after, dropping to 56k might be enough.

The most recent Firefox you can use day to day on win98se is 2.0.0.19. Firefox 2.0.0.20 will install and run, but, in at least one ancient install I have to pamper, it won't run the next time you boot the machine without removal and reinstallation; you only get one good run per install (so make it good).

Worse, it's New!Yahoo. Forced rollout of an Awkward New!Ponies look, theme-above-thought, CSS-uber-alles which I KNOW wasn't retro-tested because the topic bullet-list insists on masking the upper-left even of this TEXTAREA (Yeah, this is FF2, which is what this distro supports -- can't imagine how broken earlier browsers look here)... I know I'm pissing-and-moaning here, but seriously, this stuff's broken. I can't wait til http://www.alterslash.org/ has caught up with the changes so I can go back to reading Slashdot, because I sure can't here.

I'm surprised I didn't hear about this via email direct marketing!

"Glass cubicle walls will cut down on noise like a cubicle would, but does not give as much of the feeling of being in a box as standard cubicles. They allow unobstructed view of the video-wall and you can write on them with grease pens."

They also allow an unobstructed view of things you really don't want to stare at such as bright lights.

My experience is from the dev cubicle floor, not a NOC, but it applies at least as much to monitoring a screen or screens as to staring through the screen into the code-realm. Bad placement plus a low ceiling meant that I had a bright fluorescent fixture showing just above the cubicle corner. I tried sunglasses, moving the monitor, etc. and ended up roofing that corner of the cube with cardboard, just so I didn't have that light stabbing my eye while I was trying to dive into my code. Glass cubes will exacerbate this into a no-escape situation. Nobody's going to want to keep staring at a view which is actually painful.

Even if you don't go with glass, before you sign off on that build, have a short person and a tall person test out every station for glare within scope of view. Be prepared to hood some of those lights to keep them out of people's eyes.

Someone with a schematic of the car should have a look to see how those signals are generated and routed. If they go through the same microcontroller...

In my Chrysler-made minivan, I've learned that headlights have to be turned off BEFORE the engine is stopped. If I switch the lights off first (two steps on a rotary knob), things work fine no matter how fast I twist that knob; both switch-events are caught.

If I turn the key first, though, turning off the engine before shutting off the headlights, both headlight-switch events will be missed by whatever MCU drives the headlight relays. The lights are on, the door is open, the engine is off, but I get no chimed 'lights left on' alert unless I put that switch through another full-on-full-off cycle to resync the micro with the physical state of things.
My guess is that the same MCU is responsible for a number of tightly timed engine-shutdown sequence events during which it has to mask off switch interrupts, which is lousy embedded design on Chrysler's part.

Nothing says that the same crappiness of design isn't evident in Toyota's machines, in which case the timing of those brake lights coming on means exactly nothing: that pedal might have been pressed for some seconds before the MCU got around to noticing.

*poof*

You're a sandwich.

The reason for the Idle category is so crap like this can be put there, and I can block it.

That's a genuinely good point, I wonder if Sony would help them out on this or if they are getting the old one or what?
I don't have much of a use for linux on mine TBH, it was far too goddamn slow (and I'm no linux guru) it really does need 1gb or more of ram, then she'd be fine.
That being said, sucks for researchers who wanted this.

All the time I spent vacuuming out dead roaches from my computer cases... wasted. If I'd mashed them flat instead, obviously I'd have had a lot fewer live bugs to eliminate from my code as a result.

There's nothing like a screen that even remotely appears to respond to viewer interaction to get children involved. They won't tell you this, of course, but you'll know immediately by the trails of peanut butter, jelly, ketchup and various bodily emissions left as bookmarks in their favorite places on your console. Trust me on this.

Not exactly my preferred mind-picture of "open source", thank you.