Slashdot Mirror

Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to offer the world's largest selection of products online. for details.

AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld devices.

DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.

Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.

Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.

Salon.com - Online magazine covering news, politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web awards.

Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.

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AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.

Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software

Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.

American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.

Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.

arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.

astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.

Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.

AutoSupplyUK.com - Used Japanese import auto store.

B BDO - Austrian tax consultancy

Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer

Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.

bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.

BlackSpider - Managed services provider focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.

Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.

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cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.

Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.

If you want a truly hardcorde messenger bag, you should check out Ortleib. Timbuk2 is good (we used to sell them) but I think the Ortleib's contruction is more "bomber".

However, if you want a computer bag, you really don't want a bike messenger bag. These bags are usually designed for papers and small packages--not heavy laptops. You're better off with a real laptop backpack. I love my JanSport pack--I think it's the "Firewire" model. I bought mine at the mall and probably paid about $100 than I would have paid at eBags. I carried a heavy Apple TiBook, along with books and cables, on a business trip to New Zealand. My laptop survived six flights, five hotels, and countless bus rides without a scratch.

Chris

Hey, before you go drop $1000 on an electric bike, you need to consider this question: who is going to work on your bike when it inevitably breaks? Scanning through the thread and looking at web pages, I can tell you that pretty much every one of these "e-Bikes" has an electric motor mounted on a department store-grade bicycle. The motor drive makes up the lion's share of the bike's cost and you are ending up with a cheap steel (probably not even chro-moly) frame, crappy no-name low-grade derailluers and heavy, poorly-constructed steel wheels.

As a guy who grew up in his family's bicycle stores, let me tell you, I highly doubt that you are going to be able to find anybody to work on your e-bike when it breaks. Bike shops are usually reluctant to work on department store-grade bikes because you often end up breaking them even more when trying to fix them. Even if you have the mechanical skills to repair your own bike, the parts they use are often of non-standard size and replacements are not usually available. Keep in mind, I'm just talking about the bicycle that this e-bike is based on. When your local bike shop sees the motor on the wheel, they are going to cry.

Please, do yourself a huge favor and go to your locally-owned bicycle store and pick yourself up a quality name-brand bicycle. We sell Trek, Klien, and Gary Fisher, but Specialized and Cannondale are also pretty good, too. For the price of your e-bike, you'll get a high quality aluminum frame, durable Shimano components, tough aluminum alloy wheels, and a friendly local dealer who will gladly repair your bike if it breaks. At our store, customers get a free 30-day tune-up and subsequent minor adjustments are generally free for the first couple of years.

If you *really* don't want the life-improving effects of cycling and want power-assist, go get yourself a cheap, used Honda scooter or something.

Good luck,

Chris

Please do not spread FUD. Almost all dogs available at the shelters will make fine and hardy pets. Why? Unfortunately, most injured or otherwise unadoptable dogs are put down if not claimed within a day or two of their arrival. There is nothing about the shelter process that will make a dog unhardy. Well, with the exception of diseases like Parvo--but this disease is not very common and will be very obvious within a few days of adopting a dog. If you adopt a dog, take it to the vet for a thorough check-up and you and pup will be fine.

One of the best dogs that I've ever had came from a shelter. You can't beat a good labrador mix from a shelter for their intelligence and character. I'm also a big fan of purebred Chesapeake Bay Retrievers but I advocate rescuing one (see my sig) instead of purchasing a puppy. There's just something about a rescued animal...most of them, especially those that have had some hard times, are truly appreciative of you as their saviour.

Chris

The sad thing about this article is that we still don't have a decent, non-specific, OSS point-of-sale package for *nix. I've seen cheezy GTK-based "cash register" apps but nothing that can compete (or even compare) to Windows-based products.

This is unfortunate. My father's company runs FreeBSD and OpenBSD on all of its servers but I still have to support over 35 Windows 2000 desktops here at our stores because there is no *nix alternative. Retail is the perfect place for Linux and the BSDs. Retail people need simple, easy-to-use interfaces and they do not want to deal with the problems associated with administering Microsoft OSes (worms, spyware, etc). I would love nothing more than to replace every single Windows desktop in this company with a X11-capable thin client.

Thoughts?

At my family's bicycle store, we have a shop dog named Macy, who is a labrador mix. Macy is getting old now but back in his prime, he loved to pull people around on a skateboard. Some of the braver employees would put a harness on the dog and take a longboard out behind the shop and let him run. It was unreal how fast this dog could run. One of the guys came up with an idea for clocking Macy's top speed: the GPS. Using a Garmin eMap, we clocked them at 28mph. At this speed, the board began to get unstable so the rider bailed but he's pretty sure that Macy had a few more mph in him.
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At my family's bicycle store, we have a shop dog named Macy, who is a labrador mix. Macy is getting old now but back in his prime, he loved to pull people around on a skateboard. Some of the braver employees would put a harness on the dog and take a longboard out behind the shop and let him run. It was unreal how fast this dog could run. One of the guys came up with an idea for clocking Macy's top speed: the GPS. Using a Garmin eMap, we clocked them at 28mph. At this speed, the board began to get unstable so the rider bailed but he's pretty sure that Macy had a few more mph in him.
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For us, we're not so concerned about the bundling of apps (we can do that ourselves) as we are with the availability of business apps. I've been looking for *nix-based Point-of-Sale apps since '97 and have yet to see anything that comes close to Sage's $700 Point-of-Sale Point-of-Sale system. I would love nothing more than to move the fifty mail order and cash register workstations in our stores to FreeBSD or Linux but it's not going to happen until somebody writes a decent point-of-sale app, one that's not specifically tailed for gas stations, restaurants, or small mom-and-pop shops with five items in their inventory.