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People buy SUVs for a reason, after all, and they aren't all slack jawed, environment hating, oil guzzling, high income, wasteful spenders.

One of the chief problems now-a-days in promoting conservation is that ideas like this persist: if you buy an SUV you are being wasteful unless you are one of the corner cases that actually needs one. Programs needs to be discussed and implemented to promote smart consumerism and ecology--indeed to make ecology sexy, desirable, and cheap. However, you and I are in agreement about this. You are just under the false impression that people need SUVs.

In reading the rest of your comment and your previous comment I did and will conclude now that you do bring up several highly relevant points. However, the thrust of my argument has to do primarily with the following:

People of good faith hoping to change the world have to realistically take real issues into account when they try to come to a decision.

The problem with this thinking is that you assume that being realistic is actually the best vehicle to promote change. This is an easy trap to fall in to because its so comfortable, marketable, and conservative. Fat. Dumb. Happy.

As you have said yourself, "moving to a new energy base from petroleum will bring with it a new set of costs and benefits, many of which can't be predicted and understood until the change has already occurred." Precisely. There is a history (you may read "history" as "conspiracy" if anybody is so inclined) in the U.S. to promote a dependence on oil. There is a legislative record nearly a century long to support this statement. To deny this would be foolish. Here is the problem: we live in a "reality" of fossils and fossil-fuel so we cannot imagine a "reality" without them.

Somebody has to destroy this reality. Somebody has to say "Why?" instead of "Why not." Somebody has to play the fool.

For example, Galileo-- amongst a set of almost any other revolutionary you can name, such as: George Washington, Ben Franklin, Einstein, Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King--had to free themselves at some point from the "reality" they were living in to see some place beyond, often by bucking the imposed status quo and looking like a crazy idiot.

Did Galileo think to himself, "I had better not try and define the movements of the solar-system because it isn't socially acceptable?" Did he run from the possibilies of ex-communication and house-arrest? No. His observations pointed the world in a new direction at a great personal expense and later at the expense of embaressment of the entire Catholic Church.

Did Ghandi or Dr. King decide not to fight for the freedom of their peoples because of the status quo? No. More importantly, did they not realize that they were going to make some of their own people uncomfortable, hurt, or possibly slain? Of course not. Although the way in which they changed the world cost the British Empire and the U.S. a lot of money, made a lot of whites very unhappy, and a cost people their lives it should be clear that it is wrong thinking to have preferred things to remain the other way.

Telling people why things won't work--I'm sorry--I mean, "raising the level of discussion" is an easy game to play because by simply "discussing" the topics you can never be wrong. You're not actually putting anything on the line. What I am asking is that people such as yourself be brave and start dreaming and sharing ideas of why things will work and actually start making choices in your life now to get there.

It does nothing to make people "aware" of why things won't work. It just scares them into keeping things the same way. Instead, spend your energies on inspiring them. Challenge them to dream about what the future will look like after the change.

Intuitively, you can tell me "dreaming" about something is a lot easier than thinking about how to really implement it. In reality, I can tell you this is not the case. Implementing war and burning oil is a hell-of-a-lot easier than imagining a world without them. In essence, here are some smaller examples of the same sort of wrong-thinking:

• I could loose weight, but that means I have to watch what I eat and exercise and feel uncomfortable.
• I could actively parent my child and show him how to watch television and make good choices, but it's hard and I don't want him to resent me as a teenager.
• I should sue the college kids stealing our music instead of changing the business model, no matter that the nature of the business has already permanently changed.

Instead, dream of yourself thin while you prepare vegetables and exercise. Instead, dream of what your child will grown into as an adult and spend time with them. Instead, dream of other ways to make money promoting music.

In closing, don't be a coward. Dare to dream. Tell others.

-AP

You win.

These should be submitted to the Linux Image Montage Project!

Maybe old news for you, but this is the first I've heard of IPW (thanks for the link) and I try to keep an eye on these things. RS.org also hosts LIMP - Large Image Manipulation Project - which is not to be confused with LIMP - the Linux Montage Project. GRASS has already been mentioned, and there is also SPRING, TOPOG (almost but not quite Free Software) and OpenMap.

Another good place in addition to remotesensing.org to keep an eye on Libre RS/GIS software development and data is freegis.org.

This "pluggable" MP3 player for the Gameboy reminds me a whole lot of the Handspring "Springboard" MP3 player from Innogear. The MiniJam Player uses the same approach as this Gameboy product uses of inserting a module with a DSP, stero-out, and memory; and leaving the "host" hardware to do management functions.

I might actually buy the player from Innogear: I just love those buttons on the top (ala MiniDisc)! It is just too bad they had to go with a proprietary flash memory spec. Bummer.

For the MiniJam spec in PDF, click here.

-AP

Perhaps the Linux Montage would show the best aspects of Linux. Just a thought..

I think you should hook up with the guys on the Linux Image Montage Project and see what they could come up with to help out. That way, it would be open source. :-)

• The two Slackware Tuxen b("Bobbed" Tux and Tux as Bob (Sorry, don't have a URL, but it's Tux with Bob's pipe. I only know it exists because I have button with it on it from this year's COMDEX-Chicago.))
• Demon Linux Project (Using the Linux kernel with a BSD style setup) (An evil looking Tux with curved horns)

• The two Slackware Tuxen b("Bobbed" Tux and Tux as Bob (Sorry, don't have a URL, but it's Tux with Bob's pipe. I only know it exists because I have button with it on it from this year's COMDEX-Chicago.))
• Demon Linux Project (Using the Linux kernel with a BSD style setup) (An evil looking Tux with curved horns)

I wholeheartedly disagree with you! It would be _great_ to have a free port for Windows so more people could learn to use SQL, prototype applications, and increase the "free-market share" of MySQL as the SQL server of choice.

"If you have the money for WinNT, you also have the money for MSSQL."

There are plenty of copies of WinNT or Win9x with student liscenses. Open-source is an avenue for learning (for some), and in-my-not-so-humble-opionion should be distributed like the wind.

A Win9x or NT Port would be fantastic for little projects like this; they don't need a lot of horse power or reliabilty, but provide rapid development under the-other wide-spread O/S.

-AP

Here is our cron.daily/daily.dump file:

#!/bin/sh
## Daily Full System Backup Givin with 20GB Tape Cap.
mt rewind
mt erase
mt rewind
/sbin/dump 0uBf 20000000 /dev/nst0 /dev/sdb1
/sbin/dump 0uBf 20000000 /dev/nst0 /dev/sda1
/sbin/dump 0uBf 20000000 /dev/nst0 /dev/sdc1
mt rewind

This dumps all three of our partitions out to a single tape. The 0 ("zero") option dumps the entire thing, as out tape drive is fast, vs. specifing a dump level > 0 (which is for doing various levels of incremental backups); The u, which updates a human-readable /etc/dumpdates file; B for the number of blocks ("kilobytes") the tape is long (this is your problem); and finally f: the device to dump to.

One of the things that really gets people is how to pass arguments correctly to dump. A little diagram might serve as an aid:

dump [arg name 1][arg name 2][arg name 3] [arg value 1][arg value 2][arg value 3]

We use the /dev/nst0 device to write to the tape three times without the thing rewinding. This is the key to putting more than one filesystem on per tape.

If anybody has any questions about using dump, I would be happy to help.

-AP
jordanh@remotepoint.com

I am surprised that somebody in the Open Source community hasn't come out with a standard for benchmarking servers. This sounds like a job for a new RFC. Who is going to step up to the plate? Can you see it? The RFC's test suite would start fairly low-level: a file-system test, a memory test, a raw TCP/UDP throughput test; and would eventually get more high-level: a web-server test, a file-server test, etc. Otherwise, you can all participate in something rather benign, " The Linux Image Montage Project (LIMP)." -AP

The viewer can be found of off Summus's site:

To download:
http://www.summus.com/products/download/download .html

Click on ActiveX or Netscape to take a look at there image gallery.

Amoeba