My wife runs Windows 98 on her little 300mhz computer and it basically does what she needs - some photo editing, writing of documents, spreadsheets, e-mail, and Web surfing....
Not much wiggle room there. I can see 3 possible explanations here:
Maureen is Lesbian... I live on the west coast (Vancouver), so that's not only not hard to swallow -- It seems entirely feasable.
She's in a polyamorous relationship. Given that she likes supporting SCO, who hail from Utah, This too, doesn't strike me as entirely unreasonable. (yes, I know that most people in Utah only have one spouse, but Polygamy is at least more infamous there than anywhere else).
She's fobbing off someone else's as her own and didn't even botheer to do the most minimal of editing before posting it.
Personally, I'd say that #3 is the most disturbing of the three.
I guess we could add #4, that she's really a transgendered "he", but I'd say you could swallow that inside of #1.
I realize that this upset a number of players, but I'm wondering if this may actually do more good than harm. For the people for whom this is a painful reminder of actions in the real world, this may actually provide a bit of cathartic relief. The incident here is at least one level removed from direct reality, and I'd expect that this is the first time that some of these people have felt the power to respond to this sort of situation from a position of personal asertiveness.
With luck they'll take that with them into the real world.
This is not a trivial instance for me either. I'm a visible minority myself, and have suffered prejudice. I also have friends who have suffered from abusive relationships (including one who's still recovering and one who killed herself). I have no sympathies for this Malakai.
For me the fact that the abuser was ultimately ostracized (and mostly thru the actions of his 'victims') is far more important than that he was introduced into the world.
Ah, that's where I heard the name before... In any case, the designers may have chosen the name from the hebrew, or they may have chosen it for homonyminous meaning. Given how he acted, I'd still be inclined to bet the latter.
It would be cheaper to add ethernet capability than to add a pcmcia slot and then need to include the card... all of that added hardware (and testing) would be way more expensive than an ethnet chip and connector.
In any case, they'd be lucky if the whole box gives them a $40 profit margin, so every little bit counts. Since they're selling it into third world markets that don't already have machines, I expect that they believe that most of them won't have ethernet connectivity (and those that do can probably afford an ethernet/usb addapter -- not to mention a more powerful box).
Much of the 3rd world has a massive income disparity. those that have any money at all tend to have lots. $2 may not seem like a lot to us, but it's a few meals for some of the people being targeted by this product.
I hope not! I wouldn't want to waste my money like that. -- and as someone else pointed out, WinCE is designed to reject some regular Windows Apps.
As for size -- no, it's a regular floortop box (with lots of dead air). It'd be easy enough to bring it down to something about a third the size -- and even smaller if you started paying attention to airflow.
Malakai was inserted as a plot device. He was not expected to be accepted
Consider the name MALakai -- base being mal ('bad' in french, and latin/greek -- think MALadjusted).and it turned out that many of the people who traded with him ended up losing what they traded for to begin with (so the women refused service were proabably better off for it).
I've played in a live RPG where I came this close to being randomly attacked by a friggin GM, had an arm turned into a tentacle and told that I'd fallen in love with another character who my most recent interaction with resulted in both of us being dead. -- and that's just game creatures (introduced by the company who ran the game).
Nasty occurences are meant to be part of any good RPG. How people respond to such distrubances is IMHO more important (malakai was (rightly) hounded out of the country).
That the ATITD community ejected the cad the way they did says more (IMHO) about the game than that he was inserted into the plot.
I can't get any hard data on just how bad the 'riots' were, but I get a feeling that a reaction like that was intended.
My neighbourhood computer store sells pretty much such a machine (note that prices are in Canadian Dollars -> ~ $.80US/$1.00CAD). An AMD 2700 with 256MB ram, 40GB drive and CDROM for $289CAD -> $230US.It has an onboard 10/100 ethernet rather than a modem.
Add Linux and a used monitor, and you're Rocking.
I presume that you could find something similar in the US.
He didn't say that they were that common, but when they occur, they're very visible and can be very annoying --- and they're not all texan.
An old GF of mine who's originally from England told me the story of a friend of hers who was visiting from England, and spent a lot of time denigrating everything Canadian. She took him on a trip to the rockies, and he was pooh-poohing that to:
"You call these mountains? We have mountains this big back home. This is not something to write home about. I don't know why you made such a big thing of this"
"We don't call these mountains", she replied. "These are foothills. If you look at the horizon when we get to the top of the next hill, you'll see the real mountains."
She was very happy to report that this shut him up for at least a week... not to mention the dropped jaw effect.
I've also run into a couple of incarnations of the 'stupid Texan', including one guy who absolutely insisted that Montana was nowhere near the Canadian border.
That having been said, one Texan friend of mine is an extremely intelligent and thoughtfull writer (although he did get a good bit of his schooling in Canada). And another I consider to be something of a mentor (although he did have a tendancy to spurt the occasional racist quip like "act like a white man!", he was doing his honest best to beet it out of himeslf).
There's also the one in Downtown Vancouver (Grandville) and there is/was one on Broadway (secondary downtown for Vancouver) and I think there may be at least one more.
I actually interviewed for the Sony Stores' IT group in Edmonton back in the '80s.
In any case, I second the 'not big news' for Canadians. I didn't think twice about seeing a Sony Store in San Fran.
Regarding the rise of militant extremism, I say good. Let's confront it now, today, rather than later. This hatred of the West, and the United States in particular, is not going to go away on it's own.
The rise of extremism like what we're seeing in Iraq is coming from the US's disregard for human and civil rights.
Way too many innocent civilians are dying in Iraq at the hands of US soldiers, and people are starting to go "If I'm gonna take a bullet in the back of the head at any time, I might as well get shot for a good reason'. Many people in the Middle east have no problems with the people of America and The West, but they have deep issues with the actions of the governments and corporatins thereof.
Blowing up someone's house withoug so much as an 'oops, sorry', is not the way to make friends and influence people.
That reminds me of the quote: "Say want you want about Mussolini, but he made the trains run on time" (paraphrase).
I think that there were very few people who were unhappy to see Saddamn go. On the other hand, the way Bush Did it sucked bigtime for a number of reasons -- including him causing a massive rise in extremism, both inside Iraq and outside.
In 1991 Many Iraqis were entirely fed up with Saddam, and QUITE willing to put up with the bombing campaign, etc. to get him out. When Bush (sr) called for the people of Iraq to rise up and revolt against Saddam, many did.
Many a surprised Journalist in that war came across Iraqi soldiers happily surrendering and chanting stuff lie "long live George Bush". I expect that they meant it because they expected that their country was well on the way to being liberated.
What GB Sr. did, however, was -- once he had secured the oil wells of Kuwait, the no-fly stipulation for the Iraqi military was relaxed to allow saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the civilians who had heeded GB Sr's calls for revolt. The people of Iraq who responded to bush's call for support were literally rewarded with death and dismemberment.
This cost the US in general, and the name of George Bush specifically a LOT of good will. That the US and UN then funneled most of the money/supplies from the food-for-oil campaign thru Saddamn and his minions (thus reinforcing his hold on Iraq) didn't help much.
Junior's insistence on going into Iraq based on clearly fabricated grounds didn't help much. The Iraqi people were clear, at that point, that whatever the reason GB had for going into Iraq, helping them was NOT at the top of the list (and possibly not even near the top).
The unwillingness of US soldiers to protect Iraqi civilians from looting and random violence in the early days of the occupation didn't help (and was, by the way, a possible violation of the Geneva Convention).
That the US military seems to be continually acting as if Iraqi civilian 'collateral damage' (read: death, and maiming of innocent civilians and destructin of (what's left of) their proerty) isn't a big deal doesn't help. Things like the tourture, murder and general mistreatment at Abu Gharib (and probably other) prisons -- and the way that it was dealt with when it came to light have been bad ideas too.
It's not that GB Sr. didn't go all the way into Iraq, and GB Jr. did. that's at question here. The contexts of the two invasions were very different. Among other things, there were a good number of Arab nations involved in 1991, but effectively none in 2003 other than Turkey who are (a) not arab, and (b) seriously hated by the Kurds in northern Iraq (not without reason).
Best analogy I can come up with at this late hour: If you let a fat lady drown and then insist on saving the pretty blonde who seems to be in somewhat less distress (having waited for her to work her way out of deep water), some people may (rightly) question your motives -- for both situations.
(( Paraphrase: The best defence is to avoid firefights. ))
Someone please pass on that bit of wisdom on to Bush and his pentagon drinking buddies who seem to think that killind and displacing thousands of Iraqis is going to solve the base problem which is that the US government has been pissing off the Iraqi people since Bush Sr. Betrayed the Iraqis who answered his call for a revolt against Saddamn.
If you piss off enough people, sooner or later someone is going to get a critical hit in. Star Wars II (whatever it's official name) is not going to defend New York against a cargo ship with a dirty nuke and a big slingshot; or someone grief-torn enough to allow him/herself to be injected with a nasty airborn virus that has a 3-day incubation period.
On the other hand, all of the terrorist attacks on US soil in the last decade don't even get into the ballpark of what drunk drivers and second hand smoke have done in the last year.
I fully agree with you on all points -- in fact, I think that I may have replied to the wrong posting... I was replying to the comment about someone thinking we (the OS community) were somehow pissed that Echelon was supposedly not based on Open source. My point is that there's no evidence that that was the case -- and, in fact what evidence there is suggest that it probably was (and that may be a bit to the chagrin of some OS developers -- but, hey that's life and a side effect of Open source: It doesn't only get used by the people you like today).
I didn't see anything that said Echelon didn't use Linux... In fact they suggeted that the thing might be controled by a central CRAY system -- and Cray supports Linux on their hardware.
I asked for RedHat (it was 2002) to be installed when I purchased the new machine but, oops, Linux has to be installed before Windows.
This is because Windows (willfully) stomps on the boot loader for any non-MS OS during installation. Once you understand this, it's more annoying than anything else.
It's not that hard to fix... boot into knoppix (or the rescue mode of your install CDs), and mount the Linux partition.
(replace/dev/hda1 with the name of your Linux partition... cat/etc/fstab for a list of what's where.}
chroot/mnt/hda1 grub-install/dev/hda exit reboot
Red Hat/Fedora (and other distros, I presume) have a 'rescue' mode for their installation CDs that allow you to do much the same thing.
Oh yeah???? Just ask some of the guys trying to pin down Iraq! -- and we're not getting defections there. If the government got overt about it's crackdown on civil rights, I expect that you'd find a good number of 'good soldiers (cops, etc)' refusing to follow orders.
They've sworn to uphold the constitution first, and their orders second. I expect that some would take that oath seriously.
I expect that it's probably still easier to get the scripting done using Unix/Linux. Also: the last thing you want is a blue-screen or the need to reboot in the middle of an eruption. It's no that DOS/Windows isn't capable of getting the job done -- just that Linux is likely to do a better job.
and what kind of responsibility (if any!) PayPal will take.
Read their EULA. I'm expecting them to do their best to avoid any fiscal responsibility unless there's a massive user uprising. Nothing special about PayPal... it's just a side effect of being a corporation.
Would they really be so stupid as to tether it??? it would be a NASTY navigation threat for airplanes. I would have expected it to be free-floating with engines. for station-keeping.
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I guess we could add #4, that she's really a transgendered "he", but I'd say you could swallow that inside of #1.
With luck they'll take that with them into the real world.
This is not a trivial instance for me either. I'm a visible minority myself, and have suffered prejudice. I also have friends who have suffered from abusive relationships (including one who's still recovering and one who killed herself). I have no sympathies for this Malakai.
For me the fact that the abuser was ultimately ostracized (and mostly thru the actions of his 'victims') is far more important than that he was introduced into the world.
Ah, that's where I heard the name before... In any case, the designers may have chosen the name from the hebrew, or they may have chosen it for homonyminous meaning. Given how he acted, I'd still be inclined to bet the latter.
In any case, they'd be lucky if the whole box gives them a $40 profit margin, so every little bit counts. Since they're selling it into third world markets that don't already have machines, I expect that they believe that most of them won't have ethernet connectivity (and those that do can probably afford an ethernet/usb addapter -- not to mention a more powerful box).
Much of the 3rd world has a massive income disparity. those that have any money at all tend to have lots. $2 may not seem like a lot to us, but it's a few meals for some of the people being targeted by this product.
I hope not! I wouldn't want to waste my money like that. -- and as someone else pointed out, WinCE is designed to reject some regular Windows Apps.
As for size -- no, it's a regular floortop box (with lots of dead air). It'd be easy enough to bring it down to something about a third the size -- and even smaller if you started paying attention to airflow.
Consider the name MALakai -- base being mal ('bad' in french, and latin/greek -- think MALadjusted).and it turned out that many of the people who traded with him ended up losing what they traded for to begin with (so the women refused service were proabably better off for it).
I've played in a live RPG where I came this close to being randomly attacked by a friggin GM, had an arm turned into a tentacle and told that I'd fallen in love with another character who my most recent interaction with resulted in both of us being dead. -- and that's just game creatures (introduced by the company who ran the game).
Nasty occurences are meant to be part of any good RPG. How people respond to such distrubances is IMHO more important (malakai was (rightly) hounded out of the country).
That the ATITD community ejected the cad the way they did says more (IMHO) about the game than that he was inserted into the plot.
I can't get any hard data on just how bad the 'riots' were, but I get a feeling that a reaction like that was intended.
I presume that you could find something similar in the US.
An old GF of mine who's originally from England told me the story of a friend of hers who was visiting from England, and spent a lot of time denigrating everything Canadian. She took him on a trip to the rockies, and he was pooh-poohing that to:
"You call these mountains? We have mountains this big back home. This is not something to write home about. I don't know why you made such a big thing of this"
"We don't call these mountains", she replied. "These are foothills. If you look at the horizon when we get to the top of the next hill, you'll see the real mountains."
She was very happy to report that this shut him up for at least a week... not to mention the dropped jaw effect.
I've also run into a couple of incarnations of the 'stupid Texan', including one guy who absolutely insisted that Montana was nowhere near the Canadian border.
That having been said, one Texan friend of mine is an extremely intelligent and thoughtfull writer (although he did get a good bit of his schooling in Canada). And another I consider to be something of a mentor (although he did have a tendancy to spurt the occasional racist quip like "act like a white man!", he was doing his honest best to beet it out of himeslf).
I actually interviewed for the Sony Stores' IT group in Edmonton back in the '80s.
In any case, I second the 'not big news' for Canadians. I didn't think twice about seeing a Sony Store in San Fran.
The rise of extremism like what we're seeing in Iraq is coming from the US's disregard for human and civil rights.
Way too many innocent civilians are dying in Iraq at the hands of US soldiers, and people are starting to go "If I'm gonna take a bullet in the back of the head at any time, I might as well get shot for a good reason'. Many people in the Middle east have no problems with the people of America and The West, but they have deep issues with the actions of the governments and corporatins thereof.
Blowing up someone's house withoug so much as an 'oops, sorry', is not the way to make friends and influence people.
Engineer: "Uhm, safety?"
I think that there were very few people who were unhappy to see Saddamn go. On the other hand, the way Bush Did it sucked bigtime for a number of reasons -- including him causing a massive rise in extremism, both inside Iraq and outside.
Many a surprised Journalist in that war came across Iraqi soldiers happily surrendering and chanting stuff lie "long live George Bush". I expect that they meant it because they expected that their country was well on the way to being liberated.
What GB Sr. did, however, was -- once he had secured the oil wells of Kuwait, the no-fly stipulation for the Iraqi military was relaxed to allow saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the civilians who had heeded GB Sr's calls for revolt. The people of Iraq who responded to bush's call for support were literally rewarded with death and dismemberment.
This cost the US in general, and the name of George Bush specifically a LOT of good will. That the US and UN then funneled most of the money/supplies from the food-for-oil campaign thru Saddamn and his minions (thus reinforcing his hold on Iraq) didn't help much.
Junior's insistence on going into Iraq based on clearly fabricated grounds didn't help much. The Iraqi people were clear, at that point, that whatever the reason GB had for going into Iraq, helping them was NOT at the top of the list (and possibly not even near the top).
The unwillingness of US soldiers to protect Iraqi civilians from looting and random violence in the early days of the occupation didn't help (and was, by the way, a possible violation of the Geneva Convention).
That the US military seems to be continually acting as if Iraqi civilian 'collateral damage' (read: death, and maiming of innocent civilians and destructin of (what's left of) their proerty) isn't a big deal doesn't help. Things like the tourture, murder and general mistreatment at Abu Gharib (and probably other) prisons -- and the way that it was dealt with when it came to light have been bad ideas too.
It's not that GB Sr. didn't go all the way into Iraq, and GB Jr. did. that's at question here. The contexts of the two invasions were very different. Among other things, there were a good number of Arab nations involved in 1991, but effectively none in 2003 other than Turkey who are (a) not arab, and (b) seriously hated by the Kurds in northern Iraq (not without reason).
Best analogy I can come up with at this late hour: If you let a fat lady drown and then insist on saving the pretty blonde who seems to be in somewhat less distress (having waited for her to work her way out of deep water), some people may (rightly) question your motives -- for both situations.
Someone please pass on that bit of wisdom on to Bush and his pentagon drinking buddies who seem to think that killind and displacing thousands of Iraqis is going to solve the base problem which is that the US government has been pissing off the Iraqi people since Bush Sr. Betrayed the Iraqis who answered his call for a revolt against Saddamn.
If you piss off enough people, sooner or later someone is going to get a critical hit in. Star Wars II (whatever it's official name) is not going to defend New York against a cargo ship with a dirty nuke and a big slingshot; or someone grief-torn enough to allow him/herself to be injected with a nasty airborn virus that has a 3-day incubation period.
On the other hand, all of the terrorist attacks on US soil in the last decade don't even get into the ballpark of what drunk drivers and second hand smoke have done in the last year.
I fully agree with you on all points -- in fact, I think that I may have replied to the wrong posting... I was replying to the comment about someone thinking we (the OS community) were somehow pissed that Echelon was supposedly not based on Open source. My point is that there's no evidence that that was the case -- and, in fact what evidence there is suggest that it probably was (and that may be a bit to the chagrin of some OS developers -- but, hey that's life and a side effect of Open source: It doesn't only get used by the people you like today).
I didn't see anything that said Echelon didn't use Linux... In fact they suggeted that the thing might be controled by a central CRAY system -- and Cray supports Linux on their hardware.
Happpy Birthday is still Copyright. Now Slashdot is gonna get a DMCA Takedown!
Nice to see how standards allow you to access Slashdot via the microwave. Very nice.
Probably uses windows... For some people, when you use MS windows, you're not using the computer,, the computer uses You.
(( and not just in Soviet Russia ))
This is because Windows (willfully) stomps on the boot loader for any non-MS OS during installation. Once you understand this, it's more annoying than anything else.
It's not that hard to fix... boot into knoppix (or the rescue mode of your install CDs), and mount the Linux partition. /dev/hda1 with the name of your Linux partition... cat /etc/fstab for a list of what's where.}
Red Hat(replace
They've sworn to uphold the constitution first, and their orders second. I expect that some would take that oath seriously.
I expect that it's probably still easier to get the scripting done using Unix/Linux. Also: the last thing you want is a blue-screen or the need to reboot in the middle of an eruption. It's no that DOS/Windows isn't capable of getting the job done -- just that Linux is likely to do a better job.
Read their EULA. I'm expecting them to do their best to avoid any fiscal responsibility unless there's a massive user uprising. Nothing special about PayPal... it's just a side effect of being a corporation.
It's called 'increased corporate effeciency'.
Would they really be so stupid as to tether it??? it would be a NASTY navigation threat for airplanes. I would have expected it to be free-floating with engines. for station-keeping.
Oh, you don't want me to lose my tag when I leave hospital? Why not?