I own a server on the Internet which basically serves my hobby stuff. Being a busy guy, I simply don't have time to deal with the various patches and such that I should be getting.
Jon Katz talks a lot about big corporations taking over the Internet and obliverating the little guys. Well, I'm a little guy who has a server with information on it of various types that many folks find useful.
When someone attacks the big companies, they have resources to deal with it.
When someone attacks my server, I'm effectively helpless - and that's pretty much burned me out on creating useful stuff and putting it there.
It seems to me that script kiddies are much more of a threat to "the little guy" than the big corporations that Katz fears. The corporations can't knock us offline, while a script kiddie killed off my server for a solid month.
I wish there was a way to convey to these people how much misery and anguish they cause on the other side, especially for servers run by individuals who really don't have any good options for protection.
I've read in this thread stuff like "script kiddies help the ecology of the net by eliminating clueless sysadmins". But what's so bad about being a clueless sysadmin? If I have something to share with the world, and can afford a server to share it with, well, surely I should be able to do it. Why should I have to spend hours of my time trying to keep up with nonsense like this?
To me, there's nothing more vile and contemptable than a script kiddie. Except, perhaps, the people who publish exploits for them to use.
Why on earth would someone do something like that?
Expert users love the taskbar and start button, but despite millions of dollars worth of Microsoft propaganda, I still see people minimizing all their applications and using the desktop to perform most tasks - which is basically the same thing they did in Windows 3.1.
Owners of such equipment should certainly thank Mindcraft. It was thanks to the kick in the pants that benchmark gave Linux folks that the appropriate changes were made to fix the problem.
We can still denounce Mindcraft as being a test that would be representative of real-world conditions to very few people (those who could afford a $ 50,000 server).
But in the end, it's good that kick was given - and we should congratulate everyone in the Linux community who worked hard to make those improvements possible.
Most of the people I know of who use Microsoft(tm) technologies don't think much of the company, they just think it's a way to make a living. Most of them, at least around me, admit that they'd rather use something else, but the market wants Microsoft, and the market gets what it wants most of the time.
There are a good number of principled Libertarians who are appalled at the MS antitrust case, casting it as a company that's worked very hard to give the computing world a standard that, if not perfect, is better than no standard at all. Here's a good example of their beliefs:
http://reason.com/bi/microsoft.html
I'm a libertarian, and I agree with most of what Reason magazine says. At the same time, I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company. I have a difficult time supporting the case, because of principle, and I have a tough time opposing it, because the company is indeed evil. So I sit at the sidelines and laugh at the amazing cock-up Microsoft has made of the trial.
I don't think there are many people who love Microsoft software; I think there are many people who agree with Microsoft on principle in this case.
This was actually covered - it talked about people hopping between sites instead of staying on the same site - and if you read carefully enough, it's clear that the hopping is done through multiple browser windows.
What's interesting is that nobody in the studies pointed out that this is most likely due to sluggish load times. You start something loading, and then flee to something else while it's in process. I do this all the time, more (of course) on slow sites or those with huge amounts of content that load slowly (Slashdot being a good example of this).
My behaviour, incidentally, is almost exactly like the other user on this thread (opening multiple articles in different windows) except that being in the US, I don't disconnect from my net connection, even when using a modem. This is most likely because I'm in the US with unlimited local calling, while he's in the UK with per-minute charges for use.
This is why child porn is prohibited in Sealand; they don't want to get the US or UK authorities riled up. I don't know of anything other than that with the potential of making US/UK authorities so riled up as to cause SeaLand to be attacked.
HavenCo is right in saying that it would be a horrorific PR disaster to all concerned. Even if HavenCo put national secrets on the web, the most likely result of trying to censor HavenCo would be to give those secrets even greater spread. Look what happened to the Church of Scientology's "Sacred Secrets" when they went after the ISPs that hosted them.
In practice, HavenCo would most likely cooperate with the US and UK security folks, but not those in Iraq or other oppressive nations, simply because the UK would defend Sealand in defense of its own territorial integrity.
You are correct, of course, but we're about as far away from a seasonal food supply as can be imagined.
What I really wanted to say was something that would allow self-indulgence without the conesequences - if we could breed out the gene that causes us to save fat in our bodies to the extent we do it, we could solve the problem forever.
(Whoever discovers that will make a fortune that makes Bill Gates look like a pauper).
I think people are a bit more diverse in their desires than you imply, and in the end problems like this should be self-correcting - once the plastic blonde sons decide they don't like the plastic blonde daughters, we'll be back to some kind of diversity.
But wouldn't it be fabulous to breed out obesity, which - as far as I can tell - has caused nothing but health problems and misery?
Certainly this process is going to be driven by parents, not marketers, so I don't fear a lockstep future of Microsoft-loving drones (at least to the extent this does not already exist:-( ). Many people would rather have a thinking kid than one that sits down, watches the tube and consumes all the time. I know I certainly would.
I predict most people will desire a combination of their own attributes with genetically engineered ones. If we all wanted to find perfect kids, then we'd be searching the adoption agencies for those that struck our fancy instead of making them on our own.
I don't think any parent wants a dumb kid, so I would assume the population would grow smarter overall. Maybe too smart for its own good; smart people are often puzzlingly bad at things morons do perfectly. Perhaps in the future knowledge workers will be a dime a dozen, and a good janitor will be priceless.
If I wanted a child in this brave new world, I would take my genes + my wife's genes and have the combination checked and altered to prevent obesity, alzheimers, autism and other unpleasantness. I think that's the way most people will go in the end, and I'd argue it holds little danger.
You seem to be responding to this poor fellow as though he was Microsoft hatred incarnate, while that's really hard to judge without more information.
Still, you have an interesting point, and since I do have the basic opinion you cite above, I thought I'd give you the courtesy of a response.
The worst thing about Microsoft is simply that it builds its products on a house of cards foundation, which generally falls down on anyone trying to do serious work with the platform. Mix this with the virtual monopoly they have in many parts of the industry, and you have a killer brew which brings out the worst in programmers.
The general idea of having to use products we despise in order to eat is highly unsettling. I'd make a case for saying that millions of programmers are slowly killing themselves working with systems they despise. Until I became fortunate enough to get a Linux-based job, I was one of those people - so I know how it feels, and that I don't exaggerate.
Microsoft is the most vicious competitor in the industry. This is why, despite all they have to offer, they have made so few real friends. I wasn't as ferociously against them as I am now before their giant Internet push; I felt that "my internet" could survive on Unix servers and I wouldn't have to use crummy Microsoft technology. Well, I was wrong; Microsoft followed me to the net, and I will never forgive them for it.
The reason they have a near-monopoly in PC operating systems is that developers will generally write for the platform that has the most consumer/business mindshare. They got the mindshare by basically giving away the product with PCs running their previously dominant DOS. They acted brilliantly in exploiting their position. As a result, lots of people developed for them, and Microsoft Windows, despite its faults, became dominant.
It was proably inevitable that some company would thus gain a near-monopoly on operating systems. My beef is not with the monopoly; it's with the quality of the system and software provided with it.
So why don't I dislike Sun, SGI, Cisco or Oracle? Because they produce high quality products, for the most part, and I like using them.
I hate using Microsoft Windows, and yet there's a Microsoft Windows computer on my desktop. Granted, I have three others that I use 95% of the time, but the fact that even I have to use Windows for some things irks me.
Since the whole philosophy of the thing is radically different from SQL Server, I can't say I like that description - especially for a publication that claims to be Linux-aware.
I was under the impression that the main reason mySQL wasn't under the GPL was that their business plan involved selectively selling the product for profit (instead of mandatorily allowing it to be given away as per the GPL).
I wonder how much they were paid, since I'd like to see them do well. It seems odd that they would give up a previously profitable strategy - maybe someone else can enlighten me on the probable financial picture? I'm much curious.
A lot of people, including me, have notebooks as their primary computing platform. I run Linux on an IBM ThinkPad 770Z and it works great as a development platform for my server-based applications.
So I agree with the original complainers - it would be a bummer for the OS not to work on PowerBooks.
My company had DSL service via Concentric. In the six months I worked there and the service was available, we had one outage, lasting over 12 hours (!).
In our new location, we have a spiffy new UUNET T1. So far, it's been great. The people are good, the service is super-fast, I'm delighted. Of course the service has only been on for three days, but so far, I'd say it's worth the money.
A company you've never heard of will give you a T1 for around $ 999 a month. UUNET's T1 was $ 1,300. Considering that the line is a pretty hefty percentage of our business, I thought the price premium was reasonable. It used to be much higher (like 200%-300% over what the cheapest vendor would charge). Note that the complaining former UUNET customer was in the UK, where telecommunications costs are much higher, which distorts the picture.
I thought the article was muddled and confusing. The problem is that it costs a lot more money to drag cables to remote areas, so naturally direct T3 service is not available there, at least not at a price you might want to pay. Even with peering arrangements, you have to pay big fees for space in the cages and access to the other players.
I would certainly get a UUNET T1 to my house if and when I could afford it.
I suspect people don't complain more just because the look and feel of the machine is so nice. The keyboard and trackpoint mouse are fantastic, the screen is nice and crisp, and the assembly quality is best in the business.
There are tons of reasons to like the ThinkPad even though (as I said in another message) the X-Windows performance lags a bit.
I have a 770Z with the 1280x1024 video and love it, but X could be a bit faster. Actually, quite a bit faster. Adding 'Option "accel"' to the configuration file worked a bit, but I can still watch it draw the screen when I switch desktops, which is annoying.
How's your XF86 4.0 working out? Does it improve performance at all over the previous release?
L Ron Hubbard, author of Battlefield Earth the book, was a mediocre SF writer known chiefly for founding Dianetics in the 1950s, which then led to the Church of Scientology today.
Hubbard pioneered many of the classic legal harassment techniques that are so much in the news nowadays. He perfected the "litigate until your hapless victim runs out of money" dodge, and was highly - ahem - creative in his use of trade secret and copyright law to keep his "sacred scriptures" from the public eye.
The Church of Scientology was invented to get over the tiresome legal problems his Dianetics scheme had, while still using basically the same techniques. Hubbard is well known for the practice of massively overcharging for highly insideous programmes of treatment.
Hubbard has died, but his successors live on in his path; to do otherwise would be contrary to his teachings and therefore sacriledge. As a result, massive legal attacks were brought against net posters who attempted to expose his tactics and works on the net. As a result, the Church is known as a major enemy of free speech on the Internet.
One of the many things Scientology did successfully was to recruit celebrities, who are treated very well, far better than the hoi-polli "raw meat" who are typical Church fodder. Thus, people like Travolta support the Church and there is thus a built-in receptivity among many people for Scientology-related movies. There is no doubt at all that Battlefield Earth pumped substantial amounts into the pockets of Scientology-related folks, in royalties to the now-dead author. I think it's fair to say that to support Battlefield Earth is to support Scientology.
I wouldn't think so, simply because I doubt there are many functions in common between the two businesses. Certainly I don't think anyone on the editorial side is in danger.
There might be some benefit in consolidating ad sales between the various web sites run by Andover and VA, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was little overlap even there.
For those who are curious, CmdrTaco gets $90k a year and Slashdot's previous owners (mainly him) got $ 1.5 million up front, $ 6 million when certain targets were met. I'm not sure what the targets were, but they do have a hefty amount of Andover stock that is now VA stock.
So Rob's doing pretty well considering that he's in the Midwest someplace. $ 1 million or so still goes a long way anywhere in the US outside of California, New York or Hawaii.
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Lease a single-family house, not an apartment
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 2
I just moved into a single-family house in a neighborhood with almost identical demographics to the area I had an apartment in for several years.
I found, curiously, that even though I'm still renting, I feel a much more settled connection with my house and neighborhood than I ever did in the old place.
I think the sense of having your own domain is much stronger in a house than an apartment; a house is a more personal space. And, oddly enough, in many areas the price difference isn't what you might think. In Woodland Hills, CA (in the Los Angeles metro area) where I'm currently renting a house, I'm paying $1,325 a month; I would have had to pay $ 1,200 a month for a similar-sized apartment in one of the mega-complexes nearby. I don't have a pool or fitness centre, but I do have a front and back yard (be they ever so puny) and an attractive neighborhood to return to at night instead of a bunch of impersonal corridors.
Something to think of next time you're checking out rentals. House rentals are usually harder to find than apartments; check out your local free ad paper for advertising.
A recent news.com story mentioned that their new models are the cheapest yet - in the $ 1,200 range.
Of course the really cool ones are always more expensive, but they've gone down quite a bit. A few years back, the state of the art 750 series was pushing $ 7,000. Now the closest equivalent (with the great 15" screen) is pushing $4,000, not bad relatively speaking.
You can get reconditioned ThinkPads at ubid.com - I bought my 770Z (366mhz, 128mb ram [upgraded to 256], 14gb hard drive, 1280x1024 active matrix screen]) for $ 2,750. I've had it a few months and I'm very pleased with it - the display has perfectly crisp tiny characters that are just perfect for the programmer who likes having lots of information in little space.
But I still want the new titatium case and the spiffier higher resolution screens... maybe next year:-).
According to How to start your own country, the main reference I know of on Sealand, the UK government felt strongly enough about the dangers inherent in Sealand clones to blow up the remaining platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
I own a server on the Internet which basically serves my hobby stuff. Being a busy guy, I simply don't have time to deal with the various patches and such that I should be getting.
Jon Katz talks a lot about big corporations taking over the Internet and obliverating the little guys. Well, I'm a little guy who has a server with information on it of various types that many folks find useful.
When someone attacks the big companies, they have resources to deal with it.
When someone attacks my server, I'm effectively helpless - and that's pretty much burned me out on creating useful stuff and putting it there.
It seems to me that script kiddies are much more of a threat to "the little guy" than the big corporations that Katz fears. The corporations can't knock us offline, while a script kiddie killed off my server for a solid month.
I wish there was a way to convey to these people how much misery and anguish they cause on the other side, especially for servers run by individuals who really don't have any good options for protection.
I've read in this thread stuff like "script kiddies help the ecology of the net by eliminating clueless sysadmins". But what's so bad about being a clueless sysadmin? If I have something to share with the world, and can afford a server to share it with, well, surely I should be able to do it. Why should I have to spend hours of my time trying to keep up with nonsense like this?
To me, there's nothing more vile and contemptable than a script kiddie. Except, perhaps, the people who publish exploits for them to use.
Why on earth would someone do something like that?
D
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Depends on how you define "quite well".
Expert users love the taskbar and start button, but despite millions of dollars worth of Microsoft propaganda, I still see people minimizing all their applications and using the desktop to perform most tasks - which is basically the same thing they did in Windows 3.1.
Strange.
D
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Owners of such equipment should certainly thank Mindcraft. It was thanks to the kick in the pants that benchmark gave Linux folks that the appropriate changes were made to fix the problem.
We can still denounce Mindcraft as being a test that would be representative of real-world conditions to very few people (those who could afford a $ 50,000 server).
But in the end, it's good that kick was given - and we should congratulate everyone in the Linux community who worked hard to make those improvements possible.
D
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I'd actually like to know the answer to this one.
Most of the people I know of who use Microsoft(tm) technologies don't think much of the company, they just think it's a way to make a living. Most of them, at least around me, admit that they'd rather use something else, but the market wants Microsoft, and the market gets what it wants most of the time.
There are a good number of principled Libertarians who are appalled at the MS antitrust case, casting it as a company that's worked very hard to give the computing world a standard that, if not perfect, is better than no standard at all. Here's a good example of their beliefs:
http://reason.com/bi/microsoft.html
I'm a libertarian, and I agree with most of what Reason magazine says. At the same time, I absolutely loathe Microsoft as a company. I have a difficult time supporting the case, because of principle, and I have a tough time opposing it, because the company is indeed evil. So I sit at the sidelines and laugh at the amazing cock-up Microsoft has made of the trial.
I don't think there are many people who love Microsoft software; I think there are many people who agree with Microsoft on principle in this case.
D
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This was actually covered - it talked about people hopping between sites instead of staying on the same site - and if you read carefully enough, it's clear that the hopping is done through multiple browser windows.
What's interesting is that nobody in the studies pointed out that this is most likely due to sluggish load times. You start something loading, and then flee to something else while it's in process. I do this all the time, more (of course) on slow sites or those with huge amounts of content that load slowly (Slashdot being a good example of this).
My behaviour, incidentally, is almost exactly like the other user on this thread (opening multiple articles in different windows) except that being in the US, I don't disconnect from my net connection, even when using a modem. This is most likely because I'm in the US with unlimited local calling, while he's in the UK with per-minute charges for use.
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This is why child porn is prohibited in Sealand; they don't want to get the US or UK authorities riled up. I don't know of anything other than that with the potential of making US/UK authorities so riled up as to cause SeaLand to be attacked.
HavenCo is right in saying that it would be a horrorific PR disaster to all concerned. Even if HavenCo put national secrets on the web, the most likely result of trying to censor HavenCo would be to give those secrets even greater spread. Look what happened to the Church of Scientology's "Sacred Secrets" when they went after the ISPs that hosted them.
In practice, HavenCo would most likely cooperate with the US and UK security folks, but not those in Iraq or other oppressive nations, simply because the UK would defend Sealand in defense of its own territorial integrity.
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Sounds like a "so bad it's good" sort of thing.
...
Did anyone have the patience to download the audio? I'd be curious to hear a brief description, and I never did get my sound card working
D
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You are correct, of course, but we're about as far away from a seasonal food supply as can be imagined.
What I really wanted to say was something that would allow self-indulgence without the conesequences - if we could breed out the gene that causes us to save fat in our bodies to the extent we do it, we could solve the problem forever.
(Whoever discovers that will make a fortune that makes Bill Gates look like a pauper).
D
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I think people are a bit more diverse in their desires than you imply, and in the end problems like this should be self-correcting - once the plastic blonde sons decide they don't like the plastic blonde daughters, we'll be back to some kind of diversity.
:-( ). Many people would rather have a thinking kid than one that sits down, watches the tube and consumes all the time. I know I certainly would.
But wouldn't it be fabulous to breed out obesity, which - as far as I can tell - has caused nothing but health problems and misery?
Certainly this process is going to be driven by parents, not marketers, so I don't fear a lockstep future of Microsoft-loving drones (at least to the extent this does not already exist
I predict most people will desire a combination of their own attributes with genetically engineered ones. If we all wanted to find perfect kids, then we'd be searching the adoption agencies for those that struck our fancy instead of making them on our own.
I don't think any parent wants a dumb kid, so I would assume the population would grow smarter overall. Maybe too smart for its own good; smart people are often puzzlingly bad at things morons do perfectly. Perhaps in the future knowledge workers will be a dime a dozen, and a good janitor will be priceless.
If I wanted a child in this brave new world, I would take my genes + my wife's genes and have the combination checked and altered to prevent obesity, alzheimers, autism and other unpleasantness. I think that's the way most people will go in the end, and I'd argue it holds little danger.
D
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You seem to be responding to this poor fellow as though he was Microsoft hatred incarnate, while that's really hard to judge without more information.
Still, you have an interesting point, and since I do have the basic opinion you cite above, I thought I'd give you the courtesy of a response.
The worst thing about Microsoft is simply that it builds its products on a house of cards foundation, which generally falls down on anyone trying to do serious work with the platform. Mix this with the virtual monopoly they have in many parts of the industry, and you have a killer brew which brings out the worst in programmers.
The general idea of having to use products we despise in order to eat is highly unsettling. I'd make a case for saying that millions of programmers are slowly killing themselves working with systems they despise. Until I became fortunate enough to get a Linux-based job, I was one of those people - so I know how it feels, and that I don't exaggerate.
Microsoft is the most vicious competitor in the industry. This is why, despite all they have to offer, they have made so few real friends. I wasn't as ferociously against them as I am now before their giant Internet push; I felt that "my internet" could survive on Unix servers and I wouldn't have to use crummy Microsoft technology. Well, I was wrong; Microsoft followed me to the net, and I will never forgive them for it.
The reason they have a near-monopoly in PC operating systems is that developers will generally write for the platform that has the most consumer/business mindshare. They got the mindshare by basically giving away the product with PCs running their previously dominant DOS. They acted brilliantly in exploiting their position. As a result, lots of people developed for them, and Microsoft Windows, despite its faults, became dominant.
It was proably inevitable that some company would thus gain a near-monopoly on operating systems. My beef is not with the monopoly; it's with the quality of the system and software provided with it.
So why don't I dislike Sun, SGI, Cisco or Oracle? Because they produce high quality products, for the most part, and I like using them.
I hate using Microsoft Windows, and yet there's a Microsoft Windows computer on my desktop. Granted, I have three others that I use 95% of the time, but the fact that even I have to use Windows for some things irks me.
I hope that answers your question.
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"Analagous to a low-end Microsoft SQL server"?
Humph.
Since the whole philosophy of the thing is radically different from SQL Server, I can't say I like that description - especially for a publication that claims to be Linux-aware.
D
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I don't know about that, my company has now processed thousands of orders using mySQL-based ordering system I wrote with nary a glitch.
D
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I was under the impression that the main reason mySQL wasn't under the GPL was that their business plan involved selectively selling the product for profit (instead of mandatorily allowing it to be given away as per the GPL).
I wonder how much they were paid, since I'd like to see them do well. It seems odd that they would give up a previously profitable strategy - maybe someone else can enlighten me on the probable financial picture? I'm much curious.
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It was some other license before, but they released some very old versions under the GPL.
D
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A lot of people, including me, have notebooks as their primary computing platform. I run Linux on an IBM ThinkPad 770Z and it works great as a development platform for my server-based applications.
So I agree with the original complainers - it would be a bummer for the OS not to work on PowerBooks.
D
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D
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If it weren't for the fact that I hate, hate, hate those touchpad rodents with a passion, I would :-(.
D
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My company had DSL service via Concentric. In the six months I worked there and the service was available, we had one outage, lasting over 12 hours (!).
In our new location, we have a spiffy new UUNET T1. So far, it's been great. The people are good, the service is super-fast, I'm delighted. Of course the service has only been on for three days, but so far, I'd say it's worth the money.
A company you've never heard of will give you a T1 for around $ 999 a month. UUNET's T1 was $ 1,300. Considering that the line is a pretty hefty percentage of our business, I thought the price premium was reasonable. It used to be much higher (like 200%-300% over what the cheapest vendor would charge). Note that the complaining former UUNET customer was in the UK, where telecommunications costs are much higher, which distorts the picture.
I thought the article was muddled and confusing. The problem is that it costs a lot more money to drag cables to remote areas, so naturally direct T3 service is not available there, at least not at a price you might want to pay. Even with peering arrangements, you have to pay big fees for space in the cages and access to the other players.
I would certainly get a UUNET T1 to my house if and when I could afford it.
D
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I suspect people don't complain more just because the look and feel of the machine is so nice. The keyboard and trackpoint mouse are fantastic, the screen is nice and crisp, and the assembly quality is best in the business.
There are tons of reasons to like the ThinkPad even though (as I said in another message) the X-Windows performance lags a bit.
D
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I have a 770Z with the 1280x1024 video and love it, but X could be a bit faster. Actually, quite a bit faster. Adding 'Option "accel"' to the configuration file worked a bit, but I can still watch it draw the screen when I switch desktops, which is annoying.
How's your XF86 4.0 working out? Does it improve performance at all over the previous release?
D
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L Ron Hubbard, author of Battlefield Earth the book, was a mediocre SF writer known chiefly for founding Dianetics in the 1950s, which then led to the Church of Scientology today.
Hubbard pioneered many of the classic legal harassment techniques that are so much in the news nowadays. He perfected the "litigate until your hapless victim runs out of money" dodge, and was highly - ahem - creative in his use of trade secret and copyright law to keep his "sacred scriptures" from the public eye.
The Church of Scientology was invented to get over the tiresome legal problems his Dianetics scheme had, while still using basically the same techniques. Hubbard is well known for the practice of massively overcharging for highly insideous programmes of treatment.
Hubbard has died, but his successors live on in his path; to do otherwise would be contrary to his teachings and therefore sacriledge. As a result, massive legal attacks were brought against net posters who attempted to expose his tactics and works on the net. As a result, the Church is known as a major enemy of free speech on the Internet.
One of the many things Scientology did successfully was to recruit celebrities, who are treated very well, far better than the hoi-polli "raw meat" who are typical Church fodder. Thus, people like Travolta support the Church and there is thus a built-in receptivity among many people for Scientology-related movies. There is no doubt at all that Battlefield Earth pumped substantial amounts into the pockets of Scientology-related folks, in royalties to the now-dead author. I think it's fair to say that to support Battlefield Earth is to support Scientology.
Hope that helped.
D
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I wouldn't think so, simply because I doubt there are many functions in common between the two businesses. Certainly I don't think anyone on the editorial side is in danger.
There might be some benefit in consolidating ad sales between the various web sites run by Andover and VA, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was little overlap even there.
For those who are curious, CmdrTaco gets $90k a year and Slashdot's previous owners (mainly him) got $ 1.5 million up front, $ 6 million when certain targets were met. I'm not sure what the targets were, but they do have a hefty amount of Andover stock that is now VA stock.
So Rob's doing pretty well considering that he's in the Midwest someplace. $ 1 million or so still goes a long way anywhere in the US outside of California, New York or Hawaii.
D
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I just moved into a single-family house in a neighborhood with almost identical demographics to the area I had an apartment in for several years.
I found, curiously, that even though I'm still renting, I feel a much more settled connection with my house and neighborhood than I ever did in the old place.
I think the sense of having your own domain is much stronger in a house than an apartment; a house is a more personal space. And, oddly enough, in many areas the price difference isn't what you might think. In Woodland Hills, CA (in the Los Angeles metro area) where I'm currently renting a house, I'm paying $1,325 a month; I would have had to pay $ 1,200 a month for a similar-sized apartment in one of the mega-complexes nearby. I don't have a pool or fitness centre, but I do have a front and back yard (be they ever so puny) and an attractive neighborhood to return to at night instead of a bunch of impersonal corridors.
Something to think of next time you're checking out rentals. House rentals are usually harder to find than apartments; check out your local free ad paper for advertising.
Hope that helps some people.
D
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A recent news.com story mentioned that their new models are the cheapest yet - in the $ 1,200 range.
... maybe next year :-).
Of course the really cool ones are always more expensive, but they've gone down quite a bit. A few years back, the state of the art 750 series was pushing $ 7,000. Now the closest equivalent (with the great 15" screen) is pushing $4,000, not bad relatively speaking.
You can get reconditioned ThinkPads at ubid.com - I bought my 770Z (366mhz, 128mb ram [upgraded to 256], 14gb hard drive, 1280x1024 active matrix screen]) for $ 2,750. I've had it a few months and I'm very pleased with it - the display has perfectly crisp tiny characters that are just perfect for the programmer who likes having lots of information in little space.
But I still want the new titatium case and the spiffier higher resolution screens
D
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According to How to start your own country, the main reference I know of on Sealand, the UK government felt strongly enough about the dangers inherent in Sealand clones to blow up the remaining platforms.
D
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