Oh, I didn't say you should only help private schools. Private schools don't need your help. They know where their dollar is coming from and where it is going, so they manage things just as well as any successful business.
Where do our skilled workers and professionals come from? Well, invariably they are people who are dilligent enough to claw their way to where they are, regardless of their schooling. I fell into one of those "special needs" categories, which made public schools a very hostile environment for me. I wouldn't be where i am now if it weren't for that learning environment.
I wholeheartedly advocate vouchers. And i believe the calculation of the value of each voucher should be carefully meted out and rounded up rather than down so we can ensure that the value of each voucher is the actual cost of educating one student per year, including administrative costs, building maintenence, the whole tamale, rather than a conservative estimate of how much load one student puts on the system. Yes, this would definately raise the education expenditure. Boo hoo, eh?
Second, I advocate education financing reform. Currently most schools recieve a large portion of their funding in the form of grants, which invariably have time limits and requirements. It's not uncommon for a district to recieve something along the lines of $100,000 that must be spent in the next 90 days on "handicapped access". If you don't spend it within 90 days, it's gone. If you spend it on something other than something obviously related to handicapped access, you're in big trouble. This is absurd. Schools should be allowed to pool their fluid assets and manage them like businesses.
Third, I advocate tax credits for businesses that donate time, money, or resources to schools. I don't just mean donating old or spare computers, I'm talking about teaching. Say, a local company that engineers electronics devices sending an engineer over to the school once a week to teach applied electrical engineering for a few hours.
Fourth, I advocate annual recertification of all educators. Failure to recertify resulting in manditory furlough. I challenge any educator to explain to me why they shouldn't have to prove they are qualified to teach. If you're certian you're qualified, a recertification test shouldn't scare you.
Fifth, I recommend that the processes employed by district offices to manage schools be audited every three years. Many districts are horrendously inefficent and would fail as businesses if they were required to compete.
Sixth, I recommend that it be made much easier to rid the market of poor educators. Currently, if a district attempts to revoke an educators teaching certificate for any reason, the teachers union will sue the district to prevent it, costing the district a huge ammount of money. Avoiding this often results in what districts refer to as "passing the trash" - the act of moving a poor educator to another district with a good recommendation, merely to get them away from the people who want them gone.
Finally, I recommend that teacher salaries be signifigantly raised as based on standardized tests and parental review. cronieism is rampant in our education system, so I would not recommend peer review under any circumstances. I recommend that teachers be allowed to carry their existing salary rate with them when moving between schools. I also recommend salary raises based on aquisition of additional training or further certification.
All of these recommendations are likely to cause quite a ruckus in the public education system if they were instituted. Centuries of complacency on the part of the public at large and stop gap measures on top of stop gap measures on the part of the districts and schools have lead to a state of affairs that is astoundingly unacceptable.
If we bankrupt the public education system in the process of building a private education system that is self sustaining and just as open to the poor and needy, so be it.
I have no respect for any person who says "Sure, the public education system is bad, but we'd be doomed without it."
If you're willing to protect the system on the basis that it's better than nothing, you are as much a part of the problem as the system is. It's like saying "We can't stop using DDT, it's the only thing that keeps the aphids down".
My parents were, and are, far from wealthy. I, and two of my brothers, and one of my sisters, were sent to private school on the salary of a tenured humanities professor. Many people assume that private school is the exclusive domain of the wealthy. It is not. At the end of the school day, every type and class of vehicle was present to pick up students, from Jaguars to Yugos.
After two of my older sisters and two of my older brothers were dragged through the public education system kicking and screaming, my parents were determined that i should recieve a quality education. They bit the bullet and paid for it.
The fact is that the school that i attended spends 11% less per student than the state of utah reports that it spends per student. This is signifigant, considering that the state of utah spends both the least ammount per student of any state, and the highest percentage of their total budget of any state.
Regardless of the fact that this school did not, and has never had a selective application process, their standardized test scores have always been signifigantly higher than the state average.
The difference? An unencumbered learning environment and a small group of students whos parents were directly involved with their education.
It's not fair that they had to pay out of pocket for my education while still bankrolling the public education system through their property taxes. But they did what they had to in order to put me somewhere where i could learn effectively.
All this being said, the real problem starts at home. As a parent, it is your responsibility to be actively engaged in your child's education, wherever that may take place. If your student is doing poorly in school, no matter how bad the teachers are, no matter how big the school is, you are the first person at fault. Accept that responsibility, and deal with it.
There are a precious few schools in the united states that actually know what they're doing.
Off the top of my head would be Ingraham Highschool in Seattle WA, the "technology magnet" school in St. Paul MN (forget the name), most of the Cedar UT schools (shockingly, but they have a surprisingly adept IT staff), Glouchester VA Central Schools, and Spokane WA school district.
But I can't stress enough, Ingraham is the diamond in the manure where Seattle schools are concerned, as is the technology magnet to the rest of St. Paul.
Frankly, I'm surprised people trust their children with the people who run most public schools. I wouldn't, and don't intend to.
In my experience, a very small number of the people employed by public schools are underpaid, hard working, thoughtful individuals who have real talent. The rest are making out like bandits with their $26k/yr for the effort and expertise they bring to the job.
I've worked extensively with the public education system in the united states, as the former technical lead in the customer service department of a company that sells an educational software package exclusively to schools.
It's doomed. Burn it.
My work included pre-sales coordination, so i wasn't only talking to the "bad" customers. Out of the literally dozens i worked with every week, I found that maybe 1 in 100 wasn't suffering from cranio-rectal insertion.
My advice is simple. If the school gets the idea that you are offering them a free service, they will overstay their welcome. Yes, I even have extensive experience dealing with the Salt Lake City and West Jordan school districts.
The first day will be fine. You'll arrive, install the system, show a math teacher and an administrative secretary how to work some of the programs, tell them where the power switch is, they'll chat with you for a while, say good bye, and everything will seem hunky dory.
The second day you will recieve a call from someone who says they can't find the mouse. Someone will have stolen it, err, re-assigned it to a more important use. Alternatively, they may state that they turned it on and "nothing works". After an hour of troubleshooting over the phone they will admit that someone decided the system absolutly positively needed to be moved to another location, and that nobody knows where to plug anything in. They will also wonder why the network doesn't work, regardless of the visible lack of a network connection of any kind at the new location. You will be asked to run cable for the network connection.
The third day, someone will accuse your system of having wreaked havok with something, anything else in the building. You will spend the rest of the day picking bits of paper out of the fax machine to prove it wasn't your fault.
On the fourth day, the administrative secretary will call you and say that "nothing works". Upon further investigation you will realize that she carefully wrote down every single operation required to turn on the system, start IE, and bring up her Hotmail. She will be waiting at the prompt stating that windows was not properly shut down and the drive needs to be checked, utterly helpless.
The following days will be various repetitions of the previous four. Some time within the first two weeks, someone important will call you and ask that you come to train a few of the teachers on how to use the system. You will arrive and find half of the district crammed into the gym staring at your system, which has been moved again, and again has the mouse plugged into the keyboard port and vice-versa.
On a date some time between one week and two months from installation, you will recieve an angry call regarding pornography.
Not until you disconnect your telephone, get new email addresses, and move to a new home will they stop asking you for help. You're a free lunch. Get used to it.
That's pretty much right, but there's one more important point.
As the owner of a copyrighted recording you are allowed to make copies for personal use. I'm not sure if the law states one copy or if multiple copies are allowed, but you can not presuppose that the MP3's stored in this device would be redundant, and therefore, it is not possible, from a legal standpoint, to classify this as a device designed for piracy of music.
This all falls under the definition of "fair useage"
Fair Usage also allows you to go to any library and photocopy or otherwise make facimily of any materials found therein for personal study. My father, as an english professor, regularly has his universities library photocopy entire rare books for him to take home or use at his office. These copies are perfectly legal, but often make people who don't know better cry foul.
The legal definitions of fair usage make it impossible to outlaw most devices used for piracy of copyrighted materials. This makes a lot of people very angry, but most countries are supposedly free, and there's nothing you can do about it without removing essential freedoms from the populace.
This aside, I ask you to produce a statement from any recording artist complaining about lost profits due to amateur piracy. Just one. I don't think you'll find one.
First, a lot of these boxes have very tired cmos batteries. They won't boot if the battery voltage is too low. They use a standard 4.5 volt battery, and in my case i ended up taping together three AAA batteries.
Second, these do indeed run hot. I had one running at about head-level on top of some other equipment. The experience was not unlike blowdrying my hair. But there are some things you can do to improve the situation.
Most importantly, run these in vertical configuration, processor end up. This is the side with more holes drilled in the casing. These all came from the factory with a metal bracket to hold them upright, but some are now missing them. Mine is missing that bracket.
Also, you may notice there's two wires leading out from the fan clipped to the side of the power supply with a little dark thing about the size of a match head attached. This is a temperature sensor, and in many cases these are no longer effective. If you clip those wires, the fan will spin at it's top speed instead of relying on a temperature reading from the sensor. This, in addition to running the system in the vertical position, often overcomes overheating problems.
You can put just about any PCI video card that will fit in these, if you have the right riser card for the job. But the xfree86 ports to linux/alpha don't support nearly as many cards as the intel version. The Matrox mil2 is very popular in these. I have a #9 motion 771 in mine. s3 vision 968. It barely fits.
If you want a little more oomph in an alpha, computersurplusoutlet.com in vegas is selling 266mhz alpha-pci motherboards for $150, including the processor. These, like the multia, are a 21064 processor, and none too fast, but they are a bit snappier. They need +3.3v supplied from the power supply in addition to the usual voltages - it would be possible to modify a cheap ATX power supply to supply the regular AT voltages and the additional 3.3v, and thus avoid buying the hugely expensive power supply ComputerSurplusOutlet tries to pawn off with it.
standard disclaimers apply, I don't work for anyone, blah blah blah. (well, i have a job, but, you know.)
No more than you can use both the 10bT and 10b2 ports on a cheap nic.
But it does have two pcmcia slots, and you can put a cheap pcmcia nic in one
Re:Holy Shit! Someone has heard of Enders Game!
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 1
I've read a lot of Card. A whole lot of card. Lemme 'splain.
Ender's Game was required reading in jr. high where i went to school, back in the 80's. I liked it quite a bit at the time.
Orson Card went to college with my father, they were apparantly friends of some sort, distant now.
I've met Orson Card, briefly, and that memory still makes me feel like i have a pretty good haircut. He was at a friend-of-a-friend's house helping said friend-removed's mother with a writing project of some sort.
Orson still stops by to say hi at my dad's office whenever he's in town and near the university.
My copy of Lost Boys isn't just autographed, it's annotated, in pencil. He read from it at a local SF con.
I read ender, and then read it again, and then read Speaker, and then read the entire Alvin Maker series, and songmaster, and wyrms, and treason, and folk of the fringe, and a bunch of stuff from dad's copy of Maps In A Mirror, a few other i don't recall. Anybody who thinks Card is fundamental or closed minded should really read Wyrms. My was it shocking for my 16 year old mind at the time.
And then i read Xeoncide. And i was entirely nonplussed. I found it painfully typical of his work, and entirely predictable. I felt it was a complete snoozer. I was, to put it lightly, disappointed. When the quantum siblings showed up in the faster than light vehicle i almost stopped reading right there. Man, that whole sequence of events just stank.
And that's when i started to really think about the formula Card applies to his books, and how rarely he'd strayed from it.
And then I read Lost Boys. This is Card's attempt at a horror story. I don't really care for horror fiction, and to say it was predictable would be unfair, since it's based on a published short story that I'd already read.
And again, tho he apparantly tried, he'd again used the same old archetype. Wonderchild's life is amazing until it sucks. That's pretty much the story of every book he's ever written. I'm tired of it.
I haven't read any Card since. I skipped children of the mind. When he started adapting scripture into novels, I was mildly offended and declined.
I'm not optimistic about this new book. When you read enough of someone, you can feel their presence in every paragraph they write, you can hear their voice in the back of your head as you go through the dialog, and you can make pretty fair guesses as to which plot complications will come next.
Frankly, i see it like this. It took Card seven years of badgering his publisher to get Ender published. And when it was finally published, it was a pretty good book, and deserved the awards it won.
These days, his publisher will probably accept anything that's spelled correctly.
The man's gone sloppy. Call me back when he breaks a sweat. I stopped listening when i heard him say "I didn't think I'd ever be this good of a writer"
Lego can't afford to alienate any potential customers. They've been experiencing financial distress for the first time in decades lately, citing competition from cheap chinese knockoffs that look like and are compatible with genuine Lego, but are not nearly as durable.
They are looking at the possibility of making their very first round of layoffs, or already have by this point. The last thing they need is to tell a fanatical customer to take a hike.
I've seen the 11tb model, up close and personal. If you're ever feeling chilly, just go stand next to the exaust port on one. Nice & toasty.
The drives internal to it are, err, dangit, it's a TLA starting with S for Serial, not SCA, but something else.
Very fast, external interface is LVD, the unit I've worked around (closed lab) was on two 20 meter cables strung along the celing. Sure, they're loud and run hot, but you can literally store them in the closet down the hall.
Am I the only one who caught the bit about portability? Didn't Linus himself say that it probably couldn't be ported to other archetectures due to it's inherent dependence on i386 archetecture?
Yes, we know we overcame that a long time ago, but it wasn't in the original design.
the "Wonderful 128 bit cpu" is a Toshiba, based on a Mips IV core. Mips IV is neither new nor exciting. It's just efficent, and time-tested, and carries with it arguably the most flexible technology licensing scheme used by any chip maker.
Mips Co doesn't care who sees, uses, modifies their design, 'long as they sign the license check.
If the usps screws up your priority mail delivery, you're pretty much SOL.
In my personal experience, it takes the USPS one to two days to recover a priority mail package that bears the wrong zip code. This has happened to me twice.
When they lose a package, it's just plain gone. Don't expect anybody to have any clue where it was last seen. They have no tracking system for Priority packages.
Express mail is quite a bit more expensive, and USPS claims a tracking system is "in the works".
The extra cost of UPS or FedEx buys you a lot of assurances that the USPS is unable or unwilling to give you.
Right now, I'm wondering where the heck the book i mailed a girl for her birthday went. The USPS is not on my list of friends today.
It's more like "Two to three days, or maybe not at all"
As an aside, the Louvre uses a particle accelerator to study paintings without visibly damaging them.
They place the painting infront of a target and fire particles through the painting, and by capturing what comes out the other side they are able to determine the materials used in the paint without removing more than a few molicules of it.
This is vitally important research, if you expect to preserve art for the future. Before they started using the particle accelerator, they were forced to take scrapings of the paintings for chemical analysis - always visibly damaging the painting.
If you don't know what they made it out of, you don't know how you should gauge the humidity in it's area, what temperatures might damage it, whether you should encase it in glass or let it breathe.
I don't need to talk to anybody who doesn't think history is important to society.
Slashdot Mirror
That all depends on what kind of a radio it is and what kind of licenses he does or doesn't have.
If he's using a stock CB radio - that is, 4 watts deadkey / 7 watts peak, the police can call it a domestic disturbance and tell him to knock it off.
That yeong-yang case wholesales for $230, retail is closer to $300. When i asked them how it's worth even half that, they stopped talking.
- Eric
It's interesting that you should point out RedHat as being "100% GPL"
Nobody has yet seen the source code for the DiskDruid partitioner.
Oh, I didn't say you should only help private schools. Private schools don't need your help. They know where their dollar is coming from and where it is going, so they manage things just as well as any successful business.
Where do our skilled workers and professionals come from? Well, invariably they are people who are dilligent enough to claw their way to where they are, regardless of their schooling. I fell into one of those "special needs" categories, which made public schools a very hostile environment for me. I wouldn't be where i am now if it weren't for that learning environment.
I wholeheartedly advocate vouchers. And i believe the calculation of the value of each voucher should be carefully meted out and rounded up rather than down so we can ensure that the value of each voucher is the actual cost of educating one student per year, including administrative costs, building maintenence, the whole tamale, rather than a conservative estimate of how much load one student puts on the system. Yes, this would definately raise the education expenditure. Boo hoo, eh?
Second, I advocate education financing reform. Currently most schools recieve a large portion of their funding in the form of grants, which invariably have time limits and requirements. It's not uncommon for a district to recieve something along the lines of $100,000 that must be spent in the next 90 days on "handicapped access". If you don't spend it within 90 days, it's gone. If you spend it on something other than something obviously related to handicapped access, you're in big trouble. This is absurd. Schools should be allowed to pool their fluid assets and manage them like businesses.
Third, I advocate tax credits for businesses that donate time, money, or resources to schools. I don't just mean donating old or spare computers, I'm talking about teaching. Say, a local company that engineers electronics devices sending an engineer over to the school once a week to teach applied electrical engineering for a few hours.
Fourth, I advocate annual recertification of all educators. Failure to recertify resulting in manditory furlough. I challenge any educator to explain to me why they shouldn't have to prove they are qualified to teach. If you're certian you're qualified, a recertification test shouldn't scare you.
Fifth, I recommend that the processes employed by district offices to manage schools be audited every three years. Many districts are horrendously inefficent and would fail as businesses if they were required to compete.
Sixth, I recommend that it be made much easier to rid the market of poor educators. Currently, if a district attempts to revoke an educators teaching certificate for any reason, the teachers union will sue the district to prevent it, costing the district a huge ammount of money. Avoiding this often results in what districts refer to as "passing the trash" - the act of moving a poor educator to another district with a good recommendation, merely to get them away from the people who want them gone.
Finally, I recommend that teacher salaries be signifigantly raised as based on standardized tests and parental review. cronieism is rampant in our education system, so I would not recommend peer review under any circumstances. I recommend that teachers be allowed to carry their existing salary rate with them when moving between schools. I also recommend salary raises based on aquisition of additional training or further certification.
All of these recommendations are likely to cause quite a ruckus in the public education system if they were instituted. Centuries of complacency on the part of the public at large and stop gap measures on top of stop gap measures on the part of the districts and schools have lead to a state of affairs that is astoundingly unacceptable.
If we bankrupt the public education system in the process of building a private education system that is self sustaining and just as open to the poor and needy, so be it.
I have no respect for any person who says "Sure, the public education system is bad, but we'd be doomed without it."
If you're willing to protect the system on the basis that it's better than nothing, you are as much a part of the problem as the system is. It's like saying "We can't stop using DDT, it's the only thing that keeps the aphids down".
My parents were, and are, far from wealthy. I, and two of my brothers, and one of my sisters, were sent to private school on the salary of a tenured humanities professor. Many people assume that private school is the exclusive domain of the wealthy. It is not. At the end of the school day, every type and class of vehicle was present to pick up students, from Jaguars to Yugos.
After two of my older sisters and two of my older brothers were dragged through the public education system kicking and screaming, my parents were determined that i should recieve a quality education. They bit the bullet and paid for it.
The fact is that the school that i attended spends 11% less per student than the state of utah reports that it spends per student. This is signifigant, considering that the state of utah spends both the least ammount per student of any state, and the highest percentage of their total budget of any state.
Regardless of the fact that this school did not, and has never had a selective application process, their standardized test scores have always been signifigantly higher than the state average.
The difference? An unencumbered learning environment and a small group of students whos parents were directly involved with their education.
It's not fair that they had to pay out of pocket for my education while still bankrolling the public education system through their property taxes. But they did what they had to in order to put me somewhere where i could learn effectively.
All this being said, the real problem starts at home. As a parent, it is your responsibility to be actively engaged in your child's education, wherever that may take place. If your student is doing poorly in school, no matter how bad the teachers are, no matter how big the school is, you are the first person at fault. Accept that responsibility, and deal with it.
There are a precious few schools in the united states that actually know what they're doing.
Off the top of my head would be Ingraham Highschool in Seattle WA, the "technology magnet" school in St. Paul MN (forget the name), most of the Cedar UT schools (shockingly, but they have a surprisingly adept IT staff), Glouchester VA Central Schools, and Spokane WA school district.
But I can't stress enough, Ingraham is the diamond in the manure where Seattle schools are concerned, as is the technology magnet to the rest of St. Paul.
Frankly, I'm surprised people trust their children with the people who run most public schools. I wouldn't, and don't intend to.
In my experience, a very small number of the people employed by public schools are underpaid, hard working, thoughtful individuals who have real talent. The rest are making out like bandits with their $26k/yr for the effort and expertise they bring to the job.
I've worked extensively with the public education system in the united states, as the former technical lead in the customer service department of a company that sells an educational software package exclusively to schools.
It's doomed. Burn it.
My work included pre-sales coordination, so i wasn't only talking to the "bad" customers. Out of the literally dozens i worked with every week, I found that maybe 1 in 100 wasn't suffering from cranio-rectal insertion.
My advice is simple. If the school gets the idea that you are offering them a free service, they will overstay their welcome. Yes, I even have extensive experience dealing with the Salt Lake City and West Jordan school districts.
The first day will be fine. You'll arrive, install the system, show a math teacher and an administrative secretary how to work some of the programs, tell them where the power switch is, they'll chat with you for a while, say good bye, and everything will seem hunky dory.
The second day you will recieve a call from someone who says they can't find the mouse. Someone will have stolen it, err, re-assigned it to a more important use. Alternatively, they may state that they turned it on and "nothing works". After an hour of troubleshooting over the phone they will admit that someone decided the system absolutly positively needed to be moved to another location, and that nobody knows where to plug anything in. They will also wonder why the network doesn't work, regardless of the visible lack of a network connection of any kind at the new location. You will be asked to run cable for the network connection.
The third day, someone will accuse your system of having wreaked havok with something, anything else in the building. You will spend the rest of the day picking bits of paper out of the fax machine to prove it wasn't your fault.
On the fourth day, the administrative secretary will call you and say that "nothing works". Upon further investigation you will realize that she carefully wrote down every single operation required to turn on the system, start IE, and bring up her Hotmail. She will be waiting at the prompt stating that windows was not properly shut down and the drive needs to be checked, utterly helpless.
The following days will be various repetitions of the previous four. Some time within the first two weeks, someone important will call you and ask that you come to train a few of the teachers on how to use the system. You will arrive and find half of the district crammed into the gym staring at your system, which has been moved again, and again has the mouse plugged into the keyboard port and vice-versa.
On a date some time between one week and two months from installation, you will recieve an angry call regarding pornography.
Not until you disconnect your telephone, get new email addresses, and move to a new home will they stop asking you for help. You're a free lunch. Get used to it.
Personally, I'm a product of a private education.
I submitted this about a month ago as an AP story. I guess it took a wanna-be rag like Wired to make it news?
That's pretty much right, but there's one more important point.
As the owner of a copyrighted recording you are allowed to make copies for personal use. I'm not sure if the law states one copy or if multiple copies are allowed, but you can not presuppose that the MP3's stored in this device would be redundant, and therefore, it is not possible, from a legal standpoint, to classify this as a device designed for piracy of music.
This all falls under the definition of "fair useage"
Fair Usage also allows you to go to any library and photocopy or otherwise make facimily of any materials found therein for personal study. My father, as an english professor, regularly has his universities library photocopy entire rare books for him to take home or use at his office. These copies are perfectly legal, but often make people who don't know better cry foul.
The legal definitions of fair usage make it impossible to outlaw most devices used for piracy of copyrighted materials. This makes a lot of people very angry, but most countries are supposedly free, and there's nothing you can do about it without removing essential freedoms from the populace.
This aside, I ask you to produce a statement from any recording artist complaining about lost profits due to amateur piracy. Just one. I don't think you'll find one.
Mmm, you're right, I overlooked that.
However, the 21066 is merely the "low cost" version of the 21064, and the two chips aren't signifigantly different.
the other poster was also right about the 275mhz thing at CSO. what can i say, i've had a cold all weekend.
First, a lot of these boxes have very tired cmos batteries. They won't boot if the battery voltage is too low. They use a standard 4.5 volt battery, and in my case i ended up taping together three AAA batteries.
Second, these do indeed run hot. I had one running at about head-level on top of some other equipment. The experience was not unlike blowdrying my hair. But there are some things you can do to improve the situation.
Most importantly, run these in vertical configuration, processor end up. This is the side with more holes drilled in the casing. These all came from the factory with a metal bracket to hold them upright, but some are now missing them. Mine is missing that bracket.
Also, you may notice there's two wires leading out from the fan clipped to the side of the power supply with a little dark thing about the size of a match head attached. This is a temperature sensor, and in many cases these are no longer effective. If you clip those wires, the fan will spin at it's top speed instead of relying on a temperature reading from the sensor. This, in addition to running the system in the vertical position, often overcomes overheating problems.
You can put just about any PCI video card that will fit in these, if you have the right riser card for the job. But the xfree86 ports to linux/alpha don't support nearly as many cards as the intel version. The Matrox mil2 is very popular in these. I have a #9 motion 771 in mine. s3 vision 968. It barely fits.
If you want a little more oomph in an alpha, computersurplusoutlet.com in vegas is selling 266mhz alpha-pci motherboards for $150, including the processor. These, like the multia, are a 21064 processor, and none too fast, but they are a bit snappier. They need +3.3v supplied from the power supply in addition to the usual voltages - it would be possible to modify a cheap ATX power supply to supply the regular AT voltages and the additional 3.3v, and thus avoid buying the hugely expensive power supply ComputerSurplusOutlet tries to pawn off with it.
standard disclaimers apply, I don't work for anyone, blah blah blah. (well, i have a job, but, you know.)
No more than you can use both the 10bT and 10b2 ports on a cheap nic.
But it does have two pcmcia slots, and you can put a cheap pcmcia nic in one
I've read a lot of Card. A whole lot of card. Lemme 'splain.
Ender's Game was required reading in jr. high where i went to school, back in the 80's. I liked it quite a bit at the time.
Orson Card went to college with my father, they were apparantly friends of some sort, distant now.
I've met Orson Card, briefly, and that memory still makes me feel like i have a pretty good haircut. He was at a friend-of-a-friend's house helping said friend-removed's mother with a writing project of some sort.
Orson still stops by to say hi at my dad's office whenever he's in town and near the university.
My copy of Lost Boys isn't just autographed, it's annotated, in pencil. He read from it at a local SF con.
I read ender, and then read it again, and then read Speaker, and then read the entire Alvin Maker series, and songmaster, and wyrms, and treason, and folk of the fringe, and a bunch of stuff from dad's copy of Maps In A Mirror, a few other i don't recall. Anybody who thinks Card is fundamental or closed minded should really read Wyrms. My was it shocking for my 16 year old mind at the time.
And then i read Xeoncide. And i was entirely nonplussed. I found it painfully typical of his work, and entirely predictable. I felt it was a complete snoozer. I was, to put it lightly, disappointed. When the quantum siblings showed up in the faster than light vehicle i almost stopped reading right there. Man, that whole sequence of events just stank.
And that's when i started to really think about the formula Card applies to his books, and how rarely he'd strayed from it.
And then I read Lost Boys. This is Card's attempt at a horror story. I don't really care for horror fiction, and to say it was predictable would be unfair, since it's based on a published short story that I'd already read.
And again, tho he apparantly tried, he'd again used the same old archetype. Wonderchild's life is amazing until it sucks. That's pretty much the story of every book he's ever written. I'm tired of it.
I haven't read any Card since. I skipped children of the mind. When he started adapting scripture into novels, I was mildly offended and declined.
I'm not optimistic about this new book. When you read enough of someone, you can feel their presence in every paragraph they write, you can hear their voice in the back of your head as you go through the dialog, and you can make pretty fair guesses as to which plot complications will come next.
Frankly, i see it like this. It took Card seven years of badgering his publisher to get Ender published. And when it was finally published, it was a pretty good book, and deserved the awards it won.
These days, his publisher will probably accept anything that's spelled correctly.
The man's gone sloppy. Call me back when he breaks a sweat. I stopped listening when i heard him say "I didn't think I'd ever be this good of a writer"
Have you seen the framerate of his gear? it would be more of a "premier webcam" than a stream.
the iPic looks very cool, but he hasn't been willing to let anybody look at his source, so i tend to believe it's a hoax.
Lego can't afford to alienate any potential customers. They've been experiencing financial distress for the first time in decades lately, citing competition from cheap chinese knockoffs that look like and are compatible with genuine Lego, but are not nearly as durable.
They are looking at the possibility of making their very first round of layoffs, or already have by this point. The last thing they need is to tell a fanatical customer to take a hike.
I've seen the 11tb model, up close and personal. If you're ever feeling chilly, just go stand next to the exaust port on one. Nice & toasty.
The drives internal to it are, err, dangit, it's a TLA starting with S for Serial, not SCA, but something else.
Very fast, external interface is LVD, the unit I've worked around (closed lab) was on two 20 meter cables strung along the celing. Sure, they're loud and run hot, but you can literally store them in the closet down the hall.
Man, haven't you ever played with one of those keyboards with the "backspace bar"?
Those came with a LOT of deskpros. Imagine looking up at your screen and seeing that you'd accidentally erased a large number of your letters.
It does work, but it doesn't understand ICQ's newer protocols.
Thus, it won't work for icq98 or icq99, but it will work with older versions of icq.
The problem is I'm not about to tell my users they should retrograde their icq. So i installed Socks instead.
Yeah, that page is a positive goldmine if you're attempting something with a 1.3.x kernel
Otherwise, it's hogwash.
It's been in dire need of an update since about 2.0.17
Am I the only one who caught the bit about portability? Didn't Linus himself say that it probably couldn't be ported to other archetectures due to it's inherent dependence on i386 archetecture?
Yes, we know we overcame that a long time ago, but it wasn't in the original design.
the "Wonderful 128 bit cpu" is a Toshiba, based on a Mips IV core. Mips IV is neither new nor exciting. It's just efficent, and time-tested, and carries with it arguably the most flexible technology licensing scheme used by any chip maker.
Mips Co doesn't care who sees, uses, modifies their design, 'long as they sign the license check.
Well said. But regardless, it only takes UPS a few hours to figure out it.
I can't believe i didn't see that when I reread what I'd written.
That's one to two WEEKS to recover from a bad zip code.
Yeah, unless you actually need it to get there.
If the usps screws up your priority mail delivery, you're pretty much SOL.
In my personal experience, it takes the USPS one to two days to recover a priority mail package that bears the wrong zip code. This has happened to me twice.
When they lose a package, it's just plain gone. Don't expect anybody to have any clue where it was last seen. They have no tracking system for Priority packages.
Express mail is quite a bit more expensive, and USPS claims a tracking system is "in the works".
The extra cost of UPS or FedEx buys you a lot of assurances that the USPS is unable or unwilling to give you.
Right now, I'm wondering where the heck the book i mailed a girl for her birthday went. The USPS is not on my list of friends today.
It's more like "Two to three days, or maybe not at all"
As an aside, the Louvre uses a particle accelerator to study paintings without visibly damaging them.
They place the painting infront of a target and fire particles through the painting, and by capturing what comes out the other side they are able to determine the materials used in the paint without removing more than a few molicules of it.
This is vitally important research, if you expect to preserve art for the future. Before they started using the particle accelerator, they were forced to take scrapings of the paintings for chemical analysis - always visibly damaging the painting.
If you don't know what they made it out of, you don't know how you should gauge the humidity in it's area, what temperatures might damage it, whether you should encase it in glass or let it breathe.
I don't need to talk to anybody who doesn't think history is important to society.