You don't have to give a computer an Internet connection to make it usable.
This may have been before your time, but I remember in the early '90s when my high school had computer labs full of Macs running System 7.1 and PCs with Windows 3.1. No Internet connection, no firewall. They did have antivirus. They also had period apps like MS Works 2.0 on the PCs and ClarisWorks 2.0 on the Macs, and we were perfectly productive (though the Macs were slow -- 16-33 MHz 68030s with maybe 4MB of RAM).
Is the slashdot moderation system just a formalized system where a bunch of clueless wanker stand around a water cooler shooting the shit, and each day they draw secret lots to select the toady responsible for telling the other idiots that they're smart, interesting, and funny?
In the Society for Creative Anachronism, people can fight in various amounts of steel armor and wield rattan swords. This always includes a helm and some other mandatory armor.
One man got the idea to make his mandatory helmet out of titanium. Titanium is stronger than steel, but less dense. When he went into combat that day with his new helmet, he took one good whack to the head that someone wearing a steel helm would have shrugged off. With his lighter titanium model, he was knocked unconscious and got a concussion. The helmet was undamaged, however.
It all goes back to physics: action, reaction, momentum.
It sounds to me like you've just used/ingested too much fluoride. Not enough, and you get cavities. Too much, your teeth turn brown and brittle. I knew a guy like that from high school -- he'd gotten too many fluoride treatments from his dentist at his parents' urging.
I come from a small town with fluoridation. When I was about 10-14 years old, I took extremely poor care of my teeth -- almost never brushed 'em or used mouthwash, and I only got one cavity ever, in a baby tooth that soon fell out anyway. I now brush at least daily, and my teeth look pretty good -- fairly straight (my mouth is too small to fit all my teeth perfectly), no discoloration, though I haven't seen a dentist regularly for over ten years. Approx same deal for my sister, modulo she was better at brushing.
My wife grew up on unfluoridated well water, but took much better care of her teeth growing up. She has several fillings from cavities. Same deal for my parents.
Sure, this is a very small sample size, but I'd bet a larger study would show similar trends.
Converting that wad of RPMs using rpm2tgz and then untarring all of them using a for loop (yeah, Slackware) wasn't all that hard, and it even worked! Thanks everyone.
I have a FAT32 partition for that very purpose. Sure, it doesn't support files larger than 4GB, but I don't have DVD rips on my computer so I don't care.
No monitor: So they'll have a cheap 15" CRT the user can buy for $100 or so. Maybe it can be plugged into a TV as well. It's just not economically feasible to include a monitor at this price point.
Cheap disk: A hard drive of that size you get from Tiger (of all places) will be cheap, as in junk. This one has to be laptop-sized, which cost more per gig than 3.5" desktop drives, are quieter, and use less energy.
Limited software: Consider who this thing's aimed at. First-time, probably computerphobic users. They're not going to want or need the great crawling monstrosity that is MS Office and OpenOffice, which would run too slowly on this hardware anyway. Something like Abiword or even Wordpad would be just about perfect. There's not likely to be any need for a spreadsheet, let alone presentation software and a database, in this market.
Overpriced: That depends on the market. Sure, a few tens of dollars per unit will go to the Microsoft tax, but the target audience may decide this thing's worth it versus a Dell PC, especially if it's so locked down that the worm de jure can't attack it and in general it Just Works.
I agree that preinstalling something like a customized Ubuntu would have been better, though. Basic stuff like Epiphany for browsing, Gpdf for PDF viewing, Gaim for IM, and so on.
You don't have to give a computer an Internet connection to make it usable.
This may have been before your time, but I remember in the early '90s when my high school had computer labs full of Macs running System 7.1 and PCs with Windows 3.1. No Internet connection, no firewall. They did have antivirus. They also had period apps like MS Works 2.0 on the PCs and ClarisWorks 2.0 on the Macs, and we were perfectly productive (though the Macs were slow -- 16-33 MHz 68030s with maybe 4MB of RAM).
You must be new here.
About six years. 500 MHz processors came out in late 1999.
More or less.
Meh. Done that, but my Senateweasels (Bond, Talent) are both staunchly in favor of the Unpatriotic Act.
That would depend on how dense this stuff is.
In the Society for Creative Anachronism, people can fight in various amounts of steel armor and wield rattan swords. This always includes a helm and some other mandatory armor.
One man got the idea to make his mandatory helmet out of titanium. Titanium is stronger than steel, but less dense. When he went into combat that day with his new helmet, he took one good whack to the head that someone wearing a steel helm would have shrugged off. With his lighter titanium model, he was knocked unconscious and got a concussion. The helmet was undamaged, however.
It all goes back to physics: action, reaction, momentum.
Got a citation for that, or did you just pull it out of your ass?
No. SBC Yahoo also sells DSL.
Not to mention how stupid the Black Dog looks. I'd be embarrassed to use it, let alone be seen with it.
More like management just didn't want to pay to have the filters replaced as often as was needed.
Sigh, another misleading Slashwank headline (and another post whining about same).
It sounds to me like you've just used/ingested too much fluoride. Not enough, and you get cavities. Too much, your teeth turn brown and brittle. I knew a guy like that from high school -- he'd gotten too many fluoride treatments from his dentist at his parents' urging.
I come from a small town with fluoridation. When I was about 10-14 years old, I took extremely poor care of my teeth -- almost never brushed 'em or used mouthwash, and I only got one cavity ever, in a baby tooth that soon fell out anyway. I now brush at least daily, and my teeth look pretty good -- fairly straight (my mouth is too small to fit all my teeth perfectly), no discoloration, though I haven't seen a dentist regularly for over ten years. Approx same deal for my sister, modulo she was better at brushing.
My wife grew up on unfluoridated well water, but took much better care of her teeth growing up. She has several fillings from cavities. Same deal for my parents.
Sure, this is a very small sample size, but I'd bet a larger study would show similar trends.
It's not quite that cheap -- the school's part of the license fees comes from student activity fees or somesuch.
Converting that wad of RPMs using rpm2tgz and then untarring all of them using a for loop (yeah, Slackware) wasn't all that hard, and it even worked! Thanks everyone.
It's a collection of RPMs inside that tarball.
Has anyone repackaged it in a straight tarball? This is inconvenient for people who use other distributions.
Is the Norwegian legal system as broken as the American, though?
Got a cite for your statistic, or did you just pull that out of your ass?
I have a FAT32 partition for that very purpose. Sure, it doesn't support files larger than 4GB, but I don't have DVD rips on my computer so I don't care.
Get one that attaches to your keychain. I'm absent-minded, but have yet to lose mine.
The Dell rep I emailed said that the different units are overseen by different managers, each of whom have control over the individual units' sales.
There appear to be more than 3 units, btw. We buy from the MHEC unit: Midwestern Higher Education Compact. Wouldn't surprise me if there were others.
Kind of how it worked for Cuba, huh?
No monitor: So they'll have a cheap 15" CRT the user can buy for $100 or so. Maybe it can be plugged into a TV as well. It's just not economically feasible to include a monitor at this price point.
Cheap disk: A hard drive of that size you get from Tiger (of all places) will be cheap, as in junk. This one has to be laptop-sized, which cost more per gig than 3.5" desktop drives, are quieter, and use less energy.
Limited software: Consider who this thing's aimed at. First-time, probably computerphobic users. They're not going to want or need the great crawling monstrosity that is MS Office and OpenOffice, which would run too slowly on this hardware anyway. Something like Abiword or even Wordpad would be just about perfect. There's not likely to be any need for a spreadsheet, let alone presentation software and a database, in this market.
Overpriced: That depends on the market. Sure, a few tens of dollars per unit will go to the Microsoft tax, but the target audience may decide this thing's worth it versus a Dell PC, especially if it's so locked down that the worm de jure can't attack it and in general it Just Works.
I agree that preinstalling something like a customized Ubuntu would have been better, though. Basic stuff like Epiphany for browsing, Gpdf for PDF viewing, Gaim for IM, and so on.