Do you really think the work you do has anything to do with the work everyone else does? You might as well claim there's no need for big trucks or railroads, because you can buy an economy car, put a *really* low gear in it, and eventually you can deliver anything, anywhere.
The fact that you only need to haul a small trailer now and then has nothing to do with the fact that someone else may need to haul enough steel to build a World Trade Center. And if you think you're going to haul that steel cross country with a state of the art Kia, you've lost your mind.
We have 200+ systems in our sim farm at an average speed of 1200MHz. We really need more power, but can't afford to replace all the systems every 1, 2, or even 3 years. And if we had to run everything on one system, even the fastest PC available today, we'd be out of business in short order because our schedule would be slipping faster than we could update the customer.
If this Grid of Sun's ran Linux instead of Solaris, I'd be seriously looking at it. As it is, we have been switching from Solaris to Linux because licensing costs for the tools we use are much lower for Linux.
Whoa! Given the huge herds of deer we keep chasing out of our yard (massive nearby development having removed their quaint, forest homes), I could get quite a bit of free computing at a buck an hour!
How do you send medium sized animals via PayPal, though?
This means having a custom system, and custom code, custom network setup, etc, for your problem.
Not true at all. Supercomputers have been used like the Sun Grid will be used for years. Theyve simply never been quite this cheap.
Even with custom software, you can develop it on a much smaller grid (two computers), develop your data set, then copy it all to Sun's grid and run it with the real data. Again, this has been done for decades with old style supercomputers.
I recall developing a FORTRAN program on my university's Cyber (early 1980s) on my personal account (we got a certain amount per quarter to do whatever we wanted with), then running it with the full data set on an IBM mainframe through a timesharing company for my customer. This paid for a quarter or two of schooling. 8^)
Please, don't give it all to a museum! There are lots of people who would *love* to have this stuff, including me, and dozens of people I know.
Tubes are a Big Deal for guitar amps and high end audio. They're also in demand for people restoring old radios and other equipment. Thnere's a huge market for the tubes *and* the equipment.
If you don't want to mess with it, I'd be happy to handle the selling for you, for a small commission, most likely taken from stock (with an independent third party valuation so you know it's fair). Or I can point you to the forums to find large groups of buyers.
I, for one, look forward eagerly to the day that EA promises, when a major league baseball gane pits a team of human pros against a team of robots controlled by WWW interfaces. Between the thrashing of the pitcher as various people all try to make him throw their favorite pitch at once, the outfielders dancing, and the infield insanity (catcher goosing the umpire, 1st baseman mooning the batter, etc.), ML baseball will become the hottest comedy around!
But I've known several people who have given up on the internet because of spam, nevermind spyware.
My wife is one. She really doesn't care for computers much. She only started using email when I was in Europe on business for a week, and our schedules made phone calls difficult. She liked it enough to keep using it, but she never used it much. So when she was getting several hundred spams a week, vs 1 or 2 real emails a week, she just gave up. She goes to the Yelow Pages and information and calling friends rather than using the web. I can't say that I blame her.
I think the best thing we can do is apply 19th century Texas justice. We can start with the UT student they just busted. If he's guilty, string him up from the highest light pole on I35 for the whole world to see. Run it on every news program for a week; ``Spammers, we're coming for you.''
These guys are costing us hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and wasting the single, most precious commodity we have -- time. By intergalactic ore hauler loads.
This sort of thing still brings a tear (literally) to this old fart's eye. For so long, we had the promise of living in space, traveling to other planets, seemingly within our grasp. Then, it just petered out in the directionless void after the moon landings. Then, with the shuttle, it was back. Then, with shuttle disasters, it was gone.
But the basic, hard core research, reaching where no human has gone before, through robots and even dumb transponders, gives me hope. With every passing day, my hope of seeing the stars, or at least Mars, in this life dwindles, but my hope that my children or their children will have that opportunity grows.
With this probe, every science fiction story related to Saturn and its moons is likely debunked. But a new crop will spring up in its place, and more probes will go, and some day-- soon, if we manage to avoid spending most of our time, energy and goods on destroying ourselves and one another-- someone will stand on the surface of these planets and moons. And my DNA will get there eventually, if only by proxy.
So yes, congratulations to all involved. Not only have you made another huge leap for science, not only have you pushed the boundaries of engineering, but you have yet again instilled hope in any number of people.
Is it just me, or did this title make anyone else think of a bunch of rednecks sitting around on a front porch, drinking beer, talking sports, cars, and coon dawgs, with a 196s clock radio tossed off the end of the porch and a computer sitting on a wire spool with car speakers jury rigged to it, and Windows MediaPlayer running on a 13" monitor in 640x480 mode?
When a politician takes office, his or her brain is petrified and shot into space so there's no chance it'll ever be used again. This one looks like Clinton's, but it could be Bush's. They're a lot more similar than many people realize.
I've worked on OSes that used both methods, as well as others. Either of the two mentioned here is fine. You just spend a few minutes learning how your system does it, and deal with it.
There are, IMO, much better uses of good engeineers' and programmers' time, than fighting this battle.
Any logical approach, that's my preferred approach. And both of these are logical enough.
I was thinking that I guess you can see humor in it so long as it's far, far away (not the beatings, but most of the story). But if I lived in India, I seriously doubt I'd see anything humorous in this, if I was involved in any way with either high tech or the police. Or passports. Or driving. Come ti think of it, nobody would find it humorous except, perhaps, some anti-technology type longing for the good old days before the UK showed up. But they probably wouldn't hear about it.
I've long thought it odd that people will quote Occam's razor to "prove" there is no need for God, but then go deeper into the maze of twisty little passages of Big Bang Theory and Evolution. Frankly, I think those require a *lot* more faith.
And that's from someone who used to believe in them.
I know several folk who had 4.0 through at least their undergraduate years, and some through a Masters or PhD. The majority of them are real people, not ubergeeks. They communicate, they have fun, they can make jokes with or without computer references, they get along with just about everyone short of Osama.
Anyone who ignored these peoples' resumes because of the 4.0 would be an utter fool.
Yes, I've known a couple of the types the parent referred to, but only a couple. Of course, now that s/he avoids 4.0 people like the plague, s/he will probably never meet another, and thus the percentage of 4.0s that are weenies will remain fixed in this person's experience, as a self-validating proof.
I've loved it for years. It hasn't really gotten old for me (20+ years), but then every few years I reinvent my career. I started out in real time, with assembly and FORTRAN on minicomputers, then learned C, then learned UNIX, early on became an X11 guru, learned C++ and Objective C (along with some Nextstep), jumped on the WWW bandwagon before 99.999% of anyone had heard of it, was an early Java guru (with a book to prove it), and so forth. Along the way I've done some free software stuff, including work with the GIMP, programming web sites, tools, etc. My career has morphed into IT manager (working at small companies, or hot spots in big ones, I've always had my hand in it), so that's another career.
The computer industry has been good to me. It paid the bills while my wife stayed home to raise our children (things were tight, but we managed). Now, I'm ready to try making a living via some of my other interests; hopefully I'll be out of high tech in 2-3 years. In the meantime, I'm fine with it. And even after I'm out, I'll still dabble, if only writing PHP or something else for web sites I maintain.
FWIW, I've never had any problem differentiating the computer at home as an email/web/etc tool from my computer at work as a development/management/slashdot tool.
I've long wished for 8some* symmetrical calendar. Even before I had to deal with them in software.
12x30+5, 13x28+1, I don't care. And while I agree Henry's proposal would make printing of calendarts eaier, I don't think a "Newton month" is ay easier to deal with than a leap year.
Especially since I don't especially want everything on the same day of the week the rest of my life.
I wouldn't say he's a nut, but he's a bit too anal for me.
My favorite part of the ref'd page is that "digital photos of Henry are available". Hmmm. Why not just put them on the page? Afraid someone will steal them for their calendar? or dartboard>
Go Selectric or equivalent (Remington made one)
on
A USB Typewriter?
·
· Score: 1
Even if you don't find one with an adapter already installed, it'll still be easier to adapt, if only because:
1) You need far less solenoids since keystrokes get encoded for the ball mechanism, and 2) The solenoids can be weaker than they would need to be for most other types.
You'll have a hard time rigging solenoids to anything else, esp. a manual, which would require a more matched pull/push from each solenoid onto each lever or key, nevermind the room required.
The other thing to watch out for is the delay between keystrokes. I forget what the max. speed is on a Selectric, but the required pause between strokes wlill be higher on many typewiters, esp. manuals.
``Just as only a handful of professional web designers would use notepad or vim for web page design, only a handful of hobbyists will use something like gEDA for serious designing.''
Far more pros use vim than you might expect. Many of the tools available for web design have only recently become useful, and there's still not much that's very good for *nix. And yet, gazillions of web sites run on *nix, and many of those are built on *nix as well. Not all by a long shot, but lots.
The reality is that this wlil vary quite a bit, depending on the school and neighborhoods involved. One of the schools in our district has a low interest, overall, in science an dtechnology. The kids there are (seriously) more likely to be interested in drugs, sex, and music, and looking cool (lotsa goths and gangstas). You can get them interested in art, drama, dance, and writing much more easily than science and technology. Other schools have other primary interests.
BUT... there are some things that will always get their attention. Some have bene noted already.
video games and cool graphics
computer controlled light and sound
radio scontrolled cars, planes, etc
model rockets
things that blow up and explode
anything really loud
If you can combine a bunch of these, you have it made. Other than the legal hurdles and paranoid parents. But lots of high schoolers seem to be aware of things like Burning Man, robot wars, pumpkin chunking contests, etc. We've used the latter and video games to good effect to get kids' attention. We're stll looking at how to do something along the lines of the first two on a small scale, with a very limited budget, without having trouble with the neighbors, government, etc.
Another thing to look for is the Have Nots. For instance, if you have a school where few people have computers, get businesses to donate their older computers, and either set up labs (with cool graphics and sound) at schools, or even just give them to the kids (or at least libraries and clubs). You'll want to install a variety of software to do interesting things, and have mentors available. You could have a series of computer workshops, where you learn about computers and build your own from the Big Heap O' Components, install software (FOSS looks awfully good here!), and learn certain applications. After completing all the steps or trials (don't call them lessons or tests. ``This is too much like school" is something we have learned to dread.) they get to take the system home.
You can tie in technology-lovers with the schools like the first one I mentioned. If you can get people doing video editing, or computer-controlled light and sound, or both (or whatever), to work with a dance group or band (for example) you draw both worlds, you get a certain synergy level going, and you get crossover interest from kids you wouldn't have attracted otherwise.
Run a "job fair". Get folks to show what they do for a living (with corporate help to get the cool stuff there!) Cover teh goals, the fun of the job, and the potential eranings. (Kids spell love two ways" t-i-m-e" and "m-o-n-e-y".)
I've been involved at some level with every one of these over the last 20 years, with church youth groups, Boy Scouts, home schooling, community groups, public school groups, and others, and seen good results.
I don't know what the yearly limit is, but if you give over a certain amount annually to a single organization (I believe it's $3,000), you need a receipt from them; send a copy of it with your return.
How much will you save on taxes? Roughly your tax percentage times your donations. For instance, if you are buying a home, have kids and give a fair amount to charity, your real tax rate might be around 10% (taxes owed / gross income / 100). In this case, your tax benefit is 10% of whatever you give. IOW, if you donate $5,000, you will pay roughly $500 less in taxes. If your real tax rate is 33%, you'd pay almost $1,700 less in taxes. If you're poor enough that you don't owe any tax, you obviously don't have any tax savings (the government won't give you money for helping other people).
Some sites I use a lot take PayPal contributions, such as http://www.ax84.com/ The Salvation Army
The Goodwill Computer Store (semi-technical?)
The Ronald McDonald House
Some kids who don't have a dad around
Our church always helps 1-3 needy families (it's a small church)
A local veterans organization
The NRA
Blue or Brown Santa, or Toys for Tots
sometimes a local homeless group
You might consider having the homeless in for a meal
local boy, girl, cub, etc. scouts
pretty much any kid who shows up at our door selling something 8^/
groups that help those laid off (often high tech)
In the spirit of the original St. Nick, just helping anonymously with specific needs (layoffs, sick, dadless or momless, etc) is near the top of my list
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be a smart aleck, but so what?
Do you really think the work you do has anything to do with the work everyone else does? You might as well claim there's no need for big trucks or railroads, because you can buy an economy car, put a *really* low gear in it, and eventually you can deliver anything, anywhere.
The fact that you only need to haul a small trailer now and then has nothing to do with the fact that someone else may need to haul enough steel to build a World Trade Center. And if you think you're going to haul that steel cross country with a state of the art Kia, you've lost your mind.
We have 200+ systems in our sim farm at an average speed of 1200MHz. We really need more power, but can't afford to replace all the systems every 1, 2, or even 3 years. And if we had to run everything on one system, even the fastest PC available today, we'd be out of business in short
order because our schedule would be slipping faster than we could update the customer.
If this Grid of Sun's ran Linux instead of Solaris, I'd be seriously looking at it. As it is, we have been switching from Solaris to Linux because licensing costs for the tools we use are much lower for Linux.
Whoa! Given the huge herds of deer we keep chasing out of our yard (massive nearby development having removed their quaint, forest homes), I could get quite a bit of free computing at a buck an hour!
How do you send medium sized animals via PayPal, though?
This means having a custom system, and custom code, custom network setup, etc, for your problem.
Not true at all. Supercomputers have been used like the Sun Grid will be used for years. Theyve simply never been quite this cheap.
Even with custom software, you can develop it on a much smaller grid (two computers), develop your data set, then copy it all to Sun's grid and run it with the real data. Again, this has been done for decades with old style supercomputers.
I recall developing a FORTRAN program on my university's Cyber (early 1980s) on my personal account (we got a certain amount per quarter to do whatever we wanted with), then running it with the full data set on an IBM mainframe through a timesharing company for my customer. This paid for a quarter or two of schooling. 8^)
Please, don't give it all to a museum! There are lots of people who would *love* to have this stuff, including me, and dozens of people I know.
Tubes are a Big Deal for guitar amps and high end audio. They're also in demand for people restoring old radios and other equipment. Thnere's a huge market for the tubes *and* the equipment.
If you don't want to mess with it, I'd be happy to handle the selling for you, for a small commission, most likely taken from stock (with an independent third party valuation so you know it's fair). Or I can point you to the forums to find large groups of buyers.
-Miles (MEO at RRU dot COM)
I, for one, look forward eagerly to the day that EA promises, when a major league baseball gane pits a team of human pros against a team of robots controlled by WWW interfaces. Between the thrashing of the pitcher as various people all try to make him throw their favorite pitch at once, the outfielders dancing, and the infield insanity (catcher goosing the umpire, 1st baseman mooning the batter, etc.), ML baseball will become the hottest comedy around!
Well, close enough.
But I've known several people who have given up on the internet because of spam, nevermind spyware.
My wife is one. She really doesn't care for computers much. She only started using email when I was in Europe on business for a week, and our schedules made phone calls difficult. She liked it enough to keep using it, but she never used it much. So when she was getting several hundred spams a week, vs 1 or 2 real emails a week, she just gave up. She goes to the Yelow Pages and information and calling friends rather than using the web. I can't say that I blame her.
I think the best thing we can do is apply 19th century Texas justice. We can start with the UT student they just busted. If he's guilty, string him up from the highest light pole on I35 for the whole world to see. Run it on every news program for a week; ``Spammers, we're coming for you.''
These guys are costing us hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and wasting the single, most precious commodity we have -- time. By intergalactic ore hauler loads.
Yeehah!
This sort of thing still brings a tear (literally) to this old fart's eye. For so long, we had the promise of living in space, traveling to other planets, seemingly within our grasp. Then, it just
petered out in the directionless void after the moon landings. Then, with the shuttle, it was back. Then, with shuttle disasters, it was gone.
But the basic, hard core research, reaching where no human has gone before, through robots and even dumb transponders, gives me hope. With every passing day, my hope of seeing the stars, or at least Mars, in this life dwindles, but my hope that my children or their children will have that opportunity grows.
With this probe, every science fiction story related to Saturn and its moons is likely debunked. But a new crop will spring up in its place, and more probes will go, and some day-- soon, if we manage to avoid spending most of our time, energy and goods on destroying ourselves and one another-- someone will stand on the surface of these planets and moons. And my DNA will get there eventually, if only by proxy.
So yes, congratulations to all involved. Not only have you made another huge leap for science, not only have you pushed the boundaries of engineering, but you have yet again instilled hope in any number of people.
Is it just me, or did this title make anyone else think of a bunch of rednecks sitting around on a front porch, drinking beer, talking sports, cars, and coon dawgs, with a 196s clock radio tossed off the end of the porch and a computer sitting on a wire spool with car speakers jury rigged to it, and Windows MediaPlayer running on a 13" monitor in 640x480 mode?
[Run-on sentences a specialty]
When a politician takes office, his or her brain is petrified and shot into space so there's no chance it'll ever be used again. This one looks like Clinton's, but it could be Bush's. They're a lot more similar than many people realize.
I've worked on OSes that used both methods, as well as others. Either of the two mentioned here is fine. You just spend a few minutes learning how your system does it, and deal with it.
There are, IMO, much better uses of good engeineers' and programmers' time, than fighting this battle.
Any logical approach, that's my preferred approach. And both of these are logical enough.
No wonder I can't anything done.
They claimed no processor company hit their promised speed. Ours did.
We promised a 2GHz MIPS chip, and we not only hit it, we passed it almost immediately with a 2.5GHz MIPS. With a fast math processor built in.
Unfortunately, the market didn't care. 8^(
But we made our promised speed *and* release date.
So Intel, Apple, and Wired can all kiss my giga til it hertz!
I was thinking that I guess you can see humor in it so long as it's far, far away (not the beatings, but most of the story). But if I lived in India, I seriously doubt I'd see anything humorous in this, if I was involved in any way with either high tech or the police. Or passports. Or driving. Come ti think of it, nobody would find it humorous except, perhaps, some anti-technology type longing for the good old days before the UK showed up. But they probably wouldn't hear about it.
I've said for many years that Gates was just another mad fascist out for world domination at any cost.
How old was Hitler when he began gnawing carpets?
"Bill! Spit that out! The MSNvideo interview is about to begin!"
"But I LOVE chocolate brown shag! Mmmmmm...."
I've long thought it odd that people will quote Occam's razor to "prove" there is no need for God, but then go deeper into the maze of twisty little passages of Big Bang Theory and Evolution. Frankly, I think those require a *lot* more faith.
And that's from someone who used to believe in them.
I know several folk who had 4.0 through at least their undergraduate years, and some through a Masters or PhD. The majority of them are real people, not ubergeeks. They communicate, they have fun, they can make jokes with or without computer references, they get along with just about everyone short of Osama.
Anyone who ignored these peoples' resumes because of the 4.0 would be an utter fool.
Yes, I've known a couple of the types the parent referred to, but only a couple. Of course, now that s/he avoids 4.0 people like the plague, s/he will probably never meet another, and thus the percentage of 4.0s that are weenies will remain fixed in this person's experience, as a self-validating proof.
Beware the stereotype!
I've loved it for years. It hasn't really gotten old for me (20+ years), but then every few years I reinvent my career. I started out in real time, with assembly and FORTRAN on minicomputers, then learned C, then learned UNIX, early on became an X11 guru, learned C++ and Objective C (along with some Nextstep), jumped on the WWW bandwagon before 99.999% of anyone had heard of it, was an early Java guru (with a book to prove it), and so forth. Along the way I've done some free software stuff, including work with the GIMP, programming web sites, tools, etc. My career has morphed into IT manager (working at small companies, or hot spots in big ones, I've always had my hand in it), so that's another career.
The computer industry has been good to me. It paid the bills while my wife stayed home to raise our children (things were tight, but we managed). Now, I'm ready to try making a living via some of my other interests; hopefully I'll be out of high tech in 2-3 years. In the meantime, I'm fine with it. And even after I'm out, I'll still dabble, if only writing PHP or something else for web sites I maintain.
FWIW, I've never had any problem differentiating the computer at home as an email/web/etc tool from my computer at work as a development/management/slashdot tool.
I've long wished for 8some* symmetrical calendar. Even before I had to deal with them in software.
12x30+5, 13x28+1, I don't care. And while I agree Henry's proposal would make printing of calendarts eaier, I don't think a "Newton month" is ay easier to deal with than a leap year.
Especially since I don't especially want everything on the same day of the week the rest of my life.
I wouldn't say he's a nut, but he's a bit too anal for me.
My favorite part of the ref'd page is that "digital photos of Henry are available". Hmmm. Why not just put them on the page? Afraid someone will steal them for their calendar? or dartboard>
Even if you don't find one with an adapter already installed, it'll still be easier to adapt, if only because:
1) You need far less solenoids since keystrokes get encoded for the ball mechanism, and
2) The solenoids can be weaker than they would need to be for most other types.
You'll have a hard time rigging solenoids to anything else, esp. a manual, which would require a more matched pull/push from each solenoid onto each lever or key, nevermind the room required.
The other thing to watch out for is the delay between keystrokes. I forget what the max. speed is on a Selectric, but the required pause between strokes wlill be higher on many typewiters, esp. manuals.
You lost me when you said they "go weeks without rebooting" as if this was a *bad* thing...
``Just as only a handful of professional web designers would use notepad or vim for web page design, only a handful of hobbyists will use something like gEDA for serious designing.''
Far more pros use vim than you might expect. Many of the tools available for web design have only recently become useful, and there's still not much that's very good for *nix. And yet, gazillions of web sites run on *nix, and many of those are built on *nix as well. Not all by a long shot, but lots.
BUT... there are some things that will always get their attention. Some have bene noted already.
- video games and cool graphics
- computer controlled light and sound
- radio scontrolled cars, planes, etc
- model rockets
- things that blow up and explode
- anything really loud
If you can combine a bunch of these, you have it made. Other than the legal hurdles and paranoid parents. But lots of high schoolers seem to be aware of things like Burning Man, robot wars, pumpkin chunking contests, etc. We've used the latter and video games to good effect to get kids' attention. We're stll looking at how to do something along the lines of the first two on a small scale, with a very limited budget, without having trouble with the neighbors, government, etc.Another thing to look for is the Have Nots. For instance, if you have a school where few people have computers, get businesses to donate their older computers, and either set up labs (with cool graphics and sound) at schools, or even just give them to the kids (or at least libraries and clubs). You'll want to install a variety of software to do interesting things, and have mentors available. You could have a series of computer workshops, where you learn about computers and build your own from the Big Heap O' Components, install software (FOSS looks awfully good here!), and learn certain applications. After completing all the steps or trials (don't call them lessons or tests. ``This is too much like school" is something we have learned to dread.) they get to take the system home.
You can tie in technology-lovers with the schools like the first one I mentioned. If you can get people doing video editing, or computer-controlled light and sound, or both (or whatever), to work with a dance group or band (for example) you draw both worlds, you get a certain synergy level going, and you get crossover interest from kids you wouldn't have attracted otherwise.
Speaking of bands, there's lots of opportunity with electronic instruments. Teach them how to repair and mod amps and effects, or design their own. (http://www.ax84.com/isagreatplacetolearnabouttube amps,forexample).Teachthemhowto(forexample)setupag uitar,butalsoopenitupandcleanthepots,usingthistime toexplainaboutshieldingthecavity,groundingthebridg e,shieldedwire,andthebasicsofresistanceandsignalfl ow,withapotentialbonusoflearningtodesolderandsolde r,anduseofbasicelectronicstools.Getafrequencyanaly zerandplaywithdifferentstringsetsonaguitar.
A shop on how cars/motorcycles/scooters work with hands on tune ups will be a good draw. For areas near water, do the same with boats and jet skis and such. Talk to the Civil Air Patrol or a nearby air base or airport about starting a club to learn about airplanes.
Run a "job fair". Get folks to show what they do for a living (with corporate help to get the cool stuff there!) Cover teh goals, the fun of the job, and the potential eranings. (Kids spell love two ways" t-i-m-e" and "m-o-n-e-y".)
I've been involved at some level with every one of these over the last 20 years, with church youth groups, Boy Scouts, home schooling, community groups, public school groups, and others, and seen good results.
It probably came in teh next day while the phone system was down. I hate those temporal whirlpools.
How much will you save on taxes? Roughly your tax percentage times your donations. For instance, if you are buying a home, have kids and give a fair amount to charity, your real tax rate might be around 10% (taxes owed / gross income / 100). In this case, your tax benefit is 10% of whatever you give. IOW, if you donate $5,000, you will pay roughly $500 less in taxes. If your real tax rate is 33%, you'd pay almost $1,700 less in taxes. If you're poor enough that you don't owe any tax, you obviously don't have any tax savings (the government won't give you money for helping other people).
The Salvation Army
The Goodwill Computer Store (semi-technical?)
The Ronald McDonald House
Some kids who don't have a dad around
Our church always helps 1-3 needy families (it's a small church)
A local veterans organization
The NRA
Blue or Brown Santa, or Toys for Tots
sometimes a local homeless group
You might consider having the homeless in for a meal
local boy, girl, cub, etc. scouts
pretty much any kid who shows up at our door selling something 8^/
groups that help those laid off (often high tech)
In the spirit of the original St. Nick, just helping anonymously with specific needs (layoffs, sick, dadless or momless, etc) is near the top of my list
-Evyl Abrahamic Type, apparently