Nice try. I'm betting you grew up within two blocks of Lake of the Isles or Linden Hills if you did indeed grow up in Minneapolis
No, I actually was a couple of miles from Lake Harriet, in Minneapolis proper, and not in Kenwood, Linden Hills, or any other limousine liberal neighborhood. But what's proximity to either of those two lakes have to do with hardship, anyway? There's plenty of low-income rental housing within walking distance of both lakes.
Disadvantaged kids from the inner city just don't call a moderate like Mark Dayton a "limosine socialist."
Sure they do. If they use hard work and their own smarts to get ahead and then see some wealthy asshole decide to buy a Senate seat and turn around and propose new, regressive taxes, they call 'em like they see 'em, limousine socialists. Or is it just that you think that people who start out behind aren't smart enough to see through the failed trappings of welfare society?
Just pointing out that Dayton lives his convictions.
If Dayton lived his convictions, he'd be working a real job like the rest of us, giving away all his money (and I mean all, and I mean now, not in some tax-sheltered foundation giveway over time) and working full time to convince the rest of his artistocratic heirs to do the same.
Instead, he's looking for ways to take from those of us that have worked all our lives to earn what we have to give to those who refuse to work. If you're so myopic that you think that makes me an Edinite, so be it, but at least be comforted in knowing at I hate the rich just as much.
The same thing has happened with drug enforcement. In many places, posessing an ounce of marijuana is a petty misdemeanor with a small fine. In some places (like Minnesota), they passed an additional drug tax, requiring all illegal drugs to have tax stamps affixed to them as well.
And as expected, the penalties for "tax evasion" are huge, as is the cost of the drug stamps. They actually have sold some, and went to great length to defend their process and the fact that they don't bust you on the spot for even buying the stamps or use the information as part of an investigation.
They learned their lesson well from Al Capone. If you can't bust 'em, get 'em on tax evasion.
First we'll have the $0.00001 per email tax. It will fail, but we're told its failing because enforcement doesn't work when you don't know where the SMTP servers are. Which means that we'll have a law requiring SMTP server registration, enforced by the IRS and your ISP.
Forget to pay your SMTP tax when setting up your new box? Good news! The IRS can now search your hard disk (gotta know how much untaxed mail you sent) and then file tax liens against your bank account and your home.
When these don't work, we'll be told that the tax rate isn't high enough. So they'll raise it. And keep raising it. And then someone will figure out that it's a great way to put PCs in poor neighborhoods or some other "worthy" project.
Have I mentioned Ashcroft's take on SMTP registration?
Enforce the fraud laws. Arrest the people behind SPAM products. Ensnare the spammers as part of the conspiracy. That will solve the problem. Everything else just takes away our rights AND or money.
He's an apalling public speaker. He's on MPR all the time and both his semi-prepared comments and his answers to interview questions and callers verge on the unintelligable.
He's also a limousine socialist who would have never gotten elected if it wasn't for the backing of Paul Wellstone and the huge amount of money inherited from his family (his family were the owners of the Dayton's department store in Minneapolis and the Target discount chain, which eventually owned Hudson's and Marshall Fields. The parent company is now called Target corporation).
With Wellstone dead and his political machine in shambles, Dayton's aimless rambling and his limousine socialist policies will likely cost him the next election.
If they aren't, it could actually doom the project. DVD recorders are expected to drop below $300 next year. If the pace continues, we might even see sub-$200 DVD recorders.
With DVD recordable getting so cheap, doesn't another format incompatible with recordable DVD and without its own recording capability sound like a lost cause?
I've long wished that someone would make the VGA port on a laptop bidirectional, so with the addition of a gender changer, you could turn the laptop's display panel into a monitor. This would be great for lots of things, not the least of which would be a portable, battery-powered high-res display that folds into its own case.
Anybody with an electronics background know why something like this wouldn't be fairly simple to implement? The only thing I can think of is that the display adapter chipset (Nvidia/ATI/etc) may be integrated with the electronics required to drive the LCD panel, making an external connection impossible.
We haven't run a Groupware SMTP server exposed to the internet since our very first one, the DOS SMTP gateway for Groupwise cira 1995.
And it wasn't even security per se that caused us to stop, but the dreadfully untransparent logging and tools available for logfile analysis in everything (GW STMP NLM, GWIA NLM, and now E2K).
Even though E2K's Message Tracking is nice, it's still not as flexible or as transparent to debugging as flat logfiles of our FreeBSD systems. Plus you get the added benefit of being able to sniff the network interface to find other, weirder glitches.
The big driving factor now, of course, is security and the ability to keep E2K from exposure to the internet.
I'm not surprised at the people that still run it exposed to the internet, though. There's a whole host of biggish small companies that simply won't pay for seasoned admins, just talented desktop support people who can manuever daily admin duties and call in consultants when something "complicated" has to get done.
I read earlier that someone suggested picking up a wireless phone that has good signal but isn't subscribed to any particular service. Cell phones almost universally will dial 911 if they can, subscribed or not. (Double-check that, though.) There again, though, remember they'll likely not have your physical address.
Even worse, in Minnesota it's been the source of more than one newspaper article that 911 on cell phones goes the State Highway Patrol dispatcher, not the the local 911 service. I don't know if this is still true, but if it is not only do they not have your address, they're not even the right place to call for help for an at-home emergency.
What I want to know is, what did people do before 911 became available? Was it just calling the operator for help? The local police precinct? The hospital directly?
Subsidized phones are a gamble that you'll be paying 14 UKP or more for several years, not just one.
However, I agree with you that (A) bluetooth would be a better technology and (B) given its wide penetration of the cell phone market and computer market, the chipsets should fit the $40-$100 badge price easily.
Text mode installers are fine, but Sysinstall (FreeBSD's) ain't that great.
The user interface isn't terribly consistant or easy to navigate, although it may be curses fault as much as FreeBSD's. It's also a major fuckaround if it fails someplace -- there's no recovering, despite the fact that the installer sticks around.
Personally I think it needs major rework to improve the UI. I'd like to see fewer seperate screens and more expandable hierarchical menus. They do seem to be kind of stuck on the two-floppy size limitation, which I'm not sure makes much sense anymore outside of die-hards that insist on doing floppy-started network installations.
I'd also like to see it capable of doing installations for network booted systems. This might seems contradictory, but think of an installer you run on the master system that lets you fill in the blanks and generate an image for bootable floppy or.iso that would then be net bootable, or on the net-booted system itself if the HDD was to be the boot source.
While it's been a usable install screen, it could use some UI and functionality help, all of which would require ditching the 2.88MB barrier.
The iTunesDB file that the iPod uses to index files is proprietory[...]
It still is dependent on software to put songs on there. Just because there's a whole garden variety of third party applications still means you're dependent on special applications to put songs on it.
I want to copy songs there with Explorer/Finder/etc. I *don't* want to rely on ANY software (other than the device's firmware) to make those songs playable.
A vendor gave me an Intel Pocket Concert 128MB MP3 player about two years ago, and its now very nearly a boat anchor. Intel stopped selling them and has ceased development on drivers. The version of software still available from Intel supports XP, but what about the next iteration/service pack from Redmond? I didn't pay for this device out of my pocket, but if I did I'd be kind of pissed that it's very nearly unusable due to software on the computer.
And that's what scares me (next to breaking or having stolen) about an iPod -- what happens when Apple says "Sorry, we don't support you" as few as two years down the road -- are you just SOL? Time for another $300+ to buy another one?
I'd have a little more faith in these things if they were primarily 1394/USB disks with firmware. Put MP3s and playlists on them, voila, it will play them, and did not have a closed interface with proprietary software that the vendor may or may not decide to support or fix, rendering an otherwise functional machine worthless.
I have never seen a blue screen that didn't have that on there. Is that the "standard" message, or is it like the bad old days of MacOS when "BUS ERROR" or something came up for lots of variable error conditions.
Even with OSDL providing him legal services, I'd be inclined to retain my own counsel whose sole responsibility is to me and my interests.
OSDL's counsel may prove to be just fine, but there's always the chance that in some way OSDL and Torvalds' interests may actually not be truly in sync, in which case OSDL's counsel may decide to drop Torvalds due to conflict of interest or have him do something not in his best interest, but in the best interest of OSDL.
This is the reason there's such huge legal teams around high-profile cases; each counsel represents a specific entity, such as a business, a person, etc. They may agree on the goal, but there are times where sacrificing someone on your team for your advantage can be appealing, and without your OWN counsel, you might end up being the sacrificial lamb.
There are a number of good entry level choices in the projector market now. I did make sure I bought from a place with no restocking fees, as I was worried about rainbows (X1 has a 2x color wheel and some fraction of people seem to be sensitive to them, it's a potential problem with any low end DLP)... I can see rainbows if I try, but they haven't bothered any of the 15 or so people who've watched movies on my X1.
The rainbows are an artifact of the single chip DLP system's need for a color wheel. Even "high end" single-chip DLP systems can suffer from them.
The "high end" 3-chip DLP projectors are really expensive -- 10s of $K.
I've seen the rainbow by turning my head and paying attention to my peripheral vision, but I can't really do it reliably. My personal feeling is that DLP looks a little too "digital" compared to some of the LCD offerings, at least in the RPTV arena. We have a DLP projector here at work, I should check it out sometime and see what it does for me.
1) Increase flagging sales by providing value-add: a "making of.." video and maybe the first music video or something. This would work if they kept pricing the same and would enhance the perceived value of recordings, which is pretty low now.
2) Half-baked DRM/copy inhibition. Yes, I know you can copy a DVD, but it would be much more difficult to a lot of people and would probably buy the industry 2-3 years breathing room before the tools were good enough for easy ripping. There's enough variability in how you can put music on a DVD that it might make ripping really convoluted.
3) Widespread adoption of DVD players. There's so many out there now, it's much easier than trying to push a new, music-only format. The only place they're not widespread is in cars, but its only a matter of time before the same miniaturization that put CDs there makes DVDs in cars trivially inexpensive (if we're not already there now).
The original CD spec put the disc in a caddy, but was dropped as part of the spec. Some of the very early CD ROM drives required a caddy for the CD. Many other optical media formats either have always used caddies or have caddy versions as an option.
The Type II and IV DVD-RAM discs can be removed from their caddies for use in mechanisms that don't accept caddies, and they also sell empty caddies and caddyless discs.
What surprises me is why we CDs are so darn easy to scratch; isn't there a better polymer coating they can put on them that will prevent anything from scratching? I know that anti-scratch technology is pretty good for eyeglasses; I've seen several shops that had demo lenses you could take steel wool to and not damage.
I'd go for balanced interconnects, but I'd also like to see a single cable with a single connector for both channels, with the capability to optionally carry video as well.
Better yet would be digital connectors (firewire, coax, or even optical) between system components to minimize cable clutter.
I think some Pioneer systems, even at the low end, have a microphone that can be used to optimize surround modes for a specific listening spot. My super-ancient VSX93000S has pretty decent balance controls for its Dolby Pro-Logic which I thought helped as well.
One kind is the low-level "Pay me or I wreck shit". In this model, you don't actually get "protection" from anyone else, just the people you paid don't arbitrarily wreck your stuff. If some third party decides to play rough, the people you're paying protection to generally don't care, unless it threatens their protection money (ie, driving a store owner completely out of business).
The more sophisticated kind of protection generally involves paying someone so that you can operate without interference. Generally this involves handing over a percentage of the operations as a tithe or tribute (and in fact among Italian mafia, it is a historical descendent of the practice of conquered peoples paying tributes to Roman officials). In this case, since the payment is generally dependent on the successful completion of whatever the protected activity is, you'd be more likely to get muscle applied in your favor to keep rivals away. But even then there may be extra money associated with hiring muscle, and often it is an artificial ruse used to obtain larger tributes. (In an episode of the Sopranos, Tony uses a black political agitator to get more tribute out of a construction business that is already paying tribute. He then "breaks up" the black's protest and later splits the take with the black's leaders).
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Nice try. I'm betting you grew up within two blocks of Lake of the Isles or Linden Hills if you did indeed grow up in Minneapolis
No, I actually was a couple of miles from Lake Harriet, in Minneapolis proper, and not in Kenwood, Linden Hills, or any other limousine liberal neighborhood. But what's proximity to either of those two lakes have to do with hardship, anyway? There's plenty of low-income rental housing within walking distance of both lakes.
Disadvantaged kids from the inner city just don't call a moderate like Mark Dayton a "limosine socialist."
Sure they do. If they use hard work and their own smarts to get ahead and then see some wealthy asshole decide to buy a Senate seat and turn around and propose new, regressive taxes, they call 'em like they see 'em, limousine socialists. Or is it just that you think that people who start out behind aren't smart enough to see through the failed trappings of welfare society?
Just pointing out that Dayton lives his convictions.
If Dayton lived his convictions, he'd be working a real job like the rest of us, giving away all his money (and I mean all, and I mean now, not in some tax-sheltered foundation giveway over time) and working full time to convince the rest of his artistocratic heirs to do the same.
Instead, he's looking for ways to take from those of us that have worked all our lives to earn what we have to give to those who refuse to work. If you're so myopic that you think that makes me an Edinite, so be it, but at least be comforted in knowing at I hate the rich just as much.
When someone asks me what I did over the weekend I always say "I raised a people's army and seized control of the state."
Just don't do it on LV-426.
How many years did you spend teaching poor and disadvantaged kids in north Minneapolis, swb?
Bite me, troll, I grew up disadvantaged in Minneapolis.
The same thing has happened with drug enforcement. In many places, posessing an ounce of marijuana is a petty misdemeanor with a small fine. In some places (like Minnesota), they passed an additional drug tax, requiring all illegal drugs to have tax stamps affixed to them as well.
And as expected, the penalties for "tax evasion" are huge, as is the cost of the drug stamps. They actually have sold some, and went to great length to defend their process and the fact that they don't bust you on the spot for even buying the stamps or use the information as part of an investigation.
They learned their lesson well from Al Capone. If you can't bust 'em, get 'em on tax evasion.
This is where anti-spam legislation will lead us.
First we'll have the $0.00001 per email tax. It will fail, but we're told its failing because enforcement doesn't work when you don't know where the SMTP servers are. Which means that we'll have a law requiring SMTP server registration, enforced by the IRS and your ISP.
Forget to pay your SMTP tax when setting up your new box? Good news! The IRS can now search your hard disk (gotta know how much untaxed mail you sent) and then file tax liens against your bank account and your home.
When these don't work, we'll be told that the tax rate isn't high enough. So they'll raise it. And keep raising it. And then someone will figure out that it's a great way to put PCs in poor neighborhoods or some other "worthy" project.
Have I mentioned Ashcroft's take on SMTP registration?
Enforce the fraud laws. Arrest the people behind SPAM products. Ensnare the spammers as part of the conspiracy. That will solve the problem. Everything else just takes away our rights AND or money.
He's an apalling public speaker. He's on MPR all the time and both his semi-prepared comments and his answers to interview questions and callers verge on the unintelligable.
He's also a limousine socialist who would have never gotten elected if it wasn't for the backing of Paul Wellstone and the huge amount of money inherited from his family (his family were the owners of the Dayton's department store in Minneapolis and the Target discount chain, which eventually owned Hudson's and Marshall Fields. The parent company is now called Target corporation).
With Wellstone dead and his political machine in shambles, Dayton's aimless rambling and his limousine socialist policies will likely cost him the next election.
If they aren't, it could actually doom the project. DVD recorders are expected to drop below $300 next year. If the pace continues, we might even see sub-$200 DVD recorders.
With DVD recordable getting so cheap, doesn't another format incompatible with recordable DVD and without its own recording capability sound like a lost cause?
I've long wished that someone would make the VGA port on a laptop bidirectional, so with the addition of a gender changer, you could turn the laptop's display panel into a monitor. This would be great for lots of things, not the least of which would be a portable, battery-powered high-res display that folds into its own case.
Anybody with an electronics background know why something like this wouldn't be fairly simple to implement? The only thing I can think of is that the display adapter chipset (Nvidia/ATI/etc) may be integrated with the electronics required to drive the LCD panel, making an external connection impossible.
We haven't run a Groupware SMTP server exposed to the internet since our very first one, the DOS SMTP gateway for Groupwise cira 1995.
And it wasn't even security per se that caused us to stop, but the dreadfully untransparent logging and tools available for logfile analysis in everything (GW STMP NLM, GWIA NLM, and now E2K).
Even though E2K's Message Tracking is nice, it's still not as flexible or as transparent to debugging as flat logfiles of our FreeBSD systems. Plus you get the added benefit of being able to sniff the network interface to find other, weirder glitches.
The big driving factor now, of course, is security and the ability to keep E2K from exposure to the internet.
I'm not surprised at the people that still run it exposed to the internet, though. There's a whole host of biggish small companies that simply won't pay for seasoned admins, just talented desktop support people who can manuever daily admin duties and call in consultants when something "complicated" has to get done.
I read earlier that someone suggested picking up a wireless phone that has good signal but isn't subscribed to any particular service. Cell phones almost universally will dial 911 if they can, subscribed or not. (Double-check that, though.) There again, though, remember they'll likely not have your physical address.
Even worse, in Minnesota it's been the source of more than one newspaper article that 911 on cell phones goes the State Highway Patrol dispatcher, not the the local 911 service. I don't know if this is still true, but if it is not only do they not have your address, they're not even the right place to call for help for an at-home emergency.
What I want to know is, what did people do before 911 became available? Was it just calling the operator for help? The local police precinct? The hospital directly?
Subsidized phones are a gamble that you'll be paying 14 UKP or more for several years, not just one.
However, I agree with you that (A) bluetooth would be a better technology and (B) given its wide penetration of the cell phone market and computer market, the chipsets should fit the $40-$100 badge price easily.
Text mode installers are fine, but Sysinstall (FreeBSD's) ain't that great.
.iso that would then be net bootable, or on the net-booted system itself if the HDD was to be the boot source.
The user interface isn't terribly consistant or easy to navigate, although it may be curses fault as much as FreeBSD's. It's also a major fuckaround if it fails someplace -- there's no recovering, despite the fact that the installer sticks around.
Personally I think it needs major rework to improve the UI. I'd like to see fewer seperate screens and more expandable hierarchical menus. They do seem to be kind of stuck on the two-floppy size limitation, which I'm not sure makes much sense anymore outside of die-hards that insist on doing floppy-started network installations.
I'd also like to see it capable of doing installations for network booted systems. This might seems contradictory, but think of an installer you run on the master system that lets you fill in the blanks and generate an image for bootable floppy or
While it's been a usable install screen, it could use some UI and functionality help, all of which would require ditching the 2.88MB barrier.
If it was widely popular, why does it have to be resurrected?
The iTunesDB file that the iPod uses to index files is proprietory[...]
It still is dependent on software to put songs on there. Just because there's a whole garden variety of third party applications still means you're dependent on special applications to put songs on it.
I want to copy songs there with Explorer/Finder/etc. I *don't* want to rely on ANY software (other than the device's firmware) to make those songs playable.
That was a great post. Highly technically informative, but not obfuscationist.
I added you to my friends list.
A vendor gave me an Intel Pocket Concert 128MB MP3 player about two years ago, and its now very nearly a boat anchor. Intel stopped selling them and has ceased development on drivers. The version of software still available from Intel supports XP, but what about the next iteration/service pack from Redmond? I didn't pay for this device out of my pocket, but if I did I'd be kind of pissed that it's very nearly unusable due to software on the computer.
And that's what scares me (next to breaking or having stolen) about an iPod -- what happens when Apple says "Sorry, we don't support you" as few as two years down the road -- are you just SOL? Time for another $300+ to buy another one?
I'd have a little more faith in these things if they were primarily 1394/USB disks with firmware. Put MP3s and playlists on them, voila, it will play them, and did not have a closed interface with proprietary software that the vendor may or may not decide to support or fix, rendering an otherwise functional machine worthless.
I have never seen a blue screen that didn't have that on there. Is that the "standard" message, or is it like the bad old days of MacOS when "BUS ERROR" or something came up for lots of variable error conditions.
What does IRQL... mean, anyway?
Even with OSDL providing him legal services, I'd be inclined to retain my own counsel whose sole responsibility is to me and my interests.
OSDL's counsel may prove to be just fine, but there's always the chance that in some way OSDL and Torvalds' interests may actually not be truly in sync, in which case OSDL's counsel may decide to drop Torvalds due to conflict of interest or have him do something not in his best interest, but in the best interest of OSDL.
This is the reason there's such huge legal teams around high-profile cases; each counsel represents a specific entity, such as a business, a person, etc. They may agree on the goal, but there are times where sacrificing someone on your team for your advantage can be appealing, and without your OWN counsel, you might end up being the sacrificial lamb.
There are a number of good entry level choices in the projector market now. I did make sure I bought from a place with no restocking fees, as I was worried about rainbows (X1 has a 2x color wheel and some fraction of people seem to be sensitive to them, it's a potential problem with any low end DLP)... I can see rainbows if I try, but they haven't bothered any of the 15 or so people who've watched movies on my X1.
The rainbows are an artifact of the single chip DLP system's need for a color wheel. Even "high end" single-chip DLP systems can suffer from them.
The "high end" 3-chip DLP projectors are really expensive -- 10s of $K.
I've seen the rainbow by turning my head and paying attention to my peripheral vision, but I can't really do it reliably. My personal feeling is that DLP looks a little too "digital" compared to some of the LCD offerings, at least in the RPTV arena. We have a DLP projector here at work, I should check it out sometime and see what it does for me.
DVD as a medium could do the following:
1) Increase flagging sales by providing value-add: a "making of.." video and maybe the first music video or something. This would work if they kept pricing the same and would enhance the perceived value of recordings, which is pretty low now.
2) Half-baked DRM/copy inhibition. Yes, I know you can copy a DVD, but it would be much more difficult to a lot of people and would probably buy the industry 2-3 years breathing room before the tools were good enough for easy ripping. There's enough variability in how you can put music on a DVD that it might make ripping really convoluted.
3) Widespread adoption of DVD players. There's so many out there now, it's much easier than trying to push a new, music-only format. The only place they're not widespread is in cars, but its only a matter of time before the same miniaturization that put CDs there makes DVDs in cars trivially inexpensive (if we're not already there now).
The original CD spec put the disc in a caddy, but was dropped as part of the spec. Some of the very early CD ROM drives required a caddy for the CD. Many other optical media formats either have always used caddies or have caddy versions as an option.
The Type II and IV DVD-RAM discs can be removed from their caddies for use in mechanisms that don't accept caddies, and they also sell empty caddies and caddyless discs.
What surprises me is why we CDs are so darn easy to scratch; isn't there a better polymer coating they can put on them that will prevent anything from scratching? I know that anti-scratch technology is pretty good for eyeglasses; I've seen several shops that had demo lenses you could take steel wool to and not damage.
Wow, something I'd never thought I'd see on Slashdot -- shilling for the krauts!
Go get 'em, Werner! Raus! Raus! Mach Schnell!
Q: Why are French roads lined with trees?
A: So the German army can match in the shade!
I'd go for balanced interconnects, but I'd also like to see a single cable with a single connector for both channels, with the capability to optionally carry video as well.
Better yet would be digital connectors (firewire, coax, or even optical) between system components to minimize cable clutter.
I think some Pioneer systems, even at the low end, have a microphone that can be used to optimize surround modes for a specific listening spot. My super-ancient VSX93000S has pretty decent balance controls for its Dolby Pro-Logic which I thought helped as well.
There's two kinds of protection:
One kind is the low-level "Pay me or I wreck shit". In this model, you don't actually get "protection" from anyone else, just the people you paid don't arbitrarily wreck your stuff. If some third party decides to play rough, the people you're paying protection to generally don't care, unless it threatens their protection money (ie, driving a store owner completely out of business).
The more sophisticated kind of protection generally involves paying someone so that you can operate without interference. Generally this involves handing over a percentage of the operations as a tithe or tribute (and in fact among Italian mafia, it is a historical descendent of the practice of conquered peoples paying tributes to Roman officials). In this case, since the payment is generally dependent on the successful completion of whatever the protected activity is, you'd be more likely to get muscle applied in your favor to keep rivals away. But even then there may be extra money associated with hiring muscle, and often it is an artificial ruse used to obtain larger tributes. (In an episode of the Sopranos, Tony uses a black political agitator to get more tribute out of a construction business that is already paying tribute. He then "breaks up" the black's protest and later splits the take with the black's leaders).