This is something that I started a long, long, long time ago and it's worked well for me. I have a "Music" directory. In that directory, I have directories 0-9 and a-z. In these, I put the artist by last name. So, if it's Lenny Kravitz, there is a directory (also, I remove all characters that aren't a-z, 0-9, -, _ and replace them with _):/content/music/k/kravitz__lenny
If the album is Circus I make a directory:/content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus
Then to know if it's the complete album or incomplete, I append a '(c)' (complete) or an '(i)' (incomplete) on the end of the album name. So we end up with:/content/music/k/kravitz__lenny/circus(c)
Each track is the song name and playlists for XMMS , WinAMP and XBox Media Center are generated.
Compilations are put in/content/music/c/compilations. Soundtracks go in/content/music/s/soundtrack___theme (Soundtrack & Theme.)
This has served me well for years and I can pretty much find anything in a matter of seconds and I can immediately tell if it's the complete album or not.
The major problem isn't the language, the psychotic religious right being in charge, who are trying to legislate morality.
Isn't any legislation that tries to modify behavior (either encourage or discourage it) trying to legislate morality? When congress created our welfare system, wasn't it to be compassionate to the poor? Sounds like a morality thing to me. And if congress ever creates legislation having the government recognize marriages between a man and a man (or men), a woman and a woman (or women), a man and women, a woman and men, a man and a child (or children), a woman and a child (or children), a man and a family pet (or pets) and a woman and a family pet (or pets) isn't that legislating morality? I suspect that you view those issues as "common sense that any enlightened moron can see" since you agree with them. Yet issues that you don't agree with are somebody's morality being "pushed down your throat".
Pot, kettle, black?
As for the "holy shit" comment on a live CNN broadcast, there is a huge difference between that and an intentional "wardrobe malfunction" that exposes a nipple with a sunburst around it or somebody intentionally saying "Suck my cock you cocksucking motherfucker" as a means of rough-sex foreplay on the next episode of "7th Heaven". IMNSHO, two should be enforced as indecency violations and one should not. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine which...
The Mini comes with a VGA and a DVI cable. IIRC, the video out on the back has both DVI and analog. There is no magic cable that goes from analog to digital AFAIK.
I've got a Dell 2001FP and it has 4 inputs (DVI, D-SUB, S-VIDEO and composite.) Unfortunately the D-SUB connector is already in use, hence my desire for the KVM with DVI capability.
...USB/DVI KVM switch. The cheapest one that I've found is this one. NewEgg has the Belkin model for $133 not including cables (another $32 from NewEgg.) I'd like to get a MacMini, but it's not going to be able to replace my current workstation immediately and as such, I need some kind of KVM. Are there any others out there that are cheaper?
XBMC will play DVDs (at least recent CVS builds will.) Just stick it in and go if you have it set to autoplay. There is no menu support however. I suspect what they are doing is looking at the DVD stucture and playing the largest title.
how else do you verify that a paperless voting system is working properly?
Uh, run a test? Before the election, vote for Kerry 50 times. Vote for Bush 50 times. Tally the results. If it's not 50 and 50, something is jacked up. It doesn't seem to be rocket science to me.
BTW, this is a softmodded XBox so the total cost was $189 for the bunder with the IR dongle. $25 for the memory card. $30 for the S-Video, digital audio XBox out thingy. Borrowed copy of Mech Assault. It boots right into XBMC and uses the standard HD since all of the data is on my server.
So for under $250 I have the most versatile piece of equipment in my entertainment center.
I'll second, third, fifth or whatever this sentiment.
I use Samba on my server to give files to my XBox downstairs.
For music, I have playlists that are generated for XMMS, WinAmp and XBMC stored with all of my music. The only downside of this is that I have about 13,000 tracks in my "jukebox" with the following hierarchy:
first character of artist name
artist
album
tracks
and for some reason the scan on the top level directory is pretty slow. Otherwise it's great.
For movies I either use XVid encoded files, SVCD images or DVD images (yes, XBMC can mount the images directly!:-). Since storage is so cheap lately I've just been using DVDShrink to store uncompressed DVD images of the movie only and watch them via XBMC.
I haven't done any slideshow stuff with it yet. I'm sure it's cool though.
I tied it all into my entertainment center and use my Harmony remote to control it all. The one (very minor) downside is that the XBox needs to be powered on by hand but there are mods to change this behavior out there.
Head on over to 3ware and select the RAID controller you need... I've got a 7506-4LP in my server at home and it simply kicks ass.
OT: The Fair Tax (Was: Re:Sure there is...)
on
No EZ Fix For The IRS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I like the idea of the Fair Tax with the exception of one element -- the rebate. I don't like the idea of the government sending a check every month. By not taxing necessities it would seem to me that it can done without the rebate.
Not me... I'm too busy listening to their new album to come up with anything...
On a serious note, year ago I read Margaret Cheney's book about Nikola Tesla and it was an interesting read. The man was talented, but he sure was a kook. I'll have my TiVo record this program for sure.
I don't really care about all the fancy features, just give me play, stop, fast forward, and the ability to transfer recorded video files off the machine.
Is there such a thing out there with assembly not required? I just can't stand the idea of paying a monthly fee for a relatively simple device masquerading as a service.
Get a Series 1 TiVo off of ebay. Put in a network card and don't subscribe to the TiVo service. You might want to find a 1.3 version of the OS as, IIRC, it doesn't nag you about the lack of service.
Man, I totally skipped that paragraph I guess. Thanks! The whole chad thing was rather dumb to me. The directions said to make sure that the chads were to be removed completely from your ballot. Not exactly rocket science. I always thought that if your vote wasn't clear, it shouldn't be counted. If you couldn't follow some simple directions, then too bad, so sad...
Back around 2000, I bought an old punch card machine. For the life of me, I could not make a dimpled chad no matter how hard I tried by using the machine with one punchcard. The only way that I could do it was with multiple cards... Just one of those things that made me go, "Hmmmm."
The Supreme Court didn't directly vote on who should win the 2000 election, the question they voted 5-4 on was whether Kathrine Harris, a Republican who the Secretary of State of Florida, did her job correctly.
No, the Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with the Secretary of State and her actions, but had everything to do with the Florida Supreme Court and their decision to re-write election law after the election took place. Last I checked, it was the legislature that creates law, not the judiciary...
Also, do you have a reference for any of the media counts that showed Gore won. IIRC, Bush won all the recounts (at least from the two major media recounts.)
I've read other (fringe?) sites that claim Gore won, but come on, do you really think that the major media would pass up the chance to embroil a sitting president in a scandal (think Watergate, Iran Contra, Lewinsky)? Think of the ratings.
I agree that ditching backwards compatability might not be a bad idea, but until suitable momentum is achieved for X-Box Next (or whatever it's going to be callled) the lack of backwards compatability is going to be a perceived strike against it...
You may not have used it, but initially, it was a very important selling point for Sony. The PS1 owners were happy to know that their existing investment was still useable on the new console.
IIRC, the first of Bush's massive tax cuts was passed before Clinton left office.
You don't... The first tax cut bill was signed into law on June 7, 2001. The bulk of the rate reductions aren't even going to be seen until 2006. However, the reduction in the lower tax brackets that year were retroactive to the beginning of the year and that's why you may have been thinking that they were passed before Clinton left office.
After you've got it down once it's old hat after that.
I remember the first time that I did a 'vos move' on an AFS server and the volume moved from one server to the other without any downtime for the users. Talk about an admin's dream!:-)
Because we don't have enough money to pay teachers as it is.
Facts, please? Now, just think. The state education budget is $5 billion in Oregon. In an ideal world, we could take all of that money and give it to teachers. However, in the real world, there is overhead. So, let's assume that 50% of the money goes to administrative overhead. That leaves $2.5 billion for teachers. Assuming I haven't added a zero and an average salary of $60000 (which is high) that would pay for 41,666 teachers. Again, assuming a classroom size of 20 (which in CA is the law for 3rd grade and under if you want certain state funds) that would educate 833,320 children. I don't know ratio school-aged children are in the population, but let's assume 30%. That means we can support a population of 2,499,960 citizens (Oregon has a population of around 3.5 million. That's just with the state money funding education which is FAR less than the county money funding education via property taxes. You say "There isn't enough money in education". I say, "Bullshit!"; In California the average cost per student is around $7000 per year. You mean to tell me that it can't be done for less providing a damn good education? Please...; Just read this if you really want to get pissed off.
The deficit is over $500 Billion AND CLIMBING.
No, the defecit is almost $7 trillion. The budget defecit for 2003 is around $500 billion. I don't disagree that it's way too high. Where do you propose making cuts? I'll start with the federal Department of Education. States can fund their own education (and they do -- the federal money is a drop in the bucket (a little over $50 billion spread across 50 states.)) That saves $53 billion right there. The rest can easily be found in cuts in social programs which is 59% of all federal expenditure (granted Social Security is a huge part of that.) But why is the federal government doing welfare (personal and corporate)? Do you think it can be at all efficient at it. It should be a state/county issue so that monies could be spent more effectively. And those welfare programs should have a sunset date. BTW, the "War on Poverty" that was launched by LBJ, when is that war going to end? There was a 10% poverty rate in the US at that time and guess what, it's about 10% now. So can we declare that war as over and benefit from the "peace dividend" by giving back the monies that would have been spent on that "war" as more tax cuts? Or, hell, pay down the debt with it. I'd prefer the former, but would support that latter. I'd also like a constitutional balanced budget amendment but I don't think it will ever happen...
There is a difference between losing money in the stock market and having those funds looted.
Absolutely. I think all of the bastards that purposely over-valued their companies and hosed investors should live a life with just two pennies to rub together while being Bubba's prison bitch.
C'mon, be honest, you like Bush because you don't understand basic economics.
I don't particularly care for Bush. He's spending way too much money and growing the federal government at way too high a rate for my tastes. But there isn't a viable alternative out there that is going to do better and can win. BTW, I do understand basic economics. I also understand "government economics" where a 3% cut is only 7% growth vs. the 10% growth that was baselined in. I also know what I would do if I were king for a day (as I'm sure you do too.) But the reality of the situation is that congress sees no need to not spend money like it's going out of style (regardless of the party in control, but I do suspect that the current Republican spending binge is in large part to take away all of the Democrat issues -- education, healthcare, etc.)
How about if Bush announces a balanced budget, and sticks to it, that doesn't cut social security or education but does include enough funding for NASA to get to the moon?
Boy, you've got your priorities straight... Save the children and the seniors. Balance the books. But don't cut my pet projects (NASA). Why can't we cut education? There is so much waste there, it's not even funny. And social security... I bet you think there is actually a lock box (or "trust fund".) Bzzt. No such thing. All social security taxes collected go straight into the general fund. Thanks LBJ and the congress of the time for screwing social security.
We have states (OR) that do not have enough money to pay teachers.
According to this, the Oregon State Department of Education budget is $5,782,266,211. That does not include money from counties and municipalities. And they somehow can't afford to pay teachers? I somehow don't think that lack of money is the issue but rather how it is (mis)spent.
We've lost millions of manufacturing jobs.
Our labor costs (thanks to increased national wealth) have priced us out of the manufacturing market. So life goes. If you are intent on having domestic manufacturing, prepare to pay a lot more for everything...
We have a HUGE deficit.
While it's a large dollar amount that I'd love to see lowered, relative to GDP, it's not so bad. During the Carter administration, IIRC, the deficit/GDP ratio was over 6%.
Meanwhile, we still have things like the financial mess that is taking BILLIONS of dollars out of people's retirement funds.
First off, nobody has ever been guaranteed a profit investing in the stock market. The fact of the matter is, Ray Charles could have made money in the late 90's by simply pointing at the business page of the paper to pick his stocks. The market was way overvalued and investors were all too happy to pour money into it. It's no suprise that many companies fudged their books to get better valuations which turned into more investor activity. On a personal note, my 401K is kicking ass and has been for the last year, thank you...
C'mon, be honest, you hate Bush because all the other "cool" liberals do.
Slashdot Mirror
If the album is Circus I make a directory:
Then to know if it's the complete album or incomplete, I append a '(c)' (complete) or an '(i)' (incomplete) on the end of the album name. So we end up with:
Each track is the song name and playlists for XMMS , WinAMP and XBox Media Center are generated.
When all is said and done, I've got:
Compilations are put in
This has served me well for years and I can pretty much find anything in a matter of seconds and I can immediately tell if it's the complete album or not.
Isn't any legislation that tries to modify behavior (either encourage or discourage it) trying to legislate morality? When congress created our welfare system, wasn't it to be compassionate to the poor? Sounds like a morality thing to me. And if congress ever creates legislation having the government recognize marriages between a man and a man (or men), a woman and a woman (or women), a man and women, a woman and men, a man and a child (or children), a woman and a child (or children), a man and a family pet (or pets) and a woman and a family pet (or pets) isn't that legislating morality? I suspect that you view those issues as "common sense that any enlightened moron can see" since you agree with them. Yet issues that you don't agree with are somebody's morality being "pushed down your throat". Pot, kettle, black?
As for the "holy shit" comment on a live CNN broadcast, there is a huge difference between that and an intentional "wardrobe malfunction" that exposes a nipple with a sunburst around it or somebody intentionally saying "Suck my cock you cocksucking motherfucker" as a means of rough-sex foreplay on the next episode of "7th Heaven". IMNSHO, two should be enforced as indecency violations and one should not. It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine which...
Yeah, sorry about that. What you responded to was below my post score threshold so I assume you were referring to my post...
The Mini comes with a VGA and a DVI cable. IIRC, the video out on the back has both DVI and analog. There is no magic cable that goes from analog to digital AFAIK.
I've got a Dell 2001FP and it has 4 inputs (DVI, D-SUB, S-VIDEO and composite.) Unfortunately the D-SUB connector is already in use, hence my desire for the KVM with DVI capability.
That's a great idea. I wasn't aware of that functionality either. Thanks!
Strange... From the connector diagram they look like DVI connectors to me.
...USB/DVI KVM switch. The cheapest one that I've found is this one. NewEgg has the Belkin model for $133 not including cables (another $32 from NewEgg.) I'd like to get a MacMini, but it's not going to be able to replace my current workstation immediately and as such, I need some kind of KVM. Are there any others out there that are cheaper?
XBMC will play DVDs (at least recent CVS builds will.) Just stick it in and go if you have it set to autoplay. There is no menu support however. I suspect what they are doing is looking at the DVD stucture and playing the largest title.
Uh, run a test? Before the election, vote for Kerry 50 times. Vote for Bush 50 times. Tally the results. If it's not 50 and 50, something is jacked up. It doesn't seem to be rocket science to me.
So for under $250 I have the most versatile piece of equipment in my entertainment center.
Pat
I use Samba on my server to give files to my XBox downstairs.
For music, I have playlists that are generated for XMMS, WinAmp and XBMC stored with all of my music. The only downside of this is that I have about 13,000 tracks in my "jukebox" with the following hierarchy:
first character of artist name
and for some reason the scan on the top level directory is pretty slow. Otherwise it's great.
For movies I either use XVid encoded files, SVCD images or DVD images (yes, XBMC can mount the images directly! :-). Since storage is so cheap lately I've just been using DVDShrink to store uncompressed DVD images of the movie only and watch them via XBMC.
I haven't done any slideshow stuff with it yet. I'm sure it's cool though.
I tied it all into my entertainment center and use my Harmony remote to control it all. The one (very minor) downside is that the XBox needs to be powered on by hand but there are mods to change this behavior out there.
Pat
Head on over to 3ware and select the RAID controller you need... I've got a 7506-4LP in my server at home and it simply kicks ass.
I like the idea of the Fair Tax with the exception of one element -- the rebate. I don't like the idea of the government sending a check every month. By not taxing necessities it would seem to me that it can done without the rebate.
On a serious note, year ago I read Margaret Cheney's book about Nikola Tesla and it was an interesting read. The man was talented, but he sure was a kook. I'll have my TiVo record this program for sure.
Is there such a thing out there with assembly not required? I just can't stand the idea of paying a monthly fee for a relatively simple device masquerading as a service.
Get a Series 1 TiVo off of ebay. Put in a network card and don't subscribe to the TiVo service. You might want to find a 1.3 version of the OS as, IIRC, it doesn't nag you about the lack of service.
This is a test of Fedora Core 2. Gnome 2.6 should be out when FC2 final ships.
Back around 2000, I bought an old punch card machine. For the life of me, I could not make a dimpled chad no matter how hard I tried by using the machine with one punchcard. The only way that I could do it was with multiple cards... Just one of those things that made me go, "Hmmmm."
No, the Supreme Court decision had nothing to do with the Secretary of State and her actions, but had everything to do with the Florida Supreme Court and their decision to re-write election law after the election took place. Last I checked, it was the legislature that creates law, not the judiciary...
Also, do you have a reference for any of the media counts that showed Gore won. IIRC, Bush won all the recounts (at least from the two major media recounts.)
NY Times
CNN
I've read other (fringe?) sites that claim Gore won, but come on, do you really think that the major media would pass up the chance to embroil a sitting president in a scandal (think Watergate, Iran Contra, Lewinsky)? Think of the ratings.
I agree that ditching backwards compatability might not be a bad idea, but until suitable momentum is achieved for X-Box Next (or whatever it's going to be callled) the lack of backwards compatability is going to be a perceived strike against it...
You may not have used it, but initially, it was a very important selling point for Sony. The PS1 owners were happy to know that their existing investment was still useable on the new console.
You don't... The first tax cut bill was signed into law on June 7, 2001. The bulk of the rate reductions aren't even going to be seen until 2006. However, the reduction in the lower tax brackets that year were retroactive to the beginning of the year and that's why you may have been thinking that they were passed before Clinton left office.
I remember the first time that I did a 'vos move' on an AFS server and the volume moved from one server to the other without any downtime for the users. Talk about an admin's dream! :-)
Facts, please? Now, just think. The state education budget is $5 billion in Oregon. In an ideal world, we could take all of that money and give it to teachers. However, in the real world, there is overhead. So, let's assume that 50% of the money goes to administrative overhead. That leaves $2.5 billion for teachers. Assuming I haven't added a zero and an average salary of $60000 (which is high) that would pay for 41,666 teachers. Again, assuming a classroom size of 20 (which in CA is the law for 3rd grade and under if you want certain state funds) that would educate 833,320 children. I don't know ratio school-aged children are in the population, but let's assume 30%. That means we can support a population of 2,499,960 citizens (Oregon has a population of around 3.5 million. That's just with the state money funding education which is FAR less than the county money funding education via property taxes. You say "There isn't enough money in education". I say, "Bullshit!"; In California the average cost per student is around $7000 per year. You mean to tell me that it can't be done for less providing a damn good education? Please...; Just read this if you really want to get pissed off.
The deficit is over $500 Billion AND CLIMBING.
No, the defecit is almost $7 trillion. The budget defecit for 2003 is around $500 billion. I don't disagree that it's way too high. Where do you propose making cuts? I'll start with the federal Department of Education. States can fund their own education (and they do -- the federal money is a drop in the bucket (a little over $50 billion spread across 50 states.)) That saves $53 billion right there. The rest can easily be found in cuts in social programs which is 59% of all federal expenditure (granted Social Security is a huge part of that.) But why is the federal government doing welfare (personal and corporate)? Do you think it can be at all efficient at it. It should be a state/county issue so that monies could be spent more effectively. And those welfare programs should have a sunset date. BTW, the "War on Poverty" that was launched by LBJ, when is that war going to end? There was a 10% poverty rate in the US at that time and guess what, it's about 10% now. So can we declare that war as over and benefit from the "peace dividend" by giving back the monies that would have been spent on that "war" as more tax cuts? Or, hell, pay down the debt with it. I'd prefer the former, but would support that latter. I'd also like a constitutional balanced budget amendment but I don't think it will ever happen...
There is a difference between losing money in the stock market and having those funds looted.
Absolutely. I think all of the bastards that purposely over-valued their companies and hosed investors should live a life with just two pennies to rub together while being Bubba's prison bitch.
C'mon, be honest, you like Bush because you don't understand basic economics.
I don't particularly care for Bush. He's spending way too much money and growing the federal government at way too high a rate for my tastes. But there isn't a viable alternative out there that is going to do better and can win. BTW, I do understand basic economics. I also understand "government economics" where a 3% cut is only 7% growth vs. the 10% growth that was baselined in. I also know what I would do if I were king for a day (as I'm sure you do too.) But the reality of the situation is that congress sees no need to not spend money like it's going out of style (regardless of the party in control, but I do suspect that the current Republican spending binge is in large part to take away all of the Democrat issues -- education, healthcare, etc.)
BTW, you migh
Boy, you've got your priorities straight... Save the children and the seniors. Balance the books. But don't cut my pet projects (NASA). Why can't we cut education? There is so much waste there, it's not even funny. And social security... I bet you think there is actually a lock box (or "trust fund".) Bzzt. No such thing. All social security taxes collected go straight into the general fund. Thanks LBJ and the congress of the time for screwing social security.
We have states (OR) that do not have enough money to pay teachers.
According to this, the Oregon State Department of Education budget is $5,782,266,211. That does not include money from counties and municipalities. And they somehow can't afford to pay teachers? I somehow don't think that lack of money is the issue but rather how it is (mis)spent.
We've lost millions of manufacturing jobs.
Our labor costs (thanks to increased national wealth) have priced us out of the manufacturing market. So life goes. If you are intent on having domestic manufacturing, prepare to pay a lot more for everything...
We have a HUGE deficit.
While it's a large dollar amount that I'd love to see lowered, relative to GDP, it's not so bad. During the Carter administration, IIRC, the deficit/GDP ratio was over 6%.
Meanwhile, we still have things like the financial mess that is taking BILLIONS of dollars out of people's retirement funds.
First off, nobody has ever been guaranteed a profit investing in the stock market. The fact of the matter is, Ray Charles could have made money in the late 90's by simply pointing at the business page of the paper to pick his stocks. The market was way overvalued and investors were all too happy to pour money into it. It's no suprise that many companies fudged their books to get better valuations which turned into more investor activity. On a personal note, my 401K is kicking ass and has been for the last year, thank you...
C'mon, be honest, you hate Bush because all the other "cool" liberals do.