Cable infrastucture has huge fixed costs (relative to other costs), meaning only economies of scale can sustainably lower costs
Privatly owned monopolies are unnacceptable - it means hugee prices (MS could sell Windows boxed CDs for $45 are still make above average profits). So govt Telco utility monopolies are the go - if they charge too much the politicians get voted out, plus every dollar in net profit is one less dollar in tax that's needed for hospitals 'n schools, etc.
Take electricity, the only state in Oz that has problems like California's is Victoria, & that's the only state to break up & privatise it's electricity Utility, & it has the most expensive electricity in Oz to.
Here in Oz an employer has to give a months wages for every year worked when a worker's made redundent.
Plus 2 or 3 months paid long service leave that accumelates every 5 years
& any of the 4 or 5 weeks annual paid leave that doesn't get used accumalates every year too (5 weeks for shift workers).
Ontop of which some awards permit the acumelation of unused sickies, which at 15 sickies a year means if one worked somewhere for 10 years, taking just 5 sickies a year, that's 100 days of sickies left. This means that 3 months before redundency they just have to get a doctors certificate for depression or a bad back (no big deal) & 100 days worth of sickie pay gets added to the redundency pay.
So if Corel was in Oz & one had worked there for 10 years & only used 5 sickies a year, one would leave with redundency payout of 10 months pay + accured unused paid sickleave of 100 days (pending sickness certificate - has anyone met a doctor who's refused to write one?) + 2 or 3 months paid long service leave (it depends on the award, plus the 1st 5 years arn't counted) + accured unused annual leave.
Mind you some awards have a 'use it or lose it' setup for sickies & annual leave. But with such jobs employers have to schedule the full 4 or 5 weeks annual leave to you every year. With other awards where you can accumalate what you don't use, you still have to use at least a week of it every year.
So the P4 runs at 2.2ghz when plugged into a powerpoint & 1.1ghz when running of it's battery, that would be about the same speed as a PIII 800mhz.
That's plenty fast, I'd say on 97% of software out there the average user notices buggerall differance between a P111 500mhz & a topline T'bird or P4.
Lets see doing a email there wouldn't be any differance, browsing the web, no differance, downloading MP3s or warez, no difference again, writing a letter no differance, wanking off on ICQ no diifferance agian, etc, etc
Sure using Quake you might get 90fps instead of 150fps, but it's not as if you'd really notice.
Ok on rendering 3D & compiling code things could noticably slow down in battery mood, but it sounds like you need to slow down too, so what's wrong with that?
a "BUILD YOUR OWN $800 G4" how too + parts links
on
Build Your Own PowerPC?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
From what I understand Energizer Lithium AAs are not rechargable.
Does anyone make recharble Li-ion AAs?
I know if you pull a NiMH or NiCd battery pack apart, one useally finds that the battery pack consists of standard NiMH or NiCd recharble 'C', 'A', 'AA' or 'AAA' batteries inside the buggers. So designing the appliance to use some odd shape battery pack was just a way of making extra money selling special appliance specific battery packs that are in reality normal rechargables.
So do Li-ion battery packs, consist of standard size rechargable cells, when pulled apart?
& why arn't Li-ion recharble AA or AAA batteries avaliable?
The simple fact is that Generation X have had it better than any past generation in history, except for the baby boomer generation - the generation of negative unemployment, antibiotics without antibiotic resistence, reasonable housing prices, free Unis (well in Oz anyway), welfare without scrutiny, lifelong employement with long service leave & gold watches, etc, etc.
So what if the baby boomers had it so good, Xers should get some perpective & realise they are still better off than all the other previous generations.
& what's this with complaining about the fact that Xers were able to rort billions out of the community with the Y2K scare campaign & the dot.bomb pyramid schemes? So what that the party's over, they still made billions at the time, doing sweet FA of consequence.
Comes in a tin, & you get a tube of setting/heating agent, which you mix in with it, then you fill up the rusthole with it.
AKA filler.
Mind you with old bombs I prefer doing a quick weld job. Where you just weld a plate in place of the rust & then brushpaint fish-oil over it, then after a day or 2 brushpaint red oxide primer over it. All without even rubbing back/smoothing out the weld ribbing.
You see if you weld it out, the rego inspectors have to OK it no matter how bad it looks. Where as when you bog up rust you have to do a visually perfect job so the rego inspecters don't cotton on.
2, half of them pretend their just some flatmate if a stranger such as a bailife or summons server knocks on the door. It becomes habit through years of not paying traffic fines & getting cought on the train without a ticket.
3, they've got bugger all assets, at most maybe a old unregisted car that's either seeing out its days as a shed in the front yard, or, but for a old coat hanger & some bog, is due to see out its days as a shed in the front yard.
4, you can't garnish their incomes.
I know, I've been sued 3 times, & in each case they just gave up.
Bulletproof vests that stop.357 Magnum bullets is no big a deal.
The problem comes with stopping smaller high velocity rifle ammunition.
A level 3 Kevlar vest won't even stop a 7.62x25mm Mauser/Tokerov pistol round. The standard soviet pistol/sub-machine-gun round from WWII, which is bottlenecked & has a velocity of 1400+fps (the Chech CZ52 loads do 1600fps)
That's why helmets came back into vogue during WWI.
Soldiers spent the vast majority of their time in trenchs where the only danger (bar poisoness gas) came from air-burst explosions & shrapnel being blown in from near misses.
Hence the shape of British helmets with the broadlip all the way round, that gives as perfect protection a helmet could in regards to the danger of airburst & shrapnel wash to a soldier in a trench.
That's why it the US military's obsession with helmets amazes me. It's ridiculous the way their troops in Vietnam, Iraq 'n Afghanistan are virtually always wearing helmets.
Someone ought to tell them that slouch-hats (like the Brits wore in Burma, & the Aussies wore in North Africa & New Guinea) or Bush hats (like the Aussies wore in Vietnam) are much better protection from the elements (shading the face, keeping rain 'n sleet out of the eyes, etc) for jungle, dessert, bush & mountain warfare.
There used to be a 'investigators' program on telly here, & it seemed that every week they'd have some pensioner get ripped off his life savings, buying into a get rich quik scam.
You think when some salesman tells someone about some scheme promising a 30% return every month, that the normal response would be 'well the scheme obviously doesn't work, otherwise why do you need to go arround selling the scheme to others. If it worked you'd be living it up & taking it easy while keep the scheme secret amongst yourselves.' Afterall why would one go arround trying to make money selling schemes if a scheme is so good? wouldn't they be in the scheme instead?
Consequently if someone's so greedy that they let their greed get ahead of their commonsense, & they then buy into a get rich quick scheme, then they deserve being ripped off.
It's simply karma's way of punishing the greedy. So IMAO there should be a clause in consumer protection laws, where if commonsense says a scheme is too good to be true, then there's no consumer protection for the gullible conned by them.
What is it with America's love of voting machines? The vast majority of countries don't use then, including most of the OECD - really the only reason for the US using machines is because they're stupid & vote on Tuesday, not Saturday. Yet they wonder why they have the lowest voter turnout in the world, afterall what percentage of people with minimum wage jobs get paid time off to vote? (the minimum wage is probably the mode average wage in the US, or close to it, as the US has the biggest gap between mode & mean average wages in the Western World,) Plus finding casual labour, for hand counting, & volunteer scrutineers, is much harder on a Tuesday, compared with a Saturday.
But haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& most of the OECD) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good - they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the mess, as well as the fucked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has the lowest voter turnout in the OECD
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
It's extremely rare for results to not be known before the weekend is out (actually results mostly come out on the Saturday night, meaning people can go to election result parties & still be ok for work on Monday)
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Now I bet someone will think 'oh but the US is much bigger than Australia', well my answer is no problem, the US having a nationwide hand paper ballot election would be no different than if Australia the UK, Germany the Netherlands & the Scandinavian countries all voted the same day, IE there's no reason to think it won't scale up fine.
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commision's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't need a chut to glide down out of power failure. Wings are fine in that regard
Really a chut's only needed if the wings break off
Wanker in Spainish
a la Singapore.
Cable infrastucture has huge fixed costs (relative to other costs), meaning only economies of scale can sustainably lower costs
Privatly owned monopolies are unnacceptable - it means hugee prices (MS could sell Windows boxed CDs for $45 are still make above average profits). So govt Telco utility monopolies are the go - if they charge too much the politicians get voted out, plus every dollar in net profit is one less dollar in tax that's needed for hospitals 'n schools, etc.
Take electricity, the only state in Oz that has problems like California's is Victoria, & that's the only state to break up & privatise it's electricity Utility, & it has the most expensive electricity in Oz to.
Yep, the 1st 3GB every month is unlimited, once one passes that 3GB, the rest comes at modem speed.
Well that's how the default Optus plan works, there's also cheaper & more expensive plans with different thresholds.
Just think a tab a day keeps the obsession about 1500 widgets away.
So don't panic.
I'm sure with all the Amiga heads out there, that it would be piss easy to install it on any equilivent POP board.
Who gives a fuck if they're breaking some bloody licence? 99% of computers users don't.
Here in Oz an employer has to give a months wages for every year worked when a worker's made redundent.
Plus 2 or 3 months paid long service leave that accumelates every 5 years
& any of the 4 or 5 weeks annual paid leave that doesn't get used accumalates every year too (5 weeks for shift workers).
Ontop of which some awards permit the acumelation of unused sickies, which at 15 sickies a year means if one worked somewhere for 10 years, taking just 5 sickies a year, that's 100 days of sickies left. This means that 3 months before redundency they just have to get a doctors certificate for depression or a bad back (no big deal) & 100 days worth of sickie pay gets added to the redundency pay.
So if Corel was in Oz & one had worked there for 10 years & only used 5 sickies a year, one would leave with redundency payout of 10 months pay + accured unused paid sickleave of 100 days (pending sickness certificate - has anyone met a doctor who's refused to write one?) + 2 or 3 months paid long service leave (it depends on the award, plus the 1st 5 years arn't counted) + accured unused annual leave.
Mind you some awards have a 'use it or lose it' setup for sickies & annual leave. But with such jobs employers have to schedule the full 4 or 5 weeks annual leave to you every year. With other awards where you can accumalate what you don't use, you still have to use at least a week of it every year.
It's called choice
nt
So the P4 runs at 2.2ghz when plugged into a powerpoint & 1.1ghz when running of it's battery, that would be about the same speed as a PIII 800mhz.
That's plenty fast, I'd say on 97% of software out there the average user notices buggerall differance between a P111 500mhz & a topline T'bird or P4.
Lets see doing a email there wouldn't be any differance, browsing the web, no differance, downloading MP3s or warez, no difference again, writing a letter no differance, wanking off on ICQ no diifferance agian, etc, etc
Sure using Quake you might get 90fps instead of 150fps, but it's not as if you'd really notice.
Ok on rendering 3D & compiling code things could noticably slow down in battery mood, but it sounds like you need to slow down too, so what's wrong with that?
Macopz.com "build a Mac" page
They have links to all the parts suppliers, the parts add up to $800
So it doesn't cost money, while AOLs bulk rate goes up.
From what I understand Energizer Lithium AAs are not rechargable.
Does anyone make recharble Li-ion AAs?
I know if you pull a NiMH or NiCd battery pack apart, one useally finds that the battery pack consists of standard NiMH or NiCd recharble 'C', 'A', 'AA' or 'AAA' batteries inside the buggers. So designing the appliance to use some odd shape battery pack was just a way of making extra money selling special appliance specific battery packs that are in reality normal rechargables.
So do Li-ion battery packs, consist of standard size rechargable cells, when pulled apart?
& why arn't Li-ion recharble AA or AAA batteries avaliable?
Anyone expecting Phantom bidding not to exist in every auction on this planet needs their head read.
It's a fact of like, its normal, you expect. Just don't bid more than you're willing to spend.
Really laws against phantom bidding are like laws against insider trading, they show no basis of reality.
W for Wingers .
The simple fact is that Generation X have had it better than any past generation in history, except for the baby boomer generation - the generation of negative unemployment, antibiotics without antibiotic resistence, reasonable housing prices, free Unis (well in Oz anyway), welfare without scrutiny, lifelong employement with long service leave & gold watches, etc, etc.
So what if the baby boomers had it so good, Xers should get some perpective & realise they are still better off than all the other previous generations.
& what's this with complaining about the fact that Xers were able to rort billions out of the community with the Y2K scare campaign & the dot.bomb pyramid schemes? So what that the party's over, they still made billions at the time, doing sweet FA of consequence.
I've saved your email address, if & when things get up & going, I'll check with you again, in case you change your mind.
Thanks again.
Your banner add, for a satirical website I'm thinking of doing
I'll credit it to you on the contributions page
Comes in a tin, & you get a tube of setting/heating agent, which you mix in with it, then you fill up the rusthole with it.
AKA filler.
Mind you with old bombs I prefer doing a quick weld job. Where you just weld a plate in place of the rust & then brushpaint fish-oil over it, then after a day or 2 brushpaint red oxide primer over it. All without even rubbing back/smoothing out the weld ribbing.
You see if you weld it out, the rego inspectors have to OK it no matter how bad it looks. Where as when you bog up rust you have to do a visually perfect job so the rego inspecters don't cotton on.
Remember it doesn't pay to sue people on welfare.
1, many don't respond to non-personal mail.
2, half of them pretend their just some flatmate if a stranger such as a bailife or summons server knocks on the door. It becomes habit through years of not paying traffic fines & getting cought on the train without a ticket.
3, they've got bugger all assets, at most maybe a old unregisted car that's either seeing out its days as a shed in the front yard, or, but for a old coat hanger & some bog, is due to see out its days as a shed in the front yard.
4, you can't garnish their incomes.
I know, I've been sued 3 times, & in each case they just gave up.
Bulletproof vests that stop .357 Magnum bullets is no big a deal.
The problem comes with stopping smaller high velocity rifle ammunition.
A level 3 Kevlar vest won't even stop a 7.62x25mm Mauser/Tokerov pistol round. The standard soviet pistol/sub-machine-gun round from WWII, which is bottlenecked & has a velocity of 1400+fps (the Chech CZ52 loads do 1600fps)
That's why helmets came back into vogue during WWI.
Soldiers spent the vast majority of their time in trenchs where the only danger (bar poisoness gas) came from air-burst explosions & shrapnel being blown in from near misses.
Hence the shape of British helmets with the broadlip all the way round, that gives as perfect protection a helmet could in regards to the danger of airburst & shrapnel wash to a soldier in a trench.
That's why it the US military's obsession with helmets amazes me. It's ridiculous the way their troops in Vietnam, Iraq 'n Afghanistan are virtually always wearing helmets.
Someone ought to tell them that slouch-hats (like the Brits wore in Burma, & the Aussies wore in North Africa & New Guinea) or Bush hats (like the Aussies wore in Vietnam) are much better protection from the elements (shading the face, keeping rain 'n sleet out of the eyes, etc) for jungle, dessert, bush & mountain warfare.
There used to be a 'investigators' program on telly here, & it seemed that every week they'd have some pensioner get ripped off his life savings, buying into a get rich quik scam.
You think when some salesman tells someone about some scheme promising a 30% return every month, that the normal response would be 'well the scheme obviously doesn't work, otherwise why do you need to go arround selling the scheme to others. If it worked you'd be living it up & taking it easy while keep the scheme secret amongst yourselves.' Afterall why would one go arround trying to make money selling schemes if a scheme is so good? wouldn't they be in the scheme instead?
Consequently if someone's so greedy that they let their greed get ahead of their commonsense, & they then buy into a get rich quick scheme, then they deserve being ripped off.
It's simply karma's way of punishing the greedy. So IMAO there should be a clause in consumer protection laws, where if commonsense says a scheme is too good to be true, then there's no consumer protection for the gullible conned by them.
Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
But haven't you bloody Americans learnt the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stupid.
This means no bloody machines, period !!! If Australia (& most of the OECD) can do hand counted paper ballots, then so can the US.
The only reason they use machine systems in the US is to cut costs, but the simple fact is they arn't as good - they invalidate more votes then hand counts do, they intimidate & confuse a good percentage of voters & they increase the odds of something fuking up (murphy's law)
Look at the mess, as well as the fucked up punch card machines you have counties with lever machines, other with optical machines, toggle switch machines, push button machines & also touch screen systems too. Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginised). The simple fact is that huge numbers of people are intimidated with this complicated mess that's one of the reasons why most Americans don't vote & why the US has the lowest voter turnout in the OECD
Look at all the people that are intimidated by machines & even now still refuse to use Automatic Teller Machines, & there are plenty more people like that then just the illiterate, the elderly & immigrants that have poor 2nd language skills.
Its as if the bureaucracy in the US are on purposefully trying to discourage the masses from voting.
The only way to go is to Keep It Simple Stupid. Which means aiming at the lowest common denominator & designing a system that the stupidist simpleton can understand.
Which means 'X marks the spot' hand ballots.
That means a peice of paper with the candidates listed in a columne & another columne of boxes on the side with just one box next to each candidate.
Here are a couple of examples of 'KISS' paper ballots, the 1st one is an example of an Australian preferential ballot (any Americans who support 3rd parties should be demanding that the US system be made either preferential or proportional, otherwise no 3rd parties will ever make any long term headway), the 2nd ballot is an example of an ''X' marks the spot' ballot.
As far as counting goes the US should be doing what Australia does (& most of the rest of the developed world does similar) & hold the vote on a Saturday (I wonder how many blue collar workers in the US chose not to vote because of the incoveniance of voting on a Tuesday), using local schools as voting centres. Then leasing indoor stadiums & convention centres nationwide which are to be used as counting centres for the thousands of temp workers employed to count the votes. Each counter also has a Labour & conservative scrutineer looking over his/her shoulders.
It's extremely rare for results to not be known before the weekend is out (actually results mostly come out on the Saturday night, meaning people can go to election result parties & still be ok for work on Monday)
Sure its labour intensive, but as any UN election observer will tell you this is the best system if you want high turnouts with low rates of invalid votes & a result that's as accurate as can be, by Monday morning at the latest (actually in the vast majority of elections we know who's won by about 8pm the same night).
Now I bet someone will think 'oh but the US is much bigger than Australia', well my answer is no problem, the US having a nationwide hand paper ballot election would be no different than if Australia the UK, Germany the Netherlands & the Scandinavian countries all voted the same day, IE there's no reason to think it won't scale up fine.
Also all politicians must be removed from any decision making processes as far as the running of elections are concerned, etc.
Look at the way democratic afiliated local officials OKed the hand count iin Palm Beach & then the Republican Florida SoS blocked the hand count (& she was Bush's co-campaign manager, which makes it an even worse conflict of interest). That sort of thing is unheard of in Australia. Where an Independent Australian Electoral Commision administers federal elections & the various state electoral commisions administers state & local elections.
No politians are involved anywhere in the decision making process (except for calling the date of the election). As far as recounts, re-votes, referendums (in Australia politions can't amend the constitution, only the people can through referendums. Where a majority of the total votes & a majority in a majority of states, responds 'yes' to the amendment) & by-elections, etc are concerned only the electoral commision can make decisions regarding them. Although anyone can appeal to the commision's court, for a recount or re vote or something. Whether such appeals are successful is another matter.
Well then don't use them
It's that simple.
Bloody McDonald's coffee spillers.