>When organizations try to protest a group (whether it is a genetic engineering conference, world bank meeting) or individuals (abortion clinic patients) from engaging in their rights by preventing their freedoms, it does not serve the public interests or help anyone's personal liberties.
I'm guessing you aren't a big union supporter, then, are you?
I mean, it isn't fair for a union to protest unfair labour practices by preventing people who want to exercise their right to work as a scab from entering the building.
Fortunately, because your way isn't how things run, my dad can go to work in a factory without getting burned daily anymore.
Freedom of speech, assuming it's truth or stated opinion, is absolute, and should not be subject to any other laws whatsoever [although I'm sure you could come up with some kind of extreme example -- but the one you just used doesn't work, sorry]
>The speaker is wired such that if you so much as open the case, it will refuse to authenticate further. Ball's in your court. What do you do now?
Don't open the case?;-)
Tear the cone off the speaker and you've got access again (this time to the direct wires that will control the driver, which have to carry analog signals). Considering this happens all to often for people who can't seem to hear distortion, they wouldn't have the stereo de-authenticate it over that...
>If I remember right though, doesn't Canada charge some amount on CD-Rs no mater how they are labeled? (I seem to remember that from somewhere, probably on/.).
Yes, it's 21 cents. Most Canadians despise it, if asked, but at least we are legally allowed to go to a friends house and copy their entire library now. Not to mention the next time a pirate audio case comes up, I'm sure the "excuse" will be that the CD-R tax already paid for the music, so no dice.
The funny thing is I bought a 100-pack of CD-Rs a few months ago for $22... I really doubt the store only got $1 profit on them.:-)
>What if a copy protection scheme requires trusted speakers?
Cut the wires, solder an 8 Ohm 10 watt resistor in parallel to (insert favourite lo-Z audio connector here), turn the stereo down, and feed it to line in on a good soundcard.
Make sure it's a top-notch class A stereo, and no real worries about quality loss.
And if you have a small bit of pocket change, look for the "Expert Fonts" 1001 font CD (or 200 font diskette sets). If you can find one in a bargin bin, it should cost about $1, considering its age. Fortunately, all the fonts are TrueType. It helped me do some basic DTP for pocket change when I was in high school!
Because, hey, information like this wants to be free, especially in lots of different fonts.
>The extension of H-1B visas will particularly benefit the IT sector. This is good news for Indian H-1B visa holders, as nearly 50% of them are working in the high-tech sector.
Thanks for the tip. I think you'll find it's also a benefit for the rest of the United States. Ssshh (don't let the Canadians know I told you this): Immigration is a very good thing for a country.
>It's a good thing the art dept doesn't do people a disservice by teaching it.
Yup, because artists never come up with new ideas, ways of thinking, and ways of doing things when they're presented with an alternate tool, rather than using the same ones they'd been using for their entire life.
It's not like I'd suggest they spend a lot of time using CorelDraw. But I think it deserves a week or two of them experiencing it. Who knows! Some of them might enjoy it. The rest of them would be happy to have experienced whatever the art community thinks is bad with the software.
This isn't much different from how we learned Cobol and RPG in programming. By teaching us those tools, we learned how good the new ones were. Not to mention the experience is something that employers will appreciate, even if it is useless to them.
>Just look at the box of CorelDraw. Some crappy balloon with a rainbow on it. It just screams I'm a Amateur Clipart Jockey Who Likes Unicorns and Mirror Effects and CareBears LaLaLaLaLa. Completely unprofessional to reflect the userbase -- That's Corel marketing for ya.
Yeah, that's why I didn't read all those boring English books in high school. They made us use generic books with boring covers that were either plain green or had a shoddily drawn glued-on picture of the bard on them. That's shakespeare for you! Totally unprofessional and not even worth opening to read. That cover taught me everything I needed to learn in English, like "always judge a book by its cover".
>It's 20% of your gasoline budget, it's 20% less smog on the road. And remember that hybrid cars won't necessarily be replacing just economy cars, they'll be replacing older gas guzzlers as well. Frankly, i think a 20% savings *IS* relavent in the big picture.
Yes, but the cars are relatively unproven, and having experienced a long-lasting Toyota Corolla before, I didn't want to take the risk for such a small margin.
>The best solution is to lobby for legislative action, and eventually, lawsuits.
Yeah, but the problem is for every action, there's an unequal and opposite reaction (witness Alberta, a province heavy on natural resource use, acting like a chicken with it's head cut off over the Kyoto protocol).
>Potato cannons and giant 40ft. tv towers, two of the things you mentioned, don't strike me as hallmarks of an "intelligent lifestyle". *I* live in a city and I have DSS (don't need threee dishes I have a quad lnb) and I used to have an 8ft C band dish on the roof. I'm assuming you need the 40ft mast for reception, which wouldn't even be an issue if you weren't out in the sticks.
Okay, okay. Here's the problem which you (fortunately) don't experience in the US. In Canada, broadcast media is censured for non-Canadian content. I'm a bit less xenophobic than your average Canadian, so a 40 ft. TV tower, C-band dish, and those 3 DSS dishes ('till they outlawed those) get me non-Canadian TV.
Not to mention you have no hope of playing in the fun-but-pointless DXing game without a TV tower of some sort.
Without the 40 ft. tower, I can get pretty much all the locals on rabbit ears. But I just don't enjoy that type of xenophobic education. I know it's hard to believe Canada censures like that, so here's a fewwaysit's done. Oh, and swearing is so illegal the CRTC can, will, and has kicked people off the air for it, and fined stations for it. I won't even go into how the CRTC is accused of stealing C-Band dishes from Canadians that want a choice, or (shudder) how they told a local Nazi (yes, I do hate him... but saying that should have put me in jail, no? Fun how the laws are just one way) his website will be dismantled and destroyed should he choose to operate it in Canada. (I will make a journal entry about this one day... the world really needs to know broadcasting in Canada is goverened by a gestappo).
As a techno radio DJ I can assure you it's true, it seriously pisses me off that I can't play good music since I have to spend my time looking for (in general, really poor and unavailable, but there are gems) "canadian" techno. My 2 hour show basically shrunk to a 1 hour show + 1 hour weekly Canadian repeat once the station told me to follow the rules "or else".
Besides, while you seem to think it isn't "intelligence", this extra learning has provided me with a handsome second income (until mid-way through this year) installing satellites for people. I guess it's on to modchips now... At least I can use my soldering skills again!
>Eventually, ALL metro area will look like LA. Is that what you want?
YES! Again, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. Mennonites designed this town, causing main streets to meet up to three times. I'd go for straight roads _any_ day.
>What is so bad about urban living (we're not talking coffins or archologies here, we're talking about an apartment) that you'd rather DIE than live there?
Simple. Like I've said, I won't be force fed Canadian content. Not to mention I simply enjoy being able to do my hobbies.
What would you think if someone decided to take away everything you enjoy to save some trees and told you to live in a box? Would you feel that being forced in that manner is no different that being put in jail? There's a lot of people who'd rather die than be put in prison for the rest of their life.
>You live in Canada where urban crime is practically non-existent.
No, it's very much here. The difference is the "fear factor" is lower because you can trust no one will be pulling a gun on you (please, I don't need to talk about guns again......) so people walk about ignoring it. Which, to a certain degree is unfortunate, since it makes them easy targets. But, then again, minus the guns they usually don't die. Which, again, means the crime doesn't make the front page, yada yada yada.
Anyways, time for me to stop my "gassing" on this.;-)
Seriously, I _love_ Corel's software, but there's no way to convince these people in "the industry" to move away from Adobe.
Case in point: Last conversation I had with a graphics arts teacher I mentioned that I thought CorelDraw was an awesome DTP program, and wondered why not a single machine there has a copy of it (this all stemmed from a problem of people at the College receiving CorelDraw 9.0 files but the College not having anything more recent than CorelDraw 3.0). Her answer? A flat out "Nobody in the art industry anwhere uses CorelAnything whatsoever for anything".
Well, la-di-da, with that attitude, you guys never will use it, either. That still doesn't stop the Student Association from receiving many various CorelDraw files when they fill up the ad section of the student calendar.
You know... I think I just realised something. When I have that "M$ is garbage" attitude, I make users who actually find Microsoft's software decent feel just like that. Like "maybe the reason you don't like xyz is because zyx is just too EASY for you!".
>First off, a "right" is not what someone does for you. A "right" is what the government can not do to you.
Okay.
What is the proper name for the poster at work titled "Your rights as an employee in Ontario" (or something to that effect -- I know "rights" is in there) that, in part, explains must be paid for statutory holidays, even though I'm sitting on my butt at home watching TV?
Why is the slimmest update (not even a complete download) for internet explorer 6 10 MB compressed, then?
Please don't say it's because it comes with lots of extras -- I just said that's the slimmest download Microsoft offers for IE. Unless Microsoft is lying (I guess that's nothing unusual).
I suppose you could say they load almost none of that into memory, but that just doesn't seem to be Microsoft style.
>I created an APP in VB and called the IE control. Total RAM used by the IE Control: 1.5 meg. It jumps up to 7 meg when I send it to Slashdot.
Dynamically linked memory usage is 1.5 MB... A lot of the memory not shown but used by that IE instance is probably coming out of the preloaded IE dlls. Unless, that is, windows task manager includes dynamically linked items. In which case I refer you to my query as to why IE 6 is 10 MB...
>Now, I just fired up Mozilla. It's eating up a whole 20 megs and I haven't done anything or gone anywhere yet.
Well, I never said Mozilla was light. In fact, I thought I had inferred it was bloated, considering I don't reccomend running it on a low memory windows system.
>So no: IE is not eating up that much memory. It's called quickly because MS made the control that does the browsing stuff come up quickly. They needed it to because if Explorer worked like Mozilla or Netscape did, moving files around on your computer would be painful.
Sounds to me its like Internet Explorer is using all sorts of other regular explorer controls to do it's dirty work. I think it's unfair not to add that into the mix, especially considering there are functional explorer replacements.
>Consider this: Calling IE doesn't call up a mail app or news reading app. That's one of the reasons it's slimmer.
Yup, and neither does Mozilla if you install it that way...
Perhaps why I'm having a hard time believing this "IE is only 1.5 MB" idea is because the 16 MB machines at the college (oh God I don't know why they're still in use either) choke on IE 6 constantly, but don't choke on IE 3. A 1.5 MB app should fit in there nicely though!
>I'm not running at 256 megs of ram. I'm running at 128. Frankly, I don't think 2-3 megs are going to significantly improve my browsing experience. It would, however, severely impact my file operations in Windows. It'd also cause Outlook to bloat up a bit so it could interpret it's own HTML.
Frankly, I think you're Shirley wrong. 2-3 MB might have been right for IE 1.0, not today though.
My task manager on this machine says IE weighs in at 22 MB. Explorer (part of IE) weighs in at 14 MB.
That's 36 MB, and I have my IE installed pretty lean. Heck, there's probably other related processes, but I'm (fortuantely) not an IE expert.
>Why do you need to remove IE to use another browser?
Oh... that one isn't so hard.
If you don't have 256 MB of RAM, but you like to have your favourite browser loaded into memory 24x7 so it pops up as fast as IE, you'd need IE removed to free the (many) megabytes of RAM it wastes.
i-O displays will sell you an HMD with XGA resoltion for between $1k and $2k (IIRC -- they don't have this model for sale right now). They have an SVGA unit for under $700 right now, if you don't need the resolution.
>On a related note I had a firewall whose case was live with 120V AC. Even touching the table near the computer was enough to feel a tingle.
Was it hooked up to a UPS?
Cheap UPSes with dead batteries often put a "buzz" on the case. Dumb, and for the life of me I can't figure out why CSA approves them, but I've had more than one do this, and I've concurred this with other people.
Either that or your Power Supply cable is wired in reverse with a broken/poor ground connection.
The system will (likely) run fine forever. Just don't use 10 base-2, RS-232 or anything else that requires a ground between that machine and another...
Slashdot Mirror
>When organizations try to protest a group (whether it is a genetic engineering conference, world bank meeting) or individuals (abortion clinic patients) from engaging in their rights by preventing their freedoms, it does not serve the public interests or help anyone's personal liberties.
I'm guessing you aren't a big union supporter, then, are you?
I mean, it isn't fair for a union to protest unfair labour practices by preventing people who want to exercise their right to work as a scab from entering the building.
Fortunately, because your way isn't how things run, my dad can go to work in a factory without getting burned daily anymore.
Freedom of speech, assuming it's truth or stated opinion, is absolute, and should not be subject to any other laws whatsoever [although I'm sure you could come up with some kind of extreme example -- but the one you just used doesn't work, sorry]
>The speaker is wired such that if you so much as open the case, it will refuse to authenticate further. Ball's in your court. What do you do now?
;-)
Don't open the case?
Tear the cone off the speaker and you've got access again (this time to the direct wires that will control the driver, which have to carry analog signals). Considering this happens all to often for people who can't seem to hear distortion, they wouldn't have the stereo de-authenticate it over that...
>If I remember right though, doesn't Canada charge some amount on CD-Rs no mater how they are labeled? (I seem to remember that from somewhere, probably on /.).
:-)
Yes, it's 21 cents. Most Canadians despise it, if asked, but at least we are legally allowed to go to a friends house and copy their entire library now. Not to mention the next time a pirate audio case comes up, I'm sure the "excuse" will be that the CD-R tax already paid for the music, so no dice.
The funny thing is I bought a 100-pack of CD-Rs a few months ago for $22... I really doubt the store only got $1 profit on them.
>What if a copy protection scheme requires trusted speakers?
Cut the wires, solder an 8 Ohm 10 watt resistor in parallel to (insert favourite lo-Z audio connector here), turn the stereo down, and feed it to line in on a good soundcard.
Make sure it's a top-notch class A stereo, and no real worries about quality loss.
>and no, I'm not going to cite sources
I will!
Here's another one
Enjoy!
And if you have a small bit of pocket change, look for the "Expert Fonts" 1001 font CD (or 200 font diskette sets). If you can find one in a bargin bin, it should cost about $1, considering its age. Fortunately, all the fonts are TrueType. It helped me do some basic DTP for pocket change when I was in high school!
Because, hey, information like this wants to be free, especially in lots of different fonts.
>Thieves simply cut a chunk out of the wheel and remove the club.
Awesome idea alert:
New model of club: The wheel club. Covers the entire steering wheel with hardened steel...
I should have patented that before I said it, shouldn't I?
>We are a tolerant people
>I would suggest that you leave the country for good, as you are not welcome here.
Dude, if you're going to troll, at least try to be consistent in the same paragraph!
>Perhaps I'm mistaken, but isn't Cartoon Network starting a channel called Boomerang that shows all the old classics?
This started at least a year ago... And pretty much his list is exactly what's on it.
>Only if the immigrants become loyal to their new country instead of remaining loyal to their old one.
You mean they can't be both?
>The extension of H-1B visas will particularly benefit the IT sector. This is good news for Indian H-1B visa holders, as nearly 50% of them are working in the high-tech sector.
Thanks for the tip. I think you'll find it's also a benefit for the rest of the United States. Ssshh (don't let the Canadians know I told you this): Immigration is a very good thing for a country.
>It's a good thing the art dept doesn't do people a disservice by teaching it.
Yup, because artists never come up with new ideas, ways of thinking, and ways of doing things when they're presented with an alternate tool, rather than using the same ones they'd been using for their entire life.
It's not like I'd suggest they spend a lot of time using CorelDraw. But I think it deserves a week or two of them experiencing it. Who knows! Some of them might enjoy it. The rest of them would be happy to have experienced whatever the art community thinks is bad with the software.
This isn't much different from how we learned Cobol and RPG in programming. By teaching us those tools, we learned how good the new ones were. Not to mention the experience is something that employers will appreciate, even if it is useless to them.
>Just look at the box of CorelDraw. Some crappy balloon with a rainbow on it. It just screams I'm a Amateur Clipart Jockey Who Likes Unicorns and Mirror Effects and CareBears LaLaLaLaLa. Completely unprofessional to reflect the userbase -- That's Corel marketing for ya.
Yeah, that's why I didn't read all those boring English books in high school. They made us use generic books with boring covers that were either plain green or had a shoddily drawn glued-on picture of the bard on them. That's shakespeare for you! Totally unprofessional and not even worth opening to read. That cover taught me everything I needed to learn in English, like "always judge a book by its cover".
>It's 20% of your gasoline budget, it's 20% less smog on the road. And remember that hybrid cars won't necessarily be replacing just economy cars, they'll be replacing older gas guzzlers as well. Frankly, i think a 20% savings *IS* relavent in the big picture.
;-)
Yes, but the cars are relatively unproven, and having experienced a long-lasting Toyota Corolla before, I didn't want to take the risk for such a small margin.
>The best solution is to lobby for legislative action, and eventually, lawsuits.
Yeah, but the problem is for every action, there's an unequal and opposite reaction (witness Alberta, a province heavy on natural resource use, acting like a chicken with it's head cut off over the Kyoto protocol).
>Potato cannons and giant 40ft. tv towers, two of the things you mentioned, don't strike me as hallmarks of an "intelligent lifestyle". *I* live in a city and I have DSS (don't need threee dishes I have a quad lnb) and I used to have an 8ft C band dish on the roof. I'm assuming you need the 40ft mast for reception, which wouldn't even be an issue if you weren't out in the sticks.
Okay, okay. Here's the problem which you (fortunately) don't experience in the US. In Canada, broadcast media is censured for non-Canadian content. I'm a bit less xenophobic than your average Canadian, so a 40 ft. TV tower, C-band dish, and those 3 DSS dishes ('till they outlawed those) get me non-Canadian TV.
Not to mention you have no hope of playing in the fun-but-pointless DXing game without a TV tower of some sort.
Without the 40 ft. tower, I can get pretty much all the locals on rabbit ears. But I just don't enjoy that type of xenophobic education. I know it's hard to believe Canada censures like that, so here's a few ways it's done. Oh, and swearing is so illegal the CRTC can, will, and has kicked people off the air for it, and fined stations for it. I won't even go into how the CRTC is accused of stealing C-Band dishes from Canadians that want a choice, or (shudder) how they told a local Nazi (yes, I do hate him... but saying that should have put me in jail, no? Fun how the laws are just one way) his website will be dismantled and destroyed should he choose to operate it in Canada. (I will make a journal entry about this one day... the world really needs to know broadcasting in Canada is goverened by a gestappo).
As a techno radio DJ I can assure you it's true, it seriously pisses me off that I can't play good music since I have to spend my time looking for (in general, really poor and unavailable, but there are gems) "canadian" techno. My 2 hour show basically shrunk to a 1 hour show + 1 hour weekly Canadian repeat once the station told me to follow the rules "or else".
Besides, while you seem to think it isn't "intelligence", this extra learning has provided me with a handsome second income (until mid-way through this year) installing satellites for people. I guess it's on to modchips now... At least I can use my soldering skills again!
>Eventually, ALL metro area will look like LA. Is that what you want?
YES! Again, what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander. Mennonites designed this town, causing main streets to meet up to three times. I'd go for straight roads _any_ day.
>What is so bad about urban living (we're not talking coffins or archologies here, we're talking about an apartment) that you'd rather DIE than live there?
Simple. Like I've said, I won't be force fed Canadian content. Not to mention I simply enjoy being able to do my hobbies.
What would you think if someone decided to take away everything you enjoy to save some trees and told you to live in a box? Would you feel that being forced in that manner is no different that being put in jail? There's a lot of people who'd rather die than be put in prison for the rest of their life.
>You live in Canada where urban crime is practically non-existent.
No, it's very much here. The difference is the "fear factor" is lower because you can trust no one will be pulling a gun on you (please, I don't need to talk about guns again......) so people walk about ignoring it. Which, to a certain degree is unfortunate, since it makes them easy targets. But, then again, minus the guns they usually don't die. Which, again, means the crime doesn't make the front page, yada yada yada.
Anyways, time for me to stop my "gassing" on this.
Seriously, I _love_ Corel's software, but there's no way to convince these people in "the industry" to move away from Adobe.
Case in point: Last conversation I had with a graphics arts teacher I mentioned that I thought CorelDraw was an awesome DTP program, and wondered why not a single machine there has a copy of it (this all stemmed from a problem of people at the College receiving CorelDraw 9.0 files but the College not having anything more recent than CorelDraw 3.0). Her answer? A flat out "Nobody in the art industry anwhere uses CorelAnything whatsoever for anything".
Well, la-di-da, with that attitude, you guys never will use it, either. That still doesn't stop the Student Association from receiving many various CorelDraw files when they fill up the ad section of the student calendar.
You know... I think I just realised something. When I have that "M$ is garbage" attitude, I make users who actually find Microsoft's software decent feel just like that. Like "maybe the reason you don't like xyz is because zyx is just too EASY for you!".
Bummer. Now I feel sad. Strong sad.
>First off, a "right" is not what someone does for you. A "right" is what the government can not do to you.
Okay.
What is the proper name for the poster at work titled "Your rights as an employee in Ontario" (or something to that effect -- I know "rights" is in there) that, in part, explains must be paid for statutory holidays, even though I'm sitting on my butt at home watching TV?
Not a nitpick, just a valid question.
>Teachers are often middle-class left-wing, wherever they teach.
You just described 99% of Canadians (at least by the American perspective).
>Paid stories?
Maybe he got that (mistaken) idea from this?
Related Links
Ad: PriceCompare
Just a thought...
>Brands don't mean crap.
Because, hey, the only Lada that sucks is all of them.
>Total RAM used by the IE Control: 1.5 meg.
That's interesting.
Why is the slimmest update (not even a complete download) for internet explorer 6 10 MB compressed, then?
Please don't say it's because it comes with lots of extras -- I just said that's the slimmest download Microsoft offers for IE. Unless Microsoft is lying (I guess that's nothing unusual).
I suppose you could say they load almost none of that into memory, but that just doesn't seem to be Microsoft style.
>I created an APP in VB and called the IE control. Total RAM used by the IE Control: 1.5 meg. It jumps up to 7 meg when I send it to Slashdot.
Dynamically linked memory usage is 1.5 MB... A lot of the memory not shown but used by that IE instance is probably coming out of the preloaded IE dlls. Unless, that is, windows task manager includes dynamically linked items. In which case I refer you to my query as to why IE 6 is 10 MB...
>Now, I just fired up Mozilla. It's eating up a whole 20 megs and I haven't done anything or gone anywhere yet.
Well, I never said Mozilla was light. In fact, I thought I had inferred it was bloated, considering I don't reccomend running it on a low memory windows system.
>So no: IE is not eating up that much memory. It's called quickly because MS made the control that does the browsing stuff come up quickly. They needed it to because if Explorer worked like Mozilla or Netscape did, moving files around on your computer would be painful.
Sounds to me its like Internet Explorer is using all sorts of other regular explorer controls to do it's dirty work. I think it's unfair not to add that into the mix, especially considering there are functional explorer replacements.
>Consider this: Calling IE doesn't call up a mail app or news reading app. That's one of the reasons it's slimmer.
Yup, and neither does Mozilla if you install it that way...
Perhaps why I'm having a hard time believing this "IE is only 1.5 MB" idea is because the 16 MB machines at the college (oh God I don't know why they're still in use either) choke on IE 6 constantly, but don't choke on IE 3. A 1.5 MB app should fit in there nicely though!
>At least we had the good sense not to name a company "Fokker."
:-)
Sure, but what about this? At least you tried...
But this, I don't understand at all. Especially the one in Staines, UK (near the bottom).
(Not to moderators who don't have much ball bearing experience: Work safe link. Seriously.)
>Those are cool and all, but I'm still waiting for my seethrough HUD glasses
:-(
Then you want the sony glasstron. It's expensive, and if you're not in Japan, you'll probably have to order it here and that'll cost $$$.
>Is that even possible?
Yup... they're mirrored for your privacy. I don't know if the mirror is that effective though.
I've tried a prototype unit and the transparency function is top notch, though.
>I'm not running at 256 megs of ram. I'm running at 128. Frankly, I don't think 2-3 megs are going to significantly improve my browsing experience. It would, however, severely impact my file operations in Windows. It'd also cause Outlook to bloat up a bit so it could interpret it's own HTML.
Frankly, I think you're Shirley wrong. 2-3 MB might have been right for IE 1.0, not today though.
My task manager on this machine says IE weighs in at 22 MB. Explorer (part of IE) weighs in at 14 MB.
That's 36 MB, and I have my IE installed pretty lean. Heck, there's probably other related processes, but I'm (fortuantely) not an IE expert.
>Why do you need to remove IE to use another browser?
Oh... that one isn't so hard.
If you don't have 256 MB of RAM, but you like to have your favourite browser loaded into memory 24x7 so it pops up as fast as IE, you'd need IE removed to free the (many) megabytes of RAM it wastes.
>Yes, but it costs more than this projector.
No, it doesn't.
i-O displays will sell you an HMD with XGA resoltion for between $1k and $2k (IIRC -- they don't have this model for sale right now). They have an SVGA unit for under $700 right now, if you don't need the resolution.
>On a related note I had a firewall whose case was live with 120V AC. Even touching the table near the computer was enough to feel a tingle.
Was it hooked up to a UPS?
Cheap UPSes with dead batteries often put a "buzz" on the case. Dumb, and for the life of me I can't figure out why CSA approves them, but I've had more than one do this, and I've concurred this with other people.
Either that or your Power Supply cable is wired in reverse with a broken/poor ground connection.
The system will (likely) run fine forever. Just don't use 10 base-2, RS-232 or anything else that requires a ground between that machine and another...
Not that it's particularly excellent, but PerlTk does 100% of basic GUI functionality, but lacks a lot of "splash" and speed.