I know who my Congressman and Senators are. Rep. Howard Berman, one of the most thoroughly pwn3d by the RIAA and MPAA Congresspeople in the House, (remember the Berman hack-back bill?) and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, also thorougly pwn3d.
If it wasn't for the dire need to preserve as many Dem seats in Congress as possible, I wouldn't have voted for Berman and Boxer this time around. Unfortunately there are bigger fish to fry right now than the RIAA and MPAA. So they got my vote. I hated to do it, but I had no alternative.
Basically this is why I don't bother with writing them about issues like this. Their minds are made up, and they sure as fuck don't want to be confused with the facts. [sigh.]
Aside from 'dependency hell', this habit of most linux distros to often include everything + the kitchen sink is what turned me away..
Three words: Debian GNU/Linux. The main annoyance with Debian* is that too little is installed by default. Then again, that's why The Goddess invented apt-get...^_^
*another annoyance: Sarge installer is still not ready for prime time, no matter what anyone else says.
I have been waiting for this. Pentium M == more "bang" per megahertz. The P4 architecture was a hot, sweaty botch. In essence, they are going "backward" (to the still extensible PIII architecture) to move forward.
People have been using VIA EPIA because they want little, cool, quiet computers. Now it looks like little, cool, quiet computers will finally get a REAL processor.
And yes! It runs Linux! ^_^
PS: I'd welcome AMD trying a similar tack to make a cooler chip that requires less active cooling. I'm not an Intel fangirl. I'm a fan of computers that work.
Sounds like IRC to me. IRC has been around for a zillion years, and there are people running "walled garden" IRC servers all over the place. They run on a strictly "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. Don't ask about them, because they won't tell you how to get onto it. The first rule about private IRC servers is that you don't talk about private IRC servers...oops...^_^;
gaim for Windows kicks all manner of ass over AIM. AIM pukes all kinds of nasty AOHell stuff all over your desktop, your Start menu, puts an evil vampiric applet in your systray, etc. etc. Whereas gaim just installs gaim+GTK2 for Windows. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Chatting satisfaction without AOHell stinking up your computer. Oh yeah, gaim for Windows uses less system resources than AIM. Big plus.
SSH is only available on Windozers if you install Cygwin or any of those packages that provide a friendly repackaging of Cygwin. One thing MS forgot to assimilate when putting together NT5 (Win2K) and its descendents.
The guy who started Sonic Foundry and was the original writer of the SoundForge program got his start at Microsoft. A lot of his work for MS wound up in the multimedia code for Windows 3.11 and Windows95.
Fine way to thank him, MS. I hope Sony takes MS to the cleaners over this.
For Windows, Foobar 2000 is lighter and uses less resources than WinAmp. It's also 100% free of nasty hitchhikers, aka spyware. Although WinAmp never had spyware either, some competitors do.
XMMS under Linux is what WinAmp should have been...light footprint, does what it needs to, and nothing it does not.
Under MacOS, SoundApp is my choice for the same reasons. Light, does what it should and nothing else.
It's the return of Mitsui Gold...yes, there have been tests on this kind of CD-R that have suggests that they will last, if not 300 years, a lot longer than most commonly available media.
I think that it is generally agreed that both Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim/Mitsubishi Azo CD-Rs are going to last at least 100 years if archivally stored.
My congresscritter is Howard Berman. He's a Democrat, and 100% owned by the RIAA and MPAA. (Remember the Hack-Back bill?) I have voted against him twice. But yesterday I held my nose, swallowed hard, and voted for him. Did a fat lot of good, considering that the GOP gained seats in both the House and Senate.
Both parties are owned by Big Media. Get used to it.
Can I get a phone that is just a phone please? Or a phone that excels in phone-based things?
Keep a lookout on eBay for the Ericsson r520m. Bluetooth, GPRS data modem, simple black and white screen, simple phone beeps, no camera, no MP3, (unless you get an attachment) no frills. It was popular in Europe amongst business people looking for a no-nonsense phone.
This was the last phone Ericsson made in Sweden and the last phone before the Sony/Ericsson merger.
You never see them locked to a carrier because they are not intended for the US market. Europe only if my memory serves me right.
I just got one more from my friendly neighborhood phone store as a reward for re-upping for another year. They work great under T-Mobile, my carrier for the past year. The extra is there in case mine breaks, or to keep my husband set up with a mobile when Cingular/AT&T drops prepaid TDMA service. It's not a question of if this will happen, but when. Cingular has been moving people from TDMA to GSM already...I don't think they'll stop anytime soon.
The results I get out of my Kodak 3200 digital camera remind me a lot of Lomography...sort of a weird focus, you don't get a great preview out of the preview screen, everything on the preview screen moves in a weird slow-motion...in short, lots of randomness added to your photographic experience.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, when you are trying to take pictures of a band or at an event like Comic-Con, it sucks, big time.
However, I could see using the 3200 for the kind of arty photos you see on "Anything and Everything." The only thing is, it eats batteries for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. There's a LiIon pack you can get which will power the camera through the AC jack...I think that's what I want to do next with it.
Mine was also cheaper because I got it from my local Army/Navy Surplus store rather than from an overpriced online vendor.
Wearing one of these spares me the need to bring along a purse or a fannypack or backpack or whatever. I wouldn't trust a laptop to the back pocket, but I certainly trust everything else I haul around to this kind of vest.
The only thing is that people ask me for press credentials a lot when I wear it...
knoppix-installer doesn't work right...I had to clean up after its messes a few times before just using knx-install. Of course, there may have been some improvements since last year.
BTW: you can bypass the "tin can" speakers with a set of headphones or computer speakers. Those little postage-stamp speakers aren't worth a damn. I like the sound with headphones the best.
I nominate.lan as the candidate. It's just three letters and it just makes sense. That's what I use here in my home, and that's what your pet MCSEs should use as well. The TLD.local was proposed, but voted down, way back in the day. ICANN should reserve.lan for Local Area Networks, just as there are reserved IP address ranges for local, NATted networks.
My ThinkPad 600e is still nothing but trouble as far as sound goes. The only time sound worked was when the 4Front guys configured it for me using the payware OSS/Linux at SCALE2X last year, on a HD install of Knoppix. Even then, I had to su to root in a console and type in #soundon to get sound working. The attempts to add it to the init scripts all came up zeroes.
As is the classic gripe regarding Linux and weird hardware: "It works just fine under Windows!" (2K SP4 in my case) At least the video overlay for Xine has been untangled under its current Debian Sarge install.
Oh yeah, the Debian Sarge installer still doesn't leave you with a workable system. The basic-basics are there, but you have to apt-get/synaptic/aptitude for a great deal of the software that is normally a part of a good desktop install, (like Knoppix) and there is a lot of tuning needed to get it "just so."
Someone needs to fork Knoppix and create the perfect "install from Knoppix" script. The current script (I forget the name of it) is not very good, and knx-hdinstall doesn't allow partitioning. A Knoppix-based but Debian compliant distro, specifically for ThinkPads, would rock the house.
Aside from the sound blues, I love Linux on my ThinkPad 600e. I went from a 10GB HD to a 40GB HD recently, and I gave Linux the lion's share of the HD. 33GB as opposed to 7GB for Windows. I also have a Panasonic slot-loading Combo drive...the slot loading action gives the total package some added 1337-points. Always gets oohs and ahhs at the LUG. Can't wait to start burning CDs on this thing. w00t.
I'd totally dispense with the Windows partition, but the University I'm bound for specifically requests a machine running Windows, Office 2000 or XP, and SPSS as part of what I need to go. So meh, 7GBs out of 40 is devoted to the Dark Side. People with ThinkPad T42s have to deal with a recovery partition about that big, oh well. And 2K is not that bad when you compare it to XP. Or Windows(not for)ME.
In Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego (the only places I've used my T-Mobile GSM phone) connectivity is pretty sweet.
If I have a T-Mobile GSM phone, why do I know about Cingular's network? Because T-Mobile has had colocation rights on Cingular infrastructure on the West Coast since forever, and because I have an unlocked Euro-Phone (Ericsson r520m) the display identifies the actual network I'm on, not the service provider.
The only annoyances are that my apartment is under a dead zone, and at the current place that SFVLUG meets, it's also under a dead zone. I have to take a short walk to get to the next tower to place a call.
You should see some improvement if AT&T starts taking advantage of Cingular's infrastructure. Verizon has a crappy "home" zone for its users (If you call in Santa Barbara and you are an LA user, you get hit with roaming fees) and cuts no deals if you are a Verizon landline customer.
If you want to switch, go T-Mobile. Easily the geekiest mobile company on the planet, with all-you-can-eat GPRS (mobile internet) or all-you-can-eat "Hot Spot" 802.11b service for $20/month ($40/month for both) if you have a mobile phone with them.
I happily switched to T-Mobile, but my husband is still with AT&T and a TDMA "Free2Go" phone. He rarely uses the blasted thing...it's basically in the glove compartment for emergency purposes.
How long before Cingular cuts off all its TDMA customers, including prepaid customers? I need to know that because I need to know when I'm going to have to dig deep and buy him a new phone.
BTW: if and when I have to do this, he's moving to T-Mobile too. (on the Prepaid side) After being abused by AT&T when I tried to move from my prepaid TDMA account to a GSM account last year, once bitten, twice shy.
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I know who my Congressman and Senators are. Rep. Howard Berman, one of the most thoroughly pwn3d by the RIAA and MPAA Congresspeople in the House, (remember the Berman hack-back bill?) and Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, also thorougly pwn3d.
If it wasn't for the dire need to preserve as many Dem seats in Congress as possible, I wouldn't have voted for Berman and Boxer this time around. Unfortunately there are bigger fish to fry right now than the RIAA and MPAA. So they got my vote. I hated to do it, but I had no alternative.
Basically this is why I don't bother with writing them about issues like this. Their minds are made up, and they sure as fuck don't want to be confused with the facts. [sigh.]
Aside from 'dependency hell', this habit of most linux distros to often include everything + the kitchen sink is what turned me away..
Three words: Debian GNU/Linux. The main annoyance with Debian* is that too little is installed by default. Then again, that's why The Goddess invented apt-get...^_^
*another annoyance: Sarge installer is still not ready for prime time, no matter what anyone else says.
I have been waiting for this. Pentium M == more "bang" per megahertz. The P4 architecture was a hot, sweaty botch. In essence, they are going "backward" (to the still extensible PIII architecture) to move forward.
People have been using VIA EPIA because they want little, cool, quiet computers. Now it looks like little, cool, quiet computers will finally get a REAL processor.
And yes! It runs Linux! ^_^
PS: I'd welcome AMD trying a similar tack to make a cooler chip that requires less active cooling. I'm not an Intel fangirl. I'm a fan of computers that work.
Sounds like IRC to me. IRC has been around for a zillion years, and there are people running "walled garden" IRC servers all over the place. They run on a strictly "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. Don't ask about them, because they won't tell you how to get onto it. The first rule about private IRC servers is that you don't talk about private IRC servers...oops...^_^;
gaim for Windows kicks all manner of ass over AIM. AIM pukes all kinds of nasty AOHell stuff all over your desktop, your Start menu, puts an evil vampiric applet in your systray, etc. etc. Whereas gaim just installs gaim+GTK2 for Windows. No muss, no fuss, no bother. Chatting satisfaction without AOHell stinking up your computer. Oh yeah, gaim for Windows uses less system resources than AIM. Big plus.
SSH is only available on Windozers if you install Cygwin or any of those packages that provide a friendly repackaging of Cygwin. One thing MS forgot to assimilate when putting together NT5 (Win2K) and its descendents.
aRts sucks. It really does. I can think off-hand of several apps that I have issue the killall artsd command before using.
The sooner KDE axes aRts and goes ALSA+Jack for everything, the better. It's one of the last remaining annoyances in KDE.
I would kill for an ACID-type program for Linux. Ableton Live is good on the MacOS side but it's even more expensive than ACID.
The DeMuDi project seems to be pushing sound recording on Linux pretty far forward, but there needs to be a good loop composing program for it.
The guy who started Sonic Foundry and was the original writer of the SoundForge program got his start at Microsoft. A lot of his work for MS wound up in the multimedia code for Windows 3.11 and Windows95.
Fine way to thank him, MS. I hope Sony takes MS to the cleaners over this.
You mean like this? Or perhaps maybe more like this?
There's always SoundApp...a lean, mean player. However, they never got around to making a MacOS X version of it. It also never got .OGG support.
SoundApp seems to be abandoned now...
http://www.spies.com/~franke/SoundApp/
For Windows, Foobar 2000 is lighter and uses less resources than WinAmp. It's also 100% free of nasty hitchhikers, aka spyware. Although WinAmp never had spyware either, some competitors do.
XMMS under Linux is what WinAmp should have been...light footprint, does what it needs to, and nothing it does not.
Under MacOS, SoundApp is my choice for the same reasons. Light, does what it should and nothing else.
Check out the YTD view...very, very instructive.
It's the return of Mitsui Gold...yes, there have been tests on this kind of CD-R that have suggests that they will last, if not 300 years, a lot longer than most commonly available media.
I think that it is generally agreed that both Taiyo Yuden and Verbatim/Mitsubishi Azo CD-Rs are going to last at least 100 years if archivally stored.
My congresscritter is Howard Berman. He's a Democrat, and 100% owned by the RIAA and MPAA. (Remember the Hack-Back bill?) I have voted against him twice. But yesterday I held my nose, swallowed hard, and voted for him. Did a fat lot of good, considering that the GOP gained seats in both the House and Senate.
Both parties are owned by Big Media. Get used to it.
Can I get a phone that is just a phone please? Or a phone that excels in phone-based things?
Keep a lookout on eBay for the Ericsson r520m. Bluetooth, GPRS data modem, simple black and white screen, simple phone beeps, no camera, no MP3, (unless you get an attachment) no frills. It was popular in Europe amongst business people looking for a no-nonsense phone.
This was the last phone Ericsson made in Sweden and the last phone before the Sony/Ericsson merger.
You never see them locked to a carrier because they are not intended for the US market. Europe only if my memory serves me right.
I just got one more from my friendly neighborhood phone store as a reward for re-upping for another year. They work great under T-Mobile, my carrier for the past year. The extra is there in case mine breaks, or to keep my husband set up with a mobile when Cingular/AT&T drops prepaid TDMA service. It's not a question of if this will happen, but when. Cingular has been moving people from TDMA to GSM already...I don't think they'll stop anytime soon.
The results I get out of my Kodak 3200 digital camera remind me a lot of Lomography...sort of a weird focus, you don't get a great preview out of the preview screen, everything on the preview screen moves in a weird slow-motion...in short, lots of randomness added to your photographic experience.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, when you are trying to take pictures of a band or at an event like Comic-Con, it sucks, big time.
However, I could see using the 3200 for the kind of arty photos you see on "Anything and Everything." The only thing is, it eats batteries for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. There's a LiIon pack you can get which will power the camera through the AC jack...I think that's what I want to do next with it.
Mine has a "night camo" (various shades of blue+black) pattern, but otherwise it's just like this:
f ari-black.html
http://www.greatoutdoorsdepot.com/apparel-vest-sa
Mine was also cheaper because I got it from my local Army/Navy Surplus store rather than from an overpriced online vendor.
Wearing one of these spares me the need to bring along a purse or a fannypack or backpack or whatever. I wouldn't trust a laptop to the back pocket, but I certainly trust everything else I haul around to this kind of vest.
The only thing is that people ask me for press credentials a lot when I wear it...
Mandrake has had Mplayer since at least 9.1. It's neutered of all its codec-y goodness and libdvdcss stuffs, but it's there.
knoppix-installer doesn't work right...I had to clean up after its messes a few times before just using knx-install. Of course, there may have been some improvements since last year.
BTW: you can bypass the "tin can" speakers with a set of headphones or computer speakers. Those little postage-stamp speakers aren't worth a damn. I like the sound with headphones the best.
Those who have seen the Anime series "Serial Experiments: Lain" will know what I am talking about. Those who haven't, should.
I nominate .lan as the candidate. It's just three letters and it just makes sense. That's what I use here in my home, and that's what your pet MCSEs should use as well. The TLD .local was proposed, but voted down, way back in the day. ICANN should reserve .lan for Local Area Networks, just as there are reserved IP address ranges for local, NATted networks.
As is the classic gripe regarding Linux and weird hardware: "It works just fine under Windows!" (2K SP4 in my case) At least the video overlay for Xine has been untangled under its current Debian Sarge install.
Oh yeah, the Debian Sarge installer still doesn't leave you with a workable system. The basic-basics are there, but you have to apt-get/synaptic/aptitude for a great deal of the software that is normally a part of a good desktop install, (like Knoppix) and there is a lot of tuning needed to get it "just so."
Someone needs to fork Knoppix and create the perfect "install from Knoppix" script. The current script (I forget the name of it) is not very good, and knx-hdinstall doesn't allow partitioning. A Knoppix-based but Debian compliant distro, specifically for ThinkPads, would rock the house.
Aside from the sound blues, I love Linux on my ThinkPad 600e. I went from a 10GB HD to a 40GB HD recently, and I gave Linux the lion's share of the HD. 33GB as opposed to 7GB for Windows. I also have a Panasonic slot-loading Combo drive...the slot loading action gives the total package some added 1337-points. Always gets oohs and ahhs at the LUG. Can't wait to start burning CDs on this thing. w00t.
I'd totally dispense with the Windows partition, but the University I'm bound for specifically requests a machine running Windows, Office 2000 or XP, and SPSS as part of what I need to go. So meh, 7GBs out of 40 is devoted to the Dark Side. People with ThinkPad T42s have to deal with a recovery partition about that big, oh well. And 2K is not that bad when you compare it to XP. Or Windows(not for)ME.
In Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego (the only places I've used my T-Mobile GSM phone) connectivity is pretty sweet.
If I have a T-Mobile GSM phone, why do I know about Cingular's network? Because T-Mobile has had colocation rights on Cingular infrastructure on the West Coast since forever, and because I have an unlocked Euro-Phone (Ericsson r520m) the display identifies the actual network I'm on, not the service provider.
The only annoyances are that my apartment is under a dead zone, and at the current place that SFVLUG meets, it's also under a dead zone. I have to take a short walk to get to the next tower to place a call.
You should see some improvement if AT&T starts taking advantage of Cingular's infrastructure. Verizon has a crappy "home" zone for its users (If you call in Santa Barbara and you are an LA user, you get hit with roaming fees) and cuts no deals if you are a Verizon landline customer.
If you want to switch, go T-Mobile. Easily the geekiest mobile company on the planet, with all-you-can-eat GPRS (mobile internet) or all-you-can-eat "Hot Spot" 802.11b service for $20/month ($40/month for both) if you have a mobile phone with them.
How long before Cingular cuts off all its TDMA customers, including prepaid customers? I need to know that because I need to know when I'm going to have to dig deep and buy him a new phone.
BTW: if and when I have to do this, he's moving to T-Mobile too. (on the Prepaid side) After being abused by AT&T when I tried to move from my prepaid TDMA account to a GSM account last year, once bitten, twice shy.
Keep that crap off my G3! I wouldn't do it if they gave it away for free.