You don't *need* a CD drive for knoppix, do you? That would seem to be a far better way to create a no-maintenance box, IMHO. Problems on the box? Cycle the power.
What if someone here decides to hack one of these in an innovative way and gets a mail/web/whatever server running linux on one. Sure for him it's a toy, but for the village that needs a low-cost, low-maintenance webserver or mail server, it would be a godsend. The only thing getting in the way is the company's decision to try to prevent this from happening. This is a good thing how, exactly?
Take a look at some of the embedded linux devices around - they're doing things that the designers had never envisioned. Here at home, I just upgraded my mail/web/file/music/media server from a 333Mhz to a 566 Mhz. This thing is 1000Mhz and uses a fraction of the power? II'd buy one.
What if I buy one at twice the price and sponsor a village somewhere with one? If I could run Linux on one, I might consider doing that. Rather than just accuse slashdotters of taking food out of these people's mouths by buying one to play with, maybe they should be given the opportunity to help sponsor them, or at least come up with some hacks that these people could actually use. After all, how much would it cost to set up a Windows-based *server* in one of these villages?
I'm just not comfortable with the idea that people in the third world are only capable of becoming media consumers, which is where it looks like this kind of thing will lead them.
>I mean, nobody would embed ads in their IPv6 proxy if it became too popular, right?
I use mine not only to convert to IPv6, but also to convert English measurements to Metric, Relational Databases to Object Databases and any text to Esperanto.
Yes,.Mac comes with 100MB of online storage, but you can only use 15 of that for mail.
I have a.Mac account that cost me 13,900 yen per year and unless they up that to at *least* 1GB by renewal time, I won't be renewing.
Yes, it includes other things, like a virus checker. WTF? I don't need a WebDav server for files - I use Samba over an SSH tunnel to my home server. It's a lot faster and more convenient. The other things they offer, like game trials and discounts on magazines really strike me as the kind of thing I could get for free if I dug around.
I just wrote them a note to let them know how I feel about it:
Hi. My.mac account is up for renewal soon and I don't think I'll be renewing it. The quality of the service has been great, but simply put, 15MB is too little storage for email. I have little use for the other 85MB of storage, except for occasionally putting up a.mov or.mp3 that I create. I tend to feel resentful when I get that "over quota" message on my email, when I have paid for other storage that I cannot use as I like. For $99 a year, it really should be something like 5-10GB.
Thanks,
Jim http://www.wirefarm.com
Yes, you must be right
on
Moving To Linux
·
· Score: 2, Funny
That whole "Windows is Crashy" thing must be a myth. Regular users must not really be getting them at all. That whole meme must be a conspiracy by the powerful Linux cabal. Thanks for settling that.
Setting up an Xgrid cluster is braindead easy for someone familiar with installing standard Mac software. You don't have to commit much time or energy to the task to get it drawing Mandelbrot fractals using all of the computer power you have at hand. Even over wifi.
Once you get it running and figure out something useful to do with it, you could add a stack of linux boxes for a lot less than a stack of Macs. How much is a used 1Ghz PC? $50? I would consider adding 10 of those to my 3 Mac Xgrid, just for the coolness factor. If it would render frames for a video editor, all the better.
Apple is great at making complex technologies easy for anyone to use. Xgrid even has a big analog Tachometer widget that shows the available Ghz being consumed. It would be cheesy if it weren't so freaking cool.
My mobile (Japanese PHS system) has a color screen plus all the usual bells and whistles and I swear I only need to charge it every week or so. Granted I don't get a lot of calls, but at least the standby time is great. It must be the different system.
As for PDAs, I started with a Newton years ago and up through a handspring and a clie, all of which I gave away after a while.
Now I just carry a little Moleskine notebook for PDA-type functions. Really. I'm not a Luddite or anti-technology, but the benefit of having a thing full of notes that will never be obsolete or need batteries is strong. (Don't worry, they're overpriced, too, satisfying that "spend" urge. )
For backups, I scan pages that I want to keep. I've even emailed scans to coworkers. It works well, as I have one of those scanners with a "single button scan" setup.
It never crashes and if I lose it, I'm only out the 15 bucks for a new one. My writing is better, too, as I use the notes I make in the book as a reference when I type it into my powerbook later. I really love not having to charge it. No wall-wart to buy funky European adapters for. Great tactile experience: Good paper that you can use with a fountain pen. It's just the right size. The strap makes a satisfying "snap" sound. It's black. I even sketch occasionally. For input, my current choice is a sterling silver Parker 75. $40 from an antique shop.
My PDAs were never this useful. No phone interface will ever be this useful, though a camera phone could easily take photos of the pages in the book and mail them to your regular email account or even to your blog as appropriate.
There's also the "cafe coolness" factor. I never felt like really putting thoughts and impressions into my PDA. I do with the notebook. Even an occasional watercolor, though it hasn't replaced my Nikon. It's a pleasure to sit at a cafe and actually WRITE something.
Of course, it doesn't do audio or video, but I have an iPod that I rarely carry anymore and a PowerBook that shows video full-screen when I want that, which never happens to be when I'm out somewhere where I wouldn't have my laptop.
Not a bad deal for the winner, either...
on
$20,000 in Perl Contest
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Lots of people wrote plugins for the last version, released them to the community and basically got nothing for their ingenuity and their effort. Now, at least they can be rewarded in some way. How is this a bad deal?
I wrote an add-on for the last version that some people use - I never asked for, expected or got any kind of compensation. I'd have been stoked if someone gave me an iPod.
I remember hearing that during the 1980's, Iran's government officially tried to extradite Madonna and Michael Jackson so that they could be put to death on obscenity charges.
Google is not proving helpful in finding any references to this at the moment...
The Japanese don't really have a strong awareness of "December 7th" the way people in the US do - It was December 8th for them, when the attack occurred, after all.
Funny story: Back when I lived in the US, I had a Japanese housemate who was taking flying lessons at a small airfield nearby. Landing the plane one morning, he managed to bump into a couple of planes parked near the runway. It was nothing serious, but since it happened to be December 7th, he was known as "Kamikaze" from then on...
Maybe for you, but not for everyone
on
Videophones Revisited
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I did a video chat with my mother and she could forget she was using a computer. She hates computers, but seeing my face put her at ease.
My friend did a conference with his daughter on her second birthday while he had to be out of the country. The phone alone would have provided a much-diminished experience for the two of them.
I regularly video chat with friends and family back in the states, where regular phone calls are expensive. iChat and iSight provide a better experience than a normal telephone plus the added benefit of a clear picture fullscreen on a 17 inch monitor.
I work with people whose English is not great and my Japanese is not great, so having another dimension to a conversation can save a great deal of time and prevent misunderstandings.
Apple's combination is so far ahead of what everyone else is doing it's hard to conveigh the difference to anyone who has only experienced video chat over netmeeting with a quickcam.
I read a story that this is finally good enough for deaf people to use for sign language.
What may be a gimmicky toy for you and a waste of bandwidth may be a necessity for someone else.
Once on a trip to New York City with my old girlfriend, she said "Oh, no, it's going to rain tomorrow." Since it was a perfectly clear day, I asked her why she thought so. She pointed up to a big red umbrella symbol on the side of a building. "Um, no... that's the Travelers Life Insurance building..."
When I moved to Japan, I saw a lot of the umbrella mark as a weather forecast display and understood her confusion...
What you're saying was very true once, but I don't think so anymore. Go download a copy of a Knoppix iso and burn it to a CD. Then boot from it on your Windows workstation. Don't worry, it won't touch your hard disk, unless you want to use it. As you probably know, it runs from the CD and from RAM.
Now, just for fun, plug in that MP3 player of yours into the USB port. (I don't know that model of player, but I'm assuming that it's basically just a USB storage device when plugged into the PC.) Wait a moment and it will appear on your desktop. Same with your digital cameras, unless they're really old or really strange.
At my old job, the service guys knew to give me hard disks that had "died" from the Windows machines in our offices - almost without exception, they would start to work again when used with Linux.
Sure, it's possible to find hardware that only works with a vendor-provided Windows-only driver. I avoid that kind of stuff, not only because it doesn't work with Linux, but also because that kind of hardware tends to have the most troublesome drivers and the shortest useful life.
I tend to keep hardware a long time - I have a couple of old SoundBlaster cards that must be 10 years old in my closet - since they're so well supported in Linux, they're worth hanging onto - I may want barebones sound support in some odd box I'm building and I know that they'll work. Same with an old 3Com NIC. It's gonna work.
The stuff I buy now, I hope to be putting into another machine in 5 years time. I don't want to have to scrap them just because the vendor didn't want to write a new driver for Longhorn.
As for Windows Security, it's flawed. Seriously broken. The hundreds of thousands of everyday users who have never even heard of Universal PnP, Remote assistance, remote registry and so on, are causing problems for the rest of us. The few who *have* heard of these "features" and know enough to disable them are paying for features that they wind up turning off. They are having to accept a system that intentionally breaks protocols to make up for deficiencies in the client. At very least, they waste their time closing browser and messenger popups when they are trying to get work done.
Of course, you could go and grab an older iMac with DVD for ~$300 on eBay and have the best of both worlds. I'll admit that I use my Macs primarily, but for some things, I prefer Linux. Servers, internet-facing machines, older hardware, any Intel box. I have a Windows 2000 machine that runs well enough, but right now it's sitting in a closet, mainly because Windows' internationalization sucks some serious ass. Here at home we need seamless English, Japanese and French support. Windows can't come close to the support that Linux and Mac have right out of the box.
I'd probably agree with you if it hadn't happened to me.
I have an iBook that died a pretty quick death with the "plaid screen of death" logic board problem. Mine was still under warranty and Apple replaced the logic board with no questions asked about how I had treated it, even though it was pretty scuffed up.
If you have a good logic board, you will never get that particular problem - if you have a bad one, no matter how gently you treat it, it's gonna go south.
This thread is like saying "I don't know what those people who are born with genetic defects are complaining about - look at me, I'm perfectly healthy..."
Interesting post. I've taken the TGV as well as the Japanese Shinkansen and found both to be about the same in comfort and convenience. (In fact, I'm taking the Shinkansen Saturday morning up to Nagano for some skiing. It seemed weird to take a train to the slopes at first, but it's so convenient that now it would seem really odd to drive there.)
Switching either to maglev would seem a bit pointless. Both seem to work quite well.
As an interesting aside, the train to Narita, (which isn't a bullet train,) *could* make the trip in quite a bit less time than it takes, but they run it slower, as to not put the airport busses and taxis out of business. (Or so I've been told.)
When a friend asked me to teach him a bit of SQL, I did just that. To keep it from being boring, we also started doing small web applications with the databases and tables we built - it was actually quite a bit of fun. We used MySQL, since it was a simple matter to set up on his Windows 2000 laptop for his practice. Apache and PERL are also braindead easy to set up and offer quite a bit of cross-platform usefulness.
I used to do a lot of Access, way back when. I'd recommend avoiding it, as I later spent a lot of time learning to do things properly. It's a nifty little program, but sort of a dead end. Being able to write SQL from the command line or from inside your program is a skill that will be well-worth the time spent climbing the learning curve.
Dear NASA, Please be advised that your vehicle has hereby been impounded. It is being held on the same asteroid in our newly-formed impound area. Attempting to remove your vehicle from the impound lot without authorization will result in criminal penalties and the possibility of severe tire damage.
The gimp.org website used to say that Pulp Fiction's gimp was the inspiration for the name, at least partially. I think it was an amusing retrofit of the name, or at least an interesting co-incidence. The gimp.org website no longer has this reference, though it does have an unexplained link to Pulp Fiction. Sadly, they're not in the Internet Archive, either.
Ah, just found a link on Google:
http://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
It took us a little while to come up with the name. We knew we wanted an image manipulation program like Photoshop, but the name IMP sounded wrong. We also tossed around XIMP (X Image Manipulation Program) following the rule of when in doubt prefix an X for X11 based programs. At the time, Pulp Fiction was the hot movie and a single word popped into my mind while we were tossing out name ideas. It only took a few more minutes to determine what the 'G' stood for.
And to make the matter clear, the GIMP originally stood for General Image Manipulation Program, but has since been dubbed GNU software by Richard Stallman (with our agreement). Spencer and I decided that GNU Image Manipulation Program is a better usage of the 'G'.
Actually, several of my machines have these "Gomi Fee Paid" stickers on them - They were there when I grabbed the boxes from the curb and will stay on in case I ever need to pitch them.
Pretty good system, IMHO.
There's also usually a guy in the neighborhood with a truck and a loudspeaker saying that he'll haul away any electronic equipment for free.
I've sold a few of those to small businesses with really good success. I take an old P2 300, drop in a 120GB disk and install Linux, Samba and Webmin. Give the users their home directory as an "M:\" drive and use Webmin's automated backup tools to backup their home dir every night. Using webmin, you can even walk a non-technical user through a restore over the phone. I usually charge around $400 for one of these setups and it's a good deal for them and a nice easy project for me. Cheers, Jim
Slashdot Mirror
You don't *need* a CD drive for knoppix, do you?
That would seem to be a far better way to create a no-maintenance box, IMHO.
Problems on the box? Cycle the power.
What if someone here decides to hack one of these in an innovative way and gets a mail/web/whatever server running linux on one. Sure for him it's a toy, but for the village that needs a low-cost, low-maintenance webserver or mail server, it would be a godsend.
The only thing getting in the way is the company's decision to try to prevent this from happening. This is a good thing how, exactly?
Take a look at some of the embedded linux devices around - they're doing things that the designers had never envisioned. Here at home, I just upgraded my mail/web/file/music/media server from a 333Mhz to a 566 Mhz. This thing is 1000Mhz and uses a fraction of the power? II'd buy one.
What if I buy one at twice the price and sponsor a village somewhere with one? If I could run Linux on one, I might consider doing that. Rather than just accuse slashdotters of taking food out of these people's mouths by buying one to play with, maybe they should be given the opportunity to help sponsor them, or at least come up with some hacks that these people could actually use. After all, how much would it cost to set up a Windows-based *server* in one of these villages?
I'm just not comfortable with the idea that people in the third world are only capable of becoming media consumers, which is where it looks like this kind of thing will lead them.
Just as soon as I can get my modem to work over Skype...
Only if I can get Linux running on one.
I was just looking at one on a coworker's desk and it sure is a neat little machine.
Australia is south of the Equator.
It's the opposite, just like the seasons and the water in the drain thing.
Glad I could clear that up for you.
>I mean, nobody would embed ads in their IPv6 proxy if it became too popular, right?
I use mine not only to convert to IPv6, but also to convert English measurements to Metric, Relational Databases to Object Databases and any text to Esperanto.
Yes, .Mac comes with 100MB of online storage, but you can only use 15 of that for mail.
.Mac account that cost me 13,900 yen per year and unless they up that to at *least* 1GB by renewal time, I won't be renewing.
.mac account is up for renewal soon and I don't think I'll be renewing it. .mov or .mp3 that I create. I tend to feel resentful when I get that "over quota" message on my email, when I have paid for other storage that I cannot use as I like.
I have a
Yes, it includes other things, like a virus checker. WTF?
I don't need a WebDav server for files - I use Samba over an SSH tunnel to my home server. It's a lot faster and more convenient.
The other things they offer, like game trials and discounts on magazines really strike me as the kind of thing I could get for free if I dug around.
I just wrote them a note to let them know how I feel about it:
Hi.
My
The quality of the service has been great, but simply put, 15MB is too little storage for email.
I have little use for the other 85MB of storage, except for occasionally putting up a
For $99 a year, it really should be something like 5-10GB.
Thanks,
Jim
http://www.wirefarm.com
That whole "Windows is Crashy" thing must be a myth. Regular users must not really be getting them at all.
That whole meme must be a conspiracy by the powerful Linux cabal.
Thanks for settling that.
Setting up an Xgrid cluster is braindead easy for someone familiar with installing standard Mac software. You don't have to commit much time or energy to the task to get it drawing Mandelbrot fractals using all of the computer power you have at hand. Even over wifi.
Once you get it running and figure out something useful to do with it, you could add a stack of linux boxes for a lot less than a stack of Macs. How much is a used 1Ghz PC? $50? I would consider adding 10 of those to my 3 Mac Xgrid, just for the coolness factor. If it would render frames for a video editor, all the better.
Apple is great at making complex technologies easy for anyone to use. Xgrid even has a big analog Tachometer widget that shows the available Ghz being consumed. It would be cheesy if it weren't so freaking cool.
My mobile (Japanese PHS system) has a color screen plus all the usual bells and whistles and I swear I only need to charge it every week or so. Granted I don't get a lot of calls, but at least the standby time is great. It must be the different system.
As for PDAs, I started with a Newton years ago and up through a handspring and a clie, all of which I gave away after a while.
Now I just carry a little Moleskine notebook for PDA-type functions.
Really.
I'm not a Luddite or anti-technology, but the benefit of having a thing full of notes that will never be obsolete or need batteries is strong. (Don't worry, they're overpriced, too, satisfying that "spend" urge. )
For backups, I scan pages that I want to keep. I've even emailed scans to coworkers. It works well, as I have one of those scanners with a "single button scan" setup.
It never crashes and if I lose it, I'm only out the 15 bucks for a new one.
My writing is better, too, as I use the notes I make in the book as a reference when I type it into my powerbook later.
I really love not having to charge it.
No wall-wart to buy funky European adapters for.
Great tactile experience: Good paper that you can use with a fountain pen. It's just the right size. The strap makes a satisfying "snap" sound. It's black. I even sketch occasionally.
For input, my current choice is a sterling silver Parker 75. $40 from an antique shop.
My PDAs were never this useful. No phone interface will ever be this useful, though a camera phone could easily take photos of the pages in the book and mail them to your regular email account or even to your blog as appropriate.
There's also the "cafe coolness" factor. I never felt like really putting thoughts and impressions into my PDA. I do with the notebook. Even an occasional watercolor, though it hasn't replaced my Nikon. It's a pleasure to sit at a cafe and actually WRITE something.
Of course, it doesn't do audio or video, but I have an iPod that I rarely carry anymore and a PowerBook that shows video full-screen when I want that, which never happens to be when I'm out somewhere where I wouldn't have my laptop.
Lots of people wrote plugins for the last version, released them to the community and basically got nothing for their ingenuity and their effort.
Now, at least they can be rewarded in some way.
How is this a bad deal?
I wrote an add-on for the last version that some people use - I never asked for, expected or got any kind of compensation. I'd have been stoked if someone gave me an iPod.
I remember hearing that during the 1980's, Iran's government officially tried to extradite Madonna and Michael Jackson so that they could be put to death on obscenity charges.
Google is not proving helpful in finding any references to this at the moment...
The Japanese don't really have a strong awareness of "December 7th" the way people in the US do - It was December 8th for them, when the attack occurred, after all.
Funny story:
Back when I lived in the US, I had a Japanese housemate who was taking flying lessons at a small airfield nearby. Landing the plane one morning, he managed to bump into a couple of planes parked near the runway. It was nothing serious, but since it happened to be December 7th, he was known as "Kamikaze" from then on...
I did a video chat with my mother and she could forget she was using a computer. She hates computers, but seeing my face put her at ease.
My friend did a conference with his daughter on her second birthday while he had to be out of the country. The phone alone would have provided a much-diminished experience for the two of them.
I regularly video chat with friends and family back in the states, where regular phone calls are expensive. iChat and iSight provide a better experience than a normal telephone plus the added benefit of a clear picture fullscreen on a 17 inch monitor.
I work with people whose English is not great and my Japanese is not great, so having another dimension to a conversation can save a great deal of time and prevent misunderstandings.
Apple's combination is so far ahead of what everyone else is doing it's hard to conveigh the difference to anyone who has only experienced video chat over netmeeting with a quickcam.
I read a story that this is finally good enough for deaf people to use for sign language.
What may be a gimmicky toy for you and a waste of bandwidth may be a necessity for someone else.
Cheers,
Jim
Once on a trip to New York City with my old girlfriend, she said "Oh, no, it's going to rain tomorrow."
Since it was a perfectly clear day, I asked her why she thought so. She pointed up to a big red umbrella symbol on the side of a building.
"Um, no... that's the Travelers Life Insurance building..."
When I moved to Japan, I saw a lot of the umbrella mark as a weather forecast display and understood her confusion...
What you're saying was very true once, but I don't think so anymore.
Go download a copy of a Knoppix iso and burn it to a CD.
Then boot from it on your Windows workstation. Don't worry, it won't touch your hard disk, unless you want to use it. As you probably know, it runs from the CD and from RAM.
Now, just for fun, plug in that MP3 player of yours into the USB port. (I don't know that model of player, but I'm assuming that it's basically just a USB storage device when plugged into the PC.)
Wait a moment and it will appear on your desktop. Same with your digital cameras, unless they're really old or really strange.
At my old job, the service guys knew to give me hard disks that had "died" from the Windows machines in our offices - almost without exception, they would start to work again when used with Linux.
Sure, it's possible to find hardware that only works with a vendor-provided Windows-only driver. I avoid that kind of stuff, not only because it doesn't work with Linux, but also because that kind of hardware tends to have the most troublesome drivers and the shortest useful life.
I tend to keep hardware a long time - I have a couple of old SoundBlaster cards that must be 10 years old in my closet - since they're so well supported in Linux, they're worth hanging onto - I may want barebones sound support in some odd box I'm building and I know that they'll work. Same with an old 3Com NIC. It's gonna work.
The stuff I buy now, I hope to be putting into another machine in 5 years time. I don't want to have to scrap them just because the vendor didn't want to write a new driver for Longhorn.
As for Windows Security, it's flawed. Seriously broken. The hundreds of thousands of everyday users who have never even heard of Universal PnP, Remote assistance, remote registry and so on, are causing problems for the rest of us. The few who *have* heard of these "features" and know enough to disable them are paying for features that they wind up turning off. They are having to accept a system that intentionally breaks protocols to make up for deficiencies in the client. At very least, they waste their time closing browser and messenger popups when they are trying to get work done.
Of course, you could go and grab an older iMac with DVD for ~$300 on eBay and have the best of both worlds. I'll admit that I use my Macs primarily, but for some things, I prefer Linux. Servers, internet-facing machines, older hardware, any Intel box. I have a Windows 2000 machine that runs well enough, but right now it's sitting in a closet, mainly because Windows' internationalization sucks some serious ass. Here at home we need seamless English, Japanese and French support. Windows can't come close to the support that Linux and Mac have right out of the box.
Cheers,
Jim
I'd probably agree with you if it hadn't happened to me.
I have an iBook that died a pretty quick death with the "plaid screen of death" logic board problem. Mine was still under warranty and Apple replaced the logic board with no questions asked about how I had treated it, even though it was pretty scuffed up.
If you have a good logic board, you will never get that particular problem - if you have a bad one, no matter how gently you treat it, it's gonna go south.
This thread is like saying "I don't know what those people who are born with genetic defects are complaining about - look at me, I'm perfectly healthy..."
Interesting post.
I've taken the TGV as well as the Japanese Shinkansen and found both to be about the same in comfort and convenience. (In fact, I'm taking the Shinkansen Saturday morning up to Nagano for some skiing. It seemed weird to take a train to the slopes at first, but it's so convenient that now it would seem really odd to drive there.)
Switching either to maglev would seem a bit pointless. Both seem to work quite well.
As an interesting aside, the train to Narita, (which isn't a bullet train,) *could* make the trip in quite a bit less time than it takes, but they run it slower, as to not put the airport busses and taxis out of business. (Or so I've been told.)
When a friend asked me to teach him a bit of SQL, I did just that.
To keep it from being boring, we also started doing small web applications with the databases and tables we built - it was actually quite a bit of fun.
We used MySQL, since it was a simple matter to set up on his Windows 2000 laptop for his practice. Apache and PERL are also braindead easy to set up and offer quite a bit of cross-platform usefulness.
I used to do a lot of Access, way back when. I'd recommend avoiding it, as I later spent a lot of time learning to do things properly. It's a nifty little program, but sort of a dead end. Being able to write SQL from the command line or from inside your program is a skill that will be well-worth the time spent climbing the learning curve.
whats that perl script you've got running on server X
That made me laugh - We use it for that at work and it often will interpret characters in a pasted script and convert them to "smileys"...
Dear NASA,
Please be advised that your vehicle has hereby been impounded.
It is being held on the same asteroid in our newly-formed impound area.
Attempting to remove your vehicle from the impound lot without authorization will result in criminal penalties and the possibility of severe tire damage.
Love,
OrbDev
What if the press' temptation to use "Cracker" instead of "Hacker" finally caused them to get the two terms right?
At least *some* good might come of this...
The gimp.org website no longer has this reference, though it does have an unexplained link to Pulp Fiction. Sadly, they're not in the Internet Archive, either.
Ah, just found a link on Google:
http://www.xach.com/gg/1997/1/profile/1/
Actually, several of my machines have these "Gomi Fee Paid" stickers on them - They were there when I grabbed the boxes from the curb and will stay on in case I ever need to pitch them.
Pretty good system, IMHO.
There's also usually a guy in the neighborhood with a truck and a loudspeaker saying that he'll haul away any electronic equipment for free.
I've sold a few of those to small businesses with really good success.
I take an old P2 300, drop in a 120GB disk and install Linux, Samba and Webmin. Give the users their home directory as an "M:\" drive and use Webmin's automated backup tools to backup their home dir every night.
Using webmin, you can even walk a non-technical user through a restore over the phone.
I usually charge around $400 for one of these setups and it's a good deal for them and a nice easy project for me.
Cheers,
Jim