I'd be happy to see TV signals that I can actually tune in without getting cable or installing a huge arial on my roof. I don't have enough excess cash to spend $50/mo on something that I watch maybe 1hr/mo, but it would be nice if I could at least pick up my local broadcast stations. Maybe broadcasters are faring so badly that they're reducing their signal to cut costs?
I do like the idea of digital cable, but I don't see any big benefits to me, unless maybe it lowers the barrier to entry for some other tech and maybe makes my phone or ISP bill lower. I'm not going to get a new TV until they're selling them for $49.95 at a local retail chain, and if I have to make do with borrowing movies from the library until then, so be it.
There is one striking difference here: Imported autos face high import tariffs that cut into their profit margins. Building autos in the States and cutting "international trade zone" deals with individual State governments saves on import tarrifs and other taxes and levies. (And oddly enough, U.S. companies have plants in the countries that have plants here, for similar reasons.) Not saying it's a purely good or purely bad thing, just saying that looks like how it is.
As far as I know, there aren't import or export fees on technical services like programming or tech support. At least I hope there aren't, for when I start my Costa-Rica based IT consulting service in a few months.
Amazon has them with a price that's "too low to show you" but apparently less than $399. here's the link. Note, this is for "pre-orders" and says the item comes out in August 2003. Or you could cut the middle man and talk to the other reply to the parent.
I really don't mind finding blog links when I search for something, as they usually at least link to some relevant sources.
On the other hand, it is really a pain to search for help on something, and instead of getting a useful, authoritative document, I'll get a half-dozen archived unanswered mailing list posts from people with the same problem. I would much rather Google address this dilution from mailing lists.
I wouldn't be surprised. There are still people seriously using Visual FoxPro for new projects, just because they get the job done. There was an article here a while back about somebody getting sued by MS for showing people how to use VFP on Linux, or something like that.
It may be a hackish workaround, but I know php has experimental support to load Java classes, and I believe Python can as well. For someone with the patience and willingness to work with marginally-supported or unsupported tools, you can already do this. (but it's probably got a ways to go before companies start using it to make their cheap hosting better)
Yeah, well what would the presentation look like if he'd made it in MS Office then got locked out of it?
The point here is, you can't use MS Office until the patch comes out, so there's no better time to get OOo on peoples' computers and get some work done.
MS Office: doesn't work, can't do anything OpenOffice: Import/export are a little gimpy, but at least you can get work done with it. (oh and you never have to worry about Activation-related problems again ever)
and if you're not up for the whole novel, the complete text of OSC's 1977 short story Ender's Game (warning, it's a spoiler for the novel) is available here on his website
techinque for finding textfiles of novels on the web.
1) find a legitimate excerpt (e.g. a sample chapter) on the web 2) copy a sentence fragment that is unique to the book, but mundane enough that it wouldn't be quoted on peoples' "cool quotes" pages. (something like "jammed against Ender's seat back, hurting his chest") 3) paste it inside of quotation marks in a google search. 4) the top result will probably be the legitimate excerpt you found earlier. The other results will probably be.txt files that contain the complete work. You may have to repeat the search with the ommitted results included.
I get my news from a lot of different sources, and I think about it. I believe a US-led war on Iraq is entirely justified, as well. After one madman bent on your destruction is *not* attacked, and then kills thousands of innocent Americans, it is perfectly justified to seek out other madmen bent on your destruction--Does anybody, even the French, put forth that Saddam is not a madman, or is not highly interested in doing harm to the U.S.?
I just worry that Iraq and its surrounding nations will propagandize this (as history shows they have before) and use it as a tool to create more, not less terrorism. Justified or not, it will still bring a lot of negative consequences when we win--maybe more than if we didn't do it at all.
IMHO, Mozilla does have some major advantages to IE. I've been using Mozilla for -- gosh, it seems like years now, since before 1.0 and even then it had tabbed browsing and javascript popup blocking. Those are two "real" innovations, and very nice things to have.
Most of my friends who still use IE use some freeware/spyware 3rd party popup blocking program that uses a windows API hack to kill popped-up windows with a certain title that's in the list of popups to kill. It is a very weak hack and not much more effective than alt-f4 when you see a popup. Mozilla has a checkbox to disallow all automatic popups. I checked it a long time ago and have NEVER missed them. It's so funny when I'm using IE and I get a popup--it startles me because in my world, you just don't get popups and you never have to think about it.
Any observer of any part of human history should be able to tell you the same thing blues singers have told you for years: "them that's got, gets" The Bible says it in proverbs written thousands of years ago, for crying out loud!
Every human society that has ever existed has had a priviledged few increasing their comforts at the expense of others. Marxism didn't fix this, Naziism didn't fix it, and Democracy doesn't fix it either. Selfishness and greed are parts of human nature, and though they may not be the most admirable parts of humanity, they do drive scientific progress fairly efficiently, when exploited properly.
The patent system in "our brand of capitalism" is just one way of exploiting selfishness to bring good to everybody. Even if 14 years seems like a huge amount of time, it means that 86 of the next 100 years get to use this for free. (Unlike copyrighted works, which if copyrighted today will still be restricted 100 years from now, but that's another rant.)
The privately owned Union Springs Telephone company in (dirt poor, rural) Bullock County, Alabama, recently announced an expansion of Fiber-to-home internet, cable, and phone service over the next few years.
If a mom-n-pop telco can make a profit selling FIBER connections to one of the poorest rural counties in the US, certainly the big telcos could make a profit if they wanted. "Let's get the government to do it for us" is NOT the right answer for everything.
You're right, the Omron picture looks a lot like a Fresnel lens, and it is distorted. Cool, but it seems more useful for car headlights or room lighting than for computer displays.
The EETimes article OTOH is all about Organic LED's, and looks to be the real next generation for display tech.
There's a lot of talk about Linux's lower costs, and also about its "other advantages" but I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Sun in all of this.
I'll explain what I mean: If the high school computer lab could get a Solaris lab for the same or lower cost than a Win2k lab, they would in a heartbeat. And more and more everyday, Linux-on-Intel is showing it's a "good-enough" replacement for Solaris-on-Sun.
So take all the reasons that an educational institution would shell out the big bucks for some SPARCstations, and make it work on $199 Wal-Mart Durons or no-cost donated hardware, and you've got a pretty good cost-benefit equation for Linux.
The BBC article focuses on the problem of traffic problems increasing on the perimiter of the toll areas. A possible solution for this would to have a "fuzzy" or probablistic charging scheme with multiple perimiters. Within one perimiter, you have say, a 10% chance of being charged, and inside another, smaller area there may be a 50% chance of being charged. The highest congested areas can give a 100% chance of being charged.
That might, of course, bother people who un-luckily got charged more than they felt was right. Still you could get the same effect from charging in graduated increments, 10% toll in an outer perimiter, 50% in the middle and 100% in the peak area, so that drivers avoiding the toll will be spread out according to who wants to avoid how much of a toll.
I used to listen to a number of different music stations, but when they got bought out by sucky 100-ad-a-minute monopoly stations, I started listening to my local NPR station more. I know I'm not the only one who's gone that direction.
So, unless ClearChannel starts buying out (non profit, listener funded) Public Radio there are probably a lot of people (read: voters) fed up with crappy music and insipid morning shows that are switching to award-winning, (relatively) evenly-biased journalism about the politics of the U.S. and the world.
Yes, I know it's going a long way to find a "bright side" to something so obviously bad and wrong, but I can't help but see some good coming out of the bad state that things are in.
And as a note to anybody who doesn't like what's playing on the radio monopoly: turn it off. It feels really good to have some whinging pop-tart singer or annoying advertiser giving you their line, and *beep*... silence. *ahhhh*
Re:Is KDE trying to be Windows?
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I didn't notice it until reading your post, but it's all clear now! KDE isn't copying features from Windows, it's copying features from Emacs!
I'm not saying I agree with this lady, but I think a lot of people discussing this here don't really understand what she's saying. Yeah, she might mostly just want to live on someone else's work, but what she said, "I'm happy that people won't be able to take his art and show it in a way that would diminish or hurt it, or put it in a way that he wouldn't have wanted," is probably the most valid reason for the fight to keep Mickey Mouse locked up.
As the Reason interview mentions, derivative works of Mickey Mouse would have Mickey shooting heroin, or Mickey smuggling dope, or Mickey Mouse Porn. I'm not saying that makes infinite copyright okay, but it is not hard to understand why the heirs (and/or company) of a creator of a "wholesome" character would not want people to use it just anywhere.
not saying it's right, just saying it's something that could stand to be discussed a little more.
Organize yourself with other like-minded individuals, and ONLY vote for candidated who support rolling back the copyright laws, even if you have to become the "copyright reform" party and write-in your own candidate. Everyone votes in every election, and makes it clear that you're voting ENTIRELY on the issue of copyright reform.
I believe there are enough mp3-listening and internet-savvy voters out there to make a difference.
And by making a difference I do not mean electing a copyright reform candidate. All you have to do is put up enough votes to "swing" an election from one party to another, and the parties will both start paying attention. I guarantee that if a copyright-reform candidate gets 10,000 votes in a race that's won by 5,000 votes, both parties will address it in their platform and chances are one of them will . With the right support, this could be a real (as in debated by candidates) issue by the 2004 presidential elections.
Everybody wants to talk like Disney's money is the most powerful political force in the world. Not only does the government support some issues that have more voter support than corporate support, but there are many industries which would benefit from copyright reform at least as much as the few who benefit from copyright extension.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be happy to see TV signals that I can actually tune in without getting cable or installing a huge arial on my roof. I don't have enough excess cash to spend $50/mo on something that I watch maybe 1hr/mo, but it would be nice if I could at least pick up my local broadcast stations. Maybe broadcasters are faring so badly that they're reducing their signal to cut costs?
I do like the idea of digital cable, but I don't see any big benefits to me, unless maybe it lowers the barrier to entry for some other tech and maybe makes my phone or ISP bill lower. I'm not going to get a new TV until they're selling them for $49.95 at a local retail chain, and if I have to make do with borrowing movies from the library until then, so be it.
Woah, I sound so cheap. Who cares, dag nabbit!
There is one striking difference here: Imported autos face high import tariffs that cut into their profit margins. Building autos in the States and cutting "international trade zone" deals with individual State governments saves on import tarrifs and other taxes and levies. (And oddly enough, U.S. companies have plants in the countries that have plants here, for similar reasons.) Not saying it's a purely good or purely bad thing, just saying that looks like how it is.
As far as I know, there aren't import or export fees on technical services like programming or tech support. At least I hope there aren't, for when I start my Costa-Rica based IT consulting service in a few months.
Amazon has them with a price that's "too low to show you" but apparently less than $399. here's the link. Note, this is for "pre-orders" and says the item comes out in August 2003. Or you could cut the middle man and talk to the other reply to the parent.
I really don't mind finding blog links when I search for something, as they usually at least link to some relevant sources.
On the other hand, it is really a pain to search for help on something, and instead of getting a useful, authoritative document, I'll get a half-dozen archived unanswered mailing list posts from people with the same problem. I would much rather Google address this dilution from mailing lists.
I wouldn't be surprised. There are still people seriously using Visual FoxPro for new projects, just because they get the job done. There was an article here a while back about somebody getting sued by MS for showing people how to use VFP on Linux, or something like that.
My guess is other worms.
It may be a hackish workaround, but I know php has experimental support to load Java classes, and I believe Python can as well. For someone with the patience and willingness to work with marginally-supported or unsupported tools, you can already do this. (but it's probably got a ways to go before companies start using it to make their cheap hosting better)
Yeah, well what would the presentation look like if he'd made it in MS Office then got locked out of it?
The point here is, you can't use MS Office until the patch comes out, so there's no better time to get OOo on peoples' computers and get some work done.
MS Office: doesn't work, can't do anything
OpenOffice: Import/export are a little gimpy, but at least you can get work done with it. (oh and you never have to worry about Activation-related problems again ever)
Should be a no-brainer.
and if you're not up for the whole novel, the complete text of OSC's 1977 short story Ender's Game (warning, it's a spoiler for the novel) is available here on his website
techinque for finding textfiles of novels on the web.
.txt files that contain the complete work. You may have to repeat the search with the ommitted results included.
1) find a legitimate excerpt (e.g. a sample chapter) on the web
2) copy a sentence fragment that is unique to the book, but mundane enough that it wouldn't be quoted on peoples' "cool quotes" pages. (something like "jammed against Ender's seat back, hurting his chest")
3) paste it inside of quotation marks in a google search.
4) the top result will probably be the legitimate excerpt you found earlier. The other results will probably be
Here's what such steps yield for Ender's Game
5) Once you've found how good the book is, give your eyes a rest and buy the book or at least check it out of the library.
http://talks.php.net/show/php5intro
Not trying to karma-whore, I just thought I'd use my +1 for something good because nobody seemed to notice the AC link.
I get my news from a lot of different sources, and I think about it. I believe a US-led war on Iraq is entirely justified, as well. After one madman bent on your destruction is *not* attacked, and then kills thousands of innocent Americans, it is perfectly justified to seek out other madmen bent on your destruction--Does anybody, even the French, put forth that Saddam is not a madman, or is not highly interested in doing harm to the U.S.?
I just worry that Iraq and its surrounding nations will propagandize this (as history shows they have before) and use it as a tool to create more, not less terrorism. Justified or not, it will still bring a lot of negative consequences when we win--maybe more than if we didn't do it at all.
Burning a mix CD of Moog Cookbook supports terrorism, but a "Christian" country unilaterally declaring war on a Muslim nation doesn't?
Well, the Taliban made a lot of the money that kept them in power in Afghanistan by growing and selling opium ...
IMHO, Mozilla does have some major advantages to IE. I've been using Mozilla for -- gosh, it seems like years now, since before 1.0 and even then it had tabbed browsing and javascript popup blocking. Those are two "real" innovations, and very nice things to have.
Most of my friends who still use IE use some freeware/spyware 3rd party popup blocking program that uses a windows API hack to kill popped-up windows with a certain title that's in the list of popups to kill. It is a very weak hack and not much more effective than alt-f4 when you see a popup. Mozilla has a checkbox to disallow all automatic popups. I checked it a long time ago and have NEVER missed them. It's so funny when I'm using IE and I get a popup--it startles me because in my world, you just don't get popups and you never have to think about it.
Any observer of any part of human history should be able to tell you the same thing blues singers have told you for years: "them that's got, gets" The Bible says it in proverbs written thousands of years ago, for crying out loud!
Every human society that has ever existed has had a priviledged few increasing their comforts at the expense of others. Marxism didn't fix this, Naziism didn't fix it, and Democracy doesn't fix it either. Selfishness and greed are parts of human nature, and though they may not be the most admirable parts of humanity, they do drive scientific progress fairly efficiently, when exploited properly.
The patent system in "our brand of capitalism" is just one way of exploiting selfishness to bring good to everybody. Even if 14 years seems like a huge amount of time, it means that 86 of the next 100 years get to use this for free. (Unlike copyrighted works, which if copyrighted today will still be restricted 100 years from now, but that's another rant.)
The privately owned Union Springs Telephone company in (dirt poor, rural) Bullock County, Alabama, recently announced an expansion of Fiber-to-home internet, cable, and phone service over the next few years.
Here's a link to a news story about it.
If a mom-n-pop telco can make a profit selling FIBER connections to one of the poorest rural counties in the US, certainly the big telcos could make a profit if they wanted. "Let's get the government to do it for us" is NOT the right answer for everything.
You're right, the Omron picture looks a lot like a Fresnel lens, and it is distorted. Cool, but it seems more useful for car headlights or room lighting than for computer displays.
The EETimes article OTOH is all about Organic LED's, and looks to be the real next generation for display tech.
There's a lot of talk about Linux's lower costs, and also about its "other advantages" but I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Sun in all of this.
I'll explain what I mean: If the high school computer lab could get a Solaris lab for the same or lower cost than a Win2k lab, they would in a heartbeat. And more and more everyday, Linux-on-Intel is showing it's a "good-enough" replacement for Solaris-on-Sun.
So take all the reasons that an educational institution would shell out the big bucks for some SPARCstations, and make it work on $199 Wal-Mart Durons or no-cost donated hardware, and you've got a pretty good cost-benefit equation for Linux.
The BBC article focuses on the problem of traffic problems increasing on the perimiter of the toll areas. A possible solution for this would to have a "fuzzy" or probablistic charging scheme with multiple perimiters. Within one perimiter, you have say, a 10% chance of being charged, and inside another, smaller area there may be a 50% chance of being charged. The highest congested areas can give a 100% chance of being charged.
That might, of course, bother people who un-luckily got charged more than they felt was right. Still you could get the same effect from charging in graduated increments, 10% toll in an outer perimiter, 50% in the middle and 100% in the peak area, so that drivers avoiding the toll will be spread out according to who wants to avoid how much of a toll.
it seems like every year finds the nation, and its citizens, further in debt.
I used to listen to a number of different music stations, but when they got bought out by sucky 100-ad-a-minute monopoly stations, I started listening to my local NPR station more. I know I'm not the only one who's gone that direction.
... silence. *ahhhh*
So, unless ClearChannel starts buying out (non profit, listener funded) Public Radio there are probably a lot of people (read: voters) fed up with crappy music and insipid morning shows that are switching to award-winning, (relatively) evenly-biased journalism about the politics of the U.S. and the world.
Yes, I know it's going a long way to find a "bright side" to something so obviously bad and wrong, but I can't help but see some good coming out of the bad state that things are in.
And as a note to anybody who doesn't like what's playing on the radio monopoly: turn it off. It feels really good to have some whinging pop-tart singer or annoying advertiser giving you their line, and *beep*
I didn't notice it until reading your post, but it's all clear now! KDE isn't copying features from Windows, it's copying features from Emacs!
I'm not saying I agree with this lady, but I think a lot of people discussing this here don't really understand what she's saying. Yeah, she might mostly just want to live on someone else's work, but what she said, "I'm happy that people won't be able to take his art and show it in a way that would diminish or hurt it, or put it in a way that he wouldn't have wanted," is probably the most valid reason for the fight to keep Mickey Mouse locked up.
As the Reason interview mentions, derivative works of Mickey Mouse would have Mickey shooting heroin, or Mickey smuggling dope, or Mickey Mouse Porn. I'm not saying that makes infinite copyright okay, but it is not hard to understand why the heirs (and/or company) of a creator of a "wholesome" character would not want people to use it just anywhere.
not saying it's right, just saying it's something that could stand to be discussed a little more.
Organize yourself with other like-minded individuals, and ONLY vote for candidated who support rolling back the copyright laws, even if you have to become the "copyright reform" party and write-in your own candidate. Everyone votes in every election, and makes it clear that you're voting ENTIRELY on the issue of copyright reform.
I believe there are enough mp3-listening and internet-savvy voters out there to make a difference.
And by making a difference I do not mean electing a copyright reform candidate. All you have to do is put up enough votes to "swing" an election from one party to another, and the parties will both start paying attention. I guarantee that if a copyright-reform candidate gets 10,000 votes in a race that's won by 5,000 votes, both parties will address it in their platform and chances are one of them will . With the right support, this could be a real (as in debated by candidates) issue by the 2004 presidential elections.
Everybody wants to talk like Disney's money is the most powerful political force in the world. Not only does the government support some issues that have more voter support than corporate support, but there are many industries which would benefit from copyright reform at least as much as the few who benefit from copyright extension.