I'll plug my own project here: Cream is Vim tricked out in single mode with all the development tools pre-configured with all useful shortcut keys self-documented in the pull-down menus. You won't need to go searching through the help ever again.
To date, there is no CAD software for Linux that even half resembles the capability of ACAD. The best thing I've found is Cycus, but it is nowhere close. I wish everybody would stop fiddling with icon suites and desktop skins and get to work on a real GPL CAD application.
The entire design, building, and construction industry is hinged on AutoCAD. Oh sure, there are plenty of so-called competitors, but when #2 (Microstation) decides to flip its entire file format to AutoCAD's proprietary format that's a pretty good indication of who owns the market.
The pathetic thing is that AutoCAD is a house of cards. It is a mishmash of Lisp, VBA, C, C++, DCL, VB, dotNet, and is wildly unstable. The features are always changing and every release crushes all previous version file formats. It is the biggest assembly of bolt-on code for such a huge pile of money you can imagine.
But AutoCAD still rules, nobody in GPL-land is really paying attention.
This is exactly what Fedora's yum does. Has for a few years now.
RPM dependency resolution issues only came about because users would --force install packages that screwed up library version numbers. From then on further packages would get confused about what versions were installed on the system and you get what you deserve for trying to bypass the built-in check: instability.
Proving no explosives were used is like proving that UFOs don't exist. It's backwards, the hypothesis suggests the course of research rather than following the line of reasoning suggested by the facts.
What I do know is that burning jet full would weaken the structural integrety of any building steel (which is only about 450 degrees F). Steel does not have to reach melting point (3,300F+/- IIRC) to weaken structurally. This is why very basic structures are usually 1hr rated. It doesn't mean the steel will withstand 1 hr of heat, only that there is this much quantified protection assigned to it (as opposed to 2hr or 4hr). In the case of WTC, nothing short of a non-existant 8hr rating would have protected it, and it is abundantly clear that the crash removed considerable quantities of these protections on initial impact. What is amazing is that neither building collapsed in the first 10 minutes.
Denying that a 400mph 767 can take down an enormous 1970's skyscraper is nothing short of ignorant, ignorance at a 6th grade level of education at that.
That is some of the most wacko assembly of unscientific paranoia I have ever witnessed. Statements like "fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9-11" are so flat wrong, it astounds the mind to think they were offered as anything other than some sort of sick satire.
Re:emacs and vim are too difficult to use
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Vim 6.4 Released
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Vim can act like a single-mode text editor: Cream for Vim. Tons of other usability improvements, too.
Re:Why are we hiding from the police, daddy?
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Vim 6.4 Released
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Indeed, in fact Shuttleworth is apparently blind to the contradiction he offers through two examples in adjacent paragraphs:
There will never be a difference between the "commercial" product and the "free" product, as there is with Red Hat (RHEL and Fedora). Ubuntu releases will always be free.
....There are likely to be many specialised versions of Ubuntu, under other brand names, that have commercial or proprietary features. They might have proprietary fonts or software or add-ons or integration with services, etc. There is also likely to be quite a lot of proprietary software available for Ubuntu.
[Emphasis mine]
So how is Ubuntu's model any better? He paints Red Hat as evil for offering both a commercial and a free version, but then expects Ubuntu to be extended in exactly the same way (or worse)!
The only difference here is that Red Hat is a single shop. But since the GPL guarentees the same enduring freedoms for Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu and Ubuntu-derivative distributions, why should we care who encourages an effort, especially when they have everything to gain by doing so? I would think the collection of talent working on both together would have a better synergy: design, bug fixing, packaging should all be improved.
To top it off, Shuttleworth then waffles his philisophical comments by closing with:
It's also important to distinguish between Canonical, which is a for-profit services operation, and the Ubuntu Foundation, which has capital from me, on a non-profit basis, to continue Ubuntu's work.
Uh, if Ubuntu is so free, why is it necessary to make this distinction? Does it mean Ubuntu's leader could be associated as having the same commercial structure previously vilified in the competing distribution?
Look, I have nothing against Ubuntu or Shuttleworth. The distro is solid and working hard toward the goal of free software that does what people need. But this continuous bashing of Red Hat serves nothing. It is especially ironic when it comes from individuals who have to equivocate on their own position to avoid appearing the same way! These arguments are naive, poorly constructed, petty, and generally irrelevant. They only stir up trouble and are the perfect distraction from the real work at hand.
Please Ubuntu cheerleaders, focus on your project and stop bashing everybody else. There is plenty to do and many good people working alongside.
Just bought an m500
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Palm's Mistakes
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I just bought a near-new Palm m500 on eBay for $43 (to replace my ancient m105). New, it was 10x that. I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Palm, but they somehow missed that usability was their #1 asset and their price point could only match the usable features they offered.
Palm was always a simple device that did all you needed to manage contacts, memos, calendar, and todos. But once telephone, wireless, music, media, games, etc. began to be demanded by customers, they couldn't figure out how to integrate them into their concept. The basic idea was good, but it wasn't extensible. It didn't match what was demanded by their customers. For example, I spent two days just trying to get their Palm Desktop installed on Windows XP. It works well on Windows 95, but it never became dead easy for XP, a complete failing on Palm's part to make their devices useful with the current generation of technology.
Palm failed to understand how to keep going. They tried to merely extend their current offerings instead of re-designing and growing them in scale to market demand. That included a more sophisticated operating system and better interface with desktop systems. This explains why I can be happy buying a legacy unit at 10:1 original cost and be happy while at the same time explaining why I will never buy a new Palm.
The "free" scripting feature of MS Office is both unstable and responsible for half the virus problems the platform has. VBA is a huge trap door to the back of your system that you have to open in order to run customizations. And are you prepared to migrate all your customizations to the new syntax every year or two? Having scripted 20,000 lines of VBA myself (some of it hosted by the third party AutoCAD app) I was none too pleased to find the API changing and breaking all my customization. What will you do if MS decides to completely abandon it in favor of something else? (They once threatened to do in VBA in favor of VBA.net or something, anybody know if this is still the case?) With a proprietary application base, the user has no control or recourse over a situation like this.
Photoshop is more refined than GIMP, I will agree. However it also has about 100 times more development effort against it and has been around for many years longer, with that much more time for it to be refined. Notice the story just posted on GIMP usability? It has made enormous gains in the last year, which I personally expect to happen again in the next. I depend on CMYK color spaces (and others) so Photoshop is still a dependency for me at work. (My employer foots the bill.) But GIMP will catch it in two more years. I already find it more intuitive and simpler than PS for most simple/web type graphics. You may not be up to speed on it, but don't discount GIMP because it is not the same. (And please look up the PS keystrokes config file for GIMP.)
Acrobat is a proprietary application, it is apples and oranges to say Linux is deficient because it won't run Adobe products. We could easily point to hundreds of native Linux applications that have no support in Windows. That doesn't make the platform definitively superior, it just means that these particular tasks/users can only be serviced by that single application and supporting environment. (BTW, my personal application dependency is AutoCAD... I need it on whatever platform it runs on.) The real danger in holding out any particular application on a proprietary platform is that you are at the mercy of both host and application for its support. With Free Software, you can always find someone to add the support and features you need no matter what happens to the original development effort.
Very interesting thought. I occasionally pass along thoughts to the developer's of GRAMPS, I wonder how an existing/traditional app could be modified toward's this better methodology without stranding any of the traditional users.
I think the best way for you to use this information is to first develop an interest in genealogy yourself. Genealogy is an art as much a science. What you see as only mountains of raw data the genealogist sees as potential relationships between any one piece to any other. Some examples:
Census Forms. If you come across a series of census forms, how are you going to organize them? Are they by year? By location? By primary line? By associated families? (Which may be the only connection between the primary line.) Will you collect census record images with transcriptions?
Photographs. Should these be organized by date or by content? Which family dictates the primary? What about wedding photos where two or more families appear together? At what point are images of a son no longer associated with his parents? When he has a family? What about images of four generations of extended family at an event? What about pictures of houses, horses, trees, or fields? What about a booklet of photographs taken on the same roll of film, isn't it more valuable to have them in this series so you can connect all the people within?
Existing Genealogies. I have numerous genealogical references for the same family. They don't always match. Which one is correct? What if both have known errors that the other gets correct? What about how they fork into non-duplicate portions?
Cemetery Records. Are these organized by place or by family? Should images of the tombstones be included with them or somewhere else? Should a century-old record be accepted as is or should the known errors be fixed first? What about eight editions of the same record, is the latest always correct?
The best description I have ever read about genealogy is that it is like a court case in which you are trying to assemble facts and proof to make an argument. The only problem is that the same data can be used in several cases, and each individual is it's own case. Data proving one fact may disprove another. It is the entire assembly, through the skill of it's interpreter, that gives the structure real usefulness.
In your case, your mother probably had stacks of information about certain topics. You are likely to come along and re-organize it, not according to the cases she was trying to prove, but some arbitrary method. I know if I died, nobody on the planet would be able to make sense of the folders and files I have, since it is organized primarily by my interests, my cases, my explorations, some mostly finished, some barely started. It is basically impossible to organize physical data in many-to-many relationships. But what would honor my efforts most would be for my heirs not to come along behind and "organize" it, but to embrace what I was trying to do and extend it. Re-organization to further the research would be a blessing, de-organization into tiny un-connected pieces of data is the very thing the genealogist is working against.
The last important idea I can offer is that your mother's information isn't as important to another genealogist as it was to her. Research is always based on primary data, the actual physical record or statement like a birth certificate, family Bible, or tombstone. Good researchers are always attempting to connect primary sources. Swimming through someone else's secondary data is helpful only to the point that it directs one to the instigator. I usually ignore other's works these days unless they are published in book form. There are so many errors, false trails. mis-statements and lies that it is generally not worth the time of back-checking someone's statements as it would be to simply find the source yourself.
If you are somehow able to perfectly scan and digitally abstract all this data, create the perfect database that connects it all together, and automate a little robot to go retrieve the physical item on command, you will have something to sell. Until then, you are doomed to swim in mountains of information like the rest of us, occasionally noting that one item bears a familiar handwriting resemblance to another seemingly unconnected document.;)
Just thought I'd suggest (since I'm in the market for another vehicle myself at the moment and looking closely), why not buy a car in a region where rust isn't a problem? I'm in the SE US, and you could pick a paper from any of the top 10 metro areas here and find a deal that won't rust. You'd have to make a trip (or spend a couple hundred to fly) but it would be worth that small investment. Buy in Florida during the winter time and call it a vacation. Your drive back saves plane fare, and you end up with a week's opportunity to look around.
I completely agree with your point regarding total cost, most people don't factor everything. However, I would say that if you are willing to live without the status symbol of a new car, you can do a bit better with used cars.
Most people can't bear to drive around a two generation old model and give up the status of owning the latest and greatest. But it is less than half the cost. If you are willing to drive slightly older vehicles, not only do you spend far less, but you save more of the environment. The total environmental cost of producing a new car is (by some sources) two times the cost of the car itself.
Example: Here in the states, you can buy an eight year-old Honda Accord with about 80K miles on it for around $7,000. This is a car that is going to go to 180k miles, meaning you can drive it at least 100,000 miles for an upfront cost of $0.07 / mile. Do your research, this is a car that will require very little maintenance with not much more than a timing belt, brakes and a CV joint or two. Here's the math for my typical annualized costs:
Upfront Cost: $1,050 (15,000 miles) Maintenance: $500 (gratuitous, I spend less) Gas: $1,280 (27 miles/gallon at $2.30/gal) Insurance: $450 (no collision) Taxes: $80
TOTAL: $3,360 / year ($0.224 / mile)
This is a 4-door, mid-sized car, with full safety features, airbags, windows and mirrors, nice paint, air conditioning, moon roof, quality wheels, etc. Drop back to a smaller car (like a Honda Civic) and you can do even better ($2,000 less upfront cost or about $0.03/mile). The trick is to find a well made automobile that doesn't need a lot of on-going maintenance, you have to read good consumer information (Consumer Reports:Used Cars) to properly evaluate.
The metro area in which I live has terrible mass transit, it would take me almost four hours to commute the 15 miles I do to work. Biking is deadly, there are no bikelanes and only narrow roads and highways. Same goes for just about everything else we do, mass transit is not an option. But this proves that one can still own a safe car, save money and the environment. Just don't buy everything shiney and new the car makers are hawking.
Fedora Core strikes me as a good balance between Free and current. Sure there is no MP3 playback, but that is because Red Hat long ago decided to keep it's distributions free of any software using licenses that were not Free Software. There are plenty of other media formats that are as good or even better. And there are plenty of places that provide a way to add MP3 support, it's just that the distro has decided to keep the base 100% free. (Which is fine with me, I'd prefer that than starting to rely on some software that gets yanked in a year because it's copyright holders decided to start charging an arm and a leg for it.)
Fedora is also up to date. Here again, the basement dwellers among us can point to XYZ distribution that has bleeding-edge package ABC. But the FC packages alwyas seem to work within the distro. From time to time I'll venture out into one of the alternate repositories or closed-source drivers and I always regret it. The system gets unstable or something else stops working.
Which brings me to my main point, Fedore Core is proving to be a fine distribution for my productivity. I have long lost interest in tweaking and exploring the system deep into the night, now I just need one that I can use for email and web browsing, authoring various documents, develop software, draw, do genealogy, personal finances, etc. I'm not saying FC is perfect, nothing is. But it's usefulness is equal and better than my Windows XP station at work. Every release gets better, and while I want to see continuing advancements in my desktop environment, I also need one that is useful to me now.
Balance is rarely appreciated (I like Honda, too) but it's a sign of both skill and maturity. Keep it up team.
We've had a basic MindSpring (now EarthLink) DSL account for years in the Triangle, NC.
7/10
$40/month, (continued at this price requires 1 year committment)
150 KBs down, 15 KBs up. Throughput seems consistent, these speeds don't vary.
WebMail access to POP mail accounts. Most ISPs have this now, but MindSpring was one of the first. Very solid application, better than Gmail's IMO.
Outages are rare, I think I've had two legitimate in the last year and a half.
Flakey VisionNet modem behavior is more frequent, although a re-start (sometimes reset) always fixes it. Maybe 3 times a week, after several hours of non-use the PPPoE connection will drop. This is our second unit at this address, the first died and it took three calls to figure it out. The previous Linksys model at the previous address a few miles away was rock solid for several years, but they said it wouldn't work on the new line.
MindSpring tech support used to be terrific, I would get techs who used Linux, spoke without accent, and let me get to the point without a lot of scripted questions. The last year or two however, my calls are usually picked up somewhere offshore. Between the accents and the question reading it takes 10 minutes to find out if it's my end or their's after the 10 minute max wait get picked up. Now that I've figured out this modem is almost always the problem, I get by resetting it (the little paper clip hole on the bottom followed by re-config username/password via browser) most times without a call.
Spam Blocking seems decent, although many still get through. My email is posted all over the web, though so I sort of expect it.
Huge amount of email storage space, 500Mb or something.
I sometimes look around and compare. Cable would be faster, but we don't buy cable TV so it would cost more. Other carriers appear price competitive, but no better. Earthlink is bit, their infrastructure is solid. I'm sticking with what works, but feel like I pay $10 too much and get 100KB/s too slow. (But don't we all.:)
It tests all the characteristics of a printer that I cared about:
color accuracy -- C,M,Y,K,CM,CY,MY,CMY,CMYK in density increments of 10% from 10-100%
SWOP color accuracy -- Same as CMYK except in 25% increments
grayscale accuracy -- Increments of 5%
resolution -- CMYK tests of lines down to 0.25pt at 45 degree angles
Of course, you'll need a reference card by Kodak, etc. to test against, but I've found this is the simplest way short of developing a whole complex spot color sample group of colors closer to the edges of gamut.
I've never studied Japanese history, but the ideas you mentioned in one paragraph really help me to make sense of what I see in their culture today. The Japanese love toys and gadgets. And they generally do not shoot the moon with new inventions, prefering to "refine" an existing idea, even until it is superior to the "new tech".
Both these could be explained by this history, thanks for adding a whole new topic to explore.
I was fortunate enough to work at an 18th century living history museum many summers, weekends, and holidays as a blacksmith. Nearly twenty years later, I am still impressed at how much can be done with steel and fire. The technology of tempering is ancient, and the same metalurgical chemistry is used everywhere today in instrument sharpening, oxidization resistiveness, and high strength/weight component design such as in an F1 racecar (when they choose to drive them).
You can set up your own blacksmith shop now for not much more than some fireclay, an old hairdryer blower, some coal fuel, an short piece of railroad track turned upside down for an anvil (always used a forged metal, never cast) and a hammer. Although if I did it these days, I would be more disciplined about wearing hearing protection.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll plug my own project here: Cream is Vim tricked out in single mode with all the development tools pre-configured with all useful shortcut keys self-documented in the pull-down menus. You won't need to go searching through the help ever again.
Not true, you forgot AutoCAD.
To date, there is no CAD software for Linux that even half resembles the capability of ACAD. The best thing I've found is Cycus, but it is nowhere close. I wish everybody would stop fiddling with icon suites and desktop skins and get to work on a real GPL CAD application.
The entire design, building, and construction industry is hinged on AutoCAD. Oh sure, there are plenty of so-called competitors, but when #2 (Microstation) decides to flip its entire file format to AutoCAD's proprietary format that's a pretty good indication of who owns the market.
The pathetic thing is that AutoCAD is a house of cards. It is a mishmash of Lisp, VBA, C, C++, DCL, VB, dotNet, and is wildly unstable. The features are always changing and every release crushes all previous version file formats. It is the biggest assembly of bolt-on code for such a huge pile of money you can imagine.
But AutoCAD still rules, nobody in GPL-land is really paying attention.
This is exactly what Fedora's yum does. Has for a few years now.
RPM dependency resolution issues only came about because users would --force install packages that screwed up library version numbers. From then on further packages would get confused about what versions were installed on the system and you get what you deserve for trying to bypass the built-in check: instability.
Disclaimer: IIAA (I am an architect).
Proving no explosives were used is like proving that UFOs don't exist. It's backwards, the hypothesis suggests the course of research rather than following the line of reasoning suggested by the facts.
What I do know is that burning jet full would weaken the structural integrety of any building steel (which is only about 450 degrees F). Steel does not have to reach melting point (3,300F+/- IIRC) to weaken structurally. This is why very basic structures are usually 1hr rated. It doesn't mean the steel will withstand 1 hr of heat, only that there is this much quantified protection assigned to it (as opposed to 2hr or 4hr). In the case of WTC, nothing short of a non-existant 8hr rating would have protected it, and it is abundantly clear that the crash removed considerable quantities of these protections on initial impact. What is amazing is that neither building collapsed in the first 10 minutes.
Denying that a 400mph 767 can take down an enormous 1970's skyscraper is nothing short of ignorant, ignorance at a 6th grade level of education at that.
Seriously? Here's the first headline I saw: Bush Insider Claims WTC Collapse Bogus, Demolition More Likely.
That is some of the most wacko assembly of unscientific paranoia I have ever witnessed. Statements like "fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9-11" are so flat wrong, it astounds the mind to think they were offered as anything other than some sort of sick satire.
Vim can act like a single-mode text editor: Cream for Vim. Tons of other usability improvements, too.
Vim's not easy to use?
I beg to differ: Cream for Vim.
You can have Photoshop keys in GIMP with this simple download.
Indeed, in fact Shuttleworth is apparently blind to the contradiction he offers through two examples in adjacent paragraphs:
So how is Ubuntu's model any better? He paints Red Hat as evil for offering both a commercial and a free version, but then expects Ubuntu to be extended in exactly the same way (or worse)!
The only difference here is that Red Hat is a single shop. But since the GPL guarentees the same enduring freedoms for Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu and Ubuntu-derivative distributions, why should we care who encourages an effort, especially when they have everything to gain by doing so? I would think the collection of talent working on both together would have a better synergy: design, bug fixing, packaging should all be improved.
To top it off, Shuttleworth then waffles his philisophical comments by closing with:
Uh, if Ubuntu is so free, why is it necessary to make this distinction? Does it mean Ubuntu's leader could be associated as having the same commercial structure previously vilified in the competing distribution?
Look, I have nothing against Ubuntu or Shuttleworth. The distro is solid and working hard toward the goal of free software that does what people need. But this continuous bashing of Red Hat serves nothing. It is especially ironic when it comes from individuals who have to equivocate on their own position to avoid appearing the same way! These arguments are naive, poorly constructed, petty, and generally irrelevant. They only stir up trouble and are the perfect distraction from the real work at hand.
Please Ubuntu cheerleaders, focus on your project and stop bashing everybody else. There is plenty to do and many good people working alongside.
I just bought a near-new Palm m500 on eBay for $43 (to replace my ancient m105). New, it was 10x that. I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Palm, but they somehow missed that usability was their #1 asset and their price point could only match the usable features they offered.
Palm was always a simple device that did all you needed to manage contacts, memos, calendar, and todos. But once telephone, wireless, music, media, games, etc. began to be demanded by customers, they couldn't figure out how to integrate them into their concept. The basic idea was good, but it wasn't extensible. It didn't match what was demanded by their customers. For example, I spent two days just trying to get their Palm Desktop installed on Windows XP. It works well on Windows 95, but it never became dead easy for XP, a complete failing on Palm's part to make their devices useful with the current generation of technology.
Palm failed to understand how to keep going. They tried to merely extend their current offerings instead of re-designing and growing them in scale to market demand. That included a more sophisticated operating system and better interface with desktop systems. This explains why I can be happy buying a legacy unit at 10:1 original cost and be happy while at the same time explaining why I will never buy a new Palm.
Thanks for the facinating and helpful link, I just spent the last hour reading the entire site and am quite inspired.
A couple of rebutal points...
The "free" scripting feature of MS Office is both unstable and responsible for half the virus problems the platform has. VBA is a huge trap door to the back of your system that you have to open in order to run customizations. And are you prepared to migrate all your customizations to the new syntax every year or two? Having scripted 20,000 lines of VBA myself (some of it hosted by the third party AutoCAD app) I was none too pleased to find the API changing and breaking all my customization. What will you do if MS decides to completely abandon it in favor of something else? (They once threatened to do in VBA in favor of VBA.net or something, anybody know if this is still the case?) With a proprietary application base, the user has no control or recourse over a situation like this.
Photoshop is more refined than GIMP, I will agree. However it also has about 100 times more development effort against it and has been around for many years longer, with that much more time for it to be refined. Notice the story just posted on GIMP usability? It has made enormous gains in the last year, which I personally expect to happen again in the next. I depend on CMYK color spaces (and others) so Photoshop is still a dependency for me at work. (My employer foots the bill.) But GIMP will catch it in two more years. I already find it more intuitive and simpler than PS for most simple/web type graphics. You may not be up to speed on it, but don't discount GIMP because it is not the same. (And please look up the PS keystrokes config file for GIMP.)
Acrobat is a proprietary application, it is apples and oranges to say Linux is deficient because it won't run Adobe products. We could easily point to hundreds of native Linux applications that have no support in Windows. That doesn't make the platform definitively superior, it just means that these particular tasks/users can only be serviced by that single application and supporting environment. (BTW, my personal application dependency is AutoCAD... I need it on whatever platform it runs on.) The real danger in holding out any particular application on a proprietary platform is that you are at the mercy of both host and application for its support. With Free Software, you can always find someone to add the support and features you need no matter what happens to the original development effort.
Forgot to mention that XM's system is also available via two different Pioneer AVIC after-market products.
Honda provides the XM NavTraffic system in the smokin' Acura RL (a cool $50,000). You can read more on Acura's Real Time traffic page.
Very interesting thought. I occasionally pass along thoughts to the developer's of GRAMPS, I wonder how an existing/traditional app could be modified toward's this better methodology without stranding any of the traditional users.
I think the best way for you to use this information is to first develop an interest in genealogy yourself. Genealogy is an art as much a science. What you see as only mountains of raw data the genealogist sees as potential relationships between any one piece to any other. Some examples:
Census Forms. If you come across a series of census forms, how are you going to organize them? Are they by year? By location? By primary line? By associated families? (Which may be the only connection between the primary line.) Will you collect census record images with transcriptions?
Photographs. Should these be organized by date or by content? Which family dictates the primary? What about wedding photos where two or more families appear together? At what point are images of a son no longer associated with his parents? When he has a family? What about images of four generations of extended family at an event? What about pictures of houses, horses, trees, or fields? What about a booklet of photographs taken on the same roll of film, isn't it more valuable to have them in this series so you can connect all the people within?
Existing Genealogies. I have numerous genealogical references for the same family. They don't always match. Which one is correct? What if both have known errors that the other gets correct? What about how they fork into non-duplicate portions?
Cemetery Records. Are these organized by place or by family? Should images of the tombstones be included with them or somewhere else? Should a century-old record be accepted as is or should the known errors be fixed first? What about eight editions of the same record, is the latest always correct?
The best description I have ever read about genealogy is that it is like a court case in which you are trying to assemble facts and proof to make an argument. The only problem is that the same data can be used in several cases, and each individual is it's own case. Data proving one fact may disprove another. It is the entire assembly, through the skill of it's interpreter, that gives the structure real usefulness.
In your case, your mother probably had stacks of information about certain topics. You are likely to come along and re-organize it, not according to the cases she was trying to prove, but some arbitrary method. I know if I died, nobody on the planet would be able to make sense of the folders and files I have, since it is organized primarily by my interests, my cases, my explorations, some mostly finished, some barely started. It is basically impossible to organize physical data in many-to-many relationships. But what would honor my efforts most would be for my heirs not to come along behind and "organize" it, but to embrace what I was trying to do and extend it. Re-organization to further the research would be a blessing, de-organization into tiny un-connected pieces of data is the very thing the genealogist is working against.
The last important idea I can offer is that your mother's information isn't as important to another genealogist as it was to her. Research is always based on primary data, the actual physical record or statement like a birth certificate, family Bible, or tombstone. Good researchers are always attempting to connect primary sources. Swimming through someone else's secondary data is helpful only to the point that it directs one to the instigator. I usually ignore other's works these days unless they are published in book form. There are so many errors, false trails. mis-statements and lies that it is generally not worth the time of back-checking someone's statements as it would be to simply find the source yourself.
If you are somehow able to perfectly scan and digitally abstract all this data, create the perfect database that connects it all together, and automate a little robot to go retrieve the physical item on command, you will have something to sell. Until then, you are doomed to swim in mountains of information like the rest of us, occasionally noting that one item bears a familiar handwriting resemblance to another seemingly unconnected document. ;)
Just thought I'd suggest (since I'm in the market for another vehicle myself at the moment and looking closely), why not buy a car in a region where rust isn't a problem? I'm in the SE US, and you could pick a paper from any of the top 10 metro areas here and find a deal that won't rust. You'd have to make a trip (or spend a couple hundred to fly) but it would be worth that small investment. Buy in Florida during the winter time and call it a vacation. Your drive back saves plane fare, and you end up with a week's opportunity to look around.
I completely agree with your point regarding total cost, most people don't factor everything. However, I would say that if you are willing to live without the status symbol of a new car, you can do a bit better with used cars.
Most people can't bear to drive around a two generation old model and give up the status of owning the latest and greatest. But it is less than half the cost. If you are willing to drive slightly older vehicles, not only do you spend far less, but you save more of the environment. The total environmental cost of producing a new car is (by some sources) two times the cost of the car itself.
Example: Here in the states, you can buy an eight year-old Honda Accord with about 80K miles on it for around $7,000. This is a car that is going to go to 180k miles, meaning you can drive it at least 100,000 miles for an upfront cost of $0.07 / mile. Do your research, this is a car that will require very little maintenance with not much more than a timing belt, brakes and a CV joint or two. Here's the math for my typical annualized costs:
This is a 4-door, mid-sized car, with full safety features, airbags, windows and mirrors, nice paint, air conditioning, moon roof, quality wheels, etc. Drop back to a smaller car (like a Honda Civic) and you can do even better ($2,000 less upfront cost or about $0.03/mile). The trick is to find a well made automobile that doesn't need a lot of on-going maintenance, you have to read good consumer information (Consumer Reports:Used Cars) to properly evaluate.
The metro area in which I live has terrible mass transit, it would take me almost four hours to commute the 15 miles I do to work. Biking is deadly, there are no bikelanes and only narrow roads and highways. Same goes for just about everything else we do, mass transit is not an option. But this proves that one can still own a safe car, save money and the environment. Just don't buy everything shiney and new the car makers are hawking.
Fedora Core strikes me as a good balance between Free and current. Sure there is no MP3 playback, but that is because Red Hat long ago decided to keep it's distributions free of any software using licenses that were not Free Software. There are plenty of other media formats that are as good or even better. And there are plenty of places that provide a way to add MP3 support, it's just that the distro has decided to keep the base 100% free. (Which is fine with me, I'd prefer that than starting to rely on some software that gets yanked in a year because it's copyright holders decided to start charging an arm and a leg for it.)
Fedora is also up to date. Here again, the basement dwellers among us can point to XYZ distribution that has bleeding-edge package ABC. But the FC packages alwyas seem to work within the distro. From time to time I'll venture out into one of the alternate repositories or closed-source drivers and I always regret it. The system gets unstable or something else stops working.
Which brings me to my main point, Fedore Core is proving to be a fine distribution for my productivity. I have long lost interest in tweaking and exploring the system deep into the night, now I just need one that I can use for email and web browsing, authoring various documents, develop software, draw, do genealogy, personal finances, etc. I'm not saying FC is perfect, nothing is. But it's usefulness is equal and better than my Windows XP station at work. Every release gets better, and while I want to see continuing advancements in my desktop environment, I also need one that is useful to me now.
Balance is rarely appreciated (I like Honda, too) but it's a sign of both skill and maturity. Keep it up team.
We've had a basic MindSpring (now EarthLink) DSL account for years in the Triangle, NC.
7/10
I sometimes look around and compare. Cable would be faster, but we don't buy cable TV so it would cost more. Other carriers appear price competitive, but no better. Earthlink is bit, their infrastructure is solid. I'm sticking with what works, but feel like I pay $10 too much and get 100KB/s too slow. (But don't we all. :)
Interesting. Looks like you missed one, the complete set should be:
Pentagon
A field near Somerset, Pennsylvania
World Trade Center
The resolution lines should work this way. They are composed of all possible base color combinations in the basic angular directions.
I wrote this one: ColorCard.pdf (1.4Mb).
It tests all the characteristics of a printer that I cared about:
Of course, you'll need a reference card by Kodak, etc. to test against, but I've found this is the simplest way short of developing a whole complex spot color sample group of colors closer to the edges of gamut.
Great post.
I've never studied Japanese history, but the ideas you mentioned in one paragraph really help me to make sense of what I see in their culture today. The Japanese love toys and gadgets. And they generally do not shoot the moon with new inventions, prefering to "refine" an existing idea, even until it is superior to the "new tech".
Both these could be explained by this history, thanks for adding a whole new topic to explore.
I was fortunate enough to work at an 18th century living history museum many summers, weekends, and holidays as a blacksmith. Nearly twenty years later, I am still impressed at how much can be done with steel and fire. The technology of tempering is ancient, and the same metalurgical chemistry is used everywhere today in instrument sharpening, oxidization resistiveness, and high strength/weight component design such as in an F1 racecar (when they choose to drive them).
You can set up your own blacksmith shop now for not much more than some fireclay, an old hairdryer blower, some coal fuel, an short piece of railroad track turned upside down for an anvil (always used a forged metal, never cast) and a hammer. Although if I did it these days, I would be more disciplined about wearing hearing protection.