Have a look at audio books. There are some really good audio books available and while the better ones are usually fiction, there are some nice nonfiction ones too -- mostly history books. Try downloading some using amule to see if you like the style (oops, did I just suggest copyright infringment?) There are sites where you can buy the books for about $5 each.
In case you didn't notice, quite a high percentage of the US's population has arrived in the last 90 years. Are these third generation immigrants 'we' or 'they'?
The fan won't be louder... Firstly, this is ITX so there isn't a fan on either the CPU or the PSU. Even if there was they will be referring to electrical noise, not accoustic noise.
However, the grandparent may well be correct that the hard drive is not a problem. As I understood it, the PSU is the only component which often causes problems and the ITX can have the PSU in an external transformer if you want.
Even if the hard drive is a problem, ITX already has the ability to boot off the network which has got to be easier, faster and more reliable. So, I agree it is a waste of time:-)
Robots aren't the only thing with an apparent inability to climb stairs -- when was the last time you were in an office building which didn't have a lift? This particular model does not have the facility to call a lift, but others do.
Also, as I mentioned, you still need cleaners for the jobs other than vacuuming; the cleaners can shift the robot to the next floor (via the lift)
You're right about cleaning, servicing and emptying costs. But any investment that pays for itself in about a year is very impressive. ROI is typically about ten years in my experience. Heat pumps apparently break even after 27 years (if you trust the dubious statistics) yet people put them in.
There's a lot worse images we could have. They even chose libertarian instead of marxist.
Besides, I think the quote is fairly accurate -- just look at how much we jump up and down about 'trivial' licence details. In the closed source world they'd just pirate the software and forget about it.
Er, because robot is useful and the roomba sucks. And I don't mean that in a good way;-)
The Roomba just goes around in increasing circles and copes really badly with anything like furniture. (Excercise: See if you can work out its algorithm; hint: It doesn't need any internal state ala Brooks). Unless your room is approximately square or circular with gaps around the furniture, you can forget about it. Roomba needs far too much supervision, you (almost) may as well do the job yourself.
More useful are robots which can be programmed with a map. These can cope with pretty much any room, but you better not move your desk without telling them or the poor robot will get confused and go sulk in a corner.
Far more useful are the robots which build a map of their environment as they go because they can be turned on and left. I believe this robot fits into that category (though it isn't the first).
Forget for a moment you doing the vacuuming at home (or your mum doing it;-) and instead consider a large office which currently employs cleaners to come in and clean/vacuum every day. How much do you think this costs? Say they spend one hour vacuuming per floor, at perhaps $10/hr, a five floor office costs $50/day. And note that while they may be paid only $10 or less per hour, the cleaning company almost certainly charges them out at more (profit + wear and tear on machinery + uniform + admin). The robot at $1800 will take about a month to pay for itself -- suddenly the price sounds reasonable, no? Of course, the building still needs cleaners for other tasks, but if just the vacuuming was taking an hour... Certain local politicians forgot that here with 'self cleaning' toilets, but I digress...
As to your idea of fighting roombas. Remember that algorithm I got you to work out at the start? It ain't going to make very good fights, is it?
The Linspire (Lindows) folks have quite a nice one called sipphone. I particularly like how you can plug your ordinary phone in. They're a fairly new player so currently low prices may not last.
I've got one based on the atmel (at76c503_rfmd). It works pretty well. My only gripe is that even though it is open source, it isn't currently in the kernel so I have to recompile before every kernel upgrade.
I've been using it to access my server at home because I'm too lazy to lay cable under the house.
Actually, white island isn't that remote. It is a fairly popular daytrip. I'd post photos from a holiday there, but there's no way my 128k DSL line can handle slashdot:-(
Er, how is your proposal different from seteuid? A tiny setuid root wrapper gets authentication information, checks it with PAM, and then forks & seteuid to that user.
I went through a similar process and ended up getting a CMA astoria. It is a low end commercial machine but even the low end has no trouble churning out 60 coffees per hour -- far more than the high end domestic market at about the same price
Did you see the reviews that say a home popcorn machine is as good/better than most cheap personal roasters?
Personally I'm quite happy buying my beans preroasted by the local supplier (at worst, you'll get yesterday's roast) because I'd never be as good as them, but were I to roast myself, the popcorn idea looks quite self-contained.
Mixing Robusta in isn't as bad as you make it out.
Back when I wasn't quite so anal about coffee, I used to get a mix with around 10% robusta because it lasts better. Nowadays I get arabica and buy new beans every week, but if you're only going to buy every few weeks or (horror) buy _ground_ coffee then having a bit of robusta in there will probably help.
Short answer... you have no right to copy it. Were it physically possible, you could copy your part of the performance. Normally people assign their rights to a single entity (perhaps your church) and then they can ask a representative of that entity (your pastor) for permission.
Asking a single person is of course significantly easier than asking everybody who contributed, and if you're concerned about that person turning around and saying no, then you can write a contract stipulating when they should say yes. If you want to be really cautious, then create a new entity which owns the copyright, and you can write its charter.
Huh? Metrowerks produces apple development tools, and they dabble in linux/embedded development tools. I'm pretty sure that Metrowerks is not a freescale subsidary. See for example this PR.
There was one a while back. Everybody installed a program kinda like glimpse on your server and indexed your own web site and a few others. IIRC it would automatically work out by IP address any sites that were nearby and not already over-indexed. They all then kinda pooled the results.
One benefit of it is that you can keep the index of your website up to the minute if you really want. I guess they just never got enough people running the indexing software.
Er... no. Even middle-income people can significantly reduce their tax bill.
Let me give you an example. Say I earn $100k, so clearly I'm not in your 'very rich' category. Now, of course I own a company (or several). Some of my money comes from an ordinary salary, while other parts come from consulting through one of the comapnies. Sound reasonable? In order to reduce your income tax bill, you have to make less money on paper.
One of the things you can do is have one company run at a loss and have your salary credited against that loss so you don't have to pay income tax on all your salary.
So, how do you get your company to run at a loss? Let me give you a few random examples: Well, how about buying a house? They cost a lot, and they devalue down to very little (the devaluation is the expense). Sure, you have to amortise this when you sell, but you're in no hurry to do that.
Next example, every year, the company is supposed to have an AGM to discuss various things like the company's financial position. Well, how about having the next one in Italy, or Hawaii? Those holidays^Wbusiness meetings are very expensive and since it is out of the country most of the expenses become tax deductable.
You want another example? If the business suddenly needs money, then you can have a family member on a lower salary loan the business the money and then pay them back with interest.
Now, there's gotchas with all of these. Put simply, anything done just for tax benefits can be nullified, so most things need checking with an accountant or even better directly with the taxman. Simply declaring things without checking can leave you in big trouble. But if you're careful to play it legal, then it's pretty easy to significantly reduce your income tax.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is LEGAL in the US.
The company isn't allowed to ask you to work that long without a break (because too many workers have had fatal accidents after overlong shifts). But if you ignore that and work that long anyway, then I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be paying you for the extra since it would too easily be seen as implicitly ignoring the law. Nice bonus for them in saved wages too.
That's just an attempt to destroy your bayesian filter. See, the spammer knows it will still get tagged as spam but now "justice, remarked, scarecrow, sigh, dangerous,..." are slighly spammy words in your database. If you get a lot of spam then your database will get a very large number of these incorrectly spammy words. Mine is 50MB, and when I was using two word bayesian instead of one-word, it was 200MB.
Now the next time someone sends you an email about scarecrows (which I guess doesn't happen much) your spam filter goes: oh, I know that word, it's a spammy word! I'm sure the spammers know that any spam filter that starts misclassifying legit mail very quickly gets trashed.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at audio books. There are some really good audio books available and while the better ones are usually fiction, there are some nice nonfiction ones too -- mostly history books. Try downloading some using amule to see if you like the style (oops, did I just suggest copyright infringment?) There are sites where you can buy the books for about $5 each.
You forgot the timezone. It is 09:04 tuesday morning here.
In case you didn't notice, quite a high percentage of the US's population has arrived in the last 90 years. Are these third generation immigrants 'we' or 'they'?
The fan won't be louder... Firstly, this is ITX so there isn't a fan on either the CPU or the PSU. Even if there was they will be referring to electrical noise, not accoustic noise.
:-)
However, the grandparent may well be correct that the hard drive is not a problem. As I understood it, the PSU is the only component which often causes problems and the ITX can have the PSU in an external transformer if you want.
Even if the hard drive is a problem, ITX already has the ability to boot off the network which has got to be easier, faster and more reliable. So, I agree it is a waste of time
Robots aren't the only thing with an apparent inability to climb stairs -- when was the last time you were in an office building which didn't have a lift? This particular model does not have the facility to call a lift, but others do.
Also, as I mentioned, you still need cleaners for the jobs other than vacuuming; the cleaners can shift the robot to the next floor (via the lift)
You're right about cleaning, servicing and emptying costs. But any investment that pays for itself in about a year is very impressive. ROI is typically about ten years in my experience. Heat pumps apparently break even after 27 years (if you trust the dubious statistics) yet people put them in.
Hey, I agree with ESR most of the time. Now, if they thought RMS was typical, then I'd agree you had a point :-)
There's a lot worse images we could have. They even chose libertarian instead of marxist.
Besides, I think the quote is fairly accurate -- just look at how much we jump up and down about 'trivial' licence details. In the closed source world they'd just pirate the software and forget about it.
Er, because robot is useful and the roomba sucks. And I don't mean that in a good way ;-)
;-) and instead consider a large office which currently employs cleaners to come in and clean/vacuum every day. How much do you think this costs? Say they spend one hour vacuuming per floor, at perhaps $10/hr, a five floor office costs $50/day. And note that while they may be paid only $10 or less per hour, the cleaning company almost certainly charges them out at more (profit + wear and tear on machinery + uniform + admin). The robot at $1800 will take about a month to pay for itself -- suddenly the price sounds reasonable, no? Of course, the building still needs cleaners for other tasks, but if just the vacuuming was taking an hour... Certain local politicians forgot that here with 'self cleaning' toilets, but I digress...
The Roomba just goes around in increasing circles and copes really badly with anything like furniture. (Excercise: See if you can work out its algorithm; hint: It doesn't need any internal state ala Brooks). Unless your room is approximately square or circular with gaps around the furniture, you can forget about it. Roomba needs far too much supervision, you (almost) may as well do the job yourself.
More useful are robots which can be programmed with a map. These can cope with pretty much any room, but you better not move your desk without telling them or the poor robot will get confused and go sulk in a corner.
Far more useful are the robots which build a map of their environment as they go because they can be turned on and left. I believe this robot fits into that category (though it isn't the first).
Forget for a moment you doing the vacuuming at home (or your mum doing it
As to your idea of fighting roombas. Remember that algorithm I got you to work out at the start? It ain't going to make very good fights, is it?
The Linspire (Lindows) folks have quite a nice one called sipphone. I particularly like how you can plug your ordinary phone in. They're a fairly new player so currently low prices may not last.
I've got one based on the atmel (at76c503_rfmd). It works pretty well. My only gripe is that even though it is open source, it isn't currently in the kernel so I have to recompile before every kernel upgrade.
I've been using it to access my server at home because I'm too lazy to lay cable under the house.
Except it is for serving single files > 5MB. The files are only ~100kB.
Actually, white island isn't that remote. It is a fairly popular daytrip. I'd post photos from a holiday there, but there's no way my 128k DSL line can handle slashdot :-(
Er, how is your proposal different from seteuid? A tiny setuid root wrapper gets authentication information, checks it with PAM, and then forks & seteuid to that user.
I went through a similar process and ended up getting a CMA astoria. It is a low end commercial machine but even the low end has no trouble churning out 60 coffees per hour -- far more than the high end domestic market at about the same price
Did you see the reviews that say a home popcorn machine is as good/better than most cheap personal roasters?
Personally I'm quite happy buying my beans preroasted by the local supplier (at worst, you'll get yesterday's roast) because I'd never be as good as them, but were I to roast myself, the popcorn idea looks quite self-contained.
Mixing Robusta in isn't as bad as you make it out.
Back when I wasn't quite so anal about coffee, I used to get a mix with around 10% robusta because it lasts better. Nowadays I get arabica and buy new beans every week, but if you're only going to buy every few weeks or (horror) buy _ground_ coffee then having a bit of robusta in there will probably help.
Remember, for best effect, drink it through the day, not all at once
No, for best effect, drink it all at once, and keep reordering through the day.
Short answer... you have no right to copy it. Were it physically possible, you could copy your part of the performance. Normally people assign their rights to a single entity (perhaps your church) and then they can ask a representative of that entity (your pastor) for permission.
Asking a single person is of course significantly easier than asking everybody who contributed, and if you're concerned about that person turning around and saying no, then you can write a contract stipulating when they should say yes. If you want to be really cautious, then create a new entity which owns the copyright, and you can write its charter.
Huh? Metrowerks produces apple development tools, and they dabble in linux/embedded development tools. I'm pretty sure that Metrowerks is not a freescale subsidary. See for example this PR.
Is to use a hypodermic needle and suck the air out. I think it creates less of a mess than your approach.
There was one a while back. Everybody installed a program kinda like glimpse on your server and indexed your own web site and a few others. IIRC it would automatically work out by IP address any sites that were nearby and not already over-indexed. They all then kinda pooled the results.
One benefit of it is that you can keep the index of your website up to the minute if you really want. I guess they just never got enough people running the indexing software.
*LOL*, Ah well. However, my post was about reducing your 'on paper' income, which is all the new Democrat's tax laws would care about.
Er... no. Even middle-income people can significantly reduce their tax bill.
Let me give you an example. Say I earn $100k, so clearly I'm not in your 'very rich' category. Now, of course I own a company (or several). Some of my money comes from an ordinary salary, while other parts come from consulting through one of the comapnies. Sound reasonable? In order to reduce your income tax bill, you have to make less money on paper.
One of the things you can do is have one company run at a loss and have your salary credited against that loss so you don't have to pay income tax on all your salary.
So, how do you get your company to run at a loss? Let me give you a few random examples: Well, how about buying a house? They cost a lot, and they devalue down to very little (the devaluation is the expense). Sure, you have to amortise this when you sell, but you're in no hurry to do that.
Next example, every year, the company is supposed to have an AGM to discuss various things like the company's financial position. Well, how about having the next one in Italy, or Hawaii? Those holidays^Wbusiness meetings are very expensive and since it is out of the country most of the expenses become tax deductable.
You want another example? If the business suddenly needs money, then you can have a family member on a lower salary loan the business the money and then pay them back with interest.
Now, there's gotchas with all of these. Put simply, anything done just for tax benefits can be nullified, so most things need checking with an accountant or even better directly with the taxman. Simply declaring things without checking can leave you in big trouble. But if you're careful to play it legal, then it's pretty easy to significantly reduce your income tax.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe this is LEGAL in the US.
The company isn't allowed to ask you to work that long without a break (because too many workers have had fatal accidents after overlong shifts). But if you ignore that and work that long anyway, then I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be paying you for the extra since it would too easily be seen as implicitly ignoring the law. Nice bonus for them in saved wages too.
That's just an attempt to destroy your bayesian filter. See, the spammer knows it will still get tagged as spam but now "justice, remarked, scarecrow, sigh, dangerous, ..." are slighly spammy words in your database. If you get a lot of spam then your database will get a very large number of these incorrectly spammy words. Mine is 50MB, and when I was using two word bayesian instead of one-word, it was 200MB.
Now the next time someone sends you an email about scarecrows (which I guess doesn't happen much) your spam filter goes: oh, I know that word, it's a spammy word! I'm sure the spammers know that any spam filter that starts misclassifying legit mail very quickly gets trashed.