The link specifically states that you may _upgrade_ you machines' "software" under your school's educational subscription. IMU "upgrading" requires that the original OEM installation (or some descendant of it) be intact, lending force to their assertion that this original install must be preserved and, of course, legitimately licensed. I'd love to see one of these educationsl agreements - does it provide for outright installation on new machnery (say, built up by the school), or only for upgrading an OEMs install?
I guess one thing that is really good about group/pair work is that it's about the only way you can get a shot at the hotties who otherwise would just look right past you.
I made the mistake of picking out the hottest of the three females (of a class of about 80) in CSC100 (ASU's equivalent) for a "lab" partner. BZZZZZZZT.... ERROR. I doubt she'd _ever_ programmed so much as a VCR, let alone a hand calculator, in her wildest dreams, and here she was in a pascal class. I think she had driven a motorcycle once, but that was definately the limit of her technological competance. The lectures went clean over her head. I'm not much of an instructor, and my attempts at clairification did the same thing. On the bottom line I ended up doing 100% of the software authorship, and she changed her major to business (and I _hope_ NOT MIS, either!).
Never one to be convinced by a singular bad experience, I tried pretty much the same thing with an even prettier ornament in CSC101. This was about 1983, and the drug of choice on campus at the time was that coke shit. The "programming partner" was, as before, highly decorative but, despite having survived CSC100, innocent of anything that could be even remotely regarded as software development, and preferred to get wired on that coke shit before showing up for collaboration sessions. Needless to say, her concentration was shot by that, her less-than-laughable skills were NOT supplemented either, and after a couple of complete failures at even getting _started_ at writing her first line of code she decided to just buy a working program from somebody else in the class. (I wouldn't sell her mine, and I think she was proposing to pay for it with that coke shit anyway, in which I was uninterested.) The next year she, too, was in the business school.
Some years later, I had an opportunity to discuss the level of difficulty of CSC100 & 101 with one of my favorite instructors of the department - the guy who taught me COBOL (years before the fetish for pascal and requirement for CSC100/101) and at the time the department's chairman. My remark was that if you didn't walk _into_ CSC100 with, at the very least, understanding of what an indexed loop, an array, and a read statement were, you weren't going to pick up these concepts from that class. His response was that CSC100/101 were the CSC department's "weeder" classes, which served to weed out the business students. They certainly accomplished that, and I would seriously suspect that this is also the purpose of GT's CS1321 (and its second-semester successor, if any).
Just to _really_ grind my point home, I wound up with another female programming "partner" in a 400 level class. I did not choose this one on the basis of her appearance, we just happened to be sitting at the same table when the professor told everybody to pair up and collaborate on the next project, because it would be too much work for one person. I figured there was no way this little chica doll (she was from Venezuela) could have advanced to senior standing in CSC without the ability to actually _write_ code. I was wrong. She was able to come up with about 5% of the actual work, which amounted to the easiest 20% of the code. The complex work was mine alone, she never understood it, even as she was linking her stuff into it.
In "the real world", the situation is no better. When I started my present job, my immediate supervisor was a striking blonde, whose resemblance to a former girlfriend gave me the willies. I was able to set aside my emotional upheavals long enough to dig into her perl code, where I quickly discovered that she had no concept of variable scoping or inheritance by subroutines, and only the vaguest notions about variable typing (which, in perl, is a bit wierd, but spelled out well enough by Wall & Christiansen, which she gave me to read). There were several places in her code where it failed because she had inadvertantly and obviously unknowingly inherited variables from the _wrong_ places. She's gone now, and her perl code has been largely rewritten by me.
Now I realize that my statement so far has been a sexist generalization. I'm deliberately trolling for one of the couple of female programmers I _know_ are out there (I've seen your comments) to prove me wrong. All this would take is a page of deep, elegant code and a photo that isn't frightening. Even anecdotal evidence from a guy who _knows_ a competant and attractive female programmer would be appreciated.
2. Fix their pricing so that it is uniform to all OEMs...
I'll agree that ordinarily this sort of contract stuff is pretty sacrosanct, but it's NOT appropriate for a monopoly. The official word from both the original and appelate courts is that M$ _is_ a monopoly, Linux & BSD notwithstanding. M$ has also demonstrated a strong habit of using its OEM contracts as sharp instruments to control the bahavior of the entire industry. This needs to stop. These deals need to be modified expressly to facilitate _NON_exclusive distribution of WinBloze, and this is neither optional nor unfair to the monopolist. The present situation, where the entire industry must distribute WinBloze _exclusively_, or risk losing their WinBoze licensing altogether (=~ a death sentence in a market where the monopolist 0wnZ a 90+% market share), or automatically lose millions of dollars of advertizing cooperation, is unfair. The OEMs simply _must_ be freed up to distribute whatever OS their customer specifies (or none), _without_ losing M$ OEM licensing or advertizing participation. And I'm NOT talking about forcing M$ to promote competitive Operating Systems (though that might be a step in the direction of leveling the playing field), I'm talking about forcing M$ to pay advertizing bonuses based on the number of computers sold _with_ WinBloze, and forbidding the requirement that _all_ an OEMs computers _must_ be sold with WinBloze to participate in the program at all. Such provisions are clearly exclusionary and anticompetitive!
I genuinely believe the AMD guy had a gun to his head when he wrote his declaration. Sign it or sign AMD's economic suicide note. Not a tricky choice, I think I'd have done the same (and snitched as soon as possible).
OK so I think a lot of us are _waiting_ for Jerry Sanders to soften or otherwise recant his statements (and aren't buying AMD hardware in the meantime). Wouldn't that make his testimony perjurious?
I'm talking about the guy from the Black Sabbath song, who was turned to steel in a great magnetic field. I've always regarded this as a reference to an Iron Man from the comics, or at least the guy who had a cartoon on TV for a while there (contemporary with Captain America, Spiderman and Speed Racer). The Iron part was his flesh, not any suit, yet he remained motile. IIRC he had a red costume, possibly with white trim, but it's been a long time. If this is inconsistent with what Marvel is publishing now under the name, well, look what's happened to Batman & Robin's costumes over the years. OTOH the guy in the song may be totally unrelated, or possibly distorted by Ozbourne's drug consumption habits of the era.
Pioneered the construction of space ships, submarines, and IIRC _lots_ of other things from this element (explodium) in the sixties. It's especially useful in electrical equipment of all kinds.
I think the previous poster's point was that kryptonite isn't a real element, while krypton is a real element. Krypton is element 36, in fact.
That's fine, but we're talking _Comic_Book_ elements here, NOT real stuff, so Kryptonite (the element SuperMan is afraid of) definately belongs on this periodic table.
And I _have_ always wondered how that race of superbeings got along on a planet made of the only thing in the universe that hurts them. But I've never forked out for the books, so WTF do I know....
If it weren't for the cats, small rodents and birds would proliferate in suburbs, causing potential health problems. They'd be limited only by their food supply, which is approximately equal to human food supplies (mice, in particular, can get into anything that isn't protected by a metal can). When I lived on a dairy farm the cats were regarded as essential to the control of the rodents.
Even in the cities, where your statistics suggest that the cats would eliminate every other living creature, large numbers of birds and rodents survive the decimation wrought by domestic felines. There is simply no shortage of supply.
The "ecosystem" of a suburb is basically that of any other human garden: what the hew-mons want to grow, grows, what the hew-mons don't want gets eliminated. Factor in the humans' tendancy to dislike having small animals infiltrate their pantries and raid their food supplies and you get a several-thousand-year-old friendship between us and these little predators.
Deep in the city, there are probably too many stray cats to provide a good environment. I've known a couple of inner-city people who've had problems letting their cats out because they get beaten up _badly_ by tougher cats. We're talking about peeing blood and requiring hospitalization, as well as nasty infections from bites. This is less of a problem in the suburbs because it's a (slightly) more natural environment - there are lots more trees and bushes for cover, many more small animals to hunt - and no doubt simply less crowding.
Any cat that only lasts two or three years, indoors or out, is living a very tough life. Most suburban cats (neutered or not) go ten or fifteen years or more unless hit by cars. Yeah, an uncastrated male will get into fights and occasionally he'll lose these fights and get beat up, but he'll go right back outside for more. Who are you to keep him inside? The lady cats are out there.
Cats with their own doors are demonstrably happier than confined cats or cats dependant on their humans for door service. Cats with their own doors will crap outside and prefer it that way, eliminating the smell of an inside box. Of course they'll hunt, too, and unless they're wimps they'll catch all kinds of things, greatly supplementing their diet. Let's see _you_ live on meat-flavored cereal your entire life without developing some deitary-deficiency disease or other.
My only objection to the Great Furred Hunters(tm) is that their prey is usually bleeding and the feathers make a terrible mess. Hunting also seems to be the most lucrative in the single-digit hours of the morning, typically when I _least_ want my feline friend to present me with a baby rabbit (an animal capabable of producing a surprising amount of noise!).
to get the gopher/mouse/bird/whatever's blood out of your carpet(s).
....probably will take you a lot less time than hacking together your proposed lockout device.
Love trophies from Mighty Hunters(tm) are all well and good, but you have to draw the line at things which are still bleeding or, worse, ambulatory. Practically anything "a cat drags in"(tm) is usually bleeding, and the cats tend to prefer to pin the stuff down and eat it on the carpet, rather than a nice, hard, _cleanable_ surface like linoleum.
If the quarry is small it might be able to run somewhere (say, under the refrigerator) where the cat can't get at it, which I regard as a big problem. The cat does, too.
oO0Oo. WAY more. (NONE of which I've ever had to touch!)
And don't tell me M$ is simpler. It merely denies you access to the overwhelming majority of it.
I could argue that using your AV stack would be pretty simple iff all you ever did with it was play CDs:
Let's see: Press button to open cupholder. Set coaster on cupholder (OK you must get the shiny side down). press button to close cupholder. (maybe) press PLAY (if it doesn't start automatically)
But somehow I assume that you expect more from that AV collection than that it merely play CDs. I expect more from my computer than email, so I must delve into its complexity.
Can anybody see any difference between the tech industry and the Morlocks from H. G. Wells's novel The Time Machine (not the movie, which blows)?
No. Wells wrote "The Time Machine" to warn of this same "tech gap", which he saw coming a hundred years ago.
Thankfully, the Eloi still have _money_ with which to pay us, and we haven't had to resort to eating them - yet. But the day may come....
It's NOT as if we (Morlocks) are _witholding_ anythng from the Eloi. The same resources I used to learn what I know are out there, available to all, many for FREE (especially in the FREE and OSS software movements)(though with the patenting and copyrighting of _all_ IP, this may change in the very near future). The Eloi _choose_ to remain ignorant, to tell us that our equipment is "too complicated", "too hard to use", "too hard to learn", etc.
I poo on them. Computers are NOT televisions. A modern multitasking Operating System is as complex as an Apollo rocket. You are simply NOT going to take it out of the box, plug it in, and have any chance of fully utilizing it without study. Period.
The Eloi don't want to study, preferring to pay the Morlocks to do that for them. This makes them our rightful "customers".
Battlesoft.net: "Will program for money, food, beer, reasonably attractive women, some drugs, some CDs, computer parts, and other valuable considerations."
Anyone reading the article would think that KDE isn't available yet--the authors evidently think that the upcoming version of KDE is the very first version, judging by the way they wrote it up.
It's well-known within the Empire that "Linux has no GUI". This is a consistent FUD assertion which Imperial minions are happy to propagate. I've seen several statements (the "UNIX on the desktop makes no sense" FUD, among others) which repeat that *NIX/Linux has no GUI, and requires the user to type inscrutable commands unto a shell prompt. I've also seen (several times) that "KDE, the Linux GUI, is due to be released xxxx". Nevermind that X is older than WinBloze, or that I had fvwm2rc95 in 1997 which looked exactly like Lose95, the Empire can't seem to publicize _that_.
Most M$ lusers were happy to lose the command prompt with DoS, and were always made queasy, if not simply terrified, by a big blank screen that said nothing but "C:>". Threatening them with a return to that is valuable FUD, from which the Empire will not part.
that waste even more of my bandwidth and screen space will make me more likely to click on them, they're truly delusional. If _you_ believe this, well.....
You're taking square aim at your own foot. The same tiny minority who do the most browsing (and from whom you'l be asking the most money) are the tiny minority who supply your content. Any subscription system which does not provide some subsidy for those providing (perhaps positively moderated) comments will be counterproductive. I generally preview and edit my comments several times before I post. If each of these iterations is going to count as a page load, you'll see use of the "Preview" button fall off to nearly nothing. That can't be A Good Thing(tm).
The only hope is in the alternative or partially underground radio stations that still have a very nice rotation of new artists and sounds. I swear, if it wasn't for CIMX 88.7FM in Detroit, I wouldn't even know about any of the new artists.
And WHAT, pray tell, are we supposed to do if we happen to live in a "market" that doesn't have one of these stations (Phoenix)?
We have about fifty T20 (that's 20, not 40, they only play 20 songs so of course they can't get through a whole hour without repeating something) stations, maybe a dozen "country" and "western" (we have 'both kinds', here, it's Arizona after all) stations, a "classic rock" station, (with a playlist of about fifty songs, ALL of which were ground into the dust by 1980), and another station that plays only Metallica (well, it _sounds_ like Metallica, maybe they have a different list of 20 songs, all of which sound lke Metallica), which I get tired of.
In reality, Mariah Carey is a member, along with Red Green and that little annoying Pepsi girl, of a terrifying triumvirate! The Three, as they are referred to in certain circles, are at the heart of all that is unhealthy and evil in the world....
And how did Herr Gates get left out of that?
More likely Mariah Carey, Red Green, & the Pepsi grrl are just the frontmen for a far more hideous triangle consisting of DerGates, Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen. Yeah, that's it...
Today, I watch RAP on TV and hear it on the radio and realize they are forcing complete garbage on me. 95% of RAP is total trash.
It's spelled KRAP (the initial K is silent, you know) and my estimation is that the garbage fraction is more like 99.9%. Being a white male, I find it offensively racist, and I change the channel without listening to it. My (half-black) girlfriend calls it "big-mouth blacks".
And of course the RIAA has to have total control of the distribution channel in order to sell it. They learned how to do that with the bunk rawk of the early 70's, and perfected the techniques during "the disco era" (disco carried a similarly high garbage fraction, also requiring me to change channels _a_lot_. It required intervention on the part of the musicians' union to eliminate disco).
And of course they'll oppose to the death anything that threatens this control.
ricohet's theoretical maximum speed is about the speed of two 56k modems....the speed most people get will be about a fifth of that. or a little less than a 28.8 modem.
I'm sure I mentioned that the _best_ my "56K" modem has ever done on the phone line at my apartment is about 26K. I'd be delighted to actually get _one_ honest 56Kbit/sec connection, the possibility of 128K has me jazzed.
Several posters in this discussion claim they achieved Ricochet's claimed 128K, and some even more (200-300K!), so it sounds like, at worst, it's as good as my "56K" modem / phone line which only gets 26K, and at best, it can be many times faster!
One year ago, when I had just got Sprint wireless web (a $10/mo option on my Sprint PCS service) and I was looking at getting cable in my apartment, Ricochet at $80/mo looked irrelevant.
Now, with my phone line proven to be so poor that I can't get dialup to go faster than 28K (nevermind DSL), and Sprint has proven itself incapable of maintaining a call longer than 2 minutes, and my landlord has forbidden the cable company to dig up 20 ft of driveway to lay cable to me, this looks like the only way I'm _ever_ going to get more than 30Kb!
128Kb/sec, and it's _mobile_, too, for under $50? WOO HOO!!!!!!
First, there's the technological end. The Internet community will have to hand spammers to the legal authorities pretty much on a silver platter, the police don't have the resources required to patrol the Internet. This is not hard now. It's easy to prove that, over the weekend of xxxxx, so-and-so broadcast tons of spam. If you're of any size at all, your mail server logs will have thousands of examples. If a dozen ISPs show a prosecutor one thousand spamlogs _each_, he's got a pretty cut-and-dried case. This will require cooperation among some large ISPs, but I think we could get that, as these are the people whose resources are the most blatently abused.
It'll take legislation to move this behavior OUT of the province of "First Ammendment Protection of Freedom of Speech" and prescribe the pillory or keelhauling as a punishment for it. Pillorage could, at best, only be participated in by a lucky few, so I would prefer keelhauling, with lots of cameras both above and below the waterline, and (unencrypted) mpegs to be posted afterwards. It'll take international legislation to deal with the international spam, and alas, I doubt we'll get the world court to go for keelhauling. Clearly nothing but the threat of probable, serious incarceration (or, of course, worse) is going to deter someone who's making $1e6/month.
Slashdot Mirror
The link specifically states that you may _upgrade_ you machines' "software" under your school's educational subscription. IMU "upgrading" requires that the original OEM installation (or some descendant of it) be intact, lending force to their assertion that this original install must be preserved and, of course, legitimately licensed. I'd love to see one of these educationsl agreements - does it provide for outright installation on new machnery (say, built up by the school), or only for upgrading an OEMs install?
I guess one thing that is really good about group/pair work is that it's about the only way you can get a shot at the hotties who otherwise would just look right past you.
I made the mistake of picking out the hottest of the three females (of a class of about 80) in CSC100 (ASU's equivalent) for a "lab" partner. BZZZZZZZT.... ERROR. I doubt she'd _ever_ programmed so much as a VCR, let alone a hand calculator, in her wildest dreams, and here she was in a pascal class. I think she had driven a motorcycle once, but that was definately the limit of her technological competance. The lectures went clean over her head. I'm not much of an instructor, and my attempts at clairification did the same thing. On the bottom line I ended up doing 100% of the software authorship, and she changed her major to business (and I _hope_ NOT MIS, either!).
Never one to be convinced by a singular bad experience, I tried pretty much the same thing with an even prettier ornament in CSC101. This was about 1983, and the drug of choice on campus at the time was that coke shit. The "programming partner" was, as before, highly decorative but, despite having survived CSC100, innocent of anything that could be even remotely regarded as software development, and preferred to get wired on that coke shit before showing up for collaboration sessions. Needless to say, her concentration was shot by that, her less-than-laughable skills were NOT supplemented either, and after a couple of complete failures at even getting _started_ at writing her first line of code she decided to just buy a working program from somebody else in the class. (I wouldn't sell her mine, and I think she was proposing to pay for it with that coke shit anyway, in which I was uninterested.) The next year she, too, was in the business school.
Some years later, I had an opportunity to discuss the level of difficulty of CSC100 & 101 with one of my favorite instructors of the department - the guy who taught me COBOL (years before the fetish for pascal and requirement for CSC100/101) and at the time the department's chairman. My remark was that if you didn't walk _into_ CSC100 with, at the very least, understanding of what an indexed loop, an array, and a read statement were, you weren't going to pick up these concepts from that class. His response was that CSC100/101 were the CSC department's "weeder" classes, which served to weed out the business students. They certainly accomplished that, and I would seriously suspect that this is also the purpose of GT's CS1321 (and its second-semester successor, if any).
Just to _really_ grind my point home, I wound up with another female programming "partner" in a 400 level class. I did not choose this one on the basis of her appearance, we just happened to be sitting at the same table when the professor told everybody to pair up and collaborate on the next project, because it would be too much work for one person. I figured there was no way this little chica doll (she was from Venezuela) could have advanced to senior standing in CSC without the ability to actually _write_ code. I was wrong. She was able to come up with about 5% of the actual work, which amounted to the easiest 20% of the code. The complex work was mine alone, she never understood it, even as she was linking her stuff into it.
In "the real world", the situation is no better. When I started my present job, my immediate supervisor was a striking blonde, whose resemblance to a former girlfriend gave me the willies. I was able to set aside my emotional upheavals long enough to dig into her perl code, where I quickly discovered that she had no concept of variable scoping or inheritance by subroutines, and only the vaguest notions about variable typing (which, in perl, is a bit wierd, but spelled out well enough by Wall & Christiansen, which she gave me to read). There were several places in her code where it failed because she had inadvertantly and obviously unknowingly inherited variables from the _wrong_ places. She's gone now, and her perl code has been largely rewritten by me.
Now I realize that my statement so far has been a sexist generalization. I'm deliberately trolling for one of the couple of female programmers I _know_ are out there (I've seen your comments) to prove me wrong. All this would take is a page of deep, elegant code and a photo that isn't frightening. Even anecdotal evidence from a guy who _knows_ a competant and attractive female programmer would be appreciated.
DON'T MODERATE ME... FLAME AWAY!!!!
2. Fix their pricing so that it is uniform to all OEMs...
I'll agree that ordinarily this sort of contract stuff is pretty sacrosanct, but it's NOT appropriate for a monopoly. The official word from both the original and appelate courts is that M$ _is_ a monopoly, Linux & BSD notwithstanding. M$ has also demonstrated a strong habit of using its OEM contracts as sharp instruments to control the bahavior of the entire industry. This needs to stop. These deals need to be modified expressly to facilitate _NON_exclusive distribution of WinBloze, and this is neither optional nor unfair to the monopolist. The present situation, where the entire industry must distribute WinBloze _exclusively_, or risk losing their WinBoze licensing altogether (=~ a death sentence in a market where the monopolist 0wnZ a 90+% market share), or automatically lose millions of dollars of advertizing cooperation, is unfair. The OEMs simply _must_ be freed up to distribute whatever OS their customer specifies (or none), _without_ losing M$ OEM licensing or advertizing participation. And I'm NOT talking about forcing M$ to promote competitive Operating Systems (though that might be a step in the direction of leveling the playing field), I'm talking about forcing M$ to pay advertizing bonuses based on the number of computers sold _with_ WinBloze, and forbidding the requirement that _all_ an OEMs computers _must_ be sold with WinBloze to participate in the program at all. Such provisions are clearly exclusionary and anticompetitive!
I genuinely believe the AMD guy had a gun to his head when he wrote his declaration. Sign it or sign AMD's economic suicide note. Not a tricky choice, I think I'd have done the same (and snitched as soon as possible).
OK so I think a lot of us are _waiting_ for Jerry Sanders to soften or otherwise recant his statements (and aren't buying AMD hardware in the meantime). Wouldn't that make his testimony perjurious?
supposed to put up with?
I'll give you a smarter child,
I've still got a couple of MK6800D2 kits....
I'm talking about the guy from the Black Sabbath song, who was turned to steel in a great magnetic field. I've always regarded this as a reference to an Iron Man from the comics, or at least the guy who had a cartoon on TV for a while there (contemporary with Captain America, Spiderman and Speed Racer). The Iron part was his flesh, not any suit, yet he remained motile. IIRC he had a red costume, possibly with white trim, but it's been a long time. If this is inconsistent with what Marvel is publishing now under the name, well, look what's happened to Batman & Robin's costumes over the years. OTOH the guy in the song may be totally unrelated, or possibly distorted by Ozbourne's drug consumption habits of the era.
REAL or comic periodic table?
Which is it?
I've yet to see it, the mirror links
aren't working, either!
Pioneered the construction of space ships, submarines, and IIRC _lots_ of other things from this element (explodium) in the sixties. It's especially useful in electrical equipment of all kinds.
of part aluminum, part titanium, and part magic...
And I'd love to get a tissue sample from the Iron Man: how does he remain flexible/mobile?
I think the previous poster's point was that kryptonite isn't a real element, while krypton is a real element. Krypton is element 36, in fact.
That's fine, but we're talking _Comic_Book_ elements here, NOT real stuff, so Kryptonite (the element SuperMan is afraid of) definately belongs on this periodic table.
And I _have_ always wondered how that race of superbeings got along on a planet made of the only thing in the universe that hurts them. But I've never forked out for the books, so WTF do I know....
WOW, FINALLY...
a chance to _slap_ this little astroturfing troll!
Uh, wait:
battle@betty:~$ date
Mon Apr 1 10:21:51 MST 2002
Oh. Nevermind.
I don't see cats killing things as a problem.
If it weren't for the cats, small rodents and birds would proliferate in suburbs, causing potential health problems. They'd be limited only by their food supply, which is approximately equal to human food supplies (mice, in particular, can get into anything that isn't protected by a metal can). When I lived on a dairy farm the cats were regarded as essential to the control of the rodents.
Even in the cities, where your statistics suggest that the cats would eliminate every other living creature, large numbers of birds and rodents survive the decimation wrought by domestic felines. There is simply no shortage of supply.
The "ecosystem" of a suburb is basically that of any other human garden: what the hew-mons want to grow, grows, what the hew-mons don't want gets eliminated. Factor in the humans' tendancy to dislike having small animals infiltrate their pantries and raid their food supplies and you get a several-thousand-year-old friendship between us and these little predators.
and it doesn't seem to do them much harm.
Deep in the city, there are probably too many stray cats to provide a good environment. I've known a couple of inner-city people who've had problems letting their cats out because they get beaten up _badly_ by tougher cats. We're talking about peeing blood and requiring hospitalization, as well as nasty infections from bites. This is less of a problem in the suburbs because it's a (slightly) more natural environment - there are lots more trees and bushes for cover, many more small animals to hunt - and no doubt simply less crowding.
Any cat that only lasts two or three years, indoors or out, is living a very tough life. Most suburban cats (neutered or not) go ten or fifteen years or more unless hit by cars. Yeah, an uncastrated male will get into fights and occasionally he'll lose these fights and get beat up, but he'll go right back outside for more. Who are you to keep him inside? The lady cats are out there.
Cats with their own doors are demonstrably happier than confined cats or cats dependant on their humans for door service. Cats with their own doors will crap outside and prefer it that way, eliminating the smell of an inside box. Of course they'll hunt, too, and unless they're wimps they'll catch all kinds of things, greatly supplementing their diet. Let's see _you_ live on meat-flavored cereal your entire life without developing some deitary-deficiency disease or other.
My only objection to the Great Furred Hunters(tm) is that their prey is usually bleeding and the feathers make a terrible mess. Hunting also seems to be the most lucrative in the single-digit hours of the morning, typically when I _least_ want my feline friend to present me with a baby rabbit (an animal capabable of producing a surprising amount of noise!).
to get the gopher/mouse/bird/whatever's blood out of your carpet(s).
....probably will take you a lot less time than hacking together your proposed lockout device.
Love trophies from Mighty Hunters(tm) are all well and good, but you have to draw the line at things which are still bleeding or, worse, ambulatory. Practically anything "a cat drags in"(tm) is usually bleeding, and the cats tend to prefer to pin the stuff down and eat it on the carpet, rather than a nice, hard, _cleanable_ surface like linoleum.
If the quarry is small it might be able to run somewhere (say, under the refrigerator) where the cat can't get at it, which I regard as a big problem. The cat does, too.
compared to the insides of your computer.
/etc` to see a few options.
.pinerc | grep -v '#' | wc -l
Try `ls -R
Email alone probably has as many options as you enumerate for your whole AV stack.
battle@betty:~$ cat
200
oO0Oo. WAY more. (NONE of which I've ever had to touch!)
And don't tell me M$ is simpler. It merely denies you access to the overwhelming majority of it.
I could argue that using your AV stack would be pretty simple iff all you ever did with it was play CDs:
Let's see:
Press button to open cupholder.
Set coaster on cupholder (OK you must get the shiny side down).
press button to close cupholder.
(maybe) press PLAY (if it doesn't start automatically)
But somehow I assume that you expect more from that AV collection than that it merely play CDs. I expect more from my computer than email, so I must delve into its complexity.
Can anybody see any difference between the tech industry and the Morlocks from H. G. Wells's novel The Time Machine (not the movie, which blows)?
No. Wells wrote "The Time Machine" to warn of this same "tech gap", which he saw coming a hundred years ago.
Thankfully, the Eloi still have _money_ with which to pay us, and we haven't had to resort to eating them - yet. But the day may come....
It's NOT as if we (Morlocks) are _witholding_ anythng from the Eloi. The same resources I used to learn what I know are out there, available to all, many for FREE (especially in the FREE and OSS software movements)(though with the patenting and copyrighting of _all_ IP, this may change in the very near future). The Eloi _choose_ to remain ignorant, to tell us that our equipment is "too complicated", "too hard to use", "too hard to learn", etc.
I poo on them. Computers are NOT televisions. A modern multitasking Operating System is as complex as an Apollo rocket. You are simply NOT going to take it out of the box, plug it in, and have any chance of fully utilizing it without study. Period.
The Eloi don't want to study, preferring to pay the Morlocks to do that for them. This makes them our rightful "customers".
Battlesoft.net: "Will program for money, food, beer, reasonably attractive women, some drugs, some CDs, computer parts, and other valuable considerations."
Anyone reading the article would think that KDE isn't available yet--the authors evidently think that the upcoming version of KDE is the very first version, judging by the way they wrote it up.
It's well-known within the Empire that "Linux has no GUI". This is a consistent FUD assertion which Imperial minions are happy to propagate. I've seen several statements (the "UNIX on the desktop makes no sense" FUD, among others) which repeat that *NIX/Linux has no GUI, and requires the user to type inscrutable commands unto a shell prompt. I've also seen (several times) that "KDE, the Linux GUI, is due to be released xxxx". Nevermind that X is older than WinBloze, or that I had fvwm2rc95 in 1997 which looked exactly like Lose95, the Empire can't seem to publicize _that_.
Most M$ lusers were happy to lose the command prompt with DoS, and were always made queasy, if not simply terrified, by a big blank screen that said nothing but "C:>". Threatening them with a return to that is valuable FUD, from which the Empire will not part.
That's very nice, but those are all distributed as self-extracting .exes.
I don't have a WinBloze system. Those are as useless to me as all those Outlook virii out there.
Is there any place to get a nice set of free fonts _for_Linux_?
Unless somebody has a way to unpack those with Linux?
To put it in perspective, the 3% of readers who read Slashdot the most load 25 times the pages as normal users.
And these are half your posters. NOT the crowd you want to see go away, especially if lots of those paeges are previews of their posts......
that waste even more of my bandwidth and screen space will make me more likely to click on them, they're truly delusional. If _you_ believe this, well.....
You're taking square aim at your own foot. The same tiny minority who do the most browsing (and from whom you'l be asking the most money) are the tiny minority who supply your content. Any subscription system which does not provide some subsidy for those providing (perhaps positively moderated) comments will be counterproductive. I generally preview and edit my comments several times before I post. If each of these iterations is going to count as a page load, you'll see use of the "Preview" button fall off to nearly nothing. That can't be A Good Thing(tm).
And PayPal is a complete horror story:
Check this:
and this:
Even if I _do_ choose to buy a subscriptiuon (HIGHLY unlikely), I won't be doing it through PayPal!
The only hope is in the alternative or partially underground radio stations that still have a very nice rotation of new artists and sounds. I swear, if it wasn't for CIMX 88.7FM in Detroit, I wouldn't even know about any of the new artists.
And WHAT, pray tell, are we supposed to do if we happen to live in a "market" that doesn't have one of these stations (Phoenix)?
We have about fifty T20 (that's 20, not 40, they only play 20 songs so of course they can't get through a whole hour without repeating something) stations, maybe a dozen "country" and "western" (we have 'both kinds', here, it's Arizona after all) stations, a "classic rock" station, (with a playlist of about fifty songs, ALL of which were ground into the dust by 1980), and another station that plays only Metallica (well, it _sounds_ like Metallica, maybe they have a different list of 20 songs, all of which sound lke Metallica), which I get tired of.
In reality, Mariah Carey is a member, along with Red Green and that little annoying Pepsi girl, of a terrifying triumvirate! The Three, as they are referred to in certain circles, are at the heart of all that is unhealthy and evil in the world....
And how did Herr Gates get left out of that?
More likely Mariah Carey, Red Green, & the Pepsi grrl are just the frontmen for a far more hideous triangle consisting of DerGates, Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen. Yeah, that's it...
Today, I watch RAP on TV and hear it on the radio and realize they are forcing complete garbage on me. 95% of RAP is total trash.
It's spelled KRAP (the initial K is silent, you know) and my estimation is that the garbage fraction is more like 99.9%. Being a white male, I find it offensively racist, and I change the channel without listening to it. My (half-black) girlfriend calls it "big-mouth blacks".
And of course the RIAA has to have total control of the distribution channel in order to sell it. They learned how to do that with the bunk rawk of the early 70's, and perfected the techniques during "the disco era" (disco carried a similarly high garbage fraction, also requiring me to change channels _a_lot_. It required intervention on the part of the musicians' union to eliminate disco).
And of course they'll oppose to the death anything that threatens this control.
ricohet's theoretical maximum speed is about the speed of two 56k modems....the speed most people get will be about a fifth of that. or a little less than a 28.8 modem.
I'm sure I mentioned that the _best_ my "56K" modem has ever done on the phone line at my apartment is about 26K. I'd be delighted to actually get _one_ honest 56Kbit/sec connection, the possibility of 128K has me jazzed.
Several posters in this discussion claim they achieved Ricochet's claimed 128K, and some even more (200-300K!), so it sounds like, at worst, it's as good as my "56K" modem / phone line which only gets 26K, and at best, it can be many times faster!
One year ago, when I had just got Sprint wireless web (a $10/mo option on my Sprint PCS service) and I was looking at getting cable in my apartment, Ricochet at $80/mo looked irrelevant.
Now, with my phone line proven to be so poor that I can't get dialup to go faster than 28K (nevermind DSL), and Sprint has proven itself incapable of maintaining a call longer than 2 minutes, and my landlord has forbidden the cable company to dig up 20 ft of driveway to lay cable to me, this looks like the only way I'm _ever_ going to get more than 30Kb!
128Kb/sec, and it's _mobile_, too, for under $50? WOO HOO!!!!!!
First, there's the technological end. The Internet community will have to hand spammers to the legal authorities pretty much on a silver platter, the police don't have the resources required to patrol the Internet. This is not hard now. It's easy to prove that, over the weekend of xxxxx, so-and-so broadcast tons of spam. If you're of any size at all, your mail server logs will have thousands of examples. If a dozen ISPs show a prosecutor one thousand spamlogs _each_, he's got a pretty cut-and-dried case. This will require cooperation among some large ISPs, but I think we could get that, as these are the people whose resources are the most blatently abused.
It'll take legislation to move this behavior OUT of the province of "First Ammendment Protection of Freedom of Speech" and prescribe the pillory or keelhauling as a punishment for it. Pillorage could, at best, only be participated in by a lucky few, so I would prefer keelhauling, with lots of cameras both above and below the waterline, and (unencrypted) mpegs to be posted afterwards. It'll take international legislation to deal with the international spam, and alas, I doubt we'll get the world court to go for keelhauling. Clearly nothing but the threat of probable, serious incarceration (or, of course, worse) is going to deter someone who's making $1e6/month.