I read in an organic gardening book someplace that human hair will kill slugs. The theory is that if you spread hair on the ground where slugs are known to exist, as the slugs crawl over the hair, the hair wraps around the slug's body and eventually strangles it. We don't have very many slugs around my house for me to experiment to see if this is true and if so, what length/thickness of hair works best. Alan Cox's wife Telsa has complained about slug problems in her diary and I've forwarded the suggestion to her. Given it doesn't appear that Alan's been sheared yet, she probably hasn't tried either.
I've seen an article in Information Week that basically said that even other Unix OS's such as Solaris or AIX can be cheaper given the cost of maintaining the server, downtime, and client licenses for NT. I know someone that got a new laptop for work and the cost of all the client licenses needed for it exceeded the cost of the hardware. IMHO, that's insane.
The biggest demographic using WebTV is the over-65 group. There is nothing to break, and one can just turn it on like a TV. If all he wants to do is read email, surf, and write letters, then this will do all of the above with minimum fuss. Having it on a big TV would help those with bad eyesight and it can be hooked up to some printers for hardcopy output.
The only drawbacks as far as I can see are:
No choice of ISP
They keep track of all the urls visited so one can target advertising (or who knows what else)
You can still get GEOS too. Check out New Deal Software. They produce an office suite and other software primarily for schools, which are often the dumping ground for corporations that want to get a tax break for donating old computer equipment. While it's not open source, they do let you download a functional evaluation copy.
I guess that depends on what you are looking for in a city. Of your list, only reason d) and maybe e) would be something I would care about. Even then, education and the availability of tech jobs would be the most important. I couldn't give a rat's ass about diverse and/or interesting people to talk to.
On the flip side, I would rather have Minneapolis' weather. I prefer nice artic-like winters compared to the wimpy Southern winters and the drivers who freak out when a few snowflakes hit the pavement. The summers in either place would be ok with me.
cars: space limitiations and fuel taxation are probably the main differences between the two markets. Driving a 4 ton SUV wouldn't be practical in Europe (personally, I don't think it's practical in the US either, but I guess people do it because they can). Gasoline octane ratings took a big hit in the early 70s due to environmental/emissions regulations. Before then, one could get fuel with octane ratings of 100 or better for leaded gasoline. I personally like small fuel efficient cars because I'm a cheapskate (too bad I can't afford a Jetta TDI)
Washers: Never had a problem with a clothes washer tearing up clothing. The top loading models are usually less expensive to make, and until Maytag started making consumer front loading machines, the only place I've seen front loading ones were in laundromats.
bathroom stuff: I have a control knob for the hot water and the cold water for my shower and that's not all that unusual. I agree the one knob control showers can be a pain. One can get euro-style water conserving toilets. But what really annoys me about them, is that I have to flush them 2-3 times to get the crap to go down. No saving water there. I suppose one could modify the type that is used in RVs for homes.
Electricity: The plugs haven't always been polarized and I'm not sure why the change was made or why it would necessarily be a no-no. Transmission to the home is usally at a much higher voltage (440 at least) and is stepped down with a transformer to 110. If a lot of power is needed, then 2-phase is used. Blame Edison and Westinghouse
I've heard the 4/30 (or similar) ratio about the US before and often wondered, what would the ratio would be for all of Europe? I imagine things are different because the appliances/technology evolved at the same time under different governmental or resource restrictions. Also, as other people have pointed out, the US didn't have most of its industrial base and urban areas creamed because of WWII, so when it was rebuilt, industrial planners may have decided to look into ways of optimizing some things because they have to be rebuilt anyway. Many things in the US are the way they are because to change them would be a big disruption that people don't want (the switch to digital TV is going to be fun, fun, fun. I know people are going to bitch because the govt is forcing them to buy a new tv or convert box). Water restrictions and other environmental regulations are changing this in some western states.
Everything is cheaper, not necessarily of terribly high quality(unless it's imported) but still okay.I disagree with you here. The cheap low quality stuff is imported. Not from Europe or Japan, but from China, Mexico, etc. Depending on what you are buying, the US made stuff can be pretty good. I'd like to visit Europe in the near future to see what it's like so I can compare and contrast myself.
Try ebay or Y ahoo auctions. Given that Slashdot has some resources for adding new features, Rob could start Slashdot Auctions: Junk only nerds could love.
A friend of mine programs autopilot systems for Honeywell. I believe he said when he first started working for them about 6-7 years ago, they were using z80s for the embedded cpu's for flight control systems for several different types of aircraft.
IBM makes a ton of money doing service, support, consulting, etc. By making some of their products Open Souce, they get more people interested in using them and that helps them get their foot in the door so to speak. IBM becomes a friend to the Open Source movement. Some PHB reads about linux in the trade rags and thinks that someone should be up on it so they will look buzzword-compliant to the bosses in the boardroom. What do you know...IBM just sent out a new training schedule and it's got a Linux class on it. So the PHB sends a guy to the class for $2k and he gets documentation & CDs with IBM software to play with. If you think about it this way, IBM isn't getting the money from selling the software, but from the training.
Couldn't you have someone who is working on the project with you go over their source code and then generate a specification document of the file layouts, how the code is supposed to work, etc. and then pass it off to someone else who hasn't looked at it and have them implement it? What would be any other legal procedures would one have to do to make sure that Sun (or anyone else with a similar license) doesn't come along and try to sue you for lifting their code?
You can check on ebay for a card or see if there is a used mac dealer in your area. There are also SCSI to ethernet adapters for Macs w/o any expansion slots.
That's ridiculous. Guess what a lot of chains have used or are using for such activies? Xenix or SCO Unix. Get a bunch of POS terminals and hook them to a server via serial lines and run curses based apps that require the user only to pick a letter/number/function key or scroll up or down with the cursor and press enter. The users don't have to know what OS the machine is running, just how to operate the applications that have been set up for them. They aren't going to be running shell commands.
How is having a staff of DBAs & dedicated servers or the redunancy you speak of any different than trying to run on WinNT? You don't want to run a business on questionable hardware anyway and you always want to make sure that you are backing up your data. That has nothing to do with linux. Burington may have already had a lot of their software written for a Unix platform (I seem to recall that they had their store servers on Solaris), so it wouldn't be too terriblly hard to port.
I haven't tried running the Mac Seti client (I doubt my wife would let me tie up her iMac for that long), but I've been averaging 8hr 43min seti work units on my Celeron 450 (300a overclocked) running linux. I've heard the GUI clients are a lot slower, but almost 3x slower is riduculous! I suppose that prof didn't mention the Alpha system cranking out seti units in about 50 minutes did he? I like Apple, but their stuff can be so expensive! I wonder if this machine would be able to handle IBM's PPC chip that has multiple processor cores on it.
Got a 1040 tax instruction booklet from last year? Here's the breakdown:
Income
Personal Income taxes 46%
Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment 34%
Corporate Income Taxes 11%
Excise, customs, estate, gift and other misc taxes 8%
Borrowing 1%
Outlays
Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement 38%
National defense, veterans, and foreign affairs 20% (actual breakdown: defense 16%, veterans benefits 2%, military/economic assistance, maintenance of US embassies, etc 2%)
Social programs 18%
Interest on the national debt 15%
Physical, human, and community development 7%
Law enforcement and general government 2%
If you look at the actual breakdown, we are spending more on social programs than on defense, and more on retirees than both combined. Your we spend so much money on defense line doesn't wash anymore. Since Clinton took office, spending on defense as a percentage of GDP has been halved.
It's been my understanding that all celerons since the 300A have had 128K of on-chip L2 cache running the same clock speed as the processor. If the front side bus is running at 66MHz and your HD controller doesn't have a multi-threaded driver, you probably won't see an improvement over your k6-3/400 which has a FSB of 100MHz. If that's the case, not including the "-j 2" and making sure that -pipe is included in CFLAGS might be faster than if you had the "-j 2". I have a dual slot machine, but I need to get a pair of PPGA370 celerons in slockets to test it out.
I bought the Macmillian/Mandrake 6.0 box at Sam's Club for $25 (it was marked as a utility...I guess that's partially true: once you install it your computer should stop crashing). I tried installing it, but it couldn't get past the re-partioning step. No matter what I did, it would lock up and I would have to hit the reset switch. What surprised me about the lockup was that the machine is running an older version of Linux, so it's not like the hardware would have been unsupported. Has anyone else had such a problem? Oh well....at least I got my money back from Sam's
Re:Old Computers = Waste of Energy
on
High Tech Junk
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· Score: 1
Compared to my air conditioner, running a few PCs w/o monitors isn't that big of a deal. My utility bills nearly triple in the summer because of the AC alone. I don't mind though. I would rather pay $150-200 more during the summer than sit around in 90+ temps.
Re:It's always nice to revisit old friends
on
High Tech Junk
·
· Score: 1
No kidding. I still long for my old PCjr. I had it all through HS and college. It went through several upgrade cycles (SCSI HD, 3.5 floppy, 768K memory, black paint job, etc.) and it looked more like a mutant NeXT cube. It was the after hours computer center for my dorm wing for a long time (WordPerfect + laser printer made it very popular). I would still have it if our basement hadn't flooded. It was like a family member died. Seeing one at an online computer museum or in a computer junk store still makes me sad.
Re:Old macs are great machines too.
on
High Tech Junk
·
· Score: 1
I love my SE/30. It's a great little machine. It was my first Mac and I was amazed at how well built it was compared to the PCs that I was used to (it survived a toss into a construction dumpster w/o a problem). It's amazing how many people are still using their classic Macs and the number of web sites devoted to helping people find software for them or providing tips to keep them running. I got to hand it to apple for putting their old OSes and applications on the web. I doubt MS would ever do such a thing.
Obsolete, my ass. Who writes this stuff? Old computers never die, they just become routers and servers and things.
You have to remember the writer is probably coming from the Windows world where they do become obsolete if they can't handle the load of Redmond's latest bloatware. That's why the PC manufacturers love MS so much: new OS - time to get a new machine because the old one is too busy swapping. I can't believe that people really put up with this forced obsolence crap. It's like the 50s where people expected to buy a new car every 2 years. I guess that makes Linux & Free Software the Japanese car invasion.
That is a great idea! I have a 386sx/20 that I could use for such a task. It's a very small machine (2 3.5" drive bays & 2 ISA slots) and is just sitting in a box waiting for me to install Linux onto it. Since it doesn't have a CD rom, I'd either have to install linux on the HD in a different machine or install it via the network. I've never done the latter, is it very difficult? I'm sure there's a HOWTO on it someplace. I may check out the local used computer stores and/or pawn shops for 486 portables too. =)
Slashdot Mirror
I read in an organic gardening book someplace that human hair will kill slugs. The theory is that if you spread hair on the ground where slugs are known to exist, as the slugs crawl over the hair, the hair wraps around the slug's body and eventually strangles it. We don't have very many slugs around my house for me to experiment to see if this is true and if so, what length/thickness of hair works best. Alan Cox's wife Telsa has complained about slug problems in her diary and I've forwarded the suggestion to her. Given it doesn't appear that Alan's been sheared yet, she probably hasn't tried either.
I've seen an article in Information Week that basically said that even other Unix OS's such as Solaris or AIX can be cheaper given the cost of maintaining the server, downtime, and client licenses for NT. I know someone that got a new laptop for work and the cost of all the client licenses needed for it exceeded the cost of the hardware. IMHO, that's insane.
The biggest demographic using WebTV is the over-65 group. There is nothing to break, and one can just turn it on like a TV. If all he wants to do is read email, surf, and write letters, then this will do all of the above with minimum fuss. Having it on a big TV would help those with bad eyesight and it can be hooked up to some printers for hardcopy output.
The only drawbacks as far as I can see are:
You can still get GEOS too. Check out New Deal Software. They produce an office suite and other software primarily for schools, which are often the dumping ground for corporations that want to get a tax break for donating old computer equipment. While it's not open source, they do let you download a functional evaluation copy.
I guess that depends on what you are looking for in a city. Of your list, only reason d) and maybe e) would be something I would care about. Even then, education and the availability of tech jobs would be the most important. I couldn't give a rat's ass about diverse and/or interesting people to talk to.
On the flip side, I would rather have Minneapolis' weather. I prefer nice artic-like winters compared to the wimpy Southern winters and the drivers who freak out when a few snowflakes hit the pavement. The summers in either place would be ok with me.
cars: space limitiations and fuel taxation are probably the main differences between the two markets. Driving a 4 ton SUV wouldn't be practical in Europe (personally, I don't think it's practical in the US either, but I guess people do it because they can). Gasoline octane ratings took a big hit in the early 70s due to environmental/emissions regulations. Before then, one could get fuel with octane ratings of 100 or better for leaded gasoline. I personally like small fuel efficient cars because I'm a cheapskate (too bad I can't afford a Jetta TDI)
Washers: Never had a problem with a clothes washer tearing up clothing. The top loading models are usually less expensive to make, and until Maytag started making consumer front loading machines, the only place I've seen front loading ones were in laundromats.
bathroom stuff: I have a control knob for the hot water and the cold water for my shower and that's not all that unusual. I agree the one knob control showers can be a pain. One can get euro-style water conserving toilets. But what really annoys me about them, is that I have to flush them 2-3 times to get the crap to go down. No saving water there. I suppose one could modify the type that is used in RVs for homes.
Electricity: The plugs haven't always been polarized and I'm not sure why the change was made or why it would necessarily be a no-no. Transmission to the home is usally at a much higher voltage (440 at least) and is stepped down with a transformer to 110. If a lot of power is needed, then 2-phase is used. Blame Edison and Westinghouse
I've heard the 4/30 (or similar) ratio about the US before and often wondered, what would the ratio would be for all of Europe? I imagine things are different because the appliances/technology evolved at the same time under different governmental or resource restrictions. Also, as other people have pointed out, the US didn't have most of its industrial base and urban areas creamed because of WWII, so when it was rebuilt, industrial planners may have decided to look into ways of optimizing some things because they have to be rebuilt anyway. Many things in the US are the way they are because to change them would be a big disruption that people don't want (the switch to digital TV is going to be fun, fun, fun. I know people are going to bitch because the govt is forcing them to buy a new tv or convert box). Water restrictions and other environmental regulations are changing this in some western states.
Everything is cheaper, not necessarily of terribly high quality(unless it's imported) but still okay.I disagree with you here. The cheap low quality stuff is imported. Not from Europe or Japan, but from China, Mexico, etc. Depending on what you are buying, the US made stuff can be pretty good. I'd like to visit Europe in the near future to see what it's like so I can compare and contrast myself.
You can do that too. Check out GtkMozilla.
Try ebay or Y ahoo auctions. Given that Slashdot has some resources for adding new features, Rob could start Slashdot Auctions: Junk only nerds could love.
A friend of mine programs autopilot systems for Honeywell. I believe he said when he first started working for them about 6-7 years ago, they were using z80s for the embedded cpu's for flight control systems for several different types of aircraft.
Are any of the anonymous remailers using keys that can be used by gpg? The ones that I downloaded tonight are all RSA-type keys.
Check out the Moving from PGP to GPG guide. It will show you how to move pgp5 keys to gpg for exchanging encrypted messages with people using pgp5.
IBM makes a ton of money doing service, support, consulting, etc. By making some of their products Open Souce, they get more people interested in using them and that helps them get their foot in the door so to speak. IBM becomes a friend to the Open Source movement. Some PHB reads about linux in the trade rags and thinks that someone should be up on it so they will look buzzword-compliant to the bosses in the boardroom. What do you know...IBM just sent out a new training schedule and it's got a Linux class on it. So the PHB sends a guy to the class for $2k and he gets documentation & CDs with IBM software to play with. If you think about it this way, IBM isn't getting the money from selling the software, but from the training.
Couldn't you have someone who is working on the project with you go over their source code and then generate a specification document of the file layouts, how the code is supposed to work, etc. and then pass it off to someone else who hasn't looked at it and have them implement it? What would be any other legal procedures would one have to do to make sure that Sun (or anyone else with a similar license) doesn't come along and try to sue you for lifting their code?
You can check on ebay for a card or see if there is a used mac dealer in your area. There are also SCSI to ethernet adapters for Macs w/o any expansion slots.
That's ridiculous. Guess what a lot of chains have used or are using for such activies? Xenix or SCO Unix. Get a bunch of POS terminals and hook them to a server via serial lines and run curses based apps that require the user only to pick a letter/number/function key or scroll up or down with the cursor and press enter. The users don't have to know what OS the machine is running, just how to operate the applications that have been set up for them. They aren't going to be running shell commands.
How is having a staff of DBAs & dedicated servers or the redunancy you speak of any different than trying to run on WinNT? You don't want to run a business on questionable hardware anyway and you always want to make sure that you are backing up your data. That has nothing to do with linux. Burington may have already had a lot of their software written for a Unix platform (I seem to recall that they had their store servers on Solaris), so it wouldn't be too terriblly hard to port.
I haven't tried running the Mac Seti client (I doubt my wife would let me tie up her iMac for that long), but I've been averaging 8hr 43min seti work units on my Celeron 450 (300a overclocked) running linux. I've heard the GUI clients are a lot slower, but almost 3x slower is riduculous! I suppose that prof didn't mention the Alpha system cranking out seti units in about 50 minutes did he? I like Apple, but their stuff can be so expensive! I wonder if this machine would be able to handle IBM's PPC chip that has multiple processor cores on it.
Got a 1040 tax instruction booklet from last year? Here's the breakdown:
- Income
- Personal Income taxes 46%
- Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment 34%
- Corporate Income Taxes 11%
- Excise, customs, estate, gift and other misc taxes 8%
- Borrowing 1%
- Outlays
- Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement 38%
- National defense, veterans, and foreign affairs 20% (actual breakdown: defense 16%, veterans benefits 2%, military/economic assistance, maintenance of US embassies, etc 2%)
- Social programs 18%
- Interest on the national debt 15%
- Physical, human, and community development 7%
- Law enforcement and general government 2%
If you look at the actual breakdown, we are spending more on social programs than on defense, and more on retirees than both combined. Your we spend so much money on defense line doesn't wash anymore. Since Clinton took office, spending on defense as a percentage of GDP has been halved.It's been my understanding that all celerons since the 300A have had 128K of on-chip L2 cache running the same clock speed as the processor. If the front side bus is running at 66MHz and your HD controller doesn't have a multi-threaded driver, you probably won't see an improvement over your k6-3/400 which has a FSB of 100MHz. If that's the case, not including the "-j 2" and making sure that -pipe is included in CFLAGS might be faster than if you had the "-j 2". I have a dual slot machine, but I need to get a pair of PPGA370 celerons in slockets to test it out.
I bought the Macmillian/Mandrake 6.0 box at Sam's Club for $25 (it was marked as a utility...I guess that's partially true: once you install it your computer should stop crashing). I tried installing it, but it couldn't get past the re-partioning step. No matter what I did, it would lock up and I would have to hit the reset switch. What surprised me about the lockup was that the machine is running an older version of Linux, so it's not like the hardware would have been unsupported. Has anyone else had such a problem? Oh well....at least I got my money back from Sam's
Compared to my air conditioner, running a few PCs w/o monitors isn't that big of a deal. My utility bills nearly triple in the summer because of the AC alone. I don't mind though. I would rather pay $150-200 more during the summer than sit around in 90+ temps.
No kidding. I still long for my old PCjr. I had it all through HS and college. It went through several upgrade cycles (SCSI HD, 3.5 floppy, 768K memory, black paint job, etc.) and it looked more like a mutant NeXT cube. It was the after hours computer center for my dorm wing for a long time (WordPerfect + laser printer made it very popular). I would still have it if our basement hadn't flooded. It was like a family member died. Seeing one at an online computer museum or in a computer junk store still makes me sad.
I love my SE/30. It's a great little machine. It was my first Mac and I was amazed at how well built it was compared to the PCs that I was used to (it survived a toss into a construction dumpster w/o a problem). It's amazing how many people are still using their classic Macs and the number of web sites devoted to helping people find software for them or providing tips to keep them running. I got to hand it to apple for putting their old OSes and applications on the web. I doubt MS would ever do such a thing.
Obsolete, my ass. Who writes this stuff? Old computers never die, they just become routers and servers and things.
You have to remember the writer is probably coming from the Windows world where they do become obsolete if they can't handle the load of Redmond's latest bloatware. That's why the PC manufacturers love MS so much: new OS - time to get a new machine because the old one is too busy swapping. I can't believe that people really put up with this forced obsolence crap. It's like the 50s where people expected to buy a new car every 2 years. I guess that makes Linux & Free Software the Japanese car invasion.
That is a great idea! I have a 386sx/20 that I could use for such a task. It's a very small machine (2 3.5" drive bays & 2 ISA slots) and is just sitting in a box waiting for me to install Linux onto it. Since it doesn't have a CD rom, I'd either have to install linux on the HD in a different machine or install it via the network. I've never done the latter, is it very difficult? I'm sure there's a HOWTO on it someplace. I may check out the local used computer stores and/or pawn shops for 486 portables too. =)