I read a few years back that people were taking 3/50's and putting a minimal installation of *BSD on them (or letting them boot from a remote host) and then just using them as an X Terminal.
I used to work on such a beast and it would be a nice nostalgia piece (anyone got a 3/160 connected to a Pixar Image Computer via a VME card? That would be even better!).
Hmm...let's see what I have here that the wife wants to throw away...
486/100 w/ a 1.2G hard drive, 16M of Ram (32 if I can find where I misplaced some sims) and VLB IDE controller and VLB SVGA. It used to run linux until I got my celeron. It will probably become a router when it gets put back together.
486sx/33. Got it for the kids to run winblows on, but since they like the imac better and win95 craps out so much I can't even install it, it too will become a linux client.
386sx/30. This has only 2M on it and had a 80M drive and VGA on the motherboard. This used to be a FedEx powership machine, so it's got a nice small form factor
Mac SE/30. This machine has got a 1G SCSI drive and 32M of ram. It runs MacOS 7.01 and Debian Linux. I will use it as a networking toy and to log into my main linux machine via a serial cable until the ethernet card is installed and working.
Mac SE - Destined to be used for spare parts for the SE/30 and/or become a macquarium.
Dell XT w/ 640K of RAM, 2 20M harddrives, and hercules monochrome card driving IBM monitor.
Celeron 300A oc'ed to 450 w/ 10G HD and 128M of ram-- my main machine and seti number cruncher.
Toshiba 435CDS - wife's school laptop
iMac 333 - family computer for wife & kids
And of course various other bits of stuff that people give me or that's been pulled from the trash at the local university. Of course, I would love to get Linux running on all of them. Elks might work on the XT, but I think the SE is the only one that Linux is out of the question for (68000 with no MMU).
Re:SCO, and change..Tell me about it.
on
SCO does Linux
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· Score: 1
Of course they would be frightened about Linux's impact on their marketshare. SCO has the most to lose of any Unix vendor because of Linux. Unix on intel machines is SCO's main business. Unless you have some software or hardware that can't be moved over to Linux, I don't see much of an advantage to paying SCO license fees when you can have an equivalent Linux or BSD system for free. When retail chains get their stuff ported to linux/BSD and begin to replace SCO deployments, SCO is going to really going to feel the heat.
Really, I'm using gaim right now. My buddy list is intact. Earlier versions of gaim had problems keeping the buddy lists synced. Which version do you have? I'm using 0.9.7.
I downloaded Tik and TNT last night via the links I found on freshmeat.
Since a lot of my friends are using Aol or Aim, this is something that I'm interested in. When I first read about this story on Linux Today, I fired up Gaim (a GTK aim client) and within a few minutes one of my buddies was online and we sending instant messages like normal. I think this is ZDNet trying to put an MS spin on the story and trying to get open source people mat at AOL.
I was the guy the computer instructor always came to for help and had to kick out of the high school computer lab at night. I was also the only one our math teacher knew who got a perfect score on the math section of the ACT exam. I also was a first string lineman on our football team since I was a sophmore (the line coach joked that another tackle and I were the few that he never had to worry about qualifying because of grades). The latter certainly didn't help me out socially. I was in the geek section since kindergarten (I told the teacher I wanted to be a palentologist...she had to look it up =)
The men's group at my church is practically made up nothing but geeks or geek-wanna-be's. While not all may be interested in our favorite Open Source OS, they would certainly qualify as geeks in my book. Most are pretty conservative also.
But the local government and education infrastructure are still wasting your money. I doubt you are exempt from the local taxes that support the mediocre public school you chose not to send your children to.
The local school system spends at least $6k per student and does a rotten job. This is still more expensive than the most expensive private school we've looked into. I know I'm not exempt, so I'm still paying for both. It's sad that I have to. I think the big school systems have long ignored inputs from parents and that's one of the reasons they are screwed up. I would be nice if people who pay for private schools would get an exemption of some sort, but the NEA, the ACLU, and the public school systems would drag it through the courts for years.
The previous poster made it sound as if spending taxes on bad education is a good thing as long as it's 'free' -- an idiotic statement if I've ever heard one. No wonder the intelligence level of society in general seems to be on the decline.
Uhm, NO. Bad free schools beat ANY form of basic education that has to be paid for. I mean, isn't it somewhere in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the right to free basic education?
My wife and I had to make that choice with our kids. We chose to send them to a private school where they get a very good education, as opposed to the 'best' public schools in the area, where they would get a mediocre one at best. If the public schools were doing a good job, they would be going there, but they aren't. Wasting money on a bad education is not a good thing
At least people in Tn and a handfull of other states don't have to pay a state income tax. I would much rather pay a sales tax than an income tax. At least I have more control over the amount of taxes I pay and not have yet another govt. bureaucracy going over my financial information.
I certainly think it's fair. The more someone spends, the more taxes they pay. They are still paying less in taxes and would still be receiving benefits from govt programs for the poor. If you want to make it more 'fair', then eliminate a sales tax on groceries. I would much rather pay a sales tax than an income tax. Why is it 'fair' for some bureaucrat to decide that someone making $X a year should pay y% of it in taxes, while someone making $A/year (A
Someone has already calculated how long the Federal Govt would be able to run if your scheme was implemented. Guess how long it was? About 100 days. I guess you also don't care that the capital of these individuals had been used to finance businesses that provided goods, services, and jobs for other people. But it would be unlikely that these people would stand around and let themselves be robbed by the Federal Govt. As for the children, all it would do would teach them is that it's best to be mediocre and not try to excell, otherwise you will be punished for it.
No, I've read that either this fiscal year or the one beginning in Oct constsis of a real non-Fica surplus. If I can track down where I read it, I will post it.
If you look at the numbers that are online, the tax revenues during the 80s doubled. The problem was that Congressional spending just about tripled. Not all of this was due to military spending, which is a favorite target of the anti-tax cut crowd. According to data from the Concord Coalition (which is for balancing the budget), the increased tax receipts more than offset any increase in military spending. Remember, the Democrats were in control of Congress during this time, so domestic and entitlement spending was not cut, but actually increased. Programs such as REA and the Tennessee Valley Authority accomplished their goals long ago, but they still receive funding. Reagan's appointee to head the REA was in favor of dismantling the agency, but Congress said no. A great deal of the budget deficit in the late 80s and early 90s was due to the Savings and Loan bailout. While the headline grabbing part of this bailout focused on corruption, a lot of this was due to screwed up laws passed by Congress that pushed some S&Ls over the edge.
Like with individuals, Congress' debt problems have more to do with irresponsible spending that it does with income.
The F-18E and the JSF are not designed to be air superiority aircraft. All of these aircraft are designed to meet a specific set of needs, with some overlap, of course. By eliminating the F-22, the roles of the F-18E and JSF would have to be expanded, which means that those projects would be delayed due to redesign and would result in more money being wasted. Our current air superiority fighter, the F-15, was designed in the late 60s early 70s. It's a great aircraft and has gone through severla revisions to upgrade its capabilities, but one can only do so much by upgrading electronics systems and powerplants. The new Russian Mig-29 and Su-27s have more advanced airframes than the F-15 and are being produced for other countries. Given the 'remote-control warfare' shown during the Gulf War and Kosovo, some people have the assumption the US weapons are automatically more advanced than whoever we go up against. That isn't going to be the case if new weapons systems developed and put into service. Would you really want a pilot in a 15-20 year old plane in a dogfight with one in a plane that was designed 5-7 years ago?
The cost of these planes (whether it's a F-22 or B-2) includes the total cost of research, development, new assembly lines, spare parts, base modifications, support equipment, training, etc. I remember reading in Federal Computer Weekly about 5 years ago about the actual production cost of the B-2. Each plane costs about $250M to produce, which was only about 10% more than the less capable B-1B. The $2B cost is more due to the $20B spent on research and development before any planes were even produced. The same is true for the F-22. The less one produces, the more they cost. It would be as if one contracted Ford or GM to build a totally new car, bought only 100 of them and then complained that they cost $3M each.
Military spending as a percentage of GDP has been halved since Clinton took over. You can see what percentage of is being spent by just looking on the back of your tax instructions. A higher percentage is being spent on interest and entitlements. Good strategy. Spend more to let people sit around than on defense of the country. And we wonder why there is a morale problem in the military and the Navy/AirForce can't keep enough qualified pilots.
Why is it that people think that tax cuts are only for the rich? The middle class pays most of the taxes anyway, so they would be the ones that would benefit from an across the board tax cut. Is it that they might only get $500 back, but someone else might get $50,000 back?. I don't care. IMHO, if someone is paying a ton of taxes, they deserve to get a lot back when it comes to cutting taxes.
Our current surplus is due more to the recent capital gains tax cuts than the big tax increase on the rich in 1993. I know a lot of people who increased their activity in buying/selling stuff that would be taxed as a capital gain after that. They are paying more in, but it's at a lower rate, so that's acceptable. In fact, what I've read was the 1993 increase didn't net that much more because the people affected by these increases could just find away to reclassify such income as capital gains or something else. I knew a guy who owned his own computer contracting business (consisting of just himself) which was structured so that all of his income was classified as capital gains, which was taxed at a rate much lower than it would be if it was classified as regular income. An additional bonus was that he didn't pay FICA either.
Unfortunately, it's the unmanned, low profile projects that are going to be getting cut. The high PR projects like the shuttle and the Space Station have been 'fenced off' from these cuts. So, it doesn't sound like these cuts are going to do what you would like them to.
Not exactly. We are actually running a surplus now, even if you take FICA taxes out of the equation. This wasn't the case at first though. I agree that all the FICA taxes should be directed only at SS. If this was done, our total debt would go down since we would be paying off the SS trust fund, which has been used as a nice big slush fund for other programs. Unfortunately, politicans can't help but try to tap into a nice big pile of money. Which is why I'm against expansion of Medicare/Medicaid. Any past expansion that was said to help save money actually has resulted in cost overruns (the % of GDP spent on health care before these programs was about the same as what was being spent in other industrial countries. Now it's at least 2x that.). Who is to say that these won't follow the same pattern? Also, all of this is based on budget projections. These projections were made by the same people who in the mid 1990s said we would be still running 200+ billion deficits now.
I doubt I'll ever see any of what I've contributed to SS anyway. I would much rather have a portion of the money that I contribute go into a retirement plan that I've picked.
You can also look at the Navy as an example too. The power plants in any nuclear ship are standardized for each class of ship. The biggest thing in the US is getting by all the legal and enviromental impact challenges. This would be a lot less if the power plants were more standard. Training would have to be standardized, so I would expect that it would be easier to see if the people running the plants were qualified and operating it safely.
I can't stand how scientificly ignorant this country is becoming. Proven technology/methods are automatically rejected as 'bad' just because they have nuclear or radiation associated with them. Food irradiation is an example of this. Even though this technique would cut food borne bacteria down, the NIMBYs oppose it because they think the resulting food would be radioactive and they would get cancer. I guess you better not tell them about the radiation produced by their microwaves or eat any food in Europe.
The projects being cut are not huge. The really big PR ones: space shuttle and International Space Station have been pretty much left alone. What I find disturbing about cuts is that these programs are the ones doing the new and interesting research, development, and exploration. Given how much NASA funded research and development has been used to spin-off other products commonly in use today, I am disgusted that we cutting what is basically an investment in our future while still funding programs that let people sit on their butts and do nothing.
I have certainly written my Congress critters about it. Whether or not they pay any attention to it is another matter...
Two children just died in Memphis in seperate daycares on the same day because a single person was tasked with monitoring too many children.
These kids were left in vans for hours by the drivers when it was well over 90 degree heat. If this was due to too many kids, incompetence, or a combination of the two, I don't know. However, the two daycares in question have had their licenses suspended by the state, are now closed, and the drivers/attendants of the vans have been fired or prohibited from working near children. Unfortunately, this is something that happens every year.
From reading the press releases, the Gates Foundation doesn't fund any libraries or any other charitable organizations. It provides gives of Microsoft products, services, and hardware to run them. It sounds a lot more like making damn sure that these organizations are locked into Microsoft-only IT solutions and increasing long term sales.
So the young doctor on the Trapper John MD TV series was on to something. Get an old RV and park it where you work. That would be great if you could plug it into an electrical outlet or hook it up to a water source too. What would really be nice is to have it parked at a campground way outside of town, have it hooked up to electricity, water, & phone, and then telecommute. Sometimes I wish I could do that all the time. Unfortunately, the times I've tried working at home, the family gets in the way and I can't get as much done as I could at an office.
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I read a few years back that people were taking 3/50's and putting a minimal installation of *BSD on them (or letting them boot from a remote host) and then just using them as an X Terminal.
I used to work on such a beast and it would be a nice nostalgia piece (anyone got a 3/160 connected to a Pixar Image Computer via a VME card? That would be even better!).
Hmm...let's see what I have here that the wife wants to throw away...
And of course various other bits of stuff that people give me or that's been pulled from the trash at the local university. Of course, I would love to get Linux running on all of them. Elks might work on the XT, but I think the SE is the only one that Linux is out of the question for (68000 with no MMU).
Of course they would be frightened about Linux's impact on their marketshare. SCO has the most to lose of any Unix vendor because of Linux. Unix on intel machines is SCO's main business. Unless you have some software or hardware that can't be moved over to Linux, I don't see much of an advantage to paying SCO license fees when you can have an equivalent Linux or BSD system for free. When retail chains get their stuff ported to linux/BSD and begin to replace SCO deployments, SCO is going to really going to feel the heat.
Really, I'm using gaim right now. My buddy list is intact. Earlier versions of gaim had problems keeping the buddy lists synced. Which version do you have? I'm using 0.9.7.
I downloaded Tik and TNT last night via the links I found on freshmeat.
Since a lot of my friends are using Aol or Aim, this is something that I'm interested in. When I first read about this story on Linux Today, I fired up Gaim (a GTK aim client) and within a few minutes one of my buddies was online and we sending instant messages like normal. I think this is ZDNet trying to put an MS spin on the story and trying to get open source people mat at AOL.
I was the guy the computer instructor always came to for help and had to kick out of the high school computer lab at night. I was also the only one our math teacher knew who got a perfect score on the math section of the ACT exam. I also was a first string lineman on our football team since I was a sophmore (the line coach joked that another tackle and I were the few that he never had to worry about qualifying because of grades). The latter certainly didn't help me out socially. I was in the geek section since kindergarten (I told the teacher I wanted to be a palentologist...she had to look it up =)
The men's group at my church is practically made up nothing but geeks or geek-wanna-be's. While not all may be interested in our favorite Open Source OS, they would certainly qualify as geeks in my book. Most are pretty conservative also.
I thought that quote was from Chairman Mao....doesn't matter.
But the local government and education infrastructure are still wasting your money. I doubt you are exempt from the local taxes that support the mediocre public school you chose not to send your children to.
The local school system spends at least $6k per student and does a rotten job. This is still more expensive than the most expensive private school we've looked into. I know I'm not exempt, so I'm still paying for both. It's sad that I have to. I think the big school systems have long ignored inputs from parents and that's one of the reasons they are screwed up. I would be nice if people who pay for private schools would get an exemption of some sort, but the NEA, the ACLU, and the public school systems would drag it through the courts for years.
The previous poster made it sound as if spending taxes on bad education is a good thing as long as it's 'free' -- an idiotic statement if I've ever heard one. No wonder the intelligence level of society in general seems to be on the decline.
Uhm, NO. Bad free schools beat ANY form of basic education that has to be paid for. I mean, isn't it somewhere in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the right to free basic education?
My wife and I had to make that choice with our kids. We chose to send them to a private school where they get a very good education, as opposed to the 'best' public schools in the area, where they would get a mediocre one at best. If the public schools were doing a good job, they would be going there, but they aren't. Wasting money on a bad education is not a good thing
At least people in Tn and a handfull of other states don't have to pay a state income tax. I would much rather pay a sales tax than an income tax. At least I have more control over the amount of taxes I pay and not have yet another govt. bureaucracy going over my financial information.
I certainly think it's fair. The more someone spends, the more taxes they pay. They are still paying less in taxes and would still be receiving benefits from govt programs for the poor. If you want to make it more 'fair', then eliminate a sales tax on groceries. I would much rather pay a sales tax than an income tax. Why is it 'fair' for some bureaucrat to decide that someone making $X a year should pay y% of it in taxes, while someone making $A/year (A
Someone has already calculated how long the Federal Govt would be able to run if your scheme was implemented. Guess how long it was? About 100 days. I guess you also don't care that the capital of these individuals had been used to finance businesses that provided goods, services, and jobs for other people. But it would be unlikely that these people would stand around and let themselves be robbed by the Federal Govt. As for the children, all it would do would teach them is that it's best to be mediocre and not try to excell, otherwise you will be punished for it.
No, I've read that either this fiscal year or the one beginning in Oct constsis of a real non-Fica surplus. If I can track down where I read it, I will post it.
If you look at the numbers that are online, the tax revenues during the 80s doubled. The problem was that Congressional spending just about tripled. Not all of this was due to military spending, which is a favorite target of the anti-tax cut crowd. According to data from the Concord Coalition (which is for balancing the budget), the increased tax receipts more than offset any increase in military spending. Remember, the Democrats were in control of Congress during this time, so domestic and entitlement spending was not cut, but actually increased. Programs such as REA and the Tennessee Valley Authority accomplished their goals long ago, but they still receive funding. Reagan's appointee to head the REA was in favor of dismantling the agency, but Congress said no. A great deal of the budget deficit in the late 80s and early 90s was due to the Savings and Loan bailout. While the headline grabbing part of this bailout focused on corruption, a lot of this was due to screwed up laws passed by Congress that pushed some S&Ls over the edge.
Like with individuals, Congress' debt problems have more to do with irresponsible spending that it does with income.
The F-18E and the JSF are not designed to be air superiority aircraft. All of these aircraft are designed to meet a specific set of needs, with some overlap, of course. By eliminating the F-22, the roles of the F-18E and JSF would have to be expanded, which means that those projects would be delayed due to redesign and would result in more money being wasted. Our current air superiority fighter, the F-15, was designed in the late 60s early 70s. It's a great aircraft and has gone through severla revisions to upgrade its capabilities, but one can only do so much by upgrading electronics systems and powerplants. The new Russian Mig-29 and Su-27s have more advanced airframes than the F-15 and are being produced for other countries. Given the 'remote-control warfare' shown during the Gulf War and Kosovo, some people have the assumption the US weapons are automatically more advanced than whoever we go up against. That isn't going to be the case if new weapons systems developed and put into service. Would you really want a pilot in a 15-20 year old plane in a dogfight with one in a plane that was designed 5-7 years ago?
The cost of these planes (whether it's a F-22 or B-2) includes the total cost of research, development, new assembly lines, spare parts, base modifications, support equipment, training, etc. I remember reading in Federal Computer Weekly about 5 years ago about the actual production cost of the B-2. Each plane costs about $250M to produce, which was only about 10% more than the less capable B-1B. The $2B cost is more due to the $20B spent on research and development before any planes were even produced. The same is true for the F-22. The less one produces, the more they cost. It would be as if one contracted Ford or GM to build a totally new car, bought only 100 of them and then complained that they cost $3M each.
Military spending as a percentage of GDP has been halved since Clinton took over. You can see what percentage of is being spent by just looking on the back of your tax instructions. A higher percentage is being spent on interest and entitlements. Good strategy. Spend more to let people sit around than on defense of the country. And we wonder why there is a morale problem in the military and the Navy/AirForce can't keep enough qualified pilots.
Why is it that people think that tax cuts are only for the rich? The middle class pays most of the taxes anyway, so they would be the ones that would benefit from an across the board tax cut. Is it that they might only get $500 back, but someone else might get $50,000 back?. I don't care. IMHO, if someone is paying a ton of taxes, they deserve to get a lot back when it comes to cutting taxes.
Our current surplus is due more to the recent capital gains tax cuts than the big tax increase on the rich in 1993. I know a lot of people who increased their activity in buying/selling stuff that would be taxed as a capital gain after that. They are paying more in, but it's at a lower rate, so that's acceptable. In fact, what I've read was the 1993 increase didn't net that much more because the people affected by these increases could just find away to reclassify such income as capital gains or something else. I knew a guy who owned his own computer contracting business (consisting of just himself) which was structured so that all of his income was classified as capital gains, which was taxed at a rate much lower than it would be if it was classified as regular income. An additional bonus was that he didn't pay FICA either.
Unfortunately, it's the unmanned, low profile projects that are going to be getting cut. The high PR projects like the shuttle and the Space Station have been 'fenced off' from these cuts. So, it doesn't sound like these cuts are going to do what you would like them to.
Not exactly. We are actually running a surplus now, even if you take FICA taxes out of the equation. This wasn't the case at first though. I agree that all the FICA taxes should be directed only at SS. If this was done, our total debt would go down since we would be paying off the SS trust fund, which has been used as a nice big slush fund for other programs. Unfortunately, politicans can't help but try to tap into a nice big pile of money. Which is why I'm against expansion of Medicare/Medicaid. Any past expansion that was said to help save money actually has resulted in cost overruns (the % of GDP spent on health care before these programs was about the same as what was being spent in other industrial countries. Now it's at least 2x that.). Who is to say that these won't follow the same pattern? Also, all of this is based on budget projections. These projections were made by the same people who in the mid 1990s said we would be still running 200+ billion deficits now.
I doubt I'll ever see any of what I've contributed to SS anyway. I would much rather have a portion of the money that I contribute go into a retirement plan that I've picked.
You can also look at the Navy as an example too. The power plants in any nuclear ship are standardized for each class of ship. The biggest thing in the US is getting by all the legal and enviromental impact challenges. This would be a lot less if the power plants were more standard. Training would have to be standardized, so I would expect that it would be easier to see if the people running the plants were qualified and operating it safely.
I can't stand how scientificly ignorant this country is becoming. Proven technology/methods are automatically rejected as 'bad' just because they have nuclear or radiation associated with them. Food irradiation is an example of this. Even though this technique would cut food borne bacteria down, the NIMBYs oppose it because they think the resulting food would be radioactive and they would get cancer. I guess you better not tell them about the radiation produced by their microwaves or eat any food in Europe.
The projects being cut are not huge. The really big PR ones: space shuttle and International Space Station have been pretty much left alone. What I find disturbing about cuts is that these programs are the ones doing the new and interesting research, development, and exploration. Given how much NASA funded research and development has been used to spin-off other products commonly in use today, I am disgusted that we cutting what is basically an investment in our future while still funding programs that let people sit on their butts and do nothing.
I have certainly written my Congress critters about it. Whether or not they pay any attention to it is another matter...
Two children just died in Memphis in seperate daycares on the same day because a single person was tasked with monitoring too many children.
These kids were left in vans for hours by the drivers when it was well over 90 degree heat. If this was due to too many kids, incompetence, or a combination of the two, I don't know. However, the two daycares in question have had their licenses suspended by the state, are now closed, and the drivers/attendants of the vans have been fired or prohibited from working near children. Unfortunately, this is something that happens every year.
State closes two deadly daycares
Mayor asks state to help monitor daycares
Daycares fail to follow new rules
Parents, Daycares struggle with 'why'
From reading the press releases, the Gates Foundation doesn't fund any libraries or any other charitable organizations. It provides gives of Microsoft products, services, and hardware to run them. It sounds a lot more like making damn sure that these organizations are locked into Microsoft-only IT solutions and increasing long term sales.
So the young doctor on the Trapper John MD TV series was on to something. Get an old RV and park it where you work. That would be great if you could plug it into an electrical outlet or hook it up to a water source too. What would really be nice is to have it parked at a campground way outside of town, have it hooked up to electricity, water, & phone, and then telecommute. Sometimes I wish I could do that all the time. Unfortunately, the times I've tried working at home, the family gets in the way and I can't get as much done as I could at an office.