I remember reading "People of Sand and Slag" when it was published. At the time, I was in the hospital and some friends stopped by and brought me a copy of the current (2004) "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction".
I don't think it was vile, but it was sad. Both a sad story and a sad look at human nature. Still, a very good read. It's a short story and doesn't take along to finish. Better still, it's available online:
Keep in mind the global warming predictions are things like "1 degree Celsius in 20 years", not "January 2013 will be 50 degrees hotter than normal!!!!!"
Oh, come on now. Those predictions are for changes in the average temperature. And I think you probably know that already.
For a long time now the predictions have been that we will likely see a 4-5 degree Celsius increase in the average global temperature by the end of this century, and along the way we will experience an increasing number of extreme and/or unusual weather conditions and patterns.
These changing patterns could be an increased number of hurricanes due to warmer ocean surface temperatures, unexpected tornadoes during the Winter months, unusually warm Winter months, and so on. And single one of these, or even a couple, could easily be explained as a one-time fluke. But when every season and every year brings some new bizarre weather change, it's time to do something about it.
By your own admission, you DO participate in the used market (as a seller). So even though you don't often sell your used games, you do sometimes, and that helps justify your expenditure (and lower your risk): basically, if you try one out and you end up hating it, you have a way of recouping part of the cost. By eliminating that, you're going to be much more reluctant to try out games you aren't really familiar with.
Absolutely true. In the long long ago, when copyright hadn't yet been entirely perverted, you could still return PC games and sell them back to the game stores. When this was a possibility, I purchased far more PC games. Then the rules changed and the number of games I bought decreased dramatically because the risk for me was much higher. If I didn't like a game, there was nothing at all I could do about it.
I usually wait for at least some reviews anyway, but when at the store, if I saw something for, say, $20 that looked like it might be interesting, I would take a chance, knowing that I could always return it.
It wasn't until Steam became big that I began taking more chances with games again. Obviously, it's not because I can return them, but most indie games are relatively cheap so the risk is much lower.
Here in Tucson, AZ we have a local chain of stores called Bookman's which *does* buy and sell used PC (and console) games. With the rise of digital downloads for PC games purchases, the selection has dwindled, but it's nice to have it as an option. And the software (and console discs/cartridges) all have a 7 day return policy if you don't like it thus further reducing the risk.
Wow, a topic where I actually have firsthand expert knowledge!:)
IABAN (I Actually Built A Nanosatellite)...
To be more precise, I assisted a little with the building and did all of the on-board programming, along with extensive ground station testing. I was a member of the University of Arizona's Cubesat Program which worked in conjunction with CalTech. The cubesat was a 10cm cube with a maximum weight of 1kg. We built four sats in the end, one engineering model, two identical flight sats (RinconSat 1 and 2), and one done with partners from a university in France and Alcatel (AlcatelSat).
As far as orbits go, when on the nanosat scale, you get whatever orbit you can that will get your sat into space. The cubesats were originally headed for a LEO and a lifetime of a few months. But... rockets are amazingly expensive and even a boatload of nanosats won't justify their own launch. Instead, you hitch a ride along with a primary payload that does justify a launch and take up some unused cargo room and weight capacity (it's still not free, of course). The primary payload for our cubesats changed midway through the process and that in turn changed our destined orbit. The new one was much higher with a correspondingly longer lifetime.
Eventually, after more delays, we got our launch opportunity in late 2008 or early 2009, I don't recall the precise date. We were launching RinconSat 2 and AlcatelSat. They were sent to California, integrated, and then sent to the Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazahkstan to be put on a a Russian ex-ICBM. Launch day came and the damn thing lost control in the first stage and resulted in a flaming crater in the desert 70km downrange.
I am confident that had they made it to space, the cubesats would have worked well. Because of the delays we had time for lengthy ground testing. I really wish they would have flown as our sats and my software we considerably more capable than most of the other cubesats and it would have been great to get real data from them and see if our two-way communication would have worked as well in space as it did on the ground-to-mountain tests we did.
I've been burned by Ubisoft in the past. When IL2-Sturmovik was originally released some years back, it would always crash on my then PC. I actually tried customer service, who were no help at all. Turns out it was the CD copy control being used. A crack removed that and it worked fine after that. I then told this to customer service, but they just closed my tickets twice without even a reply.
I bought, and generally enjoyed, the last two Anno games... but there is no way I will buy this one. I'm sure a crack will remove it, but I can't give Ubi money for this until they remove it on their own. And probably not even then.
The suggestion to use Hulu is a good one, but I don't think it will particularly fit my needs. Hulu is focused much more on television shows rather than movies. According to their list, Hulu Plus has only 1800 movies available, of which only ~700 are in HD. That's not enough to justify the monthly cost since there is only a small subset of those movies that I will want to watch.
I am curious about this. I've been a MythTV user for many years now. I don't *need* Netflix, but it certainly would be nice to have. Part of the draw of a well built HTPC is having everything in a single place controlled by a single remote.
But, you're right that MythTV does not natively support Netflix. Maybe it could be accessed via MythBrowser? Or is a real Win/Mac (on a PC) client necessary?
Is there any other Linux alternative to getting Netflix running? Or, for that matter, any other movie streaming service? I believe MythBrowser is built on top of Webkit and that it can handle the Flash plugin. Certainly, that's enough for YouTube (already handled by MythNetbrowser), but maybe not more.
Google tells me that some people have done this by having their Mythbox launch a WinXP virtual machine to run IE to run the Silverlight Netflix player. The author seems to indicate that, overall, it is not hard to implement, but the CPU requirements are fairly high. Hmmm...
I find there's this tendency towards moralizing and discounting of cost among people with serious medical problems who get other people to pay for the associated care, either through a public program or medical insurance that is grouped by force with a bunch of healthy people. It seems a rather sad form of selfishness to me.
And I find this attitude rather disheartening.:(
I have the exact opposite view of healthcare, it would seem. I feel that healthcare should be universal. Available to all and funded through tax. It's called "insurance" for a reason... too many people (not saying you are one of them) take the view that they are healthy enough to chance not purchasing insurance when they are young and healthy and then either get it later in life when nearly everybody has some sort of medical need, or they get sick without insurance and rely on current free options which they didn't bother to even try to buy into.
Universal healthcare is a net win for society and I feel no guilt wishing it were so and no ill will to those poor enough to be on Medicaid or some state program. A good and proud society should want to help those in need. And, the only way for it to work is if all people, well and sick, are in the program. I like this country (the US, that is) a great deal, but our current healthcare system (the funding, not the expertise) is one of our greatest failings. I'm optimistic enough to believe that we will eventually arrive at some sort of single-payer/universal system. I just wish it would happen sooner rather than later.
And, I can honestly say that even if I were not ill, I would still have this same opinion, because it is how I felt before I was initially diagnosed.
In case you hadn't noticed, medicine is vastly more complex now than it was one hundred years ago. The medical community knows much more and therefore doctors must know far more as well. Regardless of what type of doctor you are, you need to know at least something about virtually all of the fields besides your own. That's how we avoid complications.
Due to my particular medical/genetic condition, I see a handful of doctors on a regular basis. I know that I am personally very glad that they are as well informed as they are.
Agreed. Way back in their broke and begging days I donated something like $20 or $30 to them. At the time they were one of the only dynamic DNS services and it worked just fine, even then.
Later, when they began offering additional commercial options, I found that my initial free account had been upgraded to a lifetime pro account (it's labeled Dynamic DNS Pro - Permanent) because I had been generous to them in those early times. It's stayed that way, too, ever since 2002. I don't get all of the commercial offerings, but I do get access to tech support and all of the available domain name choices (of which there are vastly more than when I initially made my account).
That move was enough to keep me around all this time and if I am in the need of commercial DNS services, they'll be the first place I check.
I really wish Congress, and the Post Master General for that matter, would stop pretending that the USPS is just another business and should be operated as such. It's not! Mail has been a public service almost since this country was founded and the idea goes back even further in time in some other countries.
Given what the USPS does, it cannot operate like a normal business and it shouldn't have to. Considering how much money they are losing each year, it's clear they need to change something, and I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for first class postage, but this idea that the USPS needs to break even needs to stop soon before Congress completely ruins the postal service.
Packages aside, you simply can't send everything through email. I still get plenty of real non-junk mail all the time, from bank notices to insurance EOBs. This is far more secure than email could ever hope to be. Yes, it would be nice if everybody encrypted their email (especially banks), but until that happens, regular mail is a lot more secure. We actually have laws against this sort of thing and most people even take them seriously. There is little, if anything, to prevent electronic eavesdropping.
I certainly don't want to see the end of the traditional post office in my lifetime, but at the rate Congress is going, who knows. And while I would expect the Post Master General to be fighting the good fight *for* the USPS, every time I hear him talk it seems like he's gung ho to implement whatever idea Congress throws his way.
Because, honestly, I have not found the performance hit to be anything noticeable. Oh, I'm sure it is there, but it just doesn't seem to have a big enough effect for me to worry about.
Also, simply dumping everything on a single encrypted volume makes the whole process easier. The single LUKS volume is entirely used as a single physical volume for a LVM volume group. On that VG I then create root, usr, home, etc.
In the past I have tried other methods, such as encrypting home only. Ubuntu (I think it still supports this) even allows for per user encrypted home directories. I tried this once, but it seemed kludgy and it even broke simple things like 'du' (which would always report 0 blocks used).
This method has also been the most user friendly, at least in my experience. I get prompted once at boot to enter the passphrase and that's it. Previously I had to roll my own solution when I wanted to encrypt only home. Maybe it's better now, but this has always been easier.
On my file server, where I also use this setup, I have running a whole host of processes and daemons. Included among this is MythTV and that certainly generates a substantial amount of disk I/O. Not only that, but I have root-on-lvm-on-RAID5-on-encryption on this system and it still performs quite admirably. Of course I'm sacrificing some disk and CPU performance here, but it hasn't been enough to make me look for a different/better solution.
And, as I mentioned in my original post, both the Debian and Ubuntu installers support setting up your disk in this manner so that simplifies things even further.
The main reason I just installed Debian/testing on my laptop was because the current release of Mint-Debian does not support root-on-lvm-on-crypt which is the setup I use for all of my home machines (since they are essentially single-user). I also found that the Ubuntu based Mint 11 does not support this either. I find this surprising as both of the distros Mint 11 was based on (Debian and Ubuntu) support this feature in their respective installers. I was rather disappointed that it was not available in the Mint 11 installer.
I know "Mint 12" is the Ubuntu based version and that the Debian based Mint 12 is not yet available, but does anybody know if Mint 12 supports this feature? I hope it does because Mint looks like a good fit for my laptop.
I'll second that. I needed to reinstall Linux on my notebook and after having fits with the most recent Ubuntu release, I was very much ready to give Linux Mint a try.
But, on all of my single user machines (desktop, notebook, netbook), I always use root-on-LVM-on-crypt (using LUKS for encryption) for my hard drive setup. This way, everything except for the small boot partition is encrypted. It works great and I've personally found the performance hit to be negligible. I even have my file server set up this way and it does much more I/O than any of my other machines without any noticeable problems.
Anyway, both Debian and Ubuntu support this type of configuration directly in their installers. Ubuntu also supports (or did, at least) a per-user home directory encryption. I gave it a try once, but I didn't care for it and it even broke simple things, like using 'du' to see how much space was being used by a file or directory.
Unfortunately, Linux Mint does not support this configuration. I found this to be rather odd, since Mint is based on Ubuntu, which supports it, and Mint Debian edition is based on Debian which also supports it. I found a forum thread where somebody had managed to get it to work, but it seemed like an awful lot of hoops to jump through. In the end, I just went with Debian/testing and called it a day. Hopefully the Mint people will add this ability soon because I'd really like to give it a try.
Personally, I can't stand this. I'm a customer, damn it, not some mindless all-consuming locust. And for a related question, when did this trend start?
Very interesting, indeed. And a lot to think about. In my case, I'll be dealing with DirecTV drones instead of cable drones. I *think* the former are slightly better, but I guess I'll find out soon enough.
Both the HD-PVR and the dongle sound promising. The DirecTV receiver is not connected to the Internet, but DirecTV is capable of pushing whatever software or updates it wishes down though its satellites, so I suppose it is possible that they could revoke the key that this dongle uses in that manner.
I've been using Myth for ages now with DirecTV (I rewrote one of the early versions of the directv.pl tuner script) and have been happy with it. But... so far it's always been standard def TV, even though I've got a 19" 720p panel attached to the Mythbox.
What sort of HD can I get out of the component plugs? And why does this work? Because it is still "analog" and the media companies are not yet super anal about this particular work around? Also, does this mean that there isn't a method for locking down component output signals? I'd hate to try this and find that when I tune a premium channel I get junk... although, I suppose that depends on how the receiver box is designed.
If I can get a decent picture in this manner, I may have to upgrade. Hmm...
If I'm only interested in 720p component signals, what HD capture card would you recommend? I've been using a Hauppauge PVR-250 for years and it's been good to me, despite being std. def.
I'll second that. I recently did exactly this and so far my WRT320N is performing just fine. I am, however, new to dd-wrt, having run openwrt in the past. I might switch at some point because, while dd-wrt is mostly working, its QoS code did nothing but slow down the entire network to a crawl.
It'll be back up in about 2 weeks. They do this with all their new episodes (available right away, blocked for a couple weeks, then available again indefinitely).
Except that we're not talking about the new episodes (200 & 201). The episode in question is the season 5 episode "Super Best Friends" which aired almost nine years ago (July, 2001).
That episode did show Mohammed, as one of the Super Best Friends. That Comedy Central, or whoever is in charge of what South Park Studios can air on-line, would take it down now, after so much time has passed, is as big a problem as the uber-censoring done to episode 201.
Actually, thinking more about it, virtualization probably can help in concert with other software. When you full-screen a DOS game in, say, VirtualBox, you're either going to see the VBox window resize to the low-res size of the DOS game, or the VBox window will remain at its current size and the DOS game will appear in the middle with a big black border around it.
But, suppose you were doing this while using the Compiz window manager. Of the many mods and tools that Compiz supports, one of them in a scaler that lets you scale a window to whatever size you want (this is different than the screen magnifier tool). So, run your DOS game in VBox and make it so that the VBox window has the same dimensions as the DOS game. Now use the scaler tool, and voila, your DOS game is running at whatever res you like.
There are some downsides here, of course. Foremost being that you will see the rest of your desktop around the edges of your scaled game window and that may be annoying. I know that I prefer to play most games full screen. But, you can't have everything...
Absolutely. That's why Starcraft 2 is such a consumer-unfriendly game. I'm not going to buy it; I rather hope nobody else does, although I'm sure they will. Once publishers manage to get acceptance for the idea that a game constantly needs to have an online connection, i.e., they will have seized ownership away from the consumer. They can deactivate, alter, and advertise in the game however they want, at any time.
Which is exactly why they are putting it in a game with as high a profile as Starcraft 2. Ideally, you might expect that it would get tested out first in some smaller product, but with lower sales volume it's likely that any protesters will be more easily heard and these hated technologies will get under the spotlight.
But, if you implement and deploy it with a very high profile game you are guaranteed several things. First, many people are going to buy it regardless of what junk you attach. Now you can point to those numbers and claim success. Second, you now have a foothold from which you can expand. "Well, it was Starcraft 2, and people didn't seem to mind that. Look at how popular it was."
This is exactly the strategy that Valve used with Steam. Of course, it should be pointed out that Steam is much more than a DRM scheme, and I happen to like and use Steam a lot. Still, it's the same method. Valve used the high profile Half-life 2 launch to launch Steam at the same time. I purchased the DVD version of HL2, but still had to put Steam on. And, the strategy worked wonderfully for them (in my case, at least). I still have Steam and I still buy games through it - it's exactly what they wanted to have happen.
Here's hoping that this scenario won't work nearly as well for Blizzard, though. And, since this is only a DRM scheme and multiplayer host service, maybe there will be a sufficient uproar. Hard to tell until it's released, though...
I grew up in Tucson, about two hours south of Phoenix and, thankfully, outside the jurisdiction of the madman Arpaio. Lived here for 25 years and it's always been hot in the summers. Very hot.
Then I lived in Massachusetts for three years and moved back to Tucson. Damn is it hot here! Have I really changed that much? I watch the K-12 school busses go by and wonder how in the hell I ever managed to survive 13 years of riding those metal boxes without AC in them. Each summer day seems to just suck the life right out of me.
I'm sure I'm still more "used" to it than others might be, but a relatively short time spent in a radically different climate has really changed how this particular one feels.
pretty much all the first person shooting games have this at their core.
The basics of gaming hasn't changed in over 30 years. Shortcuts, Mindless violence and the feeling of victory when you eventually "win" - which lasts all of 20 seconds until it gives way to the hollow feeling of "well, what now?"
You really should have picked a better example for your rant, I'm afraid. Just because somebody can do a speed run of Zork doesn't mean that's how you play. First off, Zork is by no means a violent gorefest. It's a game of exploration and treasure hunting. If you play using this minimal set of moves, you've neither truly played the game nor have you achieved a remotely good score.
The truth is that games have changed considerably in the past 30 years. Sure, there were lousy games back then, just as there are now, but they were an entirely different kind of lousy. Usually they were, in my opinion, of the insanely difficult and un-fun type of lousy. There's a lot less of those these days since insane levels of difficulty cause most gamers to do a 180 right quick.
There's more problems than just pulse audio, there are too many daemons appearing in general. Stuff like gnome-pty-helper, gnome-keyring, ssh-agent, consolekit, hal-addon-storage, gconfd. All this stuff is fine on general purpose machines when the user mainly engages in browsing, multimedia, IM and office apps. The problems arise when you want to do something demanding like A/V work, with distros increasingly integrating services for the common usage case it's becoming increasingly difficult to get a usable setup on older hardware.
While a multitude of daemons might be a problem from the perspective of memory usage (if they're not properly written), they should have almost zero effect on your CPU and A/V work.
The reason is that the vast majority of system daemons sit waiting for input via sockets or pipes. There is no polling involved because this is an OS-level task. The daemon tries to read from its socket/pipe and it essentially goes to sleep. The kernel doesn't even need to touch it because it knows what the daemon is waiting for. Once some new input arrives, the kernel will wake the daemon and pass the data through the socket/pipe.
This is why it's not at all a problem for every user to have ssh-agent or gnome-pty-helper running. They'll all be loaded only once into memory, and the CPU will only ever touch them when they actually have something to do (which is not that often for most daemons).
Now, that may work fine for user-space daemons, but what I would like to see more of is daemons loaded on the fly from inetd (or whatever your distro uses to replace that). For example, on Debian, ever since Exim 4 was released, you can't have it spawn via inetd when something actually opens port 25. Instead, it stays running all the time. On a regular home machine, most of the system level daemons, even things like ssh, are used so infrequently that the additional loading time needed to run them from inetd would be unnoticed.
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I remember reading "People of Sand and Slag" when it was published. At the time, I was in the hospital and some friends stopped by and brought me a copy of the current (2004) "Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction".
I don't think it was vile, but it was sad. Both a sad story and a sad look at human nature. Still, a very good read. It's a short story and doesn't take along to finish. Better still, it's available online:
http://windupstories.com/pumpsix/the-people-of-sand-and-slag/
Keep in mind the global warming predictions are things like "1 degree Celsius in 20 years", not "January 2013 will be 50 degrees hotter than normal!!!!!"
Oh, come on now. Those predictions are for changes in the average temperature. And I think you probably know that already.
For a long time now the predictions have been that we will likely see a 4-5 degree Celsius increase in the average global temperature by the end of this century, and along the way we will experience an increasing number of extreme and/or unusual weather conditions and patterns.
These changing patterns could be an increased number of hurricanes due to warmer ocean surface temperatures, unexpected tornadoes during the Winter months, unusually warm Winter months, and so on. And single one of these, or even a couple, could easily be explained as a one-time fluke. But when every season and every year brings some new bizarre weather change, it's time to do something about it.
By your own admission, you DO participate in the used market (as a seller). So even though you don't often sell your used games, you do sometimes, and that helps justify your expenditure (and lower your risk): basically, if you try one out and you end up hating it, you have a way of recouping part of the cost. By eliminating that, you're going to be much more reluctant to try out games you aren't really familiar with.
Absolutely true. In the long long ago, when copyright hadn't yet been entirely perverted, you could still return PC games and sell them back to the game stores. When this was a possibility, I purchased far more PC games. Then the rules changed and the number of games I bought decreased dramatically because the risk for me was much higher. If I didn't like a game, there was nothing at all I could do about it.
I usually wait for at least some reviews anyway, but when at the store, if I saw something for, say, $20 that looked like it might be interesting, I would take a chance, knowing that I could always return it.
It wasn't until Steam became big that I began taking more chances with games again. Obviously, it's not because I can return them, but most indie games are relatively cheap so the risk is much lower.
Here in Tucson, AZ we have a local chain of stores called Bookman's which *does* buy and sell used PC (and console) games. With the rise of digital downloads for PC games purchases, the selection has dwindled, but it's nice to have it as an option. And the software (and console discs/cartridges) all have a 7 day return policy if you don't like it thus further reducing the risk.
Wow, a topic where I actually have firsthand expert knowledge! :)
IABAN (I Actually Built A Nanosatellite)...
To be more precise, I assisted a little with the building and did all of the on-board programming, along with extensive ground station testing. I was a member of the University of Arizona's Cubesat Program which worked in conjunction with CalTech. The cubesat was a 10cm cube with a maximum weight of 1kg. We built four sats in the end, one engineering model, two identical flight sats (RinconSat 1 and 2), and one done with partners from a university in France and Alcatel (AlcatelSat).
As far as orbits go, when on the nanosat scale, you get whatever orbit you can that will get your sat into space. The cubesats were originally headed for a LEO and a lifetime of a few months. But... rockets are amazingly expensive and even a boatload of nanosats won't justify their own launch. Instead, you hitch a ride along with a primary payload that does justify a launch and take up some unused cargo room and weight capacity (it's still not free, of course). The primary payload for our cubesats changed midway through the process and that in turn changed our destined orbit. The new one was much higher with a correspondingly longer lifetime.
Eventually, after more delays, we got our launch opportunity in late 2008 or early 2009, I don't recall the precise date. We were launching RinconSat 2 and AlcatelSat. They were sent to California, integrated, and then sent to the Cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazahkstan to be put on a a Russian ex-ICBM. Launch day came and the damn thing lost control in the first stage and resulted in a flaming crater in the desert 70km downrange.
I am confident that had they made it to space, the cubesats would have worked well. Because of the delays we had time for lengthy ground testing. I really wish they would have flown as our sats and my software we considerably more capable than most of the other cubesats and it would have been great to get real data from them and see if our two-way communication would have worked as well in space as it did on the ground-to-mountain tests we did.
I've been burned by Ubisoft in the past. When IL2-Sturmovik was originally released some years back, it would always crash on my then PC. I actually tried customer service, who were no help at all. Turns out it was the CD copy control being used. A crack removed that and it worked fine after that. I then told this to customer service, but they just closed my tickets twice without even a reply.
I bought, and generally enjoyed, the last two Anno games... but there is no way I will buy this one. I'm sure a crack will remove it, but I can't give Ubi money for this until they remove it on their own. And probably not even then.
Hmmm... that is unfortunate.
The suggestion to use Hulu is a good one, but I don't think it will particularly fit my needs. Hulu is focused much more on television shows rather than movies. According to their list, Hulu Plus has only 1800 movies available, of which only ~700 are in HD. That's not enough to justify the monthly cost since there is only a small subset of those movies that I will want to watch.
I am curious about this. I've been a MythTV user for many years now. I don't *need* Netflix, but it certainly would be nice to have. Part of the draw of a well built HTPC is having everything in a single place controlled by a single remote.
But, you're right that MythTV does not natively support Netflix. Maybe it could be accessed via MythBrowser? Or is a real Win/Mac (on a PC) client necessary?
Is there any other Linux alternative to getting Netflix running? Or, for that matter, any other movie streaming service? I believe MythBrowser is built on top of Webkit and that it can handle the Flash plugin. Certainly, that's enough for YouTube (already handled by MythNetbrowser), but maybe not more.
Google tells me that some people have done this by having their Mythbox launch a WinXP virtual machine to run IE to run the Silverlight Netflix player. The author seems to indicate that, overall, it is not hard to implement, but the CPU requirements are fairly high. Hmmm...
I find there's this tendency towards moralizing and discounting of cost among people with serious medical problems who get other people to pay for the associated care, either through a public program or medical insurance that is grouped by force with a bunch of healthy people. It seems a rather sad form of selfishness to me.
And I find this attitude rather disheartening. :(
I have the exact opposite view of healthcare, it would seem. I feel that healthcare should be universal. Available to all and funded through tax. It's called "insurance" for a reason... too many people (not saying you are one of them) take the view that they are healthy enough to chance not purchasing insurance when they are young and healthy and then either get it later in life when nearly everybody has some sort of medical need, or they get sick without insurance and rely on current free options which they didn't bother to even try to buy into.
Universal healthcare is a net win for society and I feel no guilt wishing it were so and no ill will to those poor enough to be on Medicaid or some state program. A good and proud society should want to help those in need. And, the only way for it to work is if all people, well and sick, are in the program. I like this country (the US, that is) a great deal, but our current healthcare system (the funding, not the expertise) is one of our greatest failings. I'm optimistic enough to believe that we will eventually arrive at some sort of single-payer/universal system. I just wish it would happen sooner rather than later.
And, I can honestly say that even if I were not ill, I would still have this same opinion, because it is how I felt before I was initially diagnosed.
In case you hadn't noticed, medicine is vastly more complex now than it was one hundred years ago. The medical community knows much more and therefore doctors must know far more as well. Regardless of what type of doctor you are, you need to know at least something about virtually all of the fields besides your own. That's how we avoid complications.
Due to my particular medical/genetic condition, I see a handful of doctors on a regular basis. I know that I am personally very glad that they are as well informed as they are.
Agreed. Way back in their broke and begging days I donated something like $20 or $30 to them. At the time they were one of the only dynamic DNS services and it worked just fine, even then.
Later, when they began offering additional commercial options, I found that my initial free account had been upgraded to a lifetime pro account (it's labeled Dynamic DNS Pro - Permanent) because I had been generous to them in those early times. It's stayed that way, too, ever since 2002. I don't get all of the commercial offerings, but I do get access to tech support and all of the available domain name choices (of which there are vastly more than when I initially made my account).
That move was enough to keep me around all this time and if I am in the need of commercial DNS services, they'll be the first place I check.
I really wish Congress, and the Post Master General for that matter, would stop pretending that the USPS is just another business and should be operated as such. It's not! Mail has been a public service almost since this country was founded and the idea goes back even further in time in some other countries.
Given what the USPS does, it cannot operate like a normal business and it shouldn't have to. Considering how much money they are losing each year, it's clear they need to change something, and I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for first class postage, but this idea that the USPS needs to break even needs to stop soon before Congress completely ruins the postal service.
Packages aside, you simply can't send everything through email. I still get plenty of real non-junk mail all the time, from bank notices to insurance EOBs. This is far more secure than email could ever hope to be. Yes, it would be nice if everybody encrypted their email (especially banks), but until that happens, regular mail is a lot more secure. We actually have laws against this sort of thing and most people even take them seriously. There is little, if anything, to prevent electronic eavesdropping.
I certainly don't want to see the end of the traditional post office in my lifetime, but at the rate Congress is going, who knows. And while I would expect the Post Master General to be fighting the good fight *for* the USPS, every time I hear him talk it seems like he's gung ho to implement whatever idea Congress throws his way.
The USPS is a public service, not a business...
Because, honestly, I have not found the performance hit to be anything noticeable. Oh, I'm sure it is there, but it just doesn't seem to have a big enough effect for me to worry about.
Also, simply dumping everything on a single encrypted volume makes the whole process easier. The single LUKS volume is entirely used as a single physical volume for a LVM volume group. On that VG I then create root, usr, home, etc.
In the past I have tried other methods, such as encrypting home only. Ubuntu (I think it still supports this) even allows for per user encrypted home directories. I tried this once, but it seemed kludgy and it even broke simple things like 'du' (which would always report 0 blocks used).
This method has also been the most user friendly, at least in my experience. I get prompted once at boot to enter the passphrase and that's it. Previously I had to roll my own solution when I wanted to encrypt only home. Maybe it's better now, but this has always been easier.
On my file server, where I also use this setup, I have running a whole host of processes and daemons. Included among this is MythTV and that certainly generates a substantial amount of disk I/O. Not only that, but I have root-on-lvm-on-RAID5-on-encryption on this system and it still performs quite admirably. Of course I'm sacrificing some disk and CPU performance here, but it hasn't been enough to make me look for a different/better solution.
And, as I mentioned in my original post, both the Debian and Ubuntu installers support setting up your disk in this manner so that simplifies things even further.
The main reason I just installed Debian/testing on my laptop was because the current release of Mint-Debian does not support root-on-lvm-on-crypt which is the setup I use for all of my home machines (since they are essentially single-user). I also found that the Ubuntu based Mint 11 does not support this either. I find this surprising as both of the distros Mint 11 was based on (Debian and Ubuntu) support this feature in their respective installers. I was rather disappointed that it was not available in the Mint 11 installer.
I know "Mint 12" is the Ubuntu based version and that the Debian based Mint 12 is not yet available, but does anybody know if Mint 12 supports this feature? I hope it does because Mint looks like a good fit for my laptop.
I'll second that. I needed to reinstall Linux on my notebook and after having fits with the most recent Ubuntu release, I was very much ready to give Linux Mint a try.
But, on all of my single user machines (desktop, notebook, netbook), I always use root-on-LVM-on-crypt (using LUKS for encryption) for my hard drive setup. This way, everything except for the small boot partition is encrypted. It works great and I've personally found the performance hit to be negligible. I even have my file server set up this way and it does much more I/O than any of my other machines without any noticeable problems.
Anyway, both Debian and Ubuntu support this type of configuration directly in their installers. Ubuntu also supports (or did, at least) a per-user home directory encryption. I gave it a try once, but I didn't care for it and it even broke simple things, like using 'du' to see how much space was being used by a file or directory.
Unfortunately, Linux Mint does not support this configuration. I found this to be rather odd, since Mint is based on Ubuntu, which supports it, and Mint Debian edition is based on Debian which also supports it. I found a forum thread where somebody had managed to get it to work, but it seemed like an awful lot of hoops to jump through. In the end, I just went with Debian/testing and called it a day. Hopefully the Mint people will add this ability soon because I'd really like to give it a try.
Yes! Thank you!
Personally, I can't stand this. I'm a customer, damn it, not some mindless all-consuming locust. And for a related question, when did this trend start?
Bah...
Very interesting, indeed. And a lot to think about. In my case, I'll be dealing with DirecTV drones instead of cable drones. I *think* the former are slightly better, but I guess I'll find out soon enough.
Both the HD-PVR and the dongle sound promising. The DirecTV receiver is not connected to the Internet, but DirecTV is capable of pushing whatever software or updates it wishes down though its satellites, so I suppose it is possible that they could revoke the key that this dongle uses in that manner.
Thanks again for the tips!
I've been using Myth for ages now with DirecTV (I rewrote one of the early versions of the directv.pl tuner script) and have been happy with it. But... so far it's always been standard def TV, even though I've got a 19" 720p panel attached to the Mythbox.
What sort of HD can I get out of the component plugs? And why does this work? Because it is still "analog" and the media companies are not yet super anal about this particular work around? Also, does this mean that there isn't a method for locking down component output signals? I'd hate to try this and find that when I tune a premium channel I get junk... although, I suppose that depends on how the receiver box is designed.
If I can get a decent picture in this manner, I may have to upgrade. Hmm...
If I'm only interested in 720p component signals, what HD capture card would you recommend? I've been using a Hauppauge PVR-250 for years and it's been good to me, despite being std. def.
I'll second that. I recently did exactly this and so far my WRT320N is performing just fine. I am, however, new to dd-wrt, having run openwrt in the past. I might switch at some point because, while dd-wrt is mostly working, its QoS code did nothing but slow down the entire network to a crawl.
It'll be back up in about 2 weeks. They do this with all their new episodes (available right away, blocked for a couple weeks, then available again indefinitely).
Except that we're not talking about the new episodes (200 & 201). The episode in question is the season 5 episode "Super Best Friends" which aired almost nine years ago (July, 2001).
That episode did show Mohammed, as one of the Super Best Friends. That Comedy Central, or whoever is in charge of what South Park Studios can air on-line, would take it down now, after so much time has passed, is as big a problem as the uber-censoring done to episode 201.
Weak, dude. Super weak.
Actually, thinking more about it, virtualization probably can help in concert with other software. When you full-screen a DOS game in, say, VirtualBox, you're either going to see the VBox window resize to the low-res size of the DOS game, or the VBox window will remain at its current size and the DOS game will appear in the middle with a big black border around it.
But, suppose you were doing this while using the Compiz window manager. Of the many mods and tools that Compiz supports, one of them in a scaler that lets you scale a window to whatever size you want (this is different than the screen magnifier tool). So, run your DOS game in VBox and make it so that the VBox window has the same dimensions as the DOS game. Now use the scaler tool, and voila, your DOS game is running at whatever res you like.
There are some downsides here, of course. Foremost being that you will see the rest of your desktop around the edges of your scaled game window and that may be annoying. I know that I prefer to play most games full screen. But, you can't have everything...
Yes! This is why units are so important to the understanding of a problem or example. I wish more people would remember this.
With these references, I now grasp the enormity entirely.
:)
Absolutely. That's why Starcraft 2 is such a consumer-unfriendly game. I'm not going to buy it; I rather hope nobody else does, although I'm sure they will. Once publishers manage to get acceptance for the idea that a game constantly needs to have an online connection, i.e., they will have seized ownership away from the consumer. They can deactivate, alter, and advertise in the game however they want, at any time.
Which is exactly why they are putting it in a game with as high a profile as Starcraft 2. Ideally, you might expect that it would get tested out first in some smaller product, but with lower sales volume it's likely that any protesters will be more easily heard and these hated technologies will get under the spotlight.
But, if you implement and deploy it with a very high profile game you are guaranteed several things. First, many people are going to buy it regardless of what junk you attach. Now you can point to those numbers and claim success. Second, you now have a foothold from which you can expand. "Well, it was Starcraft 2, and people didn't seem to mind that. Look at how popular it was."
This is exactly the strategy that Valve used with Steam. Of course, it should be pointed out that Steam is much more than a DRM scheme, and I happen to like and use Steam a lot. Still, it's the same method. Valve used the high profile Half-life 2 launch to launch Steam at the same time. I purchased the DVD version of HL2, but still had to put Steam on. And, the strategy worked wonderfully for them (in my case, at least). I still have Steam and I still buy games through it - it's exactly what they wanted to have happen.
Here's hoping that this scenario won't work nearly as well for Blizzard, though. And, since this is only a DRM scheme and multiplayer host service, maybe there will be a sufficient uproar. Hard to tell until it's released, though...
This is very much the case.
I grew up in Tucson, about two hours south of Phoenix and, thankfully, outside the jurisdiction of the madman Arpaio. Lived here for 25 years and it's always been hot in the summers. Very hot.
Then I lived in Massachusetts for three years and moved back to Tucson. Damn is it hot here! Have I really changed that much? I watch the K-12 school busses go by and wonder how in the hell I ever managed to survive 13 years of riding those metal boxes without AC in them. Each summer day seems to just suck the life right out of me.
I'm sure I'm still more "used" to it than others might be, but a relatively short time spent in a radically different climate has really changed how this particular one feels.
Also, I miss the trees.
pretty much all the first person shooting games have this at their core.
The basics of gaming hasn't changed in over 30 years. Shortcuts, Mindless violence and the feeling of victory when you eventually "win" - which lasts all of 20 seconds until it gives way to the hollow feeling of "well, what now?"
You really should have picked a better example for your rant, I'm afraid. Just because somebody can do a speed run of Zork doesn't mean that's how you play. First off, Zork is by no means a violent gorefest. It's a game of exploration and treasure hunting. If you play using this minimal set of moves, you've neither truly played the game nor have you achieved a remotely good score.
The truth is that games have changed considerably in the past 30 years. Sure, there were lousy games back then, just as there are now, but they were an entirely different kind of lousy. Usually they were, in my opinion, of the insanely difficult and un-fun type of lousy. There's a lot less of those these days since insane levels of difficulty cause most gamers to do a 180 right quick.
There's more problems than just pulse audio, there are too many daemons appearing in general. Stuff like gnome-pty-helper, gnome-keyring, ssh-agent, consolekit, hal-addon-storage, gconfd. All this stuff is fine on general purpose machines when the user mainly engages in browsing, multimedia, IM and office apps. The problems arise when you want to do something demanding like A/V work, with distros increasingly integrating services for the common usage case it's becoming increasingly difficult to get a usable setup on older hardware.
While a multitude of daemons might be a problem from the perspective of memory usage (if they're not properly written), they should have almost zero effect on your CPU and A/V work.
The reason is that the vast majority of system daemons sit waiting for input via sockets or pipes. There is no polling involved because this is an OS-level task. The daemon tries to read from its socket/pipe and it essentially goes to sleep. The kernel doesn't even need to touch it because it knows what the daemon is waiting for. Once some new input arrives, the kernel will wake the daemon and pass the data through the socket/pipe.
This is why it's not at all a problem for every user to have ssh-agent or gnome-pty-helper running. They'll all be loaded only once into memory, and the CPU will only ever touch them when they actually have something to do (which is not that often for most daemons).
Now, that may work fine for user-space daemons, but what I would like to see more of is daemons loaded on the fly from inetd (or whatever your distro uses to replace that). For example, on Debian, ever since Exim 4 was released, you can't have it spawn via inetd when something actually opens port 25. Instead, it stays running all the time. On a regular home machine, most of the system level daemons, even things like ssh, are used so infrequently that the additional loading time needed to run them from inetd would be unnoticed.