So, my wife and are geeks. Well, I'm a geek; she's a nerd.
When she was pregnant and we confirmed it was a boy, thus began the question of what to name him. We were both interested in something a little archaic, or possibly iconic. An online baby name generator suggested "Steele Rod." We weren't going to name him after Isaac Asmiov, as my wife thought Isaac Haas would be a tad too close to Isaac Hayes. Meanwhile, my daughter asked if we could name him Cudahy. (A real Milwaukee joke: "That way we know he'd be musical... he'd have a lot of bars.")
One night, after ticking off a list of science fiction authors, I suggested Ellison. My wife remembered Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka, the mission specialist who died on the Space Shuttle Challenger's last mission in 1986.
A few days later, our science fiction baby was born with Spock ears and bearing the name of a curmudgeonly writer and an astronaut. I hope it's a fitting name for a bright, thoughtful, and as yet un-curmudgeonly boy.
I remember the end of the Cold War. I thought we would eventually start dismantling most of the nuclear arsenal that's cost trillions of dollars to build and maintain. (I'm not even going to mention the cost of cleanup at this point.)
So why do we still have the massive stockpiles?
I understand that Russian nukes are a problem. I understand that Putin is not the nicest guy in the world, to say the least, and may not be that amenable to reducing his stockpile. But god knows the Russians will need to save money. As do we. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, but we still maintain these ICBMs... for what exactly?
It's up to Congress to change this. I say it's time.
Re:Never used this keystroke
on
Goodbye, Ctrl-S
·
· Score: 1
I'm a Mac user, you insensitive clod.
And it's funny, but continual saving by a recently purchased Chromebook prevented me from losing anything when due to its hyper-frequent crashing. It's a defective unit, nothing to do with Chrome OS. Suffice to say that soured my slight migratory experiment; I'm typing this on my trusty MacBook Pro.
Milwaukee alders are very powerful in their community and on the city council. What's different here is that Milwaukee is the largest city in the state. It's the state's economic driver. So what happens here has resonance.
What may not be so different is that here, the taxi scene is dominated by one company with a de facto monopoly made possible by previous city action. Ald. Bauman is interested in expanding the choices available to consumers. Hence this action.
I serve on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. That body has been maligned so many times it's not funny. One of my colleagues was just elected as an alderman. But that's another story.
Meanwhile, I've got this open data resolution that I'm working on...
Milwaukee has a number of parallels to Detroit, but just enough differences that we are not, and will not be, the "next Detroit." Milwaukee is on the upswing. The city has a growing population once again, following its decline during the era of deindustrialization and urban-to-suburban flight. Milwaukee still has good bones, and as more people come here, they find it has a real vibrancy to it. We're truly blessed with a number of great local coffee roasters, including Anodyne, Stone Creek, Sven's, and Valentine, in addition to the ubiquitous Colectivo (formerly Alterra). Pabst, Schlitz and Miller made Milwaukee a beer capitol, and now we've got fantastic microbreweries, Lakefront Brewing, Milwaukee Brewing Company, St. Francis Brewery, and the crowdfunded Brenner Brewing Company. There's five colleges and two major universities within city limits, and a great publicly-owned international airport.
Milwaukee's Green Corridor along S. 6th Street is our sandbox for sustainable development. Among many attributes, it has the world's largest slab of water-permeable concrete, which was made part of the stormwater containment system that runs a beautiful stream and provides water for the on-site community gardens. A food hub is being developed just across the street from there, and we're showing true green development is replete with benefits.
The 20th century saw Milwaukee's first apex, and we're building toward a larger, more sustainable one right now. I'm thrilled to be part of it.
Yes. I have to wonder what the three-year-old daughter of the man thinks. The three-year-old daughter of the now-dead man.
It's utterly shameful that this happened. Especially the way that it ended the man's life.
There was a story here on/. a few days ago about New Hampshire's big move to open source. I know Wyoming is moving toward it, and Washington, D.C. has adopted an entirely Google-based platform. Other governments may be on their way.
Here in Wisconsin, we've had some movement as well. The city of Kenosha has had an extensive OSS IT platform in place for years. And here in Milwaukee County, where we have a Windows-centered IT policy, I scored a significant chip at the monolith. In my days since being the guerilla marketer for LinuxPPC, I won election last year as a Milwaukee County Supervisor. That means I'm one of 19 members in charge of policy for a $1.3 billion body of government. Because I now help craft policy — code, even, for code = law — I couldn't let the all-MS policy continue.
In the 2012 budget, I had an amendement that directs our IT department to do a study of open source software integration. I just got an update on the progress of the study: it turns out that rather than writing a white paper, we're going to have a working production model in place within a few months. It will be built entirely upon open source products (some flavor of Linux, Apache-Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Alfresco, and so on). So we'll have actual documentation of the cost of production, and cost of maintenance. Beyond that, once it's tested, it will be ready for deployment to replace a set of commercial packages that the County Department of Administration uses. The coding will be done entirely in-house, which is a big win. And the programmers are very excited to do it!
That's only the beginning. Milwaukee County still uses Lotus Notes. (Pause to allow groans and shouts...) It's easy to imagine possibilities to replace Notes. And MS IIS. This is going to make a great story for Slashdot in a few months, and I hope it will make a great story to share with my constituents. The trick there will be to put it in terms that they can understand, as most of them don't have what I presume is our shared background. But, that's part of what they elected me for.
I suppose the story here is "get elected, and make a subtle policy (with profound future impacts) that you can sell by saying it will save money." With any luck, the rest will come like gravy.
It's been a heck of a journey from my days as guerilla marketer for LinuxPPC, with a few notablestops along the way, to where I am now, a Milwaukee County Supervisor. I won election to this office back in April 2011, and won reelection in January 2012 simply by filing my nomination papers—and having no opponent. (#win!)
Back in November 2011, my colleagues on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a small budget amendment that contained an order for our IT department to do a study on moving to OSS. That made it part of the 2012 budget. Work has already begun, and there were a few guys lurking in the basement that had been running Linux for years.
Milwaukee County's IT policy is predictably centered around Windows. But we also have a mainframe somewhere in the bowels of the government, crunching away after all these years. I'm not sure if anyone still knows how to write in COBOL, but it's in there.
Worse yet, we have dozens of custom Windows apps that do all sorts of things, over many departments. I don't know that there was ever a clear voice in guiding their creation. Removing them may be painful, if and when the time comes.
This is just a study to look at integrating open source into our mix. So far, it's going well, though we'll see how it looks when I meet with the IT folks next week. My hunch from initial talks is that we have a good opening for OSS.
Also, an assistant at the county board suggested that I introduce a resolution that would bar the purchase of software with recurring upgrade fees. We need to save money, after all. It would, in essence, guide the county toward the purchase of open source solutions. While not everything has an open source alternative, many of the basic tasks we do could be done for a fraction of their current price. I tell ya, I'll drag Milwaukee County IT into the late 20th century! If not a little beyond that.
Nothings against Macworld, which is still pretty good given the hard times publishing is in, but this English Mac magazine, MacFormat, is, to use a tired cliche, thicker and juicier. And apparently it does come with a DVD. (What's the deal with that? I remember when MacAddict shipped with CDs... but I guess US rags don't now?) The writing is much richer, the overall content thicker in MacFormat. That said, I do remember the 1988 issue of Macworld that covered the introduction of the NeXT computers. Back then, the pages were thicker and glossier, and it was evident that there was a much greater ability to spend time and money on producing a lavish journal. Of course that was before the Web changed the world. Appropriately, the Web was created on a NeXT. Curious how the world moves sometimes.
I worked at an MCI IP relay call center some years ago. I remember that shortly before I quit, management was bragging about their new Filipino call center. They said people would walk for hours and hours to get to the work site in Manila, and sleep there overnight. Their efficiency was top-notch, apparently. And I guess they didn't have or didn't mind what I referred to as the "Anal Sex Hour," which happened when bored suburban teenagers (mostly from Texas, it seemed) would prank call their female classmates and have the relay operator sexually harass the call recipient over the phone. All anonymously. All without recourse. Between that and our friends from Nigeria, I'd had enough, and quit.
i have an '06 TDi, and its manual says 5% as well. Thing is, the Pump Düße TDis are very different beasts from the newer CRD TDis with the exhaust treatment. I don't know what putting more than 5% through that would do, if it would cause more of the urea compounds to be used, etc. My father-in-law used 5% bio in his Golf TDi and never had a problem with it. Just change the oil religiously and your fuel filters once a year (in October) and yours should run like a dream. (Assuming the doors open...)
From what i understand, this is good only for older (1980s) VW/Benz diesels. I saw a picture of what happen to a guy's later-1990s VW TDi that he tried to run on grease. It made the turbo cylinder look like it was in a warzone.
VW's official line is that they can take up to 5% biodiesel -- which is very different from grease/WVO/SVO. I have an '06 that ran like a dream on biodiesel, but it's become hard to get in reliable quantity for me.
I should say, we marred the surface. It was perfect and untouched, in my mind, prior to that. Sure, I'd seem the tracks behind the rovers in the films. But that wasn't seeing them from above. So why does it bother me now? I'm grateful for every probe we've sent out, whether it's left tracks on the Moon, on Mars, or even Venus. Though we probably wouldn't see it so much on Venus now.
Hey Rob,
I think it's been over a decade since we've seen each other, probably at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. (Don't Fear the Penguins!) But I just wanted to say thanks. For/. actually helped make my recovery from that horrible car crash that I was in a lot easier. I still have the cards that people sent—the huge folder full of cards from around the world. Thanks to everyone who wrote in because of that. Whether you sent a card or just posted on here, you all helped. I remember coming home from the hospital, and after a few weeks, I fired up the computer. Slashdot was one of the first few sites I looked at... and that in turn gave me the confidence to try using vi again. And by golly, it worked—even after your brain gets used as a ping pong ball by a drunk driver. That's cool.
But anyway, yes, thank you! Have a great life. I'll see you down the road a piece!
This doesn't tell us exactly which sort of financial troubles Loki encountered. Was it from low sales? Or an internal problem? Was it with the way they paid developers? Going to too many Linux conferences? (Please don't tell me it was from porting to LinuxPPC... we actually sold a fair number of Loki titles.)
Please note that I'm not challenging the user icebraining, but rather the vague language of the summary. We were all saddened when Loki closed. I occasionally daydream of grabbing an on PPC box, installing LinuxPPC 2000 Q4, and having a go at it again..
I find it funny that Rushdie was a Mac user back then, and used ClarisWorks. I actually liked that package a lot, as it did about enough for most people. I just think it's funny that he used it and Eudora at about the same time that I did.
Slashdot Mirror
So, my wife and are geeks. Well, I'm a geek; she's a nerd. When she was pregnant and we confirmed it was a boy, thus began the question of what to name him. We were both interested in something a little archaic, or possibly iconic. An online baby name generator suggested "Steele Rod." We weren't going to name him after Isaac Asmiov, as my wife thought Isaac Haas would be a tad too close to Isaac Hayes. Meanwhile, my daughter asked if we could name him Cudahy. (A real Milwaukee joke: "That way we know he'd be musical... he'd have a lot of bars.") One night, after ticking off a list of science fiction authors, I suggested Ellison. My wife remembered Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka, the mission specialist who died on the Space Shuttle Challenger's last mission in 1986. A few days later, our science fiction baby was born with Spock ears and bearing the name of a curmudgeonly writer and an astronaut. I hope it's a fitting name for a bright, thoughtful, and as yet un-curmudgeonly boy.
One must beware of folding it too many times.
I remember the end of the Cold War. I thought we would eventually start dismantling most of the nuclear arsenal that's cost trillions of dollars to build and maintain. (I'm not even going to mention the cost of cleanup at this point.) So why do we still have the massive stockpiles? I understand that Russian nukes are a problem. I understand that Putin is not the nicest guy in the world, to say the least, and may not be that amenable to reducing his stockpile. But god knows the Russians will need to save money. As do we. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, but we still maintain these ICBMs... for what exactly? It's up to Congress to change this. I say it's time.
I'm a Mac user, you insensitive clod. And it's funny, but continual saving by a recently purchased Chromebook prevented me from losing anything when due to its hyper-frequent crashing. It's a defective unit, nothing to do with Chrome OS. Suffice to say that soured my slight migratory experiment; I'm typing this on my trusty MacBook Pro.
Milwaukee alders are very powerful in their community and on the city council. What's different here is that Milwaukee is the largest city in the state. It's the state's economic driver. So what happens here has resonance.
What may not be so different is that here, the taxi scene is dominated by one company with a de facto monopoly made possible by previous city action. Ald. Bauman is interested in expanding the choices available to consumers. Hence this action.
I serve on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors. That body has been maligned so many times it's not funny. One of my colleagues was just elected as an alderman. But that's another story.
Meanwhile, I've got this open data resolution that I'm working on...
Milwaukee has a number of parallels to Detroit, but just enough differences that we are not, and will not be, the "next Detroit." Milwaukee is on the upswing. The city has a growing population once again, following its decline during the era of deindustrialization and urban-to-suburban flight. Milwaukee still has good bones, and as more people come here, they find it has a real vibrancy to it. We're truly blessed with a number of great local coffee roasters, including Anodyne, Stone Creek, Sven's, and Valentine, in addition to the ubiquitous Colectivo (formerly Alterra). Pabst, Schlitz and Miller made Milwaukee a beer capitol, and now we've got fantastic microbreweries, Lakefront Brewing, Milwaukee Brewing Company, St. Francis Brewery, and the crowdfunded Brenner Brewing Company. There's five colleges and two major universities within city limits, and a great publicly-owned international airport.
Milwaukee's Green Corridor along S. 6th Street is our sandbox for sustainable development. Among many attributes, it has the world's largest slab of water-permeable concrete, which was made part of the stormwater containment system that runs a beautiful stream and provides water for the on-site community gardens. A food hub is being developed just across the street from there, and we're showing true green development is replete with benefits.
The 20th century saw Milwaukee's first apex, and we're building toward a larger, more sustainable one right now. I'm thrilled to be part of it.
Yes. I have to wonder what the three-year-old daughter of the man thinks. The three-year-old daughter of the now-dead man. It's utterly shameful that this happened. Especially the way that it ended the man's life.
Nelson Mandela is a hero to many, myself included. May he rest in peace as we honor and mourn him, though we never shall forget him.
...in a great fireball of self-wrought annihilation brought on by the inherent and overwhelming contradictions of running vim inside Emacs?
Looking at the image on the NASA page, it jumps out at you: it's a fractal. To quote Marathon 1, "They're eveywhere!"
Yeah. What I typed up there about a "minimum of... dorkiness"? Yeah. That was me. NOT LOGED IN. Dork.
There was a story here on /. a few days ago about New Hampshire's big move to open source. I know Wyoming is moving toward it, and Washington, D.C. has adopted an entirely Google-based platform. Other governments may be on their way.
Here in Wisconsin, we've had some movement as well. The city of Kenosha has had an extensive OSS IT platform in place for years. And here in Milwaukee County, where we have a Windows-centered IT policy, I scored a significant chip at the monolith. In my days since being the guerilla marketer for LinuxPPC, I won election last year as a Milwaukee County Supervisor. That means I'm one of 19 members in charge of policy for a $1.3 billion body of government. Because I now help craft policy — code, even, for code = law — I couldn't let the all-MS policy continue.
In the 2012 budget, I had an amendement that directs our IT department to do a study of open source software integration. I just got an update on the progress of the study: it turns out that rather than writing a white paper, we're going to have a working production model in place within a few months. It will be built entirely upon open source products (some flavor of Linux, Apache-Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, Alfresco, and so on). So we'll have actual documentation of the cost of production, and cost of maintenance. Beyond that, once it's tested, it will be ready for deployment to replace a set of commercial packages that the County Department of Administration uses. The coding will be done entirely in-house, which is a big win. And the programmers are very excited to do it!
That's only the beginning. Milwaukee County still uses Lotus Notes. (Pause to allow groans and shouts...) It's easy to imagine possibilities to replace Notes. And MS IIS. This is going to make a great story for Slashdot in a few months, and I hope it will make a great story to share with my constituents. The trick there will be to put it in terms that they can understand, as most of them don't have what I presume is our shared background. But, that's part of what they elected me for.
I suppose the story here is "get elected, and make a subtle policy (with profound future impacts) that you can sell by saying it will save money." With any luck, the rest will come like gravy.
It's been a heck of a journey from my days as guerilla marketer for LinuxPPC, with a few notable stops along the way, to where I am now, a Milwaukee County Supervisor. I won election to this office back in April 2011, and won reelection in January 2012 simply by filing my nomination papers—and having no opponent. (#win!)
Back in November 2011, my colleagues on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a small budget amendment that contained an order for our IT department to do a study on moving to OSS. That made it part of the 2012 budget. Work has already begun, and there were a few guys lurking in the basement that had been running Linux for years.
Milwaukee County's IT policy is predictably centered around Windows. But we also have a mainframe somewhere in the bowels of the government, crunching away after all these years. I'm not sure if anyone still knows how to write in COBOL, but it's in there.
Worse yet, we have dozens of custom Windows apps that do all sorts of things, over many departments. I don't know that there was ever a clear voice in guiding their creation. Removing them may be painful, if and when the time comes.
This is just a study to look at integrating open source into our mix. So far, it's going well, though we'll see how it looks when I meet with the IT folks next week. My hunch from initial talks is that we have a good opening for OSS.
Also, an assistant at the county board suggested that I introduce a resolution that would bar the purchase of software with recurring upgrade fees. We need to save money, after all. It would, in essence, guide the county toward the purchase of open source solutions. While not everything has an open source alternative, many of the basic tasks we do could be done for a fraction of their current price. I tell ya, I'll drag Milwaukee County IT into the late 20th century! If not a little beyond that.
Nothings against Macworld, which is still pretty good given the hard times publishing is in, but this English Mac magazine, MacFormat, is, to use a tired cliche, thicker and juicier. And apparently it does come with a DVD. (What's the deal with that? I remember when MacAddict shipped with CDs... but I guess US rags don't now?) The writing is much richer, the overall content thicker in MacFormat. That said, I do remember the 1988 issue of Macworld that covered the introduction of the NeXT computers. Back then, the pages were thicker and glossier, and it was evident that there was a much greater ability to spend time and money on producing a lavish journal. Of course that was before the Web changed the world. Appropriately, the Web was created on a NeXT. Curious how the world moves sometimes.
I worked at an MCI IP relay call center some years ago. I remember that shortly before I quit, management was bragging about their new Filipino call center. They said people would walk for hours and hours to get to the work site in Manila, and sleep there overnight. Their efficiency was top-notch, apparently. And I guess they didn't have or didn't mind what I referred to as the "Anal Sex Hour," which happened when bored suburban teenagers (mostly from Texas, it seemed) would prank call their female classmates and have the relay operator sexually harass the call recipient over the phone. All anonymously. All without recourse. Between that and our friends from Nigeria, I'd had enough, and quit.
the papers? was that a band?
i have an '06 TDi, and its manual says 5% as well. Thing is, the Pump Düße TDis are very different beasts from the newer CRD TDis with the exhaust treatment. I don't know what putting more than 5% through that would do, if it would cause more of the urea compounds to be used, etc. My father-in-law used 5% bio in his Golf TDi and never had a problem with it. Just change the oil religiously and your fuel filters once a year (in October) and yours should run like a dream. (Assuming the doors open...)
From what i understand, this is good only for older (1980s) VW/Benz diesels. I saw a picture of what happen to a guy's later-1990s VW TDi that he tried to run on grease. It made the turbo cylinder look like it was in a warzone. VW's official line is that they can take up to 5% biodiesel -- which is very different from grease/WVO/SVO. I have an '06 that ran like a dream on biodiesel, but it's become hard to get in reliable quantity for me.
I should say, we marred the surface. It was perfect and untouched, in my mind, prior to that. Sure, I'd seem the tracks behind the rovers in the films. But that wasn't seeing them from above. So why does it bother me now? I'm grateful for every probe we've sent out, whether it's left tracks on the Moon, on Mars, or even Venus. Though we probably wouldn't see it so much on Venus now.
Hey Rob, I think it's been over a decade since we've seen each other, probably at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. (Don't Fear the Penguins!) But I just wanted to say thanks. For /. actually helped make my recovery from that horrible car crash that I was in a lot easier. I still have the cards that people sent—the huge folder full of cards from around the world. Thanks to everyone who wrote in because of that. Whether you sent a card or just posted on here, you all helped. I remember coming home from the hospital, and after a few weeks, I fired up the computer. Slashdot was one of the first few sites I looked at... and that in turn gave me the confidence to try using vi again. And by golly, it worked—even after your brain gets used as a ping pong ball by a drunk driver. That's cool.
But anyway, yes, thank you! Have a great life. I'll see you down the road a piece!
What would it be like to play Ultima IV on this thing?
I bet it can play Crystal Quest with a vengeance!
This doesn't tell us exactly which sort of financial troubles Loki encountered. Was it from low sales? Or an internal problem? Was it with the way they paid developers? Going to too many Linux conferences? (Please don't tell me it was from porting to LinuxPPC... we actually sold a fair number of Loki titles.) Please note that I'm not challenging the user icebraining, but rather the vague language of the summary. We were all saddened when Loki closed. I occasionally daydream of grabbing an on PPC box, installing LinuxPPC 2000 Q4, and having a go at it again..
So my brother Dave works at PopCap. I'll have to pick his brain on this some time. :-D
I find it funny that Rushdie was a Mac user back then, and used ClarisWorks. I actually liked that package a lot, as it did about enough for most people. I just think it's funny that he used it and Eudora at about the same time that I did.