"The premise behind the law was sound: Who needs a "hunting" weapon that was exclusively designed for killing people in wartime? Who needs a folding stock or a 30-round magazine for hunting deer?"
Not to pick on you in particular (except, well, that I am picking on you in particular;), who needs an Anything?
The idea that things not specifically "needed" (as determined by whom?) are suspect or should need to be justified for some reason has implications that I don't like, most especially when applied blithely to weapons (potentially, at least) of self defense.
Who needs plastic bags for groceries? After all, (conventional) plastics rely on petroleum, and contribute to the dissipation of natural resources. [Ignore the considerations of price, convenience, shipping convenience, reusability, etc, that might lead a person or a business to prefer them.]
Who needs more than one child? The world has enough people, and any more mouths to feed are a net loss. If you want more, too bad, others have decided you don't need any. (Forced abortions in the western provinces of China.)
Who needs more than 2000 calories a day? It's unhealthy to overeat, and people who overeat (and then develop health problems) are a burden and drain on society.
Who needs more than 10 shirts? Can't those people just wash more often? They're depleting resources and spending their money inefficiently, and hurting all of us.
Who needs a computer that is powerful enough to play a significant role in designing nuclear weapons?
I wish these questions were more rhetorical, but obviously some of them are not! And of course, who needs a Xerox machine? (Illegal to have such a thing during most of the history of the Soviet Union.)
Another snide but serious answer to "Who needs a gun designed to kill people?" is, "Well, the Swiss seem to think that they do, and they don't get invaded very often." Also, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, when they were being rounded up for extermination camps and -- bravely but ultimately unsuccessfully -- fought back with what weapons they *did* have. I don't mean to activate Godwin's Law here, I hope I've stayed just shy of it;)
To further tread that line; the question is not whether governments ever grow tyrannical and oppress the people they're supposed to be serving (at least when they make the gesture of claiming to be a servant in the first place), it's how often, to what degree, and under what circumstances. The Third Reich is only one of many such in the last 100 years. Stalin and others killed either more in absolute numbers or as a percentage of their country's / dominion's population.
"Let's start handing out nuclear and chemical weapons to any taxpayer who wants them. Their taxes did pay for them after all."
D'oh! Guess I should have thrown in an exception clause to limit my statement that tax-funded things 'had better be available.' There's certainly an edge case in weapons, especially of the mass-killing-machine kind.
Interesting point, though, is that in low-crime, high-gun Switzerland, though I see no mention of the government selling citizens lethal bioweapons, "The army sells a variety of machine guns, submachine guns, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft guns, howitzers and cannons. Purchasers of these weapons require an easily obtained cantonal license, and the weapons are registered, In a nation of six million people, there are at least two million guns, including 600,00 fully automatic assault rifles, half a million pistols, and numerous machine guns." (from http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ae771eb4adb.ht m)
Mostly though, I'd be happier if taxes *didn't* pay for foreign excursions, coups included. (Yessir, I'd like to see the clause is this here social contract that says I authorized that little adventure you have going on there...) Defense, I like. Traipsing about, I don't.
OK, so "State" is shorter, and "country" is just about right... I like to use "commonwealth" because the U.S. constitution specifically mentions the 'general welfare' being one of two things (the other being the common defense) that Congress is granted the power to spend money on; I think 'commonwealth' captures that much better than State or country do. As ignorant of it as I am, this is one of my favorite things about the U.S. Constitution:)
This is the most sensible thing I've ever heard from the NIH!
That doesn't mean they haven't said things just as sensible in the past, of course, just that I've never noticed, if so. The stinky things people / organizations do tend to stick out more.
If something is or should be funded with tax dollars (a category I think is best kept small or smaller, but *if*!), then it had better be available to the people who pay those dollars in.
Moreover, any government spending at all should be made with a specific plan for making it best benefit the commonwealth. If the Federal government (remember, that is Microsoft's largest customer, by far) threw half as much money into Free software as they have into the one-way-only stuff, things like OpenOffice might have already passed Microsoft Office, etc.
On the other hand, they might not (the world is uncertain, and Microsoft employs smart people who honestly want to make their software worth its price), but the fact is the same here as it is when the government funds research with secret results: that money does *not* directly benefit the commonwealth, and should therefore fail the test of whether it deserves money collected by force from citizens of that commonwealth.
heh, in my vast ignorance of gaming, I will have to google for Battlefield 1942 as well as Interstate 1982:) That sounds rather fun; I don't mind the occasional (simulated) highway potshot if it means a mostly-driving game, I just don't want that to be the focus.
How about a game where you gain points by scowling (some key combination could take care of this) at drivers who are talking while turned toward the backseat, applying makeup, talking on the phone while weaving around and staring into space, changing lanes without benefit of blinkers, etc.?
I don't want to assault any prostitutes. I don't want to run down taxi drivers. I'd prefer drugs be legal than remain so expensive by dint of law that people *kill* other people to get them (and the money they produce). If it weren't already true, it would seem a ludicrous contrivance...
However, I enjoy driving. So could someone please make a mod which is just fun, even if dangerous in real life, driving about?:)
Scribus impresses me, so this is a note from a fan who dabbles in it; I can't compare it deeply to state-of-the-art DTP programs.
If AbiWord is slow on your machine, then I think Scribus would be, too. However, it's a very nice application which gets better (well, that is the intent, I realize;)) with every release. They just had a major release, too, and the documentation is far better than most software's documentation in the source-secret or open-source worlds.
Is it Indesign / Quark? No, but it's also a gifthorse;)
Right now, Scribus is more like PageMaker of a few years ago, frankly, but OTOH, can directly create PDFs and do other things which (when I last touched PageMaker, quite a while ago) PageMaker could not.
(Also, though my DTP experience is several years old now, I actually preferred PageMaker for small things; Quark I was eventually won over to, but for small things PM is just more familiar and simple to work with. YMMV...)
I'd like to see various mounting solutions built just for this model.
Imagine:
- the 17" as a (passenger-area) movie machine in a car / van / minivan. (And I've seen some installs of much smaller and worse displays that cost more than this one's base model, too, and which couldn't do a lot of things a computer-based system could, like play any formats for which codecs exists, also act as a GPS display, or overqualified MP3 player, etc.)
- a thin storage spot on the back or side of a desk; when you need the computer, swing it up from there (something like old typewriter table shelves, but not quite as dangerously spring-loaded;)). When you want uninterrupted surface for writing or organizing, etc, swing the whole computer away.
- ceiling-attached pole/arm mount that doesn't need a desk surface at all, except perhaps as a place to put a keyboard and mouse. With several mounting spots in a room, and somewhat of a gooseneck, you could move the machine around, adjust the height, etc. Movies in bed without a big cantilevered horizontal surface, a web-cam interface in the kitchen so you can keep an eye on driveway, apt. building entrance, etc.
- An easel-type floor-mounted stand, turning one into a TV-for-the-evening, an art-gallery display, a temporary 2nd machine next to another one or next to a rack of machines in a data center, a less elaborate movies-in-bed machine, a demo screen for small-group presentations, etc.
- An octopus cart; there are some smart laptop carts (mostly built for Apple laptops, though I guess there are others for Dells, etc), set up so laptops can be stored in, charged in, and locked up in one rolling cart -- they're basically marketed as portable computing labs. One for G5s might only hold 3 or 4, but in a way that lets people work side by side on their own machines, and later have the whole collection secured in in the deepest keep of the castle. And there could be some slots for iBooks or other laptops, too;)
Anyhow. That is a beautiful design -- congratulations, Apple.
Mepis is rather nice either way (Knoppix, too) -- as a LiveCd or running from a hard disk. Aesthetically, I prefer the Knoppix desktop, but the nice little network config app in Mepis is a very nice touch.
Odd. I have the opposite problem (or, more likely, I don't understand what you mean:)) -- when I try to start a 2nd instance of mozilla, I get an annoying message that it can't be started with the current profile, because that profile is already in use. For several reasons (consistency of bookmarks etc) I guess this is an OK design decision, but it's not the one I wish they'd made.
Having recently discovered that Mepis does certain things better on my hardware than Knoppix (I like the wireless config and other aspects of the system-control panel, for instance), I'm curious if anyone who has downloaded / us using the new Knoppix could compare the two.
I think both of them are excellent (based on recent Knoppixes that is, not having the new one, obviously:))...
OK, r-blo is (probably definitely) right that TiVo isn't about to do this, but just think if they did. There are all kinds of caveats that throw this from mere hypothetical to deep pipedream, *but*...
- if it was boldy and straightforwardly limited to a certain subset of hardware, "guaranteed to work only with the following video cards and the listed capture devices" etc, and
- if it had just a few amenities *not* offered in the dedicated set-top box (say a TiVo-branded version of Firefox, including Chatzilla and some useful extensions and plug-ins for, say, bittorrent)
- it could deal well with removable storage - adding disks via USB2 or Firewire or SATA or whatever is the smartest fast, external bus
Then I think there'd be an small but real market for it. Most people would probably want the conventional, stereo-component TiVo, but I might pay for TiVo's software if it made easier the process of creating a Linux-based, good-quality, well Q-A'd PVR.
I saw this at OSCON; at the Red Hat booth, though they were giving away DVDs of the X86 version of FC2, their demo laptop was actually a 15" powerbook.
I asked "Does suspend work?" and I think a wave of solid gloating hit me as he pressed the power button and the machine quietly dropped to sleep.
I counted between 7 and 8 mississippi as (after another button push) it woke up, which is close enough to my iBook (under OS X) that I definitely count it as "working":)
"Parent poster's point was that the demo did not include the ability to purchase a song using iTunes on Linux. The song still had to be purchased using iTunes on Windows, then it could later be played back using iTunes on Linux."
Unless I completely misunderstood J. White when he explained this (which I'm confident I didn't because it was something he emphasized and was happy about/ proud of), the song he showed *had* been purchased from iTMS through iTunes running with WINE (CodeWeaver's version, that is) on a Linux machine. He did not need a machine running Microsoft Windows to purchase the song.
The account of the death of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was nailed to a cross; almost certainly, it would have looked more like a "T" than the cross as commonly portrayed today (crosspiece at the very top of the supporting beam).
However, this is also called "being hung on the cross." Just not "hung by the neck," the method with which 'hanging' is now more strongly associated.
You could also say he was "crucified," which is a cooler word;)
timothy
spoils the movie? I hope not ...
on
Primer
·
· Score: 1
there are things I specifically didn't mention that I think might have, and I won't mention them here, either except obliquely:
- 2-second lead time - collapsability - mysterious late-night visit:)
"Except for the LCD projector of course, which costs around a thousand bucks for a high luminosity. low wattage one now."
What sort do you use? (XGA? SVGA?)
What kind of bulb life have you found with it? I keep looking at projectors, and then not buying them on two related bases:
1) the price keeps dropping, and at whatever point I buy, I end my chance to take advantage of the next drop;)
2) bulbs are expensive enough that projectors might be semi-disposable... it's worse than ink-jets:) When the boughlb breaks, will I really want to pay $400 for a bulb / assembly, or just at that point hold out for a while and put that money toward the next, new-better-lighter-smaller-brighter projector?
There are / were more OEMs for Optimus stuff. I think Shure made at least some of the mics, Koss made some of the headphones, etc. I've seen lists that show product equivalence; in some cases the RadioShack version was a better deal, in some cases it wasn't.
(Tense confusion above because if they're not carrying optimus stuff any more, I didn't know it... I haven't been in RS much recently;))
I opened a rediffmail account a few weeks ago, partly because I wanted to have two brand-new 1-gb webmail accounts (gmail is the other), to see what spam arrives at which, how well they handle things when I really do have a significant amount of email in there, etc. I've certainly had no trouble sending messages between those accounts (or to / from there some other, existing email accounts). To me, it's not spectacular (I prefer gmail's actual interface), but it's clean and seems to work very well.
"I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this."
Re: the "Flash is evil" meme, well, I don't find it evil. I just like graphics formats (including creation tools) to have at least some free / open-source equivalent, so there's some chance of it being supported on all-free/Free platforms. Mileage obviously varies. If I could view Flash, and create (even if awkwardly) Flash presenations using all Free software, then I certainly wouldn't begrudge Macromedia making lots of money selling their source-secret versionto people who liked Macromedia's interface best. More power to you.
Flash can be used well or annoyingly, all up to the designer; it's a shame though that many sites rely on it at the expense of those who for various reasons don't want to need Flash.
(I could well be wrong; are there yet any working, Free tools for creating Flash presentations?)
I'd like to make sure my kids all have names likely to cause trouble with Big Brother's computers. Sure, depending on their temperment, it might not be so fun for *them* (the kids) but I think after a certain age they'd either like the idea and therefore stick to it stubbornly, or (peace with honor) drop most of them.
Slashdot Mirror
"The premise behind the law was sound: Who needs a "hunting" weapon that was exclusively designed for killing people in wartime? Who needs a folding stock or a 30-round magazine for hunting deer?"
;), who needs an Anything?
;)
Not to pick on you in particular (except, well, that I am picking on you in particular
The idea that things not specifically "needed" (as determined by whom?) are suspect or should need to be justified for some reason has implications that I don't like, most especially when applied blithely to weapons (potentially, at least) of self defense.
Who needs plastic bags for groceries? After all, (conventional) plastics rely on petroleum, and contribute to the dissipation of natural resources. [Ignore the considerations of price, convenience, shipping convenience, reusability, etc, that might lead a person or a business to prefer them.]
Who needs more than one child? The world has enough people, and any more mouths to feed are a net loss. If you want more, too bad, others have decided you don't need any. (Forced abortions in the western provinces of China.)
Who needs more than 2000 calories a day? It's unhealthy to overeat, and people who overeat (and then develop health problems) are a burden and drain on society.
Who needs more than 10 shirts? Can't those people just wash more often? They're depleting resources and spending their money inefficiently, and hurting all of us.
Who needs sharp knives? They're dangerous in the hands of lunatics.
Who needs a computer that is powerful enough to play a significant role in designing nuclear weapons?
I wish these questions were more rhetorical, but obviously some of them are not! And of course, who needs a Xerox machine? (Illegal to have such a thing during most of the history of the Soviet Union.)
Another snide but serious answer to "Who needs a gun designed to kill people?" is, "Well, the Swiss seem to think that they do, and they don't get invaded very often." Also, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, when they were being rounded up for extermination camps and -- bravely but ultimately unsuccessfully -- fought back with what weapons they *did* have. I don't mean to activate Godwin's Law here, I hope I've stayed just shy of it
To further tread that line; the question is not whether governments ever grow tyrannical and oppress the people they're supposed to be serving (at least when they make the gesture of claiming to be a servant in the first place), it's how often, to what degree, and under what circumstances. The Third Reich is only one of many such in the last 100 years. Stalin and others killed either more in absolute numbers or as a percentage of their country's / dominion's population.
Cheers (uh, if that is the right closing note),
Tim
Actually, we mentioned the backdoor a little while ago.However, a lot of people have resubmitted it, so I realize that not everyone saw it.
timothy
You raise a good point.
t m)
...) Defense, I like. Traipsing about, I don't.
"Let's start handing out nuclear and chemical weapons to any taxpayer who wants them. Their taxes did pay for them after all."
D'oh! Guess I should have thrown in an exception clause to limit my statement that tax-funded things 'had better be available.' There's certainly an edge case in weapons, especially of the mass-killing-machine kind.
Interesting point, though, is that in low-crime, high-gun Switzerland, though I see no mention of the government selling citizens lethal bioweapons, "The army sells a variety of machine guns, submachine guns, anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft guns, howitzers and cannons. Purchasers of these weapons require an easily obtained cantonal license, and the weapons are registered, In a nation of six million people, there are at least two million guns, including 600,00 fully automatic assault rifles, half a million pistols, and numerous machine guns." (from http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ae771eb4adb.h
Mostly though, I'd be happier if taxes *didn't* pay for foreign excursions, coups included. (Yessir, I'd like to see the clause is this here social contract that says I authorized that little adventure you have going on there
timothy
gears:
... I like to use "commonwealth" because the U.S. constitution specifically mentions the 'general welfare' being one of two things (the other being the common defense) that Congress is granted the power to spend money on; I think 'commonwealth' captures that much better than State or country do. As ignorant of it as I am, this is one of my favorite things about the U.S. Constitution :)
OK, so "State" is shorter, and "country" is just about right
Cheers,
timothy
This is the most sensible thing I've ever heard from the NIH!
That doesn't mean they haven't said things just as sensible in the past, of course, just that I've never noticed, if so. The stinky things people / organizations do tend to stick out more.
If something is or should be funded with tax dollars (a category I think is best kept small or smaller, but *if*!), then it had better be available to the people who pay those dollars in.
Moreover, any government spending at all should be made with a specific plan for making it best benefit the commonwealth. If the Federal government (remember, that is Microsoft's largest customer, by far) threw half as much money into Free software as they have into the one-way-only stuff, things like OpenOffice might have already passed Microsoft Office, etc.
On the other hand, they might not (the world is uncertain, and Microsoft employs smart people who honestly want to make their software worth its price), but the fact is the same here as it is when the government funds research with secret results: that money does *not* directly benefit the commonwealth, and should therefore fail the test of whether it deserves money collected by force from citizens of that commonwealth.
timothy
heh, in my vast ignorance of gaming, I will have to google for Battlefield 1942 as well as Interstate 1982 :) That sounds rather fun; I don't mind the occasional (simulated) highway potshot if it means a mostly-driving game, I just don't want that to be the focus.
How about a game where you gain points by scowling (some key combination could take care of this) at drivers who are talking while turned toward the backseat, applying makeup, talking on the phone while weaving around and staring into space, changing lanes without benefit of blinkers, etc.?
Tim
I don't want to assault any prostitutes. I don't want to run down taxi drivers. I'd prefer drugs be legal than remain so expensive by dint of law that people *kill* other people to get them (and the money they produce). If it weren't already true, it would seem a ludicrous contrivance ...
:)
However, I enjoy driving. So could someone please make a mod which is just fun, even if dangerous in real life, driving about?
Oh, and make it run on Linux, too.
timothy
Scribus impresses me, so this is a note from a fan who dabbles in it; I can't compare it deeply to state-of-the-art DTP programs.
;)) with every release. They just had a major release, too, and the documentation is far better than most software's documentation in the source-secret or open-source worlds.
;)
...)
If AbiWord is slow on your machine, then I think Scribus would be, too. However, it's a very nice application which gets better (well, that is the intent, I realize
Is it Indesign / Quark? No, but it's also a gifthorse
Right now, Scribus is more like PageMaker of a few years ago, frankly, but OTOH, can directly create PDFs and do other things which (when I last touched PageMaker, quite a while ago) PageMaker could not.
(Also, though my DTP experience is several years old now, I actually preferred PageMaker for small things; Quark I was eventually won over to, but for small things PM is just more familiar and simple to work with. YMMV
timothy
Yes, that certainly is a nice chunk of what I'm looking for. Thanks for pointing that out.
timothy
I'd like to see various mounting solutions built just for this model.
;)). When you want uninterrupted surface for writing or organizing, etc, swing the whole computer away.
;)
Imagine:
- the 17" as a (passenger-area) movie machine in a car / van / minivan. (And I've seen some installs of much smaller and worse displays that cost more than this one's base model, too, and which couldn't do a lot of things a computer-based system could, like play any formats for which codecs exists, also act as a GPS display, or overqualified MP3 player, etc.)
- a thin storage spot on the back or side of a desk; when you need the computer, swing it up from there (something like old typewriter table shelves, but not quite as dangerously spring-loaded
- ceiling-attached pole/arm mount that doesn't need a desk surface at all, except perhaps as a place to put a keyboard and mouse. With several mounting spots in a room, and somewhat of a gooseneck, you could move the machine around, adjust the height, etc. Movies in bed without a big cantilevered horizontal surface, a web-cam interface in the kitchen so you can keep an eye on driveway, apt. building entrance, etc.
- An easel-type floor-mounted stand, turning one into a TV-for-the-evening, an art-gallery display, a temporary 2nd machine next to another one or next to a rack of machines in a data center, a less elaborate movies-in-bed machine, a demo screen for small-group presentations, etc.
- An octopus cart; there are some smart laptop carts (mostly built for Apple laptops, though I guess there are others for Dells, etc), set up so laptops can be stored in, charged in, and locked up in one rolling cart -- they're basically marketed as portable computing labs. One for G5s might only hold 3 or 4, but in a way that lets people work side by side on their own machines, and later have the whole collection secured in in the deepest keep of the castle. And there could be some slots for iBooks or other laptops, too
Anyhow. That is a beautiful design -- congratulations, Apple.
Tim
Mepis is rather nice either way (Knoppix, too) -- as a LiveCd or running from a hard disk. Aesthetically, I prefer the Knoppix desktop, but the nice little network config app in Mepis is a very nice touch.
Tim
Odd. I have the opposite problem (or, more likely, I don't understand what you mean :)) -- when I try to start a 2nd instance of mozilla, I get an annoying message that it can't be started with the current profile, because that profile is already in use. For several reasons (consistency of bookmarks etc) I guess this is an OK design decision, but it's not the one I wish they'd made.
timothy
Having recently discovered that Mepis does certain things better on my hardware than Knoppix (I like the wireless config and other aspects of the system-control panel, for instance), I'm curious if anyone who has downloaded / us using the new Knoppix could compare the two.
:)) ...
I think both of them are excellent (based on recent Knoppixes that is, not having the new one, obviously
timothy
Re: TiVo offering its software for PCs.
...
OK, r-blo is (probably definitely) right that TiVo isn't about to do this, but just think if they did. There are all kinds of caveats that throw this from mere hypothetical to deep pipedream, *but*
- if it was boldy and straightforwardly limited to a certain subset of hardware, "guaranteed to work only with the following video cards and the listed capture devices" etc, and
- if it had just a few amenities *not* offered in the dedicated set-top box (say a TiVo-branded version of Firefox, including Chatzilla and some useful extensions and plug-ins for, say, bittorrent)
- it could deal well with removable storage - adding disks via USB2 or Firewire or SATA or whatever is the smartest fast, external bus
Then I think there'd be an small but real market for it. Most people would probably want the conventional, stereo-component TiVo, but I might pay for TiVo's software if it made easier the process of creating a Linux-based, good-quality, well Q-A'd PVR.
timothy
... unless it was a rigged demo :)
:)
I saw this at OSCON; at the Red Hat booth, though they were giving away DVDs of the X86 version of FC2, their demo laptop was actually a 15" powerbook.
I asked "Does suspend work?" and I think a wave of solid gloating hit me as he pressed the power button and the machine quietly dropped to sleep.
I counted between 7 and 8 mississippi as (after another button push) it woke up, which is close enough to my iBook (under OS X) that I definitely count it as "working"
timothy
"Parent poster's point was that the demo did not include the ability to purchase a song using iTunes on Linux. The song still had to be purchased using iTunes on Windows, then it could later be played back using iTunes on Linux."
Unless I completely misunderstood J. White when he explained this (which I'm confident I didn't because it was something he emphasized and was happy about/ proud of), the song he showed *had* been purchased from iTMS through iTunes running with WINE (CodeWeaver's version, that is) on a Linux machine. He did not need a machine running Microsoft Windows to purchase the song.
timothy
The account of the death of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was nailed to a cross; almost certainly, it would have looked more like a "T" than the cross as commonly portrayed today (crosspiece at the very top of the supporting beam).
;)
However, this is also called "being hung on the cross." Just not "hung by the neck," the method with which 'hanging' is now more strongly associated.
You could also say he was "crucified," which is a cooler word
timothy
there are things I specifically didn't mention that I think might have, and I won't mention them here, either except obliquely:
:)
- 2-second lead time
- collapsability
- mysterious late-night visit
timothy
"Except for the LCD projector of course, which costs around a thousand bucks for a high luminosity. low wattage one now."
;)
... it's worse than ink-jets :) When the boughlb breaks, will I really want to pay $400 for a bulb / assembly, or just at that point hold out for a while and put that money toward the next, new-better-lighter-smaller-brighter projector?
;)
What sort do you use? (XGA? SVGA?)
What kind of bulb life have you found with it? I keep looking at projectors, and then not buying them on two related bases:
1) the price keeps dropping, and at whatever point I buy, I end my chance to take advantage of the next drop
2) bulbs are expensive enough that projectors might be semi-disposable
he who hesitates, I realize
timothy
There are / were more OEMs for Optimus stuff. I think Shure made at least some of the mics, Koss made some of the headphones, etc. I've seen lists that show product equivalence; in some cases the RadioShack version was a better deal, in some cases it wasn't.
... I haven't been in RS much recently ;))
(Tense confusion above because if they're not carrying optimus stuff any more, I didn't know it
timothy
I opened a rediffmail account a few weeks ago, partly because I wanted to have two brand-new 1-gb webmail accounts (gmail is the other), to see what spam arrives at which, how well they handle things when I really do have a significant amount of email in there, etc. I've certainly had no trouble sending messages between those accounts (or to / from there some other, existing email accounts). To me, it's not spectacular (I prefer gmail's actual interface), but it's clean and seems to work very well.
timothy
"I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software; phone makers seem to be pretty happy with using whatever will get the job done, without getting all religious about this."
Here's a page that lists several such phones, in various stages of availability from Now to In-Development.
Re: the "Flash is evil" meme, well, I don't find it evil. I just like graphics formats (including creation tools) to have at least some free / open-source equivalent, so there's some chance of it being supported on all-free/Free platforms. Mileage obviously varies. If I could view Flash, and create (even if awkwardly) Flash presenations using all Free software, then I certainly wouldn't begrudge Macromedia making lots of money selling their source-secret versionto people who liked Macromedia's interface best. More power to you.
Flash can be used well or annoyingly, all up to the designer; it's a shame though that many sites rely on it at the expense of those who for various reasons don't want to need Flash.
(I could well be wrong; are there yet any working, Free tools for creating Flash presentations?)
timothy
I'd like to make sure my kids all have names likely to cause trouble with Big Brother's computers. Sure, depending on their temperment, it might not be so fun for *them* (the kids) but I think after a certain age they'd either like the idea and therefore stick to it stubbornly, or (peace with honor) drop most of them.
timothy
I hope to spend a few days (or at least one) in Austin in September. If schedule allows, I hope to drop by.
Tim
Innerestin'. I'm not pro-taxes, but I like tax money spent on libraries more than on some things ;)
Next time I'm in Austin, I'd like to check it out.
timothy