"I'm not a Randroid or an Objectivist, but I have read and enjoyed both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead; her two first real novels, as I recall."
A guy named Adam Ganderson convinced me to read The Fountainhead quite a long time ago, and over the next few years I read that several times, as well as most (not all) of Rand's other works.
I think her first full-length (though short) novel was "We the Living" -- perhaps this doesn't count as a novel according to some definition... It's also one of the few books that my maternal grandmother, my mother and I all read and enjoyed. (Grandma didn't like The Fountainhead, which she thought alternated between "too boring" and "too sexy." Reallly.) As I recall, she wrote WtL at age 21, but it's been long enough my memory is not an authoritative source;)
How dare you impugn the fine reputation of our Federal servants with such a base accusation! Are you implying something untoward in the process of budgeting for the grand and glorious pursuit of all things heavenly? Why, your shame must know no lower bound, you cad, you boor, you naysayer! Shall I have to ask you to step outside and repeat your vile imprecations in the presence of witnesses and seconds?
Yes, now I see what you mean. It takes a worthwhile, desired product to make the cool component inside make more sense.
I'm glad to see 1GB CF cards coming down drastically in price lately. What sucks is the "gotta have a CF card today" example I bought at a Ritz photo store several months ago - a 96 and a 64 meg card together for something well over $100. Ah, well, a hole I got myself into -- to think I was paying more than half of the cost of a 4GB CF drive (in the form of the 4GB nomad... ah, well.)
No accounting for taste (I end up saying that a lot, usually defensively;)), but I mind the oddball look of the Honda Insight less than I do that of (last year's) Prius; the current Prius is a little better. Of course, the Insight isn't a practical car for mountain driving with gear and a few passengers, but hey -- I didn't buy one;)
I am looking forward to the (hyped / announced, then pushed back) Hybrid Escape from Ford; I happen to like the shape / size of the Escape, at least from the outside. (I have not been inside one, though I have been inside the identical-cousin Mazda Tribute.) I had been planning to wait on a car purchase until the Escape Hybrid had been out for a year, then look for a deal on a used lease-return model. However, the old car started dying too fast, so I bought my Subaru wagon.
Also interesting is the (also upcoming) Ford Freestyle; I hope they make a hybrid version of this as well. It actually looks even more like the thing I've been waiting for, which is to say a domestic (and therefore, hopefully, cheap to repair) answer to the Subaru Outback wagon. I bet they'll offer it in automatic-transmission only, though. (Bastards!)
Headlight beams are entirely too coarse; I'd love to be able to dial in a perfect throw, depending on road and conditions. Lenses like this would be one good component of the perfect headlight system. Other parts would be intelligent swiveling mechanisms (left and right as well as up and down) and colored gels (or a chemical layer with a variable color) to best match the day and the driver's vision... but I digress:)
(A lot of things depend a lot on where you are, whether your lack of regular transportation effectively traps you in suburbia or elsewhere, whether there are people with money to spend on summertime child labor, etc... that said, random thoughts)
computer related: 1) consider an internship somewhere. Less exciting as an idea than starting your own, but it can also lead to contacts, give you experience, etc. All sorts of businesses need computer-smart people, don't just think of ones that sell computers or write software for sale...
2) In your own walkable / bikeable radius, offer to install wireless systems so people can work wirelessly and otherwise share their high-speed internet service. Yes, they're supposed to be open-the-box easy, but context is everything; for a lot of people, it would be easily worth paying for your time to, well, open the box. (And often setup is *not* that easy, so...)
Offer to provide, install, configure and test a) consumer-grade wireless systems (see below) b) non-wireless simple home networking (many people don't yet want wireless, and that's OK... they will, next summer;))
(See techbargains.com, and tigerdirect.com for cheap 802.11 boxes... I've tried 5 different brands -- Linksys, D-Link, Siemens, SMC, Netgear -- and they work similarly enough that I wouldn't sweat the difference in most cases: the differences are in interface, bells and whistles, default IP addresses, things like that. (See http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/c ategory_tlc.asp?CatId=35)
Keep careful track of what households get which models, a) to keep track of which models bring complaints, so you know to avoid them;) and b) so you know which default IP address each uses, how to set up MAC address cloning, etc. Maybe you'll find a favorite brand to recommend. And if you can buy such boxes cheaply, as a commodity, you can sell them for a uniform markup, with a profit that varies depending on how well you can find bargains. Ebay, too. Your customers won't be paying for the AP itself, but for the whole package of box + install + minor training. Or, if they have one already, discount your price in a way that's fair to both parties.
Recommend and use DHCP + whatever level of security is worth it; charge more for more work, explain why and be up-front about it.
This is the kind of business that's still viable (might not be in 2 years, when practically everyone is wireless, and the cable company / DSL providers all supply wireless boxes by default, etc.), can be done by young people on bikes with backpacks or baskets to hold the necessary parts. Let people know that they are responsible for understanding / dealing with their ISPs' terms of service, though.
Think guerilla marketing: print clever and punchy business cards with lots of contact info; have a clean, legible, simple web site (with a friendly FAQ list); keep track of your customers (and plot them on a map); ask people to recommend you to their friends; be courteous; give followup calls after a day and after a month; tape your business card to the bottom of the AP (and a note of the default IP address!); leave a copy of Knoppix around for when those with Microsoft Windows get sick of spyware, adware and viruses;)
(Oh, and even if people don't have high-speed access, it's still nice to be wireless and to have shareable internet access: see http://monkey.org/~timothy/dialup.html... it's a bit outdated, but the point is, 56k modem + AP with serial port beats a 56k modem by itself.)
Not-computer-related:
1) Circumstances determine what makes sense in your area, but having recently moved to Washington state, I find that there are coffee huts (some substantial, some plywood and duct-tape) *everywhere* selling generally pretty good coffe
under slightly older versions (I think up to Knoppix 3.2), type "sudo/usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall"
Under newer ones, I think you only need to type "knoppix-installer", but if you type "knoppix-" and hit tab, you'll see what the actual command is if that's not quite right;)
Thanks for sending the notes; it looks like the note-to-editor system is down at the moment, unfortunately. It *is* bedtime for me, but I was actually sitting there waiting, reading email...
However, a lot of newish micromachines still have serial ports, like the (sorry, brand forgotten) Mini-ITX shoebox style one next to me. The serial port refuses to die peacefully!
I have heard that USB Serial adapters work well for other people in connecting to various devices, dunno about modems specifically though, having never done this.
With no serial port, there's at least one other situation where an external serial modem might still be a good idea -- if you hook a cheap wireless base-station up to the modem and connect to it wirelessly via a (PCI, USB, PCMCIA, USDA, LSD) 802.11 card. (Though the prices and model names may be way out-dated, I described my reasoning in doing this on a low-frills webpage of mine.)
Too bad my prediction of cheap combo boxes from Linksys and similar companies was totally wrong...
Wallwarts are annoying, it's true, but there are worse things (like having no modem connectivity when you want some...). And the annoyance comes in three parts: 1) an extra cord. No way around that. 2) using an outlet at all and 3) using an outlet in an annoying fashion, blocking spaces in a powerstrip, or refusing to stay in a wall outlet. I recently bought from the Seattle Fry's a couple of tiny (12") extension cords similar to this (can't find the exact item on Fry's website), and they also had a version for a dollar or so more that had a passthrough power outlet. So, it's possible for a couple of bucks to a) not lose a power outlet spot and b) turn the wallwart power supply into the much-better cordlump power supply.
It would be great to see the author of every single GPL program that SCO is distributing point out that they no longer have any such right. Unless of course, they want to sign separate licensing agreements with each of them, perhaps with non-negotiable clauses like "by entering into this limited agreeement with the author of package X, SCO acknowledges that it
had previously distributed the package in violation of the GNU General Public License and in violation of the author's copyright and
is a big pile of hippo dung which deserves to be shoveled into a nice, deep pit."
The trick is not to let SCO spin this copyright protection as the actions of an unfair and rapacious Free Software Movement. Of course, they would anyhow...
Yes, it's a bit uglier (depending on your aesthetics... I like more LEDs visible at night, so there are tradeoffs), but an external can often be had cheaper than internal (hardware) modems.
If you're in the U.S.: $50 gets you a unlabeled / house-brand CompUSA serial external modem, which works fine with Linux. And by mail-order, I've seen Elsa external modems which I know to work fine with Linux from friends who have and use them at around $30.
I dunno wholesale prices on modems, but I bet you'd be very lucky to find an internal hardware modem + adapter for less than $30. And if you *do*, then you've taken up a precious PCI slot:)
I've been thinking about this lately quite a bit, as I enjoy the benefits of a household equipped with TiVo. What I'd like is not just the magic of TiVo and similar systems in *scheduling* programs I want to see, and skipping commercials; I'd also like to watch them faster.
A typical "hour" of telvision these days is probably about 40 minutes; if I could squeeze those 40 minutes to 90% of their current running time, I could watch an episode of Law and Order but leave slightly more time for non-television pursuits:)
Cassette recorders with speed and pitch control have been out for a long time, and VCRs obviously have a (constrained) range of playback speeds, but has anyone created a speed-up function for encoded video, complete with pitch correction?
Within a few weeks of encountering the GIMP, I prefered its interface to that of PhotoShop. Since a lot of people obviously (and vehemently disagree), well... No accounting for taste:) However, if you use:
a) Virtual Desktops, as many as you'd like (one per active image, perhaps? Or a "GIMP" desktop, not so bad either...)
b) Your DE/WM set to auto-raise, focus follows mouse. This lets all those little interface boxes sit wherever you'd like and pop up with a swipe of the mouse.
I noticed today on techbargains.com a particular hard drive (pretty sure it was a Western Digital, but I'm too lazy to check at the moment;)) selling (after rebate) for $150 -- a 250GB model, 8MB cache. Yes, there are larger drives available, but this is the best price I've noticed. A $150/250GB drive means
a) that theoretically (and yes, ignoring the One Rebate Per Household clause I'm sure is in the fine print) one TB can now be had for roughly $600,
b) in a total of four reasonably purchasable (not outlandishly expensive) hard drives, which means they can all fit in one case with two normal IDE controllers,
c) which means a full computer (think $200 Lindows box from Walmart) with a gig of ram and a TB of storage can be had for something close to and on the nice side of $1000. If you can find a gig of RAM for $100 (which I think is easily possible these days), a cheap flat panel would put the price at $1200 or so... now, a nice time machine to sell that resulting system in 1991 or so;)
I'd prefer my storage be in external units (say, firewire enclosures) which would bump that price up a bit, but still.
"I think it's safe to assume that POTS service would be availalbe at both locations."
In which case, requiring 911 service on VoIP seems like a restriction with little gain. Which was my point:)
On the other hand, it's getting ever harder to find payphones, and easier to find people (though I guess not many businesses)who have given up POTS altogether.
I think it's great for VoIP providers to think about 911 service, and come up with ways to provide it, but requiring it (unless that requirement is really carefully written, something it's hard to be optimistic about) ignores the ways in which VoIP is used now and will discourage its flow into as yet unanticipated uses.
Offering (for instance) GPS-linked 911 service so that if you are choking to death in the park where you were telecommuting from a 802.11 hotspot your physical location is always known to your VoIP provider sounds nice... if you want it.
Maybe you don't want to be physically tracked at all times, or maybe it would mean that open-source operating systems would not be provided with the client program which would allow a particular VoIP system to legally operate. Who knows?
Walkie-Talkies don't have built-in 911 service; but then, neither do (most) cars. It's not hard to imagine integrating 911 service into any communication or transportation device; requiring it would impose costs though that I don't want to see imposed (creativity, time to market, diversification of features, higher prices...)
" This is very simple, when you sign up to the VOIP servcie they have a form that says...
Please Enter the physical address of the phone (this may be different then your billing addres), this information will only be used in the case this line is used to call the registered emergency services for this address. If you enter incorrect information, you encounter problems in contacting or directing emergency response to your home."
What if you're using VoIP from various locations? Say, from an internet cafe, or from a hotel room while on a trip?
A relative of mine has Packet8 service; he takes the hardware (a little cisco VoIP box, iirc) with him on frequent business trips so he has a hardline number that can reach him wherever he happens to be, and from which international phone calls are cheaper than from a cell phone.
there's joe, which I often find is installed on systems that don't have nano/pico.
It's not *quite* as friendly as nano/pico, but has enough similarities (and the built in status bar / help-reminder you crave) that I tend to use it when editing things like/etc/apt/sources.list on a new Debian install...
(Of course, every UNIX system seems to have vi installed, so I wish I could remember its commands better;))
the pico flamewar is not with vi -- it's with nano;) (And luckily, it's not much of one.)
I still don't know how to do a lot of the things I got used to with pine, but I recently switched to mutt because it's faster.
However, previous to *that* switch is when I switched to nano from pico, for someone *else*'s ideological reasons:) That is, pico / pine's license isn't to the satisfaction of the debian project, but nano's is. So when I wanted a light, friendly (and apt-getable) editor, nano it was:)
My Subaru (a 1997 model, new-to-me) came with a ^%$# alarm system. Which was fine for the first 6 weeks, before it developed a short or a stuck sensor (or something), started randomly going off, annoying the neighbors (and me), causing my car to be mostly not-functional (thanks to ingnition lockout), making me disconnect the battery between drives, etc. This went on for a few days, until I could get an appointment for an alarmectomy.
It was worth the $150.
(I was ranting about its stupidity even before this episode for the exact reason you name -- it has the same brain-dead behavior that lets the %$#@#%$#%$# thing arm even while you're just sitting there in it. Which might be fine, as a bizarre and defeatable *option* -- hey, no account for taste -- but as a default, it's indefensibly stupid. Not good for tailgate parties, either.)
So I kept the pieces; I plan when the perfect method strikes me to dispose them in a way befitting such an annoyance. (Can one send COD to Subaru Design Dept., c/o Fuji Heavy Industries, Japan?)
Similarly, even though (or perhaps because) no country has a truly equitable distribution of wealth, its gini index is still a useful tool, and it still makes sense to strive to lower that number towards fairness
I doubt that there's any universally (or even practically univerally) accepted definition of "truly equitable distribution of wealth", but thanks for pointing out Gini indexes, I'd never heard of these before.
If I'd covered up the numbers first, this would have made a fun guessing game, even with "greater or less than the U.S.' number.":
Since I am usually having more than one argument at a time;), I happened to have just been looking at this Reason mag article tangentially tied to this thread, quoting J.K. Galbraith (not to be confused with J.K. Rowling) as follows:
"High technology and heavy capital use cannot be subordinate to the ebb and flow of market demand. They require planning and it is the essence of planning that public behavior be made predictable--that is be subject to control."
"At this point, prices for products or services are higher than they would be in a perfectly competitive economy; fewer goods are being produced; and the monopolistic firm is enjoying above normal profits."
I'm unconvinced by the sentence beginning "It has been determined by economists that a monopoly will create a situation...", as I am (and this is the idea that the blockquote above depends on) that there is any such thing as a "perfectly competitive economy" outside an economics classroom, *unless* the factors of real life are allowed for and "perfect competition" is considered only in terms of barriers to entry. (A good flea market may represent a perfectly competitive microcosm, but not everyone will have thought or had opportunity to actually bring the same goods...)
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not a Randroid or an Objectivist, but I have read and enjoyed both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead; her two first real novels, as I recall."
... It's also one of the few books that my maternal grandmother, my mother and I all read and enjoyed. (Grandma didn't like The Fountainhead, which she thought alternated between "too boring" and "too sexy." Reallly.) As I recall, she wrote WtL at age 21, but it's been long enough my memory is not an authoritative source ;)
A guy named Adam Ganderson convinced me to read The Fountainhead quite a long time ago, and over the next few years I read that several times, as well as most (not all) of Rand's other works.
I think her first full-length (though short) novel was "We the Living" -- perhaps this doesn't count as a novel according to some definition
timothy
How dare you impugn the fine reputation of our Federal servants with such a base accusation! Are you implying something untoward in the process of budgeting for the grand and glorious pursuit of all things heavenly? Why, your shame must know no lower bound, you cad, you boor, you naysayer! Shall I have to ask you to step outside and repeat your vile imprecations in the presence of witnesses and seconds?
... but you're right. Please disregard above.
Oh
timothy
Yes, now I see what you mean. It takes a worthwhile, desired product to make the cool component inside make more sense.
... ah, well.)
I'm glad to see 1GB CF cards coming down drastically in price lately. What sucks is the "gotta have a CF card today" example I bought at a Ritz photo store several months ago - a 96 and a 64 meg card together for something well over $100. Ah, well, a hole I got myself into -- to think I was paying more than half of the cost of a 4GB CF drive (in the form of the 4GB nomad
timothy
"[N]obody really needs to carry that much data around. ... people do have needs to carry that much of music around."
Once they're bits, they're bits. Music (as a file) is data, same as a quarterly report or a recipe in ASCII.
It's good to see the music storage market pushing down the cost of micro-hard drives, though!
timothy
No accounting for taste (I end up saying that a lot, usually defensively ;)), but I mind the oddball look of the Honda Insight less than I do that of (last year's) Prius; the current Prius is a little better. Of course, the Insight isn't a practical car for mountain driving with gear and a few passengers, but hey -- I didn't buy one ;)
I am looking forward to the (hyped / announced, then pushed back) Hybrid Escape from Ford; I happen to like the shape / size of the Escape, at least from the outside. (I have not been inside one, though I have been inside the identical-cousin Mazda Tribute.) I had been planning to wait on a car purchase until the Escape Hybrid had been out for a year, then look for a deal on a used lease-return model. However, the old car started dying too fast, so I bought my Subaru wagon.
Also interesting is the (also upcoming) Ford Freestyle; I hope they make a hybrid version of this as well. It actually looks even more like the thing I've been waiting for, which is to say a domestic (and therefore, hopefully, cheap to repair) answer to the Subaru Outback wagon. I bet they'll offer it in automatic-transmission only, though. (Bastards!)
timothy
Headlight beams are entirely too coarse; I'd love to be able to dial in a perfect throw, depending on road and conditions. Lenses like this would be one good component of the perfect headlight system. Other parts would be intelligent swiveling mechanisms (left and right as well as up and down) and colored gels (or a chemical layer with a variable color) to best match the day and the driver's vision ... but I digress :)
timothy
(A lot of things depend a lot on where you are, whether your lack of regular transportation effectively traps you in suburbia or elsewhere, whether there are people with money to spend on summertime child labor, etc ... that said, random thoughts)
...
...)
... they will, next summer ;))
... I've tried 5 different brands -- Linksys, D-Link, Siemens, SMC, Netgear -- and they work similarly enough that I wouldn't sweat the difference in most cases: the differences are in interface, bells and whistles, default IP addresses, things like that.
;) and b) so you know which default IP address each uses, how to set up MAC address cloning, etc. Maybe you'll find a favorite brand to recommend. And if you can buy such boxes cheaply, as a commodity, you can sell them for a uniform markup, with a profit that varies depending on how well you can find bargains. Ebay, too. Your customers won't be paying for the AP itself, but for the whole package of box + install + minor training. Or, if they have one already, discount your price in a way that's fair to both parties.
;)
... it's a bit outdated, but the point is, 56k modem + AP with serial port beats a 56k modem by itself.)
computer related:
1) consider an internship somewhere. Less exciting as an idea than starting your own, but it can also lead to contacts, give you experience, etc. All sorts of businesses need computer-smart people, don't just think of ones that sell computers or write software for sale
2) In your own walkable / bikeable radius, offer to install wireless systems so people can work wirelessly and otherwise share their high-speed internet service. Yes, they're supposed to be open-the-box easy, but context is everything; for a lot of people, it would be easily worth paying for your time to, well, open the box. (And often setup is *not* that easy, so
Offer to provide, install, configure and test
a) consumer-grade wireless systems (see below)
b) non-wireless simple home networking (many people don't yet want wireless, and that's OK
(See techbargains.com, and tigerdirect.com for cheap 802.11 boxes
(See http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/c ategory_tlc.asp?CatId=35)
Keep careful track of what households get which models, a) to keep track of which models bring complaints, so you know to avoid them
Recommend and use DHCP + whatever level of security is worth it; charge more for more work, explain why and be up-front about it.
This is the kind of business that's still viable (might not be in 2 years, when practically everyone is wireless, and the cable company / DSL providers all supply wireless boxes by default, etc.), can be done by young people on bikes with backpacks or baskets to hold the necessary parts. Let people know that they are responsible for understanding / dealing with their ISPs' terms of service, though.
Think guerilla marketing: print clever and punchy business cards with lots of contact info; have a clean, legible, simple web site (with a friendly FAQ list); keep track of your customers (and plot them on a map); ask people to recommend you to their friends; be courteous; give followup calls after a day and after a month; tape your business card to the bottom of the AP (and a note of the default IP address!); leave a copy of Knoppix around for when those with Microsoft Windows get sick of spyware, adware and viruses
(Oh, and even if people don't have high-speed access, it's still nice to be wireless and to have shareable internet access: see http://monkey.org/~timothy/dialup.html
Not-computer-related:
1) Circumstances determine what makes sense in your area, but having recently moved to Washington state, I find that there are coffee huts (some substantial, some plywood and duct-tape) *everywhere* selling generally pretty good coffe
Meefan:
/usr/local/bin/knx-hdinstall"
;)
under slightly older versions (I think up to Knoppix 3.2), type "sudo
Under newer ones, I think you only need to type "knoppix-installer", but if you type "knoppix-" and hit tab, you'll see what the actual command is if that's not quite right
timothy
long-haired troublemaker.
Imagine Kevin Kline's character of Otto beating down on you.
timothy
ediron2:
...
Thanks for sending the notes; it looks like the note-to-editor system is down at the moment, unfortunately. It *is* bedtime for me, but I was actually sitting there waiting, reading email
Sorry, I missed this one the first time around.
timothy
then my advice isn't worth much :)
...
...). And the annoyance comes in three parts: 1) an extra cord. No way around that. 2) using an outlet at all and 3) using an outlet in an annoying fashion, blocking spaces in a powerstrip, or refusing to stay in a wall outlet. I recently bought from the Seattle Fry's a couple of tiny (12") extension cords similar to this (can't find the exact item on Fry's website), and they also had a version for a dollar or so more that had a passthrough power outlet. So, it's possible for a couple of bucks to a) not lose a power outlet spot and b) turn the wallwart power supply into the much-better cordlump power supply.
However, a lot of newish micromachines still have serial ports, like the (sorry, brand forgotten) Mini-ITX shoebox style one next to me. The serial port refuses to die peacefully!
I have heard that USB Serial adapters work well for other people in connecting to various devices, dunno about modems specifically though, having never done this.
With no serial port, there's at least one other situation where an external serial modem might still be a good idea -- if you hook a cheap wireless base-station up to the modem and connect to it wirelessly via a (PCI, USB, PCMCIA, USDA, LSD) 802.11 card. (Though the prices and model names may be way out-dated, I described my reasoning in doing this on a low-frills webpage of mine.)
Too bad my prediction of cheap combo boxes from Linksys and similar companies was totally wrong
Wallwarts are annoying, it's true, but there are worse things (like having no modem connectivity when you want some
timothy
The trick is not to let SCO spin this copyright protection as the actions of an unfair and rapacious Free Software Movement. Of course, they would anyhow
timothy
why not external?
... I like more LEDs visible at night, so there are tradeoffs), but an external can often be had cheaper than internal (hardware) modems.
:)
Yes, it's a bit uglier (depending on your aesthetics
If you're in the U.S.: $50 gets you a unlabeled / house-brand CompUSA serial external modem, which works fine with Linux. And by mail-order, I've seen Elsa external modems which I know to work fine with Linux from friends who have and use them at around $30.
I dunno wholesale prices on modems, but I bet you'd be very lucky to find an internal hardware modem + adapter for less than $30. And if you *do*, then you've taken up a precious PCI slot
timothy
I've been thinking about this lately quite a bit, as I enjoy the benefits of a household equipped with TiVo. What I'd like is not just the magic of TiVo and similar systems in *scheduling* programs I want to see, and skipping commercials; I'd also like to watch them faster.
:)
A typical "hour" of telvision these days is probably about 40 minutes; if I could squeeze those 40 minutes to 90% of their current running time, I could watch an episode of Law and Order but leave slightly more time for non-television pursuits
Cassette recorders with speed and pitch control have been out for a long time, and VCRs obviously have a (constrained) range of playback speeds, but has anyone created a speed-up function for encoded video, complete with pitch correction?
timothy
Within a few weeks of encountering the GIMP, I prefered its interface to that of PhotoShop. Since a lot of people obviously (and vehemently disagree), well ... No accounting for taste :) However, if you use:
...)
/WM set to auto-raise, focus follows mouse. This lets all those little interface boxes sit wherever you'd like and pop up with a swipe of the mouse.
:)
a) Virtual Desktops, as many as you'd like (one per active image, perhaps? Or a "GIMP" desktop, not so bad either
b) Your DE
Works for me, anyhow
timothy
I noticed today on techbargains.com a particular hard drive (pretty sure it was a Western Digital, but I'm too lazy to check at the moment ;)) selling (after rebate) for $150 -- a 250GB model, 8MB cache. Yes, there are larger drives available, but this is the best price I've noticed. A $150/250GB drive means
... now, a nice time machine to sell that resulting system in 1991 or so ;)
a) that theoretically (and yes, ignoring the One Rebate Per Household clause I'm sure is in the fine print) one TB can now be had for roughly $600,
b) in a total of four reasonably purchasable (not outlandishly expensive) hard drives, which means they can all fit in one case with two normal IDE controllers,
c) which means a full computer (think $200 Lindows box from Walmart) with a gig of ram and a TB of storage can be had for something close to and on the nice side of $1000. If you can find a gig of RAM for $100 (which I think is easily possible these days), a cheap flat panel would put the price at $1200 or so
I'd prefer my storage be in external units (say, firewire enclosures) which would bump that price up a bit, but still.
timothy
"I think it's safe to assume that POTS service would be availalbe at both locations."
:)
... if you want it.
...)
In which case, requiring 911 service on VoIP seems like a restriction with little gain. Which was my point
On the other hand, it's getting ever harder to find payphones, and easier to find people (though I guess not many businesses)who have given up POTS altogether.
I think it's great for VoIP providers to think about 911 service, and come up with ways to provide it, but requiring it (unless that requirement is really carefully written, something it's hard to be optimistic about) ignores the ways in which VoIP is used now and will discourage its flow into as yet unanticipated uses.
Offering (for instance) GPS-linked 911 service so that if you are choking to death in the park where you were telecommuting from a 802.11 hotspot your physical location is always known to your VoIP provider sounds nice
Maybe you don't want to be physically tracked at all times, or maybe it would mean that open-source operating systems would not be provided with the client program which would allow a particular VoIP system to legally operate. Who knows?
Walkie-Talkies don't have built-in 911 service; but then, neither do (most) cars. It's not hard to imagine integrating 911 service into any communication or transportation device; requiring it would impose costs though that I don't want to see imposed (creativity, time to market, diversification of features, higher prices
timothy
"
This is very simple, when you sign up to the VOIP servcie they have a form that says...
Please Enter the physical address of the phone (this may be different then your billing addres), this information will only be used in the case this line is used to call the registered emergency services for this address. If you enter incorrect information, you encounter problems in contacting or directing emergency response to your home."
What if you're using VoIP from various locations? Say, from an internet cafe, or from a hotel room while on a trip?
A relative of mine has Packet8 service; he takes the hardware (a little cisco VoIP box, iirc) with him on frequent business trips so he has a hardline number that can reach him wherever he happens to be, and from which international phone calls are cheaper than from a cell phone.
timothy
there's joe, which I often find is installed on systems that don't have nano/pico.
/etc/apt/sources.list on a new Debian install ...
;))
It's not *quite* as friendly as nano/pico, but has enough similarities (and the built in status bar / help-reminder you crave) that I tend to use it when editing things like
(Of course, every UNIX system seems to have vi installed, so I wish I could remember its commands better
timothy
the pico flamewar is not with vi -- it's with nano ;) (And luckily, it's not much of one.)
:) That is, pico / pine's license isn't to the satisfaction of the debian project, but nano's is. So when I wanted a light, friendly (and apt-getable) editor, nano it was :)
I still don't know how to do a lot of the things I got used to with pine, but I recently switched to mutt because it's faster.
However, previous to *that* switch is when I switched to nano from pico, for someone *else*'s ideological reasons
timothy
There once was a man named McBride
...(and a naughtier feel).
Who brought a great case to be tried
His stock was a hit
As Darl talked his shit
But the code he continued to hide.
Sub in "peddled" for "talked" for an easier flow
timothy
My Subaru (a 1997 model, new-to-me) came with a ^%$# alarm system. Which was fine for the first 6 weeks, before it developed a short or a stuck sensor (or something), started randomly going off, annoying the neighbors (and me), causing my car to be mostly not-functional (thanks to ingnition lockout), making me disconnect the battery between drives, etc. This went on for a few days, until I could get an appointment for an alarmectomy.
It was worth the $150.
(I was ranting about its stupidity even before this episode for the exact reason you name -- it has the same brain-dead behavior that lets the %$#@#%$#%$# thing arm even while you're just sitting there in it. Which might be fine, as a bizarre and defeatable *option* -- hey, no account for taste -- but as a default, it's indefensibly stupid. Not good for tailgate parties, either.)
So I kept the pieces; I plan when the perfect method strikes me to dispose them in a way befitting such an annoyance. (Can one send COD to Subaru Design Dept., c/o Fuji Heavy Industries, Japan?)
timothy
Similarly, even though (or perhaps because) no country has a truly equitable distribution of wealth, its gini index is still a useful tool, and it still makes sense to strive to lower that number towards fairness
_ 1_ 1.html
I doubt that there's any universally (or even practically univerally) accepted definition of "truly equitable distribution of wealth", but thanks for pointing out Gini indexes, I'd never heard of these before.
If I'd covered up the numbers first, this would have made a fun guessing game, even with "greater or less than the U.S.' number.":
http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/indicator/indic_126
timothy
"At this point, prices for products or services are higher than they would be in a perfectly competitive economy; fewer goods are being produced; and the monopolistic firm is enjoying above normal profits."
I'm unconvinced by the sentence beginning "It has been determined by economists that a monopoly will create a situation
timothy
"that's still an enormous mark-up from the market value of their products."
:)
How are you defining "market value"?
timothy