Tho on a scale of torture, I think having to doctor one's lawn is far less horrible than having the itchies from one end to the other... so with that choice in mind, I'd rather a plague of crane flies than of mosquitoes!
BTW, if you can still get diazinon (corncob base, NOT newsprint base) two treatments in the spring will kill just about everything that you don't want living in your lawn, and continue working all summer. And if you pour some undiluted liquid diazinon around the roots of trees, they'll uptake enough to kill bugs that munch on their leaves. This was the only thing I ever found that gets rid of elm-leaf bugs.
That's how mosquitoes are in rural Minnesota too -- open the door long enough for one human to dash inside, and a cloud of mosquitoes zings inside too. Leave the door open for very long and you might as well go back outside yourself. They'll find every hole in every screen; every window that doesn't seal tightly...
Crane flies live pretty much anywhere that mosquitoes can, meaning anywhere with moisture. So they're very widespread.
However, they don't eat mosquitoes. The adults eat nectar (or nothing at all) and the larvae eat the roots of various plants.
I suspect the myth that they eat mosquitoes may arise because crane flies are so much bigger, but otherwise visually very similar. ("What eats bears? bigger bears!")
Mosquitoes are loathesome and should be wiped from the universe, but crane flies are kinda neat.
This is no longer ecologically-correct, but one quart of motor oil will coat one acre of water to a thickness of one molecule, which is all that's required to suffocate mosquito larvae. This used to be the common control method with standing water that could not be drained, particularly since that isn't enough oil to harm anything else (the single-molecule layer doesn't affect fish, birds, or other aquatic insects).
BTW, some species of mosquitoes do NOT require standing water to reproduce; it's been discovered that the damp folds in tree bark (particularly scrub oaks that collect morning dew in otherwise-arid areas) is sufficient.
I don't know about citronella, but I've got some overly-friendly honeybees (they get into everything, looking for water) and have discovered that they can be discouraged by coating stuff with a thin layer of a "flea shampoo" that contains orange oil. I have no idea if it would work against biting insects, as here in the desert we don't have enough of 'em to notice.
As to the hapless fellow for whom DEET doesn't work, there have always been a few individuals like that. I vaguely recall long-ago research into it noted a possibility of unusual chemicals in their sweat. {D'oh!!)
In Alaska, DEET works for no one; the mosquitoes are just too voracious (they make Minnesota mosquitoes look downright piddly). Alaskans coat themselves with "bear grease" (literally a layer of stinky grease), or get eaten alive.
One study found that anemia due to mosquito bites was the leading cause of death in wild cariboo in Alaska and northern Canada -- the evil bugglies literally suck more blood than the animals can spare.
Don't forget NetTamer (http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html) which has a version that runs perfectly well on an XT, and there is now a palmtop version as well. The reg'd version even does IRC. And I believe it's still maintained. Sortof a text/graphics hybrid, but basically geared toward working in plaintext. Very reliable, once you get used to it.
There's also Arachne (works okay, tho its setup is quirky as hell) and its offspring WebSpyder, which used a 32bit DOS extender, and worked really well (at least, between crashes!) But if you needed a graphical browser on a DOS-only system, WebSpyder was the best of the lot.
[eying your list of Corel-for-linux software] I am SOOOO jealous... I can't live without WP and PhotoPaint (preferably version 8 for both).
Another problem was that was about the time Corel totally lost focus as a company, went flopping off in random directions, and damnear went tits-up. They sold profitable stuff and bought pigs in pokes. They partly-baked then abandoned projects. IOW, dot-bomb madness as experienced by a company that was already distracted. Not-quite-finishing their apps-for-linux was just more of same.:(
PSP8 predates Corel's eating Jasc. And yes, PSP8 does just about everything wrong. Frex, the effects browser insists on actually DOING each transformation, and there's no way to abort it, so it takes forever to load all the effects. I'd never liked PSP, but that was the last straw.
Oh, what DO I like as a bitmap editor? Corel PhotoPaint, preferably v8. Can't live without it.
I haven't used allofmp3.com, but random-sourced MP3 downloads have instigated almost 100% of my music purchases over the past 10 years. In fact, so it's been for most of the people I know.
Funny thing, since I've not been able to readily filch MP3s, I've stopped buying music. It's not an intentional abstinence, it's just that without exposure, nothing new has caught my interest. And I've not been reminded of older stuff either, that I'd probably buy if I heard it again a few times. (No radio reception here, so no chance of that either.)
The sole exceptions have been bands that freely offer unencumbered MP3s in some way that isn't painful on my sad half-speed dialup; I've bought some of their CDs (direct from the band, too).
So... anecdotal as such evidence is, it's still far too common to ignore. And every other industry recognises that "free samples" are the best marketing tool there is, with "really cheap samples" (in this case represented by allofmp3.com) are a real near second.
"Most full albums are selling for less than $2. And it's the content owners that get to set prices, not a web site."
Okay.. let's LET the artists set their own royalty rate -- note that I said the actual artists, not the mythical "content owners" (which usually means the distributor, ie. RIAA cartel members).
Just as a starting point, let's set the download royalty at what the artists are SUPPOSED to be paid by their RIAA masters, rather than what they are ACTUALLY paid after all "costs" are deducted (see http://www.negativland.com/albini.html). And let's pay the royalty directly to the artist, not to any distribution scheme or middleman.
The artists are now ahead of the game, the downloaded music costs a mere few cents more per track, and the RIAA is rendered superfluous**.
Back to letting the artist set their own royalties -- fair enough, now that the RIAA is out of the picture, let's do that. Artists who get greedy will price themselves out of the market (or back into MP3 piracy), making gouging unprofitable. But artists who set their royalties sanely will have another income stream that they didn't have before, with no effort or expense on their part.
** Noting that THIS is exactly what the RIAA fears the most. Piracy has nothing to do with it.
XP itself wasn't your "reboot at least once" problem with the HP/Compaq.... that's not an XP issue. But it could well be an issue with all the partners' crap on an average HP desktop system, some of which does a run-once on bootup to ensure that the hapless user will be forced to see their product.
In fact I recently removed SIX GIGS worth of partners' trialware shit from a 6 month old HP machine. Funny how the machine ran so much better afterward!!
I know XP often ignores hardware changes, but other times it gets all disauthenticated over something as simple as swapping out the CPU or moving a PCI card to a different slot. Personally I think the hardware authentication thing is just plain broken, and subject to all sorts of quirks depending on stuff like driver load order, CPU instruction set, etc, etc. that normal people would never think about.
Something in your post reminded me of this hoary campfire tale:
The phone rings, and you hear a heavily-accented voice saying, "I am der vinder viper, I'll be there at nine o'clock!" And then it hangs up.
An hour later, you get the same call, the same voice, the same terse message.
This goes on all day long, every hour on the hour... by nine o'clock you're a nervous wreck, and then there's a KNOCK AT THE DOOR......and the voice announces, "I am der vinder viper. I've come to vipe yer vinders!"
Forced updates was supposedly going to be a "feature" of XP's SP2, tho having not installed SP2 I can't say for sure... but it's something to look into in your case.
Good point -- and my guess is you're right, that it's more of a timing thing than a counting thing.
Most higher animals have some sense of time, and it can be VERY accurate (to within a minute or so in 24 hours). Most people who regularly drive long distances (and particularly on unpaved roads) get so they think in terms of "about nn-hours" rather than mileage. Etc. Anyway, considering how widespread "timesense" is in the higher animals, chances are it's a very primitive function (evolution-wise), thus something ants have too.
As to the desert ants themselves... we have a species of fire ant here in the Mojave Desert that will go as far as 100 feet from the nest -- they create "roads" (by dragging home everything they encounter along that route, until it's completely cleared) that are almost as obvious as bike trails.
Good point, but all that'll happen is that the pirated copies will get re-hacked or reinstalled, and their users smartened up about the risks of updating at all. Meanwhile, legit users get raked over the coals.
Personally, I'd guess that the vast majority of bogus de-activations were and will be for legit copies. Indeed, all the complaints I've heard of so far have involved legit copies.
Just occurred to me to wonder (thanks to your remark about moving PCI cards, drivers, etc.) if XP's broken HAL might be the root culprit -- frex, it misperceives the hardware, and XP's activation thingee then throws a fit.
More accurately, to try to prevent homeless people from living in San Francisco at all. -- The "no giving away used food" law in L.A. is very old, tho, and originally had nothing to do with the homeless.
Orange County (or the city of Anaheim, I forget which) has a law that you cannot sleep in your car. Santa Monica outlawed sleeping in public (or something to that effect, the idea being to keep homeless people from sleeping on folks' front lawns). Anyway, both of these laws were specifically targeted at running out the homeless.
Personally, it's not the homeless that I have an issue with... shit happens and bad luck can put *anyone* on the street. It's the professional beggars I want run out of town -- the ones who accost or even harrass anyone who looks like they've got a spare buck, and live quite well on the money they leech from unwitting passersby. Frankly if it weren't for the pro beggars, the genuine homeless would get more breaks.
Don't know about your situation, nor whether it's CA state law, but I do know it's law in Los Angeles: you cannot give away food that has been opened or previously served. So giving away loose bagels and already-prepared soup is a no-no, unless you are a licensed restaurant, food vendor, etc.
I imagine the idea was to control health issues associated with "used" food and unlicensed vendors, but as you discovered, it can also prevent the charity of distributing surplus food.
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Glad to help, I think ... :)
Tho on a scale of torture, I think having to doctor one's lawn is far less horrible than having the itchies from one end to the other... so with that choice in mind, I'd rather a plague of crane flies than of mosquitoes!
BTW, if you can still get diazinon (corncob base, NOT newsprint base) two treatments in the spring will kill just about everything that you don't want living in your lawn, and continue working all summer. And if you pour some undiluted liquid diazinon around the roots of trees, they'll uptake enough to kill bugs that munch on their leaves. This was the only thing I ever found that gets rid of elm-leaf bugs.
Sadly, it may well be... along with "Who's most humid?? Can YOU tell where your air ends and your lake begins??"
That's how mosquitoes are in rural Minnesota too -- open the door long enough for one human to dash inside, and a cloud of mosquitoes zings inside too. Leave the door open for very long and you might as well go back outside yourself. They'll find every hole in every screen; every window that doesn't seal tightly...
Crane flies live pretty much anywhere that mosquitoes can, meaning anywhere with moisture. So they're very widespread.
However, they don't eat mosquitoes. The adults eat nectar (or nothing at all) and the larvae eat the roots of various plants.
I suspect the myth that they eat mosquitoes may arise because crane flies are so much bigger, but otherwise visually very similar. ("What eats bears? bigger bears!")
Mosquitoes are loathesome and should be wiped from the universe, but crane flies are kinda neat.
What does a Minnesotan mosquito call a busload of kids?
A: Sardines!!
This is no longer ecologically-correct, but one quart of motor oil will coat one acre of water to a thickness of one molecule, which is all that's required to suffocate mosquito larvae. This used to be the common control method with standing water that could not be drained, particularly since that isn't enough oil to harm anything else (the single-molecule layer doesn't affect fish, birds, or other aquatic insects).
BTW, some species of mosquitoes do NOT require standing water to reproduce; it's been discovered that the damp folds in tree bark (particularly scrub oaks that collect morning dew in otherwise-arid areas) is sufficient.
I don't know about citronella, but I've got some overly-friendly honeybees (they get into everything, looking for water) and have discovered that they can be discouraged by coating stuff with a thin layer of a "flea shampoo" that contains orange oil. I have no idea if it would work against biting insects, as here in the desert we don't have enough of 'em to notice.
As to the hapless fellow for whom DEET doesn't work, there have always been a few individuals like that. I vaguely recall long-ago research into it noted a possibility of unusual chemicals in their sweat. {D'oh!!)
In Alaska, DEET works for no one; the mosquitoes are just too voracious (they make Minnesota mosquitoes look downright piddly). Alaskans coat themselves with "bear grease" (literally a layer of stinky grease), or get eaten alive.
One study found that anemia due to mosquito bites was the leading cause of death in wild cariboo in Alaska and northern Canada -- the evil bugglies literally suck more blood than the animals can spare.
Don't forget NetTamer (http://www.nettamer.net/tamer.html) which has a version that runs perfectly well on an XT, and there is now a palmtop version as well. The reg'd version even does IRC. And I believe it's still maintained. Sortof a text/graphics hybrid, but basically geared toward working in plaintext. Very reliable, once you get used to it.
There's also Arachne (works okay, tho its setup is quirky as hell) and its offspring WebSpyder, which used a 32bit DOS extender, and worked really well (at least, between crashes!) But if you needed a graphical browser on a DOS-only system, WebSpyder was the best of the lot.
[eying your list of Corel-for-linux software]
:(
I am SOOOO jealous... I can't live without WP and PhotoPaint (preferably version 8 for both).
Another problem was that was about the time Corel totally lost focus as a company, went flopping off in random directions, and damnear went tits-up. They sold profitable stuff and bought pigs in pokes. They partly-baked then abandoned projects. IOW, dot-bomb madness as experienced by a company that was already distracted. Not-quite-finishing their apps-for-linux was just more of same.
PSP8 predates Corel's eating Jasc. And yes, PSP8 does just about everything wrong. Frex, the effects browser insists on actually DOING each transformation, and there's no way to abort it, so it takes forever to load all the effects. I'd never liked PSP, but that was the last straw.
Oh, what DO I like as a bitmap editor? Corel PhotoPaint, preferably v8. Can't live without it.
I haven't used allofmp3.com, but random-sourced MP3 downloads have instigated almost 100% of my music purchases over the past 10 years. In fact, so it's been for most of the people I know.
Funny thing, since I've not been able to readily filch MP3s, I've stopped buying music. It's not an intentional abstinence, it's just that without exposure, nothing new has caught my interest. And I've not been reminded of older stuff either, that I'd probably buy if I heard it again a few times. (No radio reception here, so no chance of that either.)
The sole exceptions have been bands that freely offer unencumbered MP3s in some way that isn't painful on my sad half-speed dialup; I've bought some of their CDs (direct from the band, too).
So... anecdotal as such evidence is, it's still far too common to ignore. And every other industry recognises that "free samples" are the best marketing tool there is, with "really cheap samples" (in this case represented by allofmp3.com) are a real near second.
"Most full albums are selling for less than $2. And it's the content owners that get to set prices, not a web site."
Okay.. let's LET the artists set their own royalty rate -- note that I said the actual artists, not the mythical "content owners" (which usually means the distributor, ie. RIAA cartel members).
Just as a starting point, let's set the download royalty at what the artists are SUPPOSED to be paid by their RIAA masters, rather than what they are ACTUALLY paid after all "costs" are deducted (see http://www.negativland.com/albini.html). And let's pay the royalty directly to the artist, not to any distribution scheme or middleman.
The artists are now ahead of the game, the downloaded music costs a mere few cents more per track, and the RIAA is rendered superfluous**.
Back to letting the artist set their own royalties -- fair enough, now that the RIAA is out of the picture, let's do that. Artists who get greedy will price themselves out of the market (or back into MP3 piracy), making gouging unprofitable. But artists who set their royalties sanely will have another income stream that they didn't have before, with no effort or expense on their part.
** Noting that THIS is exactly what the RIAA fears the most. Piracy has nothing to do with it.
Official M$ presenters been talking about stuff like this at various official functions since the Win2K roadshow, over 6 years ago.
XP itself wasn't your "reboot at least once" problem with the HP/Compaq.... that's not an XP issue. But it could well be an issue with all the partners' crap on an average HP desktop system, some of which does a run-once on bootup to ensure that the hapless user will be forced to see their product.
In fact I recently removed SIX GIGS worth of partners' trialware shit from a 6 month old HP machine. Funny how the machine ran so much better afterward!!
I know XP often ignores hardware changes, but other times it gets all disauthenticated over something as simple as swapping out the CPU or moving a PCI card to a different slot. Personally I think the hardware authentication thing is just plain broken, and subject to all sorts of quirks depending on stuff like driver load order, CPU instruction set, etc, etc. that normal people would never think about.
Something in your post reminded me of this hoary campfire tale:
...and the voice announces, "I am der vinder viper. I've come to vipe yer vinders!"
The phone rings, and you hear a heavily-accented voice saying, "I am der vinder viper, I'll be there at nine o'clock!" And then it hangs up.
An hour later, you get the same call, the same voice, the same terse message.
This goes on all day long, every hour on the hour... by nine o'clock you're a nervous wreck, and then there's a KNOCK AT THE DOOR...
"This is a perfect example of how not to actually perform an experiment."
Or perhaps a very good example of what can happen when an experiment is ill-designed (deliberately or otherwise).
That "redundant" mod is funnier than my post... after all, I *was* pointing out a redundancy!!
Is there a market glut of P's?? cuz every instance of the word "people" in the above summary has a surplus P.
Maybe it's a hint... what people should do all over WGA.
Forced updates was supposedly going to be a "feature" of XP's SP2, tho having not installed SP2 I can't say for sure... but it's something to look into in your case.
Good point -- and my guess is you're right, that it's more of a timing thing than a counting thing.
Most higher animals have some sense of time, and it can be VERY accurate (to within a minute or so in 24 hours). Most people who regularly drive long distances (and particularly on unpaved roads) get so they think in terms of "about nn-hours" rather than mileage. Etc. Anyway, considering how widespread "timesense" is in the higher animals, chances are it's a very primitive function (evolution-wise), thus something ants have too.
As to the desert ants themselves... we have a species of fire ant here in the Mojave Desert that will go as far as 100 feet from the nest -- they create "roads" (by dragging home everything they encounter along that route, until it's completely cleared) that are almost as obvious as bike trails.
Good point, but all that'll happen is that the pirated copies will get re-hacked or reinstalled, and their users smartened up about the risks of updating at all. Meanwhile, legit users get raked over the coals.
Personally, I'd guess that the vast majority of bogus de-activations were and will be for legit copies. Indeed, all the complaints I've heard of so far have involved legit copies.
Just occurred to me to wonder (thanks to your remark about moving PCI cards, drivers, etc.) if XP's broken HAL might be the root culprit -- frex, it misperceives the hardware, and XP's activation thingee then throws a fit.
More accurately, to try to prevent homeless people from living in San Francisco at all. -- The "no giving away used food" law in L.A. is very old, tho, and originally had nothing to do with the homeless.
Orange County (or the city of Anaheim, I forget which) has a law that you cannot sleep in your car. Santa Monica outlawed sleeping in public (or something to that effect, the idea being to keep homeless people from sleeping on folks' front lawns). Anyway, both of these laws were specifically targeted at running out the homeless.
Personally, it's not the homeless that I have an issue with... shit happens and bad luck can put *anyone* on the street. It's the professional beggars I want run out of town -- the ones who accost or even harrass anyone who looks like they've got a spare buck, and live quite well on the money they leech from unwitting passersby. Frankly if it weren't for the pro beggars, the genuine homeless would get more breaks.
Don't know about your situation, nor whether it's CA state law, but I do know it's law in Los Angeles: you cannot give away food that has been opened or previously served. So giving away loose bagels and already-prepared soup is a no-no, unless you are a licensed restaurant, food vendor, etc.
I imagine the idea was to control health issues associated with "used" food and unlicensed vendors, but as you discovered, it can also prevent the charity of distributing surplus food.
And let's hear it for the latest offering from Redmond.... Microsoft Newspeak!! Available with or without dictionaries.