See earlier comments above about the Open Voting Consortium (http://www.openvoting.org). If they use the OVC system, counties don't even have to purchase the hardware, just lease a bunch of computers for use on voting day. The OVC software comes on a bootable disk, writes votes on CD-R media, and prints out a paper ballot for auditing purposes. In the demo I saw a few years ago (probably in 2005), the whole thing worked just fine on an old Dell Optiplex GX100 Pentium II computer with no hard disk to hack. The most expensive part of the setup was an LCD touch-screen monitor.
And, of course, the software is open source and free to use. Unlike Diebold and Sequoia Systems voting machines, which cost my county $1,200 a piece. With an average of six machines per precinct, this cost the taxpayers many millions of dollars for bad technology that never worked right in the firts place.
Send me an invite! I'm in the area, and drove by that flea market on my way to work today. I had an old Atari 2600 when I lived in San Francisco, but didn't consider it my first computer. That was my Atari 1040 ST system on which I learned all about this stuff. I miss it so much, but OS/2 was a great leap forward in my opinion.
I'll bring the projector and some homebrewed beer (another byproduct hobby shared by other hackers in the area).
$30 million is considered a low to moderate budget these days, so it won't have any trouble turning a profit, even if it heads straight to DVD. Pauly Shore made a string of highly-profitable comedies in the 1990s, none of which cost more than $20 million each. They were all profitable within three weeks of their theatrical runs and everything else from cable screenings to video/DVD sales was gravy.
Trust Samuel L. Jackson. He knows how to pick a script (except for the awful SHAFT re-make a few years ago). I saw SoaP last weekend with my wife (who hates horror movies) and we had a blast. It's lots of fun and the entire theater was in on the joke. You may be surprised at how much fun you can have at a theater when the audience is heavily involved in the action. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show. SoaP may not yet achieve that level of cult success, but the target audience is in on it. My high school senior son saw it three times over four days with different groups of his friends. This is exactly how I managed to turn lots of my college classmates on to Eraserhead back in the 1980s. It was playing only at midnight screenings on Friday and Saturday at a theater near campus and every week I'd take a different couple of friends to see it.
You are probably correct that it was just a typo. But the Editors should have caught one so glaring as that, since it changes the meaning of the story. What are we paying them for, anyway?
I think what he meant to say was "OS would not ship *until* January of 2007". At least, that was the impression I got from other news reports hitting the internet this afternoon on this topic.
Jeez, your comment took me back. I built my first PC in 1993 with OS/2 Warp 3, and had a BBS running on it for two years. TradeWars was one of our top rated games. I later upgraded to Warp 4 and tried to keep it going, but I ended up getting a job supporting NetWare and Windows networks, and haven't used OS/2 in many years. I still have fond memories of learning all about computers by playing around wtth OS/2 in those days. It was an exciting time because it seemed this was the platform that would become the desktop standard, simply because Windows 3.1 was such crap, but things didn't work out that way after all.
Absolutely. I did the same thing with less than $300 worth of hardware, a Knoppmyth CD and a little bit of time. I did a practice install first with a standard IDE disk to make all my mistakes on a scratch system, then built the final box with a 200Gb SATA drive. All I wanted was a DIY PVR, and this worked great.
Some of the smartest folks who've trained me over the past ten years have not been white. When I was taking my technical courses in the mid-1990s, my NetWare instructor was from Ethiopia. When I took my Microsoft technical training, my first instructor was Indian and the next one was Asian. I took several Microsoft SQL courses to become an MCDBA and the instructor for all three was the same very sharp black man. The class took him out to dinner after our last session and, after a couple of beers, he admitted to us how much he was being paid (as an MCT) for teaching and it astonished many of us. When he wasn't overbooked teaching classes, he was highly in demand for his consulting skills. He was an inspiration to me, and I sure hope I can someday be worth $300,000 a year.
In short, I don't think racism is nearly as much of a problem in the IT field these days as it used to be. And when you can demonstrate your worth to an employer before they even know your ethnicity, race becomes irrelevant (as it always should be).
Good point. I work in a public health lab and one of the laboratory directors likes to tell stories about when he discovered some lab techs were homebrewing wine and using the lab facilities for fermenting the batches and storing them in a supply room for several years as they aged.
It wasn't discovered earlier because previous lab directors had apparently accepted bottles of the finished product as payment for keeping the public health winery a well guarded secret.
I've been using Opera since Version 6 and have always liked its look and feel. But then I'm no browser zealot either. I use Firefox as well as NetCaptor and Konqueror, depending on how well they render specific websites. I like the way Opera and NetCaptor can save your open tabs after you close the browser and re-load all of them the next time you open it. I understand there is a Firefox extension that can provide this functionality, but I haven't yet found it, and I've looked through the extensions listings with no success. Probably need to google it somehow.
Back on the main topic, I disagree with Dvorak and think it would be a questionable business decision for MS to purchase Opera as a replacement for IE, so it probably won't happen. I've played around with IE7 in the Vista Beta CTP and found it has incorporated many of these features already. If MS can clone features from other products without having to purchase the whole company, they're more likely to do that.
Yeah, I got the same message from Packet8. I've had the VOIP service since last April and have been very pleased with them so far. Of course, I've never had to call 911 since I cut my POTS line (but I thought that's what cell phones were for). I am a bit annoyed that my bill will now go up $1.99 a month to cover the costs of this additional service, but it's still cheaper than SBC. Kind of annoying, though, that the Packet8 customers who have been paying the $1.50 per month for this service before it was mandated will now have to pay the new $1.99 fee just like the rest of us. It was offered to all Packet8 customers, but apparently very few people were bothering to sign up for it since, well, I thought that's what cell phones were for.
I do. I just spent $9.99 on an album downloaded from iTunes last night. Perhaps I could have found it via p2p for nothing, but I'd have to search various networks to find the entire album instead of just selected tracks, queue it up for downloading and wait for it to complete, then hours later burn it to a CD or copy it to my music library to sync up with my iPod Mini. Overall, it was much easier and faster to just go to the artist's website, click on the link to the iTunes music store and grab the damned thing using PayPal. All 15 tracks downloaded in six minutes and immediately went to both my iPod mini and my iTunes library. Now I can burn a CD at my leisure, and not have to worry about the RIAA sniffing out my ip address and sending me an angry letter. Not that I'm afraid of them, but this really was much easier, and as a bonus, I know for sure that the artist will get the royalties (and probably an extra few pennies because of the hits on his website).
But no, I haven't paid for porn since I was in college and didn't have a computer.
Hey, I know a couple of folks who work at Microsoft, one of whom comes down to the Bay Area quite often on work-related business trips. We always make a point of going out to a ballgame together (usually the Oakland A's, but we can go to SF Giants games, too). He's a big Mariners fan and very much into baseball. He's also one of the smartest people you'll ever meet, and works in the Hotmail division, which despite rumors to the contrary, is still built and runs on BSD servers. He said attempts to migrate the architecture to Windows servers turned out not to be cost-effective, and so they decided to stick with BSD. If it ain't broke...
Re:never got copyrighted properly??
on
Attack of the $1 DVDs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You are absolutely correct. This is why George A. Romero had such trouble with his original 1968 "Night of the Living Dead." When someone found out in the mid-1980s that he had failed to properly register the copyright, they put out a colorized version of the film on VHS. When he tried to stop them, he discovered that his first feature film was now public domain and he no longer had any control over it. He didn't know any better back then, but all of his later films are properly registered (even the remake of Night of the Living Dead directed by his buddy Tom Savini).
Indeed, Thomas Paine, author of the seminal essay "Common Sense" that caused a great many colonists sitting on the fence to support the revolution, spent several years in prison in France for the horrendous crime of "atheism." When confronted with the charge, he confessed he was an atheist and therefore had to plead guilty.
The only reason NASA has such a strong presence in Texas is because Lyndon B. Johnson was Vice President when John F. Kennedy accelerated the space program in the early 1960s when we were losing so much ground to the Soviet Union. He put Johnson in charge of NASA and Johnson pledged to send the bacon back to his constituents in his home state. Mission Control could have been built just about anywhere, but Johson insisted on locating it in Houston. It was all pure political pork.
This did not please some of the early pioneers at NASA, who had already moved their families from Virginia to Florida for the Mercury program, and now had to move them all to Texas (and commute to Florida for the Gemini program launches). A lot of this is detailed in Chris Kraft's terrific autobiography "Flight" and is touched on briefly in Gene Krantz' book "Failure Is Not an Option."
Blue Origin is locating their facilities way out in the sparsely populated Davis Mountains near Van Horn, hudreds of miles from the Texas Coast. The largest nearby body of water is probably the Rio Grande (which is just a trickle of mud in this area). Bezos may be too rich to care much about the cost of land, but this would be a pretty good real estate investment for this kind of operation. This isn't farmland, it's just mountains and desert, so he probably bought it for pennies.
Speaking as someone from a state with a very poor record of supporting or encouraging business (and a reputation for taxing them into insolvency), can you tell me where I should move to enjoy the benefits you describe?
I tend to agree with you on this one. It's similar to when the DEA busts some college student's closet pot garden, they'll seize as few as six marijuana plants and brag to the media that the stuff had a "street value" of some ridiculous number like half a million dollars.
Don't ever believe a goverment agency when they talk about money and value. These are the same idiots who pay a defense contractor $400 for a hammer and $1,000 for a toilet seat.
Full disclosure: I work as a contractor with a state government agency. This government agency wastes millions of dollars every year on projects of dubious public worth, simply because they can always ask the taxpayers for more money. "BioTerrorism Preparedness" is the biggest cash cow this state has ever milked.
I didn't RTFA, but now I'm curious as to whether they count NetWare as a separate server OS, or include it with Linux sales. It would depend heavily on the version listed, as Netware 6.x would probably be counted as a separate OS, while anything higher would probably be included with the Linux figures.
My 19 year old son is an avid Firefly fan, and got up early in the morning to check his email and Aint-it-cool News homepage. As soon as he saw the announcement that there would be a San Francisco screening, he jumped to the link to reserve a ticket, only to find out it was already sold out. This was less than 3 hours after the first announcement.
We've been to test screenings and sneak previews a few times at local theaters before. They have all been free (with one exception last fall for Team America: World Police). This one required a full ticket purchase.
No doubt about it, that is impressive. Especially for a cancelled TV show very few people saw during its initial run, and most only know from the rather pricey DVD set. A demographic with that kind of devotion and disposable income is a group any savvy marketer would drool over.
Slashdot Mirror
See earlier comments above about the Open Voting Consortium (http://www.openvoting.org). If they use the OVC system, counties don't even have to purchase the hardware, just lease a bunch of computers for use on voting day. The OVC software comes on a bootable disk, writes votes on CD-R media, and prints out a paper ballot for auditing purposes. In the demo I saw a few years ago (probably in 2005), the whole thing worked just fine on an old Dell Optiplex GX100 Pentium II computer with no hard disk to hack. The most expensive part of the setup was an LCD touch-screen monitor.
And, of course, the software is open source and free to use. Unlike Diebold and Sequoia Systems voting machines, which cost my county $1,200 a piece. With an average of six machines per precinct, this cost the taxpayers many millions of dollars for bad technology that never worked right in the firts place.
Send me an invite! I'm in the area, and drove by that flea market on my way to work today. I had an old Atari 2600 when I lived in San Francisco, but didn't consider it my first computer. That was my Atari 1040 ST system on which I learned all about this stuff. I miss it so much, but OS/2 was a great leap forward in my opinion.
I'll bring the projector and some homebrewed beer (another byproduct hobby shared by other hackers in the area).
$30 million is considered a low to moderate budget these days, so it won't have any trouble turning a profit, even if it heads straight to DVD. Pauly Shore made a string of highly-profitable comedies in the 1990s, none of which cost more than $20 million each. They were all profitable within three weeks of their theatrical runs and everything else from cable screenings to video/DVD sales was gravy.
Trust Samuel L. Jackson. He knows how to pick a script (except for the awful SHAFT re-make a few years ago). I saw SoaP last weekend with my wife (who hates horror movies) and we had a blast. It's lots of fun and the entire theater was in on the joke. You may be surprised at how much fun you can have at a theater when the audience is heavily involved in the action. Think Rocky Horror Picture Show. SoaP may not yet achieve that level of cult success, but the target audience is in on it. My high school senior son saw it three times over four days with different groups of his friends. This is exactly how I managed to turn lots of my college classmates on to Eraserhead back in the 1980s. It was playing only at midnight screenings on Friday and Saturday at a theater near campus and every week I'd take a different couple of friends to see it.
You are probably correct that it was just a typo. But the Editors should have caught one so glaring as that, since it changes the meaning of the story. What are we paying them for, anyway?
I think what he meant to say was "OS would not ship *until* January of 2007". At least, that was the impression I got from other news reports hitting the internet this afternoon on this topic.
Jeez, your comment took me back. I built my first PC in 1993 with OS/2 Warp 3, and had a BBS running on it for two years. TradeWars was one of our top rated games. I later upgraded to Warp 4 and tried to keep it going, but I ended up getting a job supporting NetWare and Windows networks, and haven't used OS/2 in many years. I still have fond memories of learning all about computers by playing around wtth OS/2 in those days. It was an exciting time because it seemed this was the platform that would become the desktop standard, simply because Windows 3.1 was such crap, but things didn't work out that way after all.
Absolutely. I did the same thing with less than $300 worth of hardware, a Knoppmyth CD and a little bit of time. I did a practice install first with a standard IDE disk to make all my mistakes on a scratch system, then built the final box with a 200Gb SATA drive. All I wanted was a DIY PVR, and this worked great.
You're correct. I should have checked Wikipedia before posting. My bad.
Some of the smartest folks who've trained me over the past ten years have not been white. When I was taking my technical courses in the mid-1990s, my NetWare instructor was from Ethiopia. When I took my Microsoft technical training, my first instructor was Indian and the next one was Asian. I took several Microsoft SQL courses to become an MCDBA and the instructor for all three was the same very sharp black man. The class took him out to dinner after our last session and, after a couple of beers, he admitted to us how much he was being paid (as an MCT) for teaching and it astonished many of us. When he wasn't overbooked teaching classes, he was highly in demand for his consulting skills. He was an inspiration to me, and I sure hope I can someday be worth $300,000 a year.
In short, I don't think racism is nearly as much of a problem in the IT field these days as it used to be. And when you can demonstrate your worth to an employer before they even know your ethnicity, race becomes irrelevant (as it always should be).
MLK Day was celebrated on Monday to give U.S. workers a 3-day weekend, but Dr. King's actual date of birth was January 19.
Good point. I work in a public health lab and one of the laboratory directors likes to tell stories about when he discovered some lab techs were homebrewing wine and using the lab facilities for fermenting the batches and storing them in a supply room for several years as they aged.
It wasn't discovered earlier because previous lab directors had apparently accepted bottles of the finished product as payment for keeping the public health winery a well guarded secret.
I've been using Opera since Version 6 and have always liked its look and feel. But then I'm no browser zealot either. I use Firefox as well as NetCaptor and Konqueror, depending on how well they render specific websites. I like the way Opera and NetCaptor can save your open tabs after you close the browser and re-load all of them the next time you open it. I understand there is a Firefox extension that can provide this functionality, but I haven't yet found it, and I've looked through the extensions listings with no success. Probably need to google it somehow.
Back on the main topic, I disagree with Dvorak and think it would be a questionable business decision for MS to purchase Opera as a replacement for IE, so it probably won't happen. I've played around with IE7 in the Vista Beta CTP and found it has incorporated many of these features already. If MS can clone features from other products without having to purchase the whole company, they're more likely to do that.
Yeah, I got the same message from Packet8. I've had the VOIP service since last April and have been very pleased with them so far. Of course, I've never had to call 911 since I cut my POTS line (but I thought that's what cell phones were for). I am a bit annoyed that my bill will now go up $1.99 a month to cover the costs of this additional service, but it's still cheaper than SBC. Kind of annoying, though, that the Packet8 customers who have been paying the $1.50 per month for this service before it was mandated will now have to pay the new $1.99 fee just like the rest of us. It was offered to all Packet8 customers, but apparently very few people were bothering to sign up for it since, well, I thought that's what cell phones were for.
I do. I just spent $9.99 on an album downloaded from iTunes last night. Perhaps I could have found it via p2p for nothing, but I'd have to search various networks to find the entire album instead of just selected tracks, queue it up for downloading and wait for it to complete, then hours later burn it to a CD or copy it to my music library to sync up with my iPod Mini. Overall, it was much easier and faster to just go to the artist's website, click on the link to the iTunes music store and grab the damned thing using PayPal. All 15 tracks downloaded in six minutes and immediately went to both my iPod mini and my iTunes library. Now I can burn a CD at my leisure, and not have to worry about the RIAA sniffing out my ip address and sending me an angry letter. Not that I'm afraid of them, but this really was much easier, and as a bonus, I know for sure that the artist will get the royalties (and probably an extra few pennies because of the hits on his website).
But no, I haven't paid for porn since I was in college and didn't have a computer.
Hey, I know a couple of folks who work at Microsoft, one of whom comes down to the Bay Area quite often on work-related business trips. We always make a point of going out to a ballgame together (usually the Oakland A's, but we can go to SF Giants games, too). He's a big Mariners fan and very much into baseball. He's also one of the smartest people you'll ever meet, and works in the Hotmail division, which despite rumors to the contrary, is still built and runs on BSD servers. He said attempts to migrate the architecture to Windows servers turned out not to be cost-effective, and so they decided to stick with BSD. If it ain't broke...
You are absolutely correct. This is why George A. Romero had such trouble with his original 1968 "Night of the Living Dead." When someone found out in the mid-1980s that he had failed to properly register the copyright, they put out a colorized version of the film on VHS. When he tried to stop them, he discovered that his first feature film was now public domain and he no longer had any control over it. He didn't know any better back then, but all of his later films are properly registered (even the remake of Night of the Living Dead directed by his buddy Tom Savini).
Indeed, Thomas Paine, author of the seminal essay "Common Sense" that caused a great many colonists sitting on the fence to support the revolution, spent several years in prison in France for the horrendous crime of "atheism." When confronted with the charge, he confessed he was an atheist and therefore had to plead guilty.
The only reason NASA has such a strong presence in Texas is because Lyndon B. Johnson was Vice President when John F. Kennedy accelerated the space program in the early 1960s when we were losing so much ground to the Soviet Union. He put Johnson in charge of NASA and Johnson pledged to send the bacon back to his constituents in his home state. Mission Control could have been built just about anywhere, but Johson insisted on locating it in Houston. It was all pure political pork.
This did not please some of the early pioneers at NASA, who had already moved their families from Virginia to Florida for the Mercury program, and now had to move them all to Texas (and commute to Florida for the Gemini program launches). A lot of this is detailed in Chris Kraft's terrific autobiography "Flight" and is touched on briefly in Gene Krantz' book "Failure Is Not an Option."
Blue Origin is locating their facilities way out in the sparsely populated Davis Mountains near Van Horn, hudreds of miles from the Texas Coast. The largest nearby body of water is probably the Rio Grande (which is just a trickle of mud in this area). Bezos may be too rich to care much about the cost of land, but this would be a pretty good real estate investment for this kind of operation. This isn't farmland, it's just mountains and desert, so he probably bought it for pennies.
Not the first POV. Remember the Columbia Seven? They were the first. This will be the eighth.
Speaking as someone from a state with a very poor record of supporting or encouraging business (and a reputation for taxing them into insolvency), can you tell me where I should move to enjoy the benefits you describe?
I tend to agree with you on this one. It's similar to when the DEA busts some college student's closet pot garden, they'll seize as few as six marijuana plants and brag to the media that the stuff had a "street value" of some ridiculous number like half a million dollars.
Don't ever believe a goverment agency when they talk about money and value. These are the same idiots who pay a defense contractor $400 for a hammer and $1,000 for a toilet seat.
Full disclosure: I work as a contractor with a state government agency. This government agency wastes millions of dollars every year on projects of dubious public worth, simply because they can always ask the taxpayers for more money. "BioTerrorism Preparedness" is the biggest cash cow this state has ever milked.
Okay, now I've RTFA and see that it doesn't mention NetWare at all. As Emily LeTella (RIP Gilda) might have said, "Never mind."
I didn't RTFA, but now I'm curious as to whether they count NetWare as a separate server OS, or include it with Linux sales. It would depend heavily on the version listed, as Netware 6.x would probably be counted as a separate OS, while anything higher would probably be included with the Linux figures.
My 19 year old son is an avid Firefly fan, and got up early in the morning to check his email and Aint-it-cool News homepage. As soon as he saw the announcement that there would be a San Francisco screening, he jumped to the link to reserve a ticket, only to find out it was already sold out. This was less than 3 hours after the first announcement.
We've been to test screenings and sneak previews a few times at local theaters before. They have all been free (with one exception last fall for Team America: World Police). This one required a full ticket purchase.
No doubt about it, that is impressive. Especially for a cancelled TV show very few people saw during its initial run, and most only know from the rather pricey DVD set. A demographic with that kind of devotion and disposable income is a group any savvy marketer would drool over.