This, of course, assumes that you don't have better things to do with your time than worry about web site traffic analysis.
There's no need for you to be a prick in your reply...besides, my concern was more with third-party cookies and the cross-site tracking by organizations such as DoubleClick. I don't have any problem with webmasters maintaining their own access logs (mine gets logged to a MySQL database, FWIW). That Hitbox's logging efforts are foiled is an interesting side effect, but that's all it is—a side effect.
the mindsweeper game never has any thing that you HAVE to guess at
Given that Minesweeper is NP-complete, are you so sure of that assertion? In a sufficiently-crowded field, you almost always get to some point where you can't deduce from the surrounding squares whether or not there's a mine in a space. You end up guessing and hoping for the best when this happens. I suspect that the Minesweeper where you never have to guess isn't the true Minesweeper.
Hitbox does nothing of the kind. It uses JavaScript included on the site pages. Every time the page is opened in a browser, information about the visitor is returned to Hitbox.
This, of course, assumes that you're not filtering them out. Since they're one of the many purveyors of third-party cookies (and since exclusion of third-party cookies in browsers is a fairly recent development), they're filtered out. Whether I'm browsing with IE under Win2K, iCab under MacOS, or Lynx under Linux, they'd never know about it.
Just remember that 1/2 (that's 50%) of the Social Security and Medicare payments are deductible on your schedule C (where you will be reporting your 1099 income).
I haven't noticed if TurboTax has caught that or not...it probably has, but I haven't noticed. I figured all of the "self-employment tax" (read: SS/Medicare double-whammy) was money tossed down a rathole that I'll never see again.
There are ways to minimize your personal income but as painful as it may seem, you _should_ be paying at least something into Social Security.
<offtopic>
That's debatable...not from a tax-dodge standpoint, but from a standpoint of the near-zero likelihood of ever getting any money out of the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security. It has become one of the largest wealth-transfer schemes in the world, one that shifts money from people who are just getting started in life to people who had decades to save up for their retirement. How does a failure on the part of old people to plan for their futures constitute an entitlement to the money of today's working stiffs? Maybe people would have some incentive to save up for retirement if they knew they would have to be responsible for themselves—and if the government wasn't already bleeding them dry to pay for those who didn't.
Why are pyramid schemes illegal when Dave Rhodes and his ilk push them, but perfectly acceptable when Uncle Sam is behind them?
Word. It's really a hassle to be a 1099 "employee", and I've never tried Corp-to-Corp.
It's not that big a deal...you cut a check to the IRS four times a year (estimated tax) and you're done. About the only thing that sucks is that you're stuck paying the full Social Security and Medicare taxes (your employer would normally pay half of it), but this is no doubt reflected in the different pay rates given by the original poster. Getting to write off your computer equipment, books, etc. helps out some too. I've gone the 1099 route for the past three years or so, though that's about to end next month (I wonder how much of the pay raise will get sucked up by deductions).
One more thing self-employment makes abundantly clear is how ridiculously overtaxed we are. You tend to notice such things when you're writing $1000+ checks every so often. That's another discussion for another topic, though...
(This assumes, of course, that your state doesn't levy an income tax. Having never paid state income tax myself, I don't know what additional paperwork burden you would be stuck with if you're self-employed in a state that collects income tax.)
I bet I could train my dog to install Red Hat 7.2 with nothing more than two floppy disks and a high speed network connection. The puppy's biggest challenge would be that she lacks opposable thumbs and can't read. I assume these college kids have the former and can do the latter.
Given the state of public education in this country (how many remedial English/math courses does/did your university have?), your assumption isn't necessarily valid. "Yestirdey I kudnt spel programer...now I are one."
Re:a problem waiting to happen
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I always thought of adcritic as a problem waiting to happen. On one side, there's the potential legal problems of showing copyrighted content (i still can't belive they never got sued)
What company, in its right mind, is going to complain about someone running its ads for free? They ordinarily pay big bucks to get the word out...AdCritic runs (OK, ran) their ads whenever someone wants (um...wanted) to see them.
IBM has had the same thing out now for a while... I have one.
Check out the 8mb model for $25...
...and it has a ring through which it can be attached to a keychain. 8 megs is more than enough for a PGP/GPG key and a copy of PuTTY...looks like I'm snagging one of these. (BTW, the price is down to $23.75. Someone else provided a corrected link, but I might as well include it again.)
I tried building 0.9.6 from source on an LFS system earlier this week. It segfaulted when it tried to start up. I was able to build KDE 2.2.2 on the same system and get Konqueror running with the display going to XFree86 4.1.0 for Cygwin under Win2K. (This was done mainly so that apps like DDD that want to bring up webpages have access to a graphical browser...otherwise, it would've used Lynx.)
As for Windows versions of Mozilla...it's been a few months. It rendered pages properly without crashing too much, but I wouldn't have characterized it as a better browser than IE. More recently, I've installed K-Meleon. It seems stable enough, but doesn't offer any compelling reason to switch away from IE. I haven't seen that it supports anything that IE doesn't. OTOH, I will allow that it does a much better job of handling CSS than Nutscrape 4.x ever did.
That would require that a significant portion of Slashdot users use IE.
...and you're implying that they don't? It's not like there are many options...Konqueror and Mozilla aren't all there yet, there seems to have been some sort of stink lately WRT Opera, and there's no way in hell that I'd use Nutscrape. Not everyone who reads/. is a flaming anti-MS zealot...MS has its warts (you're nuts if you put a Windows box directly on the Internet), but then so does nearly everything/everyone else.
Actually, that isn't true. They do stop supporting old cars. Think cars that only ran on leaded fuel.
My dad's '73 Cutlass runs fine on unleaded. Given that all gasoline used to be unleaded until it was discovered in the '30s or '40s (or was it the '50s?) that tetraethyl lead was an effective octane booster, about the only cars that might complain about unleaded fuel would be the muscle cars of the '60s...and either adding lead substitute (or tetraethyl lead, if you can find it) to the fuel or installing hardened valve seats in the heads will fix that problem.
Just because the original poster never paid for his MS stuff doesn't make him a warez d00d...most of my stuff is NFRs (not-for-retail) that I picked up back when I was working for The Man.
Re:all I wanted was a frickin "Laser"
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 1
Dude, you can get way over 50, its just that 50 is the max it will display. If you get to 50 and then get 20 post modded up, you can then later get 20 post modded down before you risk loosing points. The karma is there, you just don't know it!:)
Um...no. The karma cap is a hard limit. If you're at 50 and your post is modded up, nothing happens. If you're at 50 and your post is modded down, your karma goes down. I had a ton of posts modded up in a row; the first post after those that was modded down dropped my karma to 49.
It's been said before, but tape drives are still fairly small compared to current hard drives unless you want to spend thousands for DLT or something similar. With 100GB+ hard drives around $300 or so, you might just want to throw a drive rack and a removable HD in for backup.
No doubt. I just went and had a read at a whole bunch of posts from 10-15 years ago in which I was often a real prick [and strangely enough, in which I seem to have more technical/coding prowess than I have now!?!]. There's nothing like humble pie and complete red-eared embarrassment at three in the morning -- embarrassment first at how one was acting, and second at no longer being able to fully understand technical discussions from one's own teenagehood!
I just tracked down my first Usenet post...it's almost an embarrassment how stiffly formal it was. It's even finished like a letter. The second message is even worse...it includes a fricking snail-mail address.
It didn't take long to grow out of that phase, though...message #3 has a sig, and message #4 has, along with a zillion email addresses under uiuc.edu, the same "ASCII Apple" that I still use in Usenet posts today.
Um, can you say "120VAC to 12VAC power transformer"? Good, I knew you could!
You shouldn't need even that...string them together in series with a current-limiting resistor and (maybe) a rectifier diode and you should be all set. I'd think you could stick 50 in each string (2.4V across each LED) with an appropriate resistance to keep the current to a safe level (whatever's appropriate for the LEDs in use). It'd be cheaper than a transformer, and it could even be molded into the plug (along with a warning that, under the DMCA, they'll kill your firstborn son if you try to reverse-engineer your light string).
It was never better than when AOHell was shipping its sh*t on 3.5" floppies. I went a couple of years without having to buy any floppies...peel off the label, reformat the disk, and you were all set. Much more useful...that's probably the only good thing that could ever be said for AOHell.
experienced Interneters are less likely to use chatrooms, play games, and download music than their newbie counterparts
I can buy two out of three...I had my fill of IRC eons ago and I've never been much of a game player (online or off). I'm not so sure that J. Random Newbie would know where to go looking for music, though; your average AOLer won't want to tie up his phone line for hours to download an album (assuming that his connection doesn't get dropped halfway through each file). MP3 downloaders usually have fat pipes available to them; your average new user won't want to fork over the extra $$$ for cable or DSL at first.
An unrelated report from Forrester Research claims that Internet newcomers tend to gather at LookSmart and MSN portals, while old-timers prefer InfoSpace and Yahoo.
My homepage is set to about:blank, the CowboyNeal of portals.:-) Their idea of an old-timer must be like Las Vegas' idea of an old-timer (if you've lived here at least two years, you're considered to have lived here forever). Real old-timers don't fart around with portals...if you have a homepage set at all, it's something useful like Google.
Not only Wired, but CNet/ZDNet as well. The difference is that their ads are limited in time (a few seconds) and "fold" back into a banner quickly as not to be intrusive.
I agree, the Wired one is highly annoying. They will hopefully get the point when people start spending less than 2 seconds on their site.
lynx -dump http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/xmms-1.2.5.tar.gz >xmms-1.2.5.tar.gz
tar xzf xmms-1.2.5.tar.gz
cd xmms-1.2.5 ./configure && make && make install
:-)
(I don't know offhand if that's all there is to it, though that will build 99% of what's out there. I don't run X11 on any of my Linux boxen, so I don't have a way to test it.)
The Z180 (and a variant from Hitachi, the 64180 (?)) sees a fair amount of embedded use as well. The SCSI card in my Apple IIGS, a RamFAST, uses either a Z180 or 64180 (depending on the revision) as a cache controller and DMA controller. It also implements the on-board tape-backup software...you could go into the card's firmware and tell it to back up one or more partitions to tape. You could then exit back to ProDOS (or whatever) and keep doing stuff while the backup was running (the affected partitions were locked to read-only while the backup ran). A clever trick, especially for what's now an 18-year-old computer.
There exist several physician groups which oppose all animal experiments...
...and if you believe any of the bunk put out by those organizations (little more than fronts for the likes of PETA and ALF, really), I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
#2 really burns me. The computers in the shop are typically PCs housed in a big console with several cables coming out. The cables are simply a black box to the parallel port. There is no reason that this black box cannot be made available in you local Discount Auto.
$30 gadgets usually are available at the likes of Checker and AutoZone that plug into the diagnostic connector and give a readout of whatever the computer's whining about. Even better than that, though, is that with some models, all you really need is a piece of wire jammed into the appropriate terminals on the connector. Do this and turn on the ignition, and the trouble codes will be blinked out on the "check engine" light (like the beep codes your computer's BIOS spits out when your video card goes on the fritz). Odds are that's all the $30 gadget does anyway.
Oh, and why [has THG] made the text on the page unselectable? Probably just to annoy me, and cause more people to read their source.
I just brought up one of their pages right now, and I was able to highlight text just fine. Right-clicking brought up the usual list of things you could do, "copy" among them. I have run across sites that do weird sh*t with JavaScript so that right-clicking isn't available (webmasters who do that should be shot), but THG isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that Minesweeper is NP-complete, are you so sure of that assertion? In a sufficiently-crowded field, you almost always get to some point where you can't deduce from the surrounding squares whether or not there's a mine in a space. You end up guessing and hoping for the best when this happens. I suspect that the Minesweeper where you never have to guess isn't the true Minesweeper.
I haven't noticed if TurboTax has caught that or not...it probably has, but I haven't noticed. I figured all of the "self-employment tax" (read: SS/Medicare double-whammy) was money tossed down a rathole that I'll never see again.
<offtopic>
That's debatable...not from a tax-dodge standpoint, but from a standpoint of the near-zero likelihood of ever getting any money out of the Ponzi scheme known as Social Security. It has become one of the largest wealth-transfer schemes in the world, one that shifts money from people who are just getting started in life to people who had decades to save up for their retirement. How does a failure on the part of old people to plan for their futures constitute an entitlement to the money of today's working stiffs? Maybe people would have some incentive to save up for retirement if they knew they would have to be responsible for themselves—and if the government wasn't already bleeding them dry to pay for those who didn't.
Why are pyramid schemes illegal when Dave Rhodes and his ilk push them, but perfectly acceptable when Uncle Sam is behind them?
</offtopic>
One more thing self-employment makes abundantly clear is how ridiculously overtaxed we are. You tend to notice such things when you're writing $1000+ checks every so often. That's another discussion for another topic, though...
(This assumes, of course, that your state doesn't levy an income tax. Having never paid state income tax myself, I don't know what additional paperwork burden you would be stuck with if you're self-employed in a state that collects income tax.)
As for Windows versions of Mozilla...it's been a few months. It rendered pages properly without crashing too much, but I wouldn't have characterized it as a better browser than IE. More recently, I've installed K-Meleon. It seems stable enough, but doesn't offer any compelling reason to switch away from IE. I haven't seen that it supports anything that IE doesn't. OTOH, I will allow that it does a much better job of handling CSS than Nutscrape 4.x ever did.
When you're at 50, the only way to go is down...
One more thing...First Post! :-)
It didn't take long to grow out of that phase, though...message #3 has a sig, and message #4 has, along with a zillion email addresses under uiuc.edu, the same "ASCII Apple" that I still use in Usenet posts today.
It was never better than when AOHell was shipping its sh*t on 3.5" floppies. I went a couple of years without having to buy any floppies...peel off the label, reformat the disk, and you were all set. Much more useful...that's probably the only good thing that could ever be said for AOHell.
Ad filters are your friends, especially if crap like this is set to take off.
lynx -dump http://www.xmms.org/files/1.2.x/xmms-1.2.5.tar.gz >xmms-1.2.5.tar.gz
./configure && make && make install
tar xzf xmms-1.2.5.tar.gz
cd xmms-1.2.5
(I don't know offhand if that's all there is to it, though that will build 99% of what's out there. I don't run X11 on any of my Linux boxen, so I don't have a way to test it.)
The Z180 (and a variant from Hitachi, the 64180 (?)) sees a fair amount of embedded use as well. The SCSI card in my Apple IIGS, a RamFAST, uses either a Z180 or 64180 (depending on the revision) as a cache controller and DMA controller. It also implements the on-board tape-backup software...you could go into the card's firmware and tell it to back up one or more partitions to tape. You could then exit back to ProDOS (or whatever) and keep doing stuff while the backup was running (the affected partitions were locked to read-only while the backup ran). A clever trick, especially for what's now an 18-year-old computer.