I guess. Just as a lowly ADSL home consumer, that sounds horrible -- and relevant since I'm helping an older person decide between Comcast and DSL at the moment. With about 16 hours/day including streaming audio in the background and a vanity web server, I spotted _an_ annual outage from about 15 minutes to 2 hours with my DSL from 2001 through 2003. From 2004 to the present, I can't remember the last outage. There might have been one for about ten minutes -- or maybe I just needed the reset I did at my end. I can't imagine multiple drop-outs per day. If you can't shame your local Comcast into competence, I say run, don't walk, to the competition.
This shouldn't be too daunting. I seem to remember BASIC programs for tic-tac-toe in '80s training manuals. Tie in the response to pickup and placement. The various options for input is where the challenge lies.
When I mentioned that I wasn't interested in the Maxtor on sale at the local computer store because I didn't think Maxtors were reliable the clerk woke up and got enthusiastic about the topic and agreed. Who knows?
My limited experience of a couple dozen drives over a decade and a half would rank Maxtor, Seagate and WD IDEs from low to high quality. Seagate, Hitachi and IBM-Hitachi SCSIs have all served me well, and buying for price, I guess I'll see how some Samsung IDEs work out.
Some parents however are 'enthusiastic laptop proponents,' one saying the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son 'master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'"
So she didn't get the 2003 message by artist David Byrne that PowerPoint is a schizoid, dumbed-down way to spend time and try to convey information?
Far from a pleasantly wacko suggestion, I think this is the most crucial issue of our time. Even if the Neocon regime could be crowbarred out of power, what are the chances that the Democrats would methodically roll back the precedents of the Bush Regime to restore our rights guaranteed under the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Sadly, I'm thinking, "very slim". Lawless power unleashed is too tempting to put back in the bottle. Welcome to the Empire -- and freedom and human rights don't mix with empire.
Does it matter? Pay your money, keep the receipt and you've presumably got a right to have libdvdcss code on your hard drive. It's having the encryption algorithm without a license that's the hardcore felony, isn't it?
Maybe I'm prejudiced because my Ubuntu disk hung on my test machine and I didn't think much of the Kubuntu I downloaded but I like Debian the more I use it and I'm glad I went with their base foundation. Switching to testing for close to a year, I think people will be surprised that the packages are pleasantly current.
As for the installation, there really is a question of how simple you can realistically want it to be. AT LEAST IT ISN"T DEBIAN WOODY!!
Conditioned to not see the advantage?
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
In the second half of the 90s, I basically had an ever-more-elaborate setup for six years with OS/2 because it had a separate boot partition like linux and a relatively simple file system with HPFS so it was easy to bare metal backup by just Zipping to Jaz disks from a floppy boot. As such, over several years I could build in a considerable depth of individualization in program interactions, email filtering logic and the like.
At the same time, it seemed like every Windows home user I knew was reinstalling every 3-6 months. That would have driven me crazy. Where was the opportunity to build individualization into your setup when you did that? As such I have to wonder whether Windows has conditioned people to think of a computer as the lowest common installation and _not_ as a tool which can be expanded to a user's individualizations. If the computer asked them whether they would like it to set up a macro from one program to another to automate a task they would probably freak.
It is probably the same mentality at the NYT that many streamers have. The NYT has its free stuff and it has it subscription stuff. I suspect they think they are being shrewd by only allowing open media on the "free" front page.
But is it shrewd? A radio station wouldn't make it _hard_ to tune in their broadcast because that would be counterproductive to the value of their station for ad revenue, right?
Yet internet streamers often act like every copyrighted word from their announcers is archive gold to be sold and resold for decades and they would be insane to allow access to a program like mplayer where the savvy user knows how to save their invaluable content. Well, I've got a shock for them. What they often stream is no more valuable than what is being broadcast on the radio or TV and people are no more likely to save every byte than people are to tape radio or TV all day. And, sadly, it may be that if ad revenue can't pay for stream, perhaps stream isn't a useful medium?
Now that I've got my MythTV setup running and MythStream compiled in, I can see that proprietary embedded streaming isn't going to cut it for me. EVEN IF they accommodate something like linux RealPlayer, in the living room I'm going to be listening to stations where I can add a static URL to my MythStream page and click on it with a remote.
If most african countries have retained colonial English or French as the languages of business and government because they realize they can't deal wth 100 tribal languages, why should the internet be different?
Not that it isn't a good thing that linux was converted to Sotho relatively easily and it would be great if there could be lively sites dedicated to every language group -- but Wikipedia? Lt. Uhura knew Swahili but spoke English on the bridge.
I have to agree. It is one of those unpleasant test cases I'd put up there with letting Nazis march through black neighborhoods and _NUDIST_ or art pictures including young girls.** You just have to say it is wrong for the court to allow this freelance hacking if we are a nation of principles protecting freedoms. It is wrong when we hire contractors to do our torturing for us and it is wrong for the FBI to give tacit acceptance to this guy breaking into computers. And it is wrong for the court to uphold it. If there is a loophole, Congress should close it. (Or the guy should take it to a higher court -- even if Rush Limbaugh and Reader's Digest would have a field day with it if the ACLU supported the guy.)
It is like we have lost our compass as a nation ruled by principle and have become a nation run as a social psychology experiment. I put the blame on the war on drugs. Narcs went from posing as buyers to posing as dealers. The concept caught on across the nation expanding to decoy prostitutes, decoy fences, and decoy kiddie porn sites. When you talk about government spending, I don't know when it became the government's job to act as Satan tempting us into various sins. I think it is these decoy programs that have set the foundation for saying, "Hey, who cares about principles? These programs just work!" They set a precedent for acceptance of further judgements in a case like this. But it makes you wonder where a government based on pragmatism instead of principle will take us in the end.
** In our area, we've had a mother taking a photography class get in big trouble dropping off pictures of her nude daughter at the photomat. One shot of the kid hugging her dog particularly got somebody's testicles in a knot. Lord protect their heart from cardiac arrest if they ever lay eyes upon the somewhat notorious oil Young Girl Playing with her Dog c. 1775 by Jean-Honore Fragonard occasionally shown in art history classes;)
I agree. Another $40 might be a deal breaker for countries like Mali and Chad where $100 is already a lot of money. So it becomes the Asian "Children's Machine". Could be a considerable geo-economic compromise that still leaves most of africa in particular out of the game.
I'm sure you meant to say, "And don't view, do, send or receive anything non-trivial while traveling".
The story is getting out. One of our local TV stations set up a guy with a sniffer in a coffee shop. "Someone -- I suspect that girl in the corner -- is messaging her boyfriend right now."
Succinct. But I believe there are already a lot of longitudinal health studies that demonstrate the role of environmental factors and personal choices on "cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and joint problems". What good do those do Big Pharma? They are looking for things that respond to drugs. And that isn't a bad thing even if the greatest good for the greatest number might be realized by life change and public health actions.
The issue of volunteer compensation is interesting. Before the era of Reagan (and Thatcher in this case) there was more recognition that research was for the public good instead of the greatest possible profit for a closed group. There had been an assumption that results would be affordable to the general public.
But I can think of a couple local examples of corporate volunteers:
1. Air America Radio. If the plumbers and coffee shops that advertise on our local affiliate (in a major metro market) are any indication, the big media money isn't in criticizing the Bush regime. So they solicit money from individuals who want a free-as-in-open-source media even though the contributors aren't given a financial stake in the station's success.
2. Our state fair. A fair is by historical definition essentially a marketplace. It is an opportunity for a small businessman to sell you a four dollar corn dog. But fairs are fun and our state fair has a full-time foundation with a building of people smiling and dialing to raise money to support the infrastructure. It makes emotional sense akin to a charity to a lot of people even if it is rather absurd at its base to donate money to a business mechanism because you just like them so much.
Prince of DARKness, John Carpenter, '87. Techno-babble pseudo-zombie movie but creepy atmospherics as all get out. Dark matter and mirrors will get you.
Think I'll go with the science on this one though. Seems like a logical conclusion that calls for funding a hunt for more examples.
Your example doesn't constitute the proof you think it does. If you are staring at each other through a mirror, that means YOU recognize its mirror image, and in return it recognizes YOUR mirror image.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. After we make eye contact in the mirror, my cat will turn its head away to look at my _actual_ face. That is where the combination of its representation, my representation, its actual self, my actual self, their relationship, and my cat's action upon them is so suggestive. Again, what "meaning" might or might not accompany the representations is an area for research some time in the not terribly near future.
Consider Bowie's Alladin Sane. You wouldn't know from the Ryko CD that every song title was matched with a city in parenthesis on the LP.
I think it is just that every technology is so much more expensive -- the same way CDs are so much more expensive than LPs to produce. Yeah, that's the ticket.
1. Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans).
Academic B.S. Every cat I've had has recognized itself in the mirror. I can make eye contact with my cat _in_the_mirror_ and have it turn and look me in the face. Flow chart out the cognitive ramifications of that. How _deep_ that "self" recognition lies is a question for future cognitive science.
HOWEVER, the last two cats we got as kittens. They did NOT understand mirrors until they were going into cat adolescence. Might the researchers who tested cats have failed to appreciate that cat brains go through developmental stages the same as people brains?
Furthermore, consider the anoles commonly sold as "chameleons". Put a male one in front of a mirror and it will make an aggressive display. It thinks it is seeing _another_ anole. Do cats do this? No, they do not. Why? I suggest because they know what they are seeing isn't a threat (i.e. themselves).
Oddly, I think cognitive science is _still_ being hampered hundreds of years after Descartes' need as a Christian to distinguish humans from animals in his discussions of cognition. Rather, I would suggest that once cognitive science has duplicated a cat, tacked on a logic unit and a speech unit, and gotten it down to mobile size, it will have created one scary smart and dangerous robot.
Fresh is relative. I suspect this will be sprayed on the boxes of Brazilian burger patties going to our burger chains soon. Wasn't one of the big listeria outbreaks a west coast burger chain?
1. We are in a nation of, by and for the corporations. 2. With the new bankruptcy laws, corporations do not have a problem with your lifelong responsibility and if a method can be agreed upon whereby the incurred obligations "more clearly point to you" all the better for the corporations. 3. So the nation does not have a problem. Any squawking is just the sound of poultry caught in the machinery of the system.
The general public could prove to be too inteligent to make wide adoption of this system practical. Anything's possible. Consider the guy who successfully argued that the bank shouldn't have let him use so simple a password. Generally, the more "individualized" the ID, the more a hack is going to hurt the _individual_, not the corporation. So schemes like this are not your friend. They are just attempts to throw the financial burden of proving you are _not_ guilty until proven innocent upon the consumer.
Assuming Congress gives Bush his law retroactively saying he isn't a war criminal, I assume corporations will bribe the congressmen to pass a similar law absolving them of any consequences since they "were acting in good faith on direction of the government for the safety of the nation."
The self-professed liberal radio commentator Ed Schultz is a pilot. He says he uses his cell phone while flying all the time and the guy who is spreading the rumor that they don't work on planes as part of a conspiracy theory is an idiot.
Try watching The News Hour on PBS. Interesting, unbiased, fluff-free. Follow up
That's why Bush appointed Patricia Harrison, one of his politik propagandists and former GOP Chair, to be Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She has been directly involved in precisely the "fake news" we are discussing: "[A]s a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such 'good news' segments as 'powerful strategic tools' for influencing public opinion." http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.c gi/37/9592
On my local public radio I have heard gems like, "Is it possible for an atheist to have a morality?" When they ran "Socrates, the Soldiering Years" interviewing a military academy historian while Bush was beating the Iraq war drums, I said, "You've _GOT_ to be kidding!" And turned the dial. Forever. It is wishful thinking to believe there is U.S. broadcast media untouched by the rising fascism. Question _everything_ your TV and radio tell you.
Slashdot Mirror
> We decided to go with cable internet
Mistake #1.
I guess. Just as a lowly ADSL home consumer, that sounds horrible -- and relevant since I'm helping an older person decide between Comcast and DSL at the moment. With about 16 hours/day including streaming audio in the background and a vanity web server, I spotted _an_ annual outage from about 15 minutes to 2 hours with my DSL from 2001 through 2003. From 2004 to the present, I can't remember the last outage. There might have been one for about ten minutes -- or maybe I just needed the reset I did at my end. I can't imagine multiple drop-outs per day. If you can't shame your local Comcast into competence, I say run, don't walk, to the competition.
at 2007 science fairs 4H competitions everywhere.
This shouldn't be too daunting. I seem to remember BASIC programs for tic-tac-toe in '80s training manuals. Tie in the response to pickup and placement. The various options for input is where the challenge lies.
When I mentioned that I wasn't interested in the Maxtor on sale at the local computer store because I didn't think Maxtors were reliable the clerk woke up and got enthusiastic about the topic and agreed. Who knows?
My limited experience of a couple dozen drives over a decade and a half would rank Maxtor, Seagate and WD IDEs from low to high quality. Seagate, Hitachi and IBM-Hitachi SCSIs have all served me well, and buying for price, I guess I'll see how some Samsung IDEs work out.
Some parents however are 'enthusiastic laptop proponents,' one saying the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son 'master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'"
w erpoint.ap/
So she didn't get the 2003 message by artist David Byrne that PowerPoint is a schizoid, dumbed-down way to spend time and try to convey information?
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/30/byrne.po
Far from a pleasantly wacko suggestion, I think this is the most crucial issue of our time. Even if the Neocon regime could be crowbarred out of power, what are the chances that the Democrats would methodically roll back the precedents of the Bush Regime to restore our rights guaranteed under the Constitution and Bill of Rights? Sadly, I'm thinking, "very slim". Lawless power unleashed is too tempting to put back in the bottle. Welcome to the Empire -- and freedom and human rights don't mix with empire.
Does it matter? Pay your money, keep the receipt and you've presumably got a right to have libdvdcss code on your hard drive. It's having the encryption algorithm without a license that's the hardcore felony, isn't it?
Boot Knoppix, open a root terminal, run PartImage. Yes, it will adequately backup XP NTFS and the MBR.
Burning several disks is so 1996. You can net backup to a central repository with PartImage if you have several machines.
Maybe I'm prejudiced because my Ubuntu disk hung on my test machine and I didn't think much of the Kubuntu I downloaded but I like Debian the more I use it and I'm glad I went with their base foundation. Switching to testing for close to a year, I think people will be surprised that the packages are pleasantly current.
As for the installation, there really is a question of how simple you can realistically want it to be. AT LEAST IT ISN"T DEBIAN WOODY!!
In the second half of the 90s, I basically had an ever-more-elaborate setup for six years with OS/2 because it had a separate boot partition like linux and a relatively simple file system with HPFS so it was easy to bare metal backup by just Zipping to Jaz disks from a floppy boot. As such, over several years I could build in a considerable depth of individualization in program interactions, email filtering logic and the like.
At the same time, it seemed like every Windows home user I knew was reinstalling every 3-6 months. That would have driven me crazy. Where was the opportunity to build individualization into your setup when you did that? As such I have to wonder whether Windows has conditioned people to think of a computer as the lowest common installation and _not_ as a tool which can be expanded to a user's individualizations. If the computer asked them whether they would like it to set up a macro from one program to another to automate a task they would probably freak.
It is probably the same mentality at the NYT that many streamers have. The NYT has its free stuff and it has it subscription stuff. I suspect they think they are being shrewd by only allowing open media on the "free" front page.
But is it shrewd? A radio station wouldn't make it _hard_ to tune in their broadcast because that would be counterproductive to the value of their station for ad revenue, right?
Yet internet streamers often act like every copyrighted word from their announcers is archive gold to be sold and resold for decades and they would be insane to allow access to a program like mplayer where the savvy user knows how to save their invaluable content. Well, I've got a shock for them. What they often stream is no more valuable than what is being broadcast on the radio or TV and people are no more likely to save every byte than people are to tape radio or TV all day. And, sadly, it may be that if ad revenue can't pay for stream, perhaps stream isn't a useful medium?
Now that I've got my MythTV setup running and MythStream compiled in, I can see that proprietary embedded streaming isn't going to cut it for me. EVEN IF they accommodate something like linux RealPlayer, in the living room I'm going to be listening to stations where I can add a static URL to my MythStream page and click on it with a remote.
If most african countries have retained colonial English or French as the languages of business and government because they realize they can't deal wth 100 tribal languages, why should the internet be different?
Not that it isn't a good thing that linux was converted to Sotho relatively easily and it would be great if there could be lively sites dedicated to every language group -- but Wikipedia? Lt. Uhura knew Swahili but spoke English on the bridge.
I have to agree. It is one of those unpleasant test cases I'd put up there with letting Nazis march through black neighborhoods and _NUDIST_ or art pictures including young girls.** You just have to say it is wrong for the court to allow this freelance hacking if we are a nation of principles protecting freedoms. It is wrong when we hire contractors to do our torturing for us and it is wrong for the FBI to give tacit acceptance to this guy breaking into computers. And it is wrong for the court to uphold it. If there is a loophole, Congress should close it. (Or the guy should take it to a higher court -- even if Rush Limbaugh and Reader's Digest would have a field day with it if the ACLU supported the guy.)
;)
It is like we have lost our compass as a nation ruled by principle and have become a nation run as a social psychology experiment. I put the blame on the war on drugs. Narcs went from posing as buyers to posing as dealers. The concept caught on across the nation expanding to decoy prostitutes, decoy fences, and decoy kiddie porn sites. When you talk about government spending, I don't know when it became the government's job to act as Satan tempting us into various sins. I think it is these decoy programs that have set the foundation for saying, "Hey, who cares about principles? These programs just work!" They set a precedent for acceptance of further judgements in a case like this. But it makes you wonder where a government based on pragmatism instead of principle will take us in the end.
** In our area, we've had a mother taking a photography class get in big trouble dropping off pictures of her nude daughter at the photomat. One shot of the kid hugging her dog particularly got somebody's testicles in a knot. Lord protect their heart from cardiac arrest if they ever lay eyes upon the somewhat notorious oil Young Girl Playing with her Dog c. 1775 by Jean-Honore Fragonard occasionally shown in art history classes
I agree. Another $40 might be a deal breaker for countries like Mali and Chad where $100 is already a lot of money. So it becomes the Asian "Children's Machine". Could be a considerable geo-economic compromise that still leaves most of africa in particular out of the game.
I'm sure you meant to say, "And don't view, do, send or receive anything non-trivial while traveling".
The story is getting out. One of our local TV stations set up a guy with a sniffer in a coffee shop. "Someone -- I suspect that girl in the corner -- is messaging her boyfriend right now."
Succinct. But I believe there are already a lot of longitudinal health studies that demonstrate the role of environmental factors and personal choices on "cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia and joint problems". What good do those do Big Pharma? They are looking for things that respond to drugs. And that isn't a bad thing even if the greatest good for the greatest number might be realized by life change and public health actions.
The issue of volunteer compensation is interesting. Before the era of Reagan (and Thatcher in this case) there was more recognition that research was for the public good instead of the greatest possible profit for a closed group. There had been an assumption that results would be affordable to the general public.
But I can think of a couple local examples of corporate volunteers:
1. Air America Radio. If the plumbers and coffee shops that advertise on our local affiliate (in a major metro market) are any indication, the big media money isn't in criticizing the Bush regime. So they solicit money from individuals who want a free-as-in-open-source media even though the contributors aren't given a financial stake in the station's success.
2. Our state fair. A fair is by historical definition essentially a marketplace. It is an opportunity for a small businessman to sell you a four dollar corn dog. But fairs are fun and our state fair has a full-time foundation with a building of people smiling and dialing to raise money to support the infrastructure. It makes emotional sense akin to a charity to a lot of people even if it is rather absurd at its base to donate money to a business mechanism because you just like them so much.
Prince of DARKness, John Carpenter, '87. Techno-babble pseudo-zombie movie but creepy atmospherics as all get out. Dark matter and mirrors will get you.
Think I'll go with the science on this one though. Seems like a logical conclusion that calls for funding a hunt for more examples.
Your example doesn't constitute the proof you think it does. If you are staring at each other through a mirror, that means YOU recognize its mirror image, and in return it recognizes YOUR mirror image.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. After we make eye contact in the mirror, my cat will turn its head away to look at my _actual_ face. That is where the combination of its representation, my representation, its actual self, my actual self, their relationship, and my cat's action upon them is so suggestive. Again, what "meaning" might or might not accompany the representations is an area for research some time in the not terribly near future.
Consider Bowie's Alladin Sane. You wouldn't know from the Ryko CD that every song title was matched with a city in parenthesis on the LP.
I think it is just that every technology is so much more expensive -- the same way CDs are so much more expensive than LPs to produce. Yeah, that's the ticket.
1. Dolphins have a cognitive sense of self, as shown in their ability to recognize that they are seeing themselves in mirrors. This is an ability only found in dolphins and higher primates (including humans).
Academic B.S. Every cat I've had has recognized itself in the mirror. I can make eye contact with my cat _in_the_mirror_ and have it turn and look me in the face. Flow chart out the cognitive ramifications of that. How _deep_ that "self" recognition lies is a question for future cognitive science.
HOWEVER, the last two cats we got as kittens. They did NOT understand mirrors until they were going into cat adolescence. Might the researchers who tested cats have failed to appreciate that cat brains go through developmental stages the same as people brains?
Furthermore, consider the anoles commonly sold as "chameleons". Put a male one in front of a mirror and it will make an aggressive display. It thinks it is seeing _another_ anole. Do cats do this? No, they do not. Why? I suggest because they know what they are seeing isn't a threat (i.e. themselves).
Oddly, I think cognitive science is _still_ being hampered hundreds of years after Descartes' need as a Christian to distinguish humans from animals in his discussions of cognition. Rather, I would suggest that once cognitive science has duplicated a cat, tacked on a logic unit and a speech unit, and gotten it down to mobile size, it will have created one scary smart and dangerous robot.
Fresh is relative. I suspect this will be sprayed on the boxes of Brazilian burger patties going to our burger chains soon. Wasn't one of the big listeria outbreaks a west coast burger chain?
Let's follow the steps:
1. We are in a nation of, by and for the corporations.
2. With the new bankruptcy laws, corporations do not have a problem with your lifelong responsibility and if a method can be agreed upon whereby the incurred obligations "more clearly point to you" all the better for the corporations.
3. So the nation does not have a problem. Any squawking is just the sound of poultry caught in the machinery of the system.
The general public could prove to be too inteligent to make wide adoption of this system practical. Anything's possible. Consider the guy who successfully argued that the bank shouldn't have let him use so simple a password. Generally, the more "individualized" the ID, the more a hack is going to hurt the _individual_, not the corporation. So schemes like this are not your friend. They are just attempts to throw the financial burden of proving you are _not_ guilty until proven innocent upon the consumer.
Assuming Congress gives Bush his law retroactively saying he isn't a war criminal, I assume corporations will bribe the congressmen to pass a similar law absolving them of any consequences since they "were acting in good faith on direction of the government for the safety of the nation."
Well, it is the IT field. I just took "religion" as a code word for Second Life.
The self-professed liberal radio commentator Ed Schultz is a pilot. He says he uses his cell phone while flying all the time and the guy who is spreading the rumor that they don't work on planes as part of a conspiracy theory is an idiot.
Try watching The News Hour on PBS. Interesting, unbiased, fluff-free. Follow up
c gi/37/9592
That's why Bush appointed Patricia Harrison, one of his politik propagandists and former GOP Chair, to be Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She has been directly involved in precisely the "fake news" we are discussing: "[A]s a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such 'good news' segments as 'powerful strategic tools' for influencing public opinion." http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.
See also "Destroying PBS": http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0617-27.htm
On my local public radio I have heard gems like, "Is it possible for an atheist to have a morality?" When they ran "Socrates, the Soldiering Years" interviewing a military academy historian while Bush was beating the Iraq war drums, I said, "You've _GOT_ to be kidding!" And turned the dial. Forever. It is wishful thinking to believe there is U.S. broadcast media untouched by the rising fascism. Question _everything_ your TV and radio tell you.