Ubuntu has had/serious/ issues keeping up to date with firefox for a long time, the Hoary firefox package situation was a case-in-point of this problem. They were unable to update for serious issues for *months* and barely got a update out before EOL. I'm convinced they need to drop their backporting policies altogether and bite the bullet on some software. They should have just pushed out Firefox 2.0 immediately.
And if $170/yr is too much, sign up for whatever AC control system they have in your area. In Minnesota, it saves you a considerable amount of money (15%) on your summer bills. This easily pays for the increased clean energy costs.
Plus, a CFL fixture has less Hg in it than the amount of Hg the coal plant to fire your old lighting would put into the air. The Hg in the CFL is easier to recover, to boot. I don't remember the citation for the study on this, however.
The 60W Commercial Electric bulbs are great, I've not had one fail yet. They are my general purpouse replacement bulb since they are small enough to fit in most fixtures. I even use them outside in enclosed, recessed, fixtures and even with the additional heat load they've been putting up with it fine so far. (over a year now) Westinghouse branded 'reflector' lights are what I'm using in the living room and to finish it off I have IKEA branded A-Line (frosted glass over the 'swirl') bulbs in exposed fixtures. IKEA also has small-base (candleabra?) lighting, even 60W ones! I've got 6 of them in my dining room fixture and its massively bright. The only places I've been unable to use CFL lighting is outdoor halogen flood lights, but I saw some replacement bulbs that claim to be fairly bright that I might try in the future; 12V track lighting -- I've got two low voltage (also cute little small lights) tracks that use halogen lights that aren't going to be moving to CFL and can't due to size; motion sensor lighting, which does not use a relay switch to turn it on, so my garage entry lights don't work out either; and lastly, garage door lights -- I've not found a CFL to fit in the sockets of the garage door openers we have, the socket is excessively recessed.
I do it for the savings, but I use that savings to pay for 100% wind power. Think about it if you can, you can fairly easily cut down a huge chunk of your carbon impact without having to buy a hybrid car (anyhow, I take the bus) if your state has a green power requirement. Along with a 'savers switch' on my AC I've basically paid the same as a normal customer but have had AC cycling and 100% green power.
Yeah, I did a comparison again between them for trips starting in minneapolis and I was hard pressed to figure out why not just drive the distance or stay in a hotel in the middle of nowhere for a night after driving for 8 hours or something. The trip time savings for Detriot and Traverse City (trusting google maps, which isn't really up to date on speed limits) was only like 2-3 hours at most, and actually it seemed like the express was a worse deal from this direction since the trip distance savings was only about 150mi each way. The SS Badger is a bit better, at closer to 200 miles for the traverse city trip, but only 122 miles for the detriot trip. Driving a car that gets 30mpg hwy (mmmm, ford focus wagon) means that those trip distance savings is like a tank of gas plus two gallons or so. Definately not cost effective from that perspective.
However, the trip time for the SS Badger is awfuly slow. I took it once as a kid, it was sloooooow. It might be nice though, to get a stateroom and catch one of the overnight trips if there isn't a storm or heavy 'seas', but still, again, a hotel in the middle of nowhere, Michigan or Wisconsin, is a ton cheaper than $320. (2 pax, car, stateroom on badger) You'd probally find something damn nice for $160 each way and enjoy a hottub or something. (or get a cheap room and find some good food somewhere, hopefully)
There's always flying! Only $648 to fly to Traverse City, and only $528 to Detroit! (2 pax, but then you have to figure in car rental) Gotta love Northwest! I figure next time I need to make it out that way I'll just use the FF miles I have to pay for one of the tickets.
Cripes, its cheaper to fly to Orlando, grmbl.
Oh, and damn you Illinois bastards for your open road tolling roadwork on I-90. Damn you to hell. Longest 2 hours wasted of my life, ever. Same goes with the Tri-State roadwork towards wisconsin, but to a lesser extent.
I did once go through the city on thanksgiving via the skyway (i think it was I-90, 290, 90/94, skyway or something like that) and it worked out fine, but that was just when the skyway was just opening back up from construction and nobody really got the idea that it was open again or something. We blew through IL from border to border at hwy speeds, no traffic. I even got honked at for not tailgating appropriately. (ie, not enough tailgaiting)
Ticketing for just over 5mph is becoming SOP in some cities. Some Minneapolis area freeways recently went from 55->60 speed limits, but troopers and police are pulling people over for far less than they used to. Lots more people are going close to 60 rather than going 65-68ish.
The program is called HEAT -- Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic.
EAP-TLS is a PITA to support, mostly because you'd have to implement PKI to deploy it. EAP-TTLS (in case you misspelled it) is terrible to support because you'll have to deploy a supplicant to all users before they can connect. Due to Microsoft (and the inability of the IETF and IEEE to declare one EAP type as requried that doesn't suck) if you are implementing WPA, you'll be support EAP-PEAP/MSCHAPv2. I'm not happy about it, but this doesn't require installing insane 3rd party apps into windows that you hope will work through future updates and other crap. OSX works with it fine. And NetworkManager with wpa_supplicant also works with it fine.
Really, seriously, you do not crack passwords to get your work done. You crack passwords to ensure site security if it is part of your job description, but you do not use those accounts to get work done. Cripes.
Moderately non-rich people do create jobs too. It doesn't take a billion dollars to create jobs, it takes an idea and determination. If this country has changed to where only the rich can afford to govern and start businesses, count me out.
If you've taken the time to buy a house and pop out some kids it isn't that unreasonable. If you do both and really set up some other cards right the chances of you actually paying the taxes in your bracket are fairly low. It's not hard to do.
If you don't have enough deductions and want to spend some money, you could always donate it. The government just ends up giving deductions to those who invest in homes and children at this point, and the likelyhood of that changing anytime soon is low, even with some 'Lets get rid of the AMT!' push.
You don't like it? Get someone elected that you prefer! Downside: most people have kids and a house, so the chances of this changing are about nil.
The fatman track for 7th Guest really made it worth having a sound card that could do roland emulation. It was nothing less of omfg.
For consoles, FF* with music from the now-independent Nobuo Uematsu (with his company Smile Please) is the definintive composer of game music in my mind.
I know it sounds stupid, but they have a metro area network fiber setup in some cities (especially former mediaone markets, i think) that is very, very nice and ethernet based. You'd get internet in increments from 5mbps-1gbps depending on how much you want to spend.
Their 'network' service also looks cool for distributed metro campus issues. One ethernet segment to interconnect multiple locations. They even support vlan trunking without having to harass them!
Bzzzt. Most phones can handle MMS now, which allows for absoultely huge 'messages' consisting of multimedia content.
Plus, imagine if someone figured out a worm for something popular, like a razr, and promuglated it over bluetooth.:) BT might not be turned-on-by-default for many phones now, but some day it might.
Comcast is starting to experiment with using VOD to fill this role, albiet with a smaller overall collection. However, someday we will see karoke revolution double max extreme on PS3 that will probally have like 5000 songs or some shit.;)
Hmm, I don't have an IPod and want to put it on my Brand-X mp3 player, how do I do that? Also, how do I buy music from anyone else who has their own drm fiefdom? Lastly, how do I resell this music?
So we've taken away free markets and the first sale doctrine, way to go!
Many commercial software products require use within a certain distance (not a joke) of the license server. Sometimes its the building, sometimes its 10 miles, who knows until you get the license going! Worse, you'll have to ensure that people can't get around it with VPN and the sort.
Check your licenses, be sure that you can provide this software to your end users for cheaper. We still run desktops because we can provide a unified, consistent environment (you can't do that with laptops users self-admin) and licensed software that is merely impossible to license to individual end users.
[of course, my mother in law sent it in without crediting me, and I simply don't want to figure out how to convince them to credit it properly...]
I started out with 35mm and went to some serious week long classes up at Michigan Tech University as a kid to learn how to take reasonable photos and develop B&W film. The photo above was taken on a fairly lame Kodak DC280 -- a point and shoot 2.1MP.
(except for the person with the cat) were taken with the same camera. I really need to update that section with some of my newer photos, but still, the person behind the camera defines the work. The tools help, but I feel you are pretty much right that they can't fix the photos by saying "don't use 35mm" or "digital is better".
I've got a Nikon Coolpix 5700 now and plan on a DSLR sometime in the future (2007? 2008?) but the challenge is really taking great photos with the tools available, not getting the coolest tool (like some people I know with D70's) and then barely knowing how to use it! I don't even try to consider myself semi-pro or anything like some people. I just want great photos, and from time to time they turn out to be really damn amazing.
I've got something like.75 in one and.95 in the other. I'm also slightly nearsighted, but I wear contacts while working -- I generally am far enough (2ft+, yay for that 24in widescreen LCD:) ) from my displays that not using anything would mean hunching over.
Its definately fixable with contacts or glasses. If you go with glasses, make sure you get something high quality like crizal or something, not some cheap no-anti-glare stuff. Crizal also has the bonus of less starbursts while driving, if you get those.
You'll be amazed looking at trees (mmmmm, fractal patterns) for years and wonder why you dealt with the haze.:)
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Ubuntu has had /serious/ issues keeping up to date with firefox for a long time, the Hoary firefox package situation was a case-in-point of this problem. They were unable to update for serious issues for *months* and barely got a update out before EOL. I'm convinced they need to drop their backporting policies altogether and bite the bullet on some software. They should have just pushed out Firefox 2.0 immediately.
That only works until you show up on the voter rolls for the last primary again. Stop voting if you want to be ignored. ;)
[for those months, not the entire year, but just the costs for those months in paticular, assuming that natgas is high]
And if $170/yr is too much, sign up for whatever AC control system they have in your area. In Minnesota, it saves you a considerable amount of money (15%) on your summer bills. This easily pays for the increased clean energy costs.
Find someone else to run your e-mail. pobox.com, for example, is fairly cheap. I run my own mail on a colo box and choose my own spam 'rules'.
Plus, a CFL fixture has less Hg in it than the amount of Hg the coal plant to fire your old lighting would put into the air. The Hg in the CFL is easier to recover, to boot. I don't remember the citation for the study on this, however.
The 60W Commercial Electric bulbs are great, I've not had one fail yet. They are my general purpouse replacement bulb since they are small enough to fit in most fixtures. I even use them outside in enclosed, recessed, fixtures and even with the additional heat load they've been putting up with it fine so far. (over a year now) Westinghouse branded 'reflector' lights are what I'm using in the living room and to finish it off I have IKEA branded A-Line (frosted glass over the 'swirl') bulbs in exposed fixtures. IKEA also has small-base (candleabra?) lighting, even 60W ones! I've got 6 of them in my dining room fixture and its massively bright. The only places I've been unable to use CFL lighting is outdoor halogen flood lights, but I saw some replacement bulbs that claim to be fairly bright that I might try in the future; 12V track lighting -- I've got two low voltage (also cute little small lights) tracks that use halogen lights that aren't going to be moving to CFL and can't due to size; motion sensor lighting, which does not use a relay switch to turn it on, so my garage entry lights don't work out either; and lastly, garage door lights -- I've not found a CFL to fit in the sockets of the garage door openers we have, the socket is excessively recessed.
I do it for the savings, but I use that savings to pay for 100% wind power. Think about it if you can, you can fairly easily cut down a huge chunk of your carbon impact without having to buy a hybrid car (anyhow, I take the bus) if your state has a green power requirement. Along with a 'savers switch' on my AC I've basically paid the same as a normal customer but have had AC cycling and 100% green power.
Yeah, I did a comparison again between them for trips starting in minneapolis and I was hard pressed to figure out why not just drive the distance or stay in a hotel in the middle of nowhere for a night after driving for 8 hours or something. The trip time savings for Detriot and Traverse City (trusting google maps, which isn't really up to date on speed limits) was only like 2-3 hours at most, and actually it seemed like the express was a worse deal from this direction since the trip distance savings was only about 150mi each way. The SS Badger is a bit better, at closer to 200 miles for the traverse city trip, but only 122 miles for the detriot trip. Driving a car that gets 30mpg hwy (mmmm, ford focus wagon) means that those trip distance savings is like a tank of gas plus two gallons or so. Definately not cost effective from that perspective.
However, the trip time for the SS Badger is awfuly slow. I took it once as a kid, it was sloooooow. It might be nice though, to get a stateroom and catch one of the overnight trips if there isn't a storm or heavy 'seas', but still, again, a hotel in the middle of nowhere, Michigan or Wisconsin, is a ton cheaper than $320. (2 pax, car, stateroom on badger) You'd probally find something damn nice for $160 each way and enjoy a hottub or something. (or get a cheap room and find some good food somewhere, hopefully)
There's always flying! Only $648 to fly to Traverse City, and only $528 to Detroit! (2 pax, but then you have to figure in car rental) Gotta love Northwest! I figure next time I need to make it out that way I'll just use the FF miles I have to pay for one of the tickets.
Cripes, its cheaper to fly to Orlando, grmbl.
Oh, and damn you Illinois bastards for your open road tolling roadwork on I-90. Damn you to hell. Longest 2 hours wasted of my life, ever. Same goes with the Tri-State roadwork towards wisconsin, but to a lesser extent.
I did once go through the city on thanksgiving via the skyway (i think it was I-90, 290, 90/94, skyway or something like that) and it worked out fine, but that was just when the skyway was just opening back up from construction and nobody really got the idea that it was open again or something. We blew through IL from border to border at hwy speeds, no traffic. I even got honked at for not tailgating appropriately. (ie, not enough tailgaiting)
Ticketing for just over 5mph is becoming SOP in some cities. Some Minneapolis area freeways recently went from 55->60 speed limits, but troopers and police are pulling people over for far less than they used to. Lots more people are going close to 60 rather than going 65-68ish.
i ndex.html
The program is called HEAT -- Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic.
http://www.dot.state.mn.us/hottopics/speedlimits/
EAP-TLS is a PITA to support, mostly because you'd have to implement PKI to deploy it. EAP-TTLS (in case you misspelled it) is terrible to support because you'll have to deploy a supplicant to all users before they can connect. Due to Microsoft (and the inability of the IETF and IEEE to declare one EAP type as requried that doesn't suck) if you are implementing WPA, you'll be support EAP-PEAP/MSCHAPv2. I'm not happy about it, but this doesn't require installing insane 3rd party apps into windows that you hope will work through future updates and other crap. OSX works with it fine. And NetworkManager with wpa_supplicant also works with it fine.
Its not always MSDNAA, some schools license it via their Campus Agreement, too.
GenCon 96 was the last and only gencon I went to, and it sounded like it was really the last one worth going to. Pfeh.
Really, seriously, you do not crack passwords to get your work done. You crack passwords to ensure site security if it is part of your job description, but you do not use those accounts to get work done. Cripes.
Actually, they were somewhat highly regarded in the twin cities area until their post best buy implosion/sale.
Moderately non-rich people do create jobs too. It doesn't take a billion dollars to create jobs, it takes an idea and determination. If this country has changed to where only the rich can afford to govern and start businesses, count me out.
If you've taken the time to buy a house and pop out some kids it isn't that unreasonable. If you do both and really set up some other cards right the chances of you actually paying the taxes in your bracket are fairly low. It's not hard to do.
If you don't have enough deductions and want to spend some money, you could always donate it. The government just ends up giving deductions to those who invest in homes and children at this point, and the likelyhood of that changing anytime soon is low, even with some 'Lets get rid of the AMT!' push.
You don't like it? Get someone elected that you prefer! Downside: most people have kids and a house, so the chances of this changing are about nil.
The fatman track for 7th Guest really made it worth having a sound card that could do roland emulation. It was nothing less of omfg.
For consoles, FF* with music from the now-independent Nobuo Uematsu (with his company Smile Please) is the definintive composer of game music in my mind.
I know it sounds stupid, but they have a metro area network fiber setup in some cities (especially former mediaone markets, i think) that is very, very nice and ethernet based. You'd get internet in increments from 5mbps-1gbps depending on how much you want to spend.
http://tinyurl.com/4db44
Their 'network' service also looks cool for distributed metro campus issues. One ethernet segment to interconnect multiple locations. They even support vlan trunking without having to harass them!
Bzzzt. Most phones can handle MMS now, which allows for absoultely huge 'messages' consisting of multimedia content.
:) BT might not be turned-on-by-default for many phones now, but some day it might.
Plus, imagine if someone figured out a worm for something popular, like a razr, and promuglated it over bluetooth.
Comcast is starting to experiment with using VOD to fill this role, albiet with a smaller overall collection. However, someday we will see karoke revolution double max extreme on PS3 that will probally have like 5000 songs or some shit. ;)
Hmm, I don't have an IPod and want to put it on my Brand-X mp3 player, how do I do that? Also, how do I buy music from anyone else who has their own drm fiefdom? Lastly, how do I resell this music?
So we've taken away free markets and the first sale doctrine, way to go!
From what I heard the NSF 'increase' reinstates funding that was 'cut' last year to pay for Katrina costs.
http://www.cra.org/CRN/articles/jan06/harsha.html
Many commercial software products require use within a certain distance (not a joke) of the license server. Sometimes its the building, sometimes its 10 miles, who knows until you get the license going! Worse, you'll have to ensure that people can't get around it with VPN and the sort.
Check your licenses, be sure that you can provide this software to your end users for cheaper. We still run desktops because we can provide a unified, consistent environment (you can't do that with laptops users self-admin) and licensed software that is merely impossible to license to individual end users.
Heh, one of my photos ended up on a county website, does that count? ;)
0 03.phpr ial%20Day%20Weekend/dcp_2353.jpg
a /
http://www.co.otter-tail.mn.us/pics/eastleaflake2
http://www.ringworld.org/~dieman/photos/2003/Memo
[of course, my mother in law sent it in without crediting me, and I simply don't want to figure out how to convince them to credit it properly...]
I started out with 35mm and went to some serious week long classes up at Michigan Tech University as a kid to learn how to take reasonable photos and develop B&W film. The photo above was taken on a fairly lame Kodak DC280 -- a point and shoot 2.1MP.
Most of these:
http://www.ringworld.org/~dieman/photos/Featured/
(except for the person with the cat) were taken with the same camera. I really need to update that section with some of my newer photos, but still, the person behind the camera defines the work. The tools help, but I feel you are pretty much right that they can't fix the photos by saying "don't use 35mm" or "digital is better".
I've got a Nikon Coolpix 5700 now and plan on a DSLR sometime in the future (2007? 2008?) but the challenge is really taking great photos with the tools available, not getting the coolest tool (like some people I know with D70's) and then barely knowing how to use it! I don't even try to consider myself semi-pro or anything like some people. I just want great photos, and from time to time they turn out to be really damn amazing.
Also, best time I had last year taking photos:
http://www.ringworld.org/~dieman/photos/2005/chin
I've got something like .75 in one and .95 in the other. I'm also slightly nearsighted, but I wear contacts while working -- I generally am far enough (2ft+, yay for that 24in widescreen LCD :) ) from my displays that not using anything would mean hunching over.
:)
Its definately fixable with contacts or glasses. If you go with glasses, make sure you get something high quality like crizal or something, not some cheap no-anti-glare stuff. Crizal also has the bonus of less starbursts while driving, if you get those.
You'll be amazed looking at trees (mmmmm, fractal patterns) for years and wonder why you dealt with the haze.