OK folks, Maybe my threshold is set too high here or maybe I have been too busy to pay attention, but did Congress and 3/4 of the states of the union ratify a constitutional amendment which obviates Article 1, Section 9?
That article clearly states that, and I quote verbatim: No Tax or duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
What part of this is ambiguous, and what part does not apply in this situation?
Not only that, but just below, in article 1 section 10 (Powers prohibited of States) it clearly states that No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports..
BTW, A1S9 is subtitled 'Limits on Congress', which means that Congress may NOT deviate from this legally unless the constitution itself is amended!!!! Therefore Congress can't grant those rights (A1S10) because they are not authorized to (A1S9), again, without an amendment to the Constitution itself.
What is so hard to understand here? And why get worked up about it?? This pops up occasionally, and it really shouldn't as it's much ado about nothing until the amendment is proposed....
Alphas are not "PC" quality or speed! There are only two (new) Alphas that I can think of that are less then $5,000 USD
What about Microway's Alpha-based systems? $1995 for a 533MHz 21164...
Your Working Boy,
Re:Looks like time to plug the "Dead Media Project
on
Middle Media
·
· Score: 2
how email, where messages are sent across great distances at the speed of light, has largely replaced smoke signals, where messages are send across great distances at the speed of light.
Or semaphores, though the network layer latencies of Semanet and Smoke Ring are pretty atrocious.. Bridging is really difficult and the routing algorithms are poorly implemented and not very well maintained..
Newspapers have a future if they choose to recognize a few things:
You need to develop into a wider array of offerings, such as a web component, 'journals' aiming at a specific segment, etc. Not only that, you need to task each component correctly: breaking news doesn't belong in print, and in-depth analysis requiring staring at pixels should probably be in print (with better resolution and contrast than most screens).
Alternatively, you could continue to drive your product towards either the traditional readers who are averse to technology (and who are having increasingly bad eyesight, or are even dying of old age) or to the ignorant masses who don't know how to use technology (the Globe, the Daily Mail, other tabloids). For any newspaper of record these are not valid options.
Here's a convenient hashtable for planning the future of newspapers:
breaking news: web/broadcast
in-depth analysis: print
reader participation & feedback: web/email
where to make $$: charge more for print media and reduce the # of print ads, while charging nothing for web and using web ad revenue. Consider licensing your name to broadcast media and/or public affairs shows that meet your ethics and accuracy criteria
comics: large, both in print and on web;)
One major criterion for selecting a particular newspaper is the quality of its analysis. Another is the quality of its editors. Use these where they would do the most good (analysis of the issues behind the news, editorials, op-ed contributors). Don't be afraid to make your print arm smarter and more concise: think Investors Business Daily here, but with world news/politics rather than business news as the target. Papers like IBD and magazines like The Economist have the right idea. Discuss the history of issues, discuss their connectedness, bring up multiple viewpoints and rationales. Take the time (and column inches) to do this.
Remember the brand. People turn to The New York Times or The Washington Post when they want to read the canonical news. Use that (responsibly of course;) to your advantage, and offer multiple levels of readership (free gets the news, low-budget gets some analysis, high-budget gets the whole kit&kaboodle). Note the one big success in online paid-subscriptions, WSJ interactive, offers a _lot_ of content (more than the print) and functionality.
Newspapers can survive, even (especially!!!!!) local papers, but only if they eschew oldthink...
OTOH, the rush to World Domination has often led me to wonder -- will the presence of the clueless millions "improve" Linux the same way the opening of AOL's floodgates "improved" the Internet?
Please let me get a little evil here for a minute. What, in the end, has the popularization of the Internet gotten us, as nerds? LOTS OF MONEY for doing the shit we'd be doing for free anyway. Who here really has to work for a living, in the way our parents had to work at jobs they hated?
Not only do we get the money, we get the POWER: WE understand this shit, and they do NOT. We are scary powerful in this realm, and our ideals and methods are influencing the general community because of the public Internet. Is this bad? For us, no.
Similarly, what happens when Linux is made available and accessible to the masses? WE GAIN POWER as we again are the happy few who UNDERSTAND this shit.. Not only that, but our influence on people's computing grows, and for us again, this is not bad. It means we can use the software we like, and get paid for it. WE craft the rules and determine how things are done.
This is NOT megalomania speaking here: this is thinking big. World Domination is about not having to put up with Micro$oft shit because everyone uses it. It's about being able to fix the problems with our systems when they appear. It's about freedom of speech as well as freedom of beer. It's about getting paid big bucks to work on cool shit you'd have done for free anyway, and who better to get those big bucks, you or those fratboy jocks who were such big shit way back when but who are now, if they're lucky, hapless NT techs?
Like I said, it was going to be evil and self serving, but I hope there were a few kernels of truth in there, or at least a spark or two..
Charles is right that Linux, even with KDE or Gnome, isn't suitable for SOHO environments where the user doesn't have a 'Linux Friend' handy. And I don't see this changing without us ditching the UNIX underpinnings.
I disagree. IRIX seems to be fairly user friendly last time I tried it. MacOSX comes from Apple, whose fortunes live and die by UI and ease-of-use, and they seem to be pretty happy with a unix-based infrastructure.
The point is, it doesn't really matter what you're running underneath as long as it's flexible, stable, and efficient. Linux is (or can be configured to be) that. What you need for ease of UI and ease of use is for motivated developers to create that interface and libraries. It's happening as I write this.
Personally, I believe that Linux will eventually make serious desktop inroads for many reasons (price, dollar-magnet of UI inevitably drawing commercial interest, international nature of linux, power on old platforms, driver support) and that the areas which are weakest (ease-of-use in the UI, ease of configuration, desktop apps) are being worked on.
Well, as I assembled my current PCs from base components and never had to purchase a license for the OS software, I am not about to pay $199 or whatever it is for a full version of Window$ just to view these dopey files...
Judaism and the Muslim Faith certainly [attempt to suppress opinion and technology] this as well, at times, but not nearly in so organized and vocal a way.
I guess overthrowing governments and starting countries aren't terribly organized or vocal acts... Our Xian fundies are bad but they haven't stormed the capitol with machine guns blazing.... yet...
There is no Constitution for the Net, no bylaws or widely agreed-upon system or Constitution to protect widely agreed upon system to protect such rights as privacy, openness, and property.
This is not entirely accurate. RFCs define 'bylaws' of communications protocols and necessary prerequisites of 'membership' in the Internet, and even define privacy rights (here, here, and here, among others) and openness (SMTP being the first and most common that springs to mind). The concept of property is hotly debated, but will at some point probably be covered by a mechanism defined by an RFC.
You might rebut that these concepts are merely the definition of mechanisms by which discourse on the 'net is defined and regulated. But I ask you, is the Constitution not itself merely a document which defines mechanisms for human discourse (by laying the groundwork for the definition of law and administration of government)? I would go so far as to say that app-layer RFCs are to laws as TCP/IP is to the Constitution...
Geez, then why don't they learn Silicon Valley's lesson (while also trying to mitigate the impact of that success better)?
It always intrigues me, these state governments, if they want jobs and tax revenue from tech companies, then why not MAKE THE STATE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT FRIENDLY TO (BIO|COMPUTER)TECH STARTUPS?
Provide tax relief for startups up to 5 yrs, both corporate and sales
Provide red-tape 'expediting' services and official support for people with ideas but not a lot of knowledge of the levers and machinations of state
Provide funding and equipment for technology education
Locate the 'tech startup incubators' near college campi
Improve your schools and quality-of-life to attract good, smart people and keep the ones you have from 'brain-draining' to 'nicer' areas..
Western New York has always frustrated me.. There's a corridor between Buffalo and Rochester which could be a serious tech contender if someone in state government could remove their head from their posterior and clean the feces out of their sensory regions long enough to take notice... You've got UB (the SUNY flagship university, and that is _not_ damning with faint praise..), RPI, Kodak, Xerox IIRC, a reasonably decent infrastructure, low rents and high vacancy, a nice place to live (if you like winter sports;).. What (besides the weather) is keeping this area from pulling a Rte 128 or Silicon Valley? LACK OF VISION if you ask me...
... for a replacement for my Newton MP2100.. It's been what, 2 years since it's been Steved and nothing, NO THING has come along which meets its performance and functionality criteria..
My replacement criteria:
Same size screen: Me like being able to scrawl all over the thing
PCMCIA slots.. Why use a new formfactor, when you can use an existing one with widespread manufacturing support? Does HandSpring's cartridge thingy have better power-management, or anything technically superior to 32-bit cardbus? My Newt has 2 PCMCIA slots, and I wish it had 2 more even if it added half a centimeter in thickness...
Understand the English language, and learn my writing mannerisms.. My Newt, after 2 years of care and feeding, is probably better than 95% accurate, even when I write URLs into the browser.. (Yes, virginia, it does in fact translate http://www.slashdot.org right on the first try! Though I may have to write a NetHopper interface for Slash, as the current webpageset is kinda klunky on the Newt:p )
Have color. Come on. I want candy, and I don't mind having to plug the thing into its charger/cradle at night after I get home from work. Besides, color adds multiple dimensions to UI if used correctly... Hell, I'll take true paperwhite over color, if you can do it without color... Use Li-Ion custom-shaped batteries to pack as much voltage as possible..
StrongARM or Transmeta CPU. Only those have the power/watt ratio to do the interesting things I want my new PDA to do (MP3/MPEGVideo playback, graphical web browsing, wireless voice messaging, SSH client, etc).
Rock-solid syncing of all built-in apps (notes, todos, dates, etc) and an open API to support syncing of 3rd party apps.
Voice recognition.. OK, maybe this is a bit much, but if the MP2100 could do it (Dragon Systems ported their VR software to NewtonScript for the 2100, but the platform was Steved before there was ever a decision to release) so should one of these newer-fangled bits..
My question: after the Newton brain drain to Palm, what have you Newton guys done? Where's Palm's english-language reader? I have yet to see any real progress back towards the functionality I enjoy with my Newton...
Then again, I guess I've always been a 'too good for popularity' tech collector. Atari Lynx, Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Newton... Your Working Boy,
Hah. That's nothing. Wait'll you have to create a volume group, THEN a logical volume, THEN a physical volume, THEN a filesystem, and THEN format the f'in f'er.
I've done it countless times, in SMIT, SAM, and commandline flavors for both.. As well as Veritas VxFS... It's not so hard once you get the picture conceptually, and that's something you can say about pretty much any unix thing as long as you've got more than hot air 'tween the ears...
The _big_ problem I have is in terminology mangling.. Logical Volume is to Plex as Physical Partition is to....
And I'd really be interested in learning XFS for the QoS bits alone.. How's _that_ coming along?
Depends on the feature... I kinda like having 70+ DVDs (and growing) at my fingertips, catalogged by genre and random-shufflable..;)
I have to chuckle at the people buying the high-end DVDs to hook them up to NTSC TV's
Yeah, but then there's those of us hooking them up to large screen projectors that can handle 720p and SVGA (and even those "lowly" projs like the W400Q) that can appreciate features like component (Y/Pr/Pb) video out and progressive processing...
(and yeah, PC + Matrox G400 = kickass DVD deck, but you can't hook an autochanger to your SCSI bus yet..)
Essentially, each journaled device has an area on disk that acts as a transaction log (or Journal) which keeps track of the FS's state during normal use (basically, what inodes aren't synced). When a JFS system is hard-booted, you only need to check the inodes that weren't synced, rather than scan the entire slice. This results in much faster fsck times.
Also, IBM's JFS (from what I've read on the IBM site) will have LVM features (though apparently not the entire LVM system) which depend on the JFS to ensure data integrity when you start throwing exotic filesystem mangling routines (mirroring, Logical Devices (more interesting than concatenation), etc) into the mix..
In other words, JFS is a good thing. We like it. In fact, I'd like to be able to boot off it.
... if the Slash source hadn't been opened. As it is, if we feel that/. is compromised by their affiliation(s), and that compromise is disturbing enough, we can go start our own "FreeDot" or something.
I'm willing, now that/. has 'put up', to stick with these guys and their little website that could. I probably would have even if the source hadn't been released, but I would have had agita about it.
This is also an important reminder to those of you who _weren't_ whinging about the source release: you don't get something unless you ask for it, and you need to call bullshit when you smell it, that's the true rationalist way (no hypocrisy permitted at all, strict and harsh self-editing must be imposed).. You don't have to be a flaming dick about it, but a polite reminder as needed is a _good_ thing, don't forget that.
I don't know if the Playstation 2 can displace a PC, but it sure might displace DVD players
At the low-end, yes, and particularly among people who don't already have a DVD deck. However, mid and higher end DVD people want features that PSX2 can't handle (such as megachanger, component video out, progressive playback, etc).
Still, this device should really help DVD go from manic growth to true explosion... And if the new users are shephereded in correctly, there'll be mounting pressure for DVD features, Anamorphic transfers, and lower prices.. This is a plus for DVD owners as long as the cattle don't ask 'why are all these people stretched out?'...
Personally, I have a 200DVD jukebox. And I'll be getting a PSX2.
Slashdot Mirror
I had thought that polite behavior was a thing of the past. I am so delighted to be proved wrong! :)
Believe it or not, that's how USENET USEd to be.. ten years ago...
Boy, it's been awhile...
Your Working Boy,
Hmm.. I wonder what Joike and the Bots would say...
Your Working Boy,
OK folks, Maybe my threshold is set too high here or maybe I have been too busy to pay attention, but did Congress and 3/4 of the states of the union ratify a constitutional amendment which obviates Article 1, Section 9?
That article clearly states that, and I quote verbatim: No Tax or duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
What part of this is ambiguous, and what part does not apply in this situation?
Not only that, but just below, in article 1 section 10 (Powers prohibited of States) it clearly states that No State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports..
BTW, A1S9 is subtitled 'Limits on Congress', which means that Congress may NOT deviate from this legally unless the constitution itself is amended!!!! Therefore Congress can't grant those rights (A1S10) because they are not authorized to (A1S9), again, without an amendment to the Constitution itself.
What is so hard to understand here? And why get worked up about it?? This pops up occasionally, and it really shouldn't as it's much ado about nothing until the amendment is proposed....
Your Working Boy,
Aah, Pirates of Penzance.. Funny!
Your Working Boy,
Alphas are not "PC" quality or speed! There are only two (new) Alphas that I can think of that are less then $5,000 USD
What about Microway's Alpha-based systems? $1995 for a 533MHz 21164...
Your Working Boy,
how email, where messages are sent across great distances at the speed of light, has largely replaced smoke signals, where messages are send across great distances at the speed of light.
Or semaphores, though the network layer latencies of Semanet and Smoke Ring are pretty atrocious.. Bridging is really difficult and the routing algorithms are poorly implemented and not very well maintained..
Your Working Boy,
Well, Billy Baldwin is sitting in my office, and he saw this story and says
Didn't he get blow'd up?
;)
Your Working Boy,
Newspapers can survive, even (especially!!!!!) local papers, but only if they eschew oldthink...
Your Working Boy,
to hell waiting until the researches pronounce the technology to be "cost-competitive"
Have you tried to buy a gallon of Diesel in the Northeast US lately? It's going for over US$2/gallon!
What price can they generate biodiesel for now?
Your Working Boy,
OTOH, the rush to World Domination has often led me to wonder -- will the presence of the clueless millions "improve" Linux the same way the opening of AOL's floodgates "improved" the Internet?
Please let me get a little evil here for a minute. What, in the end, has the popularization of the Internet gotten us, as nerds? LOTS OF MONEY for doing the shit we'd be doing for free anyway. Who here really has to work for a living, in the way our parents had to work at jobs they hated?
Not only do we get the money, we get the POWER: WE understand this shit, and they do NOT. We are scary powerful in this realm, and our ideals and methods are influencing the general community because of the public Internet. Is this bad? For us, no.
Similarly, what happens when Linux is made available and accessible to the masses? WE GAIN POWER as we again are the happy few who UNDERSTAND this shit.. Not only that, but our influence on people's computing grows, and for us again, this is not bad. It means we can use the software we like, and get paid for it. WE craft the rules and determine how things are done.
This is NOT megalomania speaking here: this is thinking big. World Domination is about not having to put up with Micro$oft shit because everyone uses it. It's about being able to fix the problems with our systems when they appear. It's about freedom of speech as well as freedom of beer. It's about getting paid big bucks to work on cool shit you'd have done for free anyway, and who better to get those big bucks, you or those fratboy jocks who were such big shit way back when but who are now, if they're lucky, hapless NT techs?
Like I said, it was going to be evil and self serving, but I hope there were a few kernels of truth in there, or at least a spark or two..
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
Charles is right that Linux, even with KDE or Gnome, isn't suitable for SOHO environments where the user doesn't have a 'Linux Friend' handy. And I don't see this changing without us ditching the UNIX underpinnings.
I disagree. IRIX seems to be fairly user friendly last time I tried it. MacOSX comes from Apple, whose fortunes live and die by UI and ease-of-use, and they seem to be pretty happy with a unix-based infrastructure.
The point is, it doesn't really matter what you're running underneath as long as it's flexible, stable, and efficient. Linux is (or can be configured to be) that. What you need for ease of UI and ease of use is for motivated developers to create that interface and libraries. It's happening as I write this.
Personally, I believe that Linux will eventually make serious desktop inroads for many reasons (price, dollar-magnet of UI inevitably drawing commercial interest, international nature of linux, power on old platforms, driver support) and that the areas which are weakest (ease-of-use in the UI, ease of configuration, desktop apps) are being worked on.
Don't forget, TiVo is a Linux-based solution that is extremely easy to use...
It can be done.
It SHALL be done.
Be patient.
Your Working Boy,
Well, as I assembled my current PCs from base components and never had to purchase a license for the OS software, I am not about to pay $199 or whatever it is for a full version of Window$ just to view these dopey files...
Anyone care to mpeg-ify them?
Your Working Boy,
Do you think his advertisers appreciated out visit?
....
His advertisers didn't know I was even there
(have you junkbusted lately? Damn it feels good...)
Your Working Boy,
Judaism and the Muslim Faith certainly [attempt to suppress opinion and technology] this as well, at times, but not nearly in so organized and vocal a way.
I guess overthrowing governments and starting countries aren't terribly organized or vocal acts... Our Xian fundies are bad but they haven't stormed the capitol with machine guns blazing.... yet...
Your Working Boy,
"Well, it's really cool. Our web developer is really proud of it. Can't you just get the plug-in?"
;) ;)
Sure.. Where do I download the version for Newton?
(yes, I know you were quoting
Your Working Boy,
There is no Constitution for the Net, no bylaws or widely agreed-upon system or Constitution to protect widely agreed upon system to protect such rights as privacy, openness, and property.
This is not entirely accurate. RFCs define 'bylaws' of communications protocols and necessary prerequisites of 'membership' in the Internet, and even define privacy rights (here, here, and here, among others) and openness (SMTP being the first and most common that springs to mind). The concept of property is hotly debated, but will at some point probably be covered by a mechanism defined by an RFC.
You might rebut that these concepts are merely the definition of mechanisms by which discourse on the 'net is defined and regulated. But I ask you, is the Constitution not itself merely a document which defines mechanisms for human discourse (by laying the groundwork for the definition of law and administration of government)? I would go so far as to say that app-layer RFCs are to laws as TCP/IP is to the Constitution...
Your Working Boy,
It always intrigues me, these state governments, if they want jobs and tax revenue from tech companies, then why not MAKE THE STATE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT FRIENDLY TO (BIO|COMPUTER)TECH STARTUPS?
Western New York has always frustrated me.. There's a corridor between Buffalo and Rochester which could be a serious tech contender if someone in state government could remove their head from their posterior and clean the feces out of their sensory regions long enough to take notice... You've got UB (the SUNY flagship university, and that is _not_ damning with faint praise..), RPI, Kodak, Xerox IIRC, a reasonably decent infrastructure, low rents and high vacancy, a nice place to live (if you like winter sports
Your Working Boy,
My replacement criteria:
My question: after the Newton brain drain to Palm, what have you Newton guys done? Where's Palm's english-language reader? I have yet to see any real progress back towards the functionality I enjoy with my Newton...
Then again, I guess I've always been a 'too good for popularity' tech collector. Atari Lynx, Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Newton...
Your Working Boy,
Hah. That's nothing. Wait'll you have to create a volume group, THEN a logical volume, THEN a physical volume, THEN a filesystem, and THEN format the f'in f'er.
I've done it countless times, in SMIT, SAM, and commandline flavors for both.. As well as Veritas VxFS... It's not so hard once you get the picture conceptually, and that's something you can say about pretty much any unix thing as long as you've got more than hot air 'tween the ears...
The _big_ problem I have is in terminology mangling.. Logical Volume is to Plex as Physical Partition is to....
And I'd really be interested in learning XFS for the QoS bits alone.. How's _that_ coming along?
Your Working Boy,
High end DVD players are a rip-off.
;)
Depends on the feature... I kinda like having 70+ DVDs (and growing) at my fingertips, catalogged by genre and random-shufflable..
I have to chuckle at the people buying the high-end DVDs to hook them up to NTSC TV's
Yeah, but then there's those of us hooking them up to large screen projectors that can handle 720p and SVGA (and even those "lowly" projs like the W400Q) that can appreciate features like component (Y/Pr/Pb) video out and progressive processing...
(and yeah, PC + Matrox G400 = kickass DVD deck, but you can't hook an autochanger to your SCSI bus yet..)
Your Working Boy,
JFS == Journaling Filesystem
Essentially, each journaled device has an area on disk that acts as a transaction log (or Journal) which keeps track of the FS's state during normal use (basically, what inodes aren't synced). When a JFS system is hard-booted, you only need to check the inodes that weren't synced, rather than scan the entire slice. This results in much faster fsck times.
Also, IBM's JFS (from what I've read on the IBM site) will have LVM features (though apparently not the entire LVM system) which depend on the JFS to ensure data integrity when you start throwing exotic filesystem mangling routines (mirroring, Logical Devices (more interesting than concatenation), etc) into the mix..
In other words, JFS is a good thing. We like it. In fact, I'd like to be able to boot off it.
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
... if the Slash source hadn't been opened. As it is, if we feel that /. is compromised by their affiliation(s), and that compromise is disturbing enough, we can go start our own "FreeDot" or something.
/. has 'put up', to stick with these guys and their little website that could. I probably would have even if the source hadn't been released, but I would have had agita about it.
I'm willing, now that
This is also an important reminder to those of you who _weren't_ whinging about the source release: you don't get something unless you ask for it, and you need to call bullshit when you smell it, that's the true rationalist way (no hypocrisy permitted at all, strict and harsh self-editing must be imposed).. You don't have to be a flaming dick about it, but a polite reminder as needed is a _good_ thing, don't forget that.
Your Working Boy,
I don't know if the Playstation 2 can displace a PC, but it sure might displace DVD players
At the low-end, yes, and particularly among people who don't already have a DVD deck. However, mid and higher end DVD people want features that PSX2 can't handle (such as megachanger, component video out, progressive playback, etc).
Still, this device should really help DVD go from manic growth to true explosion... And if the new users are shephereded in correctly, there'll be mounting pressure for DVD features, Anamorphic transfers, and lower prices.. This is a plus for DVD owners as long as the cattle don't ask 'why are all these people stretched out?'...
Personally, I have a 200DVD jukebox. And I'll be getting a PSX2.
Your Working Boy,
.... When can I Order my own TARDIS???
;)
Your Working Boy,
That's easy:
THROAT WOBBLER MANGROVE
Your Working Boy,