The overwhelming majority of monies coming in to the federal government is "already spent" by the time it's received. We will continue to spend for 90%+ of federal programs at the same or a greater level annually. In short, costs are fixed or rising, unless legislative heads start spinning and major programs get major funding cuts.
If the economy manages a reasonable growth rate, there's no harm in these slight increases in funding. If government can spent more more efficiently, that's no problem. If we grow our base of taxable revenues, that's not a problem. But when we increase our spending and at the same time DECREASE our revenues, well, I guess they don't get to math with negative numbers 'till 8th grade whereever you live, Mr. AC.
A tax cut today will require deficit spending tomorrow.
A large number of my peers seem to think that making mortgage payments with credit cards is a good idea. Tax cuts against a budget shortfall are nearly equivalent (we're not going to have as much money next year, so let's spend what we do have _right now_), and ultimately will lead to the same place.
No. I read it when it first came. I wasn't impressed. When I got to college, the guy teaching Speculative Fiction in Literature named it as a classic in the same breath with "Left Hand of Darkness", LotR, "Stranger in a Strange Land" and Neuromancer. I was shocked. I've read better fiction in role-playing game licensed novels. It was like saying "The Book of Mormon" is of the same quality as "Psalms" (I'm an atheist, folks, but Psalms are better at least on a literary level).
Of course, I got to/. and found out Card's personal politics are truly frightening, and my opinion changed from indifference to active distate.
Don't mind the corrupt ramblings of an increasingly paranoid and delusional regime.
I mean, I don't believe the friendly neighborhood mumbling vagrant who keeps pointing at people and telling them that they're satan. Especially when he points at me.
It's not the locksmith's fault that criminals use locks just like everyone else. It's not his job to give the police a key.
I got the hand-me-down projector (and presentation monitor) from my father's business. Neither of my videophile brothers understood its potential.:) My projector is a midrange Sony model, 1200 lumen, 1024x768-capable. It's very heavy for a "portable" (12 or 15lbs, I'd guess). I use it only to screen movies. It's impressive as all hell to play games on but since a bulb costs more than a low-end 27" TV, I try not to overuse it. At 1200 lumens, I still prefer a darkened room. I've seen 800 lumen, and that's just awful. 1200 is a step up. I have no idea what it would take to get comfortable daylight viewing. I built my projector its own little wooden box. There are a pair of largish fans (120mm) that move air from the bottom rear to the front of the enclosure (the front is, of course, completely open). Still, the project is the loudest part of the whole rig.
I'm utterly opposed to Klipsch speakers. From my experience, the bass they produce is akin to dropping something heavy and hollow on carpeted floor. Not impressive at all IMO (yes, I'm more than capable of handling the adjustments. Still couldn't get 'em to sound right). I actually like Logitech's 5.1's better, even though they're probably $150 cheaper.
CPU-wise, I'd look for the cheapest Athlon Tbred I could find. newegg.com has XP1700s for $50. The Tbred (ADAXA-cores and better) are.13micron chips and they run very, very cool for Athlons (they're also fantastic overclockers BTW). I'd couple that with a Spire/Speeze Falconrock II cooler (80mm fan, and they cost all of $7 from newegg.com) for very near silent operation.
I have an AIW9700 with two tuners. You can only record on one at a time. You can still watch on the other tuner, if you want, but take my advice when I say that it's not worth trying to do recordings off two sources on the same machine, even with two different cards and a PC from hell. In general, if you're recording and it's not TV on demand or the like, you probably shouldn't be doing anything else on the box in question. You WILL drop frames. I prefer the 9000 VIVO because 1.) I don't use the analog tuner. My VCRs do a better job of that (I'm OtA-only, so I know from good tuners) 2.) AIWs have a builtin line-in for sound. This is duplicated by my sound card, which also has a digital line in to match the digital line out that my receiver has. I'll stick with my sound card for recording sound. 3.) The 9000 VIVO (from Sapphire, at least) is passively cooled. Fans on video cards stuck ass. 4.) The "advantages" of the the newer Rage Theater 200 chip over the older Rage Theater used by every other ATI card make almost no real world difference. The '200 is better for recording MPEG, and it can apply some realtime filters essentially for "free", but I can't prove, even to myself, that a recording done on an older ATI card is better or worse than one from a AIW9700.
RAMwise, even 128MB is probably enough, if you aren't doing video encoding. If you're doing video editing and encoding, look at at least 512MB of RAM, preferably in a high-speed (PC2700+) or dual channel (nforce2) configuration. If you're editing on the same machine, congratulations, you have one of the few PCs in the world that it might be worth using RAID0 with.
This is a Windows box. 2000 Server in my case. On my "main" recording rig I have about 400GB online (I have two other machines that are just as capable). I record either HUFFYUV (lossless compressed for editing) or MPEGII (straight to the DVD authoring software). I could PROBABLY work something similar up in *nix but the tools I need to handle DVD video, AFAIK, are still largely Windows-based.
My main interest is in, er, video piracy but I think I have enough expertise to speak on this topic...
I'd suggest an Athlon with a nice, cool T-bred CPU, several near-silent Samsung 5400 rpm 120GB drives, a Sony 500AX for burning needs, a LiteOn 16x DVD player for ripping etc, a Sapphire Radeon 9000 VIVO (passively cooled) for video handling - including component with an adaptor, a soundblaster extigy or equivalent (e.g Yamaha), and a nice, thick case like an Antec mid-tower. Spend another $50 on a wireless keyboard and mouse, or a keyboard with an integrated trackball, or an ATI remote wonder.
If you want to get fancy, get a bt8x8 card and use that for projected output, so you can use dScaler.
My media PC system looks about like that, except I use a Live 5.1 with a midrange Onkyo receiver and some nice-ish Wharfdale speakers.
To be fair, Image *did* make some good comics. 1963 - which was simply stunning, the Alan Moore run on Supreme, the Maxx and IMO Spawn were all great. Image made some real crap, too, but I'm perfectly willing to dump all that on Liefeld (Supreme prior to Moore practically defines the term "god-awful", Youngblood, Brigade etc.). Everything else seemed pretty much middle of the road.
Valiant I'm less familar with, but I do have some fond memories of Archer and Armstrong, which really wasn't a flashy title.
I don't think you can paint either company with a uniform brush.
My cousin owns a comic shop, and from time to time he'd drop off a longbox of poor-selling old titles for my brother and me. As a result, I read a lot of different comics growing up, including some things that would never show up on a spin-rack. All in all I can say this: an average comic in the silver age was MANY steps below an average comic from the 80s or 90s. I probably read through thousands of issues of whatever my cousin couldn't sell (Late Silver Age DC apparently didn't move well in the early 80s). Comics in the 80s and 90s might've been pure artist or writer driven garbage, but they also dealt with complex emotional issues, consequences of actions, and in general, even in the really mediocre mainstream titles got a lot better in every way.
If the basis for comparison is "Watchmen" or "MircleMan" or "Astro City", man, nothing else is going to look good. If you're reading circa 1970 "Legion of Super Heroes", there's no place to go but up.
I can't see paying $3 for 32 pages any more, but I do try to keep up with graphic novels. None of the local shops keep a good selection, unfortunately.
As someone who has in fact worked with Banyan in the last two years, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that it rides the short bus in the network operating system world.
Sad thing is, I made the mistake of putting Banyan on my resume, and now I actually get calls for it:
Recruiter: "Says here you're an experienced Banyan admin..." Me: "Yup." Recruiter: "So do you work with Banyan full-time?" Me: "No. Mostly I point at it and laugh." Recruiter: "So you aren't interested in the only Baynan job I've run across in 10 years of recruiting? Pay is... uh, you'd get paid!" Me: "Not unless I get paid to point and laugh." Recruiter: "So what is Banyan, anyway?"
I took it off after about the fourth call I got like that, but I still get some desperate bastard calling me about every three months.
3. The default links on IE's link bar all redirect through microsoft's site, and the whole thing is a giant ad for MSN services ("Windows Media", "Hotmail", msn as default homepage).
5. Mozilla has image permissions, something that I find invaluable. Both mozilla and opera can block pop-ups, but I find Moz's fine-grained control over javascript more useful. Moz is also extensible and customizable, and a quick trip to mozdev.org gets me a lot of tiny extensions to the browser, including one that has the handy feature of more-or-less downloading pr0n for me. Opera does have mouse gestures - something I haven't found useful, but Moz has those, too.
7. The wasted screen real-estate, combined with my no-broadband options and shitty phone lines,leave me with the opinion that something that downloads extra ads is broken. Would you want to download a bunch of extra crap on a 19.2k connection to the internet? My stated preference would be a time-limited evaluation that doesn't include ads. I wanted to evaluate the new version of Opera. I didn't want ads. I have the choice of either un-breaking their broken, ad downloading software or downloading an illegal copy. I did both. I'm marginally less annoyed at the warez copy, but I still can't see why people think Opera is worth $30 when Mozilla does all the same stuff and more, and doesn't cost a dime.
8. Mozilla doesn't crash. I don't think I've had a Mozilla crash since the milestone releases. Sometimes xfree or some part of windows crashes and takes Mozilla with it, maybe. I leave Mozilla open for weeks and months at a time. I'll keep 50+ tabs open in two or three windows. I'm pretty hard on web browsers. Mozilla stands up to punishment very well. Also - bloated? I use Moz for mail (best IMAP client around) and on the machine I'm using, and neither Opera nor Moz seems to take longer to start.
Simply put, behavior that is normal and acceptable with Mozilla seems to lead to crashes with Opera. Opera has a neat little "crash recovery" window that comes up after an "oops". Why have I seen that neat little window three times in two days?
I'll admit that as a browser Opera is acceptable (there's some UI weirdness too, buttons that aren't where every other graphical browser EVER has put them. I imagine there are probably skins or something to fix that). If there wasn't such a thing as Mozilla, I'd probably prefer it to IE or Konq. But still, I don't see how it justifies being commercial software. For $30, it should at least not crash.
1.) I've had horrible past experiences with Opera as a browser (not the good kind of opera, with the singing and the main-character-dead-by-the-final-curtain, which I enjoy very much, thank you.). 2.) It occasionally deserves another try. 3.) I don't tolerate ads in any other browser (that pretty much means not using IE at all, but thems the breaks). 4.) It's taking me too long to grab the warez version off fasttrack - and I can safely say that I wouldn't leave this version installed, either. 5.) I continue to find Opera slightly less vanilla than IE, with somewhat better feedback options (e.g. IE's progress bar that doesn't indicate progress), but not able to do all the cool stuff Mozilla/Phoenix can. 6.) I also find that operasoft's continued insistence on charging for a browser that doesn't download pr0n for me somewhat silly. 7.) Why should I have to warez to get a non-broken trial copy? I can/etc/hosts the ads, of course, but I'm still losing screen real estate to whatever would be there. What's wrong with the 7-day-full-feature evaluation? 8.) I installed it. Managed to crash it 20 minutes later. Evidently 70 or 80 different subwindows are a few too many.
I print enough that the Phaser makes sense. The printer was actually free. Xerox is nice enough to give away the printers + black, erm, crayons, so long as I print in sufficient volume with the color ink. Filling the damn thing up with crayons costs about $800, but I print enough to justify the high speed/capacity printer and I particularly enjoy the free black ink. I might hit 100 - 150 printed pages a day with bursts where I might do a couple thousand pages.
See analogy about "your parent's toaster", above. The Deskjet 500-series inkjets were fairly expensive when they were new, and they were over-built. People shelled out real money for a product they expected to last. HP expected it to last, too. They offered 3 and 5 year warranties on those early deskjets. You have to pay $150 for an inkjet to get a *1* year warranty nowadays. Some of the $250 photo printers drop back down to 90 days, too. To me the fact that the warranty lengths have dropped so precariously says it all. If printer companies were building solid products, it wouldn't be a big deal to offer longer warranties.
Early HP Laser Printers are the same way. I have a laserjet III that's rolled it's page counter three times (probably 3.4 million pages at this point), and the only service that has been done to it is usual maintenence kit stuff. The thing is sitting in a closet now, but if I ever need a printer, I know it's there and that it'll still work.
Me? I blame a management shift at HP. Sometime, probably in the last seven years or so, HP went from a company of well-engineered products and fairly high standards to a company that seems to be all about shiny plastic and marketing.
For a long time I had an IBM 3812 page printer. It had an RS232 interface but at load it could probably spit out 15 pages per minute. Not bad for something that was made in 1982. I finally got rid of it in 2002 because I couldn't find a fuser kit for it. I don't think there's a printer being made today that will be able to print 20 years from now.
The problem is, there's no printer to spend 5x the money on. Not really. A $500 inkjet printer is either a photoprinter, in which case it's the same print engine and mechanics as the $99 inkjet, with a $20 card reader, a 2" LCD and maybe some extra paper and color matching options built into the driver (the HP 932 and several HP Photosmart printers were essentially identical, at least)... or the $500 inkjet is a low-end network printer, in which case it's the same as a $99 printer, but maybe with an ethernet port and perhaps a built in print server. In neither case is there an update to the mechanics.
$500 laser printer? Have you looked at the $300 - $500 laser printers lately. These "low-end" products have adopted the cheap manufacturing typically associated with $90 inkjets. No benefit there, either.
So how do you get a decent printer?
My rule of thumb is to either buy something that resembles a photocopier - I like HP 4000-series printers - these are printers that it's probably worth keeping up a service contract (I have a Phaser 850 at home. The service guy has been out twice since January to fix minor problems with it), or a LaserJet 1 - 4 that isn't an "L" or "M" model. Those things will take a bullet and keep printing.
For the sake of those of us who don't like children and have had the good sense to remain childless, I'd like to suggest a largish cage, a shock collar and a cattle prod.
Some little brat pissed on my shoe yesterday in Borders... and his brood mar... mother (carrying an infant and pregnant - showing, again) stood right next to me PRAISING HIM FOR PULLING DOWN HIS PANTS IN PUBLIC. Bitch didn't even apologize. To anyone.
Not that I'm bitter.
OK, now I'm going to make a more rational statement: Stay involved in your kid's life. I don't care how much you come to hate mom in the years to come. I don't care how important your job is to you. Fuck that. You are responsible for another human being, one who depends on you for all the nuturing and comfort you can give. It isn't mom's job to take care of the thing 16 or 20 hours a day, and if you're to the point where you feel proud of the one time in a day you changed a diaper, you aren't involved enough. Be involved. From my observations, kids with parents who are involved in their lives are a lot happier (and usually docile. See rant above) than kis without. I volunteer at a boys & girls club. A couple of times in my life, I've had to say those exact words to a 14-year-old who is about to be a "father". If you're from a happy home, maybe this is going to sound redundant as all hell, maybe even stupid.
Also, read out loud to your kids. Don't stop when they turn three. Turn off the TV/babysitter and read to them until they're old enough to read everything on the shelf themselves. My father - the one thing my dad did right - read my brother and I "Swiss Family Robinson", "Don Quixote", "Man in the Iron Mask", "Charlotte's Web", all the Tolkien books... I have no fonder memories from my childhood than sitting on the floor listening to those stories.
What kind of crack are you smoking? I've got a tall stack of Vantas, GF2s (MX and otherwise), and even a couple of GF4MXes. Some failed outright. Most of them get too damned hot and cause all kinds of stability problems... problems that were solved by putting, oh, anything else in the PCs in question. I'd trade all of the above for a few more cards that don't over heat or require noisy, failure-prone fans.
Nvidia could stand to take a couple of pages from ATI, particularly when it comes to fans and heat sinks. Also, if you haven't tried Catalyst drivers recently, well, they're well behaved enough for me and my customers, and also, fortunately, now using a unified model similar to nvidia's.
I saw a TV-edited "Vegas in Space" with a group of mostly stoned friends. I'd say it's like "Ed Wood in drag, only moreso", but man, that does not do it justice.
"Better than Chocolate" literally changed the sexuality of someone very close to me (literally, ask her, and she'll tell you the reason she's with a woman now is that movie). I guess that's gotta mean something.
The TV movie version of "Dr. Strange" is surprisingly good for being a late-70s adaptation of a comic book character your "man on the street" wouldn't recognize.
"pi" (the title is the greek letter) rocks on many, geeky levels. It didn't get a wide release, so few people have heard of it. Has a cool web site, too.
Speaking of movies with huge geek appeal... "The Right Stuff" was appreciated in its day but swiftly forgotten. Too bad. It's a great movie about the early days of the US space program.
I love musicals. They're a lost art at this point. The film adaptation of "West Side Story" is particularly magical IMO. I'll admit to a fondness for "Camelot" as well.
"Ghost World". Should be enjoyed by outcasts everywhere. Plus I think it's very easy to appreciate Scarlet Johannsen.
"Brazil". Surreal movie, just like everything else Gilliam does, but a special favorite of mine. Technicians seem to be the only people who know how the world works.
Anything with Ron Jeremy can be enjoyed as a comedy. Or science fiction, 'cause 1.) the Hedgehog is a funny guy and 2.) If you look at a movie with Ron Jeremy any other way, it's proof that there is no god.
Playboy's Sexy Shorts/Inside Out/Forbidden Fantasies et al. - Playboy makes some pretty good soft porn. If your lady isn't into "Anal Snow Bunnies volume 7", these shorts manage to cram a plot, characterization and lingering foreplay into 10 or 15 minutes while managing to be more explicit than the Skinemax "Friday After Dark" fare.
Mystery Men - A dark comic book movie that doesn't take itself too seriously. I think it's great fun, particularly the Greg Kinnear character.
"Braindead" - particularly the walk in the park bit. You'll either puke or piss your pants.
"Lost Boys" - A different take on Vampires. Very 80s movie, but it's still a good choice if you haven't seen it.
I can delve deeper into underappreciated porno (stuff with real budgets, plots, etc), but I'm tired and I've typed enough.
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The overwhelming majority of monies coming in to the federal government is "already spent" by the time it's received. We will continue to spend for 90%+ of federal programs at the same or a greater level annually.
In short, costs are fixed or rising, unless legislative heads start spinning and major programs get major funding cuts.
If the economy manages a reasonable growth rate, there's no harm in these slight increases in funding. If government can spent more more efficiently, that's no problem. If we grow our base of taxable revenues, that's not a problem. But when we increase our spending and at the same time DECREASE our revenues, well, I guess they don't get to math with negative numbers 'till 8th grade whereever you live, Mr. AC.
A tax cut today will require deficit spending tomorrow.
A large number of my peers seem to think that making mortgage payments with credit cards is a good idea. Tax cuts against a budget shortfall are nearly equivalent (we're not going to have as much money next year, so let's spend what we do have _right now_), and ultimately will lead to the same place.
No they can't.
No. I read it when it first came. I wasn't impressed. When I got to college, the guy teaching Speculative Fiction in Literature named it as a classic in the same breath with "Left Hand of Darkness", LotR, "Stranger in a Strange Land" and Neuromancer. I was shocked. I've read better fiction in role-playing game licensed novels. It was like saying "The Book of Mormon" is of the same quality as "Psalms" (I'm an atheist, folks, but Psalms are better at least on a literary level).
/. and found out Card's personal politics are truly frightening, and my opinion changed from indifference to active distate.
Of course, I got to
Yes. And they work fine.
Of course, that was back when a (1) CD-R cost about $40. Maybe different dyes n' stuff are used now.
Don't mind the corrupt ramblings of an increasingly paranoid and delusional regime.
I mean, I don't believe the friendly neighborhood mumbling vagrant who keeps pointing at people and telling them that they're satan. Especially when he points at me.
It's not the locksmith's fault that criminals use locks just like everyone else. It's not his job to give the police a key.
I got the hand-me-down projector (and presentation monitor) from my father's business. Neither of my videophile brothers understood its potential. :)
.13micron chips and they run very, very cool for Athlons (they're also fantastic overclockers BTW). I'd couple that with a Spire/Speeze Falconrock II cooler (80mm fan, and they cost all of $7 from newegg.com) for very near silent operation.
My projector is a midrange Sony model, 1200 lumen, 1024x768-capable. It's very heavy for a "portable" (12 or 15lbs, I'd guess). I use it only to screen movies. It's impressive as all hell to play games on but since a bulb costs more than a low-end 27" TV, I try not to overuse it. At 1200 lumens, I still prefer a darkened room. I've seen 800 lumen, and that's just awful. 1200 is a step up. I have no idea what it would take to get comfortable daylight viewing.
I built my projector its own little wooden box. There are a pair of largish fans (120mm) that move air from the bottom rear to the front of the enclosure (the front is, of course, completely open). Still, the project is the loudest part of the whole rig.
I'm utterly opposed to Klipsch speakers. From my experience, the bass they produce is akin to dropping something heavy and hollow on carpeted floor. Not impressive at all IMO (yes, I'm more than capable of handling the adjustments. Still couldn't get 'em to sound right). I actually like Logitech's 5.1's better, even though they're probably $150 cheaper.
CPU-wise, I'd look for the cheapest Athlon Tbred I could find. newegg.com has XP1700s for $50. The Tbred (ADAXA-cores and better) are
I have an AIW9700 with two tuners. You can only record on one at a time. You can still watch on the other tuner, if you want, but take my advice when I say that it's not worth trying to do recordings off two sources on the same machine, even with two different cards and a PC from hell. In general, if you're recording and it's not TV on demand or the like, you probably shouldn't be doing anything else on the box in question. You WILL drop frames. I prefer the 9000 VIVO because 1.) I don't use the analog tuner. My VCRs do a better job of that (I'm OtA-only, so I know from good tuners) 2.) AIWs have a builtin line-in for sound. This is duplicated by my sound card, which also has a digital line in to match the digital line out that my receiver has. I'll stick with my sound card for recording sound. 3.) The 9000 VIVO (from Sapphire, at least) is passively cooled. Fans on video cards stuck ass. 4.) The "advantages" of the the newer Rage Theater 200 chip over the older Rage Theater used by every other ATI card make almost no real world difference. The '200 is better for recording MPEG, and it can apply some realtime filters essentially for "free", but I can't prove, even to myself, that a recording done on an older ATI card is better or worse than one from a AIW9700.
RAMwise, even 128MB is probably enough, if you aren't doing video encoding. If you're doing video editing and encoding, look at at least 512MB of RAM, preferably in a high-speed (PC2700+) or dual channel (nforce2) configuration. If you're editing on the same machine, congratulations, you have one of the few PCs in the world that it might be worth using RAID0 with.
This is a Windows box. 2000 Server in my case. On my "main" recording rig I have about 400GB online (I have two other machines that are just as capable). I record either HUFFYUV (lossless compressed for editing) or MPEGII (straight to the DVD authoring software). I could PROBABLY work something similar up in *nix but the tools I need to handle DVD video, AFAIK, are still largely Windows-based.
My main interest is in, er, video piracy but I think I have enough expertise to speak on this topic...
I'd suggest an Athlon with a nice, cool T-bred CPU, several near-silent Samsung 5400 rpm 120GB drives, a Sony 500AX for burning needs, a LiteOn 16x DVD player for ripping etc, a Sapphire Radeon 9000 VIVO (passively cooled) for video handling - including component with an adaptor, a soundblaster extigy or equivalent (e.g Yamaha), and a nice, thick case like an Antec mid-tower. Spend another $50 on a wireless keyboard and mouse, or a keyboard with an integrated trackball, or an ATI remote wonder.
If you want to get fancy, get a bt8x8 card and use that for projected output, so you can use dScaler.
My media PC system looks about like that, except I use a Live 5.1 with a midrange Onkyo receiver and some nice-ish Wharfdale speakers.
You probably forgot Liefeld's name in much the same way I did, by ramming a white-hot butter knife up my nose until the pain went away.
Unfortunately, there's such a thing as google, which remembers things I've forgotten, and my officemate is still using the butter knife...
To be fair, Image *did* make some good comics. 1963 - which was simply stunning, the Alan Moore run on Supreme, the Maxx and IMO Spawn were all great. Image made some real crap, too, but I'm perfectly willing to dump all that on Liefeld (Supreme prior to Moore practically defines the term "god-awful", Youngblood, Brigade etc.). Everything else seemed pretty much middle of the road.
Valiant I'm less familar with, but I do have some fond memories of Archer and Armstrong, which really wasn't a flashy title.
I don't think you can paint either company with a uniform brush.
My cousin owns a comic shop, and from time to time he'd drop off a longbox of poor-selling old titles for my brother and me. As a result, I read a lot of different comics growing up, including some things that would never show up on a spin-rack. All in all I can say this: an average comic in the silver age was MANY steps below an average comic from the 80s or 90s. I probably read through thousands of issues of whatever my cousin couldn't sell (Late Silver Age DC apparently didn't move well in the early 80s). Comics in the 80s and 90s might've been pure artist or writer driven garbage, but they also dealt with complex emotional issues, consequences of actions, and in general, even in the really mediocre mainstream titles got a lot better in every way.
If the basis for comparison is "Watchmen" or "MircleMan" or "Astro City", man, nothing else is going to look good. If you're reading circa 1970 "Legion of Super Heroes", there's no place to go but up.
I can't see paying $3 for 32 pages any more, but I do try to keep up with graphic novels. None of the local shops keep a good selection, unfortunately.
As someone who has in fact worked with Banyan in the last two years, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that it rides the short bus in the network operating system world.
Sad thing is, I made the mistake of putting Banyan on my resume, and now I actually get calls for it:
Recruiter: "Says here you're an experienced Banyan admin..."
Me: "Yup."
Recruiter: "So do you work with Banyan full-time?"
Me: "No. Mostly I point at it and laugh."
Recruiter: "So you aren't interested in the only Baynan job I've run across in 10 years of recruiting? Pay is... uh, you'd get paid!"
Me: "Not unless I get paid to point and laugh."
Recruiter: "So what is Banyan, anyway?"
I took it off after about the fourth call I got like that, but I still get some desperate bastard calling me about every three months.
Yeah, there's no reason, ever, why someone would want to have something cool on a web server in their own home/small busniess.
Like that guy with his comparitive starship sizes site. Man, that needed to be colo'd at an Exodus NOC.
And mail? Pshaw! Who ever needs to get around oddball ISP sending limits for legitimate reasons like mailing lists or message size limitations?
3. The default links on IE's link bar all redirect through microsoft's site, and the whole thing is a giant ad for MSN services ("Windows Media", "Hotmail", msn as default homepage).
5. Mozilla has image permissions, something that I find invaluable. Both mozilla and opera can block pop-ups, but I find Moz's fine-grained control over javascript more useful. Moz is also extensible and customizable, and a quick trip to mozdev.org gets me a lot of tiny extensions to the browser, including one that has the handy feature of more-or-less downloading pr0n for me. Opera does have mouse gestures - something I haven't found useful, but Moz has those, too.
7. The wasted screen real-estate, combined with my no-broadband options and shitty phone lines,leave me with the opinion that something that downloads extra ads is broken. Would you want to download a bunch of extra crap on a 19.2k connection to the internet?
My stated preference would be a time-limited evaluation that doesn't include ads. I wanted to evaluate the new version of Opera. I didn't want ads. I have the choice of either un-breaking their broken, ad downloading software or downloading an illegal copy. I did both. I'm marginally less annoyed at the warez copy, but I still can't see why people think Opera is worth $30 when Mozilla does all the same stuff and more, and doesn't cost a dime.
8. Mozilla doesn't crash. I don't think I've had a Mozilla crash since the milestone releases. Sometimes xfree or some part of windows crashes and takes Mozilla with it, maybe. I leave Mozilla open for weeks and months at a time. I'll keep 50+ tabs open in two or three windows. I'm pretty hard on web browsers. Mozilla stands up to punishment very well.
Also - bloated? I use Moz for mail (best IMAP client around) and on the machine I'm using, and neither Opera nor Moz seems to take longer to start.
Simply put, behavior that is normal and acceptable with Mozilla seems to lead to crashes with Opera. Opera has a neat little "crash recovery" window that comes up after an "oops". Why have I seen that neat little window three times in two days?
I'll admit that as a browser Opera is acceptable (there's some UI weirdness too, buttons that aren't where every other graphical browser EVER has put them. I imagine there are probably skins or something to fix that). If there wasn't such a thing as Mozilla, I'd probably prefer it to IE or Konq. But still, I don't see how it justifies being commercial software. For $30, it should at least not crash.
1.) I've had horrible past experiences with Opera as a browser (not the good kind of opera, with the singing and the main-character-dead-by-the-final-curtain, which I enjoy very much, thank you.). /etc/hosts the ads, of course, but I'm still losing screen real estate to whatever would be there. What's wrong with the 7-day-full-feature evaluation?
2.) It occasionally deserves another try.
3.) I don't tolerate ads in any other browser (that pretty much means not using IE at all, but thems the breaks).
4.) It's taking me too long to grab the warez version off fasttrack - and I can safely say that I wouldn't leave this version installed, either.
5.) I continue to find Opera slightly less vanilla than IE, with somewhat better feedback options (e.g. IE's progress bar that doesn't indicate progress), but not able to do all the cool stuff Mozilla/Phoenix can.
6.) I also find that operasoft's continued insistence on charging for a browser that doesn't download pr0n for me somewhat silly.
7.) Why should I have to warez to get a non-broken trial copy? I can
8.) I installed it. Managed to crash it 20 minutes later. Evidently 70 or 80 different subwindows are a few too many.
You only need 180GB?
Wow. Slashdot has monks now.
Might be OT, might not be modded up, but that's an informative post about a hardware topic I don't know much about. Thanks.
I print enough that the Phaser makes sense. The printer was actually free. Xerox is nice enough to give away the printers + black, erm, crayons, so long as I print in sufficient volume with the color ink. Filling the damn thing up with crayons costs about $800, but I print enough to justify the high speed/capacity printer and I particularly enjoy the free black ink. I might hit 100 - 150 printed pages a day with bursts where I might do a couple thousand pages.
See analogy about "your parent's toaster", above. The Deskjet 500-series inkjets were fairly expensive when they were new, and they were over-built. People shelled out real money for a product they expected to last. HP expected it to last, too. They offered 3 and 5 year warranties on those early deskjets. You have to pay $150 for an inkjet to get a *1* year warranty nowadays. Some of the $250 photo printers drop back down to 90 days, too. To me the fact that the warranty lengths have dropped so precariously says it all. If printer companies were building solid products, it wouldn't be a big deal to offer longer warranties.
Early HP Laser Printers are the same way. I have a laserjet III that's rolled it's page counter three times (probably 3.4 million pages at this point), and the only service that has been done to it is usual maintenence kit stuff. The thing is sitting in a closet now, but if I ever need a printer, I know it's there and that it'll still work.
Me? I blame a management shift at HP. Sometime, probably in the last seven years or so, HP went from a company of well-engineered products and fairly high standards to a company that seems to be all about shiny plastic and marketing.
For a long time I had an IBM 3812 page printer. It had an RS232 interface but at load it could probably spit out 15 pages per minute. Not bad for something that was made in 1982. I finally got rid of it in 2002 because I couldn't find a fuser kit for it. I don't think there's a printer being made today that will be able to print 20 years from now.
The problem is, there's no printer to spend 5x the money on. Not really. A $500 inkjet printer is either a photoprinter, in which case it's the same print engine and mechanics as the $99 inkjet, with a $20 card reader, a 2" LCD and maybe some extra paper and color matching options built into the driver (the HP 932 and several HP Photosmart printers were essentially identical, at least)... or the $500 inkjet is a low-end network printer, in which case it's the same as a $99 printer, but maybe with an ethernet port and perhaps a built in print server. In neither case is there an update to the mechanics.
$500 laser printer? Have you looked at the $300 - $500 laser printers lately. These "low-end" products have adopted the cheap manufacturing typically associated with $90 inkjets. No benefit there, either.
So how do you get a decent printer?
My rule of thumb is to either buy something that resembles a photocopier - I like HP 4000-series printers - these are printers that it's probably worth keeping up a service contract (I have a Phaser 850 at home. The service guy has been out twice since January to fix minor problems with it), or a LaserJet 1 - 4 that isn't an "L" or "M" model. Those things will take a bullet and keep printing.
"Privacy protection" smacks of human rights. As a right-thinking person, I can't support human rights for spammers.
In fact, I think the only decision we have to make is "hunt to extinction" or seasonal hunting only.
For the sake of those of us who don't like children and have had the good sense to remain childless, I'd like to suggest a largish cage, a shock collar and a cattle prod.
Some little brat pissed on my shoe yesterday in Borders... and his brood mar... mother (carrying an infant and pregnant - showing, again) stood right next to me PRAISING HIM FOR PULLING DOWN HIS PANTS IN PUBLIC. Bitch didn't even apologize. To anyone.
Not that I'm bitter.
OK, now I'm going to make a more rational statement: Stay involved in your kid's life. I don't care how much you come to hate mom in the years to come. I don't care how important your job is to you. Fuck that. You are responsible for another human being, one who depends on you for all the nuturing and comfort you can give. It isn't mom's job to take care of the thing 16 or 20 hours a day, and if you're to the point where you feel proud of the one time in a day you changed a diaper, you aren't involved enough. Be involved. From my observations, kids with parents who are involved in their lives are a lot happier (and usually docile. See rant above) than kis without.
I volunteer at a boys & girls club. A couple of times in my life, I've had to say those exact words to a 14-year-old who is about to be a "father". If you're from a happy home, maybe this is going to sound redundant as all hell, maybe even stupid.
Also, read out loud to your kids. Don't stop when they turn three. Turn off the TV/babysitter and read to them until they're old enough to read everything on the shelf themselves. My father - the one thing my dad did right - read my brother and I "Swiss Family Robinson", "Don Quixote", "Man in the Iron Mask", "Charlotte's Web", all the Tolkien books... I have no fonder memories from my childhood than sitting on the floor listening to those stories.
Jesus saves, Moses buys wholesale, and Cthulhu forecloses.
Ironically, I'd rather post this than moderate.
IA!
Nope, but they can make REALLY strong suggestions for implementations of their reference design.
Besides, have you seen that wart on top of their new card?
What kind of crack are you smoking? I've got a tall stack of Vantas, GF2s (MX and otherwise), and even a couple of GF4MXes.
Some failed outright. Most of them get too damned hot and cause all kinds of stability problems... problems that were solved by putting, oh, anything else in the PCs in question. I'd trade all of the above for a few more cards that don't over heat or require noisy, failure-prone fans.
Nvidia could stand to take a couple of pages from ATI, particularly when it comes to fans and heat sinks. Also, if you haven't tried Catalyst drivers recently, well, they're well behaved enough for me and my customers, and also, fortunately, now using a unified model similar to nvidia's.
I saw a TV-edited "Vegas in Space" with a group of mostly stoned friends. I'd say it's like "Ed Wood in drag, only moreso", but man, that does not do it justice.
"Better than Chocolate" literally changed the sexuality of someone very close to me (literally, ask her, and she'll tell you the reason she's with a woman now is that movie). I guess that's gotta mean something.
The TV movie version of "Dr. Strange" is surprisingly good for being a late-70s adaptation of a comic book character your "man on the street" wouldn't recognize.
"pi" (the title is the greek letter) rocks on many, geeky levels. It didn't get a wide release, so few people have heard of it. Has a cool web site, too.
Speaking of movies with huge geek appeal... "The Right Stuff" was appreciated in its day but swiftly forgotten. Too bad. It's a great movie about the early days of the US space program.
I love musicals. They're a lost art at this point. The film adaptation of "West Side Story" is particularly magical IMO. I'll admit to a fondness for "Camelot" as well.
"Ghost World". Should be enjoyed by outcasts everywhere. Plus I think it's very easy to appreciate Scarlet Johannsen.
"Brazil". Surreal movie, just like everything else Gilliam does, but a special favorite of mine. Technicians seem to be the only people who know how the world works.
Anything with Ron Jeremy can be enjoyed as a comedy. Or science fiction, 'cause 1.) the Hedgehog is a funny guy and 2.) If you look at a movie with Ron Jeremy any other way, it's proof that there is no god.
Playboy's Sexy Shorts/Inside Out/Forbidden Fantasies et al. - Playboy makes some pretty good soft porn. If your lady isn't into "Anal Snow Bunnies volume 7", these shorts manage to cram a plot, characterization and lingering foreplay into 10 or 15 minutes while managing to be more explicit than the Skinemax "Friday After Dark" fare.
Mystery Men - A dark comic book movie that doesn't take itself too seriously. I think it's great fun, particularly the Greg Kinnear character.
"Braindead" - particularly the walk in the park bit. You'll either puke or piss your pants.
"Lost Boys" - A different take on Vampires. Very 80s movie, but it's still a good choice if you haven't seen it.
I can delve deeper into underappreciated porno (stuff with real budgets, plots, etc), but I'm tired and I've typed enough.