Interesting, and sounds true. Portland, some parts of it, is quite different from other parts of Oregon.
I should probably say that I didn't invent the term "Ecotopia", Joel Garreau did. At one time, Oregon was passing a lot of ecology laws, and deserved the term maybe more than it does now.
If you speak English clearly and grammatically, and don't use slang or
colloquial expressions, and are willing to contribute a lot of intellectual
energy, you are highly qualified to help someone with his or her English.
Everyone who learns a language goes through a phase where they need to
practice speaking with a native speaker. It's sometimes called conversation class.
I'm in that phase now, trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese. I know the
grammar. I know a lot of vocabulary. I just need to continue practicing.
Practicing means spending a lot of time alone with attractive Brazilian women;
you can, no doubt, appreciate how difficult this is for me *grin*.
I never learned a word of Farsi (the language spoken in Iran). I have a book
on it, but, being realistic, it requires a huge investment in time and energy
to learn any language, and at the time it was not safe for an American to
spend much time in Iran.
It all got started because I was spending Saturday mornings at a place where
volunteer teachers and prospective students would meet. One Saturday I arrived
and the coordinator assigned me a very attractive (married) Iranian woman. I
was at that time 100% ignorant about Iranians. I thought they were Arabs; I
knew something about the Arab culture. (I never worry about meeting an
interesting married woman; for sure she has single friends who look a lot like
her.)
After about 20 minutes of trying to communicate with my Iranian student, I
realized something was very wrong in my understanding. She was too passionate
and emotional and warm and friendly to be Arab. I asked her and she said
Iranians were Persian, not Arab. (Arabs reading this: Don't complain. Arabs
are not as passionate as Persians. Check it out. Italians are more passionate
than Americans; I have never seen an American become upset when someone says
this.)
When someone is first learning a language, he or she can talk about family
and culture and personal likes and dislikes better than other subjects. This
was excellent for me, because I wanted to understand her.
I found that the Iranian culture is very sexist; Iranian women, in a hidden way, think they
are superior to men. (If you live in the U.S., and pay attention to social
things happening below the surface, this will probably sound familiar.) I have
a high tolerance for people thinking that they are better than me, so I was
able to cope with that. Besides, I think, maybe they are better than me in
some ways.
She was upper class Iranian, and class means a lot more in Iran than it does
in the United States. Mostly, crazy elements of culture work against everyone,
but sometimes cultural craziness actually helps particular people in
particular situations. Since I was not part of the Iranian culture, I was
culturally insignificant to her. Since I was a man, and she already had a
husband, I was irrelevant to anything an Iranian woman thinks is important.
So, I would ask many, many questions about personal things, and, since she did
not know enough about English to talk about anything else, and since she was
interested in the subjects of the questions, she would answer them. I
was irrelevant in her social system, so she would be more frank with me than
she would with another Iranian. She would also accept me being frank with her.
Through her I met other Iranians. I began socializing with them. I began
helping another Iranian woman student, too. Iranians in Portland have huge
parties to which everyone is invited. I like parties.
Ideas about teaching English conversation classes: 1) Pick a student who is
interesting. I usually picked attractive women. 2) Pick someone who is well
educated; it's more fun to talk to them, generally. 3) Talk about things that
are of central importance to people, such as the feelings of women toward men,
or the difficulty of finding someone suitable to marry.
Another time, I began hanging around with a very attractive 19-year-old Korean
woman named Go-oon. I told her
Interesting. I was just making assumptions, because of the original poster's reply, who seems to live in an area of Georgia that is not ethnically diverse.
I live here in Portland, Oregon. This area of the U.S. is called "Ecotopia".
Traditionally, people have come here who are more idealistic about the
environment, and about everything. (For an explanation of Ecotopia, see the
book, The Nine
Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau.)
In a way, it makes sense. Mental patients are often extremely rigid. Some
won't communicate at all. If the only way to communicate with a mental patient
is in Klingon, that might be better than not communicating. The problems of
dealing with a mentally ill patient are often far more difficult than hiring
someone to speak Klingon. The expense of dealing with someone who won't
communicate at all can be huge.
The state requires that hospitals hire translators for people who don't speak
English well. This is because mistakes in communicating about medical things
can easily be life-threatening. This is more true because people who don't
speak English well often try to avoid going to hospitals, so when they do go
to one, they are often VERY sick. Some of my friends have worked as
translators.
Portland is more international than Georgia. There are many people from all
over the world here. We have more than 8,000 Hmong tribespeople from the
mountains of Vietnam here in Portland, for example. So, there are often
adjustments to the special requirements of people from other cultures. As a
volunteer, I've taught English to Iranian women, for example. It was
interesting getting to know them; Iranians are far different than you would
guess after you have read U.S. government information about Iran. The 100 or
more Iranians that I've met are gentle and friendly and concerned about
family. The Iranians I've met are light years away from being terrorists.
Note that IO Gear (at least sometimes) plays games with the supplied cables. A four port KVM will be supplied with 2 ten foot cables and 2 six foot cables. The shorter ones are too short to use in some installations. That isn't mentioned on their web site, that I can see, or in the manual, available online.
Also, the keyboard controls for switching may not be well considered.
IO Gear does seem to be the best for video quality.
1600 x 1200 resolution at 75 Hertz refresh rate is: 1600*1200*75 = 144
MegaHertz. The video system bandwidth must be much greater than that to avoid
ruining the video quality. That's why even the $30 nVidia video adapters have
a 300 MegaHertz RAMDAC (digital to analog converter).
19 inch CRT monitors with a 1600 x 1200 resolution cost as little as $225, so
that resolution is becoming a standard.
It is a big technical achievement to switch 1600 x 1200 resolution without
video degradation. IO Gear does it by
having special video processing amplifiers inside the KVM switch. Building a
KVM switch is not something most people would want to attempt, because it
would cost so much in time.
As was mentioned above, #5923272,
a tuner is a good cheap solution. They can be had at garage sales for
considerably less than $50 sometimes. Mostly you don't want to switch the
audio when you switch computers. It interrupts whatever you are listening. For
example, presumably you want only one computer signaling if you have email.
IO Gear is a little bit flaky at times. Notice that their GCS1714 KVM switch
is listed with a "case weight" of 27.25 pounds, but the weight of an entire
package is listed as 4.7 pounds. Presumably they mean the weight of a case of
KVM switches, but the quantity is not specified.
I notice that Opera is listed as having 3 security vulnerabilities in the pivx.com link above. However, Opera's history is that the security vulnerabilities get fixed quickly.
I found a serious bug (204668) in a recent build of Mozilla (a stack overflow, not a security vulnerability), reported it using Mozilla Bugzilla, and they fixed it within a day.
I complained of another bug in Mozilla, and they had an answer in two hours. Those Mozilla people are seriously interested in getting the job done.
Maybe the world only has the intellectual resources to produce one or two good browsers.
I am certainly NOT saying that he is doing anything illegal. I am only saying that by selling 567,000 shares of Microsoft stock, and keeping only 5,700 shares, he is indicating, loud and clear, that he has no strong idea that Microsoft stock will go up. Presumably, he would rather have more money than less. If he had a good idea that Microsoft stock would go up, he would have kept more shares, even if he wanted to diversify.
This theory would make sense, except that Internet Explorer's bugs are so public and severe that it would make sense to fix them, even if, overall, Microsoft's business model is to make money by delaying delivering a good product.
After months of trying to understand Microsoft's situation (Windows XP Shows the
Direction Microsoft is Going), I came to the conclusion that the
Microsoft management style leads to mountains of sloppy code that is
difficult to maintain. That's the only theory that seems to fit. For example,
in Internet Explorer browser alone, there have been for years more serious
security bugs than Microsoft fixed. There are, at present 14 security
vulnerabilities.
Here is the recent record. The list of defects has been
similar for years. Also, this is a record only of security defects, not all
defects:
June 18, 2002: 18 vulnerabilities
August 8, 2002: 22 vulnerabilities
September 9, 2002: 19 vulnerabilities
November 19, 2002: 32 vulnerabilities
December 9, 2002: 19 vulnerabilities. (Microsoft fixed 15 on Nov. 20, but
two new ones were found.)
May 8, 2003: 14 vulnerabilities
This is a terrible record for a company that has $52.9 billion in the
bank. (See "Total Current Assets" in the upper left hand corner, which is the
money available within the next few months. It takes time to spend a billion
dollars, so the next few months is equivalent to cash.)
Obviously, Microsoft could fix the bugs if the company wanted to fix them. But
the company apparently lacks the will to devote the resources necessary (IE
still does not have tabbed browsing), and apparently also, it is not easy.
Comments on Slashdot's advertising are always on-topic.
Slashdot advertiser LegalZoom offers to apply for registration of copyright for you for $149. There is no reason you cannot do this yourself, for only $30.
Slashdot marketing does itself an enormous disservice by allying its brand with a bad deal such as this, in my opinion. If the Slashdot brand becomes associated with dubious propositions, then Slashdot advertising will become far less valuable.
An acquaintance of mine says she traveled in the same social circles as Cheney, and he was known as a heavy drinker. This was much less than 30 years ago.
Find a recovered alcoholic. He or she will tell you, "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic", even if the person doesn't drink.
PowWeb FreeBSD hosting, $7.77 per month, has been good to me. The tech support is a little squirrely. It took them a week to discover why a compiled Perl program I wrote was not working. They found that someone had changed the OS without logging the change.
Sorry, but you can't pay more than $7.77 per month, when you pay on a yearly basis. I know that $30 per month would make many people feel more secure.
Last Sunday the CBS show "60 Minutes" discussed the conflict of interest. I'm not the only one who thinks there is conflict of interest. 50 years ago, President Eisenhower warned about the "Military-Industrial Complex".
See Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War
(Brown and Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton) http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2003_39/news/10427-1. html
"The Bush-Cheney team has turned the United States into a family business", says Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War.
The CBS show, "60 Minutes" told the story last Sunday. Cheney arranged to change the law, so that when he used the government to make money, it was no longer illegal.
In the case of the U.S. government, the self-destruction seems to be due to government secrecy and to the availability of easy money by fostering corruption.
Question: Shouldn't U.S. vice president Dick Cheney be investigated for using his government influence to make money? Pre-arranged no-bid contracts were given to his former company, Halliburton. In the past such conflict of interest would have resulted in a prison term.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, and sounds true. Portland, some parts of it, is quite different from other parts of Oregon.
I should probably say that I didn't invent the term "Ecotopia", Joel Garreau did. At one time, Oregon was passing a lot of ecology laws, and deserved the term maybe more than it does now.
If you speak English clearly and grammatically, and don't use slang or colloquial expressions, and are willing to contribute a lot of intellectual energy, you are highly qualified to help someone with his or her English.
Everyone who learns a language goes through a phase where they need to practice speaking with a native speaker. It's sometimes called conversation class.
I'm in that phase now, trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese. I know the grammar. I know a lot of vocabulary. I just need to continue practicing. Practicing means spending a lot of time alone with attractive Brazilian women; you can, no doubt, appreciate how difficult this is for me *grin*.
I never learned a word of Farsi (the language spoken in Iran). I have a book on it, but, being realistic, it requires a huge investment in time and energy to learn any language, and at the time it was not safe for an American to spend much time in Iran.
It all got started because I was spending Saturday mornings at a place where volunteer teachers and prospective students would meet. One Saturday I arrived and the coordinator assigned me a very attractive (married) Iranian woman. I was at that time 100% ignorant about Iranians. I thought they were Arabs; I knew something about the Arab culture. (I never worry about meeting an interesting married woman; for sure she has single friends who look a lot like her.)
After about 20 minutes of trying to communicate with my Iranian student, I realized something was very wrong in my understanding. She was too passionate and emotional and warm and friendly to be Arab. I asked her and she said Iranians were Persian, not Arab. (Arabs reading this: Don't complain. Arabs are not as passionate as Persians. Check it out. Italians are more passionate than Americans; I have never seen an American become upset when someone says this.)
When someone is first learning a language, he or she can talk about family and culture and personal likes and dislikes better than other subjects. This was excellent for me, because I wanted to understand her.
I found that the Iranian culture is very sexist; Iranian women, in a hidden way, think they are superior to men. (If you live in the U.S., and pay attention to social things happening below the surface, this will probably sound familiar.) I have a high tolerance for people thinking that they are better than me, so I was able to cope with that. Besides, I think, maybe they are better than me in some ways.
She was upper class Iranian, and class means a lot more in Iran than it does in the United States. Mostly, crazy elements of culture work against everyone, but sometimes cultural craziness actually helps particular people in particular situations. Since I was not part of the Iranian culture, I was culturally insignificant to her. Since I was a man, and she already had a husband, I was irrelevant to anything an Iranian woman thinks is important. So, I would ask many, many questions about personal things, and, since she did not know enough about English to talk about anything else, and since she was interested in the subjects of the questions, she would answer them. I was irrelevant in her social system, so she would be more frank with me than she would with another Iranian. She would also accept me being frank with her.
Through her I met other Iranians. I began socializing with them. I began helping another Iranian woman student, too. Iranians in Portland have huge parties to which everyone is invited. I like parties.
Ideas about teaching English conversation classes: 1) Pick a student who is interesting. I usually picked attractive women. 2) Pick someone who is well educated; it's more fun to talk to them, generally. 3) Talk about things that are of central importance to people, such as the feelings of women toward men, or the difficulty of finding someone suitable to marry.
Another time, I began hanging around with a very attractive 19-year-old Korean woman named Go-oon. I told her
Mod parent UP!
Mod parent up!
Interesting. I was just making assumptions, because of the original poster's reply, who seems to live in an area of Georgia that is not ethnically diverse.
I live here in Portland, Oregon. This area of the U.S. is called "Ecotopia". Traditionally, people have come here who are more idealistic about the environment, and about everything. (For an explanation of Ecotopia, see the book, The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau.)
In a way, it makes sense. Mental patients are often extremely rigid. Some won't communicate at all. If the only way to communicate with a mental patient is in Klingon, that might be better than not communicating. The problems of dealing with a mentally ill patient are often far more difficult than hiring someone to speak Klingon. The expense of dealing with someone who won't communicate at all can be huge.
The state requires that hospitals hire translators for people who don't speak English well. This is because mistakes in communicating about medical things can easily be life-threatening. This is more true because people who don't speak English well often try to avoid going to hospitals, so when they do go to one, they are often VERY sick. Some of my friends have worked as translators.
Portland is more international than Georgia. There are many people from all over the world here. We have more than 8,000 Hmong tribespeople from the mountains of Vietnam here in Portland, for example. So, there are often adjustments to the special requirements of people from other cultures. As a volunteer, I've taught English to Iranian women, for example. It was interesting getting to know them; Iranians are far different than you would guess after you have read U.S. government information about Iran. The 100 or more Iranians that I've met are gentle and friendly and concerned about family. The Iranians I've met are light years away from being terrorists.
Note that IO Gear (at least sometimes) plays games with the supplied cables. A four port KVM will be supplied with 2 ten foot cables and 2 six foot cables. The shorter ones are too short to use in some installations. That isn't mentioned on their web site, that I can see, or in the manual, available online.
Also, the keyboard controls for switching may not be well considered.
IO Gear does seem to be the best for video quality.
1600 x 1200 resolution at 75 Hertz refresh rate is: 1600*1200*75 = 144 MegaHertz. The video system bandwidth must be much greater than that to avoid ruining the video quality. That's why even the $30 nVidia video adapters have a 300 MegaHertz RAMDAC (digital to analog converter).
19 inch CRT monitors with a 1600 x 1200 resolution cost as little as $225, so that resolution is becoming a standard.
It is a big technical achievement to switch 1600 x 1200 resolution without video degradation. IO Gear does it by having special video processing amplifiers inside the KVM switch. Building a KVM switch is not something most people would want to attempt, because it would cost so much in time.
As was mentioned above, #5923272, a tuner is a good cheap solution. They can be had at garage sales for considerably less than $50 sometimes. Mostly you don't want to switch the audio when you switch computers. It interrupts whatever you are listening. For example, presumably you want only one computer signaling if you have email.
IO Gear is a little bit flaky at times. Notice that their GCS1714 KVM switch is listed with a "case weight" of 27.25 pounds, but the weight of an entire package is listed as 4.7 pounds. Presumably they mean the weight of a case of KVM switches, but the quantity is not specified.
You don't want to change the audio every time you switch to a new computer. It interrupts the program.
Mod parent up! It's the most knowledgeable post I've seen so far.
I wonder about this too.
I notice that Opera is listed as having 3 security vulnerabilities in the pivx.com link above. However, Opera's history is that the security vulnerabilities get fixed quickly.
I found a serious bug (204668) in a recent build of Mozilla (a stack overflow, not a security vulnerability), reported it using Mozilla Bugzilla, and they fixed it within a day.
I complained of another bug in Mozilla, and they had an answer in two hours. Those Mozilla people are seriously interested in getting the job done.
Maybe the world only has the intellectual resources to produce one or two good browsers.
I am certainly NOT saying that he is doing anything illegal. I am only saying that by selling 567,000 shares of Microsoft stock, and keeping only 5,700 shares, he is indicating, loud and clear, that he has no strong idea that Microsoft stock will go up. Presumably, he would rather have more money than less. If he had a good idea that Microsoft stock would go up, he would have kept more shares, even if he wanted to diversify.
Very interesting links.
Look at this: A Microsoft Group Vice President, Kevin R. Johnson, received 322,560 shares of stock 3 days ago and sold it that same day. He received 244,760 shares of stock on March 6, 2003 and sold that the same day.
Does he know something normal investors don't? Isn't he indicating that he expects MS shares to go down?
This theory would make sense, except that Internet Explorer's bugs are so public and severe that it would make sense to fix them, even if, overall, Microsoft's business model is to make money by delaying delivering a good product.
What's even funnier about this is that it is modded, "Insightful".
After months of trying to understand Microsoft's situation (Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going), I came to the conclusion that the Microsoft management style leads to mountains of sloppy code that is difficult to maintain. That's the only theory that seems to fit. For example, in Internet Explorer browser alone, there have been for years more serious security bugs than Microsoft fixed. There are, at present 14 security vulnerabilities.
Here is the recent record. The list of defects has been similar for years. Also, this is a record only of security defects, not all defects:
- June 18, 2002: 18 vulnerabilities
- August 8, 2002: 22 vulnerabilities
- September 9, 2002: 19 vulnerabilities
- November 19, 2002: 32 vulnerabilities
- December 9, 2002: 19 vulnerabilities. (Microsoft fixed 15 on Nov. 20, but
two new ones were found.)
- May 8, 2003: 14 vulnerabilities
This is a terrible record for a company that has $52.9 billion in the bank. (See "Total Current Assets" in the upper left hand corner, which is the money available within the next few months. It takes time to spend a billion dollars, so the next few months is equivalent to cash.)Obviously, Microsoft could fix the bugs if the company wanted to fix them. But the company apparently lacks the will to devote the resources necessary (IE still does not have tabbed browsing), and apparently also, it is not easy.
Linux ISO has SuSE live-eval 8.2.
Comments on Slashdot's advertising are always on-topic.
Slashdot advertiser LegalZoom offers to apply for registration of copyright for you for $149. There is no reason you cannot do this yourself, for only $30.
Slashdot marketing does itself an enormous disservice by allying its brand with a bad deal such as this, in my opinion. If the Slashdot brand becomes associated with dubious propositions, then Slashdot advertising will become far less valuable.
U.S. Copyright Office
An acquaintance of mine says she traveled in the same social circles as Cheney, and he was known as a heavy drinker. This was much less than 30 years ago.
Find a recovered alcoholic. He or she will tell you, "Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic", even if the person doesn't drink.
I've looked at many of the other suggestions. Is there any one better than PowWeb? ($7.77/mo.)
Disk Space (Raid Storage): 500 MB
Data Transfer/Bandwidth: 30 GB/mo.
POP3/IMAP Email, SMTP: 250 accounts
Catch-All Email/Email Forwarding
24 x 7 FTP Access
FTP Users 10
CGI-BIN, SSI,
Web-Based Email (secure)
PHP4 w/ Zend Optimizer, Perl5, Sendmail
FrontPage 98/2000/2002 Ext.
Detailed Webstats Report
Access to Raw Log Files
SSL (Secure Server) FREE!
24/7 Email Support
7 Days Telephone Support!
DNS Control ( A record, Cnames, MX records)
Flash, Shockwave, Midi, Mulitmedia Support
MySQL Database $10 activation!
Setup Fee FREE!
PowWeb FreeBSD hosting, $7.77 per month, has been good to me. The tech support is a little squirrely. It took them a week to discover why a compiled Perl program I wrote was not working. They found that someone had changed the OS without logging the change.
Sorry, but you can't pay more than $7.77 per month, when you pay on a yearly basis. I know that $30 per month would make many people feel more secure.
The pipeline through Afghanistan has already been started:
http://www.paknews.com/flash.php?id=8&date1=2003-
Last Sunday the CBS show "60 Minutes" discussed the conflict of interest. I'm not the only one who thinks there is conflict of interest. 50 years ago, President Eisenhower warned about the "Military-Industrial Complex".
See Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War
(Brown and Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton)
http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2003_39/news/10427-1
"The Bush-Cheney team has turned the United States into a family business", says Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War.
Societies collapse partly because they have poor leaders:
President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been arrested a total of 5 times. Here are some records:
President of the U.S. George W. Bush DUI Arrest record #1. (President Bush's date of birth is 07/6/46. The date on the record is an error.)
President of the U.S. George W. Bush DUI Arrest record #2.
Vice President of the U.S. Dick Cheney DUI Arrest record #1.
Vice President of the U.S. Dick Cheney DUI Arrest record #2.
The CBS show, "60 Minutes" told the story last Sunday. Cheney arranged to change the law, so that when he used the government to make money, it was no longer illegal.
We can study the U.S. society for clues to why societies become self-destructive:
History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories
In the case of the U.S. government, the self-destruction seems to be due to government secrecy and to the availability of easy money by fostering corruption.
Question: Shouldn't U.S. vice president Dick Cheney be investigated for using his government influence to make money? Pre-arranged no-bid contracts were given to his former company, Halliburton. In the past such conflict of interest would have resulted in a prison term.