>You're saying that as if it's free or something. >Check out a typical midrange Dell desktop. Base >price with WordPerfect = $1239. Cheap MS Office >adds $150. MS Office Pro adds $350.
Plus, the home system builder or small OEM, or even on-site tech guy who throws together a box to replace a dead one can't get the cheapest deals. You can't get a full copy of the current windows for much under USD 100, buying one copy, even with the special "OEM CD-only package that's only good every sixth fortnight and if you buy a piece of hardware valued at least USD 650" special rates.
I was in the video rental today, and all I had was a USD 100 note to rent a single game (FF Origins FWIW-- pretty good, though the FF2 is not the FF2 I remember). The clerk held it up to light to check watermark and thread....
The 2000 lei is a beautiful note-- commemorates a solar eclipse in the year of its introduction. It's also very cheap and available on the collector market.
If you've never seen a polymer note,/. crowd, this is a good one to start with.
What do they get out of it? They've killed Linux, but also ruined any goodwill they had.
Given that SCO is not a miraculously wonderful piece of systems software, what compelling reason will they give to the Linux community that we shouldn't all switch to *BSD, which likely offers better hardware support and more community, as well as a distributor who doesn't seem keen on annoying its customers?
I owned 5 shares of Caldera a while back (worth like USD 10 at the time) I got the proxy and actually voted in favour of a SCO-Caldera merger. I figured "Caldera focuses on business, SCO has many old businesses stuck in their rut, there's synergy."
I believe 101.1 in Prescott or Payson Arizona was doing that for a while. For many weeks, I heard no DJ at all. I loved it. I don't want to hear some moron babbling between songs. Then they changed it to a different sort of music (after about three days of 'nothing but vintage commercials')
>Its a grassroots movement to return to a more >stable inflation proof currency like with the green >backs that Licoln had congress create
It's NOT inflation proof. It's a fiat money, just like the paper dollar! The only difference is instead of stamping a sheet of paper worth 3 cents with a value $10, they're stamping a chunk of metal worth $5 with a value $10. Eventually, it still comes crashing down in your scenario-- perhaps not as far, but significantly. Plus, it's pegged to the fortunes of the silver industry. Look through history-- whenever there was a glut of silver, everyone would demand free coinage of silver (turning their ounce of silver worth 80 cents as bullion into silver coins worth $1.20), and whenever bullion prices rose, the coins would be hoarded and melted, and then you have to find some other form of money (tokens, small denomination paper) to fill the gap.
Importantly, notice the difference between your currency and traditional specie. An ounce of gold used to be pegged at $21 or so, and the $20 coin had almost an ounce of gold in it-- it fufilled its promise. Here, you're trying to peg an ounce of silver at $10, but you're only putting $5 worth of silver in it.
>You will have to enlighten me on what low-markup sliver rounds are.
One of a thousand different types of one-ounce, round, lumps of fine silver, sold as a means of holding silver at a relatively small markup. Often available for $6 or $7. Usually with pretty designs (emulations of old coins, and holiday-oriented themes are popular). Some foreign bullion issues (the Mexican Libertad for example) also fall in this category. Check your local coin dealer.
>Because who wants to walk around with a bunch of >heavy silver in there pocket? Its convienent to >have a warehouse reciet.
The issue with the "warehouse reciept" is its high overhead and expiration date. You can't even get an ounce of silver out of a $10 reciept, due to shipping costs, and apparently if you wait 20 years to claim, you lose everything.
Moreover, can you trust them to be there when the economy collapses?
>The facist control is whats coming from the white >house right now. Our monetary system needs >healthy competition.
Fine. Do things better. If the system offered reasonable value, it would become widely accepted. The constant hemming and hawing to justify why someone should supply you with $10 in goods for $5 in silver is what dooms it.
>The Liberty Dollar is a currency, not an investment.
It's a poor example of either.
For a currency to be worthwhile, it should be widely accepted. Norfeds aren't. It's also stupid to throw away a significant chunk of value for the benefit of it being a "currency" that's unpassable.
> If you want to buy silver at the spot price, then buy silver bullion
Still, even purchasing quantities of one at a local coin shop, you can do better than $10 an ounce, and often better than $7.50.
>We are trying to bring about a positive political and economic reform,
Well then why not just agree to use low-markup silver rounds and send the savings to lobbying?
> Partial-backing with value is infinitely better than zero-backing with debt.
Value is no good if you can't spend it. Moreover, if my FRNs go worthless, I'd say you'd suffer from the resultant economic panic too.
If you show up with $100 in silver liberties to pay me, why shouldn't I say "exchange them for FRNs, go to a coin shop, buy $100 in silver, and give me that" if I *wanted* silver in payment. As I said, why trade away value (in this case, probably about 5 ounces of silver) to have it be considered a currency?
Please waddle over to Google groups and search for 'norfed' in rec.collecting.paper-money for a variety of interesting discussion on this topic.
Synopsis:
It's a scam. Sell $5 worth of silver for $7.50 to people who then try to pass it for $10.
If it were legitimate attempt at new currency, why does it play off the value of the US dollar, rather than floating against it? The true value of a Norfed dollar is about 50 cents on the dollar for silver content, and a floating currency would fall to acknowledge it.
What I'd like to see with OSS textbooks would be a "books on demand" service. This would be something like the "custom" texts some schools use, but you'd be able to just print or download each leaflet that composes the custom book (or each chapter in a stock book) as you need it.
This evades snafus like when the custom book house puts the wrong leaflet in (we got Ada instead of C) and the waste of a large, heavy book that only has 5 chapters of 20 used in class.
We can save paper with laptops. Right. Two big issues. I did two semesters of college on laptops.
-Homework was still paper (and this in a 4th year computer science curriculum, they should know email) The best were the profs who wanted both electronic and paper submissions.
-"open notes" exams... do you think they let you fire up the Thinkpad (especially with the 802.11 card dangling out the back)
Further, exams in general are difficult to do other than pencil and paper and retain cheatproofing.
>Plus, who needs saturday morning cartoons when you >have 24 hours toon channels, such as Cartoon >Network and Fox Kids.
I see this a lot, in various forms: The "let cable handle it" argument. Why should I have to pay USD 20 or more per month, plus five times the hookup fee (three real TVs, two tuner cards) in order to get quality programming?
But back on topic, Saturday Morning died when they ruined Gargoyles with its last new season on Saturdays.
You know, blasphemy of blasphemies, it need not all be digital.
Remember, the signal going to your monitor is in all likelihood just analogue data. All you really need is three analogue signals -- red, green, blue. Perhaps use the traditional "vertical blank interrupt" period to handshake with the monitor to keep it in synch.
>2) Your brain produces enough electricity to power a microwave.
Wow. I was under the impression that a typical microwave (the one they design the frozen dinner for) required 700 watts or so. The one on my kitchen counter uses 1100 IIRC. Let's imagine the heat output of four halogen bulbs (or 15 or so Palominos at 1667MHz) in a space smaller than a two-litre soda bottle.
FWIW, I used a Hauppage card for quite a while for TV purposes, then fried it. I switched to an Avermedia card, and found the card passable, but the pack-in software very poor.
-According to them, no support for the Radeon series video boards. It works (most of the time) on mine, but 100% of the time with the Free Linux drivers and xawtv.... strange, eh?
-With the windows software, when it works, it seems to skip a frame every second or two. Very prominent at full screen. Again, no problem with xawtv.
-Unlike the Hauppaugue software, you can't turn off the thick border around the TV window, so it eats a lot of screen real estate.
I recall using Linux on a 486/80 with 32M of memory. Even with 20Mb it was adequately fast. The then-new KDE Beta 3 was a bit sluggish, but is anyone surprised?
With a 486/40 and 20Mb of memory, X11, even with FVWM2, was unusuable. I believe the factor may have been the acceleration-- or lack thereof-- in the video board, and the cache (256k vs none)
I now use a PII/266 laptop with 96M of memory. Everything's plenty fast, except starting Mozilla. I'll allow it that much, as it's sluggish on a K7/1666 too.
Actually, it sounds like they thought "Let's drown ourselves in buzzwords!"
Hmm... advertisement on top says "OS/2 3.0 for 12 bucks." I'd love a hobbyist-priced OS/2 package (I'd throw 20 bucks at it for the latest version, but last I looked, the actual packages available are ~USD 200)
>You might be surprised to note that what I want is different.
>Good news? The free market serves us both.
It can't really. At best, one of us will get fairly shoddy service. There are finite resources for support, stocking of spares, and manufacture of aftermarket parts. Are they going to make those items for a model that sells 600 units, or the competing model that sells 60,000 units?
Comparison: Look at the spares availability for a common, conventional Thinkpad or Satellite, and compare it with the availability for an equally old Libretto or a Canon NoteJet (remember those?)
>And the butterfly keyboard kicked ass.
I don't doubt it. Most of their ideas have been very clever, but I don't think you can get it on anything faster than a 486. It was mostly meant as an indication of the lengths you'd have to go to to get a usable keyboard into a digicam-sized box.
>This idea that "integration is bad" in the computer >age is just stupid
Integration is bad when you're integrating devices with mutually exclusive goals.
I want a digital camera to be small and light so I can easily carry it and move it around.
I want a laptop with a little weight (1-2 kilos at least) so it doesn't slide down the desk as I type on it, and with a form factor large enough to have a reasonable keyboard.
You can't make it both ways without bizarre compromises (something like the famous "butterfly" keyboard perhaps)
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>You're saying that as if it's free or something. >Check out a typical midrange Dell desktop. Base >price with WordPerfect = $1239. Cheap MS Office >adds $150. MS Office Pro adds $350.
Plus, the home system builder or small OEM, or even on-site tech guy who throws together a box to replace a dead one can't get the cheapest deals. You can't get a full copy of the current windows for much under USD 100, buying one copy, even with the special "OEM CD-only package that's only good every sixth fortnight and if you buy a piece of hardware valued at least USD 650" special rates.
I was in the video rental today, and all I had was a USD 100 note to rent a single game (FF Origins FWIW-- pretty good, though the FF2 is not the FF2 I remember). The clerk held it up to light to check watermark and thread....
then took the pen to it.
Sigh.
Roumania?
/. crowd, this is a good one to start with.
The 2000 lei is a beautiful note-- commemorates a solar eclipse in the year of its introduction. It's also very cheap and available on the collector market.
If you've never seen a polymer note,
As I recall it:
> 2/3 of the note: full redemption
1/3 x 2/3 of the note: 50% redemption
1/3 of the note: 0.
I guess you could try to slice the note perfectly as 2/3, 1/3 and hope to get 150% back.
>DR-DOS has no particular lineage to CP/M
CP/M begat CP/M-86 (and CP/M-68k). CP/M-86 begat DR-DOS.
If you fire up a DR-DOS system, you'll see something like "Copyright 1976-1998". The 1976 is when CP/M was beginning.
What do they get out of it? They've killed Linux, but also ruined any goodwill they had.
Given that SCO is not a miraculously wonderful piece of systems software, what compelling reason will they give to the Linux community that we shouldn't all switch to *BSD, which likely offers better hardware support and more community, as well as a distributor who doesn't seem keen on annoying its customers?
Seriously: I apologize. It's all my fault.
I owned 5 shares of Caldera a while back (worth like USD 10 at the time) I got the proxy and actually voted in favour of a SCO-Caldera merger. I figured "Caldera focuses on business, SCO has many old businesses stuck in their rut, there's synergy."
I was a fool. I'm sorry.
I believe 101.1 in Prescott or Payson Arizona was doing that for a while. For many weeks, I heard no DJ at all. I loved it. I don't want to hear some moron babbling between songs. Then they changed it to a different sort of music (after about three days of 'nothing but vintage commercials')
Seeing all those "Here's his home address, send him a pizza or letter bomb..." posts gives me an idea:
Just require that all commercial mail have a *valid* street address included. Post-office box is unacceptable.
Tick off your customers and watch as they come down for some personal satisfaction.
>Its a grassroots movement to return to a more >stable inflation proof currency like with the green >backs that Licoln had congress create
It's NOT inflation proof. It's a fiat money, just like the paper dollar! The only difference is instead of stamping a sheet of paper worth 3 cents with a value $10, they're stamping a chunk of metal worth $5 with a value $10. Eventually, it still comes crashing down in your scenario-- perhaps not as far, but significantly. Plus, it's pegged to the fortunes of the silver industry. Look through history-- whenever there was a glut of silver, everyone would demand free coinage of silver (turning their ounce of silver worth 80 cents as bullion into silver coins worth $1.20), and whenever bullion prices rose, the coins would be hoarded and melted, and then you have to find some other form of money (tokens, small denomination paper) to fill the gap.
Importantly, notice the difference between your currency and traditional specie. An ounce of gold used to be pegged at $21 or so, and the $20 coin had almost an ounce of gold in it-- it fufilled its promise. Here, you're trying to peg an ounce of silver at $10, but you're only putting $5 worth of silver in it.
>You will have to enlighten me on what low-markup sliver rounds are.
One of a thousand different types of one-ounce, round, lumps of fine silver, sold as a means of holding silver at a relatively small markup. Often available for $6 or $7. Usually with pretty designs (emulations of old coins, and holiday-oriented themes are popular). Some foreign bullion issues (the Mexican Libertad for example) also fall in this category. Check your local coin dealer.
>Because who wants to walk around with a bunch of >heavy silver in there pocket? Its convienent to >have a warehouse reciet.
The issue with the "warehouse reciept" is its high overhead and expiration date. You can't even get an ounce of silver out of a $10 reciept, due to shipping costs, and apparently if you wait 20 years to claim, you lose everything.
Moreover, can you trust them to be there when the economy collapses?
>The facist control is whats coming from the white >house right now. Our monetary system needs >healthy competition.
Fine. Do things better. If the system offered reasonable value, it would become widely accepted. The constant hemming and hawing to justify why someone should supply you with $10 in goods for $5 in silver is what dooms it.
>The Liberty Dollar is a currency, not an investment.
It's a poor example of either.
For a currency to be worthwhile, it should be widely accepted. Norfeds aren't. It's also stupid to throw away a significant chunk of value for the benefit of it being a "currency" that's unpassable.
> If you want to buy silver at the spot price, then buy silver bullion
Still, even purchasing quantities of one at a local coin shop, you can do better than $10 an ounce, and often better than $7.50.
>We are trying to bring about a positive political and economic reform,
Well then why not just agree to use low-markup silver rounds and send the savings to lobbying?
> Partial-backing with value is infinitely better than zero-backing with debt.
Value is no good if you can't spend it. Moreover, if my FRNs go worthless, I'd say you'd suffer from the resultant economic panic too.
If you show up with $100 in silver liberties to pay me, why shouldn't I say "exchange them for FRNs, go to a coin shop, buy $100 in silver, and give me that" if I *wanted* silver in payment. As I said, why trade away value (in this case, probably about 5 ounces of silver) to have it be considered a currency?
Please waddle over to Google groups and search for 'norfed' in rec.collecting.paper-money for a variety of interesting discussion on this topic.
Synopsis:
It's a scam. Sell $5 worth of silver for $7.50 to people who then try to pass it for $10.
If it were legitimate attempt at new currency, why does it play off the value of the US dollar, rather than floating against it? The true value of a Norfed dollar is about 50 cents on the dollar for silver content, and a floating currency would fall to acknowledge it.
What I'd like to see with OSS textbooks would be a "books on demand" service. This would be something like the "custom" texts some schools use, but you'd be able to just print or download each leaflet that composes the custom book (or each chapter in a stock book) as you need it.
This evades snafus like when the custom book house puts the wrong leaflet in (we got Ada instead of C) and the waste of a large, heavy book that only has 5 chapters of 20 used in class.
We can save paper with laptops. Right. Two big issues. I did two semesters of college on laptops.
-Homework was still paper (and this in a 4th year computer science curriculum, they should know email) The best were the profs who wanted both electronic and paper submissions.
-"open notes" exams... do you think they let you fire up the Thinkpad (especially with the 802.11 card dangling out the back)
Further, exams in general are difficult to do other than pencil and paper and retain cheatproofing.
>Plus, who needs saturday morning cartoons when you >have 24 hours toon channels, such as Cartoon >Network and Fox Kids.
I see this a lot, in various forms: The "let cable handle it" argument. Why should I have to pay USD 20 or more per month, plus five times the hookup fee (three real TVs, two tuner cards) in order to get quality programming?
But back on topic, Saturday Morning died when they ruined Gargoyles with its last new season on Saturdays.
You know, blasphemy of blasphemies, it need not all be digital.
Remember, the signal going to your monitor is in all likelihood just analogue data. All you really need is three analogue signals -- red, green, blue. Perhaps use the traditional "vertical blank interrupt" period to handshake with the monitor to keep it in synch.
You can fix that easily.
A single can of spray paint-- costing between 98 cents and $5 USD, can take care of a whole small tower case, possibly a large one.
My drives have been black for a long time (just remove the panels, paint, reinstall), and I've enjoyed cases in black, green, and black/silver.
>2) Your brain produces enough electricity to power a microwave.
Wow. I was under the impression that a typical microwave (the one they design the frozen dinner for) required 700 watts or so. The one on my kitchen counter uses 1100 IIRC. Let's imagine the heat output of four halogen bulbs (or 15 or so Palominos at 1667MHz) in a space smaller than a two-litre soda bottle.
FWIW, I used a Hauppage card for quite a while for TV purposes, then fried it. I switched to an Avermedia card, and found the card passable, but the pack-in software very poor.
-According to them, no support for the Radeon series video boards. It works (most of the time) on mine, but 100% of the time with the Free Linux drivers and xawtv.... strange, eh?
-With the windows software, when it works, it seems to skip a frame every second or two. Very prominent at full screen. Again, no problem with xawtv.
-Unlike the Hauppaugue software, you can't turn off the thick border around the TV window, so it eats a lot of screen real estate.
>It's laptop power without the heat and power >consumption of a full-blown system.
Okay, why not export your X displays (maybe using IPv6?) from your big old Athlon in the basement to some old Pentium and PII laptops via 802.11?
Plus, you can do some local processing-- I don't need to talk to my big machine to play simple games and run Mozilla.
I recall using Linux on a 486/80 with 32M of memory. Even with 20Mb it was adequately fast. The then-new KDE Beta 3 was a bit sluggish, but is anyone surprised?
With a 486/40 and 20Mb of memory, X11, even with FVWM2, was unusuable. I believe the factor may have been the acceleration-- or lack thereof-- in the video board, and the cache (256k vs none)
I now use a PII/266 laptop with 96M of memory. Everything's plenty fast, except starting Mozilla. I'll allow it that much, as it's sluggish on a K7/1666 too.
Actually, it sounds like they thought "Let's drown ourselves in buzzwords!"
Hmm... advertisement on top says "OS/2 3.0 for 12 bucks." I'd love a hobbyist-priced OS/2 package (I'd throw 20 bucks at it for the latest version, but last I looked, the actual packages available are ~USD 200)
>You might be surprised to note that what I want is different.
>Good news? The free market serves us both.
It can't really. At best, one of us will get fairly shoddy service. There are finite resources for support, stocking of spares, and manufacture of aftermarket parts. Are they going to make those items for a model that sells 600 units, or the competing model that sells 60,000 units?
Comparison: Look at the spares availability for a common, conventional Thinkpad or Satellite, and compare it with the availability for an equally old Libretto or a Canon NoteJet (remember those?)
>And the butterfly keyboard kicked ass.
I don't doubt it. Most of their ideas have been very clever, but I don't think you can get it on anything faster than a 486. It was mostly meant as an indication of the lengths you'd have to go to to get a usable keyboard into a digicam-sized box.
>This idea that "integration is bad" in the computer >age is just stupid
Integration is bad when you're integrating devices with mutually exclusive goals.
I want a digital camera to be small and light so I can easily carry it and move it around.
I want a laptop with a little weight (1-2 kilos at least) so it doesn't slide down the desk as I type on it, and with a form factor large enough to have a reasonable keyboard.
You can't make it both ways without bizarre compromises (something like the famous "butterfly" keyboard perhaps)