Attention counterfeiters: I have old versions of image-editing software for sale! The price just doubled but you don't have much choice now, do you? Payment by cash only... uh, never mind.
A friend told me that after her husband retired, he IM'd their son at college so much that the son blocked the dad's messages.
I've never used IM because it seems too distracting and obtrusive, but my wife and I e-mail each other sometimes, usually to forward e-mail or web links. If she needs an answer right away, she calls from her office phone to mine.
And if she needs computer help, I log onto her machine with pcAnywhere.
As for the maintenence of the iPod costing 33% of the unit's replacement value every 1.5 to two years, an automobile is slightly higher than that. At an average cost of $24,000, and an average driving distance of 15,000 miles per year at an average cost of about 50 cents per mile, automobile upkeep/operation costs about 50% of replacement costs in 1.5 to 2 years of operation.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/autos/newcar.h tm
http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/costtodrive. htm
Compared to a car, the upkeep costs of an iPod are low.
You don't really spend $600 per month on car maintenance, do you? If you look at the details of that analysis, you'll see that only 5 cents of that 50 cents per mile is for maintenance and tires, which I think is the correct analogue to the iPod's battery. The rest of that 50 cents per mile is for gas and oil (equivalent to electricity, I guess, or iTunes downloads) (7 cents), insurance (6 cents), registration/taxes (1 cent), finance charge (6 cents) and depreciation (23 cents).
So the maintenance cost every 1.5 to 2 years, as a percentage of replacement cost, is about 5% for a car, compared to about 33% for an iPod. If you want to include other operating costs for a car, be sure to add iTunes downloads, credit card finance charges, and most importantly, depreciation, to your iPod costs.
One 50,000-pound car can be lifted a quarter of an inch above the rail line using the power equivalent of running 20 hair dryers.
I'd be interested to see that calculation explained. Seems to me those hair dryers must blow as much hot air as the contractor who wrangled $14,000,000 out of those Old Dominion boys.
You're hearing it here first, folks. This is good news for Saddam Hussein and bad news for Bush. Saddam now gets a bath, a shave, clean clothes, a lawyer, and a global platform from which to reaffirm that he had no weapons of mass destruction and to accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy if not war crimes. He also has such a high profile that he can't be shipped off to Syria or Pakistan to be tortured. The Iraqi politicians who run his trial will, in the interest of national reconciliation, give him exile or a long prison term, from which he will be reprieved in 10 or 15 years. He will have time and opportunity to leave his mark on the history books.
Bush would have been better off if Saddam had been killed instead of captured. I'm shocked that he wasn't; the army didn't give his sons (and grandson) a chance to surrender. Bush's version of history would have been safer if Saddam had either been killed or been left in his rat hole.
Solaris is known for its efficient threading mechanism, and it's said to be an excellent platform for database servers. I don't know whether the x86 is as good this way as the Sparc version.
I paid $65 for the "free" x86 version of Solaris a couple years ago, when you had to buy media because Sun didn't offer a download, and it wouldn't run with the video card in my computer. Then sun dropped x86 Solaris, then my database vendor dropped support for x86 Solaris, so now I think Sun is coming around too late. Linux and even FreeBSD are making strides with their threading designs, so I don't see a compelling technical reason to use Solaris on Intel.
I can see a market for it among people who want Solaris experience for their resumes.
Security experts also worry about mischievous insiders at the voting-machine companies. That fear was fanned when Walden W. O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fundraising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."
This is the first time I've heard the point made that secret votes should not leave the polling place. That would invite corruption. Parent is right that we need a paper audit trail. So the ballot that was just cast get printed and checked by the voter, and he can either invalidate the ballot with the option of re-voting, or the ballot counts and the printout goes in the audit box in case of a recount, system crash, network failure, discovered software bug, or any of the hundred other circumstances that could call the electronic results into question. And if none of those circumstances arises, then the electronic machine serves its purpose by giving an immediate count at the end of the day.
If you know what tracks you want, or you can make a decision based on a 30-second sample, and you'll want fewer than 50 tracks per month, and you only want to hear those tracks and no others, then by all means go with iTunes. Rhapsody is for people who spend a significant amount of time near a networked computer and want more variety in their music. I can hear 100 tracks a day on Rhapsody, that's 3000 tracks a month for $10, so for me it's a better deal than iTunes by a factor of 300.
Of course I wouldn't download that many tracks. If I used iTunes, I'd probably buy 10 or 20 tracks a month, and I'd waste too much time listening to 30-second snippets to narrow my selections. With Rhapsody, I can enjoy listening to new (to me) songs all day, and I bookmark the really superb tracks for my next CD burn.
Anyway, you missed the point of your parent post, which was answering the assertion that Rhapsody wouldn't allow you to get a permanent copy of a song. It's the combination of unlimited streaming, available downloading to standard CD music format, and a very intelligent user interface that makes Rhapsody well worth $10 a month. To me.
Rhapsody lets you burn a CD with any tracks you want for 79 cents a track, 20 cents less than iTunes. Before you buy a track, you can hear the entire thing, not just a 30-second snippet. And after you buy it, you can rip an MP3 from your CD-R to your hard disk.
I admire iTunes and the iPod for their convenience and their cool tv commercials, but Rhapsody offers more music for the money, with an affordable option to save the gems permanently.
Lots of technical types are libertarian, and the rationality of the free market appeals to them. But can't they see that the Republican party's rhetoric about freedom is usually intended to give license to their economically powerful constituents? The Republican party today is about making the rich richer. And if the rich think they can become richer by taking freedoms (e.g. fair use of copyrighted works) away from the people, then the Republicans will happily accommodate. Come on, libertarians, think before you vote.
We Team OS/2 fanatics used to brag about how much more reliable OS/2 was than DOS or Windows. In fact, we bragged, OS/2 was so reliable that most banks ran their ATMs on it.
Then one day, while I was traveling, I tried to get some cash from an ATM, and it crashed, swallowing my ATM card. So there I was, far from home, with no cash and no ATM card, and the OS/2 crash screen added insult to injury.
Then I realized that banks probably used OS/2 in their ATMs because that's what they were offered to connect the ATMs to their IBM mainframes. It was around that time that I switched to Windows 95.
Windows doesn't crash less, but at least its crashes are not unexpected.
"Create native Win32 port" is one of three "urgent" items on the PostgreSQL to-do list, and Bruce Momjian publishes a detailed status report on the ongoing work. No one on earth can tell you when the work will be complete.
Computer Weekly reported that Microsoft refused to discount its pricing for Newham beyond its usual government discount. Microsoft was multiply stung when its deep-discount offer to Munich was rebuffed, making the press coverage sensationally embarrassing and giving every government body in the world the idea that it should bargain hard because Microsoft would compete on price against open source.
Microsoft evidently decided, What good is having a monopoly without enjoying monopoly rents? The Newham audit allows Microsoft's handpicked shills to report that "TCO" is lower if Newham's desktops continue to use what the vast majority already uses. Even if Microsoft loses the Newham sale, the audit report will be ammunition against open source in other government agencies, and it will defend Microsoft's profit margin.
The high-end distributions from both Red Hat and SuSE offer "asynchronous input/output" and my database vendor says it makes the database faster. Can someone please explain to me how asynchronous I/O works? Is it available except in these enterprise-price distributions? If not, why doesn't the GPL require its availability?
I can never see a mime without flashing back to the reception scene with the mime waiters in This Is Spinal Tap, with boss mime Billy Crystal snapping at Dana Carvey, "Come one, don't talk back, mime is money, let's go, move it!"
The Washington Post just ran a pair of articles on the Lackawanna Six and Jose Padilla, American citizens who got associated with bad guys. The Lackawanna Six (and John Walker Lindh and now Mike Hawash) pleaded guilty to avoid the fate that befell Padilla. When the government didn't have enough evidence to charge him with a crime, they simply designated him an enemy combatant and carted him off to a military prison, with no right to trial or to a lawyer. Hawash, Lindh and the Lackawanna Six chose prison, even though the evidence against them was weak, because the alternative was indefinite solitary confinement and possibly even a death sentence from a military tribunal. So how meaningful were their guilty pleas?
We have laws in this country to punish treason, conspiracy, or any other crime these men committed. But citizens charged with those crimes have rights, like the right to be convicted by the government's evidence. So far, this administration has been unwilling to take the chance of letting a defendant exercise those rights.
You must have watched too many Dragnet reruns. In the 21st century, here is how it works:
You are awakened at 4:00 a.m. by a battering ram smashing down your front door. Before you are out of bed, you are surrounded by troops in body armor pointing machine guns at you and your wife. As they carry your computers and filing cabinets out to their van and ransack your dresser drawers, they tell you that they know from their database about your terrorist associations. No, of course they won't tell you what they know, because they don't reveal their intelligence to terrorists. You protest your innocence and demand your phone call to your attorney. Very funny! Terrorists get neither phone calls nor attorneys. Remember to tell your wife you love her as they take you out the door, because you won't be talking to her again for the foreseeable future. She won't even know where you are.
Read the newspaper. Terrorists, suspected terrorists, and suspected associates of suspected terrorists have no rights. A larger database generates more suspicions, a fixed percentage of which are erroneous. In the land of Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, your innocence does not protect you.
The Matrix project began soon after the 2001 attacks. Seisint founder Hank Asher, a wealthy data entrepreneur, called Florida police and claimed he could pinpoint the hijackers and others who might pose a risk of terrorist activity. "Asher says, 'I'll develop this for free,' " Ramer said.
Working without a contract or pay, Asher set about creating the system in Florida, Ramer said. "We showed it to the other states, and the other states went nuts."...
In 1999, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI suspended information service contracts with an earlier Asher-run company because of concerns about his past, according to law enforcement sources. The Chicago Tribune reported in 1987 that court documents in a federal drug case said defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey, who identified Asher as a pilot and onetime smuggler, offered him as an informant.
Jennie Khoen, a spokeswoman for the Florida department, said yesterday that the agency knew about Asher's "history with drug smuggling," including his work as an informant.
Now will someone please document it?
on
Ruby 1.8.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Ruby is a cool language, but someone has to break down and document it. There is quite a bit of not-quite-current documentation, including a great online version of Programming Ruby, but the official library reference is for 1.6 and the language reference is for 1.4. The lack of current documentation for 1.8 raises doubts about the consistency of the language's behavior, especially its more Perlish, do-what-I-mean features.
Slashdot Mirror
Attention counterfeiters: I have old versions of image-editing software for sale! The price just doubled but you don't have much choice now, do you? Payment by cash only ... uh, never mind.
A friend told me that after her husband retired, he IM'd their son at college so much that the son blocked the dad's messages.
I've never used IM because it seems too distracting and obtrusive, but my wife and I e-mail each other sometimes, usually to forward e-mail or web links. If she needs an answer right away, she calls from her office phone to mine.
And if she needs computer help, I log onto her machine with pcAnywhere.
It's not the new year without the Washington Posts's annual list of what's out and what's in for 2004.
So the maintenance cost every 1.5 to 2 years, as a percentage of replacement cost, is about 5% for a car, compared to about 33% for an iPod. If you want to include other operating costs for a car, be sure to add iTunes downloads, credit card finance charges, and most importantly, depreciation, to your iPod costs.
You're hearing it here first, folks. This is good news for Saddam Hussein and bad news for Bush. Saddam now gets a bath, a shave, clean clothes, a lawyer, and a global platform from which to reaffirm that he had no weapons of mass destruction and to accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy if not war crimes. He also has such a high profile that he can't be shipped off to Syria or Pakistan to be tortured. The Iraqi politicians who run his trial will, in the interest of national reconciliation, give him exile or a long prison term, from which he will be reprieved in 10 or 15 years. He will have time and opportunity to leave his mark on the history books.
Bush would have been better off if Saddam had been killed instead of captured. I'm shocked that he wasn't; the army didn't give his sons (and grandson) a chance to surrender. Bush's version of history would have been safer if Saddam had either been killed or been left in his rat hole.
Solaris is known for its efficient threading mechanism, and it's said to be an excellent platform for database servers. I don't know whether the x86 is as good this way as the Sparc version.
I paid $65 for the "free" x86 version of Solaris a couple years ago, when you had to buy media because Sun didn't offer a download, and it wouldn't run with the video card in my computer. Then sun dropped x86 Solaris, then my database vendor dropped support for x86 Solaris, so now I think Sun is coming around too late. Linux and even FreeBSD are making strides with their threading designs, so I don't see a compelling technical reason to use Solaris on Intel.
I can see a market for it among people who want Solaris experience for their resumes.
This is the first time I've heard the point made that secret votes should not leave the polling place. That would invite corruption. Parent is right that we need a paper audit trail. So the ballot that was just cast get printed and checked by the voter, and he can either invalidate the ballot with the option of re-voting, or the ballot counts and the printout goes in the audit box in case of a recount, system crash, network failure, discovered software bug, or any of the hundred other circumstances that could call the electronic results into question. And if none of those circumstances arises, then the electronic machine serves its purpose by giving an immediate count at the end of the day.
If you know what tracks you want, or you can make a decision based on a 30-second sample, and you'll want fewer than 50 tracks per month, and you only want to hear those tracks and no others, then by all means go with iTunes. Rhapsody is for people who spend a significant amount of time near a networked computer and want more variety in their music. I can hear 100 tracks a day on Rhapsody, that's 3000 tracks a month for $10, so for me it's a better deal than iTunes by a factor of 300.
Of course I wouldn't download that many tracks. If I used iTunes, I'd probably buy 10 or 20 tracks a month, and I'd waste too much time listening to 30-second snippets to narrow my selections. With Rhapsody, I can enjoy listening to new (to me) songs all day, and I bookmark the really superb tracks for my next CD burn.
Anyway, you missed the point of your parent post, which was answering the assertion that Rhapsody wouldn't allow you to get a permanent copy of a song. It's the combination of unlimited streaming, available downloading to standard CD music format, and a very intelligent user interface that makes Rhapsody well worth $10 a month. To me.
Rhapsody lets you burn a CD with any tracks you want for 79 cents a track, 20 cents less than iTunes. Before you buy a track, you can hear the entire thing, not just a 30-second snippet. And after you buy it, you can rip an MP3 from your CD-R to your hard disk.
I admire iTunes and the iPod for their convenience and their cool tv commercials, but Rhapsody offers more music for the money, with an affordable option to save the gems permanently.
Lots of technical types are libertarian, and the rationality of the free market appeals to them. But can't they see that the Republican party's rhetoric about freedom is usually intended to give license to their economically powerful constituents? The Republican party today is about making the rich richer. And if the rich think they can become richer by taking freedoms (e.g. fair use of copyrighted works) away from the people, then the Republicans will happily accommodate. Come on, libertarians, think before you vote.
We Team OS/2 fanatics used to brag about how much more reliable OS/2 was than DOS or Windows. In fact, we bragged, OS/2 was so reliable that most banks ran their ATMs on it.
Then one day, while I was traveling, I tried to get some cash from an ATM, and it crashed, swallowing my ATM card. So there I was, far from home, with no cash and no ATM card, and the OS/2 crash screen added insult to injury.
Then I realized that banks probably used OS/2 in their ATMs because that's what they were offered to connect the ATMs to their IBM mainframes. It was around that time that I switched to Windows 95.
Windows doesn't crash less, but at least its crashes are not unexpected.
"Create native Win32 port" is one of three "urgent" items on the PostgreSQL to-do list, and Bruce Momjian publishes a detailed status report on the ongoing work. No one on earth can tell you when the work will be complete.
No thanks, I'll take the "pro" version with the 17" screen for $60K.
Maybe open source is communistic after all.
And Vietnam is just the first domino.
Computer Weekly reported that Microsoft refused to discount its pricing for Newham beyond its usual government discount. Microsoft was multiply stung when its deep-discount offer to Munich was rebuffed, making the press coverage sensationally embarrassing and giving every government body in the world the idea that it should bargain hard because Microsoft would compete on price against open source.
Microsoft evidently decided, What good is having a monopoly without enjoying monopoly rents? The Newham audit allows Microsoft's handpicked shills to report that "TCO" is lower if Newham's desktops continue to use what the vast majority already uses. Even if Microsoft loses the Newham sale, the audit report will be ammunition against open source in other government agencies, and it will defend Microsoft's profit margin.
The high-end distributions from both Red Hat and SuSE offer "asynchronous input/output" and my database vendor says it makes the database faster. Can someone please explain to me how asynchronous I/O works? Is it available except in these enterprise-price distributions? If not, why doesn't the GPL require its availability?
I can never see a mime without flashing back to the reception scene with the mime waiters in This Is Spinal Tap, with boss mime Billy Crystal snapping at Dana Carvey, "Come one, don't talk back, mime is money, let's go, move it!"
The Washington Post just ran a pair of articles on the Lackawanna Six and Jose Padilla, American citizens who got associated with bad guys. The Lackawanna Six (and John Walker Lindh and now Mike Hawash) pleaded guilty to avoid the fate that befell Padilla. When the government didn't have enough evidence to charge him with a crime, they simply designated him an enemy combatant and carted him off to a military prison, with no right to trial or to a lawyer. Hawash, Lindh and the Lackawanna Six chose prison, even though the evidence against them was weak, because the alternative was indefinite solitary confinement and possibly even a death sentence from a military tribunal. So how meaningful were their guilty pleas?
We have laws in this country to punish treason, conspiracy, or any other crime these men committed. But citizens charged with those crimes have rights, like the right to be convicted by the government's evidence. So far, this administration has been unwilling to take the chance of letting a defendant exercise those rights.
You must have watched too many Dragnet reruns. In the 21st century, here is how it works:
You are awakened at 4:00 a.m. by a battering ram smashing down your front door. Before you are out of bed, you are surrounded by troops in body armor pointing machine guns at you and your wife. As they carry your computers and filing cabinets out to their van and ransack your dresser drawers, they tell you that they know from their database about your terrorist associations. No, of course they won't tell you what they know, because they don't reveal their intelligence to terrorists. You protest your innocence and demand your phone call to your attorney. Very funny! Terrorists get neither phone calls nor attorneys. Remember to tell your wife you love her as they take you out the door, because you won't be talking to her again for the foreseeable future. She won't even know where you are.
Read the newspaper. Terrorists, suspected terrorists, and suspected associates of suspected terrorists have no rights. A larger database generates more suspicions, a fixed percentage of which are erroneous. In the land of Bush, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, your innocence does not protect you.
Ruby is a cool language, but someone has to break down and document it. There is quite a bit of not-quite-current documentation, including a great online version of Programming Ruby , but the official library reference is for 1.6 and the language reference is for 1.4. The lack of current documentation for 1.8 raises doubts about the consistency of the language's behavior, especially its more Perlish, do-what-I-mean features.
It means all your base are belong to matz.