The problem of course is, who do we get to represent us? Eric Raymond? RMS? Oh please Ghod no.
Let me tell you a brief story about a guy named Vladimir Posner. For years he was one of the more familiar voices on Radio Moscow's North American service. He was as Russian as they come, but he lived with his parents in New York City during his growing-up years, so he talked like an American, in perfectly idiomatic English . . . but he job was to put across the party line. And you know what? Just the fact that the looked and sounded American made his positions sound almost sensible. You (or at least I) couldn't dismiss him like the anonymous announcers on some of the other English language Radio Moscow services who fanned the fires of anti-Americanism.
Put simply, we need a speaker-to-suits. Someone who can speak Suit, who looks good in a suit, and someone who comes across to average Americans as a reasonable person with a reasonable point of view, not a commie nutjob who's out to steal money from that nice man at the RIAA.
Unfortunately I have no idea who that would be. Linus would be good, but he also wouldn't be interested. I don't have any good candidates in mind, unfortunately.
This points up the free software movement's greatest weakness, which is paradoxically its greatest strength. It is an unorganized coalition of like-minded individuals with an amorphous idea that Software Should Be Free As In Speech. Other than that, there is no "us." "We" can't write a check to hire someone. "We" can't come up with a single united response to SCO, or Microsoft, or even to Szulik's statement that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Of course it also means that "we" can't be bought out or eliminated, which is wonderful, and one of the things keeping "us" alive.
End of rant. I don't know what the solution is, but I hope "we" can come up with one.
Absence of features is not always a good thing. now you will have to add scripting in the webserver.
I haven't kept up with it, but Frontier 4.2 had its own scripting language. In fact there's some confusion as to whether Frontier is a language, a database, or a webserver (in fact it's all three).
MacPerl is also available for Mac OS Classic, as is a Mac version of Python. You can also set up Frontier to run Perl scripts via MacPerl, and send AppleEvents to any scriptable application. So scripting is not a problem.
My guess as to why there have been few to no Mac breakins is twofold:
1. Many fewer Macs than x86 PCs, so many fewer people banging on them.
2. Macs use PowerPCs rather than x86 chips. Lots of people know how to write code for things like buffer overflows in x86 assembly language. Few know how to do it for the PPC.
You do get a proposed fine when you're stopped for speeding, and an opportunity to explain in front of a judge why you shouldn't have to pay. In fact people sometimes get out of paying that way.
RTFA. AT&T says they have an alibi. I have no idea whether their alibi holds water or not, but they should have a chance to prove it was "only someone who looked like them" before they have to submit for the pecuniotomy.
It AT&T in fact violated the rules they should pay up. If they didn't, I have no problem with going after whoever it really was.
This has been coming for some time. In about August I switched over three of my four Redhat machines to Gentoo. The only reason I haven't switched the fourth yet is because it's an old Pentium 90 serving as a firewall/NAT and it's still doing what I want it to do. (When I do move that machine over I'll probably just buy a machine to replace my mail server and have the mail server be the new firewall. I would rather spend time preparing a drop-in replacement for the firewall than wait while everything gets emerged/configured on the current machine.)
Two of the machines get nightly updates via portage. The third is a laptop so I update it every week or so whenever I happen to think about it.
RHEL might end up being a good product, but Gentoo does what I want, in a way I want it to. I'm in no hurry to switch again.
There's only one network show I'm interested in watching this season. Otherwise, I use TiVo to pick and choose items for the Our Man In Redmond channel, and the rest of it might as well be broadcast in Uzbekistan, in Uzbek, for all the difference it'll make to me.
Yeah, I wondered about that too. I figured they'd put some kind of small transmitter on the cockroach's back to signal if they got a positive read from the yeast.
Or, they'd take the Rumsfeld approach and just hook the detector to the world's tiniest nuclear weapon. The yeast changes color, and BLAM! Problem solved.
Of course then you have to worry about the 40-foot cockroach . . .
I am saying that employees should have a right not to be exploited by their employers.
I can't disagree with that statement. Mostly I'm saying that employers do it because in the long run it saves them money.
As for the possibility of exploiting temps, yes, that is true, but in my mind an employer who would exploit contractors would be just as likely to exploit their "permanent" employees.
I apologize if I was unclear in my previous argument. I was merely trying to point out that hiring contingent staff is not a practice exclusive to Microsoft, and is not necessarily an evil thing (which was the impression I got from the parent post). In fact I know people who prefer to be contingent staff; they like the insulation from company politics and the freedom of knowing that they can walk away from the current job if they need to.
Yes, I'm for real. So let me ask you, what makes this practice worrisome? Is it that the employee doesn't have a job for life, or can be fired at will, or that it's for a limited period of time, or what? The employee knows that going in, and if he's smart he prepares for it just like he would any other employment-related potentiality.
If he's not smart, well, he'll get smart the first time it happens.
Do I like it? Not really. Yeah, I think it'd be swell if employers would just take us under their wing at 18 and keep us warm and fed and sheltered until we died. (That in itself is worrisome, and a discussion for another time.) But that is not the way the world works. The reality of the situation is, even if you THINK you're a permanent employee, you can be out of a job tomorrow if the company you're working for decides it can save a few bucks by cutting you loose. It's happened to me more than once.
The only way to approach a job in this country is to assume, that no matter what your title, no matter who you're working for, you're an independent contractor who has no more job security than any other guy out there. At least then you start planning for what will happen when/if the boss calls you in to ask if he can talk to you for a minute.
Nothing worrisome about it. He works full time at Microsoft, but he's paid through a contract agency. And yes, it does make firing him that much easier. That's one reason why they do it, but usually where it comes into play is if a project gets cut back they can let contingent staff go without having to worry about severance pay and the like. Another is that it costs Microsoft less to pay for him and let the contract agency worry about benefits, payroll taxes, etc.
Like I said, nothing worrisome, companies do this all the time. It's purely a financial move. In fact some companies these days are made up almost entirely of contractors, hired for a particular project, paid and sent on to get another job.
The main thing contractors at Microsoft have to suffer through is a 100-day "break in service" every 365 days, precisely because there's already been a lawsuit over the practice. Google for "Microsoft" and "Vizcaino", or go here for the Vizcaino lawyers' side of the story.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion, not anything I saw on a Microsoft web page or anything like that. But I suspect it's the real reason.
The guy posted a picture of a Microsoft loading dock, and posted exactly where it was located. You'll notice there was a lot of very valuable cargo sitting on that loading dock. Yeah, it was shrinkwrapped and might be hard to boost, but a lot of other valuable cargo goes through that loading dock, some of which might be small enough for someone determined to steal if they got the opportunity. A picture could help that process.
Maybe this particular picture/description was innocuous, but you don't get to be a security professional by letting people get by with violations of the policies you're supposed to be enforcing.
We Mariners fans have a reason to be grateful to KMOX for running Cardinals games. Our longtime announcer Dave Niehaus grew up a Cards fan listening to KMOX in Indiana.
That's not entirely correct. Actually, there were three classes of stations: clear channels, regionals, and locals. I don't think there was an "odd-even" split, based on a few of the channels I can remember off the top of my head: KIRO is at 710, KSL at 1160, KGO 810, WOI 640, KMOX 1120, and CBR 1010 which was right next to clear channel KOMO 1000. (Canadians used the same general band plan as the US; Mexico sort of went its own way, at least as far as transmitter power was concerned.)
The locals were (and are) assigned to seven "graveyard" frequencies in the upper portions of the AM band and limited to 1000 watts of power. Try tuning in 1490 some night; unless you have a local station there, it's an unintelligible jumble. The regionals got what was left, which to be honest was quite a bit.
As for three-letter IDs, that wasn't always the case either. The earliest commercial station was Pittsburgh's KDKA, for instance. Originally (we're talking 1910s here) shore stations communicating with ships were given three-letter calls, but eventually broadcast stations started to ask for them, sometimes to fit their parent companies' whims. WGN, for example, was supposed to stand for World's Greatest Newspaper (it was owned by the Chicago Tribune), and WLS (World's Largest Store) was owned by Sears.
Back in the day clear channel stations (not to be confused with stations owned by Clear Channel Communications) were a major communication link in this country. For those who don't know, back in the day (we're talking 70+ years ago) the Federal Communications Commission designeated a certain number of stations as "clear channel" stations. They were authorized to use the maximum power allowed by Federal law (50,000 watts), only one or two stations in the country were assigned to each frequency, and the stations were required to set up their antenna patterns to avoid interfering with each other as much as possible (this last one may have come later, I'm not sure). The net result was a set of stations that served not only their local communities, but a large area beyond. KSL in Salt Lake City, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, WOI in Des Moines, KIRO in Seattle, KGO in San Francisco . . . there were probably a hundred such stations, all serving listeners in areas where the local stations didn't broadcast at night, or didn't carry national programming (news and network radio shows) or locally-generated programs of interest (Normon-themed programming from KSL, Cardinals baseball from KMOX, crop and farming information from WOI, etc).
* whew * (catches breath)
As television became the dominant entertainment medium in America in the 60s and 70s, the clear-channel stations started becoming less and less important to their former audiences. All the stations I mentioned above are still broadcasting, but in most cases they share their frequencies with a number of other local stations.
It's a medium that doesn't require much to access. Heck, all you need to listen to AM is a few feet of wire, a diode, a capacitor, a really good earth ground and a high impedance speaker/earpiece.
Even a relatively cheap "real" receiver will get you plenty of coverage in the AM and lower shortwave (so-called "tropical") bands. And, in a poor country where there might only be a couple of radios per village, the radio instills a sense of community as people gather to listen to the news (and if they can barely afford radios, they certainly won't have computers or televisions).
It covers a lot of ground. Countries like China and Indonesia use it to install a sense of national identity, for instance.
It's no respecter of boundaries or ideologies. If you're a separatist/guerilla/whatever movement, it costs little to set up a radio station and get your message across to your intended audience. (Google for "Radio Sandino" for an example from the Nicaraguan revolution of about 25 years ago.) If you're a government, it's similarly easy (think "Radio Free Europe" in the cold war days.)
You can do things with radio that you can't do in visual media. Talk TV seems clunky compared to talk radio, for instance. And remember the old Stan Freberg skit where, using only sound effects, Freberg drained Lake Michigan and filled it up with hot chocolate, sprayed a few thousand gallons of whipped cream onto it, and had the Royal Canadian Air Force drop a hundred-ton cherry on the top, to the applause of several thousand cheering extras, then finished off with, "Let's see them do that on television."
The key is to stop thinking of radio as a tool of the entertainment industrial complex and recognize it as a medium that has potential to be far more than it has become in the United States.
This mirrors my thoughts this weekend, which had turned to photography anyway after I managed to wreck the lens assembly on my P&S Olympus.:(
My granddaughter is fascinated with my camera, and likes to take pictures. Most of what she takes is, well, what you would expect from a six-yar-old. However, if I get her a digital camera (even a cheap one) she can learn how to shoot pictures and at least hit what she's aiming for, and we'll have both the instant gratification of her getting to see her work right away and the cost saving of not having to develop rolls of pictures of her thumb.
I figure if we get her a camera for Christmas, by the time she's ten she'll be selling her work to Newsweek. (Or Weekly World News, if she confines her work to members of the family.)
The first time I saw one I thought I was looking at a desktop stereo -- you know, the boxy plastic-and-chrome kind you'd put in an office. I didn't believe it was a computer until I got a look at the connector array in the back.
And that was without putting it in an ET doll or a fishtank.
I want to get my hands on one of these. With a wireless ethernet card and a set of speakers hooked to a built-in sound card you could make a very nifty wireless MP3/streaming audio player -- one that the wife wouldn't object to having in the living room.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree it can be hard. (I also agree that 2.5 hours commuting each way is a bit much.) But, in many ways it's like smoking, or joining a religion, or being a vegetarian, or using free software or any other decision that has a major impact on your life. You make the decision and then work out how you're going to structure your life to accommodate the change. In my case I've made a conscious effort to live near public transportation. I have an employer who subsidizes my bus pass. That's one good thing about King County from a public transportation standpoint. The county has a mandate to promote the use of alternate means of transportation in companies over a certain size. My employer has paid for my bus pass for the last 7-8 years or so. If I can't get to where I want to go on a bus I take a cab. (I run up maybe $40 a month in cab fare. I couldn't buy gas for that.)
There are other avenues to explore. Carpool. Telecommute. Move closer to work. Get a different job. It may not be easy, but a lot of worthwhile things in life aren't. I'm too close to the situation to be an effective judge, but I'm sure that it's easy for me because 20 years ago it was a simple equation. I could own a car, live in it with a wife and three kids, and eat dogfood when we could afford dogfood, or I could forego the car and eat real food under a real roof. You might say I was highly motivated. And once I made the adjustments, I found that it was just easier for me to find a house on a bus route than to go through the hassle of owning a car again. (Much safer for the people on the sidewalks, too.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem of course is, who do we get to represent us? Eric Raymond? RMS? Oh please Ghod no.
Let me tell you a brief story about a guy named Vladimir Posner. For years he was one of the more familiar voices on Radio Moscow's North American service. He was as Russian as they come, but he lived with his parents in New York City during his growing-up years, so he talked like an American, in perfectly idiomatic English . . . but he job was to put across the party line. And you know what? Just the fact that the looked and sounded American made his positions sound almost sensible. You (or at least I) couldn't dismiss him like the anonymous announcers on some of the other English language Radio Moscow services who fanned the fires of anti-Americanism.
Put simply, we need a speaker-to-suits. Someone who can speak Suit, who looks good in a suit, and someone who comes across to average Americans as a reasonable person with a reasonable point of view, not a commie nutjob who's out to steal money from that nice man at the RIAA.
Unfortunately I have no idea who that would be. Linus would be good, but he also wouldn't be interested. I don't have any good candidates in mind, unfortunately.
This points up the free software movement's greatest weakness, which is paradoxically its greatest strength. It is an unorganized coalition of like-minded individuals with an amorphous idea that Software Should Be Free As In Speech. Other than that, there is no "us." "We" can't write a check to hire someone. "We" can't come up with a single united response to SCO, or Microsoft, or even to Szulik's statement that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Of course it also means that "we" can't be bought out or eliminated, which is wonderful, and one of the things keeping "us" alive.
End of rant. I don't know what the solution is, but I hope "we" can come up with one.
I don't know about the rest, but:
Absence of features is not always a good thing. now you will have to add scripting in the webserver.
I haven't kept up with it, but Frontier 4.2 had its own scripting language. In fact there's some confusion as to whether Frontier is a language, a database, or a webserver (in fact it's all three).
MacPerl is also available for Mac OS Classic, as is a Mac version of Python. You can also set up Frontier to run Perl scripts via MacPerl, and send AppleEvents to any scriptable application. So scripting is not a problem.
My guess as to why there have been few to no Mac breakins is twofold:
1. Many fewer Macs than x86 PCs, so many fewer people banging on them.
2. Macs use PowerPCs rather than x86 chips. Lots of people know how to write code for things like buffer overflows in x86 assembly language. Few know how to do it for the PPC.
You do get a proposed fine when you're stopped for speeding, and an opportunity to explain in front of a judge why you shouldn't have to pay. In fact people sometimes get out of paying that way.
RTFA. AT&T says they have an alibi. I have no idea whether their alibi holds water or not, but they should have a chance to prove it was "only someone who looked like them" before they have to submit for the pecuniotomy.
It AT&T in fact violated the rules they should pay up. If they didn't, I have no problem with going after whoever it really was.
This has been coming for some time. In about August I switched over three of my four Redhat machines to Gentoo. The only reason I haven't switched the fourth yet is because it's an old Pentium 90 serving as a firewall/NAT and it's still doing what I want it to do. (When I do move that machine over I'll probably just buy a machine to replace my mail server and have the mail server be the new firewall. I would rather spend time preparing a drop-in replacement for the firewall than wait while everything gets emerged/configured on the current machine.)
Two of the machines get nightly updates via portage. The third is a laptop so I update it every week or so whenever I happen to think about it.
RHEL might end up being a good product, but Gentoo does what I want, in a way I want it to. I'm in no hurry to switch again.
How about, everyone's just sick of what's on TV?
There's only one network show I'm interested in watching this season. Otherwise, I use TiVo to pick and choose items for the Our Man In Redmond channel, and the rest of it might as well be broadcast in Uzbekistan, in Uzbek, for all the difference it'll make to me.
Funny, I just got this piece of mail that says if I send them money, they'll tell me how to extend my SHAFT capabilities even further!
Yeah, I wondered about that too. I figured they'd put some kind of small transmitter on the cockroach's back to signal if they got a positive read from the yeast.
Or, they'd take the Rumsfeld approach and just hook the detector to the world's tiniest nuclear weapon. The yeast changes color, and BLAM! Problem solved.
Of course then you have to worry about the 40-foot cockroach . . .
Yeah, I got a question.
What about bread?
Um, to go with the beer, of course.
Ah, but that's precisely the beauty of the concept. We'll be able to identify ourselves by seeing who doesn't use the logo!
Kind of like being able to tell if someone is pretending to have been a Navy SEAL because they're talking about/displaying their medals.
Take a look
Functional, yet stylish. It gives us a connection to those hackers who have gone before us.
(Note to the humor impaired: This is supposed to be funny. Laugh, or at least try to.)
I am saying that employees should have a right not to be exploited by their employers.
I can't disagree with that statement. Mostly I'm saying that employers do it because in the long run it saves them money.
As for the possibility of exploiting temps, yes, that is true, but in my mind an employer who would exploit contractors would be just as likely to exploit their "permanent" employees.
I apologize if I was unclear in my previous argument. I was merely trying to point out that hiring contingent staff is not a practice exclusive to Microsoft, and is not necessarily an evil thing (which was the impression I got from the parent post). In fact I know people who prefer to be contingent staff; they like the insulation from company politics and the freedom of knowing that they can walk away from the current job if they need to.
Yes, I'm for real. So let me ask you, what makes this practice worrisome? Is it that the employee doesn't have a job for life, or can be fired at will, or that it's for a limited period of time, or what? The employee knows that going in, and if he's smart he prepares for it just like he would any other employment-related potentiality.
If he's not smart, well, he'll get smart the first time it happens.
Do I like it? Not really. Yeah, I think it'd be swell if employers would just take us under their wing at 18 and keep us warm and fed and sheltered until we died. (That in itself is worrisome, and a discussion for another time.) But that is not the way the world works. The reality of the situation is, even if you THINK you're a permanent employee, you can be out of a job tomorrow if the company you're working for decides it can save a few bucks by cutting you loose. It's happened to me more than once.
The only way to approach a job in this country is to assume, that no matter what your title, no matter who you're working for, you're an independent contractor who has no more job security than any other guy out there. At least then you start planning for what will happen when/if the boss calls you in to ask if he can talk to you for a minute.
Let's just say that Microsoft Security is pretty good about keeping the company's physical assets secure and leave it at that, shall we?
Nothing worrisome about it. He works full time at Microsoft, but he's paid through a contract agency. And yes, it does make firing him that much easier. That's one reason why they do it, but usually where it comes into play is if a project gets cut back they can let contingent staff go without having to worry about severance pay and the like. Another is that it costs Microsoft less to pay for him and let the contract agency worry about benefits, payroll taxes, etc.
Like I said, nothing worrisome, companies do this all the time. It's purely a financial move. In fact some companies these days are made up almost entirely of contractors, hired for a particular project, paid and sent on to get another job.
The main thing contractors at Microsoft have to suffer through is a 100-day "break in service" every 365 days, precisely because there's already been a lawsuit over the practice. Google for "Microsoft" and "Vizcaino", or go here for the Vizcaino lawyers' side of the story.
Disclaimer: This is my opinion, not anything I saw on a Microsoft web page or anything like that. But I suspect it's the real reason.
The guy posted a picture of a Microsoft loading dock, and posted exactly where it was located. You'll notice there was a lot of very valuable cargo sitting on that loading dock. Yeah, it was shrinkwrapped and might be hard to boost, but a lot of other valuable cargo goes through that loading dock, some of which might be small enough for someone determined to steal if they got the opportunity. A picture could help that process.
Maybe this particular picture/description was innocuous, but you don't get to be a security professional by letting people get by with violations of the policies you're supposed to be enforcing.
I hope the guy can find something pretty soon.
We Mariners fans have a reason to be grateful to KMOX for running Cardinals games. Our longtime announcer Dave Niehaus grew up a Cards fan listening to KMOX in Indiana.
OK, here's a link to an abbreviated history of AM radio in the United States. I'm glad that most of what I remember is correct. :)
9 .h tml
http://www.antiqueradio.com/Evol_AM_Ripley_12-9
Isn't this old news? I haven't seen a channel knob on a new TV in ages.
That's not entirely correct. Actually, there were three classes of stations: clear channels, regionals, and locals. I don't think there was an "odd-even" split, based on a few of the channels I can remember off the top of my head: KIRO is at 710, KSL at 1160, KGO 810, WOI 640, KMOX 1120, and CBR 1010 which was right next to clear channel KOMO 1000. (Canadians used the same general band plan as the US; Mexico sort of went its own way, at least as far as transmitter power was concerned.)
The locals were (and are) assigned to seven "graveyard" frequencies in the upper portions of the AM band and limited to 1000 watts of power. Try tuning in 1490 some night; unless you have a local station there, it's an unintelligible jumble. The regionals got what was left, which to be honest was quite a bit.
As for three-letter IDs, that wasn't always the case either. The earliest commercial station was Pittsburgh's KDKA, for instance. Originally (we're talking 1910s here) shore stations communicating with ships were given three-letter calls, but eventually broadcast stations started to ask for them, sometimes to fit their parent companies' whims. WGN, for example, was supposed to stand for World's Greatest Newspaper (it was owned by the Chicago Tribune), and WLS (World's Largest Store) was owned by Sears.
Back in the day clear channel stations (not to be confused with stations owned by Clear Channel Communications) were a major communication link in this country. For those who don't know, back in the day (we're talking 70+ years ago) the Federal Communications Commission designeated a certain number of stations as "clear channel" stations. They were authorized to use the maximum power allowed by Federal law (50,000 watts), only one or two stations in the country were assigned to each frequency, and the stations were required to set up their antenna patterns to avoid interfering with each other as much as possible (this last one may have come later, I'm not sure). The net result was a set of stations that served not only their local communities, but a large area beyond. KSL in Salt Lake City, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, WOI in Des Moines, KIRO in Seattle, KGO in San Francisco . . . there were probably a hundred such stations, all serving listeners in areas where the local stations didn't broadcast at night, or didn't carry national programming (news and network radio shows) or locally-generated programs of interest (Normon-themed programming from KSL, Cardinals baseball from KMOX, crop and farming information from WOI, etc).
* whew * (catches breath)
As television became the dominant entertainment medium in America in the 60s and 70s, the clear-channel stations started becoming less and less important to their former audiences. All the stations I mentioned above are still broadcasting, but in most cases they share their frequencies with a number of other local stations.
for several reasons:
It's a medium that doesn't require much to access. Heck, all you need to listen to AM is a few feet of wire, a diode, a capacitor, a really good earth ground and a high impedance speaker/earpiece.
Even a relatively cheap "real" receiver will get you plenty of coverage in the AM and lower shortwave (so-called "tropical") bands. And, in a poor country where there might only be a couple of radios per village, the radio instills a sense of community as people gather to listen to the news (and if they can barely afford radios, they certainly won't have computers or televisions).
It covers a lot of ground. Countries like China and Indonesia use it to install a sense of national identity, for instance.
It's no respecter of boundaries or ideologies. If you're a separatist/guerilla/whatever movement, it costs little to set up a radio station and get your message across to your intended audience. (Google for "Radio Sandino" for an example from the Nicaraguan revolution of about 25 years ago.) If you're a government, it's similarly easy (think "Radio Free Europe" in the cold war days.)
You can do things with radio that you can't do in visual media. Talk TV seems clunky compared to talk radio, for instance. And remember the old Stan Freberg skit where, using only sound effects, Freberg drained Lake Michigan and filled it up with hot chocolate, sprayed a few thousand gallons of whipped cream onto it, and had the Royal Canadian Air Force drop a hundred-ton cherry on the top, to the applause of several thousand cheering extras, then finished off with, "Let's see them do that on television."
The key is to stop thinking of radio as a tool of the entertainment industrial complex and recognize it as a medium that has potential to be far more than it has become in the United States.
Well, based on empirical research, the answer to that questions appears to be "0".
This mirrors my thoughts this weekend, which had turned to photography anyway after I managed to wreck the lens assembly on my P&S Olympus. :(
My granddaughter is fascinated with my camera, and likes to take pictures. Most of what she takes is, well, what you would expect from a six-yar-old. However, if I get her a digital camera (even a cheap one) she can learn how to shoot pictures and at least hit what she's aiming for, and we'll have both the instant gratification of her getting to see her work right away and the cost saving of not having to develop rolls of pictures of her thumb.
I figure if we get her a camera for Christmas, by the time she's ten she'll be selling her work to Newsweek. (Or Weekly World News, if she confines her work to members of the family.)
The first time I saw one I thought I was looking at a desktop stereo -- you know, the boxy plastic-and-chrome kind you'd put in an office. I didn't believe it was a computer until I got a look at the connector array in the back.
And that was without putting it in an ET doll or a fishtank.
I want to get my hands on one of these. With a wireless ethernet card and a set of speakers hooked to a built-in sound card you could make a very nifty wireless MP3/streaming audio player -- one that the wife wouldn't object to having in the living room.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree it can be hard. (I also agree that 2.5 hours commuting each way is a bit much.) But, in many ways it's like smoking, or joining a religion, or being a vegetarian, or using free software or any other decision that has a major impact on your life. You make the decision and then work out how you're going to structure your life to accommodate the change. In my case I've made a conscious effort to live near public transportation. I have an employer who subsidizes my bus pass. That's one good thing about King County from a public transportation standpoint. The county has a mandate to promote the use of alternate means of transportation in companies over a certain size. My employer has paid for my bus pass for the last 7-8 years or so. If I can't get to where I want to go on a bus I take a cab. (I run up maybe $40 a month in cab fare. I couldn't buy gas for that.)
There are other avenues to explore. Carpool. Telecommute. Move closer to work. Get a different job. It may not be easy, but a lot of worthwhile things in life aren't. I'm too close to the situation to be an effective judge, but I'm sure that it's easy for me because 20 years ago it was a simple equation. I could own a car, live in it with a wife and three kids, and eat dogfood when we could afford dogfood, or I could forego the car and eat real food under a real roof. You might say I was highly motivated. And once I made the adjustments, I found that it was just easier for me to find a house on a bus route than to go through the hassle of owning a car again. (Much safer for the people on the sidewalks, too.)