Too true. The administration at the large public library where I used to work seemed to view the underpriveledged types who would conduct most of their computing on our Wyse terminals more as unwelcome burdens than as "real" patrons.
These are people who needed to do simple stuff like type out a resume, write a two page book report for school, or whatever. I spent the better part of a year trying to persuade IS to put OpenOffice on a couple of unused PCs we had sitting around, and their response was, essentially, "Microsoft rulez! OOo droolz!"
"So are we going to put MS Office on the PCs for the public instead?"
"No, we can't afford the licenses."
I actually took my case all the way up to administration, and they as much as told me "We're a library, not a community center. They're lucky we don't block Hotmail."
Shit, they even locked the floppy drives on the few actual PCs (rather than Winterms) we had available for the public, to keep people from saving anything.
All this from one of the largest, and supposedly best, public library systems in the country.
I ended up writing a little PHP script that'll spit out either a preformatted resume or a simple letter-type html page and let you print them out from a browser. Took me an hour, and that was mostly getting the tables right for the resumes. The patrons, my immediate boss, and all of my co-workers were thrilled, but all I got from administration was a warning that I shouldn't have developed the app on company time.
Fuckers.
Hotmail, Yahoo, et al provide valuable services to people who couldn't otherwise get them.
Yeah, the corporations behind the services are only doing it to make a buck.
Yeah, they're free, and you get what you pay for.
Yeah, anybody who should know better, and could afford better, who does *anything* critical with Hotmail is an idiot.
But for some people, something is better than nothing.
It would seem to make sense, until you need to talk on the phone and check your calendar at the same time.
I've already got a 5500 that serves as my calendar, address book, ultra-portable notebook, wifi sniffer, and media player. What I want NOW is a tiny, cheap, monochrome, tiny, tiny, tiny, cheap, cheap phone. The Zaurus can go in my man-purse, but I really want a phone that will fit comfortably in the front pocket of a pair of Levi's 501s.
On the other hand, I've got no use for a phone at the moment, anyway. It's still cheaper for me to drop the occasional four bits when I need to make a call. YMMV.
No, they just have to make the source available to you if you ask them.
Plus, they can deliver it to you any way they want: teletype, microfiche, or Morse Code.
Of course, the only time I've ever reinstalled was when I upgraded the HDD in my notebook a couple of weeks ago. And that was essentially just copying ~/ off the old drive from a USB enclosure.
- Firefox - Plucker Distiller - Up-to-date PyGTK - Nicotine - Pan (if I forgot to select it on the initial install) - Grip (ditto) - EasyTag (") - Nano - DamnSmallLinux (Okay, not a "new program", but I try to grab a fresh ISO whenever I can.)
Hmmm... looking at this list, it looks like a substantial number of my must-have apps are GTK. Which is wierd, because I prefer KDE as a desktop environment. Go figure.
Taxpayers with an adjusted gross family income of $28,000 or more are among the top half, and are presumably the "rich" half that liberals seem determined to punish by increasing taxes.
Bolding mine.
Note that nowhere in the editorial does that idiot quote anybody saying that those with incomes above the median are necessarily rich.
In fact, Kerry, among other Democrats, has taken great pains to point out that he favors a tax increase on only those household who take home more than $200K a year. Which, by any objective measure, is stinking fucking rich.
That entire editorial is full of shit, and if that's all the evidence you got, so are you.
The events mentioned in the article, and the events that happened to you, were wrong. And I say that as a dyed in the wool Social Democrat/Secular Humanist.
I've got no problem with student-run Bible study groups in public schools, as long as any other religiously- or secularly-oriented groups of students are permitted to form their own clubs.
I'm NOT in favor of letting any such groups disrupt the educational objectives of the school, though. That means no fag bashing in the Bible group, no Christian bashing in the Athiest group, and no smoking out in the Hemp Legalization group.
Yeah, my caveat is a restriction on free speech, but it's been pretty well established that minors don't necessarily have the same rights in school as they do anywhere else.
It's like politically correct terms. That's a form of the violation of the first amendment when I use the 'N' word, but if I use African American, it's OK. But what we've learned from leftists is hypocracy, and this is what we have here.
Sorry homeskillet, it's not a violation of the First Amendment unless the government restrains you from going around an calling people "nigger." I thought conservatives were supposed to be big on a strict interpretation of the Constitution.
Sidebar: I'm still kinda amazed that in 2004, people still fail to grasp the essential difference between a minority reclaiming a pejorative for it's own use and a bigot running around spouting off the same word in a different context. Gay people occasionally call each other "faggot." Hope that doesn't make your head explode.
I only glanced over the page, but what about the case where the a high school christian club was denied the right to post a pro-christian poster on the "clubs board" at the school because it deemed inflamatory. Or what about the kid who was wearing a t-shirt which was also pro-christian... he was told to leave school.
Of course you only "glanced" at the article. Otherwise, you might have noticed that they made mention of a municipality banning a privately-funded display by a Christian group. Dunno, maybe the Christians were some of those Episcohomos or something.
----- Office Suite manufacturers should, in my opinion, get their act together and start making their applications compatible with each other. The author quite clearly shows a bias against Microsoft here by stating that they have no excuse for supporting the OpenOffice formats. IIRC, Microsoft Office has been around for quite a bit longer than OpenOffice, and has become a standard in its' own right. -----
Horsefeathers. OO's format is *open*. MS's is *closed*. How the fuck are other vendors supposed to properly support a "standard" that they have to reverse engineer?
In the intereset of thematic unity, and also because it would just fucking kick ass, I humbly submit that they change the name of Thunderbird to Thundercat.
Then again, apparently some morons would try to send emails on their collectible toys from the 80's.
I actually checked those out... I'm trying to scrape the dough together to get the one with the 40GB drive. I've been waffling between it and a 12" Powerbook.
After playing around with one at Staples a few months ago, and other than the fact that the keyboard leaves much to be desired cf the Powerbook, it looks like a damn good deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Too true. The administration at the large public library where I used to work seemed to view the underpriveledged types who would conduct most of their computing on our Wyse terminals more as unwelcome burdens than as "real" patrons.
These are people who needed to do simple stuff like type out a resume, write a two page book report for school, or whatever. I spent the better part of a year trying to persuade IS to put OpenOffice on a couple of unused PCs we had sitting around, and their response was, essentially, "Microsoft rulez! OOo droolz!"
"So are we going to put MS Office on the PCs for the public instead?"
"No, we can't afford the licenses."
I actually took my case all the way up to administration, and they as much as told me "We're a library, not a community center. They're lucky we don't block Hotmail."
Shit, they even locked the floppy drives on the few actual PCs (rather than Winterms) we had available for the public, to keep people from saving anything.
All this from one of the largest, and supposedly best, public library systems in the country.
I ended up writing a little PHP script that'll spit out either a preformatted resume or a simple letter-type html page and let you print them out from a browser. Took me an hour, and that was mostly getting the tables right for the resumes. The patrons, my immediate boss, and all of my co-workers were thrilled, but all I got from administration was a warning that I shouldn't have developed the app on company time.
Fuckers.
Hotmail, Yahoo, et al provide valuable services to people who couldn't otherwise get them.
Yeah, the corporations behind the services are only doing it to make a buck.
Yeah, they're free, and you get what you pay for.
Yeah, anybody who should know better, and could afford better, who does *anything* critical with Hotmail is an idiot.
But for some people, something is better than nothing.
Haaaa-ha!
Cool, thanks. I will.
I've already got a 5500 that serves as my calendar, address book, ultra-portable notebook, wifi sniffer, and media player. What I want NOW is a tiny, cheap, monochrome, tiny, tiny, tiny, cheap, cheap phone. The Zaurus can go in my man-purse, but I really want a phone that will fit comfortably in the front pocket of a pair of Levi's 501s.
On the other hand, I've got no use for a phone at the moment, anyway. It's still cheaper for me to drop the occasional four bits when I need to make a call. YMMV.
No, they just have to make the source available to you if you ask them. Plus, they can deliver it to you any way they want: teletype, microfiche, or Morse Code.
If that gets modded Informative, I guess the mods really are on crack.
Of course, the only time I've ever reinstalled was when I upgraded the HDD in my notebook a couple of weeks ago. And that was essentially just copying ~/ off the old drive from a USB enclosure.
- Firefox
- Plucker Distiller
- Up-to-date PyGTK
- Nicotine
- Pan (if I forgot to select it on the initial install)
- Grip (ditto)
- EasyTag (")
- Nano
- DamnSmallLinux (Okay, not a "new program", but I try to grab a fresh ISO whenever I can.)
Hmmm... looking at this list, it looks like a substantial number of my must-have apps are GTK. Which is wierd, because I prefer KDE as a desktop environment. Go figure.
Got that right. Hell, you usually don't read about them in the same sentance, even.
Being a Midwestern hayseed and all, I almost took that at face value, but I decided to check, just in case.
According to the 2000 Census, only 13.2% of white households in Manhattan made more that $200K.
So even among the wealthiest ethnic group living in the most expensive borough of NYC, $200K is still 87th percentile.
Not quite stinking rich, given those rather rarefied demographics, but nowhere near "lower middle class."
Cite (pdf).
I call bullshit on this one:
Bolding mine.
Note that nowhere in the editorial does that idiot quote anybody saying that those with incomes above the median are necessarily rich.
In fact, Kerry, among other Democrats, has taken great pains to point out that he favors a tax increase on only those household who take home more than $200K a year. Which, by any objective measure, is stinking fucking rich.
That entire editorial is full of shit, and if that's all the evidence you got, so are you.
The events mentioned in the article, and the events that happened to you, were wrong. And I say that as a dyed in the wool Social Democrat/Secular Humanist.
I've got no problem with student-run Bible study groups in public schools, as long as any other religiously- or secularly-oriented groups of students are permitted to form their own clubs.
I'm NOT in favor of letting any such groups disrupt the educational objectives of the school, though. That means no fag bashing in the Bible group, no Christian bashing in the Athiest group, and no smoking out in the Hemp Legalization group.
Yeah, my caveat is a restriction on free speech, but it's been pretty well established that minors don't necessarily have the same rights in school as they do anywhere else.
Sorry homeskillet, it's not a violation of the First Amendment unless the government restrains you from going around an calling people "nigger." I thought conservatives were supposed to be big on a strict interpretation of the Constitution.
Sidebar: I'm still kinda amazed that in 2004, people still fail to grasp the essential difference between a minority reclaiming a pejorative for it's own use and a bigot running around spouting off the same word in a different context. Gay people occasionally call each other "faggot." Hope that doesn't make your head explode.
Of course you only "glanced" at the article. Otherwise, you might have noticed that they made mention of a municipality banning a privately-funded display by a Christian group. Dunno, maybe the Christians were some of those Episcohomos or something.
You forgot to add the Bush Administration and the rest of the neo-cons. If they didn't want Lott to go, he wouldn't have.
6) Ann Coulter, banned from network interviews while promoting NYT bestseller.
Does Larry King count?
Really, man, Google before you type.
Yeah, like their story about the kid who got harassed by a school administrator for wearing an NRA shirt to school.
I'm sick to death of hearing about that mewling little Communist, Charleton Heston, and all his pinko pals.
...is why nobody's started putting 4GB microdrives in these Uber-PDAs instead of flash or ramsdisk for storage?
I mean, other than the fact that the Hitachi microdrive factory is basically a division of Apple right now.
That would totally kick ass.
-----
Office Suite manufacturers should, in my opinion, get their act together and start making their applications compatible with each other. The author quite clearly shows a bias against Microsoft here by stating that they have no excuse for supporting the OpenOffice formats. IIRC, Microsoft Office has been around for quite a bit longer than OpenOffice, and has become a standard in its' own right.
-----
Horsefeathers. OO's format is *open*. MS's is *closed*. How the fuck are other vendors supposed to properly support a "standard" that they have to reverse engineer?
Then again, apparently some morons would try to send emails on their collectible toys from the 80's.
Irony's a bitch, innit?
I've fondled one at Worst Buy; does anybody else have any real life experience with em?
And color me skeptical, but 800 songs (even at 64kbps) sounds like waaay too much for a measly 65-100 bucks. Especially from Apple.
I suppose she could use mine... I gave them to her a long time ago, anyway...
After playing around with one at Staples a few months ago, and other than the fact that the keyboard leaves much to be desired cf the Powerbook, it looks like a damn good deal.
What distro did you install on it, btw?
One 180 by music industry idiots deserves another...
Better yet, 64 kbs oggs. That would kick ass.
...sigh...
Because the files are frickin' huge, and 99% of the time that they're used, plain text or html would serve perfectly well.