I hope Bush and his gang get voted out of the office, and replaced by people who objectively weigh advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing for american citizens
Since then, the average cluefulness of computer users around the world has been plummeting because computers have been getting easier to use and the bar to entry has been lowered
I used to work with an engineer who was very fond of saying "The problem with making an idiot proof computer is that all of a sudden you have all these idiots using computers."
I have to use the default Windows XP configuration tool (which sucks, IMO)
I've often thought Microsoft should rename their "Wireless Zero Configuration" utility to "Wireless Zero Connectivity."
Because that's what you end up with: an intermitent link that you can't troubleshoot because you just can't get enough information out of it. To make matters worse, when you have this "service" enabled, it makes multiplayer gaming impossible. It actually disconnects from and reconnects to the AP every minute or two, with predictable results (stutter, even disconnection from the server.) To make things even more fun, it prevents third party configuration tools from working (like linksys' for example, though I believe Intel's will work properly.) There aren't even any usable workarounds.
Linux may not support nearly as many devices as Windows does, but at least YOU can decide who's tools you want to use to control them!
Because incompetent politics generally inhibits war, while incompetent warriors encourage it.
You, sir, are completely incorrect in your assertation. Once upon a time, you might have been largely correct--back in the days when those who had military power were the same people as those with political power (Napoleon for example) the warriors would be the ones to start the wars.
OTOH, looking at the history of 20th century US wars, not one was started by soldiers. Politicians are the ones who lead us into wars. Soldiers are the ones who die fighting them. Learn the difference.
there are 2.27+ million miles of paved roads in the US, not to mention all the unpaved ones...
First off, even at 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day, it'd take about 8 1/2 years to take the photos.
You know, nothing is preventing them from building, say, 10, 20, or 100 of these things...
You raise an excellent point about data storage requirements, but your math is poor. 1 megapixel != 1 megabyte. Depending on format, you're more likely talking 250kb. Now you're down to 4.25gb per mile. Given that the focus of this projects is to take photos of buildings, the majority of your images are going to be useless (i.e. alleys between buildings, trees, farmland, whatever) and things don't look TOO bad. Still a major problem, but not 38.59 petabytes worth of problem...
I get my taxes done for free after setting up a Samba domain for a local accountant here in my area. Pretty nice if you ask me.
I've also gotten my taxes done for working on the machine of a tax accountant. My best one however was having my 400 foot long driveway gravelled (twice) for working on a friend of the family's machine on a few occasions. The cost of the gravel plus the truck to deliver it is NOT an insignificant expense, if you're paying out of pocket.
The HP Digital Sender series are really great for this stuff. You feed it a stack of paper and it scans it, 15 pages per minute, and can store the PDF on a file server or you can send an email with the PDF attached directly from the network sender!
I have one of these on my office network, and and I agree that they're pretty good machines--though I have some complaints about them.
First off, I don't believe their functionality justifies the $3100 price tag. While the feature set it good, for that kind of money, this thing should be able to OCR, and not have to rely on 3rd party software for that functionality.
Secondly, their "scan to file server" feature requires a server side daemon to run--you can't simply drop the document to an SMB or NFS server. Further, the daemon only runs on WinNT/2k/XP systems, and you need to do a little bit of hacking to get it to run as a service, instead of opening it manually (or via startup folder) on login.
Third, it can be DOG SLOW. In particular, when scanning multiple large jobs (particularly at higher resolution) the thing will bog down. It also can only handle a fairly small number of jobs in queue at any one time. One of our secretaries can fill its queue in short order, and have to wait about ten minutes before she can scan the next document packet. When she's trying to scan a hundred packets, this essentially becomes her main focus for a work day.
All in all, our Toshiba copiers seem to do the same job better--of course, they have their own problems (i.e. over $20k each, with a poor user interface, and they don't do color, and don't OCR either.)
Scanner/Copier/Laser Printer with a 50 page document feeder for $400. And you can get an inkjet model for $150.
The really important thing for him to have here, I think, is the document feeder, based on his complaint of having to spend 1-2 minutes per page. Anything else (say, converting tiff to pdf and compressing the whole thing) can be accomplished via software.
The amount of RAM one would need for a framebuffer is immaterial: the 2600 doesn't have one. Everything is generated on the fly.
Besides the 2600's limited amount of memory, homebrew game developers say that the most difficult aspect about writing software for it is dealing with its display kernel. Since the system lacks video RAM, each scanline must be programmed directly. The picture on the screen has to be drawn in synchronization with the video beam, which can be a tricky feat to pull off, and there are only 76 CPU cycles per scanline. The game code must also control vertical synchronization, repositioning the electron beam at the top of the screen to start a new frame.
That being said, I'd say bowling for columbine was rather good. Yes parts of it exploited sensationalism and there were some factual errors, but it:::did::: raise a number of excellent questions.
This might surprise you (given my sig) but I actually agree with you: Bowling for Columbine DID raise some excellent points.
"Sensationalism" however is not a strong enough word to describe some of the other material in Bowling. The word you're looking for is "bullshit."
Conflating the NRA with the KKK, and using the basis for that claim as "they were both founded in the same year" (which they weren't, FYI) or demanding Charlton Heston apologize for the death of a little girl were both pretty despicable things to do, and made alot of people simply not listen to the other things--the worthwhile things!--Moore had to say.
Suggesting that fear is what make Americans so violent compared to other similar nations? I suspect that's pretty close to the mark. Suggesting that kids are violent because their parents around around, because they spend 4 hours commuting and 10 hours working two different jobs? I suspect that, too, has more than a kernel of truth to it. Rolling the above two points together, and blaming the NRA for everything? STUPID! It's like blaming the ACLU for kiddie porn because they so jealously guard the 1st amendment.
The truly ironic part? Stripped of it's inflamatory rhetoric, Bowling would have appealed to the very people it vilifies. Despite being presented as a racist thug who wants to see children die, your average NRA member is as against the misuse of firearms as much as Sarah Brady is. We just disagree that gun control is the means to solve the problem--and judging by some of the points Moore made in Bowling, it isn't.
Why don't you mean those yahoos up in Michigan? Because they don't agree with your politics?
I wasn't suggesting the yahoos up in Michigan weren't members of the militia (legally, they in fact are.) What I was trying to get across was that the militia is inclusive of all citizens, and not just the media representation of people who dress up in their cammies every weekend and collect nazi memorabilia.
If all the vast masses of armed American citizens were pitted against the American military, we'd see a massacre of the disorganized gun toters by the military killing machine.
That is, of course, quite probable--and it only reinforces WHY we have a 2nd amendment (see below.)
Re: your.sig: you misunderstand the cheapness of the original federal government, which planned to save money by relying on calling up citizens with their own guns, rather than supplying them from an armory.
While I'm sure this has some basis in fact (we were, after all, a fairly poor country at the beginning) you're completely ignoring that the vast majority of our founders thought that standing armies were a threat to liberty. If you don't believe me, read their writings. If you're of the opinion that those writings aren't legal documents, then see the various state constitutional provisions for the right to bear arms.
To pretend that the 2nd amendment was somehow an economy measure (or some sort of collective rights of the several states) is to ignore the actual history in favor of your world view.
Nothing within the "system" as you call it provides for its own overthrow
That's not exactly true. Means of change (both peaceful and violent) are protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In our system of checks and balances, the final check is the people. The tools the people have available are the "four boxes:" The soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
The soap box is the ability to get the word out that something is wrong. It's protected by the first amendment--freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. In an ideal world, the words of the people are heard, and government reacts accordingly. Usually, they don't--which leads us to...
The ballot box. Your right (and responsibility!) to vote. If the government doesn't change itself, then throw the bastards out. As another poster noted, we have a built in "overthrow" of government that takes place every two years. This right is defined is several places in the constitution, and modified several more times via amendment.
The jury box. Can't get the legislators out of office (rigged voting machines, maybe?) Can't get those laws repealed? Then don't enforce them! The jury is THE last word is both civil and criminal cases. Juries are responsibile for determining both the facts AND the law of the case (despite what most modern courts tell juries in their instructions, they DO have that power.) This is protected by the 6th and 7th amendments.
The cartridge box. When all of the above fail, there is still the tool of absolutely last resort. The militia. When I say militia, I don't mean those yahoos up in Michigan, I mean you, me, every citizen of this nation. It is impossible to subjugate an armed people--this is exactly why the militia is "necessary to the security of a free state" and why the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms is protected by the 2nd amendment.
- ridiculous references to modern times, like themeing the pod race like a nascar race, with stupid anachronistic quotes.
Of all the complaints I see, I've never seen anyone else complain about the one thing that annoys me the most--the freaking DINER in Attack of the Clones.
I swear, I was half expecting some manner of creature in a pink dress to come out and screech "kiss my grits!"
that the US spies on its "friends" in the first place. It may be naive, but if you want respect you have to give respect.
There's no "may" to it, it's incredibly naive. Yep, the US spies on it's allies--but if you believe that those allies are not spying on the US in turn, you're dreaming. Charles de Gaulle once said that nations do not have friends--only interests. That's as true today as it was then.
Electronic filing in particular saves the IRS tons of cash. But I prefer to pay $0.37 for a stamp than $20 to e-file.
So don't pay $20 to e-file.
Here is a list of IRS "Free File Alliance" partners. The law requires a certain percentage of US taxpayers have free access to e-file, and this is accomplished through these vendors. All of these vendors have different criteria as to who can file for free, but if you dig around you can find one to suit your needs.
For example, when I filed my taxes back in Feb, there was one outfit providing free e-file if your AGI was above $28,000 a year.
I happen to like the headline of this story from The Register: Alien puppet Linus swiped Linux from SCO, says balanced study. Trust the Reg to put this story in the proper context.
Of course, what REALLY burns me is the line that says For almost thirty years, programmers have tried to build a Unix-like system and couldn't, somehow suggesting that UNIX is like the the tinfoil hat version of the pyramids of Egypt--some mysterious advanced technology that no one understands and couldn't possibly replicate.
No, that's Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-Select-Start... which is also a popular backdoor code in many other video games from that era.
Actually, It's "Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A." The "Select" you're remembering was to choose two player mode, while "Start" of course started the game--but neither of the last two were actually part of the code.
This was the standard "30 lives" (NOT infinite lives) cheat on NES games by Konami, and not just "many other games from that era."
Figuring approximately 100 million American women of legal age, that means, as a country, we are wasting around half a million miles of pussy every year, while some men here go without!
Very funny, but it was MUCH funnier when Robin Williams (IIRC) originally said it.
How hard is it to have a BSD or Linux box acting as an el-cheapo firewall between the Internet and your internal network? I have a $200 laptop which has done just that task for several years now. I can never be bothered to patch my (Windows) machines, but they never have trouble because they can only talk within each other and not get attacked from the outside. Jeez, even if you paid someone to install it, you could have the whole job done for $1000 with old hardware and a copy of FreeBSD.
If you're talking about your home network, yeah, I guess that's okay--but in a business environment (which is what you're talking about, since you mention armies of MS only consultants) what happens when your road warriors VPN in, and infect your ENTIRE FUCKING NETWORK because you thought that a simple NATing firewall was "good enough" security, and didn't bother to patch your boxes?
Don't get me wrong--what you suggest will reasonably protect you from quite a few threats--but it's NOT the panacea you make it out to be.
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I hope Bush and his gang get voted out of the office, and replaced by people who objectively weigh advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing for american citizens
You mean like John Kerry, who voted for NAFTA?
Since then, the average cluefulness of computer users around the world has been plummeting because computers have been getting easier to use and the bar to entry has been lowered
I used to work with an engineer who was very fond of saying "The problem with making an idiot proof computer is that all of a sudden you have all these idiots using computers."
I have to use the default Windows XP configuration tool (which sucks, IMO)
I've often thought Microsoft should rename their "Wireless Zero Configuration" utility to "Wireless Zero Connectivity."
Because that's what you end up with: an intermitent link that you can't troubleshoot because you just can't get enough information out of it. To make matters worse, when you have this "service" enabled, it makes multiplayer gaming impossible. It actually disconnects from and reconnects to the AP every minute or two, with predictable results (stutter, even disconnection from the server.) To make things even more fun, it prevents third party configuration tools from working (like linksys' for example, though I believe Intel's will work properly.) There aren't even any usable workarounds.
Linux may not support nearly as many devices as Windows does, but at least YOU can decide who's tools you want to use to control them!
Because incompetent politics generally inhibits war, while incompetent warriors encourage it.
You, sir, are completely incorrect in your assertation. Once upon a time, you might have been largely correct--back in the days when those who had military power were the same people as those with political power (Napoleon for example) the warriors would be the ones to start the wars.
OTOH, looking at the history of 20th century US wars, not one was started by soldiers. Politicians are the ones who lead us into wars. Soldiers are the ones who die fighting them. Learn the difference.
Killing people is wrong. No matter who does it.
Are you suggesting it's wrong to, say, kill someone in self defense or defense of another innocent party?
Insightful, my ass.
And considering that even TIME isn't consistent there (Bart has been 13 for 15 straight years)
Bart Simpson is age 10.
there are 2.27+ million miles of paved roads in the US, not to mention all the unpaved ones...
First off, even at 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day, it'd take about 8 1/2 years to take the photos.
You know, nothing is preventing them from building, say, 10, 20, or 100 of these things...
You raise an excellent point about data storage requirements, but your math is poor. 1 megapixel != 1 megabyte. Depending on format, you're more likely talking 250kb. Now you're down to 4.25gb per mile. Given that the focus of this projects is to take photos of buildings, the majority of your images are going to be useless (i.e. alleys between buildings, trees, farmland, whatever) and things don't look TOO bad. Still a major problem, but not 38.59 petabytes worth of problem...
They offered--they owned the truck, and a family friend of theirs owned the quarry. Net cost to them was pretty much just labor, same as with us.
:)
All I can say is: barter rocks.
I get my taxes done for free after setting up a Samba domain for a local accountant here in my area. Pretty nice if you ask me.
I've also gotten my taxes done for working on the machine of a tax accountant. My best one however was having my 400 foot long driveway gravelled (twice) for working on a friend of the family's machine on a few occasions. The cost of the gravel plus the truck to deliver it is NOT an insignificant expense, if you're paying out of pocket.
The HP Digital Sender series are really great for this stuff. You feed it a stack of paper and it scans it, 15 pages per minute, and can store the PDF on a file server or you can send an email with the PDF attached directly from the network sender!
I have one of these on my office network, and and I agree that they're pretty good machines--though I have some complaints about them.
First off, I don't believe their functionality justifies the $3100 price tag. While the feature set it good, for that kind of money, this thing should be able to OCR, and not have to rely on 3rd party software for that functionality.
Secondly, their "scan to file server" feature requires a server side daemon to run--you can't simply drop the document to an SMB or NFS server. Further, the daemon only runs on WinNT/2k/XP systems, and you need to do a little bit of hacking to get it to run as a service, instead of opening it manually (or via startup folder) on login.
Third, it can be DOG SLOW. In particular, when scanning multiple large jobs (particularly at higher resolution) the thing will bog down. It also can only handle a fairly small number of jobs in queue at any one time. One of our secretaries can fill its queue in short order, and have to wait about ten minutes before she can scan the next document packet. When she's trying to scan a hundred packets, this essentially becomes her main focus for a work day.
All in all, our Toshiba copiers seem to do the same job better--of course, they have their own problems (i.e. over $20k each, with a poor user interface, and they don't do color, and don't OCR either.)
Will you please tell both of us where we can get one for a few hundred dollars, as specified in the question?
How about this?
Scanner/Copier/Laser Printer with a 50 page document feeder for $400. And you can get an inkjet model for $150.
The really important thing for him to have here, I think, is the document feeder, based on his complaint of having to spend 1-2 minutes per page. Anything else (say, converting tiff to pdf and compressing the whole thing) can be accomplished via software.
The amount of RAM one would need for a framebuffer is immaterial: the 2600 doesn't have one. Everything is generated on the fly.
That being said, I'd say bowling for columbine was rather good. Yes parts of it exploited sensationalism and there were some factual errors, but it :::did::: raise a number of excellent questions.
This might surprise you (given my sig) but I actually agree with you: Bowling for Columbine DID raise some excellent points.
"Sensationalism" however is not a strong enough word to describe some of the other material in Bowling. The word you're looking for is "bullshit."
Conflating the NRA with the KKK, and using the basis for that claim as "they were both founded in the same year" (which they weren't, FYI) or demanding Charlton Heston apologize for the death of a little girl were both pretty despicable things to do, and made alot of people simply not listen to the other things--the worthwhile things!--Moore had to say.
Suggesting that fear is what make Americans so violent compared to other similar nations? I suspect that's pretty close to the mark. Suggesting that kids are violent because their parents around around, because they spend 4 hours commuting and 10 hours working two different jobs? I suspect that, too, has more than a kernel of truth to it. Rolling the above two points together, and blaming the NRA for everything? STUPID! It's like blaming the ACLU for kiddie porn because they so jealously guard the 1st amendment.
The truly ironic part? Stripped of it's inflamatory rhetoric, Bowling would have appealed to the very people it vilifies. Despite being presented as a racist thug who wants to see children die, your average NRA member is as against the misuse of firearms as much as Sarah Brady is. We just disagree that gun control is the means to solve the problem--and judging by some of the points Moore made in Bowling, it isn't.
Uhh, SETI@Home turned five years old on May 17th, 2004. If you're going to announce an anniversary, you should at least get it right!
Why don't you mean those yahoos up in Michigan? Because they don't agree with your politics?
.sig: you misunderstand the cheapness of the original federal government, which planned to save money by relying on calling up citizens with their own guns, rather than supplying them from an armory.
I wasn't suggesting the yahoos up in Michigan weren't members of the militia (legally, they in fact are.) What I was trying to get across was that the militia is inclusive of all citizens, and not just the media representation of people who dress up in their cammies every weekend and collect nazi memorabilia.
If all the vast masses of armed American citizens were pitted against the American military, we'd see a massacre of the disorganized gun toters by the military killing machine.
That is, of course, quite probable--and it only reinforces WHY we have a 2nd amendment (see below.)
Re: your
While I'm sure this has some basis in fact (we were, after all, a fairly poor country at the beginning) you're completely ignoring that the vast majority of our founders thought that standing armies were a threat to liberty. If you don't believe me, read their writings. If you're of the opinion that those writings aren't legal documents, then see the various state constitutional provisions for the right to bear arms.
To pretend that the 2nd amendment was somehow an economy measure (or some sort of collective rights of the several states) is to ignore the actual history in favor of your world view.
Nothing within the "system" as you call it provides for its own overthrow
That's not exactly true. Means of change (both peaceful and violent) are protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In our system of checks and balances, the final check is the people. The tools the people have available are the "four boxes:" The soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
The soap box is the ability to get the word out that something is wrong. It's protected by the first amendment--freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. In an ideal world, the words of the people are heard, and government reacts accordingly. Usually, they don't--which leads us to...
The ballot box. Your right (and responsibility!) to vote. If the government doesn't change itself, then throw the bastards out. As another poster noted, we have a built in "overthrow" of government that takes place every two years. This right is defined is several places in the constitution, and modified several more times via amendment.
The jury box. Can't get the legislators out of office (rigged voting machines, maybe?) Can't get those laws repealed? Then don't enforce them! The jury is THE last word is both civil and criminal cases. Juries are responsibile for determining both the facts AND the law of the case (despite what most modern courts tell juries in their instructions, they DO have that power.) This is protected by the 6th and 7th amendments.
The cartridge box. When all of the above fail, there is still the tool of absolutely last resort. The militia. When I say militia, I don't mean those yahoos up in Michigan, I mean you, me, every citizen of this nation. It is impossible to subjugate an armed people--this is exactly why the militia is "necessary to the security of a free state" and why the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms is protected by the 2nd amendment.
- ridiculous references to modern times, like themeing the pod race like a nascar race, with stupid anachronistic quotes.
Of all the complaints I see, I've never seen anyone else complain about the one thing that annoys me the most--the freaking DINER in Attack of the Clones.
I swear, I was half expecting some manner of creature in a pink dress to come out and screech "kiss my grits!"
that the US spies on its "friends" in the first place.
It may be naive, but if you want respect you have to give respect.
There's no "may" to it, it's incredibly naive. Yep, the US spies on it's allies--but if you believe that those allies are not spying on the US in turn, you're dreaming. Charles de Gaulle once said that nations do not have friends--only interests. That's as true today as it was then.
Electronic filing in particular saves the IRS tons of cash. But I prefer to pay $0.37 for a stamp than $20 to e-file.
So don't pay $20 to e-file.
Here is a list of IRS "Free File Alliance" partners. The law requires a certain percentage of US taxpayers have free access to e-file, and this is accomplished through these vendors. All of these vendors have different criteria as to who can file for free, but if you dig around you can find one to suit your needs.
For example, when I filed my taxes back in Feb, there was one outfit providing free e-file if your AGI was above $28,000 a year.
I happen to like the headline of this story from The Register: Alien puppet Linus swiped Linux from SCO, says balanced study. Trust the Reg to put this story in the proper context.
Of course, what REALLY burns me is the line that says For almost thirty years, programmers have tried to build a Unix-like system and couldn't, somehow suggesting that UNIX is like the the tinfoil hat version of the pyramids of Egypt--some mysterious advanced technology that no one understands and couldn't possibly replicate.
No, that's Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-Select-Start ... which is also a popular backdoor code in many other video games from that era.
Actually, It's "Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A." The "Select" you're remembering was to choose two player mode, while "Start" of course started the game--but neither of the last two were actually part of the code.
This was the standard "30 lives" (NOT infinite lives) cheat on NES games by Konami, and not just "many other games from that era."
Figuring approximately 100 million American women of legal age, that means, as a country, we are wasting around half a million miles of pussy every year, while some men here go without!
Very funny, but it was MUCH funnier when Robin Williams (IIRC) originally said it.
Intel has jumped on the lowend with the Pentium-M.
Pentium-M is NOT the low end! These chips are SIGNIFICANTLY faster than P4 clock for clock.
Starfleet HQ had deemed it illegal and set up regulations that required the immediate destruction of the particle if encountered.
Err, wouldn't destroying it RELEASE all of that energy in a rather bomblike way?
How hard is it to have a BSD or Linux box acting as an el-cheapo firewall between the Internet and your internal network? I have a $200 laptop which has done just that task for several years now. I can never be bothered to patch my (Windows) machines, but they never have trouble because they can only talk within each other and not get attacked from the outside. Jeez, even if you paid someone to install it, you could have the whole job done for $1000 with old hardware and a copy of FreeBSD.
If you're talking about your home network, yeah, I guess that's okay--but in a business environment (which is what you're talking about, since you mention armies of MS only consultants) what happens when your road warriors VPN in, and infect your ENTIRE FUCKING NETWORK because you thought that a simple NATing firewall was "good enough" security, and didn't bother to patch your boxes?
Don't get me wrong--what you suggest will reasonably protect you from quite a few threats--but it's NOT the panacea you make it out to be.