Don't forget the "G5" (PPC 970). It runs 64/32. Not sure how to compare the price since you can't buy G5s alone (damn Apple). But as I recall, a dual MB with two of the fastest Opterons on the market ran to about $2,000 USD on Pricewatch. The dual 2Ghz G5 is 3 grand. So 1 grand difference but you get a sweet case, DVD-R, 160GB HDD, 512 RAM, Radeon 9600, keyboard, mouse, OS, all their onboard stuff, and 9 fans.
The movie business is about the only thing booming right now. Lots of jobs as PAs, construction workers for sets, teamsters, etc (just watch those dumb MPAA ads). And they pay well! But seriously, not all Hollywood movies are trash...Pirates of the Caribbean was actually pretty damn good.
...Ben Affleck is a master at reverse engineering??? I'm sorry I can't stop laughing. I can picture him "thinking really hard", "staring at the screen", "putting the pieces together", etc. God, this should be a good one, I can't wait.
I hate webmail without POP or IMAP access. All my tech-dumb friends are always asking me how to get their email off the webmail servers when they start to get full. It's a goddamn plague, I tell you. I recently upgraded to an IMAP account. Now that's style...
If you know how to fix the second problem, you'd be a very rich man. Apple would hire you in a second.
But seriously, if Linux and OS X never break, and are completely intuitive, then the second problem goes away. Well maybe not for Linux because you're more likely to be running a box with a bad stick of RAM. Whereas Apple folks can sleep peacefully knowing they've been way overcharged for good RAM.
I was selling a video card for a friend on eBay, and someone writes me from Spain, saying she's starting a computer shop in Amsterdam or something and needs parts. She was completely insane, but I just chalked it up to the language barrier. I cancelled the auction and waited for her to transfer money to my PayPal account. I wasn't really concerned because I figured since I got the money first, what did I have to lose?
A lot, it turns out. So she finally transfers me the money, I transfer the money to my bank account, and I go right down to FedEx and send the card 2-day. When I get back home, I have an email from PayPal telling me that the person who sent me the money had their account hijacked and PayPal had taken the money back. This, I suppose, was fine. I couldn't argue because I had agreed to their terms. I was a little pissed because I wasn't the idiot who had their account hijacked, but such is life.
So I immediately called FedEx and had them stop the shipment, but it was already over the Atlantic, so they couldn't stop it until it got to Spain. This caused me to have to pay for it to be shipped back, effectively doubling my shipping costs. Not cheap...this was 2-day to Spain.
I was further irked by PayPal's bad programming. Instead of intercepting and canceling my bank transfer, they just deducted the money from my PayPal account, so now I was in the negative, and had to wait for the transfer to go through, and then transfer the money back. Annoying, but at least it was free.
So what about PayPal's protection policy? Doesn't apply to international orders. Also, you have to ship to the person's registered address. Not sure I know how to even look that up.
Oh, also, I checked the eBay ID of the person, and that was a hijacked account, too. The person sold a lot of "exotic" drinking glasses and had a high feedback rating. Obviously, not someone in the computer fraud business.
Anyway, the point of my story was that you have to be careful even if you're the seller. Only ship to registered PayPal addresses and check what sort of stuff a person is selling on eBay. I recently saw someone selling a really cheap Powerbook, but all their previous items were dolls, or something. Definitely something fishy there.
I read somewhere that statistically the maxiumum you can live is around 500 years. Eventually, no matter how hard you try, you will get hit by a train.
On a side note, a friend of mine once stayed at a clinic somewhere for some tests, and the only rooms they had left were suicide-proof. He said there were no edges anywhere and other weird stuff. So maybe if you lived in one of those, buried in the ground somewhere, you could make it to 600 years.
Blah blah flame war. The point being, as you said, people in the Taliban used to be in the Mujahiddin. The groudwork was laid for Wahabi Islamic extremism in Afghanistan by the CIA. Who cares if it's called Taliban or Mujahiddin?
Osama bin Laden was among the Mujahiddin that fought against the Russians. Wahabis were running all over the place. If you can't see the connection between the Wahabi Muslims (Mujahiddin) fighting against the Soviet invasion in the 80s and the current al Qaeda and Taliban, then you're not paying attention.
Government agencies must pay up to $699 for each copy of the Linux operating system that they use, the SCO Group Inc., Lindon, Utah, announced Tuesday in a new licensing program.
However, SCO's intellectual property claims over Linux remain contested by other parties.
"We believe it is necessary for Linux customers to properly license SCO's [intellectual property] if they are running Linux... for commercial purposes," said Chris Sontag, who is a senior vice president of SCO. Use of any Linux distribution can cause liability, regardless of vendor, the company claimed.
"Government agencies shouldn't be too worried about this until they see more evidence," said Tony Stanco, head of the Center for Open Source and Government and associate director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University.
SCO has claimed that the 2.4 and 2.5 versions of the Linux kernel is embedded with code that SCO holds intellectual property rights on.
At least some of the code in question supposedly comes from the Unix Systems V operating system, a proprietary systems that SCO purchased the rights to from Novell Inc., Provo, Utah in 1995.
In March, SCO sued IBM for $1 billion over misuse of the intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system. The company claimed that IBM inappropriately added some of SCO's Unix proprietary code to Linux.
Other parties remain skeptical of the company's legitimacy to the licensing fees.
Stanco said that SCO's licensing fees are unusual in that a court of law hasn't determined that the intellectual property is clearly SCO's yet. "You don't try to get money until the issues are resolved in your favor," he said.
Blake Stowell, director of corporate communications for SCO said that the IBM suit is unrelated to the present licensing initiative. Although some of the overlapping code comes from IBM, there are other parts of the code that leaked into Linux from other sources, Stowell said.
"We'll be happy to show [agencies] proof, providing they sign a nondisclosure agreement," Stowell said.
John Weathersby, chairman of the Open Source Software Institute said the government clients he works with have no immediate plans to pay the fee. The Oxford, Miss.-based nonprofit Open Source Software Institute was founded in 2001 to promote government use of open-source software, or software in which the source code is included with the software package.
IBM would not comment on if it has plans to pay SCO fees on behalf of its customers using Linux-based IBM solutions.
In May, IBM Corp., Amonk, N.Y., reported that it has more than 75 government customers using Linux solutions, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Between private and public sector customers, IBM has over 6,300 Linux-based implementations.
"IBM has remains absolutely committed to providing Linux-based solutions to its customers," a spokeswoman said.
In anticipation of lawsuits from SCO, Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., established a $1 million fund to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies from SCO and other companies developing open source software.
"Red Hat has a responsibility to ensure the legal rights of users are protected," said Matthew Szulik, chairman and CEO of Red Hat.
According to the new licensing program, Linux use on a server will cost $699 per central processor unit, or CPU, through Oct. 15. Use on desktop computers cost $199 per copy. Pricing for multiple CPU systems and embedded systems are also available. The pricing structure can be found at www.sco.com/scosource/description.html.
Stowell said the company has no immediate plans to file suit again
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying anything. In fact, I re-read my post and I make no assertions whatsoever. I wasn't flamebaiting. All I do is state facts. In fact, I say "Not sure how I feel about it". Not sure why you're flaming me when my post was pretty benign.
Also, I'm not quite sure how you got that I, or the author of the article, was advocating what you suggest. I'll try to summarize what, in fact, you are suggesting:
1) That we should do away with all laws because they may have the remotest possibility of preventing someone from making a profit (this, in effect, would do away with all laws because you can make a profit doing just about anything). Incidentally, I believe the opposite. I think corporate America has too much power, but that is beside the point.
2) Beyond doing away with the aforementioned laws, we should allow businesses to create new laws that will help them maximize profit (such as your trash example).
As I said, I was making no argument in my post, just stating facts, but even if I was advocating against the do-not-call-lists law, and my logic was that it was because of all the lost jobs, the two above conclusions could in no way be drawn from that argument. Each case is particular, so you can't just assume I'm making blanket statements about all of humanity. I'll quote from the article and leave it at that:
Spurred by an irritated public, politicians have signed the death notice for telemarketing. But the end of sales calls will deliver another blow to the staggering economy....
Telemarketing is an enormous business that hires millions of people and contributes to billions in commerce every year, but it is suddenly reeling under what insiders describe as a politically expedient bit of regulation. It surprises and offends telemarketers that, of all the scourges we suffer, lawmakers made this one a priority. Telemarketing is an annoyance, but that's all it is, people in the industry insist. Unsolicited sales calls won't give you cancer or heart disease or make you fat. Telemarketing doesn't damage the environment. It doesn't cause car accidents. Telemarketers don't hurt kids or animals. They aren't suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet politicians of every stripe are united behind the issue, and they've come up with a solution -- the do-not-call list -- that experts say will devastate telemarketing.
Telemarking created a lot of jobs...jobs which the federal do-not-call lists are jeopardizing. Not sure how I feel about it because the phone never stops ringing at my parents house because of them. Salon.com ran an article about it but the link is broken (provided here in case it gets fixed). Here's the Google cache of it.
On a side note, I use Mail.app in OS X and the Junk filter is pretty damn good. I get 20+ spams a day and it only lets 3 or so in. Sometimes legit mail got lost and I'd have to dig it out of my Junk folder, but not anymore (because it "learns" over time). The updated Mail.app in 10.3 (Panther) is supposed to be even better, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget the "G5" (PPC 970). It runs 64/32. Not sure how to compare the price since you can't buy G5s alone (damn Apple). But as I recall, a dual MB with two of the fastest Opterons on the market ran to about $2,000 USD on Pricewatch. The dual 2Ghz G5 is 3 grand. So 1 grand difference but you get a sweet case, DVD-R, 160GB HDD, 512 RAM, Radeon 9600, keyboard, mouse, OS, all their onboard stuff, and 9 fans.
Just as soon as I can figure out how to climb up Bill Gates or Ross Perot's ass!
I have read and attempted to understand the SCO's arguments. My head will now explode. They have won.
Long live Chewbacca!
***boom***
> from the memento-with-two-pistols dept.
Hemos beat you to it, man...but then again, with privilege comes pre-emptive commenting
The movie business is about the only thing booming right now. Lots of jobs as PAs, construction workers for sets, teamsters, etc (just watch those dumb MPAA ads). And they pay well! But seriously, not all Hollywood movies are trash...Pirates of the Caribbean was actually pretty damn good.
> Phillip K Dick of Blade Runner and Minority Report
Like the Slashdot crowd doesn't know who PKD is... (not to mention it's "Philip" with one "L"). Sorry to Troll but I'm a fan...
...Ben Affleck is a master at reverse engineering??? I'm sorry I can't stop laughing. I can picture him "thinking really hard", "staring at the screen", "putting the pieces together", etc. God, this should be a good one, I can't wait.
Can he reverse engineer JoLo's booty?
I hate webmail without POP or IMAP access. All my tech-dumb friends are always asking me how to get their email off the webmail servers when they start to get full. It's a goddamn plague, I tell you. I recently upgraded to an IMAP account. Now that's style...
...Slashdot poll: Is the cup half full or half empty?
If you know how to fix the second problem, you'd be a very rich man. Apple would hire you in a second.
But seriously, if Linux and OS X never break, and are completely intuitive, then the second problem goes away. Well maybe not for Linux because you're more likely to be running a box with a bad stick of RAM. Whereas Apple folks can sleep peacefully knowing they've been way overcharged for good RAM.
I was selling a video card for a friend on eBay, and someone writes me from Spain, saying she's starting a computer shop in Amsterdam or something and needs parts. She was completely insane, but I just chalked it up to the language barrier. I cancelled the auction and waited for her to transfer money to my PayPal account. I wasn't really concerned because I figured since I got the money first, what did I have to lose?
A lot, it turns out. So she finally transfers me the money, I transfer the money to my bank account, and I go right down to FedEx and send the card 2-day. When I get back home, I have an email from PayPal telling me that the person who sent me the money had their account hijacked and PayPal had taken the money back. This, I suppose, was fine. I couldn't argue because I had agreed to their terms. I was a little pissed because I wasn't the idiot who had their account hijacked, but such is life.
So I immediately called FedEx and had them stop the shipment, but it was already over the Atlantic, so they couldn't stop it until it got to Spain. This caused me to have to pay for it to be shipped back, effectively doubling my shipping costs. Not cheap...this was 2-day to Spain.
I was further irked by PayPal's bad programming. Instead of intercepting and canceling my bank transfer, they just deducted the money from my PayPal account, so now I was in the negative, and had to wait for the transfer to go through, and then transfer the money back. Annoying, but at least it was free.
So what about PayPal's protection policy? Doesn't apply to international orders. Also, you have to ship to the person's registered address. Not sure I know how to even look that up.
Oh, also, I checked the eBay ID of the person, and that was a hijacked account, too. The person sold a lot of "exotic" drinking glasses and had a high feedback rating. Obviously, not someone in the computer fraud business.
Anyway, the point of my story was that you have to be careful even if you're the seller. Only ship to registered PayPal addresses and check what sort of stuff a person is selling on eBay. I recently saw someone selling a really cheap Powerbook, but all their previous items were dolls, or something. Definitely something fishy there.
Good luck.
Yeah, so I don't own a Powerbook, but does anyone really use mini-CDs?
Yes. The rail companies may be failing and weak now, but in 500 years they will be unstoppable. MWAHAHAA.
Yeah, I have my sources (Originally from the Independent(.co.uk).
I read somewhere that statistically the maxiumum you can live is around 500 years. Eventually, no matter how hard you try, you will get hit by a train. On a side note, a friend of mine once stayed at a clinic somewhere for some tests, and the only rooms they had left were suicide-proof. He said there were no edges anywhere and other weird stuff. So maybe if you lived in one of those, buried in the ground somewhere, you could make it to 600 years.
T[h]understick Pro. I mash words up like a bad mofo.
Yeah, it's pretty good. Mashes things up like a bad mofo.
Tilts both ways...bats both ways. Get it?
Sorry, it's been a long day...
Blah blah flame war. The point being, as you said, people in the Taliban used to be in the Mujahiddin. The groudwork was laid for Wahabi Islamic extremism in Afghanistan by the CIA. Who cares if it's called Taliban or Mujahiddin?
Osama bin Laden was among the Mujahiddin that fought against the Russians. Wahabis were running all over the place. If you can't see the connection between the Wahabi Muslims (Mujahiddin) fighting against the Soviet invasion in the 80s and the current al Qaeda and Taliban, then you're not paying attention.
Story Slashdoted. Copy of text:
... for commercial purposes," said Chris Sontag, who is a senior vice president of SCO. Use of any Linux distribution can cause liability, regardless of vendor, the company claimed.
08/06/03
SCO to government Linux users: Pay up
By Joab Jackson
Staff Writer
Government agencies must pay up to $699 for each copy of the Linux operating system that they use, the SCO Group Inc., Lindon, Utah, announced Tuesday in a new licensing program.
However, SCO's intellectual property claims over Linux remain contested by other parties.
"We believe it is necessary for Linux customers to properly license SCO's [intellectual property] if they are running Linux
"Government agencies shouldn't be too worried about this until they see more evidence," said Tony Stanco, head of the Center for Open Source and Government and associate director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University.
SCO has claimed that the 2.4 and 2.5 versions of the Linux kernel is embedded with code that SCO holds intellectual property rights on.
At least some of the code in question supposedly comes from the Unix Systems V operating system, a proprietary systems that SCO purchased the rights to from Novell Inc., Provo, Utah in 1995.
In March, SCO sued IBM for $1 billion over misuse of the intellectual property rights to the Unix operating system. The company claimed that IBM inappropriately added some of SCO's Unix proprietary code to Linux.
Other parties remain skeptical of the company's legitimacy to the licensing fees.
Stanco said that SCO's licensing fees are unusual in that a court of law hasn't determined that the intellectual property is clearly SCO's yet. "You don't try to get money until the issues are resolved in your favor," he said.
Blake Stowell, director of corporate communications for SCO said that the IBM suit is unrelated to the present licensing initiative. Although some of the overlapping code comes from IBM, there are other parts of the code that leaked into Linux from other sources, Stowell said.
"We'll be happy to show [agencies] proof, providing they sign a nondisclosure agreement," Stowell said.
John Weathersby, chairman of the Open Source Software Institute said the government clients he works with have no immediate plans to pay the fee. The Oxford, Miss.-based nonprofit Open Source Software Institute was founded in 2001 to promote government use of open-source software, or software in which the source code is included with the software package.
IBM would not comment on if it has plans to pay SCO fees on behalf of its customers using Linux-based IBM solutions.
In May, IBM Corp., Amonk, N.Y., reported that it has more than 75 government customers using Linux solutions, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Between private and public sector customers, IBM has over 6,300 Linux-based implementations.
"IBM has remains absolutely committed to providing Linux-based solutions to its customers," a spokeswoman said.
In anticipation of lawsuits from SCO, Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., established a $1 million fund to cover legal expenses associated with infringement claims brought against companies from SCO and other companies developing open source software.
"Red Hat has a responsibility to ensure the legal rights of users are protected," said Matthew Szulik, chairman and CEO of Red Hat.
According to the new licensing program, Linux use on a server will cost $699 per central processor unit, or CPU, through Oct. 15. Use on desktop computers cost $199 per copy. Pricing for multiple CPU systems and embedded systems are also available. The pricing structure can be found at www.sco.com/scosource/description.html.
Stowell said the company has no immediate plans to file suit again
No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying anything. In fact, I re-read my post and I make no assertions whatsoever. I wasn't flamebaiting. All I do is state facts. In fact, I say "Not sure how I feel about it". Not sure why you're flaming me when my post was pretty benign.
...
Also, I'm not quite sure how you got that I, or the author of the article, was advocating what you suggest. I'll try to summarize what, in fact, you are suggesting:
1) That we should do away with all laws because they may have the remotest possibility of preventing someone from making a profit (this, in effect, would do away with all laws because you can make a profit doing just about anything). Incidentally, I believe the opposite. I think corporate America has too much power, but that is beside the point.
2) Beyond doing away with the aforementioned laws, we should allow businesses to create new laws that will help them maximize profit (such as your trash example).
As I said, I was making no argument in my post, just stating facts, but even if I was advocating against the do-not-call-lists law, and my logic was that it was because of all the lost jobs, the two above conclusions could in no way be drawn from that argument. Each case is particular, so you can't just assume I'm making blanket statements about all of humanity. I'll quote from the article and leave it at that:
Spurred by an irritated public, politicians have signed the death notice for telemarketing. But the end of sales calls will deliver another blow to the staggering economy.
Telemarketing is an enormous business that hires millions of people and contributes to billions in commerce every year, but it is suddenly reeling under what insiders describe as a politically expedient bit of regulation. It surprises and offends telemarketers that, of all the scourges we suffer, lawmakers made this one a priority. Telemarketing is an annoyance, but that's all it is, people in the industry insist. Unsolicited sales calls won't give you cancer or heart disease or make you fat. Telemarketing doesn't damage the environment. It doesn't cause car accidents. Telemarketers don't hurt kids or animals. They aren't suspected of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Yet politicians of every stripe are united behind the issue, and they've come up with a solution -- the do-not-call list -- that experts say will devastate telemarketing.
Anyone else think this article was talking about seriously underweight fashion model consuming the Atlantic ocean?
Telemarking created a lot of jobs...jobs which the federal do-not-call lists are jeopardizing. Not sure how I feel about it because the phone never stops ringing at my parents house because of them. Salon.com ran an article about it but the link is broken (provided here in case it gets fixed). Here's the Google cache of it.
On a side note, I use Mail.app in OS X and the Junk filter is pretty damn good. I get 20+ spams a day and it only lets 3 or so in. Sometimes legit mail got lost and I'd have to dig it out of my Junk folder, but not anymore (because it "learns" over time). The updated Mail.app in 10.3 (Panther) is supposed to be even better, too.
Anyone wanna take bets on whether Braden Bournival is actually a (now really pissed off) friend of Sklivvz?