This isn't made up at all, there is a pork shortage, as in much less pork available now then at the same time last year.
The point is that in the USA we'll just pay more, but in China I would expect a complete absence of Pork Fried Rice or whatever. Also no Pork Carnitas being served south of the border.
Kind of like a rice shortage means people will starve, its just starvation won't be in the USDA's territory...
Was the "arrogant American" comment really required to make your point?
Yes. All we need is federal approval from the FCC because we're the worlds empire, stated by someone who doesn't know anything about the frequency allocation process..
The reality is the ITU and its friends regulate international allocations in 3 regions for the world, and then individual countries allocate within the regional international allocations. Its run mostly by techs, and has worked remarkably well.
I guess a close internet analogy would be some.com demanding ARIN take ip addresses from, say, AfriNIC, without talking to IANA (or AfriNIC) about it first.
There's also a very slight alpha-hacker subtext, with the philosophy of "if you can't read code, you're not worthy enough to be using this program in the first place"
Also the alpha hacker view of my code is like poetry, perfect, precise, crystal clear, and self documenting. Usually... not.
And also, Why would Weather-Balloons need that much frequency juice in the first place ?
Its older, cheaper, disposable tech. Might only be 400 baud downlink but usually a pretty wide signal. Simple FM/FSK modulation maybe. The problem is you launch 10 to different altitudes, due to frequency drift from being cold (cheap, remember?) you might find that a struggle to make them all fit without interfering with each other. On a boring fall day you don't launch 10 at a time, but for all I know in a hurricane (literally) you might drop 10 at a time.
Congress already told NOAA to stop using the bottom half or so of the band. The problem is radio allocations are done by the ITU... This is the usual american arrogance problem where it turns out the FCC only regulates inside the US. If someone in Canada wants to launch at 1770 MHz, which is well within ITU regulations, short of bombing the Canadian weather station I'm not sure what they intend to do about it. Just accept the interference I guess.
Also the 1700 MHz band has coprimary with radiosondes and met satellites. The weather satellite people are going to be pissed if their frequencies are reallocated only over the USA.
But the problem is once they're all well and trained, they can simply jump ship, and the company isn't able to recoup their investment.
I call bogus. I worked at a place in the 90s that was very proud of sending all their techs to at least one class of their choice per year... they were so proud they pounded it into everyone's head that you could leave.... but you couldn't find another place that'll send you to a new class every year, so you're better off staying. Its like an extra weeks vacation, sorta? The financial aspect is a one week generic class usually didn't cost much more than a weeks salary or so. Its financially not any worse than just offering up an extra weeks vacation. Most places are not run close enough to the bone that 1/52nd of the dudes salary will make or break the hiring decision anyway. When you factor in some expensive overhead and health insurance, a cheap class is like 1% of total annual costs...
In comparison to classes, they actually had teeth for tuition reimbursement... you quit, they want the last six months money back.
Your slackers probably get more massages and cake than the hard workers
What makes it even worse is increasing workplace friction. Admin's a reactive job so they've got little/no control over their schedule, so they cannot get a massage perhaps because they're comp timing it or went home early because they've got a 11pm rollout scheduled, devs a proactive job so they can stop at any moment and get a massage. So you've just strongly preferentially rewarded one business group over another, increasing bad feelings. Even worse the most stressed group isn't getting the stress reducer. That's just not gonna end well.
The only thing worse than preferential rewards is out of the office stuff. My life is overscheduled/stressful enough, mandatory bar night/movie night/team building night/WTF night is just going to piss me off.
That's the last thing you want to ask from IT Workers, MORE PAPER CRAP (to write and to read).
You're in IT but you can't automate paperwork.... A little bash script and I've got a daily report.
If you want to give incentivies to IT Workers, get some secretarys for them
Not secretary, apprentice aka intern. Not as crazy of an idea as you'd think. You don't want to pay an IT guy $50/hr to do the job of an $8/hr file clerk or intern anyway.
Give out bonuses based on performance, however measured. It works for the boss, so it's likely to work just as well for the employee.
Top performer gets to pick who does their:
corporate massage day
Seriously though my favorite incentive program is called money. Another thing that works well is a professional relationship... Tell me what to do, when adequate progress is made I'll be free for self directed professional development...
This is old stuff in most of the USA, I think the UK will survive its new rules. Content is more important than the domain name in the email address.
Its officially discouraged and unofficially encouraged because some random dotcom will not be backing up emails for 5 years, so you can honestly later say its deleted and unrecoverable, whereas internally its probably perma-stored by policy. On the other hand when it comes to SLAPP attacks against the small fry, its a powerful weapon.
There's a whole generation growing up asking "WTF is a shutter?"
I've noticed a disturbing sharp turn to anachronism in the tech field lately. Its all about the camera shutter, the 5 1/4 inch floppy diskette as a "save" icon, animation of turning pages... Perhaps the next stupid fad will be an animatronic coo coo clock instead of hip hop ringtones. When the mp3 music player/streamer icon is an 8-track tape then we know its the end of the tech world.
Put your phone in your pocket when not using it. Problem solved.
When talking on it, my relatively featureless "bar of soap" phone has a convenient hole for my pointer finger, that being the camera lens.
When doing something other than talking on it (99% of the time), you'd get an image of the palm of my hand. I would imagine an automated image analysis of hair distribution on palms of hands would be an interesting research project. (Ahh, I see, 99% of slashdotters have hair on palms, thus 1% of slashdotters are women...)
One of the "jobs" available to teachers over the summer when I was a kid was multicultural review. I had an algebra (or was it geometry?) teacher who spent her summer determining the racial distribution of characters in word problems, for use in purchasing decisions and as justification that the old textbooks were obsolete. Also all minorities required to be displayed in a positive, superior manner, no hint of stereotypes allowed. Writing textbooks is actually quite restrictive and you need a team of qualified racists on staff merely to make sure you know all the stereotypes so as to avoid random accidental implementation. I have a couple teachers in my family, I should ask how this is done now. The publishers probably provide this data now, or school districts share it over the internet so each district so each district doesn't have to individually calculate the John/Juan/Sheniqua ratio for each book.
Its a long winded article, the short TLDR is crowdfunding is the hip new term for the middle aged concert ticket business model which is based on the ancient business model of patronage. Some things like films work really well with a concert ticket / patronage model, almost everything else, not so well.
I've crowd funded a couple films. Mostly tech. Mostly tech documentaries directed by Jason Scott. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of 6502, for which I donated a healthy chunk of change. So I have some experience with this business model, and I like it.
I basically paid "an entire row of movie theater tickets" for a documentary I really want to see, done by a guy with a proven track record of decent tech documentaries. Needless to say the local theater is totally uninterested in taking a couple hundred bucks to put my taste of movie on instead of the bubblegum for the mind they specialize in. I literally cannot get the local movie theater to take my money. But via crowdfunding over the internet, I can finally get someone to take my money.
Crowdfunding really works best when there is no way to get "the locals" or the "established companies" to take my money. There are VERY FEW areas where this actually works. There are no shortage of pizza restaurants around here... crowdfunding a "pizza startup" isn't going to work. Or yet another web 2.0 company following existing trends.
Another thing you need is fanatics... Where mass industry collides with supply and demand. I'm more than willing to give away $15 for Stross's latest novel. Heck I'd give him $50. There is no known business model where I can give a book author $35 more than list price other than crowdfunding.
Finally crowdfunding works well in a gift economy. My wife got me a package deal with some custom signed artwork a couple years ago as a gift. Awesome, but out of pocket I would not have dropped that kind of dough for myself. Right now is prime gift giving time for Christmas, maybe even a little late, so you're going to see crowdfunding articles peak around this time of year.
Why would you teach a symbolic manipulation system that nobody is going to use?
Ugh. Its to teach that symbolic manipulation is possible and how to think symbolically, not the training task of how to factor equations.
A literary comparison is better.
As a training item were the original Tom Swift books excellent training for my job? No they're Fing useless as training manuals unless you're building an actual repellatron or a tri-phibian atomicar (real titles, BTW).
As an education tool were the original Tom Swift books great engineering tools? F no, they were pretty soft sci fi, use science in place of magic and you're there.
Were they a good way to teach me to read about 4 to 6 times as fast as a yankee can speak, hell yes.
Same analogy with algebra. You're going to learn how to manipulate symbols. Not just equations but symbols in general. Statements in a computer program? People? Who knows. But if you're doin' it right, your mind itself is actually different after you learn algebra.
I used OS-9 and I always thought everything from the mid 80s when I stopped doing OS-9 work until the mid 90s when linux started getting good was pretty much a downgrade... Didn't catch up to what I was doing in 1984 on OS-9 until something like 1995 or so. I often had the gut level feeling many ultra-early linux admins were trying to catch PCs up to the level of what they were doing on OS-9.
TRSDOS not quite the same aura of elegance, no. But it played Zork, what more do you want.
Back in ye olden days, before/. even, the running joke was distro reviews in linux journal and sysadmin and other mags ONLY discussed installation, never use or maintenance or upgrading. Just a funny observation. So if all the noobs ever did was install over and over, the odds of trying other distros greatly increases.
Also some people make a game out of using dodgy semi-compatible hardware, or even being hardware driver devs, which often enough fried your install... so if you're going to re-install anyway, then you might try something new.
Most of the people reinstalling over and over were not kernel devs trying to debug DMA mode instead of PIO mode IDE hard drives... posers trying to look like that more likely.
Was it slackware? Can't remember for sure.... Anyway, I remember downloading the dist, in "sections" (e.g., X11), each spanning a number of floppy disks with a grand total of 70+ floppies.... If all went well, it usually took about a day to get it up and running, start (download) to finish (first full boot).... (Keep in mind, this was in the day of ADSL.) Horrible.
Well before ADSL (well, at least around here, although we had ISDN), we had 28.8 modems and BBSes like ExecPC and non-commercial BBSes too.
The distro I think you're talking about is SLS Softlanding Linux solutions or something like that?
The sets were, as I recall: Set A booted and did not a heck of a lot more. You downloaded this to see if your mitsumi non-ide cdrom would even work, hardware compat check. Set B gave you a basic CLI install Set C gave you the compilers. GCC in the first version and G++ and G77 and all that in later versions. Set K was the kernel source. 4 megs on a 386dx40 meant about 4 hours compile time. Very non-linear decrease, I put in 4 256 K simms to get 5 megs and suddenly a compile took less than one episode of Star Trek TNG Set X was x windows as you list
This was all circa summer of 1993. I felt like a noob because there were rich kids who had 386s who had been fooling around with Linus's kernel since 1991 or 92 (don't remember) so I was "late to the party".
It did NOT take all day to get working. It took more than all day to download at 28.8k but once downloaded and rawrite.exe images written to the floppies, install was as fast as you could shovel the floppies into the drive and read them. I would be surprised if it took more than an hour of floppy feeding to install all the disks.
It was not 75 disks, the very first SLS was like one box of 10 3.5 inch floppies and the SLS that I used most of the time was about about 20 disks. Rapidly I started buying cdroms, much more convenient to have it all on one cd.
Eventually around Debian 1.2 or so I switched to Debian. Back when ALL of debian fit on a cd, or two, or four, I would stick the cdroms into PCs under my control and NFS export them to all the machines under my control, almost as convenient as apt-get over the internet is now.
"If you do not pay us on time, we reserve the right to spy on you and your use of our laptop."
No you missed the part of my comment
Also there are plenty of "rights" you categorically cannot sign away in a contract. Its not as simple as Disney movie magic where the evil witch can write anything on a piece of paper and once the victim signs it, it has to happen that way.
If you want, you can write on an apartment rental contract that if you don't pay your rent, the landlord will record your daughter showering and upload the videos to youtube, but that will never hold up in court. Any time you try to trickily redefine common concepts or break traditional rules you're in for a trail of tears in the legal system.
The worst part is at least theoretically the people who's privacy is getting violated are not even necessarily the people who signed the contract, now they're really in trouble. You'd have to add to the contract that only the signer is allowed to use the property... good luck... Using the apartment example that'll get thrown out of court too... Well, I signed that the landlord can upload bathroom videos of my apartment if I don't pay the rent, but my visiting female coworker didn't sign and now she's been uploaded by the landlord... this just isn't gonna turn out well.
For a good time look at what happens to people who try to sell what they call silver "dollars" that aren't govt minted "dollars", or say they're going to shoot a politician but claim they were talking about pr0n money shots or they're taking up amateur photography. The legal system has very little sense of humor about word redefinition games. You rent a laptop, it better be a laptop, not a spycam, especially if its spying on people who have nothing to do with the contract.
We could reinvent the wheel, but (as usual) the Debian wizards figured it all out years ago, in this case, they solved the problem in 2003.
You make a big list of valid hashes, GPG sign the list with a well known key that is changed every couple years or so (for a good time see Debian package named debian-keyring), and publish it.
For a good time on a Debian box go to/var/lib/apt/lists and look at a packages file. Assuming you're using wheezy/amd64 the system won't let you install the latest 0ad package (wtf that package is) version 0r11863-2 unless the md5 hash of that package is some big ole number ending in 79eb. Also sha1 and sha256 hashes.
I can hand you a questionable looking flash drive with debian packages on it and if the multiple signed hashes match Debian's official gpg signed hash list you can trust my binaries... I can't inject something extra without Fing up at least one of the three hashs.
Or, just go ahead and reinvent the wheel... thats a Security Best Practices that never leads to problems, rock on with your NIH self man!
But renting, you are just pissing your money away and paying off someone else's mortgage for them, plus 10%.
Especially during the bubble, but still in many locations, it does not work like that. Usually renting is cheaper than owning. Its been a decade+ since you can profit by renting money from the bank vs renting a house from a loanowner.
Housing market is still controlled by speculators. When (if?) investors take over, then you'll be able to buy for less than renting.
Its not much different than stocks. When you hear "dotcoms only go up" just like "house prices only go up" and people buy purely on hope of speculative gains, then talking about the rules of Graham and Dodd style long term value investment is pointless.
Fundamentally, "cash worth one house" and "one house" are equivalent, correct? So why would renting one, be a better deal than renting the other? Or rephrased, imagine I had enough money in the bank to buy a house... why would I invest it in privately owned bank stock and have the bank loan it, rather than just buying a house with it...
Slashdot Mirror
Todays /. word of the day : Hoplophobia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoplophobia
This isn't made up at all, there is a pork shortage, as in much less pork available now then at the same time last year.
The point is that in the USA we'll just pay more, but in China I would expect a complete absence of Pork Fried Rice or whatever. Also no Pork Carnitas being served south of the border.
Kind of like a rice shortage means people will starve, its just starvation won't be in the USDA's territory...
Was the "arrogant American" comment really required to make your point?
Yes. All we need is federal approval from the FCC because we're the worlds empire, stated by someone who doesn't know anything about the frequency allocation process..
The reality is the ITU and its friends regulate international allocations in 3 regions for the world, and then individual countries allocate within the regional international allocations. Its run mostly by techs, and has worked remarkably well.
I guess a close internet analogy would be some .com demanding ARIN take ip addresses from, say, AfriNIC, without talking to IANA (or AfriNIC) about it first.
There's also a very slight alpha-hacker subtext, with the philosophy of "if you can't read code, you're not worthy enough to be using this program in the first place"
Also the alpha hacker view of my code is like poetry, perfect, precise, crystal clear, and self documenting. Usually... not.
And also, Why would Weather-Balloons need that much frequency juice in the first place ?
Its older, cheaper, disposable tech. Might only be 400 baud downlink but usually a pretty wide signal. Simple FM/FSK modulation maybe. The problem is you launch 10 to different altitudes, due to frequency drift from being cold (cheap, remember?) you might find that a struggle to make them all fit without interfering with each other. On a boring fall day you don't launch 10 at a time, but for all I know in a hurricane (literally) you might drop 10 at a time.
Congress already told NOAA to stop using the bottom half or so of the band. The problem is radio allocations are done by the ITU... This is the usual american arrogance problem where it turns out the FCC only regulates inside the US. If someone in Canada wants to launch at 1770 MHz, which is well within ITU regulations, short of bombing the Canadian weather station I'm not sure what they intend to do about it. Just accept the interference I guess.
Also the 1700 MHz band has coprimary with radiosondes and met satellites. The weather satellite people are going to be pissed if their frequencies are reallocated only over the USA.
But the problem is once they're all well and trained, they can simply jump ship, and the company isn't able to recoup their investment.
I call bogus. I worked at a place in the 90s that was very proud of sending all their techs to at least one class of their choice per year... they were so proud they pounded it into everyone's head that you could leave.... but you couldn't find another place that'll send you to a new class every year, so you're better off staying. Its like an extra weeks vacation, sorta? The financial aspect is a one week generic class usually didn't cost much more than a weeks salary or so. Its financially not any worse than just offering up an extra weeks vacation. Most places are not run close enough to the bone that 1/52nd of the dudes salary will make or break the hiring decision anyway. When you factor in some expensive overhead and health insurance, a cheap class is like 1% of total annual costs...
In comparison to classes, they actually had teeth for tuition reimbursement... you quit, they want the last six months money back.
Your slackers probably get more massages and cake than the hard workers
What makes it even worse is increasing workplace friction. Admin's a reactive job so they've got little/no control over their schedule, so they cannot get a massage perhaps because they're comp timing it or went home early because they've got a 11pm rollout scheduled, devs a proactive job so they can stop at any moment and get a massage. So you've just strongly preferentially rewarded one business group over another, increasing bad feelings. Even worse the most stressed group isn't getting the stress reducer. That's just not gonna end well.
The only thing worse than preferential rewards is out of the office stuff. My life is overscheduled/stressful enough, mandatory bar night/movie night/team building night/WTF night is just going to piss me off.
That's the last thing you want to ask from IT Workers, MORE PAPER CRAP (to write and to read).
You're in IT but you can't automate paperwork.... A little bash script and I've got a daily report.
If you want to give incentivies to IT Workers, get some secretarys for them
Not secretary, apprentice aka intern. Not as crazy of an idea as you'd think. You don't want to pay an IT guy $50/hr to do the job of an $8/hr file clerk or intern anyway.
Give out bonuses based on performance, however measured. It works for the boss, so it's likely to work just as well for the employee.
Top performer gets to pick who does their:
corporate massage day
Seriously though my favorite incentive program is called money. Another thing that works well is a professional relationship... Tell me what to do, when adequate progress is made I'll be free for self directed professional development...
This is old stuff in most of the USA, I think the UK will survive its new rules. Content is more important than the domain name in the email address.
Its officially discouraged and unofficially encouraged because some random dotcom will not be backing up emails for 5 years, so you can honestly later say its deleted and unrecoverable, whereas internally its probably perma-stored by policy. On the other hand when it comes to SLAPP attacks against the small fry, its a powerful weapon.
shutter sound
There's a whole generation growing up asking "WTF is a shutter?"
I've noticed a disturbing sharp turn to anachronism in the tech field lately. Its all about the camera shutter, the 5 1/4 inch floppy diskette as a "save" icon, animation of turning pages... Perhaps the next stupid fad will be an animatronic coo coo clock instead of hip hop ringtones. When the mp3 music player/streamer icon is an 8-track tape then we know its the end of the tech world.
Put your phone in your pocket when not using it. Problem solved.
When talking on it, my relatively featureless "bar of soap" phone has a convenient hole for my pointer finger, that being the camera lens.
When doing something other than talking on it (99% of the time), you'd get an image of the palm of my hand. I would imagine an automated image analysis of hair distribution on palms of hands would be an interesting research project. (Ahh, I see, 99% of slashdotters have hair on palms, thus 1% of slashdotters are women...)
How do you have a biased math textbook?
One of the "jobs" available to teachers over the summer when I was a kid was multicultural review. I had an algebra (or was it geometry?) teacher who spent her summer determining the racial distribution of characters in word problems, for use in purchasing decisions and as justification that the old textbooks were obsolete. Also all minorities required to be displayed in a positive, superior manner, no hint of stereotypes allowed. Writing textbooks is actually quite restrictive and you need a team of qualified racists on staff merely to make sure you know all the stereotypes so as to avoid random accidental implementation. I have a couple teachers in my family, I should ask how this is done now. The publishers probably provide this data now, or school districts share it over the internet so each district so each district doesn't have to individually calculate the John/Juan/Sheniqua ratio for each book.
Its a long winded article, the short TLDR is crowdfunding is the hip new term for the middle aged concert ticket business model which is based on the ancient business model of patronage. Some things like films work really well with a concert ticket / patronage model, almost everything else, not so well.
I've crowd funded a couple films. Mostly tech. Mostly tech documentaries directed by Jason Scott. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of 6502, for which I donated a healthy chunk of change. So I have some experience with this business model, and I like it.
I basically paid "an entire row of movie theater tickets" for a documentary I really want to see, done by a guy with a proven track record of decent tech documentaries. Needless to say the local theater is totally uninterested in taking a couple hundred bucks to put my taste of movie on instead of the bubblegum for the mind they specialize in. I literally cannot get the local movie theater to take my money. But via crowdfunding over the internet, I can finally get someone to take my money.
Crowdfunding really works best when there is no way to get "the locals" or the "established companies" to take my money. There are VERY FEW areas where this actually works. There are no shortage of pizza restaurants around here... crowdfunding a "pizza startup" isn't going to work. Or yet another web 2.0 company following existing trends.
Another thing you need is fanatics... Where mass industry collides with supply and demand. I'm more than willing to give away $15 for Stross's latest novel. Heck I'd give him $50. There is no known business model where I can give a book author $35 more than list price other than crowdfunding.
Finally crowdfunding works well in a gift economy. My wife got me a package deal with some custom signed artwork a couple years ago as a gift. Awesome, but out of pocket I would not have dropped that kind of dough for myself. Right now is prime gift giving time for Christmas, maybe even a little late, so you're going to see crowdfunding articles peak around this time of year.
I don't want a nurse treating me who doesn't know how to think. I'm not seeing the problem here.
Why would you teach a symbolic manipulation system that nobody is going to use?
Ugh. Its to teach that symbolic manipulation is possible and how to think symbolically, not the training task of how to factor equations.
A literary comparison is better.
As a training item were the original Tom Swift books excellent training for my job? No they're Fing useless as training manuals unless you're building an actual repellatron or a tri-phibian atomicar (real titles, BTW).
As an education tool were the original Tom Swift books great engineering tools? F no, they were pretty soft sci fi, use science in place of magic and you're there.
Were they a good way to teach me to read about 4 to 6 times as fast as a yankee can speak, hell yes.
Same analogy with algebra. You're going to learn how to manipulate symbols. Not just equations but symbols in general. Statements in a computer program? People? Who knows. But if you're doin' it right, your mind itself is actually different after you learn algebra.
The hardest thing mixed in there was the a.out->ELF migration
Yeah thanks for that, I had completely blocked the pain out of my memory, and like a band aid ripped off exquisitely slowly...
(For the noobs, there was a time when linux didn't use ELF as a binary file format...)
Trash 80
TRSDOS or OS-9 on the coco?
I used OS-9 and I always thought everything from the mid 80s when I stopped doing OS-9 work until the mid 90s when linux started getting good was pretty much a downgrade... Didn't catch up to what I was doing in 1984 on OS-9 until something like 1995 or so. I often had the gut level feeling many ultra-early linux admins were trying to catch PCs up to the level of what they were doing on OS-9.
TRSDOS not quite the same aura of elegance, no. But it played Zork, what more do you want.
Back in ye olden days, before /. even, the running joke was distro reviews in linux journal and sysadmin and other mags ONLY discussed installation, never use or maintenance or upgrading. Just a funny observation. So if all the noobs ever did was install over and over, the odds of trying other distros greatly increases.
Also some people make a game out of using dodgy semi-compatible hardware, or even being hardware driver devs, which often enough fried your install... so if you're going to re-install anyway, then you might try something new.
Most of the people reinstalling over and over were not kernel devs trying to debug DMA mode instead of PIO mode IDE hard drives... posers trying to look like that more likely.
Was it slackware? Can't remember for sure. ... ... ....
Anyway, I remember downloading the dist, in "sections" (e.g., X11), each spanning a number of floppy disks with a grand total of 70+ floppies.
If all went well, it usually took about a day to get it up and running, start (download) to finish (first full boot)
(Keep in mind, this was in the day of ADSL.) Horrible.
Well before ADSL (well, at least around here, although we had ISDN), we had 28.8 modems and BBSes like ExecPC and non-commercial BBSes too.
The distro I think you're talking about is SLS Softlanding Linux solutions or something like that?
The sets were, as I recall:
Set A booted and did not a heck of a lot more. You downloaded this to see if your mitsumi non-ide cdrom would even work, hardware compat check.
Set B gave you a basic CLI install
Set C gave you the compilers. GCC in the first version and G++ and G77 and all that in later versions.
Set K was the kernel source. 4 megs on a 386dx40 meant about 4 hours compile time. Very non-linear decrease, I put in 4 256 K simms to get 5 megs and suddenly a compile took less than one episode of Star Trek TNG
Set X was x windows as you list
This was all circa summer of 1993. I felt like a noob because there were rich kids who had 386s who had been fooling around with Linus's kernel since 1991 or 92 (don't remember) so I was "late to the party".
It did NOT take all day to get working. It took more than all day to download at 28.8k but once downloaded and rawrite.exe images written to the floppies, install was as fast as you could shovel the floppies into the drive and read them. I would be surprised if it took more than an hour of floppy feeding to install all the disks.
It was not 75 disks, the very first SLS was like one box of 10 3.5 inch floppies and the SLS that I used most of the time was about about 20 disks. Rapidly I started buying cdroms, much more convenient to have it all on one cd.
Eventually around Debian 1.2 or so I switched to Debian. Back when ALL of debian fit on a cd, or two, or four, I would stick the cdroms into PCs under my control and NFS export them to all the machines under my control, almost as convenient as apt-get over the internet is now.
OK, so at the top of the contract:
"If you do not pay us on time, we reserve the right to spy on you and your use of our laptop."
No you missed the part of my comment
Also there are plenty of "rights" you categorically cannot sign away in a contract. Its not as simple as Disney movie magic where the evil witch can write anything on a piece of paper and once the victim signs it, it has to happen that way.
If you want, you can write on an apartment rental contract that if you don't pay your rent, the landlord will record your daughter showering and upload the videos to youtube, but that will never hold up in court. Any time you try to trickily redefine common concepts or break traditional rules you're in for a trail of tears in the legal system.
The worst part is at least theoretically the people who's privacy is getting violated are not even necessarily the people who signed the contract, now they're really in trouble. You'd have to add to the contract that only the signer is allowed to use the property... good luck... Using the apartment example that'll get thrown out of court too... Well, I signed that the landlord can upload bathroom videos of my apartment if I don't pay the rent, but my visiting female coworker didn't sign and now she's been uploaded by the landlord... this just isn't gonna turn out well.
For a good time look at what happens to people who try to sell what they call silver "dollars" that aren't govt minted "dollars", or say they're going to shoot a politician but claim they were talking about pr0n money shots or they're taking up amateur photography. The legal system has very little sense of humor about word redefinition games. You rent a laptop, it better be a laptop, not a spycam, especially if its spying on people who have nothing to do with the contract.
Now if they marketed it as a gaming and (free-)pr0n appliance rather than a general purpose PC, then maybe...
Careful about marketing it as free pr0n: the thing has a webcam, so you might end up unwittingly "producing" as much porn as you'll watch...
And if there's any minors in the house, that's an even bigger problem for the monitors.
Supermassive Black Hole Destroying Proto Star System
Naughty goatse, no soup for you
How would you know which md5 hash was correct?
We could reinvent the wheel, but (as usual) the Debian wizards figured it all out years ago, in this case, they solved the problem in 2003.
You make a big list of valid hashes, GPG sign the list with a well known key that is changed every couple years or so (for a good time see Debian package named debian-keyring), and publish it.
For a good time on a Debian box go to /var/lib/apt/lists and look at a packages file. Assuming you're using wheezy/amd64 the system won't let you install the latest 0ad package (wtf that package is) version 0r11863-2 unless the md5 hash of that package is some big ole number ending in 79eb. Also sha1 and sha256 hashes.
For a good time see
http://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt
I can hand you a questionable looking flash drive with debian packages on it and if the multiple signed hashes match Debian's official gpg signed hash list you can trust my binaries... I can't inject something extra without Fing up at least one of the three hashs.
Or, just go ahead and reinvent the wheel... thats a Security Best Practices that never leads to problems, rock on with your NIH self man!
But renting, you are just pissing your money away and paying off someone else's mortgage for them, plus 10%.
Especially during the bubble, but still in many locations, it does not work like that. Usually renting is cheaper than owning.
Its been a decade+ since you can profit by renting money from the bank vs renting a house from a loanowner.
Housing market is still controlled by speculators. When (if?) investors take over, then you'll be able to buy for less than renting.
Its not much different than stocks. When you hear "dotcoms only go up" just like "house prices only go up" and people buy purely on hope of speculative gains, then talking about the rules of Graham and Dodd style long term value investment is pointless.
Fundamentally, "cash worth one house" and "one house" are equivalent, correct? So why would renting one, be a better deal than renting the other? Or rephrased, imagine I had enough money in the bank to buy a house... why would I invest it in privately owned bank stock and have the bank loan it, rather than just buying a house with it...