Yes, I am in the same boat. My institution also does the huge pile of money for small gains.
I still maintain that by charging a reasonable fee per paper, the processing centers and the servers can get paid for (they will have to get paid for somehow.)
Let the market reward and punish the journals. A journal that charges less than its competitor for the same quality research will get more marketshare of readers, thus a higher citation index, thus more authors, and more readers of those authors. A journal that charges a lot will lose.
Perhaps the way is to let people download one or two articles for free? (You could learn how to use the links, and the occasional user would be able to download that one article from a journal that they need.) After this, you would have to pay.
Compared to the way electronic journals are bundled today, the iTunes model makes some sense. I put $50 on account at publishing house X and can download a paper for $2 each. 25 papers from what ever journals they publish.
Lastly, we come to the abstract. We can now read them online at no cost. Why not expand the format to include more of the results/discussion? If you need the paper for methods or bibliography, you buy it.
Graphics: Paid by the author (all journals require camera ready images of all graphs before considering the paper.)
If you eliminate the pagination by publishing in pdf, you eliminate the need to hire these people.
You still need to hire secretaries and IT people.
I would set up accounts like at iTunes, where users can pay a fee and download as many articles as they want till they run out of credits, then they have to re-up.
If IEEE were to get PayPal or some other fund transfer body to do this for them, their overhead would be reduced in the accounting department.
The cost savings would depend on how bad they get stung by the fund transfer company.
As far as submissions go, I would require all to be sent electronically, then sent to peer reviewers. If acceptable, I would then have the journal send the author the standard fonts and pagination rules. The Author makes corrections, transfers the paper into the publication fonts and stores it as a pdf. He/she then uploads the final draft pdf file and its done.
The last time I tried that, I even took the computer to a certified Linux professional who couldn't get the PDA or ipod to work. He was the one who was whining by the end of that day.
It would be if Linux developers would ever provide REAL support for things like Palm pilots, ipods, usb plug and play devices, and other esoteric things that fringe groups (like the 99% of us that use computers) use every day.
I am sick and tired of the next Kernel announcement talking about its support for some esoteric system or system that most of us don't use. If the linux distros want to be on desktops, the support for commonly used devices has got to improve by a LARGE amount.
Water exists in three states, ice, water, and vapor.
In the winter, the air is cold and can hold less water vapor.
The winter air is dry and will absorb water from any surface exposed to it. It will suck the water out of your nose (thus all the winter nosebleeds), or out of the leaves through the pores in the leaves.
Keep living leaves on a deciduous tree, the water would get sucked out of the plant in a quick hurry.
Up until the 70's, record companies made singles. A One Hit Wonder group could sell its one hit, we could but it, and a proportional amount of money was changed hands in the transaction. (I pay a buck and get a buck's worth of music.)
When 45's went away in the early 70's, the music industry tried to dump alblums on us. At that time, they were more money, and sometimes a rip off, but at $7.99, you couldn't get a groundswell of customer resistance built up.
In the late 70's and early 80's CDs came along and the price jumped. The premise sold then was that albums got scratchy and CD's wouldn't so they were worth the extra money. The OHW bands still existed but now the OHW cost $12.99 for the single.
Factor 10-15 years of inflation, and the escalating prices of the recreational pharmaceuticals that music people love, and you get the insane prices of today.
Marketing people don't care that most of their artists can't sing, and the music they sell is so bad, you can smell it, as long as they get the sale.
Don't need genetic engineering here. Already got that by breeding in the conventional manner. Buffalo grass varietal called "Tatanka". Great grass for lawns. Left to its own, it will grow about 3 inches in a season, so it usually gets mowed once or twice a year.
Alternatively, we could always get the good folks in Ca, Nev, AZ, and NM to realize that they are living in Deserts and blue grass just doesn't belong there.
Tried Warty Warthog. They are not even CLOSE to being close to ready to take over the desktop. There is NO customer support other than the support you get from a listserv full of other people who can 't get help with their problems.
The attitude they have towards non-freeware programs like Java is annoying. They won't support it until it is free. Fine, but this is my PC. I use it for my work and other computer needs, and it will not be used for your political axe grinding (the founder is rich enough to buy his own PC to be used for that purpose). I need Java applets for several of my business sites. If I have to use Ubuntu, I can't use the sites. I guess the big U won't be making a reappearance on my machine.
Ubuntu: African for OVER-RATED!
The NY Times has an annoying habit of espousing the rosy scenario when it is to benefit of Democrats and when the argument is needed in the other direction, the same writer will just as persuasively write about how the system is doomed and we are all going to be eating cat food while living in a box down by the river if the republicans have their way.
Basically, if GW said the system was fine, they would scream about how bad it was. If he said it needed fixing, they would say it didn't.
Lets try citing something with a little less yellow in its past. Slashdot can do better.
I have 1 kid in school and next fall will have 2 in school. I have a i686 machine at home that works fine. While I don't have a low end video card, I don't have 3D graphics either. Yes, that would be nice, but it means a new graphics card at the least. Why? I get on the net, do word processing, do my taxes, and pay bills just fine without it.
I changed to Linux after Win98 got dropped by microsoft support. I didn't consider XP due to its cost and my computer's slow speed.
Thing is, why would I go back to microsoft?
My machine does what I need it to do. I miss out on some of the KDE and Gnome games, but I don't play games much anyway.
I hope that they come up with some way to run this version of windows like Linux does where it simply notes that the 3D video is not supported and goes on. I doubt it. If microsoft holds to its usual "prop up dell and gateway by making all the current machines obsolete" MO, they will probably run all screen I/O through the 3D part of the video card and require a terrabyte of ram to load the kernel.
If memory serves it was a transoceanic QRP transmission from Alaska to California (don't hold me to it.)
The record is quite impressive given that there is more land and civilization between the new points of the new record. Still probably used ionsphere to bounce it forward, but there would be less ground effect in the new record than in the old.
These guys have advanced antennas but its still way cool that with a QRP rig and even a simple wire antenna, you can communicate over great distances with the juice of a 9 volt battery.
I agree with these comments and wish I could convince more pre-med students to take this advice. Learn to write! Learn some basic concepts of business. Take the courses that will help you do the REAL job you are hired to do. Great concepts.
Ham radio in the HF band, garage door openers, RC toys, and internet users themselves are going to get shafted by BPL.
1. HAM: HF radio operates at the frequency band that BPL poisons most. These radios are costly (about a grand to get a new basic model) and the license to get an HF radio (General class) costs money, but more so time. Who would want to drop the money and time into radio if they only hear BPL noise? With the FCC mandated band-pass filters on the BPL equipment, its still noisy (big time). The mandated abatements have demonstrably failed to lower the noise on HF.
Socially this is bad for two reasons. 1. No one will go into this as the costs versus expected benefit are not even close to breakeven. 2. When factored in that we still have some Hams that have the stuff, so we can get by with no new ones (for a short time), the Hams can't transmit out a signal strong enough to be heard over the background noise floor, so your emergency can't get handled as no one can hear what you are calling for.
So next time you are in Florida digging yourself out from a hurricane, remember that you can't call for help as there wont be many hams around and those in other areas won't hear the signals that do get out.
2. Garage door openers and RC toys. These things operate in spectrum that is near the BPL range and will be prone to interference due to image frequencies. So when its freezing cold, and you can't open the garage from your warm car, thank the FCC.
3. Users of BPL. The receivers in the BPL circuit are sensitive as they are designed to pick up very low power signals. Assuming that a Ham is anywhere in your area, and that Ham does HF, and tried low power (QRP), only to fail to contact anyone due to the noise floor problem. He or she is going to buy an amp and a beam antenna to get past that. Can you say "service interruption"? When the beam turns on, your net connection goes away as the BPL receiver gets overloaded with the strong signal from the beam.
The other way BPL users will get shafted is the shear cost of the system. (>$100/mo for internet?)
Good point. Heck, even when I am travelling around the US, carrying a laptop is a hassle. I tried geocaching with a laptop, and it worked, but was very cumbersome. This would also allow a person who bought a normal digicam (eg a canon powershot elph) to use the cheapo CF card they send along as the "film" and simply dump it onto the USB hard disk via the USB cable from the camera, skipping the need for either the big laptop or the high capacity CF cards. If the HD was big enough, and the camera to HD interface was working and stable enough for me to handle, I would snap one up. For 6000 Yen, or about $60 US, this would be a nice addition to many a backpack.
After reading some of the gun posts, I thought I would try to answer the question.
1. Is your Mom's house WELL lit? If you can't see it from space, then no. Get more lights.
2. Does your Mom's neighborhood have either a neighborhood watch or a citizen's patrol? If yes, get her involved (if she is a retiree, she can watch the houses of the working people in her neighbohood and they can watch hers at night). If not, then think about starting one.
3. Locks on doors. Dead bolts, 10 penny nails inserted like deadbolts between window casements.
4. A cell phone that never leaves your Mom's side and #1 is programmed with your number and #9 is set to call 911 automatically.
Hope these help.
I treat orphan diseases so often, I feel like Father Flanagan, MD.
Do a lit search and find a reference that might help cure a child with a rare disease. Find that I can't read the thing because its only published in some obscure journal and they won't release the copyright without charging me a significant amount of money (especially considering that the article may not do anything at all for my patient, and that there may be 5-10 of these articles.)
Much better to see these studies in the public domain. The journals charge obscene amounts for subscriptions, which is why their circulation is falling and libraries are shifting to more on line materials.
50 cal ammo cans can be bought from army surplus stores. They have a waterproof seal and clamp shut in a manner that can be locked. They are big enough for CD's and small electronics like PDA's, transformers, Laptop powersupplies. The cool thing is that the cans can be locked individually and if you line them up on a shelf, you can run some braided steel cable through the handles on the opposite ends from the locked openings and lock the whole bunch to a bed frame or some other large object.
Roommate selection is best. Find someone that is not going to be a d*ck, and stick with 'em. Avoid having parties in your room, thus avoiding getting stuff accidently broken or taken "by mistake".
Why aren't the anti govt red tape repulicans getting after this? First its the Internet over Powerlines that will screw up HF radio and now this.
If you can't practice, you can't get good, and when show time comes, you won't be ready. If we ruin HF radio, then when the hurricane comes and HF is all that gets out of Miami, don't be knocking on my door whining about the lack of comm from the disaster zone as I won't be investing in HF.
When we look at our engineering schools and see them half full of non-resident aliens on J-1 visas, and we wonder why little Timmy and little Johnny don't grow up to be engineers, we look back at the bubble wrapped world they grew up in and we see why. No challenges, no opportunities for growth, no chance to see something they think is really cool and start thinking about doing it for a living.
These regs and the mindsets that set these regs need to be dealt with.
If the govt really wants to deal with model rocketry, a better way to do it is to co-opt it. Think about how many military bases there are, add the Natl Guard, and the Coast Guard and there are a ton of people around this country that the govt could use to "host" or "sponsor" these groups. The "host" would be able to keep tabs on the members of the group and would be able to get the group surplus goodies to make cooler rockets.
The kids would care less that the govt was in effect spying on them and the adults wouldn't have to go through the hassles of getting finger prints and security screens just to buy and Estes engine.
SuSE 8.2 personal ed has been a bust at handling palm hotsyncs via a USB sync cradle. What is your experience trying to sync a pda in the 9.1 environment?
I realize that Ham radio seems passe' to the "basement full of Linux boxes" people, but its cool and this project, while rather unlikely to completely succeed would be cool to listen in on.
For those of us who go outside, Ham is a great source of communication, as many people live where cell phone towers don't and many of the really cool places are not where cell phone towers are.
I am nowhere close to a sys-admin for a linux farm, but from my POV, the needs to make Linux more user friendly focus on two things: 1. Making it easier to load and update programs 2. Making USB connections for PDA's and other peripherals work better in terms of hot-syncing.
I would be very happy to have a 75% improvement in loading and updating existing programs that didn't leave my system open like a windows machine, rather than a 100% improvement that did. (I would take 50%).
I need the PDA to sync without having to push buttons while being twisted around like a russian gymnast. Trying to push the hotsync button and launch the script at precisely the same moment is not OK.
Trying to load a program, only to find that I don't have some obscure file that should have come with the tarball, but didn't, is not OK. Hearing about the great features that the grand and glorious KDE 3.2 will do only to find out that KDE 3.2 won't run on my version of SuSE is not OK.
Fix these problems and linux will be just good enough (and that will be great and should be the desired target). Don't need more. Don't want any of the MS bells and whistles, especially when its these that cause the vulnerability.
I thought this way too. Until my son became a recording engineer and spent an afternoon with the phone lady recording numbers. They spent 2 hours on 2 numbers. The numbers had to be the right volume, right pitch, right inflection, and the correct number of miliseconds in order for the information system to sound right.
Most voice talent earn their money. The Simpsons cast are more than adequately paid and as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the show is starting to fail. Its a bad time to get demanding. Its also a bad time for fans. Usually the arc of a show is failing and the first clear sign is when the talent makes these kind of demands. They know their show is sinking and they are trying to scoop it up with both hands while they can.
Time to switch animation addiction to "This Just In".
Agreed. The thing that will also happen is that the final compromise version will allow some "value added" bundles. For example, you get MTV, and the other music channels for "one low price." This will be put in to "facilitate cuonsumer choice" blah blah blah. This will be OK as the channels I watch will likely be bundled. What gets me is the 100 channels of the same show on the discovery channels. This kind of programming will go away. Freebie days with special events may be common on channels other than HBO and Showtime.
I worry about the guy channels (Spike) where a lot of really good programs are getting made (This Just In, being a current example). These will be kept for the programs and the unwatched womens channels will go dark. Then the feminists will insinuate that the whole deal is an veiled attempt to deny women/minorities their tv. Watch for this card to get played after the hearings and before final passage.
The problem with this is that its history. Windows XP and Office have now locked down their products so you can't load them on more than one computer. This makes "borrowing" impossible.
The cost issue needs to be part of a marketing strategy for moving Linux into the Desktops. An earlier post talks about people who shop at Walmart. They can't afford (neither can I) $300 for XP Pro or $600 for Office. There are more of us than there are of those who can.
I moved from Win98 to SuSE after checking out Knoppix and Morphix. All said and done, the support I was looking for in a corporate version of Linux is not with SuSE, and the Debian systems work great. I would go back to one of the Debian systems, particularly if it came with a live CD and an opportunity to buy support. This would be cheaper for me and would get me the software at a low price and the support I need (or not) at a reasonable price. Even if I bought the support, I would bet that I would save money over XP.
Next reason: Linux, particularly the Debian systems runs quite nicely on my puny little 1.1 Mhz Celeron. Computers are less expensive than they used to be, but they still aren't giving them away. Dumping old computers is a pain. Switching to Linux means keeping your old machine a little longer and means the hardware costs are more affordable for the average consumer.
Next reason: 90% of what people do with their computers (word processing, net surfing, and email) can be done easier on a Linux system. Think about the quality of Open Office and compare it to the quality of MS Wordpad (MS Word comes with Office at extra money, Wordpad comes free with XP). Which wordprocessor are you going to use if you can't afford the several hundred dollars for MS Office?
As a non-computer professional, novice linux user, I have to say that I like the OS and its associated open source software. There are limitations and I have found a few:
1. USB interfaces for PDA's. Really needs to get better and soon.
2. OpenOffice's HTML editor is good, but the upload system for publishing webpages needs to be better (ie: there should be one.)
3. Support for novice users (If Linux is going to go to the desktop, this has to be a HUGE priority.)
4. KDE and Gnome need to work on ironing out the little bugs that keep some of the software that runs on Gnome from running on KDE and vice versa.
5. Settings re font sizes and other little things need to be able to be set and then have these settings carry forward into all programs unless over ridden by the user.
Slashdot Mirror
I still maintain that by charging a reasonable fee per paper, the processing centers and the servers can get paid for (they will have to get paid for somehow.)
Let the market reward and punish the journals. A journal that charges less than its competitor for the same quality research will get more marketshare of readers, thus a higher citation index, thus more authors, and more readers of those authors. A journal that charges a lot will lose.
Perhaps the way is to let people download one or two articles for free? (You could learn how to use the links, and the occasional user would be able to download that one article from a journal that they need.) After this, you would have to pay.
Compared to the way electronic journals are bundled today, the iTunes model makes some sense. I put $50 on account at publishing house X and can download a paper for $2 each. 25 papers from what ever journals they publish.
Lastly, we come to the abstract. We can now read them online at no cost. Why not expand the format to include more of the results/discussion? If you need the paper for methods or bibliography, you buy it.
Pagination and other aspects: Hired help
Graphics: Paid by the author (all journals require camera ready images of all graphs before considering the paper.)
If you eliminate the pagination by publishing in pdf, you eliminate the need to hire these people. You still need to hire secretaries and IT people.
I would set up accounts like at iTunes, where users can pay a fee and download as many articles as they want till they run out of credits, then they have to re-up.
If IEEE were to get PayPal or some other fund transfer body to do this for them, their overhead would be reduced in the accounting department. The cost savings would depend on how bad they get stung by the fund transfer company.
As far as submissions go, I would require all to be sent electronically, then sent to peer reviewers. If acceptable, I would then have the journal send the author the standard fonts and pagination rules. The Author makes corrections, transfers the paper into the publication fonts and stores it as a pdf. He/she then uploads the final draft pdf file and its done.
The last time I tried that, I even took the computer to a certified Linux professional who couldn't get the PDA or ipod to work. He was the one who was whining by the end of that day.
I am sick and tired of the next Kernel announcement talking about its support for some esoteric system or system that most of us don't use. If the linux distros want to be on desktops, the support for commonly used devices has got to improve by a LARGE amount.
Water exists in three states, ice, water, and vapor. In the winter, the air is cold and can hold less water vapor.
The winter air is dry and will absorb water from any surface exposed to it. It will suck the water out of your nose (thus all the winter nosebleeds), or out of the leaves through the pores in the leaves.
Keep living leaves on a deciduous tree, the water would get sucked out of the plant in a quick hurry.
Up until the 70's, record companies made singles. A One Hit Wonder group could sell its one hit, we could but it, and a proportional amount of money was changed hands in the transaction. (I pay a buck and get a buck's worth of music.)
When 45's went away in the early 70's, the music industry tried to dump alblums on us. At that time, they were more money, and sometimes a rip off, but at $7.99, you couldn't get a groundswell of customer resistance built up.
In the late 70's and early 80's CDs came along and the price jumped. The premise sold then was that albums got scratchy and CD's wouldn't so they were worth the extra money. The OHW bands still existed but now the OHW cost $12.99 for the single.
Factor 10-15 years of inflation, and the escalating prices of the recreational pharmaceuticals that music people love, and you get the insane prices of today.
Marketing people don't care that most of their artists can't sing, and the music they sell is so bad, you can smell it, as long as they get the sale.
Don't need genetic engineering here. Already got that by breeding in the conventional manner.
Buffalo grass varietal called "Tatanka". Great grass for lawns. Left to its own, it will grow about 3 inches in a season, so it usually gets mowed once or twice a year.
Alternatively, we could always get the good folks in Ca, Nev, AZ, and NM to realize that they are living in Deserts and blue grass just doesn't belong there.
Tried Warty Warthog. They are not even CLOSE to being close to ready to take over the desktop. There is NO customer support other than the support you get from a listserv full of other people who can 't get help with their problems.
The attitude they have towards non-freeware programs like Java is annoying. They won't support it until it is free. Fine, but this is my PC. I use it for my work and other computer needs, and it will not be used for your political axe grinding (the founder is rich enough to buy his own PC to be used for that purpose). I need Java applets for several of my business sites. If I have to use Ubuntu, I can't use the sites. I guess the big U won't be making a reappearance on my machine.
Ubuntu: African for OVER-RATED!
The NY Times has an annoying habit of espousing the rosy scenario when it is to benefit of Democrats and when the argument is needed in the other direction, the same writer will just as persuasively write about how the system is doomed and we are all going to be eating cat food while living in a box down by the river if the republicans have their way. Basically, if GW said the system was fine, they would scream about how bad it was. If he said it needed fixing, they would say it didn't. Lets try citing something with a little less yellow in its past. Slashdot can do better.
I have 1 kid in school and next fall will have 2 in school. I have a i686 machine at home that works fine. While I don't have a low end video card, I don't have 3D graphics either. Yes, that would be nice, but it means a new graphics card at the least. Why? I get on the net, do word processing, do my taxes, and pay bills just fine without it. I changed to Linux after Win98 got dropped by microsoft support. I didn't consider XP due to its cost and my computer's slow speed. Thing is, why would I go back to microsoft? My machine does what I need it to do. I miss out on some of the KDE and Gnome games, but I don't play games much anyway. I hope that they come up with some way to run this version of windows like Linux does where it simply notes that the 3D video is not supported and goes on. I doubt it. If microsoft holds to its usual "prop up dell and gateway by making all the current machines obsolete" MO, they will probably run all screen I/O through the 3D part of the video card and require a terrabyte of ram to load the kernel.
The record is quite impressive given that there is more land and civilization between the new points of the new record. Still probably used ionsphere to bounce it forward, but there would be less ground effect in the new record than in the old.
These guys have advanced antennas but its still way cool that with a QRP rig and even a simple wire antenna, you can communicate over great distances with the juice of a 9 volt battery.
I agree with these comments and wish I could convince more pre-med students to take this advice. Learn to write! Learn some basic concepts of business. Take the courses that will help you do the REAL job you are hired to do. Great concepts.
Ham radio in the HF band, garage door openers, RC toys, and internet users themselves are going to get shafted by BPL.
1. HAM: HF radio operates at the frequency band that BPL poisons most. These radios are costly (about a grand to get a new basic model) and the license to get an HF radio (General class) costs money, but more so time. Who would want to drop the money and time into radio if they only hear BPL noise? With the FCC mandated band-pass filters on the BPL equipment, its still noisy (big time). The mandated abatements have demonstrably failed to lower the noise on HF.
Socially this is bad for two reasons. 1. No one will go into this as the costs versus expected benefit are not even close to breakeven. 2. When factored in that we still have some Hams that have the stuff, so we can get by with no new ones (for a short time), the Hams can't transmit out a signal strong enough to be heard over the background noise floor, so your emergency can't get handled as no one can hear what you are calling for.
So next time you are in Florida digging yourself out from a hurricane, remember that you can't call for help as there wont be many hams around and those in other areas won't hear the signals that do get out.
2. Garage door openers and RC toys. These things operate in spectrum that is near the BPL range and will be prone to interference due to image frequencies. So when its freezing cold, and you can't open the garage from your warm car, thank the FCC.
3. Users of BPL. The receivers in the BPL circuit are sensitive as they are designed to pick up very low power signals. Assuming that a Ham is anywhere in your area, and that Ham does HF, and tried low power (QRP), only to fail to contact anyone due to the noise floor problem. He or she is going to buy an amp and a beam antenna to get past that. Can you say "service interruption"? When the beam turns on, your net connection goes away as the BPL receiver gets overloaded with the strong signal from the beam.
The other way BPL users will get shafted is the shear cost of the system. (>$100/mo for internet?)
Good point. Heck, even when I am travelling around the US, carrying a laptop is a hassle. I tried geocaching with a laptop, and it worked, but was very cumbersome. This would also allow a person who bought a normal digicam (eg a canon powershot elph) to use the cheapo CF card they send along as the "film" and simply dump it onto the USB hard disk via the USB cable from the camera, skipping the need for either the big laptop or the high capacity CF cards. If the HD was big enough, and the camera to HD interface was working and stable enough for me to handle, I would snap one up. For 6000 Yen, or about $60 US, this would be a nice addition to many a backpack.
After reading some of the gun posts, I thought I would try to answer the question. 1. Is your Mom's house WELL lit? If you can't see it from space, then no. Get more lights. 2. Does your Mom's neighborhood have either a neighborhood watch or a citizen's patrol? If yes, get her involved (if she is a retiree, she can watch the houses of the working people in her neighbohood and they can watch hers at night). If not, then think about starting one. 3. Locks on doors. Dead bolts, 10 penny nails inserted like deadbolts between window casements. 4. A cell phone that never leaves your Mom's side and #1 is programmed with your number and #9 is set to call 911 automatically. Hope these help.
I treat orphan diseases so often, I feel like Father Flanagan, MD. Do a lit search and find a reference that might help cure a child with a rare disease. Find that I can't read the thing because its only published in some obscure journal and they won't release the copyright without charging me a significant amount of money (especially considering that the article may not do anything at all for my patient, and that there may be 5-10 of these articles.) Much better to see these studies in the public domain. The journals charge obscene amounts for subscriptions, which is why their circulation is falling and libraries are shifting to more on line materials.
50 cal ammo cans can be bought from army surplus stores. They have a waterproof seal and clamp shut in a manner that can be locked. They are big enough for CD's and small electronics like PDA's, transformers, Laptop powersupplies. The cool thing is that the cans can be locked individually and if you line them up on a shelf, you can run some braided steel cable through the handles on the opposite ends from the locked openings and lock the whole bunch to a bed frame or some other large object. Roommate selection is best. Find someone that is not going to be a d*ck, and stick with 'em. Avoid having parties in your room, thus avoiding getting stuff accidently broken or taken "by mistake".
Why aren't the anti govt red tape repulicans getting after this? First its the Internet over Powerlines that will screw up HF radio and now this. If you can't practice, you can't get good, and when show time comes, you won't be ready. If we ruin HF radio, then when the hurricane comes and HF is all that gets out of Miami, don't be knocking on my door whining about the lack of comm from the disaster zone as I won't be investing in HF. When we look at our engineering schools and see them half full of non-resident aliens on J-1 visas, and we wonder why little Timmy and little Johnny don't grow up to be engineers, we look back at the bubble wrapped world they grew up in and we see why. No challenges, no opportunities for growth, no chance to see something they think is really cool and start thinking about doing it for a living. These regs and the mindsets that set these regs need to be dealt with. If the govt really wants to deal with model rocketry, a better way to do it is to co-opt it. Think about how many military bases there are, add the Natl Guard, and the Coast Guard and there are a ton of people around this country that the govt could use to "host" or "sponsor" these groups. The "host" would be able to keep tabs on the members of the group and would be able to get the group surplus goodies to make cooler rockets. The kids would care less that the govt was in effect spying on them and the adults wouldn't have to go through the hassles of getting finger prints and security screens just to buy and Estes engine.
SuSE 8.2 personal ed has been a bust at handling palm hotsyncs via a USB sync cradle. What is your experience trying to sync a pda in the 9.1 environment?
I realize that Ham radio seems passe' to the "basement full of Linux boxes" people, but its cool and this project, while rather unlikely to completely succeed would be cool to listen in on. For those of us who go outside, Ham is a great source of communication, as many people live where cell phone towers don't and many of the really cool places are not where cell phone towers are.
I am nowhere close to a sys-admin for a linux farm, but from my POV, the needs to make Linux more user friendly focus on two things:
1. Making it easier to load and update programs
2. Making USB connections for PDA's and other peripherals work better in terms of hot-syncing.
I would be very happy to have a 75% improvement in loading and updating existing programs that didn't leave my system open like a windows machine, rather than a 100% improvement that did. (I would take 50%).
I need the PDA to sync without having to push buttons while being twisted around like a russian gymnast. Trying to push the hotsync button and launch the script at precisely the same moment is not OK.
Trying to load a program, only to find that I don't have some obscure file that should have come with the tarball, but didn't, is not OK. Hearing about the great features that the grand and glorious KDE 3.2 will do only to find out that KDE 3.2 won't run on my version of SuSE is not OK.
Fix these problems and linux will be just good enough (and that will be great and should be the desired target). Don't need more. Don't want any of the MS bells and whistles, especially when its these that cause the vulnerability.
I thought this way too. Until my son became a recording engineer and spent an afternoon with the phone lady recording numbers. They spent 2 hours on 2 numbers. The numbers had to be the right volume, right pitch, right inflection, and the correct number of miliseconds in order for the information system to sound right.
Most voice talent earn their money. The Simpsons cast are more than adequately paid and as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the show is starting to fail. Its a bad time to get demanding. Its also a bad time for fans. Usually the arc of a show is failing and the first clear sign is when the talent makes these kind of demands. They know their show is sinking and they are trying to scoop it up with both hands while they can.
Time to switch animation addiction to "This Just In".
Agreed. The thing that will also happen is that the final compromise version will allow some "value added" bundles. For example, you get MTV, and the other music channels for "one low price." This will be put in to "facilitate cuonsumer choice" blah blah blah. This will be OK as the channels I watch will likely be bundled. What gets me is the 100 channels of the same show on the discovery channels. This kind of programming will go away. Freebie days with special events may be common on channels other than HBO and Showtime.
I worry about the guy channels (Spike) where a lot of really good programs are getting made (This Just In, being a current example). These will be kept for the programs and the unwatched womens channels will go dark. Then the feminists will insinuate that the whole deal is an veiled attempt to deny women/minorities their tv. Watch for this card to get played after the hearings and before final passage.
The problem with this is that its history. Windows XP and Office have now locked down their products so you can't load them on more than one computer. This makes "borrowing" impossible. The cost issue needs to be part of a marketing strategy for moving Linux into the Desktops. An earlier post talks about people who shop at Walmart. They can't afford (neither can I) $300 for XP Pro or $600 for Office. There are more of us than there are of those who can.
I would go back to one of the Debian systems, particularly if it came with a live CD and an opportunity to buy support. This would be cheaper for me and would get me the software at a low price and the support I need (or not) at a reasonable price. Even if I bought the support, I would bet that I would save money over XP.
Next reason: Linux, particularly the Debian systems runs quite nicely on my puny little 1.1 Mhz Celeron. Computers are less expensive than they used to be, but they still aren't giving them away. Dumping old computers is a pain. Switching to Linux means keeping your old machine a little longer and means the hardware costs are more affordable for the average consumer.
Next reason: 90% of what people do with their computers (word processing, net surfing, and email) can be done easier on a Linux system. Think about the quality of Open Office and compare it to the quality of MS Wordpad (MS Word comes with Office at extra money, Wordpad comes free with XP). Which wordprocessor are you going to use if you can't afford the several hundred dollars for MS Office?
As a non-computer professional, novice linux user, I have to say that I like the OS and its associated open source software. There are limitations and I have found a few:
1. USB interfaces for PDA's. Really needs to get better and soon.
2. OpenOffice's HTML editor is good, but the upload system for publishing webpages needs to be better (ie: there should be one.)
3. Support for novice users (If Linux is going to go to the desktop, this has to be a HUGE priority.)
4. KDE and Gnome need to work on ironing out the little bugs that keep some of the software that runs on Gnome from running on KDE and vice versa.
5. Settings re font sizes and other little things need to be able to be set and then have these settings carry forward into all programs unless over ridden by the user.