That eliminates the Democrats and the Republicans. Which party do you support then? I'm voting Libertarian for now. I'm open to new ideas though, so tell us who you like and why.:)
I'd love to see Libertarians having about 25% of Congress. Throw 10% Greens in there for fun, Dems and Repubs can split the rest however.
I'm OK with that idea as long as it's done via Constitutional Amendment and removes *ALL* other forms of taxation. No more double dipping. They can have ONE tax, consumption based, flat rate on everything purchased. I'm fine with that, but I want ALL other taxes done away with at the Constitutional level at the same time. I would also want to see some kind of limiting system in the amendment. Something like "anything more than 20% tax requires a 75% vote of ALL REGISTERED VOTERS".
It SHOULD be hard to get more than a reasonable amount out of us. Justify it, then we'll talk. I honestly think 20% of the entire economy should cover what we need from the government. Note that I'm very Libertarian leaning, so I don't think the government should be doing all that much. And I am including all forms of taxes here, Federal, State, Local, everything.
I see no reason why this new tax code should take more than 1 page of 12pt type. Personally, I think all laws should be limited to that. It would help keep them honest.:)
I would be interested in having a discussion about new government programs when some of the existing ones are completely dismantled. Until then, it's just about spending more money that they have to take from people like you and me.
The first thing I want to see from those in charge is a balanced federal budget. I'm sick of them foisting their problems onto the future. At some point, the future will catch up with us and we won't be able to cash all those checks/IOUs. They all TALK about smaller government, then proceed to make it bigger. Enough.
As for the 2 big parties this election, I'd like a "None of the Above" option on the ballot. As there isn't one, I'll likely vote Libertarian. I can't bring myself to vote for either McCain or Obama. I don't think either will make a good president. Not that it makes much difference in Utah, a subsidiary of the Republican party.
Congress isn't much better. They all suck. I see why many in my generation don't vote. You have to vote FOR someone, and there isn't anyone worth voting for. *sigh*
I'd love to see a constitutional amendment including term limits for ALL elected positions, balanced federal budget, and ranking based ballots (or at least a "no confidence/none of the above" option). If I could also put "Orin Hatch will never be allowed in any elected position ever again" in there, I would be VERY happy. I'm embarrassed to have him "representing" me.
I've opened an iPod with a putty knife and a credit card. Not really any harder to get those than a screwdriver or Allen key.
Maybe Apple could ship the little plastic tools the battery replacement companies ship with the batteries. There, now you have the tools you need included in the package.:)
What makes a spinning metal disc coated with magnetic material so special? Really? They are more fragile, slower, and larger than current flash. 32GB micro-SD exists now. It's a little pricey, but at current trends in the industry it'll be reasonably priced in 6 months or so.
I've got a 4G 20GB iPod sitting around because the HD died. I'm considering buying one of the flash adapters on EBay and putting a CF card in there instead.
They only benefit HDs have is price/GB. And that has eroded to the point that current flash players are cheap enough and large enough that it's not an issue for most people. I'm considering the new 16GB nanos, and I currently have a 30GB 5G.
As for the death of the iPod. I doubt it. I've checked out many of the competition's products. They don't have the simple integration and ease-of-use that the iPod/iTunes has. I don't care about the music store, so there is nothing proprietary about my iPod. Even if I did use iTMS, I would limit my use to iTunes+ for the extra quality and no DRM. And there's Amazon and such if I want MP3. Most users (other than on/.) don't want to deal with directory trees full of music that they have to manage themselves. They want to plug in the player, have the app load up and sync the device to the library. Automatic, simple, easy, brain dead. I actually prefer it as I have better things to do than to organize my directories and remember what stuff to copy to the player. The smart playlists are also a big deal to me. I love being able to do what amounts to a database query to find songs based on almost any criteria I choose.
The DS has 4MB of RAM. That's enough for productivity apps. Homebrew productivity apps also have access to the filesystem on the MicroSD card, so they can swap or do standard file I/O if they need it. Speed to/from the SD card is quite reasonable for a handheld platform like the DS.
The web browser is a different animal, the modern web page uses a lot of storage. I think the RAM cart is 16MB. I'm sure some of that is used for a page cache to make performance reasonable.
Just because the DRM is too irritating. I haven't been into RTS since about when Starcraft was big, so I'm a bit out of the loop and being interested in this game is about 50/50. However, when dealing with games, I don't like all the stupid DRM crap. Steam was about the most I can tolerate, and if it wasn't for HL2 I wouldn't have bothered.
We all know that the pirate groups will have a 0-day cracked release out. It's just how it works. So if I decide I want to play this game, I'll still buy it, but I'll download and play the "pirated" version because the DRM pisses me off. The box might look nice on my shelf for a while though.:)
My 5G 30Gig works fine. As have the last generation Nanos. (Just before the ones released this week. Haven't tried those.)
You do have to enable disk mode first, or do the button dance, but it works fine. I haven't tried the touch or the latest released units. But the iPods have always worked that way for me.
They can't play music I just drop on the disk, but they do work as standard USB Mass Storage devices. Personally, I don't WANT to manually manage all my music. Computers were invented to relieve the burden of repetitive tasks. I'd much rather have software to do that for me. iTunes does it as well as any other app I've tried, and has nice database-like options for searching and creating playlists.
I wonder is anyone that is affected has an XP drive/partition they can test on? It would be interesting to see if the hardware has a significant effect.
Were you running Vista on the Powerbook? I installed iTunes8 before I heard about the problems on my Mac Mini running OSX and it worked fine. No lockups, or any real slowdowns. Even the Genius stuff was quick.
In the past iTunes worked fine on my XP machines, but the story mentions Vista specifically so I assume I wouldn't have seen the bug on my boxes anyway.
HPs driver packs are the reason I stopped buying HP products. There is no good reason I need 300MB of crap installed to let the OS talk to the printer. I don't really mind the little status apps that tell me the ink is low or whatever (I want to be able to turn them off though), but I don't see any reason that needs to be more than a couple MB.
My main printer is a Brother Laser I've had for 10 years and replaced the toner in 2 times. It came with a network interface installed. All I have to do to get a machine to print to it is tell the OS what IP address to use. OSX was really nice and auto-detected the driver for me. XP and Linux I just selected a PCL driver and it all worked fine. I don't even know where the CDs that came with the printer are. In a box somewhere I guess.
I wish the damn manufacturers would come up with a basic, standard, open spec for network printers and scanners and ship more of them with network connections. 10/100 Ethernet is cheap as hell and should be included so I don't need a print server. Even better would be an open spec for USB devices as well. I really don't see any reason I should need to install anything at all to be able to print.
Is there a FULL replacement for GBS yet? And no, Foxmarks isn't one. It's good, but not what I want. Weave is Alpha quality and not widely available. I'd really love the GBS code updated for FF3 and to use a server of my choice to save the data. If I had time to learn the code I'd do it myself, but I have far too many projects right now. That's one thing keeping me on FF2, no decent multi-computer syncing.
I'll be excited about this when it's actually OPEN, not that it just has "open" in the name. That means I can download specs, for free, to build a device to decrypt channels that I paid for and the parts needed to do it are available from a large supplier like Digikey with no further licencing requirements and no requirement that the cable company or CableLabs "approve" my device. If it's technically capable of being connected and not harming the network, I should be able to connect it and the cable company should be required to provision it. Same thing as the telephone network.
Anything like that available soon? Didn't think so.
Personally, I think CableLabs should be forced to release the specs to communicate with CableCards as open source and the providers be required to activate anything that can do the handshake. They shouldn't be required to offer tech support other than getting the card to communicate, but they shouldn't get to lock it all down either. I think it's retarded that they can lock out anyone they don't like.
Note that I said the specs to interface to a CableCard, NOT the internal code or schematics. that means that if the security software is worth a shit than it's still damn hard to crack. I should be able to download the info for free to handshake with the card/provider, get the required IDs to set up the decryption, send an encrypted stream to the card, and receive the decrypted stream.
There is no good reason I shouldn't be able to build a PCI CableCard tuner and offer it to all comers for Myth, Sage, etc.. I think the same should hold for satellite providers as well. The idea behind the law was to make it possible to have an open market for the customer side. CableLabs and the cable companies have subverted that goal and they should be taken to task for it.
* it's not UNIVERSAL serial bus if the other end of the cable is allowed to be proprietary. nightmare when travelling and you've forgotten your cable. it's never in the public interest to create a hidden cost (expensive proprietary cables)
+1! I HATE proprietary cables. Use the damn standards. THAT MEANS YOU APPLE! I don't care if they ALSO have a non-standard connector, but charging and data should be available via USB Mini-B (or the new micro-B if your device is REALLY small).
I don't buy the population density argument. If that were the reason, why isn't Manhattan or LA wired up? They can easily compete with Japan on that front, yet the network there isn't much better than what I can get in a somewhat rural suburb.
On another note, UTOPIA seems to be able to wire the suburbs with comparable speeds to Japan. If they can do it there, and keep the network open for competition, we should all be able to do it anywhere. FIOS is private for Verizon, but they are doing pretty well too. Not to mention the huge money we paid the telcos for this years ago.
To each their own I guess. I haven't used (or wanted) a floppy drive in 5 years or so. I have bootable CDs and USB-Flash drives now that do the same exact thing, faster, and more reliably than floppies did. Every mobo/BIOS I've used in that time frame had working CD and USB Mass Storage booting. And I was one of the last people I knew to ditch the floppies. I can't imagine using one today.
If I work on someone else's box, I bring my laptop, boot CDs and flash drive. If I need something they don't have, I use the laptop to get it and put it on some media (usually flash) and use it to fix the problem. Lately, I even have internet access via cell tethering so I can get stuff even if their internet connection is so hosed I can't use my laptop to get online via their connection.
It seems like one should be able to combine treatment with a transfusion to get the volume needed for the machine to work without killing the patient. I think there has to be more to it than that.
So don't transport or store the current waste. Build breeders on the same sites and re-process the "waste" that still has huge amounts of power left in it.
Personally, I think we should have an X-Prize like setup for a commercial size IFR type design. Solar just doesn't cut it for base load, and neither does wind etc.. Nuclear does. Not that I don't want to see things like solar or wind deployed, they have their uses. I really liked the idea someone posted about using wind to generate H2, then reforming it onsite into hydrocarbon fuels. No more foreign oil dependency, and uses what seems to me to be a carbon-neutral cycle. Best of both worlds. I think the long term soultion is electric cars and nuclear power (fusion in the really long term) but something like that would be an excellent short term fix for the oil problem.
With MythTV I can play 1080i or 720p (output to the TV over component at 720p as that's the TV's native res). Hardware is an Athlon X2 3800 (I think) with 1GB RAM and embedded video (GF6450 based).
I don't use any hardware accel, and am doing deinterlacing (BOB2x IIRC). I use about 30% CPU and notice no playback issues.
Playback also works well on Windows with VLC on similiar hardware. This is all with ATSC sourced MPEG2 video.
MEPG2 might be a little outdated on the internet, as most things older than about 5 minutes are. But it's still the standard for OTA HDTV. If you use an antenna for HDTV, you use MPEG2. And many people still do it for local channels as Cable and Sat operators are starting to re-compress the data enough that people with large sets are noticing a quality difference.
And it's free, so why not use it?:) Not that I have a problem with supporting more codecs with hardware accelerated decode. May as well have that GPU doing something useful and take some load off the main CPU.
It's not the illegals we need. They don't pay taxes, by and large (I know *1* who did, via a business tax number).
What we need is to loosen up a little on legal immigration. Or just accept it and take over Mexico. They are already acting like the 51st state with the entitlement complex they seem to have. May as well let them in. They will fit right in with what seems to be 90% of Americans anymore. *sigh*
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That eliminates the Democrats and the Republicans. Which party do you support then? I'm voting Libertarian for now. I'm open to new ideas though, so tell us who you like and why. :)
I'd love to see Libertarians having about 25% of Congress. Throw 10% Greens in there for fun, Dems and Repubs can split the rest however.
I'm OK with that idea as long as it's done via Constitutional Amendment and removes *ALL* other forms of taxation. No more double dipping. They can have ONE tax, consumption based, flat rate on everything purchased. I'm fine with that, but I want ALL other taxes done away with at the Constitutional level at the same time. I would also want to see some kind of limiting system in the amendment. Something like "anything more than 20% tax requires a 75% vote of ALL REGISTERED VOTERS".
It SHOULD be hard to get more than a reasonable amount out of us. Justify it, then we'll talk. I honestly think 20% of the entire economy should cover what we need from the government. Note that I'm very Libertarian leaning, so I don't think the government should be doing all that much. And I am including all forms of taxes here, Federal, State, Local, everything.
I see no reason why this new tax code should take more than 1 page of 12pt type. Personally, I think all laws should be limited to that. It would help keep them honest. :)
The sad thing is, would a can of soda really serve us any worse than the current big 2 candidates? :)
I would be interested in having a discussion about new government programs when some of the existing ones are completely dismantled. Until then, it's just about spending more money that they have to take from people like you and me.
The first thing I want to see from those in charge is a balanced federal budget. I'm sick of them foisting their problems onto the future. At some point, the future will catch up with us and we won't be able to cash all those checks/IOUs. They all TALK about smaller government, then proceed to make it bigger. Enough.
As for the 2 big parties this election, I'd like a "None of the Above" option on the ballot. As there isn't one, I'll likely vote Libertarian. I can't bring myself to vote for either McCain or Obama. I don't think either will make a good president. Not that it makes much difference in Utah, a subsidiary of the Republican party.
Congress isn't much better. They all suck. I see why many in my generation don't vote. You have to vote FOR someone, and there isn't anyone worth voting for. *sigh*
I'd love to see a constitutional amendment including term limits for ALL elected positions, balanced federal budget, and ranking based ballots (or at least a "no confidence/none of the above" option). If I could also put "Orin Hatch will never be allowed in any elected position ever again" in there, I would be VERY happy. I'm embarrassed to have him "representing" me.
I've opened an iPod with a putty knife and a credit card. Not really any harder to get those than a screwdriver or Allen key.
Maybe Apple could ship the little plastic tools the battery replacement companies ship with the batteries. There, now you have the tools you need included in the package. :)
What makes a spinning metal disc coated with magnetic material so special? Really? They are more fragile, slower, and larger than current flash. 32GB micro-SD exists now. It's a little pricey, but at current trends in the industry it'll be reasonably priced in 6 months or so.
I've got a 4G 20GB iPod sitting around because the HD died. I'm considering buying one of the flash adapters on EBay and putting a CF card in there instead.
They only benefit HDs have is price/GB. And that has eroded to the point that current flash players are cheap enough and large enough that it's not an issue for most people. I'm considering the new 16GB nanos, and I currently have a 30GB 5G.
As for the death of the iPod. I doubt it. I've checked out many of the competition's products. They don't have the simple integration and ease-of-use that the iPod/iTunes has. I don't care about the music store, so there is nothing proprietary about my iPod. Even if I did use iTMS, I would limit my use to iTunes+ for the extra quality and no DRM. And there's Amazon and such if I want MP3. Most users (other than on /.) don't want to deal with directory trees full of music that they have to manage themselves. They want to plug in the player, have the app load up and sync the device to the library. Automatic, simple, easy, brain dead. I actually prefer it as I have better things to do than to organize my directories and remember what stuff to copy to the player. The smart playlists are also a big deal to me. I love being able to do what amounts to a database query to find songs based on almost any criteria I choose.
The DS has 4MB of RAM. That's enough for productivity apps. Homebrew productivity apps also have access to the filesystem on the MicroSD card, so they can swap or do standard file I/O if they need it. Speed to/from the SD card is quite reasonable for a handheld platform like the DS.
The web browser is a different animal, the modern web page uses a lot of storage. I think the RAM cart is 16MB. I'm sure some of that is used for a page cache to make performance reasonable.
Just because the DRM is too irritating. I haven't been into RTS since about when Starcraft was big, so I'm a bit out of the loop and being interested in this game is about 50/50. However, when dealing with games, I don't like all the stupid DRM crap. Steam was about the most I can tolerate, and if it wasn't for HL2 I wouldn't have bothered.
We all know that the pirate groups will have a 0-day cracked release out. It's just how it works. So if I decide I want to play this game, I'll still buy it, but I'll download and play the "pirated" version because the DRM pisses me off. The box might look nice on my shelf for a while though. :)
My 5G 30Gig works fine. As have the last generation Nanos. (Just before the ones released this week. Haven't tried those.)
You do have to enable disk mode first, or do the button dance, but it works fine. I haven't tried the touch or the latest released units. But the iPods have always worked that way for me.
They can't play music I just drop on the disk, but they do work as standard USB Mass Storage devices. Personally, I don't WANT to manually manage all my music. Computers were invented to relieve the burden of repetitive tasks. I'd much rather have software to do that for me. iTunes does it as well as any other app I've tried, and has nice database-like options for searching and creating playlists.
I wonder is anyone that is affected has an XP drive/partition they can test on? It would be interesting to see if the hardware has a significant effect.
Were you running Vista on the Powerbook? I installed iTunes8 before I heard about the problems on my Mac Mini running OSX and it worked fine. No lockups, or any real slowdowns. Even the Genius stuff was quick.
In the past iTunes worked fine on my XP machines, but the story mentions Vista specifically so I assume I wouldn't have seen the bug on my boxes anyway.
HPs driver packs are the reason I stopped buying HP products. There is no good reason I need 300MB of crap installed to let the OS talk to the printer. I don't really mind the little status apps that tell me the ink is low or whatever (I want to be able to turn them off though), but I don't see any reason that needs to be more than a couple MB.
My main printer is a Brother Laser I've had for 10 years and replaced the toner in 2 times. It came with a network interface installed. All I have to do to get a machine to print to it is tell the OS what IP address to use. OSX was really nice and auto-detected the driver for me. XP and Linux I just selected a PCL driver and it all worked fine. I don't even know where the CDs that came with the printer are. In a box somewhere I guess.
I wish the damn manufacturers would come up with a basic, standard, open spec for network printers and scanners and ship more of them with network connections. 10/100 Ethernet is cheap as hell and should be included so I don't need a print server. Even better would be an open spec for USB devices as well. I really don't see any reason I should need to install anything at all to be able to print.
Is there a FULL replacement for GBS yet? And no, Foxmarks isn't one. It's good, but not what I want. Weave is Alpha quality and not widely available. I'd really love the GBS code updated for FF3 and to use a server of my choice to save the data. If I had time to learn the code I'd do it myself, but I have far too many projects right now. That's one thing keeping me on FF2, no decent multi-computer syncing.
I'll be excited about this when it's actually OPEN, not that it just has "open" in the name. That means I can download specs, for free, to build a device to decrypt channels that I paid for and the parts needed to do it are available from a large supplier like Digikey with no further licencing requirements and no requirement that the cable company or CableLabs "approve" my device. If it's technically capable of being connected and not harming the network, I should be able to connect it and the cable company should be required to provision it. Same thing as the telephone network.
Anything like that available soon? Didn't think so.
Personally, I think CableLabs should be forced to release the specs to communicate with CableCards as open source and the providers be required to activate anything that can do the handshake. They shouldn't be required to offer tech support other than getting the card to communicate, but they shouldn't get to lock it all down either. I think it's retarded that they can lock out anyone they don't like.
Note that I said the specs to interface to a CableCard, NOT the internal code or schematics. that means that if the security software is worth a shit than it's still damn hard to crack. I should be able to download the info for free to handshake with the card/provider, get the required IDs to set up the decryption, send an encrypted stream to the card, and receive the decrypted stream.
There is no good reason I shouldn't be able to build a PCI CableCard tuner and offer it to all comers for Myth, Sage, etc.. I think the same should hold for satellite providers as well. The idea behind the law was to make it possible to have an open market for the customer side. CableLabs and the cable companies have subverted that goal and they should be taken to task for it.
3 things i hope they address:
* it's not UNIVERSAL serial bus if the other end of the cable is allowed to be proprietary. nightmare when travelling and you've forgotten your cable. it's never in the public interest to create a hidden cost (expensive proprietary cables)
+1! I HATE proprietary cables. Use the damn standards. THAT MEANS YOU APPLE! I don't care if they ALSO have a non-standard connector, but charging and data should be available via USB Mini-B (or the new micro-B if your device is REALLY small).
I don't buy the population density argument. If that were the reason, why isn't Manhattan or LA wired up? They can easily compete with Japan on that front, yet the network there isn't much better than what I can get in a somewhat rural suburb.
On another note, UTOPIA seems to be able to wire the suburbs with comparable speeds to Japan. If they can do it there, and keep the network open for competition, we should all be able to do it anywhere. FIOS is private for Verizon, but they are doing pretty well too. Not to mention the huge money we paid the telcos for this years ago.
To each their own I guess. I haven't used (or wanted) a floppy drive in 5 years or so. I have bootable CDs and USB-Flash drives now that do the same exact thing, faster, and more reliably than floppies did. Every mobo/BIOS I've used in that time frame had working CD and USB Mass Storage booting. And I was one of the last people I knew to ditch the floppies. I can't imagine using one today.
If I work on someone else's box, I bring my laptop, boot CDs and flash drive. If I need something they don't have, I use the laptop to get it and put it on some media (usually flash) and use it to fix the problem. Lately, I even have internet access via cell tethering so I can get stuff even if their internet connection is so hosed I can't use my laptop to get online via their connection.
So we should all revert to being hunter-gatherers? Good luck with that.
It seems like one should be able to combine treatment with a transfusion to get the volume needed for the machine to work without killing the patient. I think there has to be more to it than that.
So don't transport or store the current waste. Build breeders on the same sites and re-process the "waste" that still has huge amounts of power left in it.
Personally, I think we should have an X-Prize like setup for a commercial size IFR type design. Solar just doesn't cut it for base load, and neither does wind etc.. Nuclear does. Not that I don't want to see things like solar or wind deployed, they have their uses. I really liked the idea someone posted about using wind to generate H2, then reforming it onsite into hydrocarbon fuels. No more foreign oil dependency, and uses what seems to me to be a carbon-neutral cycle. Best of both worlds. I think the long term soultion is electric cars and nuclear power (fusion in the really long term) but something like that would be an excellent short term fix for the oil problem.
With MythTV I can play 1080i or 720p (output to the TV over component at 720p as that's the TV's native res). Hardware is an Athlon X2 3800 (I think) with 1GB RAM and embedded video (GF6450 based).
I don't use any hardware accel, and am doing deinterlacing (BOB2x IIRC). I use about 30% CPU and notice no playback issues.
Playback also works well on Windows with VLC on similiar hardware. This is all with ATSC sourced MPEG2 video.
MEPG2 might be a little outdated on the internet, as most things older than about 5 minutes are. But it's still the standard for OTA HDTV. If you use an antenna for HDTV, you use MPEG2. And many people still do it for local channels as Cable and Sat operators are starting to re-compress the data enough that people with large sets are noticing a quality difference.
And it's free, so why not use it? :) Not that I have a problem with supporting more codecs with hardware accelerated decode. May as well have that GPU doing something useful and take some load off the main CPU.
Okay. Camry hybrid with a PHEV option. Currently the PHEV part is aftermarket, I'm sure the manufacturers will offer it eventually.
It's not the illegals we need. They don't pay taxes, by and large (I know *1* who did, via a business tax number).
What we need is to loosen up a little on legal immigration. Or just accept it and take over Mexico. They are already acting like the 51st state with the entitlement complex they seem to have. May as well let them in. They will fit right in with what seems to be 90% of Americans anymore. *sigh*