It's the WRTSL54GS, and I wasn't familiar with it; only with the WRT54GL (aka WRT54G v4). The one that you're talking about seems to support external hard drives, so you could in theory have a Linux filesystem of almost unlimited size. Very nice!
Well, if they're visibly acting to arrest someone rather than just gathering information undercover, they aren't under very much cover anymore, are they?
The areola changes shape and colour depending on temperature, mood and random quantum field fluctuations.
Blow a cold air jet out of the camera before snapping a pic of the areola. The cold combined with the stimulation of the air should cause it to scrunchify and erect nicely.
Sure, because there isn't a paper trail for any credit card or check purchase you've ever made.
I carry $50 or so on me at all times and use it to pay for things. No paper trail unless it's (a) an expensive item or (b) bought for work, in which case I *want* a paper trail for IRS reasons.
When I read the summary I thought, "Hey this sounds pretty useless, but maybe I just missed something." Then I read the article, and I'm still thinking, "Hey this sounds pretty useless."
It verifies ID, so it verifies age. Thus, it may be good for vending alcohol in drinking-age-paranoiac countries like the US. Or cigarettes - the purchasers' info is sent straight to an insurance database, of course.
The better and cheaper solution would just be to accept the fact that teenagers *will* drink, lower the drinking age to 16 and raise the driving age to 18. That way, they'll get the "binging" out of their collective systems *before* learning to drive.
Linux, on the other hand, is an essential tool for millions of taxpaying Americans. Which represents the best American traditions of hard individual work paying off in results rewarded by merit, not corporate leverage. And it's an immigrant which has brought its experience to build America, in the best American tradition.
I guess you didn't see where my tongue was when I posted my post - firmly in cheek:) Myself, I use a red-blooded 'merkin OS - BSD - named after UC Berkeley, Calif... Yeehaw!
cops might be assholes, but we have to respect the fact that they are people too, and they also have rights granted by law.
On the job, they should have *zero* right to privacy. We have granted then extraordinary powers within the law in order so that can preserve order. It's our right and *duty* to keep a constant eye on them so that don't abuse those powers. If criminals are bad enough, criminals operating under protection of law are worse.
According to the state law, the homeowner did commit a felony if he recorded the officers' conversation without their knowledge and consent.
Well, then state law should be changed. Cops on duty should not have any right to privacy. If they know that they're working in a fishbowl, the potential for police abuse goes way down.
Take breast implants. They require periodic checkups to make sure everything is going just right (ie. you're not about to be killed or made deathly ill byt them). If you happen to be coming up on a checkup and the hospitals are full of bomb blast victims, do you think anyone is going to see you anytime soon to check them out?
If you're stupid enough to get a plastic bag implanted in one of your more sensitive body parts and you happen to die slowly and painfully because of it, I have approximately zero sympathy for you. Call it Darwinian selection.
Global warming is NOT a doomsday scenario. It might be a "things are really going to suck" scenario, and I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying to stop it, but it's not going to KILL everybody, it just might make it unbearably hot, ruin crops, cause flooding, worsen natural disasters, etc.
Visit Venus sometime, then get back to me, please. If there's some kind of cascading process that releases more and more carbon as the temperature goes up, then we really might be headed for Doomsday unless something is done.
Even the flu killed 30 million out of almost 2,000 million, or 1.5%. Yeah, sucks to be them, but killing 1.5% of the population didn't exactly move homo sapiens to the endangered species list.
Even a bug that kills 99.9% of the population will leave 6,000,000 people on the Earth. If anything, it'll be a better world for the survivors: no overcrowding, no energy shortage, abundant food, resources, and free housing. The real problem in such a situation after the dust has settled won't be the bug itself - it'll be the waste from humankind's activities over the past 400 years or so. Who's gonna make sure that the chemical plants and nukes were cleanly shut down, that there's still water in the waste fuel pools to avert a meltdown, that various stocks of chemical weapons aren't leaking? We've been playing with some bad toys, and the only thing keeping those toys from mauling our sorry asses is the structure of civilization.
-- old PCs may be fire hazards due to aging components.
The "danger" is mainly confined to the power supply unit. AT power supplies are cheap - if you're feeling paranoid, throw in a new one. And anything under 10 years is probably safe, insulation technology has come a long way in the last 2 decades or so. I'm using a 15 yr. old stereo, a 5 yr. old computer, and no problems so far.
Probably your best bet is a USB printer supported by linux and then stick CUPs on a Linksys 54GSL or whatever it's called (the wireless router with USB support).
CUPS requires a Unix PC. It won't even come close to fitting in the ROM of a Linksys blue-box router. However, setting up a Unix server (whether running CUPS or not) is never a bad idea if only for the learning experience:)
Panasonic has horrid puke crap shite instead of drivers so whatever you win in terms of price per copy,you will lose on computer downtime and driver problems.
Drivers for the lower-end HPs are also regurgitated excrement. Bloated, install-error prone, and don't run the install program on the CD since it installs about 70MB of unnecessary garbageware by default. Did I mention that some of the HP printer/scanner control programs don't quit gracefully when logging out of Windoze, so you have to wait 30 sec while the "trying to close..." dialogue hangs out on the screen with the progress bars marching insufferably slowly?
Save yourself a lot of headaches and get a printer that accepts standard Postscript or PCL5. Actually, what I'd *like* to see is a printer that accepts straight HTML with.gif,.jpg,.png, and.dxf graphics and renders on the fly. Sort of a modern extension to Postscript support.
It has a JetDirect card, but I have no freakin' clue how to configure it. Any ideas for help? Thanks.
I've done a few. First, hardware-reset the thing. Depending on whether the JetDirect is internal to the printer or not, hold down the "TEST" or "ONLINE" button on the card/printer while connecting the power chord.
Then either use the menuing system of the printer (if it's new enough to have a screen and it's an internal card) OR configure the thing via Telnet. Use a crossover cable or router between the computer and printer. Default IP of the JetDirect is 192.0.0.192, IIRC, and the prompts are somewhat self-explanatory.
Instead they're sticking with Microsoft, even when the new MS OS won't be good for customers for years.
Well, if you want to wave the American flag, I suppose you *should* stick with M$. They're still very much an American company that provides many jobs in certain regions of the US. Some stuff has been outsourced, but not even close to everything, and certainly not the important development work.
And frankly, the WRT54G-L is still a good deal, even with their "premium" pricing.
Yep, $80 (or less, depending on where you get it) for a router that can be made almost infinitely configurable, is rock-solid, and runs an OpenVPN server. Good deal for me, since OpenVPN client-side software is free and has been ported to almost any platform that's out there today.
That said, is everyone defending it on principle -- that principle being a sincere dislike for the RIAA -- or is it just fun to play ignorant?
The RIAA can squick themselves with a steel dildo studded with glass shards and then piss in the Amazon and get a candiru in their urethra for all I care. If I like a band, I'll go to their concerts and support them that way. At least the rights-grabbers at the RIAA aren't getting their soiled hands on 95% of the profits.
Improving software is HARD - Vista is a crystal clear example of how hard - which makes it expensive.
Writing good, robust OS's is *not* that hard. Writing good OS's that have to run DOS binaries dating from the early 80's and everything in between *is* hard and leads to super-bloated code. The current crop of *BSD OS's can (and do) run utilities and apps dating from the 70s, but the difference is that those apps have been recompiled (and to some extent rewritten) many times since then. This is only possible with the open source development model.
but it's still an industry ripe for a new enry Ford to invent the digital equivalent of a production line.
Micro$oft? Turns out a vast quantity of a mediocre product for the consumption of the everyman. This statement can apply both to the Model T and to Windows. The Model T wasn't the fastest, nor the lightest, not the best handling, but it was cheap and did the job ok. Linux/BSD can be compared to a kitcar - cheap to build, but requiring an investment in labor to get on the road. MacOS? Maybe a Mercedes sports model? Fast, bulletproof, but limited in application and more expensive than the competition...
Fortunatly the crap was easy enough to delete, well except for McAfee's spyware.
Copy the Windows registration files to an external drive, as well as the contents of system and system32, and reinstall 'doze from an OEM CD if you're so inclined. I've also heard that, at least with their higher-end systems (Precision range), you can get them with *just* Windows (or RedHat Enterprise Linux!) installed if you ask nicely upon ordering. Those are about the only good desktops to come out of Dell today. Dimension = cheaply-made garbazhe. Optiplex = ok, but barely cheaper than the Precisions which can come with built-in hardware SATA RAID.
The top bars of windows, between the program icon/description text and the minimize/expand/close buttons have plents of room for scrolling/switching ads, and you're not taking away room from anything useful. All the same, I'd just as soon use a *truly* free OS like BSD or Linux and not have to deal with someone owning a share in my computer.
I claim that, in my experience, XP is far less broken than previous versions of Windows. As a matter of fact, my experience with it has softened some of my contempt for Windows as an OS.
X-Pee is better than previous versions, but that doesn't make it good. Use it for occasional web surfing, media, and e-mail and editing with MS Orifice - you'll do fine. Try to run any "out of the ordinary" applications, esp. with non-root permissions, and see how much fun you have. Small Biz Server 2003 is even worse in this regard - permissions are fucked up out of the box, Shadow Copy up and dies periodically despite "hotfixes" from M$, etc. UNIX/Linux might be a bit of a bear to set up initially, but once they're running, they're rock-solid. Windows, on the other hand, seems to degrade as it's used and need to be re-installed. Thank God that MS is including a volume imaging utility as part of Vista - it's gonna need it!
Fine, do you have human versions of Photoshop, iTunes, or a whole myriad of software titles? Games? e-Commerce? Point of sale? Medical office tracking? Databases? Enterprise content software? ...Or a free software equivalent, which was my original point that you seem to have wilfully missed.
Well, free software equivalents:
Photoshop - the GIMP
iTunes - plenty of MP3 players out there. Who needs DRM lock-in?
Games - numerous
e-Commerce - web development is probably easier than under 'doze. Apache may be intimidating at first, but at least the config and setup isn't as hopelessly contrived as IIS!
Databases - MySQL engine, and OpenOffice Base for interfacing with Access.mdb files
Medical office - I do consulting for a company that sells medical/dental x-ray systems. I've seen offices using something called FreeMed that runs on a BSD box and is accessed via web browsers on client boxes. Don't know how good it is, and unfortunately, the x-ray acquisition software so far is only written for 'doze (though it is free and open source - the real moneymaker is the sensor arrays).
Slashdot Mirror
-b.
Well, if they're visibly acting to arrest someone rather than just gathering information undercover, they aren't under very much cover anymore, are they?
-b.
Blow a cold air jet out of the camera before snapping a pic of the areola. The cold combined with the stimulation of the air should cause it to scrunchify and erect nicely.
-b.
I carry $50 or so on me at all times and use it to pay for things. No paper trail unless it's (a) an expensive item or (b) bought for work, in which case I *want* a paper trail for IRS reasons.
-b.
It verifies ID, so it verifies age. Thus, it may be good for vending alcohol in drinking-age-paranoiac countries like the US. Or cigarettes - the purchasers' info is sent straight to an insurance database, of course.
The better and cheaper solution would just be to accept the fact that teenagers *will* drink, lower the drinking age to 16 and raise the driving age to 18. That way, they'll get the "binging" out of their collective systems *before* learning to drive.
-b.
I guess you didn't see where my tongue was when I posted my post - firmly in cheek :) Myself, I use a red-blooded 'merkin OS - BSD - named after UC Berkeley, Calif... Yeehaw!
-b.
On the job, they should have *zero* right to privacy. We have granted then extraordinary powers within the law in order so that can preserve order. It's our right and *duty* to keep a constant eye on them so that don't abuse those powers. If criminals are bad enough, criminals operating under protection of law are worse.
-b.
Well, then state law should be changed. Cops on duty should not have any right to privacy. If they know that they're working in a fishbowl, the potential for police abuse goes way down.
-b.
Humans: 1
Yay!
-b.
If you're stupid enough to get a plastic bag implanted in one of your more sensitive body parts and you happen to die slowly and painfully because of it, I have approximately zero sympathy for you. Call it Darwinian selection.
-b.
Visit Venus sometime, then get back to me, please. If there's some kind of cascading process that releases more and more carbon as the temperature goes up, then we really might be headed for Doomsday unless something is done.
-b.
Even a bug that kills 99.9% of the population will leave 6,000,000 people on the Earth. If anything, it'll be a better world for the survivors: no overcrowding, no energy shortage, abundant food, resources, and free housing. The real problem in such a situation after the dust has settled won't be the bug itself - it'll be the waste from humankind's activities over the past 400 years or so. Who's gonna make sure that the chemical plants and nukes were cleanly shut down, that there's still water in the waste fuel pools to avert a meltdown, that various stocks of chemical weapons aren't leaking? We've been playing with some bad toys, and the only thing keeping those toys from mauling our sorry asses is the structure of civilization.
-b.
The "danger" is mainly confined to the power supply unit. AT power supplies are cheap - if you're feeling paranoid, throw in a new one. And anything under 10 years is probably safe, insulation technology has come a long way in the last 2 decades or so. I'm using a 15 yr. old stereo, a 5 yr. old computer, and no problems so far.
-b.
-b.
Drivers for the lower-end HPs are also regurgitated excrement. Bloated, install-error prone, and don't run the install program on the CD since it installs about 70MB of unnecessary garbageware by default. Did I mention that some of the HP printer/scanner control programs don't quit gracefully when logging out of Windoze, so you have to wait 30 sec while the "trying to close ..." dialogue hangs out on the screen with the progress bars marching insufferably slowly?
Save yourself a lot of headaches and get a printer that accepts standard Postscript or PCL5. Actually, what I'd *like* to see is a printer that accepts straight HTML with .gif, .jpg, .png, and .dxf graphics and renders on the fly. Sort of a modern extension to Postscript support.
-b. -b.
I've done a few. First, hardware-reset the thing. Depending on whether the JetDirect is internal to the printer or not, hold down the "TEST" or "ONLINE" button on the card/printer while connecting the power chord.
Then either use the menuing system of the printer (if it's new enough to have a screen and it's an internal card) OR configure the thing via Telnet. Use a crossover cable or router between the computer and printer. Default IP of the JetDirect is 192.0.0.192, IIRC, and the prompts are somewhat self-explanatory.
-b.
Well, if you want to wave the American flag, I suppose you *should* stick with M$. They're still very much an American company that provides many jobs in certain regions of the US. Some stuff has been outsourced, but not even close to everything, and certainly not the important development work.
Linux, on the other hand, was Not Invented Here ;)
-b.
Yep, $80 (or less, depending on where you get it) for a router that can be made almost infinitely configurable, is rock-solid, and runs an OpenVPN server. Good deal for me, since OpenVPN client-side software is free and has been ported to almost any platform that's out there today.
-b.
Well, they are offering Precision 380 workstations with Redhat Enterprise pre-installed. A step in the right direction.
-b.
The RIAA can squick themselves with a steel dildo studded with glass shards and then piss in the Amazon and get a candiru in their urethra for all I care. If I like a band, I'll go to their concerts and support them that way. At least the rights-grabbers at the RIAA aren't getting their soiled hands on 95% of the profits.
-b.
Writing good, robust OS's is *not* that hard. Writing good OS's that have to run DOS binaries dating from the early 80's and everything in between *is* hard and leads to super-bloated code. The current crop of *BSD OS's can (and do) run utilities and apps dating from the 70s, but the difference is that those apps have been recompiled (and to some extent rewritten) many times since then. This is only possible with the open source development model.
but it's still an industry ripe for a new enry Ford to invent the digital equivalent of a production line.
Micro$oft? Turns out a vast quantity of a mediocre product for the consumption of the everyman. This statement can apply both to the Model T and to Windows. The Model T wasn't the fastest, nor the lightest, not the best handling, but it was cheap and did the job ok. Linux/BSD can be compared to a kitcar - cheap to build, but requiring an investment in labor to get on the road. MacOS? Maybe a Mercedes sports model? Fast, bulletproof, but limited in application and more expensive than the competition...
-b.
-b.
-b.
X-Pee is better than previous versions, but that doesn't make it good. Use it for occasional web surfing, media, and e-mail and editing with MS Orifice - you'll do fine. Try to run any "out of the ordinary" applications, esp. with non-root permissions, and see how much fun you have. Small Biz Server 2003 is even worse in this regard - permissions are fucked up out of the box, Shadow Copy up and dies periodically despite "hotfixes" from M$, etc. UNIX/Linux might be a bit of a bear to set up initially, but once they're running, they're rock-solid. Windows, on the other hand, seems to degrade as it's used and need to be re-installed. Thank God that MS is including a volume imaging utility as part of Vista - it's gonna need it!
-b.
Well, free software equivalents: .mdb files
Photoshop - the GIMP
iTunes - plenty of MP3 players out there. Who needs DRM lock-in?
Games - numerous
e-Commerce - web development is probably easier than under 'doze. Apache may be intimidating at first, but at least the config and setup isn't as hopelessly contrived as IIS!
Databases - MySQL engine, and OpenOffice Base for interfacing with Access
Medical office - I do consulting for a company that sells medical/dental x-ray systems. I've seen offices using something called FreeMed that runs on a BSD box and is accessed via web browsers on client boxes. Don't know how good it is, and unfortunately, the x-ray acquisition software so far is only written for 'doze (though it is free and open source - the real moneymaker is the sensor arrays).
-b.