Thanks for the link to running Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8 under wine. The last I checked (a few months ago), Dreamwaver 2004 was the highest that worked.
I'll throw that on my spare box and see how it goes.
On principle I'm trying to switch to entirely open source software (OSX is not, I know) and away from Microsoft products.
So far I've replaced the following: Browser: Firefox Email: Thunderbird FTP: Filezilla IM: GAIM Media: VLC Media Player Suite: Open Office
Among a host of other little utilities, etc.
So far I haven't found a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver or Photoshop. If it weren't for those 2 I could, and would, switch tomorrow. If they could be purchased for use on Linux I'd buy them and switch.
So, yes, for now I'm staying on XP out of necessity, and will continue to do so regardless of when Vista ships. When I can switch I will, but I will not be switching to Vista.
There is way too much bloat and way too little pro-consumer changes in Vista.
I for one am jumping ship. I haven't decided whether to switch to Linux or OSX (I'm a professional web developer, and the GIMP and VIM just don't cut it), but I will NOT be installing Vista!
That is a very compelling movie about the use of depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan and the horrific affects it's having there, and on hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and their families.
The pictures of deformed babies is almost unbearable, and the evidence overwhelming. Just how little of this is getting reported in the normal news is probably most shocking.
Most lightbulbs put out a very narrow spectrum band of light. Full spectrum light is light that includes many more of the different wave-lengths, approaching that of the sun at noon-day.
It is also related to the color temperature, how close the temperature (in kelvin, not farenheit! This has to do with color not temperature) is to noon-day sun. See this chart.
- are 3x-10x the cost of an ordinary light bulb At less than $2 each, the ROI is VERY fast on a CF bulb. Unless you're very short sighted it doesn't make financial sense to use a normal bulb.
- are a bit dimmer than their stated wattage equivalent standard bulbs With off-the-shelf CF bulbs I agree. With the ones linked above, using my preferred full-spectrum 5100K bulb, my experience has been just the opposite. I love the way they brighten up my home.
- take a bit of time to warm up I haven't noticed this a bit. Instant on. They may get brighter after 30 seconds, but I've never noticed it, so if these ones do you'd need scientific instrumentation to pick it up.
- don't have quite the same color temperature as standard bulbs With the full spectrum CF's linked above, that is a good thing! The few normal bulbs I have left put off a nasty yellow light compared to the full spectrum CF's. Gloomy and depressing. I just placed a $100 order before 1000Bulbs.com gets slashdotted so I can replace the rest of my normal, yuck-yellow bulbs.
- sometimes don't fit under (e.g.) ceiling fan light domes, especially the 100W equivalent models OK, ok, size does matter. But they come in many different sizes and with a little planning I've had 100% success. I even rewired my kitchen chandelier to use these CF bulbs instead of those stupid tiny expensive candle ones. Couldn't be happier.
As you can see I'm sold on good full-spectrum CF bulbs. I have no affiliation with 1000Bulbs.com, they just happened to be what I was looking for and have good prices, products, and service.
They are cheap in price but high in quality. I initially ordered a dozen and haven't had a single problem with a single bulb. I prefer the full spectrum CF bulbs.
They have them for less than $2. It doesn't make financial sense to use anything else.
I thought they were looking for people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars for the good of exploration and humanity.
We could learn a whole lot by sending one person to mars, on a one-way trip, with supplies for 90 days or whatever.
The person would never be coming back, and would know that in advance, but I think you'd get people volunteering, even those terminally ill but still functional enough to survive.
It absolutely infuriates me that our government places a 100% import tariff on clean, green ethanol from a non-terrorist country, but places a ZERO, zilch, nada, 0% tariff on imported oil (gas is taxed at the pump, after refining, but the imported oil has no tariff).
I think its no coincidence that we have a Texas oil-man for a president and the highest gas and oil prices in history.
Brazil is absolutely HUGE, larger than the continental 48 United States.
They have plenty of room to grow more sugar cane, and they are adding refineries at a very rapid pace.
If the U.S. market were there (ie. level playing field with equal tariffs or no tariffs), you would see production ramp up very quickly.
The cool thing about sugar cane to ethanol is that it is very, very efficient. The distance from the cane fields to the refinery is usually less than 25 miles. Start to finish it's a very efficient, clean process.
I hope it succeeds and grows rapidly, despite our foolish, oil-loving government.
Most normal-sized electric vehicles need a LOT of electricity to do their thing. The new Honda Fuel-Cell Prototype used 100KW of juice.
The normal household generator, using about 1 gallon per hour, puts out 3.5KW - 6.5KW. Not nearly enough. If you were running 4 of them, you still wouldn't have anywhere near enough electricity, and you'd be using 4 GPH, which at freeway speeds would be only 15 MPG.
I like the idea of diesel-electric vehicles, too. And there have been big advancements in the generators and motors, but I don't think we're there yet...
Brazil, and it won't be corn, it will be sugar cane. Sugar cane is around 3 times more energy dense than corn for ethanol, and is the best source of ethanol known on the planet.
Brazil already has a LOT of ethanol they'd love to sell us, much cheaper than the gas we're currently buying. The problem is the U.S. government places a HUGE import tariff on it (on the order of 100%, doubling the cost), making it too expensive to be viable.
For the record, the tariff on oil coming to the U.S. is zero, zilch, nada, 0%.
A good documentary about this is Addicted to Oil, by Thomas L. Friedman.
So for some reason the government wants to keep our money funding terrorism in the middle east and the slow destruction of our planet rather than funding Brazil and a clean, efficient fuel.
Open markets should take care of that. People go where the service is best and where they are happiest. Voting with your money is one of the strongest votes you can cast.
If Charter didn't give me good enough service, I'd switch to DSL or some other solution. There are some who only have the choice of one broadband provider, but that's the way it is with any service offered.
For the tiny amount of home users who have a legitimate reason to be running an email server (which is often against their TOS anyway), I think it's still a viable solution whose benefits and advantages outweight any disadvantages by a long shot.
But this conversation is irrelevant anyway, since this has been talked about before and never implemented. The ISP's have little reason to, unfortunately.
But I'm webmaster for dozens of sites, all with various public addresses. Just because spam isn't a problem for you, doesn't mean it isn't a problem for most people.
A good indication of whether or not spam is still an issue (in general) is how often it's discussed, which is regularly on Slashdot, and frequently in many various news mediums and even daily conversation. Google returns 573,000,000 results for "spam", and the Ad Words column is full of ads for anti-spam solutions. Apparently the problem hasn't just gone away.
Filters are a bandaid, not a cure. I have 2 different levels of filtering, but the stronger the filtering, the more false positives you have, and in a business setting even a single missed email can be expensive and intolerable.
Just because bandaids have become good enough for some, doesn't mean we should stop searching for a cure.
The internet is very analogous to the highway system in most countries. Commercial drivers create increased risk to all drivers on the road, and thus require training and registration for the safety and benefit of everyone involved, including each other.
The commercial drivers could (and may) complain that it's unfair that they have to go through the hassle of getting licensed and registered, after all, each thinks he is a perfect driver and poses no risk whatsoever. But I think most people would agree regulation of commercial drivers is a good thing and everyone benefits.
Likewise, those (myself included) wanting to do more than normal with the information super highway would likely complain if we had to take an extra step before being able to do what we want on the internet, such as running a web server or email server. But again, I think the benefits outweight the inconvenience 100 times over. I could call my ISP and be added to their open ports list in 5 minutes (ONCE), but I easily spend 10 minutes A DAY on spam, and often more.
Mind you, this is only on dial up and broadband accounts. Most T1 lines, etc, used for business wouldn't need this requirement as they already have administrators that keep things secure and zombies to a minimum, and RBL's already deal with most of the rest.
Your mom probably doesn't need to run an email server. Neither does 99% of other ISP users. The far less than 1% (of which I'm included) that need specific ports opened up can do so by working with the ISP.
That would eliminate 99% of zombie spam right off the bat, without significantly affecting anyone. It may take you 5 minutes on the phone with tech support, but it closes a HUGE whole that is actively exploited by the spammers.
Bye-bye spam. It also takes a way a LOT of the motivation for creating zombie machines, so bye-bye much of the spyware and viruses (not all, but probably a noticeable amount).
So we aren't sacrificing freedom for security. We're tolerating a 5 minute phone call for 1% of users so that everyone can enjoy the internet far, far more.
Well worth it, if you ask me. Absolutely nothing is lost. A whole lot is gained.
If the ISP's implemented a system whereby port 25 was closed and the average John Q. Public had to send mail through it's servers, or something else like GMail, then the vast majority of zombie spam would disappear overnight.
Then each customer could be limited to __ number of emails each day (perhaps 20). Beyond that they would have to log in and manually re-enable their account for another 20. People regularly exceeding their amount could apply for a higher threshhold.
A little inconvenient? Yes. More inconvenient than receiving 400 spams a day? I think not.
To say it isn't is to ignore the highest lifespan average of humanity, EVER.
Anyone who takes the bible at anywhere near face value would have to disagree with that statement. Methuselah lived to be 969, back when the planet had little to no pollution and the people were very in tune with their surroundings. The manna helped, too, I'm sure.
We already have ~way~ too many landmines, and way too many innocents being killed or disabled by them.
IF you're going to design a high-tech landmine, for heavens sakes, design in a renewable sunset clause so that if the landmine doesn't hear from you in 30 days it disables itself. If you need to reenable it, fine, but disabled should be the default.
I was using a Kill-A-Watt to test it, so the 90W took into account the inefficiency of the brick.
That's another thing, the brick on my wifes laptop is the a little bigger than a deck of card, and the brick on mine is literally the size and weight of a brick. Grrrr... I have laptop envy...:}
Nothing should be attached to any bill. Every issue should have to stand on it's own merits.
And there should be a law that any time a new bill is passed, 2 old bills / laws have to be removed. That way government is ever-shrinking instead of ever-growing.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link to running Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8 under wine. The last I checked (a few months ago), Dreamwaver 2004 was the highest that worked.
I'll throw that on my spare box and see how it goes.
On principle I'm trying to switch to entirely open source software (OSX is not, I know) and away from Microsoft products.
So far I've replaced the following:
Browser: Firefox
Email: Thunderbird
FTP: Filezilla
IM: GAIM
Media: VLC Media Player
Suite: Open Office
Among a host of other little utilities, etc.
So far I haven't found a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver or Photoshop. If it weren't for those 2 I could, and would, switch tomorrow. If they could be purchased for use on Linux I'd buy them and switch.
So, yes, for now I'm staying on XP out of necessity, and will continue to do so regardless of when Vista ships. When I can switch I will, but I will not be switching to Vista.
There is way too much bloat and way too little pro-consumer changes in Vista.
I for one am jumping ship. I haven't decided whether to switch to Linux or OSX (I'm a professional web developer, and the GIMP and VIM just don't cut it), but I will NOT be installing Vista!
Yes, it would be nice to know the shipping up front.
However, their website is clear that shipping is calculated afterwards based on where it's going. Next time, read.
I think $9.50 is reasonable for shipping + handling + packaging costs, anyway.
Still, I hope you enjoy the bulbs.
It's clearly hard to see with your head so far in the sand, but how do you eat and breathe?
Watch the movie or search the internet, then make a decision. You're liable to throw something out if you keep up those knee-jerk reactions.
Bush might not eat babies, but he's sure been responsible for a lot of deformed ones.
That is a very compelling movie about the use of depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan and the horrific affects it's having there, and on hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and their families.
The pictures of deformed babies is almost unbearable, and the evidence overwhelming. Just how little of this is getting reported in the normal news is probably most shocking.
Most lightbulbs put out a very narrow spectrum band of light. Full spectrum light is light that includes many more of the different wave-lengths, approaching that of the sun at noon-day.
It is also related to the color temperature, how close the temperature (in kelvin, not farenheit! This has to do with color not temperature) is to noon-day sun. See this chart.
See also this description.
This is the bulb I've been using, and I haven't noticed it. I'd be interested in what the light meter has to say about that bulb, however.
I've looked for several years for a CF I liked and trusted enough (not to die on me) until I found these. And the price is right, too.
I have been very pleased with these CF bulbs.
- are 3x-10x the cost of an ordinary light bulb
At less than $2 each, the ROI is VERY fast on a CF bulb. Unless you're very short sighted it doesn't make financial sense to use a normal bulb.
- are a bit dimmer than their stated wattage equivalent standard bulbs
With off-the-shelf CF bulbs I agree. With the ones linked above, using my preferred full-spectrum 5100K bulb, my experience has been just the opposite. I love the way they brighten up my home.
- take a bit of time to warm up
I haven't noticed this a bit. Instant on. They may get brighter after 30 seconds, but I've never noticed it, so if these ones do you'd need scientific instrumentation to pick it up.
- don't have quite the same color temperature as standard bulbs
With the full spectrum CF's linked above, that is a good thing! The few normal bulbs I have left put off a nasty yellow light compared to the full spectrum CF's. Gloomy and depressing. I just placed a $100 order before 1000Bulbs.com gets slashdotted so I can replace the rest of my normal, yuck-yellow bulbs.
- sometimes don't fit under (e.g.) ceiling fan light domes, especially the 100W equivalent models
OK, ok, size does matter. But they come in many different sizes and with a little planning I've had 100% success. I even rewired my kitchen chandelier to use these CF bulbs instead of those stupid tiny expensive candle ones. Couldn't be happier.
As you can see I'm sold on good full-spectrum CF bulbs. I have no affiliation with 1000Bulbs.com, they just happened to be what I was looking for and have good prices, products, and service.
I can highly recommend 1000Bulbs.com for compact flourescent bulbs.
They are cheap in price but high in quality. I initially ordered a dozen and haven't had a single problem with a single bulb. I prefer the full spectrum CF bulbs.
They have them for less than $2. It doesn't make financial sense to use anything else.
I thought they were looking for people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars for the good of exploration and humanity.
We could learn a whole lot by sending one person to mars, on a one-way trip, with supplies for 90 days or whatever.
The person would never be coming back, and would know that in advance, but I think you'd get people volunteering, even those terminally ill but still functional enough to survive.
P.S. I'm not volunteering.
Slashdot isn't anti Web 2.0, it's dissing your code... calling it lame garbage.
But don't take it personally.
It absolutely infuriates me that our government places a 100% import tariff on clean, green ethanol from a non-terrorist country, but places a ZERO, zilch, nada, 0% tariff on imported oil (gas is taxed at the pump, after refining, but the imported oil has no tariff).
I think its no coincidence that we have a Texas oil-man for a president and the highest gas and oil prices in history.
Brazil is absolutely HUGE, larger than the continental 48 United States.
They have plenty of room to grow more sugar cane, and they are adding refineries at a very rapid pace.
If the U.S. market were there (ie. level playing field with equal tariffs or no tariffs), you would see production ramp up very quickly.
The cool thing about sugar cane to ethanol is that it is very, very efficient. The distance from the cane fields to the refinery is usually less than 25 miles. Start to finish it's a very efficient, clean process.
I hope it succeeds and grows rapidly, despite our foolish, oil-loving government.
Here's the problem with that:
Most normal-sized electric vehicles need a LOT of electricity to do their thing. The new Honda Fuel-Cell Prototype used 100KW of juice.
The normal household generator, using about 1 gallon per hour, puts out 3.5KW - 6.5KW. Not nearly enough. If you were running 4 of them, you still wouldn't have anywhere near enough electricity, and you'd be using 4 GPH, which at freeway speeds would be only 15 MPG.
I like the idea of diesel-electric vehicles, too. And there have been big advancements in the generators and motors, but I don't think we're there yet...
Brazil, and it won't be corn, it will be sugar cane. Sugar cane is around 3 times more energy dense than corn for ethanol, and is the best source of ethanol known on the planet.
Brazil already has a LOT of ethanol they'd love to sell us, much cheaper than the gas we're currently buying. The problem is the U.S. government places a HUGE import tariff on it (on the order of 100%, doubling the cost), making it too expensive to be viable.
For the record, the tariff on oil coming to the U.S. is zero, zilch, nada, 0%.
A good documentary about this is Addicted to Oil, by Thomas L. Friedman.
So for some reason the government wants to keep our money funding terrorism in the middle east and the slow destruction of our planet rather than funding Brazil and a clean, efficient fuel.
Maybe they're afraid of soccer...
Open markets should take care of that. People go where the service is best and where they are happiest. Voting with your money is one of the strongest votes you can cast.
If Charter didn't give me good enough service, I'd switch to DSL or some other solution. There are some who only have the choice of one broadband provider, but that's the way it is with any service offered.
For the tiny amount of home users who have a legitimate reason to be running an email server (which is often against their TOS anyway), I think it's still a viable solution whose benefits and advantages outweight any disadvantages by a long shot.
But this conversation is irrelevant anyway, since this has been talked about before and never implemented. The ISP's have little reason to, unfortunately.
How nice for you.
But I'm webmaster for dozens of sites, all with various public addresses. Just because spam isn't a problem for you, doesn't mean it isn't a problem for most people.
A good indication of whether or not spam is still an issue (in general) is how often it's discussed, which is regularly on Slashdot, and frequently in many various news mediums and even daily conversation. Google returns 573,000,000 results for "spam", and the Ad Words column is full of ads for anti-spam solutions. Apparently the problem hasn't just gone away.
Filters are a bandaid, not a cure. I have 2 different levels of filtering, but the stronger the filtering, the more false positives you have, and in a business setting even a single missed email can be expensive and intolerable.
Just because bandaids have become good enough for some, doesn't mean we should stop searching for a cure.
The internet is very analogous to the highway system in most countries. Commercial drivers create increased risk to all drivers on the road, and thus require training and registration for the safety and benefit of everyone involved, including each other.
The commercial drivers could (and may) complain that it's unfair that they have to go through the hassle of getting licensed and registered, after all, each thinks he is a perfect driver and poses no risk whatsoever. But I think most people would agree regulation of commercial drivers is a good thing and everyone benefits.
Likewise, those (myself included) wanting to do more than normal with the information super highway would likely complain if we had to take an extra step before being able to do what we want on the internet, such as running a web server or email server. But again, I think the benefits outweight the inconvenience 100 times over. I could call my ISP and be added to their open ports list in 5 minutes (ONCE), but I easily spend 10 minutes A DAY on spam, and often more.
Mind you, this is only on dial up and broadband accounts. Most T1 lines, etc, used for business wouldn't need this requirement as they already have administrators that keep things secure and zombies to a minimum, and RBL's already deal with most of the rest.
Who says it has to be one or the other?
Your mom probably doesn't need to run an email server. Neither does 99% of other ISP users. The far less than 1% (of which I'm included) that need specific ports opened up can do so by working with the ISP.
That would eliminate 99% of zombie spam right off the bat, without significantly affecting anyone. It may take you 5 minutes on the phone with tech support, but it closes a HUGE whole that is actively exploited by the spammers.
Bye-bye spam. It also takes a way a LOT of the motivation for creating zombie machines, so bye-bye much of the spyware and viruses (not all, but probably a noticeable amount).
So we aren't sacrificing freedom for security. We're tolerating a 5 minute phone call for 1% of users so that everyone can enjoy the internet far, far more.
Well worth it, if you ask me. Absolutely nothing is lost. A whole lot is gained.
If the ISP's implemented a system whereby port 25 was closed and the average John Q. Public had to send mail through it's servers, or something else like GMail, then the vast majority of zombie spam would disappear overnight.
Then each customer could be limited to __ number of emails each day (perhaps 20). Beyond that they would have to log in and manually re-enable their account for another 20. People regularly exceeding their amount could apply for a higher threshhold.
A little inconvenient? Yes. More inconvenient than receiving 400 spams a day? I think not.
To say it isn't is to ignore the highest lifespan average of humanity, EVER.
Anyone who takes the bible at anywhere near face value would have to disagree with that statement. Methuselah lived to be 969, back when the planet had little to no pollution and the people were very in tune with their surroundings. The manna helped, too, I'm sure.
We already have ~way~ too many landmines, and way too many innocents being killed or disabled by them.
IF you're going to design a high-tech landmine, for heavens sakes, design in a renewable sunset clause so that if the landmine doesn't hear from you in 30 days it disables itself. If you need to reenable it, fine, but disabled should be the default.
I was using a Kill-A-Watt to test it, so the 90W took into account the inefficiency of the brick.
:}
That's another thing, the brick on my wifes laptop is the a little bigger than a deck of card, and the brick on mine is literally the size and weight of a brick. Grrrr... I have laptop envy...
Nothing should be attached to any bill. Every issue should have to stand on it's own merits.
And there should be a law that any time a new bill is passed, 2 old bills / laws have to be removed. That way government is ever-shrinking instead of ever-growing.
Washington sucks big time...