I watched an amazing mini-documentary about Re-Captcha and really like the concept and the end goal. Basically Re-Captcha uses two words, one known word and one of the words is unknown and comes from book digitization efforts. The known word gets you into the site for whatever you are doing, the unknown one comes from a literary work that OCR couldn't figure out. After a large sampling of people have typed the unknown word the majority answer becomes the text entered in the digitization effort.
My contention is that people like myself who think it is a great cause would happily spend some free/bored time just entering the unknown words on a website without the whole captcha bit. If anyone here is a part or knows anyone on the team please bring this idea up.
It also eliminates any bias or other negative impact that can come from a single person in a particular role. Even with apps being open source, most users do not take the time to comb through an exhaustive list to notice/uncover any sort of shenanigans that could be easily added/removed to match their cause.
This guy had even mentioned how much bribery and money is at stake here.
Moving things into more of a truly chaotic and amorphous blob can only help in the long run, it takes that "many eyes" theory to the next level.
Wow, your pretty high and mighty for someone named "drinkypoo." I think I'll sit out a battle of wits with you.
If you can't see that *This* instance, this one right here, the one in the article, today, shows the possibility for problems then you are pretty mentally deficient. In fact, you don't know what REAL repercussions this will actually have despite what others have said or think will come of it. Just like when someone seemingly insignificant leaves a company and then all of a sudden the realization that they had or did some critical thing that no one can now do or access.
But, nevermind, there is no problem and this hasn't already happened in the past and will surely never happen again. Christ. Gimme a fuckin break shit eater.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Maybe not in this instance but too many major projects have single points of failure in their structure. It IS a problem, and ignoring it is not the solution.
I'm a big fan of both this project and the Open Source movement in general, but this does show off one major flaw in the system. Just like the proverbial bus that is so widely feared and runs down IT folks everywhere, many projects are small and while there may be many contributors there is one main person whom without the project would fail. When that person meets that proverbial bus, in an instant a widely used and relied upon piece of software can become dead as well. That's a major problem.
If things were truly born of chaos like we seem to think, these things would have no impact... but there is still a major underlying structure and hierarchy to this "chaos" and it is quite fragile.
The biggest barrier is ego, quickly followed by celebrity. It is hard for the creator of some neat widget to give up total control and truly step back and just share the success with those who hopped onto "their" project after the fact, but that is what needs to happen. There should never be less than two individuals at every level of a serious project, and both need to be fully competent... but that is not the case, even in very large projects.
* Oh, and give up on bashing the people who are concerned about what this means as to updates/life of the project... none of us were his good friend and the question is not callous or insensitive.
$400 is just too much, I do factor in the fact that you don't need to shell out money for antivirus/antimalware apps and I count the included iLife apps too, but to me that premium is worth about $100, $150-200 tops. So if the unibody macbooks had hit for $1099 I'd be typing on one now... they didn't and Apple seems content to ignore that market, so I will continue to ignore them for the same reason... but when both of us are in agreement I'm fine with the extra premium.
Look, I am not a "Mac user" but I really like their hardware and software and have high hopes for Snow Leopard... that being said it is total bullshit to state it is not simply overpriced by a fair margin.
Just recently I bought an Asus laptop with 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, Fastest Intel C2D at the time (2.53), HDMI, eSATA, *FIREWIRE*, etc. for $899. That was the same week that Apple unveiled the unibody Macbooks starting at $1299 with far less in every area and the neutered white Macbook at $999.
You *ARE* paying about $200-400 premium for most Apple computers, it is as simple as that. There is no need to justify it with specious comparisons, it is what it is. For me once that gets to be about a +$100 I'm all in, but at the current 33% increase it just isn't worth it. I just wish Apple fans could be OK with the fact that they are slightly overpaying for a premium product that has a fad/trend/luxury tax.
Haptic feedback is actually what you are contending, and it is coming and very possible. I have seen one implementation that easily has as much travel as the current Macbook/Apple keyboards.
Basically you can still have a regular keyboard but you would also have a Wacom like tablet that is a programmable screen for input as well, and on laptops there would be no keyboard or touchpad, just a second large screen field with proper haptic feedback.
It will be a major paradigm shift, and there will be many (possibly yourself) who will resist it but the flexibility and new interfaces it would open up would be revolutionary. We shall see.
No, you have missed my point. The second screen can be simply a touchpad for most instances where it still makes sense to be one. The beauty lies in the fact that it *can* be other things and not necessarily a *second* display but actually a primary display like with the Nintendo DS.
So for instance, you are a musician and like the Korg Kaos Pad. Rather than need a seperate unit, you fire up Korg's virtual Kaos Pad software and the touchscreen looks just like a Kaos Pad and functions as one. That's way more useful than trying to use a mouse pointer to interface with an on screen Kaos Pad.
It would be able to be utilized in tons of ways, imagine being able to set and drag icons or buttons on to it to *help* make a game better. One that comes to mind is an MMO like WoW. People shell out money for laptops with programable buttons on the side or costly overlays that still are just generic unlabeled buttons. You could have pictoral icons that link to spells or items quickly accessable by sight rather than remembering if potions are F8 or F7 or Hotbutton 4.
Those are just some uses but there are tons more. Touching (and covering) part of the actual display to interface is a fundamental flaw of the current touch interfaces.
I would be fine with either keeping the keyboard and just including a larger touchpad or making the entire right-hand side (normally numpad) into the touch interface kind of like the concept by Asus for the wireless keyboard with the iTouch-like touch portion. The big next step up would be true haptic feedback like the Blackberry Storm but individual regions and programably set as the ultimate evolution.
Everyone is close but just missing the boat in my opinion. Touch is the way to go but NOT directly on the display screen. A second screen (similar to the dual screened OLPC concept, or a Nintendo DS) that can be customized by each app or else function as a standard pointer/multi-touch input. It has to be essentially a full-on touchscreen display with full color and solid refresh rate.
This would spur all kinds of new interactions, games, and input.
I haven't seen it posted yet so far, but the couple times I've used it it was pretty nice. I don't personally own an EEE so I can't say much more than to look into it.
I am being 100% honest here. I too work at a univeristy, a bit larger but same deal. You are shooting yourself in the foot big time, but well intentioned.
There are far too many individual needs in this setting to do what you propose. Instead identify and choose a few specific spots where open source actually makes sense and offers a huge advantage (there are a couple) and make it happen. Start small and be smart about it. If it goes smoothly and shows real savings and improvements you may have earned the chance to do the same in another area.
Openoffice sucks. Period. Large-scale monitoring and maintenance can also suck. Sometimes Mac OSX is even the best choice. You have to take off the rose-colored glasses and think critically about everyone's real needs not just your pie-in-the-sky dream.
Umm, many schools employ this system with no problem. My wife is an elementary teacher in a very economically depressed area and not only do they not disappear, they even have a system where the older laptops from past years can be signed out like library books. Occasionally one gets broken or spilled on but they have already been written off at that point.
The nice thing is that they get moved to one classroom, and the teacher hands them out and collects them. No real room for error unless the teacher is useless.
Laptop Carts are the way to go. They are small, efficient, mobile, and more than enough for any task needed in school.
I'd say 1-2 carts with a classroom's worth of laptops, a wireless router/AP, and wireless printer (or regular printer plugged into a wireless router/ap that can act as a print server). Brand would be whoever can offer the best support contract, Dell, HP, etc. Stay away from OLPC or EEE's while I love Open Source they are too crippled and you can always install Linux (or live CDs) on a regular laptop if the desire is there.
Then if there would be the room/money available have one lab with desktops for any/all other needs. The other item would be USB thumbdrives for each student (they can be reasonably small like 1GB) and lock out the ability to save to anything but the thumbdrives. A projector may be useful for the cart too.
"Under US law, 47 U.S.C. Â 317, a radio station can play a specific song in exchange for money, but this must be disclosed on the air as being sponsored airtime, and that play of the song should not be counted as a "regular airplay.""
I never said they would have to play it secretively. Just as they have huge ads on the side of the site, or sponsored "stations" like for Scion, etc. They could in your rotation state: "And up next is an unreleased track from Kanye West's upcoming album hitting stores on such and such a date" but let people still thumb up/down it or even skip it as with any music.
It's better than listening to an ad for some product or unrelated B.S.
Thanks for trying to give me a lesson though, I have done promotion so yes, I have thought up a ton of solutions because this is not the first time Pandora has been grasping at straws trying to stay afloat. So can Pandora. The people behind it, not the service or idea are flawed.
No, you are missing the point. Ads and donation are not the only way to generate revenue from a project like this. Pandora needs creativity, not donations. They are not just providing you and me a service, they are getting new artists heard, they have the ability to place songs, they have tons of options available yet they fail to act on anything beyond a tired ass system of ads or donations.
Say, Kanye West has a new album coming out. They go to the record company and strike a deal to have a track from the new album pop up in any related stations for X amount of days leading up to the release for Y dollars. That is just one example of hundreds I could easily think of, I have no interest of giving Pandora any donations because it is just like an able-bodied person asking for a handout. They *CAN* generate the revenue, they just don't.
I have worked in the music industry and I can get everything I get from Pandora elsewhere with less hassle, I have stayed with them because they have a novel idea that I think could be a great bridge between the old and the new. They are slowly burning their own bridge.
I have been using Pandora for years and have found a few new artists by using it, and I know they have struggled to make a profit, but this is the end for me. Besides the ads they have also shortened the time you can just listen tremendously now stopping the music and popping up the "Are you still listening?" dialog every 5 minutes.
Pandora is a company/project that could be profitable in so many creative ways but the asshats behind it seem to only know intrusive ads in one way or another. It is a classic case of tunnel vision and a complete lack of creativity and effort.
I plan on emailing them my thoughts before just disappearing, and I'd urge anyone who uses it to do the same.
Umm, I'm not sure if you are trying to be real or just cute. I just moved into the home recently so I spent the time I have been there making it as efficient (appliances, lighting, habits, HVAC) as possible. That costs money. So I don't have the additional resources at the moment to do solar as well right now, but have plans to. It will have batteries but also stay connected to the grid to sell back excess power since I do not have huge draw demands.
The reason I plan on waiting as well is that with the economy and the change of political power and focus I believe there will be incentives and drops in price within a short amount of time after a major effort is announced.
I'm not doing it because of guilt or "green" popularity, I am doing it because I choose to and it is how I live. I am an avid outdoorsman and hiker/backpacker so I'm not just some yuppy with a trust fund or independently wealthy and trying to be trendy.
Exactly. I am still totally on the grid but I have done a lot to get my house ready for a switch as it becomes feasible. I'm a techie and I've given up little to get there.
Light bulbs to cfl or LED.
Living room TV sized right (32") rather than huge TV in too small of a room.
A single powerful desktop that is now also my server running 24x7 but designed smartly (C2D 7200, 2gb ram, 1TB single drive, 19" LCD, and NV9600, 85+ PSU) Easily runs all games, stores media, and sips power with a Gigabyte MB and energy saver. It idles at around 15 Watts.
2 laptops one for me and one for my wife.
Dish DVR on 24x7.
Even a electric oil heater to suppliment in one bedroom.
All of this and fairly normal living and my electric bill is $30-40 per month. That's all. That includes washer and dryer and electric stove, but gas heat for a couple in a full sized home in Western PA.
I might eek out 300kWh a month. I can easily make the switch to solar, I'm just waiting for the right time.
McCain: $5,000 is not enough for proper health coverage for most of the population. On top of this, this gives companies the chance to be rid of dealing with health coverage altogether. The reason healthcare is even at or around $10,000 per individual right now is because the group rates these big companies deal in keep them even that low. When you are all of a sudden an individual, especially someone with some health issues you can now be singled out easier and either have your rates raised or dropped totally. It is actually much harder now because of everyone being lumped in one group and it is bad now.
Obama: Keeping the onus on companies and offering tax breaks and incentives keeps the system working pretty much as-is with a few more getting coverage when they wouldn't have otherwise. Costs stay the same if not drop for many individuals and companies. It may also help keep companies like Wal-Mart from abusing the welfare system by not supplying healthcare and keeping wages low to skirt around it, this would actually free up a lot of funds which are *our* tax dollars.
My View: I'd love to pay 2-3% more in taxes to turn it into a universal government system as long as healthcare/insurance lobbyists are kept the fuck out of it. Which will never happen in this great country. The average individual is not equipped to take on healthcare individually and when sick or in need of care even those of us who are should be focused on recovery and health over filling forms and sitting on hold fighting faceless corporations.
Yes, it was certainly pre-DMCA... I still have the letter as a kind of geek badge of honor but I don't remember the exact reasoning or law they cited. I did run it past my families lawyer at the time and he said to take down my code and just call it a day. I was young and had no money so that was what I did.
Basically it was about circumventing their software and making public the fact that each:CueCat had a trackable ID that was associated to you (Radioshack had to take your name, address, and phone# to get one for free) and it logged what products you scanned and I guess they planned on either selling that data or using it for marketing.
I actually still have a pretty cool database app that catalogs CD's and interfaced with I think it was called freeDB for artist/track info. I was working on an ISBN version for my books but lost interest by then.
Geez I guess it has been that long. I was one of the first to figure out that it sent a coded mix of letters and numbers with the scanned barcode inside so that it could be hacked to function as a proper barcode scanner. I also was one of the first to get a certified cease and desist letter and a followup call by one of their attorneys.
I still have a bunch of both the serial and USB versions wrapped and new... however now they would actually have proper legal grounds to prosecute so I won't be redistributing my code online again:)
Never thought I'd see:CueCat come up again on the 'ole Internets.
I'm not saying you are wrong because I use Win/Mac/Lin every day of my life but nothing you stated is actually exclusive. iPhoto is nice but Picasa is just as good and free. NeoOffice == OpenOffice which again is free on Windows. Firefox, well everyone knows is free and available.
There are some upsides to OSX but honestly most of them are very minor and nowhere near as vast as they make them seem. In fact if you only stick to the bundled software you are much better off with a Mac, but once you need to go beyond that it really isn't much different.
Uninstalling programs fully, crashes, terminal, games, etc. They are issues you just won't see or hear about them in the I'm a Mac ads.
Slashdot Mirror
I watched an amazing mini-documentary about Re-Captcha and really like the concept and the end goal. Basically Re-Captcha uses two words, one known word and one of the words is unknown and comes from book digitization efforts. The known word gets you into the site for whatever you are doing, the unknown one comes from a literary work that OCR couldn't figure out. After a large sampling of people have typed the unknown word the majority answer becomes the text entered in the digitization effort.
My contention is that people like myself who think it is a great cause would happily spend some free/bored time just entering the unknown words on a website without the whole captcha bit. If anyone here is a part or knows anyone on the team please bring this idea up.
It also eliminates any bias or other negative impact that can come from a single person in a particular role. Even with apps being open source, most users do not take the time to comb through an exhaustive list to notice/uncover any sort of shenanigans that could be easily added/removed to match their cause.
This guy had even mentioned how much bribery and money is at stake here.
Moving things into more of a truly chaotic and amorphous blob can only help in the long run, it takes that "many eyes" theory to the next level.
Wow, your pretty high and mighty for someone named "drinkypoo." I think I'll sit out a battle of wits with you.
If you can't see that *This* instance, this one right here, the one in the article, today, shows the possibility for problems then you are pretty mentally deficient. In fact, you don't know what REAL repercussions this will actually have despite what others have said or think will come of it. Just like when someone seemingly insignificant leaves a company and then all of a sudden the realization that they had or did some critical thing that no one can now do or access.
But, nevermind, there is no problem and this hasn't already happened in the past and will surely never happen again. Christ. Gimme a fuckin break shit eater.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Maybe not in this instance but too many major projects have single points of failure in their structure. It IS a problem, and ignoring it is not the solution.
I'm a big fan of both this project and the Open Source movement in general, but this does show off one major flaw in the system. Just like the proverbial bus that is so widely feared and runs down IT folks everywhere, many projects are small and while there may be many contributors there is one main person whom without the project would fail. When that person meets that proverbial bus, in an instant a widely used and relied upon piece of software can become dead as well. That's a major problem.
If things were truly born of chaos like we seem to think, these things would have no impact... but there is still a major underlying structure and hierarchy to this "chaos" and it is quite fragile.
The biggest barrier is ego, quickly followed by celebrity. It is hard for the creator of some neat widget to give up total control and truly step back and just share the success with those who hopped onto "their" project after the fact, but that is what needs to happen. There should never be less than two individuals at every level of a serious project, and both need to be fully competent... but that is not the case, even in very large projects.
* Oh, and give up on bashing the people who are concerned about what this means as to updates/life of the project... none of us were his good friend and the question is not callous or insensitive.
$400 is just too much, I do factor in the fact that you don't need to shell out money for antivirus/antimalware apps and I count the included iLife apps too, but to me that premium is worth about $100, $150-200 tops. So if the unibody macbooks had hit for $1099 I'd be typing on one now... they didn't and Apple seems content to ignore that market, so I will continue to ignore them for the same reason... but when both of us are in agreement I'm fine with the extra premium.
Look, I am not a "Mac user" but I really like their hardware and software and have high hopes for Snow Leopard... that being said it is total bullshit to state it is not simply overpriced by a fair margin.
Just recently I bought an Asus laptop with 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, Fastest Intel C2D at the time (2.53), HDMI, eSATA, *FIREWIRE*, etc. for $899. That was the same week that Apple unveiled the unibody Macbooks starting at $1299 with far less in every area and the neutered white Macbook at $999.
You *ARE* paying about $200-400 premium for most Apple computers, it is as simple as that. There is no need to justify it with specious comparisons, it is what it is. For me once that gets to be about a +$100 I'm all in, but at the current 33% increase it just isn't worth it. I just wish Apple fans could be OK with the fact that they are slightly overpaying for a premium product that has a fad/trend/luxury tax.
Haptic feedback is actually what you are contending, and it is coming and very possible. I have seen one implementation that easily has as much travel as the current Macbook/Apple keyboards.
Basically you can still have a regular keyboard but you would also have a Wacom like tablet that is a programmable screen for input as well, and on laptops there would be no keyboard or touchpad, just a second large screen field with proper haptic feedback.
It will be a major paradigm shift, and there will be many (possibly yourself) who will resist it but the flexibility and new interfaces it would open up would be revolutionary. We shall see.
No, you have missed my point. The second screen can be simply a touchpad for most instances where it still makes sense to be one. The beauty lies in the fact that it *can* be other things and not necessarily a *second* display but actually a primary display like with the Nintendo DS.
So for instance, you are a musician and like the Korg Kaos Pad. Rather than need a seperate unit, you fire up Korg's virtual Kaos Pad software and the touchscreen looks just like a Kaos Pad and functions as one. That's way more useful than trying to use a mouse pointer to interface with an on screen Kaos Pad.
It would be able to be utilized in tons of ways, imagine being able to set and drag icons or buttons on to it to *help* make a game better. One that comes to mind is an MMO like WoW. People shell out money for laptops with programable buttons on the side or costly overlays that still are just generic unlabeled buttons. You could have pictoral icons that link to spells or items quickly accessable by sight rather than remembering if potions are F8 or F7 or Hotbutton 4.
Those are just some uses but there are tons more. Touching (and covering) part of the actual display to interface is a fundamental flaw of the current touch interfaces.
I would be fine with either keeping the keyboard and just including a larger touchpad or making the entire right-hand side (normally numpad) into the touch interface kind of like the concept by Asus for the wireless keyboard with the iTouch-like touch portion. The big next step up would be true haptic feedback like the Blackberry Storm but individual regions and programably set as the ultimate evolution.
Everyone is close but just missing the boat in my opinion. Touch is the way to go but NOT directly on the display screen. A second screen (similar to the dual screened OLPC concept, or a Nintendo DS) that can be customized by each app or else function as a standard pointer/multi-touch input. It has to be essentially a full-on touchscreen display with full color and solid refresh rate.
This would spur all kinds of new interactions, games, and input.
I haven't seen it posted yet so far, but the couple times I've used it it was pretty nice. I don't personally own an EEE so I can't say much more than to look into it.
I am being 100% honest here. I too work at a univeristy, a bit larger but same deal. You are shooting yourself in the foot big time, but well intentioned.
There are far too many individual needs in this setting to do what you propose. Instead identify and choose a few specific spots where open source actually makes sense and offers a huge advantage (there are a couple) and make it happen. Start small and be smart about it. If it goes smoothly and shows real savings and improvements you may have earned the chance to do the same in another area.
Openoffice sucks. Period. Large-scale monitoring and maintenance can also suck. Sometimes Mac OSX is even the best choice. You have to take off the rose-colored glasses and think critically about everyone's real needs not just your pie-in-the-sky dream.
Umm, many schools employ this system with no problem. My wife is an elementary teacher in a very economically depressed area and not only do they not disappear, they even have a system where the older laptops from past years can be signed out like library books. Occasionally one gets broken or spilled on but they have already been written off at that point.
The nice thing is that they get moved to one classroom, and the teacher hands them out and collects them. No real room for error unless the teacher is useless.
Laptop Carts are the way to go. They are small, efficient, mobile, and more than enough for any task needed in school.
I'd say 1-2 carts with a classroom's worth of laptops, a wireless router/AP, and wireless printer (or regular printer plugged into a wireless router/ap that can act as a print server). Brand would be whoever can offer the best support contract, Dell, HP, etc. Stay away from OLPC or EEE's while I love Open Source they are too crippled and you can always install Linux (or live CDs) on a regular laptop if the desire is there.
Then if there would be the room/money available have one lab with desktops for any/all other needs. The other item would be USB thumbdrives for each student (they can be reasonably small like 1GB) and lock out the ability to save to anything but the thumbdrives. A projector may be useful for the cart too.
No, that is not payola.
"Under US law, 47 U.S.C. Â 317, a radio station can play a specific song in exchange for money, but this must be disclosed on the air as being sponsored airtime, and that play of the song should not be counted as a "regular airplay.""
I never said they would have to play it secretively. Just as they have huge ads on the side of the site, or sponsored "stations" like for Scion, etc. They could in your rotation state: "And up next is an unreleased track from Kanye West's upcoming album hitting stores on such and such a date" but let people still thumb up/down it or even skip it as with any music.
It's better than listening to an ad for some product or unrelated B.S.
Thanks for trying to give me a lesson though, I have done promotion so yes, I have thought up a ton of solutions because this is not the first time Pandora has been grasping at straws trying to stay afloat. So can Pandora. The people behind it, not the service or idea are flawed.
No, you are missing the point. Ads and donation are not the only way to generate revenue from a project like this. Pandora needs creativity, not donations. They are not just providing you and me a service, they are getting new artists heard, they have the ability to place songs, they have tons of options available yet they fail to act on anything beyond a tired ass system of ads or donations.
Say, Kanye West has a new album coming out. They go to the record company and strike a deal to have a track from the new album pop up in any related stations for X amount of days leading up to the release for Y dollars. That is just one example of hundreds I could easily think of, I have no interest of giving Pandora any donations because it is just like an able-bodied person asking for a handout. They *CAN* generate the revenue, they just don't.
I have worked in the music industry and I can get everything I get from Pandora elsewhere with less hassle, I have stayed with them because they have a novel idea that I think could be a great bridge between the old and the new. They are slowly burning their own bridge.
I have been using Pandora for years and have found a few new artists by using it, and I know they have struggled to make a profit, but this is the end for me. Besides the ads they have also shortened the time you can just listen tremendously now stopping the music and popping up the "Are you still listening?" dialog every 5 minutes.
Pandora is a company/project that could be profitable in so many creative ways but the asshats behind it seem to only know intrusive ads in one way or another. It is a classic case of tunnel vision and a complete lack of creativity and effort.
I plan on emailing them my thoughts before just disappearing, and I'd urge anyone who uses it to do the same.
Umm, I'm not sure if you are trying to be real or just cute. I just moved into the home recently so I spent the time I have been there making it as efficient (appliances, lighting, habits, HVAC) as possible. That costs money. So I don't have the additional resources at the moment to do solar as well right now, but have plans to. It will have batteries but also stay connected to the grid to sell back excess power since I do not have huge draw demands.
The reason I plan on waiting as well is that with the economy and the change of political power and focus I believe there will be incentives and drops in price within a short amount of time after a major effort is announced.
I'm not doing it because of guilt or "green" popularity, I am doing it because I choose to and it is how I live. I am an avid outdoorsman and hiker/backpacker so I'm not just some yuppy with a trust fund or independently wealthy and trying to be trendy.
Exactly. I am still totally on the grid but I have done a lot to get my house ready for a switch as it becomes feasible. I'm a techie and I've given up little to get there.
Light bulbs to cfl or LED.
Living room TV sized right (32") rather than huge TV in too small of a room.
A single powerful desktop that is now also my server running 24x7 but designed smartly (C2D 7200, 2gb ram, 1TB single drive, 19" LCD, and NV9600, 85+ PSU) Easily runs all games, stores media, and sips power with a Gigabyte MB and energy saver. It idles at around 15 Watts.
2 laptops one for me and one for my wife.
Dish DVR on 24x7.
Even a electric oil heater to suppliment in one bedroom.
All of this and fairly normal living and my electric bill is $30-40 per month. That's all. That includes washer and dryer and electric stove, but gas heat for a couple in a full sized home in Western PA.
I might eek out 300kWh a month. I can easily make the switch to solar, I'm just waiting for the right time.
OK so for me it boils down like this:
McCain: $5,000 is not enough for proper health coverage for most of the population. On top of this, this gives companies the chance to be rid of dealing with health coverage altogether. The reason healthcare is even at or around $10,000 per individual right now is because the group rates these big companies deal in keep them even that low. When you are all of a sudden an individual, especially someone with some health issues you can now be singled out easier and either have your rates raised or dropped totally. It is actually much harder now because of everyone being lumped in one group and it is bad now.
Obama: Keeping the onus on companies and offering tax breaks and incentives keeps the system working pretty much as-is with a few more getting coverage when they wouldn't have otherwise. Costs stay the same if not drop for many individuals and companies. It may also help keep companies like Wal-Mart from abusing the welfare system by not supplying healthcare and keeping wages low to skirt around it, this would actually free up a lot of funds which are *our* tax dollars.
My View: I'd love to pay 2-3% more in taxes to turn it into a universal government system as long as healthcare/insurance lobbyists are kept the fuck out of it. Which will never happen in this great country. The average individual is not equipped to take on healthcare individually and when sick or in need of care even those of us who are should be focused on recovery and health over filling forms and sitting on hold fighting faceless corporations.
Heh, I actually found an article that explains it from 2000 and I even got a mention in it :)
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/89
I just found it now googling for what the legal basis was... I had never read it before... so I gotta thank you for making me curious!
Yes, it was certainly pre-DMCA... I still have the letter as a kind of geek badge of honor but I don't remember the exact reasoning or law they cited. I did run it past my families lawyer at the time and he said to take down my code and just call it a day. I was young and had no money so that was what I did.
Basically it was about circumventing their software and making public the fact that each :CueCat had a trackable ID that was associated to you (Radioshack had to take your name, address, and phone# to get one for free) and it logged what products you scanned and I guess they planned on either selling that data or using it for marketing.
I actually still have a pretty cool database app that catalogs CD's and interfaced with I think it was called freeDB for artist/track info. I was working on an ISBN version for my books but lost interest by then.
Geez I guess it has been that long. I was one of the first to figure out that it sent a coded mix of letters and numbers with the scanned barcode inside so that it could be hacked to function as a proper barcode scanner. I also was one of the first to get a certified cease and desist letter and a followup call by one of their attorneys.
I still have a bunch of both the serial and USB versions wrapped and new... however now they would actually have proper legal grounds to prosecute so I won't be redistributing my code online again :)
Never thought I'd see :CueCat come up again on the 'ole Internets.
I'm not saying you are wrong because I use Win/Mac/Lin every day of my life but nothing you stated is actually exclusive. iPhoto is nice but Picasa is just as good and free. NeoOffice == OpenOffice which again is free on Windows. Firefox, well everyone knows is free and available.
There are some upsides to OSX but honestly most of them are very minor and nowhere near as vast as they make them seem. In fact if you only stick to the bundled software you are much better off with a Mac, but once you need to go beyond that it really isn't much different.
Uninstalling programs fully, crashes, terminal, games, etc. They are issues you just won't see or hear about them in the I'm a Mac ads.