Government requires too darn much record-keeping these days. If the pioneers were required to retain as much paper as we do for taxes and the like, the US would still be stuck on the east side of the Mississippi River. Can't we just cut through the regulation burden and get rid of all that crap in our lives? If I want to escape from a natural or man-made disaster with the things that are necessary/important to me, I sure as heck hope I'd be grabbing kids, pets, food/clothes/gun (depending if it's an apocalypse), and a few treasured keepsakes rather than tax returns, licenses, and paperwork. Anyone else yearning for a more libertarian society or is it just me?
That said, the article did have make some good points. A "bug out" bag is a wise idea (as is a bomb shelter - y'all have one of them too, right?). Thank goodness for technology, so that all the important "crap" can be reduced to a USB stick. I deal with information so much better if I don't have to mess with the physicality of the (paper) records. (Yes, my natural filing system is heaps and stacks. Thank God for my wife or I wouldn't be able to find my desk.) I think the advice about medical records was the most useful. Now that's something I'd want if I had to pick up and move fast.
The technology trades, blogs and industry are buzzing about a monumental policy shift in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Officials in the state have proposed a new policy that mandates that every state technology system use only applications designed around OpenDocument file formats (search).
Such a policy might seem like something that should concern only a small group of technology professionals, but in fact the implications are staggering and far-reaching. The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations.
Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
Actually, just throw out the 16th and 17th Amendments - and every law that's passed since then, if you really feel like it. Those two alone are almost completely responsely for the vast increase in the size of government and usurpation of our rights by it in the last century. With Congress unable to arbitrarily filch from our pockets, and states having a voice in the federal government again, checks and balances are restored.
A number of presidents have vetoed relief/aid bills in the past. I used to have a number of them collected in my quotations list, but I lost that when I reformatted my machine and the backup failed. I believe one was Teddy Roosevelt, concerning a draught in Texas - but that's purely from memory so I may be wrong. Personally I like Col. David Crockett's "Not Yours To Give" speech on the floor of the House.
Which is why the voting masses need to work up the gumption to vote third-party. Say NO to the continued reign of the Duopoly - one is just as bad as the other, you know. We need to work toward introducing Condorcet Voting so that everyone can vote honestly instead of strategically, but even in the meantime a surge of honest voting would help. Imagine what the reaction would be if 3rd parties consistently (not just in one year) ran even 10% in most races (not just one visible race) across the country? The Duopoly might sit up and take notice.
I once tried cleaning up a site with lots of tables and inline formatting, converting it to CSS. Stripping the formatting down saved roughly 15-20% on that site the more pages were visited using the cached stylesheets. If you only visited the front page, the bandwidth usage was actually a bit higher. It all depends how much inline formatting you have, but I thought 15% was significant enough to make the effort for, especially if traffic (hence bandwidth expense) is high.
I'm actually glad I learned about the GO menu. Often I accidentally kill a tab I wanted to keep the history of. A global history that's easily accessible can occasionally be handy. Sometimes you want to look at it chronologically by when accessed, sometimes you want to read it organized by the sites accessed, sometimes maybe a combination. Options are good.
How many people out there use JOnAS as an alternative to JBoss? I've heard that JBoss now uses Tomcat as a base for the JSP/servlet stuff, just like JOnAS, so it's pretty much an apples-to-apples comparison now.
How many people are using either of these as compared to more commercialized offerings such as Websphere, WebLogic, JRun, etc?
Once I found the Harmony site from someone else's post (hint: it's in the Apache incubator, not a full-fledged project yet), I saw this in the FAQ:
13) Does this compete with Kaffe and Classpath?
People from Kaffe and Classpath are helping start this project! Their experience in the open source VM and class library is invaluable, and they bring problems that the larger architecture community discussion can help solve.
We will have an implementation under the Apache License, but we think of this as complementary rather than competitive. And when we solve a few small license interoperability issues, we expect we'll be able to complement each other even more.
So, it sounds like a cooperative deal between various players. I've been hoping for an OSS JVM because there is no Java for some of the platforms I use. Having a few big-name drivers behind it will definitely help.
I agree completely. "Half milestones" are better for marketing - and that's the only thing they're good for. For anyone that cares to actually keep track of how much better, or new-and-improved, a certain version is compared to another, the x.y.z system with single unit increments makes more sense. Without going into changelogs or some such, it's a concise expression of how far a system has advanced. Version numbers are not simply decimal, so the ".5" release does not equate to half-way to the next major release! But the marketers presume the average joe is completely clueless.
Apple used to irk me in this, too. But at least Firefox hasn't gone the Microsoft route of using year numbers or other completely irrelevant monikers. Apple now uses codenames in conjunction with the version numbers, and that may be the best route.
Solaris, and now Java, realized that they were never going to have a rewrite or other change major enough for a major rev. Wisely, IMO, they promoted the minor rev number to be the major. The "Java 2" marketing term for Java 1.2.x-1.4.x was confusing and annoying. If you want to call it v2, just let it be v2.
They need to upgrade from a DOS attack to a Windows attack! If all the spammers' machines were infected with Windows, surely some would subsequently crash and less spam would be sent out. That would be more effective than a DOS attack.
I'm not an apologist for the US government. But I'm definitely not a UN cheerleader, either. Personally I think every domain should be under a ccTLD, which is under the jurisdiction of its respective gov't, so trademark issues can be enforced by applicable laws. Other than that, I don't see why the internet needs technical oversight by any governmental entity. Others have noted that this is primarily a tax scheme by the UN to generate a revenue stream independent of member nation contributions. That I'd hate to see.
Just a littlebitofastart of UN schemes to suck away your freedom. Government is always the antithesis of freedom. More government, that is not accountable to the people, is never a solution to anything.
Couldn't agree more. I've been saying this for a long time. Since we're stuck with the reality that the world is divided into political units called countries, that are going to want to regulate some aspects of the internet (and appropriately so, in the case of things like trademark issues), why not require every domain to be in the correct ccTLD? For truly international efforts, we do have.int which could be organized by convention or treaty. Get rid of generic TLDs. Searches for pepsi.com, for instance, would return a code 300 response with a list of all the pepsi.com.[a-zA-Z]{2} that matched.
it was the friendliest OS out there for the hard-core assembly language programmer
This has to explain why a VAX was our primary academic computer at my uni, since the CS department was pretty big on assembler. Unfortunately, this set back my education of things Unixy by four years - I manned a student helpline so I had to know all sorts of things about it, and basically ignored the school's Ultrix box. I actually thought I was doing myself a favor. Now, 10 years later, I think I have dumped almost all of the VAX knowledge I ever learned.
Right - either consent to the nomination, or withhold your consent. Either way is fine. But don't stall bringing the issue up.
Judicial appointments are not legislation, and shouldn't be treated with the same procedural rules. In the grand scheme, nobody's going to care if we go another day with or without some law being passed. But justice goes unserved when there are vacancies on the bench.
Thanks for the offer, but I'm in middle-of-nowhere USA. A small SparcStation like that would fit my needs perfectly. Have you tried offering them on a development list? People who code, say, NetBSD or Kaffe might love to have another machine available for testing.
(I'm getting rid of the last of my 60-70MHz PowerMacs myself.)
Agreed on RAM, color, and HD. It should have been designed from the get-go to be expanded easily as the Mac matured. In the same vein I'll point out that Nubus (superior to ISA) was already standardized, so they could have used that earlier than the Mac II. If they'd had it earlier, and promoted it, maybe PCs would have adopted it.
Slashdot Mirror
Government requires too darn much record-keeping these days. If the pioneers were required to retain as much paper as we do for taxes and the like, the US would still be stuck on the east side of the Mississippi River. Can't we just cut through the regulation burden and get rid of all that crap in our lives? If I want to escape from a natural or man-made disaster with the things that are necessary/important to me, I sure as heck hope I'd be grabbing kids, pets, food/clothes/gun (depending if it's an apocalypse), and a few treasured keepsakes rather than tax returns, licenses, and paperwork. Anyone else yearning for a more libertarian society or is it just me?
That said, the article did have make some good points. A "bug out" bag is a wise idea (as is a bomb shelter - y'all have one of them too, right?). Thank goodness for technology, so that all the important "crap" can be reduced to a USB stick. I deal with information so much better if I don't have to mess with the physicality of the (paper) records. (Yes, my natural filing system is heaps and stacks. Thank God for my wife or I wouldn't be able to find my desk.) I think the advice about medical records was the most useful. Now that's something I'd want if I had to pick up and move fast.
Yesterday James Prendergast said Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument. A snippet...
Actually, just throw out the 16th and 17th Amendments - and every law that's passed since then, if you really feel like it. Those two alone are almost completely responsely for the vast increase in the size of government and usurpation of our rights by it in the last century. With Congress unable to arbitrarily filch from our pockets, and states having a voice in the federal government again, checks and balances are restored.
A number of presidents have vetoed relief/aid bills in the past. I used to have a number of them collected in my quotations list, but I lost that when I reformatted my machine and the backup failed. I believe one was Teddy Roosevelt, concerning a draught in Texas - but that's purely from memory so I may be wrong. Personally I like Col. David Crockett's "Not Yours To Give" speech on the floor of the House.
Which is why the voting masses need to work up the gumption to vote third-party. Say NO to the continued reign of the Duopoly - one is just as bad as the other, you know. We need to work toward introducing Condorcet Voting so that everyone can vote honestly instead of strategically, but even in the meantime a surge of honest voting would help. Imagine what the reaction would be if 3rd parties consistently (not just in one year) ran even 10% in most races (not just one visible race) across the country? The Duopoly might sit up and take notice.
The slashboxes seem a little too wide for the background image, at least in Mac Opera.
I once tried cleaning up a site with lots of tables and inline formatting, converting it to CSS. Stripping the formatting down saved roughly 15-20% on that site the more pages were visited using the cached stylesheets. If you only visited the front page, the bandwidth usage was actually a bit higher. It all depends how much inline formatting you have, but I thought 15% was significant enough to make the effort for, especially if traffic (hence bandwidth expense) is high.
It doesn't make iCab smile, either. Mostly unknown entities, probably from unescaped ampersands.
Anybody have access to some truly ancient GUI browser (pre-CSS, like Netscape 2), that would want to post a screenshot?
I'm actually glad I learned about the GO menu. Often I accidentally kill a tab I wanted to keep the history of. A global history that's easily accessible can occasionally be handy. Sometimes you want to look at it chronologically by when accessed, sometimes you want to read it organized by the sites accessed, sometimes maybe a combination. Options are good.
How many people out there use JOnAS as an alternative to JBoss? I've heard that JBoss now uses Tomcat as a base for the JSP/servlet stuff, just like JOnAS, so it's pretty much an apples-to-apples comparison now.
How many people are using either of these as compared to more commercialized offerings such as Websphere, WebLogic, JRun, etc?
Once I found the Harmony site from someone else's post (hint: it's in the Apache incubator, not a full-fledged project yet), I saw this in the FAQ:
So, it sounds like a cooperative deal between various players. I've been hoping for an OSS JVM because there is no Java for some of the platforms I use. Having a few big-name drivers behind it will definitely help.
I'd be more interested in support of J2EE 1.4 than J2SE 5. But that's just me.
What is the relationship between Harmony and Kaffe? Anybody know?
I agree completely. "Half milestones" are better for marketing - and that's the only thing they're good for. For anyone that cares to actually keep track of how much better, or new-and-improved, a certain version is compared to another, the x.y.z system with single unit increments makes more sense. Without going into changelogs or some such, it's a concise expression of how far a system has advanced. Version numbers are not simply decimal, so the ".5" release does not equate to half-way to the next major release! But the marketers presume the average joe is completely clueless.
Apple used to irk me in this, too. But at least Firefox hasn't gone the Microsoft route of using year numbers or other completely irrelevant monikers. Apple now uses codenames in conjunction with the version numbers, and that may be the best route.
Solaris, and now Java, realized that they were never going to have a rewrite or other change major enough for a major rev. Wisely, IMO, they promoted the minor rev number to be the major. The "Java 2" marketing term for Java 1.2.x-1.4.x was confusing and annoying. If you want to call it v2, just let it be v2.
I guess my attempt at humor fell flat, eh? Maybe I should have included a smiley?
They need to upgrade from a DOS attack to a Windows attack! If all the spammers' machines were infected with Windows, surely some would subsequently crash and less spam would be sent out. That would be more effective than a DOS attack.
I'm not an apologist for the US government. But I'm definitely not a UN cheerleader, either. Personally I think every domain should be under a ccTLD, which is under the jurisdiction of its respective gov't, so trademark issues can be enforced by applicable laws. Other than that, I don't see why the internet needs technical oversight by any governmental entity. Others have noted that this is primarily a tax scheme by the UN to generate a revenue stream independent of member nation contributions. That I'd hate to see.
Just a little bit of a start of UN schemes to suck away your freedom. Government is always the antithesis of freedom. More government, that is not accountable to the people, is never a solution to anything.
Couldn't agree more. I've been saying this for a long time. Since we're stuck with the reality that the world is divided into political units called countries, that are going to want to regulate some aspects of the internet (and appropriately so, in the case of things like trademark issues), why not require every domain to be in the correct ccTLD? For truly international efforts, we do have .int which could be organized by convention or treaty. Get rid of generic TLDs. Searches for pepsi.com, for instance, would return a code 300 response with a list of all the pepsi.com.[a-zA-Z]{2} that matched.
Gadsden.info is a good site I have bookmarked. I don't know if the owner uses an email at that domain, though.
This has to explain why a VAX was our primary academic computer at my uni, since the CS department was pretty big on assembler. Unfortunately, this set back my education of things Unixy by four years - I manned a student helpline so I had to know all sorts of things about it, and basically ignored the school's Ultrix box. I actually thought I was doing myself a favor. Now, 10 years later, I think I have dumped almost all of the VAX knowledge I ever learned.
The only machines I've gotten for free that I've kept for my own use are:
The O2 and Q840 were expensive machines in their day. It's fun to have what was once dream hardware just for playing with.
Right - either consent to the nomination, or withhold your consent. Either way is fine. But don't stall bringing the issue up.
Judicial appointments are not legislation, and shouldn't be treated with the same procedural rules. In the grand scheme, nobody's going to care if we go another day with or without some law being passed. But justice goes unserved when there are vacancies on the bench.
Thanks for the offer, but I'm in middle-of-nowhere USA. A small SparcStation like that would fit my needs perfectly. Have you tried offering them on a development list? People who code, say, NetBSD or Kaffe might love to have another machine available for testing.
(I'm getting rid of the last of my 60-70MHz PowerMacs myself.)
Agreed on RAM, color, and HD. It should have been designed from the get-go to be expanded easily as the Mac matured. In the same vein I'll point out that Nubus (superior to ISA) was already standardized, so they could have used that earlier than the Mac II. If they'd had it earlier, and promoted it, maybe PCs would have adopted it.