At the Raleigh fest a few weeks ago an SGI Indy, cpu box and monitor, with Irix installed, doom demo, etc - going for $60. I actually left and came back to get it but it was gone.
Re:Ham radio swap meets are so over
on
Hamvention
·
· Score: 1
Nope, sorry - tv didn't kill movies, vcr's didn't kill tv, and ebay isnt going to kill swap meets as long as humans are social animals. Besides, a lot of good bargains come from older folks with neat stuff their children aren't interested in, and who wouldn't know what to do with a computer if it was one big red button labled 'push to operate'.
One big fest near here happens every labor day - people show up from all over in campers and rec-vehicles and buy and sell stuff. Some folks head to Disneyland, others to the fest, either way they're on vacation, away from the office and house, having a good time.
It's an old, perfectly legal, tradition of software: the paying licensees are the testers. I just crashed IE and XP automatically sent in a bug report.
I just love the simplicity of it, kinda like the early vesions of NT where you could just telnet to port 139, type a few random characters and hang up, then watch CPU utilization stay at 100% untill reboot.
'science' is just as much about opinion as the humanities.
Basically what you are saying is there are no objective truths about reality in the hard sciences, just followers of intellectual fashion which are mere 'opinions' disguised as solid, arrogant, indisputable 'facts'. There's a lot to be said for that view, but consider this: is the equation E=mc^2 "merely" Einsteins 'opinion' or does it convey some real usable truth's about the universe? Similarly with Newton's F=ma or Ohm's law, E=IR? Certainly there is some element of arbitrary fashion and social cultural convention with those 'absolute truths' - the letters used to represent variables. In Ohm's law, why do they (we) use 'E' for electromotive force when we could use 'V' for voltage? Those 'truths' could also take a different form if the fundamental unit definitions where changed like the terms of the speed of light or units of energy. So you can see, the language of the 'hard' sciences contains a lot of social convention and arbitrary fashion dictated by a paternalistic hierarical social command and control structure, but they also convey, once you see thru that descriptive human language, an intuition about the workings of the actual physical universe that appearantly you artsy fartsy faggots will never understand.
What do you expect from the guy who gave us the 'hardware application layer' - he's just a prancing rich guy who wants to stay on the gravy train. Msft is a highly visible alien culture that constantly spreads disinformation about anything other than themselves (and often screws that up too). Listening to any Msft mogul's statement about any aspect of the computer industry other than themselves is like an eskimo's comments on life in the Andes mountains - usually cartoonish caricatures , like someone's profound comments about Shakespeare after a 5 minute speed read thru the cliffs notes on Hamlet.
spamd, a spam deferral daemon, can be used to tie up resources on a spammer's machine. spamd uses the new pf(4) table facility to redirect connections from a blacklist such as SPEWS or DIPS.
-- Probably questionable legality and ethics on that one, being a real tool in the battle against what some call 'free speech'.
If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that?
Seeing the Msft strives very hard to purposely keep customers dependant on a continuous stream of paid upgrades, support and bugfixes, that position is understandable. However, I don't see how anyone can beleive anything the emBallmer says as anything other than a used car sales pitch unless they're on the company payroll. How about this Steve: I'll use an open product that fits *our* needs, and if the developers drop the ball and it no longer is a solution, and Msft has successfully monopolized then entire software universe, THEN we'll buy your lousy products ?
It's kinda bizarre to pick one's software based on the hardware you happen to have to run it on. My OpenBSD PostFix mail server runs fine on an older Celeron workstation and the good feeling of trust and security is worth not even having a keyboard and mouse normally connected - I last plugged them in to reboot after a power failure, then moved them over to the Win2K box for it's regular maintenance reboots. Rarely ever have to move them back as all OpenBSD maintenance is done from my office.
That is to say, having a near uncrackable box is well worth giving up the peripheral style de jour, to me;))
Now that would be cool - you go to a web page, some ActiveX control or whatever takes control of the InfraRed port on you pc and changes the channel of your TV set to the one running their AD. Now that would be such an awesome accomplishment I'd probably just gape open mouthed and get the ad 'impression' and subconsciously purchase their product next time an opportunnity arises in the store.
Ok, econ-101 for you: where does tax money come from? Ans: Income, business and sales. Does raising taxes encourage or discourage income and business? Ans: It discourages business (you raise taxes on alcohol and tobacco in order to DISCOURAGE their use, for example). Therefore, the answer is to lower spending, and cut taxes to encourage business, thus generating greater revenue. I know that's incredibly difficult to understand, but you have to realize that level of taxation has an effect on the economy, it's not just dangling out there to either take it or leave it. Greedy overspending governments can get into real trouble during downturns if they do the simple minded thing and stupidly raise taxes, leading to an even worse investment climate which produces even less tax receipts, repeat untill depression. Just look at California, with the dot-bomb bust their tax base was decimated, leaving a huge budget shortfall, enough to make people want to recall the Governor. Should they just simple raise taxes to make up for it? Of course not, they need to RAISE BUSINESS levels and grow their way out of it. Simply raising the tax percentage on what business is left only discourages any businesses for forming and paying taxes. Look at it this way, you have a farm and during a drought year, you don't harvest as much corn as you expected and can't pay for some things you bought when you were expecting a big harvest. What do you do? Probably sell off some things, get out of debt, take a second job - but just running the corn harvester around trying to get more corn won't help (i.e., raising taxes during a trying economic period).
Bottom feeders like me are eating it up - I just bought an SGI Indigo2 for $96 - that's with the monitor, vid cable, remote control, internal 2g scsi disk w/ Irix 5.2 (or was it.3?), external 2g scsi disk, owners manuals, spare drive sled, microphone, audio, 128Mb ram, etc - boots and runs fine. Then I picked up an Octane with 6.5.14, 512Mb memory, SE graphics, etc - $250. Jeebus, these were over $20,000 machines at one time, now they're giving them away at surplus prices.
Indeed - I used to maintain cash registers, uh, 'point of sale terminals' in stores and the ones with the most dust, I mean inch thick layer of dust over the mainboard in about a year, were in textile departments, clothing, curtains, carpets, etc.
Yes, I'm sure every 6 year old child dragging her mom thru Toys'R'us will now be saying, "Don't buy me THAT mommy - her manufacturer supresses free speech by threatening to persecute adult parodies of it on the web!"
Gee, I never would have paid it no mind, but now I have to d/l a copy, burn it on several CD's and put it by my copy of deCSS, cellphone enabled scanner and drug paraphernalia.
"Hello, Jim? This is Bob in the 'Office' department. Can you fax over that Visual FoxPro EULA? I think we might need to include that verbiage in our products too now. Sure, I'll be looking for it. Thanks!"
That's how they rape consumers who don't understand the deal - you aren't really 'buying' the software, like you buy a box of soap - only a 'license' to use it in certain ways, like renting a car. The software is still the property of the Msft Corp. It's like XYZ Oil Company also leases cars, and part of the contract is that you will only use XYZ brand gasoline in it, and they can test for 'foreign' gas and charge you a fine if you put ABC gas in (even tho it works just as good or better). (It used to be, years ago, you could ONLY lease mainframes from IBM, you could not buy them outright).
Was reading something yesterday about how 'globalism' was supposed to INCREASE competition, but we are getting just the opposite effect - hi tech is enabling more 'protectionist' measures by companies (like the Lexmark 'chip in toner' deal). Software enables corporate protectionism and a whole 'nuther level of customer control, vendor lock in and removal of consumer choice.
a) Whoever's in the office of Cybersecurity Adviser is basically the designated fall guy. We'll see this person pushed out (e.g. fake resignation) whenever there's a "cyber attack" that he "should have seen coming."
That's like the old story about the king who always kept several heads of cabbage on his advisory committee. That way, whenever one of his programs conspicuously miscarriages, he could announce that a member of the royal staff has just been beheaded over it, to everyone's nodding approval.
I was about to post this about 'self winding watches' but that would hardly be called 'vibrations'. Anyway, recovering energy, however miniscule, that would otherwise be waste heat is always good.
Try any radiation monitors on old orange glazed Fiestaware in granny's house, you'll be suprised how much it makes a geiger counter tick! I tried it with my old 50's era CD counter and a plate was as hot as the calibration source. Also smoke detectors have a radioactive ionizing source in them.
Last Friday I started up my home XP box for the usual morning rounds, and when it was up the mouse and keyboard didn't work. This happens ocassionally and I just turned it off as usual. When it came back up it started to boot then got a big blue STOP screen claiming Unmountable Disk! I took it into work and tried recovery, reinstall, everything on the XP install CD said it was just an inaccessible disk and would have to be reformatted. Before taking that extreme measure (there was some stuff I didn't want to lost and hadn't backed up) I thought what the heck, lets boot the Linux disk in there - so I did, built the NTFS module, mounted the disk and was able to read it just fine! Recovered all my movies and sounds w/ no problem.
My disks are: hda1 - linux boot, small; hda2 8Gb FAT32 to share files; hdb CD/DVD writer; hdc Windows XP; hdd1 Linux root. My Asus A7V has an option on boot up you can select which drive to boot, so it can start either XP or RH Linux 7.
The practical application is to bring fame, fortune, prizes, publishing royalties and paid speaking engagements in the math world to whoever solves it.
I mean, seriously, when someone grabs an oblong pigskin full of compressed air, runs with it down a field with some guys trying to help and other guys trying to stop him, and does it better than anybody else, does that have any practical application? Yes it does! Entertainment, advertising, etc etc.
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The next fest in line for me is Manassas VA - I usually score something neat/cheap there. June 1.
At the Raleigh fest a few weeks ago an SGI Indy, cpu box and monitor, with Irix installed, doom demo, etc - going for $60. I actually left and came back to get it but it was gone.
Nope, sorry - tv didn't kill movies, vcr's didn't kill tv, and ebay isnt going to kill swap meets as long as humans are social animals. Besides, a lot of good bargains come from older folks with neat stuff their children aren't interested in, and who wouldn't know what to do with a computer if it was one big red button labled 'push to operate'.
One big fest near here happens every labor day - people show up from all over in campers and rec-vehicles and buy and sell stuff. Some folks head to Disneyland, others to the fest, either way they're on vacation, away from the office and house, having a good time.
I heard someone suggest they hire better testers?
It's an old, perfectly legal, tradition of software: the paying licensees are the testers. I just crashed IE and XP automatically sent in a bug report.
I just love the simplicity of it, kinda like the early vesions of NT where you could just telnet to port 139, type a few random characters and hang up, then watch CPU utilization stay at 100% untill reboot.
'science' is just as much about opinion as
the humanities.
Basically what you are saying is there are no objective truths about reality in the hard sciences, just followers of intellectual fashion which are mere 'opinions' disguised as solid, arrogant, indisputable 'facts'. There's a lot to be said for that view, but consider this: is the equation E=mc^2 "merely" Einsteins 'opinion' or does it convey some real usable truth's about the universe? Similarly with Newton's F=ma or Ohm's law, E=IR? Certainly there is some element of arbitrary fashion and social cultural convention with those 'absolute truths' - the letters used to represent variables. In Ohm's law, why do they (we) use 'E' for electromotive force when we could use 'V' for voltage? Those 'truths' could also take a different form if the fundamental unit definitions where changed like the terms of the speed of light or units of energy. So you can see, the language of the 'hard' sciences contains a lot of social convention and arbitrary fashion dictated by a paternalistic hierarical social command and control structure, but they also convey, once you see thru that descriptive human language, an intuition about the workings of the actual physical universe that appearantly you artsy fartsy faggots will never understand.
What do you expect from the guy who gave us the 'hardware application layer' - he's just a prancing rich guy who wants to stay on the gravy train. Msft is a highly visible alien culture that constantly spreads disinformation about anything other than themselves (and often screws that up too). Listening to any Msft mogul's statement about any aspect of the computer industry other than themselves is like an eskimo's comments on life in the Andes mountains - usually cartoonish caricatures , like someone's profound comments about Shakespeare after a 5 minute speed read thru the cliffs notes on Hamlet.
spamd, a spam deferral daemon, can be used to tie up resources on a spammer's machine. spamd uses the new pf(4) table facility to redirect connections from a blacklist such as SPEWS or DIPS.
-- Probably questionable legality and ethics on that one, being a real tool in the battle against what some call 'free speech'.
If the lead developer for this component chooses to do something else with his life, who will carry on the mantle for that?
Seeing the Msft strives very hard to purposely keep customers dependant on a continuous stream of paid upgrades, support and bugfixes, that position is understandable. However, I don't see how anyone can beleive anything the emBallmer says as anything other than a used car sales pitch unless they're on the company payroll. How about this Steve: I'll use an open product that fits *our* needs, and if the developers drop the ball and it no longer is a solution, and Msft has successfully monopolized then entire software universe, THEN we'll buy your lousy products ?
It's kinda bizarre to pick one's software based on the hardware you happen to have to run it on. My OpenBSD PostFix mail server runs fine on an older Celeron workstation and the good feeling of trust and security is worth not even having a keyboard and mouse normally connected - I last plugged them in to reboot after a power failure, then moved them over to the Win2K box for it's regular maintenance reboots. Rarely ever have to move them back as all OpenBSD maintenance is done from my office.
;))
That is to say, having a near uncrackable box is well worth giving up the peripheral style de jour, to me
Now that would be cool - you go to a web page, some ActiveX control or whatever takes control of the InfraRed port on you pc and changes the channel of your TV set to the one running their AD. Now that would be such an awesome accomplishment I'd probably just gape open mouthed and get the ad 'impression' and subconsciously purchase their product next time an opportunnity arises in the store.
Ok, econ-101 for you: where does tax money come from? Ans: Income, business and sales. Does raising taxes encourage or discourage income and business? Ans: It discourages business (you raise taxes on alcohol and tobacco in order to DISCOURAGE their use, for example). Therefore, the answer is to lower spending, and cut taxes to encourage business, thus generating greater revenue. I know that's incredibly difficult to understand, but you have to realize that level of taxation has an effect on the economy, it's not just dangling out there to either take it or leave it. Greedy overspending governments can get into real trouble during downturns if they do the simple minded thing and stupidly raise taxes, leading to an even worse investment climate which produces even less tax receipts, repeat untill depression. Just look at California, with the dot-bomb bust their tax base was decimated, leaving a huge budget shortfall, enough to make people want to recall the Governor. Should they just simple raise taxes to make up for it? Of course not, they need to RAISE BUSINESS levels and grow their way out of it. Simply raising the tax percentage on what business is left only discourages any businesses for forming and paying taxes. Look at it this way, you have a farm and during a drought year, you don't harvest as much corn as you expected and can't pay for some things you bought when you were expecting a big harvest. What do you do? Probably sell off some things, get out of debt, take a second job - but just running the corn harvester around trying to get more corn won't help (i.e., raising taxes during a trying economic period).
Ok, so how's that for priorities?
here's one for you - faster and better than mine w/ 6.5, only $45, two hours left and NO bids.
ebay auctions, like this and this.
Bottom feeders like me are eating it up - I just bought an SGI Indigo2 for $96 - that's with the monitor, vid cable, remote control, internal 2g scsi disk w/ Irix 5.2 (or was it .3?), external 2g scsi disk, owners manuals, spare drive sled, microphone, audio, 128Mb ram, etc - boots and runs fine. Then I picked up an Octane with 6.5.14, 512Mb memory, SE graphics, etc - $250. Jeebus, these were over $20,000 machines at one time, now they're giving them away at surplus prices.
Indeed - I used to maintain cash registers, uh, 'point of sale terminals' in stores and the ones with the most dust, I mean inch thick layer of dust over the mainboard in about a year, were in textile departments, clothing, curtains, carpets, etc.
percevied by potential customers
Yes, I'm sure every 6 year old child dragging her mom thru Toys'R'us will now be saying, "Don't buy me THAT mommy - her manufacturer supresses free speech by threatening to persecute adult parodies of it on the web!"
Gee, I never would have paid it no mind, but now I have to d/l a copy, burn it on several CD's and put it by my copy of deCSS, cellphone enabled scanner and drug paraphernalia.
"Hello, Jim? This is Bob in the 'Office' department. Can you fax over that Visual FoxPro EULA? I think we might need to include that verbiage in our products too now. Sure, I'll be looking for it. Thanks!"
1. pay many dollars for your software
That's how they rape consumers who don't understand the deal - you aren't really 'buying' the software, like you buy a box of soap - only a 'license' to use it in certain ways, like renting a car. The software is still the property of the Msft Corp. It's like XYZ Oil Company also leases cars, and part of the contract is that you will only use XYZ brand gasoline in it, and they can test for 'foreign' gas and charge you a fine if you put ABC gas in (even tho it works just as good or better). (It used to be, years ago, you could ONLY lease mainframes from IBM, you could not buy them outright).
Was reading something yesterday about how 'globalism' was supposed to INCREASE competition, but we are getting just the opposite effect - hi tech is enabling more 'protectionist' measures by companies (like the Lexmark 'chip in toner' deal). Software enables corporate protectionism and a whole 'nuther level of customer control, vendor lock in and removal of consumer choice.
Buy a sexy new toy, they gotcha!
a) Whoever's in the office of Cybersecurity Adviser is basically the designated fall guy. We'll see this person pushed out (e.g. fake resignation) whenever there's a "cyber attack" that he "should have seen coming."
That's like the old story about the king who always kept several heads of cabbage on his advisory committee. That way, whenever one of his programs conspicuously miscarriages, he could announce that a member of the royal staff has just been beheaded over it, to everyone's nodding approval.
I was about to post this about 'self winding watches' but that would hardly be called 'vibrations'. Anyway, recovering energy, however miniscule, that would otherwise be waste heat is always good.
Called the Allen Telescope Array (or ATA),
We much prefer the Scientists Concerned with Space Intelligence (or SCSI) Array for serious work , even if it is a bit more expensive.
All my old favorites are here.
Katzenjammer Kids are still running after over 100 years.
Try any radiation monitors on old orange glazed Fiestaware in granny's house, you'll be suprised how much it makes a geiger counter tick! I tried it with my old 50's era CD counter and a plate was as hot as the calibration source. Also smoke detectors have a radioactive ionizing source in them.
Last Friday I started up my home XP box for the usual morning rounds, and when it was up the mouse and keyboard didn't work. This happens ocassionally and I just turned it off as usual. When it came back up it started to boot then got a big blue STOP screen claiming Unmountable Disk! I took it into work and tried recovery, reinstall, everything on the XP install CD said it was just an inaccessible disk and would have to be reformatted. Before taking that extreme measure (there was some stuff I didn't want to lost and hadn't backed up) I thought what the heck, lets boot the Linux disk in there - so I did, built the NTFS module, mounted the disk and was able to read it just fine! Recovered all my movies and sounds w/ no problem.
My disks are: hda1 - linux boot, small; hda2 8Gb FAT32 to share files; hdb CD/DVD writer; hdc Windows XP; hdd1 Linux root. My Asus A7V has an option on boot up you can select which drive to boot, so it can start either XP or RH Linux 7.
The practical application is to bring fame, fortune, prizes, publishing royalties and paid speaking engagements in the math world to whoever solves it.
I mean, seriously, when someone grabs an oblong pigskin full of compressed air, runs with it down a field with some guys trying to help and other guys trying to stop him, and does it better than anybody else, does that have any practical application? Yes it does! Entertainment, advertising, etc etc.