Oh, I don't know... 50 years (?!) ago, it was at least humorous. Having just taken two toddlers to see the circus last weekend, I found this one especially funny.
Modern folks think they are required to have air conditioning
Tallahassee resident and former South Florida resident here. Sure, A/C isn't required. Neither is an internet connection. Neither is electricity, if you want to debate the meaning of "required". But all of those are necessary for modern life. Summers in Florida without A/C consist primarily of sitting on a porch, fanning yourself and drinking iced tea. It makes for a nice "Andy Griffith" tableau, but for those of us not benefiting from coastal breezes (like Jacksonville), we'd rather get some work done.
As far as older folk and kids "keeling over", heat strokes do still happen, and they happened more frequently before air conditioning became commonplace. Sure, most of them are northern transplants who don't know you can suffer from dehydration without feeling thirsty.
All that being said, I think you're 100% correct about home design and landscaping. The amount of land here that has had its native live oaks bulldozed to make way for a subdivision with puny little trees in their front yards is mind boggling. I'd love to see more houses look like this, or at least landscaped according to this.
I'm just pissed. Asus was so close... A lightweight hackable laptop for $200 would have been ideal. I understand that their first generation didn't have the volume to be made so cheaply, but now that they've got everyone's attention, they should be (IMHO) concentrating their efforts on hitting their initial price point. Instead, they're increasing the storage, screen size, RAM, etc, and increasing the price correspondingly.
Seriously, HP, Dell et al are going to roll out their own versions of the EEE PC, and with their marketing and support, Asus will get left by the wayside. For $200, there are a lot of low-income families that would be willing to buy a laptop for the kids to take to school, lots of hackers (like myself) willing to tinker with it (yes, I realize there is already a large hacker group for the EEE, but plenty more would be willing to crack it open at $200 instead of $500+), and without Windows, the big name vendors would be much less likely to intrude on their marketspace.
Doesn't Sony make a tiny Vaio about the same size as the EEE PC? I'm sure it's probably twice the price or more, but as Apple has shown, make a good solid ultraportable, and people are willing to pay for it.
It seems like the new maxim is "Cheap, Tiny, Hackable. Pick any 2".
I guess I'm wrong; I'm sure they've analyzed the market for these things. But anybody got a good recommendation for something the size of an EEE PC for cheap? I see there's an EEE PC on eBay for only $255, but it's still got a while left, and experience shows it'll go over $300 by the time it's done. Older is fine, I'll just stick a small linux distro and XFCE on it.
I'll second this. I've got a Sony PRS-500 (one generation older, bought in January). I've never bought a book for it yet; I use it to read books I've downloaded in text files, primarily from Project Gutenberg. Wonder of wonders, Sony actually lets you read plain old ASCII text files on it; I never thought I'd get excited over a device letting you view non-DRM material... It also uses SD cards, which is unusual for Sony.
The screen is great, with 3 different font sizes, and it's -thin-.
There's a hint of feature creep, as it does play mp3's and display pictures (in greyscale), but it's got only a few buttons compared to the photos I've seen of the Kindle. It's primarily for reading books.
I've got an iPhone, and even though I'm used to reading ebooks on a small backlit screen (I used a Palm TX for years), it doesn't compare to e-ink on a large (by comparison) screen.
Email has been ruined by spam. Either you don't give out your address, meaning that you cannot make wide use of it, or you get too much spam.
Really? I'm not being a wise-ass here, but is that really the common assumption these days? I use Gmail for all my personal stuff, and for all my work email on an Exchange server, I use Thunderbird. Maybe one spam a week hits my Thunderbird inbox, and maybe one a month hits my Gmail. And I have a feeling it's far rarer than that, I don't really keep track anymore. I had a problem initially with Thunderbird (false positives, actually), but that's been solved. And yes, I do give out my personal address when needed (not insane enough to post it publicly to Slashdot, but registering on websites isn't a problem).
It's guess it's sort of like telemarketers. Some of my older friends bitch about telemarketers. I dumped my land-line 4 years ago in favor of only a cellphone, and have gotten maybe 2 marketing calls since then. If you're willing to embrace newer technology, you can solve most of the problems of past technology.
Ok, so I'm late to the memorial, I just found out...
I was JUST thinking a couple of days ago about the episode where he had a kid spray oven cleaner (the kind that specifically says DON'T spray on aluminum) onto a big sheet of aluminum foil. He then crumpled the foil up, set it aside, and then proceeded to go over the oven cleaner directions with the kid. Halfway through reading the directions, the kid notices the smoke pouring off the now bubbling foil, and his eyes got really really big...
I have many memories, and he definitely sparked a love of science in me. He will be sorely missed. Time to go buy some Mr. Wizard's World DVD's.
That'd be the short story The Hole Man by Larry Niven. It won the 1975 Hugo for short story, and is included in his collection of short stories, "N-Space."
In the 24 hours between the time I composed the prior note, and sent it, and it made its way through the moderation software, two things happened:
1) I heard from a trusted source that Paramount is giving the Trek TV world a rest for maybe one to two years, depending on circumstances, no matter who would come along to run it. So it's not right to have folks putting in time doing something that ultimately would be pointless, I don't think that's a proper use of anybody's time.
2) At the same time as the above, an offer came in to run a new TV series for fall of '06, and since there's no way anything Trek can happen in the interim, I've said yes (now we have to negotiate the deal, but that should be fairly straightforward).
So on two counts, the whole thing is kind of moot.
We can reconvene a year or two down the road to see where this takes us, but in the interim...my apologies for waking everybody up in the middle of the night.
(and in reality, ones that probably have a bunch of weird hacks)
As two data points, my parents' DirecTiVo (which only had an extra hard drive installed) had this problem, although a hard reset fixed it. My DirecTiVo, which had just about every hack possible, didn't have the problem, although I did have to reinstall all my hacks. I think I'll specify '$upgradesoftware" = false' in my rc.sysinit this time around (didn't think DirecTV would release any more updates after so long!)
Well, that sucks. I paid for lifetime service for my tivo.... I do plan on moving at some point in time, and probably canceling DTV for a few months until I get settled in. So, you're sure that I will lose my lifetime tivo service that I paid for?
So downgrade your service to local channels only (~$5/month), and eat the monthly cost for the "few months" until you get settled in.
The description on the page sucks, but go to your local Best Buy and check out the RoboSapien. Its joints have several degrees of freedom, and the remote looks like a TiVo remote on steroids.
If that's not screaming to be hacked, hooked to a linux box, and used to terrify the cat, I don't know what is. And at 1/14th the price of the Korean `bot. It's not a kit though, which I know is a negative on Slashdot...
What would be better is to make windows out of this stuff.
Read the short story "Light of Other Days" (Bob Shaw, 1966) sometime. It was nominated for the Nebula award.
In it, he proposes exactly that; but instead of 12 or 24 hours, make it years or more "thick". Then you can have "window farms" with hundreds of windows, all looking out onto a pastoral scene, and years later, city dwellers purchase them so that they can have a pretty view to look at, one which changes with the seasons.
...For Microsoft, that is. A quick google search indicates they have roughly $40 Billion in cash and short-term investments to draw upon if needed. That's analogous to your average person having $4,000 in their savings account, and getting hit with a $6.40 fine.
Monty Burns: "Smithers, get my checkbook."
That being said, maybe Microsoft will eventually die the death of a thousand paper cuts...
I ran some really rough numbers to figure out when these guys would be totally cashed out. It's interesting that although the records go back 2 years, none of this activity is prior to 6/20/03.
BENCH, ROBERT K. Chief Financial Officer 221,043 shares held currently 21,000 sold since 7/8/03 Average: ~368 shares/day sold totally sold off in 20 months
BROUGHTON, REGINALD C. Senior Vice President 110,000 shares held currently 90,000 sold since 6/20/03 Average: ~1200 shares/day sold totally sold off in 3 months
HUNSAKER, JEFF F. Vice President 25,494 shares held currently 35,000 sold since 7/9/03 Average: ~625 shares/day sold totally sold off in 1.3 months
OLSON, MICHAEL P Controller 60,830 shares held currently 15,000 sold since 7/11/03 Average: ~278 shares/day sold totally sold off in 7.3 months
WILSON, MICHAEL SEAN Senior Vice President 6,000 shares held currently 12,000 sold since 7/15/03 Average: ~240 shares/day sold totally sold off in 25 days
The flipside is that the DirecTivos are more difficult to hack
Not so; the Series 2 DirecTivo's (and Standalone's) are more difficult to hack. I've got a Series 1 DirecTiVo (Phillips), and I've added a second hard drive, an ethernet card, installed Tivoweb, and can extract crystal-clear video from it.:-)
What killed it was DEC, whose management were naive enough to believe that great products sell themselves
Agreed. I administer (among other O/S's) Tru64 boxes, and AdvFS is one of the better add-on products I've seen, but DEC never said a word about it. Their field engineers used to refer to it as "Stealth Marketing"...
Microsoft was offering a $400 subsidy of your Best Buy purchase if you signed up for a two year (?) subscription to MSN, I believe.
AOL ought to offer the same; a free Microtel PC (plus a cheap monitor) for new AOL subscribers that sign a 2 year service agreement. That's become almost the standard now with DirecTV receivers...
...except that in this case, the entire truck tipped over (on the I-10 off-ramp).
Compaq "ES" class servers are shipped with heavy cardboard tubes on each of the case corners, and thick, but clear, plastic wrapping (think industrial Saran-wrap) around the whole thing. We were able to see lots of loose, broken bits rattling around inside and, needless to say, did NOT accept the shipment, much to the dismay and verbal abuse of the driver.
Only later did Compaq reveal what had happened to us (we had no idea at the time, just that it was most definitely broken), and said they would ship a replacement. The replacement arrived in less than a week (it should have taken longer to prep a new machine at the factory; the burn-in period is several days...), and it turned out to be the original machine, "inspected" at the local warehouse, and shipped back out to us with a new door.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I don't know... 50 years (?!) ago, it was at least humorous. Having just taken two toddlers to see the circus last weekend, I found this one especially funny.
Modern folks think they are required to have air conditioning
Tallahassee resident and former South Florida resident here. Sure, A/C isn't required. Neither is an internet connection. Neither is electricity, if you want to debate the meaning of "required". But all of those are necessary for modern life. Summers in Florida without A/C consist primarily of sitting on a porch, fanning yourself and drinking iced tea. It makes for a nice "Andy Griffith" tableau, but for those of us not benefiting from coastal breezes (like Jacksonville), we'd rather get some work done.
As far as older folk and kids "keeling over", heat strokes do still happen, and they happened more frequently before air conditioning became commonplace. Sure, most of them are northern transplants who don't know you can suffer from dehydration without feeling thirsty.
All that being said, I think you're 100% correct about home design and landscaping. The amount of land here that has had its native live oaks bulldozed to make way for a subdivision with puny little trees in their front yards is mind boggling. I'd love to see more houses look like this, or at least landscaped according to this.
It is in the nature of people to seek the shortest path to gratification.
Can you honestly say you've never done it?
Remind me never to swim in any pool this guy has ever been in...
I'm just pissed. Asus was so close... A lightweight hackable laptop for $200 would have been ideal. I understand that their first generation didn't have the volume to be made so cheaply, but now that they've got everyone's attention, they should be (IMHO) concentrating their efforts on hitting their initial price point. Instead, they're increasing the storage, screen size, RAM, etc, and increasing the price correspondingly.
Seriously, HP, Dell et al are going to roll out their own versions of the EEE PC, and with their marketing and support, Asus will get left by the wayside. For $200, there are a lot of low-income families that would be willing to buy a laptop for the kids to take to school, lots of hackers (like myself) willing to tinker with it (yes, I realize there is already a large hacker group for the EEE, but plenty more would be willing to crack it open at $200 instead of $500+), and without Windows, the big name vendors would be much less likely to intrude on their marketspace.
Doesn't Sony make a tiny Vaio about the same size as the EEE PC? I'm sure it's probably twice the price or more, but as Apple has shown, make a good solid ultraportable, and people are willing to pay for it.
It seems like the new maxim is "Cheap, Tiny, Hackable. Pick any 2".
I guess I'm wrong; I'm sure they've analyzed the market for these things. But anybody got a good recommendation for something the size of an EEE PC for cheap? I see there's an EEE PC on eBay for only $255, but it's still got a while left, and experience shows it'll go over $300 by the time it's done. Older is fine, I'll just stick a small linux distro and XFCE on it.
Thanks
I'll second this. I've got a Sony PRS-500 (one generation older, bought in January). I've never bought a book for it yet; I use it to read books I've downloaded in text files, primarily from Project Gutenberg. Wonder of wonders, Sony actually lets you read plain old ASCII text files on it; I never thought I'd get excited over a device letting you view non-DRM material... It also uses SD cards, which is unusual for Sony.
The screen is great, with 3 different font sizes, and it's -thin-.
There's a hint of feature creep, as it does play mp3's and display pictures (in greyscale), but it's got only a few buttons compared to the photos I've seen of the Kindle. It's primarily for reading books.
I've got an iPhone, and even though I'm used to reading ebooks on a small backlit screen (I used a Palm TX for years), it doesn't compare to e-ink on a large (by comparison) screen.
Email has been ruined by spam. Either you don't give out your address, meaning that you cannot make wide use of it, or you get too much spam.
Really? I'm not being a wise-ass here, but is that really the common assumption these days? I use Gmail for all my personal stuff, and for all my work email on an Exchange server, I use Thunderbird. Maybe one spam a week hits my Thunderbird inbox, and maybe one a month hits my Gmail. And I have a feeling it's far rarer than that, I don't really keep track anymore. I had a problem initially with Thunderbird (false positives, actually), but that's been solved. And yes, I do give out my personal address when needed (not insane enough to post it publicly to Slashdot, but registering on websites isn't a problem).
It's guess it's sort of like telemarketers. Some of my older friends bitch about telemarketers. I dumped my land-line 4 years ago in favor of only a cellphone, and have gotten maybe 2 marketing calls since then. If you're willing to embrace newer technology, you can solve most of the problems of past technology.
Ok, so I'm late to the memorial, I just found out...
I was JUST thinking a couple of days ago about the episode where he had a kid spray oven cleaner (the kind that specifically says DON'T spray on aluminum) onto a big sheet of aluminum foil. He then crumpled the foil up, set it aside, and then proceeded to go over the oven cleaner directions with the kid. Halfway through reading the directions, the kid notices the smoke pouring off the now bubbling foil, and his eyes got really really big...
I have many memories, and he definitely sparked a love of science in me. He will be sorely missed. Time to go buy some Mr. Wizard's World DVD's.
That'd be the short story The Hole Man by Larry Niven. It won the 1975 Hugo for short story, and is included in his collection of short stories, "N-Space."
Trekweb
(and in reality, ones that probably have a bunch of weird hacks)
As two data points, my parents' DirecTiVo (which only had an extra hard drive installed) had this problem, although a hard reset fixed it. My DirecTiVo, which had just about every hack possible, didn't have the problem, although I did have to reinstall all my hacks. I think I'll specify '$upgradesoftware" = false' in my rc.sysinit this time around (didn't think DirecTV would release any more updates after so long!)
Well, that sucks. I paid for lifetime service for my tivo.... I do plan on moving at some point in time, and probably canceling DTV for a few months until I get settled in. So, you're sure that I will lose my lifetime tivo service that I paid for?
So downgrade your service to local channels only (~$5/month), and eat the monthly cost for the "few months" until you get settled in.
The description on the page sucks, but go to your local Best Buy and check out the RoboSapien. Its joints have several degrees of freedom, and the remote looks like a TiVo remote on steroids.
If that's not screaming to be hacked, hooked to a linux box, and used to terrify the cat, I don't know what is. And at 1/14th the price of the Korean `bot. It's not a kit though, which I know is a negative on Slashdot...
What would be better is to make windows out of this stuff.
Read the short story "Light of Other Days" (Bob Shaw, 1966) sometime. It was nominated for the Nebula award.
In it, he proposes exactly that; but instead of 12 or 24 hours, make it years or more "thick". Then you can have "window farms" with hundreds of windows, all looking out onto a pastoral scene, and years later, city dwellers purchase them so that they can have a pretty view to look at, one which changes with the seasons.
> people only have to channel 1% of that to the FSF and we can almost double FSF's annual revenues
Good point, admittedly one I hadn't thought of. Now if we can only convince Tennesseeans to "purchase" free software from FSF with their vouchers.
...For Microsoft, that is. A quick google search indicates they have roughly $40 Billion in cash and short-term investments to draw upon if needed. That's analogous to your average person having $4,000 in their savings account, and getting hit with a $6.40 fine.
Monty Burns: "Smithers, get my checkbook."
That being said, maybe Microsoft will eventually die the death of a thousand paper cuts...
...Something smells fishy about this.
(ouch. Sorry, had to be said).
Made me think about the Dr. Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death, though.
All this is publicly available Here
I ran some really rough numbers to figure out when these guys would be totally cashed out. It's interesting that although the records go back 2 years, none of this activity is prior to 6/20/03.
BENCH, ROBERT K.
Chief Financial Officer
221,043 shares held currently
21,000 sold since 7/8/03
Average: ~368 shares/day sold
totally sold off in 20 months
BROUGHTON, REGINALD C.
Senior Vice President
110,000 shares held currently
90,000 sold since 6/20/03
Average: ~1200 shares/day sold
totally sold off in 3 months
HUNSAKER, JEFF F.
Vice President
25,494 shares held currently
35,000 sold since 7/9/03
Average: ~625 shares/day sold
totally sold off in 1.3 months
OLSON, MICHAEL P
Controller
60,830 shares held currently
15,000 sold since 7/11/03
Average: ~278 shares/day sold
totally sold off in 7.3 months
WILSON, MICHAEL SEAN
Senior Vice President
6,000 shares held currently
12,000 sold since 7/15/03
Average: ~240 shares/day sold
totally sold off in 25 days
SCO has issued a letter saying SCO Linux customers won't be sued.
SideSCO Bob [on P.A.]: The following linux users will ~not~ be sued by me: SCO/Linux. That is all.
SCO User: Woohoo! Did ya hear, Linus!? Hey---Oh.
This article indicates to me its more like a duel between two masters.
IBM: [struggling to keep SCO away] There's something I ought to tell you.
SCO: Tell me!
IBM: I'm not left-handed either.
The flipside is that the DirecTivos are more difficult to hack
:-)
Not so; the Series 2 DirecTivo's (and Standalone's) are more difficult to hack. I've got a Series 1 DirecTiVo (Phillips), and I've added a second hard drive, an ethernet card, installed Tivoweb, and can extract crystal-clear video from it.
Fermat? Is that you?
What killed it was DEC, whose management were naive enough to believe that great products sell themselves
Agreed. I administer (among other O/S's) Tru64 boxes, and AdvFS is one of the better add-on products I've seen, but DEC never said a word about it. Their field engineers used to refer to it as "Stealth Marketing"...
Microsoft was offering a $400 subsidy of your Best Buy purchase if you signed up for a two year (?) subscription to MSN, I believe.
AOL ought to offer the same; a free Microtel PC (plus a cheap monitor) for new AOL subscribers that sign a 2 year service agreement. That's become almost the standard now with DirecTV receivers...
-Grant
...except that in this case, the entire truck tipped over (on the I-10 off-ramp).
Compaq "ES" class servers are shipped with heavy cardboard tubes on each of the case corners, and thick, but clear, plastic wrapping (think industrial Saran-wrap) around the whole thing. We were able to see lots of loose, broken bits rattling around inside and, needless to say, did NOT accept the shipment, much to the dismay and verbal abuse of the driver.
Only later did Compaq reveal what had happened to us (we had no idea at the time, just that it was most definitely broken), and said they would ship a replacement. The replacement arrived in less than a week (it should have taken longer to prep a new machine at the factory; the burn-in period is several days...), and it turned out to be the original machine, "inspected" at the local warehouse, and shipped back out to us with a new door.
This, too, was refused.
If I get that damn song stuck in my head (again), you're gettin' modded down buddy...
;-)