Someone needs to cluster a bunch of unbranded cell phones and build an HPC out of them! A custom rack could hold countless phones and each could contain a 128 GB card. When one goes down they can chuck it into the trash and toss a new one into the cradle. Using a wireless mesh network would be a bottleneck but I suspect it would crunch a lot of numbers but the power consumption may be an issue. I am sure I am missing some snags, I have not actually given this any real thought, but those could be ironed out.
I think this is a thing that needs to be done simply because of General Principle and his army of ants. We need to give it a good cause and get a kickstarter going. I would throw a few dollars (if it looked like they may actually make a serious attempt) at it just to have some laughs. We can build it and sell the compute cycles at cost to people sequencing genomes of rain forest flora and fauna. (It might actually be okay at that. If not, throw some more hardware at it - my favorite solution for everything.) The environmentalist ideal would potentially garner support. We could even make it based on used (read "RECYCLED") cell phones. Register it as a NPO and people can write off their old phones as a donation. It would employ smart people and help the environment! What's not to love?
Dell will sell you an MD3860i with 60 6TB hard drives...
How odd? I was drooling over that exact appliance the other day and wishing I could find something similar for home use. I do not want/need fiber. I do have a rack in my data room in the basement. Something rackable, CAT5/6, PB (or close) support, low power, easy management, enterprise level support - can be toned down a bit, expandable, and offering built-in redundancy... There was a YellowBox (I think that was its name, it has been long since discarded) appliance that as nice and met some of those needs, I feel it should have been expanded on. I currently have a home-grown solution based on simple white boxes. They are not rackable and they are power hungry even though they are minimally used. Maybe something based on the above ideas with four Atom CPUs running a *NIX variation with a front end or ability to mount slices of space. Money is not the objective, I will pay handsomely, but finding something that really fits my desires is difficult.
I am sure such an appliance is out there and meets my needs almost exactly. I have not yet found it. I would even pay enterprise level pricing (though I expect enterprise level hardware) and would also want the ability to upgrade to SSDs (without needing to add them all at once) when those become a bit more mature for long-term use and the price becomes more reliable.
One of the things I miss most about still owning my company is I am no longer able to lug home equipment that has been replaced. (I always just gave depreciated equipment to myself, employees, or donated the hardware to local schools. Being a tech-heavy business meant stuff was replaced fairly often and still had a great deal of use left in it.) I kept a lot of that stuff and still use a bunch of it today though it is, more often than not, to play around and much of that is now 10+ years old so upgrading/adding new toys is an option. I do get occasional hand me downs as I still go in and do some work for the company once in a while, I also have stock in the parent company, but they are fewer than was in the past.
Anyhow, the silly mindless drivel above is mostly unimportant. I too, however, would like to be able to have a large storage array with backup capability. I already have off-site backups (not at the enterprise level) and a disaster recovery plan in place as well as cold-storage in a safe deposit box as well as a friend's garage. I would love to have a decent, easily managed, appliance for it that had great support and easy upgrading to 'future proof' things for a while.
I do not mind it. I am on the beta testing upgrade track and I report bugs to them. I figure I have used their browser long enough.
With HTML5 I think the trend is going to be an inability to easily use add-ons, as they currently work, to block malicious sites. It will be at that point that I revert to using the HOSTS file. Speaking of which, I downloaded your application but completely forgot to install it and get your email so that I could email you. I should have time to get to that today.
I did some work to help ease the traffic flow around Atlanta, GA. (There is a giant highway that runs around it in a circle, access was fairly easy but egress was not as good as it should have been. The idea was brilliant when they designed it. Importantly,population growth was around the outside of the circle and there was congestion at peak hours and the load was not where it was anticipated and designed for.)
Anyhow, after bidding and getting the contract (a consulting contract - we would recommend design changes, for example, but not specify how the changes were made only what needed to be changed and where and traffic engineers would take care of the rest - traffic engineering was not a part of this contract and we did not bid on that project due to the mess that it was, it has only been marginally improved but it is great in off-peak hours except it is not really needed in off-peak hours) we learned something. They had effectively bid out to hire a consultant to see if they had needed to hire a consultant. Our internal name was, "The Georgia Recursive Loop." The City of Atlanta has its own traffic engineers, not as many as needed really, so we were unable to recommend consulting a consultant to keep the chain going.
That was one of the projects (surprisingly few) that made me feel a little bad for the tax payers. They were not the only ones that hired a consultant to consult on hiring consultants. Sometimes they hire a lawyer, a specialist who is not on the city budget, to determine if they should hire a consultant to determine if they should employ the services of a consultant. (I am looking at YOU District of Columbia. I am looking at you...) Buffalo, NY hired a lawyer who recommended a specialist lawyer to vet our proposals. The original lawyer remained on the books and handled communication between the specialist lawyer (who had ended up being our main contact) and the city council. The council, of course, reported to the manager of the local transportation department. It was a lot like the "Chinese Telephone" game we played as kids where you say one thing in one person's ear and they repeat it and so on and so on until it is munged silliness at the end.
It is quite lucrative, really. If you are not insane when you start then you will be by the time you get familiar with all of the silliness. Sorry for the novella but there simply is no easy way to share the experiences. Hopefully it is reasonably clear. My only justification, for being a part of the system, is that it paid well, provided great jobs, and the tech/educational aspects of it were originally mind blowing and fun.
The best part is that we have been modded down. Quite likely because they think I am a Rightwinger, a racist and a sexist. I can not vouch for you but I suspect you are not that bad of I'd have noticed and I have seen plenty of your posts in the past.
The beautiful part is that I am neither of those things and am much (much) further to the left than any elected Democrat. What will really make them confused is that I am a Libertarian. I support things like Single-Payer health care because it is cheaper for me to pay the taxes for preventative care than it is to pay for ER visits for a head cold. A non-employed acquaintance called an ambulance and went to the ER because they put a staple in their hand. I only wish I were kidding... An ambulance! A staple! I do not care about the cost as much as I care about the lack of some hydrogen peroxide in the home, maybe a bandage, and maybe an ibuprofen.
I care about highways, environment, libraries, court systems, welfare, and all those social things because they make me able to be more productive in a safe environment. I pay too little in taxes. I make up for it by donating to worthy causes. Those causes are not oak desk businessmen in darkened rooms filled with smoke from fine cigars. They are charities like Heifer International or the EFF. Let's raise them up and get them productive. It's not altruism - it is greed.
Most of all... I care about individual freedoms (and the responsibilities that go with that). Ayn Rand was a blooming idiot though they did have some valid insights but they were often overlooked in favor of extremist views. More importantly, they were an idiot. They do not define Libertarianism and the vast majority are not anarcho-capitalists. *sighs*
Anyhow, I could rant for hours. I will spare you. I am an asshole. I accept that. Now let's move on to something pertinent.;-)
Someone postulated that it was a group of trolls who made posts to see who could get the highest response count. They seemed to indicate some higher knowledge but, frankly, they could just be conspiratorially inclined. Anyhow, the posts seem to show up fairly quick and at all hours of the day. I suspect it is a bot. Faking a CAPTCHA is not too hard to do once you have enough samples.
Also, things have improved for them in many ways. They do not have autonomy but they do have electricity. i say this as a Buddhist even. We're a pragmatic bunch.
Anyhow, you made me chuckle. Then I felt bad. Then I realized I am a Buddhist and not a fucking monk. Laughing is good for the body and mind. (And he was enlightened.) So, thanks.
Heh... I knew there would be at lest one of you.;) I can see it being valuable for other folks but I do not do that much management or manipulation. I also do not organize stuff well so automating with scripts or customizing scripts would not help me much. However, I was reasonably sure there was at least one of you out there.
My observation is that the number of posts has gone down but, and this is hardly objective, the percentage of "quality" posts in the "good threads" are the same as they have always been. I suppose I do not help. I simply refuse to moderate most of the time. I see no value in it. Another consideration is that there are vast number of discussion sites online now as compared to then. The world, and how we interact with it, has changed.
So the few outliers (you can use a shelter as an address) are influencing elections as you claimed? That seems quite a stretch. Few elections are lost or won by the margin you are suggesting. It is not that I agree with the practice but your hyperbole is trite and not entirely correct - or even really correct when taken in regards to your statement.
Good guesses. I have my PhD in Applied Mathematics and a MA in Electrical Engineering. And I *might* be able to do all 138 drives faster than you can do it in a spreadsheet. It is strange, I look at numbers and just *get* them. I can not really explain it. Early on, in basic mathematics, I had a hard time doing proofs. Showing my work was a problem. Eventually I had a teacher who explained the concepts in an abstract form and that is when things just sort of clicked.
There is a documentary about Best Korea on YouTube but I forgot the name. My meory sucks, they need a drop for that. Anyhow, the documentary covers an eye doctor who visits North Korea and performs many cataract surgeries in primitive conditions but with great success. What is odd is, at the end, they are removing the gauze and all these nearly blind people head up to the picture at the front and praise the Dear Leader as if he was the cure and not the cause of their suffering.
No pun intended but it was eye opening to see the contrast between cultures. I am not entirely sure that the loud wailing was sincere either. They wailed and praised the Dear Leader and I believe the narrator mentioned that it was pretty much a requirement that they do so and those who did not (all of them did) would be punished severely for not showing proper deference.
It makes me glad that I can call my president an asshole if I feel he is being an asshole. Of course, I will be labled a racist if I do so but that is another matter entirely. I am sure I will be a sexist for not voting for Hillary as well but, again, that is another matter entirely. I am just glad to be able to be critical of my government and this story reminded me of that documentary.
Thunderbird, for email, is actually pretty good now. It is a lot like Outlook Express was and, honestly, OE was a fantastic application. Sadly it was slaughtered by Microsoft. I would love a Linux port of OE. It would be awesome. I should look into seeing if it can be run in Wine but I doubt it - it had a lot of dependencies.
I do not do a lot of image management (and little to no image manipulation beyond cutting and resizing). I do not have a Linux recommendation. On Windows systems I have been a very happy XnView user for a lot of years. Maybe that is of interest? It has a handy image browser and lets you do all sorts of things. There are plugins but I honestly have not used any of them. I use it to browse images, maybe move them around when I am motivated to categorize them, and make screen shots. It can do much more than that and is really a pretty decent application I suppose. I do not use even 1/100 of the features I suspect and I haven't a clue how robust the plugin community is but they have been around for a very long time and I use their application as needed.
Give it a shot (either of you) if you want. It is surprisingly feature-rich and not at all bloated feeling. It is, however, bloated beyond what it was when I first poked at it. It just does not feel bloated in use. I dare say that they have done a good job with it.
Thunderbird is, obviously, easy to find and everyone knows where to download that. I really think it has improved a great deal over what it once was. I used Opera Mail for a long time but, honestly, that is not so very good and there does not seem to be much interest in improving it. XnView is not open source.
Finally, and more specific, what image management tools would you recommend for Linux? I have not found one that I am comfortable using. Obviously a GUI is required. It would be illogical (to me) to use an command line utility for image management. I am certain someone has and reasonably certain that someone here would profess to like such a tool.
I think we can extrapolate that to mean that ease of access is also implied. Public implies more than available on Tuesdays from 1:00 to 1:30 and the resources are limited - and in Chinese.
I have your other link open as well. I am currently getting a 400 error (bad request) but i will keep trying. I am kind of surprised that the ACLU is not involved in this. While they do not get involved in all sorts of things (and lack resources to tackle everything) this seems like something that would be right up their alley. Then again, they have turned into a group that seems to do things for publicity more often than not lately. I still support them.
Maybe I will send a smaller donation to their Georgia chapter and an email suggesting that they consider lending aid to this group's struggle. They are probably better funded and resourced than the group currently involved.
I passed my yearly allotment for donations already. Anything more that I donate will not result in a tax reduction. That is okay. That is not why I donate anyways. I figure I have an obligation to pay, my taxes are actually lower (percentage wise) than they were before I sold my business even though I have and spend much more money. I make up for the difference by donating and, honestly, it feels better. I am still contributing (more than I am obligated even) but I am able to contribute to things that do not involve bombing the hell out of little brown men.
As always, i will research the non-profit and then likely make a donation. I usually do so in the name of anonymous or the site which lead me to it - "/." has made a number of donations in the past.;-) The only reasons I review non-profits before donating is because I want to see the overhead and wages as well as the percentage of donated dollars that go towards their stated cause. (I'm looking at you Red Cross.) I have found a number of disturbing trends with some of the non-profits. The online resources, such as Charity Watch are a good start.
So, thank you. I will take a deeper look and do what I can. I may contact them to see what else I can do, something more tangible, to help. Legal education is a pet peeve of mine as I feel it is our obligation to know, monitor, and react to the justice system. Knowing the law is as important as knowing the procedure - though I sometimes think knowing the procedure is more important than knowing the specifics of the law but I digress.
My old business still has an office in the panhandle of Florida. Maybe there is something they can do to help as well. A lot of the non-profits are helped with more than just cash, even something as simple as getting them a discount or free printing helps. More than once the business has hosted content on behalf of a non-profit including the website for Heifer International at one point. (I have always been a fan of helping non-profits.) I am not certain, they may still host the site for all I know. We had space and bandwidth aplenty.
Again, thanks for the link. I will look into it and likely send them some funds. You also helped me understand the problem a bit better. I was wondering why people were saying that they did not have access to the law when I know damned well that they do have access. It is that they do not have *complete* access that is the problem. I think it may be high time to advocate a change in ease of access as well. There is no reason to make access require a special location or dead-tree formats. I suspect improving those areas would be an improvement to the system in general as it could add efficiency and accuracy as well. It may even lower tax rates in the long run but I do not dare speculate that far ahead.
My email is real should you have an urge to see how things went regarding my looking into the organization and what I chose to do. I will spend a couple of hours looking into them tomorrow afternoon and make a call or two on Monday if needed. Maybe they can organize some sort of matching donation fund drive or something along those lines. If they are amicable and able then I would not mind matching funds up to a certain limit. The tax payers paid for our consulting in Georgia, a number of times, and giving something back is a nice gesture.
Voter IDs are supposed to be free unless you mean the state's that require a state ID to vote? Those are usually just a few dollars and required for many other tasks which minimizes the expense. I agree with you in theory but in practicality?
Restricted poll times? The booths are open late and one can vote absentee if they want to or if they are worried about the time constraints. I can not speak to other states but I have been able to get my ballot online in my state for a number of years now. Such was not really an option when I retired and moved here. Things like state functions where just starting to go online eight years ago. Prior to that one had to call or write to request an application. It has never really been anything I have seen as prohibitive. There has to be a finite limit to the times the booths are open. Such needs to fit in with social expectations. Remediation is possible with absentee voting if such is a problem due to scheduling or physical limitations.
You have been here long enough to know that such behavior is not tolerated around here. You should feel bad for even suggesting such a thing. RTFA? No... We do not even read the summary half the time. We do not even read the comment we are replying to half the time. It is how we roll.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not sure if it is my file system or my OS but I am definitely suffering from bit rot. Maybe it is Windows and I need a defrag utility?
NewEgg has them at $260 with a 2/customer limit and 12 in stock. That number will be smaller in a minute when they update the page. Free shipping too.
Someone needs to cluster a bunch of unbranded cell phones and build an HPC out of them! A custom rack could hold countless phones and each could contain a 128 GB card. When one goes down they can chuck it into the trash and toss a new one into the cradle. Using a wireless mesh network would be a bottleneck but I suspect it would crunch a lot of numbers but the power consumption may be an issue. I am sure I am missing some snags, I have not actually given this any real thought, but those could be ironed out.
I think this is a thing that needs to be done simply because of General Principle and his army of ants. We need to give it a good cause and get a kickstarter going. I would throw a few dollars (if it looked like they may actually make a serious attempt) at it just to have some laughs. We can build it and sell the compute cycles at cost to people sequencing genomes of rain forest flora and fauna. (It might actually be okay at that. If not, throw some more hardware at it - my favorite solution for everything.) The environmentalist ideal would potentially garner support. We could even make it based on used (read "RECYCLED") cell phones. Register it as a NPO and people can write off their old phones as a donation. It would employ smart people and help the environment! What's not to love?
That, folks, is my shitty idea of the day.
Dell will sell you an MD3860i with 60 6TB hard drives ...
How odd? I was drooling over that exact appliance the other day and wishing I could find something similar for home use. I do not want/need fiber. I do have a rack in my data room in the basement. Something rackable, CAT5/6, PB (or close) support, low power, easy management, enterprise level support - can be toned down a bit, expandable, and offering built-in redundancy... There was a YellowBox (I think that was its name, it has been long since discarded) appliance that as nice and met some of those needs, I feel it should have been expanded on. I currently have a home-grown solution based on simple white boxes. They are not rackable and they are power hungry even though they are minimally used. Maybe something based on the above ideas with four Atom CPUs running a *NIX variation with a front end or ability to mount slices of space. Money is not the objective, I will pay handsomely, but finding something that really fits my desires is difficult.
I am sure such an appliance is out there and meets my needs almost exactly. I have not yet found it. I would even pay enterprise level pricing (though I expect enterprise level hardware) and would also want the ability to upgrade to SSDs (without needing to add them all at once) when those become a bit more mature for long-term use and the price becomes more reliable.
One of the things I miss most about still owning my company is I am no longer able to lug home equipment that has been replaced. (I always just gave depreciated equipment to myself, employees, or donated the hardware to local schools. Being a tech-heavy business meant stuff was replaced fairly often and still had a great deal of use left in it.) I kept a lot of that stuff and still use a bunch of it today though it is, more often than not, to play around and much of that is now 10+ years old so upgrading/adding new toys is an option. I do get occasional hand me downs as I still go in and do some work for the company once in a while, I also have stock in the parent company, but they are fewer than was in the past.
Anyhow, the silly mindless drivel above is mostly unimportant. I too, however, would like to be able to have a large storage array with backup capability. I already have off-site backups (not at the enterprise level) and a disaster recovery plan in place as well as cold-storage in a safe deposit box as well as a friend's garage. I would love to have a decent, easily managed, appliance for it that had great support and easy upgrading to 'future proof' things for a while.
I do not mind it. I am on the beta testing upgrade track and I report bugs to them. I figure I have used their browser long enough.
With HTML5 I think the trend is going to be an inability to easily use add-ons, as they currently work, to block malicious sites. It will be at that point that I revert to using the HOSTS file. Speaking of which, I downloaded your application but completely forgot to install it and get your email so that I could email you. I should have time to get to that today.
And by shear coincidence the encrypted header's plain text output is MOO! Compressed meta-data is goatse.
I did some work to help ease the traffic flow around Atlanta, GA. (There is a giant highway that runs around it in a circle, access was fairly easy but egress was not as good as it should have been. The idea was brilliant when they designed it. Importantly,population growth was around the outside of the circle and there was congestion at peak hours and the load was not where it was anticipated and designed for.)
Anyhow, after bidding and getting the contract (a consulting contract - we would recommend design changes, for example, but not specify how the changes were made only what needed to be changed and where and traffic engineers would take care of the rest - traffic engineering was not a part of this contract and we did not bid on that project due to the mess that it was, it has only been marginally improved but it is great in off-peak hours except it is not really needed in off-peak hours) we learned something. They had effectively bid out to hire a consultant to see if they had needed to hire a consultant. Our internal name was, "The Georgia Recursive Loop." The City of Atlanta has its own traffic engineers, not as many as needed really, so we were unable to recommend consulting a consultant to keep the chain going.
That was one of the projects (surprisingly few) that made me feel a little bad for the tax payers. They were not the only ones that hired a consultant to consult on hiring consultants. Sometimes they hire a lawyer, a specialist who is not on the city budget, to determine if they should hire a consultant to determine if they should employ the services of a consultant. (I am looking at YOU District of Columbia. I am looking at you...) Buffalo, NY hired a lawyer who recommended a specialist lawyer to vet our proposals. The original lawyer remained on the books and handled communication between the specialist lawyer (who had ended up being our main contact) and the city council. The council, of course, reported to the manager of the local transportation department. It was a lot like the "Chinese Telephone" game we played as kids where you say one thing in one person's ear and they repeat it and so on and so on until it is munged silliness at the end.
It is quite lucrative, really. If you are not insane when you start then you will be by the time you get familiar with all of the silliness. Sorry for the novella but there simply is no easy way to share the experiences. Hopefully it is reasonably clear. My only justification, for being a part of the system, is that it paid well, provided great jobs, and the tech/educational aspects of it were originally mind blowing and fun.
The best part is that we have been modded down. Quite likely because they think I am a Rightwinger, a racist and a sexist. I can not vouch for you but I suspect you are not that bad of I'd have noticed and I have seen plenty of your posts in the past.
The beautiful part is that I am neither of those things and am much (much) further to the left than any elected Democrat. What will really make them confused is that I am a Libertarian. I support things like Single-Payer health care because it is cheaper for me to pay the taxes for preventative care than it is to pay for ER visits for a head cold. A non-employed acquaintance called an ambulance and went to the ER because they put a staple in their hand. I only wish I were kidding... An ambulance! A staple! I do not care about the cost as much as I care about the lack of some hydrogen peroxide in the home, maybe a bandage, and maybe an ibuprofen.
I care about highways, environment, libraries, court systems, welfare, and all those social things because they make me able to be more productive in a safe environment. I pay too little in taxes. I make up for it by donating to worthy causes. Those causes are not oak desk businessmen in darkened rooms filled with smoke from fine cigars. They are charities like Heifer International or the EFF. Let's raise them up and get them productive. It's not altruism - it is greed.
Most of all... I care about individual freedoms (and the responsibilities that go with that). Ayn Rand was a blooming idiot though they did have some valid insights but they were often overlooked in favor of extremist views. More importantly, they were an idiot. They do not define Libertarianism and the vast majority are not anarcho-capitalists. *sighs*
Anyhow, I could rant for hours. I will spare you. I am an asshole. I accept that. Now let's move on to something pertinent. ;-)
That is a valid point and I already understand it. It is not how things are. You have resources. Use them.
Someone postulated that it was a group of trolls who made posts to see who could get the highest response count. They seemed to indicate some higher knowledge but, frankly, they could just be conspiratorially inclined. Anyhow, the posts seem to show up fairly quick and at all hours of the day. I suspect it is a bot. Faking a CAPTCHA is not too hard to do once you have enough samples.
Also, things have improved for them in many ways. They do not have autonomy but they do have electricity. i say this as a Buddhist even. We're a pragmatic bunch.
Anyhow, you made me chuckle. Then I felt bad. Then I realized I am a Buddhist and not a fucking monk. Laughing is good for the body and mind. (And he was enlightened.) So, thanks.
If you are sure the testing is good then why did you question it? And you accuse them of reading comprehension issues...
Heh... I knew there would be at lest one of you. ;) I can see it being valuable for other folks but I do not do that much management or manipulation. I also do not organize stuff well so automating with scripts or customizing scripts would not help me much. However, I was reasonably sure there was at least one of you out there.
My observation is that the number of posts has gone down but, and this is hardly objective, the percentage of "quality" posts in the "good threads" are the same as they have always been. I suppose I do not help. I simply refuse to moderate most of the time. I see no value in it. Another consideration is that there are vast number of discussion sites online now as compared to then. The world, and how we interact with it, has changed.
So the few outliers (you can use a shelter as an address) are influencing elections as you claimed? That seems quite a stretch. Few elections are lost or won by the margin you are suggesting. It is not that I agree with the practice but your hyperbole is trite and not entirely correct - or even really correct when taken in regards to your statement.
You don't. You can go without and remain ignorant. That is entirely up to you as well.
Good guesses. I have my PhD in Applied Mathematics and a MA in Electrical Engineering. And I *might* be able to do all 138 drives faster than you can do it in a spreadsheet. It is strange, I look at numbers and just *get* them. I can not really explain it. Early on, in basic mathematics, I had a hard time doing proofs. Showing my work was a problem. Eventually I had a teacher who explained the concepts in an abstract form and that is when things just sort of clicked.
Tell that to Tibet.
There is a documentary about Best Korea on YouTube but I forgot the name. My meory sucks, they need a drop for that. Anyhow, the documentary covers an eye doctor who visits North Korea and performs many cataract surgeries in primitive conditions but with great success. What is odd is, at the end, they are removing the gauze and all these nearly blind people head up to the picture at the front and praise the Dear Leader as if he was the cure and not the cause of their suffering.
No pun intended but it was eye opening to see the contrast between cultures. I am not entirely sure that the loud wailing was sincere either. They wailed and praised the Dear Leader and I believe the narrator mentioned that it was pretty much a requirement that they do so and those who did not (all of them did) would be punished severely for not showing proper deference.
It makes me glad that I can call my president an asshole if I feel he is being an asshole. Of course, I will be labled a racist if I do so but that is another matter entirely. I am sure I will be a sexist for not voting for Hillary as well but, again, that is another matter entirely. I am just glad to be able to be critical of my government and this story reminded me of that documentary.
Thunderbird, for email, is actually pretty good now. It is a lot like Outlook Express was and, honestly, OE was a fantastic application. Sadly it was slaughtered by Microsoft. I would love a Linux port of OE. It would be awesome. I should look into seeing if it can be run in Wine but I doubt it - it had a lot of dependencies.
I do not do a lot of image management (and little to no image manipulation beyond cutting and resizing). I do not have a Linux recommendation. On Windows systems I have been a very happy XnView user for a lot of years. Maybe that is of interest? It has a handy image browser and lets you do all sorts of things. There are plugins but I honestly have not used any of them. I use it to browse images, maybe move them around when I am motivated to categorize them, and make screen shots. It can do much more than that and is really a pretty decent application I suppose. I do not use even 1/100 of the features I suspect and I haven't a clue how robust the plugin community is but they have been around for a very long time and I use their application as needed.
I am not affiliated and the URL for XnView is:
http://www.xnview.com/
Give it a shot (either of you) if you want. It is surprisingly feature-rich and not at all bloated feeling. It is, however, bloated beyond what it was when I first poked at it. It just does not feel bloated in use. I dare say that they have done a good job with it.
Thunderbird is, obviously, easy to find and everyone knows where to download that. I really think it has improved a great deal over what it once was. I used Opera Mail for a long time but, honestly, that is not so very good and there does not seem to be much interest in improving it. XnView is not open source.
Finally, and more specific, what image management tools would you recommend for Linux? I have not found one that I am comfortable using. Obviously a GUI is required. It would be illogical (to me) to use an command line utility for image management. I am certain someone has and reasonably certain that someone here would profess to like such a tool.
Maybe they meant that they hit their own sciatic nerve?
I think we can extrapolate that to mean that ease of access is also implied. Public implies more than available on Tuesdays from 1:00 to 1:30 and the resources are limited - and in Chinese.
I have your other link open as well. I am currently getting a 400 error (bad request) but i will keep trying. I am kind of surprised that the ACLU is not involved in this. While they do not get involved in all sorts of things (and lack resources to tackle everything) this seems like something that would be right up their alley. Then again, they have turned into a group that seems to do things for publicity more often than not lately. I still support them.
Maybe I will send a smaller donation to their Georgia chapter and an email suggesting that they consider lending aid to this group's struggle. They are probably better funded and resourced than the group currently involved.
I passed my yearly allotment for donations already. Anything more that I donate will not result in a tax reduction. That is okay. That is not why I donate anyways. I figure I have an obligation to pay, my taxes are actually lower (percentage wise) than they were before I sold my business even though I have and spend much more money. I make up for the difference by donating and, honestly, it feels better. I am still contributing (more than I am obligated even) but I am able to contribute to things that do not involve bombing the hell out of little brown men.
As always, i will research the non-profit and then likely make a donation. I usually do so in the name of anonymous or the site which lead me to it - "/." has made a number of donations in the past. ;-) The only reasons I review non-profits before donating is because I want to see the overhead and wages as well as the percentage of donated dollars that go towards their stated cause. (I'm looking at you Red Cross.) I have found a number of disturbing trends with some of the non-profits. The online resources, such as Charity Watch are a good start.
So, thank you. I will take a deeper look and do what I can. I may contact them to see what else I can do, something more tangible, to help. Legal education is a pet peeve of mine as I feel it is our obligation to know, monitor, and react to the justice system. Knowing the law is as important as knowing the procedure - though I sometimes think knowing the procedure is more important than knowing the specifics of the law but I digress.
My old business still has an office in the panhandle of Florida. Maybe there is something they can do to help as well. A lot of the non-profits are helped with more than just cash, even something as simple as getting them a discount or free printing helps. More than once the business has hosted content on behalf of a non-profit including the website for Heifer International at one point. (I have always been a fan of helping non-profits.) I am not certain, they may still host the site for all I know. We had space and bandwidth aplenty.
Again, thanks for the link. I will look into it and likely send them some funds. You also helped me understand the problem a bit better. I was wondering why people were saying that they did not have access to the law when I know damned well that they do have access. It is that they do not have *complete* access that is the problem. I think it may be high time to advocate a change in ease of access as well. There is no reason to make access require a special location or dead-tree formats. I suspect improving those areas would be an improvement to the system in general as it could add efficiency and accuracy as well. It may even lower tax rates in the long run but I do not dare speculate that far ahead.
My email is real should you have an urge to see how things went regarding my looking into the organization and what I chose to do. I will spend a couple of hours looking into them tomorrow afternoon and make a call or two on Monday if needed. Maybe they can organize some sort of matching donation fund drive or something along those lines. If they are amicable and able then I would not mind matching funds up to a certain limit. The tax payers paid for our consulting in Georgia, a number of times, and giving something back is a nice gesture.
Voter IDs are supposed to be free unless you mean the state's that require a state ID to vote? Those are usually just a few dollars and required for many other tasks which minimizes the expense. I agree with you in theory but in practicality?
Restricted poll times? The booths are open late and one can vote absentee if they want to or if they are worried about the time constraints. I can not speak to other states but I have been able to get my ballot online in my state for a number of years now. Such was not really an option when I retired and moved here. Things like state functions where just starting to go online eight years ago. Prior to that one had to call or write to request an application. It has never really been anything I have seen as prohibitive. There has to be a finite limit to the times the booths are open. Such needs to fit in with social expectations. Remediation is possible with absentee voting if such is a problem due to scheduling or physical limitations.
You have been here long enough to know that such behavior is not tolerated around here. You should feel bad for even suggesting such a thing. RTFA? No... We do not even read the summary half the time. We do not even read the comment we are replying to half the time. It is how we roll.