Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2018

You may have heard about the animated gif spam that's going around with "subliminal" advertising in it. I caught someone's blog who took it apart, frame by frame, recently, trying to figure out what was going on. Can't find that now, so the following will have to do:

tamingthebeast.net:

On opening the email, instead of the usual static .gif with text on it (which helps to evade spam filters); the .gif was animated. The first frame was set to around 1/10th of a second and simply had the words "buy" in large fonts in different colors scattered about the image at various angles. Certainly grabbed my attention, but not because I'm interested in stocks - it just was the flash effect.

Perhaps it was a poor attempt at subliminal advertising?

Finally got it today, as it somehow slipped through the spam filter, and it went through the flash as I started to hit "Junk". Would have gone into "junk" too if it hadn't been for the viral marketing via blogs that I'd accidentally caught wind of; the purple font was quickly recognizable. The companion viral response to this otherwise very plain piece of spam is, in itself, remarkable.

In fact it's the very non-subliminal -- may I say superliminal? -- part of the flash that seems to attract people to it like flies to flames. Ur, moths. We see and register the "BUY!"'s that are flying around. We see the manipulation and are intrigued. This is a "new" manipulation that some people find horribly interesting. Personally I don't.

What I find interesting is the spam-poetry again. Messages bypass spam filters through clever text, not because the message's gif holds text within the image and thereby bypassing OCR-spam detection mechanisms. Who is heaven's name is sending you a legitimate gif with text in email? The words "buy" or an image with text in it by itself are still spam. I guess it's a neat trick to hide the spam text in the image, but it's still the poetry that evades the filter. [Perhaps I should try slapping old poetry into emails with Viagara commercials and see how much slips through.]

He had a large fame, but it was subterranean.
Brusque letters from businessmen beginning, What do youguys think youre up to? I mean a moregeneral idealistic association, more spiels about freedom anddemocracy. Hes one of the very cleverest and most influential men in thewhole world of welfare-promotion!
Bitteryused to favor lynching agnostics and now favors lynchingsocialists.
Then theresthe class that gives from a kind of restless feeling that theyought to be useful. In all her dissertations occurred the face-saving phrases: Oh,just a second.
Its the deepest and richest mine in the country, and yet ithasnt hardly been prospected. It is a shame for women not to speak in thechurch. He thinks that having methere on the board as his stooge is enough. Im not going to work for Soapy Ernie in that factory forever.
Average American the happiest and prettiest human being that hadever existed. But what are you doing with these people, Gid?
It was interested in helping out fifty differentcharities.
It had kept him outof any race for the State Legislature, the national Congress.
Just let me speak of this,and then Ill shut up. Hes one of the very cleverest and most influential men in thewhole world of welfare-promotion!
Pathetic letters from old ladies about ancestral firsteditions of Robert J. Years of leadership and of oratory enabled Dr. They had a home now, and they were only a step or two from glory.
It was interested in helping out fifty differentcharities. Her only trouble is that she read her Scriptures wrong.
On the plaza of the deskwas one calla lily and a signed photograph of Lord Beaverbrook.
They had a home now, and they were only a step or two from glory. Trying to trap her own mother by saying things like that!

Thanks, email claiming to be from wty@johnwstiles.com. Beautiful. ;^)

I admit it. I hate high definition radio. I could change my mind, as it would appear HD radio could allow for more players in the same bandwidth, which could mean, ultimately, a lower price to enter the radio market. That's generally good.

This, though, is generally bad (from Popular Mechanics):

Currently, stations operating digitally are transmitting in hybrid mode. They're delivering both analog and digital programming by using unused space around the analog frequencies. This space originally was assigned by the FCC to protect against bleeding of the analog signal into adjacent frequencies. 'Those inefficiencies have improved over the years so that spectrum was able to be refarmed for use of digital transmissions,' Struble says.

When the day comes that there is no longer a need for the analog mode, broadcasters will be able to recapture that part of the spectrum and use it for multicasting

Clever rhetoric there. Hey, this hybrid stuff isn't really taking up any more bandwidth at all! It was extra fuzz around the old signal we're able to finally claim! A benefit! Continue listening to your old analog system; you lose nothing. HD radio is essentially recycling currently worthless space on your radio dial.

Then, in the Year 2000, Conan (meant to represent some future where you apparently no longer have a stake in legacy standards), and only when you (this is a royal you, btw) don't care about analog and it's now the trash, it will be recycled as well! Now the station can multicast more than one sort of content! Hooray!

I'm happy that AM radio isn't being forced out of the door by the government by a certain year, like I believe analog TV is, apparently so that they can shift TV's spectrum [for more cell phone space?]. Yet at the same time, I don't like this spiel where analog only goes away once "we" want it gone.

This is like the pots of money in the NC & SC "education" lotteries. Either you have a true education lottery, and the dough goes to public schools, from grammar on up, and, SURPRISE!, the old education funding gets shifted to, say, building roads for Wal-Mart [1], or you "fix" that problem by keeping public grammar and secondary education separate from lottery money, like SC &, I believe, NC have done. Now you use lottery money almost exclusively for universities, buying votes by routing this dough to scholarships for voting-age schmoes and voting-age parents and, what's more, using the lottery dough to fund research that, guess what, benefits those same corps that would have gotten dough from the "shifted" pots in scenario one.

I need to spend more time making that make sense, but read it four or five times and I think you'll get the drift. It's a bait and switch thanks to some fancy persuasive tactics. In the end, education-as-in-the-education-that-needs-improving-before-we-can-pretend-people-have-equal-opportunity my big ole butt.

HD radio, as presented above in Popular Mechanics uses the same appeal. HD only uses bandwidth not used now. But you'd better believe every-freakin-body in the radio industry, from poor AM stations that can't broadcast hifi music without HD and are getting knocked around by FM to Kenwood selling HD radio receivers for $500 -- yes, $500, and even then they require new "heads" in your car to hook up to -- to the gov't who can sell more bandwidth, want to push analog right out of the door. Goodbye $13 radio kits that don't require batteries that can pick up stations hundreds of miles away. Goodbye usefulness of millions of radios in homes today. Goodbye one hell of a broadcast network that we've spent the last hundred years building, all for a few [billion] bucks.

That, my friends, irks me. As in all cases of the failure of The Great Experiment of the United States, I suppose I'll simply have to make enough money to combat the problem, here by buying my own AM radio station and keep it analog. I'm a dreamer. That's no problem, right?

[1] Hey, Wal-Mart's only trying to make a buck, bless their hearts.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, September 28, 2006
Playlist: Microsoft Zune to cost $249, music to cost 99 cents from playlistmag.com: But there are a few key differences: Microsoft plans to use the same transaction system as Xbox Live, its video game console's online service, which will allow consumers to pay for music using prepaid cards they can buy in retail stores -- saving some the hassle of needing to use a credit card. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I see those iTunes prepaid cards everywhere, and you can buy virtual ones to send to your giftees via email as well. Paypal is another iTunes option. The Zune is interesting, and I like the FM tuner, I suppose, but I'm still not seeing many reasons it's an iPod "killer," other than marketing, of course. The possibility of a subscription service, an idea I don't like a whole lot, is a more important distinction, which Playlist covers a bit later in the piece. That the Zune will do both -- subscription and the "song-in-hand" iTunes model -- is the most remarkable take-home message. posted by ruffin at 9/28/2006 02:10:00 PM
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Expose is MDI Apple's been anti-multi document interface (MDI) forever. In MS Word, eg, on Windows, you'll have multiple documents open in windows that have a parent container window. Well, at least you did once upon a time, iirc. Apple doesn't like that, and the only place you've seen anything resembling them sanctioning its use was in their Java VM, and then only to make sure apps made with MDI (like in SQuirreL SQL, eg) would work without being rewritten. Expose, the fancy deal where you can click a button or key and see all the windows open on your machine, gives Macintosh MDI for the first time. There's an option to see all open windows belonging to the current app with Expose, which is, for all practical purposes, what MDI was trying to give you. You'll have every window sitting in a "parent" of sorts. Voila. There you have it, Macintosh copies Windows a few decades late. Take that, Mac zealots. Ouch. posted by ruffin at 9/26/2006 10:45:00 PM
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Friday, September 22, 2006
Macworld: News: BitTorrent takes on movie download rivals Do I buy DRM? IDGNS: What’s your view on DRM and how it will impact the movie download business? Navin: The bottom line is that DRM is bad for the content provider and it’s bad for the consumer, and the reason it’s being used today is because we’re in the very early stages of a new product cycle for the entertainment industry and they want to walk before they run. I think the future will not be marked by digital rights management. It will be marked by advertising-supported content that’s clear of DRM, because the content publisher wants it to be as widely distributed as possible and consumed over as many platforms as possible. And we hope to be part of that evolution, and to drive that evolution wherever we can. This seems a logic fallacy here... Proffered is some theoretical idea that would seem better than any existing option, but no method of getting from here to there is given. Boils down to ye olde theory:practice debate. If un-DRMed content that could hit every platform and still make the most money worked, well, sure, it'd happen. Problem is that, to date, it hasn't happened and I don't see any way of convincing companies to swap paradigms mid-stride (possibly because the theory isn't practical and would mean less money for those who adopt it?). I'd also say that less-than-perfect DRM is still very effective DRM. If I make it difficult enough for 80% of my target audience to ever get their hands on un-DRMed content, well, I bet I still make a ton of dough. It should also be noted that the leftover 20% is over-represented by the number of pirated downloads. Many of those people wouldn't have purchased the movie at any price, who in some cases might very well come into contact with embedded advertisements as an added bonus. So why not do both? Perhaps today's DRM is a dual-pronged approach. Seriously, though, however many music files being traded are un-DRM'd tracks from iTunes? I'm betting a negligible number, or at least one small enough that it doesn't impact profits as badly as the iTMS pumps them back up. It's a net gain, thanks to DRM. Perhaps also worth noting is the extreme change in programming required for embedded advertisement to work. Look at the Disney Channel; they've already mastered "advertising-supported content" embedded to the point that it can't be removed. I caught two episodes of the DoodleBops stuck at the doctor's recently. It's non-stop brand bombardment, evident in part by my remembering the name after having only seen an hour's worth of shows. The beginning is, I assume, always the same, in fact I believe likely a third of the show is the same episode to episode, including the intro and scene setup pieces. The intro makes a pretty big point of repeating the characters' names, quite clearly so that kids know who their favorite is (Thomas the Train is little different). The songs sung are essentially warm-ups for the Doodlebop concerts, following very clearly in the Wiggles and Barney's footsteps. Katie Couric's move to CBS was, in many ways, handled with very few variations on that theme. If this is the style DRMless distribution encourages -- because believe me, if they're conventional commercials in an open format, they'll be removed by the first schmoe that gets their hands on it -- I don't think I'm voting for it. It's a mistake to assume that the market is going to passively create worthwhile content that's freely accessible. If I've read Navin, apparently co-creator of BitTorrent, correctly, his community-straddling position (capitalism/consumerism and "openness") is an unsuccessful synthesis of both. Speaking of, if YouTube can provide crossplatform users with video they can watch, why can't CBS News? posted by ruffin at 9/22/2006 01:48:00 PM
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Why Google Checkout? Lookit there, Google is what Passport wished it'd become. Why Google Checkout?: Google Checkout is a checkout process that you integrate with your website, enabling your customers to buy from you quickly and securely, using a single username and password. And once they do, you can use Checkout to charge their credit cards, process their orders, and receive payment in your bank account. Makes me wonder if the viruses on Windows didn't cost it the ability to become the first Google, so to speak. People simply didn't trust Passport, afaict. Now Google is all about trust. Whether it should still be considered that way is a question for another day. posted by ruffin at 9/20/2006 02:46:00 PM
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Monday, September 18, 2006
Selling ads means losing your cachet Mac Rumors: Apple Selling Ads on iTunes? ... In a deal that should bring in several hundred million dollars off the bat, the company will run ads, most notably on its iTunes store. ... An AdAge article from April 2006 indicated that Apple was looking into publishing ads while users listen to podcasts: Apple's [April 2006] plans call for the ads to appear only in the lower-left corner of the iTunes library while users listen to podcasts from their computers rather than from portable devices. I think I said at some point that I'd never put ads on this blog. Surprisingly, many people have come to this blog to get some esoteric issue solved, like fixing their ArcIMS License Manager connection. I probably could have gotten .1% of them to click on some Google ad. This would have made me a high quality nickel. Yet I've thrown that nickel -- and the curiousity of seeing if anyone would actually click ads on this site -- away to keep my proverbial idealistic cachet. I may change my mind yet, but so far, cachet, and the fact that I said "No New Taxes," has kept 'em off. Apple's mini music store ad window in iTunes was bad enough. How long before iTunes becomes as tacky as the ad-supported version of Limewire? Look, you can't be the BMW of audio devices and paste sponsor stickers all over the car. You can't even slap on a Harley-Davidson emblem. No, then you're not tastefully cool, but another obvious sellout. And then so are the people using your products. Obviously being The [Capitalist] Man is not hip; subtly being The Man is. That's called "style." Don't alienate your mp3 users. You might just open the door for another player on the desktop, and iTunes will just be a way to move things to the iPod, until something better comes along. Aren't the relatively subtle arrows on each song (note how the number of visible arrows grew x2 in the latest version of iTunes?) enough? posted by ruffin at 9/18/2006 09:53:00 PM
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Re: How do you enable VNC from the command line I'm not sure it's worked for me yet, but it's a good thing to note, I suppose... Re: How do you enable VNC from the command line: i.e. this does the trick: `users='myadmin' sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users '$users' -privs -all -restart -agent -menu -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes -setvncpw -vncpw '$password'` The only question then is, what is $password? Through experimentation I found that at least for 10.4, ARD's VNC 'vncpw' argument is simply the password truncated to 8 characters and XORd with a 16 character fixed key (1734516E8BA8C5E2FF1C39567390ADCA), in hex. i.e. `$ perl -nwe 'BEGIN { @k = unpack 'C', pack 'H', '1734516E8BA8C5E2FF1C39567390ADCA'}; chomp; s/^(.{8})./$1/; @p = unpack 'C', $_; foreach (@k) { printf '%02X', $_ ^ (shift @p \|\| 0) }; print '\n'' hello 7F513D02E4A8C5E2FF1C39567390ADCA ^D` posted by ruffin at 9/18/2006 12:14:00 PM
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Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Well, it looks cool The new iPod Shuffle looks cool, but is it? I like small. I like clipable a lot. What's not to like? Well, it has a base now, which makes it more difficult to pair your Shuffle with your iBook or Macbook. It's also lost the USB connector in the process. Having recently misplaced my jumpdrive (which is driving me crazy), I was easily able to set aside some space on the Shuffle and pick right back up in the interim. That's a handy feature. Still, I really like that clip. Much nicer than carrying around the Shuffle in the pocket, and without the worry of having the earphones trash the Shuffle's innards while it's there. Yes, that happened to me, and I had to take the danged thing apart and solder some pieces back together. Not fun and, like my iBook whose hard drive I upgraded, the Shuffle is at least cosmetically a little worse for wear. posted by ruffin at 9/12/2006 03:13:00 PM
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24-inch iMac not^H^H^H^H as 3D-upgradable as you might think - Alpha Blog - alpha.cnet.com I believe CNet's writer may find himself eating the words I've emphasized, below: 24-inch iMac not as 3D-upgradable as you might think - Alpha Blog - alpha.cnet.com: So, sorry, would-be iMac 3D chip upgraders. You might be able to swap out MXM chips at home someday, but not now, and not on this iMac. If iMac users got Voodoo 2s for an unsupported, appendix-like Mezzanine slot for the first batch of iMacs (wonder if it's related to this?), smart money's probably on some niche company putting out an upgrade for what is an industry standard slot, regardless of how difficult it is to get to. I've wondered about cutting a hole in the case of my iBook to upgrade the hard drive. When I took my last iBook's case off to replace the hard drive, well, things didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked. Adding an easily accessible door to the general area of the card, though I wonder if it's covered cleverly by the monitor in this case, would be a neat hack. posted by ruffin at 9/12/2006 01:24:00 PM
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Monday, September 11, 2006
Apple's September 12th Media Event Roundup - Mac Forums Apple's September 12th Media Event Roundup - Mac Forums: Originally Posted by Chundles >> 10 hours? Luxury. I dream of being able to download 2GB in 10 hours. > It'll take me over 4 days. Yikes. It'd take me 1.13 hours. Maybe you can get a friend to call you and start reading off ones and zeros? And with that chuckle, it's well past time to go to bed. posted by ruffin at 9/11/2006 01:26:00 AM
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Thursday, September 07, 2006
Ah, that's why it's cheap Why is the new iMac $999? Because it's the one from the "Apple Education Store" they recently stopped selling to individuals. Intel GMA 950 graphics with 64MB of shared memory Yep, back into the retail "channel" it goes. Now we've got a complete line of video options on the iMac, from no real video card to [reportedly] an upgradable one. So though I've told some that I'd recommend this iMac to anyone with a copy of Windows for their next computer, I wouldn't any more. Intel integrated video means creeeeappy for games (though not a problem for OS X only users), and the built-in monitor sure isn't worth $400. Buy a Mac Mini if you want OS X, a MacBook if you want a portable, and buy an off-brand Alienware equivalent with an SLI motherboard and a dedicated video card if you game. Not that anyone cares, but I'm right, dang it. posted by ruffin at 9/07/2006 08:17:00 PM
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Attaboy, Apple. It's finally happened. the Mezzanine slot is back, but it's supported this time! Macsimumnews reports that the new 24' iMac incorporates a Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM) connector for its video card. The use of this standard connector potentially means that the video card in the newest iMac is upgradeable. Good job, Jobs. This is precisely what the iMac needed. Now RAM, processor (based on earlier reports of people saying the Mini has a sockets proc, at least), and video cards are upgradable, at least in the high end Mac. Truth told, other than hard drive space and buying a new optical drive, that's about all the internal upgrading I've ever needed to do (though admittedly my old StarMax has seen a USB, Firewire, and a few ethernet cards in its day). Now with dual core in the cheapest mini and upgradable video in the nicest iMac, Apple, for practical purposes, has a nice, continuous product line, without unecessarily constraining performance from any of its boxes. posted by ruffin at 9/07/2006 06:29:00 PM
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A Field Guide to Developers - Joel on Software Joel hasn't been doing as well as usual in his words of wisdom, but he picked things back up with his lastest post, A Field Guide to Developers - Joel on Software: Programmers have very well-honed senses of justice. Code either works, or it doesn't. There's no sense in arguing whether a bug exists, since you can test the code and find out. The world of programming is very just and very strictly ordered and a heck of a lot of people go into programming in the first place because they prefer to spend their time in a just, orderly place, a strict meritocracy where you can win any debate simply by being right. ... When a programmer complains about “politics,” they mean—very precisely—any situation in which personal considerations outweigh technical considerations. "Well-honed" seems to be a simple obfuscation of "idealistic," but I like the way he's thinking. Joel was a programmer, I believe, still does some hacking, and managed at Microsoft "back when." Now he owns a company. It's interesting to see how a once-programmer handles management issues where most companies seem to have the attitude, "Why couldn't I bring in a successful manager in any field and have them get my programming staff on track?" Better anything is better than crappy when it comes to managers (forgive my impressive word choice), but I know I prefered a manager to "got" programming, and they are few and far between. posted by ruffin at 9/07/2006 04:59:00 PM
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Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Subliminal spam advertising? - Marketing/Ecommerce Research You may have heard about the animated gif spam that's going around with "subliminal" advertising in it. I caught someone's blog who took it apart, frame by frame, recently, trying to figure out what was going on. Can't find that now, so the following will have to do: tamingthebeast.net: On opening the email, instead of the usual static .gif with text on it (which helps to evade spam filters); the .gif was animated. The first frame was set to around 1/10th of a second and simply had the words "buy" in large fonts in different colors scattered about the image at various angles. Certainly grabbed my attention, but not because I'm interested in stocks - it just was the flash effect. Perhaps it was a poor attempt at subliminal advertising? Finally got it today, as it somehow slipped through the spam filter, and it went through the flash as I started to hit "Junk". Would have gone into "junk" too if it hadn't been for the viral marketing via blogs that I'd accidentally caught wind of; the purple font was quickly recognizable. The companion viral response to this otherwise very plain piece of spam is, in itself, remarkable. In fact it's the very non-subliminal -- may I say superliminal? -- part of the flash that seems to attract people to it like flies to flames. Ur, moths. We see and register the "BUY!"'s that are flying around. We see the manipulation and are intrigued. This is a "new" manipulation that some people find horribly interesting. Personally I don't. What I find interesting is the spam-poetry again. Messages bypass spam filters through clever text, not because the message's gif holds text within the image and thereby bypassing OCR-spam detection mechanisms. Who is heaven's name is sending you a legitimate gif with text in email? The words "buy" or an image with text in it by itself are still spam. I guess it's a neat trick to hide the spam text in the image, but it's still the poetry that evades the filter. [Perhaps I should try slapping old poetry into emails with Viagara commercials and see how much slips through.] He had a large fame, but it was subterranean. Brusque letters from businessmen beginning, What do youguys think youre up to? I mean a moregeneral idealistic association, more spiels about freedom anddemocracy. Hes one of the very cleverest and most influential men in thewhole world of welfare-promotion! Bitteryused to favor lynching agnostics and now favors lynchingsocialists. Then theresthe class that gives from a kind of restless feeling that theyought to be useful. In all her dissertations occurred the face-saving phrases: Oh,just a second. Its the deepest and richest mine in the country, and yet ithasnt hardly been prospected. It is a shame for women not to speak in thechurch. He thinks that having methere on the board as his stooge is enough. Im not going to work for Soapy Ernie in that factory forever. Average American the happiest and prettiest human being that hadever existed. But what are you doing with these people, Gid? It was interested in helping out fifty differentcharities. It had kept him outof any race for the State Legislature, the national Congress. Just let me speak of this,and then Ill shut up. Hes one of the very cleverest and most influential men in thewhole world of welfare-promotion! Pathetic letters from old ladies about ancestral firsteditions of Robert J. Years of leadership and of oratory enabled Dr. They had a home now, and they were only a step or two from glory. It was interested in helping out fifty differentcharities. Her only trouble is that she read her Scriptures wrong. On the plaza of the deskwas one calla lily and a signed photograph of Lord Beaverbrook. They had a home now, and they were only a step or two from glory. Trying to trap her own mother by saying things like that! Thanks, email claiming to be from wty@johnwstiles.com. Beautiful. ;^) posted by ruffin at 9/05/2006 09:02:00 PM
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Monday, September 04, 2006
Popular Mechanics - Get Ready For High-Definition Radio I admit it. I hate high definition radio. I could change my mind, as it would appear HD radio could allow for more players in the same bandwidth, which could mean, ultimately, a lower price to enter the radio market. That's generally good. This, though, is generally bad (from Popular Mechanics): Currently, stations operating digitally are transmitting in hybrid mode. They're delivering both analog and digital programming by using unused space around the analog frequencies. This space originally was assigned by the FCC to protect against bleeding of the analog signal into adjacent frequencies. 'Those inefficiencies have improved over the years so that spectrum was able to be refarmed for use of digital transmissions,' Struble says. When the day comes that there is no longer a need for the analog mode, broadcasters will be able to recapture that part of the spectrum and use it for multicasting Clever rhetoric there. Hey, this hybrid stuff isn't really taking up any more bandwidth at all! It was extra fuzz around the old signal we're able to finally claim! A benefit! Continue listening to your old analog system; you lose nothing. HD radio is essentially recycling currently worthless space on your radio dial. Then, in the Year 2000, Conan (meant to represent some future where you apparently no longer have a stake in legacy standards), and only when you (this is a royal you, btw) don't care about analog and it's now the trash, it will be recycled as well! Now the station can multicast more than one sort of content! Hooray! I'm happy that AM radio isn't being forced out of the door by the government by a certain year, like I believe analog TV is, apparently so that they can shift TV's spectrum [for more cell phone space?]. Yet at the same time, I don't like this spiel where analog only goes away once "we" want it gone. This is like the pots of money in the NC & SC "education" lotteries. Either you have a true education lottery, and the dough goes to public schools, from grammar on up, and, SURPRISE!, the old education funding gets shifted to, say, building roads for Wal-Mart [1], or you "fix" that problem by keeping public grammar and secondary education separate from lottery money, like SC &, I believe, NC have done. Now you use lottery money almost exclusively for universities, buying votes by routing this dough to scholarships for voting-age schmoes and voting-age parents and, what's more, using the lottery dough to fund research that, guess what, benefits those same corps that would have gotten dough from the "shifted" pots in scenario one. I need to spend more time making that make sense, but read it four or five times and I think you'll get the drift. It's a bait and switch thanks to some fancy persuasive tactics. In the end, education-as-in-the-education-that-needs-improving-before-we-can-pretend-people-have-equal-opportunity my big ole butt. HD radio, as presented above in Popular Mechanics uses the same appeal. HD only uses bandwidth not used now. But you'd better believe every-freakin-body in the radio industry, from poor AM stations that can't broadcast hifi music without HD and are getting knocked around by FM to Kenwood selling HD radio receivers for $500 -- yes, $500, and even then they require new "heads" in your car to hook up to -- to the gov't who can sell more bandwidth, want to push analog right out of the door. Goodbye $13 radio kits that don't require batteries that can pick up stations hundreds of miles away. Goodbye usefulness of millions of radios in homes today. Goodbye one hell of a broadcast network that we've spent the last hundred years building, all for a few [billion] bucks. That, my friends, irks me. As in all cases of the failure of The Great Experiment of the United States, I suppose I'll simply have to make enough money to combat the problem, here by buying my own AM radio station and keep it analog. I'm a dreamer. That's no problem, right? [1] Hey, Wal-Mart's only trying to make a buck, bless their hearts. posted by ruffin at 9/04/2006 09:30:00 PM
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Another neat trick Here's a good way to list the files in a directory structure. Not quite as nice as MS-DOS' `tree`, but close. Re: list of files with full path: `ls -d -1 */` posted by ruffin at 9/04/2006 01:53:00 PM
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*I !<3 NIX** So I want to remove all the .jpgs from one dir on my Mac on down, including any folders lower in the hierarchy as well. In Windows, I'd use... `del .jpg /s` Easy. If I forget, and I do, I type a simple `help del` and I remember. How do you do it on NIX? The discussion of "experts" looking for the solution looks like this. That's not intuitive, folk. If usenet users, already a pretty seriously savvy subset of the PC using community, have that much trouble, something's screwy. Here's the easiest to remember solution for me from that thread: rm `find . -name '.abc'` If I forget, and I do, all I have to do is type `man rm` and I'm right back to Google, looking for something like this again. Crazy. posted by ruffin at 9/04/2006 01:15:00 PM
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Saturday, September 02, 2006
Old School VNC For any number of strange, idiosyncratic reasons, I finally set up OS9vnc on Max, my old StarMax 3000. Neat. Works flawlessly [so far]. Still seems an awfully bizarre thing to do, but I'm happy it works so well. posted by ruffin at 9/02/2006 11:14:00 AM
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