flatbield @ furrowsofar @beehaw.org

Interests: News, Finance, Computer, Science, Tech, and Living

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759

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yes. Ham is about playing with tech, learning skills, and building a social network all before the internet existed. It was also considered a means if communication in a national emergency and presumably a base of skills. It was not intended to be a service delivery platform.

Plus as the post says, the security apparatus does not universally like the use of encryption by the public. This is a fact not a conspiracy theory. Liked the way the poster said that.

Frankly do not agree with your assessment especially about Ukraine. Russia still retains maximal aims. Ukraine still retains the ability to militarily defeat Russia but the west has been a day late and a dollar short. Manpower. That is a Ukranian political decision. Ukrainian losses have been not that large compared to their population. Similar in ratio to Russian losses to their population.

Gaza is harder. No good solution. The residents of Gaza choose this by choosing Hamas as their government and starting a war with Israel. Iran is similarly responsible.

Edit: The amount of money the US has put into either conflicts is minimal, had been spend largely in the US, and has no relation to social funding.

Thanks. Interesting.

It is easy in itself. Like on Debian, just go into synaptic and install or use apg-get. Also if you can find a good how to to just follow.

The thing about QEMU is that it has a blithering number of options and reading the man page to get an idea is a major time sink. The other challenge is deciding how you run it and interface with it via the GUI, and file system. You can setup but there are various choices. Also it integrates with other useful commands too -- the commands to qcow manage images is a separate command. Or you can work with direct images and use dd, loopback, mount, etc to work with them. The nice thing is you get great Linux integration. The bad thing (or maybe good thing?) is helps to be good with man pages, bash scripting, command line, processes, networking, routing, and the Linux system.

So do not think of it like an OS setup though you will probably do an OS setup in a VM, but qemu just a complicated command. In the end you'll want to setup a folder tree, and some scripts to handle various things so it's baked in. I use it that way, for flexibility but VirtualBox is much easier since there are menus for or that.

You could use cinnamon. Yes gnome tech based but quite different. I use that on my workstation and leave Gnome for my media center and laptop.

What licensing and cost is needed for the links? I assume one just cannot set it up free and no paperwork?

Thanks.

Yes I have a brother. Mostly good. Does have issues with some PS where I get offending commamd was... Also cannot really update the firmware without windows which sucks. Mine is a multifunction printer but I just scan to my phone or a USB. Never tried to connect scanning to Linux.

The challenge is the physical layer. The how you send the physical signal is where the cost, the telecoms, and regulation steps in. The rest use what we have. Linux and IP stack.

You could for example become a ham radio operator and IP can be used there but you could only talk to other hams and encryption is not allowed plus other rules.

You could use unregulated band used by wifi routers and build a mesh but the range would be small and there are regulations.

You could lay fiber but you'd have to have access to the utility right of way.

You could setup a WiMax like system or point to point microwave links but you would have to have access to the spectrum to do that which costs money and has regulations.

It goes on and on. The short answer is almost anything is not allowed without money and tons of hoops. That is why we have telecoms and how they protect themselves.

I know during COVID I tried Jitsi Meet eith a friend and we had quality issues using the FSF server. Zoom was way better. Have not conferenced since then. Plus way more people have Zoom installed, tested, and know how to use it.

Also Zoom, people can dial in by phone. My wife conferences with a friend where that is required.

Would prefer a FOSS alternative. Sadly above is our experience which shows why Zoom is way more popular.

Do this mean that we no longer have to give our connections our phone number? Never liked the phone number requirement.

Maybe https://sfconservancy.org. is worth a look. Member services include https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services. A little outside their central focus but might fit to the extent you provide services based on free software. They also may have other ideas.

I am guessing but probably about half of the cost of rent is related to true costs and the other half related to the financial mumbo jumbo of capital opportunity cost.

Just based on my experience owning our house.

Even if you do pay cash, housing is expensive. Our little house in a not so good part of town costs about $25K a year. About half that is out of pocket and the other half is capital opportunity cost. One reason many people carry mortgages longer then they need to is the capital opportunity cost. My wife and I both rented until about age 45 and to our surprise we were just barely able to do cash at that point so we did.

The other issue at the moment is high interest rates. Mortgages look less good compared to cash. The other issue of course is the high market price of homes as I said previously. That drives both mortgage and capital opportunity cost and is not directly related to true society wide cost, but is more of a financial mumbo jumbo thing.

Buy your own house or condo for cash. Then you pay maintenance and taxes only. Done.

The big issure is the high cash price of housing. The true total society cost of housing per unit per year is actually the annual maintenance cost plus the cost of new construction per year divided by the total number of units. This is presumably less then the cash price.

General cash price is pretty close to the cost of building a new house. I guess you could annuitize that over a life time to get a set of annual payments and compare. Or you could go the other way and calculate the present value of the annual per unit cost and compare to cash price.

It is sad, but most people seem to go to school for certification not learning. Use to grade when in grad school... the lazy sloppy work was nuts. Working for a company... the terrible writing some people do even with advanced degrees.

This is the reason I balk at personifiing these things with human terms. It sounds cool but it is both inaccurate and misleading especially in the hands of the media and the general public.

I am not sure why anyone cares. As far as Reddit, I moved on last year.

The FOSS stuff, there is hope. As long as it can be built from source, the bug can be fixed. Some software is easy to build, some is not. The bigger issue is it will not incorporate new features and later standards.

Also the alternative to site is a little premature in declaring things dead. Not all software needs to have continuous updates.

Libreoffice has an HTML mode and also you can take any document and save as HTML.

Another way is use Markdown.

Another is to use a template editor like Bluefish. This is coding HTML but more easily.

Libreoffice has an HTML mode. Seamonkey has a basic graphical editor. Bluefish is a text editor with HTML templates. Useful but not a graphical editor.

Here are a list of Dreameeaver alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-dreamweaver/

Here are Front Page alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-office---frontpage/

Most of the graphical page layout programs have been discontinued or at least not maintained. BlueGriffon, NVU, and Kompozer were examples. I do not know if they are still usable.

Edit: You might look at Silex. It seems to be the only FOSS graphical editor with much popularity that is still supported. I have not used.