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Firearms & Hunting
Contact Us
Maine's Largest Selection of Firearms!
At Willey's Sport Center, we know the outdoors! We have been in the sporting business for over 86 years, and all of our staff are outdoor enthusiasts. If you have questions, we have answers!
We have the largest selection of new, used, and antique guns in Maine, and we buy and trade firearms. We also specialize in out of business liquidations, estate sales, and collection purchases. Need ammunition? We have a full selection of ammo from the most common to the hard to find! Our scope selection is abundant and we also carry the rings and bases to mount any scope to any gun.
We carry a "complete" line of open water fishing and hunting supplies from flies to knives and everything in between. Come in and look around, we're confident you'll find what you're looking for!
We will buy your gun collection! From one gun to 500 guns or more! Give us a call or come see us!
Click to visit the
Maine Department of
Inland Fisheries and Wildlife
Click to visit the
Maine Professional
Guides Association
Click to visit the
Sportsman's Alliance of Maine
Be sure to visit our other business!
Copyright © 2020
Willey's Enterprises
Website design and hosting provided by PHD Consulting, a Maine company.


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Please Note: Special prices only apply to online orders.
Special prices are not available in store or at our Fisherman's wharf market location.
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Introducing the all new iJDMTOY Mercedes-Benz Style High Power LED Daytime Running Lights Kit to be installed as grill lights or bumper lights as DRL driving lights.
The European style 5-LED daytime driving lights will give you the look of an authentic Mercedes-Benz E Class, S Class, or Porsche Carrera.
These high power LED DRL have a slim design and relay harness for easy wiring.
We took some pictures, here you go!
Featured product: Mercedes Style LED Daytime Running Lights
For more product pictures, please visit our Pictures and Video Gallery.
You can also find useful information on iJDMTOY Tech Support, Installation and DIY Guides as well.
Brought to you by iJDMTOY.com, the one stop store for all your Super Bright LED Car Light needs.


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Ok, this may sound like an odd request, but I was wondering (after googling this for a long time) if it is possible to add new Start Menu Items, where My Documents, My Computer, My Pictures, and the rest of those folders are. I know I can redirect the My Documents to any folder I want to, but that doesn't solve my problem because I, from time to time, need access to My Documents and would prefer to just click that folder.
I am running Windows XP SP2. Any help would be appreciated.


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I caught about 30 films at TIFF, and will be writing a piece on the festival for the next issue of LOLA. Meanwhile, here's a quick personal summary evaluation:
Far From Vietnam (Marker/Godard/Varda/Resnais/Ivens/Klein/Lelouch, France, 1967)
Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor/Paravel, France/UK/USA)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami, Japan/France)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA)
Passion (Brian De Palma, France/Germany)
Barbara (Christian Petzold, Germany)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Tabu (Miguel Gomes, Portugal)
Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)
Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, UK)
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK)
The Girl from the South (José Luis Garcia, Argentina)
Nights with Theodore (Sébastien Betbeder, France)
When Night Falls (Ying Lang, China)
Walker (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan)
Fascinating, but I had reservations:
The Last Time I Saw Macao (Rodrigues/da Mata, Portugal)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, USA)
Still pondering:
Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz, France/Chile)
The Capsule (Athena Rachel Tsangari, Greece)
Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, Israel)
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, USA)
Gebo and the Shadow (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)
The Tortoise, An Incarnation (Girish Kasaravalli, India)
Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, UK)
All That You Possess (Bernard Émond, Canada)
Links to recent reads:
-- For your TIFF coverage needs: Cinema Scope magazine; David Hudson's Keyframe Daily; MUBI Notebook; and Blake Williams' TIFF super-post. Also: David Bordwell's account of attending industry and filmmaker panels at the festival.
-- Great amounts of reading: new issues of Screening the Past (helpfully rounded up by Catherine Grant); Cinema Scope; Film Comment; Senses of Cinema; Screen Machine; and World Picture.
-- Far From Vietnam (1967), the single best film I encountered at TIFF, is notoriously hard to see. I knew this going in, resolved to take notes to keep the film in my memory, then got caught up in its riveting, heterogeneous images and quick pace. And so I'm glad to discover Thomas Waugh's visual essay at Jump Cut that brings the images back to me.
-- Jonathan Rosenbaum on Ray Carney in a 2001 piece for Cineaste which reviewed five books on John Cassavetes: "...no critical monopoly can ever be healthy, no matter how conscientious, thoughtful, or thorough the monopolist."
-- At Art of the Title: an interesting interview-post with video clips on the title sequences of David Fincher's films.
-- Several recent reviews by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at MUBI.
-- Mark Le Fanu on Boris Barnet at the BFI website.
-- Phil Coldiron's piece at Moving Image Source: "Shooting on 16-millimeter in a digital age".
-- Andrew Klevan and Alex Clayton respond to a negative review by Warren Buckland of their film criticism essay collection. Buckland's review is unavailable to read for free online.
-- An essay on cinephilia by Sam Roggen at the Belgian website Photogénie.
-- An interview with Brian De Palma on "the art, the technology, and the ethics of watching".
-- via Matt Zoller Seitz: a blog post comparing the images of Ozu and Edward Hopper.
-- At Film International: Gwendolyn Audrey Foster on capitalism, gluttony, hoarding, waste, excess consumption and film.
-- Just discovered This Long Century, a fascinating website that collects, from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians, etc., "such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work."
pic: Far from Vietnam (1967).


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Though she wore long sleeves, Jean Driscoll's muscular arms were evident as she confidently gripped the handrims of her wheelchair. She hasn't competed professionally in years, but Driscoll clearly maintains her athletic physique, as well as her drive for success.
The seven-time winner of the Boston Marathon in the women's wheelchair division visited the Illinois State Military Museum in Springfield on July 19 to raise money for a project benefiting severely disabled veterans attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Currently serving as assistant dean of advancement at UIUC's College of Applied Health Sciences, Driscoll was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame earlier this month. The 45-year-old retired wheelchair athlete holds two Olympic medals and 12 medals – including five gold medals - in the Paralympic Games. She also holds several records, including the world record for the 10,000-meter (6.2 miles) track event set at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the fastest finish of the Boston Marathon in the women's wheelchair division set in 1990.
As part of her job at UIUC, Driscoll works with the university's program that provides housing and supportive services for students with disabilities that impede their ability to live independently. The university seeks to expand that program to include severely disabled military veterans.
"We have service men and women who have put their lives on the line, and they're coming back with new bodies and a new normal," Driscoll said. "We want to serve those who have served us. … We want to empower them and help them see that there is a bright future despite their injuries."
There are an estimated 250,000 veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with severe disabilities that require them to have daily help from a personal assistant, Driscoll said.
The proposed Center for Wounded Veterans in Higher Education will feature 12 to 14 apartment-style "suites" specially outfitted for disabled student veterans with technology like automatic doors, buttonless elevators and overhead body lifts that can assist a person moving from room to room.
The center would also offer counseling, career services, physical therapy and other support services to veterans and their families. It would be located at the university's campus in Urbana, Driscoll said, but she hopes the university's campuses in Springfield and Chicago follow suit, along with universities around the nation.
The Center will cost an estimated $12 million, Driscoll said, adding that $6 million has been pledged by the Chicago-based Chez Family Foundation. The university must raise another $3 million before beginning construction.
Driscoll says her own experiences help her identify with those seeking independence despite a disability.
"As a person with a disability, I came to the University of Illinois and it changed my life," Driscoll said. "There are things that I didn't know and understand about opportunities that existed. All of a sudden, you get around other people and see what's possible, and it's invigorating."
Driscoll notes that having a disability doesn't define who a person is, a point hammered home for her by reading Christopher Reeve's 1998 book, Still Me.
"I love that title, because in the midst of all that injury, deep inside, it's still his same thoughts, his same soul, his same likes and dislikes," Driscoll said. "I know that even with the veterans who have head injuries, it's still them. They're still inside, even if they're not able to express themselves in the same way. These are still the same people who want the same things out of life, the same hopes and dignities. It's right that we give back to them when they have given so much of themselves."
For more information, visit woundedvetcenter.ahs.illinois.edu.
Contact Patrick Yeagle at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Crisis in the Black Community
It was former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) who first said, "What's the use in being Irish if you don't know someday the world will break your heart." He said that when JFK was assassinated. And it fell to Irishman Moynihan in 1965 to break the news that a 25 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate in the black community was a harbinger of social disaster. Moynihan's report on black families was shouted down by liberal social theorists then. They accused him of "blaming the victim."
Shelby Steele, a black scholar, captured the 1960s mindset among liberal theorists: "Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the 'imperialism' of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil."
Thus, for liberals, concentrating on mundane matters like family formation seemed to be "selling out" to bourgeois values.
Dr. Patrick Fagan directs the Family Research Council's Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI). Pat was born and educated in Ireland. He came to America with a passion to help the family – all families. Like Moynihan, he has a special concern for black families. This is where the crisis of family breakdown is most severe.
Fagan's latest MARRI study, "The Annual Report on Family Trends (2011)," tells us why. For example, only 16 percent of black children aged 17 in Washington, D.C. have been raised by a mother and father who are married. By contrast, in largely white, mostly Mormon Utah, 59 percent of black children grow up in intact families. All other figures range between these two extremes.
The numbers per thousand for live births, abortions and miscarriages for 2005, the most recent reported, should shock us. The rates per thousand unmarried white women were a total of 76 pregnancies resulting in 43 live births, 22 abortions and 11 miscarriages. The rates per thousand unmarried black women, were a total of 150 pregnancies, resulting in 68 live births, 62 abortions, and 20 miscarriages.
Thus, the abortion rate among unmarried black women is more than three times that of unmarried white women. It should also be noted that states like New York, Massachusetts and California provide state funding for abortions. These states have large concentrations of black people. In New York City, for example, a recent study shows that six of every ten pregnancies of black women end in abortion.
Dr. Fagan's MARRI studies show convincingly that the more young people have sex outside of marriage, the less likely they are to marry, and if they marry, the more likely they are to divorce. Thus, government support for Planned Parenthood, whose primary goal is to facilitate and foster sexual activity by minors and young adults, seems like bad social policy.
Planned Parenthood, of course, wants to work without parental knowledge or consent. A generation ago, liberals in Congress shouted down the Reagan administration's attempt to force Planned Parenthood to give parental notice. And it was only parental notice – not even consent – that would be required when minor children were being plied with federally-funded contraceptives.
Marriage may be the prime mover in family income statistics. TIME Magazine last fall linked up with the Pew Foundation to poll Americans' attitudes toward marriage. They reported that in 1960, the median household income for married adults was only 12 percent higher than for singles. But by 2008, the married households had a startling 41 percent higher income than the unmarried.
TIME therefore concedes that if you're married, you're more likely to be well off.
Thus, anything that threatens marriage also threatens the material well-being of those most vulnerable in society. This means, especially, children. While the TIME Pew survey found Americans broadly tolerant of differing lifestyles, it said Americans still overwhelmingly favor marriage for child-rearing. More than three-quarters of respondents say children need a mother and father.
In a recent interview with former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, scholar Allen Guelzo reported on a little-noted phenomenon from 1866. Thousands more marriages were suddenly registered in Tennessee. That's because thousands of former slaves walked hundreds of miles to make their marriages legal.
What hope and what change those barefooted marchers brought about. In a first act of freedom, they committed to one another in marriage. That's a remarkable statement about the sanctity of the home from men and women who, due to slavery, had lost so many loved ones for so long.
Their example still resonates today. These brave freedmen marched out of slavery to honor and cherish marriage. May we emulate them, not forsake them.


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MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Commerce
Commerce has to be the oldest business model. Sell something to someone. Or maybe it was barter back then. In any case, ecommerce revenues topped $200bn in the US in 2011 and are growing at close to 10% annually. Global ecommerce revenues are at least double that, maybe as much as $500bn depending on who you ask. So selling something to someone online is a big business and getting bigger.
Retailing is by far the largest component of the online commerce market. Retailing is buying a product at wholesale and selling it to the customer at a markup. Retailing involves inventory. You stock up on inventory so you can provide the goods quickly to the customer.
Amazon is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon's revenues in the past four quarters were approximately $55bn. Clearly some of that revenue is non-retailing but let's assume their retailing revenues are about $50bn annually. They are roughly 10% of the global ecommerce market.
Retailing is a tough business. The difference between what you buy the product for at wholesale and sell it at retail is called your gross margin. Amazon's gross margin ranges between 20% and 25% depending on what time of year it is. The holiday quarter brings the lowest gross margins because retail makes up a larger perecent of revenues. At Amazon's size, a 25% gross margin turns into a lot of money. But a smaller online retailer can really struggle at these margins. Let's imagine a retailer of bicycles on the Internet does $50mm in revenues. That sounds great. But that means that only $10mm to $12mm a year actually stays in the business. The rest goes out to the bicycle manufacturers. And then the retailer has to pay for the website, the traffic acquisition, the staff to operate the business and a lot more. Pre-tax margins for online retailers will typically be in the sub 10% range, often less than 5%. To put that in context, the bicycle online retailer that generates $50mm in sales will keep a couple million pre-tax at the end of the year. It's a business for sure but not an easy one.
The reason that online retailing is so tough is that it is hard to differentiate one retailer from another. You want a new mountain bike? Go to Google and see what's out there.
Retailing has always relied on location to provide some margin protection. There is no "location" on the Internet other than SEO. So gross margins online are going to be lower than they are in the real world. And on top of that, you have the capital outlays required to stock up on inventory and the markdown costs associated with getting out of unsold inventory. And then there are the shipping costs which increase the price to the customer unless you are willing to eat them.
I have never invested in online retailing. I don't like the economics of this business even though it is a huge market.
Beyond retailing, there are a number of other ways to do commerce on the Internet. The next is marketplaces. Marketplaces are places where buyers and sellers come together to transact. Marketplaces have always existed in the offline world. It turns out that the Internet is a terrific place to create marketplaces. And they have much better economics. There is no gross margin for the marketplace operator, just a transaction fee. There is no inventory. There are no shipping costs. All of those costs are born by the seller. I have invested in quite a few online marketplaces. I love the economics of these businesses. I plan to write an entire post in this series on peer to peer business models and marketplaces will be a large component of that post, so I will move on.
One way to get past the gross margin and differentiation problem on the Internet is to make all the goods you sell yourself. This is called "vertically integrated retailing" and it is a growing trend in online commerce. A great example of this model is Warby Parker which makes and sells a line of fashion eyeglasses. Warby Parker has no stores (at least they didn't when they started out). The Internet is their store. Vertically integtrated retailing has better economics because your products aren't commoditized by Google and the other search engines. Customers seeking your products must come to your website to purchase them. But these businesses have other issues. Building a brand is tough, particularly from a standing start. Manufacturing, most likely overseas, can be a challenge. The capital costs remain high because you still need to stock up on inventory. And you can face markdowns if your SKUs go out of style. Although I like this model much better than straight up retailing, I have never invested in this model either. The Gotham Gal has made a few investments in this sector though.
Another flavor of retailing is flash sales and daily deals. This is not a new concept on the Internet. There have always been clearance sales in the retailing world. But the Internet brings new tools to drive immediacy and rapid transactions. A french startup called Vente-Privee brought the concept of the flash sale to the Internet over ten years ago and it has been adopted widely across the globe, particularly in the past five years. Flash sales have better economics than traditional retailing. They are often acquiring the product at discounted prices. The inventory costs are lower because they blow out of the product quickly. And there is no competing for the buyer's loyalty on Google every day. Flash sales sites leverage mailing lists to bring their customers back again and again. The issue with flash sales is customer burn out. It is difficult to maintain a vibrant flash sale business over many years.
Auctions are another way to drive commerce online. eBay is the canonical company in this category. The nice thing about auctions is they leverage a set time frame to drive toward a clearing price. It is game of sorts and can be quite addicting and engaging. Auctions work particularly well in marketplaces where there are unique items to be bought and sold. eBay's gradual adoption of the "buy it now" model suggests that there are limits to the auciton model at scale and that consumers prefer a straight up retail model because of its simplicity. I suspect that auctions make up a substantially smaller percentage of online commerce revenues than they did ten years ago.
The revenue model hackpad includes a number of other forms of online commerce which I am not going to dive into in this post. If you have questions about any of them, I would be happy to take them in the comments.
In summary, commerce represents the largest and most common online revenue model. But it is not an easy one to execute profitably. It lends itself to commoditization and margin compression in most cases and the economies go to scale players like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. While there has been substantial venture capital investment in this sector, particularly in recent years, it is not a sector that I like very much, other than marketplaces which to me are really peer to peer businesses. I will cover them more in a few weeks.


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KDE Announces 4.9 Beta2
Today KDE released the second beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.9 will include the following and more:
More improvements can be found in the 4.9 Feature Plan. As with any large number of changes, we need to give 4.9 a good testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and our user's user experience when they get the update. If you want to make a difference, check out the Testing Initiative.
Testing effort status
Since the Beta 1 release, the QA and Testing Team so far opened or confirmed 101 bugs reports and 33 of those are already closed. Regressions especially are targeted to be fixed. New people joined the team and are working enthusiastically in testing, triaging and even patching! You can join too, we are available on IRC Freenode in the #kde-quality channel.
By Anne-Marie Mahfouf at Wed, 2012/06/13 - 7:12pm
File | Open
Was the "use the Dolphin2 engine to display the File | Open and File | Save dialogs" feature dropped?
By Ernesto Manríquez at Thu, 2012/06/14 - 11:51pm
Feature is not planned for 4.9
This feature has not been planned for 4.9 and personally I think it would not be very effective to implement this before Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 have been released.
By Peter Penz at Fri, 2012/06/15 - 8:39am


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We exchange links with quality Boating, Fishing & Outdoor related websites. To qualify for a link exchange your site must meet the following minimum criteria:
NJ Saltwater Fisherman NJ Saltwater Fishing Website, Containing NJ Fishing Forums and Saltwater Fishing News and Information.
HTML Code
After our link is LIVE in your site send us an e-mail with the URL of the page where our link has been added and your link information (title, URL, description)..


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The "sequester" – mindless, across-the-board spending cuts designed purposefully to be abhorrent to both political parties – now seems likely to go into effect on March 1. If not reversed, we will see the degrading of all government services from food inspection to airport controls, as mass furloughs – 20-30 day forced absences without pay – shudder agencies.
The sequester cuts added to spending cuts and tax increases already scheduled will slow growth and cost jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office and most economic analysis. Government austerity has already contributed to the worst recovery in post-World War II history. In Europe, austerity has driven the economies back into recession, with the countries enforcing the harshest cuts suffering the most.
Why would the U.S. repeat this folly, despite warnings from the International Monetary Fund and Federal Reserve officials? Every calamity has many authors – Obama's premature turn to deficit reduction in 2009, the Tea Party zealots, a hapless and clueless Republican congressional leadership and more.
Pete Peterson's Mighty Wurlitzer
One major contribution comes from the money and monomania of Pete Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire who has committed about half a billion bucks rousing hysteria about deficits and debt. On Thursday, The Nation magazine and the Center for Media and Democracy are releasing an expose of Peterson and his latest front, the Fix the Debt coalition, with a new resource detailing the background at the center's SourceWatch.org.
Ironically, Peterson never raised a murmur about the housing bubble or the Wall Street wilding or the global trade imbalances that eventually blew up the economy, led to the Great Recession.
Peterson, Nixon's former Secretary of Commerce, says that he "has been wailing about this (debt and deficits) since 1980."
Peterson made his billions on Wall Street, taking the private equity firm Blackstone Group public, after benefiting from the obscene "carried interest tax deduction" that allows hedge fund billionaires to pay lower tax rates than their chauffeurs. (His former partner, Stephen Schwartzman, famously labeled the effort to end this obscenity as a war, the equivalent of "when Hitler invaded Poland.")
Peterson has three relentless harangues. First that the pillars of family security – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – pose a "catastrophic threat" to the country must be cut deeply. Peterson scorns Social Security and Medicare as providing "a publicly subsidized vacation" for "the last third or more of one's adult life."
Second, Peterson wants to move from income and corporate taxes to far more regressive consumption taxes. If he could, he'd eliminate corporate and income taxes and replace them with sales and gas and sin taxes, with adjustments to "protect the poor." At a time of extreme Gilded Age inequality, this is a recipe for hiking taxes on the middle class while lowering them on the rich.
Finally, Peterson has been warning that deficits and debt would cause a "Pearl Harbor moment" for years. Ironically, he never raised a murmur about the housing bubble or the Wall Street wilding or the global trade imbalances that eventually blew up the economy, led to the Great Recession. (He got his money out early.) Nor did the fact that the collapse came when the deficit was less than 2 percent of gross domestic product and the debt to GDP ratio was falling cause any change in his views. Instead, he has sought to use the crisis to force through his utterly unpopular views.
Peterson has thus far committed about $500 million of his fortune to the campaign on deficits, paying for a mighty Wurlitzer of propaganda.
He has funded ersatz national "town meetings," sprinkled think tanks right, center and left with grants, sponsored national conferences and events. He's seeded what the National Journal calls "a loose network of deficit hawk organizations that seem independent but that all spout the Peterson-sanction messages" on deficits – including the Concord Coalition, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, America Speaks, and Comeback America.
Never Miss a Beat.
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He launched his own news service – The Fiscal Times – feeding articles to increasingly cash-strapped newspapers. He purchased both ad campaigns and the tendentious "I.O.U.S.A" documentary that received national screening. He sponsored bipartisan commissions to develop debt reduction plans, including partnering with and helping to staff and promote the President's "bipartisan commission," known for the co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles.
The Drumbeat $500 Million Can Buy
Bowles and Simpson serve as co-chairs and co-founders of Peterson's latest front, the Fix the Debt Coalition, which rounded up 127 CEOs and a $60 million budget, retaining at least four major public relation firms, to drive the campaign for a "grand bargain."
Despite the consultants, "Fix" has exhibited a hilariously tin ear. They trotted out Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein to lecture Americans on "lowering their expectations" and accepting less in Social Security and Medicare. Who better to argue for "shared sacrifice" than the head of a Wall Street firm that helped blow up the economy and got bailed out by taxpayers while its leaders pocketed the millions they made along the way?
Blankfein was followed by David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, calling on Americans to be responsible about funding our public pension plan. Who more qualified, as the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out in a scathing report, than a CEO with $78 million dollar personal retirement plan tucked away, while his company's employee pension plan is underfunded by $2.8 billion?
But the egregious gaffes aren't as telling as the incessant drumbeat that $500 million can buy. So last week, Fix the Debt helped trot out the tireless minstrels of austerity, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, to issue dire warnings once more of the damnation to come from deficits, while peddling a new "bipartisan" plan on deficit reduction.
This plan called for even more deficit reduction over 10 years than the last plan the co-chairs promoted. (There was never a Simpson-Bowles commission plan, since the co-chairs' draft was rejected by the commission.) Instead of a one-to-one ratio of new revenue to spending cuts, the co-chairs now call for three times as much in spending cuts than in increased revenue.
But they stayed true to the Peterson principles. They would raise the eligibility age for Medicare and the retirement age for Social Security, reducing that "paid vacation." They'd cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. Tax reform would close loopholes – no doubt hitting employer-based health care plans – but use the money largely to lower top tax rates for individuals and corporations. And they call for deeper ceilings for cuts in domestic and military spending, ducking the question of what programs would take the hit.
Get The Focus Right
Following this advice would surely weaken the already faltering recovery and cost jobs. It could easily drive the economy back into recession. Simpson and Bowles and the Peterson claque ignore the fact that the deficit is already falling faster than any time since the demobilization after World War II. They admit that soaring health care costs are what drive the scary long-term debt projections. But they fail to note that the rise of these costs has already slowed. The Congressional Budget Office has already reduced the projected costs of Medicare over the next decade by more than the cuts demanded in the original Simpson-Bowles report.
What we need is a focus on putting people back to work, and a strategy to make this economy work for working people. And continued efforts to fix our health care system – starting with using Medicare's purchasing power to lower prescription drug prices, or by setting up a public option in Obamacare to compete with private insurers and limit their rip-offs.
Instead, Pete Peterson's $500 million has helped to focus America on how to "fix the debt" rather than how to fix the economy and put people to work. And he's redoubling his efforts to make America's most vulnerable – its seniors, its disabled, and its retired veterans – pick up the tab for cleaning up Wall Street's mess. And if he gets his way and forces a "grand bargain" and even harsher austerity, his $500 million just may end up purchasing a new recession.


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Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of image hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.
Okay, so let's suppose you've gotten your hands on something fun, but slow — slow like 133Mhz or so, with maybe 64Mb of memory and a teeny 4Gb hard drive, and no video card to speak of. Maybe the GTK2 rank-and-file is just to sluggish, and even GTK1.2 seems a tad … laggy. Well, if you're convinced you still don't want to resort to console applications (which is really what you should do) there is one final "layer" of applications that might be useful to you.
If GTK1.2 was ugly, X-based applications are almost too hideous to look at. I can still remember my first reaction to an X-application — my therapist is still making money off that episode.
But, as I mentioned once before, you're not without a few last-ditch options for machines that just don't have the muscle for anything else, and you absolutely refuse to go commando … I mean, command-line. 😳
Here's a glimpse of the beast, just so you know if you want to read any further:
Ah, that's a beauty, now isn't it? How very … very … 1996? Is that a four-color desktop I see there? Ecch.
Window manager note: Amiga fans might enjoy tinkering with amiwm, which makes your desktop look like a workbench. If you don't get the word play there, you probably never owned an Amiga. In that case, disregard. Move along, nothing to see here. … 🙂
One last confession: Some of these aren't "strictly" X-based, meaning they use slightly different toolkits or window libraries, instead of the old Athena widget set. So if you see one pulling in the Motif libraries, don't freak out. It's about as fast, and about as ugly. It's not bait-and-switch, I swear.
Okay, let's get started. As I mentioned in the GTK1.2 essay, I have four key components to a desktop, and unfortunately, there seems to be one missing from the X-based rank: a browser. I can't really find anything that measures up as a browser that uses X-, Motif- or similar-toolset. I might be overlooking something, but I think if you're going to get a functional browser, you're either going to use elinks, or links2 or Dillo. Not that there's anything wrong with those. Even elinks is a masterful way to surf. 🙂
But it would be nice to find something that used this godawful appearance to manage its interface while it gave you a speedy browsing alternative. Like before, if you know of one, please tell.
Now that that's out of the way, here's the good news: There are quite a few options for old machines that fall in this bracket. (Did you know I was going to say that?) The difference between X-based applications and GTK1.2, from my perspective, is that most software that started out at GTK1.2 probably was rewritten to make the leap to GTK2 at some point in the last six years or so (kind of like Beaver, if you want to see an example). That's only natural; a program with a solid user base is going to take the time and get enough support to start with a new toolkit.
On the other hand, X-based stuff seems to have trickled down to nothing around the turn of the century. I find screenshots and software updates as late as about 1999 for some programs, but usually no later — with the obvious exception of the core software that runs the xorg system.
What's that mean? It means there are a lot of programs available at the X-based level, and most of them matured to a satisfactory degree. GTK1.2 has enough leftover utilities here and there to keep you busy for a day or two, but there is a huge morass of X-ish stuff in the Ubuntu repositories (and beyond) that will keep you occupied for much, much longer.
And that's a good thing. For example, here's a nice combination file browser and application launcher: xfm.
Switchable to a tree view, has built-in submenus for most common X-based applications and does almost everything via click-and-point. It's primitive, yes, but it's enough to, for example, manage a few file transfers or preview a view files or images. It's not the most attractive thing, but nothing here will be. Better get used to that. 🙂
If you're like me and you prefer the two-pane style for managing files, here's worker.
As you might have guessed by looking at it, worker behaves a lot like most two-pane arrangements, whether it's mc or gentoo or emelfm or emelfm2 or even the ancient and venerable Norton Commander. If you've never used a file manager like this, it's worth learning because it's so much faster than the average drag-and-drop arrangement. Try it and you might like it.
xedit appears in Ubuntu only when an immense overwhelming life-threatening emergency arises. Or by default, as I mentioned a few months ago.
Even so, it's a workable text editor and will do in a pinch, or if you just absolutely refuse to use vi or nano.
So, with no viable browser, maybe one text editor and a few file managers to pick from, there's really only one more essential — some sort of audio playback option. And believe it or not, the X crowd has a couple of good ones. Here's xmcd:
xmcd is actually rather comprehensive, for something that supposedly just plays CDs. CDDB access, file information editors, a basic and standard interface, plus index playback, keypad direct access (who does that any more, huh?), track sampling and a mess of other options. All that, and it's ugly too! 😀
Here's a sister application for it: mctools-lite, which is a grab bag of audio utilities.
The package also has a rudimentary audio database called "xmdb", with an opening screen that looks something like this.
I don't have many audio CDs to test all the functions, but it's possible that it might be something useful if you want to handle an entire library on a local machine. Give it a run and see if it's useful.
So now that the obligatory applications are out of the way, here are some goodies.
First, system monitors appear to have been all the rage way back in 1998 (or whenever X-based applications fell out of favor). Here's xosview, which improves on xload, which appears by default in Ubuntu (and some other distros). (Just to be clear, xload is included in Hardy, but a separate package in previous releases.)
The nice thing about this is that it shows a neat slice of software and hardware information. Yeah, you can get system load figures from just about any utility, but how many of them show interrupt activity, or caching levels? It's also configurable from the command line, which means you can set it up to show different colors, fonts and system information, as you desire. Start, match the background color to your root window, remove decorations, lock it to the lowest layer and bingo — you've got a conkyesque answer for a machine that otherwise couldn't (or just wouldn't) use conky.
Now here's a system utility I predict you won't use except on the slowest machine: xengine.
I'm guessing anything that postdates the Pentium II era will only show madly spinning blurs of engine parts. It's meant as a benchmarking utility, but unless your machine is around 300Mhz or so, I doubt you'll have much use for it. It might be nifty to measure system load, in other words watch the rates drop when other processes are running. But your machine is going to need to be quite slow to use it in its default form.
More functional and less flaky is procmeter3, which is rather odd to configure, until you realize that almost all of its fun parts are accessible through a right-click menu.
That little snapshot doesn't do it justice. There are so many meters and graphs and options available, I'm just too lazy to get them all configured and into a pretty state before I take the screenshot. Sigh. Well, you get what you pay for, right?
Regardless, that one is a definite keeper. There's lots to play with, and since it's fairly easy to control, you don't have to set up a range of command line options or tinker with a configuration file to get the results you want. If you're anti-command-line (which you shouldn't be, if you're messing with a 133Mhz machine 😉 ), this is a good toy.
Another tiny porthole into your Ubuntu system: xmem. To the right is its sister program, xload.
A clean and fresh default Ubuntu system gives you xload when you install the xorg metapackage, but xmem is something you have to install manually. It escapes me why that would be the case; they're practically the same program. They look the same, behave the same, smell the same and … well anyway.
xmem has the advantage over xload as a prettier program, just because it starts out with a tricolor band, whereas xload is generally just a string of black peaks. All of that is generally configurable of course … and hey, maybe that's why it's an ancillary package, instead of in the main xorg group: too much color. 🙄
Moving on … take a look at your hard drive usage with a real utility, xdiskusage.
Technically this is an FLTK toolkit application, so it probably belongs in the GTK1.2 department, but I thought I would mention it here too. This is a very cool little utility, that uses the
du command to show your disk usage graphically. Bounce forward and backward through the tree and you get a clean idea of what files take up the most space, which directories are hogging your drive, and where you can lighten the load. Very useful, and very easy on the processor.
Also useful, and in some ways a veritable godsend: xcb — think, "X cubbyhole."
You're probably aware that you can stash a highlighted text string and paste it with the middle mouse button click. Did you know you could keep about eight — and many more, if you want them — pasted strings in a series of pasteboxes, to be added or deleted, as you see fit? Immensely useful.
Just for an example, if you look at the screenshot up there, you'll notice I have two paste lines that I refer to quite often while I'm writing here. One is the packages.ubuntu.com prefix, which is a bother to type, and the other is the line that centers text on a WordPress page, which is an even greater bother to type. One click to select, and middle button to paste it into the page. Genius!
One last hint: Shift-middle-click to clear a pastebox. Aside from that clue, you can learn most of its features on the man page.
One I wished would work for me: xdkcal, a kind of floating X-desktop calendar. Unfortunately the Ubuntu version was demanding font sets I couldn't track down, so I don't know what it would look like in Ubuntu. If you can get it running on your machine, let me know what you did. (Edit: It seems to work with IceWM, so perhaps this is just a quirk of the amiwm window manager I was using.)
One last "utility," before moving on to something fun: the XView packages, which still exist in the Ubuntu repos and actually work, to a degree. The text editor and shell tool still do most of what they're supposed to, and it's kind of interesting to see how the earliest (1988, if Wikipedia is to be believed) graphical arrangements appeared.
Now a few more useful tools: I told a little lie a few days ago, when I said I couldn't find a PDF viewer for the GTK1.2 series. There's something like GTK1.2, but kind of like X too, in the repos — gv, which looks something like this, when it's doing its thing.
I'm not sure where those wild colors come from, and the interface font is more or less the Reader's Digest large print edition, but if you need to open a PDF on an old, old machine, that will do the trick for you. Occasionally the page rendering is odd, but that's something in common to just about every PDF reader I've ever used. They all think just a little differently. 😉
After gv, there's always the omnipresent xpdf.
This is the common PDF viewer in a lot of ultralight distributions, so it probably doesn't need much of an introduction. When gv seems skittish, or if you just prefer the xpdf interface, it's there for your perusal.
For color selection tools, which are useful in theming work and for tampering with desktop appearances or Web page design, try xcolors and xcolorsel.
Both have uses, although they seem to approach the same task from different angles. If you want to browse colors you're probably better off with xcolors, but if you know the color or want to track it by value, xcolorsel is probably what you want. Oh, just install both. It's not that big a sacrifice. 😉
Since we're talking about graphics utilities, here's xpaint, which is what I've been using to capture all these programs in action.
Once you learn the interface and the style of the program, it's quite functional. It has any number of quasi-modern pixel graphics editing tools — brush sizes, bezier tools, paint bucket functions, and some funky gradient-like effects that will keep hippies enthralled for a minute or two.
Like any of these programs the trick to learning them is to use them, and so if you can muster enough time and courage and learn where things are at, xpaint is worth the effort.
Another graphics tool, and this one even more impressive: xfig, which is the stealth fighter of X-based applications, if I get to be the judge.
I don't know how many people will find xfig useful; I daresay it's not enough, since what you've got here is a real gold mine for anyone who needs to do diagrams or vector-based images in an extremely lightweight environment. Polygons, path tools, resizing, object alignment, freehand drawing and more and more and more …
This is one of those programs I wish I had a use for, just so I could use it more often … or any at all. With this much in the way of options and power, it's something that could be very very useful, and would probably make me rather proud to understand. Like those CS2 geeks who brag about their 'shopping skills. 🙄
But like so many things in life, what I have in enthusiasm, I lack in necessity. 😦 So we move on … to a couple of oddball programs. Here's xpostit, which, as you might imagine, gives you a few on-screen jot-it notes for fun and profit.
Right click on the tartan square for a menu of note options. One of the nice things about this particular desktop note application is that you can pick presized notes, rather than just smearing them around the screen. Others that I've seen, like xpad, don't necessarily give you that option. You size as you like, but I can see where presized notes would be appealing to some.
Since we're talking about tartans, it's probably worthwhile to mention xtartan.
Use the "n" key to skip through the patterns; of course, more options are on the man page. And don't ask me how I found this one; to be honest, I don't remember. But with so many possible desktops arranged around traditional Scottish patterns, you could be busy for days seeking out the one you like best. Or the one you call family. 😉
Okay, we're almost finished, and then I have a little surprise. Here are a couple of card games, and believe it or not a working role-playing game that you can all run without any more processor demand than most X applications require.
First xpat2 and spider, which are card games of two sorts, both light and fast.
xpat2 actually has rules for several traditional solitaire games, like Klondike and Idiot's Delight, and a few more options to boot. Spider is … well, it's Spider. If you know the game, you're a step ahead.
And now, just so you don't say there's nothing interesting to do with an X-based machine, here's Crossfire, which has an X version as crossfire-client-x11.
It appears to be a bit like rogue, with fundamental role-playing commands and good selection of classes available. And yes, there are active servers for the game, so I'm not giving you a title that you can't at least connect and try out.
And now, one small extra gift, just for sticking around this long.
That's not in the Ubuntu repositories, but you probably have an idea what it is — an early Pac-Man game written for the X desktop. Finding the source code for that little gem was a challenge in and of itself; start here for a possible location, or just Scroogle
xchomp.tar.gz. I found the code on a server here, although that's no guarantee it'll be around forever.
Install the build utilities and X development files for your distro (for Ubuntu:
sudo aptitude install -y --without-recommends xorg-dev build-essential), decompress the package and
make. That should leave you with an
xchomp binary; start it with
./xchomp & from the commmand line.
And there you have it. No sound, no color, and completely unplayable on anything faster than about 300Mhz. 😉 But you can't say there's nothing to do on your leftover 133Mhz laptop machine now. I mean, you've got Pac-Man, and that's everything!
And that's where I call this quits — almost. Before you quit, and before you dismiss all these applications as ugly and not-worth-the-effort, take a look at this page, for a way to at least make them look a little prettier. It won't cure all the problems X-based applications suffer, but it will at least make them passable.
I hope this is helpful, or at least a little interesting. There's a good chunk of software in the Ubuntu repos that I didn't even touch, and a few I did but didn't mention. If you have an older machine that can't do the so-called "light" desktops, try substituting a few of these ancient programs instead. Cheers!


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Hey john! My apologies I only just saw this now.
I have Tein coilovers in mine, which started off not too low then gradually I lowered it more and more till now I scrub while driving, scrape on every driveway and speed hump everywhere and my front bar, side skirts and even rear bar are covered in scrapes haha
I have a photo shoot this weekend and after that i be raising the car up again to a drivable level
I was wondering if you wouldn't mind a answering a question I have about lowering my E1 Clubby as you have? I am a little worried about scraping the underside of the front bar/skirt when going up/down driveways etc. Have you noticed this to be an issue? I am not too concerned about hitting parking bay barriers etc., as you can be a little vigilant about that but sometimes you may not have a choice with driveways. What are your thoughts?
Thanks in advance
Senior Member
GOLD Member
Junior Member


text:
EMC's RSA to acquire Tablus for data loss prevention
RSA, the security division of EMC Corp., said it planned to acquire Tablus, a maker of sensitive data scanning and classification tools and data protection software.
RSA, EMC Corp.'s security division, on Thursday said it is acquiring privately held Tablus, a provider of data-loss prevention products and services. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Tablus, of San Mateo, Calif., is one of a number of small start-ups that have been angling for enterprise IT dollars in a small, but growing, niche of the security market.
EMC, of Hopkinton, Mass., said it plans to integrate Tablus' Content Sentinel and Content Alarm products with its RSA division's encryption and information management offerings. How exactly that integration will be handled remains to be seen, however.
The acquisition gives EMC a foothold in the emerging market for products that stop sensitive information from leaving corporate networks. The rash of stolen laptops, security breaches and lost backup tapes in the last few years has brought the task of securing such data to the forefront and made it a key issue for senior management as well security professionals. (For more on the data storage implications of this announcement, please see "EMC buys Tablus for data classification and security" by Beth Pariseau on SearchStorage.com.)
High-profile incidents such as the theft of a hard drive belonging to the Veterans' Administration and this week's revelation that a laptop containing personal information on VeriSign Inc. employees was stolen from a car also have shown that the problem is not limited to small organizations or those without the budget to put proper controls in place
Aside from the security aspects of the problem, one of the major stumbling blocks in putting a data-loss prevention product in place is classification of the company's data. Determining which data needs strict controls and which can be less closely watched is a time-consuming task and one that can be layered with inter-departmental battles. Tablus' products help with this classification and enable customers to identify sensitive intellectual property. The products also have the ability to monitor email and other network traffic and enforce policies relating to what content can go where.
Data-loss prevention products have gained in popularity in recent years, but the vendor landscape is still populated mainly by start-ups such as Vericept, Vontu, Reconnex and a handful of others. EMC is the first major IT vendor to get into the market. That is one of the things that made the Tablus deal attractive to RSA, officials said.Consolidation in the market is inevitable said Paul Stamp a principal analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. In December, WebSense started the trend by acquiring PortAuthority Technologies. Tablus was probably acquired at a bargain price since it doesn't have the market footprint that Vericept and Vontu has, Stamp said.
"This is not a technology that can stand on its own," Stamp said. "Tablus has really good technology but they haven't really captured the imagination of the enterprise."
Stamp said to look for larger security vendors to acquire or develop similar technology as part of an overall information lifecycle management suite as enterprises struggle to lock down systems and protect sensitive data.
"Data leakage is a symptom of companies not knowing where their data is and where it is going," Stamp said.
The data-loss prevention market "is growing to critical mass and beginning to be tracked and identified by analysts…though no large company has addressed this space yet," said Dennis Hoffman, vice president and chief strategy officer at RSA.
If history is any guide, the Tablus acquisition may start a run on similar deals in the next few months as other large IT providers look for a way in.News Editor Robert Westervelt contributed to this report.


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COURIER-JOURNAL / SEARCH: 8614 Loyal Drive Louisville, KY 40229
- 2 beds
- 2 baths
- $216,990 price
- 1561502 mls id
- Square Feet: 1,419 sqft
- Neighborhood: Heritage Creek
Listing Description
Fischer Homes is offering its Maple Street Collection of homes in Heritage Creek, a new home community in Louisville, Kentucky.. This community will feature several design options including open-concept floorplans and bonus living spaces. Located only 20 minutes from downtown Louisville, off Cedar Creek Road offering easy access to I-265, I-65, and an abundance of shopping and dining on KY-61. Heritage Creek is located in the Jefferson County Public School District - Marion C. Moore High School, Marion C. Moore Middle School, and Laukhuf Elementary School.
- Builder Website
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- New Construction Yes
Subdivision: Heritage Creek
- Price Range $207.9K - $266.9K
- Subdivision StatusActive
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Courtesy of: Fischer Homes
Office Phone: 502-806-8466
Updated: 7th April, 2020 7:49 AM.
8614 Loyal Drive Louisville, KY
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These games teach valuable skills and have a high fun and educational rating.
Your child watches a surprising science experiment in which you can make water go from one glass to another without pouring it.
Your child watches a surprising science experiment about a leak proof bag based on the properties of the plastic.
Your child will practice investigation skills by scanning Dora's room for certain objects. Walking around her house, your child will play a variety of games such as dressing up Dora, helping her mother cook, and fetching her dog.
Your child gains familiarity of colonial occupations as well as spatial reasoning skills by completing challenge along the way of delivering a midnight message.
Your child learns about the concept of economics and the exchange of goods for money by solving difficult problems and unlocking key parts to the map.
Your child watches a clip from Ready Jet Go! in which the characters learn about how gravity works.
Your child watches a clip from Ready Jet Go! in which Jet sings a song that introduces each planet in our solar system.
Your child develops the skills needed to make predictions by participating in this lively auction.
Your child learns creative development and dance performance by watching these videos and trying the moves at home.
Your child will learn a wide variety of facts about different ecosystems on the planet (e.g., Amazon rainforest, Savanna, Rockies, Barrier reef etc.) by playing games with animals and reading about them.
Zoodles 11.8.7 Copyright (c) 2014 Inquisitive Minds, Inc. All rights reserved.