Linux Mint is a distribution of Linux that is based off of Ubuntu. Like Ubuntu, it uses Debian packages.
When Ubuntu made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("Unity") and the GNOME project made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("GNOME Shell"), Linux Mint in turn made the decision to support those of us who loved GNOME 2. We have two options: MATE and Cinnamon. Both are well-supported by Linux Mint (and in fact primary development on both is by Linux Mint guys).
MATE is simply a fork of GNOME 2. For reasons that are not clear to me, GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 cannot co-exist on the same system... something about library conflicts. (Doesn't Linux have library versioning that should make it possible to avoid these conflicts? Eh, moving on.) The MATE project did a mass rename on everything in GNOME ("libgnome" -> "libmate", etc.) so MATE can co-exist on the same system with GNOME 3. So, those of us who loved the smooth polish that came from man-decades of development in GNOME can still use it.
But MATE isn't the future. From what I have heard, the library underpinnings of GNOME 3 really have improved over GNOME 2, and the new technology is a step up. Who wants to be locked into a frozen clone of GNOME 2 forever? Thus, Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a project to build on top of GNOME 3 and provide a user experience similar to GNOME 2. New plugins, new themes, etc. all go together to make a very usable desktop; but GNOME 3 apps will work seamlessly with it.
Many disgruntled Ubuntu users have abandoned Ubuntu for Linux Mint. Mint is now the top Linux distribution on distrowatch.com; I'm not sure it was even in the top ten before the whole Unity/GNOME Shell fiasco, but now it's number one.
Linux Mint has always focused on making a beautiful system that is out-of-the-box usable. Now they are one of the top choices for people who have rejected Unity and GNOME Shell.
For me, the most important part of the announcement is that they have the password keeper working right now. I'm using Linux Mint on a laptop at work, and I can't connect to Windows shares; I'm hoping the new updates will sort that out for me.
Since this is based on Debian packages, I can probably just update in place without needing to do a full re-install.
P.S. One of my biggest complaints about GNOME 3 is that I can no longer take sit a Windows user down and just say "it works pretty much like what you are used to". You may like GNOME Shell and you may think it is better, but you cannot argue that it is very different, and it would take a bit of training before a guest could use it. Linux Mint, on the other hand, works a lot like pre-Windows 8 versions of Windows; with a little customization and theming I'll bet you could fool people into thinking it was actually Windows XP.
Likewise with Unity, it is pretty different from Windows. But it's very similar to the Mac, so maybe users familiar with the Mac can use it?
on most cases I checked, the result [with Clang] executes between 5-25% slower.
I recompiled a large audio processing code base in Clang and the result was about a 2-3% speedup, with no problems. I immediately switched to using Clang for all release builds. (I still use GCC for debug builds.)
It's almost literally an order of magnitude larger than it needs to be.
Does it "need" to have room for four standard 3.5" hard drives? Personally, I like using RAID, and I don't think one hard drive is enough. For my purposes, yeah, it "needs" those hard drive bays. That's why I bought the thing.
This thing is designed with a standard 5.25" drive bay instead of a laptop optical drive; you can argue that this is just wasted space, if you like. I might put something other than an optical drive in there, though... I'd love some sort of slot for hot-swapping hard drives, to be used for data backup.
This thing also can take PCI express cards, but I'm going to claim that the space for that is exactly as large as it needs to be and not one cubic millimeter larger.
How can this thing could be made one-tenth the size, without giving up any functionality? It can't, because it isn't literally an order of magnitude bigger than it needs to be.
Now, if you are going to claim that hard drive bays, a 5.25" drive bay, and PCI express card slots are all useless, and that you could replace this whole thing with a single PandaBoard, then sure you could make something a tenth the size of this thing. So if all you "need" is an SBC with a NIC and some ROM, then you don't need something this big. However, that also doesn't make the enclosure less cunningly designed.
So, if you still want to sneer at the enclosure, now it's your turn. Provide specifics on how you would design the thing differently, and what tradeoffs will result from your design changes.
I don't work in a data center. But I think you might want to look at an HP Proliant MicroServer.
Basically it is an AMD laptop chipset on a tiny motherboard in a cunningly designed compact enclosure. The SATA drives go into carriers that are easily swapped (but not hot-swappable). It's quiet and power-efficient. It supports ECC memory (max 8GB) and supports virtualization.
Newegg also has 8GB of ECC RAM for about $55, so you can get one of these and max its RAM for under $400.
I just got one and haven't had time to really wring it out, but I did do the RAM upgrade. Despite the tiny enclosure, it wasn't too painful to work on it, and I was impressed by the design. The Turion dual-core processor has a passive heat sink on it, and the single large fan on the back pulls air through to cool everything. (There is also a tiny high-speed fan on the power supply.)
I'm going to use this as my personal mail server. It's cheap enough and small enough that I plan to have at least one put away as a hot spare; if the server dies, I'll power it down, move the hard drives to the spare, and I'll have the mail server back up within 5 minutes. Not bad for a cheap little box.
I found the above list because I was searching for information on a story I read and enjoyed, "The Mathenauts". The basic idea is that it is possible to travel into a universe or dimension of pure math, and discover new mathematics by exploration. Some of the explorers don't come back; the chief danger is to lose yourself in the math and never return to our reality. You become imaginary, or something like that.
Re:Apple doesn't want to be *more* dependent on In
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To achieve the mind-boggling quad-XGA resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels using the display technology available today, Apple had to more than double the power draw of the LED backlight that lights up the iPad screen. According to DisplayMate, Apple had to bump up the backlight power draw from 2.7 watts on the iPad 2 to 7 watts on the new iPad.
As DisplayMate explains it, that huge bump in power consumption in the LED backlight was caused by the use of amorphous silicon type LCD panels whose transistors block out more light when pixel density increases. The iPhone 4 in contrast has even higher pixel density--but its use of low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) technology makes the iPhone 4 more than twice as energy efficient per square inch to achieve the same brightness as the new iPad. The problem is that LTPS technology is expensive and would not have been practical for a screen as big as the new iPad's. A new display technology called indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) has the benefit of better energy efficiency at a competitive price, but IGZO isn't ready for mass production.
This means we are both correct. The majority of power use is just to light the display, and with a Retina, more power is needed.
But technology is on the horizon that should someday permit a Retina display that doesn't need as much brightness and thus saves power.
Re:Apple doesn't want to be *more* dependent on In
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Also note that Apple has people paying $2500 and up for the Mac Pro, and $1000 and up for laptops. But mobile devices are closer to $500, and the Android competition is hitting the $200 price point.
There just isn't as much room to pay top dollar prices for Intel parts in the mobile space.
So even if Intel mobile x86 parts are slightly faster than the ARM chips, will Intel be happy selling at prices competitive with ARM prices? History suggests "no". The cheapest Atom chips are around $20 but Intel makes those suck, just as much as Intel can get away with.
Intel is the master of segmenting markets. Different chips at different price points have different features enabled. Cheaper chips are as crippled as possible, to encourage you to buy a more expensive chip. For example, Intel doesn't support virtualization features on their less-expensive chips; and Intel mostly reserves support for ECC RAM to only the Xeon processors.
(In contrast, AMD puts full functionality in all their parts; they are #2 and they are trying harder to please the customer. That is how you can get an HP Proliant MicroServer with a 1.5 GHz dual-core AMD Turion processor for $320 at Newegg, with full support for virtualization and ECC RAM. I cannot imagine a MicroServer with equal or better Intel parts hitting that price point.)
Intel will try to balance the functionality it allows into the mobile chips against the price it can get. Apple just wants the best chips for the cheapest price. These two goals are not in alignment.
Apple doesn't want to be *more* dependent on Intel
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Intel wants to be the only company that can meet your needs. That way, they can make you pay premium prices for their chips. This is perfectly understandable; that is what is best for Intel.
Apple wants to be vertically integrated. They want full control over everything they do. Partly this is so they can keep as much as possible of the money they collect; partly this is so that they can guarantee excellent quality and excellent availability. This is what is best for Apple, and it isn't bad for their customers either.
Intel does not want to become just another ARM source, competing on price with all the others. But Apple will never lock themselves in to depending on Intel for mobile chips, when ARM chips have been shown to be more than adequate. And Apple would not be investing in custom ARM chips if it was planning to adopt Intel mobile chips.
People keep pointing out that Intel's mobile x86 chips are competitive with ARM. That won't cut it. Intel's chips would have to be better, and so much better that the risk of depending on Intel is worth it.
That was the case for the PowerPC to x86 transition! Intel's chips were so much better than PowerPC for laptops that it was worth getting into an entangling relationship with Intel. AMD was not able to guarantee delivery of the massive quantities of chips Apple was planning to sell, and Intel was, so AMD wasn't really an option... but at least they served to keep Intel from trying to charge totally outrageous prices for their chips; there was always a credible threat of going to AMD.
Hmm. It's looking like AMD is going to crater in spectacular fashion soon. I wonder if Apple will make a serious attempt to buy what's left of the company. That would enable Apple to make its own x86 chips! Eh, probably not. AMD is behind Intel on process, so switching to AMD chips would mean taking a hit on performance, power use, or both.
The "SemiAccurate" web site thinks that Apple will transition to using ARM chips for laptops, not just for mobile devices, once ARM chips are good enough (which they will be soon). So, transitioning away from x86 and to, say, multi-core 64-bit ARM chips is another way Apple can untangle from Intel.
Apple may not be in a big hurry to actually complete the transition away from Intel chips; just a credible threat of switching to ARM chips might be enough to negotiate good prices on x86 chips. That would leave lower power consumption as the main reason to go to ARM, but a laptop's display is probably the worst power drain, especially with a Retina display.
Charlie is an armchair CEO of AMD, and his analysis is about as accurate as the name of his website suggests.
He is an analyst; his job is to write analyses. He has been rather harsh on AMD, but then he has been harsh on Intel and harsh on nVidia also.
His predictions about Ultrabooks from a year ago were accurate. (He said they were overpriced and wouldn't sell well.)
I'm actually hoping that his current predictions of doom for AMD won't come true. What he wrote was "if the planned layoffs happen, AMD is doomed"; there is at least a tiny chance that maybe the planned layoffs won't actually happen.
If the layoffs are as he describes, then I'll join him in predicting doom for AMD. AMD has no future without its engineers. The plan to outsource engineering for the video cards strikes me as insane; there is an old saying, "You can't outsource your core competency." AMD right now is a design house that hires out the actual fabbing of its processors. If it hires out design and fabbing, what is left for AMD to do that really adds value?
If AMD hires out the engineering on video cards, either they will end up spending more on quality engineering, in which case they didn't save any money (or their costs actually go up!); or they will spend less on middle-of-the-road engineering, in which case they won't be able to compete with nVidia.
Maybe, just maybe, the hot light of publicity before the planned round of layoffs will make AMD management think twice. If not, a few years from now, Qualcomm will be buying up AMD intellectual property at fire-sale prices when AMD goes under. (Or maybe Intel will buy it all and just shred it.)
AMD management made some bad decisions, then got rid of all the people who argued against those decisions. Now they are going to cut costs by firing the engineers who could develop new products. It is now inevitable: AMD is doomed.
"Unless the entire board and their puppets are removed in the next week or two, the little chance AMD has now will vanish. There is no up side here."
"AMD senior management, or (mis)management, as we are now calling them, have delayed the roadmap past the critical point. Project Win was survivable, barely. The churn of technical talent made things worse, far worse, and put the company at the breaking point. Layoffs sapped confidence, and senior management was negligent in not messaging a damn thing to those who mattered internally and externally. The cuts that will follow ensure that the plans in place are not achievable, and SemiAccurate can not see AMD surviving at this point."
It would have taken you 10 whole seconds to google that and find out you are wrong. Yes, "rumble" feedback is patented
It sounds like your examples show that the basic idea of a rumble feedback isn't patented, but specific technology implementations are. I didn't mean to say that there were no patents on rumble mechanisms, only that there was no patent on the basic idea of rumbling. It doesn't sound like I am mistaken on this point.
I have no problem with Sony patenting a specific implementation; I have a problem if Sony has just succeeded in making a "land grab" and nobody else will be able to do thermal feedback in computer controllers.
The article says: "Though it doesn't mention any specific technology for heating or cooling on such a small scale, the patent does present a lot of ideas for how changing temperatures could be applied to video games." This sounds like a patent on the basic idea, not the patent on an implementation. Am I wrong here?
By the way, if Sony has some really clever way to heat and cool a controller without draining the battery quickly, that does sound to me like a technology that is worth patenting. But as I noted above, the article says the patent doesn't describe any particular way to do the heating and cooling.
No, a movie is not prior art, since it says nothing at all about HOW that effect is accomplished (which is, of course, what is patentable).
This sounds like you agree with me: the basic idea of a temperature feedback should not be patentable, but a technology to accomplish that feedback should be patentable.
Yes, "temperature feedback motion controller" is different from "battery level indicator". Why would you think otherwise?
Do you mean to say that Microsoft could make a new mouse, or joystick, or keyboard or something incorporating technology similar to what is described in the patent, and Sony wouldn't sue because the patent only covers a "motion controller"?
For that matter, if someone builds thermal feedback technology into a VR body suit, you think Sony won't sue them for infringing this patent?
The more limited the patent is, the less unhappy I will be about it. I thought Sony had just managed to patent the fundamental idea of a thermal feedback in a user interface. If they really have only managed to patent one specific way of doing it, and only in the domain of video game controllers, then never mind.
"The price of a thing is what the thing will bring." You can set a price anywhere you want, but it is up to the customers to decide whether they are willing to pay the price.
So, now, who wants a Surface? How does Surface fit in to the tablet market?
Apple made the first non-sucky tablet, and they reaped huge first-mover advantage, which is still paying off for them today. Related, they have network effect: everyone made apps for iPad because all the customers bought iPads, and customers bought iPads (in part) because of the rich selection of apps. Additionally, Apple did a great job on the user experience, and the quality is excellent. So you put all this together and Apple can command a premium price.
Along comes Android. Now you can get quite nice tablets for $200, and you can install any application you like. You can use multiple app stores if you like. So Android is both the low-cost solution and the more-free solution.
Along comes Microsoft. They are very, very late to the party. First mover advantage? Definitely not. Network effect, vast library of apps? No; they need to build a new stable of C# Windows 8 apps, from scratch. More-free? No; they are copying the Apple model, where the customer must go to the official app store. (And Microsoft is also copying the idea of raking a 30% commission on each sale. App developers tolerate this of Apple... will they tolerate it of Microsoft?)
So... low-cost? Definitely not. The Surface is being priced like an iPad. Customers are willing to pay a premium price for an iPad, but I cannot see any reason why customers would see enough value in a Surface to justify a premium price.
IMHO, Microsoft's best bet is to make the Surface integrate very smoothly into a Windows network. It should connect smoothly to Windows servers, it should have a good email client that can talk to Exchange servers, that sort of thing. That can carve out a niche in the business market, where incidentally a higher price doesn't hurt so much. But they are so late to the party, that many companies are already standardized on iPad. (And all the C-level executives want iPads and already have them.)
In short, at this price level, the Surface will be a niche product at best, and very possibly the next Zune.
I don't think anyone tried to patent the "rumble" feedback. Here's another feedback. Is this really patentable?
If so, I expect companies will rush out and file patents on making a controller emit audio to serve as a game feedback, making a controller flash LEDs to serve as a game feedback, making a controller give little electric shocks as a game feedback, etc. Basically just go down the list of possible stimuli and patent everything.
P.S. In the novel Bug Park, people tele-operate micro-robots by VR technology. The battery life of the remote micro-robot is signaled by means of a thermal plate touching the operator's skin: when the battery is full, the plate feels warm, and the plate cools as battery life drops. I'm not a lawyer, so maybe "in a video game" is different enough from "when tele-operating a micro-robot"... but IMHO, even if this patent passes the "obvious" test, it should flunk the prior art test.
Actually, now that I think about it, on that VTOL thing you stood on a platform directly over the engine. I guess the platform must have been offset high enough to allow sufficient air intake into the engine?
I'll just have to go back to the Evergreen Aviation Museum and look again, one of these days.
You can see a display about this in the Evergreen Avation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. They have an airplane on display with the "catcher" appratus mounted on the nose, and I think they have the other hardware too. (It's been a few years since I went there, and I mostly remember my tour of the Spruce Goose.)
They had some other intriguing stuff. I remember a short-range VTOL device that was basically an airplane engine mounted vertically; it sucked air in from the top, blew it out the bottom, and the operator would stand on a ring that circled the outside of the engine. I remember wondering how difficult that might be to fly, since it was too old to have a computer-controlled active stabilisation system. Also, I think I would want to wear hearing and eye protection if I was riding that thing.
If you custom-build a board, and cost-engineer it so that it just has the components you actually need, you are spending a whole bunch of money up-front (mostly, the salaries of the engineers who do the custom board design). This will pay off if you ship a large volume. This up-front cost is called "NRE", for "non-recurring engineering costs"; the final cost of your product is NRE divided by the number of units you ship, plus the actual cost of the unit (parts and assembly).
If you know you are shipping exactly 1000 magazines with this gimmick inside, a custom board makes no sense; the NRE would totally wipe out the per-board savings. The cheapest option would be a stack of pre-built boards that someone has lying around, maybe from a phone that was current technology two years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if the ROM contains an off-the-shelf build of Android, just with one additional app installed and set always to run at boot-up. They could have built a custom ROM image of Android, for example with the phone app removed, but why bother? (And clearly the phone app was not in fact removed, as the Mashable folks used it to place a call.)
That doesn't make sense. Nexus costs, what, $200? Is he claiming that Windows OEM license for tablets costs $170?
Well, you could have tried reading the article. If you do read it, you will see that indeed he is claiming $170, but for a total cost, not just the OEM license for Windows 8 itself. Expanded quote from article:
Then there is the software costs. Microsoft threw Intel under a bus with WART [Windows on an ARM Tablet], if you buy the ARM version of Windows for about 2x the cost, you get Office for âfreeâ(TM). If you buy the x86 version of Windows 8, you get the OS for a little less than half the price, but without office. You then have to buy the full version of Office to put on it for $125 and up, way up if you want Outlook. That puts any Clover Trail machine at $170 for the software alone before the bloated hardware costs to store and run everything.
I think he is assuming here that anyone who actually wants to buy a Windows 8 tablet will also want Office and probably Outlook. I think he's probably right on that point: I'm happy to run LibreOffice on Linux Mint, or use Google Docs on an Android tablet, but I'm not the target customer for a Windows 8 tablet.
It would be more fair to take out the cost of office when comparing the cost of the tablets. But the larger point is valid: Microsoft is trying for a premium product in a market where a $200 product is already established and popular.
The author of this makes no attempt to pretend to be impartial, but if his facts are correct I think his conclusions must be correct also.
My favorite comment:
You can buy a full Nexus 7 for $30 more than what Microsoft gets for the software on a Clover Trail tablet, and that is before the added hardware costs. The Nexus works better, has better battery life, and is not a security nightmare either.
It doesn't have to be a Visor, either. Any full-size Palm after the III will have a serial port on the bottom and enough memory and power to run your typing tutor app.
It doesn't have to be a Visor, but the Visor is a good choice: 16 MHz clock rate, quite good for PalmOS; at least a couple of megabytes of RAM; and a few years newer than the oldest Palm PDAs.
Even the earliest Palm PDAs had a serial port on the bottom. Later Palms had a newer connector that included both USB and serial. Still later Palms had USB-only. All Visors had the same connector on the bottom and would work with the keyboard.
(When the very first Palm Pilot PDAs came out, people were using them with an Apple Newton accessory keyboard, using an adapter that mated the Newton connector to the serial port on a Palm sync cable!)
Newer Palm PDAs could work also, perhaps with Bluetooth keyboards; but they have internal batteries only, so you can't keep them going just by swapping AAA cells, and Bluetooth keyboards will cost more. The Handspring Visor solution is really quite inexpensive and should be a good solution to the problem.
P.S. I said in my first comment that I don't know if there is a typing tutor program for PalmOS. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker, though. I personally learned to type on a manual typewriter with no typing tutor computer program. It's very possible to learn typing as long as you have a keyboard to type on. (It's probably possible to learn typing just by pretending to have a keyboard, but having feedback when you are making mistakes is a huge help.)
But anyway I just spent some time with Google and found one typing tutor program for PalmOS. I haven't tested this so I have no idea if it is any good. There could also be others out there.
I know you said you can't afford OLPC computers. You could try just asking people to donate them, and see if you get any.
I used to have an OLPC and I gave it to a school in India. Before I handed it over, I bought a $10 USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and I installed a program called "Typing Turtle". Also, I bought an an SD card, and installed a copy of Wikipedia for Schools on it (this is a collection of Wikipedia articles, vetted to remove any vandalism, and indexed so you can use them as pure static web pages, offline).
If you follow my other suggestion and use Handspring Visor PDAs for students, and you get a handful of OLPC computers, maybe you can use the OLPC computers for test stations.
Be sure to get an external, USB keyboard and mouse for any OLPC laptops you get. The built-in keyboard sucks, and the built-in trackpad really sucks.
I just checked eBay, and there are still plenty of Handspring Visors left for sale cheap. Those things go a very long time on a pair of AAA cells. You don't want the color model, you want the black-and-white that takes AAA cells.
Finally, buy a stack of NiMH AAA cells and some chargers.
These should suffice for learning. The keyboard is a little bit small, but I was able to type on it, and my hands are not small.
I don't know if there are any actual typing tutorial programs, but you might be able to get a college student to write one for you as a project.
I do remember that there is at least one "typing speed" program for PalmOS. It was intended for users to test their writing speed using the stylus, but it should work for typing.
He was tempted to rename his sailboat "Entropy" because things kept breaking, so I recommend you carry tools and essential spares (whatever those might be for your ship).
Also, you should be armed, and you should be trained in the use of your weapons. Paul Lutus had a close encounter with a pirate; after he made it clear he was armed, the pirate decided to go somewhere else. As is often the case with firearms, it wasn't necessary to kill anyone or even shoot the firearm, but having it present made all the difference. This incident is described in day 5 in this page:
He says on the above page that he was often below-decks, reading, and he was very lucky he was on deck and saw the pirate coming. He wondered what would have happened if the pirate had actually gotten on board his sailboat before he knew anything was up... nothing good, surely. Is there any sort of proximity alert system you can get for your ship, that would alert if anyone approached?
Paul Lutus is a computer geek as well (he wrote GraForth and some other stuff; see his web site) so you might try contacting him for advice on tech gear. I have no idea whether he is likely to reply or not.
The only problem with your thesis is that you presume there is a great chance of getting malware from non repository software.
I say this because I have, several times, been asked to help friends or family to clean malware off their Windows PCs. My wife and I have never had to clean malware off of our Linux PCs.
If you know what you are doing, you have a good chance to avoid the malware; and it sounds like you not only know what you are doing, but have trained your child with the needed skills, so Windows should work for you. And you seem to prefer Windows, so I think you should use Windows.
Using Linux takes some different skills. You don't need to run and administer an antivirus program, but you do need to learn some other stuff. My guess is: you already know the Windows skills, so you don't think about just how much you had to learn, and meanwhile the Linux stuff seems arbitrary and annoying to you.
Zero infections, because we don't surf russian porn sites, we don't install shovelware, and we don't click OK on anything that pops up and says "Hi, can I install your free ?".
I'm pretty sure that the friends and family I helped out with malware problems didn't all surf Russian porn sites or install shovelware. I think some can legitimately blame actual security holes in Windows, in Adobe Flash, in Adobe Acrobat, or whatever. But I'm glad to hear that you have avoided malware. And as far as I can tell, Windows 7 really is more proof against malware than Windows XP and previous.
Then there is the associated funny business with well established software, which mimics my linux OS installation experience. You always have to edit some files, find some obscure software, or use odd troubleshooting methods to make simple things that work just fine under windows work under linux.
Now, I have to feel you are moving the goal posts on me here. I never claimed, for example, that it would be just as easy to install Minecraft on Linux as it is to install Minecraft on Windows. My claim is that the Ubuntu "app store" GUI is something a 7-year-old can use, unsupervised, to get fun and cool stuff; and I claim there is a lot of cool and fun stuff for free on Linux. Maybe the whole family can play Minecraft on the family Windows computer, and the 7-year-old can play Linux games on the Linux computer.
When you use an Ubuntu computer, and you are installing an Ubuntu-specific package using the package manager, that is the slickest and easiest experience you can have. If you get a shell script and a README.TXT file, with a bunch of instructions to follow, that is definitely a worse experience.
Ubuntu has such a large share of the (tiny) home-Linux market; I wish more games would offer single-click-install Ubuntu packages. There are 89 billion different Linux distributions, and it would be unduly burdensome to support them all, but darn it Ubuntu has a huge share of the market and it wouldn't be so bad to provide a proper Ubuntu package.
Then we're back to the original point of "Why do this when the computer already comes with windows, windows works fine, everybody knows it, they use it at school, and we've already determined that there is no killer app or capability that linux has that windows doesn't"?
I'm getting tired of repeating myself. Okay, one more time: there is a ton of cool free stuff that an unsupervised 7-year-old can get just by clicking, and the computer is unlikely to get malware. If an adult helps the kid, makes sure there is antivirus installed and working correctly, and teaches the kid which web sites to go to, and the kid actually avoids the other web sites, and there are no security holes in either Windows or in major subsystems like Adobe Flash... if all that is going well, Windows can also be a good solution, and has the advantage of more software available.
And while I'm repeating myself, I'll say again that I think using Linux will teach some basic stuff about computers that might be valuable to l
Again, I'm looking for the "aha!" in the linux home desktop space where windows and os x fall down, but linux works or has something the others don't.
I'm not sure I want to claim that there is any slam-dunk feature where Linux smokes the competition.
But the Linux package management system is so much better than the Windows situation. The Windows model is: go to web page, download installer, run installer, trust that the installer is not doing anything bad. Note that these are the same steps whether you go to "SafeVettedKidsSoftware.com" or "MalwareToWreckYourComputer.com".
With Ubuntu, you can get the packages from an "app store" GUI application that pulls from the Ubuntu repositories. You can find a category (like "Games") and click around in the GUI, find something interesting, click, and it downloads. I don't care if you are an adult or a 7-year-old, that is just easier than Windows.
Windows wins on software availability. Almost all the software available on Linux is also available cross-platform, but the converse is definitely not true. But there is a ton of free cool stuff on Linux, and he is less likely to end up with malware installed and popping up porn ads.
I know a high-school boy who is has learned Linux; he wipes computers, installs Linux, installs additional packages... he doesn't use the "app store" GUI but rather uses the low-level tools. He has a better skill set than I had at his age (albeit he also had access to all this cool stuff and I didn't). I don't know if he will study computers when he goes to college, but if he does, he already knows a lot of the stuff that the intro classes will cover. Linux has been good for him.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux Mint is a distribution of Linux that is based off of Ubuntu. Like Ubuntu, it uses Debian packages.
When Ubuntu made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("Unity") and the GNOME project made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("GNOME Shell"), Linux Mint in turn made the decision to support those of us who loved GNOME 2. We have two options: MATE and Cinnamon. Both are well-supported by Linux Mint (and in fact primary development on both is by Linux Mint guys).
MATE is simply a fork of GNOME 2. For reasons that are not clear to me, GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 cannot co-exist on the same system... something about library conflicts. (Doesn't Linux have library versioning that should make it possible to avoid these conflicts? Eh, moving on.) The MATE project did a mass rename on everything in GNOME ("libgnome" -> "libmate", etc.) so MATE can co-exist on the same system with GNOME 3. So, those of us who loved the smooth polish that came from man-decades of development in GNOME can still use it.
But MATE isn't the future. From what I have heard, the library underpinnings of GNOME 3 really have improved over GNOME 2, and the new technology is a step up. Who wants to be locked into a frozen clone of GNOME 2 forever? Thus, Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a project to build on top of GNOME 3 and provide a user experience similar to GNOME 2. New plugins, new themes, etc. all go together to make a very usable desktop; but GNOME 3 apps will work seamlessly with it.
Many disgruntled Ubuntu users have abandoned Ubuntu for Linux Mint. Mint is now the top Linux distribution on distrowatch.com; I'm not sure it was even in the top ten before the whole Unity/GNOME Shell fiasco, but now it's number one.
A comment I have seen multiple times on Slashdot from different people: the Linux Mint guys are focused on making their users happy, rather than making something new. Where the GNOME Shell guys promise a "consistent and recognisable visual identity", and Mark Shuttleworth (the head Ubuntu guy) said "This is not a democracy. [...] we are not voting on design decisions.", the Linux Mint guys promise that you will "Love your Linux, Feel at Home, Get things Done!"
Linux Mint has always focused on making a beautiful system that is out-of-the-box usable. Now they are one of the top choices for people who have rejected Unity and GNOME Shell.
For me, the most important part of the announcement is that they have the password keeper working right now. I'm using Linux Mint on a laptop at work, and I can't connect to Windows shares; I'm hoping the new updates will sort that out for me.
Since this is based on Debian packages, I can probably just update in place without needing to do a full re-install.
P.S. One of my biggest complaints about GNOME 3 is that I can no longer take sit a Windows user down and just say "it works pretty much like what you are used to". You may like GNOME Shell and you may think it is better, but you cannot argue that it is very different, and it would take a bit of training before a guest could use it. Linux Mint, on the other hand, works a lot like pre-Windows 8 versions of Windows; with a little customization and theming I'll bet you could fool people into thinking it was actually Windows XP.
Likewise with Unity, it is pretty different from Windows. But it's very similar to the Mac, so maybe users familiar with the Mac can use it?
on most cases I checked, the result [with Clang] executes between 5-25% slower.
I recompiled a large audio processing code base in Clang and the result was about a 2-3% speedup, with no problems. I immediately switched to using Clang for all release builds. (I still use GCC for debug builds.)
If you're not using blades which rack mount which is probably the best thing to do,
Sure, makes sense. The MicroServer might actually cost a bit less, but if every other server is racked, why make an exception?
you're going to want something smaller than that for purposes like time server.
How many time servers do you need? This thing is 8" by 10" by 10". It's not that large, really.
But okay, your objection to its size is duly noted.
It's almost literally an order of magnitude larger than it needs to be.
Does it "need" to have room for four standard 3.5" hard drives? Personally, I like using RAID, and I don't think one hard drive is enough. For my purposes, yeah, it "needs" those hard drive bays. That's why I bought the thing.
This thing is designed with a standard 5.25" drive bay instead of a laptop optical drive; you can argue that this is just wasted space, if you like. I might put something other than an optical drive in there, though... I'd love some sort of slot for hot-swapping hard drives, to be used for data backup.
This thing also can take PCI express cards, but I'm going to claim that the space for that is exactly as large as it needs to be and not one cubic millimeter larger.
How can this thing could be made one-tenth the size, without giving up any functionality? It can't, because it isn't literally an order of magnitude bigger than it needs to be.
Now, if you are going to claim that hard drive bays, a 5.25" drive bay, and PCI express card slots are all useless, and that you could replace this whole thing with a single PandaBoard, then sure you could make something a tenth the size of this thing. So if all you "need" is an SBC with a NIC and some ROM, then you don't need something this big. However, that also doesn't make the enclosure less cunningly designed.
So, if you still want to sneer at the enclosure, now it's your turn. Provide specifics on how you would design the thing differently, and what tradeoffs will result from your design changes.
steveha
I don't work in a data center. But I think you might want to look at an HP Proliant MicroServer.
Basically it is an AMD laptop chipset on a tiny motherboard in a cunningly designed compact enclosure. The SATA drives go into carriers that are easily swapped (but not hot-swappable). It's quiet and power-efficient. It supports ECC memory (max 8GB) and supports virtualization.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237918-4237917-4248009-5153252-5153253.html?dnr=1
Silent PC Review did a complete review of an older model (with a 1.3 GHz Turion instead of 1.5 GHz).
http://www.silentpcreview.com/HP_Proliant_MicroServer
SRP is $350, but Newegg has it for $320 (limit 5 per customer).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107052
Newegg also has 8GB of ECC RAM for about $55, so you can get one of these and max its RAM for under $400.
I just got one and haven't had time to really wring it out, but I did do the RAM upgrade. Despite the tiny enclosure, it wasn't too painful to work on it, and I was impressed by the design. The Turion dual-core processor has a passive heat sink on it, and the single large fan on the back pulls air through to cool everything. (There is also a tiny high-speed fan on the power supply.)
I'm going to use this as my personal mail server. It's cheap enough and small enough that I plan to have at least one put away as a hot spare; if the server dies, I'll power it down, move the hard drives to the spare, and I'll have the mail server back up within 5 minutes. Not bad for a cheap little box.
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf52
I found the above list because I was searching for information on a story I read and enjoyed, "The Mathenauts". The basic idea is that it is possible to travel into a universe or dimension of pure math, and discover new mathematics by exploration. Some of the explorers don't come back; the chief danger is to lose yourself in the math and never return to our reality. You become imaginary, or something like that.
Check out this link: http://www.informationweek.com/byte/personal-tech/tablets/why-the-ipad-3-regressed-in-battery-life/232602960
This means we are both correct. The majority of power use is just to light the display, and with a Retina, more power is needed.
But technology is on the horizon that should someday permit a Retina display that doesn't need as much brightness and thus saves power.
Also note that Apple has people paying $2500 and up for the Mac Pro, and $1000 and up for laptops. But mobile devices are closer to $500, and the Android competition is hitting the $200 price point.
There just isn't as much room to pay top dollar prices for Intel parts in the mobile space.
So even if Intel mobile x86 parts are slightly faster than the ARM chips, will Intel be happy selling at prices competitive with ARM prices? History suggests "no". The cheapest Atom chips are around $20 but Intel makes those suck, just as much as Intel can get away with.
Intel is the master of segmenting markets. Different chips at different price points have different features enabled. Cheaper chips are as crippled as possible, to encourage you to buy a more expensive chip. For example, Intel doesn't support virtualization features on their less-expensive chips; and Intel mostly reserves support for ECC RAM to only the Xeon processors.
(In contrast, AMD puts full functionality in all their parts; they are #2 and they are trying harder to please the customer. That is how you can get an HP Proliant MicroServer with a 1.5 GHz dual-core AMD Turion processor for $320 at Newegg, with full support for virtualization and ECC RAM. I cannot imagine a MicroServer with equal or better Intel parts hitting that price point.)
Intel will try to balance the functionality it allows into the mobile chips against the price it can get. Apple just wants the best chips for the cheapest price. These two goals are not in alignment.
Intel wants to be the only company that can meet your needs. That way, they can make you pay premium prices for their chips. This is perfectly understandable; that is what is best for Intel.
Apple wants to be vertically integrated. They want full control over everything they do. Partly this is so they can keep as much as possible of the money they collect; partly this is so that they can guarantee excellent quality and excellent availability. This is what is best for Apple, and it isn't bad for their customers either.
Intel does not want to become just another ARM source, competing on price with all the others. But Apple will never lock themselves in to depending on Intel for mobile chips, when ARM chips have been shown to be more than adequate. And Apple would not be investing in custom ARM chips if it was planning to adopt Intel mobile chips.
People keep pointing out that Intel's mobile x86 chips are competitive with ARM. That won't cut it. Intel's chips would have to be better, and so much better that the risk of depending on Intel is worth it.
That was the case for the PowerPC to x86 transition! Intel's chips were so much better than PowerPC for laptops that it was worth getting into an entangling relationship with Intel. AMD was not able to guarantee delivery of the massive quantities of chips Apple was planning to sell, and Intel was, so AMD wasn't really an option... but at least they served to keep Intel from trying to charge totally outrageous prices for their chips; there was always a credible threat of going to AMD.
Hmm. It's looking like AMD is going to crater in spectacular fashion soon. I wonder if Apple will make a serious attempt to buy what's left of the company. That would enable Apple to make its own x86 chips! Eh, probably not. AMD is behind Intel on process, so switching to AMD chips would mean taking a hit on performance, power use, or both.
The "SemiAccurate" web site thinks that Apple will transition to using ARM chips for laptops, not just for mobile devices, once ARM chips are good enough (which they will be soon). So, transitioning away from x86 and to, say, multi-core 64-bit ARM chips is another way Apple can untangle from Intel.
Apple may not be in a big hurry to actually complete the transition away from Intel chips; just a credible threat of switching to ARM chips might be enough to negotiate good prices on x86 chips. That would leave lower power consumption as the main reason to go to ARM, but a laptop's display is probably the worst power drain, especially with a Retina display.
steveha
Charlie is an armchair CEO of AMD, and his analysis is about as accurate as the name of his website suggests.
He is an analyst; his job is to write analyses. He has been rather harsh on AMD, but then he has been harsh on Intel and harsh on nVidia also.
His predictions about Ultrabooks from a year ago were accurate. (He said they were overpriced and wouldn't sell well.)
I'm actually hoping that his current predictions of doom for AMD won't come true. What he wrote was "if the planned layoffs happen, AMD is doomed"; there is at least a tiny chance that maybe the planned layoffs won't actually happen.
If the layoffs are as he describes, then I'll join him in predicting doom for AMD. AMD has no future without its engineers. The plan to outsource engineering for the video cards strikes me as insane; there is an old saying, "You can't outsource your core competency." AMD right now is a design house that hires out the actual fabbing of its processors. If it hires out design and fabbing, what is left for AMD to do that really adds value?
If AMD hires out the engineering on video cards, either they will end up spending more on quality engineering, in which case they didn't save any money (or their costs actually go up!); or they will spend less on middle-of-the-road engineering, in which case they won't be able to compete with nVidia.
Maybe, just maybe, the hot light of publicity before the planned round of layoffs will make AMD management think twice. If not, a few years from now, Qualcomm will be buying up AMD intellectual property at fire-sale prices when AMD goes under. (Or maybe Intel will buy it all and just shred it.)
AMD management made some bad decisions, then got rid of all the people who argued against those decisions. Now they are going to cut costs by firing the engineers who could develop new products. It is now inevitable: AMD is doomed.
"Unless the entire board and their puppets are removed in the next week or two, the little chance AMD has now will vanish. There is no up side here."
AMD's layoffs target engineering -- Board incompetence dooms the company
"AMD senior management, or (mis)management, as we are now calling them, have delayed the roadmap past the critical point. Project Win was survivable, barely. The churn of technical talent made things worse, far worse, and put the company at the breaking point. Layoffs sapped confidence, and senior management was negligent in not messaging a damn thing to those who mattered internally and externally. The cuts that will follow ensure that the plans in place are not achievable, and SemiAccurate can not see AMD surviving at this point."
AMD is imploding because management doesn't understand semiconductors -- Analysis: You can't Win by ignoring fundamentals
It would have taken you 10 whole seconds to google that and find out you are wrong. Yes, "rumble" feedback is patented
It sounds like your examples show that the basic idea of a rumble feedback isn't patented, but specific technology implementations are. I didn't mean to say that there were no patents on rumble mechanisms, only that there was no patent on the basic idea of rumbling. It doesn't sound like I am mistaken on this point.
I have no problem with Sony patenting a specific implementation; I have a problem if Sony has just succeeded in making a "land grab" and nobody else will be able to do thermal feedback in computer controllers.
The article says: "Though it doesn't mention any specific technology for heating or cooling on such a small scale, the patent does present a lot of ideas for how changing temperatures could be applied to video games." This sounds like a patent on the basic idea, not the patent on an implementation. Am I wrong here?
By the way, if Sony has some really clever way to heat and cool a controller without draining the battery quickly, that does sound to me like a technology that is worth patenting. But as I noted above, the article says the patent doesn't describe any particular way to do the heating and cooling.
No, a movie is not prior art, since it says nothing at all about HOW that effect is accomplished (which is, of course, what is patentable).
This sounds like you agree with me: the basic idea of a temperature feedback should not be patentable, but a technology to accomplish that feedback should be patentable.
Yes, "temperature feedback motion controller" is different from "battery level indicator". Why would you think otherwise?
Do you mean to say that Microsoft could make a new mouse, or joystick, or keyboard or something incorporating technology similar to what is described in the patent, and Sony wouldn't sue because the patent only covers a "motion controller"?
For that matter, if someone builds thermal feedback technology into a VR body suit, you think Sony won't sue them for infringing this patent?
The more limited the patent is, the less unhappy I will be about it. I thought Sony had just managed to patent the fundamental idea of a thermal feedback in a user interface. If they really have only managed to patent one specific way of doing it, and only in the domain of video game controllers, then never mind.
steveha
"The price of a thing is what the thing will bring." You can set a price anywhere you want, but it is up to the customers to decide whether they are willing to pay the price.
So, now, who wants a Surface? How does Surface fit in to the tablet market?
Apple made the first non-sucky tablet, and they reaped huge first-mover advantage, which is still paying off for them today. Related, they have network effect: everyone made apps for iPad because all the customers bought iPads, and customers bought iPads (in part) because of the rich selection of apps. Additionally, Apple did a great job on the user experience, and the quality is excellent. So you put all this together and Apple can command a premium price.
Along comes Android. Now you can get quite nice tablets for $200, and you can install any application you like. You can use multiple app stores if you like. So Android is both the low-cost solution and the more-free solution.
Along comes Microsoft. They are very, very late to the party. First mover advantage? Definitely not. Network effect, vast library of apps? No; they need to build a new stable of C# Windows 8 apps, from scratch. More-free? No; they are copying the Apple model, where the customer must go to the official app store. (And Microsoft is also copying the idea of raking a 30% commission on each sale. App developers tolerate this of Apple... will they tolerate it of Microsoft?)
So... low-cost? Definitely not. The Surface is being priced like an iPad. Customers are willing to pay a premium price for an iPad, but I cannot see any reason why customers would see enough value in a Surface to justify a premium price.
IMHO, Microsoft's best bet is to make the Surface integrate very smoothly into a Windows network. It should connect smoothly to Windows servers, it should have a good email client that can talk to Exchange servers, that sort of thing. That can carve out a niche in the business market, where incidentally a higher price doesn't hurt so much. But they are so late to the party, that many companies are already standardized on iPad. (And all the C-level executives want iPads and already have them.)
In short, at this price level, the Surface will be a niche product at best, and very possibly the next Zune.
steveha
I don't think anyone tried to patent the "rumble" feedback. Here's another feedback. Is this really patentable?
If so, I expect companies will rush out and file patents on making a controller emit audio to serve as a game feedback, making a controller flash LEDs to serve as a game feedback, making a controller give little electric shocks as a game feedback, etc. Basically just go down the list of possible stimuli and patent everything.
P.S. In the novel Bug Park, people tele-operate micro-robots by VR technology. The battery life of the remote micro-robot is signaled by means of a thermal plate touching the operator's skin: when the battery is full, the plate feels warm, and the plate cools as battery life drops. I'm not a lawyer, so maybe "in a video game" is different enough from "when tele-operating a micro-robot"... but IMHO, even if this patent passes the "obvious" test, it should flunk the prior art test.
steveha
Actually, now that I think about it, on that VTOL thing you stood on a platform directly over the engine. I guess the platform must have been offset high enough to allow sufficient air intake into the engine?
I'll just have to go back to the Evergreen Aviation Museum and look again, one of these days.
steveha
You can see a display about this in the Evergreen Avation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon. They have an airplane on display with the "catcher" appratus mounted on the nose, and I think they have the other hardware too. (It's been a few years since I went there, and I mostly remember my tour of the Spruce Goose.)
http://www.evergreenmuseum.org/
They had some other intriguing stuff. I remember a short-range VTOL device that was basically an airplane engine mounted vertically; it sucked air in from the top, blew it out the bottom, and the operator would stand on a ring that circled the outside of the engine. I remember wondering how difficult that might be to fly, since it was too old to have a computer-controlled active stabilisation system. Also, I think I would want to wear hearing and eye protection if I was riding that thing.
steveha
If you custom-build a board, and cost-engineer it so that it just has the components you actually need, you are spending a whole bunch of money up-front (mostly, the salaries of the engineers who do the custom board design). This will pay off if you ship a large volume. This up-front cost is called "NRE", for "non-recurring engineering costs"; the final cost of your product is NRE divided by the number of units you ship, plus the actual cost of the unit (parts and assembly).
If you know you are shipping exactly 1000 magazines with this gimmick inside, a custom board makes no sense; the NRE would totally wipe out the per-board savings. The cheapest option would be a stack of pre-built boards that someone has lying around, maybe from a phone that was current technology two years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if the ROM contains an off-the-shelf build of Android, just with one additional app installed and set always to run at boot-up. They could have built a custom ROM image of Android, for example with the phone app removed, but why bother? (And clearly the phone app was not in fact removed, as the Mashable folks used it to place a call.)
steveha
That doesn't make sense. Nexus costs, what, $200? Is he claiming that Windows OEM license for tablets costs $170?
Well, you could have tried reading the article. If you do read it, you will see that indeed he is claiming $170, but for a total cost, not just the OEM license for Windows 8 itself. Expanded quote from article:
I think he is assuming here that anyone who actually wants to buy a Windows 8 tablet will also want Office and probably Outlook. I think he's probably right on that point: I'm happy to run LibreOffice on Linux Mint, or use Google Docs on an Android tablet, but I'm not the target customer for a Windows 8 tablet.
It would be more fair to take out the cost of office when comparing the cost of the tablets. But the larger point is valid: Microsoft is trying for a premium product in a market where a $200 product is already established and popular.
steveha
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/09/27/intels-clover-trail-is-a-bloated-nightmare/
The author of this makes no attempt to pretend to be impartial, but if his facts are correct I think his conclusions must be correct also.
My favorite comment:
steveha
It doesn't have to be a Visor, either. Any full-size Palm after the III will have a serial port on the bottom and enough memory and power to run your typing tutor app.
It doesn't have to be a Visor, but the Visor is a good choice: 16 MHz clock rate, quite good for PalmOS; at least a couple of megabytes of RAM; and a few years newer than the oldest Palm PDAs.
Even the earliest Palm PDAs had a serial port on the bottom. Later Palms had a newer connector that included both USB and serial. Still later Palms had USB-only. All Visors had the same connector on the bottom and would work with the keyboard.
(When the very first Palm Pilot PDAs came out, people were using them with an Apple Newton accessory keyboard, using an adapter that mated the Newton connector to the serial port on a Palm sync cable!)
Newer Palm PDAs could work also, perhaps with Bluetooth keyboards; but they have internal batteries only, so you can't keep them going just by swapping AAA cells, and Bluetooth keyboards will cost more. The Handspring Visor solution is really quite inexpensive and should be a good solution to the problem.
P.S. I said in my first comment that I don't know if there is a typing tutor program for PalmOS. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker, though. I personally learned to type on a manual typewriter with no typing tutor computer program. It's very possible to learn typing as long as you have a keyboard to type on. (It's probably possible to learn typing just by pretending to have a keyboard, but having feedback when you are making mistakes is a huge help.)
But anyway I just spent some time with Google and found one typing tutor program for PalmOS. I haven't tested this so I have no idea if it is any good. There could also be others out there.
http://www.freewarepalm.com/educational/texttutor.shtml
steveha
I know you said you can't afford OLPC computers. You could try just asking people to donate them, and see if you get any.
I used to have an OLPC and I gave it to a school in India. Before I handed it over, I bought a $10 USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and I installed a program called "Typing Turtle". Also, I bought an an SD card, and installed a copy of Wikipedia for Schools on it (this is a collection of Wikipedia articles, vetted to remove any vandalism, and indexed so you can use them as pure static web pages, offline).
If you follow my other suggestion and use Handspring Visor PDAs for students, and you get a handful of OLPC computers, maybe you can use the OLPC computers for test stations.
Be sure to get an external, USB keyboard and mouse for any OLPC laptops you get. The built-in keyboard sucks, and the built-in trackpad really sucks.
steveha
I just checked eBay, and there are still plenty of Handspring Visors left for sale cheap. Those things go a very long time on a pair of AAA cells. You don't want the color model, you want the black-and-white that takes AAA cells.
Then for a keyboard:
http://www.amazon.com/LandWare-GoType-Keyboard-Handspring-Visor/dp/B00004TF4V
Finally, buy a stack of NiMH AAA cells and some chargers.
These should suffice for learning. The keyboard is a little bit small, but I was able to type on it, and my hands are not small.
I don't know if there are any actual typing tutorial programs, but you might be able to get a college student to write one for you as a project.
I do remember that there is at least one "typing speed" program for PalmOS. It was intended for users to test their writing speed using the stylus, but it should work for typing.
steveha
Paul Lutus sailed around the world over the course of four years. He posted a free book online so you can read about his adventures:
http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html
He was tempted to rename his sailboat "Entropy" because things kept breaking, so I recommend you carry tools and essential spares (whatever those might be for your ship).
Also, you should be armed, and you should be trained in the use of your weapons. Paul Lutus had a close encounter with a pirate; after he made it clear he was armed, the pirate decided to go somewhere else. As is often the case with firearms, it wasn't necessary to kill anyone or even shoot the firearm, but having it present made all the difference. This incident is described in day 5 in this page:
http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/Chapter_6_--_Darwin_to_Sri_Lanka.html
He says on the above page that he was often below-decks, reading, and he was very lucky he was on deck and saw the pirate coming. He wondered what would have happened if the pirate had actually gotten on board his sailboat before he knew anything was up... nothing good, surely. Is there any sort of proximity alert system you can get for your ship, that would alert if anyone approached?
Paul Lutus is a computer geek as well (he wrote GraForth and some other stuff; see his web site) so you might try contacting him for advice on tech gear. I have no idea whether he is likely to reply or not.
steveha
The only problem with your thesis is that you presume there is a great chance of getting malware from non repository software.
I say this because I have, several times, been asked to help friends or family to clean malware off their Windows PCs. My wife and I have never had to clean malware off of our Linux PCs.
If you know what you are doing, you have a good chance to avoid the malware; and it sounds like you not only know what you are doing, but have trained your child with the needed skills, so Windows should work for you. And you seem to prefer Windows, so I think you should use Windows.
Using Linux takes some different skills. You don't need to run and administer an antivirus program, but you do need to learn some other stuff. My guess is: you already know the Windows skills, so you don't think about just how much you had to learn, and meanwhile the Linux stuff seems arbitrary and annoying to you.
Zero infections, because we don't surf russian porn sites, we don't install shovelware, and we don't click OK on anything that pops up and says "Hi, can I install your free ?".
I'm pretty sure that the friends and family I helped out with malware problems didn't all surf Russian porn sites or install shovelware. I think some can legitimately blame actual security holes in Windows, in Adobe Flash, in Adobe Acrobat, or whatever. But I'm glad to hear that you have avoided malware. And as far as I can tell, Windows 7 really is more proof against malware than Windows XP and previous.
Then there is the associated funny business with well established software, which mimics my linux OS installation experience. You always have to edit some files, find some obscure software, or use odd troubleshooting methods to make simple things that work just fine under windows work under linux.
Now, I have to feel you are moving the goal posts on me here. I never claimed, for example, that it would be just as easy to install Minecraft on Linux as it is to install Minecraft on Windows. My claim is that the Ubuntu "app store" GUI is something a 7-year-old can use, unsupervised, to get fun and cool stuff; and I claim there is a lot of cool and fun stuff for free on Linux. Maybe the whole family can play Minecraft on the family Windows computer, and the 7-year-old can play Linux games on the Linux computer.
When you use an Ubuntu computer, and you are installing an Ubuntu-specific package using the package manager, that is the slickest and easiest experience you can have. If you get a shell script and a README.TXT file, with a bunch of instructions to follow, that is definitely a worse experience.
Ubuntu has such a large share of the (tiny) home-Linux market; I wish more games would offer single-click-install Ubuntu packages. There are 89 billion different Linux distributions, and it would be unduly burdensome to support them all, but darn it Ubuntu has a huge share of the market and it wouldn't be so bad to provide a proper Ubuntu package.
Then we're back to the original point of "Why do this when the computer already comes with windows, windows works fine, everybody knows it, they use it at school, and we've already determined that there is no killer app or capability that linux has that windows doesn't"?
I'm getting tired of repeating myself. Okay, one more time: there is a ton of cool free stuff that an unsupervised 7-year-old can get just by clicking, and the computer is unlikely to get malware. If an adult helps the kid, makes sure there is antivirus installed and working correctly, and teaches the kid which web sites to go to, and the kid actually avoids the other web sites, and there are no security holes in either Windows or in major subsystems like Adobe Flash... if all that is going well, Windows can also be a good solution, and has the advantage of more software available.
And while I'm repeating myself, I'll say again that I think using Linux will teach some basic stuff about computers that might be valuable to l
Again, I'm looking for the "aha!" in the linux home desktop space where windows and os x fall down, but linux works or has something the others don't.
I'm not sure I want to claim that there is any slam-dunk feature where Linux smokes the competition.
But the Linux package management system is so much better than the Windows situation. The Windows model is: go to web page, download installer, run installer, trust that the installer is not doing anything bad. Note that these are the same steps whether you go to "SafeVettedKidsSoftware.com" or "MalwareToWreckYourComputer.com".
With Ubuntu, you can get the packages from an "app store" GUI application that pulls from the Ubuntu repositories. You can find a category (like "Games") and click around in the GUI, find something interesting, click, and it downloads. I don't care if you are an adult or a 7-year-old, that is just easier than Windows.
Windows wins on software availability. Almost all the software available on Linux is also available cross-platform, but the converse is definitely not true. But there is a ton of free cool stuff on Linux, and he is less likely to end up with malware installed and popping up porn ads.
I know a high-school boy who is has learned Linux; he wipes computers, installs Linux, installs additional packages... he doesn't use the "app store" GUI but rather uses the low-level tools. He has a better skill set than I had at his age (albeit he also had access to all this cool stuff and I didn't). I don't know if he will study computers when he goes to college, but if he does, he already knows a lot of the stuff that the intro classes will cover. Linux has been good for him.
steveha