It might run OOo, I don't know. It might if it had more memory. Abi-Word is the word-processor offered as standard, but what I do know is that it is much smaller than a normal laptop. It has been specially designed for child-sized hands. An adult, particularly somebody who could touch-type, would find the tiny keyboad absolutely infuriating.
The other point is that without the wireless mesh, an access-point and an internet connected server on the other end of the radio link its functionality would be serverely compromised.
I've nearly finished reading it, and can assure/.ers that it's not only a very good read, but it also seems to give a pretty good insight to how the Google Guys work, and what it would be like working there.
The Company mode seems to have changed somewhat since the early pre-IPO days, but if I was able to replay my life I'd certainly try very hard to get on the Google payroll. "The Google Way" seems to have replaced the old "HP Way".
It's really very strange, because they are not normally sea-birds, but I can quite distinctly hear the call of a cuckoo even though I'm 12,000 miles from Sealand! Very odd indeed!
By buying one from somewhere such as these folks:-
http://system76.com/
They offer Ubuntu, but if after using that particular distribution you want to try another one you will _know_ that all the hardware works properly with Linux. For a hassle free Linux experience, that's the secret of it. IBM ThinkPads also run Linux very well indeed. Now you should get the distribution your favourite helper uses. I installed Gentoo on a ThinkPad belonging to a friend of mine who, as far as computing goes, is a compleat nitwit. Gentoo lasted longer than than any other distribution before he needed a sky-hook to pull him out of the deep, um, quicksands. However I do not recommend it for total beginners unless they have competent helpers to get them going, because the installation can be a bit of a baptism of fire.
For your publishing activities, you might like to install both
Scribus and
LyX in addition to the TeX and LaTeX you mention.
While the suggestion to buy a Mac is marked 'Funny', and was, I'm sure, intended to be such, it's actually not such a silly suggestion because Macs do run Linux very well, and if you find you don't like Linux, which while being superbly user friendly, it does tend to be somewhat pickey about the friendships it makes. If you and Linux just do not get on, you still have a very good piece of hardware and software in your possession. Macs will also run the software I have mentioned using the X-11 server from either Apple or Fink. That's in addition to all the proprietary software offered by Apple and their ISVs.
... absolutely definitively, that the enquirer on the web site really is the person authorised to know where this particular child is located?
What with all the insecurities, such as reporting key loggers, to which computer systems are prone I might have, in a moment of total madness, installed such a system for keeping tabs on my son, but would have never ever even dreamt of setting up this sort of thing on my daughter.
In the context of child protection this is technology gone totally mad.
Have the perps. of this horror never heard of the word 'TRUST'?
My life experience about trust is that it works two ways: If you don't trust people they very quickly become untrustworthy; and similarly, those who cannot trust others are themselves usually untrustworthy.
This gadget might be handy in a work context so that the office knew where itinerant service people are situated.
But there are things about this whole horrible business which I find very disturbing. There are a number of questions which I feel should be asked.
There has not been any report of Hans being seen by a psychiatrist. In California, does the prosecution not have to demonstrate that a person is not insane as part of the preliminary trial? There would seem to me to be ample evidence to indicate that the question should at least be asked. There is a difference between being left to rot in prison possibly on Death Row, effectively in solitary confinement, perhaps for decades, and being hospitalised in an institution for the criminally insane.
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A304228
On the surface, going from press reports on the 'Net about what has happened, there would appear to be sufficient motivation and opportunity for Hans to have been framed by a demonstrably vindictive ex-spouse. So far, and imho there has now been sufficient time to find her, a body has not been discovered. Has this possibility even been examined by the legal profession?
Why is Hans having to find money? Does the State of California not have a legal aid fund? Although it is in direct contradiction of Magna Carta, upon which all Common Law is based, it would appear that Californian Justice is a commodity which is for sale!
That's right. Introduce an important bill just as the country is closing down for the rituals surrounding the Christmas holiday and set the date for submissions just a few days after most people surface after the haze has cleared.
If this is what is called Consultative Democracy, then frankly I've just become rather envious of the Fijians. Now we know why the leadership of the NZ Government was saying such condemnatory things about the actions of Cdr. Bainimarama.
We are very isolated from the Real World(tm) here in Little Ol' NZ, so don't get to hear very much about what's happening out there. Do the governments of other countries which purport to be ruled "by the people for the people" get up to these tricks?
The commercial Autodesk Maya was used by Weta Digital to create the Lord of the Rings triology. Maya is, as you can see, available for use under Linux.
For Desktop Publishing you can use the Free Scribus which I have used to produce very nice pamphlets and booklets.
Linux has come of age in recent months and the excuse that it is not suitable for ordinary folks to do ordinary computer jobs is simply not true any more.
When the election turnout is such a small proportion of the electorate and there is no physical, human readable, and verifiable record of a person's vote, it's pure and simple fantasy to imagine that the US is ruled by the will of the people for the people.
In my country, New Zealand, the turnout usually approaches 80 to 90 percent and every ballot has an obscured serial number and a counter-foil with the voter's roll number written on it by the poll clerk. OK, it's not a completely secret poll, but revealing the serial numbers requires a court order and the people involved are sworn to secrecy. This means that proof of irregular or duplicate voting is easy to establish, and is a prison term offence. Counting is by hand.
How can they benefit from Linux being threatened when their entire business is revolving around Linux these days??
Haven't they just received a check for some 350 million?
If that's not a benefit I don't know what is.
They have just been set up to be FiaSCO number 2.
My prediction: SuSE, and possibly Novell themselves, won't be around at all in five years, and I can't help but wonder which Linux distribution is going to be put on the execution block next? I suspect that all the commercial ones are going to be picked off one by one like this until only the "community" ones are left. Then it will be the *BSDs turn.
Go the college route only IF you can afford it, and IF the college has a well developed and staffed CS/IT department. If it hasn't then you are just throwing away your money, which would be much better spent on a decent library of text-books.
Assuming you decide to teach yourself then you'll need to learn a language or three. I'd suggest you learn what the OO paradigm is all about.
These languages are pretty good implementations of it:-
Smalltalk - The original OO language and programming environment
Get your head around that lot, toss in a sprinkling of accountancy, and you will be a very valuable item, but don't forget to have a bit of fun on the side.
If my memory serves correctly The GIMP was re-engineered to use Qt right at the very start of the KDE project. The GIMP developer team squeaked blue murder about their GPL code being linked with the, then, non-free Qt libs and the KIMP - or whatever it was called, I forget that detail - and the 'port to KDE was abandoned.
A pity.
It all depends whether you want work for a corporate entity which has as its motto "do no evil" or not.
My advice is to steer well clear of this Industry entirely. It's pure cyanide to having a happy, fulfilled, and balanced life.
The working conditions throughout are not far off being well paid slavery. Burn-out, divorce and the intertwined melancholia are rampant. That's not a life-style I would wish on anybody. Consider also that unless you are an exception you will probably be 'spat-out', 'let go', i.e. sacked at the age of about 50. If you have been very lucky you will have amassed sufficient capital be able to retire, or start your own business, but at that age success is by no means certain.
Use your computer skills in a business which does something else as the main activity.
Computer Science is fine as a facinating hobby as long as you don't let it get totally out of control.
And if they're for OSS, should they try to put some pressure on their users/clients?
Never, because you are going to do yourself out of a job fixing up knackered Windoze boxes.
Linux machines require a mere fraction of the support needed by Windoze boxes, so unless you have an ocean of work, you will quickly end up with no work, and thus no $$$$.
If asked, that is a completely different situation. Be sure, however, to install a distribution with which you are completely familiar. Otherwise you won't be able to answer that awkward question when you are away from your keyboard.
I learnt how to conjugate my ( Latin and English ) verbs about 52 years ago. It looks as if M/S must have realised that the current generations of modern teachers are no longer able to teach much about grammar. Thus they have discovered yet another niche to fill, I didn't think there were any left, well good for them. That's ok but to be able patent it? Well, perhaps the next patent will be for the recognition of the glyphs and the deciphering thereof. a.k.a Optical Character Recognition and language analysis. That my dear friends means that reading text has just become a licenced activity. Kids, Get out Dad's check-book, and roll up for your Reading Licences, only $25 a pop, renewable every 10 years, no unlicensed reading allowed. Six rotan strokes, and a $1,000 fine for literacy pirates. You know, it might just eliminate illiteracy.
Squeakland is the site to go to.
Squeak is a pure Smalltalk with many extra objects and methods. It gives 'children of all ages' hours of fun and games, while teaching one of the most productive programming environments ever created. A programming foundation using Squeak can lead directly to a professional programming career using
SmalltalkX or Cincom Smalltalk
If the teacher finds the Smalltalk paradigm incomprehensible I'd suggest (s)he try
Ruby. The author, quite truthfully, claims it's a 'surprise-free' language. Together with Smalltalk it's one of the few truly Object Oriented programming languages. It's been reported that both Squeak and Ruby are going to be installed on the OLPC machine. ( The OLPC folks change their minds so frequently that I'm now not certain of that though )
Slashdot Mirror
The DVD has very nearly destroyed the pleasure of a night out at the movies/pictures watching 'the content' on the big screen.
Please don't give one of life's few remaining legal pleasures the coup de grace.
The other point is that without the wireless mesh, an access-point and an internet connected server on the other end of the radio link its functionality would be serverely compromised.
Here is a link to the WWW site of the book
The Company mode seems to have changed somewhat since the early pre-IPO days, but if I was able to replay my life I'd certainly try very hard to get on the Google payroll. "The Google Way" seems to have replaced the old "HP Way".
It's really very strange, because they are not normally sea-birds, but I can quite distinctly hear the call of a cuckoo even though I'm 12,000 miles from Sealand! Very odd indeed!
For your publishing activities, you might like to install both Scribus and LyX in addition to the TeX and LaTeX you mention.
While the suggestion to buy a Mac is marked 'Funny', and was, I'm sure, intended to be such, it's actually not such a silly suggestion because Macs do run Linux very well, and if you find you don't like Linux, which while being superbly user friendly, it does tend to be somewhat pickey about the friendships it makes. If you and Linux just do not get on, you still have a very good piece of hardware and software in your possession. Macs will also run the software I have mentioned using the X-11 server from either Apple or Fink. That's in addition to all the proprietary software offered by Apple and their ISVs.
... absolutely definitively, that the enquirer on the web site really is the person authorised to know where this particular child is located?
What with all the insecurities, such as reporting key loggers, to which computer systems are prone I might have, in a moment of total madness, installed such a system for keeping tabs on my son, but would have never ever even dreamt of setting up this sort of thing on my daughter.
In the context of child protection this is technology gone totally mad.
Have the perps. of this horror never heard of the word 'TRUST'?
My life experience about trust is that it works two ways: If you don't trust people they very quickly become untrustworthy; and similarly, those who cannot trust others are themselves usually untrustworthy.
This gadget might be handy in a work context so that the office knew where itinerant service people are situated.
There has not been any report of Hans being seen by a psychiatrist. In California, does the prosecution not have to demonstrate that a person is not insane as part of the preliminary trial? There would seem to me to be ample evidence to indicate that the question should at least be asked. There is a difference between being left to rot in prison possibly on Death Row, effectively in solitary confinement, perhaps for decades, and being hospitalised in an institution for the criminally insane. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A304228
On the surface, going from press reports on the 'Net about what has happened, there would appear to be sufficient motivation and opportunity for Hans to have been framed by a demonstrably vindictive ex-spouse. So far, and imho there has now been sufficient time to find her, a body has not been discovered. Has this possibility even been examined by the legal profession?
Why is Hans having to find money? Does the State of California not have a legal aid fund? Although it is in direct contradiction of Magna Carta, upon which all Common Law is based, it would appear that Californian Justice is a commodity which is for sale!
I could go on and on, but that's enough for now.
That's right. Introduce an important bill just as the country is closing down for the rituals surrounding the Christmas holiday and set the date for submissions just a few days after most people surface after the haze has cleared.
If this is what is called Consultative Democracy, then frankly I've just become rather envious of the Fijians. Now we know why the leadership of the NZ Government was saying such condemnatory things about the actions of Cdr. Bainimarama.
We are very isolated from the Real World(tm) here in Little Ol' NZ, so don't get to hear very much about what's happening out there. Do the governments of other countries which purport to be ruled "by the people for the people" get up to these tricks?
The commercial Autodesk Maya was used by Weta Digital to create the Lord of the Rings triology. Maya is, as you can see, available for use under Linux.
For Desktop Publishing you can use the Free Scribus which I have used to produce very nice pamphlets and booklets.
Linux has come of age in recent months and the excuse that it is not suitable for ordinary folks to do ordinary computer jobs is simply not true any more.
When the election turnout is such a small proportion of the electorate and there is no physical, human readable, and verifiable record of a person's vote, it's pure and simple fantasy to imagine that the US is ruled by the will of the people for the people.
In my country, New Zealand, the turnout usually approaches 80 to 90 percent and every ballot has an obscured serial number and a counter-foil with the voter's roll number written on it by the poll clerk. OK, it's not a completely secret poll, but revealing the serial numbers requires a court order and the people involved are sworn to secrecy. This means that proof of irregular or duplicate voting is easy to establish, and is a prison term offence. Counting is by hand.
Birmingham is North of the Watford Gap, so what else can you expect?
What a load of expensive dung. No decent touch typist ever looks at the keys! So what's the point?
If that's not a benefit I don't know what is.
They have just been set up to be FiaSCO number 2.
My prediction: SuSE, and possibly Novell themselves, won't be around at all in five years, and I can't help but wonder which Linux distribution is going to be put on the execution block next? I suspect that all the commercial ones are going to be picked off one by one like this until only the "community" ones are left. Then it will be the *BSDs turn.
I'm sure your patches will be very welcome.
- Smalltalk - The original OO language and programming environment
- The Smalltalk Portal
- For a bit Free of fun and games
- Gratis Very Fast - Recommended
- Gratis non-commercial version of the top-shelf product
- The online Smalltalk library - gratis
- Ruby - OO in a sane file oriented environment
- The Ruby Portal
- Buy the best of the books. Only $25 for a pdf download.
- The gratis first edition as a WWW site
- SQL - You'll need to store your data somehow
- PostgreSQL - The Free Relational Database off the top-shelf
- MySQL - The fast, and most popular, one for Web use
- Gratis book - PostgreSQL Introduction and Concepts as a WWW site
- C and C++ - Get these downloadable books FAQ & Tutorial.
- The New C Standard - A huge well written book
- comp.lang.c FAQ'
- My own modest contribution
Get your head around that lot, toss in a sprinkling of accountancy, and you will be a very valuable item, but don't forget to have a bit of fun on the side.No, Although it looks like a sale it isn't - it's a lease agreement. Note: I don't agree with Microsoft so I don't use their software.
If my memory serves correctly The GIMP was re-engineered to use Qt right at the very start of the KDE project. The GIMP developer team squeaked blue murder about their GPL code being linked with the, then, non-free Qt libs and the KIMP - or whatever it was called, I forget that detail - and the 'port to KDE was abandoned. A pity.
not a cake, a laptop surely?
It all depends whether you want work for a corporate entity which has as its motto "do no evil" or not.
My advice is to steer well clear of this Industry entirely. It's pure cyanide to having a happy, fulfilled, and balanced life.
The working conditions throughout are not far off being well paid slavery. Burn-out, divorce and the intertwined melancholia are rampant. That's not a life-style I would wish on anybody. Consider also that unless you are an exception you will probably be 'spat-out', 'let go', i.e. sacked at the age of about 50. If you have been very lucky you will have amassed sufficient capital be able to retire, or start your own business, but at that age success is by no means certain.
Use your computer skills in a business which does something else as the main activity.
Computer Science is fine as a facinating hobby as long as you don't let it get totally out of control.
Please give us a call if you spot that errant Beagle puppy. The Brits are still mourning their wee dog.
Never, because you are going to do yourself out of a job fixing up knackered Windoze boxes. Linux machines require a mere fraction of the support needed by Windoze boxes, so unless you have an ocean of work, you will quickly end up with no work, and thus no $$$$.
If asked, that is a completely different situation. Be sure, however, to install a distribution with which you are completely familiar. Otherwise you won't be able to answer that awkward question when you are away from your keyboard.
And the LaTeX class called Beamer produces the really beautiful pdf slide files for kpdf to display.
I learnt how to conjugate my ( Latin and English ) verbs about 52 years ago.
It looks as if M/S must have realised that the current generations of modern teachers are no longer able to teach much about grammar. Thus they have discovered yet another niche to fill, I didn't think there were any left, well good for them. That's ok but to be able patent it? Well, perhaps the next patent will be for the recognition of the glyphs and the deciphering thereof. a.k.a Optical Character Recognition and language analysis. That my dear friends means that reading text has just become a licenced activity. Kids, Get out Dad's check-book, and roll up for your Reading Licences, only $25 a pop, renewable every 10 years, no unlicensed reading allowed. Six rotan strokes, and a $1,000 fine for literacy pirates. You know, it might just eliminate illiteracy.
If the teacher finds the Smalltalk paradigm incomprehensible I'd suggest (s)he try Ruby. The author, quite truthfully, claims it's a 'surprise-free' language. Together with Smalltalk it's one of the few truly Object Oriented programming languages. It's been reported that both Squeak and Ruby are going to be installed on the OLPC machine. ( The OLPC folks change their minds so frequently that I'm now not certain of that though )
I have found the IRC channels on irc.freenode.net to be a superb source of good Linux support. #gentoo is friendly, knowledgeable, clean, and decent.