I do most of my documents in LyX or just plaintext for quick notes and the like. For LyX I tend to export to PDF and Post Script. The only time I use OO.o is at work (Funny thing about that too, the work computer with Excel crashed, they had to do a reinstall, and were too cheap to buy another copy of Excel, so I installed Open Office and no one has been able to tell the difference much. I use it merely to generate a few reports).
If I needed a less structured document (read: very very flashy/pretty) I'd use scribus.
LyX, for my general purposes is just worlds better than either.odf or.doc.
My political beliefs have diverged considerably, at one point I would have considered myself a Libertarian (my parents do: One's a Windows Systems Administrator, the other, a Broadcast Automation Engineer, anecdotal I know) I have noticed a tendency of *U.S.* geeks to identify strongly with the Libertarian Party (and/or conversely: Free-Market Economics/ideology). However no such tendency exists amongst my international geeky friends. I've also noticed, in non-tech circles it tends to correlate strongly (again, anecdotal) with two factors: The socio-economic status you were raised in, and the cultural demographic you were raised in. In general I've seen it as being more common in those who were *raised* in upward-mobile households, in generally homogeneous environments.
Now, my own beliefs have ran the gamut from anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, and libertarian. My current ones don't really fit into any of those boxes. I will however speak briefly on why Libertarianism appeals to so much to those I have described above, and also why I no longer adhere to it.
In short: It's simplistic, and self-serving. Before anyone jumps on me, I'm talking about the lay-literature and lay-foundations of the mindset. Libertarianism's strongest adherents are generally those who understand the least about the economics and politics behind it. Rather, they like the rosy sounding platitudes of the common liturgy. This is not a fault specific to Libertarianism: Pick a random Evangelical Christian off the street, and ask him what the council of Nicea is.
However, I think a great disservice is done by some of the great minds which publish much of the Libertarian cannon today. They dumb down rather complex economic phenomena and theory, into very simplistic black and white terms, which are both intellectually dishonest and which they don't honestly really believe themselves. Moreover, they purposely gloss over things which do not so nicely fit into the rosy picture they've painted (competing freedoms, public goods, market failure, moral hazards, gross negative incentives, tragedy of the anti-commons, externalities, etc.)
The average member of the public, in the same way that the average Christian does not know what the council of Nicea is, does not even know that such things exist within the cannon of thought, they are purposely insulated from it. Such things are occult and apocrypha from them. Ergo, It approaches literally a rather simplistic semi-religious ideology in scope, for the vast majority of adherents. I've had discussions where if you only switched a few words around, they would sound exactly like a Leninist, the same sort of blind ideological fervor (Particularly from Randians).
I've simply accepted that things aren't that cut and dry, and people aren't that simple. And to paraphrase a similar quote: If markets are so good, but our institutions so awful...why would they continue anyways? You know, competition and all.
Not only is this a day late and a dollar short, it doesn't really even match up in functionality. Deskbar + Tracker == Win. Tracker is super small, super fast, deskbar is highly extensible. With a few extra deskbar plugins, I can search google, gmail, use it as a calculator, launch programs from it, search flickr, man pages, parse things right into yubnub (well, in firefox at least), search all my bookmarks, delicious, etc.
This is something that the open source desktop has *lightyears* ahead of the competition.
The judges decision appears to be based on the fact that you can simply enable logging in the server software. If this stands up, which I'm optimistic that it won't, there's still another loophole you can use: Create a webserver software which has no option to log ip addresses. Then in order to create IP logs you would have to actually install another program to do so, and that *does* constitute creation of documents.
Firefox with all my extensions and everything turned off starts at about 60mb's. And it grows. Having more than one tab open especially helps grow firefox. As it is I have about 40 extensions and a theme running (most of my extensions are actually to change the default UI of firefox itself). Worse, opening more than 1 tab will cause greater and greater memory leaks, flash or no. In fact, opening flash or java at all actually increases ram useage in a one way street. E.g., closing the page does not actually decrease ram usage that much. As it is I regularly have about 15 tabs open in firefox at minimum. My record is getting firefox to eat up over 600mb's of ram, I left it running by itself for a few days. As it is, I kill it at least once or twice a day. Beryl is like this too btw, once every few days I have to kill beryl and emerald because of memory leaks. I gave up on kiba-dock and went with the slightly less functional and occasionally buggy Avant-window-navigator, as kiba-dock works like this too! I had kiba-dock running for 3 days (it normally uses maybe 4-15mb of ram) and it had ballooned to 300+mb's of ram usage.
If I wasn't so attatched to my favorite extensions I would drop firefox in a heartbeat for epiphany or Opera if Opera was open-source.
I just bought an Inspiron E1505 with Ubuntu Installed by default to replace my current laptop, which is actually an excellent little laptop, except it's incapable of playing modern games. But it runs Beryl just fine with a 32mb video card. Anyways, Dell's price != Dell's price. I priced out more or less what I wanted, and was looking at getting a laptop @ around $1000. They had their standard auto $-200 Discount. And then I saw a -$300 for anything over 999 I think. So I applied that instead. And *then* I saw a $-500 for any $1399 and over. I ended up adding about $200 worth of stuff and came out $30 cheaper than my original build, at $942 total this is what I got.
Core 2 Duo T7200, (upgrade)
512mb of ram (this is because I intend to buy the ram on Tigerdirect instead, where I can get 2gigs for $100 instead of $250)
(Upgraded) 15.4in WSXGA+ with the glossy treatment as well
8x dvd burner (upgrade)
(upgrade) 256mb Nvidia Geforce Go 7300
(upgrade) 160mb 5400rpm SATA drive
(upgrade) 85Wh 9-cell battery.
This is on top of their warranties, integrated wireless, etc. and free shipping. And it's all nicely guaranteed to work well with Ubuntu.:) I couldn't be happier with my purchase, I don't much consider it to be a "low end" purchase at all, even though I got it sub $1000, and there is no comparable Macintosh available, priced anywhere near it.
you're misreading my post a bit. The parts about contractors was referring to smart-house technology. In general I was speaking (hence references to microkernels and 64bit architecture) the difference between "technology exists" and "technology is ubiquitous".
This is probably a bit of miscommunication, but what I mean is that the ideas were mainly worked out, as well as the first implementations, 20 years or so ago. E.g., the problem is understood, the hardware is there, knowledge of potential solutions exist, making them easy to use, install, run, and manage, and making them *elegant* solutions, is lacking.
But with specific point to the article: Just because we have cameras that are capable of running allmost all the time, and just because we have small 10tb drives, does not mean necessarily that we have the infrastructure of technologies for ubiquity. E.g., cheap, portable, *easy to use*, transparent cross application/platform/hardware data access, etc. The time horizons of ubiquitous are much greater than the time horizons of "Technology actually exists."
Fundamentally they're not useless, you could for instance, co-ordinate blinds, heating, AC and appliance use to minimize your energy bills, lights that automatically turn themselves on and off as one traverses your house, or that adjust ambient lighting conditions based on # of people and time of day, or whether or not you're sitting in your couch, and the TV is on.., there's a ton more uses as well, but the implementations are clumsy, complex, and hard to manage, which was my point.
One thing that allways bothers me about these kinds of predictions, even when I agree with alot of the insights, is they neglect to note scaling problems. Recall that "smart environments" ubiquitous computing, micro-kernels, 64bit architecture, etc....have all been around for a long time, the technology that is. What has been problematic is costly implementation and lack of scalability. Take smart houses, realistically most of the technology is about 20 years old or more, and was implementable 20 years ago...at a significantly higher cost of course, but even though the comparative technology is cheap today, the implementation is not.
What this specifically means is that the average contractor would not know how to set it up, and the average consumer would not know how to manage it, so it doesn't get used. The time horizons for implementing many of these technologies at a ubiquitous level, even if they're invented now, or invented 20 years ago, is fairly large for many things. Most code is still 32bit and single threaded, despite the rather large inroads made by multi-core 64 bit processors, despite parts standardization being introduced to autos and other products and production methods shortly after the turn of the 20th century,...our houses are still built more or less like they were 200 years or more ago, just faster and with less workmanship.
With reference to his lifelogs, they will come of course, but he should definitely extend his time horizon, cellphones and small computers aren't even universally ubiquitous for most of the world yet. Hell, the *internet* isn't either for that matter. And there's a large body of deadweight that will also have to go, people who will never adopt technologies, even if their children or grandchildren do, and large masses of geographic terrain which will not be integrated with any sort of computerized ubiquitous technology for at least a century or more.
Just my $.02: the only thing that makes SAAS particularly attractive to Users is the ability to use the service from anywhere, from any device. I think home application servers, or paid for hosted application servers (and this is where free software...in a SAAS model can work) will largely defeat many of people's fears with regards to SAAS. Currently such servers are way too complicated for the general user to bother with, but then again...so are most media servers, and until recently so was network attatched storage. It makes much more sense that people would pay a company to host their own private applications (which may be commercially developed, or open source) from their servers than it does for a consumer to get "locked in" to one specific service. The advantage of this approach is that the consumer still owns/controls their applications and data, but does not have to deal with the network administration aspect.
I think it's also worth noting that *most* applications of the SAAS model are mainly going to be rather non-intensive applications. Storage, email, small games, word processing, and maybe limited photoshopping abilities, etc. Many seem to forget that the average user-level device is actually getting smaller, and less powerful, cellphones outsell computers by wide margins, laptops far outsell more powerful desktops, and less powerful but smaller and lighter laptops are even more popular. This is overall less power on the machine to necessarily handle all these memory intensive runtime applications. Especially since you add network lag and browser interface memory hogging to it as well.
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I do most of my documents in LyX or just plaintext for quick notes and the like. For LyX I tend to export to PDF and Post Script. The only time I use OO.o is at work (Funny thing about that too, the work computer with Excel crashed, they had to do a reinstall, and were too cheap to buy another copy of Excel, so I installed Open Office and no one has been able to tell the difference much. I use it merely to generate a few reports). If I needed a less structured document (read: very very flashy/pretty) I'd use scribus. LyX, for my general purposes is just worlds better than either .odf or .doc.
My political beliefs have diverged considerably, at one point I would have considered myself a Libertarian (my parents do: One's a Windows Systems Administrator, the other, a Broadcast Automation Engineer, anecdotal I know) I have noticed a tendency of *U.S.* geeks to identify strongly with the Libertarian Party (and/or conversely: Free-Market Economics/ideology). However no such tendency exists amongst my international geeky friends. I've also noticed, in non-tech circles it tends to correlate strongly (again, anecdotal) with two factors: The socio-economic status you were raised in, and the cultural demographic you were raised in. In general I've seen it as being more common in those who were *raised* in upward-mobile households, in generally homogeneous environments.
Now, my own beliefs have ran the gamut from anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, and libertarian. My current ones don't really fit into any of those boxes. I will however speak briefly on why Libertarianism appeals to so much to those I have described above, and also why I no longer adhere to it.
In short: It's simplistic, and self-serving. Before anyone jumps on me, I'm talking about the lay-literature and lay-foundations of the mindset. Libertarianism's strongest adherents are generally those who understand the least about the economics and politics behind it. Rather, they like the rosy sounding platitudes of the common liturgy. This is not a fault specific to Libertarianism: Pick a random Evangelical Christian off the street, and ask him what the council of Nicea is.
However, I think a great disservice is done by some of the great minds which publish much of the Libertarian cannon today. They dumb down rather complex economic phenomena and theory, into very simplistic black and white terms, which are both intellectually dishonest and which they don't honestly really believe themselves. Moreover, they purposely gloss over things which do not so nicely fit into the rosy picture they've painted (competing freedoms, public goods, market failure, moral hazards, gross negative incentives, tragedy of the anti-commons, externalities, etc.)
The average member of the public, in the same way that the average Christian does not know what the council of Nicea is, does not even know that such things exist within the cannon of thought, they are purposely insulated from it. Such things are occult and apocrypha from them. Ergo, It approaches literally a rather simplistic semi-religious ideology in scope, for the vast majority of adherents. I've had discussions where if you only switched a few words around, they would sound exactly like a Leninist, the same sort of blind ideological fervor (Particularly from Randians).
I've simply accepted that things aren't that cut and dry, and people aren't that simple. And to paraphrase a similar quote: If markets are so good, but our institutions so awful...why would they continue anyways? You know, competition and all.
huzzah!
Not only is this a day late and a dollar short, it doesn't really even match up in functionality. Deskbar + Tracker == Win. Tracker is super small, super fast, deskbar is highly extensible. With a few extra deskbar plugins, I can search google, gmail, use it as a calculator, launch programs from it, search flickr, man pages, parse things right into yubnub (well, in firefox at least), search all my bookmarks, delicious, etc.
This is something that the open source desktop has *lightyears* ahead of the competition.
....bastards didn't post it though >:(. Best damn product on Windows Marketplace.
The judges decision appears to be based on the fact that you can simply enable logging in the server software. If this stands up, which I'm optimistic that it won't, there's still another loophole you can use: Create a webserver software which has no option to log ip addresses. Then in order to create IP logs you would have to actually install another program to do so, and that *does* constitute creation of documents.
way the hell up, I second, third, and fourth. We have quorum, put it in the minutes.
(I has no karma lest I'd do it myself)
Firefox with all my extensions and everything turned off starts at about 60mb's. And it grows. Having more than one tab open especially helps grow firefox. As it is I have about 40 extensions and a theme running (most of my extensions are actually to change the default UI of firefox itself). Worse, opening more than 1 tab will cause greater and greater memory leaks, flash or no. In fact, opening flash or java at all actually increases ram useage in a one way street. E.g., closing the page does not actually decrease ram usage that much. As it is I regularly have about 15 tabs open in firefox at minimum. My record is getting firefox to eat up over 600mb's of ram, I left it running by itself for a few days. As it is, I kill it at least once or twice a day. Beryl is like this too btw, once every few days I have to kill beryl and emerald because of memory leaks. I gave up on kiba-dock and went with the slightly less functional and occasionally buggy Avant-window-navigator, as kiba-dock works like this too! I had kiba-dock running for 3 days (it normally uses maybe 4-15mb of ram) and it had ballooned to 300+mb's of ram usage.
If I wasn't so attatched to my favorite extensions I would drop firefox in a heartbeat for epiphany or Opera if Opera was open-source.
Core 2 Duo T7200, (upgrade)
512mb of ram (this is because I intend to buy the ram on Tigerdirect instead, where I can get 2gigs for $100 instead of $250)
(Upgraded) 15.4in WSXGA+ with the glossy treatment as well
8x dvd burner (upgrade)
(upgrade) 256mb Nvidia Geforce Go 7300
(upgrade) 160mb 5400rpm SATA drive
(upgrade) 85Wh 9-cell battery.
:) I couldn't be happier with my purchase, I don't much consider it to be a "low end" purchase at all, even though I got it sub $1000, and there is no comparable Macintosh available, priced anywhere near it.
This is on top of their warranties, integrated wireless, etc. and free shipping. And it's all nicely guaranteed to work well with Ubuntu.
you're misreading my post a bit. The parts about contractors was referring to smart-house technology. In general I was speaking (hence references to microkernels and 64bit architecture) the difference between "technology exists" and "technology is ubiquitous".
its common where I am in the U.S. at least, peak hour usage during the summer is *horrendous*
How can I be the first to tag this as "Duh"?
This is probably a bit of miscommunication, but what I mean is that the ideas were mainly worked out, as well as the first implementations, 20 years or so ago. E.g., the problem is understood, the hardware is there, knowledge of potential solutions exist, making them easy to use, install, run, and manage, and making them *elegant* solutions, is lacking.
But with specific point to the article: Just because we have cameras that are capable of running allmost all the time, and just because we have small 10tb drives, does not mean necessarily that we have the infrastructure of technologies for ubiquity. E.g., cheap, portable, *easy to use*, transparent cross application/platform/hardware data access, etc. The time horizons of ubiquitous are much greater than the time horizons of "Technology actually exists."
Fundamentally they're not useless, you could for instance, co-ordinate blinds, heating, AC and appliance use to minimize your energy bills, lights that automatically turn themselves on and off as one traverses your house, or that adjust ambient lighting conditions based on # of people and time of day, or whether or not you're sitting in your couch, and the TV is on.., there's a ton more uses as well, but the implementations are clumsy, complex, and hard to manage, which was my point.
One thing that allways bothers me about these kinds of predictions, even when I agree with alot of the insights, is they neglect to note scaling problems. Recall that "smart environments" ubiquitous computing, micro-kernels, 64bit architecture, etc....have all been around for a long time, the technology that is. What has been problematic is costly implementation and lack of scalability. Take smart houses, realistically most of the technology is about 20 years old or more, and was implementable 20 years ago...at a significantly higher cost of course, but even though the comparative technology is cheap today, the implementation is not.
What this specifically means is that the average contractor would not know how to set it up, and the average consumer would not know how to manage it, so it doesn't get used. The time horizons for implementing many of these technologies at a ubiquitous level, even if they're invented now, or invented 20 years ago, is fairly large for many things. Most code is still 32bit and single threaded, despite the rather large inroads made by multi-core 64 bit processors, despite parts standardization being introduced to autos and other products and production methods shortly after the turn of the 20th century,...our houses are still built more or less like they were 200 years or more ago, just faster and with less workmanship.
With reference to his lifelogs, they will come of course, but he should definitely extend his time horizon, cellphones and small computers aren't even universally ubiquitous for most of the world yet. Hell, the *internet* isn't either for that matter. And there's a large body of deadweight that will also have to go, people who will never adopt technologies, even if their children or grandchildren do, and large masses of geographic terrain which will not be integrated with any sort of computerized ubiquitous technology for at least a century or more.
Just my $.02: the only thing that makes SAAS particularly attractive to Users is the ability to use the service from anywhere, from any device. I think home application servers, or paid for hosted application servers (and this is where free software...in a SAAS model can work) will largely defeat many of people's fears with regards to SAAS. Currently such servers are way too complicated for the general user to bother with, but then again...so are most media servers, and until recently so was network attatched storage. It makes much more sense that people would pay a company to host their own private applications (which may be commercially developed, or open source) from their servers than it does for a consumer to get "locked in" to one specific service. The advantage of this approach is that the consumer still owns/controls their applications and data, but does not have to deal with the network administration aspect. I think it's also worth noting that *most* applications of the SAAS model are mainly going to be rather non-intensive applications. Storage, email, small games, word processing, and maybe limited photoshopping abilities, etc. Many seem to forget that the average user-level device is actually getting smaller, and less powerful, cellphones outsell computers by wide margins, laptops far outsell more powerful desktops, and less powerful but smaller and lighter laptops are even more popular. This is overall less power on the machine to necessarily handle all these memory intensive runtime applications. Especially since you add network lag and browser interface memory hogging to it as well.