Perhaps the looming Microsoft specter will finally light a fire under the collective bottoms of all the F/OSS zealots out there to stop proclaiming the superiority of Sugar and start making it a reality.
Sugar, in its current state, is holding back the capabilities of the xo. Seems fitting that the devs jumped ship after all the big pieces were finished and it was down to the grueling and monotonous (yet very necessary) polishing of all the small stuff.
I'm not a fan of MS, but if the Sugar proponents can't get their act together it shouldn't bring down the rest of the project.
Power goes out. Landlines still work.
Weather gets crappy. Landlines still work.
Not much that can fail on the user's end.
Start tossing VoIP in the picture and you're adding a whole bunch of equipment that has lot of ways to fail.
You're sorta screwed as an ISP customer for after hours support. You mostly likely don't have any contractual quality of service agreements that give you anything higher than the lowest priorities.
The last tech support job I had was supporting the register and back office systems for a number of national franchise restaurant chains. We'd have 15-20 people on during the day and 1 (one) on at night even though some of the franchises were 24 hours and their reporting process would usually run about 0130 local time regardless of being 24 hour or not (and the reports loved to bork the system). Low priority calls (had a day to resolved) got worked on if there was nothing else to do. Medium priority had a few hours to resolve and High priority had 30 minutes to an hour. So if you're calling in after hours with nothing that can rate higher than the lowest priority it probably won't be resolved until the last minute. The lone tech or severely understaffed desk probably has their hands full with things that will cost their company money if they don't resolve the problem asap.
The lone overnight tech would also act as a "lower than level 1" tech for a number of other desks who were contractually obligated to always have a tech available. The effectively L0 tech could do nothing more than enter in tickets for the actual techs that would arrive in the morning. A site could be completely down but there wasn't anything that tech could do about it.
No one wants to pay for quality tech support. A fully staffed and trained desk is overkill for most day to day operations. The bean counters see it as waste and the customers don't want to pay for it. They didn't want to pay for their contracts in general which made it all the more entertaining at 4am on a Sunday morning when an out of contract site would go down for the count, call in, and then yell at you for not servicing them while they are out of contract while calls from paying customers are piling up in the queue.
Also, if someone I knew called me at 3am because their internet was down and they didn't want to wait like everyone else there had better be a case of Guinness sitting on my doorstep in the morning. If you're doing stuff you know you will need to call in for, wait for normal business hours and save everyone a lot of hassle.
You forgot: Is the power working in your city? In the building? In the room the computer is in.
I wish I was kidding when I say that I had calls about about computers not working at all and the fact that there was no power in the room, building, or city (had all three cases) apparently didn't cross their minds at all.
"Is the power light lit on the monitor?" "No" "Is the monitor's switch turned on?" "Hold on, I'll have to get a flashlight, the power's out in the building." *eye twitch*
A level 3 tech's time is much more costly to the company than a L1's or even a L2's. It's like a pyramid. Lots of L1 techs to screen out the reboot-will-fix-it-for-now callers, some L2 techs to gather the information for the L3 and possibly script monkey away the problem and avoid escalating to L3 and then just a handful of L3 techs that handle the few calls that get through to them.
Toss in draconian call metric systems, skeleton crews and call volumes that burn out your L1 and L2 techs before they start getting raises and you've got a system that favors not promoting customers up the chain if at all possible.
Another thing to remember: when you call in you are bothering the other person on the other end as well. They really don't want to talk to you. They will make you share in the suffering. If the L2 techs can find a way to keep you in L1 hell, they will. L3 does the same.
I'm amazed that we haven't had enough incidents yet to coin the phrase "going tech support". Hitler and Stalin don't have anything on the average L2 tech when it comes to malevolence and a burning desire to rid the world of all life in the cruelest, most painful ways possible.
So it's flamebait to point out why automobiles and formerly "virgin" land able to were able to be developed?
I suppose when the facts are against you your last hope is to suppress them and inspire irrational religious devotion to protecting "the Environment". Environmentalism, the new religion for people with more money and guilt than they know what to do with!
Ecology and conservation are what we need, not some blind faith environmentalism or radical eco-terrorism.
Luckily they had Open Source software, and were able to get a working machine with no software cost,
One could argue their open source software came with a pretty hefty cost.
Reinventing the wheel and then not finishing it is putting the hurt on their little machine. It's a shame they don't have the software to compliment the quality of the hardware in the xo.
Or were you talking about the subcompact car with the coffee can sized exhaust to make it sound like it goes faster equivalent of desktop computers for 'gamers'.
Mac Pro, you get a top of the line system in one big purchase (boo! hiss!)
"Gamer PC", you get a top of the line system with lots of smaller purchases (I r s0 l33t 4 sh0pping @ newegg!).
Macs tend to hold their value much better than other computers, so once your maxed out dual quad core multi video card Pro isn't cutting it, you could easily sell it and use the money towards the next Pro. Good luck trying to sell your old and busted loose parts from a typical "Gamer PC".
/sigh It's good to see the important posts get +5.
Who said I have a tivo or a mythbox?
It doesn't take an extraordinary mental effort to extend the concept of time being the primary limiting factor instead of money to the rest of everyday life nor to apply that generalized concept to the issue at hand.
Back in college, I had the time to dink around on a recalcitrant machine. Free time was plenty, money was scarce. Time is what I threw at problems. I wondered why people would waste money on pre-built systems, especially macs, when they could save so much money by parting out their machine and assembling it themselves.
Now with a job, I have money to throw at problems and not so much time. It makes more sense to buy things that actually work than to try and piece cheap crap into something that sort of works and will require constant maintenance. Now I know why people would spend money on pre-built systems, especially macs. The good stuff "just works".
Try turning off all your fan cooled equipment for the day. Get used to the sound level. Turn all that stuff back on. You'll notice the difference. If you have to wonder why a "spare computer" mythbox wouldn't work for most people after that...
Especially with the bar example, I believe it is a case of: "If *I* have to be bored out of my gourd at the bar then you have to be as well. The value of my suffering, and thus self worth, is entirely defined by how many people are being miserable at the same time I am."
That old computer is going to sound just peachy in your living room. Then there's the amount of space one takes up.
MythTV stops being free when I have to buy a completely new rig to make it as compact and quiet as a tivo.
It may be a 4 to 6 hour project, assuming everything works. Which isn't likely if you're making due with whatever is laying around.
For a lot of people, there gets to be a point in their lives where their time is more valuable than money and they have the money to spare to spend on things that will save them time.
Just wait until you or one of your friends ends up in a divorce situation where the psychotic spouse wants the land and property the guy bought, had paid in full and improved before they had even met.
Step 1. Marry guy that already has everything Step 2. Start being the psycho you really are Step 3. (the big secret) get a divorce, sob and whine that you got used to the standard of living his previous investments provided for you Step 4. collect half or all the guy's assets Step 5. goto 1
The best part of it is, if you stop lawyering up, they win. You have to fight every petty little claim otherwise you lose all of them. Your only hope is that they start running out of lawyers that will represent them (and that's saying something when a lawyer turns down a paycheck).
Don't use the compromised computer. Don't use the compromised network. Assume anything that could be compromised is compromised. Email accounts, IM accounts, online bank accounts, etc. etc. Don't use them.
All things considered I'd prefer if they just decided to divvy the 1 billion dollars between themselves and skipped the "continuing the decline of your (the politician's society is a separate entity) society".
Congratulations on spawning and all that, but "protecting" little Billy or Susy isn't worth the damage to what liberty we have left.
That would probably fall under the image manipulation bit. Or would be treated as a loophole in the next go-round (analog manipulation or intentional staging).
So ya, you'd probably have kiddy porn if this passes./sigh I swear soccer moms will be the downfall of western civilization.
I've tried, up until last week, to make Sugar work for me (knowing *I* wasn't in the target audience for it). Now I'm running XFCE on top of a clean 703 install. Night and day difference. Went from cute, somewhat usable, toy to pretty good ultraportable.
I've mentioned this in my other post, Sugar has issues. Now I'm going to open myself up for some grade A flamage, but if all these FOSS advocates would spend as much time working on fixing Sugar's issues as they do crowing about how awesome FOSS, err, Sugar is, Sugar might have a power management system that doesn't fry SD cards. This whole sugar labs thing isn't going to help either. The xo has very specific needs and Sugar needs to be tailored to it, not ported over to run on more systems.
Are you using an emulated sugar or running it off the actual hardware?
Sugar has issues. Lots of them. They need to be fixed, have needed to be fixed but guess what? That awesomeness of FOSS hasn't done much to get them fixed.
In an environment where you're expecting to the xo to be off the grid when not at the school you'd think power management would be a top priority. Well just recently in 703 have they added a suspend/resume setup, one which nukes any SD cards you have slotted. You still can't shut power off to the wireless card when you're not using it.
All things considered, Sugar isn't mature enough to be out in the wild yet, but it is. Things need to be fixed quickly, but they won't be. The xo is getting hamstrung by its software.
It's like talking to the police. The only things you should ever say (IANAL)to a cop is "Am I under arrest?" and "I need my attorney." Anything else, no matter how innocent you think it is (or you are) can and will be used against you. They may not be able to get you for what they were initially looking for but they'll find something in your statements to get you with if they want to.
They don't need a reason, just an excuse. It's best if you don't give them either.
My sales force use the bullshit line that it saves energy and all the other crap. In reality it does not. So it's your client's fault for believing your false advertising? Brilliant! (Great advertising for your competitors btw)
It usually doesn't take much to convert technology that increases energy output (high performance cars) to increasing energy efficiency (high efficiency cars). Weight reductions make a bigger engine drive the car even faster *or* it can let a more efficient but less powerful engine drive the same size vehicle. Joe Sixpack couldn't afford the early systems, those were paid for by Mr. Martini. Aluminum engine blocks, computer control, those things didn't start out in Yugos.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the looming Microsoft specter will finally light a fire under the collective bottoms of all the F/OSS zealots out there to stop proclaiming the superiority of Sugar and start making it a reality.
Sugar, in its current state, is holding back the capabilities of the xo. Seems fitting that the devs jumped ship after all the big pieces were finished and it was down to the grueling and monotonous (yet very necessary) polishing of all the small stuff.
I'm not a fan of MS, but if the Sugar proponents can't get their act together it shouldn't bring down the rest of the project.
Power goes out. Landlines still work. Weather gets crappy. Landlines still work. Not much that can fail on the user's end. Start tossing VoIP in the picture and you're adding a whole bunch of equipment that has lot of ways to fail.
ID is all fun and games until someone finds a babelfish and renders the whole point moot.
Obviously you've never worked in tech support.
Yes, you get paid to work. Rarely do you get paid enough to put up with the callers.
$9.50/hour is a low wage in exchange for your humanity and will to live.
You're sorta screwed as an ISP customer for after hours support. You mostly likely don't have any contractual quality of service agreements that give you anything higher than the lowest priorities.
The last tech support job I had was supporting the register and back office systems for a number of national franchise restaurant chains. We'd have 15-20 people on during the day and 1 (one) on at night even though some of the franchises were 24 hours and their reporting process would usually run about 0130 local time regardless of being 24 hour or not (and the reports loved to bork the system). Low priority calls (had a day to resolved) got worked on if there was nothing else to do. Medium priority had a few hours to resolve and High priority had 30 minutes to an hour. So if you're calling in after hours with nothing that can rate higher than the lowest priority it probably won't be resolved until the last minute. The lone tech or severely understaffed desk probably has their hands full with things that will cost their company money if they don't resolve the problem asap.
The lone overnight tech would also act as a "lower than level 1" tech for a number of other desks who were contractually obligated to always have a tech available. The effectively L0 tech could do nothing more than enter in tickets for the actual techs that would arrive in the morning. A site could be completely down but there wasn't anything that tech could do about it.
No one wants to pay for quality tech support. A fully staffed and trained desk is overkill for most day to day operations. The bean counters see it as waste and the customers don't want to pay for it. They didn't want to pay for their contracts in general which made it all the more entertaining at 4am on a Sunday morning when an out of contract site would go down for the count, call in, and then yell at you for not servicing them while they are out of contract while calls from paying customers are piling up in the queue.
Also, if someone I knew called me at 3am because their internet was down and they didn't want to wait like everyone else there had better be a case of Guinness sitting on my doorstep in the morning. If you're doing stuff you know you will need to call in for, wait for normal business hours and save everyone a lot of hassle.
You forgot: Is the power working in your city? In the building? In the room the computer is in.
I wish I was kidding when I say that I had calls about about computers not working at all and the fact that there was no power in the room, building, or city (had all three cases) apparently didn't cross their minds at all.
"Is the power light lit on the monitor?"
"No"
"Is the monitor's switch turned on?"
"Hold on, I'll have to get a flashlight, the power's out in the building."
*eye twitch*
A level 3 tech's time is much more costly to the company than a L1's or even a L2's. It's like a pyramid. Lots of L1 techs to screen out the reboot-will-fix-it-for-now callers, some L2 techs to gather the information for the L3 and possibly script monkey away the problem and avoid escalating to L3 and then just a handful of L3 techs that handle the few calls that get through to them.
Toss in draconian call metric systems, skeleton crews and call volumes that burn out your L1 and L2 techs before they start getting raises and you've got a system that favors not promoting customers up the chain if at all possible.
Another thing to remember: when you call in you are bothering the other person on the other end as well. They really don't want to talk to you. They will make you share in the suffering. If the L2 techs can find a way to keep you in L1 hell, they will. L3 does the same.
I'm amazed that we haven't had enough incidents yet to coin the phrase "going tech support". Hitler and Stalin don't have anything on the average L2 tech when it comes to malevolence and a burning desire to rid the world of all life in the cruelest, most painful ways possible.
So it's flamebait to point out why automobiles and formerly "virgin" land able to were able to be developed?
I suppose when the facts are against you your last hope is to suppress them and inspire irrational religious devotion to protecting "the Environment". Environmentalism, the new religion for people with more money and guilt than they know what to do with!
Ecology and conservation are what we need, not some blind faith environmentalism or radical eco-terrorism.
Henry Ford didn't have eco-terrorists and environmentalists to deal with.
Nor did the pioneers who homesteaded newly opened territories.
We, on the other hand, do. And they have lawyers, congresscritters, and the media on their payroll.
One could argue their open source software came with a pretty hefty cost.
Reinventing the wheel and then not finishing it is putting the hurt on their little machine. It's a shame they don't have the software to compliment the quality of the hardware in the xo.
in before FOSS zealots and "fix it yourself!"
That would be the Mac Pro.
Or were you talking about the subcompact car with the coffee can sized exhaust to make it sound like it goes faster equivalent of desktop computers for 'gamers'.
Mac Pro, you get a top of the line system in one big purchase (boo! hiss!)
"Gamer PC", you get a top of the line system with lots of smaller purchases (I r s0 l33t 4 sh0pping @ newegg!).
Macs tend to hold their value much better than other computers, so once your maxed out dual quad core multi video card Pro isn't cutting it, you could easily sell it and use the money towards the next Pro. Good luck trying to sell your old and busted loose parts from a typical "Gamer PC".
/sigh It's good to see the important posts get +5.
Who said I have a tivo or a mythbox?
It doesn't take an extraordinary mental effort to extend the concept of time being the primary limiting factor instead of money to the rest of everyday life nor to apply that generalized concept to the issue at hand.
Back in college, I had the time to dink around on a recalcitrant machine. Free time was plenty, money was scarce. Time is what I threw at problems. I wondered why people would waste money on pre-built systems, especially macs, when they could save so much money by parting out their machine and assembling it themselves.
Now with a job, I have money to throw at problems and not so much time. It makes more sense to buy things that actually work than to try and piece cheap crap into something that sort of works and will require constant maintenance. Now I know why people would spend money on pre-built systems, especially macs. The good stuff "just works".
Try turning off all your fan cooled equipment for the day. Get used to the sound level. Turn all that stuff back on. You'll notice the difference. If you have to wonder why a "spare computer" mythbox wouldn't work for most people after that...
Especially with the bar example, I believe it is a case of: "If *I* have to be bored out of my gourd at the bar then you have to be as well. The value of my suffering, and thus self worth, is entirely defined by how many people are being miserable at the same time I am."
Actually, it's rather obvious.
That old computer is going to sound just peachy in your living room. Then there's the amount of space one takes up.
MythTV stops being free when I have to buy a completely new rig to make it as compact and quiet as a tivo.
It may be a 4 to 6 hour project, assuming everything works. Which isn't likely if you're making due with whatever is laying around.
For a lot of people, there gets to be a point in their lives where their time is more valuable than money and they have the money to spare to spend on things that will save them time.
Just wait until you or one of your friends ends up in a divorce situation where the psychotic spouse wants the land and property the guy bought, had paid in full and improved before they had even met.
Step 1. Marry guy that already has everything
Step 2. Start being the psycho you really are
Step 3. (the big secret) get a divorce, sob and whine that you got used to the standard of living his previous investments provided for you
Step 4. collect half or all the guy's assets
Step 5. goto 1
The best part of it is, if you stop lawyering up, they win. You have to fight every petty little claim otherwise you lose all of them. Your only hope is that they start running out of lawyers that will represent them (and that's saying something when a lawyer turns down a paycheck).
Don't use the compromised computer.
Don't use the compromised network.
Assume anything that could be compromised is compromised. Email accounts, IM accounts, online bank accounts, etc. etc. Don't use them.
All things considered I'd prefer if they just decided to divvy the 1 billion dollars between themselves and skipped the "continuing the decline of your (the politician's society is a separate entity) society".
Congratulations on spawning and all that, but "protecting" little Billy or Susy isn't worth the damage to what liberty we have left.
That would probably fall under the image manipulation bit. Or would be treated as a loophole in the next go-round (analog manipulation or intentional staging).
/sigh I swear soccer moms will be the downfall of western civilization.
So ya, you'd probably have kiddy porn if this passes.
If the mother hadn't given birth to the kid, the kid wouldn't have died. So the mother is partly responsible for the kid's death as well.
I bet the girl didn't pay for her internet access, so both her parents are guilty of causing her death.
Al Gore *INVENTED* the internet, which was used to cause the death of the girl so he's guilty as well.
Kids die. Film at eleven. Get on with life and stop kneejerking away our society.
And FOSS people wonder why everyone considers them to be stuck up zealots...
"There's a problem with the product!"
"Fix it yourself!"
"I'm not a programmer (in language X)!"
"Then you can't disparage FOSS software!"
"..."
So, what code did you contribute to Sugar?
Day 1 g1g1 xo owner. Got it in early December.
I've tried, up until last week, to make Sugar work for me (knowing *I* wasn't in the target audience for it). Now I'm running XFCE on top of a clean 703 install. Night and day difference. Went from cute, somewhat usable, toy to pretty good ultraportable.
I've mentioned this in my other post, Sugar has issues. Now I'm going to open myself up for some grade A flamage, but if all these FOSS advocates would spend as much time working on fixing Sugar's issues as they do crowing about how awesome FOSS, err, Sugar is, Sugar might have a power management system that doesn't fry SD cards. This whole sugar labs thing isn't going to help either. The xo has very specific needs and Sugar needs to be tailored to it, not ported over to run on more systems.
Are you using an emulated sugar or running it off the actual hardware?
Sugar has issues. Lots of them. They need to be fixed, have needed to be fixed but guess what? That awesomeness of FOSS hasn't done much to get them fixed.
In an environment where you're expecting to the xo to be off the grid when not at the school you'd think power management would be a top priority. Well just recently in 703 have they added a suspend/resume setup, one which nukes any SD cards you have slotted. You still can't shut power off to the wireless card when you're not using it.
All things considered, Sugar isn't mature enough to be out in the wild yet, but it is. Things need to be fixed quickly, but they won't be. The xo is getting hamstrung by its software.
It's like talking to the police. The only things you should ever say (IANAL)to a cop is "Am I under arrest?" and "I need my attorney." Anything else, no matter how innocent you think it is (or you are) can and will be used against you. They may not be able to get you for what they were initially looking for but they'll find something in your statements to get you with if they want to.
They don't need a reason, just an excuse. It's best if you don't give them either.
It usually doesn't take much to convert technology that increases energy output (high performance cars) to increasing energy efficiency (high efficiency cars). Weight reductions make a bigger engine drive the car even faster *or* it can let a more efficient but less powerful engine drive the same size vehicle. Joe Sixpack couldn't afford the early systems, those were paid for by Mr. Martini. Aluminum engine blocks, computer control, those things didn't start out in Yugos.
The poor generally can't afford any sort of cutting edge research.
We (the masses) can benefit from the wastefulness of the rich and the advances in technology their decadent lifestyle demands.
(Cars were for the rich initially. As were TVs. As were computers. As were LCD watches. etc., etc.)