is not a bad thing to try. You might give 9.2 a shot now that it is out with updates. I have a copy running on this box, just have not moved all my user data over yet. (Too busy)
Mandrake does make a difference on this machine, though I never took the time to note the X differences. (Last RH I tried was 7 something and it was not for me on the desktop yet.)
I really like Mandrake. 8.2 was a very good release. 9.2 is close, but with newer software. With a coupla downloads from PLF, DVD support (play, rip, burn) is working with DVD Shrink running under wine.
Funny you did not note fonts as one of the X shortcomings. For me, this has been a biggie. All fixed in Mandrake 9.2. The whole desktop just looks good. (Finally)
I'll bet if you get all the sources loaded, the X compile will not be too bad. If it works, let me know what you see.
While my own are still in the house, I will likely keep working with them and the school to make sure things work out ok.
Later on though, I may well consider these things. I am a young parent, so there is time. Tutoring happens once in a while now though. We were the first in the area to have DSL. Sometimens I find myself working with some of my kids friends on homework. Basic stuff, searching, understanding what you found, citing sources, Internet dangers...
I knew somebody who started a small computer club. They basically just got kids together for bi weekly meetings about computers. In the beginning we just talked or played games, after a while we got into serious stuff.
Kind of cool to be 14, sitting around talking about the advantages of the 6809 compared to the 6502 and knowing what we were talking about. Learned a lot from that little club. Maybe that's the way to go.
There are days when I feel pretty burned out given the current state of things. Showing kids simple (to us) things helps bring back a little of the magic. That is if you like kids...
Your Moz and OOO times are insane! OOO on my machine (P3/500 385Mb Ram, browsers and terms open, Mandrake 8.2) takes about 31Sec cold, 9 Sec cached... WTF !?! There is a problem on your end somewhere. Too many things running, or something.
I find it damn hard to believe your claim of less then a second for OOO on the older machine. Comparing Word are we? Maybe the fact that most of what Word needs is already running helps out just a bit.
When you say "People want..." don't you really mean you want? (Not that it's a bad want or anything, but I mean to be clear.) Companies who take advantage of network transparancy are going to save money. The users are going to deal. Since enterprise systems are where the money is, network transparancy is important.
Remember an SGI machine can do these things well and they run X. This means we can also, we just need to keep working hard at it. (Which was my first point to begin with; namely, not killing off the power now just to make a few happy.)
I am running Mandrake 8.2 at the moment on a P3/500 or so. Graphics subsystem is Matrox G400.
For me, application launch is slower than most intergrated win32 applications are. Only a bit slower than non-intergrated ones. My guess is this is a combination of non optimal code combined with the user space issues. (Takes time to init stuff in user space that might be done already in a win32 environment...)
2d buttons respond in a few milliseconds, so we clearly differ there. Window moves can be sluggish when they are moved a lot, so perhaps we agree on this point, though I have always run my computers with opaque move off. (Turned them on for this little comparison) Menus vary. The KDE menu is quite snappy. Mozilla on the other hand seems to be a bit slower. Maya works much as it does on win32. There is room for agreement here also.
I run Maya on this machine and it performs nicely within the limits of the matrox card. Quake3 sees 60Fps on average, with low latency between mouse move and screen update.
XP is well tuned in these areas, no doubt, but does it matter? X is improving all the time. Three years ago, things were worse overall. Today they are quite useable.
I still maintain X is not the problem however. It is improving every day with the current state productive and useable. X on an SGI machine is as snappy as you can ask for (even on the really old 30Mhz machines which is scary), so clearly the protocol and core design are not at fault, only implementation.
Would I give up all the good features for a bit crisper window experience? Not a chance....
These seem like awful small nits to pick given the advantages.
No growing up required. X11 is an important feature in that it keeps the whole of Linux multi-user at all levels. Multi-user computing may not be needed for your average joe, but it can easily be leveraged by most anybody else to their advantage. Multi-user computing plays hard in the enterprise space and anyone that knows anything about computing knows it. Giving that up means accepting Microsoft is right about display technology and we simply must do it cheaper and that's bullshit.
Microsoft has a market because they took shortcuts, litigated, licensed, and bought out most of the tech that stood in their way. In the early 90's I was running SGI workstations that used the X window system and frankly, they spanked any win32 running machine of the day. In terms of display capability they still punch well above their weight today.
We have work to do on X, but removing it is not the answer --refining it as SGI did is.
Windows has the market they do because they were clearly disruptive at the time. A low price point combined with court proven unethical, illegal business practices allowed them to build it. Commercial UNIX, at the time, was expensive and fragmented and weak because of it; thus, we end up with a market full of short-cut designed by marketing software that continues to color many peoples idea of computing to this day.
The fact that there are more people running single-user computers only reflects the result of business savvy and questionable ethics, not the merits of the technology itself.
There is no way a single user display sub-system is going to be able to compete with the multi-user goodness that is X. I was on that path. Got my Microsoft cert and all of that. Blazing the trail with NT. Feeling the power and having a good time, until one day....
Got assigned a job that involved some rendering. Got cocky, and had a failure that pushed the project past a deadline. Was on SGI machines at the time because of the software in use.
Well, lets just say I did not miss that deadline. Being in a multi-user environment meant that I could make use of damn near every machine in the place from my desk. I always knew this, but did not really apply it until this came up. Using X11 meant that I could install software, monitor and start renders, composite and encode all on different machines in different locations at the same time. --I spent about 14 hours doing exactly that. Printed the project to video tape about 15 minutes before the client picked it up.
That one day changed a lot of things because I finally understood what true multi-user computing is about. If I had been running win32 at the time, I would have not made it. Would have spent too much time messing around with various machines in different locations. Single user, multi-tasking OSes do not allow their users to really take advantage of their networked environment. They do not scale well because of this. Failure to scale costs money and time, but does keep a large number of admins employed these days. Oh well...
You know today, I support multi-user server based complex applications running over X. Installation of these applications is complex as is administration. Putting that application onto one compute server with shared data exported via SAMBA makes for a tight clean environment that requires very little support. What support it does require can be done from anywhere because of X. Some of the folks doing this have went the PC win32 route. Every last one of them have seen their administrative costs rise as the number of tasks that have to be done while physically at the machine rises.
Ever see a broken win32 server? We all have. What do we see? A bunch of admins standing around while one of them works the machine. Ever see the same in a multi-user environment? Everybody can be doing something as long as the network is running, plus there are fewer admins to boot because they don't spend their time walking around!
It does exactly what we want, only not on the native graphics display.
You still have to plan ahead and launch the app using an open vnc server. You can even strip the server down so that it just runs the app. So it is still a desktop, but running a single application. I do this from time to time.
The feature we want is the ability to identify and move an application running on a native X display system, to another one --the VNC one, for example, without planning ahead.
Well, I have written about them in the past regarding speed and bloat. They are getting through that nicely today.
I don't mind people making winalike desktops, as long as I can theme them. I do mind taking a nice multi-user OS and turning it into a single user one for no good reason.
I think it is all the lawyers. When I went to school, things were not as bad. The staff had a lot more options compared to today.
Schools do not teach ethics and citizenship. Afraid they might offend somebody. In fact, most of the problems today boil down to lame procedures designed by lawyers to maintain a high level of "liability managment."
The schools would not have to go through the crap they have to today, if the parents were more involved. Nothing worse than a problem kid with rich, uninvolved parents willing to sue the school when something happens to their kid.
I have 4 kids and stay right on top of what they are doing in school. Takes a lot of time most of my peers are not willing to give. As they get older, the differences are beginning to show.
As an involved parent, I am qualified to say this would not happen with my kid. The suspension is bullshit plain and simple. Schools are supposed to be places where we build new citizens one kid at a time. Giving smart kids the smackdown because the staff is too uninformed to understand their behaviour is sensless.
The schools work for us. They don't often want to admit that, but the truth is they do. With this particular kid, they have just sent a message and shaped a couple of values in his mind that are unacceptable at best, scarring at worst.
In this case, both are at fault. The school being driven by its lawyers and the state instead of its responsibility to society, and the parents for letting this crap stand.
I know the schools have it tough, but if this were my kid, I would be in the office that day, and would stay until the suspension was revoked. Clearly the educators need to get some education themselves, and I would press this point hard.
Nobody wants a lawsuit over something this small, but we don't want our kids becoming compliant drones either.
In my experience, once this is explained to the staff, this sort of thing goes away pretty quickly. When they realize they are going to deal with a parent who knows the rules and the law and cares about their kid, they back off and pester the other kids whose parents don't care.
Another thing about this that burns my ass: I would be happy to work with kids in school for a few years. I have a lot to give, practical experience, and enjoy the subject matter. Plenty of other people I know are in a similar position.
You would think the State government would have programs in place to take advantage of this for technical subject matter, but they don't. Sorry if I offend a teacher or two, but the truth is most grade / high school computer educators really have no clue. I am sure they are fine people, working hard to make the best of the situation they are in, but still it sucks to know my kids could be getting much better...
There is RTF and PDF that both work nicely for almost everything.
Almost everyone uses Microsoft Office right now, but every last one of them can easily do a bit of work to get some business. With IBM, I would think this bit of work would be worth it.
Make no mistake, if they do this we will see changes and it will be about time.
Performance is fine, features are fine. Everytime I read one of these, I grow a bit more frustrated.
The X Window system is possibly one of the best features in Linux right now, not to mention the number of applications (basically just about all of them) written to take advantage of it. The ability to remote the display is a powerful thing that allows for many compute options not easily done with single-user framebuffer based systems. (All of them are single user, unless you count some wierd dual head setup.)
We need to work harder at presenting Linux in a useable way, not stripping it to look like the other OSes out there right now.
X11 is what makes Linux a true multi-user operating system. It is a big part of where the power is. Why come all this way only to give up one of the core values?
Lets say we actually do this. All the new applications then get written for the frame buffer. Single users might gain some small benefit from a bit lower complexity (which can and will be solved in presentation), but everyone else loses. The money is in the corporate systems and that is where X11 plays hard. Application servers delivering applications to desktops over X11 are easy to administer and cost effective. Client-server just cannot compare really.
Rather than nuke one of our killer enterprise features to make Linux work for isolated single users, we need to continue to work hard at getting Linux in front of brand new users and schools. People that begin with Linux are not going to have any trouble with it. They will grow with Linux as it continues to mature, the result over time will be better for everyone.
Those running the current win32 systems are all going to want things the way they have them now. Giving that to them is not worth it because that is accepting their way at a lower cost, and that is just not what OSS is about. OSS is about powerful software with freedom built in from the beginning, not software designed around the competition.
We can continue to build Linux just the way it is now and slowly the others will either:
1.) See the light and join us,
or
2.) Continue doing what they are doing. (while paying a lot for the option of doing so)
Either way, OSS will continue as it has, which means tossing X11 (which making it an addon is doing) won't be worth it.
Linux is pretty easy now and we are only at the beginning! Lets keep it intact for a bit longer before taking such drastic measures.
I was up about 22 hours when I wrote that. Big nasty winter storm, here in Portland, mixed with a broken water main and a neighbors leaky basement = a very long night.
Learning to use OSS taught me a lot about software. Today I am 100 percent legal and intend to stay that way.
You know, the money saved on OSS can easily leave room for a few software purchases each year. I would gladly pay for those if they were offered.
It is *damn* nice not to have to make all sorts of justifications for the software I use. You would think software companies would be just craving enlightned customers that actually understood the value of their work...
He is clearly interested in Fair Use. The folks doing the ruining are the MPAA.
They want to destroy Fair Use. Apple struck a deal to get things moving. If Apple suffers over this, it won't be because of Jon, it will be because of the MPAA.
Personally, I applaud the guy. He is doing the right thing at the right time. This whole action is going to get a lot of people thinking. I believe in Fair Use, as do a lot of people --even if they do not know what it is legally. Morally they do and that is what counts in the end. If enough people continue to express their counter view, the law *will* change.
Remember, we all get older. Our chance at the law will come. Should we all just lay down and forget things until that time?
No, because we should not have to --for me that is reason enough.
I will, on occasion use a P2P service, though I keep it short and sweet. Never did use P2P big however, so the change is minor in that the frequency went down a bit.
Why use P2P? Got addicted to the variety of music present on Napster. You know, find a user with similar tastes, then grap a couple tracks you don't know, but might like. That's fun stuff that is just too damn expensive to do otherwise.
The new pay services make it pretty easy to get a lot of music, but fall way short in the finding new music area... Rock from the Aussies, techno / house / trance from Europe and Japan is very appealing to me. Didn't know that until Napster. In a way, I kind of wish I didn't given all the majors mistakes today.
I am not sure they are going to like the bigger changes however. When P2P started, I would exchange song titles with friends. Each person would just grab a copy because that was easiest. Now we are all back to the old way of doing things; namely, trading tracks directly.
How?
Ssh, scp directly from machine to machine. The music I do buy, and I do buy music just as I always have, gets ripped. Stuff I think friends might find interesting, or that ends up part of a discussion gets traded instead of just named. The stuff that comes from P2P gets hashed around and played a bit. If it's good, I buy it, then trade the quality encodes from that with whomever was interested during the critique stage. So in the end, most of the costs are there with time and distance being less of a factor. Nice improvement over dubbing parties, but it could be way better.
A while back, we were helping a small group master a CD. Sometimes it is hard to articulate production values when some people are missing the tracks in question, for example. We could lend physical media, but why? We have nicely networked computers that save a lot of time, it is foolish not to use them. Afterall, the production is happening over the Internet, why not foster the discussion as well? This sort of sharing is a totally necessary thing and can get expensive if done the way they think we should do it. The really creative folks need stuff to create from. This means a lot more music to listen to, discuss and build style influences from. If everybody hears the same top 100 crap, then we are going to get more top 100 crap --exactly what we don't need to sustain a healthy music market. P2P really helps with that, maybe it shouldn't, but the truth is it does.
Personally, I think P2P is great stuff for learning about music. It also works well for lots of other things like software, though torrents are better for new or popular software. The Apple model is a good one, though its a shame Apple and the artists do not get a bit more of the cut.
It has been mentioned many times here, but I will say it again. The majors are fools plain and simple. If they had taken the Napster deal, they would be rolling in dough right now with monthly subscriptions and marketing data up the wazoo that we paid to give them! But, nooo they want control. Today they pay the price. Lots of lawyers, annoyed customers, and the confines of age all doom them to lackluster sales and growing vulnerabltiy to potential newcomers who get it.
People all over the place are making interesting music with inexpensive equipment. Mp3.com was a first attempt to aggragate them and present them to potential listeners. It worked, but not well. Others will follow, just as the P2P clients evolve, so will they. As they get it right, the majors will be sooo sorry.
I have traded tracks all my life starting with cassette and a bit of reel to reel. For me, nothing has changed really. Napster was a brief flurry that likely cost them a few sales, but the real cost was my newly opened eyes to the real diversity in music I was missing out on. I buy music in about the same quantities I always have; namely, small quantities because good albums are few and far between, I would buy a lot more If I could get it at
Anyone can sell a cheap box, so folks shop for the cheapest they can find. Well, every last one of those people are going to have problems. Next time they buy, they are going to be looking for solutions.
The current state of affairs strongly discourages this. What the big software companies want you to do is sell the cheap box, and their software. You build their business while just getting enough to sustain your own. Oh, you get the front line support calls too --thanks for playing!
With OSS, you can provide solutions and services that solve problems on a local scale. Now you get the customer and the dollars for servicing them. Each and every one of those support calls is now a chance for you to build your business instead of your suppliers...
because our house is small, so voice works just fine. However, I do IM from work. My kids will ask when I am getting home, help with homework questions, and deliver the wife's to-do list. (Hate that last one...)
Anyway, it's pretty cool in that my kids know they can reach me before the early evening hours. I also know they are home:)
IM in the house seems really silly to me, but maybe some folks like the quiet...
So, if we reduce the value of software to "free" then we reduce the overall worth of the US, or something along those lines, because we suddenly have less "value" to offer in trade for "nothing" in return? Have I got that right?
(Assuming I do.)
There is another way to look at value however. What if people begin to understand how to use the free software, as they are doing now. Does the value really evaporate, or simply move around a little. Instead of one or two really big companies holding and controlling the value and its distribution, folks all over the county gain value in relation to the new skills they aquire.
Software becomes a resource used in "construction". Instead of one or two companies making all the money, people all over the place make more money right?
The value is still there, wealth is still being generated, the difference is in the concentration. Central vs distributed.
Seems to me, as a technical person, I stand to benefit more from the distributed distribution of wealth OSS seems to offer, than I am from the centralized one...
Not trolling at all. Actually poking fun at us really. The length of time thing really was there to dig out part of what you believe. Being really short sighted makes some things easier to consider, or not, for me anyway.
Take mars, if there is some simple primitive life --it does not know any better, so we have done no harm. Taking the really long Douglas Adams scale view of things means we humans just retarded the most advanced beings to have ever lived. The universe got a bit brighter just from a few of them walking around.
The right does not change in either case, but the worldview is the difference between doing what you feel like because you really don't care much, or doing nothing because anything at all great could (or could not) happen based on even a twitch.
Just making a bit of fun with us and those coupla ideas....
Slashdot Mirror
is not a bad thing to try. You might give 9.2 a shot now that it is out with updates. I have a copy running on this box, just have not moved all my user data over yet. (Too busy)
Mandrake does make a difference on this machine, though I never took the time to note the X differences. (Last RH I tried was 7 something and it was not for me on the desktop yet.)
I really like Mandrake. 8.2 was a very good release. 9.2 is close, but with newer software. With a coupla downloads from PLF, DVD support (play, rip, burn) is working with DVD Shrink running under wine.
Funny you did not note fonts as one of the X shortcomings. For me, this has been a biggie. All fixed in Mandrake 9.2. The whole desktop just looks good. (Finally)
I'll bet if you get all the sources loaded, the X compile will not be too bad. If it works, let me know what you see.
and copied the reporter too hoping he could get the mail to the family.
Enough of these and we will see another column.
While my own are still in the house, I will likely keep working with them and the school to make sure things work out ok.
Later on though, I may well consider these things. I am a young parent, so there is time. Tutoring happens once in a while now though. We were the first in the area to have DSL. Sometimens I find myself working with some of my kids friends on homework. Basic stuff, searching, understanding what you found, citing sources, Internet dangers...
I knew somebody who started a small computer club. They basically just got kids together for bi weekly meetings about computers. In the beginning we just talked or played games, after a while we got into serious stuff.
Kind of cool to be 14, sitting around talking about the advantages of the 6809 compared to the 6502 and knowing what we were talking about. Learned a lot from that little club. Maybe that's the way to go.
There are days when I feel pretty burned out given the current state of things. Showing kids simple (to us) things helps bring back a little of the magic. That is if you like kids...
what graphics system are you running?
Your Moz and OOO times are insane! OOO on my machine (P3/500 385Mb Ram, browsers and terms open, Mandrake 8.2) takes about 31Sec cold, 9 Sec cached... WTF !?! There is a problem on your end somewhere. Too many things running, or something.
I find it damn hard to believe your claim of less then a second for OOO on the older machine. Comparing Word are we? Maybe the fact that most of what Word needs is already running helps out just a bit.
When you say "People want..." don't you really mean you want? (Not that it's a bad want or anything, but I mean to be clear.) Companies who take advantage of network transparancy are going to save money. The users are going to deal. Since enterprise systems are where the money is, network transparancy is important.
Remember an SGI machine can do these things well and they run X. This means we can also, we just need to keep working hard at it. (Which was my first point to begin with; namely, not killing off the power now just to make a few happy.)
I am running Mandrake 8.2 at the moment on a P3/500 or so. Graphics subsystem is Matrox G400.
For me, application launch is slower than most intergrated win32 applications are. Only a bit slower than non-intergrated ones. My guess is this is a combination of non optimal code combined with the user space issues. (Takes time to init stuff in user space that might be done already in a win32 environment...)
2d buttons respond in a few milliseconds, so we clearly differ there. Window moves can be sluggish when they are moved a lot, so perhaps we agree on this point, though I have always run my computers with opaque move off. (Turned them on for this little comparison) Menus vary. The KDE menu is quite snappy. Mozilla on the other hand seems to be a bit slower. Maya works much as it does on win32. There is room for agreement here also.
I run Maya on this machine and it performs nicely within the limits of the matrox card. Quake3 sees 60Fps on average, with low latency between mouse move and screen update.
XP is well tuned in these areas, no doubt, but does it matter? X is improving all the time. Three years ago, things were worse overall. Today they are quite useable.
I still maintain X is not the problem however. It is improving every day with the current state productive and useable. X on an SGI machine is as snappy as you can ask for (even on the really old 30Mhz machines which is scary), so clearly the protocol and core design are not at fault, only implementation.
Would I give up all the good features for a bit crisper window experience? Not a chance....
These seem like awful small nits to pick given the advantages.
No growing up required. X11 is an important feature in that it keeps the whole of Linux multi-user at all levels. Multi-user computing may not be needed for your average joe, but it can easily be leveraged by most anybody else to their advantage. Multi-user computing plays hard in the enterprise space and anyone that knows anything about computing knows it. Giving that up means accepting Microsoft is right about display technology and we simply must do it cheaper and that's bullshit.
Microsoft has a market because they took shortcuts, litigated, licensed, and bought out most of the tech that stood in their way. In the early 90's I was running SGI workstations that used the X window system and frankly, they spanked any win32 running machine of the day. In terms of display capability they still punch well above their weight today.
We have work to do on X, but removing it is not the answer --refining it as SGI did is.
Windows has the market they do because they were clearly disruptive at the time. A low price point combined with court proven unethical, illegal business practices allowed them to build it. Commercial UNIX, at the time, was expensive and fragmented and weak because of it; thus, we end up with a market full of short-cut designed by marketing software that continues to color many peoples idea of computing to this day.
The fact that there are more people running single-user computers only reflects the result of business savvy and questionable ethics, not the merits of the technology itself.
There is no way a single user display sub-system is going to be able to compete with the multi-user goodness that is X. I was on that path. Got my Microsoft cert and all of that. Blazing the trail with NT. Feeling the power and having a good time, until one day....
Got assigned a job that involved some rendering. Got cocky, and had a failure that pushed the project past a deadline. Was on SGI machines at the time because of the software in use.
Well, lets just say I did not miss that deadline. Being in a multi-user environment meant that I could make use of damn near every machine in the place from my desk. I always knew this, but did not really apply it until this came up. Using X11 meant that I could install software, monitor and start renders, composite and encode all on different machines in different locations at the same time. --I spent about 14 hours doing exactly that. Printed the project to video tape about 15 minutes before the client picked it up.
That one day changed a lot of things because I finally understood what true multi-user computing is about. If I had been running win32 at the time, I would have not made it. Would have spent too much time messing around with various machines in different locations. Single user, multi-tasking OSes do not allow their users to really take advantage of their networked environment. They do not scale well because of this. Failure to scale costs money and time, but does keep a large number of admins employed these days. Oh well...
You know today, I support multi-user server based complex applications running over X. Installation of these applications is complex as is administration. Putting that application onto one compute server with shared data exported via SAMBA makes for a tight clean environment that requires very little support. What support it does require can be done from anywhere because of X. Some of the folks doing this have went the PC win32 route. Every last one of them have seen their administrative costs rise as the number of tasks that have to be done while physically at the machine rises.
Ever see a broken win32 server? We all have. What do we see? A bunch of admins standing around while one of them works the machine. Ever see the same in a multi-user environment? Everybody can be doing something as long as the network is running, plus there are fewer admins to boot because they don't spend their time walking around!
Almost the entire body of
It does exactly what we want, only not on the native graphics display.
You still have to plan ahead and launch the app using an open vnc server. You can even strip the server down so that it just runs the app. So it is still a desktop, but running a single application. I do this from time to time.
The feature we want is the ability to identify and move an application running on a native X display system, to another one --the VNC one, for example, without planning ahead.
What part(s) of the process from application launch through application interaction and close are sluggish?
Launch time, window moves, dialogs? Be detailed in your answer.
(I am serious too.)
to hate me.
Hope not, because I use KDE often. (Thanks guys!)
Well, I have written about them in the past regarding speed and bloat. They are getting through that nicely today.
I don't mind people making winalike desktops, as long as I can theme them. I do mind taking a nice multi-user OS and turning it into a single user one for no good reason.
I want that too. Personally, I would leave a bunch of apps running on a home machine for access wherever I happen to be that day.
The control issue is real. Why?
I think it is all the lawyers. When I went to school, things were not as bad. The staff had a lot more options compared to today.
Schools do not teach ethics and citizenship. Afraid they might offend somebody. In fact, most of the problems today boil down to lame procedures designed by lawyers to maintain a high level of "liability managment."
The schools would not have to go through the crap they have to today, if the parents were more involved. Nothing worse than a problem kid with rich, uninvolved parents willing to sue the school when something happens to their kid.
I have 4 kids and stay right on top of what they are doing in school. Takes a lot of time most of my peers are not willing to give. As they get older, the differences are beginning to show.
As an involved parent, I am qualified to say this would not happen with my kid. The suspension is bullshit plain and simple. Schools are supposed to be places where we build new citizens one kid at a time. Giving smart kids the smackdown because the staff is too uninformed to understand their behaviour is sensless.
The schools work for us. They don't often want to admit that, but the truth is they do. With this particular kid, they have just sent a message and shaped a couple of values in his mind that are unacceptable at best, scarring at worst.
In this case, both are at fault. The school being driven by its lawyers and the state instead of its responsibility to society, and the parents for letting this crap stand.
I know the schools have it tough, but if this were my kid, I would be in the office that day, and would stay until the suspension was revoked. Clearly the educators need to get some education themselves, and I would press this point hard.
Nobody wants a lawsuit over something this small, but we don't want our kids becoming compliant drones either.
In my experience, once this is explained to the staff, this sort of thing goes away pretty quickly. When they realize they are going to deal with a parent who knows the rules and the law and cares about their kid, they back off and pester the other kids whose parents don't care.
Another thing about this that burns my ass: I would be happy to work with kids in school for a few years. I have a lot to give, practical experience, and enjoy the subject matter. Plenty of other people I know are in a similar position.
You would think the State government would have programs in place to take advantage of this for technical subject matter, but they don't. Sorry if I offend a teacher or two, but the truth is most grade / high school computer educators really have no clue. I am sure they are fine people, working hard to make the best of the situation they are in, but still it sucks to know my kids could be getting much better...
There is RTF and PDF that both work nicely for almost everything.
Almost everyone uses Microsoft Office right now, but every last one of them can easily do a bit of work to get some business. With IBM, I would think this bit of work would be worth it.
Make no mistake, if they do this we will see changes and it will be about time.
Performance is fine, features are fine. Everytime I read one of these, I grow a bit more frustrated.
The X Window system is possibly one of the best features in Linux right now, not to mention the number of applications (basically just about all of them) written to take advantage of it. The ability to remote the display is a powerful thing that allows for many compute options not easily done with single-user framebuffer based systems. (All of them are single user, unless you count some wierd dual head setup.)
We need to work harder at presenting Linux in a useable way, not stripping it to look like the other OSes out there right now.
X11 is what makes Linux a true multi-user operating system. It is a big part of where the power is. Why come all this way only to give up one of the core values?
Lets say we actually do this. All the new applications then get written for the frame buffer. Single users might gain some small benefit from a bit lower complexity (which can and will be solved in presentation), but everyone else loses. The money is in the corporate systems and that is where X11 plays hard. Application servers delivering applications to desktops over X11 are easy to administer and cost effective. Client-server just cannot compare really.
Rather than nuke one of our killer enterprise features to make Linux work for isolated single users, we need to continue to work hard at getting Linux in front of brand new users and schools. People that begin with Linux are not going to have any trouble with it. They will grow with Linux as it continues to mature, the result over time will be better for everyone.
Those running the current win32 systems are all going to want things the way they have them now. Giving that to them is not worth it because that is accepting their way at a lower cost, and that is just not what OSS is about. OSS is about powerful software with freedom built in from the beginning, not software designed around the competition.
We can continue to build Linux just the way it is now and slowly the others will either:
1.) See the light and join us,
or
2.) Continue doing what they are doing. (while paying a lot for the option of doing so)
Either way, OSS will continue as it has, which means tossing X11 (which making it an addon is doing) won't be worth it.
Linux is pretty easy now and we are only at the beginning! Lets keep it intact for a bit longer before taking such drastic measures.
Yours might just be 'really high' compared to just 'high'. I think we have a ways to go on this question :)
(Sitting here in the middle of the worst storm to hit Portland, Oregon in a *long* time...)
open and for business and all of that using closed file formats isn't it?
people are simply lower in number than the high ID number people....
So, what is a 'high' ID number anyway?
I was up about 22 hours when I wrote that. Big nasty winter storm, here in Portland, mixed with a broken water main and a neighbors leaky basement = a very long night.
(Just got up)
Learning to use OSS taught me a lot about software. Today I am 100 percent legal and intend to stay that way.
You know, the money saved on OSS can easily leave room for a few software purchases each year. I would gladly pay for those if they were offered.
It is *damn* nice not to have to make all sorts of justifications for the software I use. You would think software companies would be just craving enlightned customers that actually understood the value of their work...
go figure.
He is clearly interested in Fair Use. The folks doing the ruining are the MPAA.
They want to destroy Fair Use. Apple struck a deal to get things moving. If Apple suffers over this, it won't be because of Jon, it will be because of the MPAA.
Personally, I applaud the guy. He is doing the right thing at the right time. This whole action is going to get a lot of people thinking. I believe in Fair Use, as do a lot of people --even if they do not know what it is legally. Morally they do and that is what counts in the end. If enough people continue to express their counter view, the law *will* change.
Remember, we all get older. Our chance at the law will come. Should we all just lay down and forget things until that time?
No, because we should not have to --for me that is reason enough.
I will, on occasion use a P2P service, though I keep it short and sweet. Never did use P2P big however, so the change is minor in that the frequency went down a bit.
Why use P2P? Got addicted to the variety of music present on Napster. You know, find a user with similar tastes, then grap a couple tracks you don't know, but might like. That's fun stuff that is just too damn expensive to do otherwise.
The new pay services make it pretty easy to get a lot of music, but fall way short in the finding new music area... Rock from the Aussies, techno / house / trance from Europe and Japan is very appealing to me. Didn't know that until Napster. In a way, I kind of wish I didn't given all the majors mistakes today.
I am not sure they are going to like the bigger changes however. When P2P started, I would exchange song titles with friends. Each person would just grab a copy because that was easiest. Now we are all back to the old way of doing things; namely, trading tracks directly.
How?
Ssh, scp directly from machine to machine. The music I do buy, and I do buy music just as I always have, gets ripped. Stuff I think friends might find interesting, or that ends up part of a discussion gets traded instead of just named. The stuff that comes from P2P gets hashed around and played a bit. If it's good, I buy it, then trade the quality encodes from that with whomever was interested during the critique stage. So in the end, most of the costs are there with time and distance being less of a factor. Nice improvement over dubbing parties, but it could be way better.
A while back, we were helping a small group master a CD. Sometimes it is hard to articulate production values when some people are missing the tracks in question, for example. We could lend physical media, but why? We have nicely networked computers that save a lot of time, it is foolish not to use them. Afterall, the production is happening over the Internet, why not foster the discussion as well? This sort of sharing is a totally necessary thing and can get expensive if done the way they think we should do it. The really creative folks need stuff to create from. This means a lot more music to listen to, discuss and build style influences from. If everybody hears the same top 100 crap, then we are going to get more top 100 crap --exactly what we don't need to sustain a healthy music market. P2P really helps with that, maybe it shouldn't, but the truth is it does.
Personally, I think P2P is great stuff for learning about music. It also works well for lots of other things like software, though torrents are better for new or popular software. The Apple model is a good one, though its a shame Apple and the artists do not get a bit more of the cut.
It has been mentioned many times here, but I will say it again. The majors are fools plain and simple. If they had taken the Napster deal, they would be rolling in dough right now with monthly subscriptions and marketing data up the wazoo that we paid to give them! But, nooo they want control. Today they pay the price. Lots of lawyers, annoyed customers, and the confines of age all doom them to lackluster sales and growing vulnerabltiy to potential newcomers who get it.
People all over the place are making interesting music with inexpensive equipment. Mp3.com was a first attempt to aggragate them and present them to potential listeners. It worked, but not well. Others will follow, just as the P2P clients evolve, so will they. As they get it right, the majors will be sooo sorry.
I have traded tracks all my life starting with cassette and a bit of reel to reel. For me, nothing has changed really. Napster was a brief flurry that likely cost them a few sales, but the real cost was my newly opened eyes to the real diversity in music I was missing out on. I buy music in about the same quantities I always have; namely, small quantities because good albums are few and far between, I would buy a lot more If I could get it at
help quite a bit with this. Why? Services.
Anyone can sell a cheap box, so folks shop for the cheapest they can find. Well, every last one of those people are going to have problems. Next time they buy, they are going to be looking for solutions.
The current state of affairs strongly discourages this. What the big software companies want you to do is sell the cheap box, and their software. You build their business while just getting enough to sustain your own. Oh, you get the front line support calls too --thanks for playing!
With OSS, you can provide solutions and services that solve problems on a local scale. Now you get the customer and the dollars for servicing them. Each and every one of those support calls is now a chance for you to build your business instead of your suppliers...
because our house is small, so voice works just fine. However, I do IM from work. My kids will ask when I am getting home, help with homework questions, and deliver the wife's to-do list. (Hate that last one...)
:)
Anyway, it's pretty cool in that my kids know they can reach me before the early evening hours. I also know they are home
IM in the house seems really silly to me, but maybe some folks like the quiet...
Bring it on, I am waiting.... :)
So, if we reduce the value of software to "free" then we reduce the overall worth of the US, or something along those lines, because we suddenly have less "value" to offer in trade for "nothing" in return? Have I got that right?
(Assuming I do.)
There is another way to look at value however. What if people begin to understand how to use the free software, as they are doing now. Does the value really evaporate, or simply move around a little. Instead of one or two really big companies holding and controlling the value and its distribution, folks all over the county gain value in relation to the new skills they aquire.
Software becomes a resource used in "construction". Instead of one or two companies making all the money, people all over the place make more money right?
The value is still there, wealth is still being generated, the difference is in the concentration. Central vs distributed.
Seems to me, as a technical person, I stand to benefit more from the distributed distribution of wealth OSS seems to offer, than I am from the centralized one...
Not trolling at all. Actually poking fun at us really. The length of time thing really was there to dig out part of what you believe. Being really short sighted makes some things easier to consider, or not, for me anyway.
Take mars, if there is some simple primitive life --it does not know any better, so we have done no harm. Taking the really long Douglas Adams scale view of things means we humans just retarded the most advanced beings to have ever lived. The universe got a bit brighter just from a few of them walking around.
The right does not change in either case, but the worldview is the difference between doing what you feel like because you really don't care much, or doing nothing because anything at all great could (or could not) happen based on even a twitch.
Just making a bit of fun with us and those coupla ideas....