Depends, I know a lot of unemployed people who live life on credit cards. Yeah, I tell them its going to bite them in the rear later on, but so far they really don't listen to me, some have bought new TVs, -good- new laptops (one got a new Macbook pro) and others have increased their internet speed to "help" them search for a job.
It really depends on where you are to what you need. Do you have people who never want any other software installed? Or do you have people who -need- various programs or want some to get the job done easier. Do you provide -all- your own hardware, or do people occasionally bring in faster printers so they don't spend all day printing? What about viruses? Are they a big deal? If say, 25 computers go down in a day due to something like a power surge will that seriously affect productivity? Are these systems running similar hardware or are they a mismatch of various cheap systems? Will these systems need hardware upgrades? If you have systems that are really static and won't need many more things done to them, yeah, 1 sysadmin and 2 sneaker techs might work. If you have systems that are dynamic with software changes, hardware changes, or computer systems that aren't identical, it could really help to increase the number of sneaker techs. In most cases one sysadmin is all you really need, but bumping up the number of decent sneaker techs you have really helps increase productivity, few things are more annoying than trying to fix someone else's machine and then someone "higher up" thinks you should drop everything and fix their computer (when really in reality they don't need their computer to begin with....).
The thing about Palm is they might not have Apple-like cult status, but there are still a lot of Palm fans out there. Plus, compared to the Centro, and the old Palm OS, Web OS is nice, new and shiny. About the biggest problems with WebOS is, its tied to one carrier that isn't a big one. Sprint, while a large company, is nothing when compared to AT&T and Verizon. When the Pre branches out to all major networks, I can see it being a small success, and really taking Palm further more than any other phone previous to it. Just look at Apple when it switched to OS X, it was a rough transition, but once it got going, it turned into a really nice OS.
While obviously Snow Leopard and Windows 7 were big deals, there are a lot more game changers and important things out there. The ION platform is a big thing, its already used in a few HTPC setups and I expect it to grow even more in 2010. The cheap full laptops are also going to be big things. Its hard to beat a laptop with a 15 inch screen, a 2.2 ghz CPU and 2 gigs DDR2 and a decent sized HDD for $300 or less. A cheap netbook is good for a geek, kids or the businessman. However, for the elderly, those unemployed and looking for a good laptop, and students, these cheap laptops are going to help change the market.
..And the only reason why Microsoft is really allowed to dominate the OS market is due to artificial regulations put in by the government (software patents) and government sponsorship.
I have to say that I don't think taxes in the first place are a good idea. Abolish all tax codes and have a free economy. Then we will see America prosper again.
Yeah, and how would it turn out? Microsoft would have gone broke, Apple would be unable to pick up the slack of Microsoft, Linux wasn't in a usable state, viruses/botnets would run more rampant due to the lack of updates and a lack of security via the obscurity of the source code. Yeah, if today that happened we would have competition. In 2001/2002 all that would happen would be the collapse of the computer industry. Today the main reason why Linux isn't adopted is due to Windows programs, back in 2001/2002, neither GNOME nor KDE were in a state that people could simply pick up a mouse/keyboard and use it. Similarly, getting even connected to a network wasn't straightforward or as easy as XP. Linux would have died.
If Microsoft was forced to release the source code to XP in 2001/2002, things would not be better, the only thing that would have happened is we would have little to no technological advancement past 2002.
I think the main problem is the fact that there is nearly no real competition among the big cell phone providers. Look at AT&T, yeah, they are willing to do smear ad campaigns against Verizon and Verizon is willing to do the same to AT&T yet both seem more hell-bent to screw their customers more than actually change anything. Verizon seems to insist on castrating their phones, yeah, things have gotten better, yeah, they got the Droid which is perhaps one of the best phones of the year and one of the most open phones, but at the same time they screw their BlackBerry customers by trying to integrate Bing in there rather than whatever search provider the customer wants ( see http://jkontherun.com/2009/12/17/verizon-bing-make-google-go-boom-on-blackberry/ )
If a single telecom could get A) Amazing coverage B) Fast networks C) Good phones D) Openness it would be great. But instead we get AT&T the overpriced carrier with good coverage, a fast 3G network and decent phones. Verizon, another overpriced network with good coverage, a -huge- 3G network, and phones that are castrated. T-Mobile which has good support (look at how they supported unlocked iPhones http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/05/tmobile-tech-support-hearts-unlocked-iphones.html ), open phones, but has a tiny 3G network and generally spotty coverage. And Sprint which is nice and cheap and has unlimited plans, has decent phones, but coverage just isn't quite there yet.
Exactly. Generally people know who are going to be the "terrorists" and who are the average Joes. Its pretty obvious that the person who is Muslim is going to be more apt to blow up a plane where a generic white guy drinking a coke isn't going to want to. Yeah, we can be fooled, but on just about every plot this has held true.
Yeah, and instead we violate human rights for everyone so therefore its fair right? All the while, most generic white people don't bring down airplanes. Really, this is akin to having a virus that runs on Windows and searching every single computer running OS X or Linux in an attempt to find it.
contrary to what the "majority" say, they are not the majority
However, what you say is contrary to these "facts and religions" you as this "high and mighty atheist" claim to "adhere" to. Just about every site I've seen estimates the number of Christians at about 2.1 billion, Islam at 1.5 billion and only about 1.1 billion as non-religious. Just right there you can see how the facts contradict with your statements. How does this make you any better of a person than a religious hypocrite?
I can't tell if you are trolling or simply an idiot. But using your justification I can easily say that those persecuting others because they aren't Christians aren't Christian because the bible condemns killing others. Same justification.
but exploring ideas such as polytheism, religious crusades, or corruption of religious institutions can add something interesting to a game.
You mean like what Tales of Symphonia did? If you haven't played the game I strongly recommend that you do as it basically covers corruption in religion, the morality of war, etc. All while being quite possibly the best RPG for the GameCube (not that there was much competition). (look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Symphonia#Story if you want an overview of the plot).
I don't really see how religion is needed in video games. Plenty of games have used religious influences heavily. Fantasy games often use elements of Norse, Egyptian, Greek/Roman, and Christianity/Judaism in their games and that hasn't been a problem. People don't like being fed propaganda from any religious group so games based on any particular religion usually will fail (the fact that they are usually done by second-rate developers and are low budget doesn't help them either). But more than anything else, there is no need. Look at some games, either A) They are done in a fantasy setting and therefore having a real-world religion as a major theme is simply unrealistic or boring B) The focus is action rather than storyline development, most gamers don't care if the Spy from Team Fortress 2 was an agnostic, Buddhist or a scientologist. C) Religion would take away key parts of character development, for example Fallout 3, choosing a religion would effectively either make your character a hypocrite, unrealistic or would make decision making too simple.
In the end, I don't think there is a need for religion in video games. While it will always and has always been referenced, theres just no good reason to put it in.
I agree teachers are better, but they can be expensive,
Yeah, but you also have to realize that most of these countries are extremely poor. A (native) teacher can live on a lot less there and have a better life compared to their students than here. A lot of these people live off of a dollar or so a day, so if you give a teacher $5 per day for each day of school, assuming there are 160 school days in a school year, that is $800 a year while keeping the teacher roughly 5 times as rich as their students. That is only enough for 10 of these laptops assuming the unreasonable price of $75 for each one. While the initial cost to teach the teachers may be high, native teachers can be quite cheap.
You have this cool toy, and you want to learn how to use it, so you have to learn how to read. It won't work for everyone, of course, but after the others start seeing the benefits of reading, the popularity will grow.
And one of two things happens
A) Your parents or you decide you are starving, the laptop is worth a lot of days worth of food, so you sell it
B) You learn reading and use the laptop and really end up going nowhere because the knowledge is purely theoretical.
The problem is, even with all the knowledge contained in all the scholarly books, it doesn't put food on the table. In most developed countries if you are good at theology, psychology, chemistry, biology, or anything else for that matter, you can get a good paying job doing it. In third world countries and some developing countries, most of those skills would be lost on the people there and end up doing a whole lot of nothing.
Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
Location. If someone has to walk 3 miles to go to the nearest place with a computer lab, they aren't going to go that often. If they have a laptop close by, they are more apt to use it.
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
Actually, I think that may be more of a negative than a positive for most kids. Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble. But on my home PC I experimented with things, bootloaders, operating systems, drivers, system files, and really, it was because of this that I got interested in computers. If my only experience with computers was at school, I would have probably turned out to be one of those people who know nothing more than Windows, Word and Excel, who thinks to use HTML you must be some 1337 coder and PowerPoint usage makes you some computer wizard.
Really, the OLPC program was a success, not only in transforming the lives of thousands of kids in third world countries, but by making computers more affordable for the first world as well with the advent of the netbook.
The problem is, without literacy there is generally very, very, very little aptitude for learning and in order to be self-taught you have to have an aptitude of learning. For example, to an illiterate person, why would they want to read in an unstable world? They have lived all their life without reading, see no possible advancement with literacy (for example, a farmer isn't going to think they can suddenly bring rain if they can read). Teachers on the other hand, can persuade people to want to learn, they can show opportunities with learning. They can bring practical skills along with higher learning to people.
The problem is, without much teacher assistance, education for the sake of learning, won't exist and without that there is no way for them to get ahead. For example, without a teacher to prod students in learning chemistry, there is very little motivation for the student to learn chemistry in a third-world country. Why would the average kid there study about valence electrons when there is seemingly little future for it? In a student with a developed, or developing economy, a student might want to be a chemist and make a living, but in a war or poverty torn nation, chemistry would be little more than a trivia.
While students may have an aptitude for learning practical skills, those things do little more than sustain them. In order to make a difference higher education for the sake of learning must happen, teachers are one way of giving the motivation to make it happen.
Re:Does this do something SFU doesn't?
on
Cygwin 1.7 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, but Services For Unix seem to be coming to an end. The download says it won't work on Vista or 7, and the Wikipedia page says it will stop being downloadable at the end of 2009.
Well, actually, taking all sentimentality aside, there are a lot of people who would want to be an astronaut. But the sheer lack of missions mean that very few can actually make it. I mean, there has only been less than 600 astronauts from all the countries in the world. And there are a lot more people who would want to be an astronaut and others who are qualified to be an astronaut but instead do something different (such as fly a fighter jet)
Not only just the launcher, but some expensive payload. I mean, just think if the entire ISS was lost in one disaster. If you lose a module, yeah, its a setback but not a huge one. If you lose an entire space station though, chances are that space station plan will never get off the ground.
Really, I wouldn't call NASA now "successful", if it wasn't for NASA having a nearly unlimited budget to compete with the USSR, they wouldn't have achieved much. I'd say "unlimited money in the hands of a simi-competent organization can let you do great things". Lets see what state NASA is at in 2009. They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014. The Space Shuttle was more or less a disaster having lost 2/5 of the shuttles and really accomplishing very little.
NASA is by no means successful, just because it is more advanced than Russia's space program which hasn't changed for several years and has hardly any funding, the ESA which is more or less a bureaucratic nightmare, and JAXA which wasn't really formed till 2003.
MMOs are perfectly acceptable for of entertainment for girls and women.
I never said that they weren't, I said that on most MMOs such as WoW and Everquest, women would usually be socially ridiculed for playing it in most circumstances. I happen to know some women who play MMOs like WoW and most are pretty good. However, they still say that people ridicule them for playing such games and keep it more of a secret than men.
My daughter as a lot of MMO options and her and het friends play them.
Such as? Yeah, there are some MMOs that are centered on the female demographic such as Neopets, and some Facebook MMOs, but these aren't Everquest like what the article was talking about. And I'm sure you would find the exact same data for males on those sites, that the men who play more female oriented MMOs are more hardcore than female players because most men will not play them because it isn't as socially acceptable and therefore will only play if they really like the game and if they like the game they are going to play it more than someone who is apathetic towards it.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends, I know a lot of unemployed people who live life on credit cards. Yeah, I tell them its going to bite them in the rear later on, but so far they really don't listen to me, some have bought new TVs, -good- new laptops (one got a new Macbook pro) and others have increased their internet speed to "help" them search for a job.
It really depends on where you are to what you need. Do you have people who never want any other software installed? Or do you have people who -need- various programs or want some to get the job done easier. Do you provide -all- your own hardware, or do people occasionally bring in faster printers so they don't spend all day printing? What about viruses? Are they a big deal? If say, 25 computers go down in a day due to something like a power surge will that seriously affect productivity? Are these systems running similar hardware or are they a mismatch of various cheap systems? Will these systems need hardware upgrades? If you have systems that are really static and won't need many more things done to them, yeah, 1 sysadmin and 2 sneaker techs might work. If you have systems that are dynamic with software changes, hardware changes, or computer systems that aren't identical, it could really help to increase the number of sneaker techs. In most cases one sysadmin is all you really need, but bumping up the number of decent sneaker techs you have really helps increase productivity, few things are more annoying than trying to fix someone else's machine and then someone "higher up" thinks you should drop everything and fix their computer (when really in reality they don't need their computer to begin with....).
The thing about Palm is they might not have Apple-like cult status, but there are still a lot of Palm fans out there. Plus, compared to the Centro, and the old Palm OS, Web OS is nice, new and shiny. About the biggest problems with WebOS is, its tied to one carrier that isn't a big one. Sprint, while a large company, is nothing when compared to AT&T and Verizon. When the Pre branches out to all major networks, I can see it being a small success, and really taking Palm further more than any other phone previous to it. Just look at Apple when it switched to OS X, it was a rough transition, but once it got going, it turned into a really nice OS.
While obviously Snow Leopard and Windows 7 were big deals, there are a lot more game changers and important things out there. The ION platform is a big thing, its already used in a few HTPC setups and I expect it to grow even more in 2010. The cheap full laptops are also going to be big things. Its hard to beat a laptop with a 15 inch screen, a 2.2 ghz CPU and 2 gigs DDR2 and a decent sized HDD for $300 or less. A cheap netbook is good for a geek, kids or the businessman. However, for the elderly, those unemployed and looking for a good laptop, and students, these cheap laptops are going to help change the market.
..And the only reason why Microsoft is really allowed to dominate the OS market is due to artificial regulations put in by the government (software patents) and government sponsorship.
I have to say that I don't think taxes in the first place are a good idea. Abolish all tax codes and have a free economy. Then we will see America prosper again.
Yeah, and how would it turn out? Microsoft would have gone broke, Apple would be unable to pick up the slack of Microsoft, Linux wasn't in a usable state, viruses/botnets would run more rampant due to the lack of updates and a lack of security via the obscurity of the source code. Yeah, if today that happened we would have competition. In 2001/2002 all that would happen would be the collapse of the computer industry. Today the main reason why Linux isn't adopted is due to Windows programs, back in 2001/2002, neither GNOME nor KDE were in a state that people could simply pick up a mouse/keyboard and use it. Similarly, getting even connected to a network wasn't straightforward or as easy as XP. Linux would have died.
If Microsoft was forced to release the source code to XP in 2001/2002, things would not be better, the only thing that would have happened is we would have little to no technological advancement past 2002.
I think the main problem is the fact that there is nearly no real competition among the big cell phone providers. Look at AT&T, yeah, they are willing to do smear ad campaigns against Verizon and Verizon is willing to do the same to AT&T yet both seem more hell-bent to screw their customers more than actually change anything. Verizon seems to insist on castrating their phones, yeah, things have gotten better, yeah, they got the Droid which is perhaps one of the best phones of the year and one of the most open phones, but at the same time they screw their BlackBerry customers by trying to integrate Bing in there rather than whatever search provider the customer wants ( see http://jkontherun.com/2009/12/17/verizon-bing-make-google-go-boom-on-blackberry/ )
If a single telecom could get A) Amazing coverage B) Fast networks C) Good phones D) Openness it would be great. But instead we get AT&T the overpriced carrier with good coverage, a fast 3G network and decent phones. Verizon, another overpriced network with good coverage, a -huge- 3G network, and phones that are castrated. T-Mobile which has good support (look at how they supported unlocked iPhones http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/05/tmobile-tech-support-hearts-unlocked-iphones.html ), open phones, but has a tiny 3G network and generally spotty coverage. And Sprint which is nice and cheap and has unlimited plans, has decent phones, but coverage just isn't quite there yet.
Exactly. Generally people know who are going to be the "terrorists" and who are the average Joes. Its pretty obvious that the person who is Muslim is going to be more apt to blow up a plane where a generic white guy drinking a coke isn't going to want to. Yeah, we can be fooled, but on just about every plot this has held true.
Yeah, and instead we violate human rights for everyone so therefore its fair right? All the while, most generic white people don't bring down airplanes. Really, this is akin to having a virus that runs on Windows and searching every single computer running OS X or Linux in an attempt to find it.
That should say "facts and reasons" not religions.
contrary to what the "majority" say, they are not the majority
However, what you say is contrary to these "facts and religions" you as this "high and mighty atheist" claim to "adhere" to. Just about every site I've seen estimates the number of Christians at about 2.1 billion, Islam at 1.5 billion and only about 1.1 billion as non-religious. Just right there you can see how the facts contradict with your statements. How does this make you any better of a person than a religious hypocrite?
I can't tell if you are trolling or simply an idiot. But using your justification I can easily say that those persecuting others because they aren't Christians aren't Christian because the bible condemns killing others. Same justification.
Because we all know that the total lack of religion isn't harmful at all either...
but exploring ideas such as polytheism, religious crusades, or corruption of religious institutions can add something interesting to a game.
You mean like what Tales of Symphonia did? If you haven't played the game I strongly recommend that you do as it basically covers corruption in religion, the morality of war, etc. All while being quite possibly the best RPG for the GameCube (not that there was much competition). (look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Symphonia#Story if you want an overview of the plot).
I don't really see how religion is needed in video games. Plenty of games have used religious influences heavily. Fantasy games often use elements of Norse, Egyptian, Greek/Roman, and Christianity/Judaism in their games and that hasn't been a problem. People don't like being fed propaganda from any religious group so games based on any particular religion usually will fail (the fact that they are usually done by second-rate developers and are low budget doesn't help them either). But more than anything else, there is no need. Look at some games, either A) They are done in a fantasy setting and therefore having a real-world religion as a major theme is simply unrealistic or boring B) The focus is action rather than storyline development, most gamers don't care if the Spy from Team Fortress 2 was an agnostic, Buddhist or a scientologist. C) Religion would take away key parts of character development, for example Fallout 3, choosing a religion would effectively either make your character a hypocrite, unrealistic or would make decision making too simple.
In the end, I don't think there is a need for religion in video games. While it will always and has always been referenced, theres just no good reason to put it in.
I agree teachers are better, but they can be expensive,
Yeah, but you also have to realize that most of these countries are extremely poor. A (native) teacher can live on a lot less there and have a better life compared to their students than here. A lot of these people live off of a dollar or so a day, so if you give a teacher $5 per day for each day of school, assuming there are 160 school days in a school year, that is $800 a year while keeping the teacher roughly 5 times as rich as their students. That is only enough for 10 of these laptops assuming the unreasonable price of $75 for each one. While the initial cost to teach the teachers may be high, native teachers can be quite cheap.
You have this cool toy, and you want to learn how to use it, so you have to learn how to read. It won't work for everyone, of course, but after the others start seeing the benefits of reading, the popularity will grow.
And one of two things happens
A) Your parents or you decide you are starving, the laptop is worth a lot of days worth of food, so you sell it
B) You learn reading and use the laptop and really end up going nowhere because the knowledge is purely theoretical.
The problem is, even with all the knowledge contained in all the scholarly books, it doesn't put food on the table. In most developed countries if you are good at theology, psychology, chemistry, biology, or anything else for that matter, you can get a good paying job doing it. In third world countries and some developing countries, most of those skills would be lost on the people there and end up doing a whole lot of nothing.
Why can't we just put in reasonable computer labs with Internet connections?
Location. If someone has to walk 3 miles to go to the nearest place with a computer lab, they aren't going to go that often. If they have a laptop close by, they are more apt to use it.
3.) Access to teachers in school (and tech support...).
Actually, I think that may be more of a negative than a positive for most kids. Most teachers are rather controlling with computers, most kids with their own computer could go more in depth with it. I don't know about anyone else, but generally on school computers I at least tried to do nothing more than what the teacher said, after all no use getting in trouble. But on my home PC I experimented with things, bootloaders, operating systems, drivers, system files, and really, it was because of this that I got interested in computers. If my only experience with computers was at school, I would have probably turned out to be one of those people who know nothing more than Windows, Word and Excel, who thinks to use HTML you must be some 1337 coder and PowerPoint usage makes you some computer wizard.
Really, the OLPC program was a success, not only in transforming the lives of thousands of kids in third world countries, but by making computers more affordable for the first world as well with the advent of the netbook.
The problem is, without literacy there is generally very, very, very little aptitude for learning and in order to be self-taught you have to have an aptitude of learning. For example, to an illiterate person, why would they want to read in an unstable world? They have lived all their life without reading, see no possible advancement with literacy (for example, a farmer isn't going to think they can suddenly bring rain if they can read). Teachers on the other hand, can persuade people to want to learn, they can show opportunities with learning. They can bring practical skills along with higher learning to people.
The problem is, without much teacher assistance, education for the sake of learning, won't exist and without that there is no way for them to get ahead. For example, without a teacher to prod students in learning chemistry, there is very little motivation for the student to learn chemistry in a third-world country. Why would the average kid there study about valence electrons when there is seemingly little future for it? In a student with a developed, or developing economy, a student might want to be a chemist and make a living, but in a war or poverty torn nation, chemistry would be little more than a trivia.
While students may have an aptitude for learning practical skills, those things do little more than sustain them. In order to make a difference higher education for the sake of learning must happen, teachers are one way of giving the motivation to make it happen.
Yeah, but Services For Unix seem to be coming to an end. The download says it won't work on Vista or 7, and the Wikipedia page says it will stop being downloadable at the end of 2009.
Well, actually, taking all sentimentality aside, there are a lot of people who would want to be an astronaut. But the sheer lack of missions mean that very few can actually make it. I mean, there has only been less than 600 astronauts from all the countries in the world. And there are a lot more people who would want to be an astronaut and others who are qualified to be an astronaut but instead do something different (such as fly a fighter jet)
Not only just the launcher, but some expensive payload. I mean, just think if the entire ISS was lost in one disaster. If you lose a module, yeah, its a setback but not a huge one. If you lose an entire space station though, chances are that space station plan will never get off the ground.
Launching Frequently Key To NASA Success
Really, I wouldn't call NASA now "successful", if it wasn't for NASA having a nearly unlimited budget to compete with the USSR, they wouldn't have achieved much. I'd say "unlimited money in the hands of a simi-competent organization can let you do great things". Lets see what state NASA is at in 2009. They currently don't have a way to send things into space on their own, having abandoned the older designs and won't have Ares done till at least 2014. The Space Shuttle was more or less a disaster having lost 2/5 of the shuttles and really accomplishing very little.
NASA is by no means successful, just because it is more advanced than Russia's space program which hasn't changed for several years and has hardly any funding, the ESA which is more or less a bureaucratic nightmare, and JAXA which wasn't really formed till 2003.
MMOs are perfectly acceptable for of entertainment for girls and women.
I never said that they weren't, I said that on most MMOs such as WoW and Everquest, women would usually be socially ridiculed for playing it in most circumstances. I happen to know some women who play MMOs like WoW and most are pretty good. However, they still say that people ridicule them for playing such games and keep it more of a secret than men.
My daughter as a lot of MMO options and her and het friends play them.
Such as? Yeah, there are some MMOs that are centered on the female demographic such as Neopets, and some Facebook MMOs, but these aren't Everquest like what the article was talking about. And I'm sure you would find the exact same data for males on those sites, that the men who play more female oriented MMOs are more hardcore than female players because most men will not play them because it isn't as socially acceptable and therefore will only play if they really like the game and if they like the game they are going to play it more than someone who is apathetic towards it.