I'm more worried the other ISPs will notice a (slight) drop in their sales because of this and maybe start pulling strings. You most likely can't get good xbox live speed on 768k, but that won't stop some of the "strictly surf" or dial-up users from saying (in this tight economy) "well, it is free..." after viewing their $ISP bill and lowered paycheck/termination letter back to back.
I would think dial-up companies would be hurt the most, then DSL users, and maybe some small businesses and a few comcast users. That said, I don't even know if routing several machines through one connection is possible with this, but be sure I'll be trying. Whenever comcast goes down again in the businesses I administer, I'll use the free access to complain, or just setup a secure parallel backbone to the internet with automatic failover just in case...
Sadly, I was the AC who posted the joke fearing karma wreckage if the mods hated the joke, and I was going to put another stack joke in there (e.g. "then I would have to pop her") but decided not to at the last minute. Got the original joke from a comedian on Comedy Central, anyway.
Actually for this thing, there's probably a whole new layout that's optimal. (That's an exercise for the reader to invent.)
Introducing the patented, copywritten hunt-and-peck touchscreen keyboard! Perfect for touchscreens of all types, and optimized for the elderly! And as an added bonus, pay shipping and handling to receive 2 hunt-and-peck keyboards! Only 2 easy payments of $19.95!
Touchscreen keyboards to me have always been hard to use. On both the plasma-screen smartboards at my friend's A/V workplace and the ones I've seen in modern (i.e. well funded) high schools, the windows on screen keyboard and the keyboard prepackaged with the smartboard software is just terrible, partially due to the heat-sensitive surface being activated wherever my finger's heat first hits it, i.e. NOT where I wanted it to be.
This looks much more promising, and will hopefully be preventing the smartboard users from running back to a physical keyboard just to type something after using the mouse in front of the actual screen.
My bad, its a horrible, terrible, morbidly obese, defiant, politically incorrect, George-Washington-and-Abraham-Lincoln-killing selfish travesty spitting on the incredibly good and fantastic never-wrong AMERICAN USA justice system!!1
You know, he has a/. account, and I wish he would reply to a story about himself and/or defend himself(or maybe he's the AC with the long post above;).
Scratch that, not every sex offender necessarily looked at kiddie porn - my ignorant mistake. What actually made me remember was a neighbor that moved in a while back that had to do the door-to-door signature thing, and when I asked him what he did he said he got caught pissing in the bushes by the wrong cop back when he was in his twenties, and now he's registered for life.
Its kind of sad for those situations really, because for one I didn't even know you could get registered for that, and now that poor guy who probably just had to pee really bad now has to get sigs and (if he lives in Georgia) hand over his internet passwords. Pissing in the bushes apparently lands you on the same level of shame as Gary Glitter these days.
It means 23-year-olds who were caught sleeping with their 17-year-old boyfriend or girlfriend.
Yeah, if I was lucky enough to get a 23 year old (hot) girlfriend when I was 17 (or even now, for that matter), I sure as hell wouldn't tell the police the next day! Where I live they'd probably laugh in my face anyway!
Heh, they should also make them use dialup. A very slow loading connection would give them time to think "man, this is actually kind of gross". A good 20k should be enough for any sex offender!
Well the old AT&T Unix System III Tape boot disks would certainly intimidate people who never used computers before (even me, somewhat). Here are some exerts from `strings boot.bin` - a dump from one of those old bootstrappers:
UNIX -- Initial Load:
Tape-to-Disk
The type of disk drive on which the Root file system will reside,
as well as the type of tape drive that will be used for Tape 1
must be specified below.
Answer the questions with a 'y' or 'n' followed by
a carriage return or line feed.
There is no type-ahead -- wait for the question to complete.
The character '@' will kill the entire line,
while the character '#' will erase the last character typed.
Ready
So what's the matter?
Restart and answer correctly.
Well, when making a website for a real estate agency, I had to explain to them that in order to get the home pictures up faster (no, I didn't take them), they had to give me jpegs, NOT.docs containing jpegs. And getting them out was harder than it seems, too.
Heh, at least you could get a senior to use a mouse! Back when Windows 98 was the de facto OS (and therefore libraries used Win 95) I took a family friend (~80 years old) to a library because she wanted a book, and I started looking it up on the computer since the textual ERIK system was reserved for employees by that time.
She says "You know I've always wanted to use one of these things (computers)", and my natural, naive response was "Well, let me show you, its not hard...
All I got through was "sit down, and grab this - its called a mouse" and she freaked. "I don't want to have anything to do with mice", she said. I tried so hard to explain that it did not crawl the floor stealing her cheese, and it was only a name for an (optional) input pointing device, but her stuborness wore well with her old age and I just took her home.
I can honestly say that was the only day I've ever almost abandoned an elderly woman somewhere, never to return.
...movies and books, are essentially toys/time wasters
Books? Really? So reading The C Programming Language and Programming Perl were both complete wastes of precious time? My definition of wasting time would be to attempt to write useful (i.e. precious time saving) C or Perl code without having read those books or an equivalent reference.
That said, compile and run my signature (#including stdio.h, conio.h, and replacing PAUSE with main) and do not reply until you have continued.
(I stripped the annoying code tags for readability):
a.) educate...blah blah... educate...blah blah... educate...
You're already looking at a high total cost of ownership since the article specifically says "seniors", and that would be phone airtime, sit-down time "educating" over and over, and many hours of support.
b.) close access to some PC and make them a non-admin and install A/V
Yes, non-escalated privileges are essential but doing so in Vista means getting the "My screen just went black and says continue or cancel" twice a day, and A/V and a firewall in either means the call will be for either a virus alert (think Avast), a firewall question, or... hell why install Windows, anyways? High senior TCO...
c. back up the hard drive partition
YES, this is a necessity, although you forgot backing up the MBR as well (dd if=/dev/hda...), because its possible for even elderly folk to mess up an MBR via either a new virus, clickity-clickity, or the bad senior habit of unplugging a machine rather than powering it off.
say them where to save their files
Oh boy, shortcuts labeled "SAVE HERE MOM" far surpass telling them where in C:\ to save, saving you phone airtime and thus TCO.
give them full access to anything
Um, didn't you just say they should be a normal (i.e. non-super) user?! That is just asking for the clickity-clickity malware I see on many senior workstations.
LiveBootCD+Linux/FreeBSD+SSH+preconfigured
Okay, in addition to not spending too much time on this initially and getting further suckered in to a lifetime sentence of family support, but do you honestly expect them to boot the thing (possibly changing BIOS settings *shiver*) and watch the text fly past the screen in peace? God help you if you run into a problem!
And the the very best is learning to say "NO" and "NO, I have no time to do this".
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD luck with that, given your above posts.
The OS Question: WindowsXP
I'm not even going to touch that one with a 50 foot stick, my friend. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to spend the time I saved from a very low (thanks to Linux) Senior Total Cost of Ownership on some precious sleep.
Footnotes:
STCO: Senior Total Cost of Ownership is the amount of physical time, money, and phone airtime spent configuring/supporting a senior computer, significantly lowered by using a Mac or Linux.
Yeah, I did this to my dad a few years ago and since then he has resorted to writing everything down on pen and paper because he thinks all computers can have that done to them easily (nevermind he couldn't prove that to himself).
(I'm going to set it to mount / as read only to prevent this when I go there for holidays)
I don't know if thats such a good idea. I know where you're coming from, so hard power offs won't corrupt the filesystem (thanks goodness for ext3/journaling), but what if mahjong or whatever writes or wishes to write data like saves, high scores or something to the hard drive? You might crash your mom's card games like that, and even worse if some important daemon critically relies on logging or (warning: !myareaofexpertise) GNOME/X11 configurations write temporary data to the disk?
I think it would be less risky to just mount the filesystem as read-write and let journaling have its way. Fsck runs automatically in Ubuntu every $COUPLEOF mounts anyways, so in the kind of rare case you would have to reinstall, its just a card game. I also have insomnia and while I play games like Halo and whatnot, if I only played a cheesy card game like that, I wouldn't lose any sleep (haha) over losing a few high scores.
Exactly. If Slashdot gave me more room, I would have put the rest of the joke on there:
void PAUSE(){ printf("\nPress any key to continue. .."); while(1) getch(); }// Enforce the 'any' key
Whats even worse is that this line of code was used in a fake cmd.exe I made for a prank on my friend's computer. Tricky to install due to having to point the COMSPEC env. variable to a backed up version of the real cmd.exe and tinkering with the dllcache directory, but it was priceless to see his reaction to the fake ping error:D.
The article uses a kernel version that predates the completely fair scheduler, that would be why. If they aim to test something like this, they need to test the most recent version.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more worried the other ISPs will notice a (slight) drop in their sales because of this and maybe start pulling strings. You most likely can't get good xbox live speed on 768k, but that won't stop some of the "strictly surf" or dial-up users from saying (in this tight economy) "well, it is free..." after viewing their $ISP bill and lowered paycheck/termination letter back to back.
I would think dial-up companies would be hurt the most, then DSL users, and maybe some small businesses and a few comcast users. That said, I don't even know if routing several machines through one connection is possible with this, but be sure I'll be trying. Whenever comcast goes down again in the businesses I administer, I'll use the free access to complain, or just setup a secure parallel backbone to the internet with automatic failover just in case...
Sadly, I was the AC who posted the joke fearing karma wreckage if the mods hated the joke, and I was going to put another stack joke in there (e.g. "then I would have to pop her") but decided not to at the last minute. Got the original joke from a comedian on Comedy Central, anyway.
This made me laugh so hard I swallowed my gum and almost choked to death! Bravo, AC!
Actually for this thing, there's probably a whole new layout that's optimal. (That's an exercise for the reader to invent.)
Introducing the patented, copywritten hunt-and-peck touchscreen keyboard! Perfect for touchscreens of all types, and optimized for the elderly! And as an added bonus, pay shipping and handling to receive 2 hunt-and-peck keyboards! Only 2 easy payments of $19.95!
and one very difficult payment of $49.99
Order now!
I know I've already posted, but as of this post this article is tagged "fuckthegovernment".
/.? I know some of the FOSS people here are pretty diehard, but come on, wtf? What does the government have to do with T9 keyboards?
Really
Touchscreen keyboards to me have always been hard to use. On both the plasma-screen smartboards at my friend's A/V workplace and the ones I've seen in modern (i.e. well funded) high schools, the windows on screen keyboard and the keyboard prepackaged with the smartboard software is just terrible, partially due to the heat-sensitive surface being activated wherever my finger's heat first hits it, i.e. NOT where I wanted it to be.
This looks much more promising, and will hopefully be preventing the smartboard users from running back to a physical keyboard just to type something after using the mouse in front of the actual screen.
My bad, its a horrible, terrible, morbidly obese, defiant, politically incorrect, George-Washington-and-Abraham-Lincoln-killing selfish travesty spitting on the incredibly good and fantastic never-wrong AMERICAN USA justice system!!1
That better?
You know, he has a /. account, and I wish he would reply to a story about himself and/or defend himself(or maybe he's the AC with the long post above ;).
Scratch that, not every sex offender necessarily looked at kiddie porn - my ignorant mistake. What actually made me remember was a neighbor that moved in a while back that had to do the door-to-door signature thing, and when I asked him what he did he said he got caught pissing in the bushes by the wrong cop back when he was in his twenties, and now he's registered for life.
Its kind of sad for those situations really, because for one I didn't even know you could get registered for that, and now that poor guy who probably just had to pee really bad now has to get sigs and (if he lives in Georgia) hand over his internet passwords. Pissing in the bushes apparently lands you on the same level of shame as Gary Glitter these days.
It means 23-year-olds who were caught sleeping with their 17-year-old boyfriend or girlfriend.
Yeah, if I was lucky enough to get a 23 year old (hot) girlfriend when I was 17 (or even now, for that matter), I sure as hell wouldn't tell the police the next day! Where I live they'd probably laugh in my face anyway!
Heh, they should also make them use dialup. A very slow loading connection would give them time to think "man, this is actually kind of gross". A good 20k should be enough for any sex offender!
UNIX -- Initial Load:
Tape-to-Disk
The type of disk drive on which the Root file system will reside, as well as the type of tape drive that will be used for Tape 1 must be specified below.
Answer the questions with a 'y' or 'n' followed by a carriage return or line feed.
There is no type-ahead -- wait for the question to complete.
The character '@' will kill the entire line, while the character '#' will erase the last character typed.
Ready
So what's the matter?
Restart and answer correctly.
Well if its Windows NT 3.x or NT 4 then yes, you will get a blue screen upon booting up.
Well, when making a website for a real estate agency, I had to explain to them that in order to get the home pictures up faster (no, I didn't take them), they had to give me jpegs, NOT .docs containing jpegs. And getting them out was harder than it seems, too.
Heh, at least you could get a senior to use a mouse! Back when Windows 98 was the de facto OS (and therefore libraries used Win 95) I took a family friend (~80 years old) to a library because she wanted a book, and I started looking it up on the computer since the textual ERIK system was reserved for employees by that time.
She says "You know I've always wanted to use one of these things (computers)", and my natural, naive response was "Well, let me show you, its not hard...
All I got through was "sit down, and grab this - its called a mouse" and she freaked. "I don't want to have anything to do with mice", she said. I tried so hard to explain that it did not crawl the floor stealing her cheese, and it was only a name for an (optional) input pointing device, but her stuborness wore well with her old age and I just took her home.
I can honestly say that was the only day I've ever almost abandoned an elderly woman somewhere, never to return.
...movies and books, are essentially toys/time wasters
Books? Really? So reading The C Programming Language and Programming Perl were both complete wastes of precious time? My definition of wasting time would be to attempt to write useful (i.e. precious time saving) C or Perl code without having read those books or an equivalent reference.
That said, compile and run my signature (#including stdio.h, conio.h, and replacing PAUSE with main) and do not reply until you have continued.
Hint: use the 'any' key on your keyboard
pop is a far better system.
Although I find it completely useless without push, personally.
1.) /tmp is still under /, which he wants to mount read only
/home were its own partition, does that necessarily make it immune to hard poweroffs?
2.) And if
a.) educate ...blah blah... educate ...blah blah... educate ...
You're already looking at a high total cost of ownership since the article specifically says "seniors", and that would be phone airtime, sit-down time "educating" over and over, and many hours of support.
b.) close access to some PC and make them a non-admin and install A/V
Yes, non-escalated privileges are essential but doing so in Vista means getting the "My screen just went black and says continue or cancel" twice a day, and A/V and a firewall in either means the call will be for either a virus alert (think Avast), a firewall question, or... hell why install Windows, anyways? High senior TCO...
c. back up the hard drive partition
YES, this is a necessity, although you forgot backing up the MBR as well (dd if=/dev/hda ...), because its possible for even elderly folk to mess up an MBR via either a new virus, clickity-clickity, or the bad senior habit of unplugging a machine rather than powering it off.
say them where to save their files
Oh boy, shortcuts labeled "SAVE HERE MOM" far surpass telling them where in C:\ to save, saving you phone airtime and thus TCO.
give them full access to anything
Um, didn't you just say they should be a normal (i.e. non-super) user?! That is just asking for the clickity-clickity malware I see on many senior workstations.
LiveBootCD+Linux/FreeBSD+SSH+preconfigured
Okay, in addition to not spending too much time on this initially and getting further suckered in to a lifetime sentence of family support, but do you honestly expect them to boot the thing (possibly changing BIOS settings *shiver*) and watch the text fly past the screen in peace? God help you if you run into a problem!
And the the very best is learning to say "NO" and "NO, I have no time to do this".
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD luck with that, given your above posts.
The OS Question: WindowsXP
I'm not even going to touch that one with a 50 foot stick, my friend. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to spend the time I saved from a very low (thanks to Linux) Senior Total Cost of Ownership on some precious sleep.
Footnotes:
STCO: Senior Total Cost of Ownership is the amount of physical time, money, and phone airtime spent configuring/supporting a senior computer, significantly lowered by using a Mac or Linux.
Yeah, I did this to my dad a few years ago and since then he has resorted to writing everything down on pen and paper because he thinks all computers can have that done to them easily (nevermind he couldn't prove that to himself).
Bad, BAD idea for seniors!
(I'm going to set it to mount / as read only to prevent this when I go there for holidays)
I don't know if thats such a good idea. I know where you're coming from, so hard power offs won't corrupt the filesystem (thanks goodness for ext3/journaling), but what if mahjong or whatever writes or wishes to write data like saves, high scores or something to the hard drive? You might crash your mom's card games like that, and even worse if some important daemon critically relies on logging or (warning: !myareaofexpertise) GNOME/X11 configurations write temporary data to the disk?
I think it would be less risky to just mount the filesystem as read-write and let journaling have its way. Fsck runs automatically in Ubuntu every $COUPLEOF mounts anyways, so in the kind of rare case you would have to reinstall, its just a card game. I also have insomnia and while I play games like Halo and whatnot, if I only played a cheesy card game like that, I wouldn't lose any sleep (haha) over losing a few high scores.
Intuit's focus on usability and customer support in its early years was legendary. [citation needed]
'Nuff said.
Exactly. If Slashdot gave me more room, I would have put the rest of the joke on there:
."); while(1) getch(); } // Enforce the 'any' key
:D.
void PAUSE(){ printf("\nPress any key to continue. .
Whats even worse is that this line of code was used in a fake cmd.exe I made for a prank on my friend's computer. Tricky to install due to having to point the COMSPEC env. variable to a backed up version of the real cmd.exe and tinkering with the dllcache directory, but it was priceless to see his reaction to the fake ping error
Very interesting story, wish I had some mod points right now :). I think I found a new blog to subscribe to, only this one has a purpose!
Oh, and mod the comment above me up as well - that was just funny.
The article uses a kernel version that predates the completely fair scheduler, that would be why. If they aim to test something like this, they need to test the most recent version.