For many people, applying this solution would seem to require thousands of dollars to acquire additional real estate. Solution is to build a stand for the power supply, and this string is an example.
Either that or a book. Though, if I were either a general contractor or a real estate salesperson, I'd suggest you go with your idea.
If you're a software business and you have the world's greatest coders but the world's worst salespeople, you won't do near the amount of business as if you have the world's worst coders and the world's greatest salespeople. Most companies can get by quite well with mediocre coders and good salespeople. Besides, crappy coders = more specialized support dough. Just ask SAP or Oracle.
Salespeople are ultimately worth more to a company's bottom line than code jockeys. Google's a bit different, but that's because they're trying to take over the world by creating services for things we didn't even think were important yet, and because their sales revenue is generated by ad sales and not by a shrinkwrapped product.
So, you want to pay an entry level wage in a very expensive place to live to someone with enough experience to be trusted with your systems?
Good freaking luck there, buddy.
The reasons that there are fewer and fewer qualified candidates are the following: (1) many of them are already employed, (2) they've moved on to more fulfilling careers, (3) qualified candidates get forced (priced) out of the market by cheap H1 and overseas labor, and most importantly, (4) companies are not willing to train otherwise motivated and intelligent candiates, so they never get the experience needed to fill the gaps.
If nobody plants any seeds because they claim they're either too expensive or not high enough quality, then why should they be suprised when they all starve to death?
This ain't just in IT. I live in an area (New Orleans) with a great number of refineries. Refineries are in constant need of welders, pipefitters, CNC operators, machinists, process operators, etc. in a NORMAL economy, but right now, they're in dire need of these types of people. They all complain that they can't find labor because of the hurricanes, yet NONE of them are offering apprenticeships to train people who might be eager for one of their positions. Can't wait until all the refineries and shipyards start to fall apart because of worker burnout.
You think that's bad? When I was in college, I used to work a full time night shift at a grocery store, then ride a bus for an hour to get to the school and stay there until 4:30pm in the afternoon for the bus to pick me up and bring me back so I could be at work for 8pm the next night. For at least 5 junior and senior level CS classes, I didn't bother showing up for class unless we had an exam or a project due. I'd simply xerox the notes of one of my classmates a few days before the exam and study those for the test. One test I kinda botched up because there was extra reading I didn't know about, but other than that, I scored an A on virtually everything I took. The girl who took the notes, on the other hand, would routinely score a low passing or failing grade on the tests.
You aren't a pro football player unless someone is paying you to play football.
You don't earn a salary as a video game developer unless someone is paying you to develop video games.
So why would someone include people in a salary that clearly don't meet the basic requirements of inclusion in the survey?
You know what they call a guy who used to develop video games? The same as the guy who used to mop the floors. They call them unemployed, and they aren't included in fun little surveys because they aren't relevant.
You know, a lot of people aren't joined at the hip to their PCs and don't want them in the living room, and given spending 99 bucks plus a monthly fee, or 9 bucks extra a month added to their cable bill, they'll take that all day long instead of opening up a PC to install multiple new components and dragging their box to the living room.
Oh YEAH! And they can um... do all that non-PVR shit you just mentioned with their PCs anyway. So shove the attitude, junior.
I'm not saying I disagree with your intentions, but Mississippi and Louisiana should have fixed their building codes a long time ago to make the homes I saw them framing on television the other day absolutely illegal south of I-10, and the fact that they're still legal should not automatically give Habitat the green light to build homes which anyone with common sense knows are ultimately unsafe for the geographic region they're being built. They could better use that money to help subsidize some people's homes and make a positive, lasting impact on their lives.
If they were building them in Nebraska, I'd have no problem with them. It's just that, down here, you can easily tell which homes were built which way. All you have to do is look down the block. My sister's neighbor has his roof in her yard. We bought an old acadian home for 5 grand from a dilapidated site, stripped it down, took the lumber, and used it in the construction of her home. That thing will be here for another hundred years, easily.
Putting someone in a house that is bound to be destroyed in the future is simply giving people a false sense of security and enabling them to hold their hand out the next time a major storm comes.
Again, I am not faulting them for their intentions. I'm faulting them for their lack of foresight. Throwing wealth into the argument doesn't change the principle of the matter: the flimsy homes that they're building are not that much safer than a trailer when dealing with tropical cyclones. They fall apart and they fall on top of the occupants inside. For these people, their posessions are likely all they have, so it is doubly erroneous on the part of the Habitat people when they don't think before acting, because when those homes go, those people lose EVERYTHING and they don't have the dough to replace them.
If you think you know so much, then perhaps YOU should be out there helping them. I'm still stuck down here cleaning up the last freaking mess from poorly built homes.
This is off topic, but can you please tell the people at Habitat for Humanity that the frames they're building for homes are virtual deathtraps for anyone living in the affected areas? Flimsy homes constructed of 2x4 pine should be flat out illegal along the gulf coast. They're dangers to the people who live in them AND the people who have to try to rescue the people who get trapped in them. The old construction... homes that have been here more than 40 years... are mostly made of 4x4 or 4x6 construction and the wood is mostly either oak or cypress. Giving people exactly what they just had after losing a home is ignoring the real problem.
The question is simple: is Google giving public access to entire books which they do not hold copyright on?
The answer is yes. It's immaterial whether or not you can search and find a certain part of the book. The fact of the matter is simple... you can view entire copyrighted works via Google's service.
So, O'Reilly is wrong because his situation is different from other copyright holders, and Google is wrong because the entire book is still available via their website without the consent of the copyright holders.
You can go to Amazon right now and view sample chapters of books on their website to pique your curiosity as to whether a book is sufficiently informative enough to purchase. The difference is that Amazon has been given the authority to do so. Google has not.
If by social gamers they mean "players who purchase and pay subscription fees for online games," then it's a no freaking brainer. Not everyone wants to spend a few hundred bucks over the course of a year or two to have the opportunity to have their level 50 night elf wear the newest funky armor.
If they mean "players who have friends over to play games," then it's probably due to the Madden phenomenon. Tons of folks purchase the next year's edition every season simply so they can keep their rosters up to date. Seems loony to me, but if it works, hey, go for it.
I suppose I'm a casual gamer. I own 27 PS2 games, but The only game I really play with friends is Hot Shots Gold Fore (I rarely play games at all). Match play = great drinking game.
Well, let's see... I live in the New Orleans area, have been surrounded by the culture all my life, know exactly where it comes from, and know who holds the purse strings in the city. You, on the other hand, apparently like to second guess because you've heard snippets from the national news.
The middle and upper classes will not leave this area. They have jobs. They have homes, and even if their homes are flooded, they'll rebuild. They have family who live here. Our freaking Mardi Gras krewes are older than most major cities in this nation. The people who left? Their culture mostly consists of the Geto Boyz, Birdman and Master P. It was a very dirty little secret, but the great poor masses in New Orleans were rarely seen or heard from. They didn't live in the garden district, rarely visited Bourbon street, and their school systems were so horrible that many of them can't even speak, read, or write coherent English. They were the invisible people.
The culture you speak of? It did not leave with the evacuees. The area was first envisioned as a city in 1699. It's dealt with many floods and many storms over its history. The majority of people who run the stores and the parties and the bars and the restaurants and Mardi Gras don't even necessarily live in the city. Most of them live in Kenner, Gretna, Metairie, and the North Shore and commute to the city. They haven't gone anywhere, so why do you expect them to go anywhere?
And again, the majority of the evacuees who are in shelters outside of this state will never return. It costs no more to live in other major cities than it does to live in New Orleans. The average income of a New Orleans resident was less than 30 grand. They were in a horrible situation before, and this is their way out. They're ALREADY relocated. Why return to an area that had nothing for you before you ever left? It's no more expensive to be unemployed and broke in New Orleans than it is in Houston or Dallas.
Except that you're completely wrong. The rich and upper middle class will move right back into the city. For them, the culture of the city and the pull of flirting with high-society is too much to ignore. Who do you think makes up those Mardi Gras krewes? They LIVE for that stuff. Much of the surrounding parishes are full of former New Orleanians who were driven out because they couldn't afford to live in the crime-free parts of towns and didn't feel safe enough to live in the parts of town they could actually afford. When they bulldoze the 9th ward and the schools and the hospitals and rebuild them... and the state government seizes the land for developers to be rebuilt via eminent domain... the New Orleans politicians will raise holy hell, because they won't be able to screw poorly educated constituents anymore. Their feet will be held to the fire for the poor educational system, the poor roads, and the corruption. The poor are used to being treated like crap in the city as long as the leaders there suck up to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton... the people who will build their homes on top of that rubble will not. So say goodbye to Bill Jefferson and Cleo Fields and Kathleen Blanco... they're not going to be representing anyone much longer.
The culture of the city itself has almost nothing to do with the poor people who are in shelters, unless you listen to Birdman and Master P. The poor who do return will likely be those whose talents are uniquely suited to the area... like the street painters of Jackson Square. Tourists come for Mardi Gras and Jazzfest and the Riverwalk and the Zoo and the Aquarium and the casinos and the food and the partying on Bourbon Street. None of that was removed from the city.
The poor will mostly not return. Why should they? They'll get better educations and better living conditions living in the projects of Dallas and Phoenix than they will in the 9th ward of New Orleans. There's nothing for them here and we aren't going to make much of an effort to bring them back. It sucks, but the best thing for them and for New Orleans is for them to be integrated into cities that can handle their needs. New Orleans never could.
Then... why would anyone bother with Linux? Multiple flavors that are all virtually the same except for brand name and package type, multiple, SLOW desktops, configuration needed by editing obscure files in even obscurer directories, console necessary for installing almost any program you download off the net, firewall almost impossible to configure for joe average without a 3rd party tool, dependency hell is a major issue even with repositiories, software that only responds to things like audio settings if its targeted specifically at the desktop environment in question, none of the standard office related programs run on it, etc.
The only good thing about Linux on the desktop for the average user is that it isn't a Microsoft product, and since the average user doesn't care about that type of thing, it's got nothing.
A lot of this depends on what stage you are in your life and career. My last job was as a technical recruiter for an international IT firm, and the majority of the people there were college grads who had less than 5 years of real world work experience. We were all young, attractive people whose base + commissions put us in the 70k+ range... not bad for your first year or two out of school when you have no dependents and your apartment is only 400 bucks a month.
We all became very good friends. There's one manager in the entire office who would hang out with us on Friday afternoons, and the rest generally stayed away because they had family obligations or were former alcoholics. We had parties, we'd go out on Saturday nights to downtown Fort Worth and have a ball, and wake up mid-morning on Sunday to go watch football together. I'm talking a group of 20+ people here.
Play only interfered with work one time, and that's when a few guys had too much to drink at a margarita bar on a Thursday night. They showed up 20 minutes late, but all was forgotten and it never happened again.
I left the position for other ambitions... I never wanted to be a recruiter in the first place, but it was what was available at the time... but now I have a bunch of friends who have nothing to do with what I'm currently doing, and that atmosphere that the old workplace had still allows me to meet new people as they bring some of their new co-workers out with them.
I agree. But the second some political mass-mailer or form letter gets dropped or bounced, the assumption will be conspiracy.
Well, that should tell you all you need to know about the source of the emails in question. I don't see spam in any form as any different than a guy walking up to you and sticking a flyer in your pocket, and I don't care whether I share in the political sentiment involved or not. In both politics and religion, those who want to hear what you have to say will seek you out, those who don't will avoid you, and proselytizing to the latter group will incite them to ignore you no matter how good your intentions or how much evidence you have to support your viewpoint.
Synaptic is just as limited as apt, which is as limited as the repositories make them, and virtually all repositories have tons of broken software that can't run unless you whip out emerge or dpkg or rpm and install some binaries or libraries that can't be found on the repository, due to poor package management, incompetence, or some sort of political stand.
After a year of running nothing but Linux on my PC, I reinstalled Windows. The only third party libraries I had to install for any of my software to work properly was GTK+ to get The Gimp running. I suppose you could throw DirectX into that mix, but I have no need for that.
Being able to download what I want, double click it, and the program just working beats the hell out of Synaptic.
Man, someone better go out and tell CompUSA to close down their stores, because apparently they haven't heard the bad news, yet!
The average user does indeed install a lot of applications on his own. He installs Firefox. He installs Zone Alarm. He installs Office. He installs anti-virus software. he installs games and filesharing programs and iTunes and a ton of other things.
He installs them because they're easy to install.
Unless you're talking about Linux. Then, may God bless his poor little soul, because if he doesn't have synaptic or smart set up properly, he's going to be SOL.
Because the average user doesn't care about your so-called cause.
People are not going to take the time to care about freedom as it relates to licenses and source code. They just aren't. Now, they might eventually if the RIAA and MPAA and the hardware manufacturers start restricting peoples' access to media, but that's a future consideration, and is not applicable today.
So... how can you get them to switch over? Offer a faster, more accessible product. This is simple, and it works. Just take a look at vehicles. Used to be that you'd have to hand-crank your car. Then came electric ignition. Then came automatic transmissions. Air conditioners and heaters came into fashion. Radios too. Then came anti-lock brakes. People will use better, easier to use products when comparably priced (and since Windows is included in the price of a new PC, and since new PCs carry warranties, they are more desirable than a bare bones PC and a distro). Many will even pay a premium to use a better product (DVD players vs. VCRs, Macs, cookware, etc).
So, if people aren't using Linux, then maybe Linux isn't superior to Windows and Mac OSX for the things that count for the average user. Crazy, I know, but the numbers don't lie.
Okay, now try to install Sun's java sdk. It's not nearly as simple as dpkg -i *.deb, and virtually no first party repositories will offer it because they're hellbent on offering FOSS instead. Hell, even in Fedora Core, you have to install services, install Java, then use alternatives to make the system point to the correct binary. Half the Linux distributions out there offer chunks and pieces of Eclipse, but won't offer the entire thing, which means that most people are just going to go to the website and download the binaries anyway.
And that is easy compared to what needs to be done to use JPackage.
Ah, but here's my experience: for the past year, I used Linux as a desktop exclusively, mostly because of all the programming tools. I've bounced around between them.. starting with Fedora Core 3, then to SuSE, then Ubuntu Warty, then Fedora Core 3 for x86_64, then to Ubuntu Hoary, then to Fedora Core 4, then to Mepis, back to Ubuntu, back to Mepis.
Why was I doing this bouncing? The repositories all blow. That's right, ALL of them. They're nice on getting some things to work, but if you're stuck in any one of their repositories, then you might as well be stuck in the mud, because either they'll have software on the repository that needs software that isn't, or the software on the repository will be so woefully out of date that other flavors of the same parent distro have passed you by a long time ago in one way or another. And depending on which library you need to replace, replacing one with a newer binary might totally screw up your existing configuration.
And the help... the Mepis guys tell ya that if you need help to go to the IRC channel... so I do... because Streamtuner and xmms weren't working together after an install and an update from the repository. I ask how I can fix it, they tell me to ditch xmms and use RealPlayer, which works, but then Realplayer totally ignores my volume settings in KDE. This kind of crap is commonplace.
Then there's the issue of speed. Speed of booting is faster in Windows by a factor of 10. Speed of loading up a program is much faster as well. I repartitioned my drive and put Win XP back on, and was shocked at how fast it was. No more waiting 5-10 seconds for firefox to load. Even with all the shell extensions I slapped onto Windows to make it closer to the KDE and Gnome desktops I was accustomed to, it's still much faster. And sure, using something like Blackbox would cut down on time... a bit... in Linux, but Blackbox is a window manager, and I want a desktop environment that is pleasing to the eye and non-annoying. I have transparency, drop shadows, window shading, an objectbar, konfabulator, and multiple other programs running, and nothing was harder to install than by downloading a file and double clicking an icon. My desktop still runs faster and smoother, and the only thing I'm missing in Windows is good ole kill -9. And the only thing I needed to download extra libraries for was... the Gimp.
Sure, Linux does a better job with some things, like having the latest drivers with the latest distro, but most copies of Windows are OEMs that come with machines with the drivers pre-loaded. Files in the repository ARE easier to get to than having to go to a bunch of websites to download them for Windows. The desktop is more configurable without having to replace system files to do it.
However, Linux right now is just not even in the same galaxy as Windows or OSX when it comes to giving a user what they need to be productive with minimum hassle, and the people who have the organizational power and clout to make it into something that can compete refuse to do so. Why? Dunno. Maybe because they deal with so many other geeks who use the same desktops and configure the same files everyday that they never have the time or the care to deal with the issues making Linux a lame duck in the race. I'd love to scrap Windows, OSX, and any other OS that requires DRM. After all, I did it once before, but until I see some improvement that puts Linux's desktop in the same realm as the other two, I'm sticking with Windows and will relegate my Mepis partition to tinkering. And lemme tell you, it was a pain in the butt to shift files from ReiserFS to FAT32 to NFTS until I was able to clear a drive to reformat the ReiserFS to NTFS and then move them all back again... twice.
... it'll give people more of a reason to be active after work. Too many people get off of work at 5 and are stuck indoors by 6 for the rest of the day because that's when it starts to get dark during the fall/winter months. But in many states, it's not especially cold except between November and March. Giving people daylight until 8 or 9pm longer during the year will probably allow them to both save electricity and have more contiguous hours of free time during the weekend if they spend some of their new daylight hours getting stuff taken care of during the week.
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Either that or a book. Though, if I were either a general contractor or a real estate salesperson, I'd suggest you go with your idea.
It won't.
If you're a software business and you have the world's greatest coders but the world's worst salespeople, you won't do near the amount of business as if you have the world's worst coders and the world's greatest salespeople. Most companies can get by quite well with mediocre coders and good salespeople. Besides, crappy coders = more specialized support dough. Just ask SAP or Oracle.
Salespeople are ultimately worth more to a company's bottom line than code jockeys. Google's a bit different, but that's because they're trying to take over the world by creating services for things we didn't even think were important yet, and because their sales revenue is generated by ad sales and not by a shrinkwrapped product.
So, you want to pay an entry level wage in a very expensive place to live to someone with enough experience to be trusted with your systems?
Good freaking luck there, buddy.
The reasons that there are fewer and fewer qualified candidates are the following: (1) many of them are already employed, (2) they've moved on to more fulfilling careers, (3) qualified candidates get forced (priced) out of the market by cheap H1 and overseas labor, and most importantly, (4) companies are not willing to train otherwise motivated and intelligent candiates, so they never get the experience needed to fill the gaps.
If nobody plants any seeds because they claim they're either too expensive or not high enough quality, then why should they be suprised when they all starve to death?
This ain't just in IT. I live in an area (New Orleans) with a great number of refineries. Refineries are in constant need of welders, pipefitters, CNC operators, machinists, process operators, etc. in a NORMAL economy, but right now, they're in dire need of these types of people. They all complain that they can't find labor because of the hurricanes, yet NONE of them are offering apprenticeships to train people who might be eager for one of their positions. Can't wait until all the refineries and shipyards start to fall apart because of worker burnout.
You think that's bad? When I was in college, I used to work a full time night shift at a grocery store, then ride a bus for an hour to get to the school and stay there until 4:30pm in the afternoon for the bus to pick me up and bring me back so I could be at work for 8pm the next night. For at least 5 junior and senior level CS classes, I didn't bother showing up for class unless we had an exam or a project due. I'd simply xerox the notes of one of my classmates a few days before the exam and study those for the test. One test I kinda botched up because there was extra reading I didn't know about, but other than that, I scored an A on virtually everything I took. The girl who took the notes, on the other hand, would routinely score a low passing or failing grade on the tests.
Because they can load a new set of ads for every page you read.
You aren't a pro football player unless someone is paying you to play football.
You don't earn a salary as a video game developer unless someone is paying you to develop video games.
So why would someone include people in a salary that clearly don't meet the basic requirements of inclusion in the survey?
You know what they call a guy who used to develop video games? The same as the guy who used to mop the floors. They call them unemployed, and they aren't included in fun little surveys because they aren't relevant.
My, aren't you just the sarcastic one?
You know, a lot of people aren't joined at the hip to their PCs and don't want them in the living room, and given spending 99 bucks plus a monthly fee, or 9 bucks extra a month added to their cable bill, they'll take that all day long instead of opening up a PC to install multiple new components and dragging their box to the living room.
Oh YEAH! And they can um... do all that non-PVR shit you just mentioned with their PCs anyway. So shove the attitude, junior.
I'm not saying I disagree with your intentions, but Mississippi and Louisiana should have fixed their building codes a long time ago to make the homes I saw them framing on television the other day absolutely illegal south of I-10, and the fact that they're still legal should not automatically give Habitat the green light to build homes which anyone with common sense knows are ultimately unsafe for the geographic region they're being built. They could better use that money to help subsidize some people's homes and make a positive, lasting impact on their lives.
If they were building them in Nebraska, I'd have no problem with them. It's just that, down here, you can easily tell which homes were built which way. All you have to do is look down the block. My sister's neighbor has his roof in her yard. We bought an old acadian home for 5 grand from a dilapidated site, stripped it down, took the lumber, and used it in the construction of her home. That thing will be here for another hundred years, easily.
Putting someone in a house that is bound to be destroyed in the future is simply giving people a false sense of security and enabling them to hold their hand out the next time a major storm comes.
Again, I am not faulting them for their intentions. I'm faulting them for their lack of foresight. Throwing wealth into the argument doesn't change the principle of the matter: the flimsy homes that they're building are not that much safer than a trailer when dealing with tropical cyclones. They fall apart and they fall on top of the occupants inside. For these people, their posessions are likely all they have, so it is doubly erroneous on the part of the Habitat people when they don't think before acting, because when those homes go, those people lose EVERYTHING and they don't have the dough to replace them.
If you think you know so much, then perhaps YOU should be out there helping them. I'm still stuck down here cleaning up the last freaking mess from poorly built homes.
This is off topic, but can you please tell the people at Habitat for Humanity that the frames they're building for homes are virtual deathtraps for anyone living in the affected areas? Flimsy homes constructed of 2x4 pine should be flat out illegal along the gulf coast. They're dangers to the people who live in them AND the people who have to try to rescue the people who get trapped in them. The old construction... homes that have been here more than 40 years... are mostly made of 4x4 or 4x6 construction and the wood is mostly either oak or cypress. Giving people exactly what they just had after losing a home is ignoring the real problem.
The question is simple: is Google giving public access to entire books which they do not hold copyright on?
The answer is yes. It's immaterial whether or not you can search and find a certain part of the book. The fact of the matter is simple... you can view entire copyrighted works via Google's service.
So, O'Reilly is wrong because his situation is different from other copyright holders, and Google is wrong because the entire book is still available via their website without the consent of the copyright holders.
You can go to Amazon right now and view sample chapters of books on their website to pique your curiosity as to whether a book is sufficiently informative enough to purchase. The difference is that Amazon has been given the authority to do so. Google has not.
If by social gamers they mean "players who purchase and pay subscription fees for online games," then it's a no freaking brainer. Not everyone wants to spend a few hundred bucks over the course of a year or two to have the opportunity to have their level 50 night elf wear the newest funky armor.
If they mean "players who have friends over to play games," then it's probably due to the Madden phenomenon. Tons of folks purchase the next year's edition every season simply so they can keep their rosters up to date. Seems loony to me, but if it works, hey, go for it.
I suppose I'm a casual gamer. I own 27 PS2 games, but The only game I really play with friends is Hot Shots Gold Fore (I rarely play games at all). Match play = great drinking game.
Well, let's see... I live in the New Orleans area, have been surrounded by the culture all my life, know exactly where it comes from, and know who holds the purse strings in the city. You, on the other hand, apparently like to second guess because you've heard snippets from the national news.
The middle and upper classes will not leave this area. They have jobs. They have homes, and even if their homes are flooded, they'll rebuild. They have family who live here. Our freaking Mardi Gras krewes are older than most major cities in this nation. The people who left? Their culture mostly consists of the Geto Boyz, Birdman and Master P. It was a very dirty little secret, but the great poor masses in New Orleans were rarely seen or heard from. They didn't live in the garden district, rarely visited Bourbon street, and their school systems were so horrible that many of them can't even speak, read, or write coherent English. They were the invisible people.
The culture you speak of? It did not leave with the evacuees. The area was first envisioned as a city in 1699. It's dealt with many floods and many storms over its history. The majority of people who run the stores and the parties and the bars and the restaurants and Mardi Gras don't even necessarily live in the city. Most of them live in Kenner, Gretna, Metairie, and the North Shore and commute to the city. They haven't gone anywhere, so why do you expect them to go anywhere?
And again, the majority of the evacuees who are in shelters outside of this state will never return. It costs no more to live in other major cities than it does to live in New Orleans. The average income of a New Orleans resident was less than 30 grand. They were in a horrible situation before, and this is their way out. They're ALREADY relocated. Why return to an area that had nothing for you before you ever left? It's no more expensive to be unemployed and broke in New Orleans than it is in Houston or Dallas.
Except that you're completely wrong. The rich and upper middle class will move right back into the city. For them, the culture of the city and the pull of flirting with high-society is too much to ignore. Who do you think makes up those Mardi Gras krewes? They LIVE for that stuff. Much of the surrounding parishes are full of former New Orleanians who were driven out because they couldn't afford to live in the crime-free parts of towns and didn't feel safe enough to live in the parts of town they could actually afford. When they bulldoze the 9th ward and the schools and the hospitals and rebuild them... and the state government seizes the land for developers to be rebuilt via eminent domain... the New Orleans politicians will raise holy hell, because they won't be able to screw poorly educated constituents anymore. Their feet will be held to the fire for the poor educational system, the poor roads, and the corruption. The poor are used to being treated like crap in the city as long as the leaders there suck up to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton... the people who will build their homes on top of that rubble will not. So say goodbye to Bill Jefferson and Cleo Fields and Kathleen Blanco... they're not going to be representing anyone much longer.
The culture of the city itself has almost nothing to do with the poor people who are in shelters, unless you listen to Birdman and Master P. The poor who do return will likely be those whose talents are uniquely suited to the area... like the street painters of Jackson Square. Tourists come for Mardi Gras and Jazzfest and the Riverwalk and the Zoo and the Aquarium and the casinos and the food and the partying on Bourbon Street. None of that was removed from the city.
The poor will mostly not return. Why should they? They'll get better educations and better living conditions living in the projects of Dallas and Phoenix than they will in the 9th ward of New Orleans. There's nothing for them here and we aren't going to make much of an effort to bring them back. It sucks, but the best thing for them and for New Orleans is for them to be integrated into cities that can handle their needs. New Orleans never could.
Then I'll have to remind my retinas that I burned out playing with the newfangled Sparcstation mice in the early 1990s at Louisiana Tech of that fact.
Not only did they use lasers, but they had a special laminated metallic pad which is the only thing they'd work on.
"WARNING: DO NOT POINT AT EYES!" Oh, okay, um... let's test that theory out... BZzZZT!
Then... why would anyone bother with Linux?
Multiple flavors that are all virtually the same except for brand name and package type, multiple, SLOW desktops, configuration needed by editing obscure files in even obscurer directories, console necessary for installing almost any program you download off the net, firewall almost impossible to configure for joe average without a 3rd party tool, dependency hell is a major issue even with repositiories, software that only responds to things like audio settings if its targeted specifically at the desktop environment in question, none of the standard office related programs run on it, etc.
The only good thing about Linux on the desktop for the average user is that it isn't a Microsoft product, and since the average user doesn't care about that type of thing, it's got nothing.
A lot of this depends on what stage you are in your life and career. My last job was as a technical recruiter for an international IT firm, and the majority of the people there were college grads who had less than 5 years of real world work experience. We were all young, attractive people whose base + commissions put us in the 70k+ range... not bad for your first year or two out of school when you have no dependents and your apartment is only 400 bucks a month.
We all became very good friends. There's one manager in the entire office who would hang out with us on Friday afternoons, and the rest generally stayed away because they had family obligations or were former alcoholics. We had parties, we'd go out on Saturday nights to downtown Fort Worth and have a ball, and wake up mid-morning on Sunday to go watch football together. I'm talking a group of 20+ people here.
Play only interfered with work one time, and that's when a few guys had too much to drink at a margarita bar on a Thursday night. They showed up 20 minutes late, but all was forgotten and it never happened again.
I left the position for other ambitions... I never wanted to be a recruiter in the first place, but it was what was available at the time... but now I have a bunch of friends who have nothing to do with what I'm currently doing, and that atmosphere that the old workplace had still allows me to meet new people as they bring some of their new co-workers out with them.
I agree. But the second some political mass-mailer or form letter gets dropped or bounced, the assumption will be conspiracy. Well, that should tell you all you need to know about the source of the emails in question. I don't see spam in any form as any different than a guy walking up to you and sticking a flyer in your pocket, and I don't care whether I share in the political sentiment involved or not. In both politics and religion, those who want to hear what you have to say will seek you out, those who don't will avoid you, and proselytizing to the latter group will incite them to ignore you no matter how good your intentions or how much evidence you have to support your viewpoint.
Synaptic is just as limited as apt, which is as limited as the repositories make them, and virtually all repositories have tons of broken software that can't run unless you whip out emerge or dpkg or rpm and install some binaries or libraries that can't be found on the repository, due to poor package management, incompetence, or some sort of political stand.
After a year of running nothing but Linux on my PC, I reinstalled Windows. The only third party libraries I had to install for any of my software to work properly was GTK+ to get The Gimp running.
I suppose you could throw DirectX into that mix, but I have no need for that.
Being able to download what I want, double click it, and the program just working beats the hell out of Synaptic.
Man, someone better go out and tell CompUSA to close down their stores, because apparently they haven't heard the bad news, yet!
The average user does indeed install a lot of applications on his own. He installs Firefox. He installs Zone Alarm. He installs Office. He installs anti-virus software. he installs games and filesharing programs and iTunes and a ton of other things.
He installs them because they're easy to install.
Unless you're talking about Linux. Then, may God bless his poor little soul, because if he doesn't have synaptic or smart set up properly, he's going to be SOL.
Because the average user doesn't care about your so-called cause.
People are not going to take the time to care about freedom as it relates to licenses and source code. They just aren't. Now, they might eventually if the RIAA and MPAA and the hardware manufacturers start restricting peoples' access to media, but that's a future consideration, and is not applicable today.
So... how can you get them to switch over? Offer a faster, more accessible product. This is simple, and it works. Just take a look at vehicles. Used to be that you'd have to hand-crank your car. Then came electric ignition. Then came automatic transmissions. Air conditioners and heaters came into fashion. Radios too. Then came anti-lock brakes. People will use better, easier to use products when comparably priced (and since Windows is included in the price of a new PC, and since new PCs carry warranties, they are more desirable than a bare bones PC and a distro). Many will even pay a premium to use a better product (DVD players vs. VCRs, Macs, cookware, etc).
So, if people aren't using Linux, then maybe Linux isn't superior to Windows and Mac OSX for the things that count for the average user. Crazy, I know, but the numbers don't lie.
Okay, now try to install Sun's java sdk. It's not nearly as simple as dpkg -i *.deb, and virtually no first party repositories will offer it because they're hellbent on offering FOSS instead. Hell, even in Fedora Core, you have to install services, install Java, then use alternatives to make the system point to the correct binary. Half the Linux distributions out there offer chunks and pieces of Eclipse, but won't offer the entire thing, which means that most people are just going to go to the website and download the binaries anyway.
And that is easy compared to what needs to be done to use JPackage.
Ah, but here's my experience: for the past year, I used Linux as a desktop exclusively, mostly because of all the programming tools. I've bounced around between them.. starting with Fedora Core 3, then to SuSE, then Ubuntu Warty, then Fedora Core 3 for x86_64, then to Ubuntu Hoary, then to Fedora Core 4, then to Mepis, back to Ubuntu, back to Mepis.
Why was I doing this bouncing? The repositories all blow. That's right, ALL of them. They're nice on getting some things to work, but if you're stuck in any one of their repositories, then you might as well be stuck in the mud, because either they'll have software on the repository that needs software that isn't, or the software on the repository will be so woefully out of date that other flavors of the same parent distro have passed you by a long time ago in one way or another. And depending on which library you need to replace, replacing one with a newer binary might totally screw up your existing configuration.
And the help... the Mepis guys tell ya that if you need help to go to the IRC channel... so I do... because Streamtuner and xmms weren't working together after an install and an update from the repository. I ask how I can fix it, they tell me to ditch xmms and use RealPlayer, which works, but then Realplayer totally ignores my volume settings in KDE. This kind of crap is commonplace.
Then there's the issue of speed. Speed of booting is faster in Windows by a factor of 10. Speed of loading up a program is much faster as well. I repartitioned my drive and put Win XP back on, and was shocked at how fast it was. No more waiting 5-10 seconds for firefox to load. Even with all the shell extensions I slapped onto Windows to make it closer to the KDE and Gnome desktops I was accustomed to, it's still much faster. And sure, using something like Blackbox would cut down on time... a bit... in Linux, but Blackbox is a window manager, and I want a desktop environment that is pleasing to the eye and non-annoying. I have transparency, drop shadows, window shading, an objectbar, konfabulator, and multiple other programs running, and nothing was harder to install than by downloading a file and double clicking an icon. My desktop still runs faster and smoother, and the only thing I'm missing in Windows is good ole kill -9. And the only thing I needed to download extra libraries for was... the Gimp.
Sure, Linux does a better job with some things, like having the latest drivers with the latest distro, but most copies of Windows are OEMs that come with machines with the drivers pre-loaded. Files in the repository ARE easier to get to than having to go to a bunch of websites to download them for Windows. The desktop is more configurable without having to replace system files to do it.
However, Linux right now is just not even in the same galaxy as Windows or OSX when it comes to giving a user what they need to be productive with minimum hassle, and the people who have the organizational power and clout to make it into something that can compete refuse to do so. Why? Dunno. Maybe because they deal with so many other geeks who use the same desktops and configure the same files everyday that they never have the time or the care to deal with the issues making Linux a lame duck in the race. I'd love to scrap Windows, OSX, and any other OS that requires DRM. After all, I did it once before, but until I see some improvement that puts Linux's desktop in the same realm as the other two, I'm sticking with Windows and will relegate my Mepis partition to tinkering. And lemme tell you, it was a pain in the butt to shift files from ReiserFS to FAT32 to NFTS until I was able to clear a drive to reformat the ReiserFS to NTFS and then move them all back again... twice.
... it'll give people more of a reason to be active after work. Too many people get off of work at 5 and are stuck indoors by 6 for the rest of the day because that's when it starts to get dark during the fall/winter months. But in many states, it's not especially cold except between November and March. Giving people daylight until 8 or 9pm longer during the year will probably allow them to both save electricity and have more contiguous hours of free time during the weekend if they spend some of their new daylight hours getting stuff taken care of during the week.
Can't really see too much of a downside.
Konfabulator has the ability to bring widgets to the forefront as well. All ya hafta do is hit f8 in Windows.