Sounds good to me. Linux's problem here in the good ol' U$ (yes, I know China has been around longer, bear with me here) is that M$ spends far too much money on marketing, has been around for long enought to have hardware support for most consumer devices, has OEMs write their own drivers, and has great games that no other system has. Half-Life, 1998 game of the year, is only on Window$. StarCraft, another classic, is also only on Window$. These are great games, that I play all the time. You need Windows for both of these. (Yes, there is StarCraft on Mac, but Macs are more expensive than Window$ boxes of identical quality.) Don't tell me to use WINE, because it is far too slow for any consumer level box. Maybe Window$ will always remain the consumer OS of choice, but I would have to lose all faith in capitalism to let that happen.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
I live about an hour away from KSC, and I can honestly say that whenever all hell breaks loose with space probes, the local media really overblows the whole thing. Yes, NASA does try to explore space, but, as Homer Simpson puts it, "Trying is the first step towards failure."
I'm not insinuating that we stop exploring space, but that we should take our failures in stride.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Even if Debian wasn't completely non-free, I would still use it. Sure, free software is better, and the GPL is helluva sweet, but I would still use it if it didn't follow it. I use Starcraft and Half-Life more than free software because they are more fun. I use Red Hat because it gets work done, not because it is mostly free software.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
I really think controlling the internet is futile, unless you eschew the Orwell approach and go for the approach taken un 'Brave New World,' in which the populace is controlled not by restriction of information, but by an unstoppable flood of information that dulls the senses. If you think the Internet has the possibility to do that right now, you are exactly correct.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Even though most modern word processors can read HTML, they do it in different ways. Some, like FrontPage, basically try to preserve the formatting, and just edit the content. Others, like Publisher, try to convert everything into tables. Hardly any two web browsers render the same HTML the same way. Therefore, a proprietary format remains good because if only one program reads it, there will never be any confusion about how to render a given tag.
If you were to write a reader for a common format, you would have to put a lot of effort into it to make it look exactly like a closed-source viewer for the same format. If you made your own closed-source viewer/editor for your own proprietary format, you could guarantee that a document saved in that format would look the same. That is why proprietary formats are popular.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Some artsy-fartsy people have trouble with their OS/WM because the computer has inherent problems in simulating human behavior. It does not act irrationally, do dumb things, or actually do anything at all. Since most OSes are designed by programmers, everything tends to be handled logically. However, OSes for non-programmers rarely work well because non-programmers figured that a programmer would be able to, say, write something that could not be written. (For this post, a programmer is basically somebody who thinks logically, not specifically programs anything.)
Computers don't have emotions like people do. If an angry person takes a file and types swear words into it, the computer records, not interprets the swear words. Non-programmers often try to reason with their computers, or coax them to working. If an OS were written that responded to everything the people did, and not those actions that the computer records via keyboard, mouse, or other input device, and actually reasoned things out like people, computers would be more accessible.
Unfortunately, the reason we use computers is because they are really fast at mathematics and transferring data around. If a computer were to toss the massive amounts of data that people do to have emotions, they would be really slow at multiplication, dividing, and surfing.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
How about the government leaves us alone, let the GNU/Linux project(s) continue as before, and just sort of make things go the way they do today. Sure, Microsoft might disappear and make Linux more popular, but we don't need the American government trying to force international free software projects down everybody's throats.
Not to be too anarchist here, but the govenment forces all sorts of crap on us that we would have liked, but they force things far too much, and people end up hating both the product and the government.
It's the same philosophy behind people hating products that are advertised too much. Linux has got along fine so far with only word-of-mouth advertising (for both customers and programmers) so why should things change?
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Sad that people have become cynical to the point of suggesting stopping scientific advances.
You may say that other animals don't even consider how many transistors they can fit on a piece of dirt, and they still live fine. However, other animals don't take showers, have life expectancies far shorter than ours, and generally don't care about short-term advancement. Sure, they'd like to evolve into us someday, but it doesn't depend on the discovery and work of individuals to do that.
We are at a time in our evolution where individuals do matter more than the individuals of other species. We didn't evolve ourselves to rocket into space, we worked at it. That is why we are here.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
All these advances in processor technology are great, but whenever something like this happens, you will have forgotten about the actual discovery whenever it comes to market in about 10 years time, once everybody's expectations of their computers have ramped up to what will then be delivered. Us consumers have it even worse than the commercial customer because our products come last. A.07 micron mainframe will before a.07 mircon Pentium XI, because they need more clock cycles.
What I'd really like to see is a helluva powerful consumer device released before its commercial counterpart. Not just helluva powerful, but something that would be like comparing a GeForce 256 DDR to a CGA card.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Try using a Sharp Zaurus with its Linux emulator, Apache, and you'll have your portable web server.
Actually, I would try using phone lines to get on with an American provider with an 800 dialin. The other option would be to restrict your trip to the US, Canada, Japan, and Europe, due to the developed state of these countries/regions.
One major thing to worry about in third world nations is theft, since the fuzz are not out in force in Mexico like they are here. Sure, they are all out there, but for personal profit, not to serve and protect. I have heard horror stories of surfers traveling to Mexico, only to have all their stuff 'confiscated' by the police. If you're traveling with things that look more valuable than a surfboard, you'd better be careful.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Self-promotion is the American Way, so it should be encouraged. This whole Columbine thing was a real mess, so it's nice to hear opinions of real people (and slashdot posters, too) about something that the whole media has blown way out of proportions, like the way Microsoft blows the whole 'Windows is Good' thing out of proportion. Unfortunately, the book probably edits some of the most controversial posts, which are often the most important and thought-provoking ones.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Great - would it only run console apps, or would it run X on a really small screen. I can just see people with their palmtop that has an instance of xeyes on screen, admiring how it's running Linux, without realizing that the xeyes are having trouble finding the mouse cursor. Worse, there would be no screen space for anything else.
It would be nice, however, to be able to run a web server in your palm. You could have a running journal that you always type into, and people hitting the reload button to read what just happened. It would be like the girl in the Doonesbury comic in the paper, but text based (call it optimized for slow connections.)
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
As soon as hardware vendors learn they can make their hardware helluva fast by looking for the sequence of instructions present in the open source benchmark program, they will just make their crappy old ATI Rage 2MB video cards that are really expensive and wait for the '3Dbenchmark.start();' command, at which point they will say '3Dbenchmark.finished("only.000000001 second!");' This is not good.
Unrelated note: A Modest Proposal was an essay written by Jonathan Swift that proposed that poor people should sell their babies for food. It was satirical and shocking, but most of all, very entertaining.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Believe me, nanotech will do to the real world what the internet did to information. You couldn't send data all over the world quickly and anonymously before the internet, and (not to sound like sci-fi) with nanotech you will be able to basically have an army of micro-robots filming a movie without the knowledge of the people being filmed, and then have this movie delivered to you quickly, if not real-time.
The real problem would arise whenever it turned out that nanotech could not be controlled as easily as the internet. On the internet, you basically decide whether or not you will be monitored, and if you will read a given data. Ignoring something in real life is much harder than online. You can always scroll past the retarded punch the monkey ads in your browser, but you can't easily scroll past a punch the monkey robot array type thingy when it covers up the instrument panel (or worse, your windshield) in your car. It would get annoying to see nothing but ads whenever the advertisers manage to land nano-bots on your eyeglasses.
Simply, when nanotech comes, we'd all better become way more ethical, or we're all screwed.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is probably actualy nice to many of its employees. It is under such scrutiny that it can't afford not to. However, some of the less popular hardware companies (AOPen, and the other really small and unheard of ones that you can't find at Best Buy) probably aren't as benevolent.
As software programmers go, they have to be nice or they'll all leave, due to the fact that the demand for software programmers is higher than the supply.
The point being, overseas labor allows you to disregard your employees more than if the labor was here. Also, the jobs that require a computer are also going to require an employer to be more benevolent. Oddly enough, there are probably more problems with Asian physical labor than American programming jobs. How would you like to spend all day lining up the same two pins on a resistor to the same two holes on your board. How would you like to spend all week at it? Aren't you glad you get to use a computer at work/school?
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
One really cheap way we use here at school to do DV is Avid Home Cinema (or something like that), which is actually affordable, and an ATI All-In-Wonder 128. The quality is not really great, as the computer we are allocated to use is a Celeron with 64 megs of RAM. The problem we have is that it is a bit incompatible with the Compaq Deskpro we are forced to use, and has difficulty capturing sound. However, it is useful when you have some AVIs that you need to string together for VHS tape.
If you're into 3D digital video, go for no less than 3D Studio MAX. I did a project with it, and it worked quite well on my machine at home (Celeron 466, 128MB, and 32MB TNT2) and on my friend's variety of machines. Network rendering is flaky in 98 (both 1&2), although you could get it to work in NT. It supports hardware acceleration for 3D, and can natively save your video as a huge directory of stills (almost any file format), AVI, or Quicktime. Once you have your stills ready, it also has a really lightweight tool for editing (mostly adding effects that can't be rendered) and combining your huge directories of stills into a singular AVI.
One way you can get your videos from PC to VHS is to get a DVD hardware decoder with NTSC out. Get an MPEG encoder online, and play it to your VCR using the DVD decoder. This worked well with the Creative Encore DVD, save for the fact that we used a fairly low-quality encoder.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Calling Linux a half-baked OS is not the same as the fact that Windows is. Were linux to claim to be a finished usable product that has its place in everyday computing, but fail to act like a finished OS should, I would call it half-baked.
However, since it is still under construction, you can expect minor glitches that you would also see if you were using something that was not finished - i.e. a car without spark plugs, an airplane with 'BETA' wings that somebody gave you for free, or a boat with a hull constructed by somebody who found that a similar hull worked on their boat. You're taking risks with situations like those. However, when you shell out money for an OS, you expect it to be done, not half-baked like Windows. It seems that the raw eggs they used never quite got the salmonella cooked out of them. When you get raw cookie dough, like Linux, you are taking the risk of poisoning knowingly. Nobody gets salmonella poisioning from Chips Ahoy!(tm). Nobody should crash their computer with Windows.
However, I found your post to be correct on several issues. I have, in fact used Linux only for 4 months, and still am trying to get all my hardware to work. But I didn't buy it expecting all my hardware to work, or expecting to do a lot of programming, or because I know anything about the inner workings. But I do want to accomplish those in the future.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
USB support - who doesn't have it - and needs it? If you want a newfangled input device, linux isn't for you. A PS2 mouse, gameport joystick, and 101-key works fine for me
Plug and Play - Windows has had it for how many years? Now, how many years has it had a reliable one? The first answer is about 4, the second is still zero. Among gamers, it's referred to as Plug and Pray, because that's how you install things in Windows.
WinModems - you get what you pay for. If you need a winmodem support, set up a w98se machine with internet connection sharing, and tell your linux machine you're on the net. Or go buy an external (serial, not USB) modem that you can use your standard Hayes commands on.
Don't compare Linux to a half-baked system like Windows. Even though Linux has almost no support for modern hardware like PCI sound cards and some things, it will always have its place in my house - as a dedicated Half-Life server, word processor, and a way to show off that I am better than my W9x using friends.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
My school sucks - all either really old macs (filthy), really old 486s that struggle to run Netscape 4 for window$ 95, or the two Pentium IIs in the library that all us smart kids want. What I reallly like are the celerons in the tech room they use for CAD and 3DS, but they're all locked up with fortres. If they put linux on those 486s, you might be able to use them. Now, I just have to use linux at home.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
As far as I care, an MP3 is just like a digital cassete recording that requires a different player. And even if the feds say I can't copy my CDs to MP3, I really don't care. People don't always stop at stop signs, either.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Now that an Athlon is really really fast, all I need is an Athlon board that will take advantage of the AGP 4x features on my brand-new GeForce. Since, in games and 3DS, the GeForce is doing as much work as the main processor, it would be nice if it could communicate with the rest of the hardware a bit faster. Also, any profit AMD passes up on the Athlon chips, it must be gouging on motherboard prices.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
A friend and I are designing an FPS game, and have most of the gameplay worked out, as well as most of the levels, characters, storyline, and that bit. However, neither of us are expert programmers. Is there a premade engine (preferrably open-source) that supports hardware, is easy to use, and is modern? We tried 'Genesis3D' but it sucked. That crystal reality stuff looks good, but it probably will never come together. The Quake engine would probably be a good one, but we'd need to rewrite for all the eye-candy we need for the game.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Slashdot Mirror
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
I'm not insinuating that we stop exploring space, but that we should take our failures in stride.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
If you were to write a reader for a common format, you would have to put a lot of effort into it to make it look exactly like a closed-source viewer for the same format. If you made your own closed-source viewer/editor for your own proprietary format, you could guarantee that a document saved in that format would look the same. That is why proprietary formats are popular.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Or maybe it's just a gimmick to get people to buy memory stick devices. Either way, Sony's really overdoing this.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Computers don't have emotions like people do. If an angry person takes a file and types swear words into it, the computer records, not interprets the swear words. Non-programmers often try to reason with their computers, or coax them to working. If an OS were written that responded to everything the people did, and not those actions that the computer records via keyboard, mouse, or other input device, and actually reasoned things out like people, computers would be more accessible.
Unfortunately, the reason we use computers is because they are really fast at mathematics and transferring data around. If a computer were to toss the massive amounts of data that people do to have emotions, they would be really slow at multiplication, dividing, and surfing.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Not to be too anarchist here, but the govenment forces all sorts of crap on us that we would have liked, but they force things far too much, and people end up hating both the product and the government.
It's the same philosophy behind people hating products that are advertised too much. Linux has got along fine so far with only word-of-mouth advertising (for both customers and programmers) so why should things change?
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
You may say that other animals don't even consider how many transistors they can fit on a piece of dirt, and they still live fine. However, other animals don't take showers, have life expectancies far shorter than ours, and generally don't care about short-term advancement. Sure, they'd like to evolve into us someday, but it doesn't depend on the discovery and work of individuals to do that.
We are at a time in our evolution where individuals do matter more than the individuals of other species. We didn't evolve ourselves to rocket into space, we worked at it. That is why we are here.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
What I'd really like to see is a helluva powerful consumer device released before its commercial counterpart. Not just helluva powerful, but something that would be like comparing a GeForce 256 DDR to a CGA card.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Actually, I would try using phone lines to get on with an American provider with an 800 dialin. The other option would be to restrict your trip to the US, Canada, Japan, and Europe, due to the developed state of these countries/regions.
One major thing to worry about in third world nations is theft, since the fuzz are not out in force in Mexico like they are here. Sure, they are all out there, but for personal profit, not to serve and protect. I have heard horror stories of surfers traveling to Mexico, only to have all their stuff 'confiscated' by the police. If you're traveling with things that look more valuable than a surfboard, you'd better be careful.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
It would be nice, however, to be able to run a web server in your palm. You could have a running journal that you always type into, and people hitting the reload button to read what just happened. It would be like the girl in the Doonesbury comic in the paper, but text based (call it optimized for slow connections.)
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Unrelated note: A Modest Proposal was an essay written by Jonathan Swift that proposed that poor people should sell their babies for food. It was satirical and shocking, but most of all, very entertaining.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
The real problem would arise whenever it turned out that nanotech could not be controlled as easily as the internet. On the internet, you basically decide whether or not you will be monitored, and if you will read a given data. Ignoring something in real life is much harder than online. You can always scroll past the retarded punch the monkey ads in your browser, but you can't easily scroll past a punch the monkey robot array type thingy when it covers up the instrument panel (or worse, your windshield) in your car. It would get annoying to see nothing but ads whenever the advertisers manage to land nano-bots on your eyeglasses.
Simply, when nanotech comes, we'd all better become way more ethical, or we're all screwed.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
As software programmers go, they have to be nice or they'll all leave, due to the fact that the demand for software programmers is higher than the supply.
The point being, overseas labor allows you to disregard your employees more than if the labor was here. Also, the jobs that require a computer are also going to require an employer to be more benevolent. Oddly enough, there are probably more problems with Asian physical labor than American programming jobs. How would you like to spend all day lining up the same two pins on a resistor to the same two holes on your board. How would you like to spend all week at it? Aren't you glad you get to use a computer at work/school?
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
If you're into 3D digital video, go for no less than 3D Studio MAX. I did a project with it, and it worked quite well on my machine at home (Celeron 466, 128MB, and 32MB TNT2) and on my friend's variety of machines. Network rendering is flaky in 98 (both 1&2), although you could get it to work in NT. It supports hardware acceleration for 3D, and can natively save your video as a huge directory of stills (almost any file format), AVI, or Quicktime. Once you have your stills ready, it also has a really lightweight tool for editing (mostly adding effects that can't be rendered) and combining your huge directories of stills into a singular AVI.
One way you can get your videos from PC to VHS is to get a DVD hardware decoder with NTSC out. Get an MPEG encoder online, and play it to your VCR using the DVD decoder. This worked well with the Creative Encore DVD, save for the fact that we used a fairly low-quality encoder.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
However, since it is still under construction, you can expect minor glitches that you would also see if you were using something that was not finished - i.e. a car without spark plugs, an airplane with 'BETA' wings that somebody gave you for free, or a boat with a hull constructed by somebody who found that a similar hull worked on their boat. You're taking risks with situations like those. However, when you shell out money for an OS, you expect it to be done, not half-baked like Windows. It seems that the raw eggs they used never quite got the salmonella cooked out of them. When you get raw cookie dough, like Linux, you are taking the risk of poisoning knowingly. Nobody gets salmonella poisioning from Chips Ahoy!(tm). Nobody should crash their computer with Windows.
However, I found your post to be correct on several issues. I have, in fact used Linux only for 4 months, and still am trying to get all my hardware to work. But I didn't buy it expecting all my hardware to work, or expecting to do a lot of programming, or because I know anything about the inner workings. But I do want to accomplish those in the future.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
Plug and Play - Windows has had it for how many years? Now, how many years has it had a reliable one? The first answer is about 4, the second is still zero. Among gamers, it's referred to as Plug and Pray, because that's how you install things in Windows.
WinModems - you get what you pay for. If you need a winmodem support, set up a w98se machine with internet connection sharing, and tell your linux machine you're on the net. Or go buy an external (serial, not USB) modem that you can use your standard Hayes commands on.
Don't compare Linux to a half-baked system like Windows. Even though Linux has almost no support for modern hardware like PCI sound cards and some things, it will always have its place in my house - as a dedicated Half-Life server, word processor, and a way to show off that I am better than my W9x using friends.
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"