Whenever I travel and jet lag is a problem, I sleep with ear plugs.
No big deal.
(I use the little yellow foam ones shaped like a cylinder...)
One time I recommended them to a co-worker who was complaining about his noisy neighbors.
He came in 2 hours late the next day, because he didn't hear his alarm.
If you think life is so bad up there, don't go.
I mean, these guys are supposed to be great explorers? No shampoo? Shave your damn head, whiner.
Too much velcro? Cover it with something.
DVD player not working? God, I'm not even going to start on that one...
I mean, for god's sake, you're in space, not a MiniVan on a ride to the mall.
How about that Dennis Tito guy? (or was it Tito Puente?) That guy paid $20,000,000 of his own money for a short trip to space - I bet he wouldn't be whining that the station doesn't have enough cup holders and doesn't get ESPN2.
How many people here would happily go up and promise never to whine about a little inconvenience?
Ok - I don't see anyone asking this -
I have the first edition, with the six books.
Is it worth it to buy the new edition?
Other than the mentioned 'drop two books, add one', are the rest unchanged from the last set?
As for that annoying Java thing, I stopped using that after about 5 minutes.
Why didn't they just write a simple search in say, um... PERL? (I would guess most users have it on their systems...)
If I really can't find what I need using the hypertext table of contents, I'll usually use grep...
I just took another look at Glade. (It came with this distro of Linux...)
Well, it looks pretty nice and I'm sure people like it and find it useful and all, but...
Where is the help file?
Why doesn't it have a sample project available?
How am I supposed to *start* using this thing?
You say it does Perl - I'd love to write my perl code in a really snappy IDE that has a code folding, chromatic editor that offers command completion, the way Kylix does. Until I find one that doesn't crash too often, I'll keep doing it in vi.
Back when I was learning to program, (
on VB and Access, yeah, go ahead, snicker...) I found that the VB IDE, which is the absolute best IDE I have seen, (no matter how bad the language is,) gave you an opportunity to actually learn more about the language while you were writing the code. If you're using an object, as soon as you type its name, you get an unobtrusive drop-down of all of the properties and methods for that object.
Even before it had that, there was a useful helpfile (with examples) that was always just one "F1" away.
If you want to see what it takes to get developers to use an IDE, go read "Dynamics of Software Development" by Jim McCarthy. (Microsoft Press. ISBN 1-55615-823-8)
Jim was in charge of getting Visual C++ 1.0 out the door, back in the days when they were a far second to Borland.
He goes into a lot of the fears that developers feel when facing a new technology and how to overcome them.
Since the world is getting motivated to move to Linux, the old-school Linuxers had better be prepared to perform some triage for the people coming to Linux from Windows - It's not just about getting a good word processor for people to use, it's about giving developers the capability of writing in-house apps for data entry into the company database. Something with a learning curve comparable to VB. Something your typical mid-sized company developer can pick up in a few weekends, because as much as he might love the idea of using Linux, without a great development IDE, it's just not a viable platform for any business that I know of.
If glade can't get helpfiles together fast enough, how about a bunch of tutorial-style apps?
"Hello, World"; "Hello, Database" kind of stuff - It didn't take me many of those to become pretty useful in perl...
Am I completely alone in feeling like this?
Maybe Hughes should move their legal base of operations *to the satellite*.
I mean, is it that much different than having a company who's legal head office is a post office box in the Cayman Islands?
What they could save in taxes could probably pay for sending a guy up there once in a while to satisfy any legal requirements.
(And, since it was my idea, *I* should get to be that guy...)
I'd venture that you don't need application software.
I think what would really get kids jazzed is to see their *own* work, not Carmen Sandiego or Rug Rats or whatever passes for educational software.
Buy a cheap scanner for the school. Get it to work on a Linux box. Set up Apache.
I'm sure kids and parents alike would much rather see scans of crayon drawings and digital photos of the Christmas Pageant than anything from any of the 'educational software' companies.
Give each kid directions on how to log in or FTP in and how to chmod the files in ~/public_html so that they can show off *their* work. Work with them and make it easier
What kind of box would you need? (My webserver is a PII that I *Found in the Trash*.)
Get a couple of boxes donated and set them up as Linux/ Apache/Samba/Gimp/Abiword/ MySQL boxes for specific tasks or general hacking. Get the school to donate the use of a couple of analog phone lines for use after hours for dial-in access to email and the kids user space. Get every parent/student/teacher set up as a user. Get the High School computer club to be administrators. Form a Linux club and donate some time to it.
Someone mentioned that their school district holds "Windows Night" once a month. Um, so just hold "Linux Night" once a month. Take a CD Burner and a stack of blank discs and burn copies of Redhat or Debian or Mozilla. Show people how to install them. Encourage them to bring an old PC to set them up on. Provide donuts and coffee
Find out what your school district spends on software licenses - I'm sure the school's budget is public record - Let people know how much of that could be saved. Did they spend $2,000 on licenses for MS Access? Did they know that MySQL is *free* and also runs on Windows and the apps they develop could probably be written as a CGI app using perl or PHP?
Promote your Linux night as a way for parents and teachers and students to learn the basics, whatever you consider that to be, (be it KDE or Gnome and StarOffice or Bash and pine and Pico.)
The way to get Linux into homes and offices is to promote it as a "Second Box" solution. If they have a PC, they probably have a copy of Windows and a license. Don't compete with that - Get Linux on the second PC, the kid's PC, the print server, whatever. That's the benefit of MSBloat - The copy of Office that comes with the box they bought recently will run like a slug on the box from 2 years ago. Linux will make better use of the resources that they probably have. Your office getting rid of some Pentium 133's Grab a couple, set them up with a workable linux configuration and give 'em away to people who are interested.
Most of all, let your kids' teachers know that you want your kids learning Python, not PowerPoint, Ansi C, not Excel macros.
I think that this recent wave of MS/BSA crackdowns is the best thing that could happen. Remind people that a MS Office CD is a lot like a credit card. Use it and it's going to cost you $500 a pop. If you manage to avoid getting caught, you are a thief.
I think licenses should be strictly enforced at schools and businesses. Once you buy the software and install it, the install CD should be locked up in the school's safe - (The liability is just too high.) Does the school leave its credit cards lying around for the convenience of the teachers? No way, that would be madness.
How is this any different?
OK, I should stop ranting...
Cheers,
Jim
When the Herley.com webmaster is looking over the logs from the site on Monday -
35,000 hits on some obsolete piece of hardware's page...
Someone send the poor guy an email.
Japanese Windows is not English Windows with Add-ons. It is totally native Double-byte code -
Japanese Windows is just as good (or bad) as its English counterpart, right out of the box.
Also, Linux works great in Japanese. KDE, GNOME - They are all working well.
Since I'm in Japan, I just buy "Linux Magazine" or one of the others - They come with a couple of distros on CD (Sometimes on DVD!)
Set up a new box as a Japanese KDE system and then you can do input with no trouble. You can also then change the language to English from the KDE control panel.
Japanese enabling an English Linux install is much more difficult. I've never been able to get the Japanese input working on such a system, though the display works fine.
Cheers
Jim
The progrm I was helping out with was in Southeast Washington, DC - I guess that qualifies as third world...
I've personally seen Net Cafes with better equipment in Russia and Thailand - since they are often used for online gaming, the spec's are much higher.
As for giving a bad impression of Linux, I doubt it. I used to use a pretty similar setup to run remote X off a guy's Linux box at my old office. (It was the backup webserver.) On a P90 with 16MB of ram and a 2MB video card, it was surprisingly responsive. KDE looked great at 1024x768x65000. I happily used that for web browsing, since it bypassed the firewall.
I just think that too many useful PCs get tossed into landfills before their time. This guy's howto could delay that a couple of years.
Would I want to use one of these as my main PC? Probably not. Would I use one if that was all that was available? In a heartbeat.
Unless that Dell laptop was in the sub $100 range, you're not even talking about the same thing.
What he's outlined is how to make good use of hardware that is affordable to almost anyone.
I once was asked by a non-profit group to help them make use of about 30 donated computers. (Donated by the NSA, no less - Beautiful IBM tempest cases and no hard drives.)
They had no budget. This would have been perfect for them.
Sure, in a perfect world, someone is going to donate 30 newish laptops with Wavelan cards, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
One of the major strong points about the whole Gnu/Linux movement is it's pricetag. Cutting hardware costs can put one more computer in front of one more user, who might not otherwise have a computer to use.
You really can't see this in a school or an adult training program or at a local library?
I was reading iMode's html-ish spec tonight and I saw the URL designation tel:// (as in tel://911)
What a bad iDea *that* is... (Yes, it's already been exploited, though over here, I think it's 119, rather than 911...)
Someone made an innocent goof in a HTML-based game a few weeks ago that highlighted this vulnerability.
On top of that, it costs the *initiator* of the call for calls placed from cell phones here, not the recipient - what was that exchange in the Carribean that was supposed to be so bad - 809?
iMode is just untroducing Java on its phones, but from what i've read on the keitai-l listserve, auto-dialing like this is not on an option.
Now, I don't really know ZeroKnowledge, so I won't pretend to.
But those of you, who, like me, aren't so familiar with them, are you so surprised by yet another setback like this to the community?
It's just another good idea that is going to have to spend some time figuring out if it ever had a chance in a market driven by money - to see if people were as aware of the value of the privacy that they are giving away with every mouse click. But most importantly, if people are willing to *pay* for the luxury of not being a demographic.
I truly think this says less about the viability of Linux, or what did they call it, the "Strong customer preference for Windows", that it does about a fringe market product trying to stay afloat on the edges of tough times.
As much as their tech staff might rest their hearts with Linux, (and I'm guessing that that is the case, since they ever had a Linux client at all,) they have just got to see if they can weather out this draught, just like the rest of us. (Best of luck to them and thanks for thinking of us.)
But, even if their product disappears, is it a true, permanent loss for the community?
If there is a need, won't the need be filled? (Hasn't every need been fulfilled...eventually?)
Don't forget that the most important Linux development was *never* done as a business.
It never had venture capital.
It never had a viable business model.
It never had an Annual Report with a heavy gloss cover and and rich earth-friendly soy-based ink gracing its pages.
All it had was stubborn devotion and outdated hardware.
Yet it worked. And it works still.
The real key players in anything that had ever mattered to Linux were never concerned with the money - they would do it for free and, I would venture, most of them always have.
You see, the real innovation of linux happenned in basements and dorm rooms across the planet.
It happened after hours, on borrowed time, by people who knew that they could maybe make a working driver for their video card, or write a script that would help the next guy get X working.
So, if there is a good idea in what they were doing - something the old farts in this game would call a 'Good Thing' - don't worry, it will be there for us, (and *by* us,) the Linux users.
Though some of us may wonder if we will ever get rich at this, who among us has ever had a fear that it won't somehow continue?
Even here on Slashdot, as we filter the signal from the noise, who among us hasn't been occasionally astounded by the amazing pool of insight among this group; Given any highly technical posting on some obscure aspect of some obscure field, within minutes, there are intelligent postings clarifying, obfuscating, correcting, adding insight.
Yet we're merely the shadow of that thing that really matters to Linux.
Those people are probably too busy to waste their time here writing long, rambling, self-congratulatory posts like this one.
So if you want to make a difference to Linux and want to see it continue, you don't have to be a brilliant coder or technical visionary - Maybe you just need to spend a couple of weekends helping someone get Linux running. Maybe that person will be the next Kernighan or Wall or Stallman, or {countless others who have mattered to this community in one way or another}. (Or, maybe you will surprise yourself and *be* that next great coder...)
Oh well, I've probably wasted enough of your time -
Thanks for reading this far down.
There's a great English mailing list here in Japan for that - The Keitai-L
You can browse the archives at:
http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/
A lot of discussions about taking iMode elsewhere, but Europe will probably be first.
Tubing is the way to go, my friend.
Connecting my speakers to the amp are super-cooled copper tubes of a quality generally only used in high-end nuclear research facilities. (Don't buy that cheap Russian Super-Cooled-Copper-Speaker-Tubing that's floating around these days! You'll *really* be able to tell the difference.)
Passing through each one is a super-cooled liquid nitrogen that pushed the temperature of the tube down towards 0 degrees kelvin.
As the tube cools, it becomes a super-conductor, causing the signal's electrons to move to the surface of the tubing, where the sound is richer.
(True audiophiles such as myself, can really tell the difference.)
On a side note, I'm moving soon - the excavation is finally done on my new listening room. I've had an accoustically perfect room carved from a layer of granite bedrock under a mountain in the Black Hills. Sadly, my wife will not be joining me - her presence in the room caused the sound waves to ricochet, causing audible distortion.
Take a typical shop with let's say 10 servers.
If they run Red Hat on all 10, they probably only have one copy of Red Hat on CD, possibly borrowed from a friend.
OTOH:
If they run NT Server on all ten, they probably have... Oh, wait... Never mind.;-)
Reminds me of a story - (Not so OT.)
When Ghandi was alive, a mother came to see him, child in tow.
"Please tell my child not to eat sugar" the woman said.
Ghandi told the woman to come back in two weeks. Two weeks later, the woman brought her child again. Ghandi looks at the kid and says: "Don't eat sugar."
The woman is stunned. "That's it? I had to go for two weeks just for that?"
"You see," says Ghandi, "Two weeks ago, *I* ate sugar."
Sure, it's just a story and the attribution is probably wrong, but I think it says something worth considering.
I think that kids in general would be more effective at monitoring their parents' surfing habits than the opposite. Are you prepared to have your kids see everything that *you* look at on the web?
And all this talk about having your kids talk openly about what they look at on the web; Are you prepared to talk openly with them about every site or newsgroup you browse? If not, the kid will know that you are being one-sided and insincere. (Kids can *smell* insincerity, just as well as you can...)
IANAP -
Sure, it *is* supported, but when it was 2:30 in the morning the night before I was supposed to deliver the program and it Just Wouldn't Work, though all the code was right, I got pretty frustrated.
I'd gotten really good at DAO. I'd memorized its functions enough to be able to dictate it to someone over the phone. I didn't appreciate having someone else tell me that it wasn't recommended anymore. I didn't want to feel like I was being shepherded along an upgrade path. If I was going to write code, shouldn't I want to write programs that weren't going to be thrown away?
Access was great. I learned to program using it. I made a lot of money being good at it, but yet, there is something flawed in it. It limits you unnecessarily. The database/app bundle concept is just wrong.
Let me explain:
I have a student that I am teaching beginning programming to - We started writing PERL on NT, using ODBC to talk to an Access database that he'd created. Between lessons, he started having trouble with the database, so I told him to mail it to me. Problem was, he was using Japanese Access 2000, I was on English 97. S.O.L... The next lesson, I installed MySQL and MyODBC and we haven't looked back. He's now comfortable writing SQL on a command line, be it Linux or Windows. I can log in remotely and check his tables. Sure, it was a little more difficult for him to grasp at first, but that went away after about a week. (We found a great front end for MySQL - http://dbtools.vila.bol.com.br/ )
Now, he can dump all of the create and insert statements into a plain text file and mail that to me. With very little editing, we could 'upsize' to Oracle or Sybase.
Plus, it's FAST.
But the biggest thing is the feeling that we don't have some marketing department somewhere deciding how we should be writing our code.
Imagine that you wrote a great application in Access 2.0 - that was what, 6 years ago? Try to sell it to a client. Try to make it run. It's not something you would really think of doing, because you've upgraded so far beyond 2.0 - Now imagine that you wrote a great program in perl, 6 years ago. (Or 16 years ago - When did Larry write it?) Chances are, it would still run now, if it ran then.
I don't want what I write now to be obsolete in 5 years.
I want to be able to run it on the platform of my choosing. Linux, Windows, whatever.
Plus, It's free. All of it.
I sometimes kid about MS requiring all of its developers to upgrade to 'ActiveIF' technology - No more writing complicated 'If..Then..Else' statements - Just drop in a few ActiveIF controls. Just be sure you have licenses for each occurrence...
How far off the mark is that, really?
I've been in a similar situation - I've done years of programming in VB and Access.
With the last 'upgrade' of Access, I found some of the methods that I'd come to rely on disabled by default. Not a huge deal, but a client's last minute change caused me to miss a deadline. ("Oh, we need it in Access 2K - not 97. " Should have been simple, but all of the DAO stuff I had written failed. The reason is still beyond me. )
I felt betrayed by MS - I'd gone and learned what they said to learn and then they changed the rules, so that they could push their latest and greatest version.
So I switched to Perl.
Not a big learning curve, if you knew what you were doing in VB. Interesting enough to get me excited about writing code again. (Yes, VB can be a lot like writing code...)
It took me a while to figure it out.
I took some working scripts and made them better.
But I missed clicking a button to see if it would 'compile'.
I missed the IDE I had in VB. typing 'object' + '.' brought up a list of the properties and methods for the object.
Yet still, I was productive; It was fun again.
Now I'm taking it as a challenge to write my perl using vi. Some of the fun comes from *not* using and IDE.
Instead of a help file, I have the O'Reilly CD bookshelf bookmarked on my HD. Instead of a 'run' button, I have 'perl -w'.
I started writing CGI scripts that used ODBC to talk to SQL Server. (ActiveState Perl on NT.)
At my company, I pushed the idea of intranetting what apps we could - It cut down on all of the support that we had to do installing VB apps on every desktop. (A surprising amount of work.)
I began to really see the the beauty of using open source tools.
I was able to keep my reference books more than a year or two. (My current favorite read is "Unix Power Tools" - my copy is from 1993 - Still lots of useful stuff in there.)
I saw the beauty of writing programs that didn't need users clicking buttons to run. (Try making your typical VB app run without a user sitting there poking the screen.)
My advice? Pick a language and get good at it. Pick something marketable, yet pick something open. Pick something you feel you can learn. Then toss yourself into it.
Get excited again.
Do really cool stuff.
Good luck and let us know how it goes!
Interestingly enough, in the Disney movie 'Mulan', some of the scenes included the names of the animators, rendered into archaic forms of the chinese pictographs.
(I read this somewhere on the web - one of those sites that have Disney 'Easter Eggs' - I've never personally seen Mulan...)
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I travel and jet lag is a problem, I sleep with ear plugs.
No big deal.
(I use the little yellow foam ones shaped like a cylinder...)
One time I recommended them to a co-worker who was complaining about his noisy neighbors.
He came in 2 hours late the next day, because he didn't hear his alarm.
MMDC Mobile Media
If you think life is so bad up there, don't go.
I mean, these guys are supposed to be great explorers? No shampoo? Shave your damn head, whiner.
Too much velcro? Cover it with something.
DVD player not working? God, I'm not even going to start on that one...
I mean, for god's sake, you're in space, not a MiniVan on a ride to the mall.
How about that Dennis Tito guy? (or was it Tito Puente?) That guy paid $20,000,000 of his own money for a short trip to space - I bet he wouldn't be whining that the station doesn't have enough cup holders and doesn't get ESPN2.
How many people here would happily go up and promise never to whine about a little inconvenience?
Whatever...
MMDC Mobile Media
Ok - I don't see anyone asking this -
I have the first edition, with the six books.
Is it worth it to buy the new edition?
Other than the mentioned 'drop two books, add one', are the rest unchanged from the last set?
As for that annoying Java thing, I stopped using that after about 5 minutes.
Why didn't they just write a simple search in say, um... PERL? (I would guess most users have it on their systems...)
If I really can't find what I need using the hypertext table of contents, I'll usually use grep...
Cheers,
Jim
MMDC Mobile Media
I just took another look at Glade. (It came with this distro of Linux...)
Well, it looks pretty nice and I'm sure people like it and find it useful and all, but...
Where is the help file?
Why doesn't it have a sample project available?
How am I supposed to *start* using this thing?
You say it does Perl - I'd love to write my perl code in a really snappy IDE that has a code folding, chromatic editor that offers command completion, the way Kylix does. Until I find one that doesn't crash too often, I'll keep doing it in vi.
Back when I was learning to program, (
on VB and Access, yeah, go ahead, snicker...) I found that the VB IDE, which is the absolute best IDE I have seen, (no matter how bad the language is,) gave you an opportunity to actually learn more about the language while you were writing the code. If you're using an object, as soon as you type its name, you get an unobtrusive drop-down of all of the properties and methods for that object.
Even before it had that, there was a useful helpfile (with examples) that was always just one "F1" away.
If you want to see what it takes to get developers to use an IDE, go read "Dynamics of Software Development" by Jim McCarthy. (Microsoft Press. ISBN 1-55615-823-8)
Jim was in charge of getting Visual C++ 1.0 out the door, back in the days when they were a far second to Borland.
He goes into a lot of the fears that developers feel when facing a new technology and how to overcome them.
Since the world is getting motivated to move to Linux, the old-school Linuxers had better be prepared to perform some triage for the people coming to Linux from Windows - It's not just about getting a good word processor for people to use, it's about giving developers the capability of writing in-house apps for data entry into the company database. Something with a learning curve comparable to VB. Something your typical mid-sized company developer can pick up in a few weekends, because as much as he might love the idea of using Linux, without a great development IDE, it's just not a viable platform for any business that I know of.
If glade can't get helpfiles together fast enough, how about a bunch of tutorial-style apps?
"Hello, World"; "Hello, Database" kind of stuff - It didn't take me many of those to become pretty useful in perl...
Am I completely alone in feeling like this?
Just a thought...
Jim in Tokyo
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Maybe Hughes should move their legal base of operations *to the satellite*.
I mean, is it that much different than having a company who's legal head office is a post office box in the Cayman Islands?
What they could save in taxes could probably pay for sending a guy up there once in a while to satisfy any legal requirements.
(And, since it was my idea, *I* should get to be that guy...)
Cheers,
Jim
MMDC Mobile Media
I'd venture that you don't need application software. /Samba/Gimp/Abiword/ MySQL boxes for specific tasks or general hacking. Get the school to donate the use of a couple of analog phone lines for use after hours for dial-in access to email and the kids user space. Get every parent/student/teacher set up as a user. Get the High School computer club to be administrators. Form a Linux club and donate some time to it.
I think what would really get kids jazzed is to see their *own* work, not Carmen Sandiego or Rug Rats or whatever passes for educational software.
Buy a cheap scanner for the school. Get it to work on a Linux box. Set up Apache.
I'm sure kids and parents alike would much rather see scans of crayon drawings and digital photos of the Christmas Pageant than anything from any of the 'educational software' companies.
Give each kid directions on how to log in or FTP in and how to chmod the files in ~/public_html so that they can show off *their* work. Work with them and make it easier
What kind of box would you need? (My webserver is a PII that I *Found in the Trash*.)
Get a couple of boxes donated and set them up as Linux/ Apache
Someone mentioned that their school district holds "Windows Night" once a month. Um, so just hold "Linux Night" once a month. Take a CD Burner and a stack of blank discs and burn copies of Redhat or Debian or Mozilla. Show people how to install them. Encourage them to bring an old PC to set them up on. Provide donuts and coffee
Find out what your school district spends on software licenses - I'm sure the school's budget is public record - Let people know how much of that could be saved. Did they spend $2,000 on licenses for MS Access? Did they know that MySQL is *free* and also runs on Windows and the apps they develop could probably be written as a CGI app using perl or PHP?
Promote your Linux night as a way for parents and teachers and students to learn the basics, whatever you consider that to be, (be it KDE or Gnome and StarOffice or Bash and pine and Pico.)
The way to get Linux into homes and offices is to promote it as a "Second Box" solution. If they have a PC, they probably have a copy of Windows and a license. Don't compete with that - Get Linux on the second PC, the kid's PC, the print server, whatever. That's the benefit of MSBloat - The copy of Office that comes with the box they bought recently will run like a slug on the box from 2 years ago. Linux will make better use of the resources that they probably have. Your office getting rid of some Pentium 133's Grab a couple, set them up with a workable linux configuration and give 'em away to people who are interested.
Most of all, let your kids' teachers know that you want your kids learning Python, not PowerPoint, Ansi C, not Excel macros.
I think that this recent wave of MS/BSA crackdowns is the best thing that could happen. Remind people that a MS Office CD is a lot like a credit card. Use it and it's going to cost you $500 a pop. If you manage to avoid getting caught, you are a thief.
I think licenses should be strictly enforced at schools and businesses. Once you buy the software and install it, the install CD should be locked up in the school's safe - (The liability is just too high.) Does the school leave its credit cards lying around for the convenience of the teachers? No way, that would be madness.
How is this any different?
OK, I should stop ranting...
Cheers,
Jim
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I can't be the *only* one posting to slashdot from a Kueffel & Esser Duplex 4080-3 rule, can I?
Cheers,
Jim
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When the Herley.com webmaster is looking over the logs from the site on Monday -
35,000 hits on some obsolete piece of hardware's page...
Someone send the poor guy an email.
Jim
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Maybe it's just me, but every time I see
'e. coli', I get it confused with Ebola...
;-)
Jim
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Japanese Windows is not English Windows with Add-ons. It is totally native Double-byte code -
Japanese Windows is just as good (or bad) as its English counterpart, right out of the box.
Also, Linux works great in Japanese. KDE, GNOME - They are all working well.
Since I'm in Japan, I just buy "Linux Magazine" or one of the others - They come with a couple of distros on CD (Sometimes on DVD!)
Set up a new box as a Japanese KDE system and then you can do input with no trouble. You can also then change the language to English from the KDE control panel.
Japanese enabling an English Linux install is much more difficult. I've never been able to get the Japanese input working on such a system, though the display works fine.
Cheers
Jim
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The progrm I was helping out with was in Southeast Washington, DC - I guess that qualifies as third world...
I've personally seen Net Cafes with better equipment in Russia and Thailand - since they are often used for online gaming, the spec's are much higher.
As for giving a bad impression of Linux, I doubt it. I used to use a pretty similar setup to run remote X off a guy's Linux box at my old office. (It was the backup webserver.) On a P90 with 16MB of ram and a 2MB video card, it was surprisingly responsive. KDE looked great at 1024x768x65000. I happily used that for web browsing, since it bypassed the firewall.
I just think that too many useful PCs get tossed into landfills before their time. This guy's howto could delay that a couple of years.
Would I want to use one of these as my main PC? Probably not. Would I use one if that was all that was available? In a heartbeat.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Join the Great Fujisan Expedition!
Unless that Dell laptop was in the sub $100 range, you're not even talking about the same thing.
What he's outlined is how to make good use of hardware that is affordable to almost anyone.
I once was asked by a non-profit group to help them make use of about 30 donated computers. (Donated by the NSA, no less - Beautiful IBM tempest cases and no hard drives.)
They had no budget. This would have been perfect for them.
Sure, in a perfect world, someone is going to donate 30 newish laptops with Wavelan cards, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
One of the major strong points about the whole Gnu/Linux movement is it's pricetag. Cutting hardware costs can put one more computer in front of one more user, who might not otherwise have a computer to use.
You really can't see this in a school or an adult training program or at a local library?
Doesn't anybody appreciate a good hack anymore?
Jim in Tokyo
Join the Great Fujisan Expedition!
Hemos decided to test Exodus' claim that the colocation cages were sharkproof. He had them lower the cage with him inside.
Poor bastard...
Join the Great Fujisan Expedition!
>>Does this sound like microsoft to anyone else?
Worse - DoCoMo charges for every email - Can you even *imagine* MS trying that?
MMDC.NET
I was reading iMode's html-ish spec tonight and I saw the URL designation tel:// (as in tel://911)
What a bad iDea *that* is... (Yes, it's already been exploited, though over here, I think it's 119, rather than 911...)
Someone made an innocent goof in a HTML-based game a few weeks ago that highlighted this vulnerability.
On top of that, it costs the *initiator* of the call for calls placed from cell phones here, not the recipient - what was that exchange in the Carribean that was supposed to be so bad - 809?
iMode is just untroducing Java on its phones, but from what i've read on the keitai-l listserve, auto-dialing like this is not on an option.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
Now, I don't really know ZeroKnowledge, so I won't pretend to.
But those of you, who, like me, aren't so familiar with them, are you so surprised by yet another setback like this to the community?
It's just another good idea that is going to have to spend some time figuring out if it ever had a chance in a market driven by money - to see if people were as aware of the value of the privacy that they are giving away with every mouse click. But most importantly, if people are willing to *pay* for the luxury of not being a demographic.
I truly think this says less about the viability of Linux, or what did they call it, the "Strong customer preference for Windows", that it does about a fringe market product trying to stay afloat on the edges of tough times.
As much as their tech staff might rest their hearts with Linux, (and I'm guessing that that is the case, since they ever had a Linux client at all,) they have just got to see if they can weather out this draught, just like the rest of us. (Best of luck to them and thanks for thinking of us.)
But, even if their product disappears, is it a true, permanent loss for the community?
If there is a need, won't the need be filled? (Hasn't every need been fulfilled...eventually?)
Don't forget that the most important Linux development was *never* done as a business.
It never had venture capital.
It never had a viable business model.
It never had an Annual Report with a heavy gloss cover and and rich earth-friendly soy-based ink gracing its pages.
All it had was stubborn devotion and outdated hardware.
Yet it worked. And it works still.
The real key players in anything that had ever mattered to Linux were never concerned with the money - they would do it for free and, I would venture, most of them always have.
You see, the real innovation of linux happenned in basements and dorm rooms across the planet.
It happened after hours, on borrowed time, by people who knew that they could maybe make a working driver for their video card, or write a script that would help the next guy get X working.
So, if there is a good idea in what they were doing - something the old farts in this game would call a 'Good Thing' - don't worry, it will be there for us, (and *by* us,) the Linux users.
Though some of us may wonder if we will ever get rich at this, who among us has ever had a fear that it won't somehow continue?
Even here on Slashdot, as we filter the signal from the noise, who among us hasn't been occasionally astounded by the amazing pool of insight among this group; Given any highly technical posting on some obscure aspect of some obscure field, within minutes, there are intelligent postings clarifying, obfuscating, correcting, adding insight.
Yet we're merely the shadow of that thing that really matters to Linux.
Those people are probably too busy to waste their time here writing long, rambling, self-congratulatory posts like this one.
So if you want to make a difference to Linux and want to see it continue, you don't have to be a brilliant coder or technical visionary - Maybe you just need to spend a couple of weekends helping someone get Linux running. Maybe that person will be the next Kernighan or Wall or Stallman, or {countless others who have mattered to this community in one way or another}. (Or, maybe you will surprise yourself and *be* that next great coder...)
Oh well, I've probably wasted enough of your time -
Thanks for reading this far down.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
There's a great English mailing list here in Japan for that - The Keitai-L
You can browse the archives at:
http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/
A lot of discussions about taking iMode elsewhere, but Europe will probably be first.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
>> "different qualities of fiber ..."
fiber??
Such tourists.
(spits derisively...)
Tubing is the way to go, my friend.
Connecting my speakers to the amp are super-cooled copper tubes of a quality generally only used in high-end nuclear research facilities. (Don't buy that cheap Russian Super-Cooled-Copper-Speaker-Tubing that's floating around these days! You'll *really* be able to tell the difference.)
Passing through each one is a super-cooled liquid nitrogen that pushed the temperature of the tube down towards 0 degrees kelvin.
As the tube cools, it becomes a super-conductor, causing the signal's electrons to move to the surface of the tubing, where the sound is richer.
(True audiophiles such as myself, can really tell the difference.)
On a side note, I'm moving soon - the excavation is finally done on my new listening room. I've had an accoustically perfect room carved from a layer of granite bedrock under a mountain in the Black Hills. Sadly, my wife will not be joining me - her presence in the room caused the sound waves to ricochet, causing audible distortion.
;-)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
Take a typical shop with let's say 10 servers.
;-)
If they run Red Hat on all 10, they probably only have one copy of Red Hat on CD, possibly borrowed from a friend.
OTOH:
If they run NT Server on all ten, they probably have... Oh, wait... Never mind.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
Reminds me of a story - (Not so OT.)
When Ghandi was alive, a mother came to see him, child in tow.
"Please tell my child not to eat sugar" the woman said.
Ghandi told the woman to come back in two weeks. Two weeks later, the woman brought her child again. Ghandi looks at the kid and says: "Don't eat sugar."
The woman is stunned. "That's it? I had to go for two weeks just for that?"
"You see," says Ghandi, "Two weeks ago, *I* ate sugar."
Sure, it's just a story and the attribution is probably wrong, but I think it says something worth considering.
I think that kids in general would be more effective at monitoring their parents' surfing habits than the opposite. Are you prepared to have your kids see everything that *you* look at on the web?
And all this talk about having your kids talk openly about what they look at on the web; Are you prepared to talk openly with them about every site or newsgroup you browse? If not, the kid will know that you are being one-sided and insincere. (Kids can *smell* insincerity, just as well as you can...)
IANAP -
Cheers,
Jim
MMDC.NET
Well, if that's really your picture, I'll switch to Postgres.
;-)
Jim
MMDC.NET
Of course, I think I'm preaching to the choir...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
Sure, it *is* supported, but when it was 2:30 in the morning the night before I was supposed to deliver the program and it Just Wouldn't Work, though all the code was right, I got pretty frustrated.
I'd gotten really good at DAO. I'd memorized its functions enough to be able to dictate it to someone over the phone. I didn't appreciate having someone else tell me that it wasn't recommended anymore. I didn't want to feel like I was being shepherded along an upgrade path. If I was going to write code, shouldn't I want to write programs that weren't going to be thrown away?
Access was great. I learned to program using it. I made a lot of money being good at it, but yet, there is something flawed in it. It limits you unnecessarily. The database/app bundle concept is just wrong.
Let me explain:
I have a student that I am teaching beginning programming to - We started writing PERL on NT, using ODBC to talk to an Access database that he'd created. Between lessons, he started having trouble with the database, so I told him to mail it to me. Problem was, he was using Japanese Access 2000, I was on English 97. S.O.L... The next lesson, I installed MySQL and MyODBC and we haven't looked back. He's now comfortable writing SQL on a command line, be it Linux or Windows. I can log in remotely and check his tables. Sure, it was a little more difficult for him to grasp at first, but that went away after about a week. (We found a great front end for MySQL - http://dbtools.vila.bol.com.br/ )
Now, he can dump all of the create and insert statements into a plain text file and mail that to me. With very little editing, we could 'upsize' to Oracle or Sybase.
Plus, it's FAST.
But the biggest thing is the feeling that we don't have some marketing department somewhere deciding how we should be writing our code.
Imagine that you wrote a great application in Access 2.0 - that was what, 6 years ago? Try to sell it to a client. Try to make it run. It's not something you would really think of doing, because you've upgraded so far beyond 2.0 - Now imagine that you wrote a great program in perl, 6 years ago. (Or 16 years ago - When did Larry write it?) Chances are, it would still run now, if it ran then.
I don't want what I write now to be obsolete in 5 years.
I want to be able to run it on the platform of my choosing. Linux, Windows, whatever.
Plus, It's free. All of it.
I sometimes kid about MS requiring all of its developers to upgrade to 'ActiveIF' technology - No more writing complicated 'If..Then..Else' statements - Just drop in a few ActiveIF controls. Just be sure you have licenses for each occurrence...
How far off the mark is that, really?
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
I've been in a similar situation - I've done years of programming in VB and Access.
With the last 'upgrade' of Access, I found some of the methods that I'd come to rely on disabled by default. Not a huge deal, but a client's last minute change caused me to miss a deadline. ("Oh, we need it in Access 2K - not 97. " Should have been simple, but all of the DAO stuff I had written failed. The reason is still beyond me. )
I felt betrayed by MS - I'd gone and learned what they said to learn and then they changed the rules, so that they could push their latest and greatest version.
So I switched to Perl.
Not a big learning curve, if you knew what you were doing in VB. Interesting enough to get me excited about writing code again. (Yes, VB can be a lot like writing code...)
It took me a while to figure it out.
I took some working scripts and made them better.
But I missed clicking a button to see if it would 'compile'.
I missed the IDE I had in VB. typing 'object' + '.' brought up a list of the properties and methods for the object.
Yet still, I was productive; It was fun again.
Now I'm taking it as a challenge to write my perl using vi. Some of the fun comes from *not* using and IDE.
Instead of a help file, I have the O'Reilly CD bookshelf bookmarked on my HD. Instead of a 'run' button, I have 'perl -w'.
I started writing CGI scripts that used ODBC to talk to SQL Server. (ActiveState Perl on NT.)
At my company, I pushed the idea of intranetting what apps we could - It cut down on all of the support that we had to do installing VB apps on every desktop. (A surprising amount of work.)
I began to really see the the beauty of using open source tools.
I was able to keep my reference books more than a year or two. (My current favorite read is "Unix Power Tools" - my copy is from 1993 - Still lots of useful stuff in there.)
I saw the beauty of writing programs that didn't need users clicking buttons to run. (Try making your typical VB app run without a user sitting there poking the screen.)
My advice? Pick a language and get good at it. Pick something marketable, yet pick something open. Pick something you feel you can learn. Then toss yourself into it.
Get excited again.
Do really cool stuff.
Good luck and let us know how it goes!
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET
Interestingly enough, in the Disney movie 'Mulan', some of the scenes included the names of the animators, rendered into archaic forms of the chinese pictographs.
(I read this somewhere on the web - one of those sites that have Disney 'Easter Eggs' - I've never personally seen Mulan...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC.NET