Having better drivers will ease game development for sure. But it ultimately comes down to market. Regardless of how well your games *can* run on Linux and how easy you *can* write for the platform, it still costs money to produce, market and distribute. If the customers aren't there then it's not worth it to the company. There's no profit.
People boast about better drives all the time and as a Linux user I want to see better drivers as well. I also want to see the games. Back in 1998 / 1999 I went to Electronic Boutique and bought every single Loki title that they had (I spent over $200 Canadian after tax). I also applied for a job at Loki a few times with little success (in hindsight the little success was a good thing). But I'm not naive enough to think that better drivers = more games.
Better drivers simply won't mean very much at all to the game manufacturers who who only consider porting their titles to another platform if they see money to be made. Think of this way. Let's pretend for a moment that there was a HUGE market for Linux and it was blatantly obvious to the game developers that if they released titles for Linux they'd be making a lot more money. However, it's only the crappy video card drivers that are stopping them. They wouldn't sit back and say "oh well, the video card drivers are crappy so we won't bother". Instead they'd be putting pressure on the ATI and Nvidia saying "hey man, we can all make a fortune supporting Linux. Get your butt in gear. Hell we'll even help you with money and programmers if you need it etc."
But alas, the video card manufacturers don't support Linux very well for the same reasons there are no games. The companies do not see the potential for profit. It's a vicious cycle. No gamers = No games. No games = No gamers.
I think the best and most likely solution to the paradox is companies like Dell [successfully] selling Linux boxes to their customers and putting pressure on both the game developers and the video card manufacturers by showing them just how much they're selling. Hell, if Dell saw profit in making a "Linux gaming machine" they might strike a deal with a big gaming company like Valve and a video card manufacturer like ATI to provide some big titles and rock solid drivers. THAT would begin to attract a market for Linux gamers and provoke interest from other game developers and video card manufacturers who see Dell actually making a profit by catering to Linux gamers.
So maybe that's an angle the community can take. Instead of just bitching at AMD/ATI, NVidia and the game manufacturers, go to Dell and HP and the other disposable PC companies and say:
"Dear Dell,
WE WANT A LINUX GAMING BOX AND WILL PAY MONEY FOR IT!
It needs to come pre-installed with at least one Linux port of a BIG-TITLE game (Half-Life 2, GTA, Halo etc.) with the option of buying more separately.
It needs to have rock solid graphics performance and stability.
Some decent audio and gaming input devices wouldn't hurt either
Hell, I'm only up to 50GB and that's with all the stuff I've gathered (and not a one I paid a cent to those greedy a-holes for) long before I got the iPod.
Would you spend $12,000 - $13,000 on your 50GB collection ? Wait you already answered that.
10 years ago, would you have even conceived that you'd have a 50GB mp3 collection ?
I mean, I remember when 4GB - 8GB drives were "freakin' massive!" and that was well into the "Napster era".
Granted, people buy larger storage devices because they don't have much of a choice (I can't count the number of times I only *needed* a small drive but ended up getting something way overkill because it was the smallest drive I could find), but people still find ways to use them. Also, storage capacity and price / GB has improved far faster than bandwidth and other technology. So we are hitting that point where people have more hard drive space then they intend to use. That doesn't mean people will never find a way to use it. Remember 640k is enough memory for anyone and all that jazz...
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media per unit is ever going to *increase* ? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses. Bigger hard drives, faster burning devices, more bandwidth, streaming flash videos etc. have all given people access to more material. And whether or not they were ever going to pay for that media and whether or not media companies are losing money because of it is irrelevant. The point is that the value to the consumer keep decreasing and it will continue to do so for the forseeable future. The Internet is a content delivery platform and with that comes media delivery. The more media someone is exposed to the less value each individual "unit of media" has.
NBC is a distributor. They don't produce the content, they buy it and then redistribute it. Jobs is also a distributor. See the conflict of interest ?
You make it sound like NBC produces the content themselves and that they should let Jobs distribute it. The problem is that NBC is, and always has been, in the distribution business. Not the production business. They may purchase and license the exclusive rights to distribute the content, but it's not *their* content. So the only way it makes sense for them to set up shop with Apple is if they, as a distributor, are making money by letting Apple redistribute the content.
In this scenario NBC becomes a middle-man. Now I'm only speculating but I would think that NBC believes that they, as a distributor, can make more money by distributing the content that they're already distributing themselves rather than letting someone else do it for them while they sit back and do absolutely nothing to further or grow their business at all. When NBC is a middle-man it's only thanks to sticky contracts that producers don't just go to Apple and other online distributors directly. That's probably a very likely scenario in the future and one which NBC wants to make sure doesn't ever happen.
As a musician (and one who encourages people to "pirate" my music and shareit etc.) I've often thought about this. I've come to the realization that the price factor is a "problem" that is going to grow exponentially as time moves forward.
A while ago I did some math and realized that for someone to legally acquire 20GB worth of music at $1 / song it would cost over $5,000. What I've realized is that as hard drive space gets bigger and cheaper / GB, as broadband access spreads and gets faster and as more and more means of illegally downloading media which can be trivially copied and reproduced come to be, the price factor eventually dwindles into obvlivion.
What is a tv show worth to the average user ? What is a song ? Today it might be $0.99 but as people get the means to acquire more and more media with the same investment of hard drive space and time that number is going to keep decreasing. People want more and more as their iPods and hard drives can handle more. And no one is going to spend $5,000 on an mp3 collection. Perhaps I shouldn't say "no one". But no one that I know personally would ever consider spending that much on something that can be had easily for free. $1 for a song, sure that's quite reasonable. But oh wait, I've got a 20GB iPod that I need to fill with these things. $5,000 !? Think of what $5,000 means to me. No more credit card debt. No more dying engine in my car. A new bathroom etc.
So I think we are WELL past the threshold of 'worth paying for'. The minute someone pirates their first song they have just crossed that invisible line where they become someone who "pirates" media. And once you do it once it becomes so easy to do it again. I'm making it sound like a drug, lol. But it's true. If you download a song for free why would you ever go and pay for one ? The only reason I can think to pay for something that you can get very easily for free is if there's a lot of added value for paying for it. And in cases like that people become very selective about what they pay for and what they download for free... and the media itself is still dirt cheap (meaning you might pay $20 for a HUGE collection of songs when each song costs a fraction of cent when you do the math etc.).
If media companies ever hope to sell what they produce directly to the consumer eventually a single copy of a song or a tv show are going to have to cost fractions of a cent and they're going to have to be very innovative in terms of how they offer it to the consumer. It's going to have to be easier than downloading each song/show/whatever independently and it's going to have to have a lot of other added value.
I'm thinking maybe with regards to tv shows, companies should be experimenting (assuming they're not already, and I'm sure many are) with traditional tv broadcast models that are "upgraded" for the Internet. Meaning broadcast shows over the Internet and make money via ads. As for music, artists should probably look to selling to distributors who distribute their music in huge packages. Then offer their music for free to download to their casual fans while also selling cds/dvds with added value to their loyal fans who will gladly shell out a few bucks to support them directly etc. There's lots of ways to be creative and make money off of media still... but the per unit / per copy model is dead. The single song or tv show just keeps getting devalued more and more as technology progresses and there's not really any end in sight.
First thing my wife did after I set up Ubuntu was go searching her old Windows drive for a background image to replace the default. She eventually settled on a Sailor Moon background and began exclaiming loudly "I am not a geek!" over and over.:/
I host directly with The Planet and this type of story is one of the reasons why.
There are LOT of resellers that buy cheap dedicated servers from providers like The Planet and resell virtual hosting and in some cases dedicated hosting at a higher price (usually with more service and 'user friendly control panels' and such).
As a webmaster / entrepreneur who used to work as a *nix admin and programmer, I've often thought about going into the reseller business. I've decided not to because I don't believe that I could sustain such an endeavor and I still have nightmares about working in tech support. But the fact remains that any Joe Blow running a business out of his basement can set up a 'hosting' company this way for next to no capital at all. Then what happens after he has a few customers but they run into problems and he doesn't feel like helping them out ? What happens if he wants to take a week vacation or hell even 2 days off on the weekend ?
It's very easy to put up a web page that looks "professional" and talks about your round the clock support team and has pictures of your provider's data center. Such a page is sure to lure in gullible customers who believe that you truly are a large company with many employees working round the clock to support you. In the end, actually delivering on those promises is not something that a single person can do.
It's very important to research who you're hosting with. Not just who their providers are but what the company history is, who owns it and most importantly do they have a good reputation that goes back at least 3 - 5 years + ? The reason that not everyone rents directly from dedicated server providers like The Planet is because you get a server and that's it. Their tech support is great when the problem is actually their fault (network or hardware problems etc.) but if you have problems configuring Apache or installing Word Press you're out of luck. You're expected to be able to admin your own box. That's why there's a market for resellers. Because they admin the boxes for you. But it's very easy to be tempted by a good offer from a company that's actually run by some 16 year-old kid living with his mom who's got your site hosted on his one dedicated server that he rents for $70 / month from The Planet.
Point = determine your needs and do your research. Host with a company who you're confident is not going out of business any time soon and who can live up to your support requirements. It's not an easy task with the loads of resellers and providers out there but it's essential if you're doing business online.
It might sound a little corny but Jurassic Park actually created my interest in science-fiction, computer programming and science in general. I saw the movie first and besides being an entertaining thriller with some cool special effects it had no effect on me at all.
Then I read the book a couple of years later. I was around 13 or 14 and sick at home for a couple days. I read through it very quickly and I just remember how despite being a nut, Ian Malcolm was the one character who seemed to have a down-to-earth and realistic point of view on the whole situation. I also remember how cool it was that Crichton gave actual examples of computer code to support the story. It sparked my interest in computers and programming and logical, scientific thought in general.
Afterwards I convinced my grandmother to help me buy a computer and I spent the next few years going from pothead rocker to nerd teaching myself how to program the best I could.
Without having read that book my life would have turned out quite differently.
If you're trying to appeal to the average kid who watches far more movies than they do reading books, why not use something from pop-culture that was made into a successful movie ? Like most books vs. movies the two are rather different and so it would be difficult to impossible for one of the students to do any kind of report or test based on the movie.
It also has the advantage of demonstrating how powerful science can be. It's science fiction but it does a good job of coming off as plausible (if not then no one would have asked afterwards "could we do that?", even if the answer is "no because we haven't found such DNA still in tact"[1]) and it also goes to show how "cool" science can be. It deals with computers, biology, science fiction and logical thought and even touches on scientific ethics every once in a while. Over all it's a very entertaining book that most young people should enjoy reading while also doing a good job of advertising what science and math has to offer.
[1] Yes I realize there's several other reasons that it's still fiction, as well.
How do you know when the attack is over if they're no longer attacking your machine thanks to the DNS record pointing to 127.0.0.1 ?
How long do you wait ?
I suppose you can try to identify the specific worm that's doing the attack and infect a test machine and watch it. Or if you can reverse engineer it you might be able to find out when the end date is. Beyond that you've effectively taken your entire web site / business offline for an undetermined period of time. I'm not sure it's any better than riding out the attack. The attack could stop and you wouldn't even know it.
Plus, the minute you unplug your network cable or change your DNS records to a machine that doesn't host your web site you've just handed yourself to the attackers. Taking your business offline is *exactly* what they intended to do. And you did it for them.
Ubuntu does this too, where 7.04 means "month 4 of year 2007". It's not very obvious.
You're right it's not obvious. I'm an old time Linux nerd who has worked as a *nix admin and reads/. on a daily basis etc. I know way more about Linux and *nix than most 'average users' would ever care to. I've been running Ubuntu for a few months now as all the hype got me really curious and I wanted to see just what kind of "inroads" they had been making on the desktop that has everyone talking.
Your post is what informed me that their version numbers were done this way.
Whether you agree with the parent or not regarding naming versions after dates aside, the fact that 7.04 translates to "April 2007" does not have a remotely similar effect and is absolutely no different, to end users, than any other major.minor versioning scheme.
I pretend mod your post +1 Informative and, at the same time, -1 Irrelevant.
Isn't that the goal of the vast majority of "successful" Linux applications -- to look just like their Windows counterpart?
Well, if you want to talk about "successful" Linux applications (whatever that means) then we can already point the finger at Thunderbird and Evolution.
Now, the way I see it, there is no point in taking the Eudora name and applying it to a new product in order to appeal to Outlook users. I know lots of lots of people (my mother is one of them) who used Eudora religiously and really misses it to this day. I agree with the parent, even though I've never used Eudora myself. We already have lots of clones of popular MS products. Why make another one ?
Besides, while I can't say what the goals of every "successful" Linux applications *is*, I can say that the goal of any application *should* be to be useful to it's users. In my opinion an application doesn't have to have a familiar interface in order to be intuitive. In concept, if you can take a person who has never used any kind of computer interface before and sit them down in front of a computer, charge them with a task and they can use it to accomplish said task and not just stare at the machine blankly wondering WTF they're supposed to do then you've succeeded.
A user who's making the switch from one machine to another will definitely have habits. Yet there is an inherent danger with trying to cater to those habits. You will never do it "just right". The user will see instantly that you are trying to copy the old interface and will expect to be able to do things the "old way" and your interface will inevitably fail in many aspects. It's much more logical to assume that your user has never used a computer before (because if your user hasn't used your interface before then that assumption is almost as good as accurate) and do it the right way.
I was dying to post some joke about just how hilarious the whole concept is, but couldn't think of anything. Immature or not I found the whole idea that MS would do such a thing extremely amusing.
Then I read the other comments and people pointed out that "Microsoft" and "Windows" are also disallowed words, as well they pointed out that there is a policy that using trademarked terms in screen names is disallowed. Assuming those posts are correct, it now seems like a complete non-story and non-issue. Ironically (as the parent poster is currently modded Troll), kdawson and shafty023 should be the ones modded Troll for the article. IMO.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I once made a similar argument that a car is a weapon, one which is far more likely to kill an innocent passer-by, even one who is not even operating a motor vehicle at the time, and thus it just common sense that drinking and driving is ridiculously stupid, dangerous and should be outlawed. You wouldn't fire a gun while drunk would you ?
To which my wife replied "It's not illegal to get pissed drunk and take a gun and go hunting... well at least I don't think it is... if it is then the vice president of the USA should be locked up for operating a deadly weapon while intoxicated and nearly taking someone's life".
Schools may be different because they are a public, government-owned establishment. However, any private establishment can search you upon your entering their premise. They can not forcibly search you, however. Meaning that you can always chose to leave / not enter. In other words, they have the right to deny you entry based on a failure to consent to a search. They can not detain you and forcibly search you, however, should you chose to leave instead of being searched.
An example of this practice is security guards searching people's bags for drugs and weapons upon entering a rock show.
Hate to reply to my own post but afterwards I realized that it's only $4 / physical cd sold. Otherwise they keep 9%. So a large portion of the $4 probably goes to shipping.
CDBaby requires a $35 one-time setup fee and takes $4 / CD sold. You can charge what ever you want... but they take $4 / CD no matter what.
I do really like CDBaby. I've sold a few CDs through them. But I feel like I have to charge a lot more for my CDs than they are worth in order to sell through them. When I did the math after producing my album I calculated that I have to charge around $3 / CD to recoup my investment. So with CDBaby I have to charge a bare minimum of $7 / CD in order to not lose money and then I don't profit. At the $12 that I am charging that's $1 / song for the consumer which I think is too high. At $1 / song it would cost over $5,000 for someone to fill a 20GB mp3 player.
The most expensive part of selling music is publicity and advertising. The production and distribution are insanely cheap. CDBaby helps with the distribution and they help *very slightly* with the advertising. I love their service and having nothing bad to say about it. But you need to consider the facts. An indie artist who spends $5,000 on producing an album and prints 1,000 copies to sell (a very small run) will have to overcharge his CD in order to turn a profit when selling through CDBaby.
The upside is that thanks to CDBaby I've got my songs in ITunes as well as a lot of other digital stores that I simply did not know existed. I also have the convenience of not having to mail out my CDs myself. By all means, shop from CDBaby, they're a great service for indie artists. But how much of the money goes to the artist is really up to the artist. $4 / CD goes to CDBaby no matter what the cost of the CD. Just something to keep in mind.
The music industry doesn't want to maximize the number of songs sold. It wants to maximize the number of dollars brought in. This means higher prices per track but selling fewer tracks, so long as they take in more money.
There is a reason that businesses give out coupons etc. You can maximize profits by selling more of something at a lower price instead of less at a bigger price.
You are absolutely correct that the music industry wants to maximize dollars rather than units. But that is true of Apple as well. And every business. They key is how to achieve that. There are loads of variables involved in deciding what your strategy will be but sometimes it means selling a lot of units at a low price and sometimes it means selling few units at a very high price. Almost every commercial product ends up somewhere in the middle with the consumers ultimately deciding.
I think in the case of the music industry the ultimate strategy will be selling a lot of units at a low price (and Apple would seem to agree with me) simply because the overhead cost to the manufacturers and distributors is relatively low* and it is something that consumers want to have a lot of and simply can't afford at a very high price per unit. Further more the consumers seem to be perfectly happy to resorting to not paying for each unit in order to achieve their goal of having a lot.
$1 / song might not seem like a lot but when people have 20GB of songs at 4MB each that's over $5,000 for the collection. And when people buy 80GB Ipods and up that says right there that they are planning on acquiring quite a huge collection. Most people not only can't afford to spend that much on music but simply don't feel it's worth it anyway. So when traditional music distributors charge $20 for a CD with 12 songs on it ($1.67 / song) they are simply pricing themselves out of business.
* ok, I know it's not unheard of to spend millions to produce an album, but once you've spent those millions you can make as many digital copies as possible. Even when printing CDs the cost per CD is almost non-existant when you're buying in extremely massive bulk quantities so the overhead is ultimately very low compared to something like cars which cost far more to produce per unit.
IANAL but I don't think it means that you ISP could block access to material at their discretion.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected, or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [such] material."
So what I take from that is that you have to want the service to block said material AND said service must be "interactive", which I assume means that you have to run it yourself and have a direct say in what it does.
My point was that if you had linked to something that *parent company* objects to then you could expect repercussions. Imagine your employer lets you host a personal web page on company servers. But they tell you "do not link to nambla.org" and then you go and link to it. Even though your context is one of objection, you have still violated your employers terms and you can probably expect to get fired.
In the case of LiveJournal, they own the servers. They own the domain that you are hosting your pages on etc. When you create a LiveJournal account you are, in a sense, "vouching" for the content on said pages. Link to something that goes against LJ's terms and see what happens.
Ok, so I understand quite well how things can change and how domains can switch hands and a link one day might be about my little pony but the next day it could get redirected to porn etc.
However, isn't it perfectly within LJ's right to protect itself and remove accounts who are linking to porn ? Is it not *your* responsibility to make sure that sites that you link to aren't something that "parent company" wouldn't object to ? Where parent company is a web host, employer or anyone else who *owns* the property (web server, domain etc.) that you are hosting your page on ?
So the owner of the link changed the page. That means Live Journal should just sit back and say "oh well... our domain is linking to porn and our policy clearly states that we do not allow that, however, since the link was obviously changed to redirect to porn *after* the page owner linked to it we'll just leave it there and do nothing" ?
Ok, so they could pull the link and inform / warn the user etc. But then the question is raised, who's responsibility is it to check those links ? IMO the guy who signed up for a Live Journal account and linked to the site that eventually got changed and redirected should be held responsible.
Maybe I'm a little biased because I'm a webmaster. But I make it a point to check the links on my sites periodically because they change. I don't expect my web hosting provider to do it for me. Not that my hosting provider would terminate my account for anything short of something extremely illegal anyway. But for my own reputation and for the sake of giving my surfers a pleasant and consistent surfing experience free of anything that they would not expect or want to come across while browsing my sites I check my links every once in a while.
And it is certainly within LJ's rights to remove pages on their servers that are violating their TOS. I don't see how it has anything to do with understanding the nature of the Internet. I haven't read their TOS but I'm assuming somewhere in there is "Don't Link To Porn Sites" and I'm also pretty sure that there is NOT an "Except unless the page you're linking to was changed afterwards" clause.
I've never taken a ride in a NYC cab but in my city (in southern Ontario Canada) the meter in the cab is clearly visible to the driver and all passengers.
The point was that I think it's silly that people obsess so much about other people that have nothing to do with them what-so-ever, besides the entertainment / art that they produce.
Personally, I don't care at all about any band, artist, celebrity, movie star etc. outside of the entertainment that they produce. For any time period.
I realize that I'm a minority, and that's why I have the problem to begin with (in other words, I'm the one who makes it a problem for myself by not being like everyone else and caring), but although the Beatles were before my time, if I were around when they had broken up I wouldn't have cared in the slightest. And I like their music. It has nothing to do with whether or not I like the entertainment that they produce.
In fact, I actually liked the movie "Mean Girls". But I couldn't give the slightest care in the world about whether or Lindsay Lohan is guilty of doing drugs. I mean for crying out loud. Teenage girl does drugs. STOP THE PRESSES!/sarcasm.
When Paris' (or Pamela's) sex tape was released it was soooo not news IMO. There's enough porn out there already if I want some. I don't care that John Lennon was shot. I don't care that the Beatles broke up. I don't care that Elvis is dead. I don't care that Princess Diana died in a car accident. I didn't care when that Kennedy brother died in a plane crash. Sure my hearts go out to the people who are actually affected by such things, like their family etc. But the fact that we have major network "news" shows like "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider" dedicated entirely to such trivial things and the fact that even major news networks like CNN talk about Paris going to jail is a major pet peeve of mine. WHO THE HELL CARES !? Is all I can think to myself. And then I get morbidly depressed when I realize "Oh right. Most people apparently:("
Of course I can simply turn the channel if I don't like it and so I do. I just find it to be a very annoying aspect of pop culture.
Hopefully in the year 2025/2029 it will be "Lindsay who?" and "Paris who?" and "Britney who?". And if we're *really* lucky people might actually stop obsessing so much over the lives of people that they don't know personally or have anything to do with all together.
The economical way to deal with the problem would be to buy the coca and opium crops from their home countries, sell the pure finished products in government stores, and tax the hell out of it, making it still 1/100th the price of the illegal version for guaranteed quality.
I happen to be someone who agrees with you. However, to play Devil's advocate...
Who wants to live in a country where the government is one giant drug dealer ? There's a large group of people who support the prohibition of Tobacco. And most people believe that illegal drugs are prohibited because they are harmful. If the government were to end the war on drugs and start taxing them it would send the message that the government no longer considers the drugs to be harmful. That would create major backlash by the people the government has been lying to all this time. They either tell the citizens "Yes we lied to you" or "Yes we were wrong, which means YOU are wrong". Either way it's a political nightmare. You would have soccer moms and doctors all over the country trying to incite riots and potentially even cause a civil war because they don't like the idea of living in a place where a crack head isn't considered a harmful criminal and is free to live next door to the house that they raise their kids in.
Personally, I believe in personal choice and freedom. IMO the government has no right to tell me what I can and can not do with my own body. Even when it comes to so-called "hard" drugs. I have no interest in taking them, but the fact that the freedom of choice has been taken from me feels like a violation of my most fundamental human rights (the right to chose what happens with my body). But the reality is that it doesn't matter anymore that the government has lied. Stopping the lies would be a great start. But there are enough people who believe that drugs are so harmful that they should be prohibited that unless those people all change their minds the situation will not change. That's one of the side effects of democracy. Sometimes you don't fit into the majority. Of course there's nothing stopping the minority from trying to change the majority's mind and I'm all for that.
LOTS of people bake bread. I'm sure a large percentage of families have at one point or another attempted baking bread.
I'm an amateur chef. I'm thinking about attending some form of culinary school and doing it professionally. While I was reading TFA I couldn't help but think how appealing the idea of being a cook on such a mission would be.
Yesterday I baked a loaf of bread (sans bread machine) from scratch for the first time. Nothing difficult or special about it at all, only that it was my first time. It was the tastiest bread I've ever had in my life. Not only that but there's something very social and time-honoured about bread. After all, it is possibly *the* oldest prepared food. There's something special and extremely social about baking a loaf of bread from scratch and sharing it at the dinner table. I'm not a conservative or an idealist at all. I'm a programmer and run web sites for a living. So I love my technology as much as the next person. But technology really has, at the very least, hidden some of the behaviours that have made us human for thousands of years. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I find that cooking, especially when you make as much from scratch as possible, is an excellent way to explore that part of who we are.
So colonizing another planet (or even a part of un-inhabited land here on earth) definitely makes an interesting social experiment. We'd bring technology with us but we'd also have to get back to basics on some things like making food from scratch and really conserving resources. It provides a small hint of what human life was like not all that long ago.
Sorry for the slightly OT blurb, but your post inspired me to bring up what I would, personally, find of value in such experiments.
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As you get more experienced, you'll want to learn the command line though - much more efficient and really easier.
... :P
There's a *GREAT* way to get someone to switch to Linux. Tell him the command line is easier than the GUI
Having better drivers will ease game development for sure. But it ultimately comes down to market. Regardless of how well your games *can* run on Linux and how easy you *can* write for the platform, it still costs money to produce, market and distribute. If the customers aren't there then it's not worth it to the company. There's no profit.
People boast about better drives all the time and as a Linux user I want to see better drivers as well. I also want to see the games. Back in 1998 / 1999 I went to Electronic Boutique and bought every single Loki title that they had (I spent over $200 Canadian after tax). I also applied for a job at Loki a few times with little success (in hindsight the little success was a good thing). But I'm not naive enough to think that better drivers = more games.
Better drivers simply won't mean very much at all to the game manufacturers who who only consider porting their titles to another platform if they see money to be made. Think of this way. Let's pretend for a moment that there was a HUGE market for Linux and it was blatantly obvious to the game developers that if they released titles for Linux they'd be making a lot more money. However, it's only the crappy video card drivers that are stopping them. They wouldn't sit back and say "oh well, the video card drivers are crappy so we won't bother". Instead they'd be putting pressure on the ATI and Nvidia saying "hey man, we can all make a fortune supporting Linux. Get your butt in gear. Hell we'll even help you with money and programmers if you need it etc."
But alas, the video card manufacturers don't support Linux very well for the same reasons there are no games. The companies do not see the potential for profit. It's a vicious cycle. No gamers = No games. No games = No gamers.
I think the best and most likely solution to the paradox is companies like Dell [successfully] selling Linux boxes to their customers and putting pressure on both the game developers and the video card manufacturers by showing them just how much they're selling. Hell, if Dell saw profit in making a "Linux gaming machine" they might strike a deal with a big gaming company like Valve and a video card manufacturer like ATI to provide some big titles and rock solid drivers. THAT would begin to attract a market for Linux gamers and provoke interest from other game developers and video card manufacturers who see Dell actually making a profit by catering to Linux gamers.
So maybe that's an angle the community can take. Instead of just bitching at AMD/ATI, NVidia and the game manufacturers, go to Dell and HP and the other disposable PC companies and say:
"Dear Dell,
WE WANT A LINUX GAMING BOX AND WILL PAY MONEY FOR IT!
It needs to come pre-installed with at least one Linux port of a BIG-TITLE game (Half-Life 2, GTA, Halo etc.) with the option of buying more separately.
It needs to have rock solid graphics performance and stability.
Some decent audio and gaming input devices wouldn't hurt either
Sincerely Yours,
The Linux Gaming Community".
My $0.02
Hell, I'm only up to 50GB and that's with all the stuff I've gathered (and not a one I paid a cent to those greedy a-holes for) long before I got the iPod.
Would you spend $12,000 - $13,000 on your 50GB collection ? Wait you already answered that.
10 years ago, would you have even conceived that you'd have a 50GB mp3 collection ?
I mean, I remember when 4GB - 8GB drives were "freakin' massive!" and that was well into the "Napster era".
Granted, people buy larger storage devices because they don't have much of a choice (I can't count the number of times I only *needed* a small drive but ended up getting something way overkill because it was the smallest drive I could find), but people still find ways to use them. Also, storage capacity and price / GB has improved far faster than bandwidth and other technology. So we are hitting that point where people have more hard drive space then they intend to use. That doesn't mean people will never find a way to use it. Remember 640k is enough memory for anyone and all that jazz...
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media per unit is ever going to *increase* ? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses. Bigger hard drives, faster burning devices, more bandwidth, streaming flash videos etc. have all given people access to more material. And whether or not they were ever going to pay for that media and whether or not media companies are losing money because of it is irrelevant. The point is that the value to the consumer keep decreasing and it will continue to do so for the forseeable future. The Internet is a content delivery platform and with that comes media delivery. The more media someone is exposed to the less value each individual "unit of media" has.
NBC is a distributor. They don't produce the content, they buy it and then redistribute it. Jobs is also a distributor. See the conflict of interest ?
You make it sound like NBC produces the content themselves and that they should let Jobs distribute it. The problem is that NBC is, and always has been, in the distribution business. Not the production business. They may purchase and license the exclusive rights to distribute the content, but it's not *their* content. So the only way it makes sense for them to set up shop with Apple is if they, as a distributor, are making money by letting Apple redistribute the content.
In this scenario NBC becomes a middle-man. Now I'm only speculating but I would think that NBC believes that they, as a distributor, can make more money by distributing the content that they're already distributing themselves rather than letting someone else do it for them while they sit back and do absolutely nothing to further or grow their business at all. When NBC is a middle-man it's only thanks to sticky contracts that producers don't just go to Apple and other online distributors directly. That's probably a very likely scenario in the future and one which NBC wants to make sure doesn't ever happen.
As a musician (and one who encourages people to "pirate" my music and shareit etc.) I've often thought about this. I've come to the realization that the price factor is a "problem" that is going to grow exponentially as time moves forward.
... and the media itself is still dirt cheap (meaning you might pay $20 for a HUGE collection of songs when each song costs a fraction of cent when you do the math etc.).
... but the per unit / per copy model is dead. The single song or tv show just keeps getting devalued more and more as technology progresses and there's not really any end in sight.
A while ago I did some math and realized that for someone to legally acquire 20GB worth of music at $1 / song it would cost over $5,000. What I've realized is that as hard drive space gets bigger and cheaper / GB, as broadband access spreads and gets faster and as more and more means of illegally downloading media which can be trivially copied and reproduced come to be, the price factor eventually dwindles into obvlivion.
What is a tv show worth to the average user ? What is a song ? Today it might be $0.99 but as people get the means to acquire more and more media with the same investment of hard drive space and time that number is going to keep decreasing. People want more and more as their iPods and hard drives can handle more. And no one is going to spend $5,000 on an mp3 collection. Perhaps I shouldn't say "no one". But no one that I know personally would ever consider spending that much on something that can be had easily for free. $1 for a song, sure that's quite reasonable. But oh wait, I've got a 20GB iPod that I need to fill with these things. $5,000 !? Think of what $5,000 means to me. No more credit card debt. No more dying engine in my car. A new bathroom etc.
So I think we are WELL past the threshold of 'worth paying for'. The minute someone pirates their first song they have just crossed that invisible line where they become someone who "pirates" media. And once you do it once it becomes so easy to do it again. I'm making it sound like a drug, lol. But it's true. If you download a song for free why would you ever go and pay for one ? The only reason I can think to pay for something that you can get very easily for free is if there's a lot of added value for paying for it. And in cases like that people become very selective about what they pay for and what they download for free
If media companies ever hope to sell what they produce directly to the consumer eventually a single copy of a song or a tv show are going to have to cost fractions of a cent and they're going to have to be very innovative in terms of how they offer it to the consumer. It's going to have to be easier than downloading each song/show/whatever independently and it's going to have to have a lot of other added value.
I'm thinking maybe with regards to tv shows, companies should be experimenting (assuming they're not already, and I'm sure many are) with traditional tv broadcast models that are "upgraded" for the Internet. Meaning broadcast shows over the Internet and make money via ads. As for music, artists should probably look to selling to distributors who distribute their music in huge packages. Then offer their music for free to download to their casual fans while also selling cds/dvds with added value to their loyal fans who will gladly shell out a few bucks to support them directly etc. There's lots of ways to be creative and make money off of media still
First thing my wife did after I set up Ubuntu was go searching her old Windows drive for a background image to replace the default. She eventually settled on a Sailor Moon background and began exclaiming loudly "I am not a geek!" over and over. :/
I host directly with The Planet and this type of story is one of the reasons why.
There are LOT of resellers that buy cheap dedicated servers from providers like The Planet and resell virtual hosting and in some cases dedicated hosting at a higher price (usually with more service and 'user friendly control panels' and such).
As a webmaster / entrepreneur who used to work as a *nix admin and programmer, I've often thought about going into the reseller business. I've decided not to because I don't believe that I could sustain such an endeavor and I still have nightmares about working in tech support. But the fact remains that any Joe Blow running a business out of his basement can set up a 'hosting' company this way for next to no capital at all. Then what happens after he has a few customers but they run into problems and he doesn't feel like helping them out ? What happens if he wants to take a week vacation or hell even 2 days off on the weekend ?
It's very easy to put up a web page that looks "professional" and talks about your round the clock support team and has pictures of your provider's data center. Such a page is sure to lure in gullible customers who believe that you truly are a large company with many employees working round the clock to support you. In the end, actually delivering on those promises is not something that a single person can do.
It's very important to research who you're hosting with. Not just who their providers are but what the company history is, who owns it and most importantly do they have a good reputation that goes back at least 3 - 5 years + ? The reason that not everyone rents directly from dedicated server providers like The Planet is because you get a server and that's it. Their tech support is great when the problem is actually their fault (network or hardware problems etc.) but if you have problems configuring Apache or installing Word Press you're out of luck. You're expected to be able to admin your own box. That's why there's a market for resellers. Because they admin the boxes for you. But it's very easy to be tempted by a good offer from a company that's actually run by some 16 year-old kid living with his mom who's got your site hosted on his one dedicated server that he rents for $70 / month from The Planet.
Point = determine your needs and do your research. Host with a company who you're confident is not going out of business any time soon and who can live up to your support requirements. It's not an easy task with the loads of resellers and providers out there but it's essential if you're doing business online.
It might sound a little corny but Jurassic Park actually created my interest in science-fiction, computer programming and science in general. I saw the movie first and besides being an entertaining thriller with some cool special effects it had no effect on me at all.
Then I read the book a couple of years later. I was around 13 or 14 and sick at home for a couple days. I read through it very quickly and I just remember how despite being a nut, Ian Malcolm was the one character who seemed to have a down-to-earth and realistic point of view on the whole situation. I also remember how cool it was that Crichton gave actual examples of computer code to support the story. It sparked my interest in computers and programming and logical, scientific thought in general.
Afterwards I convinced my grandmother to help me buy a computer and I spent the next few years going from pothead rocker to nerd teaching myself how to program the best I could.
Without having read that book my life would have turned out quite differently.
If you're trying to appeal to the average kid who watches far more movies than they do reading books, why not use something from pop-culture that was made into a successful movie ? Like most books vs. movies the two are rather different and so it would be difficult to impossible for one of the students to do any kind of report or test based on the movie.
It also has the advantage of demonstrating how powerful science can be. It's science fiction but it does a good job of coming off as plausible (if not then no one would have asked afterwards "could we do that?", even if the answer is "no because we haven't found such DNA still in tact"[1]) and it also goes to show how "cool" science can be. It deals with computers, biology, science fiction and logical thought and even touches on scientific ethics every once in a while. Over all it's a very entertaining book that most young people should enjoy reading while also doing a good job of advertising what science and math has to offer.
[1] Yes I realize there's several other reasons that it's still fiction, as well.
How do you know when the attack is over if they're no longer attacking your machine thanks to the DNS record pointing to 127.0.0.1 ?
How long do you wait ?
I suppose you can try to identify the specific worm that's doing the attack and infect a test machine and watch it. Or if you can reverse engineer it you might be able to find out when the end date is. Beyond that you've effectively taken your entire web site / business offline for an undetermined period of time. I'm not sure it's any better than riding out the attack. The attack could stop and you wouldn't even know it.
Plus, the minute you unplug your network cable or change your DNS records to a machine that doesn't host your web site you've just handed yourself to the attackers. Taking your business offline is *exactly* what they intended to do. And you did it for them.
Ubuntu does this too, where 7.04 means "month 4 of year 2007". It's not very obvious.
/. on a daily basis etc. I know way more about Linux and *nix than most 'average users' would ever care to. I've been running Ubuntu for a few months now as all the hype got me really curious and I wanted to see just what kind of "inroads" they had been making on the desktop that has everyone talking.
You're right it's not obvious. I'm an old time Linux nerd who has worked as a *nix admin and reads
Your post is what informed me that their version numbers were done this way.
Whether you agree with the parent or not regarding naming versions after dates aside, the fact that 7.04 translates to "April 2007" does not have a remotely similar effect and is absolutely no different, to end users, than any other major.minor versioning scheme.
I pretend mod your post +1 Informative and, at the same time, -1 Irrelevant.
Isn't that the goal of the vast majority of "successful" Linux applications -- to look just like their Windows counterpart?
Well, if you want to talk about "successful" Linux applications (whatever that means) then we can already point the finger at Thunderbird and Evolution.
Now, the way I see it, there is no point in taking the Eudora name and applying it to a new product in order to appeal to Outlook users. I know lots of lots of people (my mother is one of them) who used Eudora religiously and really misses it to this day. I agree with the parent, even though I've never used Eudora myself. We already have lots of clones of popular MS products. Why make another one ?
Besides, while I can't say what the goals of every "successful" Linux applications *is*, I can say that the goal of any application *should* be to be useful to it's users. In my opinion an application doesn't have to have a familiar interface in order to be intuitive. In concept, if you can take a person who has never used any kind of computer interface before and sit them down in front of a computer, charge them with a task and they can use it to accomplish said task and not just stare at the machine blankly wondering WTF they're supposed to do then you've succeeded.
A user who's making the switch from one machine to another will definitely have habits. Yet there is an inherent danger with trying to cater to those habits. You will never do it "just right". The user will see instantly that you are trying to copy the old interface and will expect to be able to do things the "old way" and your interface will inevitably fail in many aspects. It's much more logical to assume that your user has never used a computer before (because if your user hasn't used your interface before then that assumption is almost as good as accurate) and do it the right way.
I was dying to post some joke about just how hilarious the whole concept is, but couldn't think of anything. Immature or not I found the whole idea that MS would do such a thing extremely amusing.
Then I read the other comments and people pointed out that "Microsoft" and "Windows" are also disallowed words, as well they pointed out that there is a policy that using trademarked terms in screen names is disallowed. Assuming those posts are correct, it now seems like a complete non-story and non-issue. Ironically (as the parent poster is currently modded Troll), kdawson and shafty023 should be the ones modded Troll for the article. IMO.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I once made a similar argument that a car is a weapon, one which is far more likely to kill an innocent passer-by, even one who is not even operating a motor vehicle at the time, and thus it just common sense that drinking and driving is ridiculously stupid, dangerous and should be outlawed. You wouldn't fire a gun while drunk would you ?
... if it is then the vice president of the USA should be locked up for operating a deadly weapon while intoxicated and nearly taking someone's life".
To which my wife replied "It's not illegal to get pissed drunk and take a gun and go hunting... well at least I don't think it is
Schools may be different because they are a public, government-owned establishment. However, any private establishment can search you upon your entering their premise. They can not forcibly search you, however. Meaning that you can always chose to leave / not enter. In other words, they have the right to deny you entry based on a failure to consent to a search. They can not detain you and forcibly search you, however, should you chose to leave instead of being searched.
An example of this practice is security guards searching people's bags for drugs and weapons upon entering a rock show.
Hate to reply to my own post but afterwards I realized that it's only $4 / physical cd sold. Otherwise they keep 9%. So a large portion of the $4 probably goes to shipping.
CDBaby requires a $35 one-time setup fee and takes $4 / CD sold. You can charge what ever you want ... but they take $4 / CD no matter what.
I do really like CDBaby. I've sold a few CDs through them. But I feel like I have to charge a lot more for my CDs than they are worth in order to sell through them. When I did the math after producing my album I calculated that I have to charge around $3 / CD to recoup my investment. So with CDBaby I have to charge a bare minimum of $7 / CD in order to not lose money and then I don't profit. At the $12 that I am charging that's $1 / song for the consumer which I think is too high. At $1 / song it would cost over $5,000 for someone to fill a 20GB mp3 player.
The most expensive part of selling music is publicity and advertising. The production and distribution are insanely cheap. CDBaby helps with the distribution and they help *very slightly* with the advertising. I love their service and having nothing bad to say about it. But you need to consider the facts. An indie artist who spends $5,000 on producing an album and prints 1,000 copies to sell (a very small run) will have to overcharge his CD in order to turn a profit when selling through CDBaby.
The upside is that thanks to CDBaby I've got my songs in ITunes as well as a lot of other digital stores that I simply did not know existed. I also have the convenience of not having to mail out my CDs myself. By all means, shop from CDBaby, they're a great service for indie artists. But how much of the money goes to the artist is really up to the artist. $4 / CD goes to CDBaby no matter what the cost of the CD. Just something to keep in mind.
The music industry doesn't want to maximize the number of songs sold. It wants to maximize the number of dollars brought in. This means higher prices per track but selling fewer tracks, so long as they take in more money.
There is a reason that businesses give out coupons etc. You can maximize profits by selling more of something at a lower price instead of less at a bigger price.
You are absolutely correct that the music industry wants to maximize dollars rather than units. But that is true of Apple as well. And every business. They key is how to achieve that. There are loads of variables involved in deciding what your strategy will be but sometimes it means selling a lot of units at a low price and sometimes it means selling few units at a very high price. Almost every commercial product ends up somewhere in the middle with the consumers ultimately deciding.
I think in the case of the music industry the ultimate strategy will be selling a lot of units at a low price (and Apple would seem to agree with me) simply because the overhead cost to the manufacturers and distributors is relatively low* and it is something that consumers want to have a lot of and simply can't afford at a very high price per unit. Further more the consumers seem to be perfectly happy to resorting to not paying for each unit in order to achieve their goal of having a lot.
$1 / song might not seem like a lot but when people have 20GB of songs at 4MB each that's over $5,000 for the collection. And when people buy 80GB Ipods and up that says right there that they are planning on acquiring quite a huge collection. Most people not only can't afford to spend that much on music but simply don't feel it's worth it anyway. So when traditional music distributors charge $20 for a CD with 12 songs on it ($1.67 / song) they are simply pricing themselves out of business.
* ok, I know it's not unheard of to spend millions to produce an album, but once you've spent those millions you can make as many digital copies as possible. Even when printing CDs the cost per CD is almost non-existant when you're buying in extremely massive bulk quantities so the overhead is ultimately very low compared to something like cars which cost far more to produce per unit.
IANAL but I don't think it means that you ISP could block access to material at their discretion.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected, or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [such] material."
So what I take from that is that you have to want the service to block said material AND said service must be "interactive", which I assume means that you have to run it yourself and have a direct say in what it does.
You misinterpreted that sentence.
My point was that if you had linked to something that *parent company* objects to then you could expect repercussions. Imagine your employer lets you host a personal web page on company servers. But they tell you "do not link to nambla.org" and then you go and link to it. Even though your context is one of objection, you have still violated your employers terms and you can probably expect to get fired.
In the case of LiveJournal, they own the servers. They own the domain that you are hosting your pages on etc. When you create a LiveJournal account you are, in a sense, "vouching" for the content on said pages. Link to something that goes against LJ's terms and see what happens.
Ok, so I understand quite well how things can change and how domains can switch hands and a link one day might be about my little pony but the next day it could get redirected to porn etc.
However, isn't it perfectly within LJ's right to protect itself and remove accounts who are linking to porn ? Is it not *your* responsibility to make sure that sites that you link to aren't something that "parent company" wouldn't object to ? Where parent company is a web host, employer or anyone else who *owns* the property (web server, domain etc.) that you are hosting your page on ?
So the owner of the link changed the page. That means Live Journal should just sit back and say "oh well... our domain is linking to porn and our policy clearly states that we do not allow that, however, since the link was obviously changed to redirect to porn *after* the page owner linked to it we'll just leave it there and do nothing" ?
Ok, so they could pull the link and inform / warn the user etc. But then the question is raised, who's responsibility is it to check those links ? IMO the guy who signed up for a Live Journal account and linked to the site that eventually got changed and redirected should be held responsible.
Maybe I'm a little biased because I'm a webmaster. But I make it a point to check the links on my sites periodically because they change. I don't expect my web hosting provider to do it for me. Not that my hosting provider would terminate my account for anything short of something extremely illegal anyway. But for my own reputation and for the sake of giving my surfers a pleasant and consistent surfing experience free of anything that they would not expect or want to come across while browsing my sites I check my links every once in a while.
And it is certainly within LJ's rights to remove pages on their servers that are violating their TOS. I don't see how it has anything to do with understanding the nature of the Internet. I haven't read their TOS but I'm assuming somewhere in there is "Don't Link To Porn Sites" and I'm also pretty sure that there is NOT an "Except unless the page you're linking to was changed afterwards" clause.
3. You can see how much you owe and why.
I've never taken a ride in a NYC cab but in my city (in southern Ontario Canada) the meter in the cab is clearly visible to the driver and all passengers.
You missed my point entirely.
/sarcasm.
:("
The point was that I think it's silly that people obsess so much about other people that have nothing to do with them what-so-ever, besides the entertainment / art that they produce.
Personally, I don't care at all about any band, artist, celebrity, movie star etc. outside of the entertainment that they produce. For any time period.
I realize that I'm a minority, and that's why I have the problem to begin with (in other words, I'm the one who makes it a problem for myself by not being like everyone else and caring), but although the Beatles were before my time, if I were around when they had broken up I wouldn't have cared in the slightest. And I like their music. It has nothing to do with whether or not I like the entertainment that they produce.
In fact, I actually liked the movie "Mean Girls". But I couldn't give the slightest care in the world about whether or Lindsay Lohan is guilty of doing drugs. I mean for crying out loud. Teenage girl does drugs. STOP THE PRESSES!
When Paris' (or Pamela's) sex tape was released it was soooo not news IMO. There's enough porn out there already if I want some. I don't care that John Lennon was shot. I don't care that the Beatles broke up. I don't care that Elvis is dead. I don't care that Princess Diana died in a car accident. I didn't care when that Kennedy brother died in a plane crash. Sure my hearts go out to the people who are actually affected by such things, like their family etc. But the fact that we have major network "news" shows like "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider" dedicated entirely to such trivial things and the fact that even major news networks like CNN talk about Paris going to jail is a major pet peeve of mine. WHO THE HELL CARES !? Is all I can think to myself. And then I get morbidly depressed when I realize "Oh right. Most people apparently
Of course I can simply turn the channel if I don't like it and so I do. I just find it to be a very annoying aspect of pop culture.
"Lindsay Lohan was never innocent."
:(
Hopefully in the year 2025/2029 it will be "Lindsay who?" and "Paris who?" and "Britney who?". And if we're *really* lucky people might actually stop obsessing so much over the lives of people that they don't know personally or have anything to do with all together.
But I guess I'm just a dreamer
The economical way to deal with the problem would be to buy the coca and opium crops from their home countries, sell the pure finished products in government stores, and tax the hell out of it, making it still 1/100th the price of the illegal version for guaranteed quality.
...
I happen to be someone who agrees with you. However, to play Devil's advocate
Who wants to live in a country where the government is one giant drug dealer ? There's a large group of people who support the prohibition of Tobacco. And most people believe that illegal drugs are prohibited because they are harmful. If the government were to end the war on drugs and start taxing them it would send the message that the government no longer considers the drugs to be harmful. That would create major backlash by the people the government has been lying to all this time. They either tell the citizens "Yes we lied to you" or "Yes we were wrong, which means YOU are wrong". Either way it's a political nightmare. You would have soccer moms and doctors all over the country trying to incite riots and potentially even cause a civil war because they don't like the idea of living in a place where a crack head isn't considered a harmful criminal and is free to live next door to the house that they raise their kids in.
Personally, I believe in personal choice and freedom. IMO the government has no right to tell me what I can and can not do with my own body. Even when it comes to so-called "hard" drugs. I have no interest in taking them, but the fact that the freedom of choice has been taken from me feels like a violation of my most fundamental human rights (the right to chose what happens with my body). But the reality is that it doesn't matter anymore that the government has lied. Stopping the lies would be a great start. But there are enough people who believe that drugs are so harmful that they should be prohibited that unless those people all change their minds the situation will not change. That's one of the side effects of democracy. Sometimes you don't fit into the majority. Of course there's nothing stopping the minority from trying to change the majority's mind and I'm all for that.
LOTS of people bake bread. I'm sure a large percentage of families have at one point or another attempted baking bread.
I'm an amateur chef. I'm thinking about attending some form of culinary school and doing it professionally. While I was reading TFA I couldn't help but think how appealing the idea of being a cook on such a mission would be.
Yesterday I baked a loaf of bread (sans bread machine) from scratch for the first time. Nothing difficult or special about it at all, only that it was my first time. It was the tastiest bread I've ever had in my life. Not only that but there's something very social and time-honoured about bread. After all, it is possibly *the* oldest prepared food. There's something special and extremely social about baking a loaf of bread from scratch and sharing it at the dinner table. I'm not a conservative or an idealist at all. I'm a programmer and run web sites for a living. So I love my technology as much as the next person. But technology really has, at the very least, hidden some of the behaviours that have made us human for thousands of years. I don't see anything wrong with that, but I find that cooking, especially when you make as much from scratch as possible, is an excellent way to explore that part of who we are.
So colonizing another planet (or even a part of un-inhabited land here on earth) definitely makes an interesting social experiment. We'd bring technology with us but we'd also have to get back to basics on some things like making food from scratch and really conserving resources. It provides a small hint of what human life was like not all that long ago.
Sorry for the slightly OT blurb, but your post inspired me to bring up what I would, personally, find of value in such experiments.