this is absolutely the biggest joke in linux - support for multiple, co-existing languages on the same desktop. No logout/login to change a paragraph into farsi, please! Macs and even poor shlub Windows manage this fine, but talk about a wide-ranging lack of support - internationalization exists in little splintered bits from the kernel to OOo, and is very* inconsistent.
Whether you need multiple languages daily, or just to open/deal with a multibyte font in excel (even though the whole of the file was typed in english), until this is working much* better in linux (crossover office comes close, but not quite), it just isn't going to be an option onn an increasingly-internationalized desktop.
I thought that this made a GREAT pilot for a series, and just an absolutely flat* movie/miniseries. Hands down, this is the best opening shot for a sci fi TV SHOW in years - way beyond the potential and realised goodness of Andromeda, Stargate, Enterprise, etc... This reminds me most of "what Space: Above and Beyond" should've been, if it had tried to be a little less one-dimensional.
After much experimentation and testing over the years, I've found the following are always the hardest bits:
1) GUI Internationalization issues.
Sure, you can web browse multi-lingually in Linux, but just try* to set up a machine to support multiple input methods. More recent distros are very* close to getting it right, but I still experience the "if you want to input in Japanese and English, you have to have your menus/interface in Japanese" issue.
2) International file formats.
This is mostly related to MS Office... but, I haven't yet found a Mac/Linux Office product that could properly read/format/write to Japanese Excel documents.
3) Minute aspects of everyday app use.
Okay, great. I can open any Powerpoint doc in OpenOffice. But, nearly everything comes up as a 'flattened' slide, with the internal text/boxes/images wholly unmodifiable. How am I supposed to collaborate with a Windows user on a Powerpoint presentation when I can't go in and fix all their mistakes?;)
Basically, from what I can tell, Desktop Linux has arrived in terms of ease of setup/use, communicating and filesharing over a network, printing, etc... But, there are still too many gotchas for it to go over in an established office environment.
I'd love to see out of the box, GUI-based remote client administration for desktop linux... Something along the lines of Apple Remote Desktop.
Game testing is practically as bad as the unemployment line.. Low pay, bad hours, no real opportunity for advancement.
So, why would women, in general want to do that, when there are crap receptionist positions, decent tip-based jobs (which women can earn better tips at), and cash register jobs aplenty?
How do you get airplay? How do you get reviewed in the paper? How do you get on the news? You have to work the media according to their little rat-brain ruleset... Try reading 'Feeding the Media Beast' - it's a great primer to how the press operate, acquire and follow stories, and eventually put you online, in print, tv, radio, etc... Since you can't make it in the front door with the music industry, you need to use one of the side doors... Primarily the internet. BUT, in order to let people know your site exists, on a mass scale, you STILL need publicity. So, focus on how you can distinguish yourself from other bands, what is the interesting story that they could make into a bland 10pm news filler item, etc... Once you get that, make it as simple to 'get' as possible, and then just beat the media with it until you're bigger than U2...
Even Elvis and the Beatles didn't make it on their MUSIC, after all... It was the media that got them into homes across the world, which then led to everyone picking up their records.
I work for a company that's launching a new magazine in a few months... And we're really counting on the web for subscriptions, with the intent of going from a monthly to a biweekly or weekly magazine if we have the subscription support.
In our market (translated manga), there's a vast history for these magazines being weekly, and yet in the US market, it's really hard to break into retail outlets as a weekly magazine. For us, it makes more sense to go direct to the manga fans, and the web is a big part of that.
I think it's interesting to evaluate 'profitability on the web' for most modern businesses... Whether the site itself brings in actual cash or not, a website is still an incredibly important marketing and information tool that, for a company that can* put out a strong product, essential to not only providing profits, but happy/informed customers.
If you're going to be taking blurry pics, why use film? Save yourself the effort, and use a digital. Plus, you could do other cool things, like take a picture and* post it to your website every mile (okay, every 5 miles) you drive your car, period. I think that would be much more interesting than just taking a trip across country. Put together a little album of your travels when you sell the thing.
I think the message it's really sending is that "sports/games that are basically all about pattern matching and attaining optimized paths to victory make people paranoid when, outside of those tasks, they find none of the rest of the world works that way".
And don't you think that most of those bay area companies that wanted a CS degree were just plain clueless about what they needed* in a given position? As an IT Manager, I'm hardly surprised that HR or general staff would just assume that all technical/computer oriented job holders must have a CS degree. In my experience, and as someone else mentioned, CS people do skew a little bit away from good interpersonal skills - the type of concentration you need to sit in front of a monitor for 9 hours is different from the concentration required to listen to a whining user wondering "why the Internet is down".
If you're not looking to program for a living, I'd suggest avoiding the CS degree - unless you wanted to double major... It's ALWAYS better in MIS management understands what the hell their programmers are talking about.;)
I upgraded my replayTV a few months back, and I've since noticed that the 120GB drive I put in (Maxtor 5400rpm) makes a very audible clicking noise as it writes/scans... I'd just warn anyone considering an upgrade to definitely ear-test the drive first if possible... What is perfectly acceptable/quiet in terms of in-computer use, can be deafening when watching a tense moment of (intended) silence on-screen.
I myself have found it maddening how out of date Red Carpet's version of Mozilla is... Though, for pre 1.0 software, how do you determine what is 'up to date'? If an app, even gnumeric, is still in development/beta, perhaps it's more responsible to hold off until it stabilizes... After all, there are still RPMs of the more 'dangerous' builds you can find via other means. I'd prefer if a service like Red Carpet had a solid vetting process to make sure crazy software stays off my otherwise stable/secure/etc linux box.
I dunno, I've got a Matrox g400, and I've never been able to get the 3d support to stick, under any version of X... Dualhead has been similarly elusive. I think the guy's original point is this: Windows users only have to worry about in-game tweaking to improve their output... On Linux, you usually need to hand-recompile your kernel, get it wrong 4-5 times, and lose sound support just to get it right. Linux gaming will happen when 3-d is considered as important as basic 2-d graphic support as a 'built-in', need-to-have functionality.
And that's exactly the point of why the Mac's still around... You can't quantify respect, or even usability, on a rigid scale of actions. When all the dust has settled, and the computer has been turned off* for the night, the Mac's advantages shine... I regularly use both Macs and Windows machines and Linux boxes and Novell warts and NT sludgepiles, and the simple fact is that the limitations of the Mac, such as they are, allow me to see past technical concerns and concentrate on what I'm actually doing. To go back to your analogy about artists, the Mac artist is* the one making their own canvas - not through open source software, or custom-configured hardware - but rather by not focusing on computer-related issues at all. The Mac lets you go from turning the box on to creating*... Something that Windows cannot claim, and something Linux doesn't even WANT to achieve. Some people say Macs are toys, and I smile and think: "what sparks my creativity more, colorful toys, or cheap electronics in 'professional' cases?"
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this is absolutely the biggest joke in linux - support for multiple, co-existing languages on the same desktop. No logout/login to change a paragraph into farsi, please! Macs and even poor shlub Windows manage this fine, but talk about a wide-ranging lack of support - internationalization exists in little splintered bits from the kernel to OOo, and is very* inconsistent.
Whether you need multiple languages daily, or just to open/deal with a multibyte font in excel (even though the whole of the file was typed in english), until this is working much* better in linux (crossover office comes close, but not quite), it just isn't going to be an option onn an increasingly-internationalized desktop.
I thought that this made a GREAT pilot for a series, and just an absolutely flat* movie/miniseries. Hands down, this is the best opening shot for a sci fi TV SHOW in years - way beyond the potential and realised goodness of Andromeda, Stargate, Enterprise, etc... This reminds me most of "what Space: Above and Beyond" should've been, if it had tried to be a little less one-dimensional.
-deano
After much experimentation and testing over the years, I've found the following are always the hardest bits:
;)
1) GUI Internationalization issues.
Sure, you can web browse multi-lingually in Linux, but just try* to set up a machine to support multiple input methods. More recent distros are very* close to getting it right, but I still experience the "if you want to input in Japanese and English, you have to have your menus/interface in Japanese" issue.
2) International file formats.
This is mostly related to MS Office... but, I haven't yet found a Mac/Linux Office product that could properly read/format/write to Japanese Excel documents.
3) Minute aspects of everyday app use.
Okay, great. I can open any Powerpoint doc in OpenOffice. But, nearly everything comes up as a 'flattened' slide, with the internal text/boxes/images wholly unmodifiable. How am I supposed to collaborate with a Windows user on a Powerpoint presentation when I can't go in and fix all their mistakes?
Basically, from what I can tell, Desktop Linux has arrived in terms of ease of setup/use, communicating and filesharing over a network, printing, etc... But, there are still too many gotchas for it to go over in an established office environment.
I'd love to see out of the box, GUI-based remote client administration for desktop linux... Something along the lines of Apple Remote Desktop.
Game testing is practically as bad as the unemployment line.. Low pay, bad hours, no real opportunity for advancement.
So, why would women, in general want to do that, when there are crap receptionist positions, decent tip-based jobs (which women can earn better tips at), and cash register jobs aplenty?
How do you get airplay? How do you get reviewed in the paper? How do you get on the news? You have to work the media according to their little rat-brain ruleset... Try reading 'Feeding the Media Beast' - it's a great primer to how the press operate, acquire and follow stories, and eventually put you online, in print, tv, radio, etc... Since you can't make it in the front door with the music industry, you need to use one of the side doors... Primarily the internet. BUT, in order to let people know your site exists, on a mass scale, you STILL need publicity. So, focus on how you can distinguish yourself from other bands, what is the interesting story that they could make into a bland 10pm news filler item, etc... Once you get that, make it as simple to 'get' as possible, and then just beat the media with it until you're bigger than U2...
Even Elvis and the Beatles didn't make it on their MUSIC, after all... It was the media that got them into homes across the world, which then led to everyone picking up their records.
In our market (translated manga), there's a vast history for these magazines being weekly, and yet in the US market, it's really hard to break into retail outlets as a weekly magazine. For us, it makes more sense to go direct to the manga fans, and the web is a big part of that.
I think it's interesting to evaluate 'profitability on the web' for most modern businesses... Whether the site itself brings in actual cash or not, a website is still an incredibly important marketing and information tool that, for a company that can* put out a strong product, essential to not only providing profits, but happy/informed customers.
If you're going to be taking blurry pics, why use film? Save yourself the effort, and use a digital. Plus, you could do other cool things, like take a picture and* post it to your website every mile (okay, every 5 miles) you drive your car, period. I think that would be much more interesting than just taking a trip across country. Put together a little album of your travels when you sell the thing.
Well, seriously speaking, I wonder what kind of long term damage vibrators could cause to... certain body parts...
One more reason to hook up with one of those lonely geeks out there, I guess... Hint, hint...
I think the message it's really sending is that "sports/games that are basically all about pattern matching and attaining optimized paths to victory make people paranoid when, outside of those tasks, they find none of the rest of the world works that way".
Or something.
And don't you think that most of those bay area companies that wanted a CS degree were just plain clueless about what they needed* in a given position? As an IT Manager, I'm hardly surprised that HR or general staff would just assume that all technical/computer oriented job holders must have a CS degree. In my experience, and as someone else mentioned, CS people do skew a little bit away from good interpersonal skills - the type of concentration you need to sit in front of a monitor for 9 hours is different from the concentration required to listen to a whining user wondering "why the Internet is down".
;)
If you're not looking to program for a living, I'd suggest avoiding the CS degree - unless you wanted to double major... It's ALWAYS better in MIS management understands what the hell their programmers are talking about.
I upgraded my replayTV a few months back, and I've since noticed that the 120GB drive I put in (Maxtor 5400rpm) makes a very audible clicking noise as it writes/scans... I'd just warn anyone considering an upgrade to definitely ear-test the drive first if possible... What is perfectly acceptable/quiet in terms of in-computer use, can be deafening when watching a tense moment of (intended) silence on-screen.
I myself have found it maddening how out of date Red Carpet's version of Mozilla is... Though, for pre 1.0 software, how do you determine what is 'up to date'? If an app, even gnumeric, is still in development/beta, perhaps it's more responsible to hold off until it stabilizes... After all, there are still RPMs of the more 'dangerous' builds you can find via other means. I'd prefer if a service like Red Carpet had a solid vetting process to make sure crazy software stays off my otherwise stable/secure/etc linux box.
I dunno, I've got a Matrox g400, and I've never been able to get the 3d support to stick, under any version of X... Dualhead has been similarly elusive. I think the guy's original point is this: Windows users only have to worry about in-game tweaking to improve their output... On Linux, you usually need to hand-recompile your kernel, get it wrong 4-5 times, and lose sound support just to get it right. Linux gaming will happen when 3-d is considered as important as basic 2-d graphic support as a 'built-in', need-to-have functionality.
And that's exactly the point of why the Mac's still around... You can't quantify respect, or even usability, on a rigid scale of actions. When all the dust has settled, and the computer has been turned off* for the night, the Mac's advantages shine... I regularly use both Macs and Windows machines and Linux boxes and Novell warts and NT sludgepiles, and the simple fact is that the limitations of the Mac, such as they are, allow me to see past technical concerns and concentrate on what I'm actually doing. To go back to your analogy about artists, the Mac artist is* the one making their own canvas - not through open source software, or custom-configured hardware - but rather by not focusing on computer-related issues at all. The Mac lets you go from turning the box on to creating*... Something that Windows cannot claim, and something Linux doesn't even WANT to achieve. Some people say Macs are toys, and I smile and think: "what sparks my creativity more, colorful toys, or cheap electronics in 'professional' cases?"