It's an especially bad analogy because he has it completely backwards. What usually happens is the Formula 1 race engineers are the ones who invent new motor vehicle technologies. Then after many years those technologies are gradually adopted by "normal" cars. See the linear paddle shifting transmission as the prime example. See various braking, suspension and aerodynamic systems for the rest.
I just tried it out, because I've got some burning gentoo questions that nobody on the forums can answer.
First off, their web chat interface was crazy broken. It just reloaded a thousand times a second.
Their phone support was actually really good. I was surprised that it wasn't slashdotted. I didn't have to wait at all. The sad part is that calling them was about the equivalent of calling myself on the phone. They did the same google search that I did and found the same stuff I did. This is really only good for people who don't have a geeky friend who knows as much as I do. For now it's free call them with everything you've got. But it wont be worth paying for because they are no better able to answer the burning ultra hard questions than you or I.
I feel like I'm the only geek in the world who doesn't like this show/movie. I watched numerous episodes including the entire pilot and was completely unimpressed. It looked to me just like every other average sci-fi show that the sci-fi channel produces. Granted, I was never a fan of this kind of sci-fi. I like Star Wars, but I hate Star Trek with a passion. Firefly/Serenty I don't really hate, there was just nothing great about it. It's "bleh" to me.
Am I alone here? I mean seriously, how much of the liking of this show is because of the show and how much is because of the hype and mystique surrounding it?
I guess it doesn't really matter. But it's frustrating for my friends and I because I can't understand at all why they think this thing is so great. And they can't understand at all why I don't think it's the best thing since sliced bread.
Of course the momentum has slowed. Everyone who is smart enough to switch to Firefox already has. And some people are using Opera, konqueror, safar, epihany, etc. where applicable. There wont be firefox growth again until someone finds a way to push all the stupid IE users. If you find that way, you will become very rich.
This is a problem I have noticed with Linux many times. On the whole, Linux is incredibly rock solid. But there are rare instances where specific combinations of Linux software and hardware will cause crazy problems. For example, at one time there was a problem with APIC in the kernel. If you had an nforce2 motherboard and a kernel with APIC enabled it would freeze up semi-randomly. 99% of people did not have this combination, so it wasn't a problem for them. But for the 1% of people who did, how were they supposed to figure it out? Only if they are very involved in a Linux community would they discover this.
Another problem I had was with the combination of Ubuntu, Nforce2 IGP, the NVidia driver and not having DDR Dual-Channel enabled. This combination brought about frequent freezing. But who could know without good googling skills that this combination was the cause of the freezing?
I'm willing to bet that this guy had one of these weird combinatory problems. It just goes to show that the Linux testing procedure is not 100%. But switching to Windows when this happens is basically just claiming ignorance instead of figuring out why it's crashing and fixing it.
So yeah, cencorship is bad. And all the props to the people who get around it.
But I see these Falun Gong people on the streets of NY protesting and handing out whatever crazy newspaper they've got. And while the fact that their beliefs are illegal is bad, these Falun Gong people are kind of nutty. They do some wacky mediation stuff. And they dress up as people being tortured with rags covered in fake blood. There's a huge wikipedia article on it you can read.
What I'm trying to say is that it is wrong for the Chinese government to persecute these people. But when that government calls Falun Gong a cult who teaches superstition, they aren't too far away from the truth.
Proper computing education should be mandatory for high school graduation and equivalent. Not knowing this kind of information in today's world is the equivalent of being illiterate. You wouldn't hire an illiterate person to read books all day. So don't hire a computer illiterate person to sit at a computer all day.
The genius over at Lost Garden keeps falling under the radar. He consistently has the best articles on the net. His piece on the revolution, and Nintendo in general, is no different. If you read one thing about the revolution, make it this.
I don't even need to read the article to agree that LSB is bad. It's not the idea of LSB that is bad either. Having a standard base to build software against would be great for Linux software developers. There would be a slow moving target that is easy to hit. It's also a way to guarantee that software you write will work on any distro that follows the standard. And distros not following the standard would at least know what it is and make accomodations to get that software to run without giving the developer more work of building for multiple targets.
The problem is that the standard that the LSB came up with. First of all it includes rpm, which I don't have time to complain about. The real problem with it is really that it doesn't work. I had a dev kit for some hardware at a job once. That dev kit was built for LSB. First I tried to fenagle it to working on Gentoo (non-lsb) no go. So I tried it on the newest Fedora of the time (lsb) and it still didn't work. I checked to see if it was the fault of the devs or the fault of fedora. I found it was the fault of neither. They both followed LSB perfectly. The LSB was just so crappy that it allowed for an incompatability between two standard-obeying programs. But now that the problem was discovered I got it to work.
LSB is a great idea. But it wont work unless the standard itself is sane.
Firefox vulnerabilities are fixed within a day, two at most. Just about every time I see a Firefox vulnerability it is published before a fix is available. Also, I've never seen an instance of someone actually exploiting a Firefox vulnerability for evil.
IE on the other hand doesn't publish vulnerabilities until they are fixed. So 10 means they fixed only 10, how many are there? Also, IE exploits are actually exploited all the time. Usually it happens after the patch is released and the exploit published. Firefox upgrades itself now with very little user interaction whenever there is a fix. IE only updates on Black Tuesday, if you're lucky.
Actually, you're dead wrong. I've discovered that bad handwriting, tendonitis, carpal tunnel, etc. are all caused by using the wrist. Apparently anyone who is good at drawing or handwriting locks their wrist and uses their shoulder and elbow to move the writing utensil. And using your shoulder and elbow to move the mouse is the ergonomically correct way that actually has higher potential for accuracy. Just adjust your sensitivity accordingly.
The problem is that for geeks like you and me we are used to the wrist movement because I guess it's more natural to us. I've been trying to switch, but it's hard.
The XBoX has been killing PC gaming. People are playing Halo instead of Counter-Strike. I remember when some people only had one argument against switching to Linux, and that was "there are no games". Well, thanks to MS that's no longer an issue. Personally I dual-boot, but my XP partition is very small and only contains Steam. It doesn't get very much use either, and probably wont anytime soon thanks to Advance Wars: DS.
Let's see if MS actually makes some quality PC games or just brings some XBoX 360 games over that will only run on Vista. I mean, for a gamer there is really no reason to upgrade to Vista. So MS has to go out and make one.
You can make multiple root/Administrator accounts on a machine. In Linux just make more users with uid 0. In Windows just add to the Administrator group.
For everyone one on your staff who should have access, create an account on the machine for them. Give them the same username everywhere. They can keep track of their own passwords. If they want the same password at every client it's ok because they remember it. If they have a different password at every client there are plenty of handy palm/blackberry applications that encrypt/store for a single person easily.
My grandma likes to watch any television show with police, lawyers, detectives, etc. Make a way for her to interactively get the same type of entertainment, but have fresh content. Perhaps a very simple video choose your own adventure. A serial one spanning many episodes that come out once a week or so. My grandma would like that once you got her to play it.
She also plays Mah-Jongg. Old Jewish lady Mah-Jongg, not tile matching pyramid game or the real chinese game. Make a way for her to play that online that is simple and comfortable. Voice control would probably be best. They yell out the tiles as they throw them out. If the grannies had headsets and the tile they yelled actually caused it to be thrown down, that would really do the trick.
I usually don't go looking for software that does X, Y or Z because I usually just know. But if I have a need I often just ask people or use google. Also, I lookin Gentoo Portage using the esearch program. 99% of the Linux software you ever want to use is in there.
As for knowing if the software is good or not I run a demo, or I just install it if it's free. If I know what I want it shouldn't take more than the install time plus a few minutes to know if it's good or not. If there is no way to try the software for free, screw it. I wont even consider something I can't try before even knowing if it's what I want.
But most of the time I learn about new software isn't because I go looking for a program with certain features. It's from keeping track of things like del.icio.us pouplar. If there is a new program released that does something cool it will be there.
SONY comes out and markets the PSP as to compete with the DS. The DS basically won with Nintendogs and Advance Wars. With Mario Kart on the horizon hope is lost.
But wait, what's this? By selling UMDs they switched markets! PSP vs. video iPod, stay tuned.
I had freezes in 2.6 a long time ago. It was caused by a combination of nforce and IO-APIC. All I had to do what disable APIC in the kernel until the next kernel version was released with a fix. Other than that I've had no problems with 2.6.
Stop being paranoid. If you configure the kernel correctly it wont freeze. And for all the great things 2.6 has to offer I don't know why anyone would choose to use an older kernel if they have a choice.
Certifications are things that stupid people get because stupid companies require you to have them before they hire you or give you certain responsibilities. Smart people don't get stupid certifications or work for stupid companies. About the only thing they are good for is resume filler.
A good idea is to get one or two of the better certs and stick them on the resume. If an employer seems really interested in them then don't work there!
This type of bundling and pre-ordering is soley for the retailers to profit more. As it is, the margins on video games and consoles is very very small. So in order for a game retailer to make money they need to sell a lot of used games and they need to sell popular new games in high quantity.
Most importantly they need to know exactly how many copies of a game to order. Buying a few extra copies of a game and never selling can eat the profits earned of all the copies sold. That's why stores like pre-orders. They can order exactly the right number of items they are going to sell. And places like EB know that they are the only game in town for guaranteeing people their hardware will be in store on launch day.
So to maximize profit they toss in a bundle. That way they can sell copies of games they normally wouldn't sell. The people who absolutely must have the system ASAP will buy it anyway.
Personally I'll buy a bundle as long as everything in the bundle is things I would buy anyway. But if there is even one item in the bundle I don't want I wont do it. The reason is that the bundle price is usually less than the sume of the prices of the separate items. But I hate it when they throw shitty games and 3rd party controllers in there.
It's not just DVDs. It's all sorts of things like Flash, the NVidia driver, SUN Java (Blackdown doesn't cut it) mplayer will full codecs and more. I actually recently wrote a bit in my blog about how the free zealots are keeping this stuff out. Sure, some of it is legally questionable. But in Ubuntu you have to read a wiki and jump through some hoops to get multimedia to not suck. The capability is there to make it easier for the user who doesn't care about freeness to get this stuff to work in a few clicks. Let's do it.
The problem is here that the demands the corporations are making are silly. What you get is a corporation that has problem A. They purchase a proprietary solution to problem A, but it isn't a very good solution. If they switch to Linux they expect to use the exact same shitty solution to problem A. Linux offers a better, free solution to problem A, but they demand to use the same proprietary, expensive and silly one that they've been using. Even if they are willing to make one change to save money, they aren't willing to make any other changes.
Here's a hypothetical example. A company has a whole bunch of windows workstations running a crummy custom VB app to interface with their database. They want to switch to Linux to save money and increase security. The VB app doesn't run so well in wine, because it's crummy. They could hire someone to conver the VB app into a web app that would be better in many ways. And the cost of hiring that person is less than the money they are saving by switching OSes. But no, they demand to stick with what they've got.
If you are going to explore using a different base you have to be willing to explore alternatives to everything resting on that base. If you are going to buy a new car, you can't expect that all the after-market parts on your old car will work in the new one. Some of them will, some of them wont. If you really need those parts you have to tought it out and get an equivalent part that is compatible with the new car. If your old car is rusted and busted, you've got no choice. So deal with it.
It wont be any enormous instant change. But it will be a very slow methodical one. I notice that many companies are developing more and more web applications rather than buying expensive proprietary software. As companies break free of the proprietary software on their own, they will be more open to alternative OS and hardware solutions. All it takes is one salesman to go in to such a company and win them over.
AJAX helps because there was a set of desktop applications that could not formerly be made into equivalent web applications, but they now can be. You'll see MS take some losses over the years if the trend continues.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an especially bad analogy because he has it completely backwards. What usually happens is the Formula 1 race engineers are the ones who invent new motor vehicle technologies. Then after many years those technologies are gradually adopted by "normal" cars. See the linear paddle shifting transmission as the prime example. See various braking, suspension and aerodynamic systems for the rest.
I just tried it out, because I've got some burning gentoo questions that nobody on the forums can answer.
First off, their web chat interface was crazy broken. It just reloaded a thousand times a second.
Their phone support was actually really good. I was surprised that it wasn't slashdotted. I didn't have to wait at all. The sad part is that calling them was about the equivalent of calling myself on the phone. They did the same google search that I did and found the same stuff I did. This is really only good for people who don't have a geeky friend who knows as much as I do. For now it's free call them with everything you've got. But it wont be worth paying for because they are no better able to answer the burning ultra hard questions than you or I.
I feel like I'm the only geek in the world who doesn't like this show/movie. I watched numerous episodes including the entire pilot and was completely unimpressed. It looked to me just like every other average sci-fi show that the sci-fi channel produces. Granted, I was never a fan of this kind of sci-fi. I like Star Wars, but I hate Star Trek with a passion. Firefly/Serenty I don't really hate, there was just nothing great about it. It's "bleh" to me.
Am I alone here? I mean seriously, how much of the liking of this show is because of the show and how much is because of the hype and mystique surrounding it?
I guess it doesn't really matter. But it's frustrating for my friends and I because I can't understand at all why they think this thing is so great. And they can't understand at all why I don't think it's the best thing since sliced bread.
I always thought Loom was the first game on CD-ROM. Time to google and find out.
Of course the momentum has slowed. Everyone who is smart enough to switch to Firefox already has. And some people are using Opera, konqueror, safar, epihany, etc. where applicable. There wont be firefox growth again until someone finds a way to push all the stupid IE users. If you find that way, you will become very rich.
This is a problem I have noticed with Linux many times. On the whole, Linux is incredibly rock solid. But there are rare instances where specific combinations of Linux software and hardware will cause crazy problems. For example, at one time there was a problem with APIC in the kernel. If you had an nforce2 motherboard and a kernel with APIC enabled it would freeze up semi-randomly. 99% of people did not have this combination, so it wasn't a problem for them. But for the 1% of people who did, how were they supposed to figure it out? Only if they are very involved in a Linux community would they discover this.
Another problem I had was with the combination of Ubuntu, Nforce2 IGP, the NVidia driver and not having DDR Dual-Channel enabled. This combination brought about frequent freezing. But who could know without good googling skills that this combination was the cause of the freezing?
I'm willing to bet that this guy had one of these weird combinatory problems. It just goes to show that the Linux testing procedure is not 100%. But switching to Windows when this happens is basically just claiming ignorance instead of figuring out why it's crashing and fixing it.
So yeah, cencorship is bad. And all the props to the people who get around it.
But I see these Falun Gong people on the streets of NY protesting and handing out whatever crazy newspaper they've got. And while the fact that their beliefs are illegal is bad, these Falun Gong people are kind of nutty. They do some wacky mediation stuff. And they dress up as people being tortured with rags covered in fake blood. There's a huge wikipedia article on it you can read.
What I'm trying to say is that it is wrong for the Chinese government to persecute these people. But when that government calls Falun Gong a cult who teaches superstition, they aren't too far away from the truth.
Proper computing education should be mandatory for high school graduation and equivalent. Not knowing this kind of information in today's world is the equivalent of being illiterate. You wouldn't hire an illiterate person to read books all day. So don't hire a computer illiterate person to sit at a computer all day.
The genius over at Lost Garden keeps falling under the radar. He consistently has the best articles on the net. His piece on the revolution, and Nintendo in general, is no different. If you read one thing about the revolution, make it this.
I don't even need to read the article to agree that LSB is bad. It's not the idea of LSB that is bad either. Having a standard base to build software against would be great for Linux software developers. There would be a slow moving target that is easy to hit. It's also a way to guarantee that software you write will work on any distro that follows the standard. And distros not following the standard would at least know what it is and make accomodations to get that software to run without giving the developer more work of building for multiple targets.
The problem is that the standard that the LSB came up with. First of all it includes rpm, which I don't have time to complain about. The real problem with it is really that it doesn't work. I had a dev kit for some hardware at a job once. That dev kit was built for LSB. First I tried to fenagle it to working on Gentoo (non-lsb) no go. So I tried it on the newest Fedora of the time (lsb) and it still didn't work. I checked to see if it was the fault of the devs or the fault of fedora. I found it was the fault of neither. They both followed LSB perfectly. The LSB was just so crappy that it allowed for an incompatability between two standard-obeying programs. But now that the problem was discovered I got it to work.
LSB is a great idea. But it wont work unless the standard itself is sane.
Firefox vulnerabilities are fixed within a day, two at most. Just about every time I see a Firefox vulnerability it is published before a fix is available. Also, I've never seen an instance of someone actually exploiting a Firefox vulnerability for evil.
IE on the other hand doesn't publish vulnerabilities until they are fixed. So 10 means they fixed only 10, how many are there? Also, IE exploits are actually exploited all the time. Usually it happens after the patch is released and the exploit published. Firefox upgrades itself now with very little user interaction whenever there is a fix. IE only updates on Black Tuesday, if you're lucky.
Actually, you're dead wrong. I've discovered that bad handwriting, tendonitis, carpal tunnel, etc. are all caused by using the wrist. Apparently anyone who is good at drawing or handwriting locks their wrist and uses their shoulder and elbow to move the writing utensil. And using your shoulder and elbow to move the mouse is the ergonomically correct way that actually has higher potential for accuracy. Just adjust your sensitivity accordingly.
The problem is that for geeks like you and me we are used to the wrist movement because I guess it's more natural to us. I've been trying to switch, but it's hard.
The XBoX has been killing PC gaming. People are playing Halo instead of Counter-Strike. I remember when some people only had one argument against switching to Linux, and that was "there are no games". Well, thanks to MS that's no longer an issue. Personally I dual-boot, but my XP partition is very small and only contains Steam. It doesn't get very much use either, and probably wont anytime soon thanks to Advance Wars: DS.
Let's see if MS actually makes some quality PC games or just brings some XBoX 360 games over that will only run on Vista. I mean, for a gamer there is really no reason to upgrade to Vista. So MS has to go out and make one.
Screw the retailer. Things like Steam and potentially the Nintendo Revolution are where we are going.
You can make multiple root/Administrator accounts on a machine. In Linux just make more users with uid 0. In Windows just add to the Administrator group.
For everyone one on your staff who should have access, create an account on the machine for them. Give them the same username everywhere. They can keep track of their own passwords. If they want the same password at every client it's ok because they remember it. If they have a different password at every client there are plenty of handy palm/blackberry applications that encrypt/store for a single person easily.
My grandma likes to watch any television show with police, lawyers, detectives, etc. Make a way for her to interactively get the same type of entertainment, but have fresh content. Perhaps a very simple video choose your own adventure. A serial one spanning many episodes that come out once a week or so. My grandma would like that once you got her to play it.
She also plays Mah-Jongg. Old Jewish lady Mah-Jongg, not tile matching pyramid game or the real chinese game. Make a way for her to play that online that is simple and comfortable. Voice control would probably be best. They yell out the tiles as they throw them out. If the grannies had headsets and the tile they yelled actually caused it to be thrown down, that would really do the trick.
I usually don't go looking for software that does X, Y or Z because I usually just know. But if I have a need I often just ask people or use google. Also, I lookin Gentoo Portage using the esearch program. 99% of the Linux software you ever want to use is in there.
As for knowing if the software is good or not I run a demo, or I just install it if it's free. If I know what I want it shouldn't take more than the install time plus a few minutes to know if it's good or not. If there is no way to try the software for free, screw it. I wont even consider something I can't try before even knowing if it's what I want.
But most of the time I learn about new software isn't because I go looking for a program with certain features. It's from keeping track of things like del.icio.us pouplar. If there is a new program released that does something cool it will be there.
SONY comes out and markets the PSP as to compete with the DS. The DS basically won with Nintendogs and Advance Wars. With Mario Kart on the horizon hope is lost.
But wait, what's this? By selling UMDs they switched markets! PSP vs. video iPod, stay tuned.
I had freezes in 2.6 a long time ago. It was caused by a combination of nforce and IO-APIC. All I had to do what disable APIC in the kernel until the next kernel version was released with a fix. Other than that I've had no problems with 2.6.
Stop being paranoid. If you configure the kernel correctly it wont freeze. And for all the great things 2.6 has to offer I don't know why anyone would choose to use an older kernel if they have a choice.
Certifications are things that stupid people get because stupid companies require you to have them before they hire you or give you certain responsibilities. Smart people don't get stupid certifications or work for stupid companies. About the only thing they are good for is resume filler.
A good idea is to get one or two of the better certs and stick them on the resume. If an employer seems really interested in them then don't work there!
This type of bundling and pre-ordering is soley for the retailers to profit more. As it is, the margins on video games and consoles is very very small. So in order for a game retailer to make money they need to sell a lot of used games and they need to sell popular new games in high quantity.
Most importantly they need to know exactly how many copies of a game to order. Buying a few extra copies of a game and never selling can eat the profits earned of all the copies sold. That's why stores like pre-orders. They can order exactly the right number of items they are going to sell. And places like EB know that they are the only game in town for guaranteeing people their hardware will be in store on launch day.
So to maximize profit they toss in a bundle. That way they can sell copies of games they normally wouldn't sell. The people who absolutely must have the system ASAP will buy it anyway.
Personally I'll buy a bundle as long as everything in the bundle is things I would buy anyway. But if there is even one item in the bundle I don't want I wont do it. The reason is that the bundle price is usually less than the sume of the prices of the separate items. But I hate it when they throw shitty games and 3rd party controllers in there.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
It's not just DVDs. It's all sorts of things like Flash, the NVidia driver, SUN Java (Blackdown doesn't cut it) mplayer will full codecs and more. I actually recently wrote a bit in my blog about how the free zealots are keeping this stuff out. Sure, some of it is legally questionable. But in Ubuntu you have to read a wiki and jump through some hoops to get multimedia to not suck. The capability is there to make it easier for the user who doesn't care about freeness to get this stuff to work in a few clicks. Let's do it.
The problem is here that the demands the corporations are making are silly. What you get is a corporation that has problem A. They purchase a proprietary solution to problem A, but it isn't a very good solution. If they switch to Linux they expect to use the exact same shitty solution to problem A. Linux offers a better, free solution to problem A, but they demand to use the same proprietary, expensive and silly one that they've been using. Even if they are willing to make one change to save money, they aren't willing to make any other changes.
Here's a hypothetical example. A company has a whole bunch of windows workstations running a crummy custom VB app to interface with their database. They want to switch to Linux to save money and increase security. The VB app doesn't run so well in wine, because it's crummy. They could hire someone to conver the VB app into a web app that would be better in many ways. And the cost of hiring that person is less than the money they are saving by switching OSes. But no, they demand to stick with what they've got.
If you are going to explore using a different base you have to be willing to explore alternatives to everything resting on that base. If you are going to buy a new car, you can't expect that all the after-market parts on your old car will work in the new one. Some of them will, some of them wont. If you really need those parts you have to tought it out and get an equivalent part that is compatible with the new car. If your old car is rusted and busted, you've got no choice. So deal with it.
It wont be any enormous instant change. But it will be a very slow methodical one. I notice that many companies are developing more and more web applications rather than buying expensive proprietary software. As companies break free of the proprietary software on their own, they will be more open to alternative OS and hardware solutions. All it takes is one salesman to go in to such a company and win them over.
AJAX helps because there was a set of desktop applications that could not formerly be made into equivalent web applications, but they now can be. You'll see MS take some losses over the years if the trend continues.