As an 18 year old in my first year of college, I have something to say about this "blame the parents" thing. My parents raised me just fine, brought me to church every sunday (at least until my junior year of high school), had all those little "talks" with me while I was growing up, always tried whatever they could to keep me on the right track, get me to study, do my homework, and what-not.
Unfortunately, it didn't work. I don't know why, but I did pretty miserably in high school (averaging around a 2.75 GPA... miserable in MY opinion, anyway) and almost didn't graduate because I forged notes from my parents on a regular basis to excuse myself from class and got busted. Now I'm doing even MORE hideous in college. It has nothing to do with my intelligence level, just my study habits. If I'm doing something that interests me, I'll rip the problem to shreds. Give me something interesting and complicated to program, it'll get done real quick. Give me a perl script to write, it'll get done real quick. Give me a paper to write? aahhh... I'll do it later. I'd rather drink a 40 and smoke a pack and half of cigarettes while watching The Simpsons. Needless to say, the paper never gets done. I drink a 40, and maybe another one, pass out, and wake up at 4 the next afternoon, ready to start another night of drinking and chain smoking. Maybe I'll smoke a J or drop acid. Maybe I'll go out and get laid. Who knows, as long as it doesn't involve studying.
But don't go blaming this on my parents. There's nothing to blame it on. Looking back on it, I'd say I had a reasonably "normal" childhood (from the typical American point of view, which is probably what we should be blaming in the first place) and my parents disciplined me a "normal" amount, they didn't beat me, didn't verbally abuse me, and didn't let me run rampant through the street shooting people. What more do you expect from them? Also, you can't blame my high school experience for any of this, either. I was a reasonably popular kid (not a jock, obviously... note my heavy nicotine dependancy:-p....) who got along with everybody. I was a pretty quiet kid, but wasn't a "geek" in the typical sense of the word (although give me a computer with Linux installed and you won't be able to tell the difference!:-) So why am I in such a bad situation right now? I haven't been to class in a month and a half (no joke), spend my nights drinking and smoking, spend my days sleeping, and have a bank debt of $250 that I've been ignoring for the past 6 months, along with the constant "we're gonna sic our lawyers on you if you don't pay us, we promise!" letters from TeleCheck.
Why do I have such a glaring lack of self-control and motivation? It's obviously not from my parents' mistakes, as they did everything the same as most parents do. It's not from my elementary/middle/high school experiences, which were pretty much typical. So why, then? Why did I turn out so unsuccessful so far, while somebody who was raised pretty much the same way as I was might be at Princeton right now averaging a 3.98? Don't be so quick to blame the parents of these kids. For all you know they may have been the best parents in the world and it just didn't get through to the kids.
i kindof like em, personally.:-) and apple, IMHO, has be best one out there...
Oh, most definately. Right now I'm running E with the ApplePlatinum theme and the MacOS 8.5 GTK theme. MacOS is IMHO the nicest looking OS out there, if not quite the most functional. From what I've seen of OS X though, that might change. Almost makes me want to blow a huge wad of cash on one of the new PowerMacs.
so now we have apples beautiful GUI running on top of a solid, fast, and open *nix based kernel, why sould we not be happy.
OSX for intel? maybe. i think they should just make an X interface and blow the pants off KDE and gnome and...
That would make me very happy... if, and ONLY if, it was released as a TRULY Open Source project, preferably under the GPL, but at least under a license that allows modification and redistribution (dunno if the APSL allows this, I've been up for 36 hours and don't have the attention span to see:-) No, but seriously, having the MacOS interface on top of the Linux kernel (and the GNU tools, for all you gotta-be-correct people out there) would be wonderful.
1- apple should become a hardware company? well, the PPC's are really powerful and they do it very well well, so...
2- apple should make OSX for all platformas and focus on software? well, they do it very well, so...
3- apple should forget the core OS AND the hardware and focus on what they really do best: GUI's? well, there's an idea...
I like your view of things:-) I never really thought about it before, but now I guess that my idea of the ideal OS would be Linux (*sigh*... GNU/Linux) with the MacOS interface and a working copy of WINE and Executor. Ahhh... that would make me happy:-) D'oh..... double d'oh... gotta be at work in 15 minutes and I haven't showered yet. Dammit Slashdot... stop taking up so much of my time.
"Hmmm, I know it's just cruelty to you guys, but playing mp3s (stored across NFS) uses less than 1% of my system CPU time, and 3% of my RAM (X11amp I'm talking of here). Needless to say, I can do all kinds of cool things whilst listening to completely uninterrupted music. Like I can have five smooth Mesa screensavers running in windows, be compiling the latest Gnome CVS, writing emails, playing with the GIMP and Blender, etc."
Nope, sorry. X11Amp does a *very* good job of hiding it's CPU usage from top. I am (err... was) writing an mp3 visualization program (some of you may remember downloading it from freshmeat, deciding it sucked, and deleting it... it was called Flashback and I've stopped working on it) that used x11amp plugins for mp3 decoding and sound output. When it was doing nothing but this, through the plugins, top would register the CPU at 99.9% free. Top doesn't provide a *true* view of the CPU usage, but it's close enough. Problem is, it's easy to hide CPU usage from it. I don't know if this was because the mp3 code was in a different thread or what, but it didn't show up in top. Using an mp3 player such as mpg123 which doesn't hide itself from top (although I'm sure x11amp doesn't do this on purpose) shows the CPU usage at closer to 8-9% on my machine. That said, I can play an mp3 and quake 2 with sound, mixing done in software, and have quake not lag one bit, on a 350mhz P2 with 64 mb of RAM. Other than for sound quality, there is absolutely no point in using one of these bitches in a newer PC. Although they have great potential for older PC's, embedded devices, wasting time:), stuff like that.
By the way, if you want to play 2 sound channels at once through one sound card, get an Ensoniq AudioPCI es1371 (don't think the es1370 will do it.) The Linux driver provides two devices,/dev/dsp and/dev/dsp1, and handles mixing itself with low CPU usage. Matt
"Why do so many of us dislike Red Hat? We're snobs, that's why. We pride ourselves on using an "alternative" Operating System. Now that Linux is starting to be used by Joe User, we are losing that special feeling that we get by being part of an exclusive group. You hear the same thing when an underground music group suddenly gets popular. People running for the doors screaming "SELL OUT". "
Very nicely said... couldn't have said it better myself:-)
I've been using Linux for 5 years now, and started off with Slackware. Last year I decided to try out RedHat (5.0 I think) and I've been using it ever since. I'm a CLI person (like all *real* linux people, huh?:-) but I must say I love RedHat... everything from the easy installation to the automatic setup of X. RPMs make everything easier to install (for dumbasses as well as power users), but don't keep you from compiling and installing tarballs if you want. I don't understand the problem everybody has with RedHat, because they've obviously done some wonderful things for the Linux community.
I'm sorry to say this, guys, and I may be missing something, but from my experience over the last few days (I just installed NT4 because of a burning need for 3d Studio MAX:-) Apache on NT seems to actually serve up pages faster than Linux on the same box serving up the same pages. When I access the page from across campus while Linux is running, there is a somewhat noticeable delay before the page pops up (very small, though.) When NT is running, the page pops up with almost no delay. While this upsets me, there's no point in lying about it because then we'd be no better than Microsoft.
BTW both setups of Apache were un-tweaked, freshly installed copies of 1.3.6 serving up the same static pages off of their native filesystems. The server is a P2-350 with 64 mb of RAM. The NT side of things is running NT4 and the Linux side is using kernel 2.2.1.
And NO, I'm not an NT junkie. I'm a hardcore Linux fan who regrets having to run Microsoft products at all, but I just want to tell it like it is.
If anybody would like to comment on this to me, please send me an email rather than post it here, because I'm probably not gonna end up coming back to this page. (spong@isr.umd.edu)
Once we can get the "mom factor" - ie: your mother can use linux - then we can really consider linux mainstream.
Yuck. What a dumb idea. My mom prefers Unix/Linux/Solaris/Whatever with a CLI to Windows. Hell, I had to teach her how to move windows around, close them, all that shit, and within 20 minutes she had given up and was back to telnetting into her Solaris box at work.
Now what we need to do is to teach her that it's a dumb idea to lick a power supply to see if it's plugged in. No joke. She actually did this and electrocuted herself.
"Reproduce the one piece of MS software that actually works better than anybody else's;"
Uhhh... or not. RedHat 5.2 found my Ethernet card (3c905b) just fine, worked like a charm out of the box. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get NT to work with the goddam card, as well as Solaris. They both incorrectly identify it as a 3c905 (an incompatible card) and then crash when they try to use it. I've *never* had a Linux installation program crash on me.
Argh.... you people who "can see MS moving away in the rear view mirror" are making me jealous. Me? I'm stuck with Winblows until AutoDesk and Metacreations decide to port 3d Studio MAX, Bryce3D, and Poser 3 over to Linux. A version of Adobe Illustrator would be nice too. Anybody workin' on a Gimp Illustrator?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
No, I saw part of one that was from a camcorder and had all the sound, missing scenes that weren't in the pre-release, ..., ...
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I couldn't even read the article, got slashdotted in the 10 minutes I went out to have a cigarette, during which the page was posted.
How come slashdot doesn't get slashdotted???
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
As an 18 year old in my first year of college, I have something to say about this "blame the parents" thing. My parents raised me just fine, brought me to church every sunday (at least until my junior year of high school), had all those little "talks" with me while I was growing up, always tried whatever they could to keep me on the right track, get me to study, do my homework, and what-not.
:-p....) who got along with everybody. I was a pretty quiet kid, but wasn't a "geek" in the typical sense of the word (although give me a computer with Linux installed and you won't be able to tell the difference! :-) So why am I in such a bad situation right now? I haven't been to class in a month and a half (no joke), spend my nights drinking and smoking, spend my days sleeping, and have a bank debt of $250 that I've been ignoring for the past 6 months, along with the constant "we're gonna sic our lawyers on you if you don't pay us, we promise!" letters from TeleCheck.
Unfortunately, it didn't work. I don't know why, but I did pretty miserably in high school (averaging around a 2.75 GPA... miserable in MY opinion, anyway) and almost didn't graduate because I forged notes from my parents on a regular basis to excuse myself from class and got busted. Now I'm doing even MORE hideous in college. It has nothing to do with my intelligence level, just my study habits. If I'm doing something that interests me, I'll rip the problem to shreds. Give me something interesting and complicated to program, it'll get done real quick. Give me a perl script to write, it'll get done real quick. Give me a paper to write? aahhh... I'll do it later. I'd rather drink a 40 and smoke a pack and half of cigarettes while watching The Simpsons. Needless to say, the paper never gets done. I drink a 40, and maybe another one, pass out, and wake up at 4 the next afternoon, ready to start another night of drinking and chain smoking. Maybe I'll smoke a J or drop acid. Maybe I'll go out and get laid. Who knows, as long as it doesn't involve studying.
But don't go blaming this on my parents. There's nothing to blame it on. Looking back on it, I'd say I had a reasonably "normal" childhood (from the typical American point of view, which is probably what we should be blaming in the first place) and my parents disciplined me a "normal" amount, they didn't beat me, didn't verbally abuse me, and didn't let me run rampant through the street shooting people. What more do you expect from them? Also, you can't blame my high school experience for any of this, either. I was a reasonably popular kid (not a jock, obviously... note my heavy nicotine dependancy
Why do I have such a glaring lack of self-control and motivation? It's obviously not from my parents' mistakes, as they did everything the same as most parents do. It's not from my elementary/middle/high school experiences, which were pretty much typical. So why, then? Why did I turn out so unsuccessful so far, while somebody who was raised pretty much the same way as I was might be at Princeton right now averaging a 3.98? Don't be so quick to blame the parents of these kids. For all you know they may have been the best parents in the world and it just didn't get through to the kids.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
GUI's are for dumb people???
:-) and apple, IMHO, has be best one out there...
:-) No, but seriously, having the MacOS interface on top of the Linux kernel (and the GNU tools, for all you gotta-be-correct people out there) would be wonderful.
:-) I never really thought about it before, but now I guess that my idea of the ideal OS would be Linux (*sigh*... GNU/Linux) with the MacOS interface and a working copy of WINE and Executor. Ahhh... that would make me happy :-) D'oh..... double d'oh... gotta be at work in 15 minutes and I haven't showered yet. Dammit Slashdot... stop taking up so much of my time.
i kindof like em, personally.
Oh, most definately. Right now I'm running E with the ApplePlatinum theme and the MacOS 8.5 GTK theme. MacOS is IMHO the nicest looking OS out there, if not quite the most functional. From what I've seen of OS X though, that might change. Almost makes me want to blow a huge wad of cash on one of the new PowerMacs.
so now we have apples beautiful GUI running on top of a solid, fast, and open *nix based kernel, why sould we not be happy.
OSX for intel? maybe. i think they should just make an X interface and blow the pants off KDE and gnome and...
That would make me very happy... if, and ONLY if, it was released as a TRULY Open Source project, preferably under the GPL, but at least under a license that allows modification and redistribution (dunno if the APSL allows this, I've been up for 36 hours and don't have the attention span to see
1- apple should become a hardware company? well, the PPC's are really powerful and they do it very well well, so...
2- apple should make OSX for all platformas and focus on software? well, they do it very well, so...
3- apple should forget the core OS AND the hardware and focus on what they really do best: GUI's? well, there's an idea...
I like your view of things
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
"Hmmm, I know it's just cruelty to you guys, but playing mp3s (stored across NFS) uses less than 1% of my system CPU time, and 3% of my RAM (X11amp I'm talking of here). Needless to say, I can do all kinds of cool things whilst listening to completely uninterrupted music. Like I can have five smooth Mesa screensavers running in windows, be compiling the latest Gnome CVS, writing emails, playing with the GIMP and Blender, etc."
:), stuff like that.
/dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1, and handles mixing itself with low CPU usage. Matt
Nope, sorry. X11Amp does a *very* good job of hiding it's CPU usage from top. I am (err... was) writing an mp3 visualization program (some of you may remember downloading it from freshmeat, deciding it sucked, and deleting it... it was called Flashback and I've stopped working on it) that used x11amp plugins for mp3 decoding and sound output. When it was doing nothing but this, through the plugins, top would register the CPU at 99.9% free. Top doesn't provide a *true* view of the CPU usage, but it's close enough. Problem is, it's easy to hide CPU usage from it. I don't know if this was because the mp3 code was in a different thread or what, but it didn't show up in top. Using an mp3 player such as mpg123 which doesn't hide itself from top (although I'm sure x11amp doesn't do this on purpose) shows the CPU usage at closer to 8-9% on my machine. That said, I can play an mp3 and quake 2 with sound, mixing done in software, and have quake not lag one bit, on a 350mhz P2 with 64 mb of RAM. Other than for sound quality, there is absolutely no point in using one of these bitches in a newer PC. Although they have great potential for older PC's, embedded devices, wasting time
By the way, if you want to play 2 sound channels at once through one sound card, get an Ensoniq AudioPCI es1371 (don't think the es1370 will do it.) The Linux driver provides two devices,
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I had this problem too... it works if you just type in the number rather than relying on a drop-down box. Sometimes.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
"Why do so many of us dislike Red Hat? We're snobs, that's why. We pride ourselves on using an "alternative" Operating System. Now that Linux is starting to be used by Joe User, we are losing that special feeling that we get by being part of an exclusive group. You hear the same thing when an underground music group suddenly gets popular. People running for the doors screaming "SELL OUT". "
:-)
Very nicely said... couldn't have said it better myself
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I've been using Linux for 5 years now, and started off with Slackware. Last year I decided to try out RedHat (5.0 I think) and I've been using it ever since. I'm a CLI person (like all *real* linux people, huh? :-) but I must say I love RedHat... everything from the easy installation to the automatic setup of X. RPMs make everything easier to install (for dumbasses as well as power users), but don't keep you from compiling and installing tarballs if you want. I don't understand the problem everybody has with RedHat, because they've obviously done some wonderful things for the Linux community.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Nah, I know him (we both go to U of Maryland). And I'd say he's a pretty safe source.
:-)
Of course, now you have to trust ME
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Wow.... SOMEBODY had a little too much fun with xpaint :-)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I'm sorry to say this, guys, and I may be missing something, but from my experience over the last few days (I just installed NT4 because of a burning need for 3d Studio MAX :-) Apache on NT seems to actually serve up pages faster than Linux on the same box serving up the same pages. When I access the page from across campus while Linux is running, there is a somewhat noticeable delay before the page pops up (very small, though.) When NT is running, the page pops up with almost no delay. While this upsets me, there's no point in lying about it because then we'd be no better than Microsoft.
BTW both setups of Apache were un-tweaked, freshly installed copies of 1.3.6 serving up the same static pages off of their native filesystems. The server is a P2-350 with 64 mb of RAM. The NT side of things is running NT4 and the Linux side is using kernel 2.2.1.
And NO, I'm not an NT junkie. I'm a hardcore Linux fan who regrets having to run Microsoft products at all, but I just want to tell it like it is.
If anybody would like to comment on this to me, please send me an email rather than post it here, because I'm probably not gonna end up coming back to this page. (spong@isr.umd.edu)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Once we can get the "mom factor" - ie: your mother can use linux - then we can really consider linux mainstream.
Yuck. What a dumb idea. My mom prefers Unix/Linux/Solaris/Whatever with a CLI to Windows. Hell, I had to teach her how to move windows around, close them, all that shit, and within 20 minutes she had given up and was back to telnetting into her Solaris box at work.
Now what we need to do is to teach her that it's a dumb idea to lick a power supply to see if it's plugged in. No joke. She actually did this and electrocuted herself.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
"Reproduce the one piece of MS software that actually works better than anybody else's;"
Uhhh... or not. RedHat 5.2 found my Ethernet card (3c905b) just fine, worked like a charm out of the box. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get NT to work with the goddam card, as well as Solaris. They both incorrectly identify it as a 3c905 (an incompatible card) and then crash when they try to use it. I've *never* had a Linux installation program crash on me.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Argh.... you people who "can see MS moving away in the rear view mirror" are making me jealous. Me? I'm stuck with Winblows until AutoDesk and Metacreations decide to port 3d Studio MAX, Bryce3D, and Poser 3 over to Linux. A version of Adobe Illustrator would be nice too. Anybody workin' on a Gimp Illustrator? :-)
Matt
spong@isr.umd.edu
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"