We (meaning people who are afraid of what the gov't is doing and are at least a little politically minded, not just/. readers) need to figure out how to get more people to care about their civil liberties and realize that the current government is taking them away. Until enough people are upset about this, it will not stop untill it is too late. Unfortunately, I don't believe Joe Sixpack will care about this until it starts affecting his fast food and TV viewing habits, and even then I think he'll be pretty accepting of it. I saw a bumper sticker recently, though obviously meant to be sarcastic, seemed to sum up the feelings that most people have on this topic: "That's OK, I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway."
How can we help put the implications of things like this in face of more people and move them to action? It seems like an impossible task...
I consider myself something of an audiophile, and have wondered about this shift to downloading music for some time. Do any of these services offer files that sound as good as CDs? Not _nearly_ as good, but _as good_. I find that even high bitrate.ogg and.mp3 files have perceptible degradation on my mediocre equipment. How do Apple's aac files stack up? As (if) these services become more prevelant, it seems likely that we will be taking steps back in terms of sound quality and fidelity, as well as fair use. Do any of you who have used these services have comments on the quality?
I too have used joker.com for many years and have always been happy with it. No monkey business, no pestering. They do what I need, when I need them to do it. No complaints here.
That's a known problem, and it is useually because of how X is configured on your machine. You probably have "omit dga" in your XF86conifg. That's not precisely the line, but it is close enough that you will be able to find it. If you remove the "omit" so that the DGA extension does get loaded, it will work fine. I would be willing to bet you are running Gentoo, aren't you? Apparently Gentoo is just about the only distribution that configures X this way out of the box... But in any case, making this change fixed this problem on my machine.
What is the meaning of life? Seriously, your situation and requirements basically preclude any solution. The only way to get this done is to change either the security requirements, or the existing situation. Since I am assuming that the security requirements are there for good reason, you have to change the half-assed existing situation that is getting in your way. Once that is conplete, the only thing that comes to mind if PGP / GPG encryption using a token on a USB keychain or something similar as the decrypting key with DVD-R of some flavor to move the data, but even that is not as platform portable as you want.
Jacked up the registration? It only is about $30 different, IIRC. So it went from being about "practically nothing compared to everyone else" to being "a little more than practically nothing compared to everyone else"? You actually let such an insignifcant fee difference impact how you were going to spend about $20,000? That's one thing that blows me away since I moved to Oregon. Taxes and government fees here are chicken feed compared to every other state I've lived in / looked at and yet the natives here make a racket to raise the dead anytime anyone tries to align them with rest of the country, or even to raise them to a level that is reasonable to provide the services that we need. No wonder our schools are running duct-tape and bubble-gum and our roads are falling to pieces.
And my experiences with ECS have been exactly the opposite. I have personally used over thirty boards (recent revision K7S5A) in computer labs and at home, and they have proven to not only be rock-stable, I have yet to have one fail. Anecdotally, compare this to my experience with Dell computers. Supposedly great computers, which currently stand at about a 30% motherboard failure rate in my experiences. On top of that, the ECS-based machines cost me a fraction of what the Dells did. Will I buy Dell in the future? Probably not. Will I buy ECS boards for in-house machines? Most likely.
I think the things that make people get so uppity about the Vietnam being portrayed in games are:
1- Chronological distance - Vietnam is much fresher in the minds of people than other major conflicts.
2- Controversy - Vietnam was a very controversial war that never had any good resolution.
3- Psychological Healing - Most of the soldiers in Vietnam did not come home to heroes welcomes like their predecessors had. This makes it harder to get over the atrocities.
I think these points (and many others) make people really touchy about Vietnam. Now, does that make a game about Vietnam in bad taste. Not in my opinion. I frankly think these people need to get over themselves, and stop living in the past. I am personally tired of being expected to treat every one who has had something bad happen to them with kid gloves, and having to kowtow to every special interest group on the planet. Suck it up, and get on with living.
Uhhhh..... I do. I simply made the decision to use Linux exclusively, and that includes gaming, and I would consider myself to lie somewhere between "casual" and "hardcore" on the gamer spectrum. Averaged out, I probably spend an hour or so a day gaming. ANY time I can get a native linux version over running a win32 version in wine, I will. In fact, there have been several titles I have bought Linux versions of even though I already owned win32 versions simply because they were available natively and I no longer had to hassle with wine, or they didn't work in wine at all. To address the original topic, I would say that winex absolutely does not hurt Linux. It makes it a more viable choice, giving Linux the time needed to achieve a critical mass of people who are interested in gaming and become taken seriously as a game platform. Remember when Windows was seen as a joke for gaming? "Hardcore" gamers of the time would only use DOS or Amiga. While it's not an entirely valid comparison, it illustrates how the perception of a platform can change when it has good enough technology behind it (Direct X in the case of windows) and a critical mass of people interested in it.
I dunno, while this seems like a great idea on the surface, I am a little leery about going and getting "proofed" for this digital signature. Having not read the article, it seems like just one more database entry on me to be cross-referenced so that I can be "accurately" profiled by the government or whatever other really large entity decides they want to. I'll stick to my GPG signature, thanks. But then again, maybe my foil hat needs to be adjusted....
I advise my son's elementary school concerning all things that are computer related. School districts are interesting entities - There are so many dynamics running around (and different turf wars) it isn't even funny.
You hit that point on the head. I am the lone tech support person for a small-ish school district (1600 students, 550 computers) and I see the other points you brought up everyday. Running technology in a school district is a nightmare, and one that I would really like to get out of. Our patchwork is incredible, and the headaches are too numerous to count. Everything you said was spot on.
HOWEVER
I think your final conclusion is totally, totally, wrong.
ANY school district that turns down $43k in new computer equipment has, IMHO, their collective heads up their collective asses. My current installed base is close to 100% PC's, but you know what, I would do unspeakable things to get $43k worth of Macs. That would be an entire lab of new machines, which would be something that would be impossible for us to come by otherwise. So what if they are different? They amount to more seats for my students. And I need more seats.
Do you know about No Child Left Behind? One of its' requirements is that each school have a ratio of 3.5:1 or better of students to instructional computers. Instructional computers. That means teacher and office workstations don't count. that means that your schools with 100 computers in each of them must have fewer than 350 students, not counting the computers for staff. Even my schools are bigger than that... Do your schools meet that ratio? How are they planning on achieving it? Certainly not by turning away $43K in brand new apples.
One of my big projects for the summer is to figure out how to build a new 45 seat lab at my middle school. I have no money to spend, so I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but $43k in new apples would sure help.
Beware the 12" (or 17") powerbooks! They use Nvidia for the video which has absolutely _shitty_ support on PPC. You get fine 2D, but virtually _no_ 3D acceleration. IMHO, the current sweetspot for PPC laptop + Linux nirvana is the 15" powerbook which uses the much more well-supported ATI chipset. The iBooks (I own one running Gentoo...) are also nice and ATI based, but just a tiny bit underpowered if it is going to be your primary machine.
I have been using gentoo 1.4rcX on my iBook for nearly a year now as well. It has been far and away my best experience in using Linux on the desktop, and I am slowly but surely turning into one of those freaky Gentoo zealots... Every machine that I run linux on (at home or work) are *slowly* getting Gentoo installed on them, but distcc is helping...;)
Gentoo currently has the closest to what you are looking for ATM, though it really isn't all that close. It is a "live" system, but minimal at best. Just enough to get an install going pretty much. I ditched OSX on my iBook in favor of Gentoo about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. Gentoo does a lot of stuff with the Live CD's on x86, and I really don't know why, but the interest just doesn't seem to be there. Hit the various #gentoo (especially #gentoo-ppc)forums on Freenode and try to rustle up some people. I'm sure they will have good answers as to why it hasn't really been done, but I expect most of them will be along the lines of "Nobody wants to".
Do you have any links to the aforementioned studies which prove the minimal benefits of Dvorak? If so, please post them. I ask because recently on a mailing list I subscribe to someone proposed that Dvorak keyboards be offered in typing classes in public schools. His argument was that it was such a superior input method that it would be worth the headaches associated with making such an offering. I would love to show the poster some studies showing that the benefits are "minimal".
We use iButtons on keychain fobs in my school district, and they work quite well, until someone loses a fob or we actually need to do an access audit. I don't know if this is typical of other ibutton based systems, but we have no central way to track / change access and the fob-locks require batteries which need to be replaced pretty regularly (every 6 months or so. If someone loses a fob, then the lock person (luckily not me) has to go to every lock and remove that fob from the list of fobs that lock will recognize. We probably only have 14 fob-locks in the district, but it still is time consuming. If you get an ibutton system (which seem like they would be good if they were properly implemented) make sure you can centrally manage it and that the locks don't use batteries as their primary power source.
- About 550 PCs (mostly old crap held together with duct tape and a prayer running 9x. Most of which _have_ to run about 30 different kinds of POS children's "educational" software) - 6 servers (reasonably solid, but old-ish. running NT or Linux) - About 170 full-time users (employees) and 1700 part-time users (students) - Plus about a dozen big network printers, about 150 inkjet printers, 5 (slightly different) digital phone systems, and a website.
All supported by.... Me. For a little over 30k a year. Whee! Be thankful you aren't in k-12 education in the Pacific Northwest. As far as I can tell, this is pretty typical.
I apologize if I was unclear in my original post, but I questioned the choice of the SGI based purely on performace (ie- how quickly does the computer perform task X) vs cost ($$) as that was how I read the posters question. We are getting into what I like to call the "last 10%". Like in street racing. You can spend a moderate amount of money, and have a fairly respectable street racer. But that last 10% of performance, those last few seconds, those will cost a fortune. Probably more than the whole rest of the car cost. It is the same with High-end vs. Mid-range PC's, and it is similar here. Do you want to spend $5000 on intel/linux machine to run Maya and have 90% of the performance and features of the SGI which costs at least 3 times much? Or, are you willing to spend the bux for that last 10%? In the context of the poster's question, your statements about IRIX being so great are completely off-topic, regardless of the fact that they are true.
I haven't worked with the newest SGI's, but if the circa 2001 models I have worked on are any indication, he will get a much better bang for his buck if he goes with an Intel or AMD machine and linux. The SGI has a certain prestige associated with it of course, and perhaps marginally better support, but is that worth $10k+?
I've been using OOo for some time now to do all of my work at the office, and I quite like it. The word compatibility is good, but not perfect. On even relatively simple documents with embedded graphics, headers / footers, or text that has been rotated it has some minor conversion problems, but nothing that is a show-stopper for me. I am currently working to get the school district I work for to adopt Star Office 6, since it is almost as free for us as OOo is for everyone else, and we get the backing of Sun, should anything go Horribly Horribly Wrong(TM), which makes the administration more comfortable. My biggest hurdle at this point is the large installed base of Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 users. Anyone know of a win32 program that converts from Wordperfect format to something more usable relatively reliably?
He runs the installer, then hits enter as quickly as possible until the install completes.
Speaking as an IS guy who installs software by running running the installer and hitting enter/tab/space/whatever as fast as possible until the install completes, it's pretty easy to do when you have the install routine memorized because you've installed that particular piece of software about 97 times. I read it once or twice until I know the routine and then never read it ever again.
WORST IDEA EVER. Except for maybe Palladium, or the DMCA, or the Patriot Act... OK, so maybe it's not the worst idea ever, but it's right up there.... >;)
I would think that the time and effort that went into developing something like this, basically from scratch, would outweigh the "real" cost savings of not buying one off-the-shelf. I suppose if this is just for fun, than that's not really a concern, but if your time is worth anything at all, it ought to be considered.
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We (meaning people who are afraid of what the gov't is doing and are at least a little politically minded, not just /. readers) need to figure out how to get more people to care about their civil liberties and realize that the current government is taking them away. Until enough people are upset about this, it will not stop untill it is too late. Unfortunately, I don't believe Joe Sixpack will care about this until it starts affecting his fast food and TV viewing habits, and even then I think he'll be pretty accepting of it. I saw a bumper sticker recently, though obviously meant to be sarcastic, seemed to sum up the feelings that most people have on this topic: "That's OK, I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway."
How can we help put the implications of things like this in face of more people and move them to action? It seems like an impossible task...
I consider myself something of an audiophile, and have wondered about this shift to downloading music for some time. Do any of these services offer files that sound as good as CDs? Not _nearly_ as good, but _as good_. I find that even high bitrate .ogg and .mp3 files have perceptible degradation on my mediocre equipment. How do Apple's aac files stack up? As (if) these services become more prevelant, it seems likely that we will be taking steps back in terms of sound quality and fidelity, as well as fair use. Do any of you who have used these services have comments on the quality?
I too have used joker.com for many years and have always been happy with it. No monkey business, no pestering. They do what I need, when I need them to do it. No complaints here.
That's a known problem, and it is useually because of how X is configured on your machine. You probably have "omit dga" in your XF86conifg. That's not precisely the line, but it is close enough that you will be able to find it. If you remove the "omit" so that the DGA extension does get loaded, it will work fine. I would be willing to bet you are running Gentoo, aren't you? Apparently Gentoo is just about the only distribution that configures X this way out of the box... But in any case, making this change fixed this problem on my machine.
What is the meaning of life? Seriously, your situation and requirements basically preclude any solution. The only way to get this done is to change either the security requirements, or the existing situation. Since I am assuming that the security requirements are there for good reason, you have to change the half-assed existing situation that is getting in your way. Once that is conplete, the only thing that comes to mind if PGP / GPG encryption using a token on a USB keychain or something similar as the decrypting key with DVD-R of some flavor to move the data, but even that is not as platform portable as you want.
Jacked up the registration? It only is about $30 different, IIRC. So it went from being about "practically nothing compared to everyone else" to being "a little more than practically nothing compared to everyone else"? You actually let such an insignifcant fee difference impact how you were going to spend about $20,000? That's one thing that blows me away since I moved to Oregon. Taxes and government fees here are chicken feed compared to every other state I've lived in / looked at and yet the natives here make a racket to raise the dead anytime anyone tries to align them with rest of the country, or even to raise them to a level that is reasonable to provide the services that we need. No wonder our schools are running duct-tape and bubble-gum and our roads are falling to pieces.
uhh... he said first Windows with db filesystem, not first OS. Read more carefully before you go on crusade.
And my experiences with ECS have been exactly the opposite. I have personally used over thirty boards (recent revision K7S5A) in computer labs and at home, and they have proven to not only be rock-stable, I have yet to have one fail. Anecdotally, compare this to my experience with Dell computers. Supposedly great computers, which currently stand at about a 30% motherboard failure rate in my experiences. On top of that, the ECS-based machines cost me a fraction of what the Dells did.
Will I buy Dell in the future? Probably not. Will I buy ECS boards for in-house machines? Most likely.
I think the things that make people get so uppity about the Vietnam being portrayed in games are:
1- Chronological distance - Vietnam is much fresher in the minds of people than other major conflicts.
2- Controversy - Vietnam was a very controversial war that never had any good resolution.
3- Psychological Healing - Most of the soldiers in Vietnam did not come home to heroes welcomes like their predecessors had. This makes it harder to get over the atrocities.
I think these points (and many others) make people really touchy about Vietnam. Now, does that make a game about Vietnam in bad taste. Not in my opinion. I frankly think these people need to get over themselves, and stop living in the past. I am personally tired of being expected to treat every one who has had something bad happen to them with kid gloves, and having to kowtow to every special interest group on the planet. Suck it up, and get on with living.
Uhhhh..... I do. I simply made the decision to use Linux exclusively, and that includes gaming, and I would consider myself to lie somewhere between "casual" and "hardcore" on the gamer spectrum. Averaged out, I probably spend an hour or so a day gaming. ANY time I can get a native linux version over running a win32 version in wine, I will. In fact, there have been several titles I have bought Linux versions of even though I already owned win32 versions simply because they were available natively and I no longer had to hassle with wine, or they didn't work in wine at all.
To address the original topic, I would say that winex absolutely does not hurt Linux. It makes it a more viable choice, giving Linux the time needed to achieve a critical mass of people who are interested in gaming and become taken seriously as a game platform. Remember when Windows was seen as a joke for gaming? "Hardcore" gamers of the time would only use DOS or Amiga. While it's not an entirely valid comparison, it illustrates how the perception of a platform can change when it has good enough technology behind it (Direct X in the case of windows) and a critical mass of people interested in it.
I dunno, while this seems like a great idea on the surface, I am a little leery about going and getting "proofed" for this digital signature. Having not read the article, it seems like just one more database entry on me to be cross-referenced so that I can be "accurately" profiled by the government or whatever other really large entity decides they want to. I'll stick to my GPG signature, thanks. But then again, maybe my foil hat needs to be adjusted....
I advise my son's elementary school concerning all things that are computer related. School districts are interesting entities - There are so many dynamics running around (and different turf wars) it isn't even funny.
You hit that point on the head. I am the lone tech support person for a small-ish school district (1600 students, 550 computers) and I see the other points you brought up everyday. Running technology in a school district is a nightmare, and one that I would really like to get out of. Our patchwork is incredible, and the headaches are too numerous to count. Everything you said was spot on.
HOWEVER
I think your final conclusion is totally, totally, wrong.
ANY school district that turns down $43k in new computer equipment has, IMHO, their collective heads up their collective asses. My current installed base is close to 100% PC's, but you know what, I would do unspeakable things to get $43k worth of Macs. That would be an entire lab of new machines, which would be something that would be impossible for us to come by otherwise. So what if they are different? They amount to more seats for my students. And I need more seats.
Do you know about No Child Left Behind? One of its' requirements is that each school have a ratio of 3.5:1 or better of students to instructional computers. Instructional computers. That means teacher and office workstations don't count. that means that your schools with 100 computers in each of them must have fewer than 350 students, not counting the computers for staff. Even my schools are bigger than that... Do your schools meet that ratio? How are they planning on achieving it? Certainly not by turning away $43K in brand new apples.
One of my big projects for the summer is to figure out how to build a new 45 seat lab at my middle school. I have no money to spend, so I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but $43k in new apples would sure help.
Beware the 12" (or 17") powerbooks! They use Nvidia for the video which has absolutely _shitty_ support on PPC. You get fine 2D, but virtually _no_ 3D acceleration. IMHO, the current sweetspot for PPC laptop + Linux nirvana is the 15" powerbook which uses the much more well-supported ATI chipset. The iBooks (I own one running Gentoo...) are also nice and ATI based, but just a tiny bit underpowered if it is going to be your primary machine.
I have been using gentoo 1.4rcX on my iBook for nearly a year now as well. It has been far and away my best experience in using Linux on the desktop, and I am slowly but surely turning into one of those freaky Gentoo zealots... Every machine that I run linux on (at home or work) are *slowly* getting Gentoo installed on them, but distcc is helping... ;)
Gentoo currently has the closest to what you are looking for ATM, though it really isn't all that close. It is a "live" system, but minimal at best. Just enough to get an install going pretty much.
I ditched OSX on my iBook in favor of Gentoo about 6 months ago and haven't looked back. Gentoo does a lot of stuff with the Live CD's on x86, and I really don't know why, but the interest just doesn't seem to be there. Hit the various #gentoo (especially #gentoo-ppc)forums on Freenode and try to rustle up some people. I'm sure they will have good answers as to why it hasn't really been done, but I expect most of them will be along the lines of "Nobody wants to".
Do you have any links to the aforementioned studies which prove the minimal benefits of Dvorak? If so, please post them.
I ask because recently on a mailing list I subscribe to someone proposed that Dvorak keyboards be offered in typing classes in public schools. His argument was that it was such a superior input method that it would be worth the headaches associated with making such an offering. I would love to show the poster some studies showing that the benefits are "minimal".
We use iButtons on keychain fobs in my school district, and they work quite well, until someone loses a fob or we actually need to do an access audit. I don't know if this is typical of other ibutton based systems, but we have no central way to track / change access and the fob-locks require batteries which need to be replaced pretty regularly (every 6 months or so.
If someone loses a fob, then the lock person (luckily not me) has to go to every lock and remove that fob from the list of fobs that lock will recognize. We probably only have 14 fob-locks in the district, but it still is time consuming.
If you get an ibutton system (which seem like they would be good if they were properly implemented) make sure you can centrally manage it and that the locks don't use batteries as their primary power source.
and it looks like this:
- About 550 PCs (mostly old crap held together with duct tape and a prayer running 9x. Most of which _have_ to run about 30 different kinds of POS children's "educational" software)
- 6 servers (reasonably solid, but old-ish. running NT or Linux)
- About 170 full-time users (employees) and 1700 part-time users (students)
- Plus about a dozen big network printers, about 150 inkjet printers, 5 (slightly different) digital phone systems, and a website.
All supported by.... Me. For a little over 30k a year. Whee! Be thankful you aren't in k-12 education in the Pacific Northwest. As far as I can tell, this is pretty typical.
I apologize if I was unclear in my original post, but I questioned the choice of the SGI based purely on performace (ie- how quickly does the computer perform task X) vs cost ($$) as that was how I read the posters question.
We are getting into what I like to call the "last 10%". Like in street racing. You can spend a moderate amount of money, and have a fairly respectable street racer. But that last 10% of performance, those last few seconds, those will cost a fortune. Probably more than the whole rest of the car cost. It is the same with High-end vs. Mid-range PC's, and it is similar here.
Do you want to spend $5000 on intel/linux machine to run Maya and have 90% of the performance and features of the SGI which costs at least 3 times much? Or, are you willing to spend the bux for that last 10%? In the context of the poster's question, your statements about IRIX being so great are completely off-topic, regardless of the fact that they are true.
I haven't worked with the newest SGI's, but if the circa 2001 models I have worked on are any indication, he will get a much better bang for his buck if he goes with an Intel or AMD machine and linux. The SGI has a certain prestige associated with it of course, and perhaps marginally better support, but is that worth $10k+?
I've been using OOo for some time now to do all of my work at the office, and I quite like it. The word compatibility is good, but not perfect. On even relatively simple documents with embedded graphics, headers / footers, or text that has been rotated it has some minor conversion problems, but nothing that is a show-stopper for me.
I am currently working to get the school district I work for to adopt Star Office 6, since it is almost as free for us as OOo is for everyone else, and we get the backing of Sun, should anything go Horribly Horribly Wrong(TM), which makes the administration more comfortable.
My biggest hurdle at this point is the large installed base of Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 users. Anyone know of a win32 program that converts from Wordperfect format to something more usable relatively reliably?
I've had good success putting antennae into false bottoms built into wooden flower boxes.
He runs the installer, then hits enter as quickly as possible until the install completes.
Speaking as an IS guy who installs software by running running the installer and hitting enter/tab/space/whatever as fast as possible until the install completes, it's pretty easy to do when you have the install routine memorized because you've installed that particular piece of software about 97 times. I read it once or twice until I know the routine and then never read it ever again.
WORST IDEA EVER. Except for maybe Palladium, or the DMCA, or the Patriot Act... OK, so maybe it's not the worst idea ever, but it's right up there.... >;)
I would think that the time and effort that went into developing something like this, basically from scratch, would outweigh the "real" cost savings of not buying one off-the-shelf. I suppose if this is just for fun, than that's not really a concern, but if your time is worth anything at all, it ought to be considered.