Sony Netplayer with subscription to Hulu Plus at $8 a month. 1/10th what I was paying for cable, and I get The Daily Show, Colbert, Korean dramas, Criterion collection movies, and tons of other stuff.
Wall mounted indoor antenna.
A DVD recorder with a hard drive for recording off the air programs. I can play them back from the hard drive or edit out commercials and burn to DVD.
A Mac mini with Eye TV. I can convert the recordings to MP4 and save them.
I'm getting more and better entertainment than I ever did with cable, and it's cheap!
I was and still am a fan of WindowMaker, for all the reasons others have given. Lately I've switched to GNOME because I find myself constantly mounting thumb drives and DVDs, etc. In the old days there was a wmmount app for the dock that did this, and you set up your fstab so the mount points were all defined. These days I don't configure fstab. I'll have multiple USB drives plugged in and GNOME will just assign the mount point a name based on the volume label and mount them. If WindowMaker could do this I'd give up GNOME and never look back.
WindowMaker also makes it really easy to create themes and backgrounds for your desktop and switch them. Switching backgrounds in GNOME is a much bigger deal to go through.
Booki was what there was before Booktype, and FLOSS Manuals used other software before Booki which I also used. The great thing about all this software is that many people can collaborate on a book online, then distribute in in multiple formats:
1). As a website 2). As a PDF that can be published as a print-on-demand book by Lulu or Create Space. 3). As an EPUB (which you can run Kindlegen on to create a MOBI for the Kindkle). 4). As a "newspaper".
And soon, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim on Create Space.
The Spanish book was translated from "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" by a team of volunteers, mostly in South America, who likely had never met in person.
Don't underestimate what this software can do! It isn't perfect, but in time it will change how we author and publish books.
I have no idea which navigation elements you are referring to. I have an XO, I test my Activities on an IBM NetVista running Fedora 10, and I have tried Sugar on a Stick. The one thing the XO does that my other computers don't is it it can rotate the screen image. Handy, but not indispensable. While the XO has special keys for moving between its different views, in fact they are just F1-F4 with different labels. The special keys on either side of the display map to the numeric keypad on a regular keyboard. IMHO Sugar works just fine on any PIII or better machine.
I'd like to correct the title of this post. What Sugar Labs is creating is NOT a fork of Sugar. It is the thing itself. There is no other version of Sugar being developed now. Sugar Labs is making Sugar available in all major Linux distros, as well as creating the version that runs on the XO and Sugar on a Stick. All this will make it possible for far more children to be able to use Sugar.
What the schools do is irrelevant. It's what the kids do. And what the kids can do with this software is:
Learn to program in Turtle Art (like LOGO), Smalltalk (EToys), or Python (Pippy). Download and read free books from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. Write documents with a word processor that allows collaboration: multiple authors of the same document at the same time. Draw pictures with Activities that support the same kind of collaboration. Run the GCompris suite of educational Activities, which teach basic math concepts, etc. Play games that develop thinking skills...and a bunch of other stuff.
Plus, this software does not replace Windows. It runs off a stick. So the school can have a computer lab full of Windows boxes to teach the next generation of office drones, and the kids can still use SoaS on those boxes without interfering in any way with that important task.
Yes, you can use Sugar on a Stick with your old PC that doesn't support booting from a USB drive. In this case in addition to the thumb drive you need to make a "helper CD". Your system boots off the helper CD but all the data goes on the thumb drive. This is not just a Live CD to try out Sugar; it's a system children can actually use to do all their work. It's quite impressive and I encourage all Slashdot readers to try it out.
Serenity should be the name of a spacecraft, not a mere room on a space station. For a mere room "Colbert" is as good as any other name. It does, however, make me wish I had written in the name I thought of after the promotion was over:
"The Howard Johnson's Earthlight Room".
Now *that's* a name for a room on a space station. And you could probably get Howard Johnson's to pay something for the naming rights. If they're still in business, of course. The one I went to as a kid is now a Hooters.
Some of the very early sports cars (1930's) had bodies made of fabric stretched over a wooden frame. Apparently some early hot rods did too, because I think NHRA rules specifically ban this kind of body. Its a fire hazard.
I bought an XO laptop during the Give One Get One promotion and I have been using it as an ebook reader. As shipped it has a Read activity which can be used with PDFs and one other format. I wrote two more activities myself, one for Gutenberg Etexts and another for Zip files containing sequentially named images (comic books, etc.) I've been pretty pleased with it, and the price for two of them is less than one Kindle. Project Gutenberg has an amazing selection of books, many of them quite rare. I can read Sir Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, a complete translation of the Indian epic the Mahabharata, classic science fiction from Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Smith, and tons more.
The ebook function by itself justifies the cost of G1G1, and you get a bunch of other neat activities too.
Currently I'm working on making my Etexts activity do Text To Speech with Karaoke highlighting.
My Activities have been published on the OLPC Activities page if you want to check them out.
I, too, prefer dead tree books, but the XO gives me a convenient way to read books that I would otherwise never be able to own.
I have been developing a couple of Sugar Activities and I own a G1G1 XO, so I am very familiar with Sugar. I like Sugar and I think it is well suited to its target audience. I also think it has a future on machines other than the XO. What you need to understand to make sense of this is that for the kids using it, Sugar *is* the OS. It really is the only thing they see. So if you built Sugar on top of Windows it would look like *Sugar*. There would be no difference in user experience between Sugar on Windows and Sugar on Linux. They would look exactly the same.
On the other hand, you need to remember that an XO laptop has only 256 meg of RAM and 1 gig of flash drive. About half of this is available for the child's data. You can add an SD card to the machine, but most won't have these. So to get Windows on this machine you'd need to slim it down to the bare minimum and then put a totally different user interface on top of it. This would NOT be easy. And of course when you were done you'd have something that was Windows but from a user perspective would be almost nothing like Windows.
As far as Linux Evangelism goes, Sugar doesn't look like Linux either. You can open up a terminal and get a Linux command line, but that's about it. It might give Linux credibility that all the XOs run it, but you could say the same thing for your Tivo.
I used to watch his show as a kid, and I owned a copy of his book "Mr Wizard's Science Secrets". The great thing about his show was you could try all of the experiments at home using household objects like milk bottles and tin cans.
There have been several pop culture references to his show. The old cult TV show "Police Squad" had a forensic scientist who, when he was not investigating evidence, would invite children to the police station to do experiments with household objects. And who could forget the bit of dialog from "Buckaroo Banzai" which I will paraphrase. The Hong Kong Cavaliers are discussing professor Emilio Lizardo.
When I was in High School I remember being deeply impressed by something Norbert Weiner (originator of the term "Cybernetics") said, which was more or less that for the cost of another Manhattan Project we could give soldiers who had lost limbs in war better arms and legs than they were born with. Bernard Wolfe Took this idea and ran with it in the novel "Limbo", which is probably out of print but a great read if you can find it. Sounds like this is an idea that we've pretty much given up on.
I went to a shopping mall in the Philippines a few years ago and saw something that still amazes me. The movie theater had *two* competing snack bars located *outside* the front door of the theater. You could get popcorn at either place before going in. Not only that, they would let you bring any outside food you wanted into the place. The only thing the theater made money on was the tickets. They showed Filipino movies and American movies, and they were only about two weeks behind the U.S. in getting new releases. So it seems to me the "they only make money on the snack bar" rule is not universal.
I have been maintaining a website on sourceforge for years now. I had to create the pages, then tar them up and use scp to transfer the tarball to SF's server, then log in and untar it, change authorites on the files so they could be served, do minor corrections with vi, etc. Nothing challenging but tedious as hell. I would have probably released more files if I didn't have to update the website each time.
I decided that I wanted to simplify the website, put everything on one page, pretty it up with a stylesheet, etc. I had no time to do this. Then Google Pages came along and I was able to create my new website by doing copy and paste from the old website. I was able to try many different stylesheets before deciding on the one I wanted, and I published the website by pressing one button. This combined with what sourceforge gives me is exactly what I wanted.
You can check out the website at http://nicestep.sourceforge.net/ . (You'll be redirected to the google pages version from my original site.)
A long time ago I bought a Syquest EZ-135 external drive and a *lot* of disks for it. When those disks became impossible to get I bought an internal Zip drive and a *lot* of disks for that. Now, like everyone else I use CDs for offline storage and all of that media is empty and unused. I still have the drives too. I *should* throw the stuff out, but it cost me a small fortune and it is as good today as it ever was.
I have the stuff in boxes in my garage.
Also, I have a *lot* of VHS tapes I used to tape old movies off the Late Show, AMC, etc. Now I am converting all of those tapes to high quality DivX files, two or three CDs for each movie. The tapes, no longer needed, also go to boxes in the garage. I can record over them, of course, but I have way too many for that purpose. You can generally donate prerecorded VHS tapes to library sales, but nobody wants used blank tapes.
Eventually I want to take my LP collection and convert them to CDs too.
And don't get me started on my *large* collection of prerecorded BetaMax tapes.
My company benefitted from escrowed code...
on
Source Code Escrow
·
· Score: 2, Informative
about 20 years ago. We used some software written by Arthur Andersen called "Lexicon" and "Base V". This was software that we used to develop all of our applications, and the source to these products was kept in escrow. One day A.A. decided they didn't want to maintain these products any more, and we got the code from escrow. The code was written in Basic Assembly Language, but we were able to maintain it ourselves with no problem. This was fortunate, because absolutely everything we ran depended on this software.
I would tend to agree that the website oversells Prevayler, but it does get your attention. I used Prevayler in a project for work where we wanted to distribute a decision support system using Java Web Start. The system downloads data from a central server and works with it offline, producing reports and charts. It is meant for laptop users who will not always be connected to a network.
Without Prevayler we would have had to install a DBMS on each client machine. With Prevayler we were able to avoid that and create a fully cross-platform system in 100% Java, entirely deployed through Java Web Start.
Since this project we have used Prevayler on other systems where the amount of data involved did not justify buying an Oracle license. We have even used it on the server in a few cases.
Prevayler will never replace Oracle here or anywhere else, but it IS useful and well worth checking out.
I use Window Maker pretty much exclusively. Last New Year's Day my niece came over and wanted to use my computer to instant message her friends. I had GAIM installed but had never configured it (I've never used Instant Messaging). She figured out how to bring up the menu (left click anywhere on the desktop), found the menu entry for GAIM (I may have mentioned that the IM program was called GAIM) and had it configured in minutes. Then she sent messages to all of her friends.
Later, she told me she didn't understand why I bothered with Linux because it seemed to her to be "just like Windows". But Window Maker doesn't try to be like Windows at all. It is designed to look like a NeXT computer.
In some ways Window Maker is a better desktop for new users because it doesn't set up false expectations. You don't expect it to work exactly like Windows so you aren't frustrated when it doesn't. Also, how it does work is easy to figure out.
In any case, I think that yougsters won't have much trouble with Linux and will probably appreciate a choice of desktops.
What I think will happen here is they will compare free software to their commercial offerings and say for some applications their stuff scales better.
What they are NOT testing is Linux running WebSphere, ORACLE, and other name brand commercial software. If they could prove that Windows ran THAT stuff better than Linux they would have a better claim.
My company does use Linux, Apache, and even Tomcat on some boxes, but we would be far more likely to run Oracle here than MySQL, and so would just about any other sizeable business. We just have too much invested in Oracle.
The Galeon browser has an AutoBookmark feature that does exactly what you are suggesting. Unfortunately, it can't be shut off. It does demonstrate just how bad an idea this is though!
Don't laugh. I still have one TV that uses rabbit ears, another TV that can't have cable because the TV is in the middle of the room and there is no way to run cable along the baseboard to it. You'd have to run it under carpets or something. A third TV used to have cable, but then I realized I was paying something like $45 for BASIC cable every month and that for that kind of money I could buy two DVDs every month, so I discontinued it. (Originally it was like $15 a month but the costs went up every year.)
Cable is a monopoly here, so I can't get anything cheaper than what I was paying. Surprisingly, a modern TV gets excellent reception from rabbit ears. Lousy reception was one reason I got cable in the first place but with my newer TVs the same old antenna gives excellent reception. (The older TVs are still lousy).
I'd consider going back to cable if there was some decent competition.
The Sukeban Deka movies. Japanese girls in school uniforms doing kung fu with yo-yos. Even better than it sounds.
"Brewster McCloud", directed by Robert Altman and starring Bud Cort and several actors from M*A*S*H (which was Altman's previous film.)
"Lisztomania" by Ken Russell. A rock opera about Franz Liszt.
"The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane", starring Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen.
"Carny" starring Jodie Foster and Gary Busey.
"Yor, The Hunter From The Future" You gotta love a movie that combines cavemen, dinosaurs, robots and other science fiction gadgetry. The rock music score is great too.
"Metropolis" by Fritz Lang, restored with music by Giorgio Moroder back in the 80's.
"Bird Of Paradise" with Dolores Del Rio as a native girl who falls in love with a white man and ends up jumping in a volcano.
"I, The Jury" with Armand Assante and Barbara Carrera.
"The 10th Victim" with Marcello Mastroiani and Ursula Andress.
"The Stunt Man" starring Peter O'Toole and Steve Railsback.
Slashdot Mirror
My own setup:
Sony Netplayer with subscription to Hulu Plus at $8 a month. 1/10th what I was paying for cable, and I get The Daily Show, Colbert, Korean dramas, Criterion collection movies, and tons of other stuff.
Wall mounted indoor antenna.
A DVD recorder with a hard drive for recording off the air programs. I can play them back from the hard drive or edit out commercials and burn to DVD.
A Mac mini with Eye TV. I can convert the recordings to MP4 and save them.
I'm getting more and better entertainment than I ever did with cable, and it's cheap!
I wrote an Activity for the One Laptop Per Child project that does this:
http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035
I don't claim to be the first one to do this. Who would? It is such an obvious idea that you would think it could not be patented.
I was and still am a fan of WindowMaker, for all the reasons others have given. Lately I've switched to GNOME because I find myself constantly mounting thumb drives and DVDs, etc. In the old days there was a wmmount app for the dock that did this, and you set up your fstab so the mount points were all defined. These days I don't configure fstab. I'll have multiple USB drives plugged in and GNOME will just assign the mount point a name based on the volume label and mount them. If WindowMaker could do this I'd give up GNOME and never look back.
WindowMaker also makes it really easy to create themes and backgrounds for your desktop and switch them. Switching backgrounds in GNOME is a much bigger deal to go through.
Booki was what there was before Booktype, and FLOSS Manuals used other software before Booki which I also used. The great thing about all this software is that many people can collaborate on a book online, then distribute in in multiple formats:
1). As a website
2). As a PDF that can be published as a print-on-demand book by Lulu or Create Space.
3). As an EPUB (which you can run Kindlegen on to create a MOBI for the Kindkle).
4). As a "newspaper".
Some examples of books I have created:
websites
http://en.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/
http://en.flossmanuals.net/como-hacer-una-actividad-sugar/
http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/
epub, mobi, and pdf
http://www.archive.org/details/MakeYourOwnSugarActivities
http://www.archive.org/details/ComoHacerUnaActividadSugar
http://www.archive.org/details/EBookEnlightenment
On the Kindle Store
http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Sugar-Activities-ebook/dp/B0050VAHKW/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329414720&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Hacer-Actividad-Sugar-Spanish-ebook/dp/B0058DBRVA/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3
http://www.amazon.com/E-Book-Enlightenment-ebook/dp/B005BYST5I/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Bhakta-Jim-ebook/dp/B00730HE54/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329414780&sr=1-1
On Lulu
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/make-your-own-sugar-activities/12995552?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1
And soon, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim on Create Space.
The Spanish book was translated from "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" by a team of volunteers, mostly in South America, who likely had never met in person.
Don't underestimate what this software can do! It isn't perfect, but in time it will change how we author and publish books.
I have no idea which navigation elements you are referring to. I have an XO, I test my Activities on an IBM NetVista running Fedora 10, and I have tried Sugar on a Stick. The one thing the XO does that my other computers don't is it it can rotate the screen image. Handy, but not indispensable. While the XO has special keys for moving between its different views, in fact they are just F1-F4 with different labels. The special keys on either side of the display map to the numeric keypad on a regular keyboard. IMHO Sugar works just fine on any PIII or better machine.
I'd like to correct the title of this post. What Sugar Labs is creating is NOT a fork of Sugar. It is the thing itself. There is no other version of Sugar being developed now. Sugar Labs is making Sugar available in all major Linux distros, as well as creating the version that runs on the XO and Sugar on a Stick. All this will make it possible for far more children to be able to use Sugar.
What the schools do is irrelevant. It's what the kids do. And what the kids can do with this software is:
Learn to program in Turtle Art (like LOGO), Smalltalk (EToys), or Python (Pippy). ...and a bunch of other stuff.
Download and read free books from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.
Write documents with a word processor that allows collaboration: multiple authors of the same document at the same time.
Draw pictures with Activities that support the same kind of collaboration.
Run the GCompris suite of educational Activities, which teach basic math concepts, etc.
Play games that develop thinking skills
Plus, this software does not replace Windows. It runs off a stick. So the school can have a computer lab full of Windows boxes to teach the next generation of office drones, and the kids can still use SoaS on those boxes without interfering in any way with that important task.
Yes, you can use Sugar on a Stick with your old PC that doesn't support booting from a USB drive. In this case in addition to the thumb drive you need to make a "helper CD". Your system boots off the helper CD but all the data goes on the thumb drive. This is not just a Live CD to try out Sugar; it's a system children can actually use to do all their work. It's quite impressive and I encourage all Slashdot readers to try it out.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
Serenity should be the name of a spacecraft, not a mere room on a space station. For a mere room "Colbert" is as good as any other name. It does, however, make me wish I had written in the name I thought of after the promotion was over:
"The Howard Johnson's Earthlight Room".
Now *that's* a name for a room on a space station. And you could probably get Howard Johnson's to pay something for the naming rights. If they're still in business, of course. The one I went to as a kid is now a Hooters.
Some of the very early sports cars (1930's) had bodies made of fabric stretched over a wooden frame. Apparently some early hot rods did too, because I think NHRA rules specifically ban this kind of body. Its a fire hazard.
I bought an XO laptop during the Give One Get One promotion and I have been using it as an ebook reader. As shipped it has a Read activity which can be used with PDFs and one other format. I wrote two more activities myself, one for Gutenberg Etexts and another for Zip files containing sequentially named images (comic books, etc.) I've been pretty pleased with it, and the price for two of them is less than one Kindle. Project Gutenberg has an amazing selection of books, many of them quite rare. I can read Sir Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, a complete translation of the Indian epic the Mahabharata, classic science fiction from Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Smith, and tons more.
The ebook function by itself justifies the cost of G1G1, and you get a bunch of other neat activities too.
Currently I'm working on making my Etexts activity do Text To Speech with Karaoke highlighting.
My Activities have been published on the OLPC Activities page if you want to check them out.
I, too, prefer dead tree books, but the XO gives me a convenient way to read books that I would otherwise never be able to own.
I have been developing a couple of Sugar Activities and I own a G1G1 XO, so I am very familiar with Sugar. I like Sugar and I think it is well suited to its target audience. I also think it has a future on machines other than the XO. What you need to understand to make sense of this is that for the kids using it, Sugar *is* the OS. It really is the only thing they see. So if you built Sugar on top of Windows it would look like *Sugar*. There would be no difference in user experience between Sugar on Windows and Sugar on Linux. They would look exactly the same.
On the other hand, you need to remember that an XO laptop has only 256 meg of RAM and 1 gig of flash drive. About half of this is available for the child's data. You can add an SD card to the machine, but most won't have these. So to get Windows on this machine you'd need to slim it down to the bare minimum and then put a totally different user interface on top of it. This would NOT be easy. And of course when you were done you'd have something that was Windows but from a user perspective would be almost nothing like Windows.
As far as Linux Evangelism goes, Sugar doesn't look like Linux either. You can open up a terminal and get a Linux command line, but that's about it. It might give Linux credibility that all the XOs run it, but you could say the same thing for your Tivo.
I used to watch his show as a kid, and I owned a copy of his book "Mr Wizard's Science Secrets". The great thing about his show was you could try all of the experiments at home using household objects like milk bottles and tin cans.
There have been several pop culture references to his show. The old cult TV show "Police Squad" had a forensic scientist who, when he was not investigating evidence, would invite children to the police station to do experiments with household objects. And who could forget the bit of dialog from "Buckaroo Banzai" which I will paraphrase. The Hong Kong Cavaliers are discussing professor Emilio Lizardo.
"Didn't he used to have a TV show?"
"No, you're thinking of Mr. Wizard."
"Emilio Lizard was a great scientist."
"So was Mr. Wizard."
When I was in High School I remember being deeply impressed by something Norbert Weiner (originator of the term "Cybernetics") said, which was more or less that for the cost of another Manhattan Project we could give soldiers who had lost limbs in war better arms and legs than they were born with. Bernard Wolfe Took this idea and ran with it in the novel "Limbo", which is probably out of print but a great read if you can find it. Sounds like this is an idea that we've pretty much given up on.
I went to a shopping mall in the Philippines a few years ago and saw something that still amazes me. The movie theater had *two* competing snack bars located *outside* the front door of the theater. You could get popcorn at either place before going in. Not only that, they would let you bring any outside food you wanted into the place. The only thing the theater made money on was the tickets. They showed Filipino movies and American movies, and they were only about two weeks behind the U.S. in getting new releases. So it seems to me the "they only make money on the snack bar" rule is not universal.
I have been maintaining a website on sourceforge for years now. I had to create the pages, then tar them up and use scp to transfer the tarball to SF's server, then log in and untar it, change authorites on the files so they could be served, do minor corrections with vi, etc. Nothing challenging but tedious as hell. I would have probably released more files if I didn't have to update the website each time.
I decided that I wanted to simplify the website, put everything on one page, pretty it up with a stylesheet, etc. I had no time to do this. Then Google Pages came along and I was able to create my new website by doing copy and paste from the old website. I was able to try many different stylesheets before deciding on the one I wanted, and I published the website by pressing one button. This combined with what sourceforge gives me is exactly what I wanted.
You can check out the website at http://nicestep.sourceforge.net/ . (You'll be redirected to the google pages version from my original site.)
A long time ago I bought a Syquest EZ-135 external drive and a *lot* of disks for it. When those disks became impossible to get I bought an internal Zip drive and a *lot* of disks for that. Now, like everyone else I use CDs for offline storage and all of that media is empty and unused. I still have the drives too. I *should* throw the stuff out, but it cost me a small fortune and it is as good today as it ever was.
I have the stuff in boxes in my garage.
Also, I have a *lot* of VHS tapes I used to tape old movies off the Late Show, AMC, etc. Now I am converting all of those tapes to high quality DivX files, two or three CDs for each movie. The tapes, no longer needed, also go to boxes in the garage. I can record over them, of course, but I have way too many for that purpose. You can generally donate prerecorded VHS tapes to library sales, but nobody wants used blank tapes.
Eventually I want to take my LP collection and convert them to CDs too.
And don't get me started on my *large* collection of prerecorded BetaMax tapes.
about 20 years ago. We used some software written by Arthur Andersen called "Lexicon" and "Base V". This was software that we used to develop all of our applications, and the source to these products was kept in escrow. One day A.A. decided they didn't want to maintain these products any more, and we got the code from escrow. The code was written in Basic Assembly Language, but we were able to maintain it ourselves with no problem. This was fortunate, because absolutely everything we ran depended on this software.
Escrow is an old idea, but a very good one.
I would tend to agree that the website oversells Prevayler, but it does get your attention. I used Prevayler in a project for work where we wanted to distribute a decision support system using Java Web Start. The system downloads data from a central server and works with it offline, producing reports and charts. It is meant for laptop users who will not always be connected to a network.
Without Prevayler we would have had to install a DBMS on each client machine. With Prevayler we were able to avoid that and create a fully cross-platform system in 100% Java, entirely deployed through Java Web Start.
Since this project we have used Prevayler on other systems where the amount of data involved did not justify buying an Oracle license. We have even used it on the server in a few cases.
Prevayler will never replace Oracle here or anywhere else, but it IS useful and well worth checking out.
I use Window Maker pretty much exclusively. Last New Year's Day my niece came over and wanted to use my computer to instant message her friends. I had GAIM installed but had never configured it (I've never used Instant Messaging). She figured out how to bring up the menu (left click anywhere on the desktop), found the menu entry for GAIM (I may have mentioned that the IM program was called GAIM) and had it configured in minutes. Then she sent messages to all of her friends.
Later, she told me she didn't understand why I bothered with Linux because it seemed to her to be "just like Windows". But Window Maker doesn't try to be like Windows at all. It is designed to look like a NeXT computer.
In some ways Window Maker is a better desktop for new users because it doesn't set up false expectations. You don't expect it to work exactly like Windows so you aren't frustrated when it doesn't. Also, how it does work is easy to figure out.
In any case, I think that yougsters won't have much trouble with Linux and will probably appreciate a choice of desktops.
What I think will happen here is they will compare free software to their commercial offerings and say for some applications their stuff scales better.
What they are NOT testing is Linux running WebSphere, ORACLE, and other name brand commercial software. If they could prove that Windows ran THAT stuff better than Linux they would have a better claim.
My company does use Linux, Apache, and even Tomcat on some boxes, but we would be far more likely to run Oracle here than MySQL, and so would just about any other sizeable business. We just have too much invested in Oracle.
The Galeon browser has an AutoBookmark feature that does exactly what you are suggesting. Unfortunately, it can't be shut off. It does demonstrate just how bad an idea this is though!
Don't laugh. I still have one TV that uses rabbit ears, another TV that can't have cable because the TV is in the middle of the room and there is no way to run cable along the baseboard to it. You'd have to run it under carpets or something. A third TV used to have cable, but then I realized I was paying something like $45 for BASIC cable every month and that for that kind of money I could buy two DVDs every month, so I discontinued it. (Originally it was like $15 a month but the costs went up every year.)
Cable is a monopoly here, so I can't get anything cheaper than what I was paying. Surprisingly, a modern TV gets excellent reception from rabbit ears. Lousy reception was one reason I got cable in the first place but with my newer TVs the same old antenna gives excellent reception. (The older TVs are still lousy).
I'd consider going back to cable if there was some decent competition.
The Sukeban Deka movies. Japanese girls in school uniforms doing kung fu with yo-yos. Even better than it sounds.
"Brewster McCloud", directed by Robert Altman and starring Bud Cort and several actors from M*A*S*H (which was Altman's previous film.)
"Lisztomania" by Ken Russell. A rock opera about Franz Liszt.
"The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane", starring Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen.
"Carny" starring Jodie Foster and Gary Busey.
"Yor, The Hunter From The Future" You gotta love a movie that combines cavemen, dinosaurs, robots and other science fiction gadgetry. The rock music score is great too.
"Metropolis" by Fritz Lang, restored with music by Giorgio Moroder back in the 80's.
"Bird Of Paradise" with Dolores Del Rio as a native girl who falls in love with a white man and ends up jumping in a volcano.
"I, The Jury" with Armand Assante and Barbara Carrera.
"The 10th Victim" with Marcello Mastroiani and Ursula Andress.
"The Stunt Man" starring Peter O'Toole and Steve Railsback.