My new patent beats your new patent. I now have the patent on using inflatable/deflatable bio-organs to move oxygen to be used in the fuel burning process in and out of biological organisms.
Every time you inhale/exhale, you owe me! The only fella who has me beat is the guy with the patent on using bio-organs to move fuel-carrying liquids through biological organisms.
Send me your check NOW or my lawyers will be hounding you to your death!
I'm gonna be so fscking rich Bill Gates will seem a pauper in comparison, woot!
...because their expertise is knowledge based and any knowledge based profession is vulnerable to the same thing that is currently happening with the programming profession: It's being shipped to other countries in order to lower costs while raising profits.
For example, a hospital/HMO combo needs to watch costs, so has local technicians to do the local non-surgical stuff. Information on the patient is interpreted by an MD in India for low bucks, and the local technicians do the final, hands-on work if needed. Only time the hospital/HMO needs a "real" doctor/surgeon is when the patient really needs that level of hands-on work.
Hospitals/HMOs stand to make much bigger profits from this scenario and you can bet your doctor's bottom dollar they know it.
I repeat: Any and every profession which is knowledge based is vulnerable to this type of exporting.
"Sorry kid, I hate giving good people bad news." -- The Matrix
I would agree that such installers could be made available on most, if not all, distros providing variety and choice remain paramount. For example, I don't care if Slackware puts in such a noobie installer providing I still have the choice to use the basic installer I've been using for the past six years.
The big advantage to variety and choice is that noobies have room to grow and experienced users don't have to wade through a bunch of GUI crap they don't need or want. I don't see that variety is exclusive of choice or vice versa unless you have a package manager like RPM getting in the way, in which case more work needs to be done on the package manager as well.
A friend of mine in the mid-seventies put an aluminum V8 into a little Toyota (or maybe it was a Datsun, I forget.). Took quite awhile and a lot of mods on the poor little Toyota. He then drove the thing to Kansas.
The point? Well, I think he did it so he could say he did it. That and the little Toyota could smoke anything else on the street. Computer hardware mods are kinda like that too. Fun to do and the result is you have something unique (or at least different from the mainstream.)
I once hacked an Atari ST into a beige tower PC case. Wasn't much point in the exercise other than my ST looked a whole lot different than other STs and I learned alot about hacking hardware. Case modding is overall pretty damn cool, IMO.
Please see my post addressing kmellis' post below.
Yes, there are a great many incremental advances being made all the time but this doesn't mean the fundamental assumptions concernimg machine vs. human intelligence are correct. The point I'm making here is that too much of the current research is based on concepts derived from human intelligence and applied to machines. Square peg, round hole.
"Artificial intelligence," or intelligence created by we humans on our machines. It does not follow that the created intelligence must be modeled on human intelligence, but this is what we know so it's what we attempt. A better approach would be to first achieve a solid working definition of what artificial intelligence means in the context of machines. Perhaps "Created Machine Intelligence" would be more apt and lead to less anthropomorphism.
When scientists/researchers insist that machines must communicate with humans via human language in order to have achieved intelligence, you have anthropomorphism. The use of human language is not a useful criterion for defining intelligence, as ALICE readily demonstrates. The Turing test is either a really great joke or, as someone else suggested above, a dodge.
While I agree with the main point you make, there is one problem which, when examined, sheds considerable light on the primary problem with A.I. approaches to date.
You say, "...I don't see anyone claiming that an animal, a rabbit for example, that screams when it's injured is intelligent."
There is a definition problem (remember as you read the following that we're talking about computational machines.)
Ask yourself this question: How intelligent does a rabbit need to be to be successful as a rabbit? Rabbits are a very successful species, so we can assume that rabbits are as intelligent as they need to be to be successful as rabbits.
Apply this same question to machine A.I.: How intelligent does a machine need to be to be successful as a machine? Seems we have a lot of successful (functioning, purposeful) machines around these days which, if you agree, leads to the point I want to make here: I think we have already have achieved a certain level of machine A.I. but because we insist on defining intelligence for machines as we do for humans, we either don't see or don't acknowledge the intelligence. (Aside: Don't get lost in the "it's pre-programmed" argument as concerns machine intelligence. Rabbits and you and I are pre-programmed too, but that's an uncomfortable fact we don't like to acknowledge.)
Much of what passes for A.I. research (most of the human language related areas) should really be classified as H.I.(Human Interface) and not A.I. Granted, good human language interface is really important and will add considerably to the usefulness of machines, but it isn't required for a base measure of the intelligence of a machine. The machine can be and has been successful without it.
Deciding the intelligence of a machine based on it's use of human language is neither good science nor good engineering. The Turing test should be canned as an historical oddity or laughed at as Turing's joke on the scientific community. A better basic measurement of machine intelligence would be just as the question above suggests: Is the machine intelligent enough to be successful at its purpose? Is the machine intelligent enough to be successful at being a machine?
Yes, but in the context of a machine's "life" wouldn't this "smartness" be defined differently than we would define smartness for a human? This is my original point: That machines don't need to be smart as humans, they need to be smart as machines.
I understand your point but do we really need machines to do this? Wouldn't a human be a better, smarter option for your example? Remember, a good carpenter doesn't use a hammer to drive a screw -- proper tools for the job and all that.
I don't see machines ever replacing humans, at least not in the near future. I do think machines can be made to be smart enough to do a lot of the grunt work we now use humans for.
There is much too much anthropomorphizing going on in the A.I. field and this has always been true. We want to make machines which think like we do, but the sad part is that we really don't yet know the full mechanics of how our brains work (how we think.) And yet we're going to make machines which think like we do? Rather dumb, really.
IMO, A.I. researchers would do better getting machines to "think" in their own "machine" context. Instead of trying to make intelligent "human" machines, doesn't it make more sense to make intelligent "machine" machines? For example, what does a machines need to know about changing human baby diapers when it makes more sense for the machine to know about monitoring it's log files and making backups and other self-correcting actions (changing it's own diapers, heh.)
Seems to me my Linux machines are plenty smart already, there are just some missing parts:
1. Self-awareness on the part of the machine (not much more than self-monitoring with statefulness and history.)
2. Communication with decent machine/machine and machine/human interfaces (direct software for machine/machine, add human language capability or greatly improved H.I. for human/machine. Much work has already been done on these.)
3. History of self/other interactions which can be stored and referrenced (should be an interesting database project.)
Bummers, sad to see them go. Their quality was consistently good.
Seems to me to be yet another case of transition failure, trying to make square pegs go into round holes, etc. Charging subscriptions just hasn't worked on the web and this has been so obvious for so long but still the sites try it over and over.
Until the sites get wise and figure out a way to charge per article (10 cents, 25 cents, a nickle -- whatever) they're going to have a hard time. Same is true with other types of files. Ten cents per mp3 or whatever.
Paypal has a clue, now if they can expand it and make their service useful to both providers and end-users (customers) we could actually see some decent commerce start to develop on the web.
You OSS developers -- wouldn't you like to make.25 cents per download it only to cover costs for your websites?
Granted, I'm thinking out my ass here, but until providers and end-users come to agreement over cost vs. value there will not be much successful web commerce.
I have to disagree because you're describing the situation from the point of pure economics theory when we don't have a pure economics situation and haven't had for many generations.
When government pretends to regulate and then turns their collective heads the other way so as to see no evil, the results are clear: most people are lead to believe they are protected from the evil, whilst the evildoers know they have a huge flock of sheep to shear.
In other words, the government folks (how odd, it's usually the same...) set up the corporate folks (...group of folks, hmm) to shear we, the sheep.
And don't get me started on the whole Demos are better than the Repubs bullshit. White chocolate or dark chocolate, it's still chocolate. To say there are significant differences between the two is to ignore history of the past 50 years. There are very slight differences, which are played upon enormously to suggest more differences than really exist: It's the same bunch of folks agreeing to disagree so as to generate an aura of difference whilst setting us up to be shorn yet again (and again and again.)
Ack, too much, sorry.
Re:Advertising would help
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 1
Wrong. Let me explain please.
First, please do know I'm one of the three (a rough guess) people on the planet who are deep geeks with a marketing background. Okay, that said, here's some info to graze upon.
In the marketing world all research for the past 100 years shows that the very best -- bar none -- type of advertising is, surprise, word of mouth. Nothing has every beat it, nothing ever will beat it. People will trust the opinions of people they know first hand over any advertisement. Why do you think there are so many ads which try to establish that type of trust relationship in the minds of the ad viewer? These types of testimonial ads are among the most successful types of ads, but pale in comparison with "word of mouth" in terms of pure clout with the target audience.
Linux is doing as good as it is (which is very good indeed) because of a number of factors: quality, cost, and -- ta da -- the number of in-the-know technical people (computer geeks) who say it's as good or better than the commercial stuff available. Word of mouth advertising by people who have the confidence of the people with whom they're talking.
Who do you think mom or grandma or little brother/sister is going to believe, Microsoft ads or you? If they have any experience with MS product over the past ten years then they're not going to be inclined to believe anything in a MS ad -- their personal experience tells them MS marketing is geared toward getting the money out of their pocket and MS product is not very good.
You, the techincal person in-the-know, are in a great position compared with MS. You have a product with outstanding quality, an impossible-to-beat value-to-cost ratio and an entire, world-class army of other techies who are saying the same thing you are.
In my opinion, Gnu/Linux/OSS/Freeware advocates would do best to just keep doing what they've been doing. Don't focus on bashing MS, just make honest comparisons, be up front with newbies about the learning curve (harder to learn, easier to use) and focus on the benefits of the product when compared with the competition. You'll continue to win big!
Frankly, if I were leading a marketing push for Linux right now, I'd say that it's time for the little guy to be "on." Not the uber hackers (who do their own stuff so well) but all Linux users: Time for them to really focus on truely helping others understand the choices available and then helping them get going down the learning curve (which has become much shallower in the past year -- Gnome/KDE/OpenOffice.org -- hero-level work folks, congrats and thanks!)
So, if you want to help the world avoid continuus and expanding MS hell:
1. Join your local LUG or start one.
2. Learn how to make a simple press release and learn where to send copies for your area.
3. Offer some free evening classes to individuals and small businesses via the press releases (donate some time -- see next item.)
4. Make sure there are resources in your area for individuals/businesses (consultants, tutors, etc. -- if you're not seeing $$$ by now you're blind.)
5. Always remember that you serve yourself best when you do your best to help those you are targeting. This is the essense of quality! I know it sounds odd, but it works: The more helpful you are for your audience, the more rewards you'll see for yourself.
I coulda/shoulda/woulda been a preacher but that whole god thing really got it the way.
1. Reversi: C64 Speed on a Pentium IV 2. Double Your Code, Halve Your Speed 3. Real Men Don't Use Real Computers 4. VM:Very Macho or Verily laMe 5. Atari ST Rebirth: a 20 Year Reversal
Granting patents on software is the stupidest thing. Programming is just another form of speech whereby one uses a language to communicate, in this case computer language to communicate with the hardware.
Are patents on English speech next? Am I going to need to pay some corporation a dollar every time I use certain words or phrases? Why not just put patents on walking, breathing and eating too?
"The real estate on your screen is precious, and with your PC's vital stats, Winamp info, game stats, stock tickers, news tickers, sports scores, and more, it's easy to run out of space...."
Use WindowMaker (or similar wm) and you'll never again worry about lack of screen real estate. You can have as many screens as you need or want and move between them fast and easy. The number of programs you can run/display is only limited by RAM/swap.
I prefer WindowMaker and have three machines all displaying on one monitor with one keyboard controllng them (all connected via OpenSSH.) Then there are additional VCs. Lack of screen real estate has never been an issue.
Perhaps this mod has "blinky light" value, but the screen real estate issue is a non issue for Linux users.
Do some really basic historical research. Start with J. Edgar Hoover and I'm sure you'll find paths to follow from there. Just because you personally haven't heard of such abuses doesn't mean they have not happened.
Please tell me you're only in the sixth grade and thus have no excuse for not knowing about this -- my opinion of U.S. public education is already very low.
If you're in higher education still, take a couple of history classes. If you're out of school, you should be ashamed of your ignorance. I don't mean to flame you, but shit dude, get a fuckin' clue.
Personally, I'm more interested in the MUI -- Mental User Interface. The command line/language combination is hard to beat (unless you're talkin' porn, of course.)
What I'm looking forward too is the self-aware machine with acceptable communication skills and the ability to do contextual reasoning. This would be far more useful and interesting than more visual stuff as concerns my needs.
Bah, I used to be really annoyed with PDFs but finally have just gotten used to them. The points made by others who've replied to your post are worth listening to, especially as concerns Latex to PDF conversions.
For a more enjoyable PDF experience get the latest Acrobat Reader for Linux (5.0) from Adobe (free download.) It's much nicer than previous versions and can actually make PDFs usable (does searches, etc.)
The most annoying thing about PDFs these days is so many folks don't bother putting bookmarks in their PDFs. For large PDFs, bookmarks really do make the difference in comfort and overall usability.
Several posters here have made a very good point which you would be wise to take: Don't build your own just to save a few dollars as it isn't worth the trouble -- and it will be trouble, especially if you do "lowest price" on components. You'll end up with an unstable piece of crap if you do this.
Sheesh, buy a Dell. They're inexpensive and their service is excellent (I'm a most happy Dell customer.) Since they're big, they have clout with manufacturers and you get good component costs. If your machine craps out they fix it (my Dimension 8100 had a DVD drive die within the first two months. They sent a guy out and he swapped it out for me. I fully expected to get a new drive in the mail instead.)
Don't cheat yourself on this: You can easily end up spending dollars to save pennies.
Get WineX and play DiabloII on your Debian box. I use it on my Slackware 8.0 system and it works great. You can transfer all your characters too, so you don't have to completely restart the game. Also works great with StarCraft!
It's so nice not to have to use Microslop any more. No more crashes, lockups and reboots. No more sneaky Microslop OS sending spy info back to MS for their sleazy marketing efforts. No more expensive yet crappy, insecure, unreliable software.
Gaming is the last true hurdle for Linux and it's being jumped quickly.
Your site seems to be the victim of a slashdotting. Since you're the one who posted the link to your site, would this be a self-slashdotting? Kinda like suicide by cop, heh.
Slashdot Mirror
My new patent beats your new patent. I now have the patent on using inflatable/deflatable bio-organs to move oxygen to be used in the fuel burning process in and out of biological organisms.
Every time you inhale/exhale, you owe me! The only fella who has me beat is the guy with the patent on using bio-organs to move fuel-carrying liquids through biological organisms.
Send me your check NOW or my lawyers will be hounding you to your death!
I'm gonna be so fscking rich Bill Gates will seem a pauper in comparison, woot!
...because their expertise is knowledge based and any knowledge based profession is vulnerable to the same thing that is currently happening with the programming profession: It's being shipped to other countries in order to lower costs while raising profits.
For example, a hospital/HMO combo needs to watch costs, so has local technicians to do the local non-surgical stuff. Information on the patient is interpreted by an MD in India for low bucks, and the local technicians do the final, hands-on work if needed. Only time the hospital/HMO needs a "real" doctor/surgeon is when the patient really needs that level of hands-on work.
Hospitals/HMOs stand to make much bigger profits from this scenario and you can bet your doctor's bottom dollar they know it.
I repeat: Any and every profession which is knowledge based is vulnerable to this type of exporting.
"Sorry kid, I hate giving good people bad news." -- The Matrix
I would agree that such installers could be made available on most, if not all, distros providing variety and choice remain paramount. For example, I don't care if Slackware puts in such a noobie installer providing I still have the choice to use the basic installer I've been using for the past six years.
The big advantage to variety and choice is that noobies have room to grow and experienced users don't have to wade through a bunch of GUI crap they don't need or want. I don't see that variety is exclusive of choice or vice versa unless you have a package manager like RPM getting in the way, in which case more work needs to be done on the package manager as well.
A friend of mine in the mid-seventies put an aluminum V8 into a little Toyota (or maybe it was a Datsun, I forget.). Took quite awhile and a lot of mods on the poor little Toyota. He then drove the thing to Kansas.
The point? Well, I think he did it so he could say he did it. That and the little Toyota could smoke anything else on the street. Computer hardware mods are kinda like that too. Fun to do and the result is you have something unique (or at least different from the mainstream.)
I once hacked an Atari ST into a beige tower PC case. Wasn't much point in the exercise other than my ST looked a whole lot different than other STs and I learned alot about hacking hardware. Case modding is overall pretty damn cool, IMO.
No mention of Rogue? *boggle* If the subject is computer games and they start with pong and not Rogue then they're missing a big chunk of history.
Would this be a chunking vulnerability? I donno.
Please see my post addressing kmellis' post below.
Yes, there are a great many incremental advances being made all the time but this doesn't mean the fundamental assumptions concernimg machine vs. human intelligence are correct. The point I'm making here is that too much of the current research is based on concepts derived from human intelligence and applied to machines. Square peg, round hole.
"Artificial intelligence," or intelligence created by we humans on our machines. It does not follow that the created intelligence must be modeled on human intelligence, but this is what we know so it's what we attempt. A better approach would be to first achieve a solid working definition of what artificial intelligence means in the context of machines. Perhaps "Created Machine Intelligence" would be more apt and lead to less anthropomorphism.
When scientists/researchers insist that machines must communicate with humans via human language in order to have achieved intelligence, you have anthropomorphism. The use of human language is not a useful criterion for defining intelligence, as ALICE readily demonstrates. The Turing test is either a really great joke or, as someone else suggested above, a dodge.
Thanks for the reply.
While I agree with the main point you make, there is one problem which, when examined, sheds considerable light on the primary problem with A.I. approaches to date.
You say, "...I don't see anyone claiming that an animal, a rabbit for example, that screams when it's injured is intelligent."
There is a definition problem (remember as you read the following that we're talking about computational machines.)
Ask yourself this question: How intelligent does a rabbit need to be to be successful as a rabbit? Rabbits are a very successful species, so we can assume that rabbits are as intelligent as they need to be to be successful as rabbits.
Apply this same question to machine A.I.: How intelligent does a machine need to be to be successful as a machine? Seems we have a lot of successful (functioning, purposeful) machines around these days which, if you agree, leads to the point I want to make here: I think we have already have achieved a certain level of machine A.I. but because we insist on defining intelligence for machines as we do for humans, we either don't see or don't acknowledge the intelligence. (Aside: Don't get lost in the "it's pre-programmed" argument as concerns machine intelligence. Rabbits and you and I are pre-programmed too, but that's an uncomfortable fact we don't like to acknowledge.)
Much of what passes for A.I. research (most of the human language related areas) should really be classified as H.I.(Human Interface) and not A.I. Granted, good human language interface is really important and will add considerably to the usefulness of machines, but it isn't required for a base measure of the intelligence of a machine. The machine can be and has been successful without it.
Deciding the intelligence of a machine based on it's use of human language is neither good science nor good engineering. The Turing test should be canned as an historical oddity or laughed at as Turing's joke on the scientific community. A better basic measurement of machine intelligence would be just as the question above suggests: Is the machine intelligent enough to be successful at its purpose? Is the machine intelligent enough to be successful at being a machine?
Anyway, thanks for the interesting post.
Yes, but in the context of a machine's "life" wouldn't this "smartness" be defined differently than we would define smartness for a human? This is my original point: That machines don't need to be smart as humans, they need to be smart as machines.
I understand your point but do we really need machines to do this? Wouldn't a human be a better, smarter option for your example? Remember, a good carpenter doesn't use a hammer to drive a screw -- proper tools for the job and all that.
I don't see machines ever replacing humans, at least not in the near future. I do think machines can be made to be smart enough to do a lot of the grunt work we now use humans for.
Machines should augment life, not replace it.
check back in twenty years.
There is much too much anthropomorphizing going on in the A.I. field and this has always been true. We want to make machines which think like we do, but the sad part is that we really don't yet know the full mechanics of how our brains work (how we think.) And yet we're going to make machines which think like we do? Rather dumb, really.
IMO, A.I. researchers would do better getting machines to "think" in their own "machine" context. Instead of trying to make intelligent "human" machines, doesn't it make more sense to make intelligent "machine" machines? For example, what does a machines need to know about changing human baby diapers when it makes more sense for the machine to know about monitoring it's log files and making backups and other self-correcting actions (changing it's own diapers, heh.)
Seems to me my Linux machines are plenty smart already, there are just some missing parts:
1. Self-awareness on the part of the machine (not much more than self-monitoring with statefulness and history.)
2. Communication with decent machine/machine and machine/human interfaces (direct software for machine/machine, add human language capability or greatly improved H.I. for human/machine. Much work has already been done on these.)
3. History of self/other interactions which can be stored and referrenced (should be an interesting database project.)
Make smart machines, not fake humans.
Hmm, that could be most interesting and intertaining, if only to see what questions /.s asked.
Bummers, sad to see them go. Their quality was consistently good.
.25 cents per download it only to cover costs for your websites?
Seems to me to be yet another case of transition failure, trying to make square pegs go into round holes, etc. Charging subscriptions just hasn't worked on the web and this has been so obvious for so long but still the sites try it over and over.
Until the sites get wise and figure out a way to charge per article (10 cents, 25 cents, a nickle -- whatever) they're going to have a hard time. Same is true with other types of files. Ten cents per mp3 or whatever.
Paypal has a clue, now if they can expand it and make their service useful to both providers and end-users (customers) we could actually see some decent commerce start to develop on the web.
You OSS developers -- wouldn't you like to make
Granted, I'm thinking out my ass here, but until providers and end-users come to agreement over cost vs. value there will not be much successful web commerce.
I have to disagree because you're describing the situation from the point of pure economics theory when we don't have a pure economics situation and haven't had for many generations.
When government pretends to regulate and then turns their collective heads the other way so as to see no evil, the results are clear: most people are lead to believe they are protected from the evil, whilst the evildoers know they have a huge flock of sheep to shear.
In other words, the government folks (how odd, it's usually the same...) set up the corporate folks (...group of folks, hmm) to shear we, the sheep.
And don't get me started on the whole Demos are better than the Repubs bullshit. White chocolate or dark chocolate, it's still chocolate. To say there are significant differences between the two is to ignore history of the past 50 years. There are very slight differences, which are played upon enormously to suggest more differences than really exist: It's the same bunch of folks agreeing to disagree so as to generate an aura of difference whilst setting us up to be shorn yet again (and again and again.)
Ack, too much, sorry.
Wrong. Let me explain please.
First, please do know I'm one of the three (a rough guess) people on the planet who are deep geeks with a marketing background. Okay, that said, here's some info to graze upon.
In the marketing world all research for the past 100 years shows that the very best -- bar none -- type of advertising is, surprise, word of mouth. Nothing has every beat it, nothing ever will beat it. People will trust the opinions of people they know first hand over any advertisement. Why do you think there are so many ads which try to establish that type of trust relationship in the minds of the ad viewer? These types of testimonial ads are among the most successful types of ads, but pale in comparison with "word of mouth" in terms of pure clout with the target audience.
Linux is doing as good as it is (which is very good indeed) because of a number of factors: quality, cost, and -- ta da -- the number of in-the-know technical people (computer geeks) who say it's as good or better than the commercial stuff available. Word of mouth advertising by people who have the confidence of the people with whom they're talking.
Who do you think mom or grandma or little brother/sister is going to believe, Microsoft ads or you? If they have any experience with MS product over the past ten years then they're not going to be inclined to believe anything in a MS ad -- their personal experience tells them MS marketing is geared toward getting the money out of their pocket and MS product is not very good.
You, the techincal person in-the-know, are in a great position compared with MS. You have a product with outstanding quality, an impossible-to-beat value-to-cost ratio and an entire, world-class army of other techies who are saying the same thing you are.
In my opinion, Gnu/Linux/OSS/Freeware advocates would do best to just keep doing what they've been doing. Don't focus on bashing MS, just make honest comparisons, be up front with newbies about the learning curve (harder to learn, easier to use) and focus on the benefits of the product when compared with the competition. You'll continue to win big!
Frankly, if I were leading a marketing push for Linux right now, I'd say that it's time for the little guy to be "on." Not the uber hackers (who do their own stuff so well) but all Linux users: Time for them to really focus on truely helping others understand the choices available and then helping them get going down the learning curve (which has become much shallower in the past year -- Gnome/KDE/OpenOffice.org -- hero-level work folks, congrats and thanks!)
So, if you want to help the world avoid continuus and expanding MS hell:
1. Join your local LUG or start one.
2. Learn how to make a simple press release and learn where to send copies for your area.
3. Offer some free evening classes to individuals and small businesses via the press releases (donate some time -- see next item.)
4. Make sure there are resources in your area for individuals/businesses (consultants, tutors, etc. -- if you're not seeing $$$ by now you're blind.)
5. Always remember that you serve yourself best when you do your best to help those you are targeting. This is the essense of quality! I know it sounds odd, but it works: The more helpful you are for your audience, the more rewards you'll see for yourself.
I coulda/shoulda/woulda been a preacher but that whole god thing really got it the way.
Some alternate titles for this tome might be:
1. Reversi: C64 Speed on a Pentium IV
2. Double Your Code, Halve Your Speed
3. Real Men Don't Use Real Computers
4. VM:Very Macho or Verily laMe
5. Atari ST Rebirth: a 20 Year Reversal
etc., etc.
Ack, I'm turning into a crank! Oy.
Granting patents on software is the stupidest thing. Programming is just another form of speech whereby one uses a language to communicate, in this case computer language to communicate with the hardware.
Are patents on English speech next? Am I going to need to pay some corporation a dollar every time I use certain words or phrases? Why not just put patents on walking, breathing and eating too?
"The real estate on your screen is precious, and with your PC's vital stats,
Winamp info, game stats, stock tickers, news tickers, sports scores, and
more, it's easy to run out of space...."
Use WindowMaker (or similar wm) and you'll never again worry about lack of
screen real estate. You can have as many screens as you need or want and
move between them fast and easy. The number of programs you can
run/display is only limited by RAM/swap.
I prefer WindowMaker and have three machines all displaying on one monitor
with one keyboard controllng them (all connected via OpenSSH.) Then there
are additional VCs. Lack of screen real estate has never been an
issue.
Perhaps this mod has "blinky light" value, but the screen real estate issue
is a non issue for Linux users.
Do some really basic historical research. Start with J. Edgar Hoover and I'm sure you'll find paths to follow from there. Just because you personally haven't heard of such abuses doesn't mean they have not happened.
Please tell me you're only in the sixth grade and thus have no excuse for not knowing about this -- my opinion of U.S. public education is already very low.
If you're in higher education still, take a couple of history classes. If you're out of school, you should be ashamed of your ignorance. I don't mean to flame you, but shit dude, get a fuckin' clue.
Personally, I'm more interested in the MUI -- Mental User Interface. The command line/language combination is hard to beat (unless you're talkin' porn, of course.)
What I'm looking forward too is the self-aware machine with acceptable communication skills and the ability to do contextual reasoning. This would be far more useful and interesting than more visual stuff as concerns my needs.
Of course, talkin' porn might have merit too.
Bah, I used to be really annoyed with PDFs but finally have just gotten used to them. The points made by others who've replied to your post are worth listening to, especially as concerns Latex to PDF conversions.
For a more enjoyable PDF experience get the latest Acrobat Reader for Linux (5.0) from Adobe (free download.) It's much nicer than previous versions and can actually make PDFs usable (does searches, etc.)
The most annoying thing about PDFs these days is so many folks don't bother putting bookmarks in their PDFs. For large PDFs, bookmarks really do make the difference in comfort and overall usability.
Several posters here have made a very good point which you would be wise to take: Don't build your own just to save a few dollars as it isn't worth the trouble -- and it will be trouble, especially if you do "lowest price" on components. You'll end up with an unstable piece of crap if you do this.
Sheesh, buy a Dell. They're inexpensive and their service is excellent (I'm a most happy Dell customer.) Since they're big, they have clout with manufacturers and you get good component costs. If your machine craps out they fix it (my Dimension 8100 had a DVD drive die within the first two months. They sent a guy out and he swapped it out for me. I fully expected to get a new drive in the mail instead.)
Don't cheat yourself on this: You can easily end up spending dollars to save pennies.
Actually, in the context of computers, the phrase "singing Daisy" is more apt. Wetware pushed up daisies, hardware sings Daisy.
Yes, this was incorrectly rated. Someone please fix this.
Get WineX and play DiabloII on your Debian box. I use it on my Slackware 8.0 system and it works great. You can transfer all your characters too, so you don't have to completely restart the game. Also works great with StarCraft!
It's so nice not to have to use Microslop any more. No more crashes, lockups and reboots. No more sneaky Microslop OS sending spy info back to MS for their sleazy marketing efforts. No more expensive yet crappy, insecure, unreliable software.
Gaming is the last true hurdle for Linux and it's being jumped quickly.
Your site seems to be the victim of a slashdotting. Since you're the one who posted the link to your site, would this be a self-slashdotting? Kinda like suicide by cop, heh.
:)
Thanks for trying.