There's a lot of things to consider when thinking about taking a break before college. I wish I had - instead, I went to college with the same attitude I had in high school. I cared about learning, but I didn't care about busywork assignments that meant nothing to me. I had a notion to skip a year, but since my ACT score was above the 99.5 percentile, my state paid my full ride to any in-state public university, so I figured I might as well go. All I have to show for it is three semesters of C's, D's, F's, and W's permanently marked on my college transcript. The full-ride check from the state was revoked for poor academics, and now I couldn't even get grants or loans because my GPA was down in the dumpster.
Obviously, I left college and went to work, and now fully realize the value of going to college and getting a degree. This was something that no amount of "counseling" would actually have taught me (not that the so-called counselers bothered to try). Not only that, but by having some experience actually working in the computer field, I realize it's not where I want to be. I enjoy computers as a hobby, but not as a career.
So, now I am 22, I am back in school full-time, at a community college, going for a new major, working full-time as I go, and getting a 4.0. I only wish I didn't have a bad GPA from my previous college attempt that I have to work against for the rest of my college career. Next semester I should be above the 2.0 average required so I can recieve financial aid again. Pell grant and loans are my only options now - I've ruined the chance of getting anything based on merit now.
Looking back, everything in my life would be so much easier today if I had just stopped and taken a break like I wanted to after high school. Don't take is as an easy ride, bumming off family - go out and try to make it in the world. My only question now is whether one year would have been enough for me.
One problem with this logic is that as these become more common and are sold with computers (like Apple does) instead of just as accessories, the big players will naturally use the cheapest parts possible. Just as with operating systems, what comes with new PCs becomes the standard regardless of what alternatives are available, and eventually the alternatives disappear.
I few years back, while I was attending the University of Oklahoma, I hooked up a Linux system to my dorm connection. It had been intended purely for testing purposes, but one day a friend who was running a MUSH found herself serverless and needed a temporary home. I searched for some sort of policy for network use, but found none, so I offered to host the MUSH until she paid for a new hosting service.
Now, a while back, I'd purchased a domain name with the long-term goal of starting my own hosting company once I was off-campus. So, to allow the handful of people who needed to connect to the MUSH an easy way of connecting, I also set up the DNS config and told NetSol my.com's primary server was my linux box. Worked like a champ.
Well, the next week I moved off campus, but since they told my roommate that he would not be reassigned a new roommate, I left the linux box there, hosting away. The game actually was moved back to a real hosting company, but I left my domain name going, redirected, for the convenience of the players.
All went fine for a little while... I was short on space in my new apartment, so I left the server at the dorms. Next thing I know, I get a threatening voicemail on my answering machine. My roommate gave them my new number when they called the dorm. Some student IT admin ranted about me illegally running a server on the network, and that I would be facing "academic disciplinary action" if it wasn't resolved immediately. He didn't leave a phone number. My roommate, though, called me up and told me he had gotten a phone number from someone else - the head of the ResNet department. I called him up, and unlike the kid with a god complex who left the message the first time, he was very kind and apologized for the AUP not being properly posted, and so forth. But what surprised me was that it wasn't running the MUSH for a couple weeks that was the problem -- it wasn't even running the DNS server -- it was the fact I had a record at InterNIC saying the primary DNS for a.com domain was located inside OU's IP range! (something about threatening their non-profit educational status and possibly costing them $thousands...)
So I killed the DNS and took the machine home, but that didn't solve the "problem". And boy did the Network Solutions auto-bots have fun sending me denials as I tried to find ways to unlink the IP address from the primary DNS server field. Too bad I didn't know about free dns services back then... But that's another story.
Hmmm... Anything running on a Transmeta chip is being interpreted before running in the "native executable format". So, compiled executables, even the OS, would be considered scripts by this standard.
Just a nitpick. And yes, I'd consider even shell scripts software. Although I'm still split on the Excel spreadsheet issue...
I agree on the last points, but the first one gets me. The Windows Registry, as it's implemented, sucks, as demonstrated by my father's computer just this week.
Uninstall a program, registry gets corrupted, OS won't boot. Even safe mode was hosed. Luckily, it was a recent enough OS that it performs periodic registry backups for recovery purposes (ME), right? That feature has worked absolutely perfectly (translation: 0% of the time) on all the systems I've troubleshot. After that fails a few times, nothing left but a reinstall. Luckily the reinstall managed to preserve the other app installations, so it was just a little more than an hour of wasted time in the end.
Lessee, on my Amigas or Macs, I'd find the folder the program was installed in, and delete it. And, okay, if I wanted to remove shared libraries and config files, I'd run the uninstall program, which at worst fails and I have a couple extra files on my drive. Worst it might do is remove a shared library some other program needs, but at least I don't have to reinstall the OS and pray I don't have to spend a weekend reinstalling ALL my apps off of CD - even the ones installed on a different partition.
And don't even get me started about multi-booting 98 and 2k, and sharing app installs.
IANAProgrammer, but wouldn't it make sense to at least break it up between OS stuff and Other App stuff? Sure, the device driver registry is separate, but not the rest of it. Now that could be powerful. Integration is not always the best answer.
It requires two blank spaces after 'begin', and your email client may strip the spaces out before sending it. I had to add a word after it to make it so O2K could break itself.
Best way I've seen of it being used is the person who set their email client to reply with "Begin [space][space] quotation:"...
I have something that may just fit the bill, although I've never tested it. It is a relic, and it's a ribbon-cable connection, but it has a case and it's own power supply. No brand name on it, and I never could track down any reference on the net to anything like it.
I picked it up for free, to complement my computer museum. I'd be happy to loan it out however long it's needed, for shipping costs. I'd have to take a little time to hook it up and make sure it really is a PC part and not some other 8-bit accessory, but the connector looked promising.
I dunno, it sounds like a good example to me. I'd say the same for seatbelt and helmet laws, while we're on the safety subject. Based on this reasoning, the government has no business butting into my business.
I'd also compare this with the previous mention of guns... I'd personally feel less safe with a gun in my home than without it (I will admit I live in a pretty safe town, but anyway) for fear of accidents, but that doesn't mean the government should be restrict us from owning them, does it?
Government restrictions on things like speed limits, drunk driving, and so on, are attempts to prevent others from violating your safety. These are attempts to restrict things that "can impact third parties."
Now, the issue I see with car safety regulation is not the inability of people to evaluate the safety properly, it's money. If the government didn't mandate safety regulations, the cheapest cars would be deathtraps, and would be the only cars for poor people to afford. This is where these laws have been good -- not just the well-off can afford safe cars.
(must resist troll... must resist troll... ahh, I give up)
Ditto.
Okay, even though this is a troll, it does make a point. I'm whining too. But I don't have a checkbox to exclude what I'm whining about from "my" Slashdot. I do apologize to anyone who seriously took offense at my post.
> So how does one determine what is in the interest of the public?
In my opinion, it's simple. The constitution. Specifically the bill of rights -- albeit generalized a bit.
Everyone has rights. A right to live. A right to speak what we want. A right to think what we want. A right to believe in what we want. A right to do what we want. Etc.
And because everyone has those rights, there is a point where one person's liberties can infringe upon someone else's. Even though you have the right to do what you want, you can't murder someone else because that violates their right to life.
This is how I see American government is *supposed* to work. (at least this part of it)
Even though as a Christian I think things like suicide or euthanasia are wrong, our government should not limit them. Neither should any Christian -- after all, we also believe we were given free agency. (ack! gotta try not to argue religion here.) Regardless, the government shouldn't limit our right to do what we want, when it does not interfere with others. In other words, we should have a right to die, even though that is against my religious beliefs.
Now, of course, there are some issues where personal beleifs will come into play. Abortion is one issue. Not so much whether it is legal, but when. For example, I think we are 'alive' as soon as we are concieved. Thus, I'm against abortion completely. Others may believe that life begins later (up to birth, for some people), so they may apply the same guideline of 'right to life' to mean you can only abort up to that point in time.
And, to be honest, that's about the only case I've been able to think of while I've been writing this where personal beliefs would come into play. In a perfect world, at least.
>watch right now as I move Katz articles into my ignore list > (along with Patent and DOJ articles.)
That's what they're there for. Slashdot is trying to cater to a vast group of people, many more than when it was first created. Without debating whether that's good or not, we are all free to select what we do and don't want to see, through article author/subject exclusion and comment moderation.
I don't mean to aim this as a personal flame, I mean this as a comment to all of Slashdot, should anyone read it. You're doing everyone a favor when you uncheck everything you're not interested in. That way the rest of us don't have to listen to whining and bitching about how some topic or author shouldn't be here.
After all, if we took everything that some number of people didn't like off slashdot, what would we have left?
Please do. That way the rest of us don't have to listen to you and all the other whiners.
We don't *have* a box to uncheck for that.
Re:I can see at least two things wrong with it
on
Beanie Award Wrapup
·
· Score: 1
My understanding is that is wasn't exactly a port, either. Linux was written from scratch, with different design philosophies even. It was inspired by Minix (or it's price, at least), but that's about it.
Problem is, they've publicly stated that LinuxMac is *completely* proprietary, and that hformat or any other third-party software was absolutely not part of it.
It's not that the GUI wrapper isn't useful or isn't signifigant enough -- lord help us if there is a time when anything is too insignifigant to develop -- but it's their blantantly false claims that are the issue here.
I have heard nice things about the BeOS, and have been tracking it since the beginning (Back when JLG was touting it as Amiga'96), but have yet to actually use it. Back when I first got my PC, and it was still freely available, it didn't support the rather strange hardware I had. More recently, I shied away from it because Be seemed to be pushing the OS as only for media content creation, not mainstream use. It's as if they only want the BeOS to ever be a niche market OS, and not mainstream. (This is the same argument I have against the New-Amiga-NG alliance created between QNX and Phase5.) It does look like they're starting to snap out of that now.
I know Squid above (who I usually respect) is always ragging on the BeOS, but if it's good enough to use on a daily basis, like my Amiga would be if it had some better hardware, I will be happy. At the very least it could help me last until a better successor comes along. I can get used to the shortcomings if it's not crashing every hour or needing constant reconfiguring and upgrading.
And then a new Amiga can come along, and save us all.:)
I don't like having to hassle with the OS to get things done. I am not a dummy -- I certainly hope I qualify as a geek, with my collection of 20+ computers at home. I've been using computers for 14 years, from Apples and VIC-20s to SGIs and Suns.
This is why I still would rather sit at my "slow" 68040-based, graphically un-upgraded Amiga 2000 than at any of my other systems, including a "modern" K6/2-450 system I recently built.
Of course, I usually do sit in front of the above-mentioned PC, because websurfing is a lot nicer in 24-bit color as opposed to 16 colors. It was cheaper to buy the parts for this system than to get a gfx card for the aging Amiga.
I bet I'll loose my all-important karma for this, but... I had hoped Linux would help me be able to move out of the past and into the modern world without Microsoft, but the more I use it, the more I hope that it will not be the future of mainstream computing. After three years of playing, it now exclusively resides on a 166MHz Alpha for use as an internet gateway. I might add that I can't even run X on this system (with 64 megs of RAM, even) without everything slowing to a crawl. I may someday dualboot a PC for experimenting and programming, but it's just too combersome for my everyday use.
I will say that using an SGI is a real pleasure -- while it definately sucks up CPU and graphics horsepower, IRIX is the only *nix OS I know that's as consistent and well-integrated. The 6 year old Indigo box I used for a while would be my second choice for everyday use, if it were that easy to choose. (It's about as hard to play my new copy of StarFleet Command on an SGI as my Amiga, methinks.) Too bad they've screwed themselves over with their whole NT migration strategy last year.
I'm still holding onto the hope that someone will capture the Amiga spirit and give us a modern computer that is as fun and easy to use as my Amiga, without being as limiting as a Mac. All the better if it's got the label Amiga on it as well. Gateway never really planned this. Amino sounds like they just might.
Yeah, looking at it seriously, Stallman is one of my top picks (for something like the decade, not the year). The other two there are just humor. I want to say Torvalds should be on the list too, but he almost gets too much credit already. (not to insult him or Linux)
Ghandi would be a great choice for person of the century. A friend at work has one of his quotes on her sigline: "We must be the change we want in the world." My wife also used a quote of his for a while, but I forgot what it was. It's pretty obvious he's left an impact on the world.
Do you think anyone is gonna have quotes of Jeff Bezos in their sig in two or three decades? I didn't think so.
I have another problem with point 3, beyond what the previous reply brings up. What if my wife, a relative computer newbie, asks me, a 14 year veteran, to log in and write the question while she dictates?
This sort of system has way too many potential pitfalls. I do agree with the first two methods, though.:)
True, both Linux and Microsoft borrow ideas from other operating systems. But I advocate Linux and I despise Microsoft. Why? (ignoring the open vs. closed source aspects)
Microsoft makes $$$ for it. If we're shoveling out money to them, we ought to be getting some innovation, not just a rehash of what we've already paid someone else to innovate. Anyone notice Microsoft's R&D budget? I won't even go into their FUD and lies.
Linux is free. I don't mean to say that it isn't worth any money, but when a lot of the development that goes into Linux is done on unpaid spare time, I don't expect revolutionary differences from other products. I expect a merging of the best ideas from the big guys with the huge R&D budgets.
On the flip side, I'm rather happy with Apple. Yes, I have to pay them, and yes, they do borrow ideas from others, but they have actually brought some good innovation to the market as well. I like the voice-login feature of OS 9, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of things to consider when thinking about taking a break before college. I wish I had - instead, I went to college with the same attitude I had in high school. I cared about learning, but I didn't care about busywork assignments that meant nothing to me. I had a notion to skip a year, but since my ACT score was above the 99.5 percentile, my state paid my full ride to any in-state public university, so I figured I might as well go. All I have to show for it is three semesters of C's, D's, F's, and W's permanently marked on my college transcript. The full-ride check from the state was revoked for poor academics, and now I couldn't even get grants or loans because my GPA was down in the dumpster.
Obviously, I left college and went to work, and now fully realize the value of going to college and getting a degree. This was something that no amount of "counseling" would actually have taught me (not that the so-called counselers bothered to try). Not only that, but by having some experience actually working in the computer field, I realize it's not where I want to be. I enjoy computers as a hobby, but not as a career.
So, now I am 22, I am back in school full-time, at a community college, going for a new major, working full-time as I go, and getting a 4.0. I only wish I didn't have a bad GPA from my previous college attempt that I have to work against for the rest of my college career. Next semester I should be above the 2.0 average required so I can recieve financial aid again. Pell grant and loans are my only options now - I've ruined the chance of getting anything based on merit now.
Looking back, everything in my life would be so much easier today if I had just stopped and taken a break like I wanted to after high school. Don't take is as an easy ride, bumming off family - go out and try to make it in the world. My only question now is whether one year would have been enough for me.
-jupo
One problem with this logic is that as these become more common and are sold with computers (like Apple does) instead of just as accessories, the big players will naturally use the cheapest parts possible. Just as with operating systems, what comes with new PCs becomes the standard regardless of what alternatives are available, and eventually the alternatives disappear.
I few years back, while I was attending the University of Oklahoma, I hooked up a Linux system to my dorm connection. It had been intended purely for testing purposes, but one day a friend who was running a MUSH found herself serverless and needed a temporary home. I searched for some sort of policy for network use, but found none, so I offered to host the MUSH until she paid for a new hosting service.
.com's primary server was my linux box. Worked like a champ.
.com domain was located inside OU's IP range! (something about threatening their non-profit educational status and possibly costing them $thousands...)
Now, a while back, I'd purchased a domain name with the long-term goal of starting my own hosting company once I was off-campus. So, to allow the handful of people who needed to connect to the MUSH an easy way of connecting, I also set up the DNS config and told NetSol my
Well, the next week I moved off campus, but since they told my roommate that he would not be reassigned a new roommate, I left the linux box there, hosting away. The game actually was moved back to a real hosting company, but I left my domain name going, redirected, for the convenience of the players.
All went fine for a little while... I was short on space in my new apartment, so I left the server at the dorms. Next thing I know, I get a threatening voicemail on my answering machine. My roommate gave them my new number when they called the dorm. Some student IT admin ranted about me illegally running a server on the network, and that I would be facing "academic disciplinary action" if it wasn't resolved immediately. He didn't leave a phone number. My roommate, though, called me up and told me he had gotten a phone number from someone else - the head of the ResNet department. I called him up, and unlike the kid with a god complex who left the message the first time, he was very kind and apologized for the AUP not being properly posted, and so forth. But what surprised me was that it wasn't running the MUSH for a couple weeks that was the problem -- it wasn't even running the DNS server -- it was the fact I had a record at InterNIC saying the primary DNS for a
So I killed the DNS and took the machine home, but that didn't solve the "problem". And boy did the Network Solutions auto-bots have fun sending me denials as I tried to find ways to unlink the IP address from the primary DNS server field. Too bad I didn't know about free dns services back then... But that's another story.
Hmmm... Anything running on a Transmeta chip is being interpreted before running in the "native executable format". So, compiled executables, even the OS, would be considered scripts by this standard.
Just a nitpick. And yes, I'd consider even shell scripts software. Although I'm still split on the Excel spreadsheet issue...
I agree on the last points, but the first one gets me. The Windows Registry, as it's implemented, sucks, as demonstrated by my father's computer just this week.
Uninstall a program, registry gets corrupted, OS won't boot. Even safe mode was hosed. Luckily, it was a recent enough OS that it performs periodic registry backups for recovery purposes (ME), right? That feature has worked absolutely perfectly (translation: 0% of the time) on all the systems I've troubleshot. After that fails a few times, nothing left but a reinstall. Luckily the reinstall managed to preserve the other app installations, so it was just a little more than an hour of wasted time in the end.
Lessee, on my Amigas or Macs, I'd find the folder the program was installed in, and delete it. And, okay, if I wanted to remove shared libraries and config files, I'd run the uninstall program, which at worst fails and I have a couple extra files on my drive. Worst it might do is remove a shared library some other program needs, but at least I don't have to reinstall the OS and pray I don't have to spend a weekend reinstalling ALL my apps off of CD - even the ones installed on a different partition.
And don't even get me started about multi-booting 98 and 2k, and sharing app installs.
IANAProgrammer, but wouldn't it make sense to at least break it up between OS stuff and Other App stuff? Sure, the device driver registry is separate, but not the rest of it. Now that could be powerful. Integration is not always the best answer.
-jupo
It requires two blank spaces after 'begin', and your email client may strip the spaces out before sending it. I had to add a word after it to make it so O2K could break itself.
Best way I've seen of it being used is the person who set their email client to reply with "Begin [space][space] quotation:"...
-jupo
I have something that may just fit the bill, although I've never tested it. It is a relic, and it's a ribbon-cable connection, but it has a case and it's own power supply. No brand name on it, and I never could track down any reference on the net to anything like it.
I picked it up for free, to complement my computer museum. I'd be happy to loan it out however long it's needed, for shipping costs. I'd have to take a little time to hook it up and make sure it really is a PC part and not some other 8-bit accessory, but the connector looked promising.
Email me if you're interested.
-jupo
I dunno, it sounds like a good example to me. I'd say the same for seatbelt and helmet laws, while we're on the safety subject. Based on this reasoning, the government has no business butting into my business.
I'd also compare this with the previous mention of guns... I'd personally feel less safe with a gun in my home than without it (I will admit I live in a pretty safe town, but anyway) for fear of accidents, but that doesn't mean the government should be restrict us from owning them, does it?
Government restrictions on things like speed limits, drunk driving, and so on, are attempts to prevent others from violating your safety. These are attempts to restrict things that "can impact third parties."
Now, the issue I see with car safety regulation is not the inability of people to evaluate the safety properly, it's money. If the government didn't mandate safety regulations, the cheapest cars would be deathtraps, and would be the only cars for poor people to afford. This is where these laws have been good -- not just the well-off can afford safe cars.
My $.02...
(must resist troll... must resist troll... ahh, I give up)
Ditto.
Okay, even though this is a troll, it does make a point. I'm whining too. But I don't have a checkbox to exclude what I'm whining about from "my" Slashdot. I do apologize to anyone who seriously took offense at my post.
-JuPo
> So how does one determine what is in the interest of the public?
In my opinion, it's simple. The constitution. Specifically the bill of rights -- albeit generalized a bit.
Everyone has rights. A right to live. A right to speak what we want. A right to think what we want. A right to believe in what we want. A right to do what we want. Etc.
And because everyone has those rights, there is a point where one person's liberties can infringe upon someone else's. Even though you have the right to do what you want, you can't murder someone else because that violates their right to life.
This is how I see American government is *supposed* to work. (at least this part of it)
Even though as a Christian I think things like suicide or euthanasia are wrong, our government should not limit them. Neither should any Christian -- after all, we also believe we were given free agency. (ack! gotta try not to argue religion here.) Regardless, the government shouldn't limit our right to do what we want, when it does not interfere with others. In other words, we should have a right to die, even though that is against my religious beliefs.
Now, of course, there are some issues where personal beleifs will come into play. Abortion is one issue. Not so much whether it is legal, but when. For example, I think we are 'alive' as soon as we are concieved. Thus, I'm against abortion completely. Others may believe that life begins later (up to birth, for some people), so they may apply the same guideline of 'right to life' to mean you can only abort up to that point in time.
And, to be honest, that's about the only case I've been able to think of while I've been writing this where personal beliefs would come into play. In a perfect world, at least.
-JuPo
>watch right now as I move Katz articles into my ignore list
> (along with Patent and DOJ articles.)
That's what they're there for. Slashdot is trying to cater to a vast group of people, many more than when it was first created. Without debating whether that's good or not, we are all free to select what we do and don't want to see, through article author/subject exclusion and comment moderation.
I don't mean to aim this as a personal flame, I mean this as a comment to all of Slashdot, should anyone read it. You're doing everyone a favor when you uncheck everything you're not interested in. That way the rest of us don't have to listen to whining and bitching about how some topic or author shouldn't be here.
After all, if we took everything that some number of people didn't like off slashdot, what would we have left?
-JuPo
Please do. That way the rest of us don't have to listen to you and all the other whiners.
We don't *have* a box to uncheck for that.
My understanding is that is wasn't exactly a port, either. Linux was written from scratch, with different design philosophies even. It was inspired by Minix (or it's price, at least), but that's about it.
-JuPo
Problem is, they've publicly stated that LinuxMac is *completely* proprietary, and that hformat or any other third-party software was absolutely not part of it.
It's not that the GUI wrapper isn't useful or isn't signifigant enough -- lord help us if there is a time when anything is too insignifigant to develop -- but it's their blantantly false claims that are the issue here.
-JuPo
Ah, yes, BeOS. I always seem to forget about it.
:)
I have heard nice things about the BeOS, and have been tracking it since the beginning (Back when JLG was touting it as Amiga'96), but have yet to actually use it. Back when I first got my PC, and it was still freely available, it didn't support the rather strange hardware I had. More recently, I shied away from it because Be seemed to be pushing the OS as only for media content creation, not mainstream use. It's as if they only want the BeOS to ever be a niche market OS, and not mainstream. (This is the same argument I have against the New-Amiga-NG alliance created between QNX and Phase5.) It does look like they're starting to snap out of that now.
I know Squid above (who I usually respect) is always ragging on the BeOS, but if it's good enough to use on a daily basis, like my Amiga would be if it had some better hardware, I will be happy. At the very least it could help me last until a better successor comes along. I can get used to the shortcomings if it's not crashing every hour or needing constant reconfiguring and upgrading.
And then a new Amiga can come along, and save us all.
-JuPo
I don't like having to hassle with the OS to get things done. I am not a dummy -- I certainly hope I qualify as a geek, with my collection of 20+ computers at home. I've been using computers for 14 years, from Apples and VIC-20s to SGIs and Suns.
This is why I still would rather sit at my "slow" 68040-based, graphically un-upgraded Amiga 2000 than at any of my other systems, including a "modern" K6/2-450 system I recently built.
Of course, I usually do sit in front of the above-mentioned PC, because websurfing is a lot nicer in 24-bit color as opposed to 16 colors. It was cheaper to buy the parts for this system than to get a gfx card for the aging Amiga.
I bet I'll loose my all-important karma for this, but... I had hoped Linux would help me be able to move out of the past and into the modern world without Microsoft, but the more I use it, the more I hope that it will not be the future of mainstream computing. After three years of playing, it now exclusively resides on a 166MHz Alpha for use as an internet gateway. I might add that I can't even run X on this system (with 64 megs of RAM, even) without everything slowing to a crawl. I may someday dualboot a PC for experimenting and programming, but it's just too combersome for my everyday use.
I will say that using an SGI is a real pleasure -- while it definately sucks up CPU and graphics horsepower, IRIX is the only *nix OS I know that's as consistent and well-integrated. The 6 year old Indigo box I used for a while would be my second choice for everyday use, if it were that easy to choose. (It's about as hard to play my new copy of StarFleet Command on an SGI as my Amiga, methinks.) Too bad they've screwed themselves over with their whole NT migration strategy last year.
I'm still holding onto the hope that someone will capture the Amiga spirit and give us a modern computer that is as fun and easy to use as my Amiga, without being as limiting as a Mac. All the better if it's got the label Amiga on it as well. Gateway never really planned this. Amino sounds like they just might.
They've got my support...
-JuPo
Yeah, looking at it seriously, Stallman is one of my top picks (for something like the decade, not the year). The other two there are just humor. I want to say Torvalds should be on the list too, but he almost gets too much credit already. (not to insult him or Linux)
Ghandi would be a great choice for person of the century. A friend at work has one of his quotes on her sigline: "We must be the change we want in the world." My wife also used a quote of his for a while, but I forgot what it was. It's pretty obvious he's left an impact on the world.
Do you think anyone is gonna have quotes of Jeff Bezos in their sig in two or three decades? I didn't think so.
-JuPo
Hey, that last bit sounds like IWin.
Person of the decade:
GNU/Stallman.
Person of the century:
Linus. Because he's cooler than Charlie Brown.
Person of the millenium:
Harriet Tuxman. For helping to free the penguins.
I have another problem with point 3, beyond what the previous reply brings up. What if my wife, a relative computer newbie, asks me, a 14 year veteran, to log in and write the question while she dictates?
:)
This sort of system has way too many potential pitfalls. I do agree with the first two methods, though.
-JuPo
True, both Linux and Microsoft borrow ideas from other operating systems. But I advocate Linux and I despise Microsoft. Why? (ignoring the open vs. closed source aspects)
Microsoft makes $$$ for it. If we're shoveling out money to them, we ought to be getting some innovation, not just a rehash of what we've already paid someone else to innovate. Anyone notice Microsoft's R&D budget? I won't even go into their FUD and lies.
Linux is free. I don't mean to say that it isn't worth any money, but when a lot of the development that goes into Linux is done on unpaid spare time, I don't expect revolutionary differences from other products. I expect a merging of the best ideas from the big guys with the huge R&D budgets.
On the flip side, I'm rather happy with Apple. Yes, I have to pay them, and yes, they do borrow ideas from others, but they have actually brought some good innovation to the market as well. I like the voice-login feature of OS 9, for example.
-JuPo