There's a sizeable segment of the population which simply can't search properly. Being able to synthesize a question into appropriate keywords is a difficult skill for many. Try watching a novice search Google on a variety of topics. Not only will they use poorly worded queries, but it's likely they will only go to the first hit. Many users give up if the first hit isn't what they want. Only the advanced users know about tabbed browsing and will load up a series of results to scan.
So, the reason why users don't google it in the first place is that they don't trust search (though Google has some of the highest trust levels of any search engine). What really needs to happen is that workplaces which have users online need to offer more comprehensive training on internet literacy; unfortunately, it's cheaper just to hire someone to handle all of the stupid questions instead.
Actually, you can subscribe to just about any stream of data from twitter with RSS. Of course, most non-techies won't know how to do that, but it's quite possible to be a pure twitter follower with nothing other than an RSS client.
Where twitter accounts do become useful is how they're a bridge between the informal aspects of IRC and IM and the persistence of email. Rather then spamming your friends with email or IM with a link to an interesting news story, you can just tweet it, and give them the control to follow up, ignore, or filter as they see fit.
I recently played through the original Dark Forces in Dosbox, having only played Dark Forces 2 and a bit of Jedi Academy. It was amazing how addicting the game was, how well the missions were structured, and how even with the ancient graphics it drew me in. The only issue I had was a few places where the rendering engine could "hide" halls and doors on specific angles due to the size of the pixels.
If only they would use open standards, or their software had the option to save the files you are working with in more or less open (or much used) standards, our lives would be so much better.
The thing about Apple software is that it doesn't intentionally obscure document formats - and many of them are based on open standards anyways. Mail, for example, stores email messages in a way that is easily readable by any other application. iCal uses iCal files in a slightly different way (each event is it's own ICS file), but that's an understandable change for backup optimization and search indexing. iTunes creates an XML database of it's library meant to be used by other applications. The iWork suites are interesting; it would be better if it was ODF, but the XML looks well-formed and I don't think it would be too difficult to parse. 10.5's TextEdit has basic ODF support - hopefully it's a precursor to support in the next version of Pages. Apple's use of XML has also encouraged 3rd parties to do the same - unlike many Windows applications, I know I can recover data in a pinch with nothing more then sed and grep.
Every piece of Apple software I've ever used since the switch to OS X has had the option to export to something reasonable, such as XML, HTML, PDF, or domain-specific formats such as Word.
I read it on the Ubuntu site when 8.04 first came out that Firefox would be upgraded to 3.0 when it was released. I think their plan is to support Firefox 3 through the 8.04 lifecycle, as Mozilla will be supporting it for at least 18 months as well. But, I can't find anything to this effect now, so perhaps they changed their plans.
I don't know, I think given Sun's wishy-washy support of OS X for OO.org in the past it's worth it to support NeoOffice at least in the short term. I haven't looked at Sun's work in a few months, but this thread gives some good detail as to the previous deficiencies of Sun's work for OS X support.
When I was on vacation in Cuba, internet access was incredibly slow, and I don't believe many of the citizens actually have access. Of course, if Cuba wasn't embargoed by the US it would be trivial to connect to Florida.
I imagine that the infrastructure doesn't exist to connect to a South American country, and they don't have the money to connect to Europe. Even if they did, most of Cuba is rural and they don't have the infrastructure (or the political will) to connect citizens.
Most admins are all ready maintaining multiple python installations. Usually you have python2.3, python2.4, and so on with the python symlink pointing to your preferred version. Debian, Ubuntu, and Freebsd all work this way, and very rarely is it a pain.
If I use my home phone in an abusive manner, I can lose my service. A simple example would be if I bought a home phone line and send out robo-calls advertising.
Also, phone companies offer restricted numbers, unlisted numbers, and the like. It's possible to set up an account that only accepts calls from specific numbers. This doesn't interefer with their common carrier status. Presumably ISP's could work in exactly the same way.
I am Canadian though, so things could be different south of the border.
If sampling were available in Led Zeps time, I don't think they would have even bothered "trying" to disguise the theft.
Methinks you were looking for a different word. Plagiarism comes to mind.
I think this is one of the problems with how people currently view music as something which can be "owned" in perpetuity.
The blues and jazz movement of the 1900's directly influenced most of our popular music today. And blues and jazz were influenced by the music before it. Hell, I've even heard Bach called "the father of Jazz". To say that Zepplin is stealing is a vast overstatement, given the evolution of their guitar style and rhythmic texture compared to previous Rock 'n Roll.
I think most people can agree with some sort of fair compensation for artistic works. Many point to the original definition of copyright within the United States.
Creativity? How creative is it to BLATENTLY rip off blues musicians from 20,30,40 years before they were BORN?
Incredibly! Should Iron Maiden have not allowed Black Sabbath to influence their writing? Now, it's good form to cite direct influences in published music (and I don't know anything about this case beyond Wikipedia's entry), but is it actually wrong to be influenced by your musical past?! I hope such a day never occurs.
Something like mkisofs works just fine being called as a separate process. Assuming they didn't add any features to mkisofs, they could have simply used their proprietary GUI frontend and when people ask for the source, just point to the mkisofs/cdrtools/etc websites. Now by wrapping in DLL's, they'll either have to rewrite their application or publish their own source tree, possibly even their own proprietary code depending on how it's been written.
It looks like they're distributing a trial version, which I think means that anyone with the trial is entitled to any source under the GPL?
While everyone's entitled to their own experiences, I must disagree with your assertation that those in the educational profession make above-average salaries.
From the first perspecitve, I have a close family member who is the principle of a school. He started as a teacher then worked his way into the management side of things. How he describes it is that in most government jobs you are trading salaries and bonuses for job security. For example, while most people at an equilvalent management position in a corporation would have a company-provided car, this doesn't happen in education. You have to look beyond just the base salary and include the values of bonuses and equipement essentially given to the employee. He did mention once that while *teachers* in the US make significantly less than their Canadian counterparts, that *management* positions in the US make significantly more. Perhaps a redistribution of funds in the American system is in order.
I also know another person who used to work in IT, but now teaches tech and math in high school. He makes significantly less money than he did before, but feels that he is making more of a real world difference instead of being just another code monkey.
Of course, all of this is hearsay. I'd love to see some stats with perfomance reviews and such - especially with different governments at the helm:)
I'm still in my undergraduate degree, and am still fresh with memories of the public (Canadian) schools I went to. While some teachers were amazingly great, some were "average" and some were pretty horrible. But looking back, I think that's a valuable lesson. Regardless of where you work (I see this in most of the jobs that I've worked at), you have the great, the average, and the poor. Being able to work with any individual to complete a task is what's important.
I'm not actually working there now (in school now), so anything I mention isn't set in stone. Check with a service rep before you lay down your dollars:).
There are no bandwidth limits other than 40 Gig's a month on binary newsgroups (this is b/c it's outsourced to GigaNews). No ports are throttled, but it is likely that interactive traffic (especially SSH) is queued higher than "bulk" bandwidth. Either way, it's nothing like how Rogers screws around with BitTorrent.
All of the systems are run with FreeBSD. Sentex is a farily significant contributer to FreeBSD development.
As for servers, of course! Most employees run their own servers off of their DSL connection (I do imaps, http, teamspeak, and others I've forgotten about). The view is that a byte is a byte, regardless of where it's going to or coming from. Just don't spew out spam or viruses and everyone's happy:)
Everyone else uses their lines, and thus their filtering. Hopefully we'll have more effective header encryption by then.
Actually, that's not true. I work for an ISP (who shall remain nameless) who sells DSL (among other things) and everything relating to filtering is up to the ISP selling the service. This is why many different ISP's selling DSL can have different policies regarding quotas and packet filtering. Feel free to call one up in your area and free youself from the shackles of Bell and Rogers!
I've had decent success with Pages from iWork '06. I haven't done any *huge* documents with it, but it does a very good job of dealing with images, tables, etc. The Styles system is what I wish Word had. It also lets you control breaks in a very easy way, with options to prevent hanging lines and so on. The only problem I've had with it is that performance gets very slow, especially with tables or images (this is on a G4 867/640 Mb RAM). However, performance on a G4 1.5 eMac was fine so if your labs are reasonably up to date it might be worth looking into.
One other thing - the templates in Pages are *really* good. The first program for any kind of layout I've ever used where I will start with a template and modify as needed vs. just building from scratch.
Re:What's the problem with dual boot on same disk?
on
Test Driving Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In my experience (ISP Tech Support), it's even worse then that:
"What version of Windows are you running?" (since no users have any idea what an operating system is): "I don't know, the newest one?", or "Outlook Express", or "Office 97".
"Well, you know when you turn on your computer? There is a big blue or black screen which says what version of Windows you have. What does that say?": "Oh, I never pay any attention to that."
So if users don't even see the BIG FLAMING WINDOWS VERSION NUMBER during boot up, the odds of them picking up a book like this and getting it/off the shelf/ is near zero.
Too bad. I/do/ know that lots of users would like to save $50 off of the purchase of a new computer, esp. with Thunderbird and FF being cross platform so the setup is virtually the same. But consumers will never demand anything better because all they know is that their big black box plugs into their small TV and shows them pretty pictures from the internet.
Has anyone had major issues with Diablo 2 after this update? OpenGL because almost unusable, while software mode works fine. Repair perms had no effect, and Q3A and WarCraft III work fine. This is on a first-gen 12" PB with 640 MB of RAM.
--Andrew
It's relatively painless under Linux, and I would assume so under any *nix OS. I recently set up a public workstation image for the Central Student's Association at my university based off of Debian + GDM + XFCE + Firefox. GDM is setup to log in automatically with the guest user. Before a guest process is spawned, the entire contents of/home/guest is nuked, and a new skeleton is copied from/etc/guest.skel. This contains all of the 'default' settings, so it's not like everything is starting from scratch. This is also better than Deep Freeze, as I can ssh in to the workstations as my user (which doesn't have the login script), and do apt-get dist-upgrades and the like.
I doubt there is a way to do it under Windows without extra software. Deep Freeze is good, but is one more cost per workstation.
If anyone would like to talk to my about the system I've setup, email me and I'd be glad to answer any questions.
don't bring too many expensive devices, and if you have to, don't show off them in the public.
Except for PowerBooks (12") and iPods. Might be the best hope of meeting chicks you'll have. I would highly recommend showing how to add an Address card to the Address book, complete with a phone number entry. Then, sync the address to the ever-so-cute iPod, and they'll be running to your dorm;)
I have a 12" PB first gen, and the keyboard is very nice. Quiet, with a good touch, and a nice texture on the keys. All keys are full size, except for the arrow keys and the Esc-Fn-Eject keys, which are half size. Keep in mind that the keyboard is vastly different than an iBook keyboard, which are a lot less solid and comfortable to the touch.
The HP laptops I've used have a heavier feel, the keys seem thicker than the ones on the PowerBooks. However, the spring action isn't as soft. The texture is similar to any other PC laptop.
Hope this helps!
Re:OSX a major disappointment on every level
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 1
It compresses really well, and properly preserves Mac resource forks. As well, if you're using it on OS X, the interface is really nice, especially with the minimal Drop(Stuff | Tar | Zip) drag-and-drop commands.
Of course, no one outside of the Mac world uses Stuffit, so people dowloading the file would have to get the client, which is one more step to distribution.
Re:OSX a major disappointment on every level
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 1
As well, Stuffit Expander is free for Windows. They have a linux version on their website, and you can install stuffit for FreeBSD right from ports. Sounds cross-platform to me!
I see it as a really sad statement for humanity that Space needs to be "profitable" and "affordable" for us to be able to explore it. One county landed on the moon. 35 years ago at that. With todays tech, 3 countries should be able to land on Mars.
I think I'll go huddle in a corner until the world realizes that exploration and knowledge are more important than money and materialisim...:(
Slashdot Mirror
There's a sizeable segment of the population which simply can't search properly. Being able to synthesize a question into appropriate keywords is a difficult skill for many. Try watching a novice search Google on a variety of topics. Not only will they use poorly worded queries, but it's likely they will only go to the first hit. Many users give up if the first hit isn't what they want. Only the advanced users know about tabbed browsing and will load up a series of results to scan.
So, the reason why users don't google it in the first place is that they don't trust search (though Google has some of the highest trust levels of any search engine). What really needs to happen is that workplaces which have users online need to offer more comprehensive training on internet literacy; unfortunately, it's cheaper just to hire someone to handle all of the stupid questions instead.
Actually, you can subscribe to just about any stream of data from twitter with RSS. Of course, most non-techies won't know how to do that, but it's quite possible to be a pure twitter follower with nothing other than an RSS client.
Where twitter accounts do become useful is how they're a bridge between the informal aspects of IRC and IM and the persistence of email. Rather then spamming your friends with email or IM with a link to an interesting news story, you can just tweet it, and give them the control to follow up, ignore, or filter as they see fit.
I recently played through the original Dark Forces in Dosbox, having only played Dark Forces 2 and a bit of Jedi Academy. It was amazing how addicting the game was, how well the missions were structured, and how even with the ancient graphics it drew me in. The only issue I had was a few places where the rendering engine could "hide" halls and doors on specific angles due to the size of the pixels.
The sparkle is gone, and it's very sad.
If only they would use open standards, or their software had the option to save the files you are working with in more or less open (or much used) standards, our lives would be so much better.
The thing about Apple software is that it doesn't intentionally obscure document formats - and many of them are based on open standards anyways. Mail, for example, stores email messages in a way that is easily readable by any other application. iCal uses iCal files in a slightly different way (each event is it's own ICS file), but that's an understandable change for backup optimization and search indexing. iTunes creates an XML database of it's library meant to be used by other applications. The iWork suites are interesting; it would be better if it was ODF, but the XML looks well-formed and I don't think it would be too difficult to parse. 10.5's TextEdit has basic ODF support - hopefully it's a precursor to support in the next version of Pages. Apple's use of XML has also encouraged 3rd parties to do the same - unlike many Windows applications, I know I can recover data in a pinch with nothing more then sed and grep.
Every piece of Apple software I've ever used since the switch to OS X has had the option to export to something reasonable, such as XML, HTML, PDF, or domain-specific formats such as Word.
Actually, port 465 is not the correct port to use. If you maintain a mail server, you should switch it to the official SMTP submission port, 587.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2476.txt (see section 3.1)
I read it on the Ubuntu site when 8.04 first came out that Firefox would be upgraded to 3.0 when it was released. I think their plan is to support Firefox 3 through the 8.04 lifecycle, as Mozilla will be supporting it for at least 18 months as well. But, I can't find anything to this effect now, so perhaps they changed their plans.
I don't know, I think given Sun's wishy-washy support of OS X for OO.org in the past it's worth it to support NeoOffice at least in the short term. I haven't looked at Sun's work in a few months, but this thread gives some good detail as to the previous deficiencies of Sun's work for OS X support.
When I was on vacation in Cuba, internet access was incredibly slow, and I don't believe many of the citizens actually have access. Of course, if Cuba wasn't embargoed by the US it would be trivial to connect to Florida. I imagine that the infrastructure doesn't exist to connect to a South American country, and they don't have the money to connect to Europe. Even if they did, most of Cuba is rural and they don't have the infrastructure (or the political will) to connect citizens.
Most admins are all ready maintaining multiple python installations. Usually you have python2.3, python2.4, and so on with the python symlink pointing to your preferred version. Debian, Ubuntu, and Freebsd all work this way, and very rarely is it a pain.
If I use my home phone in an abusive manner, I can lose my service. A simple example would be if I bought a home phone line and send out robo-calls advertising.
Also, phone companies offer restricted numbers, unlisted numbers, and the like. It's possible to set up an account that only accepts calls from specific numbers. This doesn't interefer with their common carrier status. Presumably ISP's could work in exactly the same way.
I am Canadian though, so things could be different south of the border.
I think this is one of the problems with how people currently view music as something which can be "owned" in perpetuity.
The blues and jazz movement of the 1900's directly influenced most of our popular music today. And blues and jazz were influenced by the music before it. Hell, I've even heard Bach called "the father of Jazz". To say that Zepplin is stealing is a vast overstatement, given the evolution of their guitar style and rhythmic texture compared to previous Rock 'n Roll.
I think most people can agree with some sort of fair compensation for artistic works. Many point to the original definition of copyright within the United States.
Incredibly! Should Iron Maiden have not allowed Black Sabbath to influence their writing? Now, it's good form to cite direct influences in published music (and I don't know anything about this case beyond Wikipedia's entry), but is it actually wrong to be influenced by your musical past?! I hope such a day never occurs.
Something like mkisofs works just fine being called as a separate process. Assuming they didn't add any features to mkisofs, they could have simply used their proprietary GUI frontend and when people ask for the source, just point to the mkisofs/cdrtools/etc websites. Now by wrapping in DLL's, they'll either have to rewrite their application or publish their own source tree, possibly even their own proprietary code depending on how it's been written.
It looks like they're distributing a trial version, which I think means that anyone with the trial is entitled to any source under the GPL?
Yet another case of stupidity implying malice...
While everyone's entitled to their own experiences, I must disagree with your assertation that those in the educational profession make above-average salaries.
:)
From the first perspecitve, I have a close family member who is the principle of a school. He started as a teacher then worked his way into the management side of things. How he describes it is that in most government jobs you are trading salaries and bonuses for job security. For example, while most people at an equilvalent management position in a corporation would have a company-provided car, this doesn't happen in education. You have to look beyond just the base salary and include the values of bonuses and equipement essentially given to the employee. He did mention once that while *teachers* in the US make significantly less than their Canadian counterparts, that *management* positions in the US make significantly more. Perhaps a redistribution of funds in the American system is in order.
I also know another person who used to work in IT, but now teaches tech and math in high school. He makes significantly less money than he did before, but feels that he is making more of a real world difference instead of being just another code monkey.
Of course, all of this is hearsay. I'd love to see some stats with perfomance reviews and such - especially with different governments at the helm
I'm still in my undergraduate degree, and am still fresh with memories of the public (Canadian) schools I went to. While some teachers were amazingly great, some were "average" and some were pretty horrible. But looking back, I think that's a valuable lesson. Regardless of where you work (I see this in most of the jobs that I've worked at), you have the great, the average, and the poor. Being able to work with any individual to complete a task is what's important.
I'm not actually working there now (in school now), so anything I mention isn't set in stone. Check with a service rep before you lay down your dollars :).
:)
There are no bandwidth limits other than 40 Gig's a month on binary newsgroups (this is b/c it's outsourced to GigaNews). No ports are throttled, but it is likely that interactive traffic (especially SSH) is queued higher than "bulk" bandwidth. Either way, it's nothing like how Rogers screws around with BitTorrent.
All of the systems are run with FreeBSD. Sentex is a farily significant contributer to FreeBSD development.
As for servers, of course! Most employees run their own servers off of their DSL connection (I do imaps, http, teamspeak, and others I've forgotten about). The view is that a byte is a byte, regardless of where it's going to or coming from. Just don't spew out spam or viruses and everyone's happy
I've had decent success with Pages from iWork '06. I haven't done any *huge* documents with it, but it does a very good job of dealing with images, tables, etc. The Styles system is what I wish Word had. It also lets you control breaks in a very easy way, with options to prevent hanging lines and so on. The only problem I've had with it is that performance gets very slow, especially with tables or images (this is on a G4 867/640 Mb RAM). However, performance on a G4 1.5 eMac was fine so if your labs are reasonably up to date it might be worth looking into.
One other thing - the templates in Pages are *really* good. The first program for any kind of layout I've ever used where I will start with a template and modify as needed vs. just building from scratch.
In my experience (ISP Tech Support), it's even worse then that:
/off the shelf/ is near zero.
/do/ know that lots of users would like to save $50 off of the purchase of a new computer, esp. with Thunderbird and FF being cross platform so the setup is virtually the same. But consumers will never demand anything better because all they know is that their big black box plugs into their small TV and shows them pretty pictures from the internet.
"What version of Windows are you running?" (since no users have any idea what an operating system is): "I don't know, the newest one?", or "Outlook Express", or "Office 97".
"Well, you know when you turn on your computer? There is a big blue or black screen which says what version of Windows you have. What does that say?": "Oh, I never pay any attention to that."
So if users don't even see the BIG FLAMING WINDOWS VERSION NUMBER during boot up, the odds of them picking up a book like this and getting it
Too bad. I
Has anyone had major issues with Diablo 2 after this update? OpenGL because almost unusable, while software mode works fine. Repair perms had no effect, and Q3A and WarCraft III work fine. This is on a first-gen 12" PB with 640 MB of RAM. --Andrew
It's relatively painless under Linux, and I would assume so under any *nix OS. I recently set up a public workstation image for the Central Student's Association at my university based off of Debian + GDM + XFCE + Firefox. GDM is setup to log in automatically with the guest user. Before a guest process is spawned, the entire contents of /home/guest is nuked, and a new skeleton is copied from /etc/guest.skel. This contains all of the 'default' settings, so it's not like everything is starting from scratch. This is also better than Deep Freeze, as I can ssh in to the workstations as my user (which doesn't have the login script), and do apt-get dist-upgrades and the like.
I doubt there is a way to do it under Windows without extra software. Deep Freeze is good, but is one more cost per workstation.
If anyone would like to talk to my about the system I've setup, email me and I'd be glad to answer any questions.
I have a 12" PB first gen, and the keyboard is very nice. Quiet, with a good touch, and a nice texture on the keys. All keys are full size, except for the arrow keys and the Esc-Fn-Eject keys, which are half size. Keep in mind that the keyboard is vastly different than an iBook keyboard, which are a lot less solid and comfortable to the touch. The HP laptops I've used have a heavier feel, the keys seem thicker than the ones on the PowerBooks. However, the spring action isn't as soft. The texture is similar to any other PC laptop. Hope this helps!
It compresses really well, and properly preserves Mac resource forks. As well, if you're using it on OS X, the interface is really nice, especially with the minimal Drop(Stuff | Tar | Zip) drag-and-drop commands. Of course, no one outside of the Mac world uses Stuffit, so people dowloading the file would have to get the client, which is one more step to distribution.
As well, Stuffit Expander is free for Windows. They have a linux version on their website, and you can install stuffit for FreeBSD right from ports. Sounds cross-platform to me!
I see it as a really sad statement for humanity that Space needs to be "profitable" and "affordable" for us to be able to explore it. One county landed on the moon. 35 years ago at that. With todays tech, 3 countries should be able to land on Mars. I think I'll go huddle in a corner until the world realizes that exploration and knowledge are more important than money and materialisim... :(
I see you haven't been introduced to the joys of BitTorrent :)