I was elected President of our LUG before my Sophomore year. It was already somewhat established but that doesn't change the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I just happened to be the biggest zealot at the time. You have to go find people who do know what they are doing, and who have ideas. Then you have to filter out the bad ideas, which is an exercise I continuously failed at and will leave to the student. Also remember you're starting a university club, which means you can not count on anyone for anything. If someone promises to be somewhere, just assume that it's not going to happen and be pleasantly surprised if it does. But if you find a couple few people that you CAN actually count on - they are your inner circle and should probably be officers.
I'm sure you're looking in your Engineering department for faculty and students that are interested. But some of my most interesting experiences came from outside the CS school. We had a Philosophy and Religion professor that would come by meetings from time to time and basically was an old hippie who got into computing early, and just preferred command line interfaces for checking email and did all of his publishing using LaTeX. Several University Staff were interested and regularly helped out. (Go over to the IT department and ask around - this is the most likely source of people that have been involved in LUGs before.)
Also look for interested students outside your Engineering school. There are lots of different reasons to like Linux and Free Software, very few of which require the math education that Engineering requires. You will find the best zealots in the most surprising places. One of our members that stands out in my mind graduated with a degree in Broadcasting, but due in part to his time in the LUG was hired on at Red Hat for tech support and has moved up quite a bit in the company.
If you can find a passionate Business school student who also enjoys Linux, this person is your best friend. Let them deal with organization and getting people together and such while you focus on technical aspects.
Beyond that just get the word out there and have interesting events. Make sure you have meetings at regular intervals, not so often that people get sick of it and not so rarely that people think it's defunct. Once a month is probably a good bet, and at that meeting you can announce other events happening during the month. Installfests and LANs are always fun. Keep in mind that if you hold a LAN party and successfully get the word out there, you will end up with Windows PC Gamers all over the place, and not a few consoles as well. It's not a bad thing - think about it like raising awareness. The regular meetings should be accompanied by some kind of presentation. Get your VIM expert to talk about cool VIM stuff like good ideas for your.vimrc file. Get your Emacs expert to do the same. Find someone who can talk about how to use Autotools effectively in your new open source project or something like that. Always be ready to fill in with your own material because as I said earlier, people are unreliable. Allow plenty of time afterwards for hanging out, after all this is all about being social.
I guess if I have one point to make it's just that you shouldn't let your perceptions limit who all might be interested in this club. You're probably not going to fill your meeting space with sorority girls that are really interested in Free Software, but don't assume that they're all completely disinterested.
Oh yeah. On the topic of girls at a LUG meeting, be alert and aware. There tends to be a "boys' club" mentality that will scare the ladies right off. Just make sure that the meetings are welcoming of everyone and if you have some male members that are being creepy or causing a problem, discreetly nip it in the bud when you notice it and have a private chat with them later. It's possible to have a relatively diverse LUG if you do it right.
Appalachian supports Linux. Now, that being said, if you asked any tour guide or just about anyone on the public facing side, they will have no idea what you're talking about, and it's not mentioned on any website of course. However, most everyone in IT has a Linux box somewhere (in my branch of IT which is mostly concerned with web development, we all run Linux on our desktops and just use VMs for testing in IE), and some of the people at the student computer support desk can even help out. We also have a fairly active LUG that just went through a rough patch and seems to be gaining some momentum again. Actually, when I came here as a student several years ago, the main selling point for me was ALUG... Before I even applied I was on their mailing list making sure there would be no problem with me living in the dorms and doing class-related stuff.
As much as this is a plug for ASU, I suspect that many universities are like this - they're not going to mention it in public materials and the everyday joe in Admissions is not going to have a clue what you're talking about; you just have to find the right people to ask.
Looks like Half-Life 2 Episode 3 is going to go the way of Duke Nukem Forever at this rate... Come on Gabe, quit fscking around with these little franchises and give me some damned closure!
If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.
I agree that file management as in the same we are used to on our own hard drives, like able to selectively edit or delete individual files would just be out of place in this case. There's little benefit to doing so, and even if you wanted to, just do it locally and I imagine the changes would be uploaded.
I think the concern expressed is that you may not want "this saved game" or "that configuration file" to be automatically uploaded (talking about groups of files that make up an item here, not individual files), or that you might want to delete them entirely at some point. I'm not sure *why* you'd want this, I mean we are talking about video games and not root passwords here, but it'd be cool if they did provide a way to delete or not upload certain items.
Actually this story is strangely coincidental; just a few minutes ago, I was trying to show a coworker a cool graphical demo of different sorting algorithm efficiencies, but I didn't have the Java plugin installed. Still don't.
In fact, a huge storehouse of water and carbon dioxide could be found in underground reservoirs.
...just waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger to "get his ass to mars" and put his hand on some funky alien 3-fingered button and push, which will entirely replace the planet's atmosphere with an oxygen/nitrogen mix at roughly standard Earth pressure in a matter of seconds, just in time to save him and his girlfriend from asphyxiation on the surface, but a little too late for the bad guy to survive.
Dude, you're in the prime situation to capitalize on one of the few valuable things left: Real Estate. Hire a property manager to rent the house and take care of it. They do all the work, take a decent portion of the rent, and you get what's left as profit. It sounds to me like the house is paid off, and if so, this really is the way to go. Keep an eye on how much money you're making off the house in combination with the amount of equity you'll have simply due to the appreciation of land value, and before you know it, you'll have enough credit to buy another house and do the same thing... if you play your cards right, it's not too difficult to take an advantageous situation such as this and become a real estate tycoon (or if tycoon isn't your goal, at least put yourself in a position to where you don't really need to worry about saving for retirement anymore).
Even if you just rent the house and don't worry about further opportunities, it's extra money per month. If you just let it sit there, you'll find it's quite the burden on resources, and there is ALWAYS someone looking for a place to live, with the money to rent from you.
I don't see anywhere that he said free speech would have to be forfeit. Maybe I missed something, and in all honesty I didn't go read any transcripts on the speech; just the article. I'm not saying he didn't, but what I'm saying is that I find it interesting how easy it is for people to jump on someone for questioning something we all take for granted.
Does this mean I think we should get rid of free speech / free expression? Absolutely not! I do think we should talk about it though and not take it for granted. Perhaps by "a different set of rules" he means something better.
I'm not supporting or un-supporting ol' Newt here; I'm just pointing out that the wording used was vague, and that maybe he could be a bit more specific in what a "different set of rules" entails.
On the other hand: a regulated Internet stops working, and he is an old politician, so maybe it is all the standard political bullshit anyway. Whatever.
Fortunately, looks like the Mountaineers are on their way to another National Championship. Yeah, if we win that again, don't you worry, that party will absolutely raise the Appalachians.
You couldn't pay me to use Oracle. I'm not sure what they expect to gain by this, but it certainly isn't my respect. If they want to generate more interest, they can make a product that works and doesn't require you to hire an Oracle-certified specialist to maintain all the little quirks and problems.
Go ahead, -1 flamebait or troll or whatever, I just really don't like their database software, and especially now that MySQL has the features that it does in version 5 and from what I hear PostgreSQL has been keeping up, there's no reason to pay half a million dollars for something sub-par. There's also no reason to pay free for the limited, restricted edition only to have to use your half million to upgrade when you outgrow the restrictions.
No, as of right now anyway if you look at the 24-hour average instead of the 1-hour average, you can still see some yellow left over from whatever happened. (I was a little skeptical myself... but the pattern is too unmistakable to debate.)
Zoe: Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing? Book: Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzy around the subject of kneecaps.
I have one word for you. Er... two... they're sorta hyphenated:
gaim-encryption
Of course, this doesn't mean that I agree with or approve of AOL or anything they do... I'm just saying, if you have to use the protocol, it provides a level of protection.
See, the problem with this post which is going to get both of us modded down as trolls: I could just as easily say this is an AWESOME day for ALL of America, but the "immoral majority" is too stupid to realize it.
The problem with people is that they just don't think. Can I please go ahead and mod myself down for not thinking before I posted this troll?
It's been on my mind a lot lately, actually. Like take a car, since we often hear about "would you buy a car with the hood welded shut." I can patent a car... or maybe more specifically a type of engine or something. But the thing is, once its patented, the plans are out there, plus just anyone can take it apart and see what makes it tick.
This is why I can understand patenting real things, because if you've invented this awesome engine, all I'd need to do is reinvent it myself but find a way to make the same thing faster, smaller, and cheaper, and suddenly I control the market, not you.
Software though... the problem here is that in reality, there's infinite supply. In the supply and demand idea, what happens when you have infinite supply? Things get ugly and the whole system breaks down. That's why people want to try patenting software, to force an artificial supply limitation on something that has an unlimited supply naturally.
So while it'd be best to just eliminate software patents from the picture and let it work itself out naturally as it has for Red Hat, and is starting to for IBM and Novell, I doubt it's going to happen, at least not as long as bigger companies have more money to throw at keeping it law. What's the solution?
If you keep your software closed-source, you can't patent it, because you can't show how you did it. You're free to copyright it if you'd like, just no patenting. If you want to patent your software, you have to let *everyone* see how it works, without reverse-engineering.
Woot for Novell, I think. It's interesting that they're only defending *their* open source software, but at least it is a step in the right direction.
I wonder what would happen to the world if more Free Software projects started patenting *their* stuff. I figure if you patent your software, you should have to make it open source.
The high school I just graduated from, Southeast Raleigh High School, is purely MS. Well, not entirely accurate; the network is Novell, and our webserver is a nice Gentoo Linux box.
Ack... I just said "our" but I don't go there anymore, disregard that...
Anyway, the Windows thing is becuase the county has mandated everyone uses Windows. However, SRHS is the technology school in the county, and usually the trends we started ended up becoming policy. Except for the Microsoft thing, they've been demanding that since the school opened 8 years ago.
For my graduation project, I was exploring different ways of teaching people, and I hijacked a computer lab to teach a class on Linux. Everyone got a Knoppix CD and a floppy to save their settings on (they could take it home... just some random geek and non-geek volunteer friends of mine, and a teacher.)
A few weeks ago, one of the net admins asked if I'd be interested in helping him teach a class on Linux to more teachers with hopes of getting them to instal Linux on their laptops. It's a start, and I of course agreed.
Fact is, Longhorn isn't going to be successful, and all these Microsoft dependent people aren't going to know what to do when Microsoft isn't there for them anymore...
My local library (in fact all libraries in Wake County, NC) have some contract in which they have to use Netscape 4.7. That's right. I went there recently when the DSL was out and all they had was NS 4.7. I just got up and walked right out of the building... sneakernet is better than browsing with that mess.
I did pretty much the same thing to a friend's system, and her dad happened to be a piano tuner. He offered to tune Mom's piano in exchange for what I did, which worked out well as Christmas was approaching;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I was elected President of our LUG before my Sophomore year. It was already somewhat established but that doesn't change the fact that I had no idea what I was doing, I just happened to be the biggest zealot at the time. You have to go find people who do know what they are doing, and who have ideas. Then you have to filter out the bad ideas, which is an exercise I continuously failed at and will leave to the student. Also remember you're starting a university club, which means you can not count on anyone for anything. If someone promises to be somewhere, just assume that it's not going to happen and be pleasantly surprised if it does. But if you find a couple few people that you CAN actually count on - they are your inner circle and should probably be officers.
I'm sure you're looking in your Engineering department for faculty and students that are interested. But some of my most interesting experiences came from outside the CS school. We had a Philosophy and Religion professor that would come by meetings from time to time and basically was an old hippie who got into computing early, and just preferred command line interfaces for checking email and did all of his publishing using LaTeX. Several University Staff were interested and regularly helped out. (Go over to the IT department and ask around - this is the most likely source of people that have been involved in LUGs before.)
Also look for interested students outside your Engineering school. There are lots of different reasons to like Linux and Free Software, very few of which require the math education that Engineering requires. You will find the best zealots in the most surprising places. One of our members that stands out in my mind graduated with a degree in Broadcasting, but due in part to his time in the LUG was hired on at Red Hat for tech support and has moved up quite a bit in the company.
If you can find a passionate Business school student who also enjoys Linux, this person is your best friend. Let them deal with organization and getting people together and such while you focus on technical aspects.
Beyond that just get the word out there and have interesting events. Make sure you have meetings at regular intervals, not so often that people get sick of it and not so rarely that people think it's defunct. Once a month is probably a good bet, and at that meeting you can announce other events happening during the month. Installfests and LANs are always fun. Keep in mind that if you hold a LAN party and successfully get the word out there, you will end up with Windows PC Gamers all over the place, and not a few consoles as well. It's not a bad thing - think about it like raising awareness. The regular meetings should be accompanied by some kind of presentation. Get your VIM expert to talk about cool VIM stuff like good ideas for your .vimrc file. Get your Emacs expert to do the same. Find someone who can talk about how to use Autotools effectively in your new open source project or something like that. Always be ready to fill in with your own material because as I said earlier, people are unreliable. Allow plenty of time afterwards for hanging out, after all this is all about being social.
I guess if I have one point to make it's just that you shouldn't let your perceptions limit who all might be interested in this club. You're probably not going to fill your meeting space with sorority girls that are really interested in Free Software, but don't assume that they're all completely disinterested.
Oh yeah. On the topic of girls at a LUG meeting, be alert and aware. There tends to be a "boys' club" mentality that will scare the ladies right off. Just make sure that the meetings are welcoming of everyone and if you have some male members that are being creepy or causing a problem, discreetly nip it in the bud when you notice it and have a private chat with them later. It's possible to have a relatively diverse LUG if you do it right.
...where are all the class-action lawsuits? Here's a place where people should be suing the hell out of a company. Why isn't this happening?
Appalachian supports Linux. Now, that being said, if you asked any tour guide or just about anyone on the public facing side, they will have no idea what you're talking about, and it's not mentioned on any website of course. However, most everyone in IT has a Linux box somewhere (in my branch of IT which is mostly concerned with web development, we all run Linux on our desktops and just use VMs for testing in IE), and some of the people at the student computer support desk can even help out. We also have a fairly active LUG that just went through a rough patch and seems to be gaining some momentum again. Actually, when I came here as a student several years ago, the main selling point for me was ALUG... Before I even applied I was on their mailing list making sure there would be no problem with me living in the dorms and doing class-related stuff.
As much as this is a plug for ASU, I suspect that many universities are like this - they're not going to mention it in public materials and the everyday joe in Admissions is not going to have a clue what you're talking about; you just have to find the right people to ask.
Looks like Half-Life 2 Episode 3 is going to go the way of Duke Nukem Forever at this rate... Come on Gabe, quit fscking around with these little franchises and give me some damned closure!
If you're just going to outright shit-can it, why not open-source it? At least then people can benefit from the energy you put into it instead of just throwing that all away.
I agree that file management as in the same we are used to on our own hard drives, like able to selectively edit or delete individual files would just be out of place in this case. There's little benefit to doing so, and even if you wanted to, just do it locally and I imagine the changes would be uploaded.
I think the concern expressed is that you may not want "this saved game" or "that configuration file" to be automatically uploaded (talking about groups of files that make up an item here, not individual files), or that you might want to delete them entirely at some point. I'm not sure *why* you'd want this, I mean we are talking about video games and not root passwords here, but it'd be cool if they did provide a way to delete or not upload certain items.
But if we stop using Next-Gen now, we won't have the opportunity to call things Post-Next-Gen in a few years :-(
"Worse, popups opened this way are really evil, because they can be sized to cover the whole desktop and cannot be closed by user"
Thing #397 That You Can Do In Linux But Can't In Other Popular Desktop OS's:
1. Ctrl+Atl+F1
2. Log In
3. missile-launch -f --target-from-process java
4. killall java
4a. killall firefox-bin (if necessary)
Actually this story is strangely coincidental; just a few minutes ago, I was trying to show a coworker a cool graphical demo of different sorting algorithm efficiencies, but I didn't have the Java plugin installed. Still don't.
Dude, you're in the prime situation to capitalize on one of the few valuable things left: Real Estate. Hire a property manager to rent the house and take care of it. They do all the work, take a decent portion of the rent, and you get what's left as profit. It sounds to me like the house is paid off, and if so, this really is the way to go. Keep an eye on how much money you're making off the house in combination with the amount of equity you'll have simply due to the appreciation of land value, and before you know it, you'll have enough credit to buy another house and do the same thing... if you play your cards right, it's not too difficult to take an advantageous situation such as this and become a real estate tycoon (or if tycoon isn't your goal, at least put yourself in a position to where you don't really need to worry about saving for retirement anymore).
Even if you just rent the house and don't worry about further opportunities, it's extra money per month. If you just let it sit there, you'll find it's quite the burden on resources, and there is ALWAYS someone looking for a place to live, with the money to rent from you.
I don't see anywhere that he said free speech would have to be forfeit. Maybe I missed something, and in all honesty I didn't go read any transcripts on the speech; just the article. I'm not saying he didn't, but what I'm saying is that I find it interesting how easy it is for people to jump on someone for questioning something we all take for granted.
Does this mean I think we should get rid of free speech / free expression? Absolutely not! I do think we should talk about it though and not take it for granted. Perhaps by "a different set of rules" he means something better.
I'm not supporting or un-supporting ol' Newt here; I'm just pointing out that the wording used was vague, and that maybe he could be a bit more specific in what a "different set of rules" entails.
On the other hand: a regulated Internet stops working, and he is an old politician, so maybe it is all the standard political bullshit anyway. Whatever.
Fortunately, looks like the Mountaineers are on their way to another National Championship. Yeah, if we win that again, don't you worry, that party will absolutely raise the Appalachians.
Now's a great time for porn-enjoying Windows users to switch to Linux! All the fun of free Internet porn with none of the viral infection.
So why can't we moderate articles too?
You couldn't pay me to use Oracle. I'm not sure what they expect to gain by this, but it certainly isn't my respect. If they want to generate more interest, they can make a product that works and doesn't require you to hire an Oracle-certified specialist to maintain all the little quirks and problems.
Go ahead, -1 flamebait or troll or whatever, I just really don't like their database software, and especially now that MySQL has the features that it does in version 5 and from what I hear PostgreSQL has been keeping up, there's no reason to pay half a million dollars for something sub-par. There's also no reason to pay free for the limited, restricted edition only to have to use your half million to upgrade when you outgrow the restrictions.
Yet another example of where Free software wins.
No, as of right now anyway if you look at the 24-hour average instead of the 1-hour average, you can still see some yellow left over from whatever happened. (I was a little skeptical myself... but the pattern is too unmistakable to debate.)
Ask Hannibal
Zoe: Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?
Book: Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzy around the subject of kneecaps.
I have one word for you. Er... two... they're sorta hyphenated:
gaim-encryption
Of course, this doesn't mean that I agree with or approve of AOL or anything they do... I'm just saying, if you have to use the protocol, it provides a level of protection.
See, the problem with this post which is going to get both of us modded down as trolls: I could just as easily say this is an AWESOME day for ALL of America, but the "immoral majority" is too stupid to realize it.
The problem with people is that they just don't think. Can I please go ahead and mod myself down for not thinking before I posted this troll?
It's been on my mind a lot lately, actually. Like take a car, since we often hear about "would you buy a car with the hood welded shut." I can patent a car... or maybe more specifically a type of engine or something. But the thing is, once its patented, the plans are out there, plus just anyone can take it apart and see what makes it tick.
This is why I can understand patenting real things, because if you've invented this awesome engine, all I'd need to do is reinvent it myself but find a way to make the same thing faster, smaller, and cheaper, and suddenly I control the market, not you.
Software though... the problem here is that in reality, there's infinite supply. In the supply and demand idea, what happens when you have infinite supply? Things get ugly and the whole system breaks down. That's why people want to try patenting software, to force an artificial supply limitation on something that has an unlimited supply naturally.
So while it'd be best to just eliminate software patents from the picture and let it work itself out naturally as it has for Red Hat, and is starting to for IBM and Novell, I doubt it's going to happen, at least not as long as bigger companies have more money to throw at keeping it law. What's the solution?
If you keep your software closed-source, you can't patent it, because you can't show how you did it. You're free to copyright it if you'd like, just no patenting. If you want to patent your software, you have to let *everyone* see how it works, without reverse-engineering.
Woot for Novell, I think. It's interesting that they're only defending *their* open source software, but at least it is a step in the right direction.
I wonder what would happen to the world if more Free Software projects started patenting *their* stuff. I figure if you patent your software, you should have to make it open source.
Just some thoughts.
The high school I just graduated from, Southeast Raleigh High School, is purely MS. Well, not entirely accurate; the network is Novell, and our webserver is a nice Gentoo Linux box.
Ack... I just said "our" but I don't go there anymore, disregard that...
Anyway, the Windows thing is becuase the county has mandated everyone uses Windows. However, SRHS is the technology school in the county, and usually the trends we started ended up becoming policy. Except for the Microsoft thing, they've been demanding that since the school opened 8 years ago.
For my graduation project, I was exploring different ways of teaching people, and I hijacked a computer lab to teach a class on Linux. Everyone got a Knoppix CD and a floppy to save their settings on (they could take it home... just some random geek and non-geek volunteer friends of mine, and a teacher.)
A few weeks ago, one of the net admins asked if I'd be interested in helping him teach a class on Linux to more teachers with hopes of getting them to instal Linux on their laptops. It's a start, and I of course agreed.
Fact is, Longhorn isn't going to be successful, and all these Microsoft dependent people aren't going to know what to do when Microsoft isn't there for them anymore...
My local library (in fact all libraries in Wake County, NC) have some contract in which they have to use Netscape 4.7. That's right. I went there recently when the DSL was out and all they had was NS 4.7. I just got up and walked right out of the building... sneakernet is better than browsing with that mess.
I did pretty much the same thing to a friend's system, and her dad happened to be a piano tuner. He offered to tune Mom's piano in exchange for what I did, which worked out well as Christmas was approaching ;-)