Sure, you're correct. ULL is a lovely idea, but as you've gathered it's not an option for me as I'm on a Telstra DSLAM. I'm a 20 minute drive from one of those capital cities, but down in Hobart that almost makes me semi-rural.;)
I'm well aware that Telstra's monopoly is the biggest problem here, and that's primarily why it's a political issue. The failure of the government to separate infrastructure (which *we* all paid for) from the rest of the business before privatisation was a big mistake which we're paying for now, and will continue to pay for (one way or another) into the future.
I work from home full-time for a company in the US, so I'm not bitching about how fast the pr0n comes down - this is about my livelihood. There are more people like me around, and there could be a *lot* more if decent broadband was more affordable in this country.
I was chatting to vendor rep visiting from the US a few weeks back - he told me he had 100M cable for USD$50/month, and that he actually saw close to 100M on that connection when he needed it. That 100M is a significant fraction of the bandwidth coming into my entire *state*. I pay about AUD$110/month (USD$101 right now) for combined phone and ADSL - you can't have ADSL without a phone service, and no other feasible broadband options here. My connection is currently 512k, and soon I'll be paying more to take it up to 8M - the *maximum* I can achieve at any price.
Fast and cheap broadband is (and *should* be) both an economic and political issue here - but I just hope we're not already too late. Australia, with its small pouplation dispersed around the edges of a vast land mass, used to be a world leader in telecoms tech. And for all the posturing going on with an election round the corner, I suspect the government definition of broadband as 256k or higher is unchanged. Even YouTube is painful at 256k, let alone any kind of meaningful realtime collaboration with overseas clients or business partners.
Most people doing "home computer repairs" are cowboys.
It's boring, dull, repetitive work for 99% of problems, and for the other 1% you can almost guarantee the customer won't be willing to pay for the actual work involved in fixing it. It's a mugs game, and it doesn't surprise me that the majority of people doing it are rubbish because if they could be doing something better they would.
nitpick: NCSA HTTPd *wasn't* the first web server - it did appear very early on, but Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server at CERN (which is obvious, when you think about it..)
I still use it pretty much daily (although it's been quite a few years since I used an official client). My UID is slightly over 1.2 million, and I have a couple of continuing users on my list with 6 digit IDs. So it's not just "newbies" using it;) Still, I'd be happy if my friends would all migrate to GTalk or some other jabber service.
Perhaps, if you have cash to burn, acquiring startups is simply the most efficient means of getting hold of more smart people.. </advocate>
Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)
on
Rails Cookbook
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· Score: 1
I held off learning python for almost two years for this very reason (meeting someone who was slightly too enthusiastic in their advocacy). Turns out though that it actually *is* quite a nifty language;)
People don't make a big enough fuss about the interactive interpreter, partly because it's hard to describe why it's so useful. Try it out though, starting with diveintopython.org.
Librarything is wonderful. The Unsuggester is cool in a geeky way, but way down on the list of impressive features. There's some more info about how the Suggester and Unsuggester work in this post on the LibraryThing Blog.
A lot of the really good features only become apparent once you've created an account (best online account creation ever) and added some books. You can add 200 for free, and adding them is easy - go on, give it a try. For a start, you can get suggestions that take your entire library into account.
They're also having a very active dialogue with people in the library science field, and employ an actual real-life librarian.;)
I was not paid to say any of this! I'm just a very satisfied paid up member of the site since shortly after it appeared.
If you get a chance, try New Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo DS. Old school flavour, but with a regained sense of discovery from discovering new secrets:)
I've almost bought Cedga a few times (you know, wallet held pensively in left hand with with the other poised apprehensiively above the mouse) but in the end I just haven't been able to make the leap.
I keep a (legitimate) Windows XP install on my desktop box for the sole purpose of playing games. Rebooting into Windows in order to play something is a hassle, sure - but not as much hassle as trying to get it to work smoothly under an emulated/reimplemented environment and trying to figure out which bugs are in the implementation and which are in the game.
Most of my gaming has moved to consoles anyway, with a few exceptions - the only thing I've played on my PC in the last several months is Dungeons & Dragons Online. I just don't want the hassle involved with PC gaming anymore. I *remember* the bad old days of DOS gaming, I was *there*. At the time being able to make boot disks to squeeze an extra couple of k of memory wasn't simply a necessary evil, but a mark of respect.
It's not as though getting Cedega to work is beyond me, either - these days I'm a unix admin with almost a decade of experience, looking after big SMP systems (from 32P to 128P) for a living. But gaming is my "fun time" - I have a wife, a family, other hobbies and professional obligations. Time spent getting a game to work is time spent not playing it.
I encourage all efforts like Cedega, and agree with those who say that efforts toward providing good tools for game developers to encourage native development are steps in the right direction.
But for me, unfortunately I've decided to wait until somebody else does the hard work. In the mean time I'll take my games in the easiest, most convenient form I can find them.
It was fun, sure, but "a bit short" is a pretty massive understatement. Probably more worth hiring than buying. Although if you haven't aklready played it you should be able to pick up a copy for next to nothing these days..
Many others have posted mentioning current 2D platformers, shootemups and beatemups, but if you haven't played Paper Mario on the Gamecube then you should give that a go. It's a 2D console RPG with tongue very firmly in cheek. The english localisation is so good that it's hard to imagine the original having been that good. It's not a difficult game, but my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
The GBA Player is worth every cent. My wife and I played through Golden Sun and are currently working through Golden Sun 2, and being able to do with while sitting comfortably on the couch is a joy.
I too wish for some similar functionality with the DS, but it's obviously going to be a bit harder to reproduce the dual-screen interface.
Are you saying the power of Debian is being killed off? How?
If you're sick of typing sudo all the time, then type "sudo -s -H" to get a root shell. Or just set a password for the root user, if it bothers you.
If you'd prefer a different mail client, or web browser, or whatever, just install it. You've still got a huge selection of packages combined with the yumminess of apt - the only difference is that instead of installing five mail clients they've picked the one client they feel meets most people's requirements. The same with all other applications. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from installing anything you like.
If you're missing your compiler toolchain, start with "apt-get install build-essential" and add libraries from there depending on what you need. If you need server apps, install them.
If it's Gnome you don't like, try Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Why not install all three? ("apt-get install xubuntu-desktop", for example). Or just apt-get install your favourite window manager and go from there.
I'm completely serious when I say that I don't understand how Ubuntu is any less powerful than Debian.
I'm a *nix user (various flavours) for over 10 years now, and have been running Linux on the desktop both at home and in the office for the past two and a half years. I'm a professional *nix sysadmin, with experience ranging from embedded systems to supercomputers.
I don't feel like Ubuntu is dumbed down at all. I feel like it's easy to use, with sensible defaults. I love that it's a distro that works out of the box, and yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box (without the politics and glacial pace of change).
Next time my Mum needs her WinXP box "fixed" again, I'll be using Ubuntu to fix it. And yet I'll still be using it myself - two unix users from about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get, with their needs both met by the same distro. I like that.
Another vote for LibraryThing here, from a very happy user. It's very easy to use, powerful, in active development and with a large and enthusiastic community of users. I can't recommend it highly enough.
I used to feel the same way when I was in high school. I grew up with 8-bit machines and the transition to 16-bit computing, and felt that I'd missed out on all the good stuff.
I found something else fun to occupy me though - I'm not sure if you've noticed this whole "internet" revolution that's been going on for the past decade or more?
Seriously though, when my total mutt of a moggy has just had a skin graft and is about to undergo chemotherapy, I have to start to wonder - am I taking this too far? He's so cuddly though.
Slashdot Mirror
*whooosh*
Sure, you're correct. ULL is a lovely idea, but as you've gathered it's not an option for me as I'm on a Telstra DSLAM. I'm a 20 minute drive from one of those capital cities, but down in Hobart that almost makes me semi-rural. ;)
I'm well aware that Telstra's monopoly is the biggest problem here, and that's primarily why it's a political issue. The failure of the government to separate infrastructure (which *we* all paid for) from the rest of the business before privatisation was a big mistake which we're paying for now, and will continue to pay for (one way or another) into the future.
I work from home full-time for a company in the US, so I'm not bitching about how fast the pr0n comes down - this is about my livelihood. There are more people like me around, and there could be a *lot* more if decent broadband was more affordable in this country.
that'd have to be SA, right?
(hey, I had to pick one..)
I was chatting to vendor rep visiting from the US a few weeks back - he told me he had 100M cable for USD$50/month, and that he actually saw close to 100M on that connection when he needed it. That 100M is a significant fraction of the bandwidth coming into my entire *state*. I pay about AUD$110/month (USD$101 right now) for combined phone and ADSL - you can't have ADSL without a phone service, and no other feasible broadband options here. My connection is currently 512k, and soon I'll be paying more to take it up to 8M - the *maximum* I can achieve at any price.
Fast and cheap broadband is (and *should* be) both an economic and political issue here - but I just hope we're not already too late. Australia, with its small pouplation dispersed around the edges of a vast land mass, used to be a world leader in telecoms tech. And for all the posturing going on with an election round the corner, I suspect the government definition of broadband as 256k or higher is unchanged. Even YouTube is painful at 256k, let alone any kind of meaningful realtime collaboration with overseas clients or business partners.
</rant>
Most people doing "home computer repairs" are cowboys.
It's boring, dull, repetitive work for 99% of problems, and for the other 1% you can almost guarantee the customer won't be willing to pay for the actual work involved in fixing it. It's a mugs game, and it doesn't surprise me that the majority of people doing it are rubbish because if they could be doing something better they would.
nitpick: NCSA HTTPd *wasn't* the first web server - it did appear very early on, but Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server at CERN (which is obvious, when you think about it..)
Just for the record, kids - you try pulling this shit and Dad will spank your arse, no matter whether you're bigger than him now or not.
I still use it pretty much daily (although it's been quite a few years since I used an official client). My UID is slightly over 1.2 million, and I have a couple of continuing users on my list with 6 digit IDs. So it's not just "newbies" using it ;) Still, I'd be happy if my friends would all migrate to GTalk or some other jabber service.
Perhaps, if you have cash to burn, acquiring startups is simply the most efficient means of getting hold of more smart people..
</advocate>
I held off learning python for almost two years for this very reason (meeting someone who was slightly too enthusiastic in their advocacy). Turns out though that it actually *is* quite a nifty language ;)
People don't make a big enough fuss about the interactive interpreter, partly because it's hard to describe why it's so useful. Try it out though, starting with diveintopython.org.
Librarything is wonderful. The Unsuggester is cool in a geeky way, but way down on the list of impressive features. There's some more info about how the Suggester and Unsuggester work in this post on the LibraryThing Blog.
;)
A lot of the really good features only become apparent once you've created an account (best online account creation ever) and added some books. You can add 200 for free, and adding them is easy - go on, give it a try. For a start, you can get suggestions that take your entire library into account.
They're also having a very active dialogue with people in the library science field, and employ an actual real-life librarian.
I was not paid to say any of this! I'm just a very satisfied paid up member of the site since shortly after it appeared.
He'll always be Mitzi to me..
If you get a chance, try New Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo DS. Old school flavour, but with a regained sense of discovery from discovering new secrets :)
That's a pretty reasonable rule of thumb, though on the newest system I'm looking after it'd result in a 96GB swap file. ;)
I've almost bought Cedga a few times (you know, wallet held pensively in left hand with with the other poised apprehensiively above the mouse) but in the end I just haven't been able to make the leap.
I keep a (legitimate) Windows XP install on my desktop box for the sole purpose of playing games. Rebooting into Windows in order to play something is a hassle, sure - but not as much hassle as trying to get it to work smoothly under an emulated/reimplemented environment and trying to figure out which bugs are in the implementation and which are in the game.
Most of my gaming has moved to consoles anyway, with a few exceptions - the only thing I've played on my PC in the last several months is Dungeons & Dragons Online. I just don't want the hassle involved with PC gaming anymore. I *remember* the bad old days of DOS gaming, I was *there*. At the time being able to make boot disks to squeeze an extra couple of k of memory wasn't simply a necessary evil, but a mark of respect.
It's not as though getting Cedega to work is beyond me, either - these days I'm a unix admin with almost a decade of experience, looking after big SMP systems (from 32P to 128P) for a living. But gaming is my "fun time" - I have a wife, a family, other hobbies and professional obligations. Time spent getting a game to work is time spent not playing it.
I encourage all efforts like Cedega, and agree with those who say that efforts toward providing good tools for game developers to encourage native development are steps in the right direction.
But for me, unfortunately I've decided to wait until somebody else does the hard work. In the mean time I'll take my games in the easiest, most convenient form I can find them.
I hear this story about the NES and SNES beating the Master System and Genesis (Megadrive) all the time. It wasn't like that everywhere, you know..
In Australia, certainly in the area I grew up, it was almost exactly the reverse. Sega dominated here, and almost nobody I knew owned a Nintendo.
It was fun, sure, but "a bit short" is a pretty massive understatement. Probably more worth hiring than buying. Although if you haven't aklready played it you should be able to pick up a copy for next to nothing these days..
Many others have posted mentioning current 2D platformers, shootemups and beatemups, but if you haven't played Paper Mario on the Gamecube then you should give that a go. It's a 2D console RPG with tongue very firmly in cheek. The english localisation is so good that it's hard to imagine the original having been that good. It's not a difficult game, but my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
The GBA Player is worth every cent. My wife and I played through Golden Sun and are currently working through Golden Sun 2, and being able to do with while sitting comfortably on the couch is a joy.
I too wish for some similar functionality with the DS, but it's obviously going to be a bit harder to reproduce the dual-screen interface.
Are you saying the power of Debian is being killed off? How?
If you're sick of typing sudo all the time, then type "sudo -s -H" to get a root shell. Or just set a password for the root user, if it bothers you.
If you'd prefer a different mail client, or web browser, or whatever, just install it. You've still got a huge selection of packages combined with the yumminess of apt - the only difference is that instead of installing five mail clients they've picked the one client they feel meets most people's requirements. The same with all other applications. There's absolutely nothing preventing you from installing anything you like.
If you're missing your compiler toolchain, start with "apt-get install build-essential" and add libraries from there depending on what you need. If you need server apps, install them.
If it's Gnome you don't like, try Kubuntu or Xubuntu. Why not install all three? ("apt-get install xubuntu-desktop", for example). Or just apt-get install your favourite window manager and go from there.
I'm completely serious when I say that I don't understand how Ubuntu is any less powerful than Debian.
I'm a *nix user (various flavours) for over 10 years now, and have been running Linux on the desktop both at home and in the office for the past two and a half years. I'm a professional *nix sysadmin, with experience ranging from embedded systems to supercomputers.
I don't feel like Ubuntu is dumbed down at all. I feel like it's easy to use, with sensible defaults. I love that it's a distro that works out of the box, and yet it still allows me all the power of a Debian box (without the politics and glacial pace of change).
Next time my Mum needs her WinXP box "fixed" again, I'll be using Ubuntu to fix it. And yet I'll still be using it myself - two unix users from about as far apart on the spectrum as you can get, with their needs both met by the same distro. I like that.
Another vote for LibraryThing here, from a very happy user. It's very easy to use, powerful, in active development and with a large and enthusiastic community of users. I can't recommend it highly enough.
I used to feel the same way when I was in high school. I grew up with 8-bit machines and the transition to 16-bit computing, and felt that I'd missed out on all the good stuff.
I found something else fun to occupy me though - I'm not sure if you've noticed this whole "internet" revolution that's been going on for the past decade or more?
You insensitive clods!
Seriously though, when my total mutt of a moggy has just had a skin graft and is about to undergo chemotherapy, I have to start to wonder - am I taking this too far? He's so cuddly though.
Sorry, I now return you to your regular trolling.
Copyright is not inherently wrong. The GPL could not exist without copyright.
Patents are not inherently wrong, either. Software patents are.
I'll go check out your website though..