I've loved computers since I was a kid and my dad ran a BBS out of the dining room back in The Day(tm). I've been around them for the majority of my life, and I knew from an early age that I wanted to work with computers for a living.
When it came time for me to start college, this whole damned outsourcing trend began and got steadily worse. If I had stayed in college and graduated, I'd have a shiny new diploma, little to no job prospects, and a huge debt looming over my head. Not a good way to start a professional life.
So I enlisted.
I can now get all the job experience I want, along with a free education. And I can stay in the service while waiting for this trend to finally level off.
There are other reasons, of course, but they really don't pertain to the topic.
I feel a lot better about joining the Marine Corps aftre reading your post. It seems like everyone in this discussion is Air Force, so I can't get a good feel for what the IT field is like in the Corps. Now I at least have SOME idea of what things will be like once I get the hell out of Parris Island.
If you want to join the anti-SCO fight, what better way to do it than this? Besides going into Counterstrike-mode and sniping Darl McBride with an AWB, of course.:)
I've noticed a few posts about using Portage on DragonFly, and though this might be of interest to some people: a small group of Gentoo enthusiasts are working on porting (no pun intended) Portage to *BSD. The thread on the Gentoo forums is here.
Leaving retail clerks to make these judgement calls is a completely asinine idea, since most cashiers care more about when they can get the hell away from the hordes of illiterate, moronic masses then whether or not they should sell a copy of GTA: Vice City to a 17-year old.
About a month or so ago, the mods removed the general/off-topic forum and began banning users who complained. This pissed off a lot of the long-time members (myself included), so we jumped ship to LinuxQuestions.org .
JustLinux now is nothing more than a group of 20 post newbies helping other 20 post newbies. No decent help to be had there at all.
This product is a load of crap, pure and simple. All it does is make the information in the browser's history preety, with bar graphs and whatnot. A total waste of time and money designed by a reactionary group of religious zealots.
I have a copy of this book, and the author makes a lot of excellent points. He talks about the foot-dragging the major aerospace contractors are going through in terms of a cheap, reusable spacecraft. He also explains how to set up a semi-permanent base on Mars for robotic probes and eventually astronauts.
Re:Create a market for Laptops parts?
on
Barebones Notebook
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· Score: 1
Will more laptops sold like this open a market for laptop parts?
Maybe this will cause laptops to be more similar to desktops, as parts are standard?
It'll take more than one company selling barebones laptops for this to happen. Or a lot of people breaking the hardware they do because they don't know what the hell they're doing.
First off, I'd simply like to say that I haven't had a chance to read article (damn./ effect).
But from what the little blurb said, this looks like an excellent way to avoid paying for Windows and all the other bundled software that people don't want or need. Though the cost of parts and installation may offset this just a bit.
Another long-winded post with an anecdote
on
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
·
· Score: 2, Informative
After reading a lot of the posts, I'm amazed to see a strong "blame the victim" attitude here, which I find both disheartening and sickening at the same time. Granted, in the long run high school is pretty much meaningless, but during those four years, high school is the long run, which is why the incessant teasing and bullying is so damning.
In most high schools, there is a very distinct pecking order that verges on a caste system. It usually varies between regions, but the basic layout is the same:
-The Over-Achievers: They take all the advanced classes, participate in student government, sports, and just about everything else on campus. They are (usually) universally admired. Most of the team captains fall into this category.
-The Elitists: They take enolugh of the advanced classes to make friends with the Over-Achievers, and will usually pick one sport to play, usually on an above-average level. They try desperately to gain the levels of admiration given to the Over-Achievers, but usually fail due to an immature, cruel streak that gets taken out on the less-popular groups. These people are the bullies that the lower groups both despise and envy.
-The Average Kids: The majority of students fall into this category. They don't participate in many sports, clubs, or anything of the sort. Most of their free time is spent hanging out with friends, working, or other typical high-school behaviors.
-The Pariahs: The bottom of the rung, this group bears the brunt of attacks by the other groups, either by people trying to get a higher standing, or to simply maintain the one they already have. The Pariahs are subject to discreet discrimination by the Average Kids, brutal teasing & bullying by the Elitists, and a simple denial of their existennce by the Over-Achievers.
Teachers, for the most part, do little to change this system, either because they don't care, or they believe that their interference will only make things worse. More often than not, a teacher that steps in to help a student being picked on will be seen as under the teacher's personal protection and will thus be subject to even more cruel treatment once said teacher is gone.
So what recourse do the down-trodden, mistreated masses of today's public schools have? Very little. If they speak out on the subject, they are seen as whiners and will be treated even worse than they are now. If they complain to their parents about it, they'll be told that it's a part of life and there is no option but to suck it up and deal.
And now, for the anecdote:
When I was in high school, I did my best to imporve my social standing. I took the advanced classes, I joined clubs, I joined the track team. My social skills were on par with most of the student body, and I had good hygeine(sp?). And I did this with the grace that poseurs lack.
All of it was in vain. The awkward kid from junior high stuck in the minds of those I went to junior high with, and this idea spread among the Elitists. I was isolated in the advanced classes and the clubs until I eventually quit in disgust. I was forced to leave the track team due to an auto accident that screwed up my left knee, and was taunted for being a "wuss" and a "sissy", even though I had to, and still do on occasion, have to walk with a cane because of said injury.
And frankly, it hurt. The utter feeling of loneliness, was sometimes too much to bear. I was seriously depressed throughout high school. I considered suicide, and even attempted it twice. And I had nowhere to turn, except to my other Pariah friends, my books, and my Internet connection. My parents didn't care; it's all a part of growing up. The teachers and administrators could do nothing about something as subtle, and as vicious, and this.
Once I got out of high school and became involced in matters of substance (read: college), I was able to put the pain of the last four years behind me and become a person instead a member of a caste. I changed myself from a disillusioned, depressed wreck into an active college student with an active social life and diverse interests. But just because I've put it past me doesn't mean I've forgotten it.
There are a lot of these little guys popping up on the market, yet all of them use a physical connection. Is there some inherent technical problem with using an 802.11b device to stream the music?
If Apple ever released OSX for PC's, it would be their death knell. Why?
1. Hardware: OSX will only run on a small percentage of hardware, insuring that its stability is much higher than that of Windows. If OSX were to move to x86, then it would have to support the huge swath of shitty hardware, bringing down its stability level a great deal.
2. Customer Outrage: Mac users & Mac zealots pride themselves on being different from everyone else. If Apple made OSX available to the horde of beige boxes, they'd riot and go looking for Steve Jobs' blood.
3. No MS Office: If OSX is released for x86, you can be damn sure that Microsoft won't port Office to it at all. And while you can use OpenOffice, or any other office app, most people don't realize they exist, and won't use them.
Back home in Phoenix, there were a few underground homes scattered about. They're nice because they keep the house cooler in the summertine, thus avoiding the electric company ass-fucking you in May with higher rates
However, calling it a hobbit hole turns it into a time and money consuming quest to prove to everyone in the neighborhood that you'll never breed.
I used to work at a very busy grocery store when I was in high school, and I've seen first-hand the abuse shpooing carts go through. They're routinely kicked, smashed, knocked over, ran into walls, ran into people, broken and battered. Shopping carts at grocery stores don't last that long, either because the fucking idiotic customers beat them to shit or the homeless bums take them away.
Why would these super-nifty carts be immune to this? Why would they not suffer the same fate? It's damn near impossible to keep people from being stupid and smashing into stuff, or taking the carts home with them.
Another thing to consider is the fact that these are going to be very expensive. Most grocery stores aren't raking in the cash, and if they have to but a few thousand carts every few weeks to replace stolen or damaged ones, they're either going to go belly-up or forget about the whole thing.
It doesn't look like much. A drab, gray piece of plastic, about five inches long and three inches wide. A black-and-white screen, three inches by two inches, showing a few simple snippets of text. And yet this nondescript little computer may hold the key to bringing information technology to Third World countries.
The device is known as the Simputer. I recently got a chance to evaluate one of the preproduction models that have been put together by the Simputer Trust, a nonprofit organization based in Bangalore, India. This year Encore Software, a Bangalore company that licensed the technology from the trust (not to be confused with the California software company of the same name), plans to sell thousands of the handheld devices, capping an effort that began in 1998.
Simputer stands for " simple, inexpensive, multilingual computer." It was designed to meet the needs of rural villagers in countries such as India, Malaysia, Nigeria and Indonesia. Many of these potential users are illiterate and have never even seen a computer before. Loaded with some elementary software, the Simputer will sell for about $250 (or $300 for a model with a color screen). That's a sizable chunk of the yearly per capita income in many developing nations. But the Simputer's proponents argue that a single device could enable an entire village to access the Internet, perform transactions, keep track of agricultural prices and educate its children. Says Shreyas Patel, a consultant to Encore who has been setting up pilot tests of the Simputer in East Africa: " This will bring computing power to isolated communities. It can have an enormous impact."
The Simputer was conceived by a team of computer scientists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. To make the machine cheap enough to sell in poor regions, the developers kept the hardware requirements to a minimum. The Simputer's microprocessor is an Intel Strong-ARM chip, which is known for its low power consumption. The device will have as much as 64 megabytes of random-access memory and 32 megabytes of flash memory, as well as a modem that can connect to a telephone line. And the computer runs on the Linux operating system, which is available free of charge.
Like the Palm, the Visor and other personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Simputer has a touch-sensitive screen. You use a stylus to tap on icons and to input information. The device doesn't have a keyboard or handwriting-recognition software, but in certain applications the user can select letters or numbers from a software-generated keyboard that pops up on the screen. In addition, the Simputer has a program called Tapatap that displays a three-by-three grid; you can input a letter or number by tapping on the squares of the grid in a particular sequence. Although this method is easier than hunting and pecking on a software keyboard, it is still somewhat laborious, so the Simputer's applications have been carefully designed to minimize the need for tapping in text.
But how will illiterate people be able to use the Simputer if they can't read the directions on the screen? There are two answers. One is the simplicity of the device's interface: because each display page shows only a few possible commands, even illiterate users should be able to learn by trial and error the purpose of the icons and buttons on each page. The second answer is software that can turn text into speech. The Simputer holds a database of phonemes-- basic linguistic sounds-- and from these it can generate an audio representation of any word as long as it is spelled phonetically and in characters from the Roman alphabet. It will work for various Indian languages, including Hindi, Kannada and Tamil, allowing the Simputer to read the text aloud on its tiny built-in speakers. The Simputer Trust says the software will be made available in other languages as well, depending on where the device is used.
I was unable to test this function on my preproduction model, which lacked the text-to-speech program. I can confirm, however, that the Simputer is remarkably easy to use. Its screen is free of the annoying graphical clutter that most of us are accustomed to seeing on our PCs. Below the screen are seven small buttons, one an on-off switch and the rest for use with certain embedded applications such as the Tapatap program. I found that I did not need to bother with the buttons very often, because the design of the software made it easier to use the stylus.
The Simputer also has a slot for " smart" cards, a feature that its makers see as crucial. Because the device lacks a hard drive, smart cards will act as the device's portable storage units. In this way, many people will be able to share a single Simputer without having to share their private information with one another. The cards will cost between $1 and $3 apiece and will hold four to eight kilobytes of data-- not very much by commercial standards but enough to carry some basic information for each user. " We envisage that a village might club together to buy one," notes Shashank Garg, vice president for product development at Encore. A farmer in India, for example, could use the Simputer to find out the latest prices for cotton, allowing him to strike a better deal when selling his crop. The next day one of his neighbors could use the same device to examine government property records, eliminating the need to make a difficult journey to the city.
The Simputer Trust believes the range of applications will prove compelling. But the device does have some drawbacks. It's slow, taking about 15 seconds to boot up and often needing several seconds to digest the information that the user inputs. And the Simputer sometimes crashes when it is left idle for a while, making it necessary to reboot the machine. Also, powering the device may be a daunting task in areas that do not have a reliable electricity supply. Although the Simputer can run on three AAA batteries, it can operate for only a few hours before draining them. And in the developing world, even batteries are expensive and hard to come by.
Fortunately, Simputer users may be able to draw on muscle power instead. A decade ago English inventor Trevor G. Baylis created the Freeplay radio, which is powered by turning a crank that winds up a spring inside the machine. As the spring unwinds, it turns a shaft that runs a small electric generator. Freeplay Energy Group, the company that now sells these radios, recently produced a similar charger that can power a mobile phone. In a demonstration this year some energetic hand-cranking yielded enough energy to run an Apple laptop for a few minutes. With a few adaptations, devices such as these could charge up the Simputer.
But the Simputer may not be the best tool for bringing information to the world's poorest nations. Because most people in developing countries have no access to fixed telephone lines, many mobile-phone operators are setting up networks in those areas. Mobile phones are cheaper than the Simputer, and the most advanced models can send text messages and access the Internet. Communities choosing between the devices may find a mobile phone more immediately attractive for keeping in touch with the outside world and conducting business.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle for the Simputer, though, is cost. Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential? When so many communities in the Third World still lack clean drinking water and adequate medical facilities, are computers really a priority?
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I've loved computers since I was a kid and my dad ran a BBS out of the dining room back in The Day(tm). I've been around them for the majority of my life, and I knew from an early age that I wanted to work with computers for a living.
When it came time for me to start college, this whole damned outsourcing trend began and got steadily worse. If I had stayed in college and graduated, I'd have a shiny new diploma, little to no job prospects, and a huge debt looming over my head. Not a good way to start a professional life.
So I enlisted.
I can now get all the job experience I want, along with a free education. And I can stay in the service while waiting for this trend to finally level off.
There are other reasons, of course, but they really don't pertain to the topic.
Semper Fi.
emerge mplayer Wow. that was tough. I think I need a beer and a pizza to help recuperate after such a trying ordeal.
I feel a lot better about joining the Marine Corps aftre reading your post. It seems like everyone in this discussion is Air Force, so I can't get a good feel for what the IT field is like in the Corps. Now I at least have SOME idea of what things will be like once I get the hell out of Parris Island.
Semper Fi!
Leaving retail clerks to make these judgement calls is a completely asinine idea, since most cashiers care more about when they can get the hell away from the hordes of illiterate, moronic masses then whether or not they should sell a copy of GTA: Vice City to a 17-year old.
was that they included security updates with this little joke. Other than that, it was a good joke! Caught me off guard for a second. :)
About a month or so ago, the mods removed the general/off-topic forum and began banning users who complained. This pissed off a lot of the long-time members (myself included), so we jumped ship to LinuxQuestions.org . JustLinux now is nothing more than a group of 20 post newbies helping other 20 post newbies. No decent help to be had there at all.
This product is a load of crap, pure and simple. All it does is make the information in the browser's history preety, with bar graphs and whatnot. A total waste of time and money designed by a reactionary group of religious zealots.
Maybe this will cause laptops to be more similar to desktops, as parts are standard? It'll take more than one company selling barebones laptops for this to happen. Or a lot of people breaking the hardware they do because they don't know what the hell they're doing.
But from what the little blurb said, this looks like an excellent way to avoid paying for Windows and all the other bundled software that people don't want or need. Though the cost of parts and installation may offset this just a bit.
In most high schools, there is a very distinct pecking order that verges on a caste system. It usually varies between regions, but the basic layout is the same:
- -The Over-Achievers: They take all the advanced classes, participate in student government, sports, and just about everything else on campus. They are (usually) universally admired. Most of the team captains fall into this category.
Teachers, for the most part, do little to change this system, either because they don't care, or they believe that their interference will only make things worse. More often than not, a teacher that steps in to help a student being picked on will be seen as under the teacher's personal protection and will thus be subject to even more cruel treatment once said teacher is gone.-The Elitists: They take enolugh of the advanced classes to make friends with the Over-Achievers, and will usually pick one sport to play, usually on an above-average level. They try desperately to gain the levels of admiration given to the Over-Achievers, but usually fail due to an immature, cruel streak that gets taken out on the less-popular groups. These people are the bullies that the lower groups both despise and envy.
-The Average Kids: The majority of students fall into this category. They don't participate in many sports, clubs, or anything of the sort. Most of their free time is spent hanging out with friends, working, or other typical high-school behaviors. -The Pariahs: The bottom of the rung, this group bears the brunt of attacks by the other groups, either by people trying to get a higher standing, or to simply maintain the one they already have. The Pariahs are subject to discreet discrimination by the Average Kids, brutal teasing & bullying by the Elitists, and a simple denial of their existennce by the Over-Achievers.
So what recourse do the down-trodden, mistreated masses of today's public schools have? Very little. If they speak out on the subject, they are seen as whiners and will be treated even worse than they are now. If they complain to their parents about it, they'll be told that it's a part of life and there is no option but to suck it up and deal.
And now, for the anecdote:
When I was in high school, I did my best to imporve my social standing. I took the advanced classes, I joined clubs, I joined the track team. My social skills were on par with most of the student body, and I had good hygeine(sp?). And I did this with the grace that poseurs lack.
All of it was in vain. The awkward kid from junior high stuck in the minds of those I went to junior high with, and this idea spread among the Elitists. I was isolated in the advanced classes and the clubs until I eventually quit in disgust. I was forced to leave the track team due to an auto accident that screwed up my left knee, and was taunted for being a "wuss" and a "sissy", even though I had to, and still do on occasion, have to walk with a cane because of said injury.
And frankly, it hurt. The utter feeling of loneliness, was sometimes too much to bear. I was seriously depressed throughout high school. I considered suicide, and even attempted it twice. And I had nowhere to turn, except to my other Pariah friends, my books, and my Internet connection. My parents didn't care; it's all a part of growing up. The teachers and administrators could do nothing about something as subtle, and as vicious, and this.
Once I got out of high school and became involced in matters of substance (read: college), I was able to put the pain of the last four years behind me and become a person instead a member of a caste. I changed myself from a disillusioned, depressed wreck into an active college student with an active social life and diverse interests. But just because I've put it past me doesn't mean I've forgotten it.
Greek history
While I'm sure you can, why no wireless models?
1. Hardware: OSX will only run on a small percentage of hardware, insuring that its stability is much higher than that of Windows. If OSX were to move to x86, then it would have to support the huge swath of shitty hardware, bringing down its stability level a great deal.
2. Customer Outrage: Mac users & Mac zealots pride themselves on being different from everyone else. If Apple made OSX available to the horde of beige boxes, they'd riot and go looking for Steve Jobs' blood.
3. No MS Office: If OSX is released for x86, you can be damn sure that Microsoft won't port Office to it at all. And while you can use OpenOffice, or any other office app, most people don't realize they exist, and won't use them.
However, calling it a hobbit hole turns it into a time and money consuming quest to prove to everyone in the neighborhood that you'll never breed.
Why would these super-nifty carts be immune to this? Why would they not suffer the same fate? It's damn near impossible to keep people from being stupid and smashing into stuff, or taking the carts home with them.
Another thing to consider is the fact that these are going to be very expensive. Most grocery stores aren't raking in the cash, and if they have to but a few thousand carts every few weeks to replace stolen or damaged ones, they're either going to go belly-up or forget about the whole thing.
The device is known as the Simputer. I recently got a chance to evaluate one of the preproduction models that have been put together by the Simputer Trust, a nonprofit organization based in Bangalore, India. This year Encore Software, a Bangalore company that licensed the technology from the trust (not to be confused with the California software company of the same name), plans to sell thousands of the handheld devices, capping an effort that began in 1998.
Simputer stands for " simple, inexpensive, multilingual computer." It was designed to meet the needs of rural villagers in countries such as India, Malaysia, Nigeria and Indonesia. Many of these potential users are illiterate and have never even seen a computer before. Loaded with some elementary software, the Simputer will sell for about $250 (or $300 for a model with a color screen). That's a sizable chunk of the yearly per capita income in many developing nations. But the Simputer's proponents argue that a single device could enable an entire village to access the Internet, perform transactions, keep track of agricultural prices and educate its children. Says Shreyas Patel, a consultant to Encore who has been setting up pilot tests of the Simputer in East Africa: " This will bring computing power to isolated communities. It can have an enormous impact."
The Simputer was conceived by a team of computer scientists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. To make the machine cheap enough to sell in poor regions, the developers kept the hardware requirements to a minimum. The Simputer's microprocessor is an Intel Strong-ARM chip, which is known for its low power consumption. The device will have as much as 64 megabytes of random-access memory and 32 megabytes of flash memory, as well as a modem that can connect to a telephone line. And the computer runs on the Linux operating system, which is available free of charge.
Like the Palm, the Visor and other personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Simputer has a touch-sensitive screen. You use a stylus to tap on icons and to input information. The device doesn't have a keyboard or handwriting-recognition software, but in certain applications the user can select letters or numbers from a software-generated keyboard that pops up on the screen. In addition, the Simputer has a program called Tapatap that displays a three-by-three grid; you can input a letter or number by tapping on the squares of the grid in a particular sequence. Although this method is easier than hunting and pecking on a software keyboard, it is still somewhat laborious, so the Simputer's applications have been carefully designed to minimize the need for tapping in text.
But how will illiterate people be able to use the Simputer if they can't read the directions on the screen? There are two answers. One is the simplicity of the device's interface: because each display page shows only a few possible commands, even illiterate users should be able to learn by trial and error the purpose of the icons and buttons on each page. The second answer is software that can turn text into speech. The Simputer holds a database of phonemes-- basic linguistic sounds-- and from these it can generate an audio representation of any word as long as it is spelled phonetically and in characters from the Roman alphabet. It will work for various Indian languages, including Hindi, Kannada and Tamil, allowing the Simputer to read the text aloud on its tiny built-in speakers. The Simputer Trust says the software will be made available in other languages as well, depending on where the device is used.
I was unable to test this function on my preproduction model, which lacked the text-to-speech program. I can confirm, however, that the Simputer is remarkably easy to use. Its screen is free of the annoying graphical clutter that most of us are accustomed to seeing on our PCs. Below the screen are seven small buttons, one an on-off switch and the rest for use with certain embedded applications such as the Tapatap program. I found that I did not need to bother with the buttons very often, because the design of the software made it easier to use the stylus.
The Simputer also has a slot for " smart" cards, a feature that its makers see as crucial. Because the device lacks a hard drive, smart cards will act as the device's portable storage units. In this way, many people will be able to share a single Simputer without having to share their private information with one another. The cards will cost between $1 and $3 apiece and will hold four to eight kilobytes of data-- not very much by commercial standards but enough to carry some basic information for each user. " We envisage that a village might club together to buy one," notes Shashank Garg, vice president for product development at Encore. A farmer in India, for example, could use the Simputer to find out the latest prices for cotton, allowing him to strike a better deal when selling his crop. The next day one of his neighbors could use the same device to examine government property records, eliminating the need to make a difficult journey to the city.
The Simputer Trust believes the range of applications will prove compelling. But the device does have some drawbacks. It's slow, taking about 15 seconds to boot up and often needing several seconds to digest the information that the user inputs. And the Simputer sometimes crashes when it is left idle for a while, making it necessary to reboot the machine. Also, powering the device may be a daunting task in areas that do not have a reliable electricity supply. Although the Simputer can run on three AAA batteries, it can operate for only a few hours before draining them. And in the developing world, even batteries are expensive and hard to come by.
Fortunately, Simputer users may be able to draw on muscle power instead. A decade ago English inventor Trevor G. Baylis created the Freeplay radio, which is powered by turning a crank that winds up a spring inside the machine. As the spring unwinds, it turns a shaft that runs a small electric generator. Freeplay Energy Group, the company that now sells these radios, recently produced a similar charger that can power a mobile phone. In a demonstration this year some energetic hand-cranking yielded enough energy to run an Apple laptop for a few minutes. With a few adaptations, devices such as these could charge up the Simputer.
But the Simputer may not be the best tool for bringing information to the world's poorest nations. Because most people in developing countries have no access to fixed telephone lines, many mobile-phone operators are setting up networks in those areas. Mobile phones are cheaper than the Simputer, and the most advanced models can send text messages and access the Internet. Communities choosing between the devices may find a mobile phone more immediately attractive for keeping in touch with the outside world and conducting business.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle for the Simputer, though, is cost. Will people in developing countries be able to justify the expenditure of $250 on a device that may be helpful but is not essential? When so many communities in the Third World still lack clean drinking water and adequate medical facilities, are computers really a priority?
that some people have WAY too much time on their hands.
On the Gentoo 1.4_rc1 CD, vim is included.