Bricking a device like a MacBook Pro would require you to alter the firmware or boot settings to the point where you can't change them back or load any operating system. A well designed electronic device will have a hardware mechanism for manually re-flashing the firmware/boot settings to a factory defaults (if they can be changed in the first place) or simply make the critical firmware read only.
From the specs I've read on Intel's site, EFI is a level above the firmware itself, which makes it even more terrible to think one can brick the device just by changing settings on that.
I realize that your post is intended to be a joke, but my first reaction upon seeing this article was something akin to, "What? 'Debian System Explained'? Doesn't Debian explain itself?"
I have recently switched to Debian-based (Ubuntu on the desktop now, ran Sarge prior to that for several months). The system documentation is quite detailed and exhaustive. Also, it's not just for the expert user--the system is clear enough for even casual users to get a handle on quickly.
Debian speaks for itself and is consistent. Surprisingly, I've haven't felt this way since I used FreeBSD (whose documentation is astoundingly good, I might add).
When something like Linux is ported to anything, it's because there is a cult following in the community and this is what they specialize in. Window's has a cult following, it's just not specialized in this sort of development.
If by "cult following" you mean "the bulk of the industry" and "paid professionals", then yes.
Unless you want to market games on a really unique and proprietary platform, casual gaming and commercial gaming are two things that are difficult to mix. This article shows the most obvious reason why: cloning. The reason for this is that most casual games are so simple that most programmers are able to whip out their own version, possibly making modifications to suit their personal needs.
The bright side of this is that these are ideal free software projects. When I delved into the world of free software, I could not help but notice that the majority of games available were small, casual games. Some of them were quite clever, many were unusually addictive, and the vast majority were clones of something.
If you ask me, casual games ought to be free software because, among other reasons, it A) helps to ensure the longevity of your game and B) helps others to not have to reinvent the wheel. Why rewrite your game as a clone when they can just port it to a new platform or create their own skins? If they think they can make it better, they already have your code to start off with, so they can extend it or examine it while writing their own engine.
I like to think of casual gaming as "generic gaming", and I find it to be healthy that there is a lot of borrowing going on.
I really don't think it's that big of a deal; most blind people have friends that are not blind. An account only needs to be registered just once, so with a little help from a friend, a blind person can register an account quite easily. This is a very tiny and reasonable price to pay for better security, and is probably the best compromise.
No, definitely not, I'm interested in the other non-crappy 10%.
I here you.;_;
Lucky for people like me, I usually prefer to just revel in the past. Playing games from my childhood keeps me from lusting after new titles. When there are exceptions, I just thank my stars for consoles, which lets me keep linux on my desktop.
I invite those who are interested to check out the GP2X wiki. It has a lot of good resources. Also, please visit us on EFNet at #gp2x and #gp2xdev. The more the merrier!
I am sure that the hardware of the device is great and could easily kick nintendo's butt and probably psp too.
That is wrong in the sense of gaming. Hardware-wise, the GP2X doesn't come close to what the PSP has got, though it does have such niceties as a large amount of memory (64M of RAM, 64M of flash) and 2D acceleration (hardware video decoding, hardware scaling and bliting, etc..).
However, linux is highly experimental by nature and the programs that this device relies on have a lot to be desired from.
That is not the nature of linux. The programs this device relies on come from the GNU project, which is quite old and mature. GNU utilities have been preferred by commercial unix sysadmins working on commercial unix systems even before there was such a thing as linux. The linux kernel is the product of an immense amount of work recently and is quite stable and reliable.
As for the GP2X itself, some of the included apps are more or less beta. There are some things to be desired, but not "a lot."
Linux's weakes side is gaming and that's a fact.
Depending on how you want to interpret that statement, it may be a fact, but even so you have presented it horribly. There is nothing about linux that makes it bad for gaming--the system is quite capable of doing more than what's necessary. Also, there are a wealth of wonderful games developed natively for GNU/Linux, and many more gems have been ported. Linux does not have much support from the gaming industry, but are you really interested in 90% of the crap they're turning out these days?
I hope I am wrong but I think that a linux gaming device is doomed for failure.
It depends on how you measure success. The GP2X is already successful in its own right in the sense that we (the community) have done a good job of embracing it. Lots of development is happening right now, and we have good people.
It seems like there isn't any strong corporate support or community support for the device and the platform and I am very reluctant spending close to $200 on a device like that.
I totally understand; we GP2X owners are basically hobbiests, but we like it that way. I think anyone should do a bit of research into what the device is really about before they drop the cash, but I can assure you that owning one is a lot of fun. Corporate support exits, but it's pretty shoddy if you ask me; on the other hand, community support is great actually.
I'm also a GP2X owner, and I feel you're being a little harsh. I'm running the 1.0.1 firmware, which I'm not sure makes a difference.
1. The LCD screen has a problem with refresh rates as it appears to be interlaced. This apparently can be tweaked by running some third party utilities which adjust the clock speed of the CPU and the LCD timing but it isn't perfect. You either get a washed out screen or a flickery interlaced screen. Alledgely a future firmware upgrade will fix it...
I have no complaints about the LCD. It's not a "really nice" LCD that you would see on such things as laptops, gameboys, PSP's, pocket PC's, etc.. However, it's not bad either. It's a nice size and resolution, supports a good range of color, and refreshes plenty fast for any game. Because of its smaller size, games look better on it than they would on a large CRT.
2. The unit is very plasticy and poorly finished. The edges around the shoulder buttons are quite sharp.
That's an absolute load of rubbish. Yes, it's made of plastic--show me a console that isn't. The finish is just as good as any other handheld. The edges on the shoulder buttons are rounded and not sharp at all. The console is a very nice size and easy to hold. It looks and feels sturdy, and is very comfortable.
3. It is very easy to brick the unit as the firmware upgrade system is very unreliable. The safest way appears to be using a third party utility.
It is easy to brick the unit since there is no way to save yourself after improperly flashing the firmware, but provided you don't do that, you won't have a problem. Firmware upgrading is not unreliable at all, but you should have a consistent power supply (ie not batteries) as the flashing consumes lots of power. It is possible to accidently flash your firmware with garbage if you boot with a corrupted SD card, but this is quite rare. Also, people have reported problems when messing with the NAND file system in ways they shouldn't.
4. How it appears as a USB device is odd. It tells the computer that is a HD instead of a removable disk. This means that your PC expects the SD card to be formatted with a partition table.
I'm not a Windows user, and I assume that these problems have to do with some software you're using on your PC. I have a card reader and I load everything onto the card, which does indeed need to be formatted. No problems with this.
5. The unit is quite fat. They never show you a side profile view or the back for a reason and that is because there is a lump where you put the 2xAAs.
This is another load of rubbish. The battery compartment sticks out only a tiny bit, and it doesn't affect how easily you can handle the device. Sure, it's not totally flat on the back, but I can't see why this even matters.
In my experience, the biggest flaw is the joystick, which is not necessarily that large of a flaw. The problem is that it is not an analog stick, which can make handling difficult sometimes; I believe they should have just used a d-pad. Good motor skills are required for this console.
Also, I agree that the emulators and playback software are very immature. We look to improvements on these things.
I get a few good hours with nimh batteries. Power consumption is scheduled for improvement in a firmware update, as there are components on the board that are being powered when not in use. Also, some built-in apps should throttle down the CPU or power down the second core when the full processing power isn't needed.
Yes, the PSP is a beautiful machine, but it's worthless to me as a homebrew enthusiast. Sure, people are proving it's possible to create homebrew software, but is this even the best platform to be targeting?
I just got my GP2X a couple weeks ago, and the machine is beautiful. For just under $200, you have a very powerful console (sans hardware 3D, sadly...but the 2D hardware is great;) running on a fully open platform--linux kernel, GNU operating system, SDL libs, and everything. The development scene is vibrant, and some homebrew projects were completed before the device was even released to the public. It's the best development toy I've ever owned, and it's basically grab-and-go.
Sure, you can waste time hacking away at the PSP, but think of all that energy you could otherwise be spending on software development. Now, if what you like best is circumventing DRM, then I salute you, but I for one don't want the hassle.
How is this true? Free enterpise doesn't pull growth out of thin air. Where does it come from? Hmm...
The only countries that can sustain marxism for long are countries with a lot of natural resources to exploit.
...oh yes! Those things. Countries without those can't sustain capitalism either, sadly.
Communism will never work because absolute power will corrupt absolutely.
"Communism" is a social structure in which there is no central body of authority--it's a sort of anarchy in which individuals form their own society and cooperate on their own, free from government oppression. You know, the United States was initially populated by people who wanted exactly that, and thousands of the same people expanded westward across the continent later for precisely the same ideals.
Of course, you're probably right that such a thing will never work. However, it's because "lack of power really fucks up society and lowers the quality of life dramatically," not this absolute power mumbo jumbo.
Regulated captialism is the only economic system that works despite its flaws.
That's a really bold statement, but can you prove it?
To answer your question, my belief is that these values are cultural norms that are being taken to the extreme by a totalitarian government. The alternatives you gave are not necessarily alternatives, but two things that work together.
Speaking as a marxist as well as someone who has studied some of the various ideologies behind communist movements (marxist leninism, maoism, etc), there is nothing specifically wrong about sexuality. What it comes down to is how you and your culture feels about it, and it can go either way:
Example A: You are a policy maker in an authoritarian socialist government. You personally perceive sexual licentiousness as having a negative effect on your society. For this reason, you identify such licentiousness as a product of a culture formed by capitalism. In order to remove capitalism completely from your society, you'd also have to overturn capitalist values and culture, so that also means making an effort to inhibit what you think is sexual deviation.
Remember, most conservatives in the United States have similar views on sexuality (a product of culture), but they do not link it to any economic system--most would relate the issue to religious matters if to any body outside practicality.
Example B: You are a policy maker in an authoritarian socialist government. You personally perceive that a more liberal view of sexuality would be socially beneficial. Therefore, you identify anti-sex views in your culture as being values that have been imposed upon the working class by a capitalist elite. Since your goal is to oust the elite class and do away with their imposed culture and economic system, you must make an effort to encourage sexuality.
As you can see, communist ideologies are not necessarily equiped with pre-defined views on much of anything outside of economics and class struggle. Whatever you are for or against, you need to make the case for whether or not such a thing is antisocial.
Politics work like that in the US as well, but the government has a slightly different attitude about what needs to be done.
You have to be careful in any case. In a communist country, it may be "think of the people!" In the US, an equivalent might be, "think of yourself!" Or, in either, "think of the children!" If you think about it, those statements are nearly identical when you follow them to where they're meant to lead you (hint: yourself).
Each language has its strengths and weaknesses in the market. As other posters have mentioned, it also depends on which one you want to be on your resume.
I too am a CIS major, and the mentors I've had at my college spent a lot of energy pounding in the idea that "language doesn't matter." Now, that might seem absurd and impractical in the real world, but sometimes even the work place will demand that you pick up a programming project in an odd language that you've never seen before. In this case, it really helps to develop critical programming skills that are language-agnostic. For me, they didn't care what languages I knew at all, but what kind code I could write regardless. Sometimes they would, "That's good a good C program. Now write it in ada."
When you look at the big picture, you can't go wrong either way.
I remember seeing this demo in full years ago after downloading it from a gaming community. I was quite impressed because I thought that perhaps Square was presenting some work that would suggest that they were reworking FFVI in 3D, but I was dissappointed to discover that it was only just a demo.
One of these days I'd like to see a VI remake; I'd buy it.
Call me shallow, but I prefer to use GNOME merely because of the fact that I prefer the look and feel of it and GTK apps.
Like many KDE supporters, I too believe that KDE is more feature rich and has incorporated some applications that are vastly superior to their GNOME equivalents (when present) and that Qt is more robust than GTK.
Be that as it may, at the end of the day I want to sit down in front of something that feels comfortable. I don't get sick of looking at GNOME or my GTK apps, which is a frequent problem that I've encountered with KDE (it's a good thing there are so many themes, because I'm compelled to change mine every couple of weeks).
Bash GNOME for being too simple, but I'm just glad it doesn't get in my way and knows how to look pretty.
I wish the FSF well in its quest to create the perfect balance between freedom and the protection of creators' rights.
The GPL is designed around the idea that "what's good for the community is good for the individual." Because of this reasoning, the GPL seeks to defend the public first by making the developer/contributor give up certain luxuries, such as that of closing the source or not releasing it (this in turn helps your FOSS project not to be hijacked and closed by a private enterprise). It allows you to sell it, but not the luxury of telling others that they can't share it.
They used to tell us in school in the United States that "liberty is not freedom to do what we want, but freedom to do what we ought." Freedom can be used to do antisocial things, and things like proprietary softare are fundamentally antisocial. That doesn't mean they aren't good pieces of software, it's just that their goal is not to maximize the benefit to the community but rather to maximize the profit of the author by denying access to classes of people. While you're sacrificing a little bit of freedom to do something antisocial, you're in turn creating a vast amount of freedom for everyone else.
I'm not sure what "rights" the creator has that the GPL doesn't protect...I'd like to know more about what you're thinking just to be sure.
As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is the best license for "Free" software in the purest sense of the word. I think it embodies the ideals and goals of our movement. Not all software is Free software, so of course you need other licenses to fit what it is that you'd like to do with your particular project, but I think all of the complaints against the GPL are unwarranted in the sense that they attack it for not being something it was never supposed to be in the first place.
I think the project is just slightly out of focus:
which are reportedly bidding to manufacture the world's cheapest notebook distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives
As other posters have vocalized, our students really don't need laptops. Here in California, I've witnessed the pains of introducing computing to our schools. The labs were over-stuffed with cheap machines from Gateway, and there were two or three in every single classroom. The labs were chaotic and full of malware, the library computers weren't even understood by the library staff, the single sysadmin the school hired was seriously overworked and underpaid, and it took all of the district's entire efforts to keep a web server and an exchange server on our domain (all systems were Windows NT/2000/XP).
In this part of the state classroom sizes are a big problem, and in classes with anywhere from 30 to 40 students, the 3-4 computers in each classroom were virtually unused. Talk about a waste of money! When they WERE used, they never helped anyone do actual learning.
Witnessing how computers are misused in lower education have really made me reconsider things like laptop iniatives and whatnot. While I do believe having small, well-managed labs is good for teaching students about computers and various software, they don't belong in more general classes that don't require them.
Where computing really shines is in the home; home computing gives people the knowledge and experience that, to reiterate some form of a cliche, "vital in our day in age." Also, it's not just for students or young people--it's for everyone. I suppose you could argue that laptops in the hands are students equals laptops in the home, but I just think "for education" is just an excuse to get people to spend money on these cheap laptops.
I'd rather see the program distribute computers to low-income families that can't afford them or otherwise wouldn't buy one. They also need food, clothing, work, housing, education, etc...but if those things are met then I suppose computers fall somewhere closely down the list (don't jump on me for being all socialist...I'm just saying that if you're going to waste money on computers, you might first think about whether or not there's something more important to spend it on).
If they're going to spend money on students, they might consider things like better classroom equipment, nice books, and maybe even BETTER PAID TEACHERS.:-)
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Bricking a device like a MacBook Pro would require you to alter the firmware or boot settings to the point where you can't change them back or load any operating system. A well designed electronic device will have a hardware mechanism for manually re-flashing the firmware/boot settings to a factory defaults (if they can be changed in the first place) or simply make the critical firmware read only.
From the specs I've read on Intel's site, EFI is a level above the firmware itself, which makes it even more terrible to think one can brick the device just by changing settings on that.
I have recently switched to Debian-based (Ubuntu on the desktop now, ran Sarge prior to that for several months). The system documentation is quite detailed and exhaustive. Also, it's not just for the expert user--the system is clear enough for even casual users to get a handle on quickly.
Debian speaks for itself and is consistent. Surprisingly, I've haven't felt this way since I used FreeBSD (whose documentation is astoundingly good, I might add).
If by "cult following" you mean "the bulk of the industry" and "paid professionals", then yes.
Unless you want to market games on a really unique and proprietary platform, casual gaming and commercial gaming are two things that are difficult to mix. This article shows the most obvious reason why: cloning. The reason for this is that most casual games are so simple that most programmers are able to whip out their own version, possibly making modifications to suit their personal needs.
The bright side of this is that these are ideal free software projects. When I delved into the world of free software, I could not help but notice that the majority of games available were small, casual games. Some of them were quite clever, many were unusually addictive, and the vast majority were clones of something.
If you ask me, casual games ought to be free software because, among other reasons, it A) helps to ensure the longevity of your game and B) helps others to not have to reinvent the wheel. Why rewrite your game as a clone when they can just port it to a new platform or create their own skins? If they think they can make it better, they already have your code to start off with, so they can extend it or examine it while writing their own engine.
I like to think of casual gaming as "generic gaming", and I find it to be healthy that there is a lot of borrowing going on.
I really don't think it's that big of a deal; most blind people have friends that are not blind. An account only needs to be registered just once, so with a little help from a friend, a blind person can register an account quite easily. This is a very tiny and reasonable price to pay for better security, and is probably the best compromise.
On an unrelated noted, my hostname used to be "luna" on my desktop machine.
No, definitely not, I'm interested in the other non-crappy 10%.
I here you. ;_;
Lucky for people like me, I usually prefer to just revel in the past. Playing games from my childhood keeps me from lusting after new titles. When there are exceptions, I just thank my stars for consoles, which lets me keep linux on my desktop.
I invite those who are interested to check out the GP2X wiki. It has a lot of good resources. Also, please visit us on EFNet at #gp2x and #gp2xdev. The more the merrier!
I am sure that the hardware of the device is great and could easily kick nintendo's butt and probably psp too.
That is wrong in the sense of gaming. Hardware-wise, the GP2X doesn't come close to what the PSP has got, though it does have such niceties as a large amount of memory (64M of RAM, 64M of flash) and 2D acceleration (hardware video decoding, hardware scaling and bliting, etc..).
However, linux is highly experimental by nature and the programs that this device relies on have a lot to be desired from.
That is not the nature of linux. The programs this device relies on come from the GNU project, which is quite old and mature. GNU utilities have been preferred by commercial unix sysadmins working on commercial unix systems even before there was such a thing as linux. The linux kernel is the product of an immense amount of work recently and is quite stable and reliable.
As for the GP2X itself, some of the included apps are more or less beta. There are some things to be desired, but not "a lot."
Linux's weakes side is gaming and that's a fact.
Depending on how you want to interpret that statement, it may be a fact, but even so you have presented it horribly. There is nothing about linux that makes it bad for gaming--the system is quite capable of doing more than what's necessary. Also, there are a wealth of wonderful games developed natively for GNU/Linux, and many more gems have been ported. Linux does not have much support from the gaming industry, but are you really interested in 90% of the crap they're turning out these days?
I hope I am wrong but I think that a linux gaming device is doomed for failure.
It depends on how you measure success. The GP2X is already successful in its own right in the sense that we (the community) have done a good job of embracing it. Lots of development is happening right now, and we have good people.
It seems like there isn't any strong corporate support or community support for the device and the platform and I am very reluctant spending close to $200 on a device like that.
I totally understand; we GP2X owners are basically hobbiests, but we like it that way. I think anyone should do a bit of research into what the device is really about before they drop the cash, but I can assure you that owning one is a lot of fun. Corporate support exits, but it's pretty shoddy if you ask me; on the other hand, community support is great actually.
1. The LCD screen has a problem with refresh rates as it appears to be interlaced. This apparently can be tweaked by running some third party utilities which adjust the clock speed of the CPU and the LCD timing but it isn't perfect. You either get a washed out screen or a flickery interlaced screen. Alledgely a future firmware upgrade will fix it...
I have no complaints about the LCD. It's not a "really nice" LCD that you would see on such things as laptops, gameboys, PSP's, pocket PC's, etc.. However, it's not bad either. It's a nice size and resolution, supports a good range of color, and refreshes plenty fast for any game. Because of its smaller size, games look better on it than they would on a large CRT.
2. The unit is very plasticy and poorly finished. The edges around the shoulder buttons are quite sharp.
That's an absolute load of rubbish. Yes, it's made of plastic--show me a console that isn't. The finish is just as good as any other handheld. The edges on the shoulder buttons are rounded and not sharp at all. The console is a very nice size and easy to hold. It looks and feels sturdy, and is very comfortable.
3. It is very easy to brick the unit as the firmware upgrade system is very unreliable. The safest way appears to be using a third party utility.
It is easy to brick the unit since there is no way to save yourself after improperly flashing the firmware, but provided you don't do that, you won't have a problem. Firmware upgrading is not unreliable at all, but you should have a consistent power supply (ie not batteries) as the flashing consumes lots of power. It is possible to accidently flash your firmware with garbage if you boot with a corrupted SD card, but this is quite rare. Also, people have reported problems when messing with the NAND file system in ways they shouldn't.
4. How it appears as a USB device is odd. It tells the computer that is a HD instead of a removable disk. This means that your PC expects the SD card to be formatted with a partition table.
I'm not a Windows user, and I assume that these problems have to do with some software you're using on your PC. I have a card reader and I load everything onto the card, which does indeed need to be formatted. No problems with this.
5. The unit is quite fat. They never show you a side profile view or the back for a reason and that is because there is a lump where you put the 2xAAs.
This is another load of rubbish. The battery compartment sticks out only a tiny bit, and it doesn't affect how easily you can handle the device. Sure, it's not totally flat on the back, but I can't see why this even matters.
In my experience, the biggest flaw is the joystick, which is not necessarily that large of a flaw. The problem is that it is not an analog stick, which can make handling difficult sometimes; I believe they should have just used a d-pad. Good motor skills are required for this console.
Also, I agree that the emulators and playback software are very immature. We look to improvements on these things.
I get a few good hours with nimh batteries. Power consumption is scheduled for improvement in a firmware update, as there are components on the board that are being powered when not in use. Also, some built-in apps should throttle down the CPU or power down the second core when the full processing power isn't needed.
I just got my GP2X a couple weeks ago, and the machine is beautiful. For just under $200, you have a very powerful console (sans hardware 3D, sadly...but the 2D hardware is great ;) running on a fully open platform--linux kernel, GNU operating system, SDL libs, and everything. The development scene is vibrant, and some homebrew projects were completed before the device was even released to the public. It's the best development toy I've ever owned, and it's basically grab-and-go.
Sure, you can waste time hacking away at the PSP, but think of all that energy you could otherwise be spending on software development. Now, if what you like best is circumventing DRM, then I salute you, but I for one don't want the hassle.
Have doubts? Take a look at the wiki.
Without free enterprise the economy won't grow.
How is this true? Free enterpise doesn't pull growth out of thin air. Where does it come from? Hmm...
The only countries that can sustain marxism for long are countries with a lot of natural resources to exploit.
...oh yes! Those things. Countries without those can't sustain capitalism either, sadly.
Communism will never work because absolute power will corrupt absolutely.
"Communism" is a social structure in which there is no central body of authority--it's a sort of anarchy in which individuals form their own society and cooperate on their own, free from government oppression. You know, the United States was initially populated by people who wanted exactly that, and thousands of the same people expanded westward across the continent later for precisely the same ideals.
Of course, you're probably right that such a thing will never work. However, it's because "lack of power really fucks up society and lowers the quality of life dramatically," not this absolute power mumbo jumbo.
Regulated captialism is the only economic system that works despite its flaws.
That's a really bold statement, but can you prove it?
Speaking as a marxist as well as someone who has studied some of the various ideologies behind communist movements (marxist leninism, maoism, etc), there is nothing specifically wrong about sexuality. What it comes down to is how you and your culture feels about it, and it can go either way:
Example A: You are a policy maker in an authoritarian socialist government. You personally perceive sexual licentiousness as having a negative effect on your society. For this reason, you identify such licentiousness as a product of a culture formed by capitalism. In order to remove capitalism completely from your society, you'd also have to overturn capitalist values and culture, so that also means making an effort to inhibit what you think is sexual deviation.
Remember, most conservatives in the United States have similar views on sexuality (a product of culture), but they do not link it to any economic system--most would relate the issue to religious matters if to any body outside practicality.
Example B: You are a policy maker in an authoritarian socialist government. You personally perceive that a more liberal view of sexuality would be socially beneficial. Therefore, you identify anti-sex views in your culture as being values that have been imposed upon the working class by a capitalist elite. Since your goal is to oust the elite class and do away with their imposed culture and economic system, you must make an effort to encourage sexuality.
As you can see, communist ideologies are not necessarily equiped with pre-defined views on much of anything outside of economics and class struggle. Whatever you are for or against, you need to make the case for whether or not such a thing is antisocial.
Politics work like that in the US as well, but the government has a slightly different attitude about what needs to be done.
You have to be careful in any case. In a communist country, it may be "think of the people!" In the US, an equivalent might be, "think of yourself!" Or, in either, "think of the children!" If you think about it, those statements are nearly identical when you follow them to where they're meant to lead you (hint: yourself).
Alas, my favorite Rogue descendant is still Nethack. :)
Each language has its strengths and weaknesses in the market. As other posters have mentioned, it also depends on which one you want to be on your resume.
I too am a CIS major, and the mentors I've had at my college spent a lot of energy pounding in the idea that "language doesn't matter." Now, that might seem absurd and impractical in the real world, but sometimes even the work place will demand that you pick up a programming project in an odd language that you've never seen before. In this case, it really helps to develop critical programming skills that are language-agnostic. For me, they didn't care what languages I knew at all, but what kind code I could write regardless. Sometimes they would, "That's good a good C program. Now write it in ada."
When you look at the big picture, you can't go wrong either way.
It's out already.
OS/2 is now eComStation. You can't kill an OS.
Actually, they have a distro called "Red Flag." It's really cute...they've got a tux hoisting a red flag in the air above his head.
I remember seeing this demo in full years ago after downloading it from a gaming community. I was quite impressed because I thought that perhaps Square was presenting some work that would suggest that they were reworking FFVI in 3D, but I was dissappointed to discover that it was only just a demo.
One of these days I'd like to see a VI remake; I'd buy it.
Call me shallow, but I prefer to use GNOME merely because of the fact that I prefer the look and feel of it and GTK apps.
Like many KDE supporters, I too believe that KDE is more feature rich and has incorporated some applications that are vastly superior to their GNOME equivalents (when present) and that Qt is more robust than GTK.
Be that as it may, at the end of the day I want to sit down in front of something that feels comfortable. I don't get sick of looking at GNOME or my GTK apps, which is a frequent problem that I've encountered with KDE (it's a good thing there are so many themes, because I'm compelled to change mine every couple of weeks).
Bash GNOME for being too simple, but I'm just glad it doesn't get in my way and knows how to look pretty.
Surveyors in South Korea have discovered that only old people use Java.
I wish the FSF well in its quest to create the perfect balance between freedom and the protection of creators' rights.
The GPL is designed around the idea that "what's good for the community is good for the individual." Because of this reasoning, the GPL seeks to defend the public first by making the developer/contributor give up certain luxuries, such as that of closing the source or not releasing it (this in turn helps your FOSS project not to be hijacked and closed by a private enterprise). It allows you to sell it, but not the luxury of telling others that they can't share it.
They used to tell us in school in the United States that "liberty is not freedom to do what we want, but freedom to do what we ought." Freedom can be used to do antisocial things, and things like proprietary softare are fundamentally antisocial. That doesn't mean they aren't good pieces of software, it's just that their goal is not to maximize the benefit to the community but rather to maximize the profit of the author by denying access to classes of people. While you're sacrificing a little bit of freedom to do something antisocial, you're in turn creating a vast amount of freedom for everyone else.
I'm not sure what "rights" the creator has that the GPL doesn't protect...I'd like to know more about what you're thinking just to be sure.
As far as I'm concerned, the GPL is the best license for "Free" software in the purest sense of the word. I think it embodies the ideals and goals of our movement. Not all software is Free software, so of course you need other licenses to fit what it is that you'd like to do with your particular project, but I think all of the complaints against the GPL are unwarranted in the sense that they attack it for not being something it was never supposed to be in the first place.
I think the project is just slightly out of focus:
As other posters have vocalized, our students really don't need laptops. Here in California, I've witnessed the pains of introducing computing to our schools. The labs were over-stuffed with cheap machines from Gateway, and there were two or three in every single classroom. The labs were chaotic and full of malware, the library computers weren't even understood by the library staff, the single sysadmin the school hired was seriously overworked and underpaid, and it took all of the district's entire efforts to keep a web server and an exchange server on our domain (all systems were Windows NT/2000/XP).
In this part of the state classroom sizes are a big problem, and in classes with anywhere from 30 to 40 students, the 3-4 computers in each classroom were virtually unused. Talk about a waste of money! When they WERE used, they never helped anyone do actual learning.
Witnessing how computers are misused in lower education have really made me reconsider things like laptop iniatives and whatnot. While I do believe having small, well-managed labs is good for teaching students about computers and various software, they don't belong in more general classes that don't require them.
Where computing really shines is in the home; home computing gives people the knowledge and experience that, to reiterate some form of a cliche, "vital in our day in age." Also, it's not just for students or young people--it's for everyone. I suppose you could argue that laptops in the hands are students equals laptops in the home, but I just think "for education" is just an excuse to get people to spend money on these cheap laptops.
I'd rather see the program distribute computers to low-income families that can't afford them or otherwise wouldn't buy one. They also need food, clothing, work, housing, education, etc...but if those things are met then I suppose computers fall somewhere closely down the list (don't jump on me for being all socialist...I'm just saying that if you're going to waste money on computers, you might first think about whether or not there's something more important to spend it on).
If they're going to spend money on students, they might consider things like better classroom equipment, nice books, and maybe even BETTER PAID TEACHERS. :-)
4) Have a brief existential crisis regarding if the Universe wipes a moistened digit across humanity from time to time.
Might I be so bold as to suggest that religion and politics are prime examples of this principle at work.