I agree, I'm from a middle class Argentinian family now living in the US, and the standard of living in Argentina is pretty good, in some ways worse and some ways better than the US. I never had to worry about healthcare or education costs in Argentina.
Bitcoin in Argentina? At the very least you need everyone to have a smartphone, and smartphone penetration in Argentina is nowhere what it is in the US, plus 4G barely exists outside Buenos Aires from what I've heard. Cash is really convenient, and an electronic currency would kill all kinds of under the table deals, so it's an obvious no go.
The specs seem more than sufficient for Debian. You will have to tune it after installing, obviously. I got X11 running on Debian using 10MB of RAM (on a laptop with 32MB).
As you mention, the tricky part is installing. If you can plug the HDD in some other computer, you can format it to ext2 and copy the files no problem. Debootstrap is a very useful tool for this: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/426
If you can't plug the HDD somewhere else, it's not really a big issue, just find a floppy distro that can see your HDD, can connect through FTP or HTTP to some other computer, and then just use it to boot and copy the files like the link above shows. It doesn't really need to be a distro, anything that can create ext2 partitions and do FTP/HTTP will work, but linux is probably the best bet when dealing with unknown hardware.
This is a well known one diskette distro: http://www.toms.net/rb/
GTA is a console game. Press Q to look left, E to look right, both to look backwards? Are you kidding me? I have over a hundred keys! Can't be remapped, etc. If the game wasn't so much fun, I'd have thrown it out of the window (Final Fantasy... 7, I think, was even worse).
Ok, maybe the PC version of GTA came first (I don't know), but it reeks of console modus operandi.
It's odd to see one's sig in slashdot.
I strongly disagree with the article (yeah, I RTFA) and I strongly disagree with its conclusion. It equals science fiction with geekdom and then goes to say it would be bad, effectively saying s.f. is escapism (which he previously denies). Sorry, but the geeks I know like s.f. because of the possible reality in it, and often work towards it. I don't see what is so bad in working towards a Geek Utopia.
For geeks helping each other is important for the simple reason that not doing so limits one's possibilities. Reinventing the wheel every now and then to learn is good and fun, but doing it all the time because you have to is not.
I do hope that in the end the geek will inherit the Earth, let's just hope the current leaders leave something for us to inherit.
I played, or tried to, the Fellowship of the Ring game, the dialogs were boring (and to make it worse, I played the Spanish version, worst voice acting I've ever heard), the gameplay was ridiculous, when the ringwraiths first appear you are supposed to hide... only the three times I tried it they caught me before I even had time to read the instructions! Plus a couple of very obvious bugs, like when you first see a platform and you are instructed on how to jump and grab (the tree), if you try to do it it has a clipping error and pushes you down.
The LotR book deserves something much better, my bet is on fans getting it right (as a mod, most probably).
That does make it a lot clearer why we are talking of the 2.4 release before gnome.org
While I'm at it... I welcome our new Second Foundation overlords!
Gnome 2.4 ships with GOK, an award-winning dynamic onscreen keyboard. It supports Direct Selection, Dwell Selection, Automatic Scanning and Inverse Scanning, and includes word completion. A detailed overview can be found on the GOK website.
Gnopernicus, the second accessibility application to ship with GNOME, provides a number of assistive technologies for people suffering from visual impairment. Most notably, it includes a screen reader, a screen magnifier and a Braille writer."
This is great! I'm going to get a taxi and play music all the time, because that means sponsors will also pay me for playing their ads to people, right? right??
Seriously, I remember they tried something similar here (Argentina) a while ago, but it covered ANYONE listening to the radio, at first they even included anyone who had music loud enough inside their houses that could be heard from the street, later they said just businesses, I think they finally dropped it, claiming they had 'misintrerpreted' the law or something similar.
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I agree, I'm from a middle class Argentinian family now living in the US, and the standard of living in Argentina is pretty good, in some ways worse and some ways better than the US. I never had to worry about healthcare or education costs in Argentina.
Bitcoin in Argentina? At the very least you need everyone to have a smartphone, and smartphone penetration in Argentina is nowhere what it is in the US, plus 4G barely exists outside Buenos Aires from what I've heard. Cash is really convenient, and an electronic currency would kill all kinds of under the table deals, so it's an obvious no go.
The specs seem more than sufficient for Debian. You will have to tune it after installing, obviously. I got X11 running on Debian using 10MB of RAM (on a laptop with 32MB).
As you mention, the tricky part is installing. If you can plug the HDD in some other computer, you can format it to ext2 and copy the files no problem. Debootstrap is a very useful tool for this: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/426
If you can't plug the HDD somewhere else, it's not really a big issue, just find a floppy distro that can see your HDD, can connect through FTP or HTTP to some other computer, and then just use it to boot and copy the files like the link above shows. It doesn't really need to be a distro, anything that can create ext2 partitions and do FTP/HTTP will work, but linux is probably the best bet when dealing with unknown hardware.
This is a well known one diskette distro: http://www.toms.net/rb/
How do you know he's african-american? Maybe he's african-african? or camouflaged-albino? or dirty-mongoloid?
GTA is a console game. Press Q to look left, E to look right, both to look backwards? Are you kidding me? I have over a hundred keys! Can't be remapped, etc. If the game wasn't so much fun, I'd have thrown it out of the window (Final Fantasy... 7, I think, was even worse). Ok, maybe the PC version of GTA came first (I don't know), but it reeks of console modus operandi.
TomTom GO.
I guess some very intelligent individual clicked submit before typing in the
Duration and stability don't mean the same, we aren't talking about server uptime, you realize that, don't you?
It's odd to see one's sig in slashdot.
I strongly disagree with the article (yeah, I RTFA) and I strongly disagree with its conclusion. It equals science fiction with geekdom and then goes to say it would be bad, effectively saying s.f. is escapism (which he previously denies). Sorry, but the geeks I know like s.f. because of the possible reality in it, and often work towards it. I don't see what is so bad in working towards a Geek Utopia.
For geeks helping each other is important for the simple reason that not doing so limits one's possibilities. Reinventing the wheel every now and then to learn is good and fun, but doing it all the time because you have to is not.
I do hope that in the end the geek will inherit the Earth, let's just hope the current leaders leave something for us to inherit.
I played, or tried to, the Fellowship of the Ring game, the dialogs were boring (and to make it worse, I played the Spanish version, worst voice acting I've ever heard), the gameplay was ridiculous, when the ringwraiths first appear you are supposed to hide... only the three times I tried it they caught me before I even had time to read the instructions! Plus a couple of very obvious bugs, like when you first see a platform and you are instructed on how to jump and grab (the tree), if you try to do it it has a clipping error and pushes you down.
The LotR book deserves something much better, my bet is on fans getting it right (as a mod, most probably).
And proud! You freakin'... normal person!
That does make it a lot clearer why we are talking of the 2.4 release before gnome.org
While I'm at it... I welcome our new Second Foundation overlords!
Page 4 of the article:
"Desktop Accessibility Tools
Gnome 2.4 ships with GOK, an award-winning dynamic onscreen keyboard. It supports Direct Selection, Dwell Selection, Automatic Scanning and Inverse Scanning, and includes word completion. A detailed overview can be found on the GOK website.
Gnopernicus, the second accessibility application to ship with GNOME, provides a number of assistive technologies for people suffering from visual impairment. Most notably, it includes a screen reader, a screen magnifier and a Braille writer."
Wouldn't that be clusters within clusters within clusters?
This is great! I'm going to get a taxi and play music all the time, because that means sponsors will also pay me for playing their ads to people, right? right?? Seriously, I remember they tried something similar here (Argentina) a while ago, but it covered ANYONE listening to the radio, at first they even included anyone who had music loud enough inside their houses that could be heard from the street, later they said just businesses, I think they finally dropped it, claiming they had 'misintrerpreted' the law or something similar.