New Breed Software makes a lot of good open source edutainment applications. I know TuxPaint is part of Debian Jr. Not sure about the others like Tux Math, but you might want to check it out.
I came to the same conclusion when I was looking into buying one of these. When I decided to replace my current G3 iBook, I was looking at one of these laptops, since I thought they might be more economical, but I realized that really, they are not much cheaper than even the powerbooks, and have a few serious problems. I've also heard that these things have a lot of hardware problems. My iBook is build like a tank. it's been stepped on by kids, dropped from a table, and knocked around countless times, with no ill effects.
It's nice to see someone building laptops that are built for Linux, but with these problems, I don't see them doing well, and I hope that they don't end up saying "well, nobody bought our laptops, I guess nobody wants to use Linux".
I've been thinking the same thing, I wonder if the burning courthouse was the first of the "many waco type events". I've been considering moving to canada, but in the mean time I've been keeping stocked up on MREs, first aid supplies, ammo, etc.
You know, back in 2000/2001 I thought that guy was a nut.
I thought it was pretty interesting that it took so much longer to delete everything under windows/NTFS. Anyone know why this is (is NTFS slow, or is it the del command as the author guessed, or is there some other reason for this).
actually, I think they should have replaced the "format c:" with "Deltree/y c:\*", because even the most inept tend to know that "format" will hose their drives.
not sure if this will get modded up, I'm posting a little late, but anyway...
One idea that has always been interesting to me is a shared world between many online type of games, COV seems to be the first game to do something like this, with two stand alone clients connecting to the same world. Star Wars Galaxies tried to do something similar by allowing many different play styles. My question is this: With many different types of popular online games (first person shooters, RTS, RPGs, as well as more social type games like A Tale in the Desert and The Sims Online), what do you think of the idea of having a single shared world in which multiple types of games take place.
I had the same question, I would imagine that the laser would probably be able to go through the coating to burn the CD. If not, I could see a viable business in coating disks. I would, as I'm sure other people would, be willing to pay a couple of bucks to have home movies on DVD coated with this, or even important backups of some of my work.
I would assume that there will be cost/adoption barriers. Perhaps these are cool and damage proof, but will the average consumer lay down X times more the cost over that of regular CD's?
Yes. I think that there is a market for this sort of thing, because the average consumer doesn't take care of CDs. The ones who do take care of their CDs are so paranoid of scratches that they'll pay more.
It seems that this poll wouldn't have to be COMPLETELY useless. If you compared the number of people who signed up for this poll to the total number of people who exclusively own cell phones, then you can get an idea of how many people are decided and feel strongly enough to sign up for such a poll. Of course I'm quite sure that this wasn't a consideration during the poll, and was more of a way to say "look, look at all these people who prefer $candidate, you should prefer $candidate as well!".
I think the reason has to do with target audience. As I see it, there are really 3 main types of mac users. There are the notebook users, people who want a solid portable, and go with a mac, since the prices for the iBooks are much more similar to the prices of wintel notebooks. The second type of mac user is the type that you see in the "switch" commericals, someone who doesn't want to know how the computer works, they just want something simple to do word processing on, check email, browse the web, and are willing to pay for simplicity and asthetics. This used to be the main type of mac user, but I think that now type 3 is starting to take over. The third type of mac user are high end professional users, people that use the macs for high end graphics and scientific computing. User types 1 and 2 don't really need high end graphics cards, and user type 3 is going to be going for a high end machine anyway.
I have a legit copy of Windows XP that I got from school, didn't have a choice, we had to pay for it, was included with our tuition "technology costs". I don't have it installed, Suse works better for me. Can I call up Microsoft and read them my cd key and get free stuff, or do I have to have me legit copy of windows actually installed. Not that I particularly want any of the stuff they are giving away, but, you know, if it's free, might as well take advantage if I can.
Nintendo has always seemed sensible legally to me. I'm not saying they are alturistic or anything, but you just don't hear of them being evil, like one hears of Sony or Microsoft being evil.
From the letter, I can understand why they did what they did, after all, didn't zelda.com used to be (still is?) a porn site? For most kids, Nintendo is their first introduction to games, and it wouldn't be good for a kid to google for "pikachu" only to find out that some porn site had managed to come up high on the results list.
Somewhat off topic, but it seems to me that a lot of their newer games are targetting older gamers.
The recent entries to the zelda and metroid series seem to have been targetted at older players, mostly by virtue of their difficulty.
hmm, I'm a bit bored, I'll bite...
I don't particularly want to see an all Linux world, though it happens to be the OS that I used the most. I also don't have anything fundamentally against Microsoft, who is merely a single product of a fundamental world mindset, or with windows, which is perfectly well suited to a number of applications, thought not particularly any of the things for which I primarily use a computer.
Microsoft's primary goal is to make money, their current business plan for doing so relys on the continued dominance of Windows in the OS market, as such it's prudent to work out a deal with major hardware manufacturers.
To be honest, I don't see any difference between the situation I described above, and the recipies on certain food products that say to use "Brand X butter" and "Brand Y Sugar", it's cross marketing, and it works.
it's probably part of some agreement with microsoft. Dell is big enough to be able to sell hardware with whatever OS they want on it, but not quite big enough to do it without still kissing Microsoft's ass while doing it with a "Dell recommends Windows" message.
As a matter of fact though, I've seen the same message on IBM and HPs websites, I specifically remember thinking it was funny when I was looking into buying one of the HP notebooks with Linux pre-installed. The specific model didn't offer windows as an OS option IIRC, but it still has a message "HP Recommends Windows XP Professional" on the site.
This leads me to believe that some term microsoft gives to OEMs for them to get copies of windows cheaper, is that they have to have this message on every buy/customize page for all their hardware.
Either that or they found some really creative ways to cut costs.
your probably right, and that scares me. Seriously though, they are probably willing to take a hefty loss on this if they think that it will mean standardization on one of their proprietary formats. I wouldn't be suprised if their line of thinking went something like.
step 1: release PSP with proprietary format
step 2: ???
step 3: proprietary format is now used in every portable media device in the world.
step 4: profit!
where step 2 probably has something to do with using the PSP as an example of why this format is a good way for manufacuters to go.
Not sure if this is true or not, but a friend of mine told me that the PSP will use a slide out disk tray like the PS2, if so they this thing has no chance in the 9 hells of working, those things will snap off the first time your trying to change games on a flight and hit turbulance.
We need more challenges like this. I remember seeing this when it was posted on usenet a while ago, and my interest was peaked. Not sure if it was my math or programming skills that were lacking, but I wasn't able to immediately see a solution, and ended up forgetting to go back to the problem, but I would love to see more challenges like this.
I remember there was a time when I would spend days coding, now it seems like I spend days trying to think of something interesting to try to code, and usually end up getting distracted by something else.
I guess it could probably be laziness on my part, but I would like to see more challenges like this (perhaps a website that posts a monthly programming challenge, maybe cycling through different types of challenges like math, text procesing, optimization, etc) for people to take on. Does something like this already exist?
Somewhat off topic, but I would also like to see a site that every couple of weeks or something posts a different open source project that looks promising and needs help getting something specific to work.
As a matter of fact, the above two problems sound like something that would make a good and interesting website, maybe even offering a chance at doing some overly complex and unnessecary PHP programming.
If anyone is interested in working on a website like this, send me an email at:miyako at gmail dot com
it's really sad how insightful this is. Now days, it doesn't seem to matter if something is legal or not, because a corporation can always stand to throw enough money and lawyers that it doesn't matter how right you are, it's impossible to win.
Mod parent up +5 insightful but sad.
While the poster did say that (s)he wanted to be able to run the heat and other appliances for 8 hours, (s)he might not have meant 8 consecutive hours. It's not unheard of for power to be out for a week in some areas, in this case that would mean that the poster could run appliances for an hour or so a day. This would be enough to get the gas heater started, cook some food for the day, etc.
It's not really the hardware that causes problems with sound working on Linux. In my experience, 90% of all sound problems on Linux come from trying to run multiple sound libraries at the same time. If your running KDE this is probably because it loves to start ARTs, and other applications tend to use other sound libraries.
hmm, ok. I don't really play First/Third person shooters very much, not my type of game. I was just thinking of Half Life, Doom, Max Payne, and the GTA series, as those are the "big" games of the genres that I've seen.
The point I was trying to make though (as one of the other people who responded to my post pointed out) is that putting females in a game that will appear to a primarily male audence doesn't really solve any problems, and in a a few of the cases that I've seen, the women are often very exaggerated sex symbols (I'm not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with this, just pointing it out). I think the idea is to create games that appeal more to female gamers, that feature female protagonists.
I never really looked at the Resident Evil games that way. I think you might have been right for the first and second RE games, but in the later games, the female characters are very strong. Also, in the original game, it was just as scary playing as Chris Redfield as it was to play as Jill Valentine.
I think it depends a lot on how you view women. If you tend to view women as weak, the game game is scary because you see your character as weak. If, on the other hand, you see women as strong and equally capable, then that doesn't play as big of a part in the game.
I agree with your point on the Final Fantasy games, though I think it really just mirrors what I said about all RPGs in general, that they tend to be less male-centric.
When I look at a stack of games that I have right next to me I see this:
Resident Evil Code Veronica X: has a female protaganist for the first half of the game.
Resident Evil Zero: Once again, one of the main characters is female.
Resident Evil: Again, a female protagonsit.
Super Mario Sunshine: ok, mario save the princess, no female protagonist
Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes: No Female Protagonist.
Skies of Arcadia Legends. Two of the main characters are female.
Paper Mario 2. Once again, two of the characters in this game are female.
THUG/THUG2. Both games feature a created skater who can be male or female.
Star Ocean 3. Many female main characters in this game.
I could keep going, but really it seems to me that the male-centric problem in video games isn't as bad as it used to be. I think though it really depends on the games you look at. First and Third person shoot-em-up games tend to have male characters exclusively, but those games tend to appeal mainly to male audiences. Fighting games, RPGs, Adventure games, etc. appeal to a broader audience and seem to me to be a bit more balance of male/female ratios.
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New Breed Software makes a lot of good open source edutainment applications. I know TuxPaint is part of Debian Jr. Not sure about the others like Tux Math, but you might want to check it out.
I came to the same conclusion when I was looking into buying one of these. When I decided to replace my current G3 iBook, I was looking at one of these laptops, since I thought they might be more economical, but I realized that really, they are not much cheaper than even the powerbooks, and have a few serious problems. I've also heard that these things have a lot of hardware problems. My iBook is build like a tank. it's been stepped on by kids, dropped from a table, and knocked around countless times, with no ill effects.
It's nice to see someone building laptops that are built for Linux, but with these problems, I don't see them doing well, and I hope that they don't end up saying "well, nobody bought our laptops, I guess nobody wants to use Linux".
I've been thinking the same thing, I wonder if the burning courthouse was the first of the "many waco type events". I've been considering moving to canada, but in the mean time I've been keeping stocked up on MREs, first aid supplies, ammo, etc.
You know, back in 2000/2001 I thought that guy was a nut.
I thought it was pretty interesting that it took so much longer to delete everything under windows/NTFS. Anyone know why this is (is NTFS slow, or is it the del command as the author guessed, or is there some other reason for this).
actually, I think they should have replaced the "format c:" with "Deltree /y c:\*", because even the most inept tend to know that "format" will hose their drives.
not sure if this will get modded up, I'm posting a little late, but anyway...
One idea that has always been interesting to me is a shared world between many online type of games, COV seems to be the first game to do something like this, with two stand alone clients connecting to the same world. Star Wars Galaxies tried to do something similar by allowing many different play styles. My question is this: With many different types of popular online games (first person shooters, RTS, RPGs, as well as more social type games like A Tale in the Desert and The Sims Online), what do you think of the idea of having a single shared world in which multiple types of games take place.
I had the same question, I would imagine that the laser would probably be able to go through the coating to burn the CD. If not, I could see a viable business in coating disks. I would, as I'm sure other people would, be willing to pay a couple of bucks to have home movies on DVD coated with this, or even important backups of some of my work.
I would assume that there will be cost/adoption barriers. Perhaps these are cool and damage proof, but will the average consumer lay down X times more the cost over that of regular CD's?
Yes. I think that there is a market for this sort of thing, because the average consumer doesn't take care of CDs. The ones who do take care of their CDs are so paranoid of scratches that they'll pay more.
It seems that this poll wouldn't have to be COMPLETELY useless. If you compared the number of people who signed up for this poll to the total number of people who exclusively own cell phones, then you can get an idea of how many people are decided and feel strongly enough to sign up for such a poll. Of course I'm quite sure that this wasn't a consideration during the poll, and was more of a way to say "look, look at all these people who prefer $candidate, you should prefer $candidate as well!".
I think the reason has to do with target audience. As I see it, there are really 3 main types of mac users. There are the notebook users, people who want a solid portable, and go with a mac, since the prices for the iBooks are much more similar to the prices of wintel notebooks. The second type of mac user is the type that you see in the "switch" commericals, someone who doesn't want to know how the computer works, they just want something simple to do word processing on, check email, browse the web, and are willing to pay for simplicity and asthetics. This used to be the main type of mac user, but I think that now type 3 is starting to take over. The third type of mac user are high end professional users, people that use the macs for high end graphics and scientific computing. User types 1 and 2 don't really need high end graphics cards, and user type 3 is going to be going for a high end machine anyway.
I have a legit copy of Windows XP that I got from school, didn't have a choice, we had to pay for it, was included with our tuition "technology costs". I don't have it installed, Suse works better for me. Can I call up Microsoft and read them my cd key and get free stuff, or do I have to have me legit copy of windows actually installed. Not that I particularly want any of the stuff they are giving away, but, you know, if it's free, might as well take advantage if I can.
Nintendo has always seemed sensible legally to me. I'm not saying they are alturistic or anything, but you just don't hear of them being evil, like one hears of Sony or Microsoft being evil.
From the letter, I can understand why they did what they did, after all, didn't zelda.com used to be (still is?) a porn site? For most kids, Nintendo is their first introduction to games, and it wouldn't be good for a kid to google for "pikachu" only to find out that some porn site had managed to come up high on the results list.
Somewhat off topic, but it seems to me that a lot of their newer games are targetting older gamers.
The recent entries to the zelda and metroid series seem to have been targetted at older players, mostly by virtue of their difficulty.
hmm, I'm a bit bored, I'll bite...
I don't particularly want to see an all Linux world, though it happens to be the OS that I used the most. I also don't have anything fundamentally against Microsoft, who is merely a single product of a fundamental world mindset, or with windows, which is perfectly well suited to a number of applications, thought not particularly any of the things for which I primarily use a computer.
Microsoft's primary goal is to make money, their current business plan for doing so relys on the continued dominance of Windows in the OS market, as such it's prudent to work out a deal with major hardware manufacturers.
To be honest, I don't see any difference between the situation I described above, and the recipies on certain food products that say to use "Brand X butter" and "Brand Y Sugar", it's cross marketing, and it works.
it's probably part of some agreement with microsoft. Dell is big enough to be able to sell hardware with whatever OS they want on it, but not quite big enough to do it without still kissing Microsoft's ass while doing it with a "Dell recommends Windows" message.
As a matter of fact though, I've seen the same message on IBM and HPs websites, I specifically remember thinking it was funny when I was looking into buying one of the HP notebooks with Linux pre-installed. The specific model didn't offer windows as an OS option IIRC, but it still has a message "HP Recommends Windows XP Professional" on the site.
This leads me to believe that some term microsoft gives to OEMs for them to get copies of windows cheaper, is that they have to have this message on every buy/customize page for all their hardware.
your probably right, and that scares me. Seriously though, they are probably willing to take a hefty loss on this if they think that it will mean standardization on one of their proprietary formats. I wouldn't be suprised if their line of thinking went something like.
- step 1: release PSP with proprietary format
- step 2: ???
- step 3: proprietary format is now used in every portable media device in the world.
- step 4: profit!
where step 2 probably has something to do with using the PSP as an example of why this format is a good way for manufacuters to go.Not sure if this is true or not, but a friend of mine told me that the PSP will use a slide out disk tray like the PS2, if so they this thing has no chance in the 9 hells of working, those things will snap off the first time your trying to change games on a flight and hit turbulance.
We need more challenges like this. I remember seeing this when it was posted on usenet a while ago, and my interest was peaked. Not sure if it was my math or programming skills that were lacking, but I wasn't able to immediately see a solution, and ended up forgetting to go back to the problem, but I would love to see more challenges like this.
I remember there was a time when I would spend days coding, now it seems like I spend days trying to think of something interesting to try to code, and usually end up getting distracted by something else.
I guess it could probably be laziness on my part, but I would like to see more challenges like this (perhaps a website that posts a monthly programming challenge, maybe cycling through different types of challenges like math, text procesing, optimization, etc) for people to take on. Does something like this already exist?
Somewhat off topic, but I would also like to see a site that every couple of weeks or something posts a different open source project that looks promising and needs help getting something specific to work.
As a matter of fact, the above two problems sound like something that would make a good and interesting website, maybe even offering a chance at doing some overly complex and unnessecary PHP programming.
If anyone is interested in working on a website like this, send me an email at:miyako at gmail dot com
it's really sad how insightful this is. Now days, it doesn't seem to matter if something is legal or not, because a corporation can always stand to throw enough money and lawyers that it doesn't matter how right you are, it's impossible to win.
Mod parent up +5 insightful but sad.
this is the perfect reason to get a graphing calculator, most of which allow you to enter real text ;), think of the dirty word possibilities.
Actually, johhny cage did haved the split-punch move in MK for SNES, R+A.
Oh come one now, "You Spoony Bard!" was one of the best lines from any video game ever.
While the poster did say that (s)he wanted to be able to run the heat and other appliances for 8 hours, (s)he might not have meant 8 consecutive hours. It's not unheard of for power to be out for a week in some areas, in this case that would mean that the poster could run appliances for an hour or so a day. This would be enough to get the gas heater started, cook some food for the day, etc.
It's not really the hardware that causes problems with sound working on Linux. In my experience, 90% of all sound problems on Linux come from trying to run multiple sound libraries at the same time. If your running KDE this is probably because it loves to start ARTs, and other applications tend to use other sound libraries.
hmm, ok. I don't really play First/Third person shooters very much, not my type of game. I was just thinking of Half Life, Doom, Max Payne, and the GTA series, as those are the "big" games of the genres that I've seen.
The point I was trying to make though (as one of the other people who responded to my post pointed out) is that putting females in a game that will appear to a primarily male audence doesn't really solve any problems, and in a a few of the cases that I've seen, the women are often very exaggerated sex symbols (I'm not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with this, just pointing it out). I think the idea is to create games that appeal more to female gamers, that feature female protagonists.
I never really looked at the Resident Evil games that way. I think you might have been right for the first and second RE games, but in the later games, the female characters are very strong. Also, in the original game, it was just as scary playing as Chris Redfield as it was to play as Jill Valentine.
I think it depends a lot on how you view women. If you tend to view women as weak, the game game is scary because you see your character as weak. If, on the other hand, you see women as strong and equally capable, then that doesn't play as big of a part in the game.
I agree with your point on the Final Fantasy games, though I think it really just mirrors what I said about all RPGs in general, that they tend to be less male-centric.
- Resident Evil Code Veronica X: has a female protaganist for the first half of the game.
- Resident Evil Zero: Once again, one of the main characters is female.
- Resident Evil: Again, a female protagonsit.
- Super Mario Sunshine: ok, mario save the princess, no female protagonist
- Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes: No Female Protagonist.
- Skies of Arcadia Legends. Two of the main characters are female.
- Paper Mario 2. Once again, two of the characters in this game are female.
- THUG/THUG2. Both games feature a created skater who can be male or female.
- Star Ocean 3. Many female main characters in this game.
I could keep going, but really it seems to me that the male-centric problem in video games isn't as bad as it used to be. I think though it really depends on the games you look at. First and Third person shoot-em-up games tend to have male characters exclusively, but those games tend to appeal mainly to male audiences. Fighting games, RPGs, Adventure games, etc. appeal to a broader audience and seem to me to be a bit more balance of male/female ratios.