I agree! I've lived here all my life and Louisville just keeps getting better and better. Once Google Fiber comes to town (crosses fingers) we will be unstoppable. I like to say that we have a little bit of everything here. When it snows, we get a little bit not a full blown blizzard. When the earth shakes, it just rattles the bed and doesn't level the city. Traffic is not terrible and it takes about 30 minutes to get almost anywhere in the city. We have a river boat (cool!) with a calliope (super cool!) and a world class horse race. If you don't come here soon, you'll regret it.:)
Well, with past major versions of Mac OS X we at least got some newfangled toys to play with (the Dock, Spotlight, Spaces, etc.) But with SL, we get APIs and back end stuff. That may be neat and all but it doesn't do much for me, immediately.
Now granted it will be faster and more stable, which is a good reason to upgrade, but I'm not sure its a good enough reason to pay $100. Even the "enterprise" features wont do much for the average person. I guess Apple is just using SL to get a foot into the corporate world, what with all the "enterprise" features and all. Oh well.
BTW: This "My Mom" argument may be moot after all if SL can't run on PowerPC machines. Her computer is only 2 years old and is probably one of the last PPC iMac they offered. It would suck royally if they left the PPC out in the cold so soon.:(
My biggest problem with this upgrade is that it seems more like a Windows Service Pack than a true Mac OS X upgrade. Are we going to have to pay for "new APIs" and "multi-core processing"?
How does all this help the average user (i.e. my Mom)? WooHoo! They are building a YouTube app and you can record directly off the screen! Big whoop. You can do that today without too much trouble with third party applications. Is the Mac OS X user interface and built-in apps already so perfect that they can't find things to improve?
I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?
I agree with most of your comments and am in the same boat with regard to time in my car. Our new Honda mini-van came with a free 3 month subscription and it was nice to have on our yearly summer vacation. But we most definitely had to listen to commercials during our drive and that really bothered me. Its kinda like watching 20 minutes of commercials before the movie I paid $12 to watch starts. I just feel "cheated" by having to pay *and* listen to commercials.
The other issue is quality, or lack there of. I don't know if it is just the built-in Honda receiver or what but the quality of the music coming out of satellite radio is just not up to par. It sounds like its been compressed out the a$$! Does everyone hear this or is it just me?:)
It also has a SLA of 4 hours. What happens when your line goes down on Christmas Eve and customers can't get to your site? Try getting your DSL/Cable company to care.
I just wish I could afford a T3 or OC12 connection. Then I would be mister big stuff!:)
Puppet could be the answer to the multiple system thing. It can handle different systems running different packaging systems quite well and update them all according to generic directions. For instance you could have it install a HTTP server on all Linux machines and on RHES it uses Apache and on SLES it installs Lighttpd. Puppet is completely configurable and (fairly) easy to use.
Which window manager are they using for the Ubuntu version? I hope its not Gnome; I have nothing against it but Gnome is not really designed for this type of layout. I am very interested in something like the Remix WM and would love to know if it would work on the Inspiron Mini 9.
Re:Why would you replace Xandros with Ubuntu?
on
Ubuntu Eee Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
Excellent information from all! I now have some points to argue with the administration. I still think that Ubuntu would be better in our situation since we don't use AD or Exchange but do want more software choices (i.e. mesh networking). Ultimately its not my call but I really appreciate your insight. Thanx!
Why would you replace Xandros with Ubuntu?
on
Ubuntu Eee Goes Gold
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I am currently evaluating the Eee platform for my children's school. I use Debian (Ubuntu) quite a bit and would like to install it instead of Xandros, just for my own comfort and ease of use. However, thats not a good enough reason to dump Xandros and go with something else. I have my doubts about Xandros such as the status of their updates, but don't have any concrete reason that I should dump it for Ubuntu.
What can I go back to the technical director at school with as proof that Ubuntu is "better" for us? Is it faster? Easier to use? One thing I would like to get working is mesh networking. Xandros doesn't have it, Ubuntu might.
I have actually thought about building my own - I mean I do have some spare parts lying about.:) Anyway, thanks for the link to a "real" pedal. I might just wait to see what Guitar Hero World Tour does and if their kit is better. In fact I'm thinking about ditching RB and my XBox 360 for a GHWT + PS3 deal. But that's just me...
It's not a generic controller but it does suck. Well, technically, it works pretty well when it's not split into two or more pieces on my floor. I've had RB since Christmas and am already on my 3rd controller. Grrrrr....
I have recently thought a bit about what language I would use to code a brand new site from scratch. My first thought was RoR, but I'm not so sure that its the best choice.
Perl is probably my "base" language but it just seems so old-school for CGI programming. It could definitely do the job but it would end up fairly messy and very hard to read/maintain.
PHP is on the list as well, but everybody always points and laughs when someone uses it for web programming. It was designed specifically for this and AFAIK works pretty well, as long as your careful about construction. But that pretty much goes for any language...
I just don't care for Python much. I don't know why really, I think it just reminds me too much of COBOL or something.:/
I think I would like to love RoR but I cant seem to gather the momentum to really drink the cool-aid. I love the way it works and the cool features it brings to the web programming table, I really do. However, I can't seem to wrap my head around Ruby. Even doing simple stuff sends me running to find a tutorial or example code. I admit I'm not a hard core programmer (anymore) and that I haven't immersed myself knee deep in code in years, but I find it hard to even think about some things in Ruby and keep them straight in my head. It's kind of like C pointers.:)
Speaking of C/C++, I don't think I would ever write a web interface in either one. Enough said about that.
Java is probably the only other choice on my plate and while it should be a great one I cant shake the feeling that its still a tool looking for a problem to solve. There are probably hundreds of Java frameworks out there to choose from, and that's probably its downfall. I feel like I have to include a whole mess of extra things and carry around a dump truck load of libraries & packages just to do something simple. I'm not saying that Java is slow (I've spent many years fighting that notion) but that its deployment heavy. That said, it does have some massively good things in its corner: language maturity, great tools, and coherent documentation. RoR is still trying to nail these things down.
Anyway, what I want out of a web programming framework is pretty simple. I want to:
- be able to implement a user authentication & authorization system in a simple and effective manor.
- connect to databases in a generic way so that I'm free to switch platforms in the future.
- make using CSS free and easy.
That's pretty much it and it seems simple enough. I guess any language above could handle the task but I haven't found any thing that really jumped out at me. I'm thinking about giving RoR another try now that they seem to be maturing or maybe one of the PHP frameworks Qbertino suggested.
I have gone through 2 Rock Band pedals (and 1 guitar) in the last 6 months or so. The first one snapped in two - both the pedal *AND* base. My son just informed me this morning that the second one had developed a large crack in the pedal but the base was still holding (for now). They have been very good about replacements so far, so I am not too upset, but when you pay almost $200 for a game you don't want to keep sending it back to get fixed.
My question to the GH folks is will the drums (and pedal) hold up to real use? We do not abuse our equipment and our GH guitars have held up for more than 2 years. I am very disappointed with RB specifically and am wary about purchasing games with elaborate controllers: Wii Fit I'm looking at you!
Oh, and make it so the singer actually has to sing properly and not just hum into the mic for a 99%. Please!
I couldn't get much past the way he answered each question. It made me think of the way Bill & Steve answer questions about their products. I guess they teach that them in "manager" class.
Just a few examples:
Well, that's a great question.
There are a number of elements of the question...
In a way that's a different question.
What I think I want to say is what I just said...
I didn't actually say that.
I know that I've just pulled some quotes out of context and sometimes that makes things look worse than they are, but does anyone else see my problems? Do you have a hard time even reading the answers? Very disappointing but, again not unexpected of Microsoft.
Yes, I was truly hoping for something different from the OLPC people. In fact, just today I was discussing the possibility of purchasing some for our school. Not anymore. I don't want to be within 10' of that project now that it has thrown its morals out the door and is shacking up with the mean kid in town.:(
Iron man is shown leaving contrails -- or possibly smoke trails. Either way he's burning something that has to have mass and volume. Where does he keep it? Heres what Wikipedia has to say about contrails: "Contrails or vapour trails are condensation trails and artificial cirrus clouds made by the exhaust of aircraft engines or wingtip vortices which precipitate a stream of tiny ice crystals in moist, frigid upper air. Being composed of water, the visible white streams are not air pollution. However, vapour trails or contrails generated by engine exhaust are inevitably linked with typical fuel combustion pollutants."
Now that you mention it, I do remember turning off Java (for better startup times). In reality, I really like OOo and recommend it heartily above that "other" office suite to anyone that will listen. I just had to point out something "bad" when bhtooefr poked holes in my "Sun is stupid" comment. Java was the first|only thing I could think of.:)
Ok, Ok, OpenOffice is pretty cool so I'll give you that one, however I still stand by my statement. On the plus side their not as bad as Microsoft when it comes to screwing up.:)
BTW: I still don't like the large amount of Java in OOo. Either make it Java so that it runs everywhere (i.e. Mac) or take it out. Grrr...
However, before we go nuts with Postgres love, I think it's safe to say Sun won't be close sourcing MySQL to a damaging degree; that'd be like killing the goose that lays the golden egg. That's assuming that Sun can do anything right and you know what happens when you ass-u-me, right?! Let's face it, Sun screws up everything it purchases, they couldn't open source something even if their life depended on it (and it does) and about the only thing they have going for them is Java, and thats still not a very bright light in the dark.
I really, really want to like Sun and their cool stuff (neato servers) but they just don't act like responsible citizens. The get a new toy, play with it a while and then break it into little pieces.
My advice for Sun: Just let the engineers back into the company (Go Go Gosling!) or stare into the obscure face of your fallen ancestors - DEC, SGi, NExT, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
I agree! I've lived here all my life and Louisville just keeps getting better and better. Once Google Fiber comes to town (crosses fingers) we will be unstoppable. I like to say that we have a little bit of everything here. When it snows, we get a little bit not a full blown blizzard. When the earth shakes, it just rattles the bed and doesn't level the city. Traffic is not terrible and it takes about 30 minutes to get almost anywhere in the city. We have a river boat (cool!) with a calliope (super cool!) and a world class horse race. If you don't come here soon, you'll regret it. :)
What!? You suggest waiting until they are actual products before committing to them?!
What are you doing on Slashdot? You should be out selling insurance or something. :)
Well, with past major versions of Mac OS X we at least got some newfangled toys to play with (the Dock, Spotlight, Spaces, etc.) But with SL, we get APIs and back end stuff. That may be neat and all but it doesn't do much for me, immediately.
Now granted it will be faster and more stable, which is a good reason to upgrade, but I'm not sure its a good enough reason to pay $100. Even the "enterprise" features wont do much for the average person. I guess Apple is just using SL to get a foot into the corporate world, what with all the "enterprise" features and all. Oh well.
BTW: This "My Mom" argument may be moot after all if SL can't run on PowerPC machines. Her computer is only 2 years old and is probably one of the last PPC iMac they offered. It would suck royally if they left the PPC out in the cold so soon. :(
My biggest problem with this upgrade is that it seems more like a Windows Service Pack than a true Mac OS X upgrade. Are we going to have to pay for "new APIs" and "multi-core processing"?
How does all this help the average user (i.e. my Mom)? WooHoo! They are building a YouTube app and you can record directly off the screen! Big whoop. You can do that today without too much trouble with third party applications. Is the Mac OS X user interface and built-in apps already so perfect that they can't find things to improve?
I'm usually a pretty big Mac fan-boy but I just can't seem to get excited about this one. Hell, I'm even thinking (seriously) about ditching my iPhone and getting a Palm Pre. sigh...how the world is changing. Has Apple lost it's Mojo?
OK, this is getting a bit off topic, but Yuki Sonoda is also a character in the Megatokyo web comic.
That's where I've heard this name before!! Thank you for clearing out a portion of my brain. :)
I agree with most of your comments and am in the same boat with regard to time in my car. Our new Honda mini-van came with a free 3 month subscription and it was nice to have on our yearly summer vacation. But we most definitely had to listen to commercials during our drive and that really bothered me. Its kinda like watching 20 minutes of commercials before the movie I paid $12 to watch starts. I just feel "cheated" by having to pay *and* listen to commercials.
The other issue is quality, or lack there of. I don't know if it is just the built-in Honda receiver or what but the quality of the music coming out of satellite radio is just not up to par. It sounds like its been compressed out the a$$! Does everyone hear this or is it just me? :)
It also has a SLA of 4 hours. What happens when your line goes down on Christmas Eve and customers can't get to your site? Try getting your DSL/Cable company to care.
I just wish I could afford a T3 or OC12 connection. Then I would be mister big stuff! :)
I lease a T1 from Speakeasy and while I'm generally satisfied with the service they still don't offer IPv6.
On a T1?!
Talk about dark ages. :(
Puppet could be the answer to the multiple system thing. It can handle different systems running different packaging systems quite well and update them all according to generic directions. For instance you could have it install a HTTP server on all Linux machines and on RHES it uses Apache and on SLES it installs Lighttpd. Puppet is completely configurable and (fairly) easy to use.
Which window manager are they using for the Ubuntu version? I hope its not Gnome; I have nothing against it but Gnome is not really designed for this type of layout. I am very interested in something like the Remix WM and would love to know if it would work on the Inspiron Mini 9.
Does anyone have any details?
Yea, well couldn't you get the Windows one, refuse the EULA, and get $100 back? That sounds like the way to go to me. :)
I find jumping to conclusions works for me!
Yea, I have a mat that I use. It's great!
Excellent information from all! I now have some points to argue with the administration. I still think that Ubuntu would be better in our situation since we don't use AD or Exchange but do want more software choices (i.e. mesh networking). Ultimately its not my call but I really appreciate your insight. Thanx!
I am currently evaluating the Eee platform for my children's school. I use Debian (Ubuntu) quite a bit and would like to install it instead of Xandros, just for my own comfort and ease of use. However, thats not a good enough reason to dump Xandros and go with something else. I have my doubts about Xandros such as the status of their updates, but don't have any concrete reason that I should dump it for Ubuntu.
What can I go back to the technical director at school with as proof that Ubuntu is "better" for us? Is it faster? Easier to use? One thing I would like to get working is mesh networking. Xandros doesn't have it, Ubuntu might.
I have actually thought about building my own - I mean I do have some spare parts lying about. :) Anyway, thanks for the link to a "real" pedal. I might just wait to see what Guitar Hero World Tour does and if their kit is better. In fact I'm thinking about ditching RB and my XBox 360 for a GHWT + PS3 deal. But that's just me...
It's not a generic controller but it does suck. Well, technically, it works pretty well when it's not split into two or more pieces on my floor. I've had RB since Christmas and am already on my 3rd controller. Grrrrr....
I have recently thought a bit about what language I would use to code a brand new site from scratch. My first thought was RoR, but I'm not so sure that its the best choice.
:/
:)
Perl is probably my "base" language but it just seems so old-school for CGI programming. It could definitely do the job but it would end up fairly messy and very hard to read/maintain.
PHP is on the list as well, but everybody always points and laughs when someone uses it for web programming. It was designed specifically for this and AFAIK works pretty well, as long as your careful about construction. But that pretty much goes for any language...
I just don't care for Python much. I don't know why really, I think it just reminds me too much of COBOL or something.
I think I would like to love RoR but I cant seem to gather the momentum to really drink the cool-aid. I love the way it works and the cool features it brings to the web programming table, I really do. However, I can't seem to wrap my head around Ruby. Even doing simple stuff sends me running to find a tutorial or example code. I admit I'm not a hard core programmer (anymore) and that I haven't immersed myself knee deep in code in years, but I find it hard to even think about some things in Ruby and keep them straight in my head. It's kind of like C pointers.
Speaking of C/C++, I don't think I would ever write a web interface in either one. Enough said about that.
Java is probably the only other choice on my plate and while it should be a great one I cant shake the feeling that its still a tool looking for a problem to solve. There are probably hundreds of Java frameworks out there to choose from, and that's probably its downfall. I feel like I have to include a whole mess of extra things and carry around a dump truck load of libraries & packages just to do something simple. I'm not saying that Java is slow (I've spent many years fighting that notion) but that its deployment heavy. That said, it does have some massively good things in its corner: language maturity, great tools, and coherent documentation. RoR is still trying to nail these things down.
Anyway, what I want out of a web programming framework is pretty simple. I want to:
- be able to implement a user authentication & authorization system in a simple and effective manor.
- connect to databases in a generic way so that I'm free to switch platforms in the future.
- make using CSS free and easy.
That's pretty much it and it seems simple enough. I guess any language above could handle the task but I haven't found any thing that really jumped out at me. I'm thinking about giving RoR another try now that they seem to be maturing or maybe one of the PHP frameworks Qbertino suggested.
</soapbox>
Now all I need is the ability to sync my events between iCal and Google Calendar and I'll be all set. :)
I know you can subscribe to Google Calendar from iCal, but its not the same as its read-only. Come on, let's have a bi-directional sync!
Will the GH drum kit hold up to real world use?
I have gone through 2 Rock Band pedals (and 1 guitar) in the last 6 months or so. The first one snapped in two - both the pedal *AND* base. My son just informed me this morning that the second one had developed a large crack in the pedal but the base was still holding (for now). They have been very good about replacements so far, so I am not too upset, but when you pay almost $200 for a game you don't want to keep sending it back to get fixed.
My question to the GH folks is will the drums (and pedal) hold up to real use? We do not abuse our equipment and our GH guitars have held up for more than 2 years. I am very disappointed with RB specifically and am wary about purchasing games with elaborate controllers: Wii Fit I'm looking at you!
Oh, and make it so the singer actually has to sing properly and not just hum into the mic for a 99%. Please!
- Well, that's a great question.
- There are a number of elements of the question...
- In a way that's a different question.
- What I think I want to say is what I just said...
- I didn't actually say that.
I know that I've just pulled some quotes out of context and sometimes that makes things look worse than they are, but does anyone else see my problems? Do you have a hard time even reading the answers? Very disappointing but, again not unexpected of Microsoft.Yes, I was truly hoping for something different from the OLPC people. In fact, just today I was discussing the possibility of purchasing some for our school. Not anymore. I don't want to be within 10' of that project now that it has thrown its morals out the door and is shacking up with the mean kid in town. :(
Ahh, it *was* a pretty cool idea.
Now that you mention it, I do remember turning off Java (for better startup times). In reality, I really like OOo and recommend it heartily above that "other" office suite to anyone that will listen. I just had to point out something "bad" when bhtooefr poked holes in my "Sun is stupid" comment. Java was the first|only thing I could think of. :)
Ok, Ok, OpenOffice is pretty cool so I'll give you that one, however I still stand by my statement. On the plus side their not as bad as Microsoft when it comes to screwing up. :)
BTW: I still don't like the large amount of Java in OOo. Either make it Java so that it runs everywhere (i.e. Mac) or take it out. Grrr...
I really, really want to like Sun and their cool stuff (neato servers) but they just don't act like responsible citizens. The get a new toy, play with it a while and then break it into little pieces.
My advice for Sun: Just let the engineers back into the company (Go Go Gosling!) or stare into the obscure face of your fallen ancestors - DEC, SGi, NExT, etc...