I agree. Put 'em on Mint and give 'em Chrome to use. Especially for folks like that, a web browser is the only app they need to run.
My wife is a complete Luddite. Hates computers. She's a professional violinist and is most comfortable with 19th century technology. Ever look at a violin up close? It's a flimsy box of wood. You tune it by twisting a wooden peg. The thing hasn't even got frets!
I have her on an Ubuntu box. She runs Chrome and Thunderbird to read e-mail. She sometimes will look at a pdf file in evince. That's it.
Take one of your machines, put Linux Mint on it. Show an oldster how to run Chrome. The performance will be much, much, MUCH better than XP. Not even close.
I can't tell you how many times I've been in the home of a serious musician and they no sound system better than a boom box. Musicians listen for the musical content of the performance and can generally get what they really need from even very poor quality reproduction.
One of the great things about being an older guy is that I've got what I consider to be an ultimate system and no longer need to chase after newer gear. I just get to sit back and listen, though I do like to get my hands "dirty" in it still. I recorded my wife's string quartet today at a house concert I did. It's amazing how good a recording you can get with very modest gear.
I got my start with audio back in the early 1970s. Back in those days, nobody had computers at home to fool with. Being both a musician and an engineering major, it only made sense that I take an interest in audio. I got into building my own loudspeakers as well as doing location recording of classical music and jazz. And when you bought music, it came on those round vinyl things called records, from which you extracted music with the use of a turntable.
Interestingly enough, it's now college aged people who are the ones buying turntables and *NEW* records. I'm not one of those people who are going to argue turntables vs. CD vs. digital whatever. I just enjoy music in whatever form it comes. I have any number or records that will never be found in digital format.
If you were to examine the Linkwitz website, you'd find that the Orion loudspeaker is tri-amplified with an active crossover and that it calls for four channels of amplification on each loudspeaker. That's 8 runs from amplifier to loudspeakers. That's a *LOT* of cable.
I remember buying my cable from Parts Express. It was several years ago. All I can say is that EVERY time a serious audiophile comes to my home to hear the Orions, they come away filled with audio lust.
I recently purchased a new DAC from Peachtree at Music Lovers in Berkeley. I auditioned it in their $100k+ "reference" system - Big Wilson Audio loudspeakers, etc, etc. Their reference system sounded good. As good as my own. No better. Both were 3 dimensional and imaged well. Both were natural and detailed. But soup to nuts, my rig, amplification, loudspeakers, cables, turntable, etc, etc, comes in around $6k.
I'm not sure at what level you think "hyper-expensive" is. The top end Bose loudspeaker, the 901, is only about $1400/pair, which is pretty pedestrian these days. To me you'd have to drop $20,000 or more to begin to get into what I think is "hyper-expensive". Certainly you can drop $50,000 to $100,000 to $200,000 on a two-channel system without much trouble. That's where I put the phrase, "hyper-expensive"
I'm an Old School, two channel audiophile. To me the word "audiophile" is someone who loves listening to music in such a way that it attempts to approximate the original live performance. This is really only relevant to acoustic music.
Sadly to many others, the word "audiophile" means someone who is anal-retentive to the max and spends insane amounts of money on cables, room treatments and a lot of other wacky stuff.
I'm a big band trumpet player and my wife is a professional violinist, so acoustic music is what we listen to. I love hearing the life-like quality a good recording can bring into my home. I've probably got about $6,000 total into my audio rig and feel that it sounds as good as any other system I've ever heard, at *any* price. Oh, and I use 14 gauge zip cord for speaker wire.
If you want to hear truly extreme hi-end sound without having to sell your wife and children into slavery, check out the Linkwitz Orion system at:
Could you get sound this good with the top end Bose stuff? Not a chance. Not even close. The Bose 901 was a screwball idea when it was new, but it was fun.
But if you really want to ruin your life, go hear a Linkwitz Orion rig. Three dimensional, detailed, life-like and a great pleasure.
Parsing a formatted text file is all that Cobol is capable of doing. That there are multiple branches of your logic tree, and thus multiple Cobol routines that get run doesn't change that.
What's the problem with DRM? That's right. It's all about people copying music files they didn't pay for and now they're upset.
Why is it people seem to feel entitled to listen to music they didn't pay for? Making a living as a musician was always hard enough. But now that we have 400 years of music all on digital and people have terabytes of music files they've passed around for free, nobody needs real musicians anymore.
Cobol is based on the notion of processing what are essentially formatted text files, one line at a time. If you knew the format of a file to be read by a Cobol program, you could re-write it in awk and use about 1/50th the amount of code.
Of course what really needs to be done is to document the actual process and system requirements, and then just put up a modern payroll processing system. The biggest problem is that there are a lot of people whose job it is to take a piece of paper from one bin and put it in another. All of those jobs would be put at risk were you to actually do something substantive about this problem. They're far more concerned with their jobs than actually getting anything done.
I spent four years in USAF as an officer in the late 1970s.
It stands to reason that you'd expect your general officers in the military to have combat experience. As USAF has historically been a manned aircraft oriented organization, it stands to reason that fighter pilots would be the people who eventually become USAF generals. After all, the first mission of the military is to fight our wars and you want people who have first-hand knowledge as your leaders.
USAF is very adverse to losing fighter aircraft because they are trying to protect pilots. It only stands to reason. That's also why un-manned aircraft are so much less expensive. I believe there is a need for both manned and un-manned aircraft. Wherever you can, un-manned aircraft are preferable because they are so much less costly, but just as there is a case to be made for manned space travel, so there are times when you want humans flying combat missions.
But beyond all this, you still have the human issues of organization. It is the military's way that *ALL* officers are in training to become generals, and they only keep a small percentage of them around long enough to reach 20 years. In USAF, you go before the major's board at the 12 year mark. If you are passed over for major twice, you have to either leave USAF or accept demotion to the enlisted ranks, to finish out your 20 years and retire as a captain. This gets rid of well over half your officer staff. There aren't a lot of guys willing to take a demotion to enlisted for 6 years so they can stick around for a captain's retirement pension.
I don't know if drone operators are officers or enlisted. Either way, can you call a drone operator a combat experienced person you want to eventually become general? USAF has a problem here.
i think we're both on the same path here. My son certainly has his gifts and he does realize that the day will come when he has to support himself. Hopefully he'll find something where he'll be able to make use of his gifts. First thing though is to get him out of the house to find a life beyond our walls, so that he will no longer be Hikikomori.
We're very much on the same page here. He's a very nice kid. People like him. Rather dorky, but nice. Not a mean bone in his body. Everything is small steps with him, but he does continually make steps that take him forward.
Will he find gainful employment any time soon? I have no idea. I look at the people working at places like Papa Murphy's Pizza or Mrs. Field's Cookies and I'm sure he could do that kind of work. My hope is that he'll land some McJob somewhere and make a few bucks. Do that for a while and I think he'll come to the place where he'll want more than that. Probably sooner than later.
He certainly has his gifts, but only time will tell how he'll cope with Reality.
His school grades were very poor. He is unable to function in a normal classroom. He doesn't pay attention and has no idea what's going on. He has no idea what the homework assignments are and cares little.
He loves video games but can't program his way out of a paper bag. He took a couple of computer classes while in high school but really didn't learn anything. I offered him $10 if he could write a program to add the numbers from 1 to 100. He couldn't do it. He can't process linear thinking apparently.
He's very intelligent in his own way. He understood the whole alphabet when he was 17 months old. He taught himself to read before he was 3 years old. We didn't teach him. He figured it out on his own. He loved Bill Nye, the science guy when he was 4 years old and actually comprehended the concepts that were put before him. He has a very strong gift as a visual artist, but sadly has no interest in doing it. He has an excellent understanding of perspective, shading, proportion, etc. Quite gifted, but uninterested.
He spends a lot of time reading and surfing the web, retains a lot of what he reads and comprehends most, though there are times when I catch him parroting stuff he's read and he doesn't actually understand it.
Have you got any links for the kind of international volunteer work you're talking about? He's done a little volunteer work locally, with an emphasis on the word "little". At this point, I'm happy just to see him develop a life outside the house.
I recently joined an internet advertising startup whose claim to fame is that their technology works without cookies tracking individuals. It really is creepy how you look at something on Amazon and you start seeing Amazon ads for that item on other sites you visit.
We're profitable so at least THIS company isn't going to lay me off any time soon.
Y'know, I tried that once. Biiiiig mistake. Drove him into a frightenly severe depression. Like I said. External motivations, both negative and positive, do not work. If any of them did, believe that I'd use it.
I'm 62 years old and figure to work until I'm 70. By then the house will be paid for and we'll have just enough from Social Security and my wife's musician's union pension to cover our essential expenses. But it won't be enough to cover the kid. He's going to *have* to find a way to make money between now and then because we just won't have it. My wife won't let us throw him out on the street, so I don't know just how bad this could get.
You have to understand that this kid isn't motivated by anything external. Charging him for anything would require that he have a way to pay for it.
When the time comes that he has employment, then he'll be expected to do two things.
1. Put half of his income into savings. He's living at home. He can well afford to put money into savings.
2. He'll have to have some walking around money of course, but he'll also have to help cover his own expenses at home - power usage, food, clothing, etc.
I believe he's going to need $5,000 in the bank before he can move out. He'll need that kind of cash up front just to get started with life outside the house. That's why he'll be putting money into savings. If there are sufficient funds, I'll also see to it that he gets started with an IRA. You can never start too soon with that sort of thing.
He is mildly autistic, with anxiety being a part of it. He completely lacks initiative and ambition. He's always been largely indifferent.
Kicking him in the butt only makes him curl up into a little ball. I've tried both positive and negative motivations and there are no external means that seem to work.
The question was asked if he ever got tired of having no money. That is beginning to motivate him a bit. When the motivation is *HIS* idea, then he acts. That's how he ended up getting the Starbucks interview. I've asked the relations to NOT give him money on his birthday and Christmas, which they have agreed to. Now all he gets is birthday cards and is learning that those two days a year are no longer paydays.
One of his autistic qualities is an almost complete lack of common sense. Really. He is slowly maturing and seems to continue to progress, but at some point, he may become unemployable. My worst nightmare.
Hikikomori huh? Average age of 32?! Oh God... And I thought it was bad with my 20 year old sitting on his butt surfing the web and playing video games. His greatest professional accomplishments are getting his GED and getting an interview at Starbucks (he didn't get the job). That's it.
I'm in the Bay Area. If you need a Linux/VMware sysadmin and you're either in San Francisco or the East Bay, reply here.
Don't know if you've noticed or not, but the cost of a college education becoming more and more outside the ability of middle class people to afford. With the government cutting back education funding because they can't raise revenues with businesses complaining about taxation, you can't seem to find Americans who can do the work. There's a direct correlation between the lack of domestic workers and the lack of education funding.
I couldn't begin to afford a college education today if I were of that age.
So the government is cutting back and cutting back on education funding. Then American companies complain they can't find enough Americans to do the work, at a time when there is still massive unemployment. So naturally they have to import workers from over-seas to take those jobs that Americans can't seem to fill..
Doesn't this just make you PROUD to be an American?!
I've been an audiophile since Nixon was president. And no, I've never dropped Large Cash for cables. I run 14 gauge zip cord to my speakers. MOSFET 60 wpc power amp. Pretty pedestrian by hi-end standards, but my home system is the equal of any so-called "reference system" I've ever heard. I agree there's a lot of snake oil out there, but if you know what you're doing, you can get truly superior results with the right gear.
I do location recording for my wife's string quartet. I master at 24/96 and when I down sample to 16/44.1, I can hear the difference on my home system. It's not going to be heard on ear buds or a car system, but on something like my home system (Peachtree DAC, Bryston preamp, Linkwitz Orion loudspeaker system), you're going to hear it.
Cover New York with the impenetrable bubble that Fox News and the Tea Party have been living under. It's absolutely impervious all external reality. I'd recommend using it as a nuclear shield for the country, but it just isn't big enough. And if it's not big enough for New York, then it certainly is big enough for Wall Street.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Put 'em on Mint and give 'em Chrome to use. Especially for folks like that, a web browser is the only app they need to run.
My wife is a complete Luddite. Hates computers. She's a professional violinist and is most comfortable with 19th century technology. Ever look at a violin up close? It's a flimsy box of wood. You tune it by twisting a wooden peg. The thing hasn't even got frets!
I have her on an Ubuntu box. She runs Chrome and Thunderbird to read e-mail. She sometimes will look at a pdf file in evince. That's it.
Take one of your machines, put Linux Mint on it. Show an oldster how to run Chrome. The performance will be much, much, MUCH better than XP. Not even close.
Rhymes with "Oh shit!"
AKA... famous last words
Well said!
I can't tell you how many times I've been in the home of a serious musician and they no sound system better than a boom box. Musicians listen for the musical content of the performance and can generally get what they really need from even very poor quality reproduction.
One of the great things about being an older guy is that I've got what I consider to be an ultimate system and no longer need to chase after newer gear. I just get to sit back and listen, though I do like to get my hands "dirty" in it still. I recorded my wife's string quartet today at a house concert I did. It's amazing how good a recording you can get with very modest gear.
I got my start with audio back in the early 1970s. Back in those days, nobody had computers at home to fool with. Being both a musician and an engineering major, it only made sense that I take an interest in audio. I got into building my own loudspeakers as well as doing location recording of classical music and jazz. And when you bought music, it came on those round vinyl things called records, from which you extracted music with the use of a turntable.
Interestingly enough, it's now college aged people who are the ones buying turntables and *NEW* records. I'm not one of those people who are going to argue turntables vs. CD vs. digital whatever. I just enjoy music in whatever form it comes. I have any number or records that will never be found in digital format.
If you were to examine the Linkwitz website, you'd find that the Orion loudspeaker is tri-amplified with an active crossover and that it calls for four channels of amplification on each loudspeaker. That's 8 runs from amplifier to loudspeakers. That's a *LOT* of cable.
I remember buying my cable from Parts Express. It was several years ago. All I can say is that EVERY time a serious audiophile comes to my home to hear the Orions, they come away filled with audio lust.
I recently purchased a new DAC from Peachtree at Music Lovers in Berkeley. I auditioned it in their $100k+ "reference" system - Big Wilson Audio loudspeakers, etc, etc. Their reference system sounded good. As good as my own. No better. Both were 3 dimensional and imaged well. Both were natural and detailed. But soup to nuts, my rig, amplification, loudspeakers, cables, turntable, etc, etc, comes in around $6k.
I'm not sure at what level you think "hyper-expensive" is. The top end Bose loudspeaker, the 901, is only about $1400/pair, which is pretty pedestrian these days. To me you'd have to drop $20,000 or more to begin to get into what I think is "hyper-expensive". Certainly you can drop $50,000 to $100,000 to $200,000 on a two-channel system without much trouble. That's where I put the phrase, "hyper-expensive"
I'm an Old School, two channel audiophile. To me the word "audiophile" is someone who loves listening to music in such a way that it attempts to approximate the original live performance. This is really only relevant to acoustic music.
Sadly to many others, the word "audiophile" means someone who is anal-retentive to the max and spends insane amounts of money on cables, room treatments and a lot of other wacky stuff.
I'm a big band trumpet player and my wife is a professional violinist, so acoustic music is what we listen to. I love hearing the life-like quality a good recording can bring into my home. I've probably got about $6,000 total into my audio rig and feel that it sounds as good as any other system I've ever heard, at *any* price. Oh, and I use 14 gauge zip cord for speaker wire.
If you want to hear truly extreme hi-end sound without having to sell your wife and children into slavery, check out the Linkwitz Orion system at:
http://www.linkwitzlab.com/orion_challenge.htm
Could you get sound this good with the top end Bose stuff? Not a chance. Not even close. The Bose 901 was a screwball idea when it was new, but it was fun.
But if you really want to ruin your life, go hear a Linkwitz Orion rig. Three dimensional, detailed, life-like and a great pleasure.
Dog training collar for $80 with 100 levels of shock? Which level was your favorite? Did you enjoy it?
Parsing a formatted text file is all that Cobol is capable of doing. That there are multiple branches of your logic tree, and thus multiple Cobol routines that get run doesn't change that.
What's the problem with DRM? That's right. It's all about people copying music files they didn't pay for and now they're upset.
Why is it people seem to feel entitled to listen to music they didn't pay for? Making a living as a musician was always hard enough. But now that we have 400 years of music all on digital and people have terabytes of music files they've passed around for free, nobody needs real musicians anymore.
Pardon me while I don't worry about DRM.
Cobol is based on the notion of processing what are essentially formatted text files, one line at a time. If you knew the format of a file to be read by a Cobol program, you could re-write it in awk and use about 1/50th the amount of code.
Of course what really needs to be done is to document the actual process and system requirements, and then just put up a modern payroll processing system. The biggest problem is that there are a lot of people whose job it is to take a piece of paper from one bin and put it in another. All of those jobs would be put at risk were you to actually do something substantive about this problem. They're far more concerned with their jobs than actually getting anything done.
I spent four years in USAF as an officer in the late 1970s.
It stands to reason that you'd expect your general officers in the military to have combat experience. As USAF has historically been a manned aircraft oriented organization, it stands to reason that fighter pilots would be the people who eventually become USAF generals. After all, the first mission of the military is to fight our wars and you want people who have first-hand knowledge as your leaders.
USAF is very adverse to losing fighter aircraft because they are trying to protect pilots. It only stands to reason. That's also why un-manned aircraft are so much less expensive. I believe there is a need for both manned and un-manned aircraft. Wherever you can, un-manned aircraft are preferable because they are so much less costly, but just as there is a case to be made for manned space travel, so there are times when you want humans flying combat missions.
But beyond all this, you still have the human issues of organization. It is the military's way that *ALL* officers are in training to become generals, and they only keep a small percentage of them around long enough to reach 20 years. In USAF, you go before the major's board at the 12 year mark. If you are passed over for major twice, you have to either leave USAF or accept demotion to the enlisted ranks, to finish out your 20 years and retire as a captain. This gets rid of well over half your officer staff. There aren't a lot of guys willing to take a demotion to enlisted for 6 years so they can stick around for a captain's retirement pension.
I don't know if drone operators are officers or enlisted. Either way, can you call a drone operator a combat experienced person you want to eventually become general? USAF has a problem here.
i think we're both on the same path here. My son certainly has his gifts and he does realize that the day will come when he has to support himself. Hopefully he'll find something where he'll be able to make use of his gifts. First thing though is to get him out of the house to find a life beyond our walls, so that he will no longer be Hikikomori.
We're very much on the same page here. He's a very nice kid. People like him. Rather dorky, but nice. Not a mean bone in his body. Everything is small steps with him, but he does continually make steps that take him forward.
Will he find gainful employment any time soon? I have no idea. I look at the people working at places like Papa Murphy's Pizza or Mrs. Field's Cookies and I'm sure he could do that kind of work. My hope is that he'll land some McJob somewhere and make a few bucks. Do that for a while and I think he'll come to the place where he'll want more than that. Probably sooner than later.
He certainly has his gifts, but only time will tell how he'll cope with Reality.
His school grades were very poor. He is unable to function in a normal classroom. He doesn't pay attention and has no idea what's going on. He has no idea what the homework assignments are and cares little. He loves video games but can't program his way out of a paper bag. He took a couple of computer classes while in high school but really didn't learn anything. I offered him $10 if he could write a program to add the numbers from 1 to 100. He couldn't do it. He can't process linear thinking apparently.
He's very intelligent in his own way. He understood the whole alphabet when he was 17 months old. He taught himself to read before he was 3 years old. We didn't teach him. He figured it out on his own. He loved Bill Nye, the science guy when he was 4 years old and actually comprehended the concepts that were put before him. He has a very strong gift as a visual artist, but sadly has no interest in doing it. He has an excellent understanding of perspective, shading, proportion, etc. Quite gifted, but uninterested.
He spends a lot of time reading and surfing the web, retains a lot of what he reads and comprehends most, though there are times when I catch him parroting stuff he's read and he doesn't actually understand it.
Have you got any links for the kind of international volunteer work you're talking about? He's done a little volunteer work locally, with an emphasis on the word "little". At this point, I'm happy just to see him develop a life outside the house.
I recently joined an internet advertising startup whose claim to fame is that their technology works without cookies tracking individuals. It really is creepy how you look at something on Amazon and you start seeing Amazon ads for that item on other sites you visit.
We're profitable so at least THIS company isn't going to lay me off any time soon.
Y'know, I tried that once. Biiiiig mistake. Drove him into a frightenly severe depression. Like I said. External motivations, both negative and positive, do not work. If any of them did, believe that I'd use it.
I'm 62 years old and figure to work until I'm 70. By then the house will be paid for and we'll have just enough from Social Security and my wife's musician's union pension to cover our essential expenses. But it won't be enough to cover the kid. He's going to *have* to find a way to make money between now and then because we just won't have it. My wife won't let us throw him out on the street, so I don't know just how bad this could get.
So the kid's not depressed, but I am.
1. Put half of his income into savings. He's living at home. He can well afford to put money into savings.
2. He'll have to have some walking around money of course, but he'll also have to help cover his own expenses at home - power usage, food, clothing, etc.
I believe he's going to need $5,000 in the bank before he can move out. He'll need that kind of cash up front just to get started with life outside the house. That's why he'll be putting money into savings. If there are sufficient funds, I'll also see to it that he gets started with an IRA. You can never start too soon with that sort of thing.
Kicking him in the butt only makes him curl up into a little ball. I've tried both positive and negative motivations and there are no external means that seem to work.
The question was asked if he ever got tired of having no money. That is beginning to motivate him a bit. When the motivation is *HIS* idea, then he acts. That's how he ended up getting the Starbucks interview. I've asked the relations to NOT give him money on his birthday and Christmas, which they have agreed to. Now all he gets is birthday cards and is learning that those two days a year are no longer paydays.
One of his autistic qualities is an almost complete lack of common sense. Really. He is slowly maturing and seems to continue to progress, but at some point, he may become unemployable. My worst nightmare.
Hikikomori huh? Average age of 32?! Oh God... And I thought it was bad with my 20 year old sitting on his butt surfing the web and playing video games. His greatest professional accomplishments are getting his GED and getting an interview at Starbucks (he didn't get the job). That's it.
But does it have Raquel Welch, at the age of 28 or so, in a skin-tight wet suit? Yeah. I thought not.
Don't know if you've noticed or not, but the cost of a college education becoming more and more outside the ability of middle class people to afford. With the government cutting back education funding because they can't raise revenues with businesses complaining about taxation, you can't seem to find Americans who can do the work. There's a direct correlation between the lack of domestic workers and the lack of education funding.
I couldn't begin to afford a college education today if I were of that age.
So the government is cutting back and cutting back on education funding. Then American companies complain they can't find enough Americans to do the work, at a time when there is still massive unemployment. So naturally they have to import workers from over-seas to take those jobs that Americans can't seem to fill.. Doesn't this just make you PROUD to be an American?!
I've been an audiophile since Nixon was president. And no, I've never dropped Large Cash for cables. I run 14 gauge zip cord to my speakers. MOSFET 60 wpc power amp. Pretty pedestrian by hi-end standards, but my home system is the equal of any so-called "reference system" I've ever heard. I agree there's a lot of snake oil out there, but if you know what you're doing, you can get truly superior results with the right gear. I do location recording for my wife's string quartet. I master at 24/96 and when I down sample to 16/44.1, I can hear the difference on my home system. It's not going to be heard on ear buds or a car system, but on something like my home system (Peachtree DAC, Bryston preamp, Linkwitz Orion loudspeaker system), you're going to hear it.
Cover New York with the impenetrable bubble that Fox News and the Tea Party have been living under. It's absolutely impervious all external reality. I'd recommend using it as a nuclear shield for the country, but it just isn't big enough. And if it's not big enough for New York, then it certainly is big enough for Wall Street.