I installed it 14 months ago while visiting. She's on dialup, doesn't have/need dynamic dns or have openssh enabled....She's at the mercy of the default install. Again, she's an old lady with NO knowledge of computers and gets intimitated by them. Like the saying goes, it should "just work" for her needs and the OOO defaults do not.
Dude, you installed an operating system on her computer that she doesn't know how to configure and appearently does not have the skills to learn, and you didn't take the time to set it up for her needs nor are you willing to help her when she has problems? You're the ass here, not the OOo and Ubuntu teams that aren't psychic enough to know exactly which defaults she in particular would like to have (and then force them on everyone else). She's your mother, dude, go teach her how to use this operating system and office suite that you dumped on her.
If you're a newbie, you shouldn't use Debian, you should use a newbie distro. Ubuntu and Mepis are really good, and there's also Linspire and PCLinuxOS and some others. I'm pretty sure Mepis comes with graphics card drivers (it comes with mp3 and flash and other proprietary things) and with Ubuntu you just download EasyUbuntu and then you're a checkbox away from installing graphics drivers (as well as mp3, flash, other non-free potentially complicated things). To install programs, ignore the.debs. Go to applications-->add new programs. All your basic programs you need are now one click away, and it's just advanced->settings->repositories and a few clicks and thousands of more programs are added, and if you know the names of more repositories you have unlimited programs with simple simple install.
If you want linux to be easy, use an easy linux distro. Ubuntu is in many ways easier then WinXP, and if MS doesn't get it's act together with Vista, linux will easily sour past Windows in the ease-of-use department.
I too have feared this from happening. I am a freelance graphic designer and what I produce doesn't really exist. Its all digital. I charge between $75/hr and $200/hr depending on the job and who it is and I haven't claimed any of it. Why, because I give nothing physical in return. Everything I do is electronic. Same is with this virtual money. I can 'farm' 5000 gold in World of Warcraft and sell that for $300 in real money. What exactly did I sell. I made money, but didn't produce anything. I consider what I did a service and last time I checked, doing a service where nothing is produced physically isn't taxable.
I think you're still supposed to claim what you do as income to be taxed, because it's *income*.
At my job (IT Support), I don't produce anything physical either. I fix some computers, I update the website, I read slashdot - none of that produces anything physical, yet I'm taxed on the income I make from doing that.
I think that you could compare valuable in-game items to stocks. Physically, they're nothing (stocks used to be paper, but now they're just accounts that you buy, check on, change, etc. with your computer - just like video games) yet you can sell them for actual money. Eventually, the IRS is going to get tech savvy and make the connection between non-physical game items and other non-physical things and then start taxing when people sell game stuff. Unless you're an anti-tax nut though, I don't think you should worry about this. They're not going to tax people until they actually sell stuff, so you can still play WoW and not worry about having your level 60 cleric audited. It'll only be the gil farmers and people like that who have to worry, and those people make the game not fun anyways.
Red Wanting Blue is cool, my friend knows them. I also like Bitch & Animal, they're unique, and there's some also some more well-known artists, like Ani Difranco and MC Lars, that are cool and not RIAA.
You can check at www.riaaradar.com to see if a band you're interesting in is RIAA or not. There's getting to be more and more that aren't, which is really cool.
Am I misreading you, or are you under the delusion that artists get the money when you buy a CD?
Under the current system "some random other people" get 95%-99%* of the money... it might as well be nothing.
That's assuming you get an RIAA CD. There are bands that make their own CDs, ya know.
Ya... because teachers and administrators in public schools are so overpaid...
Teachers aren't overpaid... but administrators are. At least at the district my husband works in, the administrators make much more than the teachers, and they, unlike teachers, cannot be laid off. Seriously, his district lays off teachers every year (driving up class sizes more and more), and when they finally passed a levy, guess what they did. Hired more administrators.
Schools need smaller classes and better teachers. Everything else is just fluff.
It looks like it's pronounced "Why". And "why" is pretty much all I have to say about it.
Revolution wasn't like Dolphin, the stupid codename for the Gamecube that no one heard about. Revolution is a cool name that's been all over the game media. Everyone knows it as the Revolution, and all the Nintendo fanboys have been drooling over getting a Revolution forever. Now it's Wii? WTF.
You're under some illusion that mp3 downloading is about helping artists or "sticking it to the man"? How naive.
That's not what the GP post said. He said that downloading from Allofmp3.com doesn't help artists either. I don't know about you, but when I pay for music I want the artist to get the money, not some random other people.
You see the plan is to market it to people who have all ready broken their neck. They really won't care if they break it a second time because well what are they going to complain about. They are all ready a parapalegic.
But paraplegics can still use their arms. If they break their neck because of this stupid thing, then they'ld be quadraplegic and need robotic arms as well as legs. Of course, that just means more money for the makers of robotic limbs, so I guess they'ld call it a feature, not a bug.
I'm a life-long gamer, but I'm also a parent, and I firmly believe that parents should rigidly control what games their children play. Banning the sale of of all video games to minors would help parents in that regard, and may just force the issue with lazy parents, making them go to the store to buy a game for their kid.
With that attitude, why don't you just ban everything from being sold to kids? There's certainly a lot worse things for kids to have than video games.
It might look nice to you, but if these guys are serious about being "web 2.0" and/or replacing Office then they really need to work on their accessibility. Even that offline message has two big accessibility no-no's: text-as-images, and table-based layout. I tried looking at that page with Fangs (screen reader emulator) and you know what it said?
"thinkfree dash Internet ExplorerTable with one column and twenty rowsTable with one column and sixteen rowsTable endTable end"
That's what a visually-impaired person would get from that website. That's it, nothing else. And while accessibility might not be important to you in your current situation, it's extremely important to anyone with a disability, and also to the public sector. All government web systems must be accessible, and until accessibility gets taken more seriously on these kind of projects, the desktop is going to win out every time.
I'm glad you posted that. It seems like no one cares about screen readers anymore, I guess they just don't think blind people use computers.
I turn off pictures when I web surf at work, because it's faster and I don't trust websites to show work appropriate pictures, and all I get on thinkfree.com is some colors and boxes. I wish web designers would just take the time to put some alt tags on things.
Or the other 30 or so distros listed which are neither Red Hat nor Debian.
There's Gentoo, Linux from Scratch, and Slackware (and their derivatives). The vaste majority of linux distros are based off either Red Hat or Debian. While we shouldn't ignore the contrabutions of other distros, it's obvious that Debian has given a lot to linux. I personally would not be a linux user today if it wasn't for Debian and its derivatives.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Or, if your not the command line type, click on the "Add Programs" icons, and then look at all the programs that you can install for free. Click one. Click install.
Versus Windows. You decide you want some program. So you google for it. And Google for it. Then you find something. So you download it, open it, and it's a virus and eats your computer! Or maybe it's not, maybe it's just adware that pops up crappy ads everytime you open it up. Or maybe it's nagware that'll stop working after 14 days and then bother you to give it $20 to stop bothering you. I don't know about you, but I'ld rather save my time and download my programs in 4 seconds in linux than waste my time googling for something for windows that's probably going to wind up not being what I want.
Linux has made great strides in usability, and if Vista doesn't make much improvements in that department then linux will easily surpass windows in the next few years. Don't believe me? Try Mepis. Just try it, don't bicker and assume, just try it.
>>You're seriously telling me that you'd make the choice that determines a large part of your future based entirely on the method they use to control the college email address you will probably never use?
Unless the school requires you to use it, by sending important school stuff through that email, or the profs using that because it's easier than trying to remember l33tdude787@gmail.com or whatever for 500 students. So you could very easily have to use it, and given that it doesn't support pop3, imap, forwarding, or non-IE browsers, if you have linux or a mac checking it regularly could be very very frustrating. I could very easily see someone choose a different college just not to deal with that hassle. I wish a lot of students would too, so college drop this stupid crap, but that's just wishful thinking on my part.
The problems with Linux for the two companies that switched to Windows wasn't switching headaches - the one company had used Red Hat for three years, and the other one since '99. Their problems were that they wanted features they weren't finding in Linux, but did find in Windows. Your advice for switching is solid, but it's not relevant to the problems brought up in the article.
I WISH I could install Ubuntu on my mom's computer. It would work so much better for her; she wouldn't have to keep buying stupid games like solitaire and majohng that I could just apt-get for her, her printer wouldn't unistall itself everytime she restarts, and I wouldn't have to do anymore anti-virus/spyware sweeps. Of course that last one would be much easier if her company's it dept would stop remoting into her computer and deleting all the anti-spyware programs I install, but you know, people are just morons.
Ubuntu tells me it's a beta when I log in (splash screen says Ubuntu Dapper Beta). Maybe you accidently downloaded an old version? The beta is downloadable here.
Or they could have put her in pretty but comfy looking pajamas, like actresses on TV wear when their charactors go to bed. That would have actually implied sleep, as opposed to lingerie, which implies sex.
Yeah, I always wear sexy lingerie to sleep it. It's just so comfortable. Not.
The picture shows sex (a woman dressed up for sex) and violence/death. I think the people who add sex+violence and get rape, or sex+death and get necrophilia are not the ones with issues. The ad is rather disturbing.
Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.
I normally don't say things like this, but I think that Kubuntu should merge with Mepis. I've been using Mepis 3.4, and it's really a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu. Now that Mepis is changing to be based off Ubuntu, I'm not sure if there's a purpose left for Kubuntu. I agree with you that Ubuntu should stick to making a great Gnome distribution, but I think Ubuntu's KDE people would probably be better off making Mepis a great KDE distro.
I.e. if it was a male character, dead in some museum in front of some spectacular work of art and they used "Beautifully Executed," there would have been no controversy for this effective AD campaign.
Well, no, because the controversy isn't that it's a picture of dead woman, it's that they sexualized it, making the ad about necrophilia and even implying a rape/murder fantasy to some people.
A picture of a dead person in front of a painting just isn't the same. A better parallel would be a dead male charactor dressed only in a satin thong posed sexily on a bed. I don't think people would be too fond of that ad either, though.
>>I need to get a PS2 to play "Hogs Of War" PSX since I can't find any memory cards for my PSX. I get a lot of strange looks at stores when I ask about PSX memory cards.
Hate to break it to you, but you can't save PSX games on PS2 cards.
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I installed it 14 months ago while visiting. She's on dialup, doesn't have/need dynamic dns or have openssh enabled....She's at the mercy of the default install. Again, she's an old lady with NO knowledge of computers and gets intimitated by them. Like the saying goes, it should "just work" for her needs and the OOO defaults do not.
Dude, you installed an operating system on her computer that she doesn't know how to configure and appearently does not have the skills to learn, and you didn't take the time to set it up for her needs nor are you willing to help her when she has problems? You're the ass here, not the OOo and Ubuntu teams that aren't psychic enough to know exactly which defaults she in particular would like to have (and then force them on everyone else). She's your mother, dude, go teach her how to use this operating system and office suite that you dumped on her.
If you're a newbie, you shouldn't use Debian, you should use a newbie distro. Ubuntu and Mepis are really good, and there's also Linspire and PCLinuxOS and some others. I'm pretty sure Mepis comes with graphics card drivers (it comes with mp3 and flash and other proprietary things) and with Ubuntu you just download EasyUbuntu and then you're a checkbox away from installing graphics drivers (as well as mp3, flash, other non-free potentially complicated things). To install programs, ignore the .debs. Go to applications-->add new programs. All your basic programs you need are now one click away, and it's just advanced->settings->repositories and a few clicks and thousands of more programs are added, and if you know the names of more repositories you have unlimited programs with simple simple install.
If you want linux to be easy, use an easy linux distro. Ubuntu is in many ways easier then WinXP, and if MS doesn't get it's act together with Vista, linux will easily sour past Windows in the ease-of-use department.
Once you discover the causes and conditions of the problem you start to realize that those other 3 fingers are pointing at you.
If something doesn't work in Windows, it's the user's fault. If something doesn't work in Linux, it's Linux's fault.
The double standard is getting kinda old.
I too have feared this from happening. I am a freelance graphic designer and what I produce doesn't really exist. Its all digital. I charge between $75/hr and $200/hr depending on the job and who it is and I haven't claimed any of it. Why, because I give nothing physical in return. Everything I do is electronic. Same is with this virtual money. I can 'farm' 5000 gold in World of Warcraft and sell that for $300 in real money. What exactly did I sell. I made money, but didn't produce anything. I consider what I did a service and last time I checked, doing a service where nothing is produced physically isn't taxable.
I think you're still supposed to claim what you do as income to be taxed, because it's *income*.
At my job (IT Support), I don't produce anything physical either. I fix some computers, I update the website, I read slashdot - none of that produces anything physical, yet I'm taxed on the income I make from doing that.
I think that you could compare valuable in-game items to stocks. Physically, they're nothing (stocks used to be paper, but now they're just accounts that you buy, check on, change, etc. with your computer - just like video games) yet you can sell them for actual money. Eventually, the IRS is going to get tech savvy and make the connection between non-physical game items and other non-physical things and then start taxing when people sell game stuff. Unless you're an anti-tax nut though, I don't think you should worry about this. They're not going to tax people until they actually sell stuff, so you can still play WoW and not worry about having your level 60 cleric audited. It'll only be the gil farmers and people like that who have to worry, and those people make the game not fun anyways.
Red Wanting Blue is cool, my friend knows them. I also like Bitch & Animal, they're unique, and there's some also some more well-known artists, like Ani Difranco and MC Lars, that are cool and not RIAA.
You can check at www.riaaradar.com to see if a band you're interesting in is RIAA or not. There's getting to be more and more that aren't, which is really cool.
Am I misreading you, or are you under the delusion that artists get the money when you buy a CD? Under the current system "some random other people" get 95%-99%* of the money ... it might as well be nothing.
That's assuming you get an RIAA CD. There are bands that make their own CDs, ya know.
So pay allofmp3.com $1.50 for providing an excellent download service, then find the band's mailing address on their web site and send them $2.
Or download it with bittorent and send the band $3.50?
Ya... because teachers and administrators in public schools are so overpaid...
Teachers aren't overpaid... but administrators are. At least at the district my husband works in, the administrators make much more than the teachers, and they, unlike teachers, cannot be laid off. Seriously, his district lays off teachers every year (driving up class sizes more and more), and when they finally passed a levy, guess what they did. Hired more administrators.
Schools need smaller classes and better teachers. Everything else is just fluff.
It looks like it's pronounced "Why". And "why" is pretty much all I have to say about it.
Revolution wasn't like Dolphin, the stupid codename for the Gamecube that no one heard about. Revolution is a cool name that's been all over the game media. Everyone knows it as the Revolution, and all the Nintendo fanboys have been drooling over getting a Revolution forever. Now it's Wii? WTF.
You're under some illusion that mp3 downloading is about helping artists or "sticking it to the man"? How naive.
That's not what the GP post said. He said that downloading from Allofmp3.com doesn't help artists either. I don't know about you, but when I pay for music I want the artist to get the money, not some random other people.
You see the plan is to market it to people who have all ready broken their neck. They really won't care if they break it a second time because well what are they going to complain about. They are all ready a parapalegic.
But paraplegics can still use their arms. If they break their neck because of this stupid thing, then they'ld be quadraplegic and need robotic arms as well as legs. Of course, that just means more money for the makers of robotic limbs, so I guess they'ld call it a feature, not a bug.
I'm a life-long gamer, but I'm also a parent, and I firmly believe that parents should rigidly control what games their children play. Banning the sale of of all video games to minors would help parents in that regard, and may just force the issue with lazy parents, making them go to the store to buy a game for their kid.
With that attitude, why don't you just ban everything from being sold to kids? There's certainly a lot worse things for kids to have than video games.
It might look nice to you, but if these guys are serious about being "web 2.0" and/or replacing Office then they really need to work on their accessibility. Even that offline message has two big accessibility no-no's: text-as-images, and table-based layout. I tried looking at that page with Fangs (screen reader emulator) and you know what it said? "thinkfree dash Internet ExplorerTable with one column and twenty rowsTable with one column and sixteen rowsTable endTable end" That's what a visually-impaired person would get from that website. That's it, nothing else. And while accessibility might not be important to you in your current situation, it's extremely important to anyone with a disability, and also to the public sector. All government web systems must be accessible, and until accessibility gets taken more seriously on these kind of projects, the desktop is going to win out every time.
I'm glad you posted that. It seems like no one cares about screen readers anymore, I guess they just don't think blind people use computers.
I turn off pictures when I web surf at work, because it's faster and I don't trust websites to show work appropriate pictures, and all I get on thinkfree.com is some colors and boxes. I wish web designers would just take the time to put some alt tags on things.
Or the other 30 or so distros listed which are neither Red Hat nor Debian.
There's Gentoo, Linux from Scratch, and Slackware (and their derivatives). The vaste majority of linux distros are based off either Red Hat or Debian. While we shouldn't ignore the contrabutions of other distros, it's obvious that Debian has given a lot to linux. I personally would not be a linux user today if it wasn't for Debian and its derivatives.
Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Or, if your not the command line type, click on the "Add Programs" icons, and then look at all the programs that you can install for free. Click one. Click install.
Versus Windows. You decide you want some program. So you google for it. And Google for it. Then you find something. So you download it, open it, and it's a virus and eats your computer! Or maybe it's not, maybe it's just adware that pops up crappy ads everytime you open it up. Or maybe it's nagware that'll stop working after 14 days and then bother you to give it $20 to stop bothering you. I don't know about you, but I'ld rather save my time and download my programs in 4 seconds in linux than waste my time googling for something for windows that's probably going to wind up not being what I want.
Linux has made great strides in usability, and if Vista doesn't make much improvements in that department then linux will easily surpass windows in the next few years. Don't believe me? Try Mepis. Just try it, don't bicker and assume, just try it.
>>You're seriously telling me that you'd make the choice that determines a large part of your future based entirely on the method they use to control the college email address you will probably never use?
Unless the school requires you to use it, by sending important school stuff through that email, or the profs using that because it's easier than trying to remember l33tdude787@gmail.com or whatever for 500 students. So you could very easily have to use it, and given that it doesn't support pop3, imap, forwarding, or non-IE browsers, if you have linux or a mac checking it regularly could be very very frustrating. I could very easily see someone choose a different college just not to deal with that hassle. I wish a lot of students would too, so college drop this stupid crap, but that's just wishful thinking on my part.
The problems with Linux for the two companies that switched to Windows wasn't switching headaches - the one company had used Red Hat for three years, and the other one since '99. Their problems were that they wanted features they weren't finding in Linux, but did find in Windows. Your advice for switching is solid, but it's not relevant to the problems brought up in the article.
I WISH I could install Ubuntu on my mom's computer. It would work so much better for her; she wouldn't have to keep buying stupid games like solitaire and majohng that I could just apt-get for her, her printer wouldn't unistall itself everytime she restarts, and I wouldn't have to do anymore anti-virus/spyware sweeps. Of course that last one would be much easier if her company's it dept would stop remoting into her computer and deleting all the anti-spyware programs I install, but you know, people are just morons.
(/. says beta Ubuntu say Alpha)
Ubuntu tells me it's a beta when I log in (splash screen says Ubuntu Dapper Beta). Maybe you accidently downloaded an old version? The beta is downloadable here.
Or they could have put her in pretty but comfy looking pajamas, like actresses on TV wear when their charactors go to bed. That would have actually implied sleep, as opposed to lingerie, which implies sex.
A woman has been shot in her sleep
Yeah, I always wear sexy lingerie to sleep it. It's just so comfortable. Not.
The picture shows sex (a woman dressed up for sex) and violence/death. I think the people who add sex+violence and get rape, or sex+death and get necrophilia are not the ones with issues. The ad is rather disturbing.
Bruce George Peter Lee, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader all drove hondars. Look it up, it is a matter of public record.
Aren't there more than 5 people who drive Hondas?
Ubuntu needs to stay the course with Gnome. Let the whiners whine. Ubuntu needs to stay focused onto what it is, a highly polished Gnome desktop distribution.
I normally don't say things like this, but I think that Kubuntu should merge with Mepis. I've been using Mepis 3.4, and it's really a better Kubuntu than Kubuntu. Now that Mepis is changing to be based off Ubuntu, I'm not sure if there's a purpose left for Kubuntu. I agree with you that Ubuntu should stick to making a great Gnome distribution, but I think Ubuntu's KDE people would probably be better off making Mepis a great KDE distro.
I.e. if it was a male character, dead in some museum in front of some spectacular work of art and they used "Beautifully Executed," there would have been no controversy for this effective AD campaign.
Well, no, because the controversy isn't that it's a picture of dead woman, it's that they sexualized it, making the ad about necrophilia and even implying a rape/murder fantasy to some people.
A picture of a dead person in front of a painting just isn't the same. A better parallel would be a dead male charactor dressed only in a satin thong posed sexily on a bed. I don't think people would be too fond of that ad either, though.
>>I need to get a PS2 to play "Hogs Of War" PSX since I can't find any memory cards for my PSX. I get a lot of strange looks at stores when I ask about PSX memory cards.
Hate to break it to you, but you can't save PSX games on PS2 cards.