Multi-platform support is a strength of open source. It's not free -- it adds work to the development process. But it makes for cleaner code, and for more useful code.
The world isn't going to be x86 forever. It might be for a long time into the future, but eventually thigns are going to change. When that happens, it will be really, really hard for MS to make the change. It will be almost transparent for linux.
This is a good example of how really vital research is happening in other parts of the world, and we're off on the sidelines. Our kids will be able to explain how evolution is wrong, and creatiomism explains everything. Their kids will be able to cure spinal cord injuries.
From what I understand, this is really huge because stem cells from other people tend to be rejected by the immune system.
So the bush administration compromise that allowed researchers to work with existing stem cell lines isn't really good enough. They can get stem cells, but they can't get the right stem cells that they'd need for a patient, which won't be rejected.
For that you need cloning.
Not full blown human being cloning, but the very beginings of life in a petri dish cloning. I think that the cut off date is something like 4 days after the clone is created.
I heard some scientists on a panel show talking about this a few months ago. Everyone thought it was what was necessary, but no one thought it would happen any time soon.
Our scientists have been fighting with ways to turn off the immune system response in patients when they get someone else's stem cells. Scientists in other parts of the world don't have to struggle with that problem.
I think the divide is between free as in freedom and everyone else.
I've been using linux for a long time, since about '92. (I should be a lot better at it than I am -- I'm not claiming any kind of geek mastery over it.)
And for almost all of that time it's been about the software and not the license. I always thought the free software fanatics were, well, fanatics. Ideologues.
I don't think that any more. In the end, the only software that's perfectly alined with its users' interests is open source.
It's usually not described in these terms, but defining characteristic of open source is that the owners or creators have given away their ability to control how people use the software.
Out of the big guys in silicon valley, gates is probably one of the better ones. Personally, I'd rather hang out with him than with Jobs. I always imagine Jobs sitting in a chair with disciples gathered around his feet. Ellison must be a nightmare.
Gates is the worst only because he's the biggest and most powerful. If Jobs was the biggest and most powerful, he'd be the worst.
I used to run a business on sparc servers. I like Sun and their technology. But Sun is looking out for Sun, and they always will, and if it's in their interests to throw me under the train, they will.
Debian *can't* throw me under the train. They've signed away all the rights they'd need to be able to do it.
It's not about whether or not the guys at the top are good or bad. It's that they're in roles that simply shouldn't exist. That's the problem with google's ambitious plans. The guys who run google are great -- they probably go out on sunday's and wash the feet of the poor. But they're amassing a lot of power over information, and the mass itself isn't a good thing.
Another linksys router plugged into that, for my wireless network (I had one of those, so it was cheaper than getting an access point without a router).
2 PCs -- one about 1Ghz, the other at about 2Ghz, both dual boot with linux and XP, but mostly running linux. One machine can feed video to my tv.
I have a third PC, a 700Mhz Dell, which isn't doing anything because it's slower and I don't really need it.
3 laptops, all old and slow. Two thinkpad 770x's, one of which is just for parts, and a tp 560, which is the one I usually use because it's small and light, even though it's really slow and has a small screen.
1 old iMac, just barely fast enough to run panther. It's just to let me keep my feet wet with OS X. I used it to see what all the hoopla surrounding quicksilver was about, for example.
Various peripherals (an inkjet printer, a scanner, etc.), and a couple of external hard drives.
I've started turning down old machines -- I think it's better to use virtualization software instead of hardware whenever possible. Otherwise you have too much junk floating around.
I'd like to buy a really fast 64 bit pc, and a really nice apple desktop system, but it's hard to justify the cost.
I always try to send plain text, unless I need to do something specific. (I'll embed an image in HTML rather than attach the file to a plain text email, for example.)
But I gave up mutt for evolution because so many people send me HTML mail. At some point you kind of have to live in the world as it exists, I think.
I think the world would be a better place if email was just plain text, with file attachments, but most people don't agree, so what can you do?
If you send HTML mail, almost everyone will be able to read it -- that's the main thing. If your boss wants it, you should probably give it to him -- there are more important issues on which you can take a stand.
First of all, Microsoft has a mountain of money, and that will keep them safe for a long time.
But there are people making decisions at the top, and I think those decisions have been flawed.
It's analagous to Intel, where they decided that 64 bits wasn't important for consumers, and that compatibility with x86 wasn't important. Intel is huge, and that's not going to come close to killing them, but it did give AMD a few openings.
There are tough decisions that would have been jarring, culturally, on the Windows platform that Microsoft has shied away from. They should be pushing harder to get people not to run software with administrator privs, even though doing so would cause a lot of old software to break.
ActiveX is a security nightmare. Bagging it would cause a lot of pain and suffering in the short term, but keeping it is going to cost a lot more over the long run.
I think the main strength of open source software is that no one can make those sorts of decisions and force them on people. If you dig in on a bad decision, someone will fork the project.
I don't think that gates has had the guts to make the tough decisions since he's been the chief software architect. I know he's a genius, and he's obviously a lot smarter than I am. But I just don't see his record over the past couple of years as being that strong.
The main problem that Microsoft has now is that the bottom half of their user base (the proportion is just a guess) can't admin windows competently enough to keep the machines running reliably on the internet. Geeks can do it. My windows machines run fine, and have since the second version of windows 98. But an awful lot of people just can't pull it off -- they're bogged down in the muck, because admining their home windows boxes is too hard.
Microsoft is spending a fortune to patch bugs one at a time, but they're not addressing the fundamental architectural problems that make the bugs so damaging.
Compare that to what Jobs did with OS X. People were howling for years while they waited for it to come out. He was willing to piss off everyone by breaking compatibility with the old system. He took the long view, and he took his lumps up front to get things lined up for the future properly.
That's exactly what Gates doesn't have the guts to do. It's weak technical leadership.
I don't know -- what about people like Herzog? Or even Spielberg? I know Hitchcock had some things pushed on him -- Kim Novak in Vertigo -- but he did most of his stuff the way he wanted to do it. So did Kubrick.
I agree that many bad movies are made by auteur types. But most of the really good ones are too.
A movie like the mask is pleasant enough to sit through, and if I were in the movie business, I would have loved to have been associated with it, because it made money. But for me, a guy in the audience, it's not a great movie.
Doesn't this suggest (I didn't say prove, just suggest) that they're making the movie by committee with focus group data?
I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Most good movies are more organic -- they're the result of someone's vision, expressed with comparatively small amounts of interference.
Do we trust him? Would he have really said that it sucked?
I'm not going to this one. Lucas keeps putting crappy movies out there, and I keep going. If I go to this one, it's over, and Lucas wins every time. This is my last chance not to fall for the same old con.
I don't hate google -- I use their various services a couple of hundred times a day. They're a great company.
I'm a little worried about the hype surrounding them, though. I'm not so much worried about anything google has done, or said they plan to do, as about the hype. People keep speculating about how google will be a platform, and how great it will be when they keep all of your data on their servers, and anyone with a web browser can get at it.
The problem with that is that it's a big step backwards from microsoft, freedom wise. The google guys seem like nice guys, and they have their famous "don't be evil" motto and all of that. But the point of all of the whole open source thing is freedom -- it's having control over your own computer and your own data.
There are two problems with Microsoft. The first, and most obvious one, is that they're jerks. They spread fud, they've tried to kill off startups by announcing vaporware in the past, they twist hardware manufacturer's arms, threaten, and bully people.
But there's another problem -- the structure of the commercial software system isn't good. Microsoft abuses it's power -- but would it be ok if another corporate culture were administering that power in a less abusive way? Isn't an open source world still preferable?
Google is a like a good and just king. They don't bully people, they don't make threats, they don't throw their weight around. But they are slowly and surely consolidating a lot of control over the flow of information, generally speaking, in the world. That's scary as hell. They've never done anything that makes me think that they have evil designs. But it's still scary.
What's going to happen when the current management dies or retires? What if they get kicked out? Jobs got kicked out of Apple?
I don't mean to suggest that we should be terrified of google, or that we should think of them as a negative force in the world. But a more sophisticated inquiry into what's happening and what the long term consequences of it might be is certainly appropriate.
In particular, whiz-bang "gee, google came out with a new free-beer gadget that I love!" articles don't help much. I don't know that they hurt that much, but they don't help.
I know that all of the schools in Europe aren't first rate.
But if you can pass the Bac in France (for example) and go to University, I think you've demonstrated some skills that a college student in the US might not necessarily have demonstrated.
I've attended both Northwestern and the University of Nebraska. Everyone at Northwestern was very smart. Lots of people at the University of Nebraska could barely write a coherent paragraph.
It's the direct result of two thigns. First, there's a state law that says that the university has to accept anyone with a high school diploma issued by an accredited high school in Nebraska.
And second, when profs try to crack down and fail people, they're called to the carpet, because there's a perception that it will hurt the school's chances of getting good public funding. People call up their state senators and complain about this stuff.
Harvard is probably great, but it's not exactly representative of the US college experience. If you went there, that's terrific -- you're lucky.
I'd try to email the admissions offices of a few universities, and ask them. They'd know.
People who drop out of school here in the states can get something called a GED, which is a "high school equivilancy" certification. I know that people with GEDs can go to university here, although they usually woulnd't be able to get into top tier schools. But many public state universities will take them.
So I think that it might be possible to make something work -- the standards here are different from those in Europe, and are (unfortunately) lower. But it will help your friend.
The main thing, though, is to talk to people at admissions departments, because they know who they'll take and who they won't.
It's getting to the point where it's hard to run open source software without using bittorrent.
I'm not saying it's impossible (that would clearly be overstating things) but more and more things are being distributed via torrents.
I think the reaction should be that you know they have a problem (traffic and piracy on their network), but that you have a problem (there is stuff that's legal that you need torrents to get), and see if you can come to a reasonable solution.
I would try to emphasize the direction of the trend, too. A couple of years ago, bittorrent didn't factor into downloading linux iso's very much at all. Now I think it's clearly the best way to get most things, although more traditional downloads are still available. But eventually, I wouldn't be surprised if people without torrent access have real trouble getting large legal files.
If your school doesn't want to hamstring its students' ability to participate in open source, they'll have to open up to torrents.
I've tried sort of half-heartedly to get memaid to work, but I didn't have a lot of luck. I didn't push, though, and I didn't post any questions on the mail list.
IMAP is the answer. I don't use IMAP on a regular basis, but it did let me export mail from outlook over to Evolution on linux.
I used the UW IMAP server, which is a little easier to set up than the Cygnus one.
The UW IMAPd keeps its folders in mbox format, so it's a great tool for converting oddly formatted mail.
Moving email is pretty easy -- it's harder to move calendar entries, address books, notes, and the other sorts of data that ends up in a program like outlook. I think the easiest way to do it would be to sync to a palm device, on windows, and then do it again under linux, although I haven't actually tried that.
Laptops are so cheap now, and so common, that I think they'd probably make more if they priced these services for leisure travellers instead of just for business people.
At thiry euros, I'd probably kill time by reading a book instead. At ten, I'd probably want to geek on my laptop.
I'd encourage you to try to get something in a big city, something on the West Coast, or in Hawaii, which has a big Japanese community.
I have a friend who married a woman from Estonia (they met in the Peace Corps) and brought her back to Nebraska. She signed up for the local university.
It was very hard on her, and she ended up dropping out. There were a fair number of foreign students at the university, but it's pretty provincial here, and she had a hard time blending in and making friends. She was very unhappy.
I've had friends in Chicago who fared better -- there are quite a few people from other countries living in Chicago. Even if they're not from the same place you are, you can still compare notes as immigrants. I knew some Russian people in Chicago, and a girl from Viet Nam who got along better.
One friend, married to a Russian woman, moved from Chicago to Brooklyn, and I think she's a lot happier there. She can go to Russian neighborhoods (even though they don't live in one), speak her native language, buy Russian food, etc. It helps.
Having said all of that, I used to know a Japanese woman who was here in Nebraska doing graduate work at the University, and she seemed to like it a lot. So it can be done.
But she had a clique of grad student immigrant friends -- a woman from Bangledesh, and another woman from South Korea -- and she was here studying Native American culture, so professionally it was a great place for her.
I don't want to say something sexist, but I think it's harder for women to make these moves sometimes -- they tend to be more plugged into groups of friends, more social. It's harder if you're following someone else, too, and not doing it for your own reasons.
I'd adivse you to try to give her as much support as possible -- shoot for a community where she can fit in. Don't move to Utah, even if you get the best offer there.
Running open source in your office is a noble gesture, but doesn't really help anyone else.
Getting a vote in Congress probably won't help anyone either, since the leadership of the majority party can do whatever they want. But at least there's a chance that you could do some good down the road if you win.
Do what you can to win. Don't focus on things that aren't directly related to winning. Winning is hard, and if you don't focus on it, you will probably lose.
Winning might include open source -- if you want to set up community web sites to bring people into your campaign, for example, open source might be the way to go. Take what you can from Joe Trippi's Dean campaign.
But don't get hung up making people type letters in open office, because it won't help you win.
At least they're being up front about this. They back the companies that are screwing us out of our privacy over the consumers every chance they get. That's what they stand for.
As outrageous as this is, it's not nearly as bad as the prescription drug bill that prevents them from pushing the pharmaceutical companies for better prices.
I hope the story is big enough to be spun by the talk radio crowd. I'd love to hear how they'd defend it.
We see lots of things that tend to loosen up MS's chokehold on the industry.
Large government clients are pushing for open office document formats. People are using more and more software that runs on multpiple platforms (ie., Firefox). New platforms, like phones, set top boxes, media centers, PDAs, and the like aren't panning out.
And many customers really want out. People complain about MS a lot now.
To me, the most significant thing is that they don't seem to be making the right moves. They're not doing anything interesting, and they're not responding to their technical challenges in a vigorous and competent way.
Gates is clearly a genius with business, but I don't think he's up to running the tech side of the company. Since he became the "chief software architect" they've been floundering.
But on the other hand, think about how much money they have. That means that there's no chance of them collapsing or going away. The cash gives them enormous staying power.
I don't think that collapse is a likely scenario. It's more likely that they'll be more like an IT industry Sears.
Sears was mismanaged for decades. Long after the retail industry had passed them by, they were still doing things in the same old dumb ways they had always done it. But they were still there, because they had gotten to be so big and strong in the days when they were on top. They owned a ton of land underneath their stores, and it was worth a lot of money. They had staying power.
I feel really good about the future. I don't think anyone's going to have their boot on our necks the way MS has in the past. Apple is making some beautiful machines, and Linux is a couple of years away, at tops, from being really competitive on the desktop. Windows will probably get cleaned up, and it will probably end up being cheaper.
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Multi-platform support is a strength of open source. It's not free -- it adds work to the development process. But it makes for cleaner code, and for more useful code.
The world isn't going to be x86 forever. It might be for a long time into the future, but eventually thigns are going to change. When that happens, it will be really, really hard for MS to make the change. It will be almost transparent for linux.
What did ee cummings say? I've never heard that...
(My subject is sarcastcic.)
This is a good example of how really vital research is happening in other parts of the world, and we're off on the sidelines. Our kids will be able to explain how evolution is wrong, and creatiomism explains everything. Their kids will be able to cure spinal cord injuries.
From what I understand, this is really huge because stem cells from other people tend to be rejected by the immune system.
So the bush administration compromise that allowed researchers to work with existing stem cell lines isn't really good enough. They can get stem cells, but they can't get the right stem cells that they'd need for a patient, which won't be rejected.
For that you need cloning.
Not full blown human being cloning, but the very beginings of life in a petri dish cloning. I think that the cut off date is something like 4 days after the clone is created.
I heard some scientists on a panel show talking about this a few months ago. Everyone thought it was what was necessary, but no one thought it would happen any time soon.
Our scientists have been fighting with ways to turn off the immune system response in patients when they get someone else's stem cells. Scientists in other parts of the world don't have to struggle with that problem.
I think the divide is between free as in freedom and everyone else.
I've been using linux for a long time, since about '92. (I should be a lot better at it than I am -- I'm not claiming any kind of geek mastery over it.)
And for almost all of that time it's been about the software and not the license. I always thought the free software fanatics were, well, fanatics. Ideologues.
I don't think that any more. In the end, the only software that's perfectly alined with its users' interests is open source.
It's usually not described in these terms, but defining characteristic of open source is that the owners or creators have given away their ability to control how people use the software.
Out of the big guys in silicon valley, gates is probably one of the better ones. Personally, I'd rather hang out with him than with Jobs. I always imagine Jobs sitting in a chair with disciples gathered around his feet. Ellison must be a nightmare.
Gates is the worst only because he's the biggest and most powerful. If Jobs was the biggest and most powerful, he'd be the worst.
I used to run a business on sparc servers. I like Sun and their technology. But Sun is looking out for Sun, and they always will, and if it's in their interests to throw me under the train, they will.
Debian *can't* throw me under the train. They've signed away all the rights they'd need to be able to do it.
It's not about whether or not the guys at the top are good or bad. It's that they're in roles that simply shouldn't exist. That's the problem with google's ambitious plans. The guys who run google are great -- they probably go out on sunday's and wash the feet of the poor. But they're amassing a lot of power over information, and the mass itself isn't a good thing.
A linksys router with a phone jack, from vonage.
Another linksys router plugged into that, for my wireless network (I had one of those, so it was cheaper than getting an access point without a router).
2 PCs -- one about 1Ghz, the other at about 2Ghz, both dual boot with linux and XP, but mostly running linux. One machine can feed video to my tv.
I have a third PC, a 700Mhz Dell, which isn't doing anything because it's slower and I don't really need it.
3 laptops, all old and slow. Two thinkpad 770x's, one of which is just for parts, and a tp 560, which is the one I usually use because it's small and light, even though it's really slow and has a small screen.
1 old iMac, just barely fast enough to run panther. It's just to let me keep my feet wet with OS X. I used it to see what all the hoopla surrounding quicksilver was about, for example.
Various peripherals (an inkjet printer, a scanner, etc.), and a couple of external hard drives.
I've started turning down old machines -- I think it's better to use virtualization software instead of hardware whenever possible. Otherwise you have too much junk floating around.
I'd like to buy a really fast 64 bit pc, and a really nice apple desktop system, but it's hard to justify the cost.
I always try to send plain text, unless I need to do something specific. (I'll embed an image in HTML rather than attach the file to a plain text email, for example.)
But I gave up mutt for evolution because so many people send me HTML mail. At some point you kind of have to live in the world as it exists, I think.
I think the world would be a better place if email was just plain text, with file attachments, but most people don't agree, so what can you do?
If you send HTML mail, almost everyone will be able to read it -- that's the main thing. If your boss wants it, you should probably give it to him -- there are more important issues on which you can take a stand.
First of all, Microsoft has a mountain of money, and that will keep them safe for a long time.
But there are people making decisions at the top, and I think those decisions have been flawed.
It's analagous to Intel, where they decided that 64 bits wasn't important for consumers, and that compatibility with x86 wasn't important. Intel is huge, and that's not going to come close to killing them, but it did give AMD a few openings.
There are tough decisions that would have been jarring, culturally, on the Windows platform that Microsoft has shied away from. They should be pushing harder to get people not to run software with administrator privs, even though doing so would cause a lot of old software to break.
ActiveX is a security nightmare. Bagging it would cause a lot of pain and suffering in the short term, but keeping it is going to cost a lot more over the long run.
I think the main strength of open source software is that no one can make those sorts of decisions and force them on people. If you dig in on a bad decision, someone will fork the project.
I don't think that gates has had the guts to make the tough decisions since he's been the chief software architect. I know he's a genius, and he's obviously a lot smarter than I am. But I just don't see his record over the past couple of years as being that strong.
The main problem that Microsoft has now is that the bottom half of their user base (the proportion is just a guess) can't admin windows competently enough to keep the machines running reliably on the internet. Geeks can do it. My windows machines run fine, and have since the second version of windows 98. But an awful lot of people just can't pull it off -- they're bogged down in the muck, because admining their home windows boxes is too hard.
Microsoft is spending a fortune to patch bugs one at a time, but they're not addressing the fundamental architectural problems that make the bugs so damaging.
Compare that to what Jobs did with OS X. People were howling for years while they waited for it to come out. He was willing to piss off everyone by breaking compatibility with the old system. He took the long view, and he took his lumps up front to get things lined up for the future properly.
That's exactly what Gates doesn't have the guts to do. It's weak technical leadership.
The article said it wasn't done, that the print was a work print. And believe me, if everyone had said it sucked, they would have changed it.
Having said that, you might be right, and Whedon might be a control freak, and he might have total control. I don't know.
It was a good idea, but I don't know if it was one of his best movies. It wasn't a bad movie by any means, but it wasn't "the birds", either.
I really dig hitchcock...
I don't know -- what about people like Herzog? Or even Spielberg? I know Hitchcock had some things pushed on him -- Kim Novak in Vertigo -- but he did most of his stuff the way he wanted to do it. So did Kubrick.
I agree that many bad movies are made by auteur types. But most of the really good ones are too.
A movie like the mask is pleasant enough to sit through, and if I were in the movie business, I would have loved to have been associated with it, because it made money. But for me, a guy in the audience, it's not a great movie.
Doesn't this suggest (I didn't say prove, just suggest) that they're making the movie by committee with focus group data?
I don't know if that's a good thing or not. Most good movies are more organic -- they're the result of someone's vision, expressed with comparatively small amounts of interference.
But then again, I'm already planning on not going to the last Star Wars movie, so I'm out of step.
Do we trust him? Would he have really said that it sucked?
I'm not going to this one. Lucas keeps putting crappy movies out there, and I keep going. If I go to this one, it's over, and Lucas wins every time. This is my last chance not to fall for the same old con.
I don't hate google -- I use their various services a couple of hundred times a day. They're a great company.
I'm a little worried about the hype surrounding them, though. I'm not so much worried about anything google has done, or said they plan to do, as about the hype. People keep speculating about how google will be a platform, and how great it will be when they keep all of your data on their servers, and anyone with a web browser can get at it.
The problem with that is that it's a big step backwards from microsoft, freedom wise. The google guys seem like nice guys, and they have their famous "don't be evil" motto and all of that. But the point of all of the whole open source thing is freedom -- it's having control over your own computer and your own data.
There are two problems with Microsoft. The first, and most obvious one, is that they're jerks. They spread fud, they've tried to kill off startups by announcing vaporware in the past, they twist hardware manufacturer's arms, threaten, and bully people.
But there's another problem -- the structure of the commercial software system isn't good. Microsoft abuses it's power -- but would it be ok if another corporate culture were administering that power in a less abusive way? Isn't an open source world still preferable?
Google is a like a good and just king. They don't bully people, they don't make threats, they don't throw their weight around. But they are slowly and surely consolidating a lot of control over the flow of information, generally speaking, in the world. That's scary as hell. They've never done anything that makes me think that they have evil designs. But it's still scary.
What's going to happen when the current management dies or retires? What if they get kicked out? Jobs got kicked out of Apple?
I don't mean to suggest that we should be terrified of google, or that we should think of them as a negative force in the world. But a more sophisticated inquiry into what's happening and what the long term consequences of it might be is certainly appropriate.
In particular, whiz-bang "gee, google came out with a new free-beer gadget that I love!" articles don't help much. I don't know that they hurt that much, but they don't help.
I know that all of the schools in Europe aren't first rate.
But if you can pass the Bac in France (for example) and go to University, I think you've demonstrated some skills that a college student in the US might not necessarily have demonstrated.
But we have tiers.
I've attended both Northwestern and the University of Nebraska. Everyone at Northwestern was very smart. Lots of people at the University of Nebraska could barely write a coherent paragraph.
It's the direct result of two thigns. First, there's a state law that says that the university has to accept anyone with a high school diploma issued by an accredited high school in Nebraska.
And second, when profs try to crack down and fail people, they're called to the carpet, because there's a perception that it will hurt the school's chances of getting good public funding. People call up their state senators and complain about this stuff.
Harvard is probably great, but it's not exactly representative of the US college experience. If you went there, that's terrific -- you're lucky.
I'd try to email the admissions offices of a few universities, and ask them. They'd know.
People who drop out of school here in the states can get something called a GED, which is a "high school equivilancy" certification. I know that people with GEDs can go to university here, although they usually woulnd't be able to get into top tier schools. But many public state universities will take them.
So I think that it might be possible to make something work -- the standards here are different from those in Europe, and are (unfortunately) lower. But it will help your friend.
The main thing, though, is to talk to people at admissions departments, because they know who they'll take and who they won't.
I'd try state schools.
Did the Mozilla/Firefox guys ignore a warning about this, or did this site publish the vulnerability without giving them a chance to patch?
It's getting to the point where it's hard to run open source software without using bittorrent.
I'm not saying it's impossible (that would clearly be overstating things) but more and more things are being distributed via torrents.
I think the reaction should be that you know they have a problem (traffic and piracy on their network), but that you have a problem (there is stuff that's legal that you need torrents to get), and see if you can come to a reasonable solution.
I would try to emphasize the direction of the trend, too. A couple of years ago, bittorrent didn't factor into downloading linux iso's very much at all. Now I think it's clearly the best way to get most things, although more traditional downloads are still available. But eventually, I wouldn't be surprised if people without torrent access have real trouble getting large legal files.
If your school doesn't want to hamstring its students' ability to participate in open source, they'll have to open up to torrents.
There's a linux program called memaid:
http://memaid.sourceforge.net/index.php
Pauker is a java program:
http://pauker.sourceforge.net/
I've tried sort of half-heartedly to get memaid to work, but I didn't have a lot of luck. I didn't push, though, and I didn't post any questions on the mail list.
IMAP is the answer. I don't use IMAP on a regular basis, but it did let me export mail from outlook over to Evolution on linux.
I used the UW IMAP server, which is a little easier to set up than the Cygnus one.
The UW IMAPd keeps its folders in mbox format, so it's a great tool for converting oddly formatted mail.
Moving email is pretty easy -- it's harder to move calendar entries, address books, notes, and the other sorts of data that ends up in a program like outlook. I think the easiest way to do it would be to sync to a palm device, on windows, and then do it again under linux, although I haven't actually tried that.
Laptops are so cheap now, and so common, that I think they'd probably make more if they priced these services for leisure travellers instead of just for business people.
At thiry euros, I'd probably kill time by reading a book instead. At ten, I'd probably want to geek on my laptop.
I'd encourage you to try to get something in a big city, something on the West Coast, or in Hawaii, which has a big Japanese community.
I have a friend who married a woman from Estonia (they met in the Peace Corps) and brought her back to Nebraska. She signed up for the local university.
It was very hard on her, and she ended up dropping out. There were a fair number of foreign students at the university, but it's pretty provincial here, and she had a hard time blending in and making friends. She was very unhappy.
I've had friends in Chicago who fared better -- there are quite a few people from other countries living in Chicago. Even if they're not from the same place you are, you can still compare notes as immigrants. I knew some Russian people in Chicago, and a girl from Viet Nam who got along better.
One friend, married to a Russian woman, moved from Chicago to Brooklyn, and I think she's a lot happier there. She can go to Russian neighborhoods (even though they don't live in one), speak her native language, buy Russian food, etc. It helps.
Having said all of that, I used to know a Japanese woman who was here in Nebraska doing graduate work at the University, and she seemed to like it a lot. So it can be done.
But she had a clique of grad student immigrant friends -- a woman from Bangledesh, and another woman from South Korea -- and she was here studying Native American culture, so professionally it was a great place for her.
I don't want to say something sexist, but I think it's harder for women to make these moves sometimes -- they tend to be more plugged into groups of friends, more social. It's harder if you're following someone else, too, and not doing it for your own reasons.
I'd adivse you to try to give her as much support as possible -- shoot for a community where she can fit in. Don't move to Utah, even if you get the best offer there.
Running open source in your office is a noble gesture, but doesn't really help anyone else.
Getting a vote in Congress probably won't help anyone either, since the leadership of the majority party can do whatever they want. But at least there's a chance that you could do some good down the road if you win.
Do what you can to win. Don't focus on things that aren't directly related to winning. Winning is hard, and if you don't focus on it, you will probably lose.
Winning might include open source -- if you want to set up community web sites to bring people into your campaign, for example, open source might be the way to go. Take what you can from Joe Trippi's Dean campaign.
But don't get hung up making people type letters in open office, because it won't help you win.
At least they're being up front about this. They back the companies that are screwing us out of our privacy over the consumers every chance they get. That's what they stand for.
As outrageous as this is, it's not nearly as bad as the prescription drug bill that prevents them from pushing the pharmaceutical companies for better prices.
I hope the story is big enough to be spun by the talk radio crowd. I'd love to hear how they'd defend it.
I think that this guy is right, up to a point.
We see lots of things that tend to loosen up MS's chokehold on the industry.
Large government clients are pushing for open office document formats. People are using more and more software that runs on multpiple platforms (ie., Firefox). New platforms, like phones, set top boxes, media centers, PDAs, and the like aren't panning out.
And many customers really want out. People complain about MS a lot now.
To me, the most significant thing is that they don't seem to be making the right moves. They're not doing anything interesting, and they're not responding to their technical challenges in a vigorous and competent way.
Gates is clearly a genius with business, but I don't think he's up to running the tech side of the company. Since he became the "chief software architect" they've been floundering.
But on the other hand, think about how much money they have. That means that there's no chance of them collapsing or going away. The cash gives them enormous staying power.
I don't think that collapse is a likely scenario. It's more likely that they'll be more like an IT industry Sears.
Sears was mismanaged for decades. Long after the retail industry had passed them by, they were still doing things in the same old dumb ways they had always done it. But they were still there, because they had gotten to be so big and strong in the days when they were on top. They owned a ton of land underneath their stores, and it was worth a lot of money. They had staying power.
I feel really good about the future. I don't think anyone's going to have their boot on our necks the way MS has in the past. Apple is making some beautiful machines, and Linux is a couple of years away, at tops, from being really competitive on the desktop. Windows will probably get cleaned up, and it will probably end up being cheaper.