...and for the near-terminally thick, it is: get involved in developing the project.
Even if you couldn't code to save your life, you can document, test, draw/paint/sing/play data, promote and other stuff and use the respect that earns within each project community to convince the coders to do mroe of what you're interested in. "You fix this JavaScript bug and I'll turn the attached sample icon into a whole theme for you," sort of thing.
...may finally become a reality. The perfect laptop for parties: turn it over and barbecue, no switches to press. They could stripe the case and ship it with memtest86 for grilling.
...they would 'fess up that the "My" in question is William Henry Gates III.
When you see "My Computer", mentally translate it to "Trey's Computer" and suddenly a lot of Microsoft's odd attitudes become understandable. Not nice, or fair, or reasonable, or polite - but understandable.
...adapting your application to architectures as diverse as x86, ppc, MIPS and Sparc at different word-widths is a great way to uncover subtle and long-standing bugs.
To be sure, robustness may be as optional for you as it was for Microsoft (and would still be, absent competition from Linux), but in the long run it seems to pay off.
Most of us Linux users would not regard, forex, The GIMP as particularly robust, but compared to the typical WIn32 app it's a paladin of reliability. My sister-in-law routinely leaves it open (and unsaved) for weeks on end, confident that it will still be there when she gets back (but a recent hard-disk failure of mine seems to have put the fear of God into her WRT reliability). She also happily browses everywhere fearlessly, knowing that she can't damage anything on her own machine, and nobody either I or her know of have ever been burnt by malware while browsing in Linux.
MS users just don't do that - not more than once or twice, anyway.
The recommended markup on MS Windows XP Home (standard, not Academic or anything) OEM is AUD$75, and for MS Office 2003 Standard is AUD$60. As I understand it, that doesn't include any manuals at all.
The implication is that if you wanted to offer the computer shop some continuity of income, whatever you produce by way of FOSS add-ons has to look flash enough to be saleable for at least AUD$50 plus cost of manufacture.
I suspect that the "easy" way to do this is to break things out as Microsoft does, so you ship a package which has a "Web Browser" CD (Firefox and some plugins and themes), an "Email" CD (Thunderbird plus plugins and themes), an "Office" CD (OpenOffice plus a few handy tools and templates), an "AntiVirus" CD with ClamAV, "Graphics" with The GIMP and a passel of unencumbered images and tutorials, a "Games" CD with, surprise, games on it, a "Utilities" CD with 7Zip, WinSCP, PuTTY and so on. Maybe even a "Database" CD with a copy of PostgreSQL and/or ibFirebird on (MySQL, unfortunately, gets a bit complicated) and a GUI DB manager.
Each CD branded in common and distinguished by colour and logo, so it's obvious to the customer that they're paying about $10 a CD but sold as a bundle.
This sells for maybe AUD$80, costs AUD$10 to assemble and essentially replaces MS Office in the shop's income stream. All the shop needs to do is keep one or two sets of CDs in stock, and when one sells they do an rsync of the images in case anything changed, and burn a new set, either pulling the accompanying leaflets and boxes from stock (they won't change much) or printing them on demand.
Ideally, the box cover would be personalised for the final point of sale ("shop"), and the shop would attach fancy stickers, hand-write the version and date on and sign the product themselves. That last step makes it look a lot less like a Mom and Pop operation and a lot more like a large corporation trying to be personal.
I don't think we should be chasing a "large corporation" image exactly, but we definitely don't want an "isolated idiots" image.
In principle, the shop would kick back something like 10% of their take on each copy they sell, but we can expect a fair few of the fly-by-nighters to be dishonest and just take the money and run - and we should budget accordingly. Larger concerns (like Harvey Norman) would tend to bargain harder up front, but play fairer in the field.
I would like to take about half of whatever comes back and reticulate that to the projects represented, details to be considered if anything comes close to getting off the ground.
The recommended markup on MS Windows XP Home (standard, not Academic or anything) OEM is AUD$75, and for MS Office 2003 Standard is AUD$60. As I understand it, that doesn't include any manuals at all.
The implication is that if you wanted to offer the computer shop some continuity of income, whatever you produce by way of FOSS add-ons has to look flash enough to be saleable for at least AUD$50 plus cost of manufacture.
I suspect that the "easy" way to do this is to break things out as Microsoft does, so you ship a package which has a "Web Browser" CD (Firefox and some plugins and themes), an "Email" CD (Thunderbird plus plugins and themes), an "Office" CD (OpenOffice plus a few handy tools and templates), an "AntiVirus" CD with ClamAV, "Graphics" with The GIMP and a passel of unencumbered images and tutorials, a "Games" CD with, surprise, games on it, a "Utilities" CD with 7Zip, WinSCP, PuTTY and so on. Maybe even a "Database" CD with a copy of PostgreSQL and/or ibFirebird on (MySQL, unfortunately, gets a bit complicated) and a GUI DB manager.
Each CD branded in common and distinguished by colour and logo, so it's obvious to the customer that they're paying about $10 a CD but sold as a bundle.
This sells for maybe AUD$80, costs AUD$10 to assemble and essentially replaces MS Office in the shop's income stream. All the shop needs to do is keep one or two sets of CDs in stock, and when one sells they do an rsync of the images and burn a new set, either pulling the accompanying leaflets and boxes from stock (they won't change much) or printing them on demand.
The key challenge is coming up with a system which is:
Simple
Flexible
Effective
Effective is last but not least and I'd expect you to know all about that. Perhaps start a FOSS "brand" or range of brands? <shrug> Not my area of expertise, hoorah for you.
Simple from the users' perspective ("user" in this case being either stores or local geek advocacy groups) means the kind of stuff that any idiot in any country can take down to his local print shop and get printed up, or for some things whack out a few score on his own printer.
This means Flexible: designing materials so that they work well with LeftToRight text, maybe even vertical text, are as much at home on US-Letter as on A4 and so on, and providing as close to source as you can get in in as wide a variety as you can get so that others can take it and redo a Malaysian, Hebrew, Arabic, Big5 Chinese or whatever version of it. Boxes, manuals, on-CD presentation and documentation: the lot. Or a version with no left hands showing, or models in modest dress or of a different race or whatever it takes to make it locally acceptable.
But Simple from your PoV means making up prototypes at the start which work in your language and format, and testing it out locally and in person, before imploding from over-ambition.
And if you need web space for this, can I suggest a SourceForge project? Or if you want a bit more control over what you're doing, I think Linux Australia (email to committee at that domain) would be interested in hosting such a project.
There are also marketing groups for a few major projects already (e.g. OpenOffice's), with whom you might wish to coordinate or whom on the other hand you might find a distraction from your more general process.
Email me at cyberknights com au if you're serious and wish to take the idea further. At the very least I can put up a discussion list and wiki space for you.
if your teenager refuses to help keep the computer free of garbage, the least they could do is help pay the bill. The parent and I both really liked that idea, but the kid standing next to them gave me the evil eye.
You could be onto something there. Anything which even gets their attention is an achievement. (-:
...plus PLF for a handful of non-FOSS extras, and have it auto-update (use rsync to minimise download sizes) regularly. They have RPMdrake to point and click on if they like installing stuff, and they can either use it as-is (zero tweaking) or tweak their little hearts out point-and-click style. No compiling or command line required.
In this case it means that they have somewhere to point the finger, but not someone to solve the problem. It would seem to me that having some way of solving the problem (or better yet, of never having the problem in the first place) would be considerably more valuable to them.
Unless, of course, they want to think of all of those poor starving people in India... who probably get to see two fifths of three eighths of sweet Fanny Adams out of that $100/hr.
...we may get a new candidate for the top "stoned chick".
If one of their candidates did denounce MS on live broadcast, the server would be totally hosed within ten minutes of anyone posting a video clip of it.
Just remap some of theose otherwise useless "Windows" keys as keymap toggles - or if you have enough of them (there's three on this random Chinese USB keyboard, plus I never use the right Alt or Ctrl keys and very rarely CapsLock), just straight to keystrokes you use often. And/or remap NumLock to shift the numbers above QWERTY as well (numpad for numbers, unshifted keys-above-QWERTY for symbols when numlock is on).
You could also remap the ScrollLock key or one of the "media" keys to an uber-lock which toggles between WYSIWYG and your custom layout. Blink the ScrollLock light (xset led 3) or something to warn people if it's in uber-lock mode.
If I had to use a separate switch I'd have one or two low on the front of the keyboard under my thumbs. Much easier to coordinate. I normally lift my hands to hit back-row keys, and it's not hard (for me, anyway) to leave a thumb parked under the spacebar while doing that.
Slashdot Mirror
...and for the near-terminally thick, it is: get involved in developing the project.
Even if you couldn't code to save your life, you can document, test, draw/paint/sing/play data, promote and other stuff and use the respect that earns within each project community to convince the coders to do mroe of what you're interested in. "You fix this JavaScript bug and I'll turn the attached sample icon into a whole theme for you," sort of thing.
Couldn't have put it better myself.
Then a lot of people stand around distrubing their nits and thinking... did that just happen? And if so... WTF?
...may have tarnished that relationship for Microsoft.
However, I expect the XboX360 plus a hard disk to make a kick-ass (and take-names) Linux box.
...not sure whether it's Insightful or Funny, but it's definitely +1. (-:
...for the new XboX? (-: ...and gets sued by IBM's mainframe department? (-:
People would be running OS X on AUD$399 white-boxes instead of buying AUD$799 Mac Minis. They'd lose their hardware markup and a lot of control.
OTOH if people could "run Mac on their PC", Apple might just make money as a software company.
OTGH, maybe "x86" means AMD and being able to plug up to 8 low-power HyperChannel-connected 64-bit CPUs into your laptop. Well? I can dream if I like. (-:
...may finally become a reality. The perfect laptop for parties: turn it over and barbecue, no switches to press. They could stripe the case and ship it with memtest86 for grilling.
...they would 'fess up that the "My" in question is William Henry Gates III.
When you see "My Computer", mentally translate it to "Trey's Computer" and suddenly a lot of Microsoft's odd attitudes become understandable. Not nice, or fair, or reasonable, or polite - but understandable.
...adapting your application to architectures as diverse as x86, ppc, MIPS and Sparc at different word-widths is a great way to uncover subtle and long-standing bugs.
To be sure, robustness may be as optional for you as it was for Microsoft (and would still be, absent competition from Linux), but in the long run it seems to pay off.
Most of us Linux users would not regard, forex, The GIMP as particularly robust, but compared to the typical WIn32 app it's a paladin of reliability. My sister-in-law routinely leaves it open (and unsaved) for weeks on end, confident that it will still be there when she gets back (but a recent hard-disk failure of mine seems to have put the fear of God into her WRT reliability). She also happily browses everywhere fearlessly, knowing that she can't damage anything on her own machine, and nobody either I or her know of have ever been burnt by malware while browsing in Linux.
MS users just don't do that - not more than once or twice, anyway.
Er... wait...
...but I think it fits here as well.
--cut-here----- >8 -------cut-here------- 8< -----cut-here--
The recommended markup on MS Windows XP Home (standard, not Academic or anything) OEM is AUD$75, and for MS Office 2003 Standard is AUD$60. As I understand it, that doesn't include any manuals at all.
The implication is that if you wanted to offer the computer shop some continuity of income, whatever you produce by way of FOSS add-ons has to look flash enough to be saleable for at least AUD$50 plus cost of manufacture.
I suspect that the "easy" way to do this is to break things out as Microsoft does, so you ship a package which has a "Web Browser" CD (Firefox and some plugins and themes), an "Email" CD (Thunderbird plus plugins and themes), an "Office" CD (OpenOffice plus a few handy tools and templates), an "AntiVirus" CD with ClamAV, "Graphics" with The GIMP and a passel of unencumbered images and tutorials, a "Games" CD with, surprise, games on it, a "Utilities" CD with 7Zip, WinSCP, PuTTY and so on. Maybe even a "Database" CD with a copy of PostgreSQL and/or ibFirebird on (MySQL, unfortunately, gets a bit complicated) and a GUI DB manager.
Each CD branded in common and distinguished by colour and logo, so it's obvious to the customer that they're paying about $10 a CD but sold as a bundle.
This sells for maybe AUD$80, costs AUD$10 to assemble and essentially replaces MS Office in the shop's income stream. All the shop needs to do is keep one or two sets of CDs in stock, and when one sells they do an rsync of the images in case anything changed, and burn a new set, either pulling the accompanying leaflets and boxes from stock (they won't change much) or printing them on demand.
--cut-here----- >8 -------cut-here------- 8< -----cut-here--
Ideally, the box cover would be personalised for the final point of sale ("shop"), and the shop would attach fancy stickers, hand-write the version and date on and sign the product themselves. That last step makes it look a lot less like a Mom and Pop operation and a lot more like a large corporation trying to be personal.
I don't think we should be chasing a "large corporation" image exactly, but we definitely don't want an "isolated idiots" image.
In principle, the shop would kick back something like 10% of their take on each copy they sell, but we can expect a fair few of the fly-by-nighters to be dishonest and just take the money and run - and we should budget accordingly. Larger concerns (like Harvey Norman) would tend to bargain harder up front, but play fairer in the field.
I would like to take about half of whatever comes back and reticulate that to the projects represented, details to be considered if anything comes close to getting off the ground.
The recommended markup on MS Windows XP Home (standard, not Academic or anything) OEM is AUD$75, and for MS Office 2003 Standard is AUD$60. As I understand it, that doesn't include any manuals at all.
The implication is that if you wanted to offer the computer shop some continuity of income, whatever you produce by way of FOSS add-ons has to look flash enough to be saleable for at least AUD$50 plus cost of manufacture.
I suspect that the "easy" way to do this is to break things out as Microsoft does, so you ship a package which has a "Web Browser" CD (Firefox and some plugins and themes), an "Email" CD (Thunderbird plus plugins and themes), an "Office" CD (OpenOffice plus a few handy tools and templates), an "AntiVirus" CD with ClamAV, "Graphics" with The GIMP and a passel of unencumbered images and tutorials, a "Games" CD with, surprise, games on it, a "Utilities" CD with 7Zip, WinSCP, PuTTY and so on. Maybe even a "Database" CD with a copy of PostgreSQL and/or ibFirebird on (MySQL, unfortunately, gets a bit complicated) and a GUI DB manager.
Each CD branded in common and distinguished by colour and logo, so it's obvious to the customer that they're paying about $10 a CD but sold as a bundle.
This sells for maybe AUD$80, costs AUD$10 to assemble and essentially replaces MS Office in the shop's income stream. All the shop needs to do is keep one or two sets of CDs in stock, and when one sells they do an rsync of the images and burn a new set, either pulling the accompanying leaflets and boxes from stock (they won't change much) or printing them on demand.
The last packet seems to have been corrupted so it says ":PP~~~" instead of "suck. )-:"
Just ask a few printing shops about MS-Publisher. Remember to duck.
If you want a no-brainer way to get a professional appearance (sorry, can't do anything magic about the actual content), try LaTeX.
- Simple
- Flexible
- Effective
Effective is last but not least and I'd expect you to know all about that. Perhaps start a FOSS "brand" or range of brands? <shrug> Not my area of expertise, hoorah for you.Simple from the users' perspective ("user" in this case being either stores or local geek advocacy groups) means the kind of stuff that any idiot in any country can take down to his local print shop and get printed up, or for some things whack out a few score on his own printer.
This means Flexible: designing materials so that they work well with LeftToRight text, maybe even vertical text, are as much at home on US-Letter as on A4 and so on, and providing as close to source as you can get in in as wide a variety as you can get so that others can take it and redo a Malaysian, Hebrew, Arabic, Big5 Chinese or whatever version of it. Boxes, manuals, on-CD presentation and documentation: the lot. Or a version with no left hands showing, or models in modest dress or of a different race or whatever it takes to make it locally acceptable.
But Simple from your PoV means making up prototypes at the start which work in your language and format, and testing it out locally and in person, before imploding from over-ambition.
And if you need web space for this, can I suggest a SourceForge project? Or if you want a bit more control over what you're doing, I think Linux Australia (email to committee at that domain) would be interested in hosting such a project.
There are also marketing groups for a few major projects already (e.g. OpenOffice's), with whom you might wish to coordinate or whom on the other hand you might find a distraction from your more general process.
Email me at cyberknights com au if you're serious and wish to take the idea further. At the very least I can put up a discussion list and wiki space for you.
...that we have to wait 18 years to see the first one?
Or is it just the usual films full of people behaving childishly?
...plus PLF for a handful of non-FOSS extras, and have it auto-update (use rsync to minimise download sizes) regularly. They have RPMdrake to point and click on if they like installing stuff, and they can either use it as-is (zero tweaking) or tweak their little hearts out point-and-click style. No compiling or command line required.
"We have both kinds here, Open and Free!"
...Bill's bluff. He had to get better at snowing people, so now the computer market is flooded with crap software.
In this case it means that they have somewhere to point the finger, but not someone to solve the problem. It would seem to me that having some way of solving the problem (or better yet, of never having the problem in the first place) would be considerably more valuable to them.
Unless, of course, they want to think of all of those poor starving people in India... who probably get to see two fifths of three eighths of sweet Fanny Adams out of that $100/hr.
...no. You don't need Microsoft for that.
...we may get a new candidate for the top "stoned chick".
If one of their candidates did denounce MS on live broadcast, the server would be totally hosed within ten minutes of anyone posting a video clip of it.
...cheap keyboards which die before the keycap lables do.
Just remap some of theose otherwise useless "Windows" keys as keymap toggles - or if you have enough of them (there's three on this random Chinese USB keyboard, plus I never use the right Alt or Ctrl keys and very rarely CapsLock), just straight to keystrokes you use often. And/or remap NumLock to shift the numbers above QWERTY as well (numpad for numbers, unshifted keys-above-QWERTY for symbols when numlock is on).
You could also remap the ScrollLock key or one of the "media" keys to an uber-lock which toggles between WYSIWYG and your custom layout. Blink the ScrollLock light (xset led 3) or something to warn people if it's in uber-lock mode.
If I had to use a separate switch I'd have one or two low on the front of the keyboard under my thumbs. Much easier to coordinate. I normally lift my hands to hit back-row keys, and it's not hard (for me, anyway) to leave a thumb parked under the spacebar while doing that.