I couldn't find find anywhere in the article that said he didn't use the internet, and I know that some people *do* access the Internet on their old Commodores.
He didn't work at an office either. So therefore, I think, it is safe to assume that he didn't use it. At least not on a regular basis.
I have successfully ungoogled myself. I use Scroogle for search, if I have to. I have found that Wikipedia is a good alterternative for much of my search-engine use anyway. I bookmark more, instead of using Google as my DNS. I've gone back to using a News-Reader for Usenet.
"An EC funded study (2006) summarized in the Flosspols report, indicates that about 1.5% of FLOSS community members were female, compared with 28% in proprietary software."
I've read articles that claimed the opposite: THE HEIGHT GAP - Why Europeans are getting taller and taller and Americans aren't. And yes, they factored asian and mexican immigration out. Immigrants catch up to the "native" american standard over time. But the standard itself didn't change since the revolutionary war, according to the article.
This makes me a sad panda. It's a gorgeous game, loads of fun, but it was over before I knew it and compared to my childhood Mario experiences (SMB 1 & 3, SMW) it just seemed very easy. There's not even a % done indicator so I can see whether I've found all the coins and hidden spots. Am I missing something?:(
Try to replay any of the old titles some time. I recently tried to play Super Mario World. I didn't expect to get anywhere, since I haven't played it for 15 years and have rarely played anything for the last five years. (I'm read this article because of my nostalgic memories of these games. *sniff*)
Contrary to my expectation, I played all the way through SMW with ease. This really puzzled me, since back in the day, we kids were usually better players than non-playing guys my age. But the generation before mine had not grown up with computer games.
So chances are that it is not DS that is easier compared to SMB and SMW, but maybe your recollection is just as wrong as mine was.
They gave a new name to the "OOOH SHINEY!" syndrome that every geek has.
Back when I used to be a geek, geekdom was not a synonym for consumerism. I even remember many geeks not buying GSM cellphones, for fears of governement surveillance.
Just fine? I`ve got a desktop System with roughly the same specs. Well, it is useable allright, but just fine is something else entirely. Especially apt and dpkg are dog sloooow nowadays. The boot process takes ages. Ubuntu starts a lot of daemons, including some HP printing and imaging system, which is python based. Many of these subsystems are useless on old systems anyway. Ubuntu is great, but it is not optimized for old systems.
Well, who would have thought that the group of scientists, who actually had worked on the study for months and had surely given it a lot of thought, forsaw the most obvious, knee-jerk objections of your average slashdot poster and managed to address them preemptively in their paper? They must be psychic or something.
It truly strikes me as odd, how a self-proclaimed pro-science community, can have such little faith in the peer-reviewed work of actual scientists.
So it is going to be used like an overspeced e-book reader? And only one per classroom?
This niche will be filled by these new e-ink e-book readers and an USB stick to distribute the books. Schools use only a couple dozen different textbooks anyway.
Man, you people just wanna feed those poor kids instead of learning them how to feed themselves.
I don't know how to feed myself either, unless you count ordering pizza or buying groceries.
And how exactly are these laptops going to be used? We haven't even figured out what to do with computers in our schools. PCs are mostly used to teach how to use PCs. (textprocessing, spreadhseats, mail, etc.) But most PC users in industrialized nations, who are older than 30, didn't learn that in school either. They learned this on the job or because they wanted to get on the internet.
There are certainly many uses for affordable PCs in third world nations for governements and businesses. But in the classroom?
How could anyone NOT know? It's been the whole point of numerous Apple press releases and Slashdot stories. The MacBook Pro replaced the PowerBook, the MacBook replaced the iBook.
I remember lots of Apple users claiming that Apple will continue to produce PPC based machines for a long time and that they were a good deal, regardless of Apples plan to move to Intel. I didn't believe that either but some did.
Actually free software does not care. Watching Apple shoot it's self in the foot is quite entertaining.
It is even more entertaining to see Mac zelots having to do a complete 180 again. Only a couple of days ago, Mac users would post arguments like these:
3. "Free as in Speech"
The fact that Darwin, the BSD Layer of OS X, is open source is enough for most people. It means that Apple is wisely subjecting the underpinnings of their OS to peer review and gaining most of the wins of using open source. A few hard-core Stallmansits probably feel very differently about it, but Free Software bigotry is not really enough to drive a popular movement.
So basically until recently, it was:"The kernel is open. That's all you ever need. Only free software zealots would want more than the kernel." This immediately changed to: "Only free software zealots would demand the kernel of their OS to be free software. OSX has some open middleware and an open toolchain (gcc? duh!). Only filthy bearded types like RMS would want anything else and you don't want to be associated with them, rather than us hippster consumerists, would you?"
I still remember the time, when some Apple users wanted to convince me that nobody needs multitasking and multiuser, for these features would be to confusing anyway.
Okay, so there is no disagrement about the technical merits of Linux vs. Windows and OSX.
You are absolutely right that Linux is way better now than it was then, but times have changed, and people are not starving for another OS option the way they once were. That is why the dream of a Linux Revolution is pretty much over.
Depends on what kind of revolution you are thinking of. There is the cuban or russian-type revolition, which happens quickly. I never believed that Linux will do huge leaps in market share, within a time-frame of only a year or so. It is however true that many Linux zelots hoped for such a revolution. One of the reasons, I don't believe in an ambush-lite takeover of linux, is a fellow mac zealot I know. He is totally convinced that real soon, people will finally see the light and will buy Macs. He is informing me of this gospel since 1990. It is always some new innovation or new product linup that is supposed to spark the revolution. But it never happens. The same is true for those who have promised "the year of linux on the desktop" every single year since 1998.
But there is another type of revolution, like the industrial revolution or the sexual revolution. Such revolutions are often only recognized in hindsight, since they take decades to complete. And this may very well happen with free software in general.
Besides, the Linux desktop revolution is pretty much over anyway, isn't it? The vast majority of those who want a *nixy desktop can just buy a Mac these days.
Yeah. I also could buy a Rolex and several other things, but I don't intend to. I am not a consumerist. I get no thrill from purchasing and owning expensive things. Instead, this is a hassle to me. I don't want to deal with purchasing an OS, various important apps, plus tools. I don't want the pain associated with licence keys and upgrades. You have to go to websites, register yourself, enter credit card information, or go to stores to do all that. Frankly, I prefer apt-get or one of its frontends. Linux distributions are much more userfriendly in this respect.
But as a desktop solution, it never really advanced beyond the playgrounds of serious geeks, and it doesn't really look to me like it ever will.
My parents have been happily using Linux for years. I didn't have to do any tech support for them for at least six months. Every time I visit them, they have figured out new funcionality and apps. My father can do stuff with Gimp, I have no clue about. He self-taught himself with online tutorials, much to my surprise. KDE is very userfriendly and has been so for quite some time. This includes the availability of apps. My parents are heavy users of multiple desktops and amaroK. Without amaroK and multiple dektops, OSX just isn't there yet as a Linux replacement anyway.
So except for games, I see no technical reason for your claim. And mind you, I was not one of these lunatics who proclaimed Linux to be ready for the desktop in 1998. Today, it is, for non-gamers at least.
Adoption is another thing entirely. Linux will not make direct inroads into the consumer market. This has always been clear to me. Linux is more likely to be adopted by corporations and governements first. Also, don't forget that Linux itself is just a kernel. Notice how free software apps like Firefox and Openoffice are becoming more popular. At the same time, free software frameworks creep into proprietary OSes too. Apple doesn't only use BSD, but also KHTML, because it was cheaper to modify existing free software, instead of starting from scratch.
I stopped using GNOME much earlier. Version 1.4 of GNOME added Nautilus 1.0 and it was dog sloooow. I had a 400 Mhz machine at the time and it took Nautilus 30 sec to open my home directory.
Anybody remember Eazel? This is the company which initially wrote Nautilus and spent millions of VC cash doing so. What was their business plan again?
My question is; where they contributing anything new to the maket recently
The XFS filesystem I'm using this on a couple of machines. I sure hope that somebody will continue to maintain it.
This bankrupcy doesn't surprise me at all. I saw this coming for more than five years. But I remember having arguments with SGI fans who tried to defend the Indefensible.
One advantage of LaTex is that it separates information from presentation.
No you don't. LaTeX commands are used with a certain form of presentation in mind:
\begin{itemize}
\item Apples
\item Oranges
\item Grapes \end{itemize}
Yes, in theory, you could completely change the behaviour of itemize, but 99% of all LaTeX users don't and expect this to produce an unnumbered list. That leaves you with text, which is littered with LaTeX statements to control presentation. It is in fact easier to extract the text of a bulletted list in a word processor, or change it into a numbered list, or transoform it into individual paragraphs.
Many of the Ph.D papers have to be reformated for the proper widths, line height, etc.
England, Great Britain and the UK are three completely different things. Mix them up, and you piss people off. It's a bit like mixing up California with the USA with North America. You'd think somebody was pretty ignorant to do that, right?
There are 200+ countries on this planet, many of which are home to several peoples and minorities, often with special political status. Many of these countries are part of difficult to understand supernational structures. Could you answer all possible trivia questions about all of these states? I bet you can't.
I for one don't expect anybody to know mundane political facts of my country and am certainly not going to call anybody ignorant because of that. If somebody is really pissed off for my lack of knowledge of such things, I will choose to talk to somebody else more fun and jovial.
He sure goes to a lot of trouble to do simple things in a more universal way. Is it the case that the more correct you are about word processor usage, the closer you get to HTML/CSS? Should we just skip word processors and use that or LaTex?
LaTeX requires you to read at least a tutorial first. Incorrect documents don't compile and nobody will ever litter LaTeX documents with unnecessary formatting commands, since LaTeX commands make the text obnoxious to read.
Too many people think it's OK just to use rows of spaces for formatting.
Many? I would say most. And this includes many geeks who never bother to read a manual and are therefore completely unaware of even the most basic formatting principles of WYSIWYG-type word processors. Believe me, I know a couple of these guys, who staunchly maintain that WYSIWYG is completely unpredictable. Yet most of this supposedly unpredictable behaviour stems from the fact that they are using Word oder Openoffice like a text editor, which leaves their documents littered with invisible formatting elements. These kinds of documents are a hassle to change, as you described, since even fixing a little typo can mess up the formatting of the whole document.
What really speaks for LaTeX is that you can't use it without reading the f***ing manual first.
Slashdot Mirror
Do-It-Yourself Robotics? Isn't the whole idea behind robots to have them do things for us?
What's next? The backtalking robot? The unionized robot?
He didn't work at an office either. So therefore, I think, it is safe to assume that he didn't use it. At least not on a regular basis.
A geek, who didn't use the internet? There is your suspicion!
Wolfgang Prikopil, world's last pedophile, who didn't have an account on myspace.
I have successfully ungoogled myself. I use Scroogle for search, if I have to. I have found that Wikipedia is a good alterternative for much of my search-engine use anyway. I bookmark more, instead of using Google as my DNS. I've gone back to using a News-Reader for Usenet.
Any other suggestions?
"An EC funded study (2006) summarized in the Flosspols report, indicates that about 1.5% of FLOSS community members were female, compared with 28% in proprietary software."
I've read articles that claimed the opposite: THE HEIGHT GAP - Why Europeans are getting taller and taller and Americans aren't.
And yes, they factored asian and mexican immigration out. Immigrants catch up to the "native" american standard over time. But the standard itself didn't change since the revolutionary war, according to the article.
Try to replay any of the old titles some time. I recently tried to play Super Mario World. I didn't expect to get anywhere, since I haven't played it for 15 years and have rarely played anything for the last five years. (I'm read this article because of my nostalgic memories of these games. *sniff*)
Contrary to my expectation, I played all the way through SMW with ease. This really puzzled me, since back in the day, we kids were usually better players than non-playing guys my age. But the generation before mine had not grown up with computer games.
So chances are that it is not DS that is easier compared to SMB and SMW, but maybe your recollection is just as wrong as mine was.
Back when I used to be a geek, geekdom was not a synonym for consumerism. I even remember many geeks not buying GSM cellphones, for fears of governement surveillance.
Just fine? I`ve got a desktop System with roughly the same specs. Well, it is useable allright, but just fine is something else entirely. Especially apt and dpkg are dog sloooow nowadays. The boot process takes ages. Ubuntu starts a lot of daemons, including some HP printing and imaging system, which is python based. Many of these subsystems are useless on old systems anyway. Ubuntu is great, but it is not optimized for old systems.
Well, who would have thought that the group of scientists, who actually had worked on the study for months and had surely given it a lot of thought, forsaw the most obvious, knee-jerk objections of your average slashdot poster and managed to address them preemptively in their paper? They must be psychic or something.
It truly strikes me as odd, how a self-proclaimed pro-science community, can have such little faith in the peer-reviewed work of actual scientists.
I don't get that either. Europeans make all kinds of jokes about the French, but this whole theme about surrendering is barely known over here.
In Germany and Austria, it is the Italians who are usually accused of being lousy fighters and defectors.
So it is going to be used like an overspeced e-book reader? And only one per classroom?
This niche will be filled by these new e-ink e-book readers and an USB stick to distribute the books. Schools use only a couple dozen different textbooks anyway.
I don't know how to feed myself either, unless you count ordering pizza or buying groceries.
And how exactly are these laptops going to be used? We haven't even figured out what to do with computers in our schools. PCs are mostly used to teach how to use PCs. (textprocessing, spreadhseats, mail, etc.)
But most PC users in industrialized nations, who are older than 30, didn't learn that in school either. They learned this on the job or because they wanted to get on the internet.
There are certainly many uses for affordable PCs in third world nations for governements and businesses. But in the classroom?
I remember lots of Apple users claiming that Apple will continue to produce PPC based machines for a long time and that they were a good deal, regardless of Apples plan to move to Intel. I didn't believe that either but some did.
Where is the militant wing of the FOSS-movement nowadays? Or in other words: haven't heard from ESR for some time.
It is even more entertaining to see Mac zelots having to do a complete 180 again. Only a couple of days ago, Mac users would post arguments like these:
So basically until recently, it was
I still remember the time, when some Apple users wanted to convince me that nobody needs multitasking and multiuser, for these features would be to confusing anyway.
Oh well, there goes my karma.
Depends on what kind of revolution you are thinking of. There is the cuban or russian-type revolition, which happens quickly. I never believed that Linux will do huge leaps in market share, within a time-frame of only a year or so. It is however true that many Linux zelots hoped for such a revolution. One of the reasons, I don't believe in an ambush-lite takeover of linux, is a fellow mac zealot I know. He is totally convinced that real soon, people will finally see the light and will buy Macs. He is informing me of this gospel since 1990. It is always some new innovation or new product linup that is supposed to spark the revolution. But it never happens. The same is true for those who have promised "the year of linux on the desktop" every single year since 1998.
But there is another type of revolution, like the industrial revolution or the sexual revolution. Such revolutions are often only recognized in hindsight, since they take decades to complete. And this may very well happen with free software in general.
Yeah. I also could buy a Rolex and several other things, but I don't intend to.
I am not a consumerist. I get no thrill from purchasing and owning expensive things. Instead, this is a hassle to me. I don't want to deal with purchasing an OS, various important apps, plus tools. I don't want the pain associated with licence keys and upgrades. You have to go to websites, register yourself, enter credit card information, or go to stores to do all that. Frankly, I prefer apt-get or one of its frontends. Linux distributions are much more userfriendly in this respect.
My parents have been happily using Linux for years. I didn't have to do any tech support for them for at least six months. Every time I visit them, they have figured out new funcionality and apps. My father can do stuff with Gimp, I have no clue about. He self-taught himself with online tutorials, much to my surprise.
KDE is very userfriendly and has been so for quite some time. This includes the availability of apps. My parents are heavy users of multiple desktops and amaroK. Without amaroK and multiple dektops, OSX just isn't there yet as a Linux replacement anyway.
So except for games, I see no technical reason for your claim. And mind you, I was not one of these lunatics who proclaimed Linux to be ready for the desktop in 1998. Today, it is, for non-gamers at least.
Adoption is another thing entirely. Linux will not make direct inroads into the consumer market. This has always been clear to me. Linux is more likely to be adopted by corporations and governements first.
Also, don't forget that Linux itself is just a kernel. Notice how free software apps like Firefox and Openoffice are becoming more popular. At the same time, free software frameworks creep into proprietary OSes too. Apple doesn't only use BSD, but also KHTML, because it was cheaper to modify existing free software, instead of starting from scratch.
I stopped using GNOME much earlier. Version 1.4 of GNOME added Nautilus 1.0 and it was dog sloooow. I had a 400 Mhz machine at the time and it took Nautilus 30 sec to open my home directory.
Anybody remember Eazel? This is the company which initially wrote Nautilus and spent millions of VC cash doing so. What was their business plan again?
I'm using this on a couple of machines. I sure hope that somebody will continue to maintain it.
This bankrupcy doesn't surprise me at all. I saw this coming for more than five years. But I remember having arguments with SGI fans who tried to defend the Indefensible.
Remember, it's not a purse, it's european.
No you don't. LaTeX commands are used with a certain form of presentation in mind:Yes, in theory, you could completely change the behaviour of itemize, but 99% of all LaTeX users don't and expect this to produce an unnumbered list. That leaves you with text, which is littered with LaTeX statements to control presentation. It is in fact easier to extract the text of a bulletted list in a word processor, or change it into a numbered list, or transoform it into individual paragraphs.
That's what styles are for: OpenOffice.org Off-the-Wall: Style Is Everything, Right?
There are 200+ countries on this planet, many of which are home to several peoples and minorities, often with special political status. Many of these countries are part of difficult to understand supernational structures. Could you answer all possible trivia questions about all of these states? I bet you can't.
I for one don't expect anybody to know mundane political facts of my country and am certainly not going to call anybody ignorant because of that. If somebody is really pissed off for my lack of knowledge of such things, I will choose to talk to somebody else more fun and jovial.
LaTeX requires you to read at least a tutorial first. Incorrect documents don't compile and nobody will ever litter LaTeX documents with unnecessary formatting commands, since LaTeX commands make the text obnoxious to read.
Many? I would say most.
And this includes many geeks who never bother to read a manual and are therefore completely unaware of even the most basic formatting principles of WYSIWYG-type word processors. Believe me, I know a couple of these guys, who staunchly maintain that WYSIWYG is completely unpredictable. Yet most of this supposedly unpredictable behaviour stems from the fact that they are using Word oder Openoffice like a text editor, which leaves their documents littered with invisible formatting elements. These kinds of documents are a hassle to change, as you described, since even fixing a little typo can mess up the formatting of the whole document.
What really speaks for LaTeX is that you can't use it without reading the f***ing manual first.