Courts have nothing to do with it--a court can only order him out if the landlord has asked the court to do so. What you should wonder at is why the UNIVERSITY took so long in getting him out of there.
Sounds like it's time to transition your support job to the next generation.
That would be a logical choice, and if it works out, then everybody is better off. But just because a kid is young and impressionable does not mean that he is willing to become the family tech guy.
I ended up playing with computers a lot at that age, but then, I was also brutally nearsighted, terrible at sports, and into videogames. My younger brothers have had the benefit of far better computers and so forth than I had at their age, but they also had totally different interests. They don't really care about the computer as the computer, and are perfectly happy to deal with the computer as a mysterious magic box.
You're lucky you were dealing with the military. Military types are used to order, discipline, and process. They have to be--that's how they're trained. Ordinary users in less hierarchical environments will be more difficult to manage.
Resolution isn't the whole story here, either--there's also dynamic range. Black and white film emulsions, properly exposed and processed, have extremely wide dynamic ranges. Big negatives show tones better. (If you want to be blown away, have a look at some of Edward Weston's photographic work, done on 8"x10" view cameras). NASA probably went with Hasselblads as a compromise: they needed something reasonably portable that could give useful dynamic range images, too. I
Users are not born with an innate sense of how to use a computer--they are trained. What passes for intuitiveness really means "creating an environment identical to that on which the user was initially trained."
That means aping Windows. There's only one flaw with this: if you ape Windows well enough, users will begin to transfer their already-learned behaviors. Thus, no matter how "intuitive" the interface, a Windows user will do Windows things. He will want MS Office. He will want Silverlight. He will want to know why BonziBuddy won't run, or why the game he bought won't install.
The only way Linux was going to win the desktop was to reach out and capture untrained, impressionable users-- school-age kids or retirees with no previous computer experience.
I never said that WINE is not important. What I am suggesting is that we are, in many cases, overselling WINE.
Ubuntu's main user base has generally been desktop users migrating from Windows. The level of technical skill in this population (I am including myself here, too) is, on average, not very high. Isolated new users see WINE as a machine to run *.exe--and are frustrated easily when they bump up against WINE's limitations.
Generally, I try to steer users to existing, Linux-compatible software first before breaking down and trying WINE to solve a specific need.
I seem to recall an old typographer's rule of thumb that a line of text should contain no more than 60 characters, including spaces. consequently, large folio volumes--like Gutenberg's 42-line Bible-- were printed in two columns, with hanging hyphens, and are surprisingly readable, despite the very dense Rhenish blackletter typeface.
I wonder how much of this research is language-dependent, though. In languages like German (and Latin) verbs often come at the end of a sentence. Line-breaking as shown on the site might make each word literally more legible, but it will also introduce a great deal more ambiguity and doubt grammatically.
On an unrelated note, the "poetic" form of the "new" formatting rules reminds me of the work of William Carlos Williams. Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa produced a series of poems that reformatted news articles and the like. And Jorge Luis Borges was also fond of re-formatting existing prose into poetical form (and, occasionally, condensing blocks of prose into dense "prose poems".)
WINE isn't even in a default Ubuntu install. With or without Dell, Ubuntu does not ship with WINE. It never has. I hope it never does.
One gripe I have with the community is that we tend to oversell WINE. Even though the WINE team have made a lot of progress lately, I still find WINE to be an imperfect solution, at best. Knowledgeable users know this. But the community insists on preaching WINE to every Windows convert. This is counterproductive.
Rabid WINE advocacy builds unreasonably high expectations of 100% compatibility. This is not yet possible, and it is debatable whether this will ever be possible. New users don't appreciate the difficulty in the project, though. All they know is that NIFTY.EXE won't run. They resent the fact that they've been given "Broken Windows," rather than a "real OS."
This is not to say that I'm against the WINE project at all. Quite the contrary: the compatibility layer gives the Linux community an extra tool. But I cringe every time I see people treating WINE as some sort of panacea, rather than using it correctly as a tool of last resort.
I wish they'd kept "monad" as the name. It was a deft tip of the hat to Leibniz's Monadologie, which held that monads were the windowless metaphysical atoms of perception itself.
Under what license(s) did Reznor/NIN release the sources? Who's to say the record company/IP rights holder won't come after you if you redistribute or even sell remixes?
Can Linux nerds everywhere stop overselling Beryl? Please? Because let's face it--it's a work in progress, and up until this moment it seems to have been more about useless desktop chrome--ooh, look BURNING WINDOWS, BITCHES!--than about a stable, usable working environment.
I'm a Linux user and I resent all the Beryl desktop ricers out there. New users who have no clue about how their system works should not be converted to a new OS because of a admittedly Beta-class desktop bling.
Beryl and its kind aren't bad per se. They just aren't ready for prime-time. I'd still direct new users to GNOME/Metacity or KDE/kwin.
Ubuntu users do, every day. Ubuntu is a Debian daughter, and its own success depends on the success of the Debian project.
My outsider's perspective on the Debian/Ubuntu relationship is this: Debian is a very large, very ambitious project. Its main goal is an entirely Free operating system; all other goals seem to be subordinate to that main goal. Ubuntu is interested in a reasonably up-to-date operating system for end-users, and focuses its development on a set of core packages for that purpose. Every six months, Ubuntu takes Debian, cleans it up for a new Ubuntu release, and then returns.
As far as I know, all the licenses are adhered to, and code is flowing upstream steadily (if not necessarily in the ways that upstream devs would prefer).
Debian is a gas giant: massive and stable in its orbit. Ubuntu is a comet: eccentric, periodic, and brilliant.
threat of a black mark on the review of anyone who fails to punch in properly to the time-tracking window on their desktops. "Retarted." says our disgruntled informant.
Guess we know why that monkey's punching a clock. Welcome to the real world, kids, where the boss wants you at work on time. I work a similarly menial job. What I want to know is what the hourly wage for clock-punching down at the Googleplex is, and whether it beats my current wage.
But everything, in the end, does pay for Google. More traffic to Google means more eyeballs for AdWords. Better features on Google means more persistent users who are dependent on Google services--and consequently exposed to AdWords.
As for the common Slashdot perception of Google as presumptive MSFT-slayer: can anyone show me concrete evidence that Google is trouncing MSFT in any market other than search? By "trounce," I don't mean "has cooler apps," or "generates more goodwill." I mean "is generating more revenue than" and "is eroding MSFT's marketshare in."
It's a question of how you think about your lines of supply and re-supply.
If your travels are neither very remote nor very strenuous, and/or you require instant feedback and/or reporting capability, then the sky is the limit on what you carry. If you're going to be fewer than nine hours away from reliable electric power at any given point, and have a reasonable expectation of gaining network connectivity, heck, carry whatever you want.
Of course, that might limit your total mobility. A laptop will be about 2 kilograms; with power brick, 3 kilograms. Add that to your camera and iPod, and then see where you're at. If you can live with the extra mass (several kilos !) and volume, by all means carry whatever. But remember also Ecclesiastes 5:12:
The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.
. Your very expensive gear is highly valuable, not only in itself but also for the data it contains. See how well you sleep knowing you're carrying a few kilobucks' worth of gear into a strange country/city.
If, however, your travels are more remote, more improvised--or they do not require instantaneous feedback to your home base (i.e., you are not a journalist filing daily or hourly dispatches)--you can dispense with all the electronics. I recommend a compact camera--35mm film. The Olympus Stylus Epic (Mju II in Europe/Asia) is probably your best bet here. No zoom, but excellent optics. For keeping notes, I recommend a pencil (or pen) and a reporters' notebook. For music--God gave you ears to hear and a voice to sing (or at least hum quietly to yourself as you walk).
Oh, this is slashdot. I have to put gadgets in the post. OK. If you must have electronic gadgets: a GSM mobile phone--nothing too current or too old. In many parts of the world, it will be possible to get cheap local prepaid SIM cards and battery charges. And if you can spare the space, maybe a small shortwave radio.
Things NOT to forget: your passport, your tickets, and that the world has been traveling for a LONG time before iPods were invented.
Slashdot Mirror
Courts have nothing to do with it--a court can only order him out if the landlord has asked the court to do so. What you should wonder at is why the UNIVERSITY took so long in getting him out of there.
That would be a logical choice, and if it works out, then everybody is better off. But just because a kid is young and impressionable does not mean that he is willing to become the family tech guy.
I ended up playing with computers a lot at that age, but then, I was also brutally nearsighted, terrible at sports, and into videogames. My younger brothers have had the benefit of far better computers and so forth than I had at their age, but they also had totally different interests. They don't really care about the computer as the computer, and are perfectly happy to deal with the computer as a mysterious magic box.
Honking geese fly south
Cacophonously, just like
Slashdot pedants' posts.
You're lucky you were dealing with the military. Military types are used to order, discipline, and process. They have to be--that's how they're trained. Ordinary users in less hierarchical environments will be more difficult to manage.
Resolution isn't the whole story here, either--there's also dynamic range. Black and white film emulsions, properly exposed and processed, have extremely wide dynamic ranges. Big negatives show tones better. (If you want to be blown away, have a look at some of Edward Weston's photographic work, done on 8"x10" view cameras). NASA probably went with Hasselblads as a compromise: they needed something reasonably portable that could give useful dynamic range images, too. I
Users are not born with an innate sense of how to use a computer--they are trained. What passes for intuitiveness really means "creating an environment identical to that on which the user was initially trained." That means aping Windows. There's only one flaw with this: if you ape Windows well enough, users will begin to transfer their already-learned behaviors. Thus, no matter how "intuitive" the interface, a Windows user will do Windows things. He will want MS Office. He will want Silverlight. He will want to know why BonziBuddy won't run, or why the game he bought won't install. The only way Linux was going to win the desktop was to reach out and capture untrained, impressionable users-- school-age kids or retirees with no previous computer experience.
I carry my eee 701 in a surplus gasmask bag: http://ouij.livejournal.com/252817.html Way more punk rock than any lame laptop case.
Wait, isn't that where Latveria is located?
I never said that WINE is not important. What I am suggesting is that we are, in many cases, overselling WINE.
Ubuntu's main user base has generally been desktop users migrating from Windows. The level of technical skill in this population (I am including myself here, too) is, on average, not very high. Isolated new users see WINE as a machine to run *.exe--and are frustrated easily when they bump up against WINE's limitations.
Generally, I try to steer users to existing, Linux-compatible software first before breaking down and trying WINE to solve a specific need.
I seem to recall an old typographer's rule of thumb that a line of text should contain no more than 60 characters, including spaces. consequently, large folio volumes--like Gutenberg's 42-line Bible-- were printed in two columns, with hanging hyphens, and are surprisingly readable, despite the very dense Rhenish blackletter typeface.
I wonder how much of this research is language-dependent, though. In languages like German (and Latin) verbs often come at the end of a sentence. Line-breaking as shown on the site might make each word literally more legible, but it will also introduce a great deal more ambiguity and doubt grammatically.
On an unrelated note, the "poetic" form of the "new" formatting rules reminds me of the work of William Carlos Williams. Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa produced a series of poems that reformatted news articles and the like. And Jorge Luis Borges was also fond of re-formatting existing prose into poetical form (and, occasionally, condensing blocks of prose into dense "prose poems".)
WINE isn't even in a default Ubuntu install. With or without Dell, Ubuntu does not ship with WINE. It never has. I hope it never does.
One gripe I have with the community is that we tend to oversell WINE. Even though the WINE team have made a lot of progress lately, I still find WINE to be an imperfect solution, at best. Knowledgeable users know this. But the community insists on preaching WINE to every Windows convert. This is counterproductive.
Rabid WINE advocacy builds unreasonably high expectations of 100% compatibility. This is not yet possible, and it is debatable whether this will ever be possible. New users don't appreciate the difficulty in the project, though. All they know is that NIFTY.EXE won't run. They resent the fact that they've been given "Broken Windows," rather than a "real OS."
This is not to say that I'm against the WINE project at all. Quite the contrary: the compatibility layer gives the Linux community an extra tool. But I cringe every time I see people treating WINE as some sort of panacea, rather than using it correctly as a tool of last resort.
I wish they'd kept "monad" as the name. It was a deft tip of the hat to Leibniz's Monadologie, which held that monads were the windowless metaphysical atoms of perception itself.
FREE BEER??
Under what license(s) did Reznor/NIN release the sources? Who's to say the record company/IP rights holder won't come after you if you redistribute or even sell remixes?
Can Linux nerds everywhere stop overselling Beryl? Please? Because let's face it--it's a work in progress, and up until this moment it seems to have been more about useless desktop chrome--ooh, look BURNING WINDOWS, BITCHES!--than about a stable, usable working environment.
I'm a Linux user and I resent all the Beryl desktop ricers out there. New users who have no clue about how their system works should not be converted to a new OS because of a admittedly Beta-class desktop bling.
Beryl and its kind aren't bad per se. They just aren't ready for prime-time. I'd still direct new users to GNOME/Metacity or KDE/kwin.
Alky is supposed to be released under the GNU LGPL. Where's the source code?
Ubuntu users do, every day. Ubuntu is a Debian daughter, and its own success depends on the success of the Debian project.
My outsider's perspective on the Debian/Ubuntu relationship is this: Debian is a very large, very ambitious project. Its main goal is an entirely Free operating system; all other goals seem to be subordinate to that main goal. Ubuntu is interested in a reasonably up-to-date operating system for end-users, and focuses its development on a set of core packages for that purpose. Every six months, Ubuntu takes Debian, cleans it up for a new Ubuntu release, and then returns.
As far as I know, all the licenses are adhered to, and code is flowing upstream steadily (if not necessarily in the ways that upstream devs would prefer).
Debian is a gas giant: massive and stable in its orbit. Ubuntu is a comet: eccentric, periodic, and brilliant.
The marketplace demands easy OSes so they can go about wasting their time with bad website UI. Duh.
Other vendors tried this during the First Great Internet Bubble. Where are they now?
. . . which is precisely why their jobs are outsourced to places in the world where people do work.
Guess we know why that monkey's punching a clock. Welcome to the real world, kids, where the boss wants you at work on time. I work a similarly menial job. What I want to know is what the hourly wage for clock-punching down at the Googleplex is, and whether it beats my current wage.
J-SOX is what they'll be calling that baseball team up in Boston if Daisuke Matsuzaka's "gyroball" has any success.
Your friends and loved ones are likewise "incapable of handling" the grace, humility, and poise that gaming seems to have given you.
But everything, in the end, does pay for Google. More traffic to Google means more eyeballs for AdWords. Better features on Google means more persistent users who are dependent on Google services--and consequently exposed to AdWords.
As for the common Slashdot perception of Google as presumptive MSFT-slayer: can anyone show me concrete evidence that Google is trouncing MSFT in any market other than search? By "trounce," I don't mean "has cooler apps," or "generates more goodwill." I mean "is generating more revenue than" and "is eroding MSFT's marketshare in."
It's a question of how you think about your lines of supply and re-supply.
If your travels are neither very remote nor very strenuous, and/or you require instant feedback and/or reporting capability, then the sky is the limit on what you carry. If you're going to be fewer than nine hours away from reliable electric power at any given point, and have a reasonable expectation of gaining network connectivity, heck, carry whatever you want.
Of course, that might limit your total mobility. A laptop will be about 2 kilograms; with power brick, 3 kilograms. Add that to your camera and iPod, and then see where you're at. If you can live with the extra mass (several kilos !) and volume, by all means carry whatever. But remember also Ecclesiastes 5:12:
. Your very expensive gear is highly valuable, not only in itself but also for the data it contains. See how well you sleep knowing you're carrying a few kilobucks' worth of gear into a strange country/city.If, however, your travels are more remote, more improvised--or they do not require instantaneous feedback to your home base (i.e., you are not a journalist filing daily or hourly dispatches)--you can dispense with all the electronics. I recommend a compact camera--35mm film. The Olympus Stylus Epic (Mju II in Europe/Asia) is probably your best bet here. No zoom, but excellent optics. For keeping notes, I recommend a pencil (or pen) and a reporters' notebook. For music--God gave you ears to hear and a voice to sing (or at least hum quietly to yourself as you walk).
Oh, this is slashdot. I have to put gadgets in the post. OK. If you must have electronic gadgets: a GSM mobile phone--nothing too current or too old. In many parts of the world, it will be possible to get cheap local prepaid SIM cards and battery charges. And if you can spare the space, maybe a small shortwave radio.
Things NOT to forget: your passport, your tickets, and that the world has been traveling for a LONG time before iPods were invented.