It's easy to find people who have unsecured wireless. Those cheap routers don't keep detailed log information about who is connecting to them. It's a law enforcement nightmare and I'm surprised that the FBI hasn't gotten very gungho about punishing people for not securing wireless connections. We're reaching a point where it can be all but impossible to determine whether or not the person is guilty of a crime until the humiliating arrest and prosecution. In some cases it's trojans, others it could be open wireless. Law enforcement still hasn't grasped the delicacy of the situation. You can tell from their tactics. If they did, they'd understand how easy it is today for computers to be hijacked such that there is no way to plausibly determine prima facie who really is doing it, even if they have the IP address it seems to be coming from.
Is someone who is willing to say it like it is. Can you imagine someone standing up soberly, calmly in a Senate hearing and saying, "with all due respect, Senator Clinton (or Senator Lieberman), the majority of customers of the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 are 17 or older. This is not about 'the children,' but about legislative overreach into an area that is demonstrably dominated by adults. Even where there are issues with children, this is not a fault of our members. We provide parents with a painstakingly thorough breakdown of every possibly offensive aspect of each game we vouch for. If they fail to take advantage of the information that we not only provide to them, but provide in a convenient, easily seen location on the packaging material of every game we vouch for, that is a failure of the parents."
I guarandamntee you, that it would send shockwaves through the media. Someone who is willing to stand up for their principles and call it as it is would get a lot of publicity that might force some honest discussion.
Just look at J2EE, EJB in particular. For many clients, it'd be cheaper to just write your own custom remote objects system using RMI. Cheaper and a lot easier too. "Enterprise" anything is typically very complicated and poorly documented. It's sad to see how bureaucratic it's become, but a lot of these things are, I think, complicated just to make work for people like consultants. I look at half the stuff that I have to work with, and it's far more complicated to get these huge, unwieldy apps to work together than to write most of the code.
By now I think the Attorney General's comments on Habeus Corpus have been widely read, and remember, this guy was a member of the Texas Supreme Court. Here is another example of the lawyers and judges basically saying that the basic meaning of a phrase does not mean anything. The real problem in these cases and so many like them is that we have allowed our legal profession to become filled with addle-brained sophists who can make the word "is" mean "very well might be in theory" instead of what everyone knows it means.
The more I have looked at the DMCA, the less evil it strikes me. The real evil is how it is applied, which is why it needs to be revisited. It probably just needs clarification.
Offer them up as free gifts for giving $1 to the Salvation Army.
Look at a PS3 game with slight interest, get one free.
Buy a Wii or XBox 360, get a PS3 for free.
Ever heard of RICO? How about how Gonzalez recently asserted that there is no right to Habeus Corpus in the US Constitution, only a provision that says it cannot be taken away except in some cases. Lawyers and their ilk frequently abuse legal language to make it mean something it doesn't, using the most hyper-legalistic explanations they can. Any law that can be abused, will be abused. Hell, the DOJ even had seminars for a while on how to use the USA PATRIOT Act against non-terrorists.
F$%^ you, you idiots who can't be bothered to learn from history.
A final movie to finish off the series would be a great move. 2-2.5 hours of non-stop sci fi action, that finally ends with the Ori facing defeat. I mean, after this point, there's no returning to the story. It's over, all conceivable bad guys that could be a threat are dead. Even the wraith are finished as they'd be hopelessly outgunned technologically by a race far more willing to wipe them out. The second one just reminds me of a last ditch effort to revive some of the time traveling storylines from the series. Bad, bad move. It'll be at best anti-climactic at that point.
It should depend on how you do it, and why you do it. If you do it with good faith intentions, it should be considered a good samaritan work. If they have not touched it after a while, you should be able to reveal its existence.
Those of us with blogs that have open comments and open trackbacks have an inherent openness to "presenting the other side." If you want to disagree, go post it in the comments. Everyone will see it. While "fairness doctrine" is morally despicable, let's face it. The ones who stand to lose the most are the talking heads who don't like the idea of having an open forum where they might be shown up.
Why is it that we have groups like CAIR and many others with known links to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah operating freely? Because few of the "anti-terrorists" really care about security. We have a situation with funding Islamic development and education in America with Saudi Wahabi oil money that is akin to allowing the KGB to openly recruit domestic operatives during the height of the Cold War--but you never hear a damn thing from democrats or republicans at high enough levels to do anything. It's all because... surprise, surprise... these people are invariably too stupid to understand the issue or too corrupt to care.
What blows my mind is that true subversives are allowed to operate freely. Groups like CAIR who have openly stated that their goal is to end constitutional government and replace it with Sharia are even courted. They are FUCKING SUBVERSIVES, not legitimate dissidents. Their goal is to subvert American government and end it as it currently exists. *Cue handwringing about McCarthyism, despite the fact that one of my relatives was actually on the blacklist...*
All I can say is, how does Sega's revenge for what you did to the Dreamcast feel? This time, two much better consoles have firmly kicked Sony where it hurts. We'll know that Sony is finally done for when Final Fantasy XIII is cross-platform.
Some of his past foibles for those that may not have followed his illustrious career as the Prime Minister who has turned Britain into a nanny state with a big, middle class-friendly smile. Well, I should be careful by qualifying that by saying it depends on how you look at it. Europeans may be wont to think that America is full of gun violence, that it's all like the Old West, but I go "HOLY SHIT!" when I read some of the stories that come out of Britain under Blair with yobs and how the police deal with them. I've lived my entire life in the South, in small towns and even the worst I have seen of police here pales in comparison to how much the British police seem to side with criminals against law-abiding citizens. I gotta be honest, I'd feel safer walking through any working class town in the South than the equivalent in Britain. Between violent criminals and politically correct, criminal-loving, politicized police, Tony Blair has done a lot from what I've seen in the media to totally fuck up Britain.
The XBox 360 is a much, much better system already than the XBox ever was in terms of game library. Gears of War, 99 Nights, Quake 4, Enchanted Arms, Phantasy Star Online, Dead Rising and with games like Halo 3 and Lost Planet on the horizon for 2007, Sony faces a much tougher challenge. If Microsoft has already hit 10,000,000 units sold and is still climbing, as I suspect they are, it's probably only a matter of time before Square-Enix gets antsy and starts to think about Final Fantasy 13 and other games appearing on the XBox 360 and Wii.
I would expect 2007 to be the year that Sony finally gets its ass handed to it by Microsoft and Nintendo starts to return to its old status as a force unto itself in game production.
The job market is a lot like demographics. When you cut the young out of the picture, you end up with a collapse over the horizon. Just as societies that have sub-replacement level birthrates get pummeled by other nations and immigrant groups that do in the long run, countries that cut off the supply of apprentice-level work to their young find that surprise, surprise, their young people never become older replacements for their field.
The problem is very complex. It's a cross between expensive regulation that makes Americans expensive, lack of foresight being called an asset by many business people and just general lack of concern about the future.
One day America will look around and say, there's so much opportunity for those that know where to go, but why aren't Americans filling these jobs? Then the displaced CS, EE, hard sciences, etc. students can say "you fuckers brought it on yourselves."
There is also a realpolitik aspect of it that should scare the hell out of our leadership. Capitalists of all stripes love to harp on human rationality, but humans are **rationalizing** not **rational** beings. Nations go to war at times for completely idiotic, abundantly obviously suicidal reasons. Witness Gulf War I and Iraq. Who actually thought that Iraq wasn't going to get pummeled into oblivion militarily? Yet they did it anyway!
See, the thing is, we might not always be allies with India, Pakistan, Taiwan, etc. We might actually end up at war with them in the future. It's slim, but who knows. The people who poo poo these concerns need to face up to the facts of history which is that nations have no permanent allies, only interests. One day, we may find that all of this regulation cost-imposed outsourcing has put America in dire threat of having not enough engineers to actually keep its economy strong, its military well-equipped, etc. We might find that some of these nations are also feeling stronger, and want to start doing things their way.
Why should anyone be entitled to all you can consume bandwidth for a miniscule amount each month? We aren't getting that with electricity, and I think most people here would go ballistic if there were a serious effort to allow anyone to buy unlimited electricity for $40/month. The abuse alone would make the electrical grid unstable to say the least.
You're asking Congress to start directly regulating technical policy with how the Internet works. Once they act, they very rarely do anything to fix their mistakes. You get it wrong now, it'll permanently fuck the American section of the Internet. Stick a fork in it, it'll be done because Congress will at best make another vague, ham-handed attempt to address a technical problem most of them couldn't ever understand.
This is why I can't stand the pre-emptive regulatory arguments. There are other alternatives, such as putting pressure on ISPs that arbitrarily block access. Get a bunch of popular websites to block all of their customers. Get Google and MSN to display blacked out pages to their users. Shut off MySpace, block all outgoing email and IM protocol ports from them. Basically go two steps away from being a brownshirt on them in the private sphere until they knock it off.
This is the same Congress that puts people on anti-terror committees who think that Shiite is probably a misspelling of shit. Do you really trust them to care enough to get it right?
If you have an even number of normal DVD players being sold for both formats, but the PS3 does end up selling pretty well, you will end up with the Blu-Ray camp having a much larger installed base than HD-DVD. Personally, I'd be inclined to go for the $200 HD-DVD player for the XBox 360, but I could see the PS3 being the tipping point. In fact, that will probably be the only thing that really pushes Blu-Ray ahead.
Were Java developers any better off until the recent open sourcing of Java? Not really. Neither were most independent developers. When you do that work, you are tying part of your future to another company's good will. That's all there is to it.
I had a 770 for a little while, but it was just too slow and unstable to really enjoy. When it wasn't crashing, it was often too slow to do anything really cool with besides surfing the web. Even that was pretty slow. I hope for the sake of the N800 that it has really addressed a lot of that because it would make for a killer gadget for a lot of people. In fact, if they have addressed most of those issues, I might get one.
What I am curious about is the processors in some of the PocketPC handhelds like the Axim are pretty powerful. Why didn't they go for similar hardware specs in the first place with the 770? With those, they might have been able to get embedded Qt instead of Gtk.
The more I think it is an almost useless academic exercise. Hear me out on this before flaming me. The hardware is severely under-powered; it cannot be reasonably used for most modern experimenting with computers. The software is built with a user interface that borrows very, very little from existing interfaces on everything from UNIX to Windows to BeOS to MacOS X. Let's say that kids want to learn how to write software for this platform. Will the tools available be even comparable to what they would expect with any "real environment?"
What I don't get, and have never seen a concrete explanation for, is how this will actually help developing countries' classrooms. They've made nebulous, feel-good comments about "kids exploring" and other crap like that. Right. What could they be "exploring" that $100 of school supplies for books, pen and paper couldn't handle? Looking back on my on K-12 experience in some halfway decent public schools in the US, I can think of precious few things that a computer would have been necessary to really help with. Even in high school, we needed subject-specific science supplies more than computers.
This policy is one of the few things, in my libertarian-leaning mind, that Bill Clinton got very right. There needs to be give and take on both sides. The public needs to respect the need for state secrecy on certain issues, and the state needs to bring everything it can to the public when the problem has been fixed. The only exception that to me is valid would be one that could really cause a war or that would get a foreign contact of the US Government or their friends and family killed.
As for the video, again I'd blame Ubuntu, it is one of the slowest distros I've used.
I've only used fairly mainstream ones, but it's the fastest one short of Gentoo that I've used. Gentoo was the fastest only because I chose the painful option of compiling everything from source. Of all the major ones I've tried, Ubuntu was about tied for the fastest. Which is scary considering how slow some of them can be compared to a normal installation of Windows XP on the same hardware.
I gave Ubuntu 6 a shot as my exclusive desktop for about a month and a half, but switched back to Windows XP Home a day or two ago for a variety of reasons, all of them desktop related.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo. 2) A lot of software I as a.NET hobbyist like is simply not there. 3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE. 4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux. 5) Windows has far more good software options.
For me the final straw was when I tried playing the high def trailer of Halo 3 in VLC on Linux, and it sucked. Choppy as hell. MPlayer handled it better, but then it was using a minimal GUI and actual Windows codecs. VLC on Windows can handle that stuff with no problem on the same machine.
It's a light weight contender at this point. I would recommend it to geek and nerd friends who will understand its limitations, but not a normal user who uses their machine for anything other than things like office functions and web browsing.
Work for a company that rewards effort with recognition, money and benefits. People have this habit of not caring unless either they get recognition/are engaged or have a fire under their ass like a spouse and child to support. When I was in college, I was one of the worst procrastinators in my CS classes half the time, but in classes where I could work on my own projects for class credit and recognition, I would put in as one person at least as many hours as an entire three to four person team. Reward people who work, punish those who don't, and show off cool stuff. That tends to motivate people.
on video games. She and her family won't buy a new console for at least the first six months that it's out because they want to see what actually comes out for it, what others think, how many bugs it has, etc. I'm not surprised in the least now because the PS3 is very expensive, said to be rushed in a number of areas, and well, wasn't quite worth the hype.
As a former Dreamcast fan, I'm not surprised. Sony's hype engine is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can really crush a poorly marketed, but good console. On the other, it set a bar that was ridiculous for their engineers to try to achieve.
People are starting to wise up to Sony and realize that they are great at hyping stuff that ends up being no better than their competition's products that happen to be significantly cheaper. They probably haven't even figured out why it is that Apple has kicked them squarely in the nuts in the digital music player market. I think their worst nightmare would be a dynamic duo of Apple and Nintendo building the One True Living Room Suite.
There are so many good games for XBox/XBox 360 and Playstation 2 that only hardcore gamers need to really go out and buy a PS3. I'm going back now and buying all of the games I missed when I was busy graduating from college last year and... there's no reason for a guy like me to buy a PS3 for at least a year and a half.
Could it be that most students today have no ability to critically think? When I took a Poli Sci class to see how the other half lived in college, I wasn't surprised. I was met by peers who were largely spoon-fed political propaganda and could regurgitate it, but couldn't actually rationally justify it. For me it was like clubbing baby seals because I have frequently subjected my own views to a level of introspection that they would never do.
Why doesn't this surprise me? Because the public schools don't teach a bloody thing anymore unless you live in a rich district. Even there, they generally teach only math or science very well. There are some very worthy things about the classical education model with its three phases which happen to correspond pretty closely with recently observed brain development in most people.
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It's easy to find people who have unsecured wireless. Those cheap routers don't keep detailed log information about who is connecting to them. It's a law enforcement nightmare and I'm surprised that the FBI hasn't gotten very gungho about punishing people for not securing wireless connections. We're reaching a point where it can be all but impossible to determine whether or not the person is guilty of a crime until the humiliating arrest and prosecution. In some cases it's trojans, others it could be open wireless. Law enforcement still hasn't grasped the delicacy of the situation. You can tell from their tactics. If they did, they'd understand how easy it is today for computers to be hijacked such that there is no way to plausibly determine prima facie who really is doing it, even if they have the IP address it seems to be coming from.
Is someone who is willing to say it like it is. Can you imagine someone standing up soberly, calmly in a Senate hearing and saying, "with all due respect, Senator Clinton (or Senator Lieberman), the majority of customers of the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 are 17 or older. This is not about 'the children,' but about legislative overreach into an area that is demonstrably dominated by adults. Even where there are issues with children, this is not a fault of our members. We provide parents with a painstakingly thorough breakdown of every possibly offensive aspect of each game we vouch for. If they fail to take advantage of the information that we not only provide to them, but provide in a convenient, easily seen location on the packaging material of every game we vouch for, that is a failure of the parents."
I guarandamntee you, that it would send shockwaves through the media. Someone who is willing to stand up for their principles and call it as it is would get a lot of publicity that might force some honest discussion.
Just look at J2EE, EJB in particular. For many clients, it'd be cheaper to just write your own custom remote objects system using RMI. Cheaper and a lot easier too. "Enterprise" anything is typically very complicated and poorly documented. It's sad to see how bureaucratic it's become, but a lot of these things are, I think, complicated just to make work for people like consultants. I look at half the stuff that I have to work with, and it's far more complicated to get these huge, unwieldy apps to work together than to write most of the code.
By now I think the Attorney General's comments on Habeus Corpus have been widely read, and remember, this guy was a member of the Texas Supreme Court. Here is another example of the lawyers and judges basically saying that the basic meaning of a phrase does not mean anything. The real problem in these cases and so many like them is that we have allowed our legal profession to become filled with addle-brained sophists who can make the word "is" mean "very well might be in theory" instead of what everyone knows it means.
The more I have looked at the DMCA, the less evil it strikes me. The real evil is how it is applied, which is why it needs to be revisited. It probably just needs clarification.
Offer them up as free gifts for giving $1 to the Salvation Army. Look at a PS3 game with slight interest, get one free. Buy a Wii or XBox 360, get a PS3 for free.
Ever heard of RICO? How about how Gonzalez recently asserted that there is no right to Habeus Corpus in the US Constitution, only a provision that says it cannot be taken away except in some cases. Lawyers and their ilk frequently abuse legal language to make it mean something it doesn't, using the most hyper-legalistic explanations they can. Any law that can be abused, will be abused. Hell, the DOJ even had seminars for a while on how to use the USA PATRIOT Act against non-terrorists.
F$%^ you, you idiots who can't be bothered to learn from history.
A final movie to finish off the series would be a great move. 2-2.5 hours of non-stop sci fi action, that finally ends with the Ori facing defeat. I mean, after this point, there's no returning to the story. It's over, all conceivable bad guys that could be a threat are dead. Even the wraith are finished as they'd be hopelessly outgunned technologically by a race far more willing to wipe them out. The second one just reminds me of a last ditch effort to revive some of the time traveling storylines from the series. Bad, bad move. It'll be at best anti-climactic at that point.
It should depend on how you do it, and why you do it. If you do it with good faith intentions, it should be considered a good samaritan work. If they have not touched it after a while, you should be able to reveal its existence.
Those of us with blogs that have open comments and open trackbacks have an inherent openness to "presenting the other side." If you want to disagree, go post it in the comments. Everyone will see it. While "fairness doctrine" is morally despicable, let's face it. The ones who stand to lose the most are the talking heads who don't like the idea of having an open forum where they might be shown up.
Why is it that we have groups like CAIR and many others with known links to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah operating freely? Because few of the "anti-terrorists" really care about security. We have a situation with funding Islamic development and education in America with Saudi Wahabi oil money that is akin to allowing the KGB to openly recruit domestic operatives during the height of the Cold War--but you never hear a damn thing from democrats or republicans at high enough levels to do anything. It's all because... surprise, surprise... these people are invariably too stupid to understand the issue or too corrupt to care.
What blows my mind is that true subversives are allowed to operate freely. Groups like CAIR who have openly stated that their goal is to end constitutional government and replace it with Sharia are even courted. They are FUCKING SUBVERSIVES, not legitimate dissidents. Their goal is to subvert American government and end it as it currently exists. *Cue handwringing about McCarthyism, despite the fact that one of my relatives was actually on the blacklist...*
All I can say is, how does Sega's revenge for what you did to the Dreamcast feel? This time, two much better consoles have firmly kicked Sony where it hurts. We'll know that Sony is finally done for when Final Fantasy XIII is cross-platform.
Some of his past foibles for those that may not have followed his illustrious career as the Prime Minister who has turned Britain into a nanny state with a big, middle class-friendly smile. Well, I should be careful by qualifying that by saying it depends on how you look at it. Europeans may be wont to think that America is full of gun violence, that it's all like the Old West, but I go "HOLY SHIT!" when I read some of the stories that come out of Britain under Blair with yobs and how the police deal with them. I've lived my entire life in the South, in small towns and even the worst I have seen of police here pales in comparison to how much the British police seem to side with criminals against law-abiding citizens. I gotta be honest, I'd feel safer walking through any working class town in the South than the equivalent in Britain. Between violent criminals and politically correct, criminal-loving, politicized police, Tony Blair has done a lot from what I've seen in the media to totally fuck up Britain.
The XBox 360 is a much, much better system already than the XBox ever was in terms of game library. Gears of War, 99 Nights, Quake 4, Enchanted Arms, Phantasy Star Online, Dead Rising and with games like Halo 3 and Lost Planet on the horizon for 2007, Sony faces a much tougher challenge. If Microsoft has already hit 10,000,000 units sold and is still climbing, as I suspect they are, it's probably only a matter of time before Square-Enix gets antsy and starts to think about Final Fantasy 13 and other games appearing on the XBox 360 and Wii.
I would expect 2007 to be the year that Sony finally gets its ass handed to it by Microsoft and Nintendo starts to return to its old status as a force unto itself in game production.
The job market is a lot like demographics. When you cut the young out of the picture, you end up with a collapse over the horizon. Just as societies that have sub-replacement level birthrates get pummeled by other nations and immigrant groups that do in the long run, countries that cut off the supply of apprentice-level work to their young find that surprise, surprise, their young people never become older replacements for their field.
The problem is very complex. It's a cross between expensive regulation that makes Americans expensive, lack of foresight being called an asset by many business people and just general lack of concern about the future.
One day America will look around and say, there's so much opportunity for those that know where to go, but why aren't Americans filling these jobs? Then the displaced CS, EE, hard sciences, etc. students can say "you fuckers brought it on yourselves."
There is also a realpolitik aspect of it that should scare the hell out of our leadership. Capitalists of all stripes love to harp on human rationality, but humans are **rationalizing** not **rational** beings. Nations go to war at times for completely idiotic, abundantly obviously suicidal reasons. Witness Gulf War I and Iraq. Who actually thought that Iraq wasn't going to get pummeled into oblivion militarily? Yet they did it anyway!
See, the thing is, we might not always be allies with India, Pakistan, Taiwan, etc. We might actually end up at war with them in the future. It's slim, but who knows. The people who poo poo these concerns need to face up to the facts of history which is that nations have no permanent allies, only interests. One day, we may find that all of this regulation cost-imposed outsourcing has put America in dire threat of having not enough engineers to actually keep its economy strong, its military well-equipped, etc. We might find that some of these nations are also feeling stronger, and want to start doing things their way.
Why should anyone be entitled to all you can consume bandwidth for a miniscule amount each month? We aren't getting that with electricity, and I think most people here would go ballistic if there were a serious effort to allow anyone to buy unlimited electricity for $40/month. The abuse alone would make the electrical grid unstable to say the least.
You're asking Congress to start directly regulating technical policy with how the Internet works. Once they act, they very rarely do anything to fix their mistakes. You get it wrong now, it'll permanently fuck the American section of the Internet. Stick a fork in it, it'll be done because Congress will at best make another vague, ham-handed attempt to address a technical problem most of them couldn't ever understand.
This is why I can't stand the pre-emptive regulatory arguments. There are other alternatives, such as putting pressure on ISPs that arbitrarily block access. Get a bunch of popular websites to block all of their customers. Get Google and MSN to display blacked out pages to their users. Shut off MySpace, block all outgoing email and IM protocol ports from them. Basically go two steps away from being a brownshirt on them in the private sphere until they knock it off.
This is the same Congress that puts people on anti-terror committees who think that Shiite is probably a misspelling of shit. Do you really trust them to care enough to get it right?
If you have an even number of normal DVD players being sold for both formats, but the PS3 does end up selling pretty well, you will end up with the Blu-Ray camp having a much larger installed base than HD-DVD. Personally, I'd be inclined to go for the $200 HD-DVD player for the XBox 360, but I could see the PS3 being the tipping point. In fact, that will probably be the only thing that really pushes Blu-Ray ahead.
Were Java developers any better off until the recent open sourcing of Java? Not really. Neither were most independent developers. When you do that work, you are tying part of your future to another company's good will. That's all there is to it.
I had a 770 for a little while, but it was just too slow and unstable to really enjoy. When it wasn't crashing, it was often too slow to do anything really cool with besides surfing the web. Even that was pretty slow. I hope for the sake of the N800 that it has really addressed a lot of that because it would make for a killer gadget for a lot of people. In fact, if they have addressed most of those issues, I might get one.
What I am curious about is the processors in some of the PocketPC handhelds like the Axim are pretty powerful. Why didn't they go for similar hardware specs in the first place with the 770? With those, they might have been able to get embedded Qt instead of Gtk.
The more I think it is an almost useless academic exercise. Hear me out on this before flaming me. The hardware is severely under-powered; it cannot be reasonably used for most modern experimenting with computers. The software is built with a user interface that borrows very, very little from existing interfaces on everything from UNIX to Windows to BeOS to MacOS X. Let's say that kids want to learn how to write software for this platform. Will the tools available be even comparable to what they would expect with any "real environment?"
What I don't get, and have never seen a concrete explanation for, is how this will actually help developing countries' classrooms. They've made nebulous, feel-good comments about "kids exploring" and other crap like that. Right. What could they be "exploring" that $100 of school supplies for books, pen and paper couldn't handle? Looking back on my on K-12 experience in some halfway decent public schools in the US, I can think of precious few things that a computer would have been necessary to really help with. Even in high school, we needed subject-specific science supplies more than computers.
This policy is one of the few things, in my libertarian-leaning mind, that Bill Clinton got very right. There needs to be give and take on both sides. The public needs to respect the need for state secrecy on certain issues, and the state needs to bring everything it can to the public when the problem has been fixed. The only exception that to me is valid would be one that could really cause a war or that would get a foreign contact of the US Government or their friends and family killed.
I've only used fairly mainstream ones, but it's the fastest one short of Gentoo that I've used. Gentoo was the fastest only because I chose the painful option of compiling everything from source. Of all the major ones I've tried, Ubuntu was about tied for the fastest. Which is scary considering how slow some of them can be compared to a normal installation of Windows XP on the same hardware.
I gave Ubuntu 6 a shot as my exclusive desktop for about a month and a half, but switched back to Windows XP Home a day or two ago for a variety of reasons, all of them desktop related.
.NET hobbyist like is simply not there.
1) I got sick to death of having to run CD burning software with sudo.
2) A lot of software I as a
3) I hate to say it, but Windows XP actually runs consistently faster under load on my laptop than Ubuntu. The GUI in particular is more responsive under load than GNOME or KDE.
4) Things like easily configuring wireless connections really do work out of the box better on Windows XP than they do in Linux.
5) Windows has far more good software options.
For me the final straw was when I tried playing the high def trailer of Halo 3 in VLC on Linux, and it sucked. Choppy as hell. MPlayer handled it better, but then it was using a minimal GUI and actual Windows codecs. VLC on Windows can handle that stuff with no problem on the same machine.
It's a light weight contender at this point. I would recommend it to geek and nerd friends who will understand its limitations, but not a normal user who uses their machine for anything other than things like office functions and web browsing.
Work for a company that rewards effort with recognition, money and benefits. People have this habit of not caring unless either they get recognition/are engaged or have a fire under their ass like a spouse and child to support. When I was in college, I was one of the worst procrastinators in my CS classes half the time, but in classes where I could work on my own projects for class credit and recognition, I would put in as one person at least as many hours as an entire three to four person team. Reward people who work, punish those who don't, and show off cool stuff. That tends to motivate people.
on video games. She and her family won't buy a new console for at least the first six months that it's out because they want to see what actually comes out for it, what others think, how many bugs it has, etc. I'm not surprised in the least now because the PS3 is very expensive, said to be rushed in a number of areas, and well, wasn't quite worth the hype.
As a former Dreamcast fan, I'm not surprised. Sony's hype engine is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it can really crush a poorly marketed, but good console. On the other, it set a bar that was ridiculous for their engineers to try to achieve.
People are starting to wise up to Sony and realize that they are great at hyping stuff that ends up being no better than their competition's products that happen to be significantly cheaper. They probably haven't even figured out why it is that Apple has kicked them squarely in the nuts in the digital music player market. I think their worst nightmare would be a dynamic duo of Apple and Nintendo building the One True Living Room Suite.
There are so many good games for XBox/XBox 360 and Playstation 2 that only hardcore gamers need to really go out and buy a PS3. I'm going back now and buying all of the games I missed when I was busy graduating from college last year and... there's no reason for a guy like me to buy a PS3 for at least a year and a half.
Could it be that most students today have no ability to critically think? When I took a Poli Sci class to see how the other half lived in college, I wasn't surprised. I was met by peers who were largely spoon-fed political propaganda and could regurgitate it, but couldn't actually rationally justify it. For me it was like clubbing baby seals because I have frequently subjected my own views to a level of introspection that they would never do.
Why doesn't this surprise me? Because the public schools don't teach a bloody thing anymore unless you live in a rich district. Even there, they generally teach only math or science very well. There are some very worthy things about the classical education model with its three phases which happen to correspond pretty closely with recently observed brain development in most people.