Jared’s Blog

Regarding a recent vote, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment (basic net neutrality) and gave an amazing primer on how the Internet works: “It’s a series of tubes.” and “…an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday.” Story includes an mp3 link.

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I am always amazed when someone tells me they “I’m not computer literate.” How can you not be? How many years have you had to listen to people tell you that computers are the future and that you’ll be left behind if you don’t learn how to use one? How many jobs today require at least a basic understanding of computers and how to use one? How can you sit back and ignore the changing world around you?

Please follow the read more link and really do read this story because it’ll blow you away. I honestly can’t believe someone who has such a skewed and disconnected understanding of the Internet and computer networking is making such important decisions regarding it. I can understand a senator not having a full blown Computer Science degree, but I’d think they’d at least have an advisor on these types of issues. What’s scarier is that most of his political brethren have about the same level of understanding. Just like Hollywood and the music industry, they just don’t get technology.

Mr. Stevens’ lack of knowledge goes beyond just trying to market to my generation. It’s fine if a corporation can’t figure out MySpace or Facebook. So they lose out on that precious 18-30 market. This has to do with governing regulations. These laws are changing how things work on the Internet and have some major consequences not only for corporations, but also for just about everyone else. It doesn’t just affect the U.S. either. The Internet is more of a global community than any other and just like the real world, the U.S. has disproportionate control of it.

I am pleading. Really! Mr. Stevens, if you have any question in your mind about how the Internet works or what the ramifications of a particular law are, please just email me (that is if you can figure out how to). Hell, I’ll settle for a plain old snail mail letter. You know, it doesn’t even have to be me. Ask any dork! They’ll tell you how it should be. The entire world will be thankful. Maybe not knowingly, but trust me, they will.

“Pete’s Open Source Journal on Driver Heaven, said that it has been five months since products have been released, but ATI is still unable to supply Linux drivers for the products.”

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Thank you Pete! I’m glad this is making news. I realized this sad fact back a couple years ago when I was first getting into Linux. ATI just has crappy Linux drivers.

After reading the Digg discussion, I can see people just don’t really get it. Yes, Linux is 5% (or less depending on how you count) of the desktop market. But as Pete said. Linux users aren’t usually your average computer user. They’re the power users, server administrators, network administrators, etc. They may only be 5% of desktop users, but they’re arguably the most important and have a larger sphere of influence when it comes to purchasing decisions.

Think about it. Say I’m an IT manager at a company and we just got the budget to buy new laptops for our department. Yay! Chances are, we’re going to use Linux somewhere in our company and while Windows to Linux connectivity isn’t that bad, Linux to Linux is still better. What laptop am I going to choose, the ATI one or the nVidia one? Unless I get a screaming deal on something else, probably nVidia. You might say well that’s just an example. But I know
I saw the arguement that since Linux doesn’t run any CAD or 3D games, ATI doesn’t need to care. It doesn’t matter that I wouldn’t be running any 3D apps in this type of setting because ATI’s current Linux drivers don’t support nonstandard resolutions. Most laptops today have widescreen panels with, you guessed it, non-standard resolutions.

Think about this from a developers standpoint. Would I develop an app or a game for Linux knowing full well all my ATI users are going to have sub-par performance? No way! Of course some do, thankfully (Unreal Tournament, I’m looking at you).
This goes beyond just supporting Linux gaming though. What’s holding people back from converting to Linux completely? Software/Drivers is #1. People want their games and office and productivity and they really don’t care what OS it runs on, just that they can use it. It’s the same as TV shows. People don’t care what network they’re on, they just want to watch their shows. If ATI offered a decent Linux driver, that’s one less hurdle people have to overcome. nVidia somehow does it and does it well, why can’t ATI? Pete mentions in his article that if they cared, they could even make Linux drivers a bragging point.

I hope this article and bloggers like myself light a fire under ATI’s butt because I think they are just as capable of making a Linux driver as nVidia is. And it’s just one more piece of the Linux desktop puzzle.

An article deconstructing John C. Dvorak’s recent article speculating that Apple will drop OSX.

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Yes I’m going to open that can of worms. If you’re unfamiliar with what’s going on here. John C. Dvorak posted an article saying how Apple would dump OS X and switch to Windows and proceeded to give a number of arguments for this bold statement. Of course everyone under the sun said “No way! Dvorak is nuts!”

And rightfully so. He really doesn’t make a very compelling arguement. His #1 reason? Adobe is dragging their feet on porting Photoshop. Come on! Photoshop is a huge application and porting it to a universal binary is going to be quite the task. A large part of his justification also has to do with the ’switch’ campaign. It’s not effective, iPod’s aren’t bait enough to switch, etc. It just doesn’t add up and some things are almost unrelated. So what if iPod’s don’t use firewire any more! They obviously see something in USB (like not having to worry about two different connectors for different platforms).
Now. Where do I stand? I’m still firmly in the OS X camp on this. OS X is Apple’s thing. It makes a Mac a Mac. Without it, it’s just a cool looking, high priced PC. And given Apple’s Think Different motto, they aren’t about to go around using the same OS as everyone else.

What I can see happening is Windows being able to be run on the new Macs uninhibited. Currently, Microsoft doesn’t care what other operating systems you run on your computer. Mac OS X shouldn’t either and Apple has said publicly since the Intel conversion started that they won’t prohibit this.

Worst case scenario: The user buys Apple hardware (including OS X), wipes hard drive of OS X, and throws Windows on it. Apple doesn’t care because it’s already made it’s dime. Windows doesn’t care because it looks like any other PC to it. Microsoft should be happy because, hey, that’s another copy of Windows sold.

After Joel Spolsky’s famous rant about how Java isn’t hard enough to teach computer science, here’s a fresh idea about the best teaching language.

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I was immediately attracted to these two articles because, you guessed it, I’m a dork. Not only that, but they hit close to home. I was brought up in the Computer Science world using primarily Java. If for some reason you didn’t read both articles, that’s OK. The gist was that Java isn’t a hard enough language to weed out average programmers from great ones. The original Spolsky article says that unless students are able to wrap their head around poiners and recursion, they’re maybe not fit for the CS field.

As I said, this hit close to home and also threw in an insult. Sort of. I say that because I didn’t really feel insulted after reading the article. I found myself agreeing more with it than anything.

At St. John’s, the first few courses do teach machine code and assembler. This is a good thing, according to Doug Ross’ article. Therefore, I don’t feel totally insulted. Thinking back to my college programming days, I can remember struggling through machine code and assembler and also pointers and recursion, but being a CS TA, I got to revisit the material often enough. In the end, I felt more confident with the concepts. The same goes for Java. As I was taking higher level programming courses, I was TA’ing the intro to Java classes. The review I got from that job was priceless.

I’ve said this before. I went to school and now work with or know many CS or computer people who can only tolerate so much. They say they spend hours upon hours on a computer at work and don’t feel like using one at home. Bah! That’s not a real computer dork. Now granted, I’m not programming all day at work (though I do sneak some in), so I can’t speak for those who do. But I know that someone who can and enjoys spending much of their time on the computer can only benefit from the time.

Now was I lazy in college? Yep, probably about as much as possible! Do I feel lazy for learning Java? Somewhat. I always saw C/C++ as a more useful and widely used language whereas Java made me feel like I was wearing some sort of training wheels. The big question is, do I feel like I’m one of the mediocre programmers or one of the above average ones? On one hand, I feel the dedication I have to computing says a lot. Then again, I haven’t done a whole lot of real world programming on what I’d call “mission critical” code. Yet I find many of my peers turning to me for help, so maybe I shouldn’t short change myself so much.

This is the step by step account of what led to the Chappelle show being canceled… this is the truth man!!!

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What is it about conspiracy theories that I like so much? I’ve never really analyzed why. Part of it might be something to do with my general dislike of authority. Maybe it’s just part of my inner girl showing how much it likes gossip. I don’t know. For whatever reason, I like them.

I found this while browsing the Interweb and it’s easy to install.

Are you bored of your current wordpress admin? Well, suffer no more with this nifty plugin. Steve Smith has elevate our visual pain by creating a plugin coded named “Tiger Admin” that helps to change the design or look and feel of the Wordpress admin page.

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