Showing headlines posted by helios

In the deepest, blackest parts of us, bad things exist... Things that we cannot touch, but we see...in a momentary flicker of peripheral vision...in the dark room that takes its only light from the moon...shadows that move...that take shape.

I don't think you understand the scope of what The HeliOS Project does. This is no longer a guy puttering around in his workshop, casually piecing computers together for one or two kids a week. This has evolved into a full scale operation that takes 5-12 requests a day for computers. We have a staff of myself and 4 Directors coordinating this effort. It stopped being small a while ago. We have School Teachers, Child Protective Services Counselors, City and School Bus Drivers, State Assistance Employees, Radio Station Managers, State and Government Union Members and private individuals from every walk of life, coming to us with the names of kids or families of kids who qualify for a HeliOS Project computer. 64 percent of those requested will be built and delivered.

Now Mepis doesn't present Network Manager on first boot. Warren has devised a pretty cool Network connection utility in Mepis so I followed the bread crumbs to the menu link and opened it. I configured the settings with a couple clicks and then started Network Manager. We were in like Flynn...pulling a fluctuating 61-73 percent signal strength for the next three hours. I couldn't buy a wireless signal from the Windows machine.

I just smiled at him. "No pal...YOU put a virus on your computer. And it's a trojan, an OLD trojan. A Power User should know the difference. If you had any kind of protection at all, it would have warned you. You might want to think about re-enabling system messages while you are at it. It would have told you something was altering your Registry. You were dumb enough to click on a program given to you by a complete stranger so welcome to the world of social engineering Dilbert."

This is quietly growing the base we need to insure the future isn't presented to our kids as a shrink wrapped set of chains. I have argued and presented the case for an organized advertising effort for the concept of Linux and Free Software for almost 5 years. That didn't do so well...too many politics and egos blocked the way. But this... This is working, and it's working better than I had ever imagined.

It was only once we threatened to make a YouTube video of these computers being put through a wood chipper in super slow motion, did someone respond. See, having one of your products brutally destroyed in protest of the lack of customer service isn't exactly good news for the stockholders. That would have been compounded when the video went on to explain that these computers would have went to disadvantaged students if they had worked.

We had brought pallets and pallet jack, shrink wrap and other assorted implements of destruction to get the job done. Note to self...21 inch CRT's do not stabilize well unboxed and on a pallet. Trying to put 8 monitors on a pallet and shrink wrapping them resulted in monitors trying desperately to escape the shrink wrap oh, I'd say about every 5 feet of forward transport. Once we did succeed in getting a pallet of them down the elevator, we found that the 12 degree lip on the liftgate was much too steep to get the pallet jack onto it...not without bumping it with an 18 inch head start. Which resulted in monitors wanting to impact upon the hot asphalt in the worst way. Bad idea.

Think for yourself for a change. Stop to think that upwards to 70 percent of the Internet runs on Linux. Is that obscure? If what you say were true, wouldn't the Internet be brought to its knees on a daily basis? If it were Microsoft servers running the show, it may very well be. The fact that Linux exists gives you a stable environment to dwell on the Internet. I'd be a bit more respectful and check my facts before I went leaving public record of my ignorance. What you say or do on the Internet never goes away. Carla should have posted those comments.

Linux Against Poverty is much more than an installfest. It is an effort between the Free Software Community in any given place and the greater community that holds it. Lynn Bender's people will now begin soliciting companies and corporations in the Austin area for physical donations. He has secured the swank and popular nightspot known as Union Park for both the actual event and the party afterwards. The Park will be full of volunteer Austin Geeks, ready to accept the incoming machines, triage them and place them into different staging areas. One of the brightest tech guys I know, Andy Krell from nFusion will be there in person to lend a hand.

Even everyday users find themselves in the file manager constantly. We need to make that experience as functional, efficient and user-friendly as possible. Right now I don't think it is. Why are we adding an extra step of adding scripts? "Oh, you mean I have to go out, find them, drag them home and put them in a file folder I can't see normally? I thought you told me that everything ELSE was gears and pulleys. Now I have them in my home file? And why are there "hidden" files in my home directory? What is there that I am not supposed to see?"

OK...I think we can put the old wive's tale to bed that Linux Users just don't spend money. 2DBoy will be the first to punch a pin in that bubble. What has been proven is that Linux users will shell out a few bucks for what they want. We have another non-believer in our midst. NetFlix.

Michelle Minkin, a friend of this effort and an all-around nice lady; suggested that we auction off the opportunity to destroy these computers. We were almost ready to start soliciting the community for creative ways to make them go BOOM and film it for YouTube consumption. You are right, it was a juvenile and silly idea. One I personally liked thank you very much. Sure it might have been silly. So was spending 9 hours of my life seeking the solution for a problem that took all of 1 minute to solve.

When I began triaging the machines to get them ready for our kids, I ran across two of the Acers that had what seemed to be a bios password on them. Not a problem, either flash the bios or pull the battery for some amount of time and problem solved. Uh...no. Not here. Not for these. What I ran into was something that I have ranted about in the past to the point where I almost bored myself. Trusted Computing.

Super Ubuntu, now referred to as Super OS, started with a simple need: having a Live CD that worked out-of-the-box. "A long time ago" I used Live CDs a lot (now I use mainly Live USBs) , and one thing that frustrated me was having to install flash and MP3 codecs on the Live CD everytime I needed those features! I also know MP3 and flash (and all that restricted/"non-free" stuff) are probably the first things many people install on their Ubuntu systems, so I decided to make their life easier and at the same time promote ubuntu and open-source software. But that only gives him a jumping off point for his real innovation.

It's convenient to blame the virus writers and anti virus software makers but ultimately it is your fault you get this cr@p on your machine. You are using a system that not only allows it...it fosters it. Let it be known that by reading further, you will learn that you have a choice in how you operate your computer. A free-as-in-cost and free-as-in-no-restrictions choice. You will no longer be able to identify yourself as a victim.

I don't write because I think what I have to say is important...I write to draw your comments. That being said, the Deja Vu article drew some notable comments. I wrote it to state that I had the same revelation the "Linux Sucks" author had recently, only several years before. One comment in particular stood out and I thought I would share it verbatim, as a feature article. Thank you Magice for sharing your knowledge and thoughts. I believe they are important.

He decided it was time to get a new desktop. Knowing that Dell had Linux options, he navigated to their website and began his shopping. No one relates an experience better than the person experiencing it, so let me present it straight from the source. What follows is a verbatim account of his experience with Dell Sales on the telephone. Things fairly well turned to poop from there.

On that venue, in the summer of 2005, I wrote an article that pissed thousands of people off. To date, that article posted the third-most comments we've ever received. Many of them were not positive. I lost friends over it. I made publicly some fairly controversial statements. I said that the current model of the GNU/Linux desktop system would flounder in obscurity until a permanent level of standardization was reached. And then I crossed the line.

The Title of this blog? It has nothing to do with us. Rather, it has everything to do with a group of people who care enough to wade through the human filth of child abuse and rescue those needing them long ago. They've humbled us with a call for our help.

I will tip my hat to the obvious influence of the powerful Microsoft Lobby. They have been there and gone, and their impact on State software purchases is obvious. I am curious to know if the dollar amounts we taxpayers spend on Microsoft software is available for public consumption. Again, Microsoft has lobbied you successfully. Entire nations, states and municipalities across the globe have switched to GNU/Linux and open source software, yet the US remains the last bastion of Microsoft strength.