[geeks] Ubuntu partition on Bootcamp Mac?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2007, Jon Gilbert wrote:

> <<facepalm>> So I guess, once again, you're the authority on what is
> helpful to people, what fixes things, and what is real?

Nope.  Like I said, it's my opinion, very-much how it's my opinion (and,
from the rest of this thead, possibly not mine alone) that something
that involves so much pretending is a game, or at least an amusement,
regardless of whether it has the trappings of health meters and such.

When I use a web browser, a newsreader, an email client, an LDAP query
frontend, or any of the other tools I use on a daily basis that use the
Internet as a medium, I don't pretend I'm something I'm not.  I don't
have an "avatar".  I don't pretend that a collection of polygons and
space on someone's server is a house.  I don't pretend that someone's
web site is a mall.

Second Life is a 2D projection of a 3D extension of the MUD/MUSE idea.
Possibly interesting, but still an amusement.

> Belittle SL if you want, but this is only the beginning of virtual
> reality.

Okay.

Well, when you find a way to push those polygons around to make
something that's beneficial to the world outside (the one we actually
live in and have real problems within), that'll be excellent.

Until then, it's a communications medium at best.  A high-bandwidth,
synchronous, communications medium.  That is, it does what the Internet
was designed to do initially, but while losing two of the primary
properties that made it work so well.

> It's not painful to my pride that somebody out there does thinks of 
> my part-time computer programming job as a "game."

You have an interesting way of proving that point.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "When they turn the pages of history, when these
Elgin, TX        (   days have passed long ago, will they read of us
USA               )  with sadness for the seeds that we let grow?
-                (               --Neil Peart, "A Farewell to Kings"