The Future is Now

Here are a few of my favorite blogs.

This one in particular is called Shrinktalk.net and it's a blog about a psychologist. In each of his blogs he reveals a little bit of what it's like to be on the otherside of the table, whether it be his personal thoughts and feelings, to his personal struggles. It humanizes his plight (and hopefully all psychologists' out there) and shows that doctors, especially mental health practicioners are human and have plenty of problems of their own that they struggle with. Because I am a psychology major, I find his frank way of expressing his personal experiences enlightening, but above all it is an excellent insight into the lives of one of the less heard of professions in our nation.

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Also check out www.ubuntupoint.com, the ubuntu community blog.
In case you didn't know, Ubuntu is a FREE operating system powered by the linux kernel. While there is a lot of stigmatism surrounding linux, the Linux of today hardly resembles its ancestors 10 years ago.

I got into ubuntu around a year ago. Having grown disenchanted with Windows, I began looking for an alternative. At first, I was a little hesitant because of what I had heard about linux in general, but I quickly found those myths to be baseless and on the contrary, the exact opposite of what I found. The newest version of ubuntu out is 8.04 Hardy Heron. I won't bore you with the specifics, but pretty much in short: this particular release is built for security, stability, and ease of use. If you want, you can head to the site and download a Desktop CD (or have them ship one to you free of charge), and boot it up WITHOUT ANY CHANGES TO YOUR SYTEM. It's a livecd, which means that you can boot it up like a real operating system and play around with it (at the expense of decreased performance) and decide if you want to install it. The installation is actually much easier than any other installation I've ever had to use (XP, Vista, etc). Pretty much, you boot up the live cd, select install, and the whole thing finishes in under 25 minutes.

Despite what Microsoft would like you to believe, Ubuntu is in many ways, more advanced than it's competitors. Unlike Vista, Ubuntu does not ridiculous hardware specs and is infinitely faster. Graphically, it has the best of both worlds housing both MacOSX and Vista effects (and blazingly fast).

Here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lawkc3jH3ws
This was created 2 years ago... Compiz-fusion has evolved much since then.

And in case most of those people didn't know, MacOSX is actually built off a derivative of BSD (mac share similar code to BSD derivatives... not so far from linux)


Most importantly however-
"Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software --www.ubuntu.com

It's quite an interesting proposal-- Because F/OSS (Free / Open Source Software) is completely free, there are already a lot of people pushing for government / academic use, as well as deployment to third world developing countries. It's an unique blend of software and human ideology and I don't think its potential ends only with software. Applied on a global scale-- academics, government, corporations, etc. The level of transparency and freedom that this allows could transform humanity as we know it.


The future is now.


PS:

If any of you do decide to try out ubuntu, as a general word of caution-- be careful. Read up a little before you install it, and play around with the live cd. There are several alternatives (you don't actually have to install it to use it) so you have the luxury to pick and choose. For those who worry that their windows programs will no longer work with linux...
http://www.winehq.org/