The twentieth century was packed full of ugly trends and toxic ideologies, all of which got muted and diluted upon trying to emigrate to the states.
You mean "from the states". Ugly ideologies emigrate from the states. It's the pretty ones with cute butts that immigrate to the states, then they get all fed up on fast food and by the time they leave the states again, they're those obese tourists that take up two seats to themselves speak condescendingly to their hosts in irritatingly loud voices.
Ugly ideologies emigrate from the states, such as copyright totalitarianism.:-P
Australia does have a lot of sunshine. Solar-thermal power could work really well here. There is also an enourmous coastline. Australia also has a lot of educated people who are interested renewable energy and have taken their business overseas because of lack of government support, while the government props up the coal industry. The prime minister is now pushing nuclear energy, but if we start building these things today, they won't be ready for at least ten years. If we spent the same amount on renewables, we'd be in much better shape in ten years time.
The emissions trading is likely to be adopted here because the government is only now realising the economic benefits it could provide. Just that there is another market is already providing trading opportunities, but at the moment Australia is only trading in European emissions, not our own.
This measure in Australia is a bit of political stunt
The current government here has been vehemently opposed to any cuts in CO2 emissions for over ten years. In the past few months, since the drought and enormous fires have hit hard, people have got scared about climate change, and feeling powerless, people are getting angry at the government for their inaction. This government, much like the US administration, has used fear as the primary basis of their reelection strategy since they gained office.
It's fairly widely established that when people are scared, their ability to reason is reduced and they will try to stay with whatever feels safe irrespective of logic. Anger has the reverse effect, causing people to reject the status quo.
This move by the current government is an attempt to make people feel that they are doing something, to ease the anger at at their inaction. In the past few months, with an election looming this year, they have been falling over themselves to been seen to be managing water effectively, reduce carbon emissions and are even talking about adopting a carbon trading scheme.
Australia has a natural abundance of alternate energy sources and a highly educated and intelligent population. Last year, the same federal government canned the rebate on installing renewable energy in homes. In the anouncement of this new measure, the environment minister said that if the whole world adopts this measure it will offset more than Australia's annual CO2 emissions. If the government instead concentrated in earnest on renewable technology, and sold the technology to overseas markets, Australia could help reduce global emissions even more and encourage new local industries.
Given a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you get the idea.
This is the main reason for the cool reception from environmental groups
Modern CFLs do not oscillate at anything nearly as slow as 60Hz.
And in Australia, mains power is 240V@50Hz so the oscillations would look even worse.
We signed up to a "Green" energy package with our power company and we pay the same price for more expensive power and they gave us a box of 12 CFLs and an efficient shower head. I installed them all except 1 globe (we don't have enough screw sockets) and the light looks pretty good. No noticable flicker and a suprisingly pleasant colour temperature.
Can anyone here at/. come up with a different solution for them?
Ummm. They could come up with a mineral based fuel oil for horseless carriages. Someone is bound to mass produce those suckers, and then everyone will be dependant on the stuff.
No wait. The could get some addictive herb, pack it in paper tubes and sell them by the box to people so they can set the tubes on fire and inhale the smoke.
Or even better, they could develop treatments for diseases that have side effects that need other treatments which they could also produce. If they get the medical associations on side with a few well placed kick backs, they'll make a packet!
Or to put all that in a less sarcastic way, nobody needs large record companies except large record companies. So no, I cannot suggest a polite solution for them.
Re:How about some user interface?
on
New Blender Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've heard this critisism from people before, but usually because it is different to what they're used too rather than because it is actually bad.
I've sat and watched my brother, who is a professional 3D animator, using Max do do some relatively simple task with a path and was amazed at how long it took him. I'd been learning Blender and could accompish exactly the same result in at least a third of the time, and I'm a newb. I just happen to be uncorrupted by Max's UI.
He had tried Blender and found it difficult to use. I strongly recommended going through the tutorials, he took the time and now raves about how quick and easy it is to do complex tasks that used to take for ever.
I'd rate Blender up with Apache and Firefox as showcasing excellent OSS
Of course, this being/. I didn't read TFA but any country where if I stagger into a bar already drunk, they deny me service and throw me out physically and _they_ get charged for it is alright by me!
Using multiple package formats is great idea, IMO.
That is until you find that all the apps you used alien to install break when you do apt-get dist-upgrade.
So far I've found that every package I've used alien for has worked and at least last time I attempted an upgrade, I didn't do a dist-upgrade, I installed from an ISO to a different partition, but then I was going from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft;-)
The reason alien works for me so nicely might be because I avoid using it unless it seems the easiest path. In one example linuxsampler worked fine when I installed the RPM (for SuSE, IIRC) but the deb doesn't work for me at all and building from source is too much hassle. (I get very lazy sometimes)
Apart from the shit fight that was/is dist-upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, I avoid them for the sake of my wife. She's happier with the system if I install the new version in parallel and figure out what I need to do to get it as nice as possible before switching.
The single package system works well if the repositories have (almost) every version of every package ever written. I find that our home PC is a multi function thing that does graphics, desktop publishing, music production, 3D modelling and animation and development. So far I haven't been happy just leaving my options in the hands of the various repository mantainers. It's not that they don't do a stirling job, it's just I occasionally want do do something they didn't forsee or install a version of something they don't yet support. It's not that I can't get the software I want working, in fact the system is very functional and stable. I could be easier to manage though.
An alien like tool that could automagically figure out the dependency tree and maintain the local database well would be absolutely brilliant. Allowing me to run bleeding edge audio alongside the stable and supported graphics with the ease of a tool like Synaptic would make life a lot easier. I do think it's possible, but it's not easy and whether anyone would bother to do it for free is another matter and I think the commercial distros have a disincentive.
Why the fsck do some users insist on installing software outside their own distributions?
Scenario:
I want v1 of package x
I want v1.3 of package y
Umbootie Linux has v1 of x and v0.4b of y
Newbspire Linux has v0.7 ox x and v1.3 of y
No other distro has either version.
My options are simple. Bitch and moan about how Linux doesn't have the software I want, is too difficult to manage and is not ready for the desktop, or install packages from Newbspire on my Umbootie system.
Why the fsck do some geeks insist they know what is best for every user? It was stupid when a deaf Thomas Edison made all the decisions about the talent signed to his record company too.
Using multiple package formats is great idea, IMO. I use alien on Ubuntu for those situations where the software I want is only avaliable in RPM, but as it says in the summary, new users can be a bit confused by this and building from sources is often too much. I would like to see GUI tools get the smarts to automatically figure out dependencies across all formats, allowing all distros to become package agnostic. Perhaps Linspire's CNR interace would be a good candidate for this.
Also, the option to resolve dependencies and install as a statically linked blob would be awesome for legacy stuff. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to install an app, only to find that it relies on some obscure version of xyz.so and won't work, so I find the source for the old version of xyz, only to find it depends on some older version of abc.so. If I could get this xyz.so, etc without conflicting with that xyz.so, create a static binary and put it somewhere under/opt, I'd be happy. I know it's not elegant, and that it uses more storage, but as a work around for difficult to support stuff, it ain't so bad when storage is cheap. Some apps I always install as blobs anyway, such as blender.
BTW, from TFA: Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed
Slashdotted:-(
And as we saw in New Orleans so recently, even American civilization isn't as strong as we may think. The result will be major strife.
Well I saw a documentary about New Orleans that showed members of a family that drove from New York, I think, and managed to get members of their family out because they had an SUV. If they were driving a fucking Prius, they would have drowned. So if you pinko hippy liberals insist on destroying our God given freedom to drive our super sized asses around oversized vehicles, just cause you guys are sore at a Texan with oil connections for kicking that pervert Clinton out of the White House and restoring the church to it's rightful place ay the head of the state, the fuckin' country will fall apart.
If, on the other hand, we keep driving our big cars and spending big budgets on flying big planes to drop big bombs on countries with big oil and tiny defences to ensure supply, this country is destined for continued greatness!
De Niles, both de Blue and de White Niles, will only stop after de big lake Victoria dries up, and it's gonna haf to get a bit warmer for dat. But dat is in Africa and dis is in Peru, Sout America. Mod de parent -1 Offtopic.
AOL's openID's are all in AOL's namespace; DirtyTurtle278346812376.aol.com isn't going to prevent you having DirtyTurtle278346812376.myopenidserver.org.
Well it would stop me. I wouldn't want people confusing me with DirtyTurtle278346812376.aol.com, thank you very much.
you can't try to sell an e-book that, for example, also plays video games.
I would be happy to have sit and read while listening to music. If my music player/book interupted me for incoming phone calls, that would be an incredibly convenient bonus. It's actually something I've complained about before with my phone, that the music player is great, the ability to take calls is obviously a necessity, but the inability to read text without going cross eyed is a major headache, and I stand on the train to and from work, so laptops are pointless there. If I have documents I want to take home with me to read, I print them out.
That's the market for these things, IMHO. People who don't need fancy graphics and animation, but an easy on the eye, foldable and passive display technology integrated into mobile devices.
Posts like the parent, all that long winded scorn from a position where opinion is indisputable fact, tend to really bug me. That is until I read them in the voice of the fat guy from the comic store on The Simpsons. Try it. It works.
lower costs. better yields. new markets. stronger sales at a higher price. ask any farmer which pays better, selling to the canner or selling fresh.
So hang on, you're now supporting non-GM organic farming. Good for you!
We all know that internationally the demand for GM foods is lower than non GM, and the best prices are for organically produced food. Given the long term effects of using agricultaral chemicals on farmland, and the fact that most commercial GM crops are developed to be chemical tolerant encouraging more use of these chemicals, the hidden costs of GM crops are enourmous.
The financial damage was too insignificant? That's a rather strange reason to dismiss a case...
... but what an enlightened precedent it would make.
Reminds me of someone my mum knew who was caught growing marijuana in their backyard for personal use. He pleaded guilty and then kept appealing the sentence on the grounds that the punishment should not out weigh the crime, that what he did was a victimless crime, etc. What started out as a hefty jail sentence ended up in the Federal Court (Australia) with the judge basically offering him a small fine and asking if that was acceptable to him.
A similar precedent in IP law, where the punishment must be in proportion to the crime, would be wonderful.
Need we say more? The cards are stacked against MS. They back off, and then they go "soft" on copyright violations, but they are the big bullies if they do go ahead.
Microsoft didn't go soft on anyone. They weren't suing, it was a criminal matter (ie state vs. defendant) and whether or not Microsoft approved was almost irrelevant. Again. this had little if anything to do with Microsoft.
They did miss a golden opportunity for good PR by speaking out about it, but in the end the decision came down to the judge. It wasn't Microsoft's place to go soft or hard or otherwise.
Who are these donkeys who mod fantastically bad puns down just because they contain references to terms which may be politically sensitive or incorrect? I mean come on, that pun was beautifully apalling. Moderating it as troll seems to lack an understanding of what trolling is.
I have a good mind to suggest "Nigger Filter" just to desensitize idiots with mod points so next time they see posts like the parent, they won't get their jocks all knotty. Who needs karma anyway?
Hey Darl, et al, if you haven't dumped all your SCO stock by now, please hurry up. You're not going to get the price anywhere near where it was a couple of years ago and the whole thing is getting kind of old. Just wind up SCO, STFU and pray that someone doesn't figure the scam out and have you charged.
No you haven't. You've met wimmin who would be happier with severed penisis. If you have a penis and call them 'women' with that spelling, you may not have one for long.
Hang on, if the accounting app is changing platform, how do you know it's going to be a seemless upgrade for users. There may be some retraining required to get people used to the new interace. So there's some extra work regardless of which option is taken.
You suggested moving to XP. I'm ignoring any suggestion about moving to Vista as no business with any brains is going to migrate to that for at least a year and the very suggestion is absolutely fucking moronic. As far as XP goes, a few service packs down the line, it's a nice choice. It is, however, relatively expensive and it implies an upgrade to Vista later, which again is expensive.
It is possible that the cost of migrating the existing data to one of the systems suggested in this thread may be less than the cost of Windows licenses alone, and if you then consider that no matter which option you choose there will most likely be some retraining for staff, staying on Linux might in fact be cheaper and easier, even in the short term.
My take on the original question is that this is a request for info on what's available for Linux to help in assessing the options, rather than an invitation to be told to move to Windows. Microsoft already pays for people to give that advice, so you don't really need to do it for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't be a real American. That was just too humble.
You mean "from the states". Ugly ideologies emigrate from the states. It's the pretty ones with cute butts that immigrate to the states, then they get all fed up on fast food and by the time they leave the states again, they're those obese tourists that take up two seats to themselves speak condescendingly to their hosts in irritatingly loud voices.
Ugly ideologies emigrate from the states, such as copyright totalitarianism. :-P
Australia does have a lot of sunshine. Solar-thermal power could work really well here. There is also an enourmous coastline. Australia also has a lot of educated people who are interested renewable energy and have taken their business overseas because of lack of government support, while the government props up the coal industry. The prime minister is now pushing nuclear energy, but if we start building these things today, they won't be ready for at least ten years. If we spent the same amount on renewables, we'd be in much better shape in ten years time.
The emissions trading is likely to be adopted here because the government is only now realising the economic benefits it could provide. Just that there is another market is already providing trading opportunities, but at the moment Australia is only trading in European emissions, not our own.
This measure in Australia is a bit of political stunt
The current government here has been vehemently opposed to any cuts in CO2 emissions for over ten years. In the past few months, since the drought and enormous fires have hit hard, people have got scared about climate change, and feeling powerless, people are getting angry at the government for their inaction. This government, much like the US administration, has used fear as the primary basis of their reelection strategy since they gained office.
It's fairly widely established that when people are scared, their ability to reason is reduced and they will try to stay with whatever feels safe irrespective of logic. Anger has the reverse effect, causing people to reject the status quo.
This move by the current government is an attempt to make people feel that they are doing something, to ease the anger at at their inaction. In the past few months, with an election looming this year, they have been falling over themselves to been seen to be managing water effectively, reduce carbon emissions and are even talking about adopting a carbon trading scheme.
Australia has a natural abundance of alternate energy sources and a highly educated and intelligent population. Last year, the same federal government canned the rebate on installing renewable energy in homes. In the anouncement of this new measure, the environment minister said that if the whole world adopts this measure it will offset more than Australia's annual CO2 emissions. If the government instead concentrated in earnest on renewable technology, and sold the technology to overseas markets, Australia could help reduce global emissions even more and encourage new local industries.
Given a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you get the idea.
This is the main reason for the cool reception from environmental groups
And in Australia, mains power is 240V@50Hz so the oscillations would look even worse.
We signed up to a "Green" energy package with our power company and we pay the same price for more expensive power and they gave us a box of 12 CFLs and an efficient shower head. I installed them all except 1 globe (we don't have enough screw sockets) and the light looks pretty good. No noticable flicker and a suprisingly pleasant colour temperature.
It is most certainly 2007.
I hope you're not using Battlefield 1942 teach teach Firearms Safety and Marksmanship :-/
A 30 wheel road train makes a kick along tricycle or a scooter look intuitive and easy to learn in comparison.
Ummm. They could come up with a mineral based fuel oil for horseless carriages. Someone is bound to mass produce those suckers, and then everyone will be dependant on the stuff.
No wait. The could get some addictive herb, pack it in paper tubes and sell them by the box to people so they can set the tubes on fire and inhale the smoke.
Or even better, they could develop treatments for diseases that have side effects that need other treatments which they could also produce. If they get the medical associations on side with a few well placed kick backs, they'll make a packet!
Or to put all that in a less sarcastic way, nobody needs large record companies except large record companies. So no, I cannot suggest a polite solution for them.
I've heard this critisism from people before, but usually because it is different to what they're used too rather than because it is actually bad.
I've sat and watched my brother, who is a professional 3D animator, using Max do do some relatively simple task with a path and was amazed at how long it took him. I'd been learning Blender and could accompish exactly the same result in at least a third of the time, and I'm a newb. I just happen to be uncorrupted by Max's UI.
He had tried Blender and found it difficult to use. I strongly recommended going through the tutorials, he took the time and now raves about how quick and easy it is to do complex tasks that used to take for ever.
I'd rate Blender up with Apache and Firefox as showcasing excellent OSS
Of course, this being /. I didn't read TFA but any country where if I stagger into a bar already drunk, they deny me service and throw me out physically and _they_ get charged for it is alright by me!
So far I've found that every package I've used alien for has worked and at least last time I attempted an upgrade, I didn't do a dist-upgrade, I installed from an ISO to a different partition, but then I was going from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft ;-)
The reason alien works for me so nicely might be because I avoid using it unless it seems the easiest path. In one example linuxsampler worked fine when I installed the RPM (for SuSE, IIRC) but the deb doesn't work for me at all and building from source is too much hassle. (I get very lazy sometimes)
Apart from the shit fight that was/is dist-upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, I avoid them for the sake of my wife. She's happier with the system if I install the new version in parallel and figure out what I need to do to get it as nice as possible before switching.
The single package system works well if the repositories have (almost) every version of every package ever written. I find that our home PC is a multi function thing that does graphics, desktop publishing, music production, 3D modelling and animation and development. So far I haven't been happy just leaving my options in the hands of the various repository mantainers. It's not that they don't do a stirling job, it's just I occasionally want do do something they didn't forsee or install a version of something they don't yet support. It's not that I can't get the software I want working, in fact the system is very functional and stable. I could be easier to manage though.
An alien like tool that could automagically figure out the dependency tree and maintain the local database well would be absolutely brilliant. Allowing me to run bleeding edge audio alongside the stable and supported graphics with the ease of a tool like Synaptic would make life a lot easier. I do think it's possible, but it's not easy and whether anyone would bother to do it for free is another matter and I think the commercial distros have a disincentive.
Scenario:
I want v1 of package x
I want v1.3 of package y
Umbootie Linux has v1 of x and v0.4b of y
Newbspire Linux has v0.7 ox x and v1.3 of y
No other distro has either version.
My options are simple. Bitch and moan about how Linux doesn't have the software I want, is too difficult to manage and is not ready for the desktop, or install packages from Newbspire on my Umbootie system.
Why the fsck do some geeks insist they know what is best for every user? It was stupid when a deaf Thomas Edison made all the decisions about the talent signed to his record company too.
Using multiple package formats is great idea, IMO. I use alien on Ubuntu for those situations where the software I want is only avaliable in RPM, but as it says in the summary, new users can be a bit confused by this and building from sources is often too much. I would like to see GUI tools get the smarts to automatically figure out dependencies across all formats, allowing all distros to become package agnostic. Perhaps Linspire's CNR interace would be a good candidate for this.
Also, the option to resolve dependencies and install as a statically linked blob would be awesome for legacy stuff. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to install an app, only to find that it relies on some obscure version of xyz.so and won't work, so I find the source for the old version of xyz, only to find it depends on some older version of abc.so. If I could get this xyz.so, etc without conflicting with that xyz.so, create a static binary and put it somewhere under /opt, I'd be happy. I know it's not elegant, and that it uses more storage, but as a work around for difficult to support stuff, it ain't so bad when storage is cheap. Some apps I always install as blobs anyway, such as blender.
BTW, from TFA: Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed :-(
Slashdotted
Well I saw a documentary about New Orleans that showed members of a family that drove from New York, I think, and managed to get members of their family out because they had an SUV. If they were driving a fucking Prius, they would have drowned. So if you pinko hippy liberals insist on destroying our God given freedom to drive our super sized asses around oversized vehicles, just cause you guys are sore at a Texan with oil connections for kicking that pervert Clinton out of the White House and restoring the church to it's rightful place ay the head of the state, the fuckin' country will fall apart.
If, on the other hand, we keep driving our big cars and spending big budgets on flying big planes to drop big bombs on countries with big oil and tiny defences to ensure supply, this country is destined for continued greatness!
It's so simple, it's obvious
De Niles, both de Blue and de White Niles, will only stop after de big lake Victoria dries up, and it's gonna haf to get a bit warmer for dat. But dat is in Africa and dis is in Peru, Sout America. Mod de parent -1 Offtopic.
Well it would stop me. I wouldn't want people confusing me with DirtyTurtle278346812376.aol.com, thank you very much.
I would be happy to have sit and read while listening to music. If my music player/book interupted me for incoming phone calls, that would be an incredibly convenient bonus. It's actually something I've complained about before with my phone, that the music player is great, the ability to take calls is obviously a necessity, but the inability to read text without going cross eyed is a major headache, and I stand on the train to and from work, so laptops are pointless there. If I have documents I want to take home with me to read, I print them out.
That's the market for these things, IMHO. People who don't need fancy graphics and animation, but an easy on the eye, foldable and passive display technology integrated into mobile devices.
Posts like the parent, all that long winded scorn from a position where opinion is indisputable fact, tend to really bug me. That is until I read them in the voice of the fat guy from the comic store on The Simpsons. Try it. It works.
So hang on, you're now supporting non-GM organic farming. Good for you!
We all know that internationally the demand for GM foods is lower than non GM, and the best prices are for organically produced food. Given the long term effects of using agricultaral chemicals on farmland, and the fact that most commercial GM crops are developed to be chemical tolerant encouraging more use of these chemicals, the hidden costs of GM crops are enourmous.
... but what an enlightened precedent it would make.
Reminds me of someone my mum knew who was caught growing marijuana in their backyard for personal use. He pleaded guilty and then kept appealing the sentence on the grounds that the punishment should not out weigh the crime, that what he did was a victimless crime, etc. What started out as a hefty jail sentence ended up in the Federal Court (Australia) with the judge basically offering him a small fine and asking if that was acceptable to him.
A similar precedent in IP law, where the punishment must be in proportion to the crime, would be wonderful.
Microsoft didn't go soft on anyone. They weren't suing, it was a criminal matter (ie state vs. defendant) and whether or not Microsoft approved was almost irrelevant. Again. this had little if anything to do with Microsoft.
They did miss a golden opportunity for good PR by speaking out about it, but in the end the decision came down to the judge. It wasn't Microsoft's place to go soft or hard or otherwise.
Who are these donkeys who mod fantastically bad puns down just because they contain references to terms which may be politically sensitive or incorrect? I mean come on, that pun was beautifully apalling. Moderating it as troll seems to lack an understanding of what trolling is.
I have a good mind to suggest "Nigger Filter" just to desensitize idiots with mod points so next time they see posts like the parent, they won't get their jocks all knotty. Who needs karma anyway?
Hey Darl, et al, if you haven't dumped all your SCO stock by now, please hurry up. You're not going to get the price anywhere near where it was a couple of years ago and the whole thing is getting kind of old. Just wind up SCO, STFU and pray that someone doesn't figure the scam out and have you charged.
Seriously, that's enough.
No you haven't. You've met wimmin who would be happier with severed penisis. If you have a penis and call them 'women' with that spelling, you may not have one for long.
Hey, I'd mod you up if I had the points...Hang on, if the accounting app is changing platform, how do you know it's going to be a seemless upgrade for users. There may be some retraining required to get people used to the new interace. So there's some extra work regardless of which option is taken.
You suggested moving to XP. I'm ignoring any suggestion about moving to Vista as no business with any brains is going to migrate to that for at least a year and the very suggestion is absolutely fucking moronic. As far as XP goes, a few service packs down the line, it's a nice choice. It is, however, relatively expensive and it implies an upgrade to Vista later, which again is expensive.
It is possible that the cost of migrating the existing data to one of the systems suggested in this thread may be less than the cost of Windows licenses alone, and if you then consider that no matter which option you choose there will most likely be some retraining for staff, staying on Linux might in fact be cheaper and easier, even in the short term.
My take on the original question is that this is a request for info on what's available for Linux to help in assessing the options, rather than an invitation to be told to move to Windows. Microsoft already pays for people to give that advice, so you don't really need to do it for free.