It could power a theoretical cell phone. Or a theoretical electric nut cracker. But depending on gender, you might not want to carry that last one around in your theoretical pants pocket.
But what would they be able to use this for? They cannot use it for a phone, since Maxwell's Shoe Phone would be prior art and they would lose their patent.
And by the way, in deference to my age and my years of experience with these personal technologies, you may call me MISTER Smart.
A tablet computer by itself would only serve a few small niche markets. But a tablet computer with a few $50 docking stations with full size KVM, peripherals, etc, could be an awesome replacement for netbooks and laptops. Think full computer access at home and at work and best possible access in all other locations.
That would interest me. But right now I'm doing okay with my netbook for most tasks at home, the library, Starbucks, etc, and my Android phone when on the move and getting out the netbook would be awkward. My quadcore big ram supercali desktop computer now only sees use as a media player or when I'm messing about with graphics.
Can I pay them extra to not "upgrade" my desktop with weird unusable UI experiments?
Oh you silly thing, of course not.
But you could either stick with the Long Term Support releases on the three year upgrade cycle or even just not bother to upgrade once you have a release that suits your never changing needs.
As opposed to hospitals in the United States that used to be run by doctors but are now run by specialists in Hospital Administration. If you graph things out over the last 60 years, the rise of the role of Hospital Adminstrator parallels the rise of the USA health care crisis.
Gee, perhaps hospitals should not be run for profit; perhaps there should be some other goal for health care.
It does seem like Oracle has been gifted with the reverse Midas touch. Where everything it touches turns to shit.
Oracle could probably turn this around. A good way of starting would be to drop all current lawsuits, reduce its legal staff and their costs by about 80%, and turn its attention back to making and supporting software. But I do not think that Oracle is going to do that. Not under its current CEO.
Often those businesses with heavy reliance on Excel and Word macros have a scattering of secretaries and low level functionaries who basically set their own hours and pick and choose which tasks they will deign to take on while everyone looks the other way. Because each one of them is the only one who developed some pet MSO project that the department now depends on, and each one is the only one who can maintain the gawdawful sucker. IT might be willing to replace it with something that is properly designed and almost certainly not written as a pile of macros in an Office document, but that would mean that some PHB would have to admit to having given away effective control of daily operations to one of his minions.
I have been away from the scene for about a decade, and perhaps things have changed but I doubt it.
I would also guess that this misuse of office suite documents is fading away. Being replaced by HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP. That is the more sensible way of building and distributing interactive documents.
There are a lot of ways other than code development for contributing to a FOSS project.
What would be great is if the Danes would contribute the written end user procedures they need to develop anyway to the LO project, under a FOSS copyright license so that the procedures can be adopted and modified as needed by other LO users. Adding to a public how-to library would be a major way of contributing back to the LO community.
Bonus points if the Danes spend a little of what they have saved in licensing fees to edit their contributions to make them as generic as possible, and as easy as possible to adapt to other health care institutions, etc.
Is MSO's export to ODF any better than its export to HTML was, back at the turn of the century? For that matter, can today's MSO produce HTML that can be edited and maintained?
I cannot answer that since I moved all my document production to Star Office at the end of the last century, then OpenOffice, now LibreOffice. The experience of moving out of the Microsoft ecology into the realm of native ODF tools has been one of freedom, and most notably freedom from hidden constraints.
Microsoft has often released code whose sole purpose was to let them put some feature on a sales brochure, such as "Can export to HTML." That did not mean that every document from MSO could be successfully exported, nor did it mean than any document would be exported in a reasonable format. It simply meant that the sales rep who was talking to your PHB had been trained to demonstrate the feature, possibly with explicit instructions to avoid documents that contained certain features.
When dealing with Microsoft, one has to recognize that its goal has never been to produce quality products; its goal has always been to maximize its profits. That means there is no incentive to make things any better than they need to be to close the sale. This is especially true for features that might increase the risk of a customer escaping the Microsoft ecology.
If the pool is too small for effective anonymity, you simply make it bigger. That might not be a bad idea anyway.
Several small businesses that do not compete with each other can pool their peer review material without risking anything. Just to make it interesting, toss in some code from high quality FOSS work as well.
With any luck, the average and good programmers will begin to tweak their code to improve its scoring in the peer review process, while recognizing that the reviewer may not have a clue about the context of the code. That will foster code that is well documented and will be easy to maintain. If the comments contain phrases like "I would have preferred to implement this as a state machine, but the PHB running the show doesn't know squat about state machines and demanded it be done this way", then not only the peer reviewer but the poor sap who is assigned to maintain the code five years from now will understand why certain things were done.
My reading on this is that the Court has essentially said "It does not matter at the moment whether the teacher was right or wrong in their actions. What matters at the moment is that filing a lawsuit against the teacher is the wrong approach."
The plaintiffs should have filed suit against the school, not the teacher. That is why the teacher has immunity. It is school policies that dictate what a teacher may or may not say in classroom; it is the school policies that the plaintiffs should be challenging. Teachers need to be protected against nuisance suits concerning school policies.
Actually I think FOSS is one of the major indicators that a sea change is under way.
Companies that are heavily invested in FOSS appear to be emerging as leaders in the new economy. It takes the kinds of resources and organization that corporations can do best to manage a large successful FOSS project. Finding ways to pay for these needed services has been a bit slow, mostly due, I think, to incredible amount of FUD being thrown around by the "intellectual property" fanatics. Things are beginning to settle out with the increase in support contracts and subscriptions.
I expect to be paying a reasonable subscription fee for my uses of Ubuntu in a few short years. Exactly what shape that would be has yet to be determined, but I know that the cost would be comparable to the cost of electricity to run my desktop. And that I would not be paying for access to the software-- that would always be free-- but I would be paying for convenience features like automatic updates, compatibility-assured packages, and so on.
There are plenty of ways to do this kind of quality measurement and any competent management would be at least peripherally aware of these, know how to get more information about any of them, and be able to implement them. This is child's play with a product like code which can be directly inspected. Various forms of peer review, even very fancy double blind peer review systems, are easily constructed and managed with a few spreadsheets.
What management needs to know is fairly simple: who are their best 20% of coders, and who are their worst 20%. And within the bottom 20%, who are the jokers who not only write crappy code, but have shown through the way that they have participated in the peer review process that they do not know good code when they see it. Replace those few with new blood asap. Just doing that is well worth the cost of implementing the peer review process. (As a wag, the cost of implementing a double blind peer review system where each coder is required to do one review each month could increase direct coding costs by 5% per year, but it would decrease the much greater costs of debugging and patching production code by much more than that.)
Additional benefits a savvy company would think very hard about doing: token bonuses for those who are consistently in the Top Twenty, and some way to use the best of the best as consultants on any decisions that might impact the coders. Including changes in the cafeteria menu. Happy galley slaves will row your boat faster.
My background: Cobol, several business Basics, Pascal, a little 6502 Assembler, a lot of Perl (data mining and repurposing archival data for more than a decade). I have also managed to completely forget Fortran and awk. (And pretty much Cobol, too, for that matter).
My sense of where things are going: HTML 5 is going to require a lot of programmers who are really savvy in Javascript. Including its "advanced" features. The problem with learning Javascript is that of discerning good practice from the mounds of drivel that have been written about it. Javascript is THE language for front-end work in a cloud or client / server situation. You get to leverage all the stuff that is built into the browser. You also get to play with closures, prototypes (in place of classes), and anonymous objects, which offer several new ways of looking at problems.
On the server or cloud side, PHP is going to see an increasing amount of use. Its early versions had several intrinsic weaknesses but it has pretty much grown out of those.
There is a lot of hooey on this discussion, even for Slashdot.
Many cities now have the equivalent of Free Geek in Portland Oregon, a computer refurbishing and redistribution center. These places typically use volunteers to tear down incoming systems, test components, reassemble into outgoing systems that they can support for a couple of years, and then provide user training, user and software support, and hardware support to the end recipients of your charity.
You leave with the paperwork for the tax write off, and the comfort of knowing than none of your old data will survive the low level read/write tests that the storage devices are put through. You are not burdened with continuing support issues, user training issues, etc.
The recipients benefit from having tested machines of course, but more importantly from having a support system available on next-business-day basis that is completely familiar with the hardware and OS, even after a few years have gone by. The support typically involves training sessions and other aspects of user support (as well as hardware and software support).
These volunteer refurbishing centers typically use a Linux distro, and I believe that Ubuntu is currently the most used one. This is because of licensing of course, but it offers the end users several major benefits, such as access to the wealth of FOSS software available, easy security and maintenance patch handling, and easy upgrade paths.
If I understand the system correctly, this decision is a precedent that would be effectively binding on all similar cases in the Federal courts under this Circuit. It would be given strong weight in all other Federal courts, too. So there are benefits without going to SCOTUS.
That said, the defense could be raised that the precedent does not apply in any given case for one reason or another. So it is a deterrent to lawyers using the modern day equivalent of barratry, but it probably will not on its own stop the practice. Disbarring the lawyers involved in this case would be a much stronger deterrent, and perhaps the Bar Association they are members of will do that. If they are encouraged to do that. The Judge's decision is a strong argument that disbarment is the correct thing to do here.
As I understand it, the Federal courts, and I think all other courts in the USA, have no mechanism for disbarring a lawyer. That is an action of the various Bar Associations. Which might well happen to this lawyer, since it looks like there is a strong case for disbarment.
the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually.
Actually, the Internet is more like the shovel than the knife. Without the concept of the shovel, we would still be chasing bears out of their caves to make new housing. The lowly shovel that anybody can use changed our world. So too does the Internet.
This is on topic, since the changes in the way people relate to each other that are being brought about right now by the Internet are similar to the changes that happened between people when they started bringing their new shovels to their meetings. Instead of the usual bitching, whining and moaning about how once again none of the seedlings they had so carefully planted with their digging sticks were going to survive the drought, they were doing things like discussing the best route for an irrigation ditch. Shovels changed relationships; the Internet is changing relationships.
A chart of per capita changes over 50 years is a chart that is using an exponentially changing baseline: the population growth curve. If that graph is flat, it means that the change being charted is also exponential, with the same curve as the baseline.
A citation is needed here. Especially as parent post's view of Malthus' political posture is very different from what is generally presented in school resources (which generally do not speak about his beliefs at all).
What most people know about Malthus is that he was the first to point out the implications of a population that is growing exponentially while its resource base is expanding arithmetically. It is that pattern of exponential population growth leading to an inevitable crash when growth suddenly exceeds the carrying capacity of the ecosystem that I was referring to. Not Malthus' politicals and certainly not his religious views.
In short, economics is a dismal study. While so far technological advances have reset the slope of the line of increasing resources now and again, the curve of population growth will still hit that linear limit soon. And there seem to be no tricks left in the technology bag. Fusion power is always 25 years away; we cannot even replace the existing fission power plants quickly enough to tread water, let alone build new capacity; our only new hope in my life time has been cold fusion but that does not look like it is going to go anywhere.
I just do not have the blind faith in Science and Technology that some people have. I guess I am too much of a rationalist; my thinking is too tightly bound to the proven realities of this universe.
Did that calculation take into account the lag between when the population count increases and when those newly born reach full size?
IIRC, we passed the 6 billion milestone about 10 years ago, and we will pass the 7 billion milestone pretty soon now. Which means even if some agency imposes zero population growth on us tomorrow, there will still be a billion kids under 10 years old who are growing up and adding several billion kilos each year to the human biomass, for several more years.
You can only cheat Malthus for so long. Sooner or later, you run out of tricks to reset his inexorable calculations.
Common sense comes into this with population control and scaling back energy usage to a level that would be sustainable over the long term (like, say, 50 years).
However common sense is a very uncommon commodity.
Slashdot Mirror
It could power a theoretical cell phone. Or a theoretical electric nut cracker. But depending on gender, you might not want to carry that last one around in your theoretical pants pocket.
No pun here, sorry about that.
But what would they be able to use this for? They cannot use it for a phone, since Maxwell's Shoe Phone would be prior art and they would lose their patent.
And by the way, in deference to my age and my years of experience with these personal technologies, you may call me MISTER Smart.
A tablet computer by itself would only serve a few small niche markets. But a tablet computer with a few $50 docking stations with full size KVM, peripherals, etc, could be an awesome replacement for netbooks and laptops. Think full computer access at home and at work and best possible access in all other locations.
That would interest me. But right now I'm doing okay with my netbook for most tasks at home, the library, Starbucks, etc, and my Android phone when on the move and getting out the netbook would be awkward. My quadcore big ram supercali desktop computer now only sees use as a media player or when I'm messing about with graphics.
Can I pay them extra to not "upgrade" my desktop with weird unusable UI experiments?
Oh you silly thing, of course not.
But you could either stick with the Long Term Support releases on the three year upgrade cycle or even just not bother to upgrade once you have a release that suits your never changing needs.
As opposed to hospitals in the United States that used to be run by doctors but are now run by specialists in Hospital Administration. If you graph things out over the last 60 years, the rise of the role of Hospital Adminstrator parallels the rise of the USA health care crisis.
Gee, perhaps hospitals should not be run for profit; perhaps there should be some other goal for health care.
Just saying.
It does seem like Oracle has been gifted with the reverse Midas touch. Where everything it touches turns to shit.
Oracle could probably turn this around. A good way of starting would be to drop all current lawsuits, reduce its legal staff and their costs by about 80%, and turn its attention back to making and supporting software. But I do not think that Oracle is going to do that. Not under its current CEO.
Often those businesses with heavy reliance on Excel and Word macros have a scattering of secretaries and low level functionaries who basically set their own hours and pick and choose which tasks they will deign to take on while everyone looks the other way. Because each one of them is the only one who developed some pet MSO project that the department now depends on, and each one is the only one who can maintain the gawdawful sucker. IT might be willing to replace it with something that is properly designed and almost certainly not written as a pile of macros in an Office document, but that would mean that some PHB would have to admit to having given away effective control of daily operations to one of his minions.
I have been away from the scene for about a decade, and perhaps things have changed but I doubt it.
I would also guess that this misuse of office suite documents is fading away. Being replaced by HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP. That is the more sensible way of building and distributing interactive documents.
There are a lot of ways other than code development for contributing to a FOSS project.
What would be great is if the Danes would contribute the written end user procedures they need to develop anyway to the LO project, under a FOSS copyright license so that the procedures can be adopted and modified as needed by other LO users. Adding to a public how-to library would be a major way of contributing back to the LO community.
Bonus points if the Danes spend a little of what they have saved in licensing fees to edit their contributions to make them as generic as possible, and as easy as possible to adapt to other health care institutions, etc.
Is MSO's export to ODF any better than its export to HTML was, back at the turn of the century? For that matter, can today's MSO produce HTML that can be edited and maintained?
I cannot answer that since I moved all my document production to Star Office at the end of the last century, then OpenOffice, now LibreOffice. The experience of moving out of the Microsoft ecology into the realm of native ODF tools has been one of freedom, and most notably freedom from hidden constraints.
Microsoft has often released code whose sole purpose was to let them put some feature on a sales brochure, such as "Can export to HTML." That did not mean that every document from MSO could be successfully exported, nor did it mean than any document would be exported in a reasonable format. It simply meant that the sales rep who was talking to your PHB had been trained to demonstrate the feature, possibly with explicit instructions to avoid documents that contained certain features.
When dealing with Microsoft, one has to recognize that its goal has never been to produce quality products; its goal has always been to maximize its profits. That means there is no incentive to make things any better than they need to be to close the sale. This is especially true for features that might increase the risk of a customer escaping the Microsoft ecology.
If the pool is too small for effective anonymity, you simply make it bigger. That might not be a bad idea anyway.
Several small businesses that do not compete with each other can pool their peer review material without risking anything. Just to make it interesting, toss in some code from high quality FOSS work as well.
With any luck, the average and good programmers will begin to tweak their code to improve its scoring in the peer review process, while recognizing that the reviewer may not have a clue about the context of the code. That will foster code that is well documented and will be easy to maintain. If the comments contain phrases like "I would have preferred to implement this as a state machine, but the PHB running the show doesn't know squat about state machines and demanded it be done this way", then not only the peer reviewer but the poor sap who is assigned to maintain the code five years from now will understand why certain things were done.
My reading on this is that the Court has essentially said "It does not matter at the moment whether the teacher was right or wrong in their actions. What matters at the moment is that filing a lawsuit against the teacher is the wrong approach."
The plaintiffs should have filed suit against the school, not the teacher. That is why the teacher has immunity. It is school policies that dictate what a teacher may or may not say in classroom; it is the school policies that the plaintiffs should be challenging. Teachers need to be protected against nuisance suits concerning school policies.
Actually I think FOSS is one of the major indicators that a sea change is under way.
Companies that are heavily invested in FOSS appear to be emerging as leaders in the new economy. It takes the kinds of resources and organization that corporations can do best to manage a large successful FOSS project. Finding ways to pay for these needed services has been a bit slow, mostly due, I think, to incredible amount of FUD being thrown around by the "intellectual property" fanatics. Things are beginning to settle out with the increase in support contracts and subscriptions.
I expect to be paying a reasonable subscription fee for my uses of Ubuntu in a few short years. Exactly what shape that would be has yet to be determined, but I know that the cost would be comparable to the cost of electricity to run my desktop. And that I would not be paying for access to the software-- that would always be free-- but I would be paying for convenience features like automatic updates, compatibility-assured packages, and so on.
There are plenty of ways to do this kind of quality measurement and any competent management would be at least peripherally aware of these, know how to get more information about any of them, and be able to implement them. This is child's play with a product like code which can be directly inspected. Various forms of peer review, even very fancy double blind peer review systems, are easily constructed and managed with a few spreadsheets.
What management needs to know is fairly simple: who are their best 20% of coders, and who are their worst 20%. And within the bottom 20%, who are the jokers who not only write crappy code, but have shown through the way that they have participated in the peer review process that they do not know good code when they see it. Replace those few with new blood asap. Just doing that is well worth the cost of implementing the peer review process. (As a wag, the cost of implementing a double blind peer review system where each coder is required to do one review each month could increase direct coding costs by 5% per year, but it would decrease the much greater costs of debugging and patching production code by much more than that.)
Additional benefits a savvy company would think very hard about doing: token bonuses for those who are consistently in the Top Twenty, and some way to use the best of the best as consultants on any decisions that might impact the coders. Including changes in the cafeteria menu. Happy galley slaves will row your boat faster.
My background: Cobol, several business Basics, Pascal, a little 6502 Assembler, a lot of Perl (data mining and repurposing archival data for more than a decade). I have also managed to completely forget Fortran and awk. (And pretty much Cobol, too, for that matter).
My sense of where things are going: HTML 5 is going to require a lot of programmers who are really savvy in Javascript. Including its "advanced" features. The problem with learning Javascript is that of discerning good practice from the mounds of drivel that have been written about it. Javascript is THE language for front-end work in a cloud or client / server situation. You get to leverage all the stuff that is built into the browser. You also get to play with closures, prototypes (in place of classes), and anonymous objects, which offer several new ways of looking at problems.
On the server or cloud side, PHP is going to see an increasing amount of use. Its early versions had several intrinsic weaknesses but it has pretty much grown out of those.
There is a lot of hooey on this discussion, even for Slashdot.
Many cities now have the equivalent of Free Geek in Portland Oregon, a computer refurbishing and redistribution center. These places typically use volunteers to tear down incoming systems, test components, reassemble into outgoing systems that they can support for a couple of years, and then provide user training, user and software support, and hardware support to the end recipients of your charity.
You leave with the paperwork for the tax write off, and the comfort of knowing than none of your old data will survive the low level read/write tests that the storage devices are put through. You are not burdened with continuing support issues, user training issues, etc.
The recipients benefit from having tested machines of course, but more importantly from having a support system available on next-business-day basis that is completely familiar with the hardware and OS, even after a few years have gone by. The support typically involves training sessions and other aspects of user support (as well as hardware and software support).
These volunteer refurbishing centers typically use a Linux distro, and I believe that Ubuntu is currently the most used one. This is because of licensing of course, but it offers the end users several major benefits, such as access to the wealth of FOSS software available, easy security and maintenance patch handling, and easy upgrade paths.
If I understand the system correctly, this decision is a precedent that would be effectively binding on all similar cases in the Federal courts under this Circuit. It would be given strong weight in all other Federal courts, too. So there are benefits without going to SCOTUS.
That said, the defense could be raised that the precedent does not apply in any given case for one reason or another. So it is a deterrent to lawyers using the modern day equivalent of barratry, but it probably will not on its own stop the practice. Disbarring the lawyers involved in this case would be a much stronger deterrent, and perhaps the Bar Association they are members of will do that. If they are encouraged to do that. The Judge's decision is a strong argument that disbarment is the correct thing to do here.
As I understand it, the Federal courts, and I think all other courts in the USA, have no mechanism for disbarring a lawyer. That is an action of the various Bar Associations. Which might well happen to this lawyer, since it looks like there is a strong case for disbarment.
That sounds nasty. Breathing vaporized Hg and all that. Any mad as a hatter symptoms?
the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually.
Actually, the Internet is more like the shovel than the knife. Without the concept of the shovel, we would still be chasing bears out of their caves to make new housing. The lowly shovel that anybody can use changed our world. So too does the Internet.
This is on topic, since the changes in the way people relate to each other that are being brought about right now by the Internet are similar to the changes that happened between people when they started bringing their new shovels to their meetings. Instead of the usual bitching, whining and moaning about how once again none of the seedlings they had so carefully planted with their digging sticks were going to survive the drought, they were doing things like discussing the best route for an irrigation ditch. Shovels changed relationships; the Internet is changing relationships.
A chart of per capita changes over 50 years is a chart that is using an exponentially changing baseline: the population growth curve. If that graph is flat, it means that the change being charted is also exponential, with the same curve as the baseline.
The term "per capita" is not really that hard to understand.
Good points.
You will not find Common Sense on the bookshelves of most Americans. As a wag, probably more than 95% of Americans have never even heard of it.
A citation is needed here. Especially as parent post's view of Malthus' political posture is very different from what is generally presented in school resources (which generally do not speak about his beliefs at all).
What most people know about Malthus is that he was the first to point out the implications of a population that is growing exponentially while its resource base is expanding arithmetically. It is that pattern of exponential population growth leading to an inevitable crash when growth suddenly exceeds the carrying capacity of the ecosystem that I was referring to. Not Malthus' politicals and certainly not his religious views.
In short, economics is a dismal study. While so far technological advances have reset the slope of the line of increasing resources now and again, the curve of population growth will still hit that linear limit soon. And there seem to be no tricks left in the technology bag. Fusion power is always 25 years away; we cannot even replace the existing fission power plants quickly enough to tread water, let alone build new capacity; our only new hope in my life time has been cold fusion but that does not look like it is going to go anywhere.
I just do not have the blind faith in Science and Technology that some people have. I guess I am too much of a rationalist; my thinking is too tightly bound to the proven realities of this universe.
Did that calculation take into account the lag between when the population count increases and when those newly born reach full size?
IIRC, we passed the 6 billion milestone about 10 years ago, and we will pass the 7 billion milestone pretty soon now. Which means even if some agency imposes zero population growth on us tomorrow, there will still be a billion kids under 10 years old who are growing up and adding several billion kilos each year to the human biomass, for several more years.
You can only cheat Malthus for so long. Sooner or later, you run out of tricks to reset his inexorable calculations.
Common sense comes into this with population control and scaling back energy usage to a level that would be sustainable over the long term (like, say, 50 years).
However common sense is a very uncommon commodity.
That is an interesting spin on the subject.
Try looking up the definition of "per capita", and then looking up the increase in population of the USA for the last 50 years.
Hint: both population growth and increased energy usage have been exponential.