I got in the habit of running my computer 24/7 back in the day of the Apple ][, with its notoriously weak power switch. I have kept with that habit since. The computer is on unless I'm going to be gone for over 24 hours or a thunderstorm comes visiting (in which case it is not only off, but entirely disconnected from power and networks).
In my experience, if a new computer or component does not fail in the first 90 days of use, it is very unlikely to fail in the next 5 years, provided that
the power source is properly conditioned. Meaning a UPS with both surge protection and brownout protection.
the thermal environment is kept stable. Meaning that the computer is kept in operation 24/7, so that all components stay within their temperature specifications at all times.
the dust is blown out of it every so often.
My experience includes a lot of tech support in VAR and site manager roles as well as running my own custom programming and web development services.
Back in the day when a TRaSh-80 came into the shop for repair, the first thing we did was pop the cover and put thumb pressure on each chip until we heard it scrunch back into its socket. That often was all the repair that was needed. Thermal chip creep is not a problem today, but the circuitry that takes the current from the 20 Ga wires down to the nanoscale feeds on the silicon itself is still susceptible to fractures from thermal contraction/expansion cycles. It is very rare any more for a component to fail by letting out its magic smoke; any more most failures are because some part of the component is no longer getting any juice. It doesn't burn up; it has gone frigid.
Well, he's trying to be another William Randolph Hearst, only not yet as big and bad as Hearst (who is credited for singlehandedly inventing yellow journalism, and, through his "Remember the Maine!" slogan, for starting the Spanish American War).
Hearst had an easier time of it than Murdock, since when Hearst created his empire, he only had to contend with newspaper and telegraph technology: he bought control of the former outright, but found he could sufficiently disrupt opposition use of the telegraph network with small bribes to low level technicians, or flooding the system with junk messages at strategic times. Murdock has found to his chagrin that buying his way into control of the news is not as easy any more. And disrupting the Internet through bribery, spam floods, and DOS attacks isn't as effective as tying up telegraph connections between Washington DC and New York City with multipage transmissions from Websters Dictionary (all for the sake of assuring that the Hearst papers would be able to publish the breaking news hours before any other newspaper could get the story out).
Murdock maybe should look for some other hero to emulate, maybe some superhero character of Ayn Rand.
Well, that's mouthful, but with electronic records you can at least switch doctors without having to take X-rays, tests, and other records again. No?
No.
Even if both healthcare facilities are using the same software, the data transferred is going to be incomplete and unreliable. First, medical imaging has become a significant player in many diagnostic workups, but medical imagery data is bulky and formats are proprietary to the imagery machine (not the facility's medical management software, which probably cannot access it either). What is going to be transferred is the report about the image, which does the new physician no good at all when he is wanting the raw image as a baseline. So your basic MRI data and digital xrays are not going to transfer in a meaningful way.
This is also true to a great extent to laboratory findings, since even when the same equipment is being used, different laboratories use different calibration procedures resulting in different ranges of normal values. One facility's dangerously low Hgb/Hct values may be within the normal range of another facility. There may even be differences in the way basic vital signs (temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure) are presented, making even these unreliable.
Yet the more common case is that each facility will be using software from different vendors, or incompatible versions of the same vendor's software. Take the above mentioned problems and increase them exponentially. And remember, an error in some of the details, like drug allergy information, may cause the patient's death. But which of those details is critical is going to be different for each patient, so you can't afford to err on any part of the transcription.
Health care reform is going to require some high level work: forcing standards on the software developers similar to the SAE standards for the nuts and bolts that hold your Chevies and Fords together [obligatory car analogy: done]. There needs to be a normalized way of reporting all lab results, for instance. There also needs to be common data centers for all bulky medical data like raw MRIs and digital xrays. These can never fit within a healthcare facility's basic IT structure: safe and efficient handling of these terabytes needs to be done on a regional basis.
However all this means applying FOSS type thinking (TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, similar standards) to the healthcare industry. But that industry is now completely profit driven and sees the Microsoft model of proprietary formats as the way to best monetize the fine art of mending sick and broken people.
I am not saying that the healthcare providers are at fault. Physicians, nurses, and allied health personnel are performing artists who have little interest and no training in managing the theaters they work in. It would be easier to teach ballerinas how to work up the cost estimate for a ten week tour of Swan Lake than to get a good physician or nurse up to speed on digital data management. The fault lies squarely on those who have chosen healthcare administration as a career. We need persons with the same kind of mind set as civil engineers and architects in these roles, but mostly we have been filling these roles with persons who are oriented toward maximizing short term profits (to earn their bonuses, or position themselves for the crossover step to a higher job with a pharmaceutical house, etc).
</rant>(Sorry, 35 years of increasing frustration with a sick system may have introduced a little bias toward the end.)
The obligation extends only to lawful orders, with the key here being whether a condition existed, such as hazardous situation, where it was lawful for a cop to make the demand.
The cops are claiming that there was an imminent public safety concern with regard to the crowd's unruliness. In their OPINION, the crowd's behavior was becoming unruly to the point of being dangerous.
Others who have skills in assessing a crowd's state may have had different opinions. It is reasonable to assume that a recording company executive would also have expertise in assessing a crowd's behavior and potential for unsafe behavior. And would probably be more familiar with this kind of crowd than the cops involved.
Should the organizers of a peaceful political protest tell their crowd to disperse because the nice police officers have said that it is beginning to rain and somebody might catch the flu and die of it? That hazard definitely exists... and that kind of cooperation with the nice policemen would definitely make for less turmoil in the world...
I just don't feel that I have enough information about the situation to know whether the cops' actions were appropriate or whether the recording executives behavior was inappropriate. But since the guy did not tweet and there is nothing in the story that I saw that indicated anyone got hurt or anybody's property was damaged, I lean toward thinking that the cops were wrong in this case.
No, it is not ridiculous. It is a recognition that to avoid another HTML 3 fiasco, all parties, including vendors, have to be brought to the table. And forced to stay at the table through various market pressures, if need be.
Is this a comment about HTML5 support? The standard isn't even established yet so it seems irresponsible for web designers to use that format for their entire framework, and premature to consider it a must-have for web browsers. IE9 will support it, I believe, though MS balked at supporting a non-final language.
No, that's not right. Parent post is rife with disinformation.
The HTML5 standard will be in development for years and will be influenced by real world feedback. This is a change in strategy that is leading to a more robust standard. Quoting from the WHATWG FAQ
It is estimated, again by the editor, that HTML5 will reach a W3C recommendation in the year 2022 or later. This will be approximately 18-20 years of development, since beginning in mid-2004. That's actually not that crazy, though. Work on HTML4 started in the mid 90s, and HTML4 still, more than ten years later, hasn't reached the level that we want to reach with HTML5. There is no real test suite, there are many parts of the spec that are lacking real implementations, there are big parts that aren't interoperable, and the spec has hundreds if not thousands of known errors that haven't been fixed. When HTML4 came out, REC meant something much less exciting than it does now.
Many browsers, including MSIEv8, are incorporating at least some of the stable HTML5 features. HTML5 is also being designed so that features that are not available on a particular browser can be emulated with JavaScript. Common JavaScript libraries (JQuery,etc) are incorporating HTML5 emulations.
Microsoft, and other browser makers, are not going to wait until 2022 for a completed standard before beginning to implement HTML5 features. This is already well under way. And since the HTML5 approach deliberately eases the work of emulating its features in browsers that do not offer native support, we can expect to see more third party libraries, plug-ins, and so on that provide missing features to various browser versions.
Hey, I'll make the time to read your listing of the capabilities that GIMP lacks. That presumably Photoshop provides. It would be good if you would exclude those features that are actually present in both, but are activated differently, but if you don't know for sure, just go ahead and list it.
So go ahead, list them out! I promise I will read them. And I bet a lot of other people in the GIMP community will read them, too. Remember, we're FOSS, which means we ain't too proud to take good ideas from any source. Even trolls and flamers sometimes have gooo ideas.
I suggest keeping an eye on GIMP, there is talk of significant improvement in the interface coming along in the next few months.
Which makes me wonder if this isn't part of the reason for it being dropped from the Ubuntu 10.4 default install. There WILL be confusion and complaints when the GIMP interface is improved, since no matter how good it becomes, it is going to break lots of the tutorials and workflows that are all over the web. I think it is a very smart move for Ubuntu to distance itself from this.
I find it amusing that Blender is mentioned in a paragraph that discusses UI/UX improvements. I like Blender and expect to be doing a lot of work with it... but its interface is gawdawful bad. Yeah, the blenderistas keep telling me it was designed by professionals for a professional environment.... uh, sure, yeah, you bet. Mostly the Blender interface serves as an excellent filter that assures the core Blender community will never be overwhelmed by barbarian hordes seeking the equivalent of PowerPoint or Flash instant gratification in a 3D modeler.
Despite its flaws, OOo remains the best mode for migrating from MS Office to Linux tools, where the greatest problem is that of retraining and acceptance. Its presence as a default app in Ubuntu is important in attracting the attention of potential Ubuntu users.
There are other tools that are better in some ways-- Abiword, Gnumeric, etc-- but OOo is good enough to get the job done. Those who are ready to move on to better things can simply not use it, or even uninstall it.
I used Paint Shop Pro from nearly its beginnings until Jasc sold it to Corel. I tried Corel's first version (PSP v9 IIRC) and went back to Jasc's last version (PSP v8.1 or 8.2) since the Corel version offered nothing of significance except more idiot buttons ("click this and it will make your image better!). Then I moved to GIMP when I switched from Windows to Unbuntu-- 2007 / 2008, about 18 months in transition. Much of the transition involved learning GIMP's menus, and with changes in the last version I think this is now going to be easier for newcomers.
If you are doing commercial image work for hardcopy printing, then you need to have at least one copy of Photoshop available for the specific tools it provides for that kind of stuff (CMYK color separation, etc). And you have probably gotten your formal schooling on Photoshop and it probably isn't worth it to you to build skills with any other interface.
For everyone else, including commercial work for electronic presentation (PowerPoint, PDFs, web pages, texture and billboards in 3D modeling and animation, etc), PSP used to be an excellent low cost alternative to Photoshop. Upgrades were adding new significant new features and there was a large and active community providing an incredible amount of support. But Corel appears to be more focused on developing more idiot buttons for the digital camera amateur than in making improvements to the core code.
Meanwhile, GIMP has gained significant new capabilities and is now the clear leader in all aspects of image preparation with two exceptions: it does not have the specialized tools for interfacing with hardcopy print shops; it uses a different menu structure and nomenclature than that used in Photoshop based schools. GIMP's core is under active improvement, with new releases happening more frequently than Photoshop or Corel can manage. There is a large community of users who are providing the same kind of support that PSP users used to enjoy.
The GIMP has layering, masking, and filtering that is equivalent to Photoshop. It has a plugin capability and the community has provided a very broad range of additional features through this. It is a product that can do serious image work.
Back to the main topic of this thread-- I think Ubuntu is right in dropping the GIMP from automatic inclusion. Those of us who are into serious image work will have no trouble adding it back in. Persons who are looking for quick fixes for their snapshots are better served by Picassa or something like that (I haven't done any work with F-Spot so I can't say anything about it).
Judging by their scat, the coyotes and foxes of western Oregon subsist mostly on fruit when the wild cherries, blackberries and wild plums are in season. None of the canids seem to be obligate carnivores, and the optimum diet for any of them probably varies according to environmental conditions.
So back to the original point: pet dogs do best on diets of 30 - 35% meat and meat byproducts, with the rest of their caloric needs met by cereals and vegetables.
Modern farming methods turn large quantities of natural gas into food via fertilizer.
Oh yes! And in America for many common crops there are more calories of petrochemicals expended in fertilizer, pesticide, and the needed diesel to apply them than are harvested.
But note that these abusive practices will continue whether or not that portion of the harvest that cannot be profitably cleaned for human consumption goes into pet food or goes into the waste stream. It is inappropriate to attribute any portion of the cost of these absurd practices to a pet's environmental impact, since the same amounts of petrochemicals would be used whether or not the pet food was made.
Uh, no. Dogs in the wild rarely eat cereals a veggies. Very rarely.
Gee, how can I convey the fact that the dog is an entirely domesticated species that does not exist in the wild? There does not seem to be a car analogy for this situation, so perhaps it is beyond the limits of what some slashdot readers can possibly comprehend.
Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed.
All I can figure is that they are doing it for the shock value. Reasonable ways of reducing one's carbon footprint just don't get the kind of attention this husband and wife team seems to crave.
Brenda and Robert Vale are architects, and with the economy being as it is, it does make sense for them to look outside their profession for ways to make some money during these slack times. However they have made one of the classic mistakes of persons who are highly trained but poorly educated: they thought they could impose the logic they know upon realms where they don't have a clue, and somehow astound and impress, and get a lot of press and sell a lot of books. But they instead are going to end up as laughingstocks, and to such a degree that it is going to affect their career as architects. For who is going to trust the designs of idiots who don't do their homework before publishing?
Their numbers are way off base. I own a 110 lb German Shepherd: he is a very large dog. He consumes 260 kg per year (almost 2 lb per day between his one meal and 2 to 4 dog biscuits).
Brenda and Robert are talking about a "medium size dog", which would be like a standard collie or one of the common spaniel breeds weighing in around 30 - 40 lb. But these two are architects and seemingly not dog people, so maybe they actually mean something like a large Doberman or a big Labrador, weighing 50 lb. They really expect even this larger dog to eat as much (259 kg/yr) as my very large 110 lb German Shepherd? Well, maybe that accounts for some of the waddling woofers I see around town. But using the morbidly obese as representatives of a species doesn't work. They need to develop some truthier statistics.
Brenda and Robert also have their numbers reversed: a healthy diet for a pet dog is one third meat and meat byproducts and two thirds cereals and veggies. They have got it the other way around. Maybe they mistook the diet that a working sled dog needs in the middle of the Arctic winter for a pet's diet.
So they got neither the total amount right, nor the proportion right. But those are small errors, compared to the big one:
A pet's diet has a negligible carbon footprint no matter how much Butterball gets to eat. First, none of the pet's food is coming directly from petrochemicals; the carbon involved is already in the biosphere, just cycling through as part of dog for a while. This of course is not the case for the SUV. Second, the animal portion of pet food is derived from meat scraps and byproducts that would otherwise go directly into the waste stream. The cereal portion is often from lots that do not meet human food quality standards for one reason or another (too many bugs per cubic foot, too much evidence of rodent droppings, etc). Pets actually reduce the environmental impact of slaughterhouses, chicken ranches, and grain handlers by providing an alternative use path for stuff that isn't fit for human consumption.
Now if Brenda and Robert wanted to do a fair comparison of the environmental impacts of SUVs and of pets, they could compare the amount of diesel each consumes over its lifetime.
It will be interesting to see the first bug report from the White House. With all the layers of security they need, they are undoubtedly going to push Drupal's envelope in some novel ways.
Or maybe we will see evidence of a White House bug stomping party, or contributed code, first. I'm sure that the tech guys at whitehouse.gov will give back to the community somehow.
Is there a way to monitor drupal.org for White House activity? Can we see some "First sighting!" competitions? Or should we look for press releases: "White House fixes 37 bugs; reports 17 new ones"
We find your wisdom to be disturbingly outdated...
The consensus on/. is that resume.pdf has numerous advantages over resume.doc and marginal, if any, disadvantages.
For me, the telling point has been that I cannot know how many persons will have the opportunity to revise my resume before it gets to the desk where the decision to interview is made. Sending resume.pdf prevents meddling. That excludes me from interviewing with businesses where the lowest paid persons in the HR department get to insert their comments into the resumes that cross their desks, and maybe fiddle with my statements too. That's a good thing: it can save me from wasting further time with a company that is fucked up beyond all recognition. Fucntion foo(bar) has no place in anything that relates to HR or finances.
I do have a disturbing lack of trust in strangers who might have their own hidden agendas, especially with regard to HR employees and used car salesmen.
In of itself nuclear reactions are predictable and can be made safe using correct precautions.
This is the classic example of the intersection of the Snepscheut/Einstein/Berra observation that "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is" with Clark's corollary of Murphy's law that "If nothing can possibly go wrong, you've overlooked something."
Basically even though nuclear reactions are entirely predictable, they are only a small part of the problem set. The real limitation is that we need much better humans to design and operate fission devices safely, and we don't have a clue about how to make them. Worse than that, it seems like most of the approaches we know how to try end up creating supercilious assholes that have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
I don't know where you are getting your "facts", but hydrogen is only 11% of water by weight.
I do agree with you that "nuclear power" has become so overloaded with so much emotionalism that it is now void of useful meaning. A better term would simply refer to the energy derived from the transformation of one substance into another. We could call it "energy of transubstantiation" and be free of all this superstitious nonsense.
I, on the other hand, have never had much respect for Carl Sagan. He mixed too much politics with his science promotions, and far too little engineering. In many ways, he was the liberal's equivalent of Rush Limbaugh.
So I find it sort of remarkable that I do agree with parent post in putting some of the blame for the ISS on Sagan's thin shoulders.
Caution: this post might be a troll. Danger! or maybe not...
Looking back over 20+ years in various IT positions, I don't see that there was ever any glory. There was a lot of hype about glory. And most of that was associated with the Microsoft ecosystem attempting to sell something newer than what they had been pushing last year, and suggesting that THIS would be the product would make you the darling of the company. I'm rather glad that IT is beginning to get beyond that foolishness.
Slashdot Mirror
I got in the habit of running my computer 24/7 back in the day of the Apple ][, with its notoriously weak power switch. I have kept with that habit since. The computer is on unless I'm going to be gone for over 24 hours or a thunderstorm comes visiting (in which case it is not only off, but entirely disconnected from power and networks).
In my experience, if a new computer or component does not fail in the first 90 days of use, it is very unlikely to fail in the next 5 years, provided that
My experience includes a lot of tech support in VAR and site manager roles as well as running my own custom programming and web development services.
Back in the day when a TRaSh-80 came into the shop for repair, the first thing we did was pop the cover and put thumb pressure on each chip until we heard it scrunch back into its socket. That often was all the repair that was needed. Thermal chip creep is not a problem today, but the circuitry that takes the current from the 20 Ga wires down to the nanoscale feeds on the silicon itself is still susceptible to fractures from thermal contraction/expansion cycles. It is very rare any more for a component to fail by letting out its magic smoke; any more most failures are because some part of the component is no longer getting any juice. It doesn't burn up; it has gone frigid.
Well, he's trying to be another William Randolph Hearst, only not yet as big and bad as Hearst (who is credited for singlehandedly inventing yellow journalism, and, through his "Remember the Maine!" slogan, for starting the Spanish American War).
Hearst had an easier time of it than Murdock, since when Hearst created his empire, he only had to contend with newspaper and telegraph technology: he bought control of the former outright, but found he could sufficiently disrupt opposition use of the telegraph network with small bribes to low level technicians, or flooding the system with junk messages at strategic times. Murdock has found to his chagrin that buying his way into control of the news is not as easy any more. And disrupting the Internet through bribery, spam floods, and DOS attacks isn't as effective as tying up telegraph connections between Washington DC and New York City with multipage transmissions from Websters Dictionary (all for the sake of assuring that the Hearst papers would be able to publish the breaking news hours before any other newspaper could get the story out).
Murdock maybe should look for some other hero to emulate, maybe some superhero character of Ayn Rand.
Well, that's mouthful, but with electronic records you can at least switch doctors without having to take X-rays, tests, and other records again. No?
No.
Even if both healthcare facilities are using the same software, the data transferred is going to be incomplete and unreliable. First, medical imaging has become a significant player in many diagnostic workups, but medical imagery data is bulky and formats are proprietary to the imagery machine (not the facility's medical management software, which probably cannot access it either). What is going to be transferred is the report about the image, which does the new physician no good at all when he is wanting the raw image as a baseline. So your basic MRI data and digital xrays are not going to transfer in a meaningful way.
This is also true to a great extent to laboratory findings, since even when the same equipment is being used, different laboratories use different calibration procedures resulting in different ranges of normal values. One facility's dangerously low Hgb/Hct values may be within the normal range of another facility. There may even be differences in the way basic vital signs (temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure) are presented, making even these unreliable.
Yet the more common case is that each facility will be using software from different vendors, or incompatible versions of the same vendor's software. Take the above mentioned problems and increase them exponentially. And remember, an error in some of the details, like drug allergy information, may cause the patient's death. But which of those details is critical is going to be different for each patient, so you can't afford to err on any part of the transcription.
Health care reform is going to require some high level work: forcing standards on the software developers similar to the SAE standards for the nuts and bolts that hold your Chevies and Fords together [obligatory car analogy: done]. There needs to be a normalized way of reporting all lab results, for instance. There also needs to be common data centers for all bulky medical data like raw MRIs and digital xrays. These can never fit within a healthcare facility's basic IT structure: safe and efficient handling of these terabytes needs to be done on a regional basis.
However all this means applying FOSS type thinking (TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, similar standards) to the healthcare industry. But that industry is now completely profit driven and sees the Microsoft model of proprietary formats as the way to best monetize the fine art of mending sick and broken people.
I am not saying that the healthcare providers are at fault. Physicians, nurses, and allied health personnel are performing artists who have little interest and no training in managing the theaters they work in. It would be easier to teach ballerinas how to work up the cost estimate for a ten week tour of Swan Lake than to get a good physician or nurse up to speed on digital data management. The fault lies squarely on those who have chosen healthcare administration as a career. We need persons with the same kind of mind set as civil engineers and architects in these roles, but mostly we have been filling these roles with persons who are oriented toward maximizing short term profits (to earn their bonuses, or position themselves for the crossover step to a higher job with a pharmaceutical house, etc).
</rant>(Sorry, 35 years of increasing frustration with a sick system may have introduced a little bias toward the end.)
The obligation extends only to lawful orders, with the key here being whether a condition existed, such as hazardous situation, where it was lawful for a cop to make the demand.
The cops are claiming that there was an imminent public safety concern with regard to the crowd's unruliness. In their OPINION, the crowd's behavior was becoming unruly to the point of being dangerous.
Others who have skills in assessing a crowd's state may have had different opinions. It is reasonable to assume that a recording company executive would also have expertise in assessing a crowd's behavior and potential for unsafe behavior. And would probably be more familiar with this kind of crowd than the cops involved.
Should the organizers of a peaceful political protest tell their crowd to disperse because the nice police officers have said that it is beginning to rain and somebody might catch the flu and die of it? That hazard definitely exists... and that kind of cooperation with the nice policemen would definitely make for less turmoil in the world...
I just don't feel that I have enough information about the situation to know whether the cops' actions were appropriate or whether the recording executives behavior was inappropriate. But since the guy did not tweet and there is nothing in the story that I saw that indicated anyone got hurt or anybody's property was damaged, I lean toward thinking that the cops were wrong in this case.
No, it is not ridiculous. It is a recognition that to avoid another HTML 3 fiasco, all parties, including vendors, have to be brought to the table. And forced to stay at the table through various market pressures, if need be.
Check out the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. This is an extensive web site and will probably have an answer to all reasonable questions.
Is this a comment about HTML5 support? The standard isn't even established yet so it seems irresponsible for web designers to use that format for their entire framework, and premature to consider it a must-have for web browsers. IE9 will support it, I believe, though MS balked at supporting a non-final language.
No, that's not right. Parent post is rife with disinformation.
The HTML5 standard will be in development for years and will be influenced by real world feedback. This is a change in strategy that is leading to a more robust standard. Quoting from the WHATWG FAQ
It is estimated, again by the editor, that HTML5 will reach a W3C recommendation in the year 2022 or later. This will be approximately 18-20 years of development, since beginning in mid-2004. That's actually not that crazy, though. Work on HTML4 started in the mid 90s, and HTML4 still, more than ten years later, hasn't reached the level that we want to reach with HTML5. There is no real test suite, there are many parts of the spec that are lacking real implementations, there are big parts that aren't interoperable, and the spec has hundreds if not thousands of known errors that haven't been fixed. When HTML4 came out, REC meant something much less exciting than it does now.
Many browsers, including MSIEv8, are incorporating at least some of the stable HTML5 features. HTML5 is also being designed so that features that are not available on a particular browser can be emulated with JavaScript. Common JavaScript libraries (JQuery,etc) are incorporating HTML5 emulations.
Microsoft, and other browser makers, are not going to wait until 2022 for a completed standard before beginning to implement HTML5 features. This is already well under way. And since the HTML5 approach deliberately eases the work of emulating its features in browsers that do not offer native support, we can expect to see more third party libraries, plug-ins, and so on that provide missing features to various browser versions.
Hey, I'll make the time to read your listing of the capabilities that GIMP lacks. That presumably Photoshop provides. It would be good if you would exclude those features that are actually present in both, but are activated differently, but if you don't know for sure, just go ahead and list it.
So go ahead, list them out! I promise I will read them. And I bet a lot of other people in the GIMP community will read them, too. Remember, we're FOSS, which means we ain't too proud to take good ideas from any source. Even trolls and flamers sometimes have gooo ideas.
This is good info, thanks. I've still got v2.48 installed.... Time to upgrade!
I suggest keeping an eye on GIMP, there is talk of significant improvement in the interface coming along in the next few months.
Which makes me wonder if this isn't part of the reason for it being dropped from the Ubuntu 10.4 default install. There WILL be confusion and complaints when the GIMP interface is improved, since no matter how good it becomes, it is going to break lots of the tutorials and workflows that are all over the web. I think it is a very smart move for Ubuntu to distance itself from this.
I find it amusing that Blender is mentioned in a paragraph that discusses UI/UX improvements. I like Blender and expect to be doing a lot of work with it... but its interface is gawdawful bad. Yeah, the blenderistas keep telling me it was designed by professionals for a professional environment.... uh, sure, yeah, you bet. Mostly the Blender interface serves as an excellent filter that assures the core Blender community will never be overwhelmed by barbarian hordes seeking the equivalent of PowerPoint or Flash instant gratification in a 3D modeler.
Despite its flaws, OOo remains the best mode for migrating from MS Office to Linux tools, where the greatest problem is that of retraining and acceptance. Its presence as a default app in Ubuntu is important in attracting the attention of potential Ubuntu users.
There are other tools that are better in some ways-- Abiword, Gnumeric, etc-- but OOo is good enough to get the job done. Those who are ready to move on to better things can simply not use it, or even uninstall it.
...too limited for power users
Uh, no. Not any more.
I used Paint Shop Pro from nearly its beginnings until Jasc sold it to Corel. I tried Corel's first version (PSP v9 IIRC) and went back to Jasc's last version (PSP v8.1 or 8.2) since the Corel version offered nothing of significance except more idiot buttons ("click this and it will make your image better!). Then I moved to GIMP when I switched from Windows to Unbuntu-- 2007 / 2008, about 18 months in transition. Much of the transition involved learning GIMP's menus, and with changes in the last version I think this is now going to be easier for newcomers.
If you are doing commercial image work for hardcopy printing, then you need to have at least one copy of Photoshop available for the specific tools it provides for that kind of stuff (CMYK color separation, etc). And you have probably gotten your formal schooling on Photoshop and it probably isn't worth it to you to build skills with any other interface.
For everyone else, including commercial work for electronic presentation (PowerPoint, PDFs, web pages, texture and billboards in 3D modeling and animation, etc), PSP used to be an excellent low cost alternative to Photoshop. Upgrades were adding new significant new features and there was a large and active community providing an incredible amount of support. But Corel appears to be more focused on developing more idiot buttons for the digital camera amateur than in making improvements to the core code.
Meanwhile, GIMP has gained significant new capabilities and is now the clear leader in all aspects of image preparation with two exceptions: it does not have the specialized tools for interfacing with hardcopy print shops; it uses a different menu structure and nomenclature than that used in Photoshop based schools. GIMP's core is under active improvement, with new releases happening more frequently than Photoshop or Corel can manage. There is a large community of users who are providing the same kind of support that PSP users used to enjoy.
The GIMP has layering, masking, and filtering that is equivalent to Photoshop. It has a plugin capability and the community has provided a very broad range of additional features through this. It is a product that can do serious image work.
Back to the main topic of this thread-- I think Ubuntu is right in dropping the GIMP from automatic inclusion. Those of us who are into serious image work will have no trouble adding it back in. Persons who are looking for quick fixes for their snapshots are better served by Picassa or something like that (I haven't done any work with F-Spot so I can't say anything about it).
Tags are one specific type of metadata, intended for a narrow range of uses.
The short summary of Microsoft's vision of software licenses:
What is mine is mine, and what is yours is negotiable.
Judging by their scat, the coyotes and foxes of western Oregon subsist mostly on fruit when the wild cherries, blackberries and wild plums are in season. None of the canids seem to be obligate carnivores, and the optimum diet for any of them probably varies according to environmental conditions.
So back to the original point: pet dogs do best on diets of 30 - 35% meat and meat byproducts, with the rest of their caloric needs met by cereals and vegetables.
Modern farming methods turn large quantities of natural gas into food via fertilizer.
Oh yes! And in America for many common crops there are more calories of petrochemicals expended in fertilizer, pesticide, and the needed diesel to apply them than are harvested.
But note that these abusive practices will continue whether or not that portion of the harvest that cannot be profitably cleaned for human consumption goes into pet food or goes into the waste stream. It is inappropriate to attribute any portion of the cost of these absurd practices to a pet's environmental impact, since the same amounts of petrochemicals would be used whether or not the pet food was made.
Uh, no. Dogs in the wild rarely eat cereals a veggies. Very rarely.
Gee, how can I convey the fact that the dog is an entirely domesticated species that does not exist in the wild? There does not seem to be a car analogy for this situation, so perhaps it is beyond the limits of what some slashdot readers can possibly comprehend.
Too bad.
Why even bother looking at this stuff.. there's all kinds of other areas that could realistically be addressed.
All I can figure is that they are doing it for the shock value. Reasonable ways of reducing one's carbon footprint just don't get the kind of attention this husband and wife team seems to crave.
Brenda and Robert Vale are architects, and with the economy being as it is, it does make sense for them to look outside their profession for ways to make some money during these slack times. However they have made one of the classic mistakes of persons who are highly trained but poorly educated: they thought they could impose the logic they know upon realms where they don't have a clue, and somehow astound and impress, and get a lot of press and sell a lot of books. But they instead are going to end up as laughingstocks, and to such a degree that it is going to affect their career as architects. For who is going to trust the designs of idiots who don't do their homework before publishing?
Their numbers are way off base. I own a 110 lb German Shepherd: he is a very large dog. He consumes 260 kg per year (almost 2 lb per day between his one meal and 2 to 4 dog biscuits).
Brenda and Robert are talking about a "medium size dog", which would be like a standard collie or one of the common spaniel breeds weighing in around 30 - 40 lb. But these two are architects and seemingly not dog people, so maybe they actually mean something like a large Doberman or a big Labrador, weighing 50 lb. They really expect even this larger dog to eat as much (259 kg/yr) as my very large 110 lb German Shepherd? Well, maybe that accounts for some of the waddling woofers I see around town. But using the morbidly obese as representatives of a species doesn't work. They need to develop some truthier statistics.
Brenda and Robert also have their numbers reversed: a healthy diet for a pet dog is one third meat and meat byproducts and two thirds cereals and veggies. They have got it the other way around. Maybe they mistook the diet that a working sled dog needs in the middle of the Arctic winter for a pet's diet.
So they got neither the total amount right, nor the proportion right. But those are small errors, compared to the big one:
A pet's diet has a negligible carbon footprint no matter how much Butterball gets to eat. First, none of the pet's food is coming directly from petrochemicals; the carbon involved is already in the biosphere, just cycling through as part of dog for a while. This of course is not the case for the SUV. Second, the animal portion of pet food is derived from meat scraps and byproducts that would otherwise go directly into the waste stream. The cereal portion is often from lots that do not meet human food quality standards for one reason or another (too many bugs per cubic foot, too much evidence of rodent droppings, etc). Pets actually reduce the environmental impact of slaughterhouses, chicken ranches, and grain handlers by providing an alternative use path for stuff that isn't fit for human consumption.
Now if Brenda and Robert wanted to do a fair comparison of the environmental impacts of SUVs and of pets, they could compare the amount of diesel each consumes over its lifetime.
It will be interesting to see the first bug report from the White House. With all the layers of security they need, they are undoubtedly going to push Drupal's envelope in some novel ways.
Or maybe we will see evidence of a White House bug stomping party, or contributed code, first. I'm sure that the tech guys at whitehouse.gov will give back to the community somehow.
Is there a way to monitor drupal.org for White House activity? Can we see some "First sighting!" competitions? Or should we look for press releases: "White House fixes 37 bugs; reports 17 new ones"
This could change some things.
Word is standard for resumes like it or not
We find your wisdom to be disturbingly outdated...
The consensus on /. is that resume.pdf has numerous advantages over resume.doc and marginal, if any, disadvantages.
For me, the telling point has been that I cannot know how many persons will have the opportunity to revise my resume before it gets to the desk where the decision to interview is made. Sending resume.pdf prevents meddling. That excludes me from interviewing with businesses where the lowest paid persons in the HR department get to insert their comments into the resumes that cross their desks, and maybe fiddle with my statements too. That's a good thing: it can save me from wasting further time with a company that is fucked up beyond all recognition. Fucntion foo(bar) has no place in anything that relates to HR or finances.
I do have a disturbing lack of trust in strangers who might have their own hidden agendas, especially with regard to HR employees and used car salesmen.
In of itself nuclear reactions are predictable and can be made safe using correct precautions.
This is the classic example of the intersection of the Snepscheut/Einstein/Berra observation that "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is" with Clark's corollary of Murphy's law that "If nothing can possibly go wrong, you've overlooked something."
Basically even though nuclear reactions are entirely predictable, they are only a small part of the problem set. The real limitation is that we need much better humans to design and operate fission devices safely, and we don't have a clue about how to make them. Worse than that, it seems like most of the approaches we know how to try end up creating supercilious assholes that have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence.
So long as nobody starts a hydric acid fight, we'll be okay.
hydrogen is 2/3 of the ingredients in water!
I don't know where you are getting your "facts", but hydrogen is only 11% of water by weight.
I do agree with you that "nuclear power" has become so overloaded with so much emotionalism that it is now void of useful meaning. A better term would simply refer to the energy derived from the transformation of one substance into another. We could call it "energy of transubstantiation" and be free of all this superstitious nonsense.
It's all fractal. All the turtles. All the way down.
So look at the large scale, and it is clearly evident that the DNA folding is simply a self-similar scaling of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I, on the other hand, have never had much respect for Carl Sagan. He mixed too much politics with his science promotions, and far too little engineering. In many ways, he was the liberal's equivalent of Rush Limbaugh.
So I find it sort of remarkable that I do agree with parent post in putting some of the blame for the ISS on Sagan's thin shoulders.
Caution: this post might be a troll. Danger! or maybe not...
Looking back over 20+ years in various IT positions, I don't see that there was ever any glory. There was a lot of hype about glory. And most of that was associated with the Microsoft ecosystem attempting to sell something newer than what they had been pushing last year, and suggesting that THIS would be the product would make you the darling of the company. I'm rather glad that IT is beginning to get beyond that foolishness.
Real glory? Not so much.