I agree, and posted much the same on a thread a few days ago. We've got a thing here called the "European Computer Driving Licence" (yes, an official car analogy!) which is a basic qualification people can sit, it's usually used for office workers and the like to show basic competence. The sad thing is, the modules are basically "How to use MS Word", "How To Use MS Excel", "How To Use MS PowerPoint" and the like.
Yes, but the point is that Ubuntu, as with Linux generally, is free in both senses and supplied without warranty. Yes, they're usually nice enough to make an effort at keeping things easy and safe, but at the end of the day it's your machine and your problem. Too many people these days expect some company or another to take responsibility for everything they do online, and it's a mindset that needs to be broken.
It's like blaming a software manufacturer for your car crashing when you just went too fast.....
Yeah, that's not how credit ratings work. OK, so somebody caught a fraud in progress on your account. All that means is that your account is a risky one - you had to employ specialists after all, and they actually caught somebody at it!
Whether or not Sony offer protection, the fact remains that your account details have been compromised, which makes it a risky account. What would the credit ratings agencies suggest? Don't do business with companies who are likely to lose your data, I would imagine.
Are we really even sure there's a language at use here? A computer can either search for system, syntax and grammar, or just do a frequency analysis on soundbites. If dolphins are using the former then they might have a chance, but if it's the latter the best they can hope for is a dictionary - which sounds much the same, but it's the comparison is akin to a well written program versus a two element CSV file.
If you're not going to connect to a network that doesn't really matter. My Asus netbook uses the Splashtop and it's very handy as a disaster recovery OS - the first thing I did with the netbook was wipe the XP installation and it immediately dropped into the Splashtop, very handy if you lose the primary OS for any reason. You're right though, I wouldn't use it as a regular OS for exactly the reasons you mention.
More to the point, there aren't editors in the traditional sense. There are people who submit stories (ie you and me), people who vote stories up and down (ie you and me) and there are people who sometimes run an eye over things to stop Slashdot getting sued. They seem to comment on things sometimes, but as far as I can tell they just add a tick to stuff to send it from the top of the popular list to the front page, no actual "editing" involved. Yes it's frustrating to read crap, but the point is it's crap that we collectively voted for. From what I can tell from my own account (that I've never paid a penny into), the more modding you do, and the better you do it according to whatever algorithm there is, the more you get. Try it. (And watch my own ranking drop to near-nothing after this!)
I've been running Ubuntu/Gnome since 6.03 (now on 10.3) and the Netbook Remix (UNR - a Unity based version) for the last year and a bit. The Gnome version has always been on a desktop with a fairly bog standard monitor, and UNR has been unsurprisingly on a netbook with the wide-but-short screen that this entails. (My review of the Asus netbook I use includes a few comments on Unity: shameless-blog-link) Here's my thoughts, because I think they're relevant.
I like Gnome. I know a lot of people bitch about it, but personally I quite like it. The defaults are roughly what I set up anyway, and it's fairly intuitive for me. The only major change I make other than basic cosmetics is a menu bar on the left, auto-hiding, with big icons for Firefox, Gimp, a terminal, gphpedit and all the other programs that I use daily.
UNR took a little getting used to, but given the efficiency that it places on screenspace I've found it to be very worthwhile. You can easily drop out of UNR and re-login with Gnome, and the experience is identical to the desktop version, but Unity is genuinely a swisher, faster, easier system when you're limited on screen height and using a trackpad...the big shiny icons, much as I dislike them on a desktop, actually make things really quick and easy on a netbook.
The downside to UNR/Unity? It's clearly not hugely stable yet. This is quite possibly to do with closed source binaries from graphics card manufacturers, the only crash-worthy problem I've ever had with the netbook is UNR dropping out to a terminal after going into a bit of a panic finding the graphics card. There's nothing in particular that seems to spark it, it just seems to be a fundamental, occasional glitch very low down in the system somewhere. It's not related to processor or graphics card load, it just flips out sometimes.
So I like Unity style stuff when it works, and on a netbook. I also adopt a few of the Unity style features on a standard Gnome desktop. It definitely has a few very nice usability features. I want the option not to use it though. My preferred solution would be a very bog standard Gnome interface as standard for desktops, plus "themes" you can apply to get OSX, Unity or Windows style layouts. Then (as exists for KDE, xfce etc) options at boot for the others. And keep Unity...it's great on a netbook but it needs work. Offer it as an option, not a default, at least not until it's stable and generally the preferred option.
That said, hell, I get the whole #! for free, so who am I to bitch about these things?
I went to a lecture last week by Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal. (It's an honorary title, he doesn't just hold a telescope for the queen, he's a top level astrophysicist/cosmologist too). During the Q&A at the end he was bemoaning the fact that kids no longer have toys they can tinker with and take apart. His example was a transistor radio, and equally I remember getting a cassette walkman for my ninth birthday. Within a few hours it was in bits on my desk, and I'd worked out that if you give the rubber band connecting the motor to the tape sprocket a half twist the thing would play backwards - little hacks like that as a kid led directly to me being known as Mister Fixit at work, and people are always baffled at how I do it. For some reason they can't understand that it's possible to look at something to see how it works, and then fix it.
I'm seriously tempted to start designing kids toys that are designed to be hackable.
I know what you mean. It's like the way "creative" now seems to be a noun meaning "unemployed 20-something in a coffee shop with a macbook pro bought by daddy".
Looks like you'd enjoy Finland being in charge then. They ruled that removal of the OtherOS function was valued at around 100 euros ($145). Slashdot thread
It's worse than Flash because it adds nothing new. Flash would have been adequate to do what they needed, which is display the video whilst preventing people from downloading it too easily (I'm guessing). It adds nothing, but it requires a whole multi-megabit download and new software clogging up your browser. It adds nothing, and takes away from both those who want to see it and those who want the cleanest, fastest computer they can have. It adds nothing to the world, it's the very definition of inelegant according to Feynman himself.
There's two entirely separate issues at hand here:
Firstly, sci-fi is a niche genre. Those of us that love it and study it and understand that it's mostly a way of doing the fun, speculative side of Real Science know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm betting at least half of them are already formulating an angry response to my use of "sci-fi", arguing that it should be "SF". My point being that "we" can't even agree on what "our" genre is. So it's not a genre, it's a mindset, and we can't agree.
Secondly, it's really difficult for somebody without a basic grounding of scientific method and the history of science to properly get a grasp on what sci-fi (or whatever) is actually trying to do. Their closest reference point is literature, because SF (or whatever) is often done in book form. Scify (or whatever) doesn't do traditional literature well, in fact it often ignores the standard, conventional techniques of plot and character development because scific (or whatever) is so fundamentally grounded in explaining wild and extravagant ideas via a story. In that respect it is poor literature by any standard.
So science fiction and literature are simply two different things that happen to share a medium. The literature types don't get scifi, and the speculative fiction folk usually don't get literature. No biggy. Let just keep doing what we all do and not try to stop the other. One day somebody will do both in spectacular fashion (I'm looking at you Stephenson) and we'll all get over it and wonder what the fuss was all about.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Use a bunch of hydrogen bombs, or better a big parabolic death-ray....sorry, life-mirror, and vapourise the caps. Then scatter as much simple CO2 metabolising life as possible over the temperate regions. Sit back and watch evolution take hold. Might take a while. Just an idea...
MS buys rights to Feynman videos, puts them online for "everyone". That's very nice of them.
MS then insists that you install their propriety video player to play it. Not an HTML5 tag, not *any* of the multitude of Flash based video players, NOT EVEN A SIMPLE LINK TO A VIDEO FILE!
If you want to make something available to everybody for free you don't use a rarely used system that does nothing except replicate existing functionality whilst locking everybody else out. You don't insist they download (yet another) resource grabbing plugin. If you want everyone to see it you do what we did ten years ago, we called it "putting it on the internet" and it involved placing a video file on a server and then putting a link to the file on a web page. It's not that complicated, and I'm sure MS can cope with it. Unless, of course, you don't want "everybody" to see it. If you want only confirmed Silverlight users to see it then it makes perfect sense. I'm sure Feynman would have appreciated the gesture.
We were still using DOS based apps until a couple of years ago. Then we upgraded to a bells and whistles.NET version and everything is slower and buggier, to the extent they had to upgrade all of the machines in the company (think 75 bookshops, plus head office). The software doesn't even have to be compatible with any external companies, we just needed an upgrade because it was there as far as I can tell.
Add to that, however, that the netbook market is still huge. There's enough money involved for many OS manufacturers to produce a netbook specific variant. I've got one and wouldn't give it up for a tablet as they stand. Different tools, different jobs.
The larger scale you work on, the more efficient the power production is. An oil fire power station charging batteries will give you more miles per gallon than the equivalent in cars, and produce less pollution. Power stations don't need to have the same acceleration and handling in corners as cars do, so the engineers can concentrate on efficiency and emissions rather than weight and size.
His cousin, mostly. Still, when you're a man who won't use a toothbrush because you think they're too abrasive and begrudgingly submit to a comb (which I sympathise with entirely) then setting up house with your cousin isn't all that odd. Einstein was also a late talker by some accounts (OK, Wikipedia), which is a trait shared by Mr Barnett.
As regards the autism tag - I can't help but feel that it's sometimes used to label a kid who is simply smarter than the doctor. From watching the (admittedly short) video he doesn't seem to have any socio-linguistic problems that aren't directly attributable to: A: The fact that we're watching a 12 year old explain undergrad calculus, and B: The fact that the 12 year old is probably trying to deal with a world where he's starting to realise the majority of adults around him need him to talk down to them if they're going to understand him. It's enough to mess with anyone's concentration.
Incidentally, anyone got a link to what his theory actually is? Are we talking about a reformulation or a modification (a la MOND) or what?
There are two geeks sitting here who are trying to work out whether to cry, giggle, or giggle till they cry. This is the whole point of (good, hard) science fiction....to predict things so well that there's no real option but to go out and do it for real. Good on Discovery, good on Shatner, good on Roddenberry and good on humanity in general.
Yes, we were promised jetpacks back in the 70s, but this is nearly as good, and frankly, has a whole lot more charm. I love this stuff.
Yes, in theory. The most extreme estimation of Facebook's equity-per-user is around $800, so there's your starting point. Of course, as more and more people join the more us non-members will become statistical outliers, and therefore at the interesting and maybe valuable end of the spectrum. I'm holding out for exactly this...either Facebook go bust spectacularly, fade into obscurity, or I get a few million for being one of the last to sign up. I don't really care which, the money would be nice but I'm not enough of a fool to actually believe social marketing is worth that much per person.
The lack of calibration is all that is required in the UK, whether or not you wave your (also uncalibrated) whatsit at the judge makes no difference. He might as well have said "The speed gun wasn't calibrated, and I have a marshmallow.", the result would be identical.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, and posted much the same on a thread a few days ago. We've got a thing here called the "European Computer Driving Licence" (yes, an official car analogy!) which is a basic qualification people can sit, it's usually used for office workers and the like to show basic competence. The sad thing is, the modules are basically "How to use MS Word", "How To Use MS Excel", "How To Use MS PowerPoint" and the like.
Yes, but the point is that Ubuntu, as with Linux generally, is free in both senses and supplied without warranty. Yes, they're usually nice enough to make an effort at keeping things easy and safe, but at the end of the day it's your machine and your problem. Too many people these days expect some company or another to take responsibility for everything they do online, and it's a mindset that needs to be broken.
It's like blaming a software manufacturer for your car crashing when you just went too fast.....
Yeah, that's not how credit ratings work. OK, so somebody caught a fraud in progress on your account. All that means is that your account is a risky one - you had to employ specialists after all, and they actually caught somebody at it!
Whether or not Sony offer protection, the fact remains that your account details have been compromised, which makes it a risky account. What would the credit ratings agencies suggest? Don't do business with companies who are likely to lose your data, I would imagine.
I'm Synonymous. Exactly the same as Anonymous, just a different name.
Are we really even sure there's a language at use here? A computer can either search for system, syntax and grammar, or just do a frequency analysis on soundbites. If dolphins are using the former then they might have a chance, but if it's the latter the best they can hope for is a dictionary - which sounds much the same, but it's the comparison is akin to a well written program versus a two element CSV file.
If you're not going to connect to a network that doesn't really matter. My Asus netbook uses the Splashtop and it's very handy as a disaster recovery OS - the first thing I did with the netbook was wipe the XP installation and it immediately dropped into the Splashtop, very handy if you lose the primary OS for any reason. You're right though, I wouldn't use it as a regular OS for exactly the reasons you mention.
More to the point, there aren't editors in the traditional sense. There are people who submit stories (ie you and me), people who vote stories up and down (ie you and me) and there are people who sometimes run an eye over things to stop Slashdot getting sued. They seem to comment on things sometimes, but as far as I can tell they just add a tick to stuff to send it from the top of the popular list to the front page, no actual "editing" involved. Yes it's frustrating to read crap, but the point is it's crap that we collectively voted for. From what I can tell from my own account (that I've never paid a penny into), the more modding you do, and the better you do it according to whatever algorithm there is, the more you get. Try it. (And watch my own ranking drop to near-nothing after this!)
I've been running Ubuntu/Gnome since 6.03 (now on 10.3) and the Netbook Remix (UNR - a Unity based version) for the last year and a bit. The Gnome version has always been on a desktop with a fairly bog standard monitor, and UNR has been unsurprisingly on a netbook with the wide-but-short screen that this entails. (My review of the Asus netbook I use includes a few comments on Unity: shameless-blog-link) Here's my thoughts, because I think they're relevant.
I like Gnome. I know a lot of people bitch about it, but personally I quite like it. The defaults are roughly what I set up anyway, and it's fairly intuitive for me. The only major change I make other than basic cosmetics is a menu bar on the left, auto-hiding, with big icons for Firefox, Gimp, a terminal, gphpedit and all the other programs that I use daily.
UNR took a little getting used to, but given the efficiency that it places on screenspace I've found it to be very worthwhile. You can easily drop out of UNR and re-login with Gnome, and the experience is identical to the desktop version, but Unity is genuinely a swisher, faster, easier system when you're limited on screen height and using a trackpad...the big shiny icons, much as I dislike them on a desktop, actually make things really quick and easy on a netbook.
The downside to UNR/Unity? It's clearly not hugely stable yet. This is quite possibly to do with closed source binaries from graphics card manufacturers, the only crash-worthy problem I've ever had with the netbook is UNR dropping out to a terminal after going into a bit of a panic finding the graphics card. There's nothing in particular that seems to spark it, it just seems to be a fundamental, occasional glitch very low down in the system somewhere. It's not related to processor or graphics card load, it just flips out sometimes.
So I like Unity style stuff when it works, and on a netbook. I also adopt a few of the Unity style features on a standard Gnome desktop. It definitely has a few very nice usability features. I want the option not to use it though. My preferred solution would be a very bog standard Gnome interface as standard for desktops, plus "themes" you can apply to get OSX, Unity or Windows style layouts. Then (as exists for KDE, xfce etc) options at boot for the others. And keep Unity...it's great on a netbook but it needs work. Offer it as an option, not a default, at least not until it's stable and generally the preferred option.
That said, hell, I get the whole #! for free, so who am I to bitch about these things?
I went to a lecture last week by Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal. (It's an honorary title, he doesn't just hold a telescope for the queen, he's a top level astrophysicist/cosmologist too). During the Q&A at the end he was bemoaning the fact that kids no longer have toys they can tinker with and take apart. His example was a transistor radio, and equally I remember getting a cassette walkman for my ninth birthday. Within a few hours it was in bits on my desk, and I'd worked out that if you give the rubber band connecting the motor to the tape sprocket a half twist the thing would play backwards - little hacks like that as a kid led directly to me being known as Mister Fixit at work, and people are always baffled at how I do it. For some reason they can't understand that it's possible to look at something to see how it works, and then fix it.
I'm seriously tempted to start designing kids toys that are designed to be hackable.
I know what you mean. It's like the way "creative" now seems to be a noun meaning "unemployed 20-something in a coffee shop with a macbook pro bought by daddy".
Looks like you'd enjoy Finland being in charge then. They ruled that removal of the OtherOS function was valued at around 100 euros ($145).
Slashdot thread
It's worse than Flash because it adds nothing new. Flash would have been adequate to do what they needed, which is display the video whilst preventing people from downloading it too easily (I'm guessing). It adds nothing, but it requires a whole multi-megabit download and new software clogging up your browser. It adds nothing, and takes away from both those who want to see it and those who want the cleanest, fastest computer they can have. It adds nothing to the world, it's the very definition of inelegant according to Feynman himself.
Other than that, yeah, no problem.
There's two entirely separate issues at hand here:
Firstly, sci-fi is a niche genre. Those of us that love it and study it and understand that it's mostly a way of doing the fun, speculative side of Real Science know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm betting at least half of them are already formulating an angry response to my use of "sci-fi", arguing that it should be "SF". My point being that "we" can't even agree on what "our" genre is. So it's not a genre, it's a mindset, and we can't agree.
Secondly, it's really difficult for somebody without a basic grounding of scientific method and the history of science to properly get a grasp on what sci-fi (or whatever) is actually trying to do. Their closest reference point is literature, because SF (or whatever) is often done in book form. Scify (or whatever) doesn't do traditional literature well, in fact it often ignores the standard, conventional techniques of plot and character development because scific (or whatever) is so fundamentally grounded in explaining wild and extravagant ideas via a story. In that respect it is poor literature by any standard.
So science fiction and literature are simply two different things that happen to share a medium. The literature types don't get scifi, and the speculative fiction folk usually don't get literature. No biggy. Let just keep doing what we all do and not try to stop the other. One day somebody will do both in spectacular fashion (I'm looking at you Stephenson) and we'll all get over it and wonder what the fuss was all about.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. Use a bunch of hydrogen bombs, or better a big parabolic death-ray....sorry, life-mirror, and vapourise the caps. Then scatter as much simple CO2 metabolising life as possible over the temperate regions. Sit back and watch evolution take hold. Might take a while. Just an idea...
MS buys rights to Feynman videos, puts them online for "everyone". That's very nice of them.
MS then insists that you install their propriety video player to play it. Not an HTML5 tag, not *any* of the multitude of Flash based video players, NOT EVEN A SIMPLE LINK TO A VIDEO FILE!
If you want to make something available to everybody for free you don't use a rarely used system that does nothing except replicate existing functionality whilst locking everybody else out. You don't insist they download (yet another) resource grabbing plugin. If you want everyone to see it you do what we did ten years ago, we called it "putting it on the internet" and it involved placing a video file on a server and then putting a link to the file on a web page. It's not that complicated, and I'm sure MS can cope with it. Unless, of course, you don't want "everybody" to see it. If you want only confirmed Silverlight users to see it then it makes perfect sense. I'm sure Feynman would have appreciated the gesture.
We were still using DOS based apps until a couple of years ago. Then we upgraded to a bells and whistles .NET version and everything is slower and buggier, to the extent they had to upgrade all of the machines in the company (think 75 bookshops, plus head office). The software doesn't even have to be compatible with any external companies, we just needed an upgrade because it was there as far as I can tell.
And far harder. It's a system specifically designed to handle massive numbers of constantly running connections.
OK, like leaving Mom's Basement and going out on a really sunny day. Happy to help ;)
Add to that, however, that the netbook market is still huge. There's enough money involved for many OS manufacturers to produce a netbook specific variant. I've got one and wouldn't give it up for a tablet as they stand. Different tools, different jobs.
The larger scale you work on, the more efficient the power production is. An oil fire power station charging batteries will give you more miles per gallon than the equivalent in cars, and produce less pollution. Power stations don't need to have the same acceleration and handling in corners as cars do, so the engineers can concentrate on efficiency and emissions rather than weight and size.
Isn't that a little....*puts on shades*...derivative? (With apologies to xkcd, I couldn't resist)
His cousin, mostly. Still, when you're a man who won't use a toothbrush because you think they're too abrasive and begrudgingly submit to a comb (which I sympathise with entirely) then setting up house with your cousin isn't all that odd. Einstein was also a late talker by some accounts (OK, Wikipedia), which is a trait shared by Mr Barnett.
As regards the autism tag - I can't help but feel that it's sometimes used to label a kid who is simply smarter than the doctor. From watching the (admittedly short) video he doesn't seem to have any socio-linguistic problems that aren't directly attributable to:
A: The fact that we're watching a 12 year old explain undergrad calculus, and
B: The fact that the 12 year old is probably trying to deal with a world where he's starting to realise the majority of adults around him need him to talk down to them if they're going to understand him. It's enough to mess with anyone's concentration.
Incidentally, anyone got a link to what his theory actually is? Are we talking about a reformulation or a modification (a la MOND) or what?
There are two geeks sitting here who are trying to work out whether to cry, giggle, or giggle till they cry. This is the whole point of (good, hard) science fiction....to predict things so well that there's no real option but to go out and do it for real. Good on Discovery, good on Shatner, good on Roddenberry and good on humanity in general.
Yes, we were promised jetpacks back in the 70s, but this is nearly as good, and frankly, has a whole lot more charm. I love this stuff.
Yes, in theory. The most extreme estimation of Facebook's equity-per-user is around $800, so there's your starting point. Of course, as more and more people join the more us non-members will become statistical outliers, and therefore at the interesting and maybe valuable end of the spectrum. I'm holding out for exactly this...either Facebook go bust spectacularly, fade into obscurity, or I get a few million for being one of the last to sign up. I don't really care which, the money would be nice but I'm not enough of a fool to actually believe social marketing is worth that much per person.
The lack of calibration is all that is required in the UK, whether or not you wave your (also uncalibrated) whatsit at the judge makes no difference. He might as well have said "The speed gun wasn't calibrated, and I have a marshmallow.", the result would be identical.