We're not quite up to solar max yet (of cycle #23). Cycles 19-22 were among the largest in recorded history, but some predictions (by Schatten and a few others) suggest that Cycle 23 might be a little wimpy when all is said and done (as was Cycle #20).
One thing that isn't reported in the press is the excellent agreement between solar forcing and global warming. To zeroth order the Earth is warmed by the Sun, but variations in solar irradiance are likely the primary contributions to decadal variations in the mean terrestrial temperature (as opposed to centurial or millenial variations like the major Ice Ages). Certainly there is a lot of data about climate over the last 2-3 thousand stars that is correlated with changes in solar activity.
A paper by Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, Science, 254, 698) showed that the mean length of the sunspot cycle is inversely correlated to mean terrestrial temperature. This correlation can be seen in other proxies of solar activity back millenia. Doing a quick search produced this page which has a lot of the basic underlying information. What one has to remember is that ALL of the "climate models" that are used to suggest an anthropogenic cause to global warming make the basic assumption that the rise in termperature is primarily correlated with an exponential growth in industry.
This is a nice hypothesis, but doesn't fly in the face of the data. FRom the F-C figure, one should note that temperature rises mostly before 1940. However, exponential rises in CO and CO2 production would demand that it take place *after* 1940.
Over 90 percent of the variance is explained by the Sun. But one thing is clear: in order to have 20th century global warming be explained by man-made causes, you have to violate cause and effect. There might be something buried in the noise, but that'll take more analysis to ferret it out. Nonetheless, it points out that one must be careful reading things in the press or from press releases.
One of my pet research projects is learning more about the sunspot cycle, Activity Cycles on other stars and stars with suppressed activity (like the Sun's during the Maunder, Sporer and Dalton minimums. So, a lot of what I've been looking at with stars, overlaps with some of the work done in solar forcing and its effect on Earth's climate.
Are we going to see articles and interviews on ALL of the candidates' websites? On their views of Linux and Open Source?
I would be interested in reading a compilation of the candidates' views on general topics mentioned frequently on/. --- the ability to contrast and compare responses would be an asset. However, focusing on one candidate is highly inappropriate --- we do not vote the same way, and our party affiliations are not all the same. (And we're not all American!)
I find it very unlikely that there'd be a/. article if, say, Alan Keyes site used Linux (no, I'm not a Keyes supporter).
OK - while the couple are perfectly free to do whatever they want to for their wedding, it just seems as though the event is being reduced to some kind of freaky event. To each his/her own of course... I'm happy for them, and it's great that they were able to do things the way they wanted to.
However at the same time, in the US same-sex couples cannot get married. Twenty-something states now forbid it explicitly (thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act), and there has been attempts to impeach the entire Vermont Supreme Court for ruling (unanimously) that the state has to offer some kind of recognition for same-sex couples (state-wide domestic partner "marriage lite", or actual marriage licenses).
Seems to me that there are a lot of people who are denied equal opportunity wouldn't waste the opportunity to get married (I know, totally IMHO for word choice) were it available to them. I guess the juxtaposition of the two situations just highlights the contrast for me. If this issue didn't exist, it'd be easier for me to just react to the online wedding with "well, if it makes them happy - what the hell".
At one place I deal with, it used to be that they had about oh 6-8 operators for many dozen Solaris boxes (I'm tempted to say hundreds, but it might be 150). As soon as they began suppling Win9X/NT support, the number of operators has increased, but the amount of operator time for UNIX support has decreased dramatically. Before you could put in requests for things to be installed onto the system. You can still do that but the time scale of upgrades has gone from a few weeks to several months, and in a few cases measuring into years.
Meanwhile, more and more time is spent keeping the NT boxes working. Mind you, the situation wasn't great before, but now I've just given up any hope of ever seeing additions made to software support.
Now, another place I work is having problems with NT, Macs, Linux and Solaris machines, but that can be traced to a huge lack of admin support (they have no full-time admins and have computers scattered all over a metropolis!). So it is possible to have Linux perform as poorly as NT, but you have to really work at it!:-)
No. Linux users upgrade and update their systems. Windows people don't. Windows people can't because when you install a "service pack" it breaks half your important applications.
Didn't anyone learn from Calvin's cloning experiment (from Calvin and Hobbes).
He replicated himself so that he could spend all his time playing. The clones would do his chores, do his homework, attend school, etc. However, it ended up with him doing all the work and covering up for the extra messes the clones created!
Remember, if you're devious enough to clone yourself, your clone knows this!
Besides, where will it end? The horror. What if someone cloned the people in those "Old Navy" commercials? No --- this is simply too much evil to unleash onto the planet.
I was a second-generation USENETer and a first-generation IRC user (definitions [both my own personal reckoning - YMMV] at the bottom of this posting). For both media I was an active participant on newsgroups/channels primarily of interest to non-heterosexual people. At that time, there were only 2 or 3 states that had equal rights laws (there are still less than a dozen now!), and over 25 states still had sodomy laws on the books (it's still around 20 these days - it's important to note that almost no progress has been made in the last 10 years or so, except now we have things like Don't Ask Don't Tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act, etc.).
For many of the years I was participating, the mere act of posting publically was seen as a huge step. First, since most people only had net access through work, you were essentially coming out to your company, esp. since you had no idea who else was reading the group. But you also had no idea who was out there eavesdropping. On the optimistic side, that never-heard-from person was just not read to make himself/herself public but used the group as a resources to what was out there, and certainly first postings frequently had comments of the "I've been reading here for ### months" variety. More pessimistically, it could be your neighbor, your boss, etc. Or if you wanted to invoke a conspiracy theory, the gov't was compiling names, etc.
So, one of the running paranoid "jokes" was that someone was "out there" recording everyone and everything. It was feasible --- the entire USENET feed was only a few MB/day at the time, which was still a lot of storage, but not out of the reach of a gov't budget and a lot of 9-track tapes.
It was an in-joke --- people would refer to it from time to time by putting in parenthetical comments (And a big hello to the person in the basement of the FBI who's reading this!) or in.signature files. Even as late as 1991 or so, I completely expected that if I ever applied for a "real" gov't job that required a background check that they'd carry in this 6-inch stack of printed postings to soc.motss.
Around the second-generation IRC period we once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that all of IRC could be compressed onto one CD ROM per day. Since USENET and IRC are basically "public", there wasn't any way to be certain anyone wasn't just archiving a full USENET feed, and had hacked up a server to listen in on all IRC channels. It might not have been done, but it was technically doable.
Of course things have become MUCH larger with time, but so have recording media.
So my point is, that while it's an issue that the Russians might be requiring ISP's to feed them traffic, there's really nothing stopping our own government from slurping off the Internet at will. It could be happening now! The bad old days might have always been the same as today (and tomorrow).
--------------------------- footnotes
USENET "generations"
Before the great splitting around 1983 (i.e., when net.* split into comp., soc., rec., etc.)
After the great splitting but before the September that never ended (when the "unwashed masses invaded USENET and S/N dropped irreparably"
After 1996 or so.
IRC "generations":
Numbered channels, limit of 10 people per channel, no chan-ops, few modes.
"+" channels, no user limit, still good S/N, and early in the "#" channels era. Pretty much to when the first 'bots arrived, and S/N went to very low levels.
Other companies have NO PROBLEM entering the market. True. But, irrelevant. A company can enter the market, and come up with something absolutely fantastic. If it isn't for a M$ OS, then it's declared a "niche" item, and doesn't get picked up by most IT departments. If it *is* for a M$ OS, then one of several things happen:
M$ changes things to make it harder for the application to run under Windows. People give up on the product, and the company goes under.
M$ announces that they will soon release something similiar. Everyone drops the product and waits for the M$ version which might ever actually be produced.
There is already too much support for #2 to happen (e.g., Netscape), and M$ actually does make another product, using libraries that aren't as broken as the ones they license out to companies to make Windows-based applications. It runs faster (comparatively) then the product or (more common) gets bundled in with the OS, and the company goes under.
I find it interesting to note that the last few weeks of Doonesbury have been targeting just this very effect. Mikim didn't go under because they didn't have a good product. They entered the market. They just lost everything immediately because when they didn't sell themselves to M$, they had no way to compete.
Of course, in that example, M$ made a comparable product to Mikim's freely available on their website. Were Linux to be, say, 70% of the market share, I wouldn't expect many people to be all that interested in Win2000. But the similarity doesn't exist because open source groups lack the capital (and market share) that M$ has.
In any case, the claim that M$ isn't a monopoly by using a dictionary definition of "monopoly" isn't really valid. IMHO, the definition needs to be broadened to cover "effective" monopolies as they can exist now (and couldn't years ago when the definition as offered was valid).
Me, I don't see where breaking them up really solves anything. If you want real competition, then require that the licensed libraries that are made available to developers be the same libraries that M$ itself uses! Then, companies can compete, because they can integrate their software to the OS the same way that M$ does. Furthermore, 3rd parties will be able to fix long-standing bugs in the M$ code (or work around them), etc. At worst, at least there'd be a more-stable version of Windows produced.
Aside from the error that Dec. 22, 888 has an odd digit (*1*2), the time difference between an all-odd-digit day on 19 Nov. 1999 and an all even-digit day (provided you allow 0 to be an even digit) - 2 Feb. 2000, is the briefest of all in the calendar (even for years BC, I think).
One of the reasons the US entered the Space Race was the (fairly legitimate) fear that the USSR would deploy muclear weapons in space making any place in the US a potential target.
One need only look at the statements made by members of the Chinese government vis a vis the situation of Taiwan to immediate consider a parallel situation with the upcoming Chinese space launch. (For those who haven't been paying attention, on several occasions, officials have stated that if the US dares to intervene on behalf of Taiwan, that Honolulu or Los Angeles are reachable targets by Chinese missles. Our anti-missle technology development is at something of a standstill, since much of it was linked to Reagan's "Star Wars" program, and that has been enough for research to be dropped (ah, politics).)
Whether or not the threats could be carried out today, other analyses have suggested that China will have copious technology to do it by about 2003 (no doubt thanks to our lax security at our national laboratories).
Meanwhile, the US has floundered on its own programs for 20 years (basically since Apollo 17). Aside from some bright spots (IUE was insanely overproductive, the Voyager program's record speaks for itself), many large-scale project has either suffered incredible delays getting off the ground (the shuttle program was supposed to start in 1979, Galileo sat in storage for several years, and had been crippled from a non-working antenna since launch) or has had problems (Mars Observer, the secondary mirror of HST, etc.). Worse, several low-cost (i.e., good bang-for-the-buck) programs never got off of the ground (so to speak): one of the last things developed as part of SDI was a low-cost launch capsule that could carry a payload pretty much anywhere in the solar system and was re-usable. I think the cost was somethng like 0.1% of a shuttle launch. Oops.
The saddest part is, if we wanted to go back to the Moon again tomorrow, we woud have to start over, and it would probably take longer to get there (from the announcement of the program) than it did before.
Finally, the comments about a space program being wasted because people are starving. There is and has always been room for doing both. The cost of the Apollo program was something like 50 cents per American per year, and the R&D involved brought us useful things like Teflon, microwave ovens, many advances in solid state physics, and of course, Tang!:-) Increasing our understanding of what's around us, and meeting technical challenges is always beneficial to the general public. Somehow we lost that in the last 30 years, and now we're plunging into a very anti-science/anti-education society. I really don't see how that will help anyone.
No, the SAT's aren't the be-all, end-all of admissions, but I'd hate to be the kid who worked really hard in school to get the grades I did, just to get a rejection letter from my school of choice because I was passed over for someone who didn't have any academic requirements to speak of (at least not as good as mine) but he/she could play with Lego really well!
Ouch. It's bad enough that things get watered down to admit people solely on the basis of being able to play sports well, even though in many sports-oriented schools less than half will eventually graduate, but if you're going to ditch the SAT's, shouldn't it be in favor of some metric of academic achievement?
My new mantra: stop rewarding stupidity. It's the only way to prevent the next Dark Ages from taking more control than it already has.
Back in 1985, I worked on my first Sun machine. It had a gui called SunWin. It was OK because it was the first GUI system I was exposed to (before that it was VT100's and IBM mainframes).
Then they had color --- wheeee. (1987 ish).
Then around 1991, we were all moving to OpenWindows because that was the REALLY great thing to use and Sunwin was no longer supported by Sun, really. So, re-port all the code we wrote for Sunwin to Openwin. Sigh - OK but it's just this one time.
1993-or-so. Oops. OpenWindows is passe. Other groups jump to X11, but my IS department doesn't want to support that because Sun has a *vision* but still keeps everyone in the dark that Motif is where Sun is headed (supposedly).
1994/1995 - Did I say Motif? I meant NeXT, or something else. The X11 people are putting their fingers in their ears to drown out the complaints of all the people who heard through the grapevine to dump OpenWindows and embrace Motif (so they started porting things to Motif), but at least they've been able to use the same GUI for a few years. All the people in the dark are still using OpenWindows, and have no idea that everyone else is using something different.
1997 - Some people have CDE now. The X11 people are still using X11 and everyone else who still hasn't figured out how to configure OpenWindows are still using OpenWindows with the same blue screen. It's an easy discrminator to tell the populations who are aware of the non-Sun UNIX world and those for whom e-mail is still "a nifty new thing that might catch on".
1999 - I'm using CDE at work which is almost impossible to configure (I still haven't been able to get a Netscape button on the tool bar, but I'm the ONLY person around who has an Xterm button where everyone else has a "TextEditor" button a Sun application that is used by zero people except for my officemate).
2000 - Oops CDE is now passe as is Motif. What will Sun support next? (Well, not NeXT!:-) So in 15 years I've changed GUIs for my Sun workstations what 3 almost 4 (I avoided Motif) times.
Meanwhile all the X11 people are using things like Gnome (like I am at home) and we're back to where we started again, except all the clueless people are still on OpenWindows and almost no one uses the facilities that come with it, prefering to do all of that on M$ machines at home or next to their Sun workstation. The IS dept. hasn't said "boo" about where they're headed although most of them are using CDE... Meanwhile, I've just given up doing a lot of things with my Sun workstation and work from home on my Linux box with Gnome+Sawmill, hoping that eventually Gnumeric is less bug-riddled and the next stable version of Gnome won't make StarOffice crash (has anyone else seen this???)
So, as I said at the top. Sigh. What goes around.................
At one point when I upgraded xanim, I ran into the problem that other people have mentioned that although I supposedly had QT support, I didn't have anything that could comprehend the Sorenson codec.
So, I wrote Sorenson, and their response to me was that they couldn't do anything because of their agreement with Apple, and suggested that I talk to Apple about it. I tried to do that and the only response I received back from Apple was that it was a Sorenson issue and that I should take it up with Sorenson.
Ah yes, the 1990's - the time when corporations believed that "customer service" meant just passing the concern onto someone else.
I for one will be very happy to see something positive from this petition. However I am disheartened that another petition to encourage greater support for hardware drivers (esp. printers) under Linux seems to be short of its goal!
OK I may be a radical, but although I hear over and over again that the "failing" of Open Source (which for the purpose of this response I will equate with UNIX) is that the user-interface is SO HARD compared to
I have spent almost no time using Windows since I first ran into it in 1983 or so. I have avoided Win3.1, Win95, Win98, WinNT, and I will probably try to avoid Win00 (as in "Win zero zero") when it plops onto the universe. That doesn't mean I haven't USED it at all, but I haven't attempted to master it.
So, now it looks like I'll be started a new job soon which uses WinTel all over the place. I'm not worried about that (aside from all the obvious places I should be worried: security, scalability, reliablility, etc.:-), but when I see other people using WinTel OS's it seems that the UI is nothing CLOSE to "immediately obvious". It's levels upon levels of options and configuration which isn't intuitive most of the time.
OK - so let's compare that to X11, Gnome, CDE, and even to older things like OpenWin. Are these UI's THAT far afield from Win9X or NT that they're actually MORE difficult to master? I think not. Sure the key mappings might be different and for most users, there's some fraction of expected interaction with a command line,but even for Win9X people, there is still a LOT of "delving into DOS" that takes place, even though there is a percentage of users who only interact with the GUI.
So what about this new generation of UNIX users (defined for convenience as the post Ultrix/SunOS/ SCO people --- basically the "Linux era", although that also includes non-Linux UNIX, e.g., Solaris)? While it's not common to have users who never ever deal with the command line, I think we've reached the threshhold that it could be done. The available client software that I find under RedHat and Gnome are very quickly eating away any need (other than convenience that my fingers are hardwired to vi sequences and sentences like "ls -lt | head -5":-) for the shell. The file managers are no worse than what comes with Win9X, there's a Gnome "finder" that works as well as the one in MacOS (does anyone know why "find . -type d -exec chmod g+s {}\;" doesn;t work under Linux?), and so forth.
At this point I think arguments along the lines of "well, Linux/Open Source loses because they have really geeky UI's" is more FUD than accurate. It will become even less accurate over a somewhat short time scale! One metric to testing this assertion it to see how many "normal" admin UNIX tasks (sysadmin or user adminstrative tasks) are being pushed over to programs with UI's than are done on the shell. Programs like Gftp, xchat, etc. are definitely taking the place of all the command-line programs in my life, mostly because the UI is straightforward and gets me to complicated uses faster and easier than before. At that point, it's no different than searching for some obscure panel item in Win9X...
The problem with their "opt out" program is that it ALSO sets a cookie. So, all users are stuck in the situation that DoubleClick intends to write materials to your hard drive (and use your CPU) in order to NOT USE their product!
I find this completely unacceptable, and have written to tell them as such. Opting out should be handled at their end, not mine or yours.
I have instructed them to change their policy, or otherwise I will recommend that DoubleClick be billed for the use of our facilities for what is in effect their own record-keeping. I suggest that everyone do the same: I don't mind companies wanting to publish their ads on the net in appropriate ways, but using my computer to do it (or in this case to not do it), isn't appropriate.
Is charging them $2K/month too little? I realize they're only using a little disk space, but I'll completely understand if they want to take their cookies elsewhere.:-) And it would make a nice mortgage payment...
gnome applications are expanding phenomenally..the gnome core is also growing exponentially so yes you are going to find stability issues at this stage..its very pre alpha.
Funny. It doesn't say alpha on the releases. I completely concede that it's done great in a short time, but the exponential growth is a blessing and a curse: we get lots of potentially fantastic applications, but keeping them under control, setting standards, etc. becomes (has already become) impossible to accomplish.
And if I sound like I'm complaining, I'm really not. I got along for years withuot StarOffice, and I'll do so again (since I seem to have to). I dno't have the time to write my OWN competitor to GNOME, and I don't want to. I just hope that this explosion gets contained before it's one heap of unrealized potential.
Am I the only one noticing increasing problems trying to keep GNOME-related software afloat?
I just changed from Enlightenment to Sawmill. Now StarOffice crashes when I try to run it. (That's not the only change I've made, I've upgraded other things.)
So, now my machine is starting to behave like a Mac: upgrade a few things and watch other programs crash and burn from conflicts.
I like GNOME but so many of the associated applications are insanely buggy. I've had problems with GWeather, GNotes, the GNOME address book (it prints other people's information in the display panel mixed with the information of the person you look up --- at first I thought it was a user-input error but I verified it twice by creating new books and carefully entering in test cases).
So, while it's great that some of GNOME will come out as V1.2 --- how can we place a high standard on GNOME-based application software? OR is the problem that there's something unstable about GNOME that makes it hard to create stable application software???
Just in case anyone wanted to go look for this puppy.
It's a numbered asteroid (3753) so the orbit is well-determined. Right now it's within 60 degrees of the Sun so that's a little challenging (but Venus is always within 47, Mercury 17ish, so that gives some perspective).
According to the Minor Planet Center it's presently at magnitude 16.2 in Scutum (approx R.A. 18h 34m, Dec. -14 11', but of course that's changing fairly quickly), with a solar distance of 1.205 AU and a distance from Earth of 0.56 AU. It has a diameter of about 17.5 km.
Since it's in Scutum, that means it's also in the Milky Way so the chances of there being few 16th magnitude stars nearby is well, astronomical!:-)
You can get up to date positions, etc. from the website listed above. Please be gentle - it's not a terribly fast server, and a lot of dedicated amateurs/professionals rely on it being available!
Re:And great opportunity for the spin doctors!
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Total Lunar Eclipse
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· Score: 1
And it'll keep them in PH33R on environmental issues, like the "ozone hole" over Antarctica. Would you call a region of a wall that is a few percent less thick a "hole"? (Not to mention that we're drawing conclusions on global weather trends with a few decades worth of data. "experts" can't even explain the causes of the ice ages.)
Oh it's much worse than that. A tight correlation of mean terrestrial temperature with overall solar activity has been observed over time scales from months to millenia, but it gets overlooked in favor of computer modelling of greenhouse gas production that ignores water (the predominate greenhouse "gas" in our atmosphere) and has a cause-and-effect problem (the temperature goes up decades before the CO/CO2 buildup is supposed to have taken place, and then levels off) that's skipped over.
I'm not sure of how short of an exposure you'll want to use (a FANTASTIC book for helping with this is Barry Gordon's Astrophotograph y : Featuring the Fx System of Exposure Determination which was how I got started, and even more importantly gave me really awesome photos on my first try!
Sicne the Moon is in Gemini, you're in a good situation because you can take longer exposures without getting trails. For a 50mm shot, my guess is anything under 15-20 sec should give you no trails (using a narrower-angle lens will decrease this tremendously!), but even when eclipsed the Moon might be still bright enough that you'll be using very short exposures. (Unfortunately my copy of Gordon's book is at the office, and I"m not!). Of course if you're using a telescope with tracking, it's not as much of an issue. I've only done still tripod imaging (which is fun all by itself). But be forewarned, even though the Moon looks HUGE, with a 50 mm lens, the actual lunar disk will only have a diameter of about 3 mm on the film!
Dickinson and Newton recommend for 400 speed film (I recommend SLIDE film over print film!) at f/8, an exposure time of 1/250 s at partial phases (after ingress), to 1/4 s during ingress near totality, to 1 to 10 seconds once totality starts, up to 100s for the deepest parts of the eclipse (and probably if the Moon is at perigee). Of course for exposures that are VERY long, you'll need to track the Moon to offset sidereal motion. But at a declination of 20 degrees North, as I said you can probably get up to 15 seconds without too much distortion (for a 50 mm lens).
Of course, in Boston, it's snowing.
But the next lunar eclipse visible in North America is less than a year away (Jan. 9, 2001).
I'm really excited that there are all these games being ported to Linux (including to of my favorites: SimCity and Civilization).
But, there are SO MANY games that aren't even ported to the Mac yet? I very mich like the "Theme" games (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, etc.) and that company (BullFrog) has no interest in porting their games to anything else (and their website doesn't appear to work under Linux/NN4.7!, and there doesn't seem to be an e-mail address for their webmaster --- the pop-up for "Credits" fails to show the image that actually tells who is responsible!).
For that matter, has anyone ever heard anything from the Myst/Riven people (Cyan) about porting either to Linux? At least THEY have a Mac port...
Sorry to be sort of an unenthusiastic wet noodle about what really is good news, but it just seems that we jump whenever any company throws us a bone, while the others just completely ignore us. (I've been trying to get specs from Epson so that I can use my new color pritner, but their response has been basically "What's Linux?"), so I suppose that's coloring (no pun intended) my attitude.
So, it's great that there Mozilla/NN5 will be "beefier", but isn't it a little late to be still adding things to Mozilla?
Is there any word as to what this will do to the expected release date? Right now that's more important to me than last-minute creeping featurism.
Has anyone generated the first derivative of projected release date? Such a statistic actually DOES serve a useful purpose since it tells you if the delays are in control or are running away from you. Using Einsteinian notation for derivatives (dot = dX/dt, dotdot = d2X/dt2):
If dot(release date) is above 0 then the project is moving away, and unless measures are taken, you'll never see it completed.
If dot(release date) = 0, then it's barely contained, insofar as that the true release date is at infinity (basically it means that for every day that passes, one day is added to the release date). Whether or not "infinity" is acceptable is a different story.
dot(release date) less than 0 means that you will eventually see the project completed.
Now, you can get into second derivatives:-) at which point you can see if things are still slipping away, even if dot(release date) is negative, or if things are staying on target [i.e., dotdot(release date) == 0].
(I used to think about this in regards to a telescope that was soon-to-be-finished when I started grad school, and was soon-to-be-finished when I finished grad school. It did manage to cross over to "finished" and AFAIK is producing wonderful results.)
Well, it didn't crash... but it's really buggy
on
Opera Beta Released
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· Score: 1
First the bad news:
There wasn't a single page I visited that didn't have rendering mistakes. The most annoying bug seems to be that if the page finishes loading before images are displayed, it just stops rendering the pages. Sometimes you don't even SEE some of the images on a page, just the holes where they're supposed to go.
It's apparent that there's no support for the HEIGHT and WIDTH options to img src= tags; they're just rendered at the original size.
Forms don't work. Submit buttons do not appear to do anything. Sometimes, input areas don't appear, so you can't even fill out the form before finding out that you can't submit it anyway.
Paragraph spacing is "odd". Anyone who writes pages to fit just right is going to go insane trying to get pages to look identical on IE/NN and Opera!
In all, I would say that this is not a beta. It's not even an alpha release.
Now the good news::-)
What is encouraging is that pages do render VERY quickly compared to NN4. The status bar has a lot of geeky information (transfer speed that updates more quickly than NN's, and an elapsed time monitor), and it displays the full URL of each item that is being loaded. There were other widgets on the status bar that I didn't play with.
When Opera does have a true beta out, I'm sure it will be fantastic. It didn't crash on me, so I suppose that puts it ahead of NN:-)/2. But if you're expecting to jump in and use this starting today, you will be VERY disappointed. Instead, look at it as a "coming attractions" demo.
My alma mater had a very successful basketball team. The players frequently were allowed to slack off because they were winners. When people complained about this, they were told "Well, the basketball team brings in $2M/year!", and that was supposed to shut everyone up.
Then a few people thought this through and asked "so how much $$$ does the team give to, say, the English department"? The answer, "none of course" --- all the sports revenue goes to pay for (you guessed it), expenses for the sports teams. So if the school got rid of all of them, none of the academic departments would suffer.
In fact, the whole "sports = revenues" argument is bogus, at least for every school I've ever investigated. In fact, there's always budget money laid out for the teams, whether or not they bring in any $$$ afterwards. So, even for winning teams, there's always $$$ taken AWAY from education to fund them, and if they make money, NOTHING given back to the school.
At the same time, the overhead on contracts and grants when I was in college was about 50%. So, if someone wrote a successful NSF proposal, they only kept 66.7% of the money while the other departments siphoned off the remaining third.
Of course, no one ever made the claim that an academic department = "revenue" even when the overhead $$$ brought in to say, physics pays for several positions in the English department.
I make sure than when I give $$$ to schools I only target specific accounts. When doing so, I also recommend that the winning sports teams make a matching contribution in order to give something BACK to the school. As far as I know that's never happened. What a surprise.
The answer isn't just throwing MORE $$$ at the failing education system, it's a question of using what they have more wisely. Our education system's "priorities" are skewed far away from academics, or at least academic achievement.
Science and math education is the US is in a very sorry state, but most of the problem is that science and education are under-valued within the system. Some examples:
In terms of layoffs, science and math teachers are among the first let go when there is a budget cut.
In part, this is because science and math requirements are typically lessened compared to other subjects. In Massachusetts, they've just cut the requirements from three years of each to graduate state high schools to two. Anyone want to wager that the science/math faculties will be cut 30-50% at the end of the year? Furthermore, a significant fraction of science teachers in the US did *not* major in science as an undergraduate!
Interesting factoid that I read a long time ago (so I can't provide a reference, sorry): it is easier to get funds to build a new sports facility in any high school than it is to upgrade an EXISTING library or science lab, even though the cost of the latter is typically less than one tenth of the former.
The problem is priority. If school committees really cared about science/math education, things would improve. But all too often they're seen as "extras" (as is art, music, etc.!) while support for things like phys ed, sports, etc. flows on because we're told that school "spirit" and pride is important. I'd rather be proud that my senior class scored exceptionally well on the SATs or MCAS tests than that our local football team went 11-0, but if you look at where the concentration of attention in placed in our high schools (for example, in terms of coverage in local newspapers or on TV), it's sports, sports, sports, with maybe one or two pieces a month buried inside on some education program that's doing well. Where's the outcry from the SCHOOLS on this mistreatment?
There was a program in the 1980's in Mass. called MISTEP which was formed to get science, math, and English majors into the school systems. They offered an accelerated Master's program in Education with lots of tuition waivers, etc. if you promised to teach in the public school system for 5 years after the program. My brother signed up for this (he was a math major) which was good for him because he hadn't settled on a career, and it turns out he LOVES teaching.
He went through the program, started teaching and found himself laid off every year because math teachers are always laid off first. He managed to stay on a couple of times for a second year because he had experience coaching basketball! In fact, he says it's because of his *coaching* experience that he tends to get a sceond interview at schools. (He's now in Virginia where he just spent three years teaching kids under lock-up waiting for an opening in the regular school system.)
The only way this is going to improve is if we can scream and holler (and run for school committee) for higher standards, and rearranged priorities.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that isn't reported in the press is the excellent agreement between solar forcing and global warming. To zeroth order the Earth is warmed by the Sun, but variations in solar irradiance are likely the primary contributions to decadal variations in the mean terrestrial temperature (as opposed to centurial or millenial variations like the major Ice Ages). Certainly there is a lot of data about climate over the last 2-3 thousand stars that is correlated with changes in solar activity.
A paper by Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, Science, 254, 698) showed that the mean length of the sunspot cycle is inversely correlated to mean terrestrial temperature. This correlation can be seen in other proxies of solar activity back millenia. Doing a quick search produced this page which has a lot of the basic underlying information. What one has to remember is that ALL of the "climate models" that are used to suggest an anthropogenic cause to global warming make the basic assumption that the rise in termperature is primarily correlated with an exponential growth in industry.
This is a nice hypothesis, but doesn't fly in the face of the data. FRom the F-C figure, one should note that temperature rises mostly before 1940. However, exponential rises in CO and CO2 production would demand that it take place *after* 1940.
Over 90 percent of the variance is explained by the Sun. But one thing is clear: in order to have 20th century global warming be explained by man-made causes, you have to violate cause and effect. There might be something buried in the noise, but that'll take more analysis to ferret it out. Nonetheless, it points out that one must be careful reading things in the press or from press releases.
One of my pet research projects is learning more about the sunspot cycle, Activity Cycles on other stars and stars with suppressed activity (like the Sun's during the Maunder, Sporer and Dalton minimums. So, a lot of what I've been looking at with stars, overlaps with some of the work done in solar forcing and its effect on Earth's climate.
I would be interested in reading a compilation of the candidates' views on general topics mentioned frequently on /. --- the ability to contrast and compare responses would be an asset. However, focusing on one candidate is highly inappropriate --- we do not vote the same way, and our party affiliations are not all the same. (And we're not all American!)
I find it very unlikely that there'd be a /. article if, say, Alan Keyes site used Linux (no, I'm not a Keyes supporter).
OK - while the couple are perfectly free to do whatever they want to for their wedding, it just seems as though the event is being reduced to some kind of freaky event. To each his/her own of course... I'm happy for them, and it's great that they were able to do things the way they wanted to.
However at the same time, in the US same-sex couples cannot get married. Twenty-something states now forbid it explicitly (thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act), and there has been attempts to impeach the entire Vermont Supreme Court for ruling (unanimously) that the state has to offer some kind of recognition for same-sex couples (state-wide domestic partner "marriage lite", or actual marriage licenses).
Seems to me that there are a lot of people who are denied equal opportunity wouldn't waste the opportunity to get married (I know, totally IMHO for word choice) were it available to them. I guess the juxtaposition of the two situations just highlights the contrast for me. If this issue didn't exist, it'd be easier for me to just react to the online wedding with "well, if it makes them happy - what the hell".
At one place I deal with, it used to be that they had about oh 6-8 operators for many dozen Solaris boxes (I'm tempted to say hundreds, but it might be 150). As soon as they began suppling Win9X/NT support, the number of operators has increased, but the amount of operator time for UNIX support has decreased dramatically. Before you could put in requests for things to be installed onto the system. You can still do that but the time scale of upgrades has gone from a few weeks to several months, and in a few cases measuring into years.
Meanwhile, more and more time is spent keeping the NT boxes working. Mind you, the situation wasn't great before, but now I've just given up any hope of ever seeing additions made to software support.
Now, another place I work is having problems with NT, Macs, Linux and Solaris machines, but that can be traced to a huge lack of admin support (they have no full-time admins and have computers scattered all over a metropolis!). So it is possible to have Linux perform as poorly as NT, but you have to really work at it! :-)
No. Linux users upgrade and update their systems. Windows people don't. Windows people can't because when you install a "service pack" it breaks half your important applications.
He replicated himself so that he could spend all his time playing. The clones would do his chores, do his homework, attend school, etc. However, it ended up with him doing all the work and covering up for the extra messes the clones created!
Remember, if you're devious enough to clone yourself, your clone knows this!
Besides, where will it end? The horror. What if someone cloned the people in those "Old Navy" commercials? No --- this is simply too much evil to unleash onto the planet.
We must stop at once!
For many of the years I was participating, the mere act of posting publically was seen as a huge step. First, since most people only had net access through work, you were essentially coming out to your company, esp. since you had no idea who else was reading the group. But you also had no idea who was out there eavesdropping. On the optimistic side, that never-heard-from person was just not read to make himself/herself public but used the group as a resources to what was out there, and certainly first postings frequently had comments of the "I've been reading here for ### months" variety. More pessimistically, it could be your neighbor, your boss, etc. Or if you wanted to invoke a conspiracy theory, the gov't was compiling names, etc.
So, one of the running paranoid "jokes" was that someone was "out there" recording everyone and everything. It was feasible --- the entire USENET feed was only a few MB/day at the time, which was still a lot of storage, but not out of the reach of a gov't budget and a lot of 9-track tapes.
It was an in-joke --- people would refer to it from time to time by putting in parenthetical comments (And a big hello to the person in the basement of the FBI who's reading this!) or in .signature files. Even as late as 1991 or so, I completely expected that if I ever applied for a "real" gov't job that required a background check that they'd carry in this 6-inch stack of printed postings to soc.motss.
Around the second-generation IRC period we once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that all of IRC could be compressed onto one CD ROM per day. Since USENET and IRC are basically "public", there wasn't any way to be certain anyone wasn't just archiving a full USENET feed, and had hacked up a server to listen in on all IRC channels. It might not have been done, but it was technically doable.
Of course things have become MUCH larger with time, but so have recording media.
So my point is, that while it's an issue that the Russians might be requiring ISP's to feed them traffic, there's really nothing stopping our own government from slurping off the Internet at will. It could be happening now! The bad old days might have always been the same as today (and tomorrow).
--------------------------- footnotes
USENET "generations"
IRC "generations":
I find it interesting to note that the last few weeks of Doonesbury have been targeting just this very effect. Mikim didn't go under because they didn't have a good product. They entered the market. They just lost everything immediately because when they didn't sell themselves to M$, they had no way to compete.
Of course, in that example, M$ made a comparable product to Mikim's freely available on their website. Were Linux to be, say, 70% of the market share, I wouldn't expect many people to be all that interested in Win2000. But the similarity doesn't exist because open source groups lack the capital (and market share) that M$ has.
In any case, the claim that M$ isn't a monopoly by using a dictionary definition of "monopoly" isn't really valid. IMHO, the definition needs to be broadened to cover "effective" monopolies as they can exist now (and couldn't years ago when the definition as offered was valid).
Me, I don't see where breaking them up really solves anything. If you want real competition, then require that the licensed libraries that are made available to developers be the same libraries that M$ itself uses! Then, companies can compete, because they can integrate their software to the OS the same way that M$ does. Furthermore, 3rd parties will be able to fix long-standing bugs in the M$ code (or work around them), etc. At worst, at least there'd be a more-stable version of Windows produced.
Just more random factoids.
One need only look at the statements made by members of the Chinese government vis a vis the situation of Taiwan to immediate consider a parallel situation with the upcoming Chinese space launch. (For those who haven't been paying attention, on several occasions, officials have stated that if the US dares to intervene on behalf of Taiwan, that Honolulu or Los Angeles are reachable targets by Chinese missles. Our anti-missle technology development is at something of a standstill, since much of it was linked to Reagan's "Star Wars" program, and that has been enough for research to be dropped (ah, politics).)
Whether or not the threats could be carried out today, other analyses have suggested that China will have copious technology to do it by about 2003 (no doubt thanks to our lax security at our national laboratories).
Meanwhile, the US has floundered on its own programs for 20 years (basically since Apollo 17). Aside from some bright spots (IUE was insanely overproductive, the Voyager program's record speaks for itself), many large-scale project has either suffered incredible delays getting off the ground (the shuttle program was supposed to start in 1979, Galileo sat in storage for several years, and had been crippled from a non-working antenna since launch) or has had problems (Mars Observer, the secondary mirror of HST, etc.). Worse, several low-cost (i.e., good bang-for-the-buck) programs never got off of the ground (so to speak): one of the last things developed as part of SDI was a low-cost launch capsule that could carry a payload pretty much anywhere in the solar system and was re-usable. I think the cost was somethng like 0.1% of a shuttle launch. Oops.
The saddest part is, if we wanted to go back to the Moon again tomorrow, we woud have to start over, and it would probably take longer to get there (from the announcement of the program) than it did before.
Finally, the comments about a space program being wasted because people are starving. There is and has always been room for doing both. The cost of the Apollo program was something like 50 cents per American per year, and the R&D involved brought us useful things like Teflon, microwave ovens, many advances in solid state physics, and of course, Tang! :-) Increasing our understanding of what's around us, and meeting technical challenges is always beneficial to the general public. Somehow we lost that in the last 30 years, and now we're plunging into a very anti-science/anti-education society. I really don't see how that will help anyone.
No, the SAT's aren't the be-all, end-all of admissions, but I'd hate to be the kid who worked really hard in school to get the grades I did, just to get a rejection letter from my school of choice because I was passed over for someone who didn't have any academic requirements to speak of (at least not as good as mine) but he/she could play with Lego really well!
Ouch. It's bad enough that things get watered down to admit people solely on the basis of being able to play sports well, even though in many sports-oriented schools less than half will eventually graduate, but if you're going to ditch the SAT's, shouldn't it be in favor of some metric of academic achievement?
My new mantra: stop rewarding stupidity. It's the only way to prevent the next Dark Ages from taking more control than it already has.
Then they had color --- wheeee. (1987 ish).
Then around 1991, we were all moving to OpenWindows because that was the REALLY great thing to use and Sunwin was no longer supported by Sun, really. So, re-port all the code we wrote for Sunwin to Openwin. Sigh - OK but it's just this one time.
1993-or-so. Oops. OpenWindows is passe. Other groups jump to X11, but my IS department doesn't want to support that because Sun has a *vision* but still keeps everyone in the dark that Motif is where Sun is headed (supposedly).
1994/1995 - Did I say Motif? I meant NeXT, or something else. The X11 people are putting their fingers in their ears to drown out the complaints of all the people who heard through the grapevine to dump OpenWindows and embrace Motif (so they started porting things to Motif), but at least they've been able to use the same GUI for a few years. All the people in the dark are still using OpenWindows, and have no idea that everyone else is using something different.
1997 - Some people have CDE now. The X11 people are still using X11 and everyone else who still hasn't figured out how to configure OpenWindows are still using OpenWindows with the same blue screen. It's an easy discrminator to tell the populations who are aware of the non-Sun UNIX world and those for whom e-mail is still "a nifty new thing that might catch on".
1999 - I'm using CDE at work which is almost impossible to configure (I still haven't been able to get a Netscape button on the tool bar, but I'm the ONLY person around who has an Xterm button where everyone else has a "TextEditor" button a Sun application that is used by zero people except for my officemate).
2000 - Oops CDE is now passe as is Motif. What will Sun support next? (Well, not NeXT! :-) So in 15 years I've changed GUIs for my Sun workstations what 3 almost 4 (I avoided Motif) times.
Meanwhile all the X11 people are using things like Gnome (like I am at home) and we're back to where we started again, except all the clueless people are still on OpenWindows and almost no one uses the facilities that come with it, prefering to do all of that on M$ machines at home or next to their Sun workstation. The IS dept. hasn't said "boo" about where they're headed although most of them are using CDE... Meanwhile, I've just given up doing a lot of things with my Sun workstation and work from home on my Linux box with Gnome+Sawmill, hoping that eventually Gnumeric is less bug-riddled and the next stable version of Gnome won't make StarOffice crash (has anyone else seen this???)
So, as I said at the top. Sigh. What goes around.................
So, I wrote Sorenson, and their response to me was that they couldn't do anything because of their agreement with Apple, and suggested that I talk to Apple about it. I tried to do that and the only response I received back from Apple was that it was a Sorenson issue and that I should take it up with Sorenson.
Ah yes, the 1990's - the time when corporations believed that "customer service" meant just passing the concern onto someone else.
I for one will be very happy to see something positive from this petition. However I am disheartened that another petition to encourage greater support for hardware drivers (esp. printers) under Linux seems to be short of its goal!
I have spent almost no time using Windows since I first ran into it in 1983 or so. I have avoided Win3.1, Win95, Win98, WinNT, and I will probably try to avoid Win00 (as in "Win zero zero") when it plops onto the universe. That doesn't mean I haven't USED it at all, but I haven't attempted to master it.
So, now it looks like I'll be started a new job soon which uses WinTel all over the place. I'm not worried about that (aside from all the obvious places I should be worried: security, scalability, reliablility, etc. :-), but when I see other people using WinTel OS's it seems that the UI is nothing CLOSE to "immediately obvious". It's levels upon levels of options and configuration which isn't intuitive most of the time.
OK - so let's compare that to X11, Gnome, CDE, and even to older things like OpenWin. Are these UI's THAT far afield from Win9X or NT that they're actually MORE difficult to master? I think not. Sure the key mappings might be different and for most users, there's some fraction of expected interaction with a command line,but even for Win9X people, there is still a LOT of "delving into DOS" that takes place, even though there is a percentage of users who only interact with the GUI.
So what about this new generation of UNIX users (defined for convenience as the post Ultrix/SunOS/ SCO people --- basically the "Linux era", although that also includes non-Linux UNIX, e.g., Solaris)? While it's not common to have users who never ever deal with the command line, I think we've reached the threshhold that it could be done. The available client software that I find under RedHat and Gnome are very quickly eating away any need (other than convenience that my fingers are hardwired to vi sequences and sentences like "ls -lt | head -5" :-) for the shell. The file managers are no worse than what comes with Win9X, there's a Gnome "finder" that works as well as the one in MacOS (does anyone know why "find . -type d -exec chmod g+s {}\;" doesn;t work under Linux?), and so forth.
At this point I think arguments along the lines of "well, Linux/Open Source loses because they have really geeky UI's" is more FUD than accurate. It will become even less accurate over a somewhat short time scale! One metric to testing this assertion it to see how many "normal" admin UNIX tasks (sysadmin or user adminstrative tasks) are being pushed over to programs with UI's than are done on the shell. Programs like Gftp, xchat, etc. are definitely taking the place of all the command-line programs in my life, mostly because the UI is straightforward and gets me to complicated uses faster and easier than before. At that point, it's no different than searching for some obscure panel item in Win9X...
YMMV, of course.
I find this completely unacceptable, and have written to tell them as such. Opting out should be handled at their end, not mine or yours.
I have instructed them to change their policy, or otherwise I will recommend that DoubleClick be billed for the use of our facilities for what is in effect their own record-keeping. I suggest that everyone do the same: I don't mind companies wanting to publish their ads on the net in appropriate ways, but using my computer to do it (or in this case to not do it), isn't appropriate.
Is charging them $2K/month too little? I realize they're only using a little disk space, but I'll completely understand if they want to take their cookies elsewhere. :-) And it would make a nice mortgage payment...
Funny. It doesn't say alpha on the releases. I completely concede that it's done great in a short time, but the exponential growth is a blessing and a curse: we get lots of potentially fantastic applications, but keeping them under control, setting standards, etc. becomes (has already become) impossible to accomplish.
And if I sound like I'm complaining, I'm really not. I got along for years withuot StarOffice, and I'll do so again (since I seem to have to). I dno't have the time to write my OWN competitor to GNOME, and I don't want to. I just hope that this explosion gets contained before it's one heap of unrealized potential.
I just changed from Enlightenment to Sawmill. Now StarOffice crashes when I try to run it. (That's not the only change I've made, I've upgraded other things.)
So, now my machine is starting to behave like a Mac: upgrade a few things and watch other programs crash and burn from conflicts.
I like GNOME but so many of the associated applications are insanely buggy. I've had problems with GWeather, GNotes, the GNOME address book (it prints other people's information in the display panel mixed with the information of the person you look up --- at first I thought it was a user-input error but I verified it twice by creating new books and carefully entering in test cases).
So, while it's great that some of GNOME will come out as V1.2 --- how can we place a high standard on GNOME-based application software? OR is the problem that there's something unstable about GNOME that makes it hard to create stable application software???
It's a numbered asteroid (3753) so the orbit is well-determined. Right now it's within 60 degrees of the Sun so that's a little challenging (but Venus is always within 47, Mercury 17ish, so that gives some perspective).
According to the Minor Planet Center it's presently at magnitude 16.2 in Scutum (approx R.A. 18h 34m, Dec. -14 11', but of course that's changing fairly quickly), with a solar distance of 1.205 AU and a distance from Earth of 0.56 AU. It has a diameter of about 17.5 km.
Since it's in Scutum, that means it's also in the Milky Way so the chances of there being few 16th magnitude stars nearby is well, astronomical! :-)
You can get up to date positions, etc. from the website listed above. Please be gentle - it's not a terribly fast server, and a lot of dedicated amateurs/professionals rely on it being available!
Oh it's much worse than that. A tight correlation of mean terrestrial temperature with overall solar activity has been observed over time scales from months to millenia, but it gets overlooked in favor of computer modelling of greenhouse gas production that ignores water (the predominate greenhouse "gas" in our atmosphere) and has a cause-and-effect problem (the temperature goes up decades before the CO/CO2 buildup is supposed to have taken place, and then levels off) that's skipped over.
I'm starting to understand how Galileo felt.
Sicne the Moon is in Gemini, you're in a good situation because you can take longer exposures without getting trails. For a 50mm shot, my guess is anything under 15-20 sec should give you no trails (using a narrower-angle lens will decrease this tremendously!), but even when eclipsed the Moon might be still bright enough that you'll be using very short exposures. (Unfortunately my copy of Gordon's book is at the office, and I"m not!). Of course if you're using a telescope with tracking, it's not as much of an issue. I've only done still tripod imaging (which is fun all by itself). But be forewarned, even though the Moon looks HUGE, with a 50 mm lens, the actual lunar disk will only have a diameter of about 3 mm on the film!
Dickinson and Newton recommend for 400 speed film (I recommend SLIDE film over print film!) at f/8, an exposure time of 1/250 s at partial phases (after ingress), to 1/4 s during ingress near totality, to 1 to 10 seconds once totality starts, up to 100s for the deepest parts of the eclipse (and probably if the Moon is at perigee). Of course for exposures that are VERY long, you'll need to track the Moon to offset sidereal motion. But at a declination of 20 degrees North, as I said you can probably get up to 15 seconds without too much distortion (for a 50 mm lens).
Of course, in Boston, it's snowing.
But the next lunar eclipse visible in North America is less than a year away (Jan. 9, 2001).
But, there are SO MANY games that aren't even ported to the Mac yet? I very mich like the "Theme" games (Theme Park, Theme Hospital, etc.) and that company (BullFrog) has no interest in porting their games to anything else (and their website doesn't appear to work under Linux/NN4.7!, and there doesn't seem to be an e-mail address for their webmaster --- the pop-up for "Credits" fails to show the image that actually tells who is responsible!).
For that matter, has anyone ever heard anything from the Myst/Riven people (Cyan) about porting either to Linux? At least THEY have a Mac port...
Sorry to be sort of an unenthusiastic wet noodle about what really is good news, but it just seems that we jump whenever any company throws us a bone, while the others just completely ignore us. (I've been trying to get specs from Epson so that I can use my new color pritner, but their response has been basically "What's Linux?"), so I suppose that's coloring (no pun intended) my attitude.
So, it's great that there Mozilla/NN5 will be "beefier", but isn't it a little late to be still adding things to Mozilla?
Is there any word as to what this will do to the expected release date? Right now that's more important to me than last-minute creeping featurism.
Has anyone generated the first derivative of projected release date? Such a statistic actually DOES serve a useful purpose since it tells you if the delays are in control or are running away from you. Using Einsteinian notation for derivatives (dot = dX/dt, dotdot = d2X/dt2):
Now, you can get into second derivatives :-) at which point you can see if things are still slipping away, even if dot(release date) is negative, or if things are staying on target [i.e., dotdot(release date) == 0].
(I used to think about this in regards to a telescope that was soon-to-be-finished when I started grad school, and was soon-to-be-finished when I finished grad school. It did manage to cross over to "finished" and AFAIK is producing wonderful results.)
There wasn't a single page I visited that didn't have rendering mistakes. The most annoying bug seems to be that if the page finishes loading before images are displayed, it just stops rendering the pages. Sometimes you don't even SEE some of the images on a page, just the holes where they're supposed to go.
It's apparent that there's no support for the HEIGHT and WIDTH options to img src= tags; they're just rendered at the original size.
Forms don't work. Submit buttons do not appear to do anything. Sometimes, input areas don't appear, so you can't even fill out the form before finding out that you can't submit it anyway.
Paragraph spacing is "odd". Anyone who writes pages to fit just right is going to go insane trying to get pages to look identical on IE/NN and Opera!
In all, I would say that this is not a beta. It's not even an alpha release.
Now the good news: :-)
What is encouraging is that pages do render VERY quickly compared to NN4. The status bar has a lot of geeky information (transfer speed that updates more quickly than NN's, and an elapsed time monitor), and it displays the full URL of each item that is being loaded. There were other widgets on the status bar that I didn't play with.
When Opera does have a true beta out, I'm sure it will be fantastic. It didn't crash on me, so I suppose that puts it ahead of NN :-)/2. But if you're expecting to jump in and use this starting today, you will be VERY disappointed. Instead, look at it as a "coming attractions" demo.
Bob Donahue
My alma mater had a very successful basketball team. The players frequently were allowed to slack off because they were winners. When people complained about this, they were told "Well, the basketball team brings in $2M/year!", and that was supposed to shut everyone up.
Then a few people thought this through and asked "so how much $$$ does the team give to, say, the English department"? The answer, "none of course" --- all the sports revenue goes to pay for (you guessed it), expenses for the sports teams. So if the school got rid of all of them, none of the academic departments would suffer.
In fact, the whole "sports = revenues" argument is bogus, at least for every school I've ever investigated. In fact, there's always budget money laid out for the teams, whether or not they bring in any $$$ afterwards. So, even for winning teams, there's always $$$ taken AWAY from education to fund them, and if they make money, NOTHING given back to the school.
At the same time, the overhead on contracts and grants when I was in college was about 50%. So, if someone wrote a successful NSF proposal, they only kept 66.7% of the money while the other departments siphoned off the remaining third.
Of course, no one ever made the claim that an academic department = "revenue" even when the overhead $$$ brought in to say, physics pays for several positions in the English department.
I make sure than when I give $$$ to schools I only target specific accounts. When doing so, I also recommend that the winning sports teams make a matching contribution in order to give something BACK to the school. As far as I know that's never happened. What a surprise.
Science and math education is the US is in a very sorry state, but most of the problem is that science and education are under-valued within the system. Some examples:
The problem is priority. If school committees really cared about science/math education, things would improve. But all too often they're seen as "extras" (as is art, music, etc.!) while support for things like phys ed, sports, etc. flows on because we're told that school "spirit" and pride is important. I'd rather be proud that my senior class scored exceptionally well on the SATs or MCAS tests than that our local football team went 11-0, but if you look at where the concentration of attention in placed in our high schools (for example, in terms of coverage in local newspapers or on TV), it's sports, sports, sports, with maybe one or two pieces a month buried inside on some education program that's doing well. Where's the outcry from the SCHOOLS on this mistreatment?
There was a program in the 1980's in Mass. called MISTEP which was formed to get science, math, and English majors into the school systems. They offered an accelerated Master's program in Education with lots of tuition waivers, etc. if you promised to teach in the public school system for 5 years after the program. My brother signed up for this (he was a math major) which was good for him because he hadn't settled on a career, and it turns out he LOVES teaching.
He went through the program, started teaching and found himself laid off every year because math teachers are always laid off first. He managed to stay on a couple of times for a second year because he had experience coaching basketball! In fact, he says it's because of his *coaching* experience that he tends to get a sceond interview at schools. (He's now in Virginia where he just spent three years teaching kids under lock-up waiting for an opening in the regular school system.)
The only way this is going to improve is if we can scream and holler (and run for school committee) for higher standards, and rearranged priorities.