The reason that high school and university classes are of a certain length is that it has been found that most people can't concentrate on a particular thing for more than about 1.5 hours. After you reach that limit your productivity decreases rapidly.
Most people need some form of regular distraction. Once they have this "reset" they go back to being a lot more productive.
Re:MSN is sponsering Mensa. Get in Mensa easily!
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MSN Sponsors Mensa
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I think that the Asia Carrera boobies/IQ link is the whole deal behind the Major's assets in Ghost in the Shell. Why would a fricking cyborg (and even the digital world avatar of that cyborg) need the giant bazoombas? I've been thinking that perhaps she has some sort of extra memory (memory in her mammaries) there or something as they just don't make a whole lot of sense.
That was the Alan Fells ACCC. The ACCC is under new management which is more "pro business". Expect a lot less of the Alan Fells stick up for the little guy and expect a lot more of handing the big spiky stick to corporate Australia to beat us with.
The conservatives in.au hated the ACCC because they were interventionist and tended to want to ensure that our market didn't turn into a monopoly. The new ACCC is very friendly towards the desires of business and cares little for anyone else.
Without the fix - leaving FireFox open for > 24 hours will bring most Windows systems to a halt.
I believe that there may be other issues - especially for people that leave > 20 tabs open for > 24 hours. I've switched back to Opera after being a bit of a FireFox evangelist for a while because Opera handles leaving a large number of tabs open for a protracted amount of time without eating all my memory.
I'm guessing that some of the memory issues are significant and difficult problems to fix - otherwise they would have been fixed by now.
MWDA is a streamlined version of Battletech. The minatures contain the record sheets. The game plays pretty quickly and you can pick up second hand minatures on eBay cheap. An expensive game to play at the tournament competitive level - but cheap if you are just looking for something with your friends.
Of course you can play Classic BattleTech - though this requires a longer investment of time. Things are quite detailed and it can take quite some time to resolve rounds.
I play more MWDA now because although I miss the detail of classic BattleTech, being able to fight a company vs company level engagement in 2-3 hours (versus 2-3 days) is a big plus.
There is a new edition of Twilight Imperium out. Highly complex and takes a while to play - but a deep and rewarding experience.
The "future" version of Risk is quite fun as well.
Say what you want - the guy has donated more money to charity than any other person in history. Although the aims of Stallman are admirable, like it or not, the amazing amount of money that Gates has given to charity has had a more profound positive influence on a lot of the world outside the west. Gates has personally redistributed a lot of wealth generated by the Microsoft tax directly into charities that get out and help people.
He deserves recognition for this and a knighthood is appropriate.
Last time I checked, modding down was for either getting rid of irrelevant or trollish posts - not modding down stuff that you disagree with.
Yes, I know, people mod that way anyway - but it does get caught in metamoderation. Mod people down for the "Profit" and "In Soviet Russia" stuff - but don't post saying that someone should be modded down just because they disagree.
In a way it can make sense. The XP Pro partition is kept for serious stuff (such as learning ASP). The XP Home partition is for time wasting, installing games and so on. Lots of people here dual boot between a Windows OS and Linux, using one for games and one for work - is it truly such a silly idea to dual boot between two Windows OS with the same ideas in mind?
You're probably correct that Americans are less likely to travel to other countries (since the US is big enough that travelling within that country seems to satisfy most), but you made it sound like it was based on racism, when I would wager that it is not
I'll quietly disagree. Contiental Australia is approximately the same size as the Continental US. Australians are far more likely to have seen Europe and Asia than they are to have travelled to Darwin or North Western Australia.
Also - Australia is farther away from everything than the US is. Americans can get to Europe, Asia, South America and Africa on average quicker than Australians can get to most of these places.
As Linux becomes more popular, more people will target it. If Linux and Windows positions were reversed, we'd be reading about lots of Linux exploits - not because one OS is inherently more secure than the other (under a good administrator, either can be locked down) - but because you get a lot more bang for your buck in going after the largest number of targets.
A problem that hasn't been considered by the Linux community is that a massive amount of constant evolutionary pressure is being put on MS to secure their operating system - pressure that is not exerted on Linux. Because of this pressure, Windows will evolve more quickly into a hardened OS.
It will eventually become so difficult to write an exploit for a Windows box that, even though Linux has a smaller market share, exploit writers will get more bang for their buck in targeting Linux.
Any operating system will have exploits. Operating systems are simply to complex not to have them. Any sufficiently complex system is going to have unintended outputs for highly unusual inputs.
This is one of the reasons that the Chinese economy will surpass the US economy in the coming decade or so. The shift in focus towards short term stock market glamour means that few American companies are good long term bets. I'm not saying that Chinese enterprises are the best managed in the world - but as they don't have to constantly face shareholders looking for short term gains, they can take a longer term outlook.
BSG has 13 epiodes... SG 1 has somewhere in excess of 100. Will BSG look so good with 7 or 8 seasons? I doubt it.
The problem that BSG has is the problem that Voyager had. What do you do while you are waiting for them to get to Earth (especially now that they've reached Kobol). The episode where Starbuck managed the strike on the Cylon base felt a bit off because it showed what a long run BSG would become. The problem with the jump fuel wasn't mentioned until that episode and was resolved by the end. The water problem was handled better earlier on, but when BSG becomes problem of the week suckage will begin.
Starbuck and Apollo trapped on a Raptor, will the Galactica find them in time?!?!
The Galactica encounters a strange civilisation with a mysterious secret?!?!?!
Can't you feel the suck approaching if BSG went for five years? Even Bab 5 (designed to be a 5 year series) had some pretty sucky episodes.
BSG works really well because it is so contained. But over a long run it would be difficult to maintain that.
The Cylon plot can't be sustained for many years without becoming convoluted to the point of absurdity. It looks like it is all going to be resolved pretty soon anyway.
Leave the Cylons around for longer, and they become toothless as villans. When the Cylons become like the Borg in the later seasons of Voyager - BSG loses all its impact.
The Windows crowd, on the other hand, simply don't have enough technical knowledge to blather about and so Windows wins out. PHBs don't like to be confused.
It would be silly to assume that all Windows administrators aren't technically knowledgable, just like it would be silly to assume that all Linux administrators are.
Why not pimp up a Soyuz? The things are a fraction of the cost to launch and have a proven ability to shuttle stuff too and from the ISS.
You could probably use Soyuz as rescue/resupply ships as well. Keep a resupply soyuz on the pad. If something goes wrong, send up the resupply soyuz to keep the damaged shuttle functioning as an ark, then bring the more expensive second shuttle online in time to perform the rescue.
Keeping the resupply soyuz ready for launch is significantly cheaper than keeping a second shuttle ready for launch.
Word 2003's revisioning system is far superior to that of other versions of Microsoft Office. It is very clear which editor made particular alterations. It also distinguishes on the basis of pass, so the changes made by an editor on the first pass are represented differently by those made by an editor on their second pass. I usually have about 3 different other people go over my chapters once I submit them and even when it has gone through the cycle twice, it is clear who has changed what.
My answer to your question is I don't know. I suspect the answer is yes I would be able to, if only because the newer revisions of office haven't broken the Office 97 format. Other authors I know who have been writing since the early 80's regularly update their stuff if they've kept them (that is, they regularly save the file in a new format every 5 years or so).
Textbooks also tend to update almost as often as word processors;-).
As you know, when a book is ready for publication, the final versions are delivered in PDF (as you pointed out). Each one of my books (and even a few magazine articles) have required a final review of a PDF rather than a word document. That's generally where you have to find out if there are figures that are missing and so on. 99% of the time though there isn't any problems at this stage.
I've looked at other word processors. I've read/. for years, so I'm very aware of the alternate options out there. I've tried everything, from AbiWord, through WP for Linux, StarOffice, OO.o and a slew of others. I use a lot of Word's features and I'm fully cognisant that most other people do not. For many people, other solutions are applicable - but as Bruce Schinder recently noted in his Cryptogram, for some of us, there are certain features in Word that are completely necessary which simply aren't replicated anywhere else. They are unlikely to be replicated within an Open Source application any time soon because to few people have the same itch.
I use office every day and I'm happy with it. My primary income is as a textbook author. There are features in Office 2003, especially the revisions and comments stuff that no other package comes close to providing. These features have streamlined the editing and revision process by a significant amount compared to how it was done even a few years ago.
Believe it or not, there are people out there that do use some of those funky little features that no other package supports. Don't assume that everyone can get by with an office suite that has a less extensive feature set than the MS product.
Science's strength is that theories can be improved upon or replaced when a demonstrably better (not merely "alternate") theory eventuates.
This is not always the case. If you read Philosophers of Science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn you will gain an understanding, through their use of historical examples, that theory change is rarely a matter of simple rationality.
What history shows happens is that adherents of the old theory tend to die out whilst younger adherents of the new theory take their place. Newton wasn't immediately accepted - it took some time for the Cartesians to lose their influence and to be replaced by the Newtonians.
Describe any administrative task on Windows Server 2003 and I'm sure someone here on slashdot can give you a script or set of command line arguments that performs that administrative task.
The "basket case" of the middle east has not been fixed and the current actions of the US administration don't even go close to addressing them.
Can you even articulate what the problems are in that region? The historical causes of the problems in that region? There are a highly complex set of issues that aren't easily solved by the "simple and easy to understand" solutions proposed by your President.
Bashing it with a hammer won't make it better - yet that is the approach that has been used. The occupation of Iraq is failing. Do you believe it to be a success? Do you believe that what is happening today is really solving the "basket case" issue? Here is a hint. It isn't. It is making things worse.
The solution to this problem is the sort of nuanced diplomacy that, in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's the United States used to excel at. Not the ham fisted "you are with us or against us" rubbish that the current administration uses.
New York, directly after 9/11 is not the place where policy that influences the next century or so should have been written. Approaching world affairs with a revenge mindset is unlikely to lead to good outcomes.
You might as well say 200 years brought you to September 11th rather than 10 years. How was the policy in the 1990's any different to the policy used throughout the prior 50 years?
The US essentially DEFINED what it was to be a good global citizen for most of the 20th centry. Sure, nothing is perfect and regrettable things were done in some parts of the world - but until very recently, the United States was "the good guys" (perhaps because the Soviets were the alternative).
Being the "good guys" didn't lead to 9/11. Being "the bad guys" now won't prevent that type of act happening again.
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The reason that high school and university classes are of a certain length is that it has been found that most people can't concentrate on a particular thing for more than about 1.5 hours. After you reach that limit your productivity decreases rapidly.
Most people need some form of regular distraction. Once they have this "reset" they go back to being a lot more productive.
I think that the Asia Carrera boobies/IQ link is the whole deal behind the Major's assets in Ghost in the Shell. Why would a fricking cyborg (and even the digital world avatar of that cyborg) need the giant bazoombas? I've been thinking that perhaps she has some sort of extra memory (memory in her mammaries) there or something as they just don't make a whole lot of sense.
That was the Alan Fells ACCC. The ACCC is under new management which is more "pro business". Expect a lot less of the Alan Fells stick up for the little guy and expect a lot more of handing the big spiky stick to corporate Australia to beat us with.
.au hated the ACCC because they were interventionist and tended to want to ensure that our market didn't turn into a monopoly. The new ACCC is very friendly towards the desires of business and cares little for anyone else.
The conservatives in
The best version of Advance Australia Fair is sung at the Pub to the Benny Hill theme.
Firefox has a memory leak. To fix it read the following article:
8 166
http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=
Without the fix - leaving FireFox open for > 24 hours will bring most Windows systems to a halt.
I believe that there may be other issues - especially for people that leave > 20 tabs open for > 24 hours. I've switched back to Opera after being a bit of a FireFox evangelist for a while because Opera handles leaving a large number of tabs open for a protracted amount of time without eating all my memory.
I'm guessing that some of the memory issues are significant and difficult problems to fix - otherwise they would have been fixed by now.
MWDA is a streamlined version of Battletech. The minatures contain the record sheets. The game plays pretty quickly and you can pick up second hand minatures on eBay cheap. An expensive game to play at the tournament competitive level - but cheap if you are just looking for something with your friends.
Of course you can play Classic BattleTech - though this requires a longer investment of time. Things are quite detailed and it can take quite some time to resolve rounds.
I play more MWDA now because although I miss the detail of classic BattleTech, being able to fight a company vs company level engagement in 2-3 hours (versus 2-3 days) is a big plus.
There is a new edition of Twilight Imperium out. Highly complex and takes a while to play - but a deep and rewarding experience.
The "future" version of Risk is quite fun as well.
Say what you want - the guy has donated more money to charity than any other person in history. Although the aims of Stallman are admirable, like it or not, the amazing amount of money that Gates has given to charity has had a more profound positive influence on a lot of the world outside the west. Gates has personally redistributed a lot of wealth generated by the Microsoft tax directly into charities that get out and help people.
He deserves recognition for this and a knighthood is appropriate.
Last time I checked, modding down was for either getting rid of irrelevant or trollish posts - not modding down stuff that you disagree with.
Yes, I know, people mod that way anyway - but it does get caught in metamoderation. Mod people down for the "Profit" and "In Soviet Russia" stuff - but don't post saying that someone should be modded down just because they disagree.
In a way it can make sense. The XP Pro partition is kept for serious stuff (such as learning ASP). The XP Home partition is for time wasting, installing games and so on. Lots of people here dual boot between a Windows OS and Linux, using one for games and one for work - is it truly such a silly idea to dual boot between two Windows OS with the same ideas in mind?
If the productivity was "world class" there would be a lot less outsourcing going on wouldn't there.
You're probably correct that Americans are less likely to travel to other countries (since the US is big enough that travelling within that country seems to satisfy most), but you made it sound like it was based on racism, when I would wager that it is not
I'll quietly disagree. Contiental Australia is approximately the same size as the Continental US. Australians are far more likely to have seen Europe and Asia than they are to have travelled to Darwin or North Western Australia.
Also - Australia is farther away from everything than the US is. Americans can get to Europe, Asia, South America and Africa on average quicker than Australians can get to most of these places.
As Linux becomes more popular, more people will target it. If Linux and Windows positions were reversed, we'd be reading about lots of Linux exploits - not because one OS is inherently more secure than the other (under a good administrator, either can be locked down) - but because you get a lot more bang for your buck in going after the largest number of targets.
A problem that hasn't been considered by the Linux community is that a massive amount of constant evolutionary pressure is being put on MS to secure their operating system - pressure that is not exerted on Linux. Because of this pressure, Windows will evolve more quickly into a hardened OS.
It will eventually become so difficult to write an exploit for a Windows box that, even though Linux has a smaller market share, exploit writers will get more bang for their buck in targeting Linux.
Any operating system will have exploits. Operating systems are simply to complex not to have them. Any sufficiently complex system is going to have unintended outputs for highly unusual inputs.
Excellent post.
This is one of the reasons that the Chinese economy will surpass the US economy in the coming decade or so. The shift in focus towards short term stock market glamour means that few American companies are good long term bets. I'm not saying that Chinese enterprises are the best managed in the world - but as they don't have to constantly face shareholders looking for short term gains, they can take a longer term outlook.
BSG has 13 epiodes ... SG 1 has somewhere in excess of 100. Will BSG look so good with 7 or 8 seasons? I doubt it.
The problem that BSG has is the problem that Voyager had. What do you do while you are waiting for them to get to Earth (especially now that they've reached Kobol). The episode where Starbuck managed the strike on the Cylon base felt a bit off because it showed what a long run BSG would become. The problem with the jump fuel wasn't mentioned until that episode and was resolved by the end. The water problem was handled better earlier on, but when BSG becomes problem of the week suckage will begin.
Starbuck and Apollo trapped on a Raptor, will the Galactica find them in time?!?!
The Galactica encounters a strange civilisation with a mysterious secret?!?!?!
Can't you feel the suck approaching if BSG went for five years? Even Bab 5 (designed to be a 5 year series) had some pretty sucky episodes.
BSG works really well because it is so contained. But over a long run it would be difficult to maintain that.
The Cylon plot can't be sustained for many years without becoming convoluted to the point of absurdity. It looks like it is all going to be resolved pretty soon anyway.
Leave the Cylons around for longer, and they become toothless as villans. When the Cylons become like the Borg in the later seasons of Voyager - BSG loses all its impact.
The Windows crowd, on the other hand, simply don't have enough technical knowledge to blather about and so Windows wins out. PHBs don't like to be confused.
It would be silly to assume that all Windows administrators aren't technically knowledgable, just like it would be silly to assume that all Linux administrators are.
Why not pimp up a Soyuz? The things are a fraction of the cost to launch and have a proven ability to shuttle stuff too and from the ISS.
You could probably use Soyuz as rescue/resupply ships as well. Keep a resupply soyuz on the pad. If something goes wrong, send up the resupply soyuz to keep the damaged shuttle functioning as an ark, then bring the more expensive second shuttle online in time to perform the rescue.
Keeping the resupply soyuz ready for launch is significantly cheaper than keeping a second shuttle ready for launch.
Word 2003's revisioning system is far superior to that of other versions of Microsoft Office. It is very clear which editor made particular alterations. It also distinguishes on the basis of pass, so the changes made by an editor on the first pass are represented differently by those made by an editor on their second pass. I usually have about 3 different other people go over my chapters once I submit them and even when it has gone through the cycle twice, it is clear who has changed what.
;-).
/. for years, so I'm very aware of the alternate options out there. I've tried everything, from AbiWord, through WP for Linux, StarOffice, OO.o and a slew of others. I use a lot of Word's features and I'm fully cognisant that most other people do not. For many people, other solutions are applicable - but as Bruce Schinder recently noted in his Cryptogram, for some of us, there are certain features in Word that are completely necessary which simply aren't replicated anywhere else. They are unlikely to be replicated within an Open Source application any time soon because to few people have the same itch.
My answer to your question is I don't know. I suspect the answer is yes I would be able to, if only because the newer revisions of office haven't broken the Office 97 format. Other authors I know who have been writing since the early 80's regularly update their stuff if they've kept them (that is, they regularly save the file in a new format every 5 years or so).
Textbooks also tend to update almost as often as word processors
As you know, when a book is ready for publication, the final versions are delivered in PDF (as you pointed out). Each one of my books (and even a few magazine articles) have required a final review of a PDF rather than a word document. That's generally where you have to find out if there are figures that are missing and so on. 99% of the time though there isn't any problems at this stage.
I've looked at other word processors. I've read
I use office every day and I'm happy with it. My primary income is as a textbook author. There are features in Office 2003, especially the revisions and comments stuff that no other package comes close to providing. These features have streamlined the editing and revision process by a significant amount compared to how it was done even a few years ago.
Believe it or not, there are people out there that do use some of those funky little features that no other package supports. Don't assume that everyone can get by with an office suite that has a less extensive feature set than the MS product.
Science's strength is that theories can be improved upon or replaced when a demonstrably better (not merely "alternate") theory eventuates.
This is not always the case. If you read Philosophers of Science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn you will gain an understanding, through their use of historical examples, that theory change is rarely a matter of simple rationality.
What history shows happens is that adherents of the old theory tend to die out whilst younger adherents of the new theory take their place. Newton wasn't immediately accepted - it took some time for the Cartesians to lose their influence and to be replaced by the Newtonians.
Describe any administrative task on Windows Server 2003 and I'm sure someone here on slashdot can give you a script or set of command line arguments that performs that administrative task.
What should a prospective hiree say to you when you query them about an employment situation that may (objectively) have been terrible?
Anyone else noticed all these pro-movie industry type posts that have been posted by people with no prior posting history in this thread?
I smell astro-turf.
Are we ever going to find out the whole story of Enoch Root?
Will Enoch Root turn up in future novels?
The "basket case" of the middle east has not been fixed and the current actions of the US administration don't even go close to addressing them.
Can you even articulate what the problems are in that region? The historical causes of the problems in that region? There are a highly complex set of issues that aren't easily solved by the "simple and easy to understand" solutions proposed by your President.
Bashing it with a hammer won't make it better - yet that is the approach that has been used. The occupation of Iraq is failing. Do you believe it to be a success? Do you believe that what is happening today is really solving the "basket case" issue? Here is a hint. It isn't. It is making things worse.
The solution to this problem is the sort of nuanced diplomacy that, in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's the United States used to excel at. Not the ham fisted "you are with us or against us" rubbish that the current administration uses.
New York, directly after 9/11 is not the place where policy that influences the next century or so should have been written. Approaching world affairs with a revenge mindset is unlikely to lead to good outcomes.
You might as well say 200 years brought you to September 11th rather than 10 years. How was the policy in the 1990's any different to the policy used throughout the prior 50 years?
The US essentially DEFINED what it was to be a good global citizen for most of the 20th centry. Sure, nothing is perfect and regrettable things were done in some parts of the world - but until very recently, the United States was "the good guys" (perhaps because the Soviets were the alternative).
Being the "good guys" didn't lead to 9/11. Being "the bad guys" now won't prevent that type of act happening again.