Well when the Chicas/hynas that had my computer to pretty much their sole use at the time called COMCAST to get Internet service the service tech that came acted as if Linux was something created by alien reptilians and wouldn't even touch it. They called me "to make it work" by the time I arrived the "I just turned 13...the age of net majority you know;)" had figured out to just try the browser and type "Google" at it and poof it started working and she was happily socially networking away. She still occassionallly uses GIMP when the Myspace Gizmos don't do what she wants.
As far as people hanging onto old hardware you have to remember that there are some computer users who have used something for awhile and consider it old and trusty. I have met quite a few writers and librarians like that.
Also to mention something that will rattle the Neal Stephenson fan's of the "they did the right thing at the right time and got rich in the wwonderful commercial world from which all good stuff flows. Uh people who have not been so lucky and are of more limited means get stuck with a PC and find that Linux does most things pretty well and doesn't have to have 111 virus malware fixes. Whereas my friendly Windows guru old housemate who fell in love and moved away has reinstalled his Windows Box many times even with latest and greatest anti-virus software.
A friend of mine teaches and just in case her students send her something that is Windows only she keeps a windows box. I still haven't gone dual-boot although once I borrowed my ex-housemates computer because I wanted to use the Pleading (as in legal) features that one could get in Windows and I did not have time to write my own open source version at the time. Nor am I now, I'd rather stick to hacking climate modeling and that still works best on Linux.
Note my friend's kids use my computer which runs Linux to do all those kid and teen thiongs like simpler games and MySpace etc. and they have adapted to Linux very well, the only thing they really miss is Itunes. They like and have learned it and are now teaching their friends how to do things and so I get slightly fewer of the questions like "Steve: How do I do "....
Have Fun,
Sends Steve
I would tend to agree; they are the one who are spy camera crazy;they seem to have diluted their legal tradition farther than the US or Canada in being actually invasive; although the Law Lords actually did really take a bash at various terrorism laws; they also more completely reverse things when they blow it; whereas the US courts often act they can't say "Oh we made a mistake"
Way back when or back in the day as the kids say I worked on the ARPANET which was at the time going to go to TCP/IP. I was asked how things worked and I explained to people how it worked with RFCs and the like. People thought I was crazy and that it couldn't possibly work that way or continue to work that way or at the very least couldn't go on in anything close to the way it was going. This is now coming up on like 25 years ago.
Have Fun,
Sends Steve
From my sources not to be named it seems one device is kind of like that. It also has some sort of scripts that pretty much go and find all the images on your system and arrange them in an use to view manner. This is not much different from a lot of free download tools that many have already installed.
The idea is that they can clip through a system at a crime scene and see if you have anything that looks like "child pornography" which especially in the UK is a big bugaboo. Here(US) it's that and anything that might be radical islamic literature.
So if someone's system is boring they can walk away and not have to lug the system somewhere. This is because there have been real problems with seizing computers in a casual way and finding very pissed judges.
Last I had looked however in the case of things other than going through customs in casual encounters the "closed container" rule applied. If the laptop or computer was unaccesable without a password on even turning it on then the powers that be could not turn it on and start looking for things .
Now crime scene things get weird. Often they try to seize as much as possible and then if the judge in the case throws it out "oh well..."
Have Fun,
Sends Steve
The kids I let use my system often use all sorts of features and don't know it. Then they wonder how I manage to "fix" things like finding forgotten passwords and the like. Or how I can get data off their Win2K or Win XP by using KNOPPIX and not knowing their passwords. I try to explain and it and the interesting thing is the 13 year old gets but her 18 year old sister doesn't. Now they wish that KNOPPIX was a distro and not a live CD.
Have Fun,
Sends Steve
0C is way too low. It pretty much has been 10C during our current "ice house planet" and different from the 20C "greenhouse planet". If we had a little global warming it might be nice but a lot and a lot quickly probably would not be.
Of course we have a planet on which the last ice age was about 20kya (20,000 years ago) ans we have been coming out of it.
In fact it is amusing to look at the worries of people and scienctists in the 1970s worried about and it was "a new ice age is on its way". Of course computers weren't as powerful then and models were much simpler.
It is pretty curious that almost all models depict some degree of warming but vary a lot in how much. Some it is rather modest and others it is a lot.
It is the models of intermediate complexity that are used like CLIMBER-2. Some models like CLIMBER (sort of CLIMATE+BIOSPHERE) have some attempts at modeling the feedback mechanisms in the actual climatic system. Many are weak in modeling the cold parts of the planet called the cryosphere.
Most do seem to point to the idea that "Global Warming is real" and that humans cause a goodly portion of it and that no serious scientist, if one trusts Jerry Mahlman of the NOAA that it is a no-brainer and the skeptics are just wrong.
My big problem with this is presntation. Science should not presented like a Friday/Saturday/Sunday Sermon in church. If the evidence is so strong then just present it and let it stand on its own merits. Else it does sound like a matter of opinion.
My big worry is that if in say the next 5 to 10 years global warming doesn't become very evident people will lose faith in the arguments for it. Then oh whoops it materializes seriously 20-30 years down the line and it is "Oh !" time.
My suspicion is that there are as yet unmodeled feedback mechanisms of unknown strength that will hold things in reasonable check for some amount of time if we do not overwhelm them. I suspect we have some unspecified amount of time to get it right and develop new things but we don't have forever.
I base much of this on the strengthening of the West WInd Drift or the Antartic Circumpolar Circulation and the fact that much of Antartica is stable, although some of it has melted much of it hasn't and some of it seems to be growing in thickness. The areas around Greenland are melting but there is indication that they did that in the past, and hence why Greenland is called Green Land. There was a period called the Sangamon Interglacial in North America the Eeemian elsewhere which was much warmer than it is now and the seas were meters higher. Although such a situation would not make the planet uninhabitable, I for example would have to move as my house would be under water.
Anyway I am getting a bit carried away here. Really it seems to me we should be sensitive as to what we are doing or may be doing. I can understand why people might be skeptical but I must laugh when I here conservatives call it a Marxist conspiracy and engage in a lot of aad hominem attacks.
Yeah 60Kya (60,000 years ago) seems a little late to me. I will as I say have to check references. I remember all those maps that Cavilli-Sfoza did and they were interesting and he did a lot of study. I spoke to the guy breifly one point when I was working at Stanford some years ago now. But it isn't like I worked for him or anything.
So this is an interesting start and that would have been a big blow to some parts of the human population. It has also been posited but it is controversial that between 80kya and 50kya speech evolved. Also it is also pretty widely held, again I should check refernces, that the human somotype or body form has been stable for the last 50,000 years and this is glossed/speculated? that after that point cultural forces exerted a lot of control on human mating and this stabalised the general human form.
When one wanders into these areas one leaves the very strict "I can prove it like I can derive gas laws..." and enters into a more speculative realm, even the speculation if done carefully can be well guided and might actually give useful insight into nature and our place and relationship to it. However I don't think it can as itself be used as a platrform for erecting prescriptive formula of how to proceed.
So it is good we humans have dispersed as we are not as tied to one area. Although it is clear that once humans entered the Middle East and the figurative "Middle of the Earth" they were onto something good.
I will also have to check my references because it seems to me that all humans were not confined to Africa C. 70,000.
Also one should be careful as one or two studies on the Mitochondrial DNA of some group in Africa might not the whole story tell.
If it were say 200,000 years ago this happened then I'd have been really worried. Still it might be argued that any thing that gets the humans to tread a little more lightly on the planet might be a good thing.So this might be a good thing to think about as we persue our lives as sentient beings.
Slashdot Mirror
Well when the Chicas/hynas that had my computer to pretty much their sole use at the time called COMCAST to get Internet service the service tech that came acted as if Linux was something created by alien reptilians and wouldn't even touch it. They called me "to make it work" by the time I arrived the "I just turned 13...the age of net majority you know;)" had figured out to just try the browser and type "Google" at it and poof it started working and she was happily socially networking away. She still occassionallly uses GIMP when the Myspace Gizmos don't do what she wants. As far as people hanging onto old hardware you have to remember that there are some computer users who have used something for awhile and consider it old and trusty. I have met quite a few writers and librarians like that. Also to mention something that will rattle the Neal Stephenson fan's of the "they did the right thing at the right time and got rich in the wwonderful commercial world from which all good stuff flows. Uh people who have not been so lucky and are of more limited means get stuck with a PC and find that Linux does most things pretty well and doesn't have to have 111 virus malware fixes. Whereas my friendly Windows guru old housemate who fell in love and moved away has reinstalled his Windows Box many times even with latest and greatest anti-virus software.
A friend of mine teaches and just in case her students send her something that is Windows only she keeps a windows box. I still haven't gone dual-boot although once I borrowed my ex-housemates computer because I wanted to use the Pleading (as in legal) features that one could get in Windows and I did not have time to write my own open source version at the time. Nor am I now, I'd rather stick to hacking climate modeling and that still works best on Linux. Note my friend's kids use my computer which runs Linux to do all those kid and teen thiongs like simpler games and MySpace etc. and they have adapted to Linux very well, the only thing they really miss is Itunes. They like and have learned it and are now teaching their friends how to do things and so I get slightly fewer of the questions like "Steve: How do I do ".... Have Fun, Sends Steve
I would tend to agree; they are the one who are spy camera crazy;they seem to have diluted their legal tradition farther than the US or Canada in being actually invasive; although the Law Lords actually did really take a bash at various terrorism laws; they also more completely reverse things when they blow it; whereas the US courts often act they can't say "Oh we made a mistake"
Way back when or back in the day as the kids say I worked on the ARPANET which was at the time going to go to TCP/IP. I was asked how things worked and I explained to people how it worked with RFCs and the like. People thought I was crazy and that it couldn't possibly work that way or continue to work that way or at the very least couldn't go on in anything close to the way it was going. This is now coming up on like 25 years ago. Have Fun, Sends Steve
From my sources not to be named it seems one device is kind of like that. It also has some sort of scripts that pretty much go and find all the images on your system and arrange them in an use to view manner. This is not much different from a lot of free download tools that many have already installed. The idea is that they can clip through a system at a crime scene and see if you have anything that looks like "child pornography" which especially in the UK is a big bugaboo. Here(US) it's that and anything that might be radical islamic literature. So if someone's system is boring they can walk away and not have to lug the system somewhere. This is because there have been real problems with seizing computers in a casual way and finding very pissed judges. Last I had looked however in the case of things other than going through customs in casual encounters the "closed container" rule applied. If the laptop or computer was unaccesable without a password on even turning it on then the powers that be could not turn it on and start looking for things . Now crime scene things get weird. Often they try to seize as much as possible and then if the judge in the case throws it out "oh well..." Have Fun, Sends Steve
The kids I let use my system often use all sorts of features and don't know it. Then they wonder how I manage to "fix" things like finding forgotten passwords and the like. Or how I can get data off their Win2K or Win XP by using KNOPPIX and not knowing their passwords. I try to explain and it and the interesting thing is the 13 year old gets but her 18 year old sister doesn't. Now they wish that KNOPPIX was a distro and not a live CD. Have Fun, Sends Steve
0C is way too low. It pretty much has been 10C during our current "ice house planet" and different from the 20C "greenhouse planet". If we had a little global warming it might be nice but a lot and a lot quickly probably would not be. Of course we have a planet on which the last ice age was about 20kya (20,000 years ago) ans we have been coming out of it. In fact it is amusing to look at the worries of people and scienctists in the 1970s worried about and it was "a new ice age is on its way". Of course computers weren't as powerful then and models were much simpler. It is pretty curious that almost all models depict some degree of warming but vary a lot in how much. Some it is rather modest and others it is a lot. It is the models of intermediate complexity that are used like CLIMBER-2. Some models like CLIMBER (sort of CLIMATE+BIOSPHERE) have some attempts at modeling the feedback mechanisms in the actual climatic system. Many are weak in modeling the cold parts of the planet called the cryosphere. Most do seem to point to the idea that "Global Warming is real" and that humans cause a goodly portion of it and that no serious scientist, if one trusts Jerry Mahlman of the NOAA that it is a no-brainer and the skeptics are just wrong. My big problem with this is presntation. Science should not presented like a Friday/Saturday/Sunday Sermon in church. If the evidence is so strong then just present it and let it stand on its own merits. Else it does sound like a matter of opinion. My big worry is that if in say the next 5 to 10 years global warming doesn't become very evident people will lose faith in the arguments for it. Then oh whoops it materializes seriously 20-30 years down the line and it is "Oh !" time. My suspicion is that there are as yet unmodeled feedback mechanisms of unknown strength that will hold things in reasonable check for some amount of time if we do not overwhelm them. I suspect we have some unspecified amount of time to get it right and develop new things but we don't have forever. I base much of this on the strengthening of the West WInd Drift or the Antartic Circumpolar Circulation and the fact that much of Antartica is stable, although some of it has melted much of it hasn't and some of it seems to be growing in thickness. The areas around Greenland are melting but there is indication that they did that in the past, and hence why Greenland is called Green Land. There was a period called the Sangamon Interglacial in North America the Eeemian elsewhere which was much warmer than it is now and the seas were meters higher. Although such a situation would not make the planet uninhabitable, I for example would have to move as my house would be under water. Anyway I am getting a bit carried away here. Really it seems to me we should be sensitive as to what we are doing or may be doing. I can understand why people might be skeptical but I must laugh when I here conservatives call it a Marxist conspiracy and engage in a lot of aad hominem attacks.
Yeah 60Kya (60,000 years ago) seems a little late to me. I will as I say have to check references. I remember all those maps that Cavilli-Sfoza did and they were interesting and he did a lot of study. I spoke to the guy breifly one point when I was working at Stanford some years ago now. But it isn't like I worked for him or anything. So this is an interesting start and that would have been a big blow to some parts of the human population. It has also been posited but it is controversial that between 80kya and 50kya speech evolved. Also it is also pretty widely held, again I should check refernces, that the human somotype or body form has been stable for the last 50,000 years and this is glossed/speculated? that after that point cultural forces exerted a lot of control on human mating and this stabalised the general human form. When one wanders into these areas one leaves the very strict "I can prove it like I can derive gas laws..." and enters into a more speculative realm, even the speculation if done carefully can be well guided and might actually give useful insight into nature and our place and relationship to it. However I don't think it can as itself be used as a platrform for erecting prescriptive formula of how to proceed.
So it is good we humans have dispersed as we are not as tied to one area. Although it is clear that once humans entered the Middle East and the figurative "Middle of the Earth" they were onto something good. I will also have to check my references because it seems to me that all humans were not confined to Africa C. 70,000. Also one should be careful as one or two studies on the Mitochondrial DNA of some group in Africa might not the whole story tell. If it were say 200,000 years ago this happened then I'd have been really worried. Still it might be argued that any thing that gets the humans to tread a little more lightly on the planet might be a good thing.So this might be a good thing to think about as we persue our lives as sentient beings.