is that I find that I get even better support with open source. There have only been a few times that I could not go to Google, bust out a simple query, and find a whole forum of people who would help me through a problem within a couple of hours.
.
I think it is one of the great advantages of Open Source that answers to almost any (reasonable) question can be found with google by just finding somebody else's post with the same question, and checking the answer to that question.
Most of the time I search the answers to questions I have this way. And when I see that nobody else ran into the same problem I did, I normally first just assume that a) it was a stupid question after all or b) the answer was documented in the software itself, and I just missed it. (or both of course;-)
That this method works b.t.w. proves the large base of open source users. It would not work if there were no other users using the software(functions) with a comparable machine configuration as I have.
Obviously, when I find no questions that weren't answered before, and the answer is not obvious (or a bug) I do ask and/or report them. I just find that this is not often necessary.
Well actually, this type of pin-fraud has been wiped out completely by putting a small tongue like extension on the card input of the ATM. The extension makes it impossible to attach a magnetic card reader in front of the ATM's card entry slot.
So you can see that some problems can be solved with a very minor design change. You could even argue that the whole problem started because nobody added this (rather obvious) feature to the design in the first place.
The same can be said about all the pin-pad's (where you enter your number) that are not hidden from view. (Dutch Railways anybody)..
But then again, the same bankcards can (could?) be used in stores in France without a pincode. So the theft of your bankcard there leaves you always with an empty bankaccount.
at birth: 1.12 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.13 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female 65 years and over: 0.91 male(s)/female total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2004 es
at birth: 1.06 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 0.94 male(s)/female 65 years and over: 0.46 male(s)/female total population: 0.87 male(s)/female (2004 est.)
The linked article in this post mentions:
He also said that according to the latest poll, there are 15 percent more women in Russia than men. For every thousand men we have 1147 women, and because of lower levels of males being born as well as high mortality rates among men we should not expect the gender ratio to level out, the researcher said.
The comment about lower levels of males being born in the snippet above is clearly wrong. A normal ratio between the birthrate of man and woman is about 1.05 in favour of men, and russia is no different. Additionally, the data in the CIA world factbook states that the the ratio of men/woman in russia is 0.94, and this corresponds to (only) 1070 women for each 1000 men.
B.T.W. Normal (western) figures are equal ratio's to a slight excess of men in the ages 15-65. The 1.12 ratio in birthrate for China is very high.
Search for "Cobol IMS" on Amazon -> 191 results.
Cobol itself returns 1836 results, including "Teach yourself Cobol in 21 days".
No offence to you, but in my opinion reading skills are undervalued in software engineering, and most people don't realize the overview they can get over a certain subject area by just reading (or even browsing) a number of books in the subject.
Last month I had to repair my brother's computer, and it turned out to be the power supply which had failed.
This computer had been on for a while, and the supply's internal grille - where the air flows from the power supply into the computer - was fully blocked by dust, causing it to overheat.
So the ventilators in the power supplies do not only suck in air, but also a lot of dust. You might want to check this periodically, also on the inside...
Especially when you - as my brother - have cats or other small furry animals running around in your house;-).
I think that getting the feel of human social skills will be the hardest because they are hard to identify and quantify, and the geeks who will make the machines are not good at it themselves.
I do not necessarily agree. The lack of social intelligence in geeks is most of the times (at least partly) compensated by their reasoning skills (IQ). So they actually think about the logical relationships between the social action-reaction responses that people with a higher emotional intelligence take for granted.
Never met anybody who you could see thinking on how to respond to something?
This actually would make it a bonus for geeks when implementing these social skills.
OTOH, it would make for interesting 'geek' robots (and the question how to distinguish between them;-).
The buy or lease decision is not always the default one. Something can have substantial inherent value, but if nobody has a direct profitable use for it (either commercial or non-commercial) it will just be abandoned.
Just look at al those empty industial complexes you can find all over the world for a good example. Although (at the time, before all windows were broken;-) these places must have had a substantial - physical - economic value (no IP fuss here), they were ultimately abandoned.
The same goes with the assets from company's like these. If no one can be found who has a profitable use for it, this equipment can just as well be 'lost'. Most of the times the movable equipment will be sold for scrap, but the rest will be just left for others to worry about.
So the ultimate result of all this economic action will be that - in due time - some archeologist can wonder why we really put all those long glass lines in the ground...
Yes, but the calculation was about ice on *land*. The water coming from this ice will be fully added to the oceans, instead of replacing the volume of ice it was. For as far as the ice mass itself was above sealevel, of course.
Solar energy actually does work at night. What I mean is, solar energy can be created at the other side of the globe.
But more to the point, the problem you mention are not the generation of the electricity, it's the storage. At night you obviously need electricity, but if we can store the energy the sunlight shoots at us at daytime this problem will be solved. This could for instance be done with the conversion to hydrogen. And given the storage facilities we currently use in our oil and natural gas production chain, developing methods of storing this energy should not be a very big problem. And using this hydrogen in it's natural form also becomes easier over time, see the original article in this topic...
But there are almost limitless other possibilities to temporarily store energy, such as pumping water upwards in hydro-power plants or other closed basins of water. At daytimes, the pumped up water can be utilized to generate the electricity again, using the pumps as generators.
But my favorite future vision (and the reason for the first line): Transport the electricity over large distances, for instance from the day-part of the earth to the night-part. This would be a very interesting challenge - and certainly not feasible at this time - but imagine a network of cables like the fibers we now have on the seafloor, but instead of having fibers at it's core it would have superconductors. That would transport the energy near loss-free. This technology would by the way also be very usefull to transport solar generated energy from -let's say - Morocco or Libya, which are mostly very low inhabited, cloud free deserts to Europe. And there are similar -high solar power/low population density - regions on the Asian, Australian and American continents.
The point: we need to start thinking big when we want to create alternative systems for our huge energy demands. And this could mean large distributed systems (for instance utilizing the aforementioned hydrogen fuel cells), or large centralized systems, but they need to be large scale solutions to satisfy our current and future demands. And at that point, improbable solutions sometimes become probable.. and usefull..
If they start handling this the same way as they treat countries which function as tax loopholes, or which have laws keeping bank accounts private, I wouldn't hold my breath on it..
And these issues are just as important, if not more, given the amount of recent discussions on how the terrorists got and handled their money.
Slashdot Mirror
is that I find that I get even better support with open source. There have only been a few times that I could not go to Google, bust out a simple query, and find a whole forum of people who would help me through a problem within a couple of hours. .
;-)
I think it is one of the great advantages of Open Source that answers to almost any (reasonable) question can be found with google by just finding somebody else's post with the same question, and checking the answer to that question.
Most of the time I search the answers to questions I have this way. And when I see that nobody else ran into the same problem I did, I normally first just assume that a) it was a stupid question after all or b) the answer was documented in the software itself, and I just missed it. (or both of course
That this method works b.t.w. proves the large base of open source users. It would not work if there were no other users using the software(functions) with a comparable machine configuration as I have.
Obviously, when I find no questions that weren't answered before, and the answer is not obvious (or a bug) I do ask and/or report them. I just find that this is not often necessary.
Well actually, this type of pin-fraud has been wiped out completely by putting a small tongue like extension on the card input of the ATM. The extension makes it impossible to attach a magnetic card reader in front of the ATM's card entry slot.
a sfraudenederlanduitgeroeid.html , this page is in Dutch.
So you can see that some problems can be solved with a very minor design change. You could even argue that the whole problem started because nobody added this (rather obvious) feature to the design in the first place.
The same can be said about all the pin-pad's (where you enter your number) that are not hidden from view. (Dutch Railways anybody)..
But then again, the same bankcards can (could?) be used in stores in France without a pincode. So the theft of your bankcard there leaves you always with an empty bankaccount.
See: http://www.nos.nl/nieuws/artikelen/2005/3/26/pinp
China data: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
Additionally, the data in the CIA world factbook states that the the ratio of men/woman in russia is 0.94, and this corresponds to (only) 1070 women for each 1000 men.
B.T.W. Normal (western) figures are equal ratio's to a slight excess of men in the ages 15-65. The 1.12 ratio in birthrate for China is very high.
Search for "Cobol IMS" on Amazon -> 191 results.
Cobol itself returns 1836 results, including "Teach yourself Cobol in 21 days".
No offence to you, but in my opinion reading skills are undervalued in software engineering, and most people don't realize the overview they can get over a certain subject area by just reading (or even browsing) a number of books in the subject.
Last month I had to repair my brother's computer, and it turned out to be the power supply which had failed.
;-).
This computer had been on for a while, and the supply's internal grille - where the air flows from the power supply into the computer - was fully blocked by dust, causing it to overheat.
So the ventilators in the power supplies do not only suck in air, but also a lot of dust. You might want to check this periodically, also on the inside...
Especially when you - as my brother - have cats or other small furry animals running around in your house
I concur!
;)
Couldn't we add a list-subscribe option to Slashdot? Guess who would be one of the first subscribers... It might just teach him something...
And it would actually give a meaning to 'me too' posts like this
I think that getting the feel of human social skills will be the hardest because they are hard to identify and quantify, and the geeks who will make the machines are not good at it themselves.
;-).
I do not necessarily agree. The lack of social intelligence in geeks is most of the times (at least partly) compensated by their reasoning skills (IQ). So they actually think about the logical relationships between the social action-reaction responses that people with a higher emotional intelligence take for granted.
Never met anybody who you could see thinking on how to respond to something?
This actually would make it a bonus for geeks when implementing these social skills.
OTOH, it would make for interesting 'geek' robots (and the question how to distinguish between them
The buy or lease decision is not always the default one. Something can have substantial inherent value, but if nobody has a direct profitable use for it (either commercial or non-commercial) it will just be abandoned.
;-) these places must have had a substantial - physical - economic value (no IP fuss here), they were ultimately abandoned.
Just look at al those empty industial complexes you can find all over the world for a good example. Although (at the time, before all windows were broken
The same goes with the assets from company's like these. If no one can be found who has a profitable use for it, this equipment can just as well be 'lost'. Most of the times the movable equipment will be sold for scrap, but the rest will be just left for others to worry about.
So the ultimate result of all this economic action will be that - in due time - some archeologist can wonder why we really put all those long glass lines in the ground...
Yes, but the calculation was about ice on *land*. The water coming from this ice will be fully added to the oceans, instead of replacing the volume of ice it was. For as far as the ice mass itself was above sealevel, of course.
Yep, but even in the northern hemisphere you have ice that will cause sea level rises when it melts. Think only of Greenland.
Solar energy actually does work at night. What I mean is, solar energy can be created at the other side of the globe.
But more to the point, the problem you mention are not the generation of the electricity, it's the storage. At night you obviously need electricity, but if we can store the energy the sunlight shoots at us at daytime this problem will be solved. This could for instance be done with the conversion to hydrogen. And given the storage facilities we currently use in our oil and natural gas production chain, developing methods of storing this energy should not be a very big problem. And using this hydrogen in it's natural form also becomes easier over time, see the original article in this topic...
But there are almost limitless other possibilities to temporarily store energy, such as pumping water upwards in hydro-power plants or other closed basins of water. At daytimes, the pumped up water can be utilized to generate the electricity again, using the pumps as generators.
But my favorite future vision (and the reason for the first line): Transport the electricity over large distances, for instance from the day-part of the earth to the night-part. This would be a very interesting challenge - and certainly not feasible at this time - but imagine a network of cables like the fibers we now have on the seafloor, but instead of having fibers at it's core it would have superconductors. That would transport the energy near loss-free.
This technology would by the way also be very usefull to transport solar generated energy from -let's say - Morocco or Libya, which are mostly very low inhabited, cloud free deserts to Europe. And there are similar -high solar power/low population density - regions on the Asian, Australian and American continents.
The point: we need to start thinking big when we want to create alternative systems for our huge energy demands. And this could mean large distributed systems (for instance utilizing the aforementioned hydrogen fuel cells), or large centralized systems, but they need to be large scale solutions to satisfy our current and future demands. And at that point, improbable solutions sometimes become probable.. and usefull..
If they start handling this the same way as they treat countries which function as tax loopholes, or which have laws keeping bank accounts private, I wouldn't hold my breath on it..
And these issues are just as important, if not more, given the amount of recent discussions on how the terrorists got and handled their money.