Someone tell Dubya, quick! We'll be watching it before the troops are pulled out of Iraq... no wait, that won't happen... well anyway you get the idea.
I must agree with you and others. Penrose has a gift which is almost unique in the scientific world: the ability to communicate with and inspire the masses. The only other scientist I know of who can do this is Fritjov Capra... and I thoroughly recommend people read his works as well - he is a genius.
Apple provide iTunes for Windows to lure people over to Macs. People who have an Athlon 64 are far less likely to be switching to a Mac than others, if only for the fact that they have only recently upgraded.
You would expect iTunes to be 64-bit ready considering Apple have the G5 in mind, so I wouldn't think it would be too hard for them to come up with an Athlon 64 port... or at least an un-optimised one.
I hadn't noticed that 5-computers-a-day thing, but I only have 5 computers on my home network, and I don't use iTunes to share my music, so I don't really case. I use daapd... you'll need mDNSResponder as well. It was as simple as 'emerge daapd' on my Gentoo box ( little Celeron 333 beast ). You can share your music with as many people as you want.
Alternatively, you might even be able to get the above setup running on OS X without too much trouble. I haven't tried it, and I imagine iTunes might get a little bitchy if it can't bind to the port that daapd runs on, but there should be ways around this. Perhaps just turning off music sharing will stop daapd from running?
But yeah... you're right about Apple and their arse-licking of the major media power-that-be. I still can't get over the fact that they can't include some open-source encoding apps such as mencoder, ffmpeg, transcode etc. It would be trivial to get these supported, if not included in iMovie / iDVD. They aren't shy of using open source technology when it suits them of course.
It's all very well reducing the amount of petrol that you burn, but when you take into consideration the amount of coal that gets burned in the power station that charges your batteries, and the amount of energy that is lost in trasmission between the station and where you charge your car, I don't think you're seeing any reasonable savings. You are shifting pollution around - pushing it out to whereever the power stations are... or worse still increasing your reliance on nuclear power.
Then again it's an interesting technology. I'd prefer to see car manufacturers working harder at hydrogen fuel cell technology, along with clean, renewable sources for charging them, such as solar panels that you can put on your house / garage to extract hydrogen from water.
Burning coal to charge lead-acid batteries and then boasting about your low petrol consumption isn't that intelligent.
For those not following the constant stream of bullshit coming from Canberra, this is a half-arsed shot at the claim that won the Liberals the previous election: "They're throwing their children overboard".
Jokes aside, the federal government doesn't have a shred of social conscience in them, and a small donation from Billy G will put an end to this lunacy. Mark my words.
Don't think so. Slackware 7 had 2.95.something, or maybe even egs-1.something. It was a long time ago. But Slackware 5 and 6 certainly didn't have gcc-3.
The cost of human life is too small to worry about. The companies in the aerospace industry ( Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc al ) are primarily in the business of war. The amount of money they get from military budgets astronomically dwarfs the amount of money they get from civilian aircraft. So is it any surprise that in this particular case they have put money ahead of people's lives?
I would have added the above, but I thought that it pretty much goes without saying.
Pitty about all those millions of innocent Iraqis who were killed by 10 years of UN sanctions rammed home by the US. And pitty about the tens of thousands who were killed in the shock and awe campaign. And pitty about those who used to call Fallujah home... not many homes left standing there, eh? And pity that it was all based on a stack of deliberate lies.
Now why would I say that Americans are the most evil society on Earth? Hmmmm. Nothing really comes to mind... oh... wait... what about the Palestinians. Pity about how 85% of their land has been stolen by the Zionists. And pity about how the rest of their land is being carved up by the apartheid walls. What's the US take on all this? Well of course, the poor defenseless Zionists need more apache helicopters, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons... which the US gives them. No double-standards on WOMD here!
Apart from the fine, peace-loving Zionist state, which other society should I compare your proud country to? And what exactly are you implying when you refer to Stalinist dictatorships? I don't remember supporting any stalinist dictatorships, which is more than I can say for the fucking whitehouse. It's all very well for you to sit behind your weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and criticise the rest of the world for being anti-democratic and Stalinsts when we dare to speak out against you, but actions speak louder than words. Where do all your clothes come from? And your electronic equipment? China - a stalinist dictatorship! You're so disgusted with their regime that you throw billions at them each year so you can enjoy your cheap commodities, and then dare to accuse me of supporting stalinist dictatorships!
Off your high fucking horses, Yankee scum. Take you heads out of your arses for just a second, turn off the Ricky Lake show and have a good hard think about where your great leaders are taking you. It might surprise you to hear this, but the rest of the world thinks you are shit. Sure you won't hear it from our politicians, but trust me, the sentiment is there.
Yes, it would be a typical hollywood movie. But that doesn't mean that it can't happen. I suppose the bit about with the intent to come back to Earth and kill us all is going a bit far, but I can see how this could unintentionally kill us all.
Even if it doesn't get back to Earth and kill us... what about any life ( or traces of past life ) on Mars?
Americans have relatively advanced technology, but unfortunately for themselves and everybody else, they are the least advanced society around.
Solar panels by themselves aren't so useful. You need some method of storing the energy produced.
For people interested in alternative energy sources, I suggest you check out one of the ebooks available at http://www.goodideacreative.com/wheelockmtn.html. I bought the 'Build Your Own Fuel Cells' ebook ( plain pdf ) and it's pretty damned good. It has many detailed diagrams and templates for building a variety of fuel cells.
I must admit that I haven't actually built one yet ( I'm still trying to track down a supplier for Proton Exchange Membranes ), but once I do this the project actually looks feasible. Most will admit it has an incredible amount of cool value.
Anyway, the whole system is basically:
Solar Panel produces electricity which is used to split water into hydrogen & oxygen, and stored in tanks.
Pump hydrogen ( and possibly oxygen ) into fuel cell stack when power is required
I've got about half our office on it. We moved to StarOffice 5.2 after the BSA sent us letters demanding that we explain our software licensing before someone comes and inspects things for themselves. The other half of the office are using some pretty complicated spreadsheets with stacks of VB code, and it's just not feasible to port it to OOo ( even though it would be technically possible ) at the moment.
At the moment I've got all the OOo people on the 2.0 beta. It's working very nicely. The compatibility with Office is much better. Documents that used to have severe formatting issues now work either flawlessly, or damned close.
I've done some simple dialogs in OOo for our sales department. They enter a prospect's code and get a combo box showing all the locations and contacts for that company. They select from combo boxes and hit a button to copy all the info into a word processing document. Simple but effective. The scripting language isn't as easy to use as VB, but it's not too bad, and the macro recorder makes things easier.
I've also done a Perl-Gtk2 database front-end for them which is working remarkably better than MS Access. I've written a little Perl module, at http://entropy.homelinux.org/Gtk2-Ex-DBI/ ( screenshot available at that link ) that makes Gtk2-Perl apps designed with the Glade GUI builder data-aware. It handles all database querying, via DBI, 'paints' records onto your Glade-generated form, detects user-changes, updates the database, etc.
I've just started on a Perl-based report writer that outputs to PDF via PDF::API2. Obviously this is to replace Access reports. It's coming along very nicely.
OOo 2 has a database engine and front-end, but honestly I find that ( at least currently ), Access is far more powerful, easy to use, and stable. Of course the OOo 2 one is young and improving, but I think that no matter how good it gets, the Perl-Gtk2 way is always going to be much better ( and more fun ). Perl really is a nice language to be programming in, and Perl-Gtk2 is just so simple and logical, and yet powerful and fast that it really is a compelling option.
With IE vs Firefox, the argument about lower costs with Firefox is harder to demonstrate, as IE is free-as-in-beer.
With OpenOffice, people are aware of the obvious cost difference from the start... without requiring one of us to sit them down and explain it to them.
Once the functionality is at the right level ( OOo 1 was close, OOo 2 might just do it - it's working damned well for us in testing ), people should flock to it.
It's not much of a solution to any of the problems listed, however. Each one of them can only be solved by a substantial shift in global perception, leading to a complete reversal of US foreign policy... the most common cause of war.
The US, for example, has plenty of nuclear ( or nucular, as Baby Bush calls them ) weapons. I'm sure there aren't many Americans who would consider their own country to be a terrorist state, however the rest of the world are far more open to this interpretation. How many countries have ever used nuclear weapons as an act of war? We're told that Nagasaki and Hiroshima 'happened' to save the lives of countless others, however that seems to be the justification for just about anything these days.
Israel is a country that I would certainly call a terrorist state, and there would even be a decent proportion of the American population that would agree with me on this one. I believe Rumsfield said just the other day that Israel 'might' launch a pre-emptive strike against Tehran. Might, eh? That would be terribly convenient for the US, now wouldn't it? It's already been leaked that they have advanced planning for an invasion of Iran ( which would be more than I could say for their invasion of Iraq ). But the powers-that-be would prefer us to look the other way in this case as well.
OK then, lets move onto Iraq. They of course had massive stockpiles of WOMD, including 'nucular' weapons. The problem here is that they didn't go around terrorising other people with them. Sure they invaded a middle-eastern country here and there, but let's be honest... who hasn't? The distinction here is that the US and Israel are more than willing to use their WOMD, while other states are merely keeping their alleged WOMD as a deterance... from the US and Israel.
Getting back to the title of the article... it doesn't matter who can build a nuclear weapon. There are plenty for sale on the black market. As reported only yesterday, the UK announced that they just lost a sizable portion of plutonium, and in the same breath claim that it is probably just an 'accounting error'.
Any terrorist organisation worth their weight in oil ( ponder who I'm referring to for a while please ) can afford nuclear weapons, whether they can make them themselves or not. The real questions are:
how far can the US push them before they give the order?
will they take a leaf from the US's foreign policy and launch a pre-emptive strike?
will they target the real enemies in our governments and corrupt business leaders?
will the citizens of the US be too blind to realise why they are under attack before it's too late?
I also run OS X... on my Powerbook. But I'm embarrased to admit this when I see fucking morons like you trolling at every opportunity.
This isn't a flogging contest. It's an article on the development of open source graphics rendering libraries. If you don't like it as such, don't fucking post.
You want Linux to look and behave just like Windows so you don't have to learn anything. For any Linux user who is motivated enough to put a small amount of time into what they're doing, what you're asking for is already available. I know because I've rolled out just such a solution.
But keep sitting there waiting for people to 'ring' you. I'm sure you can focus on that.
I only do Linux and hardware support. I'll install Linux people, set up a good desktop, teach them how to use it, and do upgrades on it ( dyndns, remote maintenance via ssh ).
But people had better not tell me about their Windows issues, because I've already warned them about viruses, worms, spyware and such, and if they continue using Windows when I've given them a better alternative, then they're on their own.
I've found this reduces my tech support burden considerably. I've got 5 remote Linux boxen that their respective owners are very happy with. None of them have viruses. None of them are getting slower and slower and slower. None of them need a reinstall. None of them need me to dodgy up the Windows XP key because SP1 / SP2 are recejeting theirs as being pirated. None of them need the latest copy of MS Office that their buddy burned for them. Basically, none of them have any problems. Sometime people have questions, but for those, I have answers.
You support Windows once, and you'll be back there in 3 months fixing the same friggin' thing.
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Someone tell Dubya, quick! We'll be watching it before the troops are pulled out of Iraq ... no wait, that won't happen ... well anyway you get the idea.
I must agree with you and others. Penrose has a gift which is almost unique in the scientific world: the ability to communicate with and inspire the masses. The only other scientist I know of who can do this is Fritjov Capra ... and I thoroughly recommend people read his works as well - he is a genius.
Just a thought:
... or at least an un-optimised one.
Apple provide iTunes for Windows to lure people over to Macs. People who have an Athlon 64 are far less likely to be switching to a Mac than others, if only for the fact that they have only recently upgraded.
You would expect iTunes to be 64-bit ready considering Apple have the G5 in mind, so I wouldn't think it would be too hard for them to come up with an Athlon 64 port
I hadn't noticed that 5-computers-a-day thing, but I only have 5 computers on my home network, and I don't use iTunes to share my music, so I don't really case. I use daapd ... you'll need mDNSResponder as well. It was as simple as 'emerge daapd' on my Gentoo box ( little Celeron 333 beast ). You can share your music with as many people as you want.
... you're right about Apple and their arse-licking of the major media power-that-be. I still can't get over the fact that they can't include some open-source encoding apps such as mencoder, ffmpeg, transcode etc. It would be trivial to get these supported , if not included in iMovie / iDVD. They aren't shy of using open source technology when it suits them of course.
Alternatively, you might even be able to get the above setup running on OS X without too much trouble. I haven't tried it, and I imagine iTunes might get a little bitchy if it can't bind to the port that daapd runs on, but there should be ways around this. Perhaps just turning off music sharing will stop daapd from running?
But yeah
It's all very well reducing the amount of petrol that you burn, but when you take into consideration the amount of coal that gets burned in the power station that charges your batteries, and the amount of energy that is lost in trasmission between the station and where you charge your car, I don't think you're seeing any reasonable savings. You are shifting pollution around - pushing it out to whereever the power stations are ... or worse still increasing your reliance on nuclear power.
Then again it's an interesting technology. I'd prefer to see car manufacturers working harder at hydrogen fuel cell technology, along with clean, renewable sources for charging them, such as solar panels that you can put on your house / garage to extract hydrogen from water.
Burning coal to charge lead-acid batteries and then boasting about your low petrol consumption isn't that intelligent.
For those not following the constant stream of bullshit coming from Canberra, this is a half-arsed shot at the claim that won the Liberals the previous election: "They're throwing their children overboard".
Jokes aside, the federal government doesn't have a shred of social conscience in them, and a small donation from Billy G will put an end to this lunacy. Mark my words.
Make that "Gentoo". Damned 'n' key...
For those who want to know what works and what doesn't: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-176085.html
Ah yes.
I do remember that now.
Like I said, it was a long time ago.
Consider me slow.
Don't think so. Slackware 7 had 2.95.something, or maybe even egs-1.something. It was a long time ago. But Slackware 5 and 6 certainly didn't have gcc-3.
They're idea of a printing interface is 'lpr'.
gpdf is faster and has a *much* better ( gnome ) printing interface.
The cost of human life is too small to worry about.
The companies in the aerospace industry ( Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc al ) are primarily in the business of war. The amount of money they get from military budgets astronomically dwarfs the amount of money they get from civilian aircraft. So is it any surprise that in this particular case they have put money ahead of people's lives?
There are some nice screenshots of Gnome in the article. The article's about Gnome, right? It's not? I see.
Well at least Gnome works.
Ha!
... not many homes left standing there, eh? And pity that it was all based on a stack of deliberate lies.
... oh ... wait ... what about the Palestinians. Pity about how 85% of their land has been stolen by the Zionists. And pity about how the rest of their land is being carved up by the apartheid walls. What's the US take on all this? Well of course, the poor defenseless Zionists need more apache helicopters, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons ... which the US gives them. No double-standards on WOMD here!
I would have added the above, but I thought that it pretty much goes without saying.
Pitty about all those millions of innocent Iraqis who were killed by 10 years of UN sanctions rammed home by the US. And pitty about the tens of thousands who were killed in the shock and awe campaign. And pitty about those who used to call Fallujah home
Now why would I say that Americans are the most evil society on Earth? Hmmmm. Nothing really comes to mind
Apart from the fine, peace-loving Zionist state, which other society should I compare your proud country to? And what exactly are you implying when you refer to Stalinist dictatorships? I don't remember supporting any stalinist dictatorships, which is more than I can say for the fucking whitehouse. It's all very well for you to sit behind your weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and criticise the rest of the world for being anti-democratic and Stalinsts when we dare to speak out against you, but actions speak louder than words. Where do all your clothes come from? And your electronic equipment? China - a stalinist dictatorship! You're so disgusted with their regime that you throw billions at them each year so you can enjoy your cheap commodities, and then dare to accuse me of supporting stalinist dictatorships!
Off your high fucking horses, Yankee scum. Take you heads out of your arses for just a second, turn off the Ricky Lake show and have a good hard think about where your great leaders are taking you. It might surprise you to hear this, but the rest of the world thinks you are shit. Sure you won't hear it from our politicians, but trust me, the sentiment is there.
I wouldn't be so quick to laught at it.
... what about any life ( or traces of past life ) on Mars?
Yes, it would be a typical hollywood movie.
But that doesn't mean that it can't happen.
I suppose the bit about with the intent to come back to Earth and kill us all is going a bit far, but I can see how this could unintentionally kill us all.
Even if it doesn't get back to Earth and kill us
Americans have relatively advanced technology, but unfortunately for themselves and everybody else, they are the least advanced society around.
For people interested in alternative energy sources, I suggest you check out one of the ebooks available at http://www.goodideacreative.com/wheelockmtn.html.
I bought the 'Build Your Own Fuel Cells' ebook ( plain pdf ) and it's pretty damned good. It has many detailed diagrams and templates for building a variety of fuel cells.
I must admit that I haven't actually built one yet ( I'm still trying to track down a supplier for Proton Exchange Membranes ), but once I do this the project actually looks feasible. Most will admit it has an incredible amount of cool value.
Anyway, the whole system is basically:
Solar Panel produces electricity which is used to split water into hydrogen & oxygen, and stored in tanks.
Pump hydrogen ( and possibly oxygen ) into fuel cell stack when power is required
Yep.
I've got about half our office on it. We moved to StarOffice 5.2 after the BSA sent us letters demanding that we explain our software licensing before someone comes and inspects things for themselves. The other half of the office are using some pretty complicated spreadsheets with stacks of VB code, and it's just not feasible to port it to OOo ( even though it would be technically possible ) at the moment.
At the moment I've got all the OOo people on the 2.0 beta. It's working very nicely. The compatibility with Office is much better. Documents that used to have severe formatting issues now work either flawlessly, or damned close.
I've done some simple dialogs in OOo for our sales department. They enter a prospect's code and get a combo box showing all the locations and contacts for that company. They select from combo boxes and hit a button to copy all the info into a word processing document. Simple but effective. The scripting language isn't as easy to use as VB, but it's not too bad, and the macro recorder makes things easier.
I've also done a Perl-Gtk2 database front-end for them which is working remarkably better than MS Access. I've written a little Perl module, at http://entropy.homelinux.org/Gtk2-Ex-DBI/ ( screenshot available at that link ) that makes Gtk2-Perl apps designed with the Glade GUI builder data-aware. It handles all database querying, via DBI, 'paints' records onto your Glade-generated form, detects user-changes, updates the database, etc.
I've just started on a Perl-based report writer that outputs to PDF via PDF::API2. Obviously this is to replace Access reports. It's coming along very nicely.
OOo 2 has a database engine and front-end, but honestly I find that ( at least currently ), Access is far more powerful, easy to use, and stable. Of course the OOo 2 one is young and improving, but I think that no matter how good it gets, the Perl-Gtk2 way is always going to be much better ( and more fun ). Perl really is a nice language to be programming in, and Perl-Gtk2 is just so simple and logical, and yet powerful and fast that it really is a compelling option.
Shouldn't be all that hard.
... without requiring one of us to sit them down and explain it to them.
With IE vs Firefox, the argument about lower costs with Firefox is harder to demonstrate, as IE is free-as-in-beer.
With OpenOffice, people are aware of the obvious cost difference from the start
Once the functionality is at the right level ( OOo 1 was close, OOo 2 might just do it - it's working damned well for us in testing ), people should flock to it.
Interesting technology.
... the most common cause of war.
It's not much of a solution to any of the problems listed, however. Each one of them can only be solved by a substantial shift in global perception, leading to a complete reversal of US foreign policy
Anything less is a band-aid solution.
Israel is a country that I would certainly call a terrorist state, and there would even be a decent proportion of the American population that would agree with me on this one. I believe Rumsfield said just the other day that Israel 'might' launch a pre-emptive strike against Tehran. Might , eh? That would be terribly convenient for the US, now wouldn't it? It's already been leaked that they have advanced planning for an invasion of Iran ( which would be more than I could say for their invasion of Iraq ). But the powers-that-be would prefer us to look the other way in this case as well.
OK then, lets move onto Iraq. They of course had massive stockpiles of WOMD, including 'nucular' weapons. The problem here is that they didn't go around terrorising other people with them. Sure they invaded a middle-eastern country here and there, but let's be honest
Getting back to the title of the article
Any terrorist organisation worth their weight in oil ( ponder who I'm referring to for a while please ) can afford nuclear weapons, whether they can make them themselves or not. The real questions are:
how far can the US push them before they give the order?
will they take a leaf from the US's foreign policy and launch a pre-emptive strike?
will they target the real enemies in our governments and corrupt business leaders?
will the citizens of the US be too blind to realise why they are under attack before it's too late?
Idiot.
... on my Powerbook. But I'm embarrased to admit this when I see fucking morons like you trolling at every opportunity.
I also run OS X
This isn't a flogging contest. It's an article on the development of open source graphics rendering libraries. If you don't like it as such, don't fucking post.
Merely quoting a big number does nothing for your argument.
What you're asking for is already on offer. No hype here. No references to big numbers. No buzz words. Just what you're asking for. Do some research.
You want Linux to look and behave just like Windows so you don't have to learn anything. For any Linux user who is motivated enough to put a small amount of time into what they're doing, what you're asking for is already available. I know because I've rolled out just such a solution.
But keep sitting there waiting for people to 'ring' you. I'm sure you can focus on that.
They way you Yanks are going you won't need any WOMD to fuck you over - you're doing a fine job all by yourself.
...
Great choice of president, by the way. And secretary of state. And secretary of 'defence'. And
I only do Linux and hardware support.
I'll install Linux people, set up a good desktop, teach them how to use it, and do upgrades on it ( dyndns, remote maintenance via ssh ).
But people had better not tell me about their Windows issues, because I've already warned them about viruses, worms, spyware and such, and if they continue using Windows when I've given them a better alternative, then they're on their own.
I've found this reduces my tech support burden considerably. I've got 5 remote Linux boxen that their respective owners are very happy with. None of them have viruses. None of them are getting slower and slower and slower. None of them need a reinstall. None of them need me to dodgy up the Windows XP key because SP1 / SP2 are recejeting theirs as being pirated. None of them need the latest copy of MS Office that their buddy burned for them. Basically, none of them have any problems. Sometime people have questions, but for those, I have answers.
You support Windows once, and you'll be back there in 3 months fixing the same friggin' thing.