Well, it uses Java, so I suggest using the JRockit JVM rather than the standard issue one as it's faster. Alternatively, compile to a native binary be using gcj under Cygwin.
Why rewrite? Plenty of functionality they could add. Proper DTP support, support within Calc for the numerous maths and stats libraries out there, better document revision control, hooks for FlightGear so that the wordprocessor properly emulates the Easter eggs in MS Word, etc.
I'd consider The Guardian to be a major newspaper, but it's paper readership is only 80,000. I don't recall the exact figures, but I remember seeing that US national newspaper figures were in the same ballpark. As for your examples, you've got to remember that Australia produced Rolf Harris, Clive James and Steve Irwin. Any nation that can do that is bound to be a little bit... different.
Well, no. Ships were becoming gigantic at that time. Not sure of the exact date for the Mary Rose, but you might want to compare it to the Viking Longships in terms of wood consumed per person and then interpolate what it might have been during the Black Death. 60% fewer people might not have significantly altered wood consumption at all, due to the increased inefficiency.
As far as agriculture is concerned, this was after most European countries had some form of Enclosures Act. As a result, the land usage would have been more-or-less identical. It wouldn't have increased as population regrew, it just wouldn't have shrunk as population declined.
And you'll observe that not long after the Roman period, there were human migrations northwards. So, yes, we have seen this happen.
Understanding of human-caused changes to climate is over 100 years old, largely because people were able to map human activities to climate changes by the historical record alone. (They weren't really up to doing mass spectrometry on ice cores in the first decade of the 1900s.)
Not that it makes much difference. There are two things that are commonly ignored by TMITS when looking at climate - regional climate isn't the same as global climate (you can have cooling in a region when the global temperature is rising, and vice versa) and neither is a linear system (warming can include periods of extreme cooling, and vice versa; transition temperatures are another source of non-linearity).
CO2 is also not the only thing that is changed by deforestation/reforestation. You alter the reflectivity and therefore air temperature and air currents, you alter the water cycle and you radically alter rainfall patterns. This is why climate models are complex.
The practical upshot is that summaries about climate are always going to be bad. Anti global warming fanatics often latch onto a summary and argue that because it doesn't match every single data point that the science itself is wrong. Which, of course, is BS. Summaries in global climate aren't meaningful most of the time because they're talking about the mean change over a very long time of the sum of patterns that have pseudo-random variations within them over the short timeframes that the human mind can actually grasp, where no individual pattern need have any obvious relationship to the mean change even if you were able to filter out the fluctuations.
The point of Open Source is that it is an evolutionary-based philosophy. Branches compete and, in those environments in which a given branch thrives, that branch will continue to evolve. ("Survival of the fittest" is a misnomer as it carries the implication that there is a unique fittest and a unique environment for it to be fittest in.)
Libre Office is thriving in most of the environments Open Office used to do well in, with KOffice, Abiword and other integrated office packages doing well in their own niches. Saying "Open Office can't be allowed to die" is simply not the right approach. The right approach is to find a niche in which Open Office and not Libre Office or any other office software is the correct solution.
To do that, of course, Open Office has to actually do something new. Just doing the same things Libre Office already does better isn't a reason to maintain it. It has to diverge FIRST and then, if that divergence produces something interesting, it will survive because it is doing something interesting.
Hard to say. Slashdot has a readership in excess of 100,000 (which puts it on-par with that of most major newspapers) and is read primarily by people in IT (whereas most major newspapers have a diverse readership). Whilst it is not possible to know in any given case how big of a role Slashdot has played, mainstream newspapers like The Guardian (who broke the Murdoch scandal and were a major player in the WikiLeaks saga) have unquestionably had influence on major events.
It is therefore reasonable to say that Slashdot COULD have an equally large impact from time to time. Not that it has, is or will do in any given case, just could in some case. It has the readership, it has the prominence and it has a level of focus that mainstream media can't.
I, therefore, say that it is a far worse arrogance to assume Slashdot could not have played a role.
The only time abandoned property within international territory is off-limits is when it's a war grave. So unless the government isn't telling us something, salvage rights would seem to apply. Now, if he didn't declare it on the customs form, he might owe the government import duties, but that's about it.
Yeeeeees, but if it was meant to be left on the lander, then by now it would have been destroyed or badly damaged had he done nothing. This act - regardless of the motive or the legality - has actually preserved an element of history that wouldn't otherwise exist. (Americans claim they don't have much history, but the reality is that Americans have had vast amounts of the stuff but it keeps getting destroyed for one reason or another.)
Frankly, I don't care who wins this battle. We win if the camera ends up in a science museum. We lose if the camera ends up disposed-of or left to rot in the attic of a collector. (Collectors aren't much good at preserving things either - several pages were ripped out of the Archimedes Palimpsest, two were coloured in by the previous collector to boost auction value, and mould had seriously damaged what was left. It was amazing anything was salvaged from it at all.)
Easy way to do a comparative study. OpenLibrary reads PDFs and displays them as flippable pages, book-style. Google Books reads PDFs and displays them as a scrolling page. Find a book - any book, doesn't matter which - that exists on both systems. See for yourself which is the easier format.
My suspicion is that it's going to be dependent on the material. A novel has continuous flow, so I'd expect Google Books' style to be much easier. A technical document, where you're not wanting to read from cover to cover but randomly access material throughout at random times, would seem to be better in a random access format. Now, I wouldn't say a book is the ideal random access format (it's more indexed sequential) but it's a good first approximation. So I'd expect OpenLibrary to be much better for reference manuals, DIY guides, recipe books etc.
Now, sometimes you want to be able to pan around a document on a browser in the X axis as well as the Y axis. Equally, sometimes you want to stop the page from forcing you to do so.
My thought for a plugin is relatively simple. The plugin is told how large the virtual page is (with an option for infinite height - essentially how browsers currently work) by default. If no default is given, then the web page can provide a size in meta tags. Everyone becomes happy, everyone's viewing needs are met and Opera gets to have the functionality they want without ruining anyone's experience.
Surely you're not suggesting HP's new CEO limit themselves to such mediocre core meltdowns when, with just a little more effort, they can achieve China Syndrome proportions?
Replace the board with members of the Psychic Hotline, and then have Dave Packard's ghost as CEO. No matter how badly it fails, it can't fail worse than the current board.
The point is that Opera wanted pages, not scrollbars, which means that the starting point has to support pages. How you personally want it doesn't alter what Opera wants, it merely means you've got to cater for both.
LaTeX doesn't need to make use of pagination. If it were to be supported in a browser, then the browser would do what it does for everything else - provide overrides. In this case, you want an override which says that no matter what size of page the LaTeX document declares, the browser should always render it into a format equal to the width of the browser screen and an infinite length.
Ok, the problem of fragility was mentioned by another poster. Meh. The macros are all open-source. It would take a long time to get them all cleaned up, but look at it from this perspective instead - how long would it take to get a basic subset rock-solid (given that these are scripts) versus hacking Opera to support the entire typesetting concept in one go?
It would seem to me that fixing the LaTeX scripts (something that can be done on a rolling basis) is going to require fewer man-hours than inventing a whole new style of UI (which has to be complete in order to work at all) but also is something that can be used before it is complete.
As for LaTeX 3, yes, that's becoming something of a joke. At this point, I'd much rather see a fork of LaTeX that attempted to get the "missing" functionality sorted out all put into a single engine. Just as LaTeX 2 fragmented to the point where the maintainers couldn't stand it and actually got off their backsides to produce LaTeX 2e from the assorted engines out there, LaTeX 3 is likely to only come about when engineers fragment LaTeX 2e.
In light of the comments made about the stability, I'd say that one feature of such a fork needs to be decent script debugging. Another should be namespace support and encapsulation. Those three features alone should make a lot of macros a lot safer, though you'd still want some actual cleanup work to get the macros in decent shape.
In light of the CSS remarks, I'd say another feature needs to be to provide high-level macros that allow you to perform the functions available in CSS 1-3 via the facilities in TeX.
All four changes could probably be implemented by a small team in a year or less, with few to no distractions.
Why? Pagination is a solved problem for most systems (desktop publishing, word processing, typesetting systems), there's no good reason why it should be any less solved for browsers. If worst comes to worst, develop a plugin for Opera (and other browsers) that supports one of the existing systems and therefore has known pagination rules.
There's prior art. Page-based documents created via a markup language which supports hypertext linking have been around for a while.
But, then, I like the hyperref package for LaTeX.
Frankly, I'd rather see LaTeX as a language extension. That way, you could have the page itself specify if it's to be paginated or scrolled, and if paginated how those pages should be constructed. The syntax already exists, the parser is nearly bullet-proof (more than could be said of most browsers) and those who actually want such a format (ie: people writing books, papers, etc) are likely the ones who already know the LaTeX language.
It really doesn't help that the military use Windows for this stuff. Windows is not a Trusted OS. (If you read through all the literature on trust across multiple devices connected together, the upshot is that it should not be possible to violate Mandatory Access Controls. You should not be able to write data that is of a higher security setting than the device you are writing to can support. MAC is always inherited, so no program on an untrusted device should ever run at higher privilege than the subset of the untrusted privilege that also lies within your own privileges. And so on.)
Actually, it would be good if there was a commercial/military certification system that focused on the OS (ie: not a simple clone of the Common Criteria) that was quick and easy for OS writers to use and which could provide a suitable level of confidence that security was - if not watertight, then at least not a Titanic.
Not sure about "recently". This has been reported time and again for years. I recall reading on Slashdot quite some time back on how people in Pakistan were able to watch drone transmissions using cheap television decoders.
They can find all the funding they like, but if your K-12 schools are teaching that dinosaurs and humans walked paw-in-hand and that computers are the work of a demon-possessed Steve Jobs, then you've got a group of people fundamentally (!) incapable of network management.
80% of all you learn, you learn before you are 12. You HAVE to get the key aspects of science, engineering, mathematics and rigorous thought TOTALLY in people's brains by that time. If you do not, you are too late. Those who haven't learned the key skills by then will never be capable of learning everything needed.
By the time someone is 24, they will have mentally peaked. Their brains will have begun to deteriorate. Learning a highly advanced, technical skill after that point is possible, but it requires enormous effort and it usually involves leveraging a skill that has similarities so that the adjustment in thought processes is kept to a minimum.
Schools and pre-schools, from age 3 onwards, have to aim at producing people of extremely high calibre. They can't keep aiming at producing Walmart shelf stackers in the hope that universities can clean up the mess. Subjects have become too complex, too intertwined, to do that.
In Britain, they're phasing in a program whereby they expect people to become polyglots by age 5, on the basis that this stimulates brain growth, capacity to learn and mental longevity. That's good. That's as it should be. It would be better if science and maths were equally stressed, but I'm happy with one victory for intelligent education at a time.
It would be good to see a fair and equal race, pistons vs rotary, on the Le Mans circuit. Given that it's R&D that has limited the rotary engine, another idea would be to allow F1 use rotary engines of equal horsepower to the piston engines currently used. (Mixed formulas have been used before, for example when turbos were phased out over several seasons.) If anyone can afford to develop a high-performance high-reliability rotary engine, it would be a F1 team. You'd need to allow F1 teams to use the weight difference for extra fuel, at least for the first year or so, but once the engines became equal in fuel consumption then rotary would hold the advantage as you could run a lighter car at the start.
No idea, but that kind of monster is getting very close to the compute power needed to do full-blown raytracing (not shading sold as raytracing) for 3D movies in real-time. As in a cinema with one of these would only need the basic renderman files plus sound track.
If the US had shown any interest whatsoever in ITER (fat chance, after they lost the bidding war on who was going to house it), I'd say that a supercomputer on this kind of scale would be adequate for simulating the dynamics inside the fusion reactor. That would allow the design to be vastly tightened up, giving it a much better chance of exceeding the break-even point in a sustainable reaction.
It would also be very useful for crunching through the masses of data that CERN are producing, as it would be able to look for classes of event that could be interesting but fall outside the capacity of regular particle physicists to look at. (At present, less than 1% of the data available is processed because nobody has the means to process it. It's just dumped. A giant like this could make a far larger fraction of the events analyzable.) But, again, the US is too busy competing to cooperate. (Besides, cooperation is what those Pesky Socialists do. Pleh!) The idea of the DEA installing an ultra-fat pipe to the LHC for the purpose of helping CERN - not going to happen. The science be damned, egos are on the line!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it uses Java, so I suggest using the JRockit JVM rather than the standard issue one as it's faster. Alternatively, compile to a native binary be using gcj under Cygwin.
I'd tell you, but I need the birthdate and birthplace (nearest degree of lat and long would be fine).
Why rewrite? Plenty of functionality they could add. Proper DTP support, support within Calc for the numerous maths and stats libraries out there, better document revision control, hooks for FlightGear so that the wordprocessor properly emulates the Easter eggs in MS Word, etc.
I'd consider The Guardian to be a major newspaper, but it's paper readership is only 80,000. I don't recall the exact figures, but I remember seeing that US national newspaper figures were in the same ballpark. As for your examples, you've got to remember that Australia produced Rolf Harris, Clive James and Steve Irwin. Any nation that can do that is bound to be a little bit... different.
The Europeans didn't deforest. Well, not after they'd destroyed the forests, that is. You can't subtract from nothing.
Well, no. Ships were becoming gigantic at that time. Not sure of the exact date for the Mary Rose, but you might want to compare it to the Viking Longships in terms of wood consumed per person and then interpolate what it might have been during the Black Death. 60% fewer people might not have significantly altered wood consumption at all, due to the increased inefficiency.
As far as agriculture is concerned, this was after most European countries had some form of Enclosures Act. As a result, the land usage would have been more-or-less identical. It wouldn't have increased as population regrew, it just wouldn't have shrunk as population declined.
And you'll observe that not long after the Roman period, there were human migrations northwards. So, yes, we have seen this happen.
Understanding of human-caused changes to climate is over 100 years old, largely because people were able to map human activities to climate changes by the historical record alone. (They weren't really up to doing mass spectrometry on ice cores in the first decade of the 1900s.)
Not that it makes much difference. There are two things that are commonly ignored by TMITS when looking at climate - regional climate isn't the same as global climate (you can have cooling in a region when the global temperature is rising, and vice versa) and neither is a linear system (warming can include periods of extreme cooling, and vice versa; transition temperatures are another source of non-linearity).
CO2 is also not the only thing that is changed by deforestation/reforestation. You alter the reflectivity and therefore air temperature and air currents, you alter the water cycle and you radically alter rainfall patterns. This is why climate models are complex.
The practical upshot is that summaries about climate are always going to be bad. Anti global warming fanatics often latch onto a summary and argue that because it doesn't match every single data point that the science itself is wrong. Which, of course, is BS. Summaries in global climate aren't meaningful most of the time because they're talking about the mean change over a very long time of the sum of patterns that have pseudo-random variations within them over the short timeframes that the human mind can actually grasp, where no individual pattern need have any obvious relationship to the mean change even if you were able to filter out the fluctuations.
The point of Open Source is that it is an evolutionary-based philosophy. Branches compete and, in those environments in which a given branch thrives, that branch will continue to evolve. ("Survival of the fittest" is a misnomer as it carries the implication that there is a unique fittest and a unique environment for it to be fittest in.)
Libre Office is thriving in most of the environments Open Office used to do well in, with KOffice, Abiword and other integrated office packages doing well in their own niches. Saying "Open Office can't be allowed to die" is simply not the right approach. The right approach is to find a niche in which Open Office and not Libre Office or any other office software is the correct solution.
To do that, of course, Open Office has to actually do something new. Just doing the same things Libre Office already does better isn't a reason to maintain it. It has to diverge FIRST and then, if that divergence produces something interesting, it will survive because it is doing something interesting.
Hard to say. Slashdot has a readership in excess of 100,000 (which puts it on-par with that of most major newspapers) and is read primarily by people in IT (whereas most major newspapers have a diverse readership). Whilst it is not possible to know in any given case how big of a role Slashdot has played, mainstream newspapers like The Guardian (who broke the Murdoch scandal and were a major player in the WikiLeaks saga) have unquestionably had influence on major events.
It is therefore reasonable to say that Slashdot COULD have an equally large impact from time to time. Not that it has, is or will do in any given case, just could in some case. It has the readership, it has the prominence and it has a level of focus that mainstream media can't.
I, therefore, say that it is a far worse arrogance to assume Slashdot could not have played a role.
The only time abandoned property within international territory is off-limits is when it's a war grave. So unless the government isn't telling us something, salvage rights would seem to apply. Now, if he didn't declare it on the customs form, he might owe the government import duties, but that's about it.
Since the crime took place on the moon, does the judge even have jurisdiction?
Yeeeeees, but if it was meant to be left on the lander, then by now it would have been destroyed or badly damaged had he done nothing. This act - regardless of the motive or the legality - has actually preserved an element of history that wouldn't otherwise exist. (Americans claim they don't have much history, but the reality is that Americans have had vast amounts of the stuff but it keeps getting destroyed for one reason or another.)
Frankly, I don't care who wins this battle. We win if the camera ends up in a science museum. We lose if the camera ends up disposed-of or left to rot in the attic of a collector. (Collectors aren't much good at preserving things either - several pages were ripped out of the Archimedes Palimpsest, two were coloured in by the previous collector to boost auction value, and mould had seriously damaged what was left. It was amazing anything was salvaged from it at all.)
The rest really doesn't matter.
The fact that he's still talking is what really bothers me.
Easy way to do a comparative study. OpenLibrary reads PDFs and displays them as flippable pages, book-style. Google Books reads PDFs and displays them as a scrolling page. Find a book - any book, doesn't matter which - that exists on both systems. See for yourself which is the easier format.
My suspicion is that it's going to be dependent on the material. A novel has continuous flow, so I'd expect Google Books' style to be much easier. A technical document, where you're not wanting to read from cover to cover but randomly access material throughout at random times, would seem to be better in a random access format. Now, I wouldn't say a book is the ideal random access format (it's more indexed sequential) but it's a good first approximation. So I'd expect OpenLibrary to be much better for reference manuals, DIY guides, recipe books etc.
Now, sometimes you want to be able to pan around a document on a browser in the X axis as well as the Y axis. Equally, sometimes you want to stop the page from forcing you to do so.
My thought for a plugin is relatively simple. The plugin is told how large the virtual page is (with an option for infinite height - essentially how browsers currently work) by default. If no default is given, then the web page can provide a size in meta tags. Everyone becomes happy, everyone's viewing needs are met and Opera gets to have the functionality they want without ruining anyone's experience.
Surely you're not suggesting HP's new CEO limit themselves to such mediocre core meltdowns when, with just a little more effort, they can achieve China Syndrome proportions?
Replace the board with members of the Psychic Hotline, and then have Dave Packard's ghost as CEO. No matter how badly it fails, it can't fail worse than the current board.
The point is that Opera wanted pages, not scrollbars, which means that the starting point has to support pages. How you personally want it doesn't alter what Opera wants, it merely means you've got to cater for both.
LaTeX doesn't need to make use of pagination. If it were to be supported in a browser, then the browser would do what it does for everything else - provide overrides. In this case, you want an override which says that no matter what size of page the LaTeX document declares, the browser should always render it into a format equal to the width of the browser screen and an infinite length.
Ok, the problem of fragility was mentioned by another poster. Meh. The macros are all open-source. It would take a long time to get them all cleaned up, but look at it from this perspective instead - how long would it take to get a basic subset rock-solid (given that these are scripts) versus hacking Opera to support the entire typesetting concept in one go?
It would seem to me that fixing the LaTeX scripts (something that can be done on a rolling basis) is going to require fewer man-hours than inventing a whole new style of UI (which has to be complete in order to work at all) but also is something that can be used before it is complete.
As for LaTeX 3, yes, that's becoming something of a joke. At this point, I'd much rather see a fork of LaTeX that attempted to get the "missing" functionality sorted out all put into a single engine. Just as LaTeX 2 fragmented to the point where the maintainers couldn't stand it and actually got off their backsides to produce LaTeX 2e from the assorted engines out there, LaTeX 3 is likely to only come about when engineers fragment LaTeX 2e.
In light of the comments made about the stability, I'd say that one feature of such a fork needs to be decent script debugging. Another should be namespace support and encapsulation. Those three features alone should make a lot of macros a lot safer, though you'd still want some actual cleanup work to get the macros in decent shape.
In light of the CSS remarks, I'd say another feature needs to be to provide high-level macros that allow you to perform the functions available in CSS 1-3 via the facilities in TeX.
All four changes could probably be implemented by a small team in a year or less, with few to no distractions.
Why? Pagination is a solved problem for most systems (desktop publishing, word processing, typesetting systems), there's no good reason why it should be any less solved for browsers. If worst comes to worst, develop a plugin for Opera (and other browsers) that supports one of the existing systems and therefore has known pagination rules.
There's prior art. Page-based documents created via a markup language which supports hypertext linking have been around for a while.
But, then, I like the hyperref package for LaTeX.
Frankly, I'd rather see LaTeX as a language extension. That way, you could have the page itself specify if it's to be paginated or scrolled, and if paginated how those pages should be constructed. The syntax already exists, the parser is nearly bullet-proof (more than could be said of most browsers) and those who actually want such a format (ie: people writing books, papers, etc) are likely the ones who already know the LaTeX language.
It really doesn't help that the military use Windows for this stuff. Windows is not a Trusted OS. (If you read through all the literature on trust across multiple devices connected together, the upshot is that it should not be possible to violate Mandatory Access Controls. You should not be able to write data that is of a higher security setting than the device you are writing to can support. MAC is always inherited, so no program on an untrusted device should ever run at higher privilege than the subset of the untrusted privilege that also lies within your own privileges. And so on.)
Actually, it would be good if there was a commercial/military certification system that focused on the OS (ie: not a simple clone of the Common Criteria) that was quick and easy for OS writers to use and which could provide a suitable level of confidence that security was - if not watertight, then at least not a Titanic.
Not sure about "recently". This has been reported time and again for years. I recall reading on Slashdot quite some time back on how people in Pakistan were able to watch drone transmissions using cheap television decoders.
They can find all the funding they like, but if your K-12 schools are teaching that dinosaurs and humans walked paw-in-hand and that computers are the work of a demon-possessed Steve Jobs, then you've got a group of people fundamentally (!) incapable of network management.
80% of all you learn, you learn before you are 12. You HAVE to get the key aspects of science, engineering, mathematics and rigorous thought TOTALLY in people's brains by that time. If you do not, you are too late. Those who haven't learned the key skills by then will never be capable of learning everything needed.
By the time someone is 24, they will have mentally peaked. Their brains will have begun to deteriorate. Learning a highly advanced, technical skill after that point is possible, but it requires enormous effort and it usually involves leveraging a skill that has similarities so that the adjustment in thought processes is kept to a minimum.
Schools and pre-schools, from age 3 onwards, have to aim at producing people of extremely high calibre. They can't keep aiming at producing Walmart shelf stackers in the hope that universities can clean up the mess. Subjects have become too complex, too intertwined, to do that.
In Britain, they're phasing in a program whereby they expect people to become polyglots by age 5, on the basis that this stimulates brain growth, capacity to learn and mental longevity. That's good. That's as it should be. It would be better if science and maths were equally stressed, but I'm happy with one victory for intelligent education at a time.
It would be good to see a fair and equal race, pistons vs rotary, on the Le Mans circuit. Given that it's R&D that has limited the rotary engine, another idea would be to allow F1 use rotary engines of equal horsepower to the piston engines currently used. (Mixed formulas have been used before, for example when turbos were phased out over several seasons.) If anyone can afford to develop a high-performance high-reliability rotary engine, it would be a F1 team. You'd need to allow F1 teams to use the weight difference for extra fuel, at least for the first year or so, but once the engines became equal in fuel consumption then rotary would hold the advantage as you could run a lighter car at the start.
No idea, but that kind of monster is getting very close to the compute power needed to do full-blown raytracing (not shading sold as raytracing) for 3D movies in real-time. As in a cinema with one of these would only need the basic renderman files plus sound track.
If the US had shown any interest whatsoever in ITER (fat chance, after they lost the bidding war on who was going to house it), I'd say that a supercomputer on this kind of scale would be adequate for simulating the dynamics inside the fusion reactor. That would allow the design to be vastly tightened up, giving it a much better chance of exceeding the break-even point in a sustainable reaction.
It would also be very useful for crunching through the masses of data that CERN are producing, as it would be able to look for classes of event that could be interesting but fall outside the capacity of regular particle physicists to look at. (At present, less than 1% of the data available is processed because nobody has the means to process it. It's just dumped. A giant like this could make a far larger fraction of the events analyzable.) But, again, the US is too busy competing to cooperate. (Besides, cooperation is what those Pesky Socialists do. Pleh!) The idea of the DEA installing an ultra-fat pipe to the LHC for the purpose of helping CERN - not going to happen. The science be damned, egos are on the line!