I just bought one, too: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. I can't say I'm too upset about missing a price drop. These things happen.
What's really cool about these chips, IMO, is that you can get the power-efficient ones that only draw 65 W max for the CPU. My new system only draws 133 W (monitor included) with both CPUs running full blast, and when they're idle and the monitor is powered down, it goes down to only 51 W! These chips have AMD's cool'n'quiet, which is fully supported in recent linux kernels.
This was my first time running a dual-core system. So far I really haven't seen any improvement in performance from the dual core. The sad truth is that most of the time when I end up waiting for my computer to do something, it's either (a) doing I/O, (b) doing something CPU-intensive that's not parallelizable, or (c) it's limited by the speed of the memory, not the speed of the CPU.
and look at the newer AMD integrated video chipsets.(I think you will find these chips consume much less current than others)
I just built myself new AMD64 system yesterday, and installed ubuntu on it. It is indeed very power efficient. I'm using one of the AMD64 dual-core chips that only draws 65 W peak power. When the processors are idle, and the screen is powered down, it only draws 31 W for the whole computer! That's not in sleep mode, that's just sitting there in the GNOME desktop with the screen powered off.
However, the onboard video and ethernet on the motherboard are causing me tons of problems. I've blown most of a day trying to figure out how to get nforce drivers to work with linux. I'm probably just going to go back to the store and buy an add-on ethernet card, and bail on the onboard ethernet.
>>As others have pointed out, if you can find an obsolete laptop, and just dedicate it for your 24/7 applications, that's going to be by far the most energy-efficient solution.
>That's an easy way to get energy efficiency, but you can build a desktop more efficiently.
"Find an obsolete laptop" means buy a used one, not build one from scratch.
>80PLUS PSU, Turion CPU, etc., and your desktop can be lower power than older notebooks, while significantly faster.
No way. You simply cannot build a desktop machine that's lower power than any reasonably modern notebook. See this post, for example.
Well, the OP didn't say whether he was interested in low power in order to save on his electric bill, or for ecological reasons, or both. But you're right, it's not necessarily ecologically sensible to buy new hardware. In my area, the garbage company runs a disposal site for hazardous household waste, and when you go there, you see big stacks of computers. They have a program where if you ask, you can take computer hardware for free. For someone who really wants to do a favor to Mother Earth, it might be a very sensible way to pick up a case, a CD drive, and a hard disk. If there isn't anything like that in your area, chances are you can get those parts pretty darn easily at a garage sale. I picked up a really nice CRT recently at a garage sale for $10. I put it on a machine at the school where I teach that doesn't get used very often, so the electricity isn't a big issue. It sure beats dumping that same CRT in a landfill.
As others have pointed out, if you can find an obsolete laptop, and just dedicate it for your 24/7 applications, that's going to be by far the most energy-efficient solution.
Get a Kill-A-Watt, so you can actually measure how much power various things are using. Until I got one, I had no idea that my computer's speakers were drawing 12 W all the time, even when the computer was shut down.
2.5" hard drives are more energy efficient than 3.5" ones. You need an adapter cable, and also an adapter to mount it in a standard desktop PC's cage. A 2.5" drive is more money for the same storage, but all hard disks are ridiculously huge for most people's needs these days.
Get an 80PLUS rated power supply. The 80PLUS thing means that not only is it efficient, but it's also made in a more ecologically friendly way, without lead, etc. I've heard a lot of conflicting claims about how you should choose the capacity of your PS compared to the power your machine uses. Some people say a switching PS is most efficient if you run it near its maximum capacity, and others say it's most efficient at 50%. I came across something on usenet recently where they actually collected data, and they found there really wasn't any clear relationship. It's dangerous to get a PS that's not rated high enough, because your machine may use an unusually large amount of power during the boot process, and it may boot unreliably if your PS isn't rated high enough.
Try to get all the ACPI power management features of your machine working. Unfortunately, that can be easier said than done. Many BIOSes default to only doing S1 sleep mode, which hardly saves you any power at all. That's because a lot of older hardware can't handle S3.
For your mobo, choose something with integrated video, rather than using a video card. If you're into gaming, this is yet another good reason why you don't want your always-on machine to be the same as your main machine you use all the time.
And what about that rules out MOND?
It doesn't rule out MOND, but it shows that what MOND was trying to avoid -- dark matter -- is an intrinsic part of an extremely successful cosmological model, which has passed a variety of high-precision tests. The Wikipedia article on MOND also discusses some empirical tests that MOND (and TeVeS) seems to have failed.
I think it's odd that MOND's enthusiasts are so eager to push it as an alternative to dark matter, now that we've entered the era of high-precision cosmology. We know a hell of a lot about cosmology that we didn't know ten years ago. We know the age of the universe to two significant figures. We know that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. We know the spectrum and angular distribution of the cosmic microwave background to high precision. We've found out that neutrinos have mass. I can see how MOND would have some appeal back in 1981, when it was first proposed, but so much has changed in the last 26 years. The evidence has accumulated that we live in a universe that's much stranger than we'd believed. I think that's cool.
>Seems pretty big to me. Konqueror is a fraction of that size.
I'd love to use a smaller browser, but Konqueror has shown me at least one crippling bug in the small amount of use I've given it. When I open too many tabs, it stops loading content and just spins indefinitely.
Personally, I've been in favor of suggestions that the Wikipedia divides into "stable" and "unstable" branches, similar to what software developers do.
It's an interesting proposal, but it would mainly seem to address problems with accuracy and vandalism, which IMO are not the biggest problems. I think the biggest single problem is that people are expected to dedicate their lives to fighting against entropy in their cherished articles. I don't think this proposal would help there, because you'd still have to spend the same amount of time editing -- it would just be the unstable version that you were editing. Another big problem is that most of the articles are simply very poorly written. That isn't going to change, because writing at a very high level of quality is a specialized, valuable skill, and there aren't enough people on WP with that skill.
"Appeal to authority" is listed among "logical fallacies" for a reason. If your point is good, if you're correct and you have the background to argue your point well, then a know-nothing shouldn't be able to stand against you in a debate. If you can't debate your point, and you need to fall back on, "I'm a professor at [such-and-such] College!" then you probably don't really know what you're talking about anyway.
As I understand the proposal, they're simply saying that if you want to claim to have a PhD, they want to set standards for how the PhD will be verified. This all seems to have sprung from the infamous case of essjay, who used an appeal to authority based on academic credentials he didn't really have. The proposal would actually discourage appeals to authority, because it would make it a hassle to establish your credentials.
I have a PhD in physics, but these days I don't even log in when I edit WP. It's actually very interesting seeing how people treat anonymous edits. Sometimes they judge them based on their contents. Other times, I've seen people instantly revert my edits, simply because I'm an anon.
IMO, WP's biggest problem these days is that articles succumb to entropy. It's simply no fun anymore to edit on WP, because you're just running faster and faster to stay in the same place. One of the strongest entropic forces is edits by morons, kooks, and fanatics. Check out this version of the "neutron" article from yesterday, before I fixed it. It includes the statement that "There is a minority opinion that the neutron, per se, does not exist in nuclei, rather that nuclei are clusters of protons held together by intra-nuclear electrons in a manner somewhat analogous to bonding orbitals in molecules." Well, it's not just a "minority opinion," it's complete nonsense. I don't think WP is capable of progressing beyond its current low level of quality unless it changes its basic rules in a variety of ways. The original rules were optimized for getting an encyclopedia off the ground. They just aren't working well anymore.
I have some experience with trying to verify people's academic affiliations via the internet. I've made some physics textbooks I wrote available for free on the web. I also distribute the instructors' materials (homework solutions, exam files, etc.) for free via the web, but they're encrypted, so professors need to contact me to get the key. My policy is here. Basically I use a policy like the one described in the slashdot summary: they have to be able to show me their e-mail address on their school's web page.
Well, it kinda sorta works, but not always.
Not all experts have an EDU address. The version of this that I most often see is that they're homeschoolers. In that case, I just say I'm sorry, but I'm not going to give them the materials. For wikipedia, the more likely issue would be that they're experts with PhDs, but they just aren't working in academia.
Many experts with institutional addresses can't or won't get their employer involved in authenticating them This isn't necessary. As long as their school has a faculty directory with e-mail addresses listed, the school doesn't have to do anything special.
"Underground experts" such as black-hat security experts value their anonymity greatly. As I understand the proposal, nobody is saying you won't be able to edit WP or citizendium unless you have a PhD that's verifiable by this method. They're just saying that if you want to be able to throw your weight around and claim to have a PhD, this is the proof you'd have to provide.
The same goes for political dissidents who have expertise to share under a pseudonym. Same as #3.
I am somewhat sympathetic to people who aren't able to meet my requirements for various reasons, and for that reason I sometimes show some flexibility. Actually I myself would just barely be able to meet them. If you look at the
staff directory for my department at my school, you'll see that my address is listed, but is heavily spam-armored, and isn't the.edu e-mail address my school provided me. This is because (a) I'm trying to avoid spam, (b) my school's e-mail sucks, and (c) I hate getting occupational spam (e.g., people sending out a broadcast e-mail to 1000 faculty and staff to say that their kid is selling girl scout cookies). A common issue I've run into is that the school hires a part-timer to teach the course, and gives the part-timer authority to choose the textbook he wants. He chooses mine, but isn't listed on the department directory because he's part time. In that situation, I bend my own rules as long as he seems legit. Another issue is that although my books are college textbooks, I do have quite a few high school teachers using my books, and often their school doesn't have any web site at all, or has a very rudimentary one without a staff listing.
This is one of the reasons why whenever I buy a PC I never remove windows. I just shrink the partition to it's minimal size plus a GB or two, install linux, set it to default.
The first couple of times I tried to install Linux (ca. 2001), I failed, and one of the reasons I failed was that I was trying to do a complicated install, when my level of expertise wasn't up to the task. Trying to do a dual boot system was one of the things I shouldn't have attempted. Since then, my level of Linux skill has gone up, but there are always new people getting interested in Linux, and for most of those people, I would not suggest trying anything as tricky as resizing partitions or making a dual-boot system. Sure, installers are getting more sophisticated and easier to use, but installing an OS -- any OS -- is still a very difficult task for most people.
Really I don't know why someone who bought a PC that came with Windows, which THEY PAID FOR, would just go erase it anyways. It's a total waste of money, and you aren't sending anyone a "message".
Maybe they paid for Windows because they didn't have any other choice. If you want to buy a machine without Windows, your options are much, much more limited than if you buy one with Windows preinstalled. I've avoided the Windows tax on my last four or five machines, but that meant I was either (a) buying $180 Great Quality boxes at Fry's, or (b) building my own machines. It's extremely difficult to buy a laptop without Windows installed. It's extremely difficult to buy name-brand hardware without Windows installed. Even for low-prestige brands like Great Quality, they won't sell you anything but their lowest-end machines without Windows.
So if it was me buying an HP, the situation would be that I bought this machine with Windows on it, even though I didn't want Windows. I never intend to use Windows. I don't own any Windows applications. I don't know enough about Windows to be able to keep a Windows box secure on the public internet, and I don't have any interest in learning that particular skill,. I don't want to buy antivirus software. I don't want to worry about whether my kids will boot the machine into Windows and get it infected with malware. So why would I want to make my configuration more complex, and waste hundreds of megabytes of disk space, for an OS I have no intention of using?
Here is a similar CD of free books, intended mainly to be given away to university professors to let them know there are free alternatives to low-quality, high-cost textbooks.
I'm curious why so many people are concerned with the ability of calc to do statistics. Is this just a carryover from the MS Windows world where Excel seems to be used for all sorts of things it isn't well suited for? Why not do your stats in R, which is much more powerful than Calc or Excel?
Because OOo's only purpose in existing is to provide something that works just like Office. People who are used to Office want to be able to click around on a gui that works as much as possible like Office's. If that's not what you want, then there really isn't any task for which OOo is the best choice.
most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.
I don't telecommute, but I've experienced the same kind of thing. Especially if the message is trying to convince someone to do something, it's very easy for them just to avoid replying.
I think people also tend to be unwilling to make a final decision via e-mail. They seem to need face time in order to believe that everyone is really on board. I think part of the reason people are often so unwilling to finalize any decision via e-mail is that in any e-mail discussion involving more than two people, there is probably at least one person who is pretending to be involved, but isn't actually participating actively enough to understand what's going on. If you make a decision, that person will suddenly come out of the woodwork and complain, even though they didn't bother to participate while the discussion was going on.
People seem to have this irrational belief that sitting in meetings will result in good decisions. Then they show up to meetings without having done their homework, spend an hour saying things they could have said beforehand in a memo or e-mail, and then make a rushed decision in the last five minutes because everybody has to go.
Another part of the equation is "occupational spam." If you give people access to a big organization's e-mail list, they'll send out broadcast e-mails about anything they feel like, even if it's not important and relevant to most of the people on the list. Because of that, important e-mail is lost in the flood of crap. I don't use the e-mail address provided by the college where I teach, and one of the reasons is that I don't want to get all the occupational spam.
That problem held me up for a while too, but I figured out that you can use linest to do curve fitting. It's the "real" way to do it anyway. See my other post
Thanks for the link. It's an interesting idea, but I'm talking about college freshmen who are majoring in biology at a community college. For them, the issue isn't that they need to do a fancy curve fit, the issue is that they expect to be able to do a simple linear fit by clicking on the gui.
One problem I've encountered with Calc is that the curve fitting stuff is nowhere near as full-functioned or easy to use as Excel's. I teach physics, and in the lab classes, the students are often using Excel to make graphs. I have OOo installed on all the machines as well, but most of them are pretty reluctant to try it. The main barrier just seems to be "I know Excel, and I just want to get the job done," but it also doesn't help when I have to tell them the contortions they have to go through to fit a line to data in OOo Calc and get it to tell them the slope and y-intercept. When I've mentioned this before on Slashdot, I've often gotten responses like, "Dude, why are you even using a spreadsheet for curve fitting?" Well, I've got a simple answer: because most of the students are already familiar with how a spreadsheet works. OOo's only reason for existing is to be a monkey-copy of office, and if it can't do that job well, then it's not useful --- there are literally dozens of other open-source choices for doing wordprocessing and number crunching, and some of them are very good, but they don't copy Office's GUI slavishly. You can complain all you want about how Office's GUI isn't even that good, but for people with low computer skills, seemingly minor differences get really confusing really fast. It's perfectly reasonable to make an open-source Office clone, but if it's a second-rate clone, then people are going to get the impression from it that OSS is always second-rate.
Please, If you are new to linux don't run the beta version, Use 6.10 its much better and more supported.
Or 6.06, which is scheduled for long term support.
>>So, is anybody going to argue that it's not "free" because you can't edit and redistribute it yourself?
>Define free.
Free (as in freedom) would mean you can edit and redistribute it yourself.
I maintain a catalog of books that are free as in beer, or free as in speech. (See my sig.) Currently I have 111 books in the catalog that are under free-as-in-speech licenses such as the GFDL or CC-BY-SA. Not many of those books are actually about free information, but a few are (e.g., Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams). There are another 1022 books in the catalog that are free as in beer, but not free as in speech.
The beer/speech definition has very little to do with the format of the book. Of the 111 free-as-in-speech books, quite a few are distributed only in pdf format, which may make it a hassle to use their contents in creative ways to make derived works, but it doesn't make it illegal. It would be illegal to do so with the 1022 free-as-in-beer books. In the case of the books I've written, I distribute them in three different formats (pdf, html, latex); this is analogous to distributing a program both in binary and source form. (The GFDL does have a clause that says you can't modify and redistribute the licensed work in an "opaque" format, without making it available in a "transparent" format as well. The CC-BY-SA license has no such restriction.)
It may seem ungrateful to complain that the authors of this book haven't made it available under a copyleft license, but what they're doing does seem to contradict the ideology the book is trying to push. For instance, if someone wants to include a chapter in a course pack for a university course, they can't legally do that without claiming fair use (and most bookstores these days are very suspicious of that kind of free use claim by instructors). It's true that licenses like GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which are modeled after the GPL, may not be completely appropriate for a work that expresses opinions, but then the solution would be to use something like CC-BY-ND. Likewise, they could set the noncommercial (NC) bit, if MIT Press is scared of losing money because somebody else comes out with an edition. (But again, that would be kind of ironic, since the whole philosophy of the open source movement, which is being pushed by the book, is to renounce of the traditional monopoly on publishing rights granted by copyright law.)
I agree completely. However, what this article is talking about is redesigning the lowest-level workings of the internet and its protocols, not relatively high level stuff like e-mail. IMO what's really broken is the high-level protocols, e-mail in particular. Another thing that, with hindsight, is clearly a mistake is http, XMLHttpRequest, and all that; it's clear now that many people want to be able to run something like a GUI application through something like a web browser, but the protocols were never designed properly to allow that. Rather than putting a bag on the side of http to allow ajax apps, the right thing to do would have been to leave http alone, and create a completely different application and protocol that would do what people are trying, painfully, to do with browsers and http.
Another problem is the creep of proprietary formats for audio and video. Mp3 is still heavily patent-encumbered, and the licensing terms do not make it legal for a Linux distro, say, to distribute as many copies of an mp3 library as they like. Video is even worse, because the closest thing to an open codec is theora, and theora doesn't work well enough to be practical. What has really turned out to be popular is to wrap videos in flash apps (the way you-tube does), which piles proprietary cruft on top of proprietary cruft.
We have a whole bunch of technologies that do similar things:
Java applets are free as in everything (now that sun's java implementation is gpl'd), but users hate them because it takes so long to start up a vm. The java applet security model is also too tight for some purposes.
Ajax is a botch. It's way too hard to get an ajax app to work on all browsers, in a way that's consistent with what people expect from a GUI app. For example, where I work, we have a new ajax app we're required to use for filing certain paperwork, and it doesn't allow cut and paste. The solution that's been proposed is that we print out the old documents on paper, and send them to a summer intern, who will keyboard them.
Flash is theoretically open in many ways, but in reality it depends on way too many patent-encumbered or license-encumbered pieces to be appropriate for OSS.
Only Thailand and Turkey are countries that even have a medium record of civil rights.
Turkey is way worse than "medium." If you try to assert the truth of the Armenian genocide, they kill you.
The UK's protection of freedom of speech is much weaker than in the US. Part of that is because the UK doesn't have a bill of rights. Also, libel and slander laws are much harsher on the defendant in the UK than in the US.
Yeah, all Heinlein's juveniles are good, but a lot of them are a little dated. This one has really aged well. Another good one that doesn't feel too silly 60 years later is The Star Beast.
>>Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful.
>AKA "coders".
But seriously...the slashdot summary made me think of one OSS project in which I participated to a very small extent. On this project, I submitted one patch to deal with a bug that was affecting me. The patch was accepted, and that was it. So my own role was, I hope, a positive one, but extremely minor. I was actually thinking of getting involved more deeply in helping out with this project, but what eventally made me turn away was that one of the most active developers had a somewhat abrasive personality, and was no fun to deal with. Well, you could say that this guy was hurting the project by driving away a potential contributor. But hey, he had probably written tens of thousands of lines of code for the project, and was putting in a lot of hours every week: coding, testing, handling bug reports, participating in the e-mail list... Losing him would have been way more of a problem than losing me. And of course, there's also the issue of whether my perceptions were fair. In almost any personality conflict, each side probably feels that he's in the right. Maybe this guy saw me as a jerk, and was happy that I left.
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought one, too: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. I can't say I'm too upset about missing a price drop. These things happen.
What's really cool about these chips, IMO, is that you can get the power-efficient ones that only draw 65 W max for the CPU. My new system only draws 133 W (monitor included) with both CPUs running full blast, and when they're idle and the monitor is powered down, it goes down to only 51 W! These chips have AMD's cool'n'quiet, which is fully supported in recent linux kernels.
This was my first time running a dual-core system. So far I really haven't seen any improvement in performance from the dual core. The sad truth is that most of the time when I end up waiting for my computer to do something, it's either (a) doing I/O, (b) doing something CPU-intensive that's not parallelizable, or (c) it's limited by the speed of the memory, not the speed of the CPU.
and look at the newer AMD integrated video chipsets.(I think you will find these chips consume much less current than others)
I just built myself new AMD64 system yesterday, and installed ubuntu on it. It is indeed very power efficient. I'm using one of the AMD64 dual-core chips that only draws 65 W peak power. When the processors are idle, and the screen is powered down, it only draws 31 W for the whole computer! That's not in sleep mode, that's just sitting there in the GNOME desktop with the screen powered off. However, the onboard video and ethernet on the motherboard are causing me tons of problems. I've blown most of a day trying to figure out how to get nforce drivers to work with linux. I'm probably just going to go back to the store and buy an add-on ethernet card, and bail on the onboard ethernet.
>>As others have pointed out, if you can find an obsolete laptop, and just dedicate it for your 24/7 applications, that's going to be by far the most energy-efficient solution.
>That's an easy way to get energy efficiency, but you can build a desktop more efficiently.
"Find an obsolete laptop" means buy a used one, not build one from scratch.
>80PLUS PSU, Turion CPU, etc., and your desktop can be lower power than older notebooks, while significantly faster.
No way. You simply cannot build a desktop machine that's lower power than any reasonably modern notebook. See this post, for example.
Well, the OP didn't say whether he was interested in low power in order to save on his electric bill, or for ecological reasons, or both. But you're right, it's not necessarily ecologically sensible to buy new hardware. In my area, the garbage company runs a disposal site for hazardous household waste, and when you go there, you see big stacks of computers. They have a program where if you ask, you can take computer hardware for free. For someone who really wants to do a favor to Mother Earth, it might be a very sensible way to pick up a case, a CD drive, and a hard disk. If there isn't anything like that in your area, chances are you can get those parts pretty darn easily at a garage sale. I picked up a really nice CRT recently at a garage sale for $10. I put it on a machine at the school where I teach that doesn't get used very often, so the electricity isn't a big issue. It sure beats dumping that same CRT in a landfill.
As others have pointed out, if you can find an obsolete laptop, and just dedicate it for your 24/7 applications, that's going to be by far the most energy-efficient solution.
Get a Kill-A-Watt, so you can actually measure how much power various things are using. Until I got one, I had no idea that my computer's speakers were drawing 12 W all the time, even when the computer was shut down.
2.5" hard drives are more energy efficient than 3.5" ones. You need an adapter cable, and also an adapter to mount it in a standard desktop PC's cage. A 2.5" drive is more money for the same storage, but all hard disks are ridiculously huge for most people's needs these days.
Get an 80PLUS rated power supply. The 80PLUS thing means that not only is it efficient, but it's also made in a more ecologically friendly way, without lead, etc. I've heard a lot of conflicting claims about how you should choose the capacity of your PS compared to the power your machine uses. Some people say a switching PS is most efficient if you run it near its maximum capacity, and others say it's most efficient at 50%. I came across something on usenet recently where they actually collected data, and they found there really wasn't any clear relationship. It's dangerous to get a PS that's not rated high enough, because your machine may use an unusually large amount of power during the boot process, and it may boot unreliably if your PS isn't rated high enough.
Try to get all the ACPI power management features of your machine working. Unfortunately, that can be easier said than done. Many BIOSes default to only doing S1 sleep mode, which hardly saves you any power at all. That's because a lot of older hardware can't handle S3.
For your mobo, choose something with integrated video, rather than using a video card. If you're into gaming, this is yet another good reason why you don't want your always-on machine to be the same as your main machine you use all the time.
And what about that rules out MOND?
It doesn't rule out MOND, but it shows that what MOND was trying to avoid -- dark matter -- is an intrinsic part of an extremely successful cosmological model, which has passed a variety of high-precision tests. The Wikipedia article on MOND also discusses some empirical tests that MOND (and TeVeS) seems to have failed.
I think it's odd that MOND's enthusiasts are so eager to push it as an alternative to dark matter, now that we've entered the era of high-precision cosmology. We know a hell of a lot about cosmology that we didn't know ten years ago. We know the age of the universe to two significant figures. We know that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. We know the spectrum and angular distribution of the cosmic microwave background to high precision. We've found out that neutrinos have mass. I can see how MOND would have some appeal back in 1981, when it was first proposed, but so much has changed in the last 26 years. The evidence has accumulated that we live in a universe that's much stranger than we'd believed. I think that's cool.
>Seems pretty big to me. Konqueror is a fraction of that size.
I'd love to use a smaller browser, but Konqueror has shown me at least one crippling bug in the small amount of use I've given it. When I open too many tabs, it stops loading content and just spins indefinitely.
Personally, I've been in favor of suggestions that the Wikipedia divides into "stable" and "unstable" branches, similar to what software developers do.
It's an interesting proposal, but it would mainly seem to address problems with accuracy and vandalism, which IMO are not the biggest problems. I think the biggest single problem is that people are expected to dedicate their lives to fighting against entropy in their cherished articles. I don't think this proposal would help there, because you'd still have to spend the same amount of time editing -- it would just be the unstable version that you were editing. Another big problem is that most of the articles are simply very poorly written. That isn't going to change, because writing at a very high level of quality is a specialized, valuable skill, and there aren't enough people on WP with that skill.
"Appeal to authority" is listed among "logical fallacies" for a reason. If your point is good, if you're correct and you have the background to argue your point well, then a know-nothing shouldn't be able to stand against you in a debate. If you can't debate your point, and you need to fall back on, "I'm a professor at [such-and-such] College!" then you probably don't really know what you're talking about anyway.
As I understand the proposal, they're simply saying that if you want to claim to have a PhD, they want to set standards for how the PhD will be verified. This all seems to have sprung from the infamous case of essjay, who used an appeal to authority based on academic credentials he didn't really have. The proposal would actually discourage appeals to authority, because it would make it a hassle to establish your credentials.
I have a PhD in physics, but these days I don't even log in when I edit WP. It's actually very interesting seeing how people treat anonymous edits. Sometimes they judge them based on their contents. Other times, I've seen people instantly revert my edits, simply because I'm an anon.
IMO, WP's biggest problem these days is that articles succumb to entropy. It's simply no fun anymore to edit on WP, because you're just running faster and faster to stay in the same place. One of the strongest entropic forces is edits by morons, kooks, and fanatics. Check out this version of the "neutron" article from yesterday, before I fixed it. It includes the statement that "There is a minority opinion that the neutron, per se, does not exist in nuclei, rather that nuclei are clusters of protons held together by intra-nuclear electrons in a manner somewhat analogous to bonding orbitals in molecules." Well, it's not just a "minority opinion," it's complete nonsense. I don't think WP is capable of progressing beyond its current low level of quality unless it changes its basic rules in a variety of ways. The original rules were optimized for getting an encyclopedia off the ground. They just aren't working well anymore.
I have some experience with trying to verify people's academic affiliations via the internet. I've made some physics textbooks I wrote available for free on the web. I also distribute the instructors' materials (homework solutions, exam files, etc.) for free via the web, but they're encrypted, so professors need to contact me to get the key. My policy is here. Basically I use a policy like the one described in the slashdot summary: they have to be able to show me their e-mail address on their school's web page.
Well, it kinda sorta works, but not always.
I am somewhat sympathetic to people who aren't able to meet my requirements for various reasons, and for that reason I sometimes show some flexibility. Actually I myself would just barely be able to meet them. If you look at the staff directory for my department at my school, you'll see that my address is listed, but is heavily spam-armored, and isn't the .edu e-mail address my school provided me. This is because (a) I'm trying to avoid spam, (b) my school's e-mail sucks, and (c) I hate getting occupational spam (e.g., people sending out a broadcast e-mail to 1000 faculty and staff to say that their kid is selling girl scout cookies). A common issue I've run into is that the school hires a part-timer to teach the course, and gives the part-timer authority to choose the textbook he wants. He chooses mine, but isn't listed on the department directory because he's part time. In that situation, I bend my own rules as long as he seems legit. Another issue is that although my books are college textbooks, I do have quite a few high school teachers using my books, and often their school doesn't have any web site at all, or has a very rudimentary one without a staff listing.
This is one of the reasons why whenever I buy a PC I never remove windows. I just shrink the partition to it's minimal size plus a GB or two, install linux, set it to default.
The first couple of times I tried to install Linux (ca. 2001), I failed, and one of the reasons I failed was that I was trying to do a complicated install, when my level of expertise wasn't up to the task. Trying to do a dual boot system was one of the things I shouldn't have attempted. Since then, my level of Linux skill has gone up, but there are always new people getting interested in Linux, and for most of those people, I would not suggest trying anything as tricky as resizing partitions or making a dual-boot system. Sure, installers are getting more sophisticated and easier to use, but installing an OS -- any OS -- is still a very difficult task for most people.
Really I don't know why someone who bought a PC that came with Windows, which THEY PAID FOR, would just go erase it anyways. It's a total waste of money, and you aren't sending anyone a "message".
Maybe they paid for Windows because they didn't have any other choice. If you want to buy a machine without Windows, your options are much, much more limited than if you buy one with Windows preinstalled. I've avoided the Windows tax on my last four or five machines, but that meant I was either (a) buying $180 Great Quality boxes at Fry's, or (b) building my own machines. It's extremely difficult to buy a laptop without Windows installed. It's extremely difficult to buy name-brand hardware without Windows installed. Even for low-prestige brands like Great Quality, they won't sell you anything but their lowest-end machines without Windows.
So if it was me buying an HP, the situation would be that I bought this machine with Windows on it, even though I didn't want Windows. I never intend to use Windows. I don't own any Windows applications. I don't know enough about Windows to be able to keep a Windows box secure on the public internet, and I don't have any interest in learning that particular skill,. I don't want to buy antivirus software. I don't want to worry about whether my kids will boot the machine into Windows and get it infected with malware. So why would I want to make my configuration more complex, and waste hundreds of megabytes of disk space, for an OS I have no intention of using?
Here is a similar CD of free books, intended mainly to be given away to university professors to let them know there are free alternatives to low-quality, high-cost textbooks.
I'm curious why so many people are concerned with the ability of calc to do statistics. Is this just a carryover from the MS Windows world where Excel seems to be used for all sorts of things it isn't well suited for? Why not do your stats in R, which is much more powerful than Calc or Excel?
Because OOo's only purpose in existing is to provide something that works just like Office. People who are used to Office want to be able to click around on a gui that works as much as possible like Office's. If that's not what you want, then there really isn't any task for which OOo is the best choice.
most of my coworkers -- which are located in the same facility -- see non-customer emails as the lowest priorities, and consider them pretty much ignorable.
I don't telecommute, but I've experienced the same kind of thing. Especially if the message is trying to convince someone to do something, it's very easy for them just to avoid replying.
I think people also tend to be unwilling to make a final decision via e-mail. They seem to need face time in order to believe that everyone is really on board. I think part of the reason people are often so unwilling to finalize any decision via e-mail is that in any e-mail discussion involving more than two people, there is probably at least one person who is pretending to be involved, but isn't actually participating actively enough to understand what's going on. If you make a decision, that person will suddenly come out of the woodwork and complain, even though they didn't bother to participate while the discussion was going on.
People seem to have this irrational belief that sitting in meetings will result in good decisions. Then they show up to meetings without having done their homework, spend an hour saying things they could have said beforehand in a memo or e-mail, and then make a rushed decision in the last five minutes because everybody has to go.
Another part of the equation is "occupational spam." If you give people access to a big organization's e-mail list, they'll send out broadcast e-mails about anything they feel like, even if it's not important and relevant to most of the people on the list. Because of that, important e-mail is lost in the flood of crap. I don't use the e-mail address provided by the college where I teach, and one of the reasons is that I don't want to get all the occupational spam.
That problem held me up for a while too, but I figured out that you can use linest to do curve fitting. It's the "real" way to do it anyway. See my other post
Thanks for the link. It's an interesting idea, but I'm talking about college freshmen who are majoring in biology at a community college. For them, the issue isn't that they need to do a fancy curve fit, the issue is that they expect to be able to do a simple linear fit by clicking on the gui.
One problem I've encountered with Calc is that the curve fitting stuff is nowhere near as full-functioned or easy to use as Excel's. I teach physics, and in the lab classes, the students are often using Excel to make graphs. I have OOo installed on all the machines as well, but most of them are pretty reluctant to try it. The main barrier just seems to be "I know Excel, and I just want to get the job done," but it also doesn't help when I have to tell them the contortions they have to go through to fit a line to data in OOo Calc and get it to tell them the slope and y-intercept. When I've mentioned this before on Slashdot, I've often gotten responses like, "Dude, why are you even using a spreadsheet for curve fitting?" Well, I've got a simple answer: because most of the students are already familiar with how a spreadsheet works. OOo's only reason for existing is to be a monkey-copy of office, and if it can't do that job well, then it's not useful --- there are literally dozens of other open-source choices for doing wordprocessing and number crunching, and some of them are very good, but they don't copy Office's GUI slavishly. You can complain all you want about how Office's GUI isn't even that good, but for people with low computer skills, seemingly minor differences get really confusing really fast. It's perfectly reasonable to make an open-source Office clone, but if it's a second-rate clone, then people are going to get the impression from it that OSS is always second-rate.
Please, If you are new to linux don't run the beta version, Use 6.10 its much better and more supported.
Or 6.06, which is scheduled for long term support.
>>So, is anybody going to argue that it's not "free" because you can't edit and redistribute it yourself?
>Define free.
Free (as in freedom) would mean you can edit and redistribute it yourself.
I maintain a catalog of books that are free as in beer, or free as in speech. (See my sig.) Currently I have 111 books in the catalog that are under free-as-in-speech licenses such as the GFDL or CC-BY-SA. Not many of those books are actually about free information, but a few are (e.g., Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams). There are another 1022 books in the catalog that are free as in beer, but not free as in speech.
The beer/speech definition has very little to do with the format of the book. Of the 111 free-as-in-speech books, quite a few are distributed only in pdf format, which may make it a hassle to use their contents in creative ways to make derived works, but it doesn't make it illegal. It would be illegal to do so with the 1022 free-as-in-beer books. In the case of the books I've written, I distribute them in three different formats (pdf, html, latex); this is analogous to distributing a program both in binary and source form. (The GFDL does have a clause that says you can't modify and redistribute the licensed work in an "opaque" format, without making it available in a "transparent" format as well. The CC-BY-SA license has no such restriction.)
It may seem ungrateful to complain that the authors of this book haven't made it available under a copyleft license, but what they're doing does seem to contradict the ideology the book is trying to push. For instance, if someone wants to include a chapter in a course pack for a university course, they can't legally do that without claiming fair use (and most bookstores these days are very suspicious of that kind of free use claim by instructors). It's true that licenses like GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which are modeled after the GPL, may not be completely appropriate for a work that expresses opinions, but then the solution would be to use something like CC-BY-ND. Likewise, they could set the noncommercial (NC) bit, if MIT Press is scared of losing money because somebody else comes out with an edition. (But again, that would be kind of ironic, since the whole philosophy of the open source movement, which is being pushed by the book, is to renounce of the traditional monopoly on publishing rights granted by copyright law.)
Oops! Thanks for the correction!
I agree completely. However, what this article is talking about is redesigning the lowest-level workings of the internet and its protocols, not relatively high level stuff like e-mail. IMO what's really broken is the high-level protocols, e-mail in particular. Another thing that, with hindsight, is clearly a mistake is http, XMLHttpRequest, and all that; it's clear now that many people want to be able to run something like a GUI application through something like a web browser, but the protocols were never designed properly to allow that. Rather than putting a bag on the side of http to allow ajax apps, the right thing to do would have been to leave http alone, and create a completely different application and protocol that would do what people are trying, painfully, to do with browsers and http.
Another problem is the creep of proprietary formats for audio and video. Mp3 is still heavily patent-encumbered, and the licensing terms do not make it legal for a Linux distro, say, to distribute as many copies of an mp3 library as they like. Video is even worse, because the closest thing to an open codec is theora, and theora doesn't work well enough to be practical. What has really turned out to be popular is to wrap videos in flash apps (the way you-tube does), which piles proprietary cruft on top of proprietary cruft.
We have a whole bunch of technologies that do similar things:
Only Thailand and Turkey are countries that even have a medium record of civil rights.
Turkey is way worse than "medium." If you try to assert the truth of the Armenian genocide, they kill you.
The UK's protection of freedom of speech is much weaker than in the US. Part of that is because the UK doesn't have a bill of rights. Also, libel and slander laws are much harsher on the defendant in the UK than in the US.
Yeah, all Heinlein's juveniles are good, but a lot of them are a little dated. This one has really aged well. Another good one that doesn't feel too silly 60 years later is The Star Beast.
>>Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful.
>AKA "coders".
But seriously...the slashdot summary made me think of one OSS project in which I participated to a very small extent. On this project, I submitted one patch to deal with a bug that was affecting me. The patch was accepted, and that was it. So my own role was, I hope, a positive one, but extremely minor. I was actually thinking of getting involved more deeply in helping out with this project, but what eventally made me turn away was that one of the most active developers had a somewhat abrasive personality, and was no fun to deal with. Well, you could say that this guy was hurting the project by driving away a potential contributor. But hey, he had probably written tens of thousands of lines of code for the project, and was putting in a lot of hours every week: coding, testing, handling bug reports, participating in the e-mail list... Losing him would have been way more of a problem than losing me. And of course, there's also the issue of whether my perceptions were fair. In almost any personality conflict, each side probably feels that he's in the right. Maybe this guy saw me as a jerk, and was happy that I left.