Umm, an aircraft with the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is never going to be an inexpensive personal aircraft.
Let's not damn this thing for not being practical. It's way cool just the way it is.
Let's see you stay in the air for more than a few seconds from a height of 5-6m in any unpowered aircraft.
You'd watch a baby's first steps and say "that's not walking! you didn't even climb a flight of stairs!"
Wrong, or incomplete. One typical reason for erectile dsyfunction (ED) is treatment for prostate cancer, which damages the nerves that control erections. In this case, you can have zero CAD but still need the viagra. Without the viagra, men will not get the nightly erections that are necessary for prevention of scarring and damage to penile tissue.
"When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes".
You sir, are a moron. Just because you see me occasionally riding a bike doesn't mean that I do not also own a car and pay taxes. But even if I did not own a car, your argument is specious, since most roads are constructed with general taxation revenue, not gasoline taxes or licence-plate fees. In short, the general population is subsidizing the use of single-occupant motor vehicles.
Motorists should in fact be promoting the construction of bicycle infrastructure. A car takes up 10 times the room of a bike, so construction of a route to transport, say, 1000 bicycles a day, should cost only a small fraction of what it costs to transport 1000 cars a day. And further, every time you turn a motorist into a cyclist, you are freeing up space on the road for yourself and your unsustainable car.
What is really retarded is that Microsoft requires you to type a 26-character WEP key TWICE when connecting to a secured wireless network? Why the F%^&* should you have to confirm that key? You are not setting a new key, just entering one that already exists.
Ubuntu has it right - in most places where you have to enter a password, you can optionally unmask the characters.
Most cellular providers have a clause in their terms of service that prohibits running a webserver on your cellphone. You might want to check the consequences before you fire that thing up.
Depending on what country you work in, your marginal tax rate may be close to 50%. That is, for each additional dollar you earn, you pay $0.50 more taxes. On the side of the coin, if you earn a dollar less, you pay $0.50 less in taxes. So, if you work 9 days out of ten (without working an extra hour a day for 8 of them), you will earn just 5% less after-tax income, but have 10% more free time.
Nominally, a 0.9 schedule only gives you 2 days off per month, but many months there's a stat holiday, and if you're in the oil-patch you might get a floater day per month as well, so in practice your 0.9 schedule is actually a 4-day work week.
If more employees were to ask for 0.9 schedules, there'd be fewer layoffs!
Google's EULA for Chrome takes away all your rights for any content you post with the browser. Here are the relevant sections from the EULA:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
I speak 5 languages with some fluency and I'm and engineer, so my opinion counts for... not much.
But if you're an adult and you've never learned another language until now, and you're in the US (which explains the first part) then Spanish is your best choice. Why?
- Spanish has no weird vowel sounds or nasal dipthongs, rising or falling tones, umlauts or other weird accents
- the sentence structure is straightforward, unlike, say, German's.
- You only have to learn two genders (masculine and feminine), unlike say, German with its third, neuter, gender, and it's easy to tell which words have which gender (except for a few, simple exceptions like 'mano' and 'mapa'). French and German are more difficult in this regard.
- Nouns don't change their endings no matter what they are doing in the sentence. You don't have to remember whether the noun is acting as a direct object or an indirect object, for example, like you do in German (or Turkish).
- you only have one new verb mood to learn, the subjunctive, which is used to express uncertainty or doubt or conditional actions (vestiges of this still exist in english, which is "it is required that he eat" is correct and "it is required that he eats" is WRONG).
- most importantly, you can get to practice your spanish. Virtually every you go in the US you'll find service staff that speak spanish, and all you have to do (as with any language) is risk embarassing yourself a little by opening your mouth.
- once you've learned one foreign language, the next is easier. You might as make that first one the easiest possible.
Que le vaya bien y que tenga mucho exito! (that should be e with an accent to indicate that the emphasis is on the first syllable, but Slashdot and Mac OS X don't play well together...)
For a fascinating look at how evolution actually works, read The Making of the Fittest, by Sean B. Carroll, to be found here: http://seanbcarroll.com/books/The_Making_of_the_Fittest/. Through an approach emphasizing study of DNA (which most Americans approve of for use in murder trials, but don't approve of for supporting the fact of evolution), he describes in detail how evolutionary changes arise. Several interesting points:
- a number of key genes involved in the very basics of life are identical in organisms as diverse as humans, tomatoes, and bacteria. These genes can be said to be immortal. He shows how the proteins created by these genes are resistant to mutation.
- the genes responsible for certain characteristics, like colour vision, appear to have arisen several times during the millenia, and in several unrelated species. Good design is everywhere, and bad design is ruthlessly suppressed.
- the element of chance, often a key argument by evolution-doubters, is addressed. "Surely this couldn't have all arisen through chance", they say. In fact, we are all biased to discount the effect of processes that we can't see happening in our own lifetimes. Two responses to this in the book: one, there have in fact been significant evolutionary changes in species in very rapid intervals in some cases, and two, even a very slight change in a species will take hold world-wide in only a few millenia if it confers some minor advantage. (The author cites a fascinating study of white tail feathers in pigeons and how even affixing fake white tail feathers to pigeons gave them an advantage. )
- and lastly, the point raised in an earlier post: evolution encourages the response of species to events occurring NOW. Evolution cannot predict the foretell the future, and it cares less about the past. Many evolutionary changes are in fact likely to be dead-ends. For example, the icefish of the Antarctic have evolved over a few million years to eliminate their red blood cells, which gives them an advantage in cold water. With global warming raising the temp of the sea rapidly, they're likely all doomed.
- the study of DNA allows to us to understand evolution in a way that was impossible even 20 years ago. Previously we could only look at the gross exterior shapes and colours of creatures. Now we can look at their molecular structure and see fossil DNA that links them through millions (or even billions) of years to all other species.
There's still room for god (small 'g') after all of this is said and done. But she will perhaps be found to reside inside each and every one of us, rather than residing in some fantasy-land heaven.
missed point, more likely. The Compaq 440 has a 15.4" screen and weighs 6.6 lb. It's a massive brick! The Foleo weighs less than half of that, and has a 10" screen. It's WAY more portable, and that surely is important to some. We'll have to see whether it's important to enough people for Palm to make any money at it, though.
Comparisons involving Canada are always skewed by the fact that its energy industry is a large CO2 emitter, and that much of the output of that industry is consumed by US customers. So in a way, the US is just exporting part of its CO2 emissions to Canada.
I've found that NeoOffice is virtually unusable because it crashes so often, whereas OpenOffice, though uglier than NeoOffice, has been rock-steady on my Mac. As a result, I don't use NeoOffice any more.
Err, that would hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, not tens of thousands - according to a recent British study, the total is 655,000 dead (as of when the study was done).
It's also part of US federal law to respect the Geneva convention and not use torture on prisoners, but we all know those laws are being broken, so I have little faith that the law prohibiting testing on prisoners is being obeyed either.
I installed IE7 (since it's a beta, shouldn't it install beside my IE6, instead of replacing it? But I digress). I tried to fill in my company timesheet with it - it's a Microsoft Great Plains java application, and the application malfunctioned, refusing to recognize my entries in the timesheet.
Then I noticed some garbage characters beside my name at the top of the screen, and on a hunch decided to changed the default character encoding from Western European to Auto-detect. Voilà, it worked!
BTW, it seems Microsoft is trying to be innovative by departing from its normal CUA-compliant menu structure. IE7 starts up with no menu at all! So there's no obvious way to change settings of the browser. I had to hunt around for a while, and eventually found that a small Tools icon in the upper right has a Toolbars menu that in turn has a Classic Menu command you can check off - at which point a normal menu appears. But since when is a menu considered a toolbar? Don't toolbars normally consist of icons, with out without accompanying text, that carry out some specific function? A menu doesn't carry out a single specific function, it's more like the OS for your app. Not intuitive, MS!
Studies like the cited one focus on specific issues like security, as if that were the one decision-point for users. For me, it goes far beyond that, to the culture of the developers writing for the OS. Specifically, I'm far more likely to choose an OS based on the availability of open-source software for one reason: the availability of the developer(s) to resolve problems.
With Microsoft, if you notice a problem with the software, there is nothing you can do about it. Microsoft doesn't listen to individuals, nor communicate with them, so your options are a) suck it up, b) buy something else, or c) switch to open source.
Example: if you copy a row in Excel, you can't go to another sheet, insert a blank row, and then paste in your row. As soon as you did an intervening command, Excel forgot about your clipboard contents. Why? Is it because Microsoft thinks we're too stupid to remember what we're doing? No, it's because they decided to use the clipboard for holding command information! (I checked the API). I want them to fix this broken design, but there is no one at Microsoft to listen to me, or care.
With most open-source software, if you find a problem, you can contact the developer, and frequently get a response in days. And if the developer can't help you, you can usually help yourself. Recently I noticed that the DrPython IDE didn't have a Save Copy feature. I was able to download the source code, add the feature, and have it incorporated in the subsequent release, one week later. Meanwhile, the Microsoft Excel bug has existed for years, with no sign of a fix in sight.
we should "remind" our foreign allies that a country with our military might cannot and will not be forced
.
This one statement says so much about what's wrong with the US. Unilateral bullying and interventionism are the hallmarks of American thinking, and if that doesn't work, there's always threats to take the marbles and go home.
Ok, so I'm a relative linux newbie. Only been using it several years, always with Mandrake (recently installed 9.1). I've now done 2 or 3 debian installs. The first was manual, and the last two were through knoppix.
I just finished a knoppix install a few minutes ago. It went like this: 1) install Knoppix 3.2 CD (previously fetched from www.knoppix.net) and reboot. 2) After getting the KDE desktop, press Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a command prompt, and type knx-hdinstall. Follow the prompts 3) After a reboot, run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and here I am.
4) Complicating factors a) I was installing knoppix-debian on a new 100 MB hard drive that I had added to my PC. The install script wouldn't let me have a mini 10 MB/boot partition, so I had to re-run it and create a > 2.2 MB / partition instead. b) the script didn't pick up my intended/var and/home partition. So I had to do some work to get those working. I did a search on "add hard drive" on debianhelp.org and quickly resolved that issue. c) lilo installation. Even though I run lilo, it doesn't install on my MBR. That's likely because my new knoppix installation is on/dev/hdb instead of/dev/hda. So I'm stuck using a boot floppy for now. Will figure that out later.
Could I have done all this without the experience gained from Mandrake? Maybe, but that experience surely helped.
But anyway knoppix rocks as a way to demo linux to others, or a way to run your favourite OS on a borrowed PC.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called Windows Phone 7 because it uses 7GB of data per month in standby mode.
Umm, an aircraft with the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is never going to be an inexpensive personal aircraft. Let's not damn this thing for not being practical. It's way cool just the way it is.
Let's see you stay in the air for more than a few seconds from a height of 5-6m in any unpowered aircraft. You'd watch a baby's first steps and say "that's not walking! you didn't even climb a flight of stairs!"
Wrong, or incomplete. One typical reason for erectile dsyfunction (ED) is treatment for prostate cancer, which damages the nerves that control erections. In this case, you can have zero CAD but still need the viagra. Without the viagra, men will not get the nightly erections that are necessary for prevention of scarring and damage to penile tissue.
"When bikers pay into the highway system, then they can have bike lanes". You sir, are a moron. Just because you see me occasionally riding a bike doesn't mean that I do not also own a car and pay taxes. But even if I did not own a car, your argument is specious, since most roads are constructed with general taxation revenue, not gasoline taxes or licence-plate fees. In short, the general population is subsidizing the use of single-occupant motor vehicles. Motorists should in fact be promoting the construction of bicycle infrastructure. A car takes up 10 times the room of a bike, so construction of a route to transport, say, 1000 bicycles a day, should cost only a small fraction of what it costs to transport 1000 cars a day. And further, every time you turn a motorist into a cyclist, you are freeing up space on the road for yourself and your unsustainable car.
What is really retarded is that Microsoft requires you to type a 26-character WEP key TWICE when connecting to a secured wireless network? Why the F%^&* should you have to confirm that key? You are not setting a new key, just entering one that already exists.
Ubuntu has it right - in most places where you have to enter a password, you can optionally unmask the characters.
Most cellular providers have a clause in their terms of service that prohibits running a webserver on your cellphone. You might want to check the consequences before you fire that thing up.
Depending on what country you work in, your marginal tax rate may be close to 50%. That is, for each additional dollar you earn, you pay $0.50 more taxes. On the side of the coin, if you earn a dollar less, you pay $0.50 less in taxes. So, if you work 9 days out of ten (without working an extra hour a day for 8 of them), you will earn just 5% less after-tax income, but have 10% more free time.
Nominally, a 0.9 schedule only gives you 2 days off per month, but many months there's a stat holiday, and if you're in the oil-patch you might get a floater day per month as well, so in practice your 0.9 schedule is actually a 4-day work week.
If more employees were to ask for 0.9 schedules, there'd be fewer layoffs!
So, if I'm mistaken, then why has there been a huge outcry on this issue, and why has Google amended its EULA and admitted they made a mistake? See http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/09/04/chrome.eula.security/
Google's EULA for Chrome takes away all your rights for any content you post with the browser. Here are the relevant sections from the EULA:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.
11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.
11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
I speak 5 languages with some fluency and I'm and engineer, so my opinion counts for... not much.
But if you're an adult and you've never learned another language until now, and you're in the US (which explains the first part) then Spanish is your best choice. Why?
- Spanish has no weird vowel sounds or nasal dipthongs, rising or falling tones, umlauts or other weird accents
- the sentence structure is straightforward, unlike, say, German's.
- You only have to learn two genders (masculine and feminine), unlike say, German with its third, neuter, gender, and it's easy to tell which words have which gender (except for a few, simple exceptions like 'mano' and 'mapa'). French and German are more difficult in this regard.
- Nouns don't change their endings no matter what they are doing in the sentence. You don't have to remember whether the noun is acting as a direct object or an indirect object, for example, like you do in German (or Turkish).
- you only have one new verb mood to learn, the subjunctive, which is used to express uncertainty or doubt or conditional actions (vestiges of this still exist in english, which is "it is required that he eat" is correct and "it is required that he eats" is WRONG).
- most importantly, you can get to practice your spanish. Virtually every you go in the US you'll find service staff that speak spanish, and all you have to do (as with any language) is risk embarassing yourself a little by opening your mouth.
- once you've learned one foreign language, the next is easier. You might as make that first one the easiest possible.
Que le vaya bien y que tenga mucho exito! (that should be e with an accent to indicate that the emphasis is on the first syllable, but Slashdot and Mac OS X don't play well together...)
For a fascinating look at how evolution actually works, read The Making of the Fittest, by Sean B. Carroll, to be found here: http://seanbcarroll.com/books/The_Making_of_the_Fittest/. Through an approach emphasizing study of DNA (which most Americans approve of for use in murder trials, but don't approve of for supporting the fact of evolution), he describes in detail how evolutionary changes arise. Several interesting points:
- a number of key genes involved in the very basics of life are identical in organisms as diverse as humans, tomatoes, and bacteria. These genes can be said to be immortal. He shows how the proteins created by these genes are resistant to mutation.
- the genes responsible for certain characteristics, like colour vision, appear to have arisen several times during the millenia, and in several unrelated species. Good design is everywhere, and bad design is ruthlessly suppressed.
- the element of chance, often a key argument by evolution-doubters, is addressed. "Surely this couldn't have all arisen through chance", they say. In fact, we are all biased to discount the effect of processes that we can't see happening in our own lifetimes. Two responses to this in the book: one, there have in fact been significant evolutionary changes in species in very rapid intervals in some cases, and two, even a very slight change in a species will take hold world-wide in only a few millenia if it confers some minor advantage. (The author cites a fascinating study of white tail feathers in pigeons and how even affixing fake white tail feathers to pigeons gave them an advantage. )
- and lastly, the point raised in an earlier post: evolution encourages the response of species to events occurring NOW. Evolution cannot predict the foretell the future, and it cares less about the past. Many evolutionary changes are in fact likely to be dead-ends. For example, the icefish of the Antarctic have evolved over a few million years to eliminate their red blood cells, which gives them an advantage in cold water. With global warming raising the temp of the sea rapidly, they're likely all doomed.
- the study of DNA allows to us to understand evolution in a way that was impossible even 20 years ago. Previously we could only look at the gross exterior shapes and colours of creatures. Now we can look at their molecular structure and see fossil DNA that links them through millions (or even billions) of years to all other species.
There's still room for god (small 'g') after all of this is said and done. But she will perhaps be found to reside inside each and every one of us, rather than residing in some fantasy-land heaven.
Ahem. from the installation instructions for Moonlight:
Steps:
1. Install Mono 1.2.4 for Unix
An N800 plus a Bluetooth keyboard is going to cost more than the Foleo, and the screen is smaller.
missed point, more likely. The Compaq 440 has a 15.4" screen and weighs 6.6 lb. It's a massive brick! The Foleo weighs less than half of that, and has a 10" screen. It's WAY more portable, and that surely is important to some. We'll have to see whether it's important to enough people for Palm to make any money at it, though.
Comparisons involving Canada are always skewed by the fact that its energy industry is a large CO2 emitter, and that much of the output of that industry is consumed by US customers. So in a way, the US is just exporting part of its CO2 emissions to Canada.
I've found that NeoOffice is virtually unusable because it crashes so often, whereas OpenOffice, though uglier than NeoOffice, has been rock-steady on my Mac. As a result, I don't use NeoOffice any more.
Err, that would hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, not tens of thousands - according to a recent British study, the total is 655,000 dead (as of when the study was done).
It's also part of US federal law to respect the Geneva convention and not use torture on prisoners, but we all know those laws are being broken, so I have little faith that the law prohibiting testing on prisoners is being obeyed either.
Try Airset - it syncs your Outlook calender to its web calendar so you don't have to do so manually.
I installed IE7 (since it's a beta, shouldn't it install beside my IE6, instead of replacing it? But I digress). I tried to fill in my company timesheet with it - it's a Microsoft Great Plains java application, and the application malfunctioned, refusing to recognize my entries in the timesheet.
Then I noticed some garbage characters beside my name at the top of the screen, and on a hunch decided to changed the default character encoding from Western European to Auto-detect. Voilà, it worked!
BTW, it seems Microsoft is trying to be innovative by departing from its normal CUA-compliant menu structure. IE7 starts up with no menu at all! So there's no obvious way to change settings of the browser. I had to hunt around for a while, and eventually found that a small Tools icon in the upper right has a Toolbars menu that in turn has a Classic Menu command you can check off - at which point a normal menu appears. But since when is a menu considered a toolbar? Don't toolbars normally consist of icons, with out without accompanying text, that carry out some specific function? A menu doesn't carry out a single specific function, it's more like the OS for your app. Not intuitive, MS!
Studies like the cited one focus on specific issues like security, as if that were the one decision-point for users. For me, it goes far beyond that, to the culture of the developers writing for the OS. Specifically, I'm far more likely to choose an OS based on the availability of open-source software for one reason: the availability of the developer(s) to resolve problems.
With Microsoft, if you notice a problem with the software, there is nothing you can do about it. Microsoft doesn't listen to individuals, nor communicate with them, so your options are a) suck it up, b) buy something else, or c) switch to open source.
Example: if you copy a row in Excel, you can't go to another sheet, insert a blank row, and then paste in your row. As soon as you did an intervening command, Excel forgot about your clipboard contents. Why? Is it because Microsoft thinks we're too stupid to remember what we're doing? No, it's because they decided to use the clipboard for holding command information! (I checked the API). I want them to fix this broken design, but there is no one at Microsoft to listen to me, or care.
With most open-source software, if you find a problem, you can contact the developer, and frequently get a response in days. And if the developer can't help you, you can usually help yourself. Recently I noticed that the DrPython IDE didn't have a Save Copy feature. I was able to download the source code, add the feature, and have it incorporated in the subsequent release, one week later. Meanwhile, the Microsoft Excel bug has existed for years, with no sign of a fix in sight.
This one statement says so much about what's wrong with the US. Unilateral bullying and interventionism are the hallmarks of American thinking, and if that doesn't work, there's always threats to take the marbles and go home.
US is the Microsoft of nations.
you mean, given *their* current capabilities?
Ok, so I'm a relative linux newbie. Only been using it several years, always with Mandrake (recently installed 9.1). I've now done 2 or 3 debian installs. The first was manual, and the last two were through knoppix.
/boot partition, so I had to re-run it and create a > 2.2 MB / partition instead. /var and /home partition. So I had to do some work to get those working. I did a search on "add hard drive" on debianhelp.org and quickly resolved that issue. /dev/hdb instead of /dev/hda. So I'm stuck using a boot floppy for now. Will figure that out later.
I just finished a knoppix install a few minutes ago. It went like this:
1) install Knoppix 3.2 CD (previously fetched from www.knoppix.net) and reboot.
2) After getting the KDE desktop, press Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a command prompt, and type knx-hdinstall. Follow the prompts
3) After a reboot, run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and here I am.
4) Complicating factors
a) I was installing knoppix-debian on a new 100 MB hard drive that I had added to my PC. The install script wouldn't let me have a mini 10 MB
b) the script didn't pick up my intended
c) lilo installation. Even though I run lilo, it doesn't install on my MBR. That's likely because my new knoppix installation is on
Could I have done all this without the experience gained from Mandrake? Maybe, but that experience surely helped.
But anyway knoppix rocks as a way to demo linux to others, or a way to run your favourite OS on a borrowed PC.
cheers
stewart in Calgary