When something goes wrong with my mother's Windows-based computer, what does she do? I'll give you a hint: It doesn't involve fixing it herself.
Ignoring that what you described can be accomplished in Windows with some type of VNC, it doesn't matter that in your case your mother doesn't fix her computer. In those cases, it doesn't matter if your mother was using Linux, Windows, Unix, or MacOS. That class of computer users will ALWAYS call someone else to fix their computers. But what about the people with a slightly greater interest in maintaining a computer? For anyone whose level of computer troubleshooting is even slightly beyond 'I'll just call my son.' Windows is much easier to troubleshoot.
Pick a program that isn't native to Windows or Linux default installations. Then try to type in the instructions for installing such a program in both windows and linux. How would the average user install the program on their machine? Could you document the steps for Linux? How would those steps compare to a windows installation? That is a thing you imagine. It is not what actually happens. My girlfriend doesn't know much about computers, but she feels much more comfortable with her Ubuntu at home than the XP she has at work. Right now we are 5000 miles apart, and it takes little work, while I talk on skype with her, to fix any issues she could have. Yesterday she needed to shrink some pictures to send by mail. I could help her easily by telling her to install ssh-server, then logging in, installing imagemagik, writing a one line shellscript, and associating it to her nautilus actions.
Telling her how to install sshd was easy: write sudo aptitude install sshd and then your password. Tell me what happens. I just don't thing it would be that easy get someone to grant you remote access to their machine in XP, installing software and all.
She does know how to use synaptic, but there was this easier alternative.
About default installs, I think your metrics are not fair. Windows default installs don't do anything. The software included does nothing. The case fo installing not provided software while in windows is much more common than with Ubuntu.
In Ubuntu, the process to install software is easy, it's usually four words if you need to say it on the phone, and for slightly more knowledgeable users, there is synaptic, much easier than some random installer with licenses and keys and optional rebooting and stuff.
If you want software not available from the original repos, you need to add the repo, and it's an easy task to learn. Also that procedure is easy on the phone, and easier via IM, a one liner. And it's just one task you need to learn, for all non included software.
Rich people don't get to be rich by wasting money. Even with $50mil in the bank, unless those cables really DO work 70x as well as normal cables, the millionaire will buy the cheap cables. One of the most important sources of of millionaire-ness is birth. There might be some correlation between sense and money, but it's not strong.
If the cables were 2x better, one could pay 70 times the regular value. That _does_ make sense. It makes sense to many times more (directly or indirectly) for better tickets at the theater. The relationship between money and function shouldn't be linear.
The issue here is that you pay 70x for nothing. _That_ is what does not make sense, unless you are just using it as a status symbol among your aquaintances who don't think you are stupid spending 7k (almost 5000 euros!!) for a cable.
Hmm. I don't agree with what I'm about to say, but I have to say it - it's the devil's advocate in me: technically speaking, that's not in conflict with what the rep stated: When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.
Making a copy of a CD for archival purposes is not the same as ripping songs for playback in additional devices.
The whole issue is that when you walk into a store and buy a CD, you either buy the CD, or you buy a license to play the music.
Just by selling a CD, they can't sell you a license to play the music, but only in a certain way, unless they make you sign some contract that says so. They would like to do that, but there is no way they can do it, short of passing a law that says it is what actually happens.
Yes. And they were different before as well. Adopting the third world practice of making people dissappear is not helping things but thankfully that's still the spooks plus Edgar Hoover's crowd and not professional law enforcement. The CIA says now, in their unclassified records, that they had a role in Plan Condor, the framework where people got "dissapeared" in south america, and tortured to death. The harshest torture techniques used in my country where taught mostly by a comissioned US police guy, who was later killed. They were amazingly similar than what you saw happening in iraq.
They are not adopting third world techniques. Those are _their_ techniques. They are just using them closer to home.
Not to downplay the threat, but is a new version of Windows out?
Yes, thankfully. It's been out for 8 months, it has twice the market share of Linux and OS X combined, and it's much more secure than the one it's replacing.
BTW, I think it's funny that you'd give so much weight to companies that you've referred to in the past as "snake oil vendors".
Given the fact that the vast majority of computers on botnets are there because of user action instead of exploited vulnerabilities, I fail to see what a new version of Windows has to do with this or not. People will infect a mainframe if the given the chance and someone can be bothered to write the malware for it. Hmmm. BonzyBuddy for OS/390 must be quite an experience. I wonder if it runs on InfoMan...
User action, and protecting from its bad consequences, has to do with the OS. e.g. : a badly designed OK/Cancel button is responsible for people losing their data (hint: ok/cancel dialogs just don't work), but you can say that data is lost due to "user action". The reality is that a well designed UI would help the user in identifying and preventing malware.
In Ubuntu, for example, you always know where the software comes from. You don't usually run self-executable installers. You get a warning every time you are installing software from an untrusted source. Of course, it helps that you don't get those warnings most of the time, just in the not that frequent occasion of needing software outside of the trusted main repository. If you were to be owned, you would need to perform an unusual operation to do it, whil in windows you get owned by the same procedure followed for installing base software like firefox.
Personally I don't think either one is more free than the other. I think it comes down to the GPL keeping code free and the BSD license keeping people free. Wrong. BSD gives all the freedom possible to first-level users/developers of the software. GPL doesn't. It takes some of that freedom away (the freedom to restrict other users/developers) in order to ensure more people get the resulting limited freedom.
I think it's more exact to say that BSD is a lot of freedom for less people, while the GPL means somewhat less freedom to a lot of people.
Paranoia is healthy at times. As the world becomes more and more 'tech-bound', this is a far worse long term risk then us continuing to rely on oil provided by people that want to see our way of life ended. They never said that. They said they want you out of the middle east. Only if your way of life includes vacationing in Dubai.
Foreigners in the US are not eligible for financial aid. Period. If you want to go to a state university you have to pay for it too. Much like someone from out of state has to pay, but it's higher for foreigners.
Graduate students can get fellowships from universities, usually funded from an NSF grant or such, but this isn't for free, they have to do top-notch research to keep those grants. It is in the best interest of universities to get the best people worldwide, though it is a lot easier to recruit americans anyway. In my field (Computer Science) you don't see many americans going for PhDs so you get a lot of foreigners.
Been there, done that. Could I have stayed in the states for as long as you choose to keep me and where you want me to work? Again, What are you talking about?
I probably could've stayed to work where I could find a job, but I would've had to go through the whole H-1b process. Given that I have a PhD in CS, it might be slightly easier, but it's still not taking up an american job, or being a slave as you say. You answered the wrong post. I didn't say any of those things.
European countries, they import graduates for example from Latin America, give them a free or a cheap Phd, and they get a cheap doctor in whetever they need, for 3 o 4 years of education.
What Europe are you talking about? I am Latin American currently doing a PhD in Comp.Sci. in the UK and let me tell you it is faaaaaar from cheap, I've got to pay £10,500 (about $20,838.8) a year plus about £700 for montly expenses... The only way I could afford it is by a sponsorship from my government. I have friends in Sweden, and Switzerland they get money from those governments to do their PhD on Chemistry. I also have a friend from Ecuador working on a CS PhD in Bruselas, and the government is paying for that.
Country of origin is irrelevant to this debate. In this case, it is most definitely relevant, as it impacts whether the poster is paying for something someone else gets for free, or gets a free ride on our ticket.
Why? Do non-Americans somehow know less about education systems? All of your absurd suggestions aside, the reason why is because there is an obvious bias in suggesting it is a good idea for a foreign country, that you don't pay taxes to, to pay for your education and import a foreigner. Americans, who fund the policy, should be the ones deciding whether it goes to Americans, or not.
~Rebecca Don't worry about that. I have just a graduate education (that is free for everyone, even foreigners, in my countries best university), and from what I have been told by my teachers, it would very easy for me to get a free Phd education in Europe, because I am an Uruguayan, and I am brilliant. The issue is that I'm not sure if I want that. I think I can have a better life in my country. I make more money than I would make in the US, and I don't work 60 hours a week, because I rent my brains and my knowledge, not hours filling a seat.
I'm not planning to go to study to the US, because I don't think it's a nice place to live, and that is important for me. I have gone to the US in the past, but since 2002 they require tourist visas to enter the country, and I'm not getting one. I don't want visas in my passport, my passport asks politely other countries to be nice to me, and requiring a visa is not my idea of being nice to me. I only got a diplomatic visa once, but I needed that for work. I hope I don't need to go to the US for work, but I'm sure that won't happen at least for some years.
Look how well it's done with the US Government giving free educations to the Indians and Chinese; imagine if we gave it to Americans! They should teach you English, too.
Aside from that, don't forget that giving free college education to foreigners is great, considering that you get to choose how long you keep them, and where you let them work. You save twelve years of fundamental education, and with just four, you get an engineer who will work where you want him to work, and for as long as you wish.
The same thing is done by European countries, they import graduates for example from Latin America, give them a free or a cheap Phd, and they get a cheap doctor in whetever they need, for 3 o 4 years of education. Of course, that money comes back in patent royalties, and expensive technology exports even to the same countries that provided the people.
I'm quite aware of Infocom games but the term "adventure game" is normally applied to the later graphics games - Sierra, LucasArts, Legend, etc. That would be "graphic adventure".
You open what is supposed to be all the world's knowledge combined in a site, except that the policy is to treat it like a public bathroom. That's fine, but why is it news every time someone gets caught taking a shit in it?
It's fine to let people contribute, but most articles need to be locked down when they are completed, and then you submit stuff to be added for peer review or something. There is no reason why 8 year old Johnny needs to be editing the live version of a page on something he knows nothing about.
Is there enough new information on Elvis arriving, that his page needs to be open to live submissions from anyone 24/7/365? I don't understand why your post is modded as insightful. Everybody can have an idea of a good website. The merit of the Wikipedia is that it is very important for a lot of people, as is. There is nothing stopping you from creating a non editable wikipedia, you could even use the content that is already there.
The power of the Wikipedia is that its rules are set by someone smarter than you, and with more vision. Anyone can make a comment like yours. The thing that is brilliant about the Wikipedia is that is has an amazing accuracy, even taking into account vandals and fanatics and all. And the beauty of it is that is really is a collaborative effort, and very inclusive. That is nice by itself.
Of course you can say that academic people could make a better encyclopedia, only that they have not. The Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia ever, because (in order) it is readily available for lots of people (OLPC carrying kids in my country, for example : ) , it has a great breadth, it is very current, and it has an accuracy comparable to paper ones. Good luck doing the same with the restrictions you propose. You can always try.
I just think that for the things you mentioned, there is probably just no good way for an easy to use, WSIWYG editor to handle things correctly without some sort of artificial intelligence.
Some people will want it to act one way, while other will want the complete opposite. That might be true for the same person working on two different documents.
I think that something like LyX, or even LaTeX, offers a much saner solution to the problems that exist in Word. The "specific concept" you mentioned might just be that WYSIWYG isn't such a great idea after all. While I agree with you that WYSIWYG is not such a great idea (I waited for WYSIWYG editing for years, and when I had WordPerfect 6.0, I was very happy with it, but of course I used the code window a lot, because that was what I thought of as part of the experience, because not only I need to see how it looks like, but also I didn't want to lose the knowledge and the control of what was being written. That is what we lost, now you have the WYSIWIG view, but the view that shows the codes is not logical or easily understandable, and doesn't teach you anything. The fact that it is not plain text doesn't help with the editing, either.
Anyhow, there is such a thing as an interface that is good for everyone. I was really looking forward for The Humane Environment, that is what I would call a good idea applied to text.
In a less radical fashion, I think table editing and images could be a lot more consistent for everyone, and easy to use, just with a more careful and polished design. The big issue with MS and interfaces is that they owe a ot to old users, so they can't change their interfaces so much that their skills become useless. I haven't beta tested Office 2007 (and I'm not planning to) but in every other release I have seen lots of inconsistencies that can only be blamed to the effort in not changing old interfaces.
For example, shortcuts in msoffice are laughable. I use Spanish-language computers right now, but the ocassional English winword at a friends house. Not only the shortcuts differ among languages, but also Notepad, Wordpad, Winword, and Excel do not have a consistent "Find" shortcut, and the dialogs differ everywhere. The management of tables is winword is spartan. I had more control, and less trial-and-error when I used WordPerfect 6. Images were easier to use. Don't get me wrong, you could not drag and drop an image in wordperfect for DOS, but the whole process of putting an image exactly where you wanted, subtitled and all, was much faster, and more straightforward. You would think that in more than 10 years, they could have improved some of that, right?. No, instead of improving, you get tabbed properties dialogs with lots of options that are not self describing, and mostly useless, and most importantly, bad defaults! But they stay that way only because they need their faithful customers not to waste their skills.
I don't think AI is needed to provide an easy to use a text editor on steroids. Good design is.
Linux is not an operating system. Ever googled for information? Ever xerox a flyer? Ever blown your nose on a kleenex? Drink a coke? Face it, "Linux" has become the common collective noun (or "genericized trademark", if you like) for any and all distros. Tell your average office worker that you don't use Windows, you use Gentoo and collect a blank stare. Tell them you use Linux and you'll be more likely to get a "oh, one of those computer geeks" look. Point being, people have heard of Linux, but aren't too likely to be able to identify individual distros. Like it or not, that's the way the world sees it, if you want to change things you'll need to get a new term out there to replace it. And it'll have to be snappier than "Debian GNU/X.org/Linux".
Personally, I'd be much more willing to use the term "GNU/Linux" if the GNU software was actually shipped with some other kernel, so there'd be a need to differentiate between GNU/Linux and GNU/BSD or GNU/HP-UX. And don't even bother throwing GNU/Hurd out there, the window closed on that project long ago... Well, I haven't ever done any of those things, mainly because I have never lived in English speaking countries. But of course, I get your point. The issue is that we are in a technology forum, where most of us should know better, and in the context of a story about the kernel, when someone says something about Linux, it should not be assumed he doesn't know the difference, and that the less specific meaning is the right one.
There is a context to every conversation. I think in _this_ context, "Linux" means Linux. Of course, I agree with you, in the streets, and when talking to people who don't know or care about that, it's easier to use words for what they have been already marketed to mean.
Aside from that, when people ask me about my laptop software (mostly because of the Beryl desktop), I don't tell people I use Linux, I say it's Ubuntu, and most of them already know what it is.
Mount options are not the first thing to know about Linux, but they are about the first. And as long as this is true, Linux will not be ready for the desktop. I don't want to have to dick around with how my filesystems are mounted any more than I want to dick around with how the wheel camber on my car is set up. People don't want to give their car a four-wheel alignment before they can drive it home, nor do they want to have to deal with the intricacies of file system mounting. Ok. Again. Linux is not an operating system. Debian GNU/Linux is an operating system. Ubuntu is an operating system. SuSE Linux is an operating system.
Linux is a kernel. Following your bad analogy, it is an engine, not a car.
People who want to use SuSE don't need to know anything about Linux. Most people who want to know about Linux should learn about mount, since most Linuxes are used to mount stuff.
It depends on the hardware, and really there tends to be little windows of time where some hardware is so new compared to how old the Windows CDs are that you might have to look for drivers elsewhere. It is common that you install a new OS on a new machine. That is the issue with windows. They don't have a release every six months, so your hardware is not going to be supported right from the installation CD. You have to add the fact that if the hardware includes windows drivers that you can use, the installation process is not the same in all cases, so it's added complexity. Of course, most of us don't take that into account, because we did that for lots of years (windows 3.0 through windows 2000, in my case) and the we don't regard that as "hard", but it has even more steps to remember and intricacies than compiling and installing a new Linux kernel, that is the most difficult thing you could ever do with regard to Linux drivers.
With most GNU/Linux distributions, you are getting the last drivers, because you are getting a fairly new Linux, and there is where most drivers are.
There is the issue of proprietary hardware with no specs, but for example, Ubuntu brings some current proprietary drivers, and for example my HP pavillion installations have been seamless.
The memory/drive/screen size may be too limiting for windows.
But I've never had a driver problem installing windows. The last time I did a windows install was w2k, but I had no problems installing it on my custom built computer or a compaq. The same computer, with the same hardware, Red Hat 4 wouldn't install, and after installing red hat 5, I had to recompile with mouse support. Metro X had some display problems and I needed to get an updated driver for xfree86 to support my card (Matrox Millenium II). BeOS didn't need any extra drivers (I intentionally purchased equipment they supported).
Find the correct drivers = insert the windows CD.
Mini poll: Is that true?
Not for me. WinXP in a recent laptop is not like that. With older desktops, it wasn't either. Win98 was never like that for me.
Ubuntu was, in both my pavillion laptop, and 3 self built machines.
If you allow GM food, then you allow food GM to resist more chemicals. That is a problem by itself.
That's just silly. That's like blaming seatbelts for car crashes. People feel safer with them, so they drive more recklessly. So, seatbelts should be banned because they cause crashes. If you are pro-seatbelts, then you are obviously trying to kill babies.
Your analogy, like most analogies, is flawed. Monsanto RR soy is Roundup Ready. That means that it can take more Roundup than other soy beans. They developed RR soy in order to be able to use more gliphosphate on those crops. People buy RR soy _because_ it lets them use more gliphosphate.
I don't have any proof myself that gliphosphate in particular is bad for people per se, but the whole reasoning is not based on that, but on the fact that GM crops usually are GM in order to resist more chemicals, with the intention of using more chemicals.
It's like blaming car deaths (not crashes, crashes are somewhat orthogonal to speed) on faster cars, if you want another bad analogy.
You pointed out the health implications of GM food.
If you allow GM food, then you allow food GM to resist more chemicals. That is a problem by itself. "RRR" means: you can soak the soil with chemicals, and the crop will grow. That is not healthy, a priori.
Aside from that, it's ok, watching it from a scientific point of view, the crops we use right now are the result of a long time of evolution, in company of our evolution. The crops we eat now are the ones that are good for us, and that has been proved in practice, not in theory.
GM food, in the best case, are things that _should_ be good for us, in theory, but could be disasterous, because it hasn't been tried by actual people through thousands of years, so the risk is much higher than with traditional crops.
If you add to that the desirable characteristic of GM food that they should have great advantages over traditional crops, the possibility of having big populations exposed to higher risks is higher.
Of course, biodiversity, ouside of closed labs, is threatened by this kind of thing, and that is bad in many ways.
You could say that the same kind of threats come from traditionally "breeded" crops, but the rate at which those change is much lower, and the changes incorporated are much smaller than with GM food.
What I say is that although it's not the end of the world, I don't think it's fair to consider GM food as safe as "organic" food.
Throwing laptops at kids in shithole countries may sound like a great idea, but that's making a LOT of assumptions (that they'll only use them for good, that the officials in their countries will actually distribute them rather than sell them, etc.). I don't think my country is a shithole country. It's a beautiful place to live, but a somewhat bad place to try and make a living. I don't know where you live, but unless you live in _some_ countries in Europe, your country probably falls better under the standard definition of what is a shithole, than my country. Aside from that, we don't have enough money to give equal education to all our kids. We have too few teachers for them, and giving the kids access to better forms of communication, and all the reading material they need, I thing we are taking a big step towards making education in Uruguay more fair than it is right now.
OpenDocument is XML, and is great for versioning with svn. Not really. Open Document is XML wrapped in a zip file, so its still a binary file from the point of view of the source code control system.
Unless there's a plugin for SVN that will unzip the opendoc files and version the contents. I havent run into such a thing if so. You don't need to zip the files, and versioning a zipped archive is not difficult, either through shellscripts, or a plugin.
Not to mention, if that works for opendocument, then it'll work exactly the same for office 2007 docs, since both are just xml files zipped into a binary. Not quite. office 2007 docs allow blobs, that is not easily versionable.
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Ignoring that what you described can be accomplished in Windows with some type of VNC, it doesn't matter that in your case your mother doesn't fix her computer. In those cases, it doesn't matter if your mother was using Linux, Windows, Unix, or MacOS. That class of computer users will ALWAYS call someone else to fix their computers. But what about the people with a slightly greater interest in maintaining a computer? For anyone whose level of computer troubleshooting is even slightly beyond 'I'll just call my son.' Windows is much easier to troubleshoot.
Pick a program that isn't native to Windows or Linux default installations. Then try to type in the instructions for installing such a program in both windows and linux. How would the average user install the program on their machine? Could you document the steps for Linux? How would those steps compare to a windows installation? That is a thing you imagine. It is not what actually happens.
My girlfriend doesn't know much about computers, but she feels much more comfortable with her Ubuntu at home than the XP she has at work.
Right now we are 5000 miles apart, and it takes little work, while I talk on skype with her, to fix any issues she could have. Yesterday she needed to shrink some pictures to send by mail. I could help her easily by telling her to install ssh-server, then logging in, installing imagemagik, writing a one line shellscript, and associating it to her nautilus actions.
Telling her how to install sshd was easy: write sudo aptitude install sshd and then your password. Tell me what happens. I just don't thing it would be that easy get someone to grant you remote access to their machine in XP, installing software and all.
She does know how to use synaptic, but there was this easier alternative.
About default installs, I think your metrics are not fair.
Windows default installs don't do anything. The software included does nothing. The case fo installing not provided software while in windows is much more common than with Ubuntu.
In Ubuntu, the process to install software is easy, it's usually four words if you need to say it on the phone, and for slightly more knowledgeable users, there is synaptic, much easier than some random installer with licenses and keys and optional rebooting and stuff.
If you want software not available from the original repos, you need to add the repo, and it's an easy task to learn. Also that procedure is easy on the phone, and easier via IM, a one liner.
And it's just one task you need to learn, for all non included software.
If the cables were 2x better, one could pay 70 times the regular value.
That _does_ make sense.
It makes sense to many times more (directly or indirectly) for better tickets at the theater.
The relationship between money and function shouldn't be linear.
The issue here is that you pay 70x for nothing. _That_ is what does not make sense, unless you are just using it as a status symbol among your aquaintances who don't think you are stupid spending 7k (almost 5000 euros!!) for a cable.
Hmm. I don't agree with what I'm about to say, but I have to say it - it's the devil's advocate in me: technically speaking, that's not in conflict with what the rep stated: When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.
Making a copy of a CD for archival purposes is not the same as ripping songs for playback in additional devices.
The whole issue is that when you walk into a store and buy a CD, you either buy the CD, or you buy a license to play the music.Just by selling a CD, they can't sell you a license to play the music, but only in a certain way, unless they make you sign some contract that says so. They would like to do that, but there is no way they can do it, short of passing a law that says it is what actually happens.
They are not adopting third world techniques. Those are _their_ techniques. They are just using them closer to home.
Yes, thankfully. It's been out for 8 months, it has twice the market share of Linux and OS X combined, and it's much more secure than the one it's replacing.
BTW, I think it's funny that you'd give so much weight to companies that you've referred to in the past as "snake oil vendors".
User action, and protecting from its bad consequences, has to do with the OS. e.g. : a badly designed OK/Cancel button is responsible for people losing their data (hint: ok/cancel dialogs just don't work), but you can say that data is lost due to "user action". The reality is that a well designed UI would help the user in identifying and preventing malware.Given the fact that the vast majority of computers on botnets are there because of user action instead of exploited vulnerabilities, I fail to see what a new version of Windows has to do with this or not. People will infect a mainframe if the given the chance and someone can be bothered to write the malware for it. Hmmm. BonzyBuddy for OS/390 must be quite an experience. I wonder if it runs on InfoMan...
In Ubuntu, for example, you always know where the software comes from. You don't usually run self-executable installers. You get a warning every time you are installing software from an untrusted source. Of course, it helps that you don't get those warnings most of the time, just in the not that frequent occasion of needing software outside of the trusted main repository.
If you were to be owned, you would need to perform an unusual operation to do it, whil in windows you get owned by the same procedure followed for installing base software like firefox.
BSD gives all the freedom possible to first-level users/developers of the software.
GPL doesn't. It takes some of that freedom away (the freedom to restrict other users/developers) in order to ensure more people get the resulting limited freedom.
I think it's more exact to say that BSD is a lot of freedom for less people, while the GPL means somewhat less freedom to a lot of people.
Foreigners in the US are not eligible for financial aid. Period. If you want to go to a state university you have to pay for it too. Much like someone from out of state has to pay, but it's higher for foreigners.
Graduate students can get fellowships from universities, usually funded from an NSF grant or such, but this isn't for free, they have to do top-notch research to keep those grants. It is in the best interest of universities to get the best people worldwide, though it is a lot easier to recruit americans anyway. In my field (Computer Science) you don't see many americans going for PhDs so you get a lot of foreigners.
Been there, done that. Could I have stayed in the states for as long as you choose to keep me and where you want me to work? Again, What are you talking about?
I probably could've stayed to work where I could find a job, but I would've had to go through the whole H-1b process. Given that I have a PhD in CS, it might be slightly easier, but it's still not taking up an american job, or being a slave as you say. You answered the wrong post. I didn't say any of those things.
What Europe are you talking about? I am Latin American currently doing a PhD in Comp.Sci. in the UK and let me tell you it is faaaaaar from cheap, I've got to pay £10,500 (about $20,838.8) a year plus about £700 for montly expenses... The only way I could afford it is by a sponsorship from my government. I have friends in Sweden, and Switzerland they get money from those governments to do their PhD on Chemistry.
I also have a friend from Ecuador working on a CS PhD in Bruselas, and the government is paying for that.
~Rebecca Don't worry about that. I have just a graduate education (that is free for everyone, even foreigners, in my countries best university), and from what I have been told by my teachers, it would very easy for me to get a free Phd education in Europe, because I am an Uruguayan, and I am brilliant. The issue is that I'm not sure if I want that. I think I can have a better life in my country. I make more money than I would make in the US, and I don't work 60 hours a week, because I rent my brains and my knowledge, not hours filling a seat.
I'm not planning to go to study to the US, because I don't think it's a nice place to live, and that is important for me. I have gone to the US in the past, but since 2002 they require tourist visas to enter the country, and I'm not getting one. I don't want visas in my passport, my passport asks politely other countries to be nice to me, and requiring a visa is not my idea of being nice to me. I only got a diplomatic visa once, but I needed that for work. I hope I don't need to go to the US for work, but I'm sure that won't happen at least for some years.
Aside from that, don't forget that giving free college education to foreigners is great, considering that you get to choose how long you keep them, and where you let them work.
You save twelve years of fundamental education, and with just four, you get an engineer who will work where you want him to work, and for as long as you wish.
The same thing is done by European countries, they import graduates for example from Latin America, give them a free or a cheap Phd, and they get a cheap doctor in whetever they need, for 3 o 4 years of education. Of course, that money comes back in patent royalties, and expensive technology exports even to the same countries that provided the people.
It's fine to let people contribute, but most articles need to be locked down when they are completed, and then you submit stuff to be added for peer review or something. There is no reason why 8 year old Johnny needs to be editing the live version of a page on something he knows nothing about.
Is there enough new information on Elvis arriving, that his page needs to be open to live submissions from anyone 24/7/365? I don't understand why your post is modded as insightful.
Everybody can have an idea of a good website. The merit of the Wikipedia is that it is very important for a lot of people, as is.
There is nothing stopping you from creating a non editable wikipedia, you could even use the content that is already there.
The power of the Wikipedia is that its rules are set by someone smarter than you, and with more vision. Anyone can make a comment like yours. The thing that is brilliant about the Wikipedia is that is has an amazing accuracy, even taking into account vandals and fanatics and all. And the beauty of it is that is really is a collaborative effort, and very inclusive. That is nice by itself.
Of course you can say that academic people could make a better encyclopedia, only that they have not. The Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia ever, because (in order) it is readily available for lots of people (OLPC carrying kids in my country, for example : ) , it has a great breadth, it is very current, and it has an accuracy comparable to paper ones.
Good luck doing the same with the restrictions you propose. You can always try.
What is the process called that new plant varities are derived? Genetic Engineering
Some people will want it to act one way, while other will want the complete opposite. That might be true for the same person working on two different documents.
I think that something like LyX, or even LaTeX, offers a much saner solution to the problems that exist in Word. The "specific concept" you mentioned might just be that WYSIWYG isn't such a great idea after all. While I agree with you that WYSIWYG is not such a great idea (I waited for WYSIWYG editing for years, and when I had WordPerfect 6.0, I was very happy with it, but of course I used the code window a lot, because that was what I thought of as part of the experience, because not only I need to see how it looks like, but also I didn't want to lose the knowledge and the control of what was being written. That is what we lost, now you have the WYSIWIG view, but the view that shows the codes is not logical or easily understandable, and doesn't teach you anything. The fact that it is not plain text doesn't help with the editing, either.
Anyhow, there is such a thing as an interface that is good for everyone. I was really looking forward for The Humane Environment, that is what I would call a good idea applied to text.
In a less radical fashion, I think table editing and images could be a lot more consistent for everyone, and easy to use, just with a more careful and polished design. The big issue with MS and interfaces is that they owe a ot to old users, so they can't change their interfaces so much that their skills become useless. I haven't beta tested Office 2007 (and I'm not planning to) but in every other release I have seen lots of inconsistencies that can only be blamed to the effort in not changing old interfaces.
For example, shortcuts in msoffice are laughable. I use Spanish-language computers right now, but the ocassional English winword at a friends house.
Not only the shortcuts differ among languages, but also Notepad, Wordpad, Winword, and Excel do not have a consistent "Find" shortcut, and the dialogs differ everywhere. The management of tables is winword is spartan. I had more control, and less trial-and-error when I used WordPerfect 6. Images were easier to use. Don't get me wrong, you could not drag and drop an image in wordperfect for DOS, but the whole process of putting an image exactly where you wanted, subtitled and all, was much faster, and more straightforward.
You would think that in more than 10 years, they could have improved some of that, right?.
No, instead of improving, you get tabbed properties dialogs with lots of options that are not self describing, and mostly useless, and most importantly, bad defaults! But they stay that way only because they need their faithful customers not to waste their skills.
I don't think AI is needed to provide an easy to use a text editor on steroids. Good design is.
In the US, only old people use the yellow pages.
Personally, I'd be much more willing to use the term "GNU/Linux" if the GNU software was actually shipped with some other kernel, so there'd be a need to differentiate between GNU/Linux and GNU/BSD or GNU/HP-UX. And don't even bother throwing GNU/Hurd out there, the window closed on that project long ago... Well, I haven't ever done any of those things, mainly because I have never lived in English speaking countries. But of course, I get your point.
The issue is that we are in a technology forum, where most of us should know better, and in the context of a story about the kernel, when someone says something about Linux, it should not be assumed he doesn't know the difference, and that the less specific meaning is the right one.
There is a context to every conversation. I think in _this_ context, "Linux" means Linux. Of course, I agree with you, in the streets, and when talking to people who don't know or care about that, it's easier to use words for what they have been already marketed to mean.
Aside from that, when people ask me about my laptop software (mostly because of the Beryl desktop), I don't tell people I use Linux, I say it's Ubuntu, and most of them already know what it is.
Debian GNU/Linux is an operating system.
Ubuntu is an operating system.
SuSE Linux is an operating system.
Linux is a kernel. Following your bad analogy, it is an engine, not a car.
People who want to use SuSE don't need to know anything about Linux. Most people who want to know about Linux should learn about mount, since most Linuxes are used to mount stuff.
I wonder if this is among the "first things" to know about Linux, how it will ever become widespread on the desktop...
Kernels have nothing to do with desktops.Mount options are not the first thing to know about Linux, but they are about the first.
With most GNU/Linux distributions, you are getting the last drivers, because you are getting a fairly new Linux, and there is where most drivers are.
There is the issue of proprietary hardware with no specs, but for example, Ubuntu brings some current proprietary drivers, and for example my HP pavillion installations have been seamless.
The memory/drive/screen size may be too limiting for windows.
But I've never had a driver problem installing windows. The last time I did a windows install was w2k, but I had no problems installing it on my custom built computer or a compaq. The same computer, with the same hardware, Red Hat 4 wouldn't install, and after installing red hat 5, I had to recompile with mouse support. Metro X had some display problems and I needed to get an updated driver for xfree86 to support my card (Matrox Millenium II). BeOS didn't need any extra drivers (I intentionally purchased equipment they supported).
Mini poll: Is that true?Find the correct drivers = insert the windows CD.
Not for me. WinXP in a recent laptop is not like that.
With older desktops, it wasn't either.
Win98 was never like that for me.
Ubuntu was, in both my pavillion laptop, and 3 self built machines.
Anyone else with experiences?
That's just silly. That's like blaming seatbelts for car crashes. People feel safer with them, so they drive more recklessly. So, seatbelts should be banned because they cause crashes. If you are pro-seatbelts, then you are obviously trying to kill babies.
Your analogy, like most analogies, is flawed.
Monsanto RR soy is Roundup Ready. That means that it can take more Roundup than other soy beans.
They developed RR soy in order to be able to use more gliphosphate on those crops.
People buy RR soy _because_ it lets them use more gliphosphate.
I don't have any proof myself that gliphosphate in particular is bad for people per se, but the whole reasoning is not based on that, but on the fact that GM crops usually are GM in order to resist more chemicals, with the intention of using more chemicals.
It's like blaming car deaths (not crashes, crashes are somewhat orthogonal to speed) on faster cars, if you want another bad analogy.
You pointed out the health implications of GM food.
If you allow GM food, then you allow food GM to resist more chemicals. That is a problem by itself.
"RRR" means: you can soak the soil with chemicals, and the crop will grow. That is not healthy, a priori.
Aside from that, it's ok, watching it from a scientific point of view, the crops we use right now are the result of a long time of evolution, in company of our evolution. The crops we eat now are the ones that are good for us, and that has been proved in practice, not in theory.
GM food, in the best case, are things that _should_ be good for us, in theory, but could be disasterous, because it hasn't been tried by actual people through thousands of years, so the risk is much higher than with traditional crops.
If you add to that the desirable characteristic of GM food that they should have great advantages over traditional crops, the possibility of having big populations exposed to higher risks is higher.
Of course, biodiversity, ouside of closed labs, is threatened by this kind of thing, and that is bad in many ways.
You could say that the same kind of threats come from traditionally "breeded" crops, but the rate at which those change is much lower, and the changes incorporated are much smaller than with GM food.
What I say is that although it's not the end of the world, I don't think it's fair to consider GM food as safe as "organic" food.
I don't know where you live, but unless you live in _some_ countries in Europe, your country probably falls better under the standard definition of what is a shithole, than my country.
Aside from that, we don't have enough money to give equal education to all our kids.
We have too few teachers for them, and giving the kids access to better forms of communication, and all the reading material they need, I thing we are taking a big step towards making education in Uruguay more fair than it is right now.
Unless there's a plugin for SVN that will unzip the opendoc files and version the contents. I havent run into such a thing if so. You don't need to zip the files, and versioning a zipped archive is not difficult, either through shellscripts, or a plugin. Not to mention, if that works for opendocument, then it'll work exactly the same for office 2007 docs, since both are just xml files zipped into a binary. Not quite.
office 2007 docs allow blobs, that is not easily versionable.