The unelected European commission and the national governments that cannot stand up to business pressure should have no role in forming EU directives. Instead, every directive should start in the European parliament. If approved there, it should go for ratification by an "upper house" representing the people of Europe by means of referendums. These might be arranged in many ways; one would be for each directive to require the approval of a majority of the electorate in countries whose combined populations add up to two-thirds of the EU. Referendums would discourage the EU from adopting directives over things that could well be left to individual countries to decide.
Much as I respect RMS's ideas about freedom for software developers, that has got to be the most stupid idea in the world. He is seriously suggesting that "one would be for each directive to require the approval of a majority of the electorate in countries whose combined populations add up to two-thirds of the EU".. I suggest he has a quick glance at an encyclopedia sometime and check's out the distribution of people around Europe. The numbers aren't evenly spread across all the countries.
Doing what he suggests would give the populations of the UK, France, and Germany massively more power than the populations of places like Sweden and Finland.. And it's these smaller countries that are the ones who have been successful in their opposition to software patents thus far.
What's more, a referendum on software patents would be of so little interest to 99% of the population they wouldn't bother to cast a ballot. It would be a horribly expensive exercise and would guarantee to fail to return a valid, representative result.
I suggest RMS goes back to his campaign to put "GNU" in front of everything. That's actually less stupid than what he's suggesting here.
I'm not sure this would work the same way though. There is some provision in the RSS standard for new things, but it's usually up to the reader software how to display it.
Unless Google have been exceptionally clever and done something I can't even dream of, they must be either inserting adverts in a way that most readers will ignore, or else they're inserting adverts in the same format as news items.
In which case, news and adverts will become "merged" with each other.
That sounds pretty dodgy to me. I don't mind adverts I can easily ignore that are sectioned off from content, but if I have to skip adverts in the middle of my RSS news feeds I'll get annoyed. Equally, if I set my news feed to display 25 items, and I end up getting 22 items and 3 adverts, I'll be even more annoyed.
Until now Google's advertising has been nice and discrete. This sounds a lot less discrete. It sounds like a step in the wrong direction.
Caveat: I reserve final judgement until I see how a Google ad-enabled feed looks in my reader.
what is next, the republican plan to protect forrests- you can cut down 300 year old trees as long as you stick a seed back in the ground?
If you're interested in the environmental effect overall, that's actually a very good thing to do. Tree's soak up a lot more CO2 as they grow than they do when they're at their full size. From an environmental aspect cutting trees down and planting new ones is considerably better than leaving fully grown trees standing.
Of course, that sort of ignores the heritage of old trees, and assumes people plant the same species to replace what's cut down, but in principle at least reforestation and managed forests are a very good idea.
The only Yahoo! specific thing it does is the My Yahoo system of adding pages to a central server so you can take "favourites" with you between computers. The Yahoo search is an easy addition to the site searcher (defaults to Google, easy to switch), and the rest of it is just duplicating the bookmarks system. I'll ignore the "anti-spyware" stuff because that's Windows specific.
At least Google's toolbar does stuff like reporting PageRanks. This one seems to be bloat for the sake of getting a Yahoo logo onto your desktop.
There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
Actually, I agree with his sentiment. He's bang on. There's nothing Linux does that Windows can't do, certaintly if you're willing to invest the time and effort to produce a solution.
But the opposite is also true. There's nothing Windows does that Linux can't do either.
So the "battle" comes down to other issues, not simply what each OS can or can't do. Those issues are things like cost, trust, support, availability.. And those are when open source really starts to win. Microsoft is a corporate behemoth. Making decisions in a company that size takes real time.. months, if not years. Things have to be discussed, agreed, signed off, checked, signed off again. Compare that to the open source world where someone sees an issue, writes a patch, submits it to the dev tree, and it's in if the maintainer likes it, maybe with a handful of emails bounced around a mailing list, and open source starts to get a real, tangible business advantage over Microsoft.
So yeah, I'd agree with Taylor's analysis that Windows is just as capable as Linux on the CPU.. But if he thinks that's where Linux's fighting ground ends, he's dead wrong.
No. It really should not be up to the customer, simply because if there's an emergency you might have someone else trying to use your phone. If you slip and impale yourself in the neck on a kitchen knife a friend of yours might try to call help on your phone.. because, quite rightly, everyone expects every single phone everywhere should be able to call 911 at any time.
Compatible with 95% of things.. so 1 in every 20 applications won't work.
Sounds like rather a lot to me.
I see no reason why, if you design your API correctly and extensibly in the first place, with good modularisation, your OS shouldn't be compatible with code in 50 or 100 years time, let alone 5. Backwards compatibility is useful. Especially in computing where projects are rarely maintained beyond the second or third stable release. I don't quite see why moving forward should necessarily leave old applications broken.
Maybe they'll sell it on a similar plan to mobile phones. Free, but tied into a $60/month 12 month contract. You get 5,000 characters 'free', with additional characters available for $0.01 each thereafter.
Charactersets and "keyboard themes" will be sold by Jamba/Jamster for $6 a time.
If you're resorting to lies and trickery to avoid the work you ought to be doing, then you should quit. If your job is so bad, don't carry on with it. Find one you actually like, that you enjoy, that isn't something you want to avoid. You'll be a lot less stressed and you'll find life a whole lot easier.
I don't know about Australian law, but here in the UK if you were to point at a car and suggest to someone "Hey, steal that one." you'd be up for a conspiracy charge.
Re:Wood Ipod (guilt)
on
Real Wood iPod
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Wood is a lot easy to sustain than plastic. You can plant new trees and harvest them in 20 - 100 years. What's more, chopping down trees and planting new ones is actually better for the environment than simply leaving the trees there. As a tree grows it generates more oxygen and takes up more CO2 than an old tree.
Plastic, which comes from oil, takes a bit longer. Recycled plastic is a possibility, but that doesn't generate new oxygen or decrease CO2 levels. It still takes energy to do the recycling process.
contact of the "Deep Impact" satellite with the Tempel 1 comet...at roughly 23,000 miles per hour
That's very deceptive. It's the relative velocity of the comet and the probe that's important, not the absolute speed. If it really made contact going at 23,000 miles an hour relative to the comet.. well.. I don't think we can expect much useful science back from it.
There's certainly good reason to keep old data readers about the place.. I once spent a very dull weekend with a cassette->parallel interface loading some old ZX Spectrum code onto a pc and encoding the files into.z80 format. But there's no good reason at all to keep the rest of the hardware around. Every system before about 1995 has been emulated on faster, more stable modern system that afford us things like memory save points, video output recording, and other pleasentries.
Ok, first thought on the quality is.. Durrr.. obviously the quality is going to be lower. Any idiot could tell you that.
However..
Does it actually matter? Certainly I find that any documentation I want a client to see has to be *perfect*, which generally means sending it out to a proper copy shop or in-house repro facility. Internal documentation doesn't need to be anywhere near as high quality, so replacement inks are ok assuming they actually last a few years on the paper, I find thats more important than a few lines here and there.
So really where I work there isn't actually a market for "premium" ink cartridges. They're too expensive for everyday things, and not good enough for top quality things. There isn't any middle ground.
What's the point? Ok, it'll be pretty to look at, but highly accurate maps are actually less useful in pretty much all applications than simplified thematic representations.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you look at the task of, for example, checking email and finding spam, you have two options. Either you test whether someone knows what buttons in Outlook to click on, or you show them a client they're never seen before and ask them to figure it out. Testing a user on Outlook is tying the problem to the technology. Testing the user on a new email client is looking for pattern recognition, problem solving, and general logic applied to IT skills.
In my opinion, to be "IT literate" you should be able to transfer skills between applications. Thats what the test ought to be looking for..
Sounds like an interesting challenge certainly, but let me guess the bank's thinking behind this move..
If you use their traditional online banking service from a PC not booted using their CD, and subsequently get defrauded somehow, this will enable them to say "Ahhh.. but you weren't using our special software!", and ignore your complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
To head people off, while the exact tensile strength is not listed, it sounds like it is still far from the >100 GPa needed for a space elevator.
Why do they say they're going to enter the material into some space elevator competition at the end of the article then?
The unelected European commission and the national governments that cannot stand up to business pressure should have no role in forming EU directives. Instead, every directive should start in the European parliament. If approved there, it should go for ratification by an "upper house" representing the people of Europe by means of referendums. These might be arranged in many ways; one would be for each directive to require the approval of a majority of the electorate in countries whose combined populations add up to two-thirds of the EU. Referendums would discourage the EU from adopting directives over things that could well be left to individual countries to decide.
.. I suggest he has a quick glance at an encyclopedia sometime and check's out the distribution of people around Europe. The numbers aren't evenly spread across all the countries.
Much as I respect RMS's ideas about freedom for software developers, that has got to be the most stupid idea in the world. He is seriously suggesting that "one would be for each directive to require the approval of a majority of the electorate in countries whose combined populations add up to two-thirds of the EU"
Doing what he suggests would give the populations of the UK, France, and Germany massively more power than the populations of places like Sweden and Finland.. And it's these smaller countries that are the ones who have been successful in their opposition to software patents thus far.
What's more, a referendum on software patents would be of so little interest to 99% of the population they wouldn't bother to cast a ballot. It would be a horribly expensive exercise and would guarantee to fail to return a valid, representative result.
I suggest RMS goes back to his campaign to put "GNU" in front of everything. That's actually less stupid than what he's suggesting here.
stupid Web tricks of the late 90s that allowed animated unicorns to follow your cursor
If my boss reads Slashdot I think I know what I'll be asked to add to the corporate website tomorrow morning..
I'm not sure this would work the same way though. There is some provision in the RSS standard for new things, but it's usually up to the reader software how to display it.
Unless Google have been exceptionally clever and done something I can't even dream of, they must be either inserting adverts in a way that most readers will ignore, or else they're inserting adverts in the same format as news items.
In which case, news and adverts will become "merged" with each other.
That sounds pretty dodgy to me. I don't mind adverts I can easily ignore that are sectioned off from content, but if I have to skip adverts in the middle of my RSS news feeds I'll get annoyed. Equally, if I set my news feed to display 25 items, and I end up getting 22 items and 3 adverts, I'll be even more annoyed.
Until now Google's advertising has been nice and discrete. This sounds a lot less discrete. It sounds like a step in the wrong direction.
Caveat: I reserve final judgement until I see how a Google ad-enabled feed looks in my reader.
what is next, the republican plan to protect forrests- you can cut down 300 year old trees as long as you stick a seed back in the ground?
If you're interested in the environmental effect overall, that's actually a very good thing to do. Tree's soak up a lot more CO2 as they grow than they do when they're at their full size. From an environmental aspect cutting trees down and planting new ones is considerably better than leaving fully grown trees standing.
Of course, that sort of ignores the heritage of old trees, and assumes people plant the same species to replace what's cut down, but in principle at least reforestation and managed forests are a very good idea.
The only Yahoo! specific thing it does is the My Yahoo system of adding pages to a central server so you can take "favourites" with you between computers. The Yahoo search is an easy addition to the site searcher (defaults to Google, easy to switch), and the rest of it is just duplicating the bookmarks system. I'll ignore the "anti-spyware" stuff because that's Windows specific.
At least Google's toolbar does stuff like reporting PageRanks. This one seems to be bloat for the sake of getting a Yahoo logo onto your desktop.
There's really nothing innovative today that Linux does that we can't do.
Actually, I agree with his sentiment. He's bang on. There's nothing Linux does that Windows can't do, certaintly if you're willing to invest the time and effort to produce a solution.
But the opposite is also true. There's nothing Windows does that Linux can't do either.
So the "battle" comes down to other issues, not simply what each OS can or can't do. Those issues are things like cost, trust, support, availability.. And those are when open source really starts to win. Microsoft is a corporate behemoth. Making decisions in a company that size takes real time.. months, if not years. Things have to be discussed, agreed, signed off, checked, signed off again. Compare that to the open source world where someone sees an issue, writes a patch, submits it to the dev tree, and it's in if the maintainer likes it, maybe with a handful of emails bounced around a mailing list, and open source starts to get a real, tangible business advantage over Microsoft.
So yeah, I'd agree with Taylor's analysis that Windows is just as capable as Linux on the CPU.. But if he thinks that's where Linux's fighting ground ends, he's dead wrong.
No. It really should not be up to the customer, simply because if there's an emergency you might have someone else trying to use your phone. If you slip and impale yourself in the neck on a kitchen knife a friend of yours might try to call help on your phone.. because, quite rightly, everyone expects every single phone everywhere should be able to call 911 at any time.
From the Zeta FAQs:
"The Home Edition and Developer Edition don't have all the applications the Deluxe Edition does."
That's fine, I just want to poke about with the OS and see if I want to go further.. Developer edition will be fine thanks.
Pop to the Shop section.. Alas, only the bloated Deluxe edition with 3Gb of apps I'll never look at is for sale.
Back to *nix..
Compatible with 95% of things.. so 1 in every 20 applications won't work.
Sounds like rather a lot to me.
I see no reason why, if you design your API correctly and extensibly in the first place, with good modularisation, your OS shouldn't be compatible with code in 50 or 100 years time, let alone 5. Backwards compatibility is useful. Especially in computing where projects are rarely maintained beyond the second or third stable release. I don't quite see why moving forward should necessarily leave old applications broken.
Maybe they'll sell it on a similar plan to mobile phones. Free, but tied into a $60/month 12 month contract. You get 5,000 characters 'free', with additional characters available for $0.01 each thereafter.
Charactersets and "keyboard themes" will be sold by Jamba/Jamster for $6 a time.
If you're resorting to lies and trickery to avoid the work you ought to be doing, then you should quit. If your job is so bad, don't carry on with it. Find one you actually like, that you enjoy, that isn't something you want to avoid. You'll be a lot less stressed and you'll find life a whole lot easier.
The actual article.
I don't know about Australian law, but here in the UK if you were to point at a car and suggest to someone "Hey, steal that one." you'd be up for a conspiracy charge.
Wood is a lot easy to sustain than plastic. You can plant new trees and harvest them in 20 - 100 years. What's more, chopping down trees and planting new ones is actually better for the environment than simply leaving the trees there. As a tree grows it generates more oxygen and takes up more CO2 than an old tree.
Plastic, which comes from oil, takes a bit longer. Recycled plastic is a possibility, but that doesn't generate new oxygen or decrease CO2 levels. It still takes energy to do the recycling process.
contact of the "Deep Impact" satellite with the Tempel 1 comet...at roughly 23,000 miles per hour
That's very deceptive. It's the relative velocity of the comet and the probe that's important, not the absolute speed. If it really made contact going at 23,000 miles an hour relative to the comet.. well.. I don't think we can expect much useful science back from it.
That's a really cool idea. It's inspired me to knock something together to let other people control my desktop backgrounds..
There's certainly good reason to keep old data readers about the place.. I once spent a very dull weekend with a cassette->parallel interface loading some old ZX Spectrum code onto a pc and encoding the files into .z80 format. But there's no good reason at all to keep the rest of the hardware around. Every system before about 1995 has been emulated on faster, more stable modern system that afford us things like memory save points, video output recording, and other pleasentries.
Old hardware is dead.
The average Asian elephant has a brain mass of 7.8kg.
I for one welcome our supremely intelligent, prehensile nosed overlords.
Ok, first thought on the quality is .. Durrr .. obviously the quality is going to be lower. Any idiot could tell you that.
..
However
Does it actually matter? Certainly I find that any documentation I want a client to see has to be *perfect*, which generally means sending it out to a proper copy shop or in-house repro facility. Internal documentation doesn't need to be anywhere near as high quality, so replacement inks are ok assuming they actually last a few years on the paper, I find thats more important than a few lines here and there.
So really where I work there isn't actually a market for "premium" ink cartridges. They're too expensive for everyday things, and not good enough for top quality things. There isn't any middle ground.
What's the point? Ok, it'll be pretty to look at, but highly accurate maps are actually less useful in pretty much all applications than simplified thematic representations.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you look at the task of, for example, checking email and finding spam, you have two options. Either you test whether someone knows what buttons in Outlook to click on, or you show them a client they're never seen before and ask them to figure it out. Testing a user on Outlook is tying the problem to the technology. Testing the user on a new email client is looking for pattern recognition, problem solving, and general logic applied to IT skills.
In my opinion, to be "IT literate" you should be able to transfer skills between applications. Thats what the test ought to be looking for..
$600/day is cheap for a good graphic designer or illustrator. I write web applications, my rate is approx $1100/day (well, £550 as I'm in the UK).
Charge out price salary.
Sounds like an interesting challenge certainly, but let me guess the bank's thinking behind this move..
If you use their traditional online banking service from a PC not booted using their CD, and subsequently get defrauded somehow, this will enable them to say "Ahhh.. but you weren't using our special software!", and ignore your complaint.
How.. nice.
Its because theres only one of me to go round, and they're unhappy not to be working with me all the time.
Yes.
Thats it for sure.