Maybe being a programmer and being stuck in too many 'dungeons' makes me feel this way, but adding large windows, more greenery(plants) inside offices and plants (where they do not risk safety obviously) just makes employees feel such much better, that they're happier and more productive, aside from reduced heating bills due to solar heat
While I do agree with you, it's worth pointing out that very few offices have to worry about heating costs even in the winter. In many offices, just the computers and lighting will put off sufficient heat to keep the office warm, never mind any other stuff that produces waste heat in the course of doing it's primary function.
On the contrary, adding (efficient) windows to a space and putting the normal lights on dimmers + light/occupancy sensors will not only cut down electricity costs, but will substantially cut down cooling costs, as office lighting tends to be the primary cooling load in most office buildings.
This debate is far older than gaim. I remember seeing the exact same discussions regarding fetchmail years ago, and the points raised back then were almost identical.
Really, I think that whole page could pretty much be boiled down to this: if someone you don't trust has sufficient access to read the password file, you have much bigger things to worry about than whether they can read your email/im/whatever passwords.
When I want to "Voice Chat" with someone, I tend to use CPP (Cell Phone Protocol), or possibly FFP (Face2Face Protocol), if the other party is only a few hops away and the latency is low enough. Both work perfectly no matter what OS I am using.
Of course, if they want to work on better voice support, I'm certainly in no position to complain- I just hope it's an option that can be disabled.
If you're willing to go through that much trouble for a lossless to lossless transcoding, why not burn them to a cd-r and rip them from there. It would be a hell of a lot less hassle (no messing with editing blank spaces, cddb/freedb can probably identify and tag the files for you automatically, etc.), and the end result would be the same.
I'd put up with apple's DRM if I could get the files in a lossless format for less than the cost of buying them on CD. Until I can do that, I might as well keep buying and ripping CD's.
2. Reverse engineering (section 1201(f)). This exception permits circumvention, and the development of technological means for such circumvention, by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to use a copy of a computer program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing elements of the program necessary to achieve interoperability with other programs, to the extent that such acts are permitted under copyright law.
Who needs social acceptance, or the CEO's word, when you've got the law itself on your side?
IE 5 -> IE 6 included a substantial improvement in DOM and CSS support (which is a little sad when you consider how awful IE 6 is at both...) while Firefox 1.5 -> 2.0 changed virtually nothing on either front, so I would say this is nowhere near the scale of IE 5 -> IE 6 (or even IE 5.5 -> IE 6).
Anyways, IMO even if Firefox 2.0 is, as many people have claimed, as much of an upgrade from 1.5 as 1.5 was from 1.0, than no, it doesn't deserve to be called 2.0. If they didn't think the last upgrade was worthy of a major version jump, then why would another equivalent upgrade suddenly be worth it now? And from what I've read regarding the changes (based only on reviews so far- haven't had time to test it yet) it really doesn't sound like this version jump is even that big. It sounds to me like it belongs around 1.7 or 1.8 or so...
Of course if every other browser out there is jumping the major verion every other release, I guess you have to as well, or people will think you're falling behind.
Really? I don't see anything there about hoops to jump through for IE7, except for one article that talks about how all the old hacks for IE6 will stop working, which shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last two years.
IE7 certainly isn't perfect, but in my experience so far, I haven't found any issues that couldn't be worked around while still remaining compatible with Firefox and Safari. I don't really mind that none of the old hacks don't work any more. In fact for most of the sites that I work on, it worked out pretty well- All of the IE6 hacks stopped working in IE7, but since IE7 rendered things mostly correctly to start out with, the hacks weren't needed anymore, either.
The catch in all this is simple: Luck and Selection. If your first project is a failure, your career stops. It does not matter what the reason was. This is true all the way
You need look no further than the very company we are talking about to see that this is not entirely true. How does a CEO who rode not one but two companies (in a row, even) straight into the ground still have any career at all?
Close but not quite. It's not the IE-only apps they are most concerned with, it's the Windows only apps. If the vast majority of web browsers followed established web standards properly, it would be far too easy to replace many compiled applications with cross platform web applications. If that happened on a wide scale, then they would really be in trouble.
Don't get me wrong, I'm used to gnome and KDE, and they're impressive efforts, but they've not had hundreds of focus groups full of arts students and old ladies.
Some of us consider that a bonus. Personally, I'm about ready to ditch Gnome once I can find a suitable replacement mainly because those 'focus groups' have removed most of the features that I actually removed. They should never have ditched saw{mill|fish}...
While I partially agree with you, it's not just "some councils" that have ass hats running them. Most of the major decision makers in American scouting are (and have been for some time) LDS (Mormons). The more level headed troops and councils seem to be an ever decreasing minority- or at least they were the last time I was actively involved in scouting, which was some years ago now. My troop, I think was in a lot of ways one of the better ones. While there was a slightly noticeable conservative bent due to the fact that were associated with a church, and a lot of the adults were church members, it wasn't opressive (partly due to a bit of a political falling out between the scout leader and some of the church officials), and we still spent most of our time focusing on the more traditional scouting skills, such as hiking, camping, conoeing, and shooting.
Personally, I found my scouting experience to be immensely rewarding, but I am a little hesitant of whether I would ever want my kids to be involved in it. If it continues down the path it's been following, probably not.
Well, not all of the people who departed in the scandal did something wrong. If I remember correctly, one of the directors who departed was the one who they found was leaking the information in the first place, and I thought at least one of the higher-ups left out of protest of how the situation was handled. (I could be wrong- I haven't been following this all that closely)
Anyway, last I heard, the matter was still being looked into by the California AG and even congress, so even if criminal charges haven't been filed yet, they may still be forthcoming....not that I'm holding my breath.
Or to take your example with drug testing, the thing is: people aren't testing only investors and board members. You know, people who could actually blow a huge chunk of corporate cash in a drugged stupour. (In fact, I doubt those get tested at all.)
Ah... Right. The new economy. let me know when it gets here.
What do you base that on? Surely you realise that there is capital investment in coal power stations, in the infrastructure that maintains them (eg railways, coal mines) and that the primary reason for wanting to keep them is that coal producers (like Australia) want to sell coal and employ coal miners, and those with coal burning power stations are reluctant to spend the money to build solar/nuclear/other power stations instead.
From the NIST Advanced Technology Program:
At an average price of $5.23 per watt, worldwide sales of terrestrial photovoltaic modules totaled over $400 million in 1996. General industry consensus is that when the price per watt drops to $3.00 or below, PV will be competitive with conventional power generation.
From a site promoting PV panels for people's houses:
Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications.
Keep in mind that these are from organizations promoting solar power. As for being less viable technically, well, yes it is. Not less viable in theory, but certainly less viable with current technology, and for some time to come. See that number above? Total yearly sales of terrestrial photovoltaic modules. We'd be lucky if all of the PV panels produced in an entire year could replace 2 or 3 large coal plants. Manufacturing PV panels with current technology requires a large investment in both power and materials, an investment that currently they may never pay back during their useful life.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of solar power. My wife is very much into solar power and sustainable technologies because of her work, and a good friend from my work just went back to grad school to study solar power generation. I've been following it for a while, and I would love to see it become totally ubiquitous. But I also know its limitations, and I know that all the hopeful wishing in the world won't change them. And while I don't doubt that the so-called hydrogen economy will someday be powered by solar power, when it first gets here, and for some time after that, we're still going to be getting the vast majority of our power from coal, gas, and nuclear sources.
Long ago, I found my first DSL service through an ad on Slashdot. I've probably clicked on a handful of thinkgeek ads over the years, although I admit I haven't ever bought much there. For a while I would click on hosting ads somewhat regularly- I wasn't actively looking for a new provider, but I was curious to see how they compared to the service I had.
I don't mind ads if they aren't obnoxious and don't get in the way of what I am trying to read. I do tend to ignore them unless they are for something that is interesting to me, something that very rarely happens outside of slashdot, and the occasional Google Adword.
I doubt it has very little to do with "family-oriented midset" (at least within the population as a whole, perhaps in certain subgroups), it has far more to do with basic urban planning. Most Europeans (at least compared to the US) live in densely populated cities, which tend to have small or even slightly negative population growth. While the U.S does have quite a few very large cities, they are not growing any more than their Eurpoean equivalents. The parts of the US that are growing the most rapidly are the 'smaller' more recently developed urban areas. Maricopa county (Phoenix, AZ) was barely a blip on the radar when the US passed 200MM people 40 years ago, but now it is one of the top five most populated counties in the nation. There are probably a half a dozen cities within an hour or two drive of where I lived in Southern California ten years ago that barely consisted of a freeway offramp or two back then but are now pushing 50K or 100K population.
In a nutshell, the US is growing rapidly because we have a lot of room to grow yet, and we aren't (for the most part) hesitant to use it, something that very few European countries have.
Sure, maybe 50 years in the future, when solar technology advances to the point where it can produce energy on the scale that we currently get by burning coal and gas. The poster you are responding to is talking about using hydrogen now, or at least in the immediate future, and is pointing out that most people take for granted that the power in 'hydrogen power' ultimately comes from somewhere else, primarily (in the US at least) coal. I've got a news flash for you. If solar power was in any way, shape, or form ready to replace coal as a primary power source, it would have happened by now, hydrogen or no.
I doubt it very much.
You must have missed the word 'current'.
You could try solar cells then electrolysis, but why go the extra step? The best approach would doubtless be Artificial Photosynthesis. Go straight from the solar to the hydrogen. Eliminate the steps in the middle.
That has got to be by far the cheapest feasible method. Now all mankind has to do is find the catalyst, and the carrier to transport the hydrogen with. Instant hydrogen economy.
(emphasis mine)
Well, shoot, that's it? While we're at it, why don't we hurry up and get all those fusion reactors working. I mean, all we have to do is figure out how to make the reaction sustainable without using up huge amounts of power on containment, and we're set. For that matter, the cheapest feasible method of power generation has got to be to find a way to directly tap into the background radiation of the universe. All we have to do is figure out how, and we have free energy for life.
More seriously, has anyone (with an appropriate scientific background) ever proposed this as even a theoretical model, much less suggested an actual mechanism by which it might work? Because if you can show me some actual research into that, I'd love to see it.
It's really far more than five times as dangerous if you consider that the WTC attacks were a one-time event and that there have been no similarly deadly attacks since then. Put another way, at 16,000/year (which is lower than I remembered, but whatever) over 80,000 Americans have been killed by car accidents since 9/11, while the number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks in the last 5 years and change is still right around 3,000.
Well... I stand corrected. Congratulations on your good fortune.
Not that it really affects me either way. I've met very few women in my lifetime who would care for the music on my iPod. (Well that, and I'm already married, so kissing a random girl who plugged her headphones into my iPod would probably get me into a bit of trouble.)
If the aim is to replace commercial software with 'free' software
What if the aim is to write something that meets their own needs? Contrary to poular belief, most open source programmers are not completely obsessed with market share. And it won't kill OSS, because unlike traditional softwre companies, OSS doesn't need market share to survive. All it needs are developers.
If I wanted to get really snarky, I could respond with "That's the sort of question that, if asked frequently, could kill OSS." It might be true, and it has happened in some cases. Users of a program get so insistent about taking the project in a direction that doesn't interest the developer, and eventually the developer gets sick of it and abandons the project. (My memory is a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe that may have actually been why one of the Gimp's original developers abandoned the project almost 10 years ago and why the Gimp languished around version 0.9x for sooo long.)
Besides, pod-jacking gives you a much better chance of being able to talk to that pretty girl.;-)
Riiight. Ever done it? Ever even tried it? Ever heard a reliable story of one single person who successfully initiated that maneuver? As far as I can tell, 'Pod-Jacking' is pretty much right up there with 'BLuetoothing' as a completely fabricated tech phenomenon.
Slashdot Mirror
While I do agree with you, it's worth pointing out that very few offices have to worry about heating costs even in the winter. In many offices, just the computers and lighting will put off sufficient heat to keep the office warm, never mind any other stuff that produces waste heat in the course of doing it's primary function.
On the contrary, adding (efficient) windows to a space and putting the normal lights on dimmers + light/occupancy sensors will not only cut down electricity costs, but will substantially cut down cooling costs, as office lighting tends to be the primary cooling load in most office buildings.
Huh, that looks familiar...
This debate is far older than gaim. I remember seeing the exact same discussions regarding fetchmail years ago, and the points raised back then were almost identical.
Really, I think that whole page could pretty much be boiled down to this: if someone you don't trust has sufficient access to read the password file, you have much bigger things to worry about than whether they can read your email/im/whatever passwords.
When I want to "Voice Chat" with someone, I tend to use CPP (Cell Phone Protocol), or possibly FFP (Face2Face Protocol), if the other party is only a few hops away and the latency is low enough. Both work perfectly no matter what OS I am using.
Of course, if they want to work on better voice support, I'm certainly in no position to complain- I just hope it's an option that can be disabled.
If you're willing to go through that much trouble for a lossless to lossless transcoding, why not burn them to a cd-r and rip them from there. It would be a hell of a lot less hassle (no messing with editing blank spaces, cddb/freedb can probably identify and tag the files for you automatically, etc.), and the end result would be the same.
I'd put up with apple's DRM if I could get the files in a lossless format for less than the cost of buying them on CD. Until I can do that, I might as well keep buying and ripping CD's.
Who needs social acceptance, or the CEO's word, when you've got the law itself on your side?
IE 5 -> IE 6 included a substantial improvement in DOM and CSS support (which is a little sad when you consider how awful IE 6 is at both...) while Firefox 1.5 -> 2.0 changed virtually nothing on either front, so I would say this is nowhere near the scale of IE 5 -> IE 6 (or even IE 5.5 -> IE 6).
Anyways, IMO even if Firefox 2.0 is, as many people have claimed, as much of an upgrade from 1.5 as 1.5 was from 1.0, than no, it doesn't deserve to be called 2.0. If they didn't think the last upgrade was worthy of a major version jump, then why would another equivalent upgrade suddenly be worth it now? And from what I've read regarding the changes (based only on reviews so far- haven't had time to test it yet) it really doesn't sound like this version jump is even that big. It sounds to me like it belongs around 1.7 or 1.8 or so...
Of course if every other browser out there is jumping the major verion every other release, I guess you have to as well, or people will think you're falling behind.
Really? I don't see anything there about hoops to jump through for IE7, except for one article that talks about how all the old hacks for IE6 will stop working, which shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last two years.
IE7 certainly isn't perfect, but in my experience so far, I haven't found any issues that couldn't be worked around while still remaining compatible with Firefox and Safari. I don't really mind that none of the old hacks don't work any more. In fact for most of the sites that I work on, it worked out pretty well- All of the IE6 hacks stopped working in IE7, but since IE7 rendered things mostly correctly to start out with, the hacks weren't needed anymore, either.
Not to mention they did the same thing for Firefox 1.5 and (I think) 1.0 as well...
You'd think they'd learn sooner or later.
Will IE ever support event capturing?
You need look no further than the very company we are talking about to see that this is not entirely true. How does a CEO who rode not one but two companies (in a row, even) straight into the ground still have any career at all?
Close but not quite. It's not the IE-only apps they are most concerned with, it's the Windows only apps. If the vast majority of web browsers followed established web standards properly, it would be far too easy to replace many compiled applications with cross platform web applications. If that happened on a wide scale, then they would really be in trouble.
Some of us consider that a bonus. Personally, I'm about ready to ditch Gnome once I can find a suitable replacement mainly because those 'focus groups' have removed most of the features that I actually removed. They should never have ditched saw{mill|fish}...
God, we can only hope...
While I partially agree with you, it's not just "some councils" that have ass hats running them. Most of the major decision makers in American scouting are (and have been for some time) LDS (Mormons). The more level headed troops and councils seem to be an ever decreasing minority- or at least they were the last time I was actively involved in scouting, which was some years ago now. My troop, I think was in a lot of ways one of the better ones. While there was a slightly noticeable conservative bent due to the fact that were associated with a church, and a lot of the adults were church members, it wasn't opressive (partly due to a bit of a political falling out between the scout leader and some of the church officials), and we still spent most of our time focusing on the more traditional scouting skills, such as hiking, camping, conoeing, and shooting.
Personally, I found my scouting experience to be immensely rewarding, but I am a little hesitant of whether I would ever want my kids to be involved in it. If it continues down the path it's been following, probably not.
Well, not all of the people who departed in the scandal did something wrong. If I remember correctly, one of the directors who departed was the one who they found was leaking the information in the first place, and I thought at least one of the higher-ups left out of protest of how the situation was handled. (I could be wrong- I haven't been following this all that closely)
...not that I'm holding my breath.
Anyway, last I heard, the matter was still being looked into by the California AG and even congress, so even if criminal charges haven't been filed yet, they may still be forthcoming.
Well, yeah, 'cause that's real tough to fake...
You know, I'll be the first to admit that Windows is far from perfect, but I think that "Broken" is probably a little too strong of an adjective. /duck
From the NIST Advanced Technology Program:
From a site promoting PV panels for people's houses:
Keep in mind that these are from organizations promoting solar power. As for being less viable technically, well, yes it is. Not less viable in theory, but certainly less viable with current technology, and for some time to come. See that number above? Total yearly sales of terrestrial photovoltaic modules. We'd be lucky if all of the PV panels produced in an entire year could replace 2 or 3 large coal plants. Manufacturing PV panels with current technology requires a large investment in both power and materials, an investment that currently they may never pay back during their useful life.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of solar power. My wife is very much into solar power and sustainable technologies because of her work, and a good friend from my work just went back to grad school to study solar power generation. I've been following it for a while, and I would love to see it become totally ubiquitous. But I also know its limitations, and I know that all the hopeful wishing in the world won't change them. And while I don't doubt that the so-called hydrogen economy will someday be powered by solar power, when it first gets here, and for some time after that, we're still going to be getting the vast majority of our power from coal, gas, and nuclear sources.
Long ago, I found my first DSL service through an ad on Slashdot. I've probably clicked on a handful of thinkgeek ads over the years, although I admit I haven't ever bought much there. For a while I would click on hosting ads somewhat regularly- I wasn't actively looking for a new provider, but I was curious to see how they compared to the service I had.
I don't mind ads if they aren't obnoxious and don't get in the way of what I am trying to read. I do tend to ignore them unless they are for something that is interesting to me, something that very rarely happens outside of slashdot, and the occasional Google Adword.
I doubt it has very little to do with "family-oriented midset" (at least within the population as a whole, perhaps in certain subgroups), it has far more to do with basic urban planning. Most Europeans (at least compared to the US) live in densely populated cities, which tend to have small or even slightly negative population growth. While the U.S does have quite a few very large cities, they are not growing any more than their Eurpoean equivalents. The parts of the US that are growing the most rapidly are the 'smaller' more recently developed urban areas. Maricopa county (Phoenix, AZ) was barely a blip on the radar when the US passed 200MM people 40 years ago, but now it is one of the top five most populated counties in the nation. There are probably a half a dozen cities within an hour or two drive of where I lived in Southern California ten years ago that barely consisted of a freeway offramp or two back then but are now pushing 50K or 100K population.
In a nutshell, the US is growing rapidly because we have a lot of room to grow yet, and we aren't (for the most part) hesitant to use it, something that very few European countries have.
Sure, maybe 50 years in the future, when solar technology advances to the point where it can produce energy on the scale that we currently get by burning coal and gas. The poster you are responding to is talking about using hydrogen now, or at least in the immediate future, and is pointing out that most people take for granted that the power in 'hydrogen power' ultimately comes from somewhere else, primarily (in the US at least) coal. I've got a news flash for you. If solar power was in any way, shape, or form ready to replace coal as a primary power source, it would have happened by now, hydrogen or no.
You must have missed the word 'current'.
(emphasis mine)
Well, shoot, that's it? While we're at it, why don't we hurry up and get all those fusion reactors working. I mean, all we have to do is figure out how to make the reaction sustainable without using up huge amounts of power on containment, and we're set. For that matter, the cheapest feasible method of power generation has got to be to find a way to directly tap into the background radiation of the universe. All we have to do is figure out how, and we have free energy for life.
More seriously, has anyone (with an appropriate scientific background) ever proposed this as even a theoretical model, much less suggested an actual mechanism by which it might work? Because if you can show me some actual research into that, I'd love to see it.
Well... I stand corrected.
Congratulations on your good fortune.
Not that it really affects me either way. I've met very few women in my lifetime who would care for the music on my iPod. (Well that, and I'm already married, so kissing a random girl who plugged her headphones into my iPod would probably get me into a bit of trouble.)
What if the aim is to write something that meets their own needs? Contrary to poular belief, most open source programmers are not completely obsessed with market share. And it won't kill OSS, because unlike traditional softwre companies, OSS doesn't need market share to survive. All it needs are developers.
If I wanted to get really snarky, I could respond with "That's the sort of question that, if asked frequently, could kill OSS." It might be true, and it has happened in some cases. Users of a program get so insistent about taking the project in a direction that doesn't interest the developer, and eventually the developer gets sick of it and abandons the project. (My memory is a bit fuzzy on the details, but I believe that may have actually been why one of the Gimp's original developers abandoned the project almost 10 years ago and why the Gimp languished around version 0.9x for sooo long.)
Riiight. Ever done it? Ever even tried it? Ever heard a reliable story of one single person who successfully initiated that maneuver? As far as I can tell, 'Pod-Jacking' is pretty much right up there with 'BLuetoothing' as a completely fabricated tech phenomenon.