Regardless of the idiot in Labour who was responsible, the real surprise is that the ruling liberal party voted in favour of this filtering. It was probably a carrot for the christians who they need to stay in power, but still...
The amount of money spent on engineers paid to work on the code base is quite large and if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale
Looking at the OOo progress these last 12 years since StarOffice, I think we should be happy with the enthousiasm behind LibreOffice.
Not to belittle the work of all those well-paid engineers, but what exactly have they been doing all this time? ODF, OOXML importing, database tool changes, exporting to PDF...
All fine and well that Sun open sourced the project, but it seems OOo has been hampered from the start due to Sun "owning" the project: progress has been minimal. It's time for fresh blood and a new start. It worked for XFree86, it'll work for OOo.
You want it to be there, holding everything up and easy to hand, but you don't want it to get in the way.
I think that every Linux distribution and DE developer should have this as a mantra.
For everything that has been developed over the last 10 years, a lot of it has been busywork that serves to only stroke the ego of the developers. Every desktop and every distribution should be easy to use, but most importantly shouldn't get in the way of the user. Switching interfaces (KDE 4, Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3, Unity) might be fun for developers (Ooo shiny 3D windows!) and keep them interested, users just can't give a damn and either are forced to learn yet another interface or switch DE/OS.
Look at Windows 95 -> Windows 7. Anyone comfortable with one can easily switch to the next. The interface might not always be pretty but it is consistent, gets out of the way and lets you get to work.
Just like XFCE4 actually, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more.
1999 called, it wants its rant back. Where have you been this last decade?
Seriously, with CSS (W3C, not coincidently the same maintainers of HTML) we have that web presentation language and it works pretty well across all major browsers. If you want to give your users a 'consistent user experience', CSS will force it upon them.
Even with differences between CSS versions and DOM implementations we have it much easier than when frames, white 1px images, ActiveX hacks and tables were the way to do "web design". Those 'designed for IE' labels weren't for show: getting that consistent user experience was a beast for a single browser and nearly impossible across multiple browsers.
Nowadays we have 3 major rendering engines: Trident, Gecko and Webkit. You have differences between IE-versions that you should test for, but it's rare that a Firefox or Chrome/Safari update would ruin your site. Between CSS being the norm and having a number of great Javascript libraries to work with, web development is a breeze compared to the old days.
I am not sure if there is any difference between EC2 or a cheaply rented VPS
When wanting scalability via Amazon primarily S3 makes the most sense. An EC2 instance can be flooded with requests just as well as a VPS or dedicated server can (although upgrading a EC2 instance is much easier), however offloading your media files to S3 and having your server stick to serving only HTML means bandwidth is a better way to help scale your system.
Slashdot will still flood your EC2 instance, but S3 can easily handle the load and help you survive a few seconds longer.
I have to admit that iOS is whupping our arse in usability when it comes to the iPad.
Exactly, and Google has no one to blame but themselves when it comes to poor Android tablet sales.
2011 would have been the year of the Android Tablet. Then manufacturers delayed until easter, OK. Now it's fall 2011 for most models except for those blessed by Google.
For now we can only choose between the overpriced Galaxy Tab and Xoom (on par with the iPad in price) or the Android 2.x el-cheapo tablets, where there probably is a huge opportunity for tablets between those two extremes.
Slashdot's format is tuned towards debate, not discussion.
True, but isn't debate inherent when allowing people to comment on news items? Slashdot in my eyes has never been about solving other peoples problems. Slashdot is about venting opinions on the latest tech news.
Slashdot isn't a forum where you'd ask for help about your favorite Linux distro, for instance. You might have an excellent question but it might only be slightly relevant to the news item being discussed, and there only is a tight window of time in which you'll get any answers: before you know it the news article with your question drops off the front page. But even so you can have short-lived discussions on Slashdot.
On ordinary discussion forums you set the topic and the group sets the speed in which new topics are brought up. Much more useful for questions, for en-mass debate maybe less so.
Expanding on my own post, I recently looked into run-of-the-river small scale hydro but the calculations show that you'll need a fast flowing river to get any serious amount of energy. With wind-power it's easy to scale: make it higher and the blades longer. With hydro-without-a-dam you're stuck with sucking the same amount of energy from a single stream. It works for small scale power generation but it's not something that will contribute beyond that.
For serious large-scale hydro energy without dams, the only major contender I could think of is placing large amounts of gigantic turbines in the Gulf stream.
Hydro can be done without the dam, and it's just as efficient.
The problem is that this isn't the case. Those dams aren't there only for the flow fluctuations, more importantly is that a large body of water results in water flowing faster through the turbines. The potential energy is much higher when you have all that pressure behind the dam.
1. a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge.
The only reason encyclopedias didn't add more information was because it wasn't feasible. Wikipedia was doing great, why would you want to limit it to only a subset of human knowledge? Information that I find trivial might interest my neighbor, so why would I delete an article about his precious snowflake? Why should my article about belly button lint have to be relevant?
Storage is cheap. Compared to wiki articles storage is insanely cheap. Someone can add articles about every flower in his local park and it still wouldn't cost more than a few MB. Extra articles don't clutter up anything.
Stop trying to place an arbitrary border around a subset of human knowledge and pretend you're the gatekeeper. The whole deletionist movement and infighting about relevancy has done Wikipedia much more harm than any article about an obscure anime series could ever do.
Give us our H2G2. If I don't think something is relevant, I'll simply ignore it.
Or, if the professor in question was going to attend this conference anyhow, then you could ask if he/she would be willing to present it in your place. A published paper might look good on your CV right out of school; at least it would give the interviewer something to talk with you about.
I was in the same boat a few years ago and did exactly this. I had a paper published in some eastern conference but really didn't have the time or money to go, but my supervisor did.
A published paper is a nice way to spruce up your resume and as an undergrad it shows you are willing to go the extra mile. Conferences themselves are only worthwhile if you are actually interested in the topic and want to continue your studies.
Conferences can be a costly affair, with travel costs and attendance fees. They make their money due to everyone wanting to publish and coming to present their work. IMHO papers and conferences have very little to do with actual science and everything to do with quota's, funding and the like. But that's another topic altogether.
But now some other company, maybe one with a strong Intel partnership, can come along, scoop it up and run with it if they decide their existing OS is dying a slow death.
Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting. Why go with Meego when you can get a supported and actively developed OS instead?
Every now and then someone rants about division between desktop Linux distributions being the cause of lack of adoption. In mobile Linux "distributions" there is one large player and porting to and from the various alternatives is much more complex.
Perhaps it's just better in the long run to rally around Android and do our best to make it as open as possible, Meego doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And I'm saying this as a happy N900/Maemo user.
I would choose an Android, Microsoft, HP, RIM or even Apple ahead of Symbian. It was great for smartphones three years ago, but who would choose it today?
Agreed. Symbian as an OS isn't that bad. The symbian UI and menu structure is terrible, they simply failed to keep up.
5 years ago Nokia was by far the largest in the smartphone business. That made them lazy and slow to react. Along comes a company that decided to do touchscreens properly with a clean uncluttered UI and Nokia failed to respond.
It's really a shame. Instead of putting all their efforts into either Symbian (a proper touchscreen interface / refactoring) or Meego (actually releasing more than 1 product) they decide to haul in _another_ OS, one that is barely more mature than Meego. It doesn't matter which OS it is, splitting their resources so late in the game is suicide.
The point is you do not live with concepts (ask to somebody teaching math) you need to SELL them and to do that you need to know DETAILS of ever new and changing stuff. Nice the first 10 years of your careers, then you think, wow, I spend quite some time learning and nobody pays me anything... wow.
You are correct that as a small consultant you don't live with concepts. However why are you trying to sell them? Just learn a couple very well and keep an open mind to anything new that comes along.
As a small who^Wconsultant you should be selling only one thing properly: yourself. That is the only 'concept' that brings in the dough. If no one is paying you you aren't doing that very well, regardless of everything else that you know.
That's not meddling in the Middle East. It's stopping meddling in the Middle East.
Nope, that's still meddling.
The best the US can do is to simply leave Egypt alone. If they throw their weight on either side they are meddling with a country's internal affairs and simply planting the seed for the next revolution.
If the US drops support for Mubarak it will show to other supported dictators (Pakistan, SA etc) that US-support is limited when it comes to popular uprisings. Anti-government groups will use this weakness to topple their governments and dictators will have to choose between force or surrender.
If the US openly supports anti-government groups in Egypt this will bolster numerous groups even further and the US will be seen as a very untrustworthy ally at best. How would you see China if they openly backed revolutionary groups in the US? Even if those groups might be morally right, it still is meddling.
Alas, US interests are everywhere and not meddling will harm those interests. The reality is that Egypt is most likely a lose/lose/lose situation for the US.
Why are trying to "defeat" creationism? Why can't we just put the data and findings out there, and let people make their own decisions
Because putting creationism and evolution next to each other and letting the kids figure out which one is right isn't teaching?
Evolution should be taught during biology classes, christianity/islam/wicca can be taught during religion classes. There is no overlap and anyone that thinks there is should get a good slapping by one of His noodly appendages. These aren't the Dark Ages anymore.
Dear $DEITY, the number of times I've seen (mostly) PHP crapplications use CREATE DATABASE and CREATE / ALTER TABLE, often with ingenious naming schemes, instead of simply inserting new rows. Certain people shouldn't be allowed to touch databases.
If anyone needs me I'll be sobbing over my coffee.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Iron Neelie were to slam facebook for privacy abuses when she herself has a facebook page?
If she were to delete her profile in response to this it might be a good gesture. She has been pushing online privacy strongly, and facebook almost certainly doesn't comply to EU-US safe harbour privacy principles.
+1 nano. Around 10 years ago during my CS undergraduate classes everyone could just pick what they were used to, but students that were still getting used to this here shell thingy were nudged to use nano first during the unix introduction class. Easy to pick up and get stuff done and graduating to emacs (or vi if you like colons) is relatively easy.
And to the sibling post about nano not conforming to any standard: you're right. But when you've barely touched the surface of programming it's a relief to have an editor that has the basic control functions always displayed. Forcing them to learn vi is pointless when they can use those braincells to learn about asm, pointers and compilers. Learning how to use an editor has nothing to do with CS.
I suspect they were losing money, compared to their earlier plans that is.
As long as customers don't mind paying for 160 bytes of text telco's will happily accept and make it last as long as they can. They'll start to see their texting-profits erode soon enough once more customers (read: teens) discover flat-fee mobile internet with apps like whatsapp can save them a hunk of cash every month.
Slashdot Mirror
But that would have meant that those poor overworked civil servants in charge would actually have to manage an IT project, heaven forbid.
No, it's much easier to let others do the heavy lifting and simply pay the bills with our money.
And the internet does a collective *facepalm*
Regardless of the idiot in Labour who was responsible, the real surprise is that the ruling liberal party voted in favour of this filtering. It was probably a carrot for the christians who they need to stay in power, but still...
Politicians: Ignorant, stupid, malicious. Pick 3.
Looking at the OOo progress these last 12 years since StarOffice, I think we should be happy with the enthousiasm behind LibreOffice.
Not to belittle the work of all those well-paid engineers, but what exactly have they been doing all this time? ODF, OOXML importing, database tool changes, exporting to PDF...
All fine and well that Sun open sourced the project, but it seems OOo has been hampered from the start due to Sun "owning" the project: progress has been minimal. It's time for fresh blood and a new start. It worked for XFree86, it'll work for OOo.
I think that every Linux distribution and DE developer should have this as a mantra.
For everything that has been developed over the last 10 years, a lot of it has been busywork that serves to only stroke the ego of the developers. Every desktop and every distribution should be easy to use, but most importantly shouldn't get in the way of the user. Switching interfaces (KDE 4, Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3, Unity) might be fun for developers (Ooo shiny 3D windows!) and keep them interested, users just can't give a damn and either are forced to learn yet another interface or switch DE/OS.
Look at Windows 95 -> Windows 7. Anyone comfortable with one can easily switch to the next. The interface might not always be pretty but it is consistent, gets out of the way and lets you get to work.
Just like XFCE4 actually, I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more.
1999 called, it wants its rant back. Where have you been this last decade?
Seriously, with CSS (W3C, not coincidently the same maintainers of HTML) we have that web presentation language and it works pretty well across all major browsers. If you want to give your users a 'consistent user experience', CSS will force it upon them.
Even with differences between CSS versions and DOM implementations we have it much easier than when frames, white 1px images, ActiveX hacks and tables were the way to do "web design". Those 'designed for IE' labels weren't for show: getting that consistent user experience was a beast for a single browser and nearly impossible across multiple browsers.
Nowadays we have 3 major rendering engines: Trident, Gecko and Webkit. You have differences between IE-versions that you should test for, but it's rare that a Firefox or Chrome/Safari update would ruin your site. Between CSS being the norm and having a number of great Javascript libraries to work with, web development is a breeze compared to the old days.
Now get off my lawn!
When wanting scalability via Amazon primarily S3 makes the most sense. An EC2 instance can be flooded with requests just as well as a VPS or dedicated server can (although upgrading a EC2 instance is much easier), however offloading your media files to S3 and having your server stick to serving only HTML means bandwidth is a better way to help scale your system.
Slashdot will still flood your EC2 instance, but S3 can easily handle the load and help you survive a few seconds longer.
Exactly, and Google has no one to blame but themselves when it comes to poor Android tablet sales.
2011 would have been the year of the Android Tablet. Then manufacturers delayed until easter, OK. Now it's fall 2011 for most models except for those blessed by Google.
For now we can only choose between the overpriced Galaxy Tab and Xoom (on par with the iPad in price) or the Android 2.x el-cheapo tablets, where there probably is a huge opportunity for tablets between those two extremes.
Oh well, 2011 isn't over yet.
True, but isn't debate inherent when allowing people to comment on news items? Slashdot in my eyes has never been about solving other peoples problems. Slashdot is about venting opinions on the latest tech news.
Slashdot isn't a forum where you'd ask for help about your favorite Linux distro, for instance. You might have an excellent question but it might only be slightly relevant to the news item being discussed, and there only is a tight window of time in which you'll get any answers: before you know it the news article with your question drops off the front page. But even so you can have short-lived discussions on Slashdot.
On ordinary discussion forums you set the topic and the group sets the speed in which new topics are brought up. Much more useful for questions, for en-mass debate maybe less so.
Chad was backed by France and indirectly by the US, and actually won in the end. Chad was Qadaffi's Vietnam.
Expanding on my own post, I recently looked into run-of-the-river small scale hydro but the calculations show that you'll need a fast flowing river to get any serious amount of energy. With wind-power it's easy to scale: make it higher and the blades longer. With hydro-without-a-dam you're stuck with sucking the same amount of energy from a single stream. It works for small scale power generation but it's not something that will contribute beyond that.
For serious large-scale hydro energy without dams, the only major contender I could think of is placing large amounts of gigantic turbines in the Gulf stream.
The problem is that this isn't the case. Those dams aren't there only for the flow fluctuations, more importantly is that a large body of water results in water flowing faster through the turbines. The potential energy is much higher when you have all that pressure behind the dam.
en cy clo pe di a
1. a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge.
The only reason encyclopedias didn't add more information was because it wasn't feasible. Wikipedia was doing great, why would you want to limit it to only a subset of human knowledge? Information that I find trivial might interest my neighbor, so why would I delete an article about his precious snowflake? Why should my article about belly button lint have to be relevant?
Storage is cheap. Compared to wiki articles storage is insanely cheap. Someone can add articles about every flower in his local park and it still wouldn't cost more than a few MB. Extra articles don't clutter up anything.
Stop trying to place an arbitrary border around a subset of human knowledge and pretend you're the gatekeeper. The whole deletionist movement and infighting about relevancy has done Wikipedia much more harm than any article about an obscure anime series could ever do.
Give us our H2G2. If I don't think something is relevant, I'll simply ignore it.
I was in the same boat a few years ago and did exactly this. I had a paper published in some eastern conference but really didn't have the time or money to go, but my supervisor did.
A published paper is a nice way to spruce up your resume and as an undergrad it shows you are willing to go the extra mile. Conferences themselves are only worthwhile if you are actually interested in the topic and want to continue your studies.
Conferences can be a costly affair, with travel costs and attendance fees. They make their money due to everyone wanting to publish and coming to present their work. IMHO papers and conferences have very little to do with actual science and everything to do with quota's, funding and the like. But that's another topic altogether.
Thanks for the tip.
I was using Clusty before it got Yippified, after that Scroogle. I'll give duckduckgo a try.
Except that they also could simply go with Android and let Google do most of the heavy lifting. Why go with Meego when you can get a supported and actively developed OS instead?
Every now and then someone rants about division between desktop Linux distributions being the cause of lack of adoption. In mobile Linux "distributions" there is one large player and porting to and from the various alternatives is much more complex.
Perhaps it's just better in the long run to rally around Android and do our best to make it as open as possible, Meego doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And I'm saying this as a happy N900/Maemo user.
Oracle has trashed OpenSSO though, which was a pity.
I'm glad ForgeRock picked up the pieces, I guess Oracle was afraid it might cut into their "enterprise" IM business.
Agreed. Symbian as an OS isn't that bad. The symbian UI and menu structure is terrible, they simply failed to keep up.
5 years ago Nokia was by far the largest in the smartphone business. That made them lazy and slow to react. Along comes a company that decided to do touchscreens properly with a clean uncluttered UI and Nokia failed to respond.
It's really a shame. Instead of putting all their efforts into either Symbian (a proper touchscreen interface / refactoring) or Meego (actually releasing more than 1 product) they decide to haul in _another_ OS, one that is barely more mature than Meego. It doesn't matter which OS it is, splitting their resources so late in the game is suicide.
You are correct that as a small consultant you don't live with concepts. However why are you trying to sell them? Just learn a couple very well and keep an open mind to anything new that comes along.
As a small who^Wconsultant you should be selling only one thing properly: yourself. That is the only 'concept' that brings in the dough. If no one is paying you you aren't doing that very well, regardless of everything else that you know.
Nope, that's still meddling.
The best the US can do is to simply leave Egypt alone. If they throw their weight on either side they are meddling with a country's internal affairs and simply planting the seed for the next revolution.
If the US drops support for Mubarak it will show to other supported dictators (Pakistan, SA etc) that US-support is limited when it comes to popular uprisings. Anti-government groups will use this weakness to topple their governments and dictators will have to choose between force or surrender.
If the US openly supports anti-government groups in Egypt this will bolster numerous groups even further and the US will be seen as a very untrustworthy ally at best. How would you see China if they openly backed revolutionary groups in the US? Even if those groups might be morally right, it still is meddling.
Alas, US interests are everywhere and not meddling will harm those interests. The reality is that Egypt is most likely a lose/lose/lose situation for the US.
Give them a try, I don't see how a HTML5 MMORPG (far7) lacks ambition and in my eyes it is more polished (and original) than freeciv.net.
I do agree that HTML5 gaming is wide open. Amazing work, a playable game using only Javascript would have been unheard of a few years ago.
Because putting creationism and evolution next to each other and letting the kids figure out which one is right isn't teaching?
Evolution should be taught during biology classes, christianity/islam/wicca can be taught during religion classes. There is no overlap and anyone that thinks there is should get a good slapping by one of His noodly appendages. These aren't the Dark Ages anymore.
Dear $DEITY, the number of times I've seen (mostly) PHP crapplications use CREATE DATABASE and CREATE / ALTER TABLE, often with ingenious naming schemes, instead of simply inserting new rows. Certain people shouldn't be allowed to touch databases.
If anyone needs me I'll be sobbing over my coffee.
Wouldn't it be ironic if Iron Neelie were to slam facebook for privacy abuses when she herself has a facebook page?
If she were to delete her profile in response to this it might be a good gesture. She has been pushing online privacy strongly, and facebook almost certainly doesn't comply to EU-US safe harbour privacy principles.
+1 nano. Around 10 years ago during my CS undergraduate classes everyone could just pick what they were used to, but students that were still getting used to this here shell thingy were nudged to use nano first during the unix introduction class. Easy to pick up and get stuff done and graduating to emacs (or vi if you like colons) is relatively easy.
And to the sibling post about nano not conforming to any standard: you're right. But when you've barely touched the surface of programming it's a relief to have an editor that has the basic control functions always displayed. Forcing them to learn vi is pointless when they can use those braincells to learn about asm, pointers and compilers. Learning how to use an editor has nothing to do with CS.
I suspect they were losing money, compared to their earlier plans that is.
As long as customers don't mind paying for 160 bytes of text telco's will happily accept and make it last as long as they can. They'll start to see their texting-profits erode soon enough once more customers (read: teens) discover flat-fee mobile internet with apps like whatsapp can save them a hunk of cash every month.