Take, for example the Force, from Star Wars. What was the almost universal reaction when it turns out that it's not some kinda mystical force, but tiny parasites living in your blood? It was a shit explanation.
Christianity (and Islam, and Jewdaism, sortof) And here I'll just point out that Judaism, Islam and Christianity are simply branches of the same sect, all three of which base their religion on the "Old Testament"/Torah/Tawrat.
What we need is a professional standards body that actually measures skills and mandates periodic skills reviews to maintain certification according to accepted industry guidelines. Practical examinations as well as an apprenticeship period would be preferable to ensure capability. Sorry that isn't enough to give high salaries. It is a good beginning step though. You want to know what the ??? step is towards profit? Scarcity.
1: What you do is persuade your local representative that government contracts require the professional certification.
2: You persuade your representative that certification is required to practice at all.
3: That's when you hit paydirt. Profit!!!
The key to profit is scarcity. Induced naturally, by law or by whatever means you can arrange. It's how the doctors and lawyers have arranged to become wealthy.
I'm not trying to crap on your parade, it just seems like ever since the.com boom people have been saying it more and more and I just don't see it as being a good idea. The very fact that you're reading this page tells me that.
You and I are outnumbered by people like our aunts, their friends, brothers, mothers our friends who find computers to be a form of black magic. I am quite happy for them to use a thin client. In fact, I encourage it.
Ultimately it'll happen, you'll see it more and more as bandwidth increases.
Get rid of compiz, put metacity back in. Run XFCE rather than Gnome and you have a light usable desktop...
The Window List works as expected, the behavior in Gnome is a bit odd. Wireless does work though NetworkManager is not as reliable as init. Lets see, the only complaint I have with XFCE is that I can't change the amount of text available on desktop icons, long file names are truncated to about 20 chars. Oh and I can't be bothered figuring out how to get an OpenOffice icon for odt files.
Oh and cool feature. The pager remembers where applications were running when you log back in. That's a killer feature Gnome doesn't get right.
It just works, gets out of the way and seems to be saving me about 100Mb on RAM overall.
I realize this is just a trial, but seriously, can anyone explain to me how this a good idea? The more you use it, the better it learns what you mean when you type "black rubber strapping" and gives the results appropriate weighting just for you.
"Schizophrenia is a perfectly reasonable response to modern society, if you've accepted that you can't change it and you want to live at any cost, I suppose..."
Schizophrenia is not Multiple Personality Disorder...
It's not about smart/stupid as far as I can see, it's about motivation and effort. You can be brilliant intellectually and completely unmotivated. In fact that seems to be the raison d'etre for teachers and our educational establishment.
From what I've seen of the world, motivation is far more important in determining success than intelligence.
Given two people with similar degrees from Oxford and from the Open University, I'll take the OU graduate every time.
The UK education system is seriously fucked up. It's goal based now. The purpose is to get you to pass exams, not to educate. We might be better off with the International Baccalaureate outwith political control. The other thing is that education should be life long. It should just be a standard part of being a citizen.
The brain changes shape, it takes several years, it has to modify the strength of all these trillions of connections but with enough effort eventually you get good at what you're learning.
The fucking dumb idea is that we didn't learn the Soviets' lesson, even though we helped them invent asymmetrical warfare. You didn't invent it or help them invent it. It's been around for thousands of years.
Take a look at the weavers during the 18th century. As soon as power and roads allowed. That's approximately what's going to happen to internal IT organisations and independent software places.
Primarily, take more than 8% of journeys off the road.
They fit in with the western "everything personalised" thinking. It's not the personalised feature of PRT which is the real benefit. It's just the mathematics of travel.
With rail, or maglev or a monorail, an APM, or even a bus you are moving a group of people from A to Z, stopping at B, C, D, E, F.... on the way. This is SLOW. It doesn't matter how fast the top speed is if you have to sit stationary for 30 seconds every 2 miles while people get on and off.
When you have a group of people on the vehicle it has to stop at B at 5 mins past the hour, C at 10mins past, D at 15 mins past etc etc so that people can be there waiting at the station. This is also SLOW. Think about it, you have to leave early, travel to the station and then wait for everyone else to arrive at the scheduled time on the vehicle.
Of course then there's the fact that you want to go south east to your destination but the route which the vehicle must travel only goes east, so you have to switch to another mode in order to make it to your destination.
The result of all this is that any form of travel which moves groups of people is subject to a set of fundamental limitations which make it really SLOW under most circumstances. The optimal circumstances for a group vehicle are point to point from source to destination with no stops in between. Something like an inter city express train. For anything else they suck.
PRT on the other hand is always point to point non stop because it doesn't have to stop at intermediate stations to let passengers on and off.
You're seriously overestimating the ease of the software licence world. It's just another cost of using proprietary software. Pay it or be audited and sued.
What I find most strange about Linus is that the Linux kernel isn't an obligatory part of a Free operating system and can easily be replaced. Perhaps he should just keep his mouth closed. *BSD, Hurd, Linux
You can have a nearly identical operating system sitting on top of any of them. Choose your preferred kernel.
I think Linus should keep his head on the kernel, in particular how he can improve it to bring it to the level where it can compete with the opensolaris kernel when Sun GPLv3's it. I'm sure he'll worry[1] about that when they actually do it.
but you can't defend Microsoft's right to participate in foreign corruption just because the place is a shit-hole. The alternative is dead American soldiers... Is that defence enough for you?
Slashdot Mirror
And set up your own telecommunications company.
Oh wait... It's easier to sit back and complain.
Y'know, this was exactly my thought.
As politics within the empire become more important than results, the results begin to decline.
1: What you do is persuade your local representative that government contracts require the professional certification.
2: You persuade your representative that certification is required to practice at all.
3: That's when you hit paydirt. Profit!!!
The key to profit is scarcity. Induced naturally, by law or by whatever means you can arrange. It's how the doctors and lawyers have arranged to become wealthy.
You and I are outnumbered by people like our aunts, their friends, brothers, mothers our friends who find computers to be a form of black magic. I am quite happy for them to use a thin client. In fact, I encourage it.
Ultimately it'll happen, you'll see it more and more as bandwidth increases.
Get rid of compiz, put metacity back in. Run XFCE rather than Gnome and you have a light usable desktop...
The Window List works as expected, the behavior in Gnome is a bit odd. Wireless does work though NetworkManager is not as reliable as init. Lets see, the only complaint I have with XFCE is that I can't change the amount of text available on desktop icons, long file names are truncated to about 20 chars. Oh and I can't be bothered figuring out how to get an OpenOffice icon for odt files.
Oh and cool feature. The pager remembers where applications were running when you log back in. That's a killer feature Gnome doesn't get right.
It just works, gets out of the way and seems to be saving me about 100Mb on RAM overall.
The idea of separation of social and professional lives is a touch... sophisticated... for your average Slashdotter. You never know, it may catch on.
"Schizophrenia is a perfectly reasonable response to modern society, if you've accepted that you can't change it and you want to live at any cost, I suppose..."
Schizophrenia is not Multiple Personality Disorder...
It's not about smart/stupid as far as I can see, it's about motivation and effort. You can be brilliant intellectually and completely unmotivated. In fact that seems to be the raison d'etre for teachers and our educational establishment.
From what I've seen of the world, motivation is far more important in determining success than intelligence.
Given two people with similar degrees from Oxford and from the Open University, I'll take the OU graduate every time.
The UK education system is seriously fucked up. It's goal based now. The purpose is to get you to pass exams, not to educate. We might be better off with the International Baccalaureate outwith political control. The other thing is that education should be life long. It should just be a standard part of being a citizen.
The brain changes shape, it takes several years, it has to modify the strength of all these trillions of connections but with enough effort eventually you get good at what you're learning.
Um... What's the standard deviation on that?
While I like the sentiment, I suspect the usefulness is going to be... limited... It'll be as easy to put in the street names and such.
They pretty much all support syncml now and there are a couple of syncml servers available. Seems to work ok.
Opensync, multisync and funambol. Funambol may be your best all in one bet.
Take a look at the weavers during the 18th century. As soon as power and roads allowed. That's approximately what's going to happen to internal IT organisations and independent software places.
With rail, or maglev or a monorail, an APM, or even a bus you are moving a group of people from A to Z, stopping at B, C, D, E, F.... on the way. This is SLOW. It doesn't matter how fast the top speed is if you have to sit stationary for 30 seconds every 2 miles while people get on and off.
When you have a group of people on the vehicle it has to stop at B at 5 mins past the hour, C at 10mins past, D at 15 mins past etc etc so that people can be there waiting at the station. This is also SLOW. Think about it, you have to leave early, travel to the station and then wait for everyone else to arrive at the scheduled time on the vehicle.
Of course then there's the fact that you want to go south east to your destination but the route which the vehicle must travel only goes east, so you have to switch to another mode in order to make it to your destination.
The result of all this is that any form of travel which moves groups of people is subject to a set of fundamental limitations which make it really SLOW under most circumstances. The optimal circumstances for a group vehicle are point to point from source to destination with no stops in between. Something like an inter city express train. For anything else they suck.
PRT on the other hand is always point to point non stop because it doesn't have to stop at intermediate stations to let passengers on and off.
You can have a nearly identical operating system sitting on top of any of them. Choose your preferred kernel. I think Linus should keep his head on the kernel, in particular how he can improve it to bring it to the level where it can compete with the opensolaris kernel when Sun GPLv3's it. I'm sure he'll worry[1] about that when they actually do it.
[1] Where worry == rejoice.
No. The desktop is dead. It's the year of Linux in your pocket.
In that circumstance you think whether the OLPC or whatever is successful or not is the problem?
The customers who bought a device got what they wanted. Those who didn't, didn't.