I think the common assumption that introns are junk may well turn out to be one of the most glaring fallacies of turn-of-the-century genetics.
I'll go out on a limb and bet that within the next 20 years we discover that not only is the protein coding of the exons immensely more convoluted than we ever dreamed, but that the "junk" introns are indeed information carrying and serve a vital and useful purpose. (There is some speculation that the information that tells the coded information *how* to develop (*something* tells undifferentiated tissue to become a heart) could reside in the introns.)
Remember, if we're at all intellectually honest on this subject, the first thing we have to admit is that we don't even know how much we don't know. Unfortunately, this attitude is rare amongst genetic researchers.
God is an awesome engineer, so doing the reverse engineering is likely to take quite a while...
I agree fiber cabling isn't much more expensive, but wait till you start to pay for the network electronics (NICs, switches, routers, etc.) OUCH!
BTW, security of fiber is not what many people think: Anybody that wants the data on a fiber bad enough to try to physically tap it is going to know that they can simply dunk the cable into some really nasty solvents to eat away the jacket, then simply flex the cable enough to cause a little light leakage in the bend and hook up an optical receiver and amplifier. Note that this method avoids ever severing the cable, and is quite hard to detect...
This is total and complete bunk. Common Cat 5 wiring is also know as UTP, or Unshielded Twisted Pair. There's no shield, and nothing to ground.
And yes, I used to design premises wiring systems. This was so blatant an error, I thought it should be stomped out now before someone believes this BS.
If you really want to understand how to do wiring right, spend a little time at the Siemon or Leviton web sites. This stuff is not that hard, so long as you listen to people who know what they're talking about.
My recommendations for homes in a nutshell:
1) dont' fall for expensive wiring centers (On-Q and their ilk)
2) use cat 5 wiring, jacks, punch-down blocks, and patch cables - that's plenty adequate. Run 2 jackets (16 wires or 8 pairs total) to each location you think you'll want a phone or computer device in the next five years. (Don't go overboard - I see a lot of new houses here in Austin with a ridiculous amount of wiring. I have only what I need, and I'm quite happy with it. Remember wireless is an option, too...
3) I like the little Leviton modular outlets.
4) The same little Leviton modules can be snapped into a very inexpensive 8-hole metal bracket they sell to provide the equivalent of a small patch panel at much lower cost.
5) Stick to well-known wiring standards: Use EIA/TIA 568A (general stds) and 606 (labeling).
6) There are also pair-to-pin standards. I prefer T-568A, although T-568B is also a good alternative. (Note the "T", which spcifies the "termination" spec, not the generic 568A spec mentioned above.) Avoid RBOC and other schemes as they're less common and will confuse other people.
7) Spend some time at web sites devoted to cabling before diving in. You'll be glad you did.
8) Look around for tools, too: There are a number of special drill bits, wire retrievers, string throwers, etc, that can make the job easier. Some are worth the money even for a home job.
9)There's just no subsitute for a 3-foot long drill bit when you really need one, and despite what someone said elsewhere in this discussion, don't open up the drywall if you can help it. It's not usually necessary, the repairs always show, and doing so represents a substantial failure of creativity and imagination.;-)
For any of you that were wondering, Clippy is Bob. For proof, just call up the paperclip in word by clicking on the little help ballon ion on the toolbar, then search for "Bob" - the hits are all about the Office Assistant. (Well, all in Excel97, nearly all in Word97.)
BTW - I never expected them to get rid of this for one very good reason: I've been told by several Microsoft employees that the product manager for Bob was none other than the woman we now know as Melinda Gates. Bob has friends in high places indeed...
Tentacle, my hat's off to you. I didn't find this thread when it was fresh, or I would have been posting alongside you. Your postings have been accurate, thoughtful and polite - that's not easy in the face of such raw hatred as seems to be flowing here.
You missed one very important point, though: when you said,
"I read an earlier post, whose main arguments against a conservative is that they are anti-women, anti-homosexual, and anti "minority-religion" (whatever that means). Honestly, I don't recall the last time a conservative suggested beating women, imprisoning homosexuals, or burning Wiccans at the stake.",
you should have mentioned that the *only* societies in the history of the world that have tolerated other religions as a policy are Christian.
Don't forget - it was the intensely Protestant & Puritan founding fathers that created the most tolerant culture in the history of the entire planet. I sometimes wonder if the Slashdot Socialists would even be capable of *reading* Jonathan Edwards without suffering from sever cognitive dissonance... (For those of you suffering as I was, from a public education, Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded even by many non-Christian historians as the most intelligent person ever to live in the Americas. And apparently, the insight and intelligence stayed in the family: A survey done in 1900 showed his descendants included 13 college presidents, 65 professors, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, a dean of a prestigious law school, 80 public office holders, nearly 100 missionairies, 3 mayors of large cities, 3 governors, 3 US senators, one US treasurer, and a US vice-president!)
If they're not afraid of the truth, the Slashdot Socialists should read Edwards at my friend Mark Trigsted's excellent site: www.jonathanedwards.com. It's funny, isn't it, that Edwards was one of the most influential driving forces behind the mindset that created the uniquely tolerant American government?
This is a real problem, but the fundamental reason it's a problem is one that's well-understood by library scientists: We only have addresses, not content identifiers.
To use a book analogy, the entire web is built on Dewey Decimal addresses (URLs), when what we need is those combined with ISBN numbers (URNs).
I didn't make up the idea of URNs - the concept was first described to me by Peter Deutsch, the inventor of Archie, at Interop sometime in the early 90's, shortly after the web got going. (Back when there were no search engines, and we found out about new web sites by visiting NCSA's What's New page, which for a while, anyway, actualy cataloged *every* new web site that appeared, and some of us could claim to have surfed the entire web...)
The idea behind URNs is that they would be a unique identifier for the content. The same content living on different sites would have severl URLs, but only a single URN. This is still needed today, but the problems that kept it from being implemented then are even more intractable today: Who hands out URNs? (IANA didn't want to touch that!) How do you handle versioning? What about dynamic content? Who are the librarians?
We still desperately need somthing that fills this need, but it's not likely we'll get it. One last parting thought - in discussing this with Deutsch, he pointed out that these are new problems to us, but that the library scientists had solved them quite some time ago: It is only the typical CS insistence on reinventing everything and dismissing the knowledge of those in other fields that makes the process so incredibly painful... Hubris strikes again.
You know, I'm not exactly dying to have a high power GSM phone next to my head using the only modulation method that *has* correlated to cancer in laboratory tests.
GSM cancer-phones are a BAD idea - we certainly don't know for sure that they're dangerous, but it looks quite possible that they're far more dangerous than other systems (like CDMA) where the RF signal looks like low-power noise and doesn't have very sharp high-power square waves.
If GSM is the way to change the world, leave me behind. (It pains me that the VisorPhone, possibly the coolest piece of technology integration of the past 10 years, is only available in warmware-hostile GSM form for now.)
I'd argue that the Internet is really the *only* reason PCs make the list - and one day, they'll be an interesting sidenote to history as embeded devices take over more and more of the PC's function. Like Scott McNealy said, "When was the last time you had to reboot your telephone?" (Remember that to more than 99% of computer users, a disconnected PC is not much more than a nice typewriter.)
And of course, one could make the argument that the Internet itself, as revolutionary as it is in some ways, was to a significant degree built on the circuit switched backbone that only existed because of the telephone, so maybe only Alex Bell's invention deserves credit, here anyway...
OK, Let's stop the hysterical ranting against the rights of anyone to ever assert any control at all on the fruits of thier own labor, and look at the facts:
First, PDF *does not* prevent copying. In fact, Adobe went out of ther way to ensure that the PDF itself could indeed be legitimately passed around. The bits in question simply flag two conditions, neither of which should be controversial or contentious:
1. Don't allow changes. This one simply (and quite reasonably) implements within a PDF the same requirement that exists even in many open source licenses: don't make changes to someone else's work and then pass on those changes as if they were the original author's. In reality, someone passing off a modified version of my work as mine is likely to make me far angrier than if they were to simply steal it. This is a matter of authorial integrity, and we *should* honor those bits, if the author chooses - and he may or may not - they're optional, remember. Ignoring this bit is nothing less than dismissing the author's integrity and character as unimportant. Note that this is far more important in text than in code, since text is far more frequently used to express opnions and arguments.
2. Don't allow printing of the PDF. This is also quite reasonable, and there are many good reasons for allowing authors (or distributors) to specify this option: Sometimes, the document is large and may change frequently, therefore, allowing printing makes little sense, and can result in an organization incurring very high costs for users printing off their own personal copies of documents. (This is about the most expensive method known for distributing documents.) Finally, much PDF content is actually available in printed form, and it's reasonable to have to actually *buy* the printed version if that's what you're after. (Again, it's generally cheaper, too.)
This whole thing is nothing more than a disgruntled freenet developer trying to impose his notions of "freedom to steal the legitimate work of others" on the entire Debian community. Debian should NOT incorporate this patch. I think the GPL is folly, but it doesn't concern me too much because I have a choice.
What Adam Langley proposes here is the document equivalent of retroactively imposing a GPL-like license on PDF content, simply because he prefers it. The choice of licenses is a very personal one and one that should *always* be made by the author: whether or not we agree with it, we must honor the author's decision on this matter, as it is his work that is at issue.
At IBM PartnerWorld in Atlanta this past week, they showed off the most impressive display I've ever seen. Here are some of the specs from a card I picked up on it:
Image size: 22" diagonal
Aspect ratio: 16x10
Resolution: 204 ppi (!!)
Addressability: QUXGA-Wide (I think they're making this stuff up... [grin])
Number of pixels: 9.2 Million (3840x2400)
Contrast Ratio: 400:1
This thing, as you might expect, is REALLY impressive. It's like having a fully virtual 11x17 (B-size) sheet of paper in front of you, since the pixel density is one that would be respectable for a printer, much less a screen.
Tiny details and hairlines are sharply visible: they showed a street map of all of Manhatan, and every street was clear, if small. This sort of thing in a foldable, portable, low power form factor would finally give us a viable replacement for paper in some cases.
I have no idea what kind of video card it used, or how much compute power is required to run the thing. It was quite snappy in the demos.
Oh and it's not available yet (it will be targeted at CAD/CAM and medical imaging markets), but when it is, expect to pay around 30 kilobucks. Guess I won't be gettig one after all...
This shouldn't turn into a flame war, so I'll simply say that there is good scientific evidence that supports a literal reading of the Biblical creation account. Many "scientists" reject this data out of hand because it doesn't fit their preferred worldview. At this point, this *ceases* to be in any way a question of science and becomes one of philosophy. Most scientist refuse to admit that, however.
I have read Sobel's Galileo's Daughter - it's a great book, and I truly sympathize with his struggles with the Roman church. But you missed my point - we STILL don't know today any more than he could know then, which model is right. Relativitiy tells us theres no way to tell...
URL completion did not work for me. Don't know why, if it was working for you.
As for bookmarks, they may work for trivial lists of bookmarks, but mine is quite large, having been built since 1993 (although only a few have stayed around that long...)
Mozilla is DEFINITELY not up to the task of handling my bookmarks file.
But should they have done so? You see, it's possible to construct a perfectly spherical model of the universe with earth at the center which properly represents everything we observe. (Such a universe does violate Ockham's razor, as it appears (at least from where we sit) to be more complex than the now-conventional view.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that WE CAN NEVER KNOW which is really the case. It was exactly this line of thought that got Einstien going on relativity, and he himself said that there's no way we could ever prove geocentricity, heliocentricity, or whatevercentricity false. (That's the whole point of relativity...)
Whether or not the earth is the center of the universe is not something we can know in this life, or that science can tell us. The failure to acknowledge this simple fact is the root of much of the dissension on this topic here today.
In a nutshell, this proves the existence of God. The very act of presupposing these axioms to be true implies the existence of objective truth.
We've got hundreds of very good (or at least, logical) philosophers over the past two hundred years that have shown that if objective truth exists, then God must exist. Since they reject the notion of God, they then (corretly from a logical point of view) work backwards to prove that there is no objective truth, resulting a the slew of postmodernist humanist philosophies that fly in the face of common sense and observed reality. But they DO manage to deny the existence of God...
An easy (but certainly oversimplistic) example of this might be Douglas Jones' now-moderately-famous article about how the assumption of a Christian worldview is implicit in something as simple and innocuous as going to the store and buying milk.
There are *always* underlying assumptions - scientists that deny this are fooling themselves, and philosophers have acknowledged this to be true for thousands of years, so to claim otherwise is simply ignorance...
As evolutionary theory itself makes an enormous number of claims that are neither testable of falsifiable, I believe your argument fails.
Too many people are too quick to dismiss one side or the other on the basis of "religion".
The fact is that this entire area of inquiry is full of VERY hard qustions, and there are extremely valid SCIENTIFIC reasons to doubt much of what passes for evolutionary gospel in today's scintific circles.
I recommend a few of the following articles from uber-hacker Do-While Jones' excellent web site, if you're open-minded enough to really analyze the facts as we see them presented in the real world:
All of these articles can be found at the index to Do-While Jones' excellent web archive of his scienceagainstevolution.org newsletter, Disclosure (see sig below, or http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/newsletters.htm, plus many more. The truth may not be so clear-cut as you think...
If more people used browsers that understood the newer standards, including stuff like CSS, developers may be more inclined to ensure that their sites work for all (CSS used for all the fluff, so it degrades nicely) - rather than spending their time trying for incompatibility between the many different browsers. CSS could well be the main thing, not least because the major browsers (IE, Mozilla, not sure about Opera) allow the user to override CSS settings if desired.
Not even close. Having just been through CSS hell trying to get even the simplest things working correctly on a new site, I can tell you that the client end isn't the problem - it's the authoring end. I've yet to find a tool that really has the knowledge required to build things like they ought to be built, and it's silly to think that only "professional web designers" (those that care about the arcanities of CSS) are building web pages today.
Compare the effort required to get something as simple as a good-looking (graphical) heirarchical nav menu working in JavaScript vs. CSS/DHTML and then decide which makes more sense if your time is worth anything. I wasted several hours, then usashamedly opted for JavaScript. Until that knowledge is embedded in the authoring tools, it's just not going to make it into most of the pages out there, since I (and many others) simply won't take the time to deal with today's morass of web "standards", a situation that leaves us at something of an impasse, doesn't it?
Yep, I downloaded and tried the new 0.8 this week, in fact.
It's still so far from usable as to be an absolute joke. It does render well, but is missing functionality that's important in the real world (seemingly little things like URL completion, bookmarks that work, and roaming profiles.)
On top of that, when I tried the mail, it failed to acknowledge any of my messages between some time in October of 1999 and yesterday. That's just scary. (Fortunately, it doesn't appear that it damaged my mail files.)
Mozilla's gone from my box now, and good riddance. Mozilla had a chance, but is now completely irrelevant, as Netscape may soon be as well. I *hate* IE with a passion, but will probably switch to it in the next couple of months simply because I can't afford to marginalize myself relative to my peers. (But I refuse to use Outlook/Exchange for mail - that's where the real line in the sand is for me...)
It's sad nothing else handles bookmarks worth a flip...
Although I agree that Win95 is better than Win98 on these machines, I have a *real* hard time believing that a) IE 5.5 is faster than Netscape on a machine of that vintage, and b) that Netscape/X11/Linux cannot do acceptably on that hardware.
As to item "a" above, I know that IE adds a tremendous amount of overhead to the OS itself - this was one of the big reasons Win98 is such a pig. "Upgrading" a Win95 machine to IE rips up and replaces very large portions of the OS. (And I think I speak with some authority on this issue, as I was software program manager for Dell's notebook lines of business for the introduction of both IE4 and Win98 - NOT a fun job. BTW, 32 MB is an absolute minimum with IE *or* W98, which is why we decided not to support W98 on machines with less than 32 MB.) In my experience, a thin/fast Windows-based browsing environment is best achieved with Win95 and Netscape.
As to point b) I'm certainly not the "Linux or death" type (In fact, I currently have only one Linux machine left here, and have moved most everything over to Windows simply because my time is worth too much to mess with Linux while I try to start a company), but if Linux wasn't WAY faster on that old hardware, you were doing something badly wrong. (I suspect it had to do with trying to use the obese new Linux/WM distros - you apparently aren't even aware, for instance, that Mandrake does offer a 486-optimized version of their code, although it often lags a rev.)
How do I know this should work? The one Linux box I still have here is an Epson IM-403. You've never heard of that, because it's a *cash register* CPU, darn it: a 486SX33, with the max 32 MB of memory, a scrounged 2.5" HD, and a generic NE2000 clone stuffed into the only slot the poor thing has. Running Caldera 2.2, and a not-so-thin (but positively anorexic by today's standards) WM like fvwm or even afterstep, it's not speedy (especially when starting up Netscape), but once it's up and running, the preformance is really quite acceptable. In fact, it was my primary browser here at home for much of last year.
I just can't see how IE5.5 could even possibly be faster in the environment you specify - that doesn't make sense.
Finally, if you really want thin and fast, try Win95 and the new Win32 version of Opera, since that's what I would expect to offer the best possible browsing performance on the machines you describe, and it has adequate plug-in support, to boot (sadly, another advantage of W9x for browsing.)
The multi-versioning capability you describe is essentially a subset of Ted Nelson's Parallel Textface idea, which is about 30 years old now.
Imagine a document that had an actual "brightness" control that worked like the old joke about the knob on the TV... that's Parallel Textface in a nutshell - content can be abstracted or displayed in detail at will or to suit the reader's knowledge level. (There's no getting around the fact that this requires complex editing/autohoring, though...)
To be able to track the development of a document over time, you need an even more sophisticated system - and that's why he invented Xanadu - a brilliant concept that may well outstrip our abilty to realize it for a long time yet...
Why does everyone here start with the assumption that global warming is even real? There is *very* credible evidence that there is no such effect, and a number of scientists have stated as much, but they're not getting the big megaphone from the UN and radical "environmental" groups.
Radical leftist "scientists" and their computer models have been known to intentionally lie to us before: witness the laughable computer predictions of the original 1970 Earth Day and the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" fiasco which assured us with certainty that we would be completely out of oil, gas, copper, zinc, gold, and tin by now. Oh, and the pollution was supposed to be killing us off in the midst of the massive famines that have never happened. In fact, we now have more of all the resources listed above at our disposal than we had then, pollution is sharply down, and food production is at all-time record levels.
A few links that point this out the fallacy of global warming:
http://www.globalwarming.org is the source of these and other links exposing the truth about global warming, which is quite simply that there's no credible evidence that it even exists, and that the global warming crowd employs some of the worst science ever seen so long as it fits their political agenda.
It never ceases to amaze me that the numerous self-proclaimed libertarians on Slashdot are so willing to cede their liberty to a politically motivated cabal far more dangerous to our society than the RIAA or the MPAA could ever be. Wake up and pay attention to the things that really matter, and will impact your real freedoms in the future in ways that are truly Orwellian...
Of course, there's no real objective and credible evidence that global warming even exists. The "science" backing this is nonexistent and the entire IPCC report is a political, rather than a scientific, initiative strongly tainted with radical politics.
Check out http://www.globalwarming.org to at least understand what's going on before you fall for the global warming catastrophists' "the sky is falling" line...
This has been tried with varying degrees of success in the past. One interesting incursion along this avenue was the Xrdb product (never really finished) from RSW software (rsw.com), which grafted a Unix pipe-building and modification interface on top of the shell-oriented/rdb database. (Which in itself may be one of the purest executions of the Unix philosophy I've seen - it's a complete relational DB using the Unix shell as its 4GL, which buys you all of the killer Unix text processing utilities in addition to the DB stuff. Really the best of both worlds - I wish someone would really pick up this idea and run with it...)
Anyway, I don't think they ever completely finished it, but Xrdb was essentially an open-look-based pipeline editor that allowed you to graphically play with the various filters as software legos. IIRC, it even transparently handled things like tee to split a data stream in two. Very cool, and I;m still waiting for a standard package that does something similar...
Not only that, they get that valuable info whether or not they choose to redeem your rebate as they should. This is one reason it ticks me off so bad to be burned on rebate deals, like I was recently after the manufacturer refused to honor a $75 rebate on a new PC - and this is a large and well-known company. I'm rapidly coming to believe that consumers almost never get rebates, since I'm maybe 3 for 25 over the past few years.
At the very least, rebates have been weakened to the point that they no longer affect my buying decision. It's more like buying the product and a lottery ticket than any sort of assurance of saving money...
Here's some of what I've found with newer, but not really current, information. It's really odd that a large display tech. that doesn't require semiconductor processing could just drop off the face of the earth like this...
http://www.meko.com/palc.html
http://www.eurodisplay.org/pdf/progr_eurodisplay .p df (Page 8 contains a description of a 1999 conference discussing a 42" prototype.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the common assumption that introns are junk may well turn out to be one of the most glaring fallacies of turn-of-the-century genetics.
I'll go out on a limb and bet that within the next 20 years we discover that not only is the protein coding of the exons immensely more convoluted than we ever dreamed, but that the "junk" introns are indeed information carrying and serve a vital and useful purpose. (There is some speculation that the information that tells the coded information *how* to develop (*something* tells undifferentiated tissue to become a heart) could reside in the introns.)
Remember, if we're at all intellectually honest on this subject, the first thing we have to admit is that we don't even know how much we don't know. Unfortunately, this attitude is rare amongst genetic researchers.
God is an awesome engineer, so doing the reverse engineering is likely to take quite a while...
I agree fiber cabling isn't much more expensive, but wait till you start to pay for the network electronics (NICs, switches, routers, etc.) OUCH!
BTW, security of fiber is not what many people think: Anybody that wants the data on a fiber bad enough to try to physically tap it is going to know that they can simply dunk the cable into some really nasty solvents to eat away the jacket, then simply flex the cable enough to cause a little light leakage in the bend and hook up an optical receiver and amplifier. Note that this method avoids ever severing the cable, and is quite hard to detect...
This is total and complete bunk. Common Cat 5 wiring is also know as UTP, or Unshielded Twisted Pair. There's no shield, and nothing to ground.
;-)
And yes, I used to design premises wiring systems. This was so blatant an error, I thought it should be stomped out now before someone believes this BS.
If you really want to understand how to do wiring right, spend a little time at the Siemon or Leviton web sites. This stuff is not that hard, so long as you listen to people who know what they're talking about.
My recommendations for homes in a nutshell:
1) dont' fall for expensive wiring centers (On-Q and their ilk)
2) use cat 5 wiring, jacks, punch-down blocks, and patch cables - that's plenty adequate. Run 2 jackets (16 wires or 8 pairs total) to each location you think you'll want a phone or computer device in the next five years. (Don't go overboard - I see a lot of new houses here in Austin with a ridiculous amount of wiring. I have only what I need, and I'm quite happy with it. Remember wireless is an option, too...
3) I like the little Leviton modular outlets.
4) The same little Leviton modules can be snapped into a very inexpensive 8-hole metal bracket they sell to provide the equivalent of a small patch panel at much lower cost.
5) Stick to well-known wiring standards: Use EIA/TIA 568A (general stds) and 606 (labeling).
6) There are also pair-to-pin standards. I prefer T-568A, although T-568B is also a good alternative. (Note the "T", which spcifies the "termination" spec, not the generic 568A spec mentioned above.) Avoid RBOC and other schemes as they're less common and will confuse other people.
7) Spend some time at web sites devoted to cabling before diving in. You'll be glad you did.
8) Look around for tools, too: There are a number of special drill bits, wire retrievers, string throwers, etc, that can make the job easier. Some are worth the money even for a home job.
9)There's just no subsitute for a 3-foot long drill bit when you really need one, and despite what someone said elsewhere in this discussion, don't open up the drywall if you can help it. It's not usually necessary, the repairs always show, and doing so represents a substantial failure of creativity and imagination.
For any of you that were wondering, Clippy is Bob. For proof, just call up the paperclip in word by clicking on the little help ballon ion on the toolbar, then search for "Bob" - the hits are all about the Office Assistant. (Well, all in Excel97, nearly all in Word97.)
BTW - I never expected them to get rid of this for one very good reason: I've been told by several Microsoft employees that the product manager for Bob was none other than the woman we now know as Melinda Gates. Bob has friends in high places indeed...
Tentacle, my hat's off to you. I didn't find this thread when it was fresh, or I would have been posting alongside you. Your postings have been accurate, thoughtful and polite - that's not easy in the face of such raw hatred as seems to be flowing here.
You missed one very important point, though: when you said,
"I read an earlier post, whose main arguments against a conservative is that they are anti-women, anti-homosexual, and anti "minority-religion" (whatever that means). Honestly, I don't recall the last time a conservative suggested beating women, imprisoning homosexuals, or burning Wiccans at the stake.",
you should have mentioned that the *only* societies in the history of the world that have tolerated other religions as a policy are Christian.
Don't forget - it was the intensely Protestant & Puritan founding fathers that created the most tolerant culture in the history of the entire planet. I sometimes wonder if the Slashdot Socialists would even be capable of *reading* Jonathan Edwards without suffering from sever cognitive dissonance... (For those of you suffering as I was, from a public education, Jonathan Edwards is widely regarded even by many non-Christian historians as the most intelligent person ever to live in the Americas. And apparently, the insight and intelligence stayed in the family: A survey done in 1900 showed his descendants included 13 college presidents, 65 professors, 30 judges, 100 lawyers, a dean of a prestigious law school, 80 public office holders, nearly 100 missionairies, 3 mayors of large cities, 3 governors, 3 US senators, one US treasurer, and a US vice-president!)
If they're not afraid of the truth, the Slashdot Socialists should read Edwards at my friend Mark Trigsted's excellent site: www.jonathanedwards.com. It's funny, isn't it, that Edwards was one of the most influential driving forces behind the mindset that created the uniquely tolerant American government?
This is a real problem, but the fundamental reason it's a problem is one that's well-understood by library scientists: We only have addresses, not content identifiers.
To use a book analogy, the entire web is built on Dewey Decimal addresses (URLs), when what we need is those combined with ISBN numbers (URNs).
I didn't make up the idea of URNs - the concept was first described to me by Peter Deutsch, the inventor of Archie, at Interop sometime in the early 90's, shortly after the web got going. (Back when there were no search engines, and we found out about new web sites by visiting NCSA's What's New page, which for a while, anyway, actualy cataloged *every* new web site that appeared, and some of us could claim to have surfed the entire web...)
The idea behind URNs is that they would be a unique identifier for the content. The same content living on different sites would have severl URLs, but only a single URN. This is still needed today, but the problems that kept it from being implemented then are even more intractable today: Who hands out URNs? (IANA didn't want to touch that!) How do you handle versioning? What about dynamic content? Who are the librarians?
We still desperately need somthing that fills this need, but it's not likely we'll get it. One last parting thought - in discussing this with Deutsch, he pointed out that these are new problems to us, but that the library scientists had solved them quite some time ago: It is only the typical CS insistence on reinventing everything and dismissing the knowledge of those in other fields that makes the process so incredibly painful... Hubris strikes again.
You know, I'm not exactly dying to have a high power GSM phone next to my head using the only modulation method that *has* correlated to cancer in laboratory tests.
GSM cancer-phones are a BAD idea - we certainly don't know for sure that they're dangerous, but it looks quite possible that they're far more dangerous than other systems (like CDMA) where the RF signal looks like low-power noise and doesn't have very sharp high-power square waves.
If GSM is the way to change the world, leave me behind. (It pains me that the VisorPhone, possibly the coolest piece of technology integration of the past 10 years, is only available in warmware-hostile GSM form for now.)
I'd argue that the Internet is really the *only* reason PCs make the list - and one day, they'll be an interesting sidenote to history as embeded devices take over more and more of the PC's function. Like Scott McNealy said, "When was the last time you had to reboot your telephone?" (Remember that to more than 99% of computer users, a disconnected PC is not much more than a nice typewriter.)
And of course, one could make the argument that the Internet itself, as revolutionary as it is in some ways, was to a significant degree built on the circuit switched backbone that only existed because of the telephone, so maybe only Alex Bell's invention deserves credit, here anyway...
OK, Let's stop the hysterical ranting against the rights of anyone to ever assert any control at all on the fruits of thier own labor, and look at the facts:
First, PDF *does not* prevent copying. In fact, Adobe went out of ther way to ensure that the PDF itself could indeed be legitimately passed around. The bits in question simply flag two conditions, neither of which should be controversial or contentious:
1. Don't allow changes. This one simply (and quite reasonably) implements within a PDF the same requirement that exists even in many open source licenses: don't make changes to someone else's work and then pass on those changes as if they were the original author's. In reality, someone passing off a modified version of my work as mine is likely to make me far angrier than if they were to simply steal it. This is a matter of authorial integrity, and we *should* honor those bits, if the author chooses - and he may or may not - they're optional, remember. Ignoring this bit is nothing less than dismissing the author's integrity and character as unimportant. Note that this is far more important in text than in code, since text is far more frequently used to express opnions and arguments.
2. Don't allow printing of the PDF. This is also quite reasonable, and there are many good reasons for allowing authors (or distributors) to specify this option: Sometimes, the document is large and may change frequently, therefore, allowing printing makes little sense, and can result in an organization incurring very high costs for users printing off their own personal copies of documents. (This is about the most expensive method known for distributing documents.) Finally, much PDF content is actually available in printed form, and it's reasonable to have to actually *buy* the printed version if that's what you're after. (Again, it's generally cheaper, too.)
This whole thing is nothing more than a disgruntled freenet developer trying to impose his notions of "freedom to steal the legitimate work of others" on the entire Debian community. Debian should NOT incorporate this patch. I think the GPL is folly, but it doesn't concern me too much because I have a choice.
What Adam Langley proposes here is the document equivalent of retroactively imposing a GPL-like license on PDF content, simply because he prefers it. The choice of licenses is a very personal one and one that should *always* be made by the author: whether or not we agree with it, we must honor the author's decision on this matter, as it is his work that is at issue.
At IBM PartnerWorld in Atlanta this past week, they showed off the most impressive display I've ever seen. Here are some of the specs from a card I picked up on it:
Image size: 22" diagonal
Aspect ratio: 16x10
Resolution: 204 ppi (!!)
Addressability: QUXGA-Wide (I think they're making this stuff up... [grin])
Number of pixels: 9.2 Million (3840x2400)
Contrast Ratio: 400:1
This thing, as you might expect, is REALLY impressive. It's like having a fully virtual 11x17 (B-size) sheet of paper in front of you, since the pixel density is one that would be respectable for a printer, much less a screen.
Tiny details and hairlines are sharply visible: they showed a street map of all of Manhatan, and every street was clear, if small. This sort of thing in a foldable, portable, low power form factor would finally give us a viable replacement for paper in some cases.
I have no idea what kind of video card it used, or how much compute power is required to run the thing. It was quite snappy in the demos.
Oh and it's not available yet (it will be targeted at CAD/CAM and medical imaging markets), but when it is, expect to pay around 30 kilobucks. Guess I won't be gettig one after all...
Could be. I only tried the Windows version, since I don't use Linux on the desktop very often.
This shouldn't turn into a flame war, so I'll simply say that there is good scientific evidence that supports a literal reading of the Biblical creation account. Many "scientists" reject this data out of hand because it doesn't fit their preferred worldview. At this point, this *ceases* to be in any way a question of science and becomes one of philosophy. Most scientist refuse to admit that, however.
I have read Sobel's Galileo's Daughter - it's a great book, and I truly sympathize with his struggles with the Roman church. But you missed my point - we STILL don't know today any more than he could know then, which model is right. Relativitiy tells us theres no way to tell...
URL completion did not work for me. Don't know why, if it was working for you.
As for bookmarks, they may work for trivial lists of bookmarks, but mine is quite large, having been built since 1993 (although only a few have stayed around that long...)
Mozilla is DEFINITELY not up to the task of handling my bookmarks file.
But should they have done so? You see, it's possible to construct a perfectly spherical model of the universe with earth at the center which properly represents everything we observe. (Such a universe does violate Ockham's razor, as it appears (at least from where we sit) to be more complex than the now-conventional view.
The simple fact of the matter, though, is that WE CAN NEVER KNOW which is really the case. It was exactly this line of thought that got Einstien going on relativity, and he himself said that there's no way we could ever prove geocentricity, heliocentricity, or whatevercentricity false. (That's the whole point of relativity...)
Whether or not the earth is the center of the universe is not something we can know in this life, or that science can tell us. The failure to acknowledge this simple fact is the root of much of the dissension on this topic here today.
In a nutshell, this proves the existence of God. The very act of presupposing these axioms to be true implies the existence of objective truth.
We've got hundreds of very good (or at least, logical) philosophers over the past two hundred years that have shown that if objective truth exists, then God must exist. Since they reject the notion of God, they then (corretly from a logical point of view) work backwards to prove that there is no objective truth, resulting a the slew of postmodernist humanist philosophies that fly in the face of common sense and observed reality. But they DO manage to deny the existence of God...
An easy (but certainly oversimplistic) example of this might be Douglas Jones' now-moderately-famous article about how the assumption of a Christian worldview is implicit in something as simple and innocuous as going to the store and buying milk.
There are *always* underlying assumptions - scientists that deny this are fooling themselves, and philosophers have acknowledged this to be true for thousands of years, so to claim otherwise is simply ignorance...
As evolutionary theory itself makes an enormous number of claims that are neither testable of falsifiable, I believe your argument fails.
s .htm, plus many more. The truth may not be so clear-cut as you think...
Too many people are too quick to dismiss one side or the other on the basis of "religion".
The fact is that this entire area of inquiry is full of VERY hard qustions, and there are extremely valid SCIENTIFIC reasons to doubt much of what passes for evolutionary gospel in today's scintific circles.
I recommend a few of the following articles from uber-hacker Do-While Jones' excellent web site, if you're open-minded enough to really analyze the facts as we see them presented in the real world:
Problems with the Origin of Mammals
Radioactive Dating Methods (PartI, Radiocarbon) This series explains the fallacies that underlie several dating methods, including several quite possibly invalid assumptions that are "taken on faith" by the evolutionist scientists.)
Radioactive Dating Methods, (Part II, Potassium-Argon, Rubidium-Strontium, and Isochron methods, with similar observations to above about the underlying assumptions.
A great expose about the bias that permeates evolutionary thinking and the genuinely bad science that has resulted, and is now accepted as in the evolutionary truth. This is a shocker for those of you that think science is squarely on te side of evolution.
All of these articles can be found at the index to Do-While Jones' excellent web archive of his scienceagainstevolution.org newsletter, Disclosure (see sig below, or http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/newsletter
If more people used browsers that understood the newer standards, including stuff like CSS, developers may be more inclined to ensure that their sites work for all (CSS used for all the fluff, so it degrades nicely) - rather than spending their time trying for incompatibility between the many different browsers. CSS could well be the main thing, not least because the major browsers (IE, Mozilla, not sure about Opera) allow the user to override CSS settings if desired.
Not even close. Having just been through CSS hell trying to get even the simplest things working correctly on a new site, I can tell you that the client end isn't the problem - it's the authoring end. I've yet to find a tool that really has the knowledge required to build things like they ought to be built, and it's silly to think that only "professional web designers" (those that care about the arcanities of CSS) are building web pages today.
Compare the effort required to get something as simple as a good-looking (graphical) heirarchical nav menu working in JavaScript vs. CSS/DHTML and then decide which makes more sense if your time is worth anything. I wasted several hours, then usashamedly opted for JavaScript. Until that knowledge is embedded in the authoring tools, it's just not going to make it into most of the pages out there, since I (and many others) simply won't take the time to deal with today's morass of web "standards", a situation that leaves us at something of an impasse, doesn't it?
Yep, I downloaded and tried the new 0.8 this week, in fact.
It's still so far from usable as to be an absolute joke. It does render well, but is missing functionality that's important in the real world (seemingly little things like URL completion, bookmarks that work, and roaming profiles.)
On top of that, when I tried the mail, it failed to acknowledge any of my messages between some time in October of 1999 and yesterday. That's just scary. (Fortunately, it doesn't appear that it damaged my mail files.)
Mozilla's gone from my box now, and good riddance. Mozilla had a chance, but is now completely irrelevant, as Netscape may soon be as well. I *hate* IE with a passion, but will probably switch to it in the next couple of months simply because I can't afford to marginalize myself relative to my peers. (But I refuse to use Outlook/Exchange for mail - that's where the real line in the sand is for me...)
It's sad nothing else handles bookmarks worth a flip...
Although I agree that Win95 is better than Win98 on these machines, I have a *real* hard time believing that a) IE 5.5 is faster than Netscape on a machine of that vintage, and b) that Netscape/X11/Linux cannot do acceptably on that hardware.
As to item "a" above, I know that IE adds a tremendous amount of overhead to the OS itself - this was one of the big reasons Win98 is such a pig. "Upgrading" a Win95 machine to IE rips up and replaces very large portions of the OS. (And I think I speak with some authority on this issue, as I was software program manager for Dell's notebook lines of business for the introduction of both IE4 and Win98 - NOT a fun job. BTW, 32 MB is an absolute minimum with IE *or* W98, which is why we decided not to support W98 on machines with less than 32 MB.) In my experience, a thin/fast Windows-based browsing environment is best achieved with Win95 and Netscape.
As to point b) I'm certainly not the "Linux or death" type (In fact, I currently have only one Linux machine left here, and have moved most everything over to Windows simply because my time is worth too much to mess with Linux while I try to start a company), but if Linux wasn't WAY faster on that old hardware, you were doing something badly wrong. (I suspect it had to do with trying to use the obese new Linux/WM distros - you apparently aren't even aware, for instance, that Mandrake does offer a 486-optimized version of their code, although it often lags a rev.)
How do I know this should work? The one Linux box I still have here is an Epson IM-403. You've never heard of that, because it's a *cash register* CPU, darn it: a 486SX33, with the max 32 MB of memory, a scrounged 2.5" HD, and a generic NE2000 clone stuffed into the only slot the poor thing has. Running Caldera 2.2, and a not-so-thin (but positively anorexic by today's standards) WM like fvwm or even afterstep, it's not speedy (especially when starting up Netscape), but once it's up and running, the preformance is really quite acceptable. In fact, it was my primary browser here at home for much of last year.
I just can't see how IE5.5 could even possibly be faster in the environment you specify - that doesn't make sense.
Finally, if you really want thin and fast, try Win95 and the new Win32 version of Opera, since that's what I would expect to offer the best possible browsing performance on the machines you describe, and it has adequate plug-in support, to boot (sadly, another advantage of W9x for browsing.)
The multi-versioning capability you describe is essentially a subset of Ted Nelson's Parallel Textface idea, which is about 30 years old now.
Imagine a document that had an actual "brightness" control that worked like the old joke about the knob on the TV... that's Parallel Textface in a nutshell - content can be abstracted or displayed in detail at will or to suit the reader's knowledge level. (There's no getting around the fact that this requires complex editing/autohoring, though...)
To be able to track the development of a document over time, you need an even more sophisticated system - and that's why he invented Xanadu - a brilliant concept that may well outstrip our abilty to realize it for a long time yet...
Why does everyone here start with the assumption that global warming is even real? There is *very* credible evidence that there is no such effect, and a number of scientists have stated as much, but they're not getting the big megaphone from the UN and radical "environmental" groups.
Radical leftist "scientists" and their computer models have been known to intentionally lie to us before: witness the laughable computer predictions of the original 1970 Earth Day and the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" fiasco which assured us with certainty that we would be completely out of oil, gas, copper, zinc, gold, and tin by now. Oh, and the pollution was supposed to be killing us off in the midst of the massive famines that have never happened. In fact, we now have more of all the resources listed above at our disposal than we had then, pollution is sharply down, and food production is at all-time record levels.
A few links that point this out the fallacy of global warming:
A good BBC article with coverage of some reasonable scientific dissent
A good overview of this from Reason magazine
Another article exposing the political as opposes to scientific basis of the IPCC report.
http://www.globalwarming.org is the source of these and other links exposing the truth about global warming, which is quite simply that there's no credible evidence that it even exists, and that the global warming crowd employs some of the worst science ever seen so long as it fits their political agenda.
It never ceases to amaze me that the numerous self-proclaimed libertarians on Slashdot are so willing to cede their liberty to a politically motivated cabal far more dangerous to our society than the RIAA or the MPAA could ever be. Wake up and pay attention to the things that really matter, and will impact your real freedoms in the future in ways that are truly Orwellian...
Of course, there's no real objective and credible evidence that global warming even exists. The "science" backing this is nonexistent and the entire IPCC report is a political, rather than a scientific, initiative strongly tainted with radical politics.
Check out http://www.globalwarming.org to at least understand what's going on before you fall for the global warming catastrophists' "the sky is falling" line...
This has been tried with varying degrees of success in the past. One interesting incursion along this avenue was the Xrdb product (never really finished) from RSW software (rsw.com), which grafted a Unix pipe-building and modification interface on top of the shell-oriented /rdb database. (Which in itself may be one of the purest executions of the Unix philosophy I've seen - it's a complete relational DB using the Unix shell as its 4GL, which buys you all of the killer Unix text processing utilities in addition to the DB stuff. Really the best of both worlds - I wish someone would really pick up this idea and run with it...)
Anyway, I don't think they ever completely finished it, but Xrdb was essentially an open-look-based pipeline editor that allowed you to graphically play with the various filters as software legos. IIRC, it even transparently handled things like tee to split a data stream in two. Very cool, and I;m still waiting for a standard package that does something similar...
Not only that, they get that valuable info whether or not they choose to redeem your rebate as they should. This is one reason it ticks me off so bad to be burned on rebate deals, like I was recently after the manufacturer refused to honor a $75 rebate on a new PC - and this is a large and well-known company. I'm rapidly coming to believe that consumers almost never get rebates, since I'm maybe 3 for 25 over the past few years.
At the very least, rebates have been weakened to the point that they no longer affect my buying decision. It's more like buying the product and a lottery ticket than any sort of assurance of saving money...
Here's some of what I've found with newer, but not really current, information. It's really odd that a large display tech. that doesn't require semiconductor processing could just drop off the face of the earth like this...
y .p df (Page 8 contains a description of a 1999 conference discussing a 42" prototype.)
http://www.meko.com/palc.html
http://www.eurodisplay.org/pdf/progr_eurodispla