Nothing in the article or journal they reference talks about the health effects of CRT monitors, the use of the term Visual Display Terminal (VDT) throughout the article seems to be a generic term for any type of monitor used with a PC, be they CRT or LCD.
To quote from the article
"While the type of computer work the study participants performed varied considerably, as did the size of the computer used and the work environment, "it should be emphasized that even under such working conditions, our results were extremely consistent over a 3-year period," Nakazawa and colleagues note."
In a three year study with this number of participants, you sould expect a range of monitors to be used, but they show no exception for LCD users. You can see an abstract of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine study this was based on here or sign up for a trial subscription which will allow you to download the whole study in pdf format.
If running Microsoft Office on Linux is such a requirement, why is there no effort to run Mac OS X applications on Linux?
Microsoft Office X is far nicer then office 2000/XP and can read all these file formats. Microsoft make good money out of this port so aren't going to stop producing it any time soon. Because Microsoft don't own the underlying OS they are restricted in the number of changes they can make to Office X to break emulator compatability, unlike with WINE.
Yet OS X is based on Free BSD, so a binary compatability layer should be far easier than emulating Microsoft Windows. I realise this wouldn't give us Visio and possibly not Access, but I would take this option up long before running a heavyweight WINE install on my box, plus we would get the nice Mac plugins which ae generally every bit as good as their Windows versions.
I agree, full Kudos to Nationwide which I use quite happily with Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux. Try using Mac OS x (10.0.1) and the Default IE install won't ever let you past the login screen, no error messages appear, you just never get in to the site. Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1.0 both work fine on the Mac though, perhaps we should have a special category for sites which are more friendly to open source sites than closed browsers:-).
I have to take issue with their description of Abbey National as a sinner. I have been using it with Netscape and now Mozilla on Linux for well over a year and have never had any problems with it. Well, perhaps one problem, there does seem to be a bug which always renders the amount of money in my current account as a small or negative number, if they counld fix this I would recomment them even more strongly.
Is this not a necessary stage in the development of every modern democracy? If you look at the UK, arguably the birthpace of modern capitalism, you had an industrial revolution with appauling working conditions long before you had a modern democracy. The same pattern was repeated in various forms in Europe and the US, and is currently being played out in the former USSR.
The growth of industry leads to the growth of skilled profesionals and the emergence of a middle class. These people in return need the freedom to manage their capital and labour relations which leads to a complex legal structure which is best managed by a "democratic" system.
Even Karl Marx noted that Capitalism was the most revolutionary form of society and observed that the interests of capitalists often coinceded wth the growth of "democratic" society.
So I would fully support all industrialisation as a precursor to challenging all non democratic countries. Policies of isolation and non - industrialisation in states such as North Korea and Cuba have clearly failed, free trade is the only way to generate free societies (and while we are on this subject, what are all those steel traiffs about...)
Re:Hot Damn!
on
LCD Round-up
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have a pair of NEC MultiSync 1850DX monitors for work and I have to say they were the best investment I ever made on IT equipment. My headaches have reduced from about 1 every 2 days on busy days to one in the six months I have owned these monitors, this was beginning to concern me as I didn't put it down to the monitors until I bought these (and my CRT monitor was a very hig end Sony with a high refresh rate).
One thing I have noticed about flat panel displays is that you can get end of life models relativly cheaply if you are prepared to search the web and wait a bit. NEC seem to refresh their monitor range fairly frequently, the one I am using cost over $1000 each but three months later a friend managed to pick one up for around $450. If I had to move jobs and was given a CRT display now, i would seriously consider spending up to $1000 of my own money on this quality of flat screen display, such is the difference it has made to my ability to work.
One of the main problems Novell have is that the market, and customers to a large extent, always associate them with Netware, which most corporation are activly retiring.
Yet if you look at their full product range they have products such as;
Zenworks, probably the best NT / 2000 Desktop managememnt and application installer out there.
DirXML - A fantastic meta directory product which has been fully based on XML and XSLT since long before they were fashionable.
eDirectory - A fully featured and very capable multi-master directory which runs on NT, Solaris and Linux and knocks AD into a crooked hat yet is fully LDAP complient (more so in many ways than Netscape / Sun's Directory Server).
A very nice suite of WEb Services products they recently aquired from Silverstream.
I could go on but the message is clear, the company is packed with good products which it doesn't know how to sell.
Last year I ran an evaluation of all the Meta Directory software out there and DirXML was the clear winner. We bought it and are very happy with it's performance, it certainly should be looked at by anyone who has looked at the Sun ONE or Siemens "equivelents".
My advice to Novell would be that they need to spin off the Netware business to continue developing this and keeping their many millions of existing users happy. The remainder of the business should then be refocused as a Directory Services company. They already almost give away eDirectory, they should make this more official and then when organisations are hooked sell them all the value add products which integrate so nicely with this. This would also be welcomed by all the organisations who are concerned about Active Directory's single platform nature and the high cost of the Sun ONE Directory and their on|off support for Linux, which Novell have always been very committed too.
"Abraham Lincoln said that patents added the "fuel of interest to the fire of genius," by promoting the creation of new and useful inventions.
He didn't say that patent laws, or by extension intellectual property laws in general, were created to be cash cows solely for the gain of those with sufficient resources to play the system and intimidate any challengers into inaction."
It seems to me we need some middle ground between the current patent system and the absolute position which states that intellectual property rights are wrong and all information should be free.
Under capitalism, every company can only raise money to do research if their investors in the heavy start up costs believe they will get a return. Now for every company that seems to have an outrageous patent there are a minimum of 10 who will take investors money from pension funds, private investor etc. (ultimately you and me) and never produce any return because their research will ultimately never result in anything. therefore there is an absurd amount of pressure on the companies who do succeed in making a discovery, and the returns have to be in the several thousand percent mark, hence this type of case.
In order to combat this, we can't just go on moaning, we need to suggest alternatives. Some suggestions would be;
Governments fund genetic research regardless of the profit and loss - remember a minimum of 90% of this type of research produces nothing, are you prepared to vote for this?
We work out a new system whic doesn't pay according to patents but still gives investors a return on very speculative work, to stand a chance of continuing funding in this area we would need to give investors a return of 20-30 times their initial investment, would this be acceptable?
The present system - It is very easy to criticize but there is probably more money going in to this type of research now then at any time in human history. People love advances which would save their lives but I suspect more money is spent on developing the next model of Ford Focus then on solutions for Breast Cancer, if you want this to change then you have to stand up and be counted and stopping one system which is pumping money into medical research without coming up with a viable alternative isn't helping anyone at present.
"you can also try it out with your home stereo and a song with a lot of base. Take your speakers and aim them at each other then take one of the sets of wires and switch the positive and the negative. You will notice the sound of the bass reduces dramatically due to an effect called phasing"
Actually many years ago I did try reversing speaker wires at a party and did notice a reduction of around 50% in the base due to an effect called "blowing up your speaker".
I can't say for certain this was simply due to reversing the speaker leads, I was using far more powerful amps than the speakers were rated for but this is one experiment I won't be rushing to try at home.
Have a look at the NEC MultiSync Range of Monitors, I have a pair of them in front of me now running at 1600 x 1280. Although this makes for a lovely wide desktop, for both web page viewing and document composing it would be preferable to rotate them and run at 1280 x 1600. I briefly tried them on a Windows XP PC and this worked fine, but I haven't found an easy way to support this on XFree86.
One reservation I have about these monitors is that they sit very nicely together in horizontal mode, but if you were to rotate the pair of them vertically the buttons and wider top bar would prevent them easily sitting together for dual screen viewing, I would love to find a flat screen with even screen broders for this type of rotation.
However, I would have to say that these dual NEC screens are among the best IT purchases I have ever made. I bought them for over $1000 each but a friend of mine did a quick web search for them recently and mananged to pick one up for around $400. The models I use are the NEC 1850DX, the nice thing about flat screens from NEC and others is that new models are introduced fairly regularly and you can often up up excellent end of line screens at reasonable prices.
"Speech, not speach, you pitiful excuse for a native-born English English speaker!"
What's this, an appeal for correct spelling on Slashdot of all places, surely that goes against everything the Slashdot community holds most dear.
Next you'll be telling me that "Imagine a Baowolf cluster of those..." or "You could do that in 2 lines of Perl" aren't the funniest thing you have ever heard and worth a "+5 Funny" moderation very time they are posted in a discussion.
English is a continuously evolving language, surely we should have the freedom to have spelling which reflect regional accents and personal preference. Speach is mearly an incorrect spelling of speech, lose and loose have two very different meanings so the comparison is not 100% fair.
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take?"
This is an easy one, you quite clearly take the side of the consumer, even though in this case you may not agree with their use of their rights. Free speach is to be supported, even if no one person could support, say, the racist and anti-racist uses that this may be put to. So first you support the fundamental principle and then you critisise those who would use that right for what you may consider to be "the wrong ends".
Re:Guardian Interview with Christopher Reeve
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 2
I agree, but there is one fundamental difference.
The laws of science are generally regarded as being separate from the laws of religion and politics. If I drop an apple on the surface of the earth, it falls at a known speed. Equally, assembler instructions behave in a certain way and DNA inserted into a cell nucleus will modify the cell according to know rules.
Churches stand for a political and moral framework, as do politicans. Science doesn't and can be used to many ends, which people fight over as being good or bad.
What I feel is needed are humanist or secular organisation to be involved in the debate with the same strength that the churches and patent owning companies can muster, and representatives of people who would benefit from this research, as Christoper Reeve clearly believes he would.
There is a famous quote (unsure of the origin) which states that "when people don't believe in religion, the problem is not that they believe in nothing, it is that they believe anything" (I will have got this wrong, but the point is there).
Research into cells does pose moral issues, regardless of whether you are religious or not, as does splitting the atom and even free software. There are long traditions of secular humanism in scientists in Europe and the US, who have attempted to put scientific discovery within a moral framework for society. I would be interested to know how we feel we can add to this debate, and stop it from being almost exclusively owned by religious and commercial interests.
Guardian Interview with Christopher Reeve
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Interestly enough, there is a Guardian inteview with Christoper Reeve in todays issue in which he makes a number of passionate and obviously, very personal, points about stem cell research and the need for separation between Church and State. The interview can be read here
"We've had a severe violation of the separation of church and state in the handling of what to do about this emerging technology. Imagine if developing a polio vaccine had been a controversial issue," he says. "There are religious groups - the Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe - who think it's a sin to have a blood transfusion. What if the president for some reason decided to listen to them, instead of to the Catholics, which is the group he really listens to in making his decisions about embryonic stem cell research? Where would we be with blood transfusions?"
It's an interesting read, not only for his political comments but also to see his determination to fight back when many would have given up.
I found this one, qt3-3.0.5 can be found in KDE 3.03 which is available from SuSE's main website under the KDE update service.
I did eventually get some of KDE 3.1 Beta One to work, but don't consider the effect on stability to be worth the upgrade, certainly not for my main PC, so if you do consider it keep the 3.03 packages around, after playing with the beta for a bit you should be able to reinstall all of these and have your system back as stable as before (note, this may just be my machine, other people I know are using the beta without any crashes at all so far, I just like having a guarenteed 28+ day uptime on my window manager).
error: failed dependencies:
libkviewsupport.so.0 is needed by kdegraphics3-3.0.7-0
Any ideas where kdegraphics3-3.0.7-0 can be found, rpmfind didn't turn up anything useful. I am using SuSE 8 with a full install of KDE3.03, but this has been updated many times since its initial install as SuSE 7.0.
I did get some components working. The panel is much improved, and support for dual head displays looks much better (the panel can now be configured on a per display basis). However, I couln't convince Konq to display any web page, in tabs or otherwise:-(.
As a Linux user of 4 years now, I bought a new iMac a few months ago and have to say I have been nothing but impressed. I have a beautifully configured Linux box at work, but the thought of going home to the same thing after a 9 to 10 hour day didn't fill me with joy, plus I was concerned that I would be forever recompiling KDE betas when my wife wanted to check her email, which wouldn't lead to a happy family life. Yet I refuse to have a dull Microsoft box in the house.
The iMac has proved a superb compromise. Both my children are addicted to the various DK educational software the shop on Tottenham Court Road threw in. iPhoto is superb and the integration of Digital Cameras and Camcorders with the rest of the OS is seamless, my four year old can now take the camera and edit photos on the box without much help. And underneath it all is UNIX, it connects easily to my broadband connection, and all my IMAP, LDAP and SSH sessions to my corporate network work fine, making it the perfect machine to use for working from home (and it looks good too).
So I wouldn't described myself as someone who has switched from Windows or Linux, rather Apple achieved a sale where nothing would have been bought in it's place. I am confident I am not alone in this market segment, one of my friends with children the same age has bought an iMac for exactly the same reasons, and I know of others considering it.
Japanese art...
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 4, Funny
SKY have just won the rights to screen the World Origami Championships from Tokyo.
Unfortunately it's only available on Paper View.
(sorry, it's a slow day)
Re:Seventeen syllables?
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
The Sometimes Wacky Awsome Haiku Generator (S.W.A.H.G.) can be found here.
Unfortunatly, it's 0.5 MB of C++ rather than 2 lines of Perl but is capable of taking any literature source and converting it to Haikus, the examples from Moby Dick and Dracula show its potential, although they have a tendency to repeat the same word as the ending of the second and third lines. I'm going to run some of the 15,000 words of system documentation I have just finished writing through it to see what happens...
One of the most interesting things to come from the review was the potential for this to be sold as an embedded computing device. I guess many Slashdot readers grew up in the age when we had Atari 400/800s, Vic 20s, Commodore 64s, BBC and Spectrums. The interesting thing about all these devices was that that only required a TV for display and they all had costs which were in the $100 - $350 range, low enough to be affordable to 11 / 12 / 13 years olds. For a long time after that we have been educated that $1000 has been the right price to pay for a PC with Games Consoles holding the low end of the market.
An embedded device with this plus Linux in a single keyboard device surely hold the possibility of a return to those days. This would boot directly into the browser and mail / OpenOffice and thus provide more of the functionality than todays set top boxes usually provide. The interior of Linux would be hidden but would be available for those who wanted to hack on the system. The price could then be lower than even the bare bones systems Wal Mart has been selling recently (and remember many of us in Europe still can't get systems this cheap). By using the TV as an output device it could compete with Games Consoles and run software of similar quality (Doom, Quake World, Tux Racer:-) ). The space advantages of having a keyboard sized device should not be underestimated, many people who have a PC for their home office don't want to take up the same space again for a kids device. As broadband take up increases this could share the bandwidth with other PCs and mobile devices.
If they could get the price back to the level of the much loved home computers of old, I would buy one, if only to boot up Atari and Commodore emulators....
"Less online phone directories more online report generation from divergent systems. Moving data from paper booklets to online is cute, but what does it save?"
I manage the directory team for a large multinational. By moving from multiple island directories and scrapping paper based phone books for 120,000 staff, we have saved well in excess of $1 Million per year. What is more, it is an essential pre-requitise for developing the applications you describe. Once this is done, you can add additional feeds from accounting, building managmenet systems etc. in batch mode and real time. Over 100 applications now take feeds of that data in batch mode or using LDAP queries, and their life is much better.
If we had started with this end goal as our initial objective, we would never have run this project. By building the phone book first, we got something which everyone likes and uses and has provided the basis for a very successful meta directory project. Real time reports are perhaps two years away, and I don't see the major advantage, but we will get there.
This is what makes IT fun and useful, upgrading routers and desktop productivity apps isn't. Lots of us are still adding value and having fun, some introspection is useful but don't get too dishartened yet.
I think their distribution will be based on "Red Hat Enterprise Server". here may be some slight tuning for the exact hardware they will be shipping (although it dosn't look anything special) and I dare say the menus and splash screens will be customised, but that's it.
If you look at the product line for Sun ONE software (formally iPlanet), you'll see that most of it is becoming available for Red Hat Linux, which is a good thing but a bit of a set back for those of us hoping for more applications for Uniited Linux, I guess we can keep lobying...
"Apparently, someone has become clued in that Dance Dance Revolution promotes physical activity, and a school in California is making use of that. Can I go back and retake gym?"
Timothy, were you to see kids playing "Dance Dance Revolution" you would know it normally involves the player stringing together 70 or more flawless dance steps in an increasingly complex routine. As I suspect you are;
a) A Nerd b) English (and therefore devoid of any sense of natural rhythm (speaking as an English person))
I personally would give you credit to go back into a secondary school and dance for the class...
Slashdot Mirror
In all the discussion about Microsoft TCO, you missed The Register story of the day...
Woman jump starts car with cyber-infant.
To quote from the article
In a three year study with this number of participants, you sould expect a range of monitors to be used, but they show no exception for LCD users. You can see an abstract of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine study this was based on here or sign up for a trial subscription which will allow you to download the whole study in pdf format.
If running Microsoft Office on Linux is such a requirement, why is there no effort to run Mac OS X applications on Linux?
Microsoft Office X is far nicer then office 2000/XP and can read all these file formats. Microsoft make good money out of this port so aren't going to stop producing it any time soon. Because Microsoft don't own the underlying OS they are restricted in the number of changes they can make to Office X to break emulator compatability, unlike with WINE.
Yet OS X is based on Free BSD, so a binary compatability layer should be far easier than emulating Microsoft Windows. I realise this wouldn't give us Visio and possibly not Access, but I would take this option up long before running a heavyweight WINE install on my box, plus we would get the nice Mac plugins which ae generally every bit as good as their Windows versions.
I agree, full Kudos to Nationwide which I use quite happily with Mozilla and Konqueror on Linux. Try using Mac OS x (10.0.1) and the Default IE install won't ever let you past the login screen, no error messages appear, you just never get in to the site. Netscape 6 and Mozilla 1.0 both work fine on the Mac though, perhaps we should have a special category for sites which are more friendly to open source sites than closed browsers :-).
I have to take issue with their description of Abbey National as a sinner. I have been using it with Netscape and now Mozilla on Linux for well over a year and have never had any problems with it. Well, perhaps one problem, there does seem to be a bug which always renders the amount of money in my current account as a small or negative number, if they counld fix this I would recomment them even more strongly.
Is this not a necessary stage in the development of every modern democracy? If you look at the UK, arguably the birthpace of modern capitalism, you had an industrial revolution with appauling working conditions long before you had a modern democracy. The same pattern was repeated in various forms in Europe and the US, and is currently being played out in the former USSR.
...)
The growth of industry leads to the growth of skilled profesionals and the emergence of a middle class. These people in return need the freedom to manage their capital and labour relations which leads to a complex legal structure which is best managed by a "democratic" system.
Even Karl Marx noted that Capitalism was the most revolutionary form of society and observed that the interests of capitalists often coinceded wth the growth of "democratic" society.
So I would fully support all industrialisation as a precursor to challenging all non democratic countries. Policies of isolation and non - industrialisation in states such as North Korea and Cuba have clearly failed, free trade is the only way to generate free societies (and while we are on this subject, what are all those steel traiffs about
I have a pair of NEC MultiSync 1850DX monitors for work and I have to say they were the best investment I ever made on IT equipment. My headaches have reduced from about 1 every 2 days on busy days to one in the six months I have owned these monitors, this was beginning to concern me as I didn't put it down to the monitors until I bought these (and my CRT monitor was a very hig end Sony with a high refresh rate).
One thing I have noticed about flat panel displays is that you can get end of life models relativly cheaply if you are prepared to search the web and wait a bit. NEC seem to refresh their monitor range fairly frequently, the one I am using cost over $1000 each but three months later a friend managed to pick one up for around $450. If I had to move jobs and was given a CRT display now, i would seriously consider spending up to $1000 of my own money on this quality of flat screen display, such is the difference it has made to my ability to work.
Yet if you look at their full product range they have products such as;
I could go on but the message is clear, the company is packed with good products which it doesn't know how to sell.
Last year I ran an evaluation of all the Meta Directory software out there and DirXML was the clear winner. We bought it and are very happy with it's performance, it certainly should be looked at by anyone who has looked at the Sun ONE or Siemens "equivelents".
My advice to Novell would be that they need to spin off the Netware business to continue developing this and keeping their many millions of existing users happy. The remainder of the business should then be refocused as a Directory Services company. They already almost give away eDirectory, they should make this more official and then when organisations are hooked sell them all the value add products which integrate so nicely with this.
This would also be welcomed by all the organisations who are concerned about Active Directory's single platform nature and the high cost of the Sun ONE Directory and their on|off support for Linux, which Novell have always been very committed too.
Wired has an article on Patents and IP today at;
0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55831,0
One of the more interesting quotes
"Abraham Lincoln said that patents added the "fuel of interest to the fire of genius," by promoting the creation of new and useful inventions.
He didn't say that patent laws, or by extension intellectual property laws in general, were created to be cash cows solely for the gain of those with sufficient resources to play the system and intimidate any challengers into inaction."
Under capitalism, every company can only raise money to do research if their investors in the heavy start up costs believe they will get a return. Now for every company that seems to have an outrageous patent there are a minimum of 10 who will take investors money from pension funds, private investor etc. (ultimately you and me) and never produce any return because their research will ultimately never result in anything. therefore there is an absurd amount of pressure on the companies who do succeed in making a discovery, and the returns have to be in the several thousand percent mark, hence this type of case. In order to combat this, we can't just go on moaning, we need to suggest alternatives. Some suggestions would be;
"you can also try it out with your home stereo and a song with a lot of base. Take your speakers and aim them at each other then take one of the sets of wires and switch the positive and the negative. You will notice the sound of the bass reduces dramatically due to an effect called phasing"
Actually many years ago I did try reversing speaker wires at a party and did notice a reduction of around 50% in the base due to an effect called "blowing up your speaker".
I can't say for certain this was simply due to reversing the speaker leads, I was using far more powerful amps than the speakers were rated for but this is one experiment I won't be rushing to try at home.
Have a look at the NEC MultiSync Range of Monitors, I have a pair of them in front of me now running at 1600 x 1280. Although this makes for a lovely wide desktop, for both web page viewing and document composing it would be preferable to rotate them and run at 1280 x 1600. I briefly tried them on a Windows XP PC and this worked fine, but I haven't found an easy way to support this on XFree86.
One reservation I have about these monitors is that they sit very nicely together in horizontal mode, but if you were to rotate the pair of them vertically the buttons and wider top bar would prevent them easily sitting together for dual screen viewing, I would love to find a flat screen with even screen broders for this type of rotation.
However, I would have to say that these dual NEC screens are among the best IT purchases I have ever made. I bought them for over $1000 each but a friend of mine did a quick web search for them recently and mananged to pick one up for around $400. The models I use are the NEC 1850DX, the nice thing about flat screens from NEC and others is that new models are introduced fairly regularly and you can often up up excellent end of line screens at reasonable prices.
"Speech, not speach, you pitiful excuse for a native-born English English speaker!"
..." or "You could do that in 2 lines of Perl" aren't the funniest thing you have ever heard and worth a "+5 Funny" moderation very time they are posted in a discussion.
What's this, an appeal for correct spelling on Slashdot of all places, surely that goes against everything the Slashdot community holds most dear.
Next you'll be telling me that "Imagine a Baowolf cluster of those
English is a continuously evolving language, surely we should have the freedom to have spelling which reflect regional accents and personal preference. Speach is mearly an incorrect spelling of speech, lose and loose have two very different meanings so the comparison is not 100% fair.
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take?"
This is an easy one, you quite clearly take the side of the consumer, even though in this case you may not agree with their use of their rights. Free speach is to be supported, even if no one person could support, say, the racist and anti-racist uses that this may be put to. So first you support the fundamental principle and then you critisise those who would use that right for what you may consider to be "the wrong ends".
I agree, but there is one fundamental difference.
The laws of science are generally regarded as being separate from the laws of religion and politics. If I drop an apple on the surface of the earth, it falls at a known speed. Equally, assembler instructions behave in a certain way and DNA inserted into a cell nucleus will modify the cell according to know rules.
Churches stand for a political and moral framework, as do politicans. Science doesn't and can be used to many ends, which people fight over as being good or bad.
What I feel is needed are humanist or secular organisation to be involved in the debate with the same strength that the churches and patent owning companies can muster, and representatives of people who would benefit from this research, as Christoper Reeve clearly believes he would.
There is a famous quote (unsure of the origin) which states that "when people don't believe in religion, the problem is not that they believe in nothing, it is that they believe anything" (I will have got this wrong, but the point is there).
Research into cells does pose moral issues, regardless of whether you are religious or not, as does splitting the atom and even free software. There are long traditions of secular humanism in scientists in Europe and the US, who have attempted to put scientific discovery within a moral framework for society. I would be interested to know how we feel we can add to this debate, and stop it from being almost exclusively owned by religious and commercial interests.
Interestly enough, there is a Guardian inteview with Christoper Reeve in todays issue in which he makes a number of passionate and obviously, very personal, points about stem cell research and the need for separation between Church and State. The interview can be read here
3 585,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/genes/article/0,2763,79
One of many excellent quotes is,
"We've had a severe violation of the separation of church and state in the handling of what to do about this emerging technology. Imagine if developing a polio vaccine had been a controversial issue," he says. "There are religious groups - the Jehovah's Witnesses, I believe - who think it's a sin to have a blood transfusion. What if the president for some reason decided to listen to them, instead of to the Catholics, which is the group he really listens to in making his decisions about embryonic stem cell research? Where would we be with blood transfusions?"
It's an interesting read, not only for his political comments but also to see his determination to fight back when many would have given up.
I found this one, qt3-3.0.5 can be found in KDE 3.03 which is available from SuSE's main website under the KDE update service.
I did eventually get some of KDE 3.1 Beta One to work, but don't consider the effect on stability to be worth the upgrade, certainly not for my main PC, so if you do consider it keep the 3.03 packages around, after playing with the beta for a bit you should be able to reinstall all of these and have your system back as stable as before (note, this may just be my machine, other people I know are using the beta without any crashes at all so far, I just like having a guarenteed 28+ day uptime on my window manager).
Sorry, that should have read, any idea where libkviewsupport.so.0 can be found, kdegraphics3-3.0.7-0 is the base package.
The site provides RPMs for Suse, they can be downloaded from
. 1-beta1/SuSE/i386/8.0/
:-(.
http://download.at.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3
However, when I check the RPMs I get
error: failed dependencies:
libkviewsupport.so.0 is needed by kdegraphics3-3.0.7-0
Any ideas where kdegraphics3-3.0.7-0 can be found, rpmfind didn't turn up anything useful. I am using SuSE 8 with a full install of KDE3.03, but this has been updated many times since its initial install as SuSE 7.0.
I did get some components working. The panel is much improved, and support for dual head displays looks much better (the panel can now be configured on a per display basis). However, I couln't convince Konq to display any web page, in tabs or otherwise
As a Linux user of 4 years now, I bought a new iMac a few months ago and have to say I have been nothing but impressed. I have a beautifully configured Linux box at work, but the thought of going home to the same thing after a 9 to 10 hour day didn't fill me with joy, plus I was concerned that I would be forever recompiling KDE betas when my wife wanted to check her email, which wouldn't lead to a happy family life. Yet I refuse to have a dull Microsoft box in the house.
The iMac has proved a superb compromise. Both my children are addicted to the various DK educational software the shop on Tottenham Court Road threw in. iPhoto is superb and the integration of Digital Cameras and Camcorders with the rest of the OS is seamless, my four year old can now take the camera and edit photos on the box without much help. And underneath it all is UNIX, it connects easily to my broadband connection, and all my IMAP, LDAP and SSH sessions to my corporate network work fine, making it the perfect machine to use for working from home (and it looks good too).
So I wouldn't described myself as someone who has switched from Windows or Linux, rather Apple achieved a sale where nothing would have been bought in it's place. I am confident I am not alone in this market segment, one of my friends with children the same age has bought an iMac for exactly the same reasons, and I know of others considering it.
SKY have just won the rights to screen the World Origami Championships from Tokyo.
Unfortunately it's only available on Paper View.
(sorry, it's a slow day)
The Sometimes Wacky Awsome Haiku Generator (S.W.A.H.G.) can be found here.
Unfortunatly, it's 0.5 MB of C++ rather than 2 lines of Perl but is capable of taking any literature source and converting it to Haikus, the examples from Moby Dick and Dracula show its potential, although they have a tendency to repeat the same word as the ending of the second and third lines. I'm going to run some of the 15,000 words of system documentation I have just finished writing through it to see what happens...
One of the most interesting things to come from the review was the potential for this to be sold as an embedded computing device. I guess many Slashdot readers grew up in the age when we had Atari 400/800s, Vic 20s, Commodore 64s, BBC and Spectrums. The interesting thing about all these devices was that that only required a TV for display and they all had costs which were in the $100 - $350 range, low enough to be affordable to 11 / 12 / 13 years olds. For a long time after that we have been educated that $1000 has been the right price to pay for a PC with Games Consoles holding the low end of the market.
:-) ). The space advantages of having a keyboard sized device should not be underestimated, many people who have a PC for their home office don't want to take up the same space again for a kids device. As broadband take up increases this could share the bandwidth with other PCs and mobile devices.
An embedded device with this plus Linux in a single keyboard device surely hold the possibility of a return to those days. This would boot directly into the browser and mail / OpenOffice and thus provide more of the functionality than todays set top boxes usually provide. The interior of Linux would be hidden but would be available for those who wanted to hack on the system. The price could then be lower than even the bare bones systems Wal Mart has been selling recently (and remember many of us in Europe still can't get systems this cheap). By using the TV as an output device it could compete with Games Consoles and run software of similar quality (Doom, Quake World, Tux Racer
If they could get the price back to the level of the much loved home computers of old, I would buy one, if only to boot up Atari and Commodore emulators....
"Less online phone directories more online report generation from divergent systems. Moving data from paper booklets to online is cute, but what does it save?"
I manage the directory team for a large multinational. By moving from multiple island directories and scrapping paper based phone books for 120,000 staff, we have saved well in excess of $1 Million per year. What is more, it is an essential pre-requitise for developing the applications you describe. Once this is done, you can add additional feeds from accounting, building managmenet systems etc. in batch mode and real time. Over 100 applications now take feeds of that data in batch mode or using LDAP queries, and their life is much better.
If we had started with this end goal as our initial objective, we would never have run this project. By building the phone book first, we got something which everyone likes and uses and has provided the basis for a very successful meta directory project. Real time reports are perhaps two years away, and I don't see the major advantage, but we will get there.
This is what makes IT fun and useful, upgrading routers and desktop productivity apps isn't. Lots of us are still adding value and having fun, some introspection is useful but don't get too dishartened yet.
I think their distribution will be based on "Red Hat Enterprise Server". here may be some slight tuning for the exact hardware they will be shipping (although it dosn't look anything special) and I dare say the menus and splash screens will be customised, but that's it.
If you look at the product line for Sun ONE software (formally iPlanet), you'll see that most of it is becoming available for Red Hat Linux, which is a good thing but a bit of a set back for those of us hoping for more applications for Uniited Linux, I guess we can keep lobying...
"Apparently, someone has become clued in that Dance Dance Revolution promotes physical activity, and a school in California is making use of that. Can I go back and retake gym?"
Timothy, were you to see kids playing "Dance Dance Revolution" you would know it normally involves the player stringing together 70 or more flawless dance steps in an increasingly complex routine. As I suspect you are;
a) A Nerd
b) English (and therefore devoid of any sense of natural rhythm (speaking as an English person))
I personally would give you credit to go back into a secondary school and dance for the class...