This is just another story to get more/. eyeballs on their site and generate banner revenues except this time it's a pro-community piece. Couldn't we ban Windows- or Linux-based op ed pieces on ZDNet altogether? They just seem to be all hot air.
If the DMCA is the stick....are $3 DVD's sitting in the checkout racks of your local Walmart the carrot?
Nah. What's going to happen with that is people would go buy more disks because they're more affordable, discover alot of them are crap, and then go around to sell them on eBay to recoup some of the cost of that disk. But the MPAA would come down in their Black Helicopters (TM) and pressure eBay to disallow those sales because people would stop buying new disks.
I started my current round of torture (otherwise known as graduate school) back in January of 1998. In that time I have actually come to respect some of the thinkers in the business management community. Right now I'm enrolled in a class that (so far) deals with "discontinuous change". Comparisons have been made between this type of change and incremental change.
I'm sure we all would love to have stability and be able to plan out our projects to their proper conclusion - some small changes along the way wouldn't necessarily hurt. So far this class has shown me that we no longer live in that kind of world. That world passed about 100 years ago. Now we face challenges from people we didn't know existed and change occurs faster than ever. Sometimes these managers don't cut off development because they want to screw people over or because they're incompetent. Sometimes they do it because they see threats or opportunities out there and want to take action to deal with it. That can mean they would ask technical people like us to make major adjustments or take a whole different path altogether. It's not necessarily the case management puts up with quick and dirty solutions - it's because they need something to deal with any urgent issues that arise.
I hate this kind of change as much as the next person. But would you want to deal with this change yourself? Someone else posted earlier that he'd rather have others deal with policy, research and management and he'll deal with the "coalface".
I think that, on top of being frustrated with projects being cut off at the knees, people are frustrated with not knowing what is the overall reality they have to deal with. That's part of my reason for going for my MS degree - so I'd be better clued in as to what is happening with me and my org and be able to possibly do something about it.
2. Improve the broadband experience for those who have gone through it thus far. By this I mean a concerted effort to reduce the delays in getting DSL service and the fiascos related to the @home collapse.
2a. Improve software security. At least Billy Goat^h^h^hates is paying some lip service to this issue... If we have all these 56k users with their Win9x machines moved over to broadband, we'd have a huge pool of potential DoS zombies.
IMO the real trick is how to generate that energy in the form of hydrogen in a nondestructive way. Currently every form of energy generation has a drawback. Hydroelectric dams destroy river ecosystems. Wind turbines mess with birds (I think) and are big eyesores. Fossil fuels are like hydrogen - they are an energy transport medium, not energy itself. I don't think I need to spell out the negatives of nuclear fission plants. And even if someone could get nuclear fusion working, the process would create very radioactive materials used for the reactors.
I don't know if anyone has thought about doing this, but does anyone know if anyone has attempted to use plants to generate electricity? Chlorophyll has been used for billions of years to convert sunlight into ATP - why not use it to generate electricity or hydrogen? Or maybe run that ATP through a paladium catalyst to get at those electrons...
Your view on this is correct but the ignorance of the greater part of the American (and perhaps Western) population is only part of the problem. There is no question in my mind that we have to understand past American and Western foreign and colonial policies and attempts to impose Western culture and values have made these people distrustful and angry of us. Look at China: Taiwan has a vibrant Chinese culture that readily welcomes other cultures because it understands and gets along with others while the Mainland Chinese cast a suspicious eye towards them because they feel it will subjugate its own.
At the same time, ignorance goes both ways. Islamic fundamentalist schools teach extremism in the absence of presenting other points of views(Jewish and Christan schools are not entirely innocent of this). Fundamentalism twists holy scriptures in perverse ways without a rational counterbalance.
There are people who do get both sides of the story and want to accept and embrace the best aspects of American and Western culture (eg. pluralism, rule of law from what I saw in the news). But they are frustrated at how the US is supporting regimes that run counter to these values, thus making us look like hypocrites. I understand that some of these regimes are safety valves that keep the fundamentalists in check. But these regimes have to either be told to change gradually but definitively or have to be toppled.
Finally, money helps. One of the many reasons young Arab and South Asian boys go to maddrassas (?) is that their families are poor and these places provide food and shelter w/o realizing their minds become poisoned. And once these students graduate, they see how government officials horde loads of cash for themselves while they usually remain dirt poor. These people need financial help.
The Rio Receiver seems to do the same thing. They have more information on their site and I suspect you can hook this up to a component home theatre system as well.
What - you didn't consider Nurse Chapel or that red-shirted blonde chick with the mini and the pony tail to be hot? It would have been nice if the green-skinned lap dancer stayed for a few epis...
I dunno exactly how effective they are but people might want to write to the Federation of American Scientists. I personally don't consider the EFF a PAC and I doubt the people here in/. are about to start one. The FAS is probably the closest PAC we've got that will influence the pols in our favor. Quoting from their site:
The Federation of American Scientists conducts analysis and advocacy on science, technology and public policy, including national security, nuclear weapons, arms sales, biological hazards, secrecy, education technology, information technology, energy and the environment... FAS combines the scholarly resources of its scientists with a knowledge of practical politics. As a non-profit organization licensed to lobby in the public interest, FAS is uniquely qualified to bring the scientific perspective to the legislative arena through direct lobbying, membership and grassroots work, and expert testimony at Congressional hearings.
Every cent that is wasted on expensive technology is money that couldn't be used to hire competent teachers-- and teaching children is a LOT more than guiding them through point and click exercises on some candy colored computer.
So you want to keep those poor kids using PETs and Apple ][s? You want to keep those kids from learning how to create HTML pages while professors are complaining incoming freshmen don't know the basics of creating HTML documents? You claim they school system has not improved a whole lot despite expenditures for new software and equipment. I say it's that the school faculty have not taken full advantage of the power the new equipment provides for them and their students.
I would be interested in seeing if IBM or someone else could convince people to convert over from Windows systems. For years it's been people going from Unix to Windows - going the other way would be the real trick.
I was listening to NPR on my way home and there was a soundbite of a woman who was a person I described in my subject, was a fund raiser for the American Cancer Society and who had a son who had brain cancer. She said she was against this kind of research because of her beliefs and did admit before this cancer she could not imagine what life was like for other suffering people. Now she has been through this experience she says she still has the same views because she feels if (paraphrasing) "...If God wants my son to come home to him that's his will. I don't want to have the lives of hundreds of potential human beings used to save the life of my child."
That being said, I just want to tell her that those fertilized eggs were going to be discarded anyways. The couples who had them produced don't want the excess and if, by some chance, other couples wanted them, I would think only a small handful of them would be used. So even though these eggs all have the potential to produce human life, they will be discarded after they are used. So now what will happen? The couples who had them produced will be sent to jail for murder of a cluster of cells???
<tangent>
This is just an excuse by the evangelical, protestant conservative right wing of the Republican Party to hijack the country and force it to accept ITS views, especially on the right to life and abortion. IMO abortions and anything related to it are a bad thing and it should be avoided if possible. But whatever choice is made by the people involved IS NOBODY ELSE'S BUSINESS These rights cannot and should not be legislated away and those people who physically maim or kill those involved are not doing God's work - they are murderers.
</tangent>
I have learned from my professional life that if I find something online that I find interesting, I prefer to print it out. I cannot read anything relatively long on a screen; I prefer to have my code and documentation on paper so I can go back and forth in the material and make notes.
As for books I agree with one poster that people like the tactile response of turning the pages of a book. I can't imagine getting one of those dumb RCA eBook devices and pressing that snooze bar to turn the page...
Maybe it's been resolved with this new release or maybe it's because the software is still beta... But could someone PLEASE reduce Mozilla's memory footprint? I just find it rediculous to have a browser start up and immediately suck up 30MB worth of memory.
"Beside the obvious concerns regarding to safety of the commute, I wonder how you could make it cooler. Can't seem to lower it or add alloy wheels to it. I guess you could make the flight stick smaller and put some UV light underneath it, but it's still not the same thing now is it... "
I've seen alot of nice spoilers on slammed Honda Civics. Couldn't you put one on the Moller - wait - never mind...
By the time IBM implemented MCA, the PC market was already populated with alot of clones. If IBM had done this back in, say, 1985-6, we would not be using generic and clone ISA systems later on. The reason MCA did not take hold was because they didn't have any clout in that market anymore. And buying clones was not frowned on.
On the other hand, M$ seems to be creating a software architecture that people seem to still think is necessary. Sure there are alternatives (M$ never seems to be first) but they have clout and people never got fired for buying M$.
(I wanted to use AD as a success vs NDS but I don't know of anyone using it.)
Slashdot Mirror
That picture was just of the skirt at the base of the rocket. The individual engines were tiny, just like the ones used for the Proton booster.
Mark Wade's site has more information on the N1.
"All your species are belong to us!"
This is just another story to get more /. eyeballs on their site and generate banner revenues except this time it's a pro-community piece. Couldn't we ban Windows- or Linux-based op ed pieces on ZDNet altogether? They just seem to be all hot air.
If the DMCA is the stick....are $3 DVD's sitting in the checkout racks of your local Walmart the carrot?
Nah. What's going to happen with that is people would go buy more disks because they're more affordable, discover alot of them are crap, and then go around to sell them on eBay to recoup some of the cost of that disk. But the MPAA would come down in their Black Helicopters (TM) and pressure eBay to disallow those sales because people would stop buying new disks.
I started my current round of torture (otherwise known as graduate school) back in January of 1998. In that time I have actually come to respect some of the thinkers in the business management community. Right now I'm enrolled in a class that (so far) deals with "discontinuous change". Comparisons have been made between this type of change and incremental change.
I'm sure we all would love to have stability and be able to plan out our projects to their proper conclusion - some small changes along the way wouldn't necessarily hurt. So far this class has shown me that we no longer live in that kind of world. That world passed about 100 years ago. Now we face challenges from people we didn't know existed and change occurs faster than ever. Sometimes these managers don't cut off development because they want to screw people over or because they're incompetent. Sometimes they do it because they see threats or opportunities out there and want to take action to deal with it. That can mean they would ask technical people like us to make major adjustments or take a whole different path altogether. It's not necessarily the case management puts up with quick and dirty solutions - it's because they need something to deal with any urgent issues that arise.
I hate this kind of change as much as the next person. But would you want to deal with this change yourself? Someone else posted earlier that he'd rather have others deal with policy, research and management and he'll deal with the "coalface".
I think that, on top of being frustrated with projects being cut off at the knees, people are frustrated with not knowing what is the overall reality they have to deal with. That's part of my reason for going for my MS degree - so I'd be better clued in as to what is happening with me and my org and be able to possibly do something about it.
You could have used this service.
;^)
"Anyone else amazed by the fact that there is a place called Chevy Chase, Maryland?!"
I used to be when I first moved into the area... And I'll tell ya - everything in the Chevy Chase/Bethesda area is so ungodly expensive.
What about Bowie, MD? You wouldn't think people who live there would pronounce it "boo-ie". Go figure."
"...Unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations."
For a sec I was thinking "WTF!!! I thought Linux used glibc... And I didn't think anyone could do a comparison of Linux vs Windows libraries..."
2. Improve the broadband experience for those who have gone through it thus far. By this I mean a concerted effort to reduce the delays in getting DSL service and the fiascos related to the @home collapse.
2a. Improve software security. At least Billy Goat^h^h^hates is paying some lip service to this issue... If we have all these 56k users with their Win9x machines moved over to broadband, we'd have a huge pool of potential DoS zombies.
IMO the real trick is how to generate that energy in the form of hydrogen in a nondestructive way. Currently every form of energy generation has a drawback. Hydroelectric dams destroy river ecosystems. Wind turbines mess with birds (I think) and are big eyesores. Fossil fuels are like hydrogen - they are an energy transport medium, not energy itself. I don't think I need to spell out the negatives of nuclear fission plants. And even if someone could get nuclear fusion working, the process would create very radioactive materials used for the reactors.
I don't know if anyone has thought about doing this, but does anyone know if anyone has attempted to use plants to generate electricity? Chlorophyll has been used for billions of years to convert sunlight into ATP - why not use it to generate electricity or hydrogen? Or maybe run that ATP through a paladium catalyst to get at those electrons...
Or do we live comfortable with ourselves knowing we're hypocrites?
I liked Slashdot back in the day... :^)
PS - IMO WHFS currently sucks. I really miss when they were REALLY alternative.
Your view on this is correct but the ignorance of the greater part of the American (and perhaps Western) population is only part of the problem. There is no question in my mind that we have to understand past American and Western foreign and colonial policies and attempts to impose Western culture and values have made these people distrustful and angry of us. Look at China: Taiwan has a vibrant Chinese culture that readily welcomes other cultures because it understands and gets along with others while the Mainland Chinese cast a suspicious eye towards them because they feel it will subjugate its own.
At the same time, ignorance goes both ways. Islamic fundamentalist schools teach extremism in the absence of presenting other points of views(Jewish and Christan schools are not entirely innocent of this). Fundamentalism twists holy scriptures in perverse ways without a rational counterbalance.
There are people who do get both sides of the story and want to accept and embrace the best aspects of American and Western culture (eg. pluralism, rule of law from what I saw in the news). But they are frustrated at how the US is supporting regimes that run counter to these values, thus making us look like hypocrites. I understand that some of these regimes are safety valves that keep the fundamentalists in check. But these regimes have to either be told to change gradually but definitively or have to be toppled.
Finally, money helps. One of the many reasons young Arab and South Asian boys go to maddrassas (?) is that their families are poor and these places provide food and shelter w/o realizing their minds become poisoned. And once these students graduate, they see how government officials horde loads of cash for themselves while they usually remain dirt poor. These people need financial help.
The Rio Receiver seems to do the same thing. They have more information on their site and I suspect you can hook this up to a component home theatre system as well.
Really? Try typing those words on a computer screen and lifting it. Don't tell me that is NOT lighter than words on a sheet of paper!!!
What - you didn't consider Nurse Chapel or that red-shirted blonde chick with the mini and the pony tail to be hot? It would have been nice if the green-skinned lap dancer stayed for a few epis...
The Federation of American Scientists conducts analysis and advocacy on science, technology and public policy, including national security, nuclear weapons, arms sales, biological hazards, secrecy, education technology, information technology, energy and the environment... FAS combines the scholarly resources of its scientists with a knowledge of practical politics. As a non-profit organization licensed to lobby in the public interest, FAS is uniquely qualified to bring the scientific perspective to the legislative arena through direct lobbying, membership and grassroots work, and expert testimony at Congressional hearings.
Every cent that is wasted on expensive technology is money that couldn't be used to hire competent teachers-- and teaching children is a LOT more than guiding them through point and click exercises on some candy colored computer.
So you want to keep those poor kids using PETs and Apple ][s? You want to keep those kids from learning how to create HTML pages while professors are complaining incoming freshmen don't know the basics of creating HTML documents? You claim they school system has not improved a whole lot despite expenditures for new software and equipment. I say it's that the school faculty have not taken full advantage of the power the new equipment provides for them and their students.
I would be interested in seeing if IBM or someone else could convince people to convert over from Windows systems. For years it's been people going from Unix to Windows - going the other way would be the real trick.
That being said, I just want to tell her that those fertilized eggs were going to be discarded anyways. The couples who had them produced don't want the excess and if, by some chance, other couples wanted them, I would think only a small handful of them would be used. So even though these eggs all have the potential to produce human life, they will be discarded after they are used. So now what will happen? The couples who had them produced will be sent to jail for murder of a cluster of cells???
<tangent>
This is just an excuse by the evangelical, protestant conservative right wing of the Republican Party to hijack the country and force it to accept ITS views, especially on the right to life and abortion. IMO abortions and anything related to it are a bad thing and it should be avoided if possible. But whatever choice is made by the people involved IS NOBODY ELSE'S BUSINESS These rights cannot and should not be legislated away and those people who physically maim or kill those involved are not doing God's work - they are murderers.
</tangent>
As for books I agree with one poster that people like the tactile response of turning the pages of a book. I can't imagine getting one of those dumb RCA eBook devices and pressing that snooze bar to turn the page...
Paperless office my ass.
Maybe it's been resolved with this new release or maybe it's because the software is still beta... But could someone PLEASE reduce Mozilla's memory footprint? I just find it rediculous to have a browser start up and immediately suck up 30MB worth of memory.
I've seen alot of nice spoilers on slammed Honda Civics. Couldn't you put one on the Moller - wait - never mind...
On the other hand, M$ seems to be creating a software architecture that people seem to still think is necessary. Sure there are alternatives (M$ never seems to be first) but they have clout and people never got fired for buying M$.
(I wanted to use AD as a success vs NDS but I don't know of anyone using it.)
Is there a category for the idiots that write their passwords on post-its and stick them to the bottom of their keyboards?
Oh, so THAT's how my wife found all that pr0n on my private share...