So what is it, really? A pirated copy? Based on Windows? OSX? Linux? Something unique?
It's about a dictatorial regime imposing a new version of its software on what it sees as a captive population of users, with a generic new user interface obviously copied from somewhere else.
Oh sorry, you meant Red Star, not Slashdot Beta! No idea. Looks like Linux.
No, don't JUST post rants here. But post them here as well. Then perhaps somebody with a financial interest in this site who would otherwise see only pre-filtered comments from whoever is in charge of this Windows-8 style fiasco ("we've had some very positive feedback from seven of the target demographics listed in Happy Table 5") will happen to come across what most people on here actually think. Which is that Beta sucks.
With ebooks, the 'region lock' is at the time of purchase. Amazon US will happily ship printed books to (e.g.) the UK, but you can't (officially) buy US Kindle books from a UK-registered account. You can use the Amazon UK Kindle store, of course, but if the price is higher or the book simply isn't available in the UK, tough luck. For obvious reasons all this is about as effective as the DVD region lock, but if DRM and location checking were perfect, country-specific ebooks wouldn't be available elsewhere.
The answer is to calibrate against something organic with a known age. Tree rings, which can give you a whole series of data points, are perfect for this.
Future archaeologists may be puzzled by the anomalous atmospheric levels of C14 in the mid 1960s, which were nearly double the normal levels (thanks to the radiation from above-ground nuclear weapon testing converting more N14 than usual). Contrary to the pop science picture, not all of the atoms in your body are replaced every 7 years and (e.g.) the DNA in certain long-lived brain cells of people born in this era still contains elevated levels of C14. In fact, it's thanks to the nuclear powers effectively doing an isotopic labelling experiment on the entire biosphere that we know the age of these cells in the first place.
She found him because she was searching for '6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA'. If you happen to be 6 foot with blue eyes and live near UCLA, you probably don't need a machine learning algorithm to tell you that it might be worth mentioning these things in your profile.
So how do the conspiracy theories explain the dramatic improvement in survival rates in those cancers where research-guided improvements in treatment have been very successful?:
Clearly there's a great deal to be done, and finding 'cures' is a very complex and difficult task. But we finally have the tools to do this in a systematic and rational way, and targeted therapies are already emerging.
My 10 minutes are really just spent in downloading and installing Classic Shell, tweaking its settings to taste (no active corners, boot to desktop, pre-Vista style start menu, etc.), then getting rid of the Metro associations for common file types in Default Programs (and installing a non-Metro alternative if required, like PDF X-Change). The high DPI stuff still seems very clunky in 8.1, but I have noticed significantly improved stability with my AMD graphics card relative to 8.0, and more reliable booting directly to desktop (probably because 8.1 supports this directly, rather than relying on Classic Shell code). On the other hand, startup seems a bit slower with 8.1.
I'm not a fan of ribbons in general (I use one of the classic menu addons for Office), but I don't find Windows 8 Explorer much of an issue, probably because there aren't many tabs, or items per tab, and the right-click menu is still available. Classic Shell does provide a toolbar for Explorer, but I don't bother with it. Mostly I just keep the ribbon hidden, and bring up the 'View' tab when I need it.
For me there are no showstoppers, though. I'd go as far as saying that I slightly prefer using 8.1 + Classic Shell (with filetype associations re-assigned to non-Metro applications) to a stock Windows 7 installation. Startup is quicker, the file copy dialogue and task manager are improved, and I never liked Aero Glass. There's certainly no compelling reason to 'downgrade' to Windows 7, any more than there is to 'upgrade' a Windows 7 system to 8. Of course, if I were stuck with a locked down Windows 8 installation with its horrible default configuration and jarring interface shifts, that would be an entirely different story. Windows 8.x is still an awful experience out of the box, but there's nothing serious that a knowledgeable user with an admin account can't fix in 10 minutes (or at least, nothing that has affected me so far).
Or is it just a weak virus that cannot survive inside an uncompromised immune system and thus serves as a great diagnostic for immune problems that it does not actually cause?
You are confusing legitimate high quality research with HIV denialist fiction. This work describes a new and potentially very important mechanism by which HIV infection and partial replication lead directly to cell death. Uninfected cells are not dying. Uninfected patients are not developing AIDS. Unfortunately, HIV denial is one of the more harmful conspiracy theories, leading to (e.g.) hundreds of thousands of avoidable AIDS deaths in South Africa when scientifically uninformed officials were in charge of health policy.
One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.
So, can the story now be told? Who was the eventual winner?
I think a lot of people don't realise how easy it is to switch desktops in Ubuntu - just install the appropriate packages from the standard repositories and choose whichever you want to use at login. Occasionally you run into minor conflicts, but the major DEs generally co-exist quite happily. You don't have to go with, say, Xubuntu just because you want Xfce. The spinoff distributions aren't just standard Ubuntu with alternative desktops, they also have very different collections of default packages, so that you might get, e.g., Abiword and Gnumeric instead of LibreOffice. The last time I tried this, I actually found it easier to get what I wanted by installing the basic Xfce package on top of standard Ubuntu, rather than hunting around for what was missing from the default Xubuntu.
Canonical, of course, wants to promote their own specific flavour of Ubuntu, so it's in their interests for the non-Unity spinoffs to have distinct identities with different names, and not to provide a choice of DEs in the standard installer.
You really need to pay more attention. The Tsien landed on Europa three years ago. Unfortunately there was technical problems and contact with the lander was lost.
"There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried and we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on. They are a mystery and I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the Universe, that we have not explained everything. Whatever they are, Miss Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957 and they must walk there alone."
Not only did he learn Java to understand the case, but Judge Alsup was already a programmer (and mathematics graduate), putting him in an ideal position to make nuanced judgements about Oracle's arguments:
' Alsup told Boies, "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America --how could you even make that kind of argument?" '
It seems very unlikely that the current panel will be as well-qualified (which is great for Oracle).
Slashdot Mirror
So what is it, really? A pirated copy? Based on Windows? OSX? Linux? Something unique?
It's about a dictatorial regime imposing a new version of its software on what it sees as a captive population of users, with a generic new user interface obviously copied from somewhere else.
Oh sorry, you meant Red Star, not Slashdot Beta! No idea. Looks like Linux.
No, don't JUST post rants here. But post them here as well. Then perhaps somebody with a financial interest in this site who would otherwise see only pre-filtered comments from whoever is in charge of this Windows-8 style fiasco ("we've had some very positive feedback from seven of the target demographics listed in Happy Table 5") will happen to come across what most people on here actually think. Which is that Beta sucks.
With ebooks, the 'region lock' is at the time of purchase. Amazon US will happily ship printed books to (e.g.) the UK, but you can't (officially) buy US Kindle books from a UK-registered account. You can use the Amazon UK Kindle store, of course, but if the price is higher or the book simply isn't available in the UK, tough luck. For obvious reasons all this is about as effective as the DVD region lock, but if DRM and location checking were perfect, country-specific ebooks wouldn't be available elsewhere.
Yes, once the plant dies, the C14 is locked in and starts decaying. But A.C. was asking about the atmosphere -- isn't that supposed to be constant?
It's not quite constant, for various reasons listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
The answer is to calibrate against something organic with a known age. Tree rings, which can give you a whole series of data points, are perfect for this.
Future archaeologists may be puzzled by the anomalous atmospheric levels of C14 in the mid 1960s, which were nearly double the normal levels (thanks to the radiation from above-ground nuclear weapon testing converting more N14 than usual). Contrary to the pop science picture, not all of the atoms in your body are replaced every 7 years and (e.g.) the DNA in certain long-lived brain cells of people born in this era still contains elevated levels of C14. In fact, it's thanks to the nuclear powers effectively doing an isotopic labelling experiment on the entire biosphere that we know the age of these cells in the first place.
She found him because she was searching for '6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA'. If you happen to be 6 foot with blue eyes and live near UCLA, you probably don't need a machine learning algorithm to tell you that it might be worth mentioning these things in your profile.
So how do the conspiracy theories explain the dramatic improvement in survival rates in those cancers where research-guided improvements in treatment have been very successful?:
https://www.stjude.org/stjude/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=5b25e64c5b470110VgnVCM1000001e0215acRCRD
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15726810
Clearly there's a great deal to be done, and finding 'cures' is a very complex and difficult task. But we finally have the tools to do this in a systematic and rational way, and targeted therapies are already emerging.
My 10 minutes are really just spent in downloading and installing Classic Shell, tweaking its settings to taste (no active corners, boot to desktop, pre-Vista style start menu, etc.), then getting rid of the Metro associations for common file types in Default Programs (and installing a non-Metro alternative if required, like PDF X-Change). The high DPI stuff still seems very clunky in 8.1, but I have noticed significantly improved stability with my AMD graphics card relative to 8.0, and more reliable booting directly to desktop (probably because 8.1 supports this directly, rather than relying on Classic Shell code). On the other hand, startup seems a bit slower with 8.1.
I'm not a fan of ribbons in general (I use one of the classic menu addons for Office), but I don't find Windows 8 Explorer much of an issue, probably because there aren't many tabs, or items per tab, and the right-click menu is still available. Classic Shell does provide a toolbar for Explorer, but I don't bother with it. Mostly I just keep the ribbon hidden, and bring up the 'View' tab when I need it.
Sadly classic shell doesn't fix all the problems.
For me there are no showstoppers, though. I'd go as far as saying that I slightly prefer using 8.1 + Classic Shell (with filetype associations re-assigned to non-Metro applications) to a stock Windows 7 installation. Startup is quicker, the file copy dialogue and task manager are improved, and I never liked Aero Glass. There's certainly no compelling reason to 'downgrade' to Windows 7, any more than there is to 'upgrade' a Windows 7 system to 8. Of course, if I were stuck with a locked down Windows 8 installation with its horrible default configuration and jarring interface shifts, that would be an entirely different story. Windows 8.x is still an awful experience out of the box, but there's nothing serious that a knowledgeable user with an admin account can't fix in 10 minutes (or at least, nothing that has affected me so far).
Classic Shell fixes most of the issues in Windows 8.x. The Windows 8.1 update doesn't really fix anything.
You're the guy who told me to get off his lawn when I first joined, aren't you?
He's not wearing an orange jumpsuit in a stress position with razor wire in front of him either.
Avoiding this indefinitely is probably one of the 'stretch goals' he mentions.
In 2017 we can expect the next PM to retroactively drop charges and build a statue in his honor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing_Memorial
Or is it just a weak virus that cannot survive inside an uncompromised immune system and thus serves as a great diagnostic for immune problems that it does not actually cause?
You are confusing legitimate high quality research with HIV denialist fiction. This work describes a new and potentially very important mechanism by which HIV infection and partial replication lead directly to cell death. Uninfected cells are not dying. Uninfected patients are not developing AIDS. Unfortunately, HIV denial is one of the more harmful conspiracy theories, leading to (e.g.) hundreds of thousands of avoidable AIDS deaths in South Africa when scientifically uninformed officials were in charge of health policy.
In his Slashdot interview back in 2004, Neal Stephenson told us about the epic battles that he, William Gibson and you were fighting:
http://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor
One of my psi blasts kicked up a large divot of earth and rubble, uncovering a silver metallic object, hitherto buried, that seemed to have been crafted by an industrial designer. It was a nitro-veridian device that had been buried there by Sterling. We were able to fly clear before it detonated. The blast caused a seismic rupture that split off a sizable part of Canada and created what we now know as Vancouver Island. This was the last fight between me and Gibson. For both of us, by studying certain ancient prophecies, had independently arrived at the same conclusion, namely that Sterling's professed interest in industrial design was a mere cover for work in superweapons. Gibson and I formed a pact to fight Sterling. So far we have made little headway in seeking out his lair of brushed steel and white LEDs, because I had a dentist appointment and Gibson had to attend a writers' conference, but keep an eye on Slashdot for any further developments.
So, can the story now be told? Who was the eventual winner?
Also I was hoping for something I could take with me in luggage when I travel so I could watch stuff in a hotel room on business.
Why not a laptop? Won't you have one anyway? (with portable apps on a USB stick if your company locks it down).
The Beatles: "Money (That's What I Want)":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeqW3t6EnvU
I think a lot of people don't realise how easy it is to switch desktops in Ubuntu - just install the appropriate packages from the standard repositories and choose whichever you want to use at login. Occasionally you run into minor conflicts, but the major DEs generally co-exist quite happily. You don't have to go with, say, Xubuntu just because you want Xfce. The spinoff distributions aren't just standard Ubuntu with alternative desktops, they also have very different collections of default packages, so that you might get, e.g., Abiword and Gnumeric instead of LibreOffice. The last time I tried this, I actually found it easier to get what I wanted by installing the basic Xfce package on top of standard Ubuntu, rather than hunting around for what was missing from the default Xubuntu.
Canonical, of course, wants to promote their own specific flavour of Ubuntu, so it's in their interests for the non-Unity spinoffs to have distinct identities with different names, and not to provide a choice of DEs in the standard installer.
I expected a blog post with lots of citations and historical information... instead it's just some random guy's opinion
...and, oddly, the example he gives of an 'enlightened' approach is 'House of Cards' on Netflix, presumably distributed with their usual DRM.
You really need to pay more attention. The Tsien landed on Europa three years ago. Unfortunately there was technical problems and contact with the lander was lost.
If you make derogatory comments or threats toward a general group, that's not really hurting anyone.
Really?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines
to give just one recent example.
"There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried and we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on. They are a mystery and I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the Universe, that we have not explained everything. Whatever they are, Miss Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957 and they must walk there alone."
Not only did he learn Java to understand the case, but Judge Alsup was already a programmer (and mathematics graduate), putting him in an ideal position to make nuanced judgements about Oracle's arguments:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57445082-94/judge-william-alsup-master-of-the-court-and-java/
' Alsup told Boies, "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America --how could you even make that kind of argument?" '
It seems very unlikely that the current panel will be as well-qualified (which is great for Oracle).
It is a large ship compared to humans, compared to an ocean, it is a speck.
And, if necessary, easy enough to avoid:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John-Trimmer/dp/0870334336
But what about his nemesis?:
http://www.window.state.tx.us/border/ch09/cobalto.html
"In the prison where he still awaits sentencing, the guards call him El Cobalto - the Cobalt Man."