no, the idea is that you use pressure on the steering wheel as an indication of the will to accellerate. Now that I think about it, I think it would be better if it was pulling on the steering wheel. It doesn't have to move, it just has to sense the tension. The more you pull back on the wheel, the more accelleration. That way, if you slam on the brake with your foot, your body lunges forward, and it is very difficult to accidentally or even purposefully accellerate. There is no confusion of pedals.
See below for issue of pedal confusion:
Cars Gone Wild: The Major Contributor to Unintended Acceleration in Automobiles is Pedal Error -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153815/The term “unintended acceleration” (UA – sometimes called “sudden acceleration”) was coined in the 1980s to describe a type of automobile accident that was attracting considerable attention at the time. In these episodes, the driver would report that, as he/she was initiating a driving cycle, after starting the engine, placing the right foot lightly on the brake (to prevent the car from “creeping”), and shifting from Park to a drive gear (usually Park or Reverse, depending on the situation), the vehicle would go to an uncommanded (i.e., unintended) wide-open-throttle condition, coupled with an apparent loss of braking effectiveness (Pollard and Sussman, 1989; Reinhart, 1989; Schmidt, 1989, 1993). The episode would often end with a crash. In the 1980s, there was a surge of UA reports, representing almost every brand of automobile. This situation resulted in a frantic search by three federal government agencies, various auto makers, and several private research firms, for some electrical/mechanical defect that would cause these events. None was ever found.
...
a number of researchers began to suspect that these episodes might have a human-error component (e.g., Schmidt, 1989; Reinhart, 1994), and that a search for an electro-mechanical defect might be misguided. The essential idea was that the driver, intending to put the right foot on the brake, would occasionally place the foot on the accelerator by mistake. Then, when the car moved when a drive gear was engaged, the driver would press harder on the “brake” to stop it, the vehicle would go even faster, resulting in more “brake” application, usw., until the vehicle soon was in a wide-open-throttle condition; the driver (who was invariably panicked) was rendered incapable of diagnosing the situation in the few seconds before a crash occurred.
You suggest putting a software change in there so that the accelerator is ignored when someone is pressing on the brake as well. I don't dispute that. It's another solution, and it's likely a better solution given the history of automobile interfaces. The whole point of the post was to illustrate that if you take a use case of "new users" (or 200 accidents out of 2 million reported.) and build your interface from scratch, you may end up with a result that does not take into account all the existing drivers, who are used to two pedals. Probably the simplest interface would be a centrally mounted joy stick, so that one would no longer have to make left and right hand drive versions of cars, just the central joy stick and you can drive on either side. Pull back to accellerate, push forward to brake (again to make the movement more natural under hard manoeuvring.) Another option is the tank interface, where you drive with an accellerator under each foot for one side of the vehicle, and each hand has a corresponding brake. Another option is a camera in the dash that simply tracks your eye movement, and asks you to look where your want to go, the further ahead you look, the faster you want to go. Don't look at that blonde in the convertible two lanes over!
There are many ways to do it, and once you have drive by wire, as many modern vehi
The ribbon hate comes from the fact that ribbons are to help new users. News flash: It turns the old users into idiots by changing where everything was. My 6000 person organization has not deployed office 2007 because of the ribbons. I'm a beta tester (for two years now), and as someone who used ooo and MS Word for many years, my most common way of understanding how to do something I knew perfectly well how to do in Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2003, is to Google ''office 2007 " and then follow the instructions from some random site. I am still finding I need to do that fairly regularly. so to make something better for 1% of the user base, you are gratuitously turning the other 99% into frustrated idiots. When you learn how to use any precision tool, like a lathe, or a grinder, you get basically proficient pretty quickly, but it takes years for things to be automatic, and for instincts to develop. Similarly, the new interface abuses and disrespects users by throwing out their hard earned instincts. Why would that ever be considered an improvement?
Everyone already knows how to use a computer. There aren't any new users. the ribbons are essentially user abuse. Besides, the only new users are 8 year olds, and they pick this stuff up whether there are ribbons, menus, or feathery hats in the interface. Learning the interface is a non-problem. The real problem
slashdot car analogy:
Ya know. now that automobile transmissions are almost entirely electronic, it would probably be pretty smart to put the shift lever on the ceiling, out of reach of children, and dogs. You can have bench seats with more room and flexibility. Also you could also use forward pressure on the steering wheel as an accellerator impulse, and thus have only a single pedal (the brake.) Many accidents are caused by people who, in a panic situation, step on both pedals. Would be much easier for new users to have only a single pedal to deal with. We can also add a blender between the seats for make snacks while on the road in the space made available for new functionality between the seats.
I don't disagree that the above a probably good, absolute improvements in the automobile driving interface that would, in a world where there were no existing vehicles, and no existing practice, likely make it easier to learn how to drive, and perhaps reduce the frequency and severity of accidents. But we don't live in a world where there is no existing interface that people are already experienced with. How do you think that would do in the market? How about people who use different cars? How about training reflexes (will you cause accidents because someone who learned in the new car, suddenly has to use an old one and is confused by the extra pedal?) How big a problem are you solving, versus the one being caused?
The sampler from FCAT seems fine to me. I had no problem with any of the questions. On Slashdot, there are a lot of mathy types. isnt the point of such exams to show a spectrum of competency, so isnt it normal that other people will find it hard? I dont see an issue with the test... I guess it depends on what people do with the results... A few hours remediation seems more like punishment than effective correction.
What do you mean by "the languages are included" ?
When I click on Tools/Options/Language Settings, the user interface languages tab gives me a half-dozen choices... various Englishes, and French from France (but not Canada)
The next Dialog offers me "Locale Settings" (I know what those are, but does someone without 15 years of linux bruises know?) There are a hundred odd choices there, I could change those all day long, and not affect a single dictionary. Then we have:
"Default Languages for Documents"... Interesting... It says "languages" so it ought to be plural, but you can only choose Western one, and the other choices are greyed out. No idea why. Does this activate a Dictionary? why No! it doesn't!
Then we can proceed to the helpful sounding ''Writing Aids"... Where it helpfully points out that there is a hunspell checker, and if you click Edit there, you will be given the choice of "Language" there also. Does that allow you to pick the language in the document? Nope.
So I can document five different places in the application that ordinary people would expect to change the language of the text, but none of them actually do it. Instead they present the user with five different sets of languages/locales/etc... being installed, but because none of the lists agree, the user has no idea whether any particular language is actually installed or not.
So You may very well be right. Perhaps the languages are installed, but no mortal human will be able to find them. Even If I did as you say, and installed less than all the languagaes, which I don't recall doing months ago, but it could have happenned. It should not be this difficult to add them later.
Next... What do you mean by "default install" ?
When I say default install I mean use the packaging system, and thus the LO that came with the OS when it was installed. By default, languages are not installed. Even though LO icons are all over the unity launcher on the left, and even though writer comes up when I click on a odt document, I decided to go and check if, for some strange reason, LO is not actually installed. so I go to the Ubuntu Software Centre, I search for libreoffice, and low and behold, it offers to install it for me! Full of hope (desperation?) I click install, and authenticate, and then let it trundle for ten minutes or so. Finally it is done.
I fire up the file manager, click on an opendocument, and try to spell check in Canadian French.
Nope, no difference whatsoever... So I go back to the software centre, and hit "Remove" so it trundles for a while preparing to remove, and then crashes. I start-up the software centre again, and it offers to install it again. I do dpkg -l | grep libreoffice, and all the libreoffice packages are there, except for the language packs. wtf does ''Remove" from software Centre do if it doesn't even remove it? oth, it is likely consistent, since it worked before it was "installed" and it still worked after it was "Removed"
Starting to see a pattern? Stuff is pretty, it looks like it ought to work, it looks like it should be simple. There are ten different easy ways to do things. But if you actually see it through, all the simple obvious stuff doesn't work. broken, horribly mangled, user hostile.
btw... a relevant a bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/875850
actually, it's worse than that. I succeeded in finding the modules, but Libreoffice still doesn't show them to me. For example, I select Tools/Language/For All Text and I am presented with the choice of English (Canada), English (US), and French (France). If I click on 'More Dictionaries Online' it takes me to the extensions page, which as I said, has no dictionaries for any of the languages I need. If you are fortunate enough need Afrikaans good for you. I have another option, I can go to Tools/Languages/For All Text/More... in which case I am led to a preferences dialog. No normal person would assume that this is to set application wide preferences, but a careful reading will tell you that that is what it is. So you pick the first dialog with a language in it, and it changes the language of the interface... fabulous... natural... intuitive...
I keep looking... Ah, there is a writing aids section on the left. Click that. It shows me that the hunspell checker is enabled, click edit. It brings up an ''Options'' dialog, which the first field is "Language"... What that language is for, I have no idea, but it is set to English (Canada.) I set it to French (Canada) and click ok and go back to the document. I click Tools/Language/For All Text and guess what? French (Canada) isn't in the list. I have no fucking idea how to get the dictionary to be used, and I have used OOO for ten years, and linux for >20 years. a lot. I just never bothered with a spell checker. I just took it for granted that it works.
Ordinary people, one of the first things they do, is look for that. Lots of ordinary people use multiple languages. Language settings in LO (and OOO) are deeply convoluted and totally confusing.
Are you using ubuntu 11.10? It has only English installed by default. Over many years, I have done the same exercise on multiple different versions of Linux, and the other languages were never installed by default.
Do you realize that package is dated 2008? Did you look for any of the languages I actually mentioned, because none of them are there. You went to the list, you found the second thing in the list. Do you actually speak Africaans?
My conclusion: you are an asshole who wants to show people up without actually helping.
I really want to like it, and I still use it on Linux (what choice do I have?) and have done so since giving up on applixware a decade ago. But even now, it still really, really sucks for normal people. I tried to get people to use it, but you know what? People I know and respect gave it a good try and rejected it as unusable.
This past week, as an English speaker, with an English OS, I had to write a five page document in French libreoffice. Should be straight-forward. It crashed four times before I figured out that pasting an image that is too big can do that, shrank the image and it was OK. Disabled the spell checking because I had no time to figure out how to add a French Dictionary, but later on, I have taken the time, here is the sad story:
My area and family are very multi-lingual (Canadian English, Canadian French, Spanish from Spain & German from Germany and Austria (depending who you are dealing with), and Russian.) LO comes out of the box English, and adding languages is hell. The method used to be one kind of hell, something with five steps and some finger crossing and dancing on certain toes, now it is a different hell. Go ahead, find the French dictionary for libreoffice on ubuntu 11.10:
-- Google for how to install dictionaries on libre office. Enjoy.
-- Go to Tools/Language... More Languages Online... Enjoy.
-- go to Software Centre, and search for libre office or dictionaries. Enjoy.
After you have given up there. I did apt-get install libreoffice-l10n-fr and saw that there was a recommends for hunspell-fr or myspell-fr. ok... which one? tried both, noticed that one removes the other, flipped a coin and went with hunspell.
so then apt-cache search, and find all the appropriate ones (hint, there is no regularity, you just have to look at the list, and pick the ones that seem ok.) and nothing happens... until you restart LO, at which point they will be there.
Sure, I can put up a web page, and explain this crap, but really... you lose 99% of people when you ask them to open a terminal. And I know it was completely different the last time I did this, about two years ago. I and understand why it is that way (independent groups, people working for free, yada, yada, yada...) I get it, I just cannot recommend the result to someone who doesn't inhale bits until 2am every morning. The result sucks for ordinary people.
Please point to an add for a computer controlled multi-axis milling machine for 1300$ Not a manual one that requires a skilled machinist to calibrate, maintain and operate, but an automated one that accepts at least G-code.
If we had only a few companies making roads across entire countries, how high do we think the tolls would be? It's hard to get around using roads. It's hard to set up a competing road, without having to connect into the existing roads, and having to deal with the encumbents. It is hard to havea business case for 'competing roads' that makes much sense in the private sector. People like roads, so governments tend to be involved in getting them built, such as expropriating when needed, giving rights of way, etc... It is never a purely private sector thing because the permitting process is quite complex.
Roads are a public good. Internet is very similar in many ways. It is clear that physical internet connectivity isn't really a competitive market, because having ten network drops to every house, much like having ten highways between the same two cities, makes little, to no sense. You end up with natural monopolies, or at best duopolies, These monopolies interests are always going to be to raise the tolls as normal private sector motivations apply. They will try to minimize investment (because that just kills profits, and improvements drive down profits) and maximize margin. It's the rational thing for them to do. If a government regulator is put in place, they will just argue with them in that direction. There is no rational free market reason for the rent seekers to do anything else. This is not an argument against private sector involvement. For example: Government often doesn't actually build it's own roads. Rather, it contracts with private sector to build roads. then owns them, and lets contracts for their upkeep. Private sector would still be doing all the heavy lifting, and still be competing on construction and maintenance contracts, they just don't own the infrastructure.
So the real question is: Do you encourage greater overall economic growth by leaving ISP service captured by rent seeking, or does this hurt the rest of the economy that relies on the infrastructure? In the case of roads, there is a lot of public road building, as well as toll roads. Private sector only moves in on profitable highway projects where the tolls are limited by the amount of competition provided by public roads, and the un-profitable feeder roads are typically all public. The goal of citizens, and their commercial activities, is to have a decent road system that enables the economy and other societal activities.
The rational economic goal of encumbent isp's is to maximize the rate they can charge for a minimized level of investment and maintenance.
So then it isn't you, but the original copyright holder who is holding people hostage. Debian documentation is usually available in multiple languages, what happens when well meaning people take the english work and re-translate it to French, Spanish, or whatever, is it a copyright violation?
http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/index.en.html
You leave a hole in the matrix for the French version? You produce a second one not covered by the original because it is based on the translation? You put a link to amazon store? (I'm sure that last one will be popular;-) As long as the original work is not released, there is substantial risk that the rights holder will cause trouble in some fashion at some point, which makes it unattractive.
I am a native English speaker who speaks and writes fluent French. I have no interest in helping with the translation of someone else's copywritten work. If it was available under a free documentation license, I would gladly contribute and commit to translating two chapters. It just looks like a gimmicky cash grab.
Finally, for those who note that in countries with socialized medicine, they do not have to pay much for hearing aids, I must point out that they have actually paid more. With higher tax rates than in the United States it is likely they have paid more over time. The difference is that in the U.S., people are able to keep more of their money and odds are, the money that would in a country with socialized medicine be spent on a hearing aid, went to the person's family, car, house, been spent for a vacation, or a whole host of other options.
In the United States, the various levels of government spend more per capita on health care than levels of government do in Canada. In 2004, Canada government-spending was $2,120 (in US dollars) per person on health care, while the United States government-spending $2,724
A 1999 report found that after exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0% of health care expenditures in the United States, as compared with 16.7% of health care expenditures in Canada. In looking at the insurance element, in Canada, the provincial single-payer insurance system operated with overheads of 1.3%, comparing favourably with private insurance overheads (13.2%), U.S. private insurance overheads (11.7%) and U.S. Medicare and Medicaid program overheads (3.6% and 6.8% respectively). The report concluded by observing that gap between U.S. and Canadian spending on health care administration had grown to $752 per capita and that a large sum might be saved in the United States if the U.S. implemented a Canadian-style health care system
However, U.S. government spending covers less than half of all health care costs. Private spending for health care is also far greater in the U.S. than in Canada. In Canada, an average of $917 was spent annually by individuals or private insurance companies for health care, including dental, eye care, and drugs. In the U.S., this sum is $3,372.[11] In 2006, health care consumed 15.3% of U.S. annual GDP. In Canada, only 10% of GDP was spent on health care.[5]
So Americans pay more for less care than socialized countries do. The reason is plain to see. There is no free market in health insurance. You only find out it is any good if youre sick, and then you cannot change. The insurance companies self interest is in higher medical costs, because they set their rates by the costs they are under-writing. The HMO alternative incentivises providing no care, since reducing costs improves profitability. And then Americans bring out the rationing bogey man, which is precisely equivalent to an HMO. At Its base, there is no free market method that I have heard of that aligns the financial interest of the health provider with getting someone health care for the least possible cost. There is no cost discipline that comes into the story without it coming into conflict with the patients' interest.
so profit-driven health care costs more, provides less, and places the US at a disadvantage. You know why Canadian auto workers cost less than Americans even when the currencies are at par? Thats right, add up the numbers and you see an employee in Canada costs on the order of 5,000 $ less per year, because non-profit health care costs less.
This peculiarly American all guvimint bad, all private sector good mentality is tantamount to a religious belief. It's ok, I dont expect your truthiness to get the least flustered when face with mere facts.
It's a macro language, It's and extension language. If there is something compute intensive, you write it in C with a python wrapper, or you can just call an existing one with ctypes. If you expect the language you choose to make your application fast, you're an idiot. I have replaced a C app that ran in operations for 10 years with python and had the code run many times faster (>100x in practice, from O(n*2) -> O(logn) for some bits, and O(c) for others.)
The authors of the C code had written to strange constraints 20 years ago, and re-factoring C was so painful, no-one would touch it. A total re-write, thinking about the algorithms (which is possible when there is less code to worry about.) and for current machines, made it possible to make things much better. I don't know Haskell, I've heard good things about it, and I like rabbitMQ. I have had very good success with python, however. Readability really is the most important thing. Once you're doing the right thing, you can always optimize it later, and C will be there for you then.
http://pymacs.progiciels-bpi.ca/index.html
<preach>
python optimized the correct thing: readability. It has been around for 20 years, and is still growing. There are multiple free implementations. It has very good interoperability with C, which is very important since most GNU software is written in C. It is a language which has survived harsh competition with other languages. The GNU people could use the above modules to transition to it smoothly. It's the right answer.
</preach>
Everyone is wondering what's in it for Google. There is a lot in it for Google. This is a really excellent way to shut up the telco's etc... about net neutrality mumbo jumbo. If they want to charge people for bandwidth usage, and premium bandwidth, then Google is saying that if they make it too expensive for google to reach the target eyeballs, google'll go get them themselves, so f*** off. The monopoly co's will be SOL.
So they test by asking some small companies to run the fibres for them, and get a good idea of the costing involved. Their business plan will be ready to execute if net neutrality goes south. Google will know exactly when it becomes cheaper to build your own than to pay the bandwith protection... ahem... premium. Once the break-even gets to a few years, they're off.
I love what google does, but they always have a way of making the good things they do pay for themselves. I'd prefer municipal broadband, treated as a utility with a CO in each town where the fibre terminates and one can connect to the ISP of choice, but it isn't looking like I get to choose, so Google's option is, by far, the best thing on the horizon.
Your mistake was plugging it into an internal network. That network is IT's responsibility, and as you have seem from the shrill responses, there is a lot more going on there that you don't appreciate. To do what you want to do legally, and without subjecting yourself to abuse, it would have been better to go with a hosting provider (a co-hoster, or a cloud provider.) That way it is outside the network, in exactly the same place as all your doctors' cell phones. There shouldn't be any patient data there, it would be your server, so you would not have to let IT in.
Putting the server out there makes YOU entirely responsible for it, and removes any connection with IT or the hospital. So if someone decides to sue for disclosing Sally's appointment at a cancer ward, they will sue you, and not the hospital. This is also helpful from the IT dept. perspective because by making it external, they will use their web scanners to look at the traffic in-bound and outbound, virus scan it, etc...
Mind you, IT will likely still have their shorts in a knot because you by-passed them and got an external service, which is likely not HIPAA certified, etc... but they would have a harder time and a lot less leverage.
what's the big deal, the artists just set up a.com site with a shopping cart, and use the current youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/user/PomplamooseMusic
It's not that big a deal.
Loved your page, most of it is bang on, but your first point, about ASCII being a bad choice for default, is bogus. When FTP was invented, you had IBM's (with EBCDIC, talking with DEC PDP ASCII, or Control Data machines (some 6 bit vendor charset, etc... charsets were vendor specific) So getting a correct ASCII conversion was the only way to get any data across a link. FTP said: Convert your random line format and charset to ASCII, and the other guy will do the same on his end. Sending a binary from one machine to another was laughably useless. There were no standard binary formats. JPG, GIF, MP3, MPEG? all were science fiction. So what the heck would you have transferred in binary? Nothing.
ASCII was the correct decision at the time, and it is still occasionally useful today. For example, At work, we send and or post a lot of data, to a lot of different clients. The following has happenned twice now:
call from client. "Your data is corrupt"
remote destination is a VAX.
everything looks fine.
half a dozen analysts look at it.
someone eventually figures out that a configuration file in vsftd by default actually IGNORES AND OVERRIDES the ascii setting, and sends everything binary while calling it ASCII. That's class!
linux text storage: <bunch of character> <LF>
vax text storage: <line length> <bunch of characters.>
so yeah, it was corrupt.
Note that this would also corrupt text being sent to windows boxes, who would expect a <CR> before the <LF> on text files.
It's happenned twice, because five years later when we went from Redhat 7 fo Debian Etch, the tweak got lost, had to figure it out again.
ftps wraps up all the issues with firewalling FTP, and makes them 1000 times worse, by adding encryption. You still have two connections, you still have pseudo-random ports that are such a joy to firewall & load balancer admin's every where, and you pile the joy of encrypting the port number so that you have to terminate the SSL session at each intervening firewall. Pure, unadulterated joy if you sell cpus for routers.
Take a 10 foot pole, and gingerly push FTPS away... It is a really bad idea. secsh ftp (what is more often called SFTP, but confusingly was the original name used for ftps) is the way to go. I don't get why they don't adopt the RFC already, it's been an expired draft for nearly five years!
Slashdot Mirror
a number of researchers began to suspect that these episodes might have a human-error component (e.g., Schmidt, 1989; Reinhart, 1994), and that a search for an electro-mechanical defect might be misguided. The essential idea was that the driver, intending to put the right foot on the brake, would occasionally place the foot on the accelerator by mistake. Then, when the car moved when a drive gear was engaged, the driver would press harder on the “brake” to stop it, the vehicle would go even faster, resulting in more “brake” application, usw., until the vehicle soon was in a wide-open-throttle condition; the driver (who was invariably panicked) was rendered incapable of diagnosing the situation in the few seconds before a crash occurred.
You suggest putting a software change in there so that the accelerator is ignored when someone is pressing on the brake as well. I don't dispute that. It's another solution, and it's likely a better solution given the history of automobile interfaces. The whole point of the post was to illustrate that if you take a use case of "new users" (or 200 accidents out of 2 million reported.) and build your interface from scratch, you may end up with a result that does not take into account all the existing drivers, who are used to two pedals. Probably the simplest interface would be a centrally mounted joy stick, so that one would no longer have to make left and right hand drive versions of cars, just the central joy stick and you can drive on either side. Pull back to accellerate, push forward to brake (again to make the movement more natural under hard manoeuvring.) Another option is the tank interface, where you drive with an accellerator under each foot for one side of the vehicle, and each hand has a corresponding brake. Another option is a camera in the dash that simply tracks your eye movement, and asks you to look where your want to go, the further ahead you look, the faster you want to go. Don't look at that blonde in the convertible two lanes over!
There are many ways to do it, and once you have drive by wire, as many modern vehi
Everyone already knows how to use a computer. There aren't any new users. the ribbons are essentially user abuse. Besides, the only new users are 8 year olds, and they pick this stuff up whether there are ribbons, menus, or feathery hats in the interface. Learning the interface is a non-problem. The real problem
slashdot car analogy: Ya know. now that automobile transmissions are almost entirely electronic, it would probably be pretty smart to put the shift lever on the ceiling, out of reach of children, and dogs. You can have bench seats with more room and flexibility. Also you could also use forward pressure on the steering wheel as an accellerator impulse, and thus have only a single pedal (the brake.) Many accidents are caused by people who, in a panic situation, step on both pedals. Would be much easier for new users to have only a single pedal to deal with. We can also add a blender between the seats for make snacks while on the road in the space made available for new functionality between the seats.
I don't disagree that the above a probably good, absolute improvements in the automobile driving interface that would, in a world where there were no existing vehicles, and no existing practice, likely make it easier to learn how to drive, and perhaps reduce the frequency and severity of accidents. But we don't live in a world where there is no existing interface that people are already experienced with. How do you think that would do in the market? How about people who use different cars? How about training reflexes (will you cause accidents because someone who learned in the new car, suddenly has to use an old one and is confused by the extra pedal?) How big a problem are you solving, versus the one being caused?
The sampler from FCAT seems fine to me. I had no problem with any of the questions. On Slashdot, there are a lot of mathy types. isnt the point of such exams to show a spectrum of competency, so isnt it normal that other people will find it hard? I dont see an issue with the test... I guess it depends on what people do with the results... A few hours remediation seems more like punishment than effective correction.
no data for climate change? how about... http://en.mercopress.com/2011/09/01/two-major-arctic-ocean-shipping-routes-open-simultaneously-as-ice-recedes
So I can document five different places in the application that ordinary people would expect to change the language of the text, but none of them actually do it. Instead they present the user with five different sets of languages/locales/etc... being installed, but because none of the lists agree, the user has no idea whether any particular language is actually installed or not.
So You may very well be right. Perhaps the languages are installed, but no mortal human will be able to find them. Even If I did as you say, and installed less than all the languagaes, which I don't recall doing months ago, but it could have happenned. It should not be this difficult to add them later.
Next... What do you mean by "default install" ?
When I say default install I mean use the packaging system, and thus the LO that came with the OS when it was installed. By default, languages are not installed. Even though LO icons are all over the unity launcher on the left, and even though writer comes up when I click on a odt document, I decided to go and check if, for some strange reason, LO is not actually installed. so I go to the Ubuntu Software Centre, I search for libreoffice, and low and behold, it offers to install it for me! Full of hope (desperation?) I click install, and authenticate, and then let it trundle for ten minutes or so. Finally it is done.
I fire up the file manager, click on an opendocument, and try to spell check in Canadian French. Nope, no difference whatsoever... So I go back to the software centre, and hit "Remove" so it trundles for a while preparing to remove, and then crashes. I start-up the software centre again, and it offers to install it again. I do dpkg -l | grep libreoffice, and all the libreoffice packages are there, except for the language packs. wtf does ''Remove" from software Centre do if it doesn't even remove it? oth, it is likely consistent, since it worked before it was "installed" and it still worked after it was "Removed"
Starting to see a pattern? Stuff is pretty, it looks like it ought to work, it looks like it should be simple. There are ten different easy ways to do things. But if you actually see it through, all the simple obvious stuff doesn't work. broken, horribly mangled, user hostile. btw... a relevant a bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/875850
I keep looking... Ah, there is a writing aids section on the left. Click that. It shows me that the hunspell checker is enabled, click edit. It brings up an ''Options'' dialog, which the first field is "Language"... What that language is for, I have no idea, but it is set to English (Canada.) I set it to French (Canada) and click ok and go back to the document. I click Tools/Language/For All Text and guess what? French (Canada) isn't in the list. I have no fucking idea how to get the dictionary to be used, and I have used OOO for ten years, and linux for >20 years. a lot. I just never bothered with a spell checker. I just took it for granted that it works.
Ordinary people, one of the first things they do, is look for that. Lots of ordinary people use multiple languages. Language settings in LO (and OOO) are deeply convoluted and totally confusing.
Are you using ubuntu 11.10? It has only English installed by default. Over many years, I have done the same exercise on multiple different versions of Linux, and the other languages were never installed by default.
It's and online poll, If they are honest, it'll be the Colbert Big Ensemble for Astronomy in the Radio Spectrum. http://www.cio.com/article/489397/Will_NASA_Name_Space_Station_After_Comedian_Colbert_ (Colbert has an issue with BEARS. I think his main motivation would be to detect any extraplanetary bears way ahead of time.) http://wikiality.wikia.com/Bears
Do you realize that package is dated 2008? Did you look for any of the languages I actually mentioned, because none of them are there. You went to the list, you found the second thing in the list. Do you actually speak Africaans? My conclusion: you are an asshole who wants to show people up without actually helping.
This past week, as an English speaker, with an English OS, I had to write a five page document in French libreoffice. Should be straight-forward. It crashed four times before I figured out that pasting an image that is too big can do that, shrank the image and it was OK. Disabled the spell checking because I had no time to figure out how to add a French Dictionary, but later on, I have taken the time, here is the sad story:
My area and family are very multi-lingual (Canadian English, Canadian French, Spanish from Spain & German from Germany and Austria (depending who you are dealing with), and Russian.) LO comes out of the box English, and adding languages is hell. The method used to be one kind of hell, something with five steps and some finger crossing and dancing on certain toes, now it is a different hell. Go ahead, find the French dictionary for libreoffice on ubuntu 11.10:
-- Google for how to install dictionaries on libre office. Enjoy.
-- Go to Tools/Language ... More Languages Online... Enjoy.
-- go to Software Centre, and search for libre office or dictionaries. Enjoy.
After you have given up there. I did apt-get install libreoffice-l10n-fr and saw that there was a recommends for hunspell-fr or myspell-fr. ok... which one? tried both, noticed that one removes the other, flipped a coin and went with hunspell. so then apt-cache search, and find all the appropriate ones (hint, there is no regularity, you just have to look at the list, and pick the ones that seem ok.) and nothing happens... until you restart LO, at which point they will be there.
Sure, I can put up a web page, and explain this crap, but really... you lose 99% of people when you ask them to open a terminal. And I know it was completely different the last time I did this, about two years ago. I and understand why it is that way (independent groups, people working for free, yada, yada, yada...) I get it, I just cannot recommend the result to someone who doesn't inhale bits until 2am every morning. The result sucks for ordinary people.
Please point to an add for a computer controlled multi-axis milling machine for 1300$ Not a manual one that requires a skilled machinist to calibrate, maintain and operate, but an automated one that accepts at least G-code.
Roads are a public good. Internet is very similar in many ways. It is clear that physical internet connectivity isn't really a competitive market, because having ten network drops to every house, much like having ten highways between the same two cities, makes little, to no sense. You end up with natural monopolies, or at best duopolies, These monopolies interests are always going to be to raise the tolls as normal private sector motivations apply. They will try to minimize investment (because that just kills profits, and improvements drive down profits) and maximize margin. It's the rational thing for them to do. If a government regulator is put in place, they will just argue with them in that direction. There is no rational free market reason for the rent seekers to do anything else. This is not an argument against private sector involvement. For example: Government often doesn't actually build it's own roads. Rather, it contracts with private sector to build roads. then owns them, and lets contracts for their upkeep. Private sector would still be doing all the heavy lifting, and still be competing on construction and maintenance contracts, they just don't own the infrastructure.
So the real question is: Do you encourage greater overall economic growth by leaving ISP service captured by rent seeking, or does this hurt the rest of the economy that relies on the infrastructure? In the case of roads, there is a lot of public road building, as well as toll roads. Private sector only moves in on profitable highway projects where the tolls are limited by the amount of competition provided by public roads, and the un-profitable feeder roads are typically all public. The goal of citizens, and their commercial activities, is to have a decent road system that enables the economy and other societal activities.
The rational economic goal of encumbent isp's is to maximize the rate they can charge for a minimized level of investment and maintenance.
There is an inherent conflict.
So then it isn't you, but the original copyright holder who is holding people hostage. Debian documentation is usually available in multiple languages, what happens when well meaning people take the english work and re-translate it to French, Spanish, or whatever, is it a copyright violation? http://qref.sourceforge.net/Debian/reference/index.en.html You leave a hole in the matrix for the French version? You produce a second one not covered by the original because it is based on the translation? You put a link to amazon store? (I'm sure that last one will be popular ;-) As long as the original work is not released, there is substantial risk that the rights holder will cause trouble in some fashion at some point, which makes it unattractive.
I am a native English speaker who speaks and writes fluent French. I have no interest in helping with the translation of someone else's copywritten work. If it was available under a free documentation license, I would gladly contribute and commit to translating two chapters. It just looks like a gimmicky cash grab.
Finally, for those who note that in countries with socialized medicine, they do not have to pay much for hearing aids, I must point out that they have actually paid more. With higher tax rates than in the United States it is likely they have paid more over time. The difference is that in the U.S., people are able to keep more of their money and odds are, the money that would in a country with socialized medicine be spent on a hearing aid, went to the person's family, car, house, been spent for a vacation, or a whole host of other options.
-Art
The facts take issue with your assertions. The following is lifted straight from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_systems_in_Canada_and_the_United_States with sources in support:
In the United States, the various levels of government spend more per capita on health care than levels of government do in Canada. In 2004, Canada government-spending was $2,120 (in US dollars) per person on health care, while the United States government-spending $2,724
A 1999 report found that after exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0% of health care expenditures in the United States, as compared with 16.7% of health care expenditures in Canada. In looking at the insurance element, in Canada, the provincial single-payer insurance system operated with overheads of 1.3%, comparing favourably with private insurance overheads (13.2%), U.S. private insurance overheads (11.7%) and U.S. Medicare and Medicaid program overheads (3.6% and 6.8% respectively). The report concluded by observing that gap between U.S. and Canadian spending on health care administration had grown to $752 per capita and that a large sum might be saved in the United States if the U.S. implemented a Canadian-style health care system
However, U.S. government spending covers less than half of all health care costs. Private spending for health care is also far greater in the U.S. than in Canada. In Canada, an average of $917 was spent annually by individuals or private insurance companies for health care, including dental, eye care, and drugs. In the U.S., this sum is $3,372.[11] In 2006, health care consumed 15.3% of U.S. annual GDP. In Canada, only 10% of GDP was spent on health care.[5]
So Americans pay more for less care than socialized countries do. The reason is plain to see. There is no free market in health insurance. You only find out it is any good if youre sick, and then you cannot change. The insurance companies self interest is in higher medical costs, because they set their rates by the costs they are under-writing. The HMO alternative incentivises providing no care, since reducing costs improves profitability. And then Americans bring out the rationing bogey man, which is precisely equivalent to an HMO. At Its base, there is no free market method that I have heard of that aligns the financial interest of the health provider with getting someone health care for the least possible cost. There is no cost discipline that comes into the story without it coming into conflict with the patients' interest.
so profit-driven health care costs more, provides less, and places the US at a disadvantage. You know why Canadian auto workers cost less than Americans even when the currencies are at par? Thats right, add up the numbers and you see an employee in Canada costs on the order of 5,000 $ less per year, because non-profit health care costs less.
This peculiarly American all guvimint bad, all private sector good mentality is tantamount to a religious belief. It's ok, I dont expect your truthiness to get the least flustered when face with mere facts.
The authors of the C code had written to strange constraints 20 years ago, and re-factoring C was so painful, no-one would touch it. A total re-write, thinking about the algorithms (which is possible when there is less code to worry about.) and for current machines, made it possible to make things much better. I don't know Haskell, I've heard good things about it, and I like rabbitMQ. I have had very good success with python, however. Readability really is the most important thing. Once you're doing the right thing, you can always optimize it later, and C will be there for you then.
http://pymacs.progiciels-bpi.ca/index.html
<preach>
python optimized the correct thing: readability. It has been around for 20 years, and is still growing. There are multiple free implementations. It has very good interoperability with C, which is very important since most GNU software is written in C. It is a language which has survived harsh competition with other languages. The GNU people could use the above modules to transition to it smoothly. It's the right answer.
</preach>
Everyone is wondering what's in it for Google. There is a lot in it for Google. This is a really excellent way to shut up the telco's etc... about net neutrality mumbo jumbo. If they want to charge people for bandwidth usage, and premium bandwidth, then Google is saying that if they make it too expensive for google to reach the target eyeballs, google'll go get them themselves, so f*** off. The monopoly co's will be SOL. So they test by asking some small companies to run the fibres for them, and get a good idea of the costing involved. Their business plan will be ready to execute if net neutrality goes south. Google will know exactly when it becomes cheaper to build your own than to pay the bandwith protection ... ahem... premium. Once the break-even gets to a few years, they're off.
I love what google does, but they always have a way of making the good things they do pay for themselves. I'd prefer municipal broadband, treated as a utility with a CO in each town where the fibre terminates and one can connect to the ISP of choice, but it isn't looking like I get to choose, so Google's option is, by far, the best thing on the horizon.
http://www.tornadoweb.org/ -- This one looks interesting to me. I would like to try this one. Anyone used it?
Putting the server out there makes YOU entirely responsible for it, and removes any connection with IT or the hospital. So if someone decides to sue for disclosing Sally's appointment at a cancer ward, they will sue you, and not the hospital. This is also helpful from the IT dept. perspective because by making it external, they will use their web scanners to look at the traffic in-bound and outbound, virus scan it, etc...
Mind you, IT will likely still have their shorts in a knot because you by-passed them and got an external service, which is likely not HIPAA certified, etc... but they would have a harder time and a lot less leverage.
set login shell to /usr/lib/sftp-server.
or..
http://www.minstrel.org.uk/papers/sftp/builtin/
simpler than ftp...
what's the big deal, the artists just set up a .com site with a shopping cart, and use the current youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/user/PomplamooseMusic
It's not that big a deal.
ASCII was the correct decision at the time, and it is still occasionally useful today. For example, At work, we send and or post a lot of data, to a lot of different clients. The following has happenned twice now:
so yeah, it was corrupt.
Note that this would also corrupt text being sent to windows boxes, who would expect a <CR> before the <LF> on text files. It's happenned twice, because five years later when we went from Redhat 7 fo Debian Etch, the tweak got lost, had to figure it out again.
ftps wraps up all the issues with firewalling FTP, and makes them 1000 times worse, by adding encryption. You still have two connections, you still have pseudo-random ports that are such a joy to firewall & load balancer admin's every where, and you pile the joy of encrypting the port number so that you have to terminate the SSL session at each intervening firewall. Pure, unadulterated joy if you sell cpus for routers. Take a 10 foot pole, and gingerly push FTPS away... It is a really bad idea. secsh ftp (what is more often called SFTP, but confusingly was the original name used for ftps) is the way to go. I don't get why they don't adopt the RFC already, it's been an expired draft for nearly five years!
Exactly. You have a right to legal representation, but your lawyer isn't free.