Well there is the fact that it appears that you need incredible luck to get as far as we have.
It's taken us over 4 billion years to get where we are now. We're 100 years into being able to transmit radio waves. That has taken into account numerous global cataclysms, never mind the luck of having a planet in the right orbit, size, etc. However the maths show that it's likely that other suitable planets will exist out there.
And natural cataclysms are one thing, there self-made destruction as well. How many developing planets get to nuclear weapons and destruction? Or black-hole generation and destruction? And so on, and so forth.
Then we have signal broadcasts that will be so weak as to be undetectable in the very near vicinity, and rapid technological advancement to digital compressed signals that aren't that distinguishable from background noise. Any society that develops into space will move rapidly to point to point laser communications as well, rather than broadcasting more loudly. So what you are hoping to discover is a race deliberately transmitting in all directions, very very loudly, a deliberate signal for other life. After a few hundred years of not detecting anything themselves, they'll probably give up anyway.
And unless FTL is cheap, it will cost a lot to send out spacecraft to investigate surrounding systems to find life, never mind intelligent life. What if they only did a round sweep of surrounding systems every 100,000 years? If they survived that long as a civilisation themselves... what if terraforming takes 10,000 years? It could be that there aren't enough "island" planets out there for a species to spread out to, so they're stuck terraforming other planets in systems nearby, and hoping that their civilisation will last long enough for the terraforming to complete and populate the other planet. More likely the island planets become separated by civilisation failure, and a catastrophe occurs sending the planet back 50m years evolution-wise.
Yes. You've explained how people are TRAINED to use software, not TAUGHT.
Companies supposedly hire people with degrees who should be able to learn things, but instead they seem to give up on that and pick up the bare minimum in training ("click here to do this") to not get fired.
I think Outlook is a pile of dross, not just interface-wise and speed-wise, but functionality-wise. The email features are acceptable, the calendar is okay, but the other stuff like ToDos is appalling, and nothing like the outliner/task oriented ToDo functionality that I would prefer. Indeed everyone I know ignores the ToDo bar in Outlook because it is so inadequate.
I don't feel that open source software should be imitating when it comes to this type of functionality. If a company has Exchange Server already, it's already paid for it. The aim should be to create a better, more open (maybe to the point of standardisation for protocols) communications and planning infrastructure. And clearly the client software needs to be pretty damn awesome, and run on all major platforms. Maybe within 10 years uptake would be significant, maybe a few percent of corporations!
Exactly. I fail to see the logic in not fighting here. Test the lawyer's certainty in winning:
* Free if you win less than $200,000.
* 10% of any amount above that. I.e., they win $2m, they get $190,000. If they truly think it is a really winnable case, they'll jump on it. If they actually just wanted the $50,000 up front and don't think it is winnable, then you've caught them out.
You win, you get $1.81m, and your life is forever easy - you won't be able to retire on it unless you are 50+ or make massive sacrifices to eke that money out over the next 50 years, but you'll have the house, the rental properties (=income), maybe even a holiday home, the nice pension and a couple of nice cars at the very least.
Hell, going back to the company and saying "$500,000, and I'll resign and not take it any further" is the bare minimum! Taking $100,000 is just lame.
How they can say it is equivalent to 40-50W incandescent is beyond me.
Still, 9 of those Par20 lights should be able to replace a single 100W room light - in a mere 63W of power consumption! Not quite equivalent to the 20W CFLs that are equivalent to a 100W incandescent.
The thing is, I looked up some LED bulbs, and they all have better power specs than the one you bought. 12W for 1200 lumen for example...
That sounds sensible. It would require a small device that could take input current, and depending on its strength, activate a number of output currents, dividing the input current between the active outputs.
You'd want it to do it efficiently of course.
Anyone into electronics know what this type of device is, what it would cost, is it available in chip form that could be stuck on the circuit board that the LEDs are mounted on as well, etc?
I actually think that the work that KDE have been doing to extend the desktop beyond a "pile of icons" is well worthwhile. I love the idea that I can have multiple views into my file system, rather than having a Desktop folder that becomes unmanageable.
For example, people have "Download to Desktop" enabled. It then appears on your desktop amongst your Shortcut Icons, Trash and Computer Icons, etc. It really should fall into a "Downloads" folder, and a plasmoid view of that folder on the desktop will still show it, managed nicely, for you to process without getting it all mixed up.
I'm sure it can do far more powerful things as well.
The "Desktop As Repository Of Everything" concept has to die. This could be one thing that keeps Windows 7 a mess.
Firstly from the fact that a lot of your users are more geekier than the average person, and thus get frothy around the mouth about version numbers, which are as meaningless as you say.
And secondly that your KDE brand, and especially your KDE 4 brand, are now sullied, from poor release branding. Yes, you should have had a major public release at 4.0, but it should have been marked a beta in the brand, and the release of Windows 7 Beta shows that people do in fact download these. If people get burned, hey, it's a beta. You can't sacrifice your everyday users!
I am sure that one of your core team knows someone who works with branding or marketing or similar. See if they can get talked into sorting out the public KDE branding, i.e., a mapping of internal version numbers to external branded releases as a first step, to ongoing brand management throughout the KDE website and press releases, etc.
If you already have someone doing this, I suggest that their help has been counter-productive.
Seeing this KDE 4 debacle has been like watching a team of total fuck-ups on The Apprentice. You can see, as an external viewer, everything they're doing wrong, yet even when told by Alan Sugar that they've been total fuck-ups, they refuse to see where they went wrong, and how they can improve, because they were so involved.
I think it really needs the KDE people to say "yes, we made a mistake and accept that". Otherwise with the continued denial they will make the same mistake again.
KDE 4.0 should have been "KDE 4 Beta" with a very brief description/subheading of "API Stable Release for Developers and Beta Testers".
KDE 4.1 should have been "KDE 4 Release Candidate".
KDE 4.2 should be "KDE 4".
KDE 4.3 should be "KDE 4 Update 1"
and so on. The entire point is that we have "KDE 4" as the brand, so stop abusing it with point releases.
Meh, I'd prefer the CPU to be creating a basic scene graph for a GPU to display rather than copying pixels left right and centre and applying filters and effects in a CPU based compositor.
Except that those countries won't be able to fund social pensions because of the reduced numbers of people working to fund them.
So the retirement age will be raised. To 67. Then 70. Possibly later by 2050. Also required as medical advances allow people to live longer. The next round of medical advances will have to stop people's bodies breaking down after 60, and move that to after 70.
The problem is that the market for products and services will be dropping in size along with the population, so there won't be jobs available for these people. So they'll have to accept social benefits. Or work on the socialised farms that produce food so that nobody starves despite having no money... although they'll mostly be automated.
To be honest, all we have to look forward to is a retirement of soy-burgers and sitting around playing card games. Won't be able to afford to drink in a pub, of course, but that's okay because alcohol will have been banned by increasingly puritan and controlling governments who need to keep the masses of people sedate.
Then someone will discover anti-gravity and nano-bots, and population growth can explode into space, the moon, Mars, and beyond.
Or a massive disease or war will keep people working and require population turnover. That worked in the past.
Anyway, now that's cheered you all up I can get back to work.
Linking to other media sites is a common feature of many news sites. BBC News has links to other site's reporting for stories. It's just a headline and link, nothing special.
That link boosts the other site's search rankings, and every click-through is a reader that they didn't have before, and an ad-hit, and maybe a repeat visitor.
Taking the headline and the entire article is a different issue altogether, but I don't think that is the situation in this case. It is like all the Belgian (?) newspapers that want to have zero online presence or searchability. It makes no sense! You either participate, or you fade away on the fringes. That's why there is a "web" in "world wide web". Why be a bit of gossamer drifting on the wind when you can be in the web and actually be useful?
I'm not talking about teaching them Linux, or Mac OS X.
I'm talking about the IT infrastructure that allows the teacher to teach, which can be Linux, or Mac OS X, or even Windows if the school has a good firewall and security policy, and the time to keep on top of updates.
Using OpenOffice to present something on physics is not teaching Linux or OpenOffice. It's teaching physics. Simple.
You can't be married. Any woman would have turned on the central heating to max by now, and filled every room with electric heaters on top.
And they'd still complain about it being cold, even as you sat there sweating like a pig, wearing a wife-beater, with your feet in cold water, and a cold can of wife-beater in your hand.
I don't think there was a problem with blackboards and chalk for learning, computers were for IT lessons, not for every lesson. They are incredibly distracting machines.
The teachers should have one, to find and get resources for lessons. Indeed a projector + screen for each classroom makes sense, under the teacher's control. I suggest Linux + OpenOffice for presentations, or Macs + iWork (KeyNote), because a teacher cannot risk Windows, cannot risk the chance of getting bad software like that poor teacher in the US that got fired and nearly got 40 years for using a hijacked computer.
Indeed the Wii has the room to move upwards, it's next incarnation will surely be a 1080p system, but perhaps with graphics on the level of the NVIDIA 9800 rather than a theoretical GTX400 that the PS4 could utilise in 2011.
For all systems, moving to 2GB or 4GB of RAM will pretty much sort out that aspect.
I think extra GPU power on the PS4 would be used to move games to 1080p with extra detail and quality, with support for 120Hz 3D glasses like those shown at CES this month. By then the technology will be sorted, and presumably a variant of HDMI that can carry 120Hz 1080p will have been created.
To be honest, it's pointless speculating. Right now that future specification sounds like it would be enough for 20 years of entertainment given the resources required to make a game already that can take advantage of that power, as you mention. Games like GTA5 will have hundreds of hours of TV shows on the disc just to give you something to watch when you switch on the in-game TV and to fill up the game media (I'm not one of those physical media is dead within 5 years believers). I'm sure in 5 years time the specs will seem outdated just like the PS3 and 360 seem outdated now.
You do realise that the PS1 and the PS2 also had 10 year lifespans, but it isn't 2018 yet?
Sony will release the PS4 in 2011 or 2012, it could use a PowerXCell32 derivative (2/4 enhanced PPU, 32 enhanced SPU, >1.5 TFLOPS) at around 5GHz, along with some GTX300/400 level graphics (2-3 TFLOPS), and remain backwards compatible, and take advantage of all the effort Sony have put into the PS3 firmware, Home, media, etc, straight away. i.e., this system will generate a beast of a console for very little development money. The SPUs will be used for immense physics calculations, leaving the graphics free to run 1080p/120 for 3D glasses games. I bet Microsoft's hardware will be of a similar power.
Seems to make sense seeing as consoles are usually on a 5 year cycle, which means we could see the next XBox released in late 2010, but maybe Microsoft will want to get an extra year out of it instead of launching early with dodgy hardware again. The PS4 in late 2011 also seems likely. The Wii is an unknown. Surely the next version will have HD capability, but only at a certain price point and Nintendo will want to make a profit from launch. So "Wii Too" will be less powerful than its competitors, but more powerful than the PS3 or 360. 32nm process is probably going to be used, with a rapid shrink in 2013 to 22nm.
<flamebait> I blame excessive religious indoctrination</flamebait>
Hallelujah! Preach it brother!
And seriously, there is no crime in what these young adults (I hate the term, but it's correct in this context) did. I think a lot of people need to get their heads out of their arses, and perhaps the law clarified as to the intent (i.e., to not harm minors, yet this is what is going to happen and what has already happened).
Oh I'm sure the "sex offender" list somehow isn't effected by the age someone is, and is never wiped.
Why aren't there thief lists? Murderer lists? Fraud lists? These are far more important to know, especially as some of these have high re-offending rates.
Or maybe, just maybe, the idea of a sex offender list is wrong, and once someone has served their time, they've served their time. Maybe they can be on a list if they're released early up until the end of their sentence - but the same goes for other offenders as well. And the severity needs noting - violent stranger rape versus taking a piss.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there is the fact that it appears that you need incredible luck to get as far as we have.
It's taken us over 4 billion years to get where we are now. We're 100 years into being able to transmit radio waves. That has taken into account numerous global cataclysms, never mind the luck of having a planet in the right orbit, size, etc. However the maths show that it's likely that other suitable planets will exist out there.
And natural cataclysms are one thing, there self-made destruction as well. How many developing planets get to nuclear weapons and destruction? Or black-hole generation and destruction? And so on, and so forth.
Then we have signal broadcasts that will be so weak as to be undetectable in the very near vicinity, and rapid technological advancement to digital compressed signals that aren't that distinguishable from background noise. Any society that develops into space will move rapidly to point to point laser communications as well, rather than broadcasting more loudly. So what you are hoping to discover is a race deliberately transmitting in all directions, very very loudly, a deliberate signal for other life. After a few hundred years of not detecting anything themselves, they'll probably give up anyway.
And unless FTL is cheap, it will cost a lot to send out spacecraft to investigate surrounding systems to find life, never mind intelligent life. What if they only did a round sweep of surrounding systems every 100,000 years? If they survived that long as a civilisation themselves... what if terraforming takes 10,000 years? It could be that there aren't enough "island" planets out there for a species to spread out to, so they're stuck terraforming other planets in systems nearby, and hoping that their civilisation will last long enough for the terraforming to complete and populate the other planet. More likely the island planets become separated by civilisation failure, and a catastrophe occurs sending the planet back 50m years evolution-wise.
Tell that to my friend who can't get Linux to display anything on a laptop using i810 graphics.
Appalling hardware.
Appalling drivers.
And people think Larrabee will be good!
Yes. You've explained how people are TRAINED to use software, not TAUGHT.
Companies supposedly hire people with degrees who should be able to learn things, but instead they seem to give up on that and pick up the bare minimum in training ("click here to do this") to not get fired.
I think Outlook is a pile of dross, not just interface-wise and speed-wise, but functionality-wise. The email features are acceptable, the calendar is okay, but the other stuff like ToDos is appalling, and nothing like the outliner/task oriented ToDo functionality that I would prefer. Indeed everyone I know ignores the ToDo bar in Outlook because it is so inadequate.
I don't feel that open source software should be imitating when it comes to this type of functionality. If a company has Exchange Server already, it's already paid for it. The aim should be to create a better, more open (maybe to the point of standardisation for protocols) communications and planning infrastructure. And clearly the client software needs to be pretty damn awesome, and run on all major platforms. Maybe within 10 years uptake would be significant, maybe a few percent of corporations!
Exactly. I fail to see the logic in not fighting here. Test the lawyer's certainty in winning:
* Free if you win less than $200,000.
* 10% of any amount above that. I.e., they win $2m, they get $190,000. If they truly think it is a really winnable case, they'll jump on it. If they actually just wanted the $50,000 up front and don't think it is winnable, then you've caught them out.
You win, you get $1.81m, and your life is forever easy - you won't be able to retire on it unless you are 50+ or make massive sacrifices to eke that money out over the next 50 years, but you'll have the house, the rental properties (=income), maybe even a holiday home, the nice pension and a couple of nice cars at the very least.
Hell, going back to the company and saying "$500,000, and I'll resign and not take it any further" is the bare minimum! Taking $100,000 is just lame.
That 200lm Par20 LED bulb is equivalent to a 25W incandescent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Power
How they can say it is equivalent to 40-50W incandescent is beyond me.
Still, 9 of those Par20 lights should be able to replace a single 100W room light - in a mere 63W of power consumption! Not quite equivalent to the 20W CFLs that are equivalent to a 100W incandescent.
The thing is, I looked up some LED bulbs, and they all have better power specs than the one you bought. 12W for 1200 lumen for example...
http://www.everbrightlights.com/screw.html
That sounds sensible. It would require a small device that could take input current, and depending on its strength, activate a number of output currents, dividing the input current between the active outputs.
You'd want it to do it efficiently of course.
Anyone into electronics know what this type of device is, what it would cost, is it available in chip form that could be stuck on the circuit board that the LEDs are mounted on as well, etc?
I actually think that the work that KDE have been doing to extend the desktop beyond a "pile of icons" is well worthwhile. I love the idea that I can have multiple views into my file system, rather than having a Desktop folder that becomes unmanageable.
For example, people have "Download to Desktop" enabled. It then appears on your desktop amongst your Shortcut Icons, Trash and Computer Icons, etc. It really should fall into a "Downloads" folder, and a plasmoid view of that folder on the desktop will still show it, managed nicely, for you to process without getting it all mixed up.
I'm sure it can do far more powerful things as well.
The "Desktop As Repository Of Everything" concept has to die. This could be one thing that keeps Windows 7 a mess.
I think you have a brand management problem.
Firstly from the fact that a lot of your users are more geekier than the average person, and thus get frothy around the mouth about version numbers, which are as meaningless as you say.
And secondly that your KDE brand, and especially your KDE 4 brand, are now sullied, from poor release branding. Yes, you should have had a major public release at 4.0, but it should have been marked a beta in the brand, and the release of Windows 7 Beta shows that people do in fact download these. If people get burned, hey, it's a beta. You can't sacrifice your everyday users!
I am sure that one of your core team knows someone who works with branding or marketing or similar. See if they can get talked into sorting out the public KDE branding, i.e., a mapping of internal version numbers to external branded releases as a first step, to ongoing brand management throughout the KDE website and press releases, etc.
If you already have someone doing this, I suggest that their help has been counter-productive.
Seeing this KDE 4 debacle has been like watching a team of total fuck-ups on The Apprentice. You can see, as an external viewer, everything they're doing wrong, yet even when told by Alan Sugar that they've been total fuck-ups, they refuse to see where they went wrong, and how they can improve, because they were so involved.
No.
"KDE 4" is a brand. That KDE have screwed up royally.
4.0 should have been "KDE 4 Beta". The beta-ness of it shouldn't have been written about in a paragraph on the release notes halfway down the page.
The point releases are just versioning information that can be rebranded upon release.
KDE 4.0 -> KDE 4 Beta
KDE 4.1 -> KDE 4 RC
KDE 4.2 -> KDE 4
KDE 4.3 -> KDE 4 Update 1
I think the KDE people need to learn about not exposing internal version numbers to the point of having them in the branded product.
Even if they had gone with "KDE 4 RC" for 4.0, the feedback would have meant that 4.1 would have been "KDE 4 RC 2"...
I think it really needs the KDE people to say "yes, we made a mistake and accept that". Otherwise with the continued denial they will make the same mistake again.
KDE 4.0 should have been "KDE 4 Beta" with a very brief description/subheading of "API Stable Release for Developers and Beta Testers".
KDE 4.1 should have been "KDE 4 Release Candidate".
KDE 4.2 should be "KDE 4".
KDE 4.3 should be "KDE 4 Update 1"
and so on. The entire point is that we have "KDE 4" as the brand, so stop abusing it with point releases.
Meh, I'd prefer the CPU to be creating a basic scene graph for a GPU to display rather than copying pixels left right and centre and applying filters and effects in a CPU based compositor.
Except that those countries won't be able to fund social pensions because of the reduced numbers of people working to fund them.
So the retirement age will be raised. To 67. Then 70. Possibly later by 2050. Also required as medical advances allow people to live longer. The next round of medical advances will have to stop people's bodies breaking down after 60, and move that to after 70.
The problem is that the market for products and services will be dropping in size along with the population, so there won't be jobs available for these people. So they'll have to accept social benefits. Or work on the socialised farms that produce food so that nobody starves despite having no money ... although they'll mostly be automated.
To be honest, all we have to look forward to is a retirement of soy-burgers and sitting around playing card games. Won't be able to afford to drink in a pub, of course, but that's okay because alcohol will have been banned by increasingly puritan and controlling governments who need to keep the masses of people sedate.
Then someone will discover anti-gravity and nano-bots, and population growth can explode into space, the moon, Mars, and beyond.
Or a massive disease or war will keep people working and require population turnover. That worked in the past.
Anyway, now that's cheered you all up I can get back to work.
Linking to other media sites is a common feature of many news sites. BBC News has links to other site's reporting for stories. It's just a headline and link, nothing special.
That link boosts the other site's search rankings, and every click-through is a reader that they didn't have before, and an ad-hit, and maybe a repeat visitor.
Taking the headline and the entire article is a different issue altogether, but I don't think that is the situation in this case. It is like all the Belgian (?) newspapers that want to have zero online presence or searchability. It makes no sense! You either participate, or you fade away on the fringes. That's why there is a "web" in "world wide web". Why be a bit of gossamer drifting on the wind when you can be in the web and actually be useful?
I'm not talking about teaching them Linux, or Mac OS X.
I'm talking about the IT infrastructure that allows the teacher to teach, which can be Linux, or Mac OS X, or even Windows if the school has a good firewall and security policy, and the time to keep on top of updates.
Using OpenOffice to present something on physics is not teaching Linux or OpenOffice. It's teaching physics. Simple.
You can't be married. Any woman would have turned on the central heating to max by now, and filled every room with electric heaters on top.
And they'd still complain about it being cold, even as you sat there sweating like a pig, wearing a wife-beater, with your feet in cold water, and a cold can of wife-beater in your hand.
Damn right.
I don't think there was a problem with blackboards and chalk for learning, computers were for IT lessons, not for every lesson. They are incredibly distracting machines.
The teachers should have one, to find and get resources for lessons. Indeed a projector + screen for each classroom makes sense, under the teacher's control. I suggest Linux + OpenOffice for presentations, or Macs + iWork (KeyNote), because a teacher cannot risk Windows, cannot risk the chance of getting bad software like that poor teacher in the US that got fired and nearly got 40 years for using a hijacked computer.
All very pertinent points.
Indeed the Wii has the room to move upwards, it's next incarnation will surely be a 1080p system, but perhaps with graphics on the level of the NVIDIA 9800 rather than a theoretical GTX400 that the PS4 could utilise in 2011.
For all systems, moving to 2GB or 4GB of RAM will pretty much sort out that aspect.
I think extra GPU power on the PS4 would be used to move games to 1080p with extra detail and quality, with support for 120Hz 3D glasses like those shown at CES this month. By then the technology will be sorted, and presumably a variant of HDMI that can carry 120Hz 1080p will have been created.
To be honest, it's pointless speculating. Right now that future specification sounds like it would be enough for 20 years of entertainment given the resources required to make a game already that can take advantage of that power, as you mention. Games like GTA5 will have hundreds of hours of TV shows on the disc just to give you something to watch when you switch on the in-game TV and to fill up the game media (I'm not one of those physical media is dead within 5 years believers). I'm sure in 5 years time the specs will seem outdated just like the PS3 and 360 seem outdated now.
And a guy called "Stallin" who couldn't get his free printer to work goes around evangelising Lenix.
It must run KDE ... for the Krushchev application, which "de-Stallin-ised" Lenix and allowed binary drivers.
"In Soviet Russia, the Operating System runs|owns YOU!"
Which is oddly correct in more than just the meme construction.
"In The Matrix, the Operating System installs you."
Is also correct on both counts.
You do realise that the PS1 and the PS2 also had 10 year lifespans, but it isn't 2018 yet?
Sony will release the PS4 in 2011 or 2012, it could use a PowerXCell32 derivative (2/4 enhanced PPU, 32 enhanced SPU, >1.5 TFLOPS) at around 5GHz, along with some GTX300/400 level graphics (2-3 TFLOPS), and remain backwards compatible, and take advantage of all the effort Sony have put into the PS3 firmware, Home, media, etc, straight away. i.e., this system will generate a beast of a console for very little development money. The SPUs will be used for immense physics calculations, leaving the graphics free to run 1080p/120 for 3D glasses games. I bet Microsoft's hardware will be of a similar power.
Seems to make sense seeing as consoles are usually on a 5 year cycle, which means we could see the next XBox released in late 2010, but maybe Microsoft will want to get an extra year out of it instead of launching early with dodgy hardware again. The PS4 in late 2011 also seems likely. The Wii is an unknown. Surely the next version will have HD capability, but only at a certain price point and Nintendo will want to make a profit from launch. So "Wii Too" will be less powerful than its competitors, but more powerful than the PS3 or 360. 32nm process is probably going to be used, with a rapid shrink in 2013 to 22nm.
<flamebait> I blame excessive religious indoctrination</flamebait>
Hallelujah! Preach it brother!
And seriously, there is no crime in what these young adults (I hate the term, but it's correct in this context) did. I think a lot of people need to get their heads out of their arses, and perhaps the law clarified as to the intent (i.e., to not harm minors, yet this is what is going to happen and what has already happened).
Oh I'm sure the "sex offender" list somehow isn't effected by the age someone is, and is never wiped.
Why aren't there thief lists? Murderer lists? Fraud lists? These are far more important to know, especially as some of these have high re-offending rates.
Or maybe, just maybe, the idea of a sex offender list is wrong, and once someone has served their time, they've served their time. Maybe they can be on a list if they're released early up until the end of their sentence - but the same goes for other offenders as well. And the severity needs noting - violent stranger rape versus taking a piss.
It just means that the term "sex offender" is meaningless.
The dangerous people get lost in the crowd.
Not one brain cell has gone into thinking these policies through.
Yeah, video performance sucks it has to be said.