i thought that global warming (if really induced by humanity) was a cause of combusting fossile fuels and thus releasing previously bound CO2. not to forget our (european and american) incredible waste of energy and ressources!
how exactly do we have the problem of global warming due to nuclear energy?? the environmentalists haven't really proposed going back to fossile fuels but instead have campaigned for regenerative energy sources like wind, water, sun,...
disclaimer: blaming global warming on the environmentalists is the most stupid thing i've ever heard!
talking about privacy, maybe you shouldn't have posted the COMPLETE details here on slashdot. the possibility of just guessing roll numbers has been noted before in this thread but the author was kind enough not to post the personal data!!!
well, now these kids can be googled for, that's not so bad either;-)
the question is whether you subtract the speed of the moving star from the speed of light, i.e. whether "c" is absolute (to what;-) or relative to its sender.
well, people with no clue in astronomy (like me) shouldn't be meddling in things they don't quite understand!
imagine a comet/planet/whatever moving away from us at slightly less than the speed of light...
relative to those far-off planets/stars/whatever we ARE travelling at nearly the speed of light. therefore we stay very "close" to the photons that were emitted at the beginning of the universe, them being just slightly faster.
but on the other hand, when thinking of the planet/star/whatever travelling away at close to "c", when having travelled 1/2 light year away from us, its image will reach us after 1 year (because light travels just as long).
but those two models contradict each other *argh* i am confused
well, if hubble could actually see as far as (light speed * age of the universe) light years than we could gain new knowledge about the big bang theory and the creation of the universe. as it is, knowing what the universe looked like at age 300Million is quite nice by itself and simply saying that it "ain't nuttin' new" is quite ignorant!
as the light has traveled millions of light years, we ARE actually seeing something that existed millions of years before our time and thus you could call it some kind of "looking into the past"!
If you knew what you were talking about AT ALL, you would not go around spouting off about a lack of free Java implementations.
from their respective web sites:
kaffe: Kaffe is constantly under development, and lacks compatibility in many ways with the current releases of Java. It lacks many key features of a full Java virtual machine implementation - including security related features such as a complete bytecode verifier essential for running untrusted code.
jikesrvm: Jikes RVM can run many, but not all Java programs. The Classpath libraries, which Jikes RVM uses, currently does not provide a complete Java implementation; Swing and AWT coverage is particularly incomplete. Jikes RVM also currently does not support other features such as bytecode verification.
sablevm: SableVM is able to run many applications and benchmarks, including multi-threaded programs, but it is limited by the current state of the class libraries, and occasionally lacks VM support for some class library features.
gnu classpath: Not all classes and methods are implemented yet, but most are.
why be so rude to assume that i have NO PLAN AT ALL??? i do know about the free java implementations, but according to themselves they are (not yet) a complete alternative to the sun java jre. surely you can develop java projects under them, but you can't neccessarily run all code written for the sun JRE. sun's java itself is most certainly NOT FREE (as in speech), which is all i said!. and the fact that after many years there are alternative implementation getting ready, does not refute the fact that in the past there weren't!
why be such a smartass? you know perfectly well that java's non-free-ness is a problem especially among the followers of the Free Software movement (which is also why so much energy has been put into writing alternatives).
java is not slow, it has a high overhead on startup!
it is just that the loading of the runtime engine, garbage collector, on-the-fly-compiling by the interpreter, etc produce a high overhead at startup. thus small, short programs seem to run slow, whereas in big applications the speed penalty is marginal!
while all these buffer overflows, etc are more than a nuissance in C/C++, many of the bugs stem from a misunderstanding on the part of the programmer (i.e. use of deprecated functions,...). of course, this does not make it any better and in my opinion manual memory allocation is the GREATEST possible waste of a programmer's time (sensible exceptions excluded;-).
languages featuring garbage collection, length encoded strings, array bound checks, etc are hopefully the future, but at the moment (not least due to the lack of a free java compiler/interpreter/RE) many libraries and toolkits are still written for C/C++ and thus are also mostly used from these two languages.
it certainly is a nice idea and i am all in favor of it. but wouldn't this become just the antagonist of microsoft's efforts to slander OpenSource? wouldn't this soon become an institution for companies like IBM, Novell, HP, SuSE, RedHat,... to voice their own propaganda and TCO-FUD?
while unbiased information is always a good thing, it can only be achieved by a knowledgeable yet uninvolved person or group and how exactly is such a thing to occur with OpenSource?
in my opinion, it would be nice to have a more or less official institution releasing OpenSource/FreeSoftware related news to the news agencies to prevent obviously false and erroneous headlines. but to think that such an institution would abstain from propaganda and biased assessments is naive!
because the whole idea of the "bazaar model" is to allow anyone to contribute. if your restrictions on who is allowed to do what are too stringent, interest on the part of possible developers dwindles and you'll have to all the work by yourself *g*.
apart from that, many high-profile OSS project use such an approach that only senior developers (i.e. those who have proven themselves reliable in the past) are allowed write access to the repositories. the most obvious case being the linux kernel itself, where most (if not all) patches go through the top level maintainers.
but instead of just restricting write access (which as i pointed out above can be a hinderance to OSS projects) you can introduce a slashdot-karma-like moderation that ensures that any added code was reviewed by another developer before it is "submitted" into the real repository.
anyway, by what criterium would you give out privileges to single users and restricted file sets? managing huge OSS project is an unbelievably complex task and so far, most of the projects have proven to be pretty responsive towards security issues. but successful intrusions at debian, gnu, etc have shown that one definite draw-back of a completely open community is the risk of shipping planted, evil code!
in germany an "american billion" is called "milliarde" whereas the NEXT unit is called "billion". so what was the "american billion" called before, what is the next unit called and WHY create such confusion???
this is why I have switched to free (amateur) music from such places as garageband.
the recording quality is for obvious reasons inferior and some of the bands actually sound like amateurs, but for the most part I find the music better to listen to than the current charts. additionally I can promote a good band by downloading their music and don't have to worry whether the newest chart wonder, who claims to have come from the gutter through a life of hardship, is actually a casted middle class nerd.
not that I cared so much about the background of performers, but I DO hate to be lied to and especially when it is done to get my sympathies!
support free music - don't prolong the rip-off-music-industry tyranny - support the artists!
It's a very common practice in many industries to "tilt" the facts to their favor. Look at the hard drive industry and tell me why my 80GB drive ends up being a 74.5GB drive when I format it.
i do actually hope that the above was a rhetoric question... but just for the heck of it:
Giga is defined (in almost all of science) as 10^9; therefore 80GB = 80 * 10^9 Byte. Computer Scientists have calculated most data sizes in exponents of "2"; therefore it is common to write KB as 2^10 Byte, MB as 2^20 Byte and GB as 2^30 Byte; this is also how your operating system will output your HDD capacity.
Recently it has been tried to introduce the units Mebibyte (MiB) and Gibibyte (GiB) for the exponents of "2", but it might still take quite a while (or may never happen) that the majority of computer scientists and the industry will switch to the new notation.
thus it is (due to ill-defined units) more or less correct to write: 80GB = 80 * 2^30 Byte = 8.59 * 10^10 Byte = 86GB
obviously it should really be written as 80GiB = 86GB, but such is our beloved computer science;-))
yet, most likely you already knew that... well, next time better put the <irony> tags *gg*
I'd like to know what people with good equipment and golden ears think.
you mean the people who will have a generator in the basement and a large array of batteries in order to get a more constant current?
you mean people who buy audio cable for hundreds of dollars per meter, who put their hifi-rack on spikes in order to eliminate some of the speaker induced vibrations of the cd player.
who are buying cds only from certain companies famous for their great recordings, because the audio equipment is so perfect that it is actually becoming the quality bottleneck.
people who have no problem whatsoever with paying 5 to 6 figure prices for hifi equipment that (to the layman) sounds exactly the same as from a hifi set for $1000?
well, i haven't asked any lately, but if you ask me they might not be so happy with lossy compression in general, least of all at any realistic bitrate *gg*
But in the real world other factors may be more important to chose a coded, like for example general acceptance, freely available code and specs, and a large content base available.
well, maybe "humanity" should have a say which codec is to be widely accepted in the future, based on merit and not lazyness. and a large content base only really matters when considering decoding hardware, but with our superfast multipurpose computers, playing mixed codecs is a negligible problem!
you can't seriously be saying that we should go on using what we've "always" (i.e. for the last 5 years) have been using, can you;-?
You see: performance will increase allways in all codecs with time... so this kind of testing is only a minute factor amongst others.
actually i don't see! why should the audio quality of a codec increase all the time all by itself and if it were so, wouldn't the best codec than stay the best? why use a mediocre solution when there are better ones at hand?
hmm, the whole point of the "lossy" compression algorithms is to filter out information the human ear/brain is unable/unwilling to hear (psychoacoustics,...). therefore just comparing the decoded signal with the original won't do, because the "subjectively" heard difference is what matters.
and adhering to a certain norm and "scientific method" when comparing those codecs can't be bad...
hmm, it's the same for H2G2U as for all "fantastic" fiction!
they did it to LotR, they did it to the Neverending Story, so why should H2G2U turn out to be exploited less than its noble predecessors? (oh, I almost forgot: although not fantasy at all, haven't "they" just spoilt the epos of the trojan war for just about everyone? i mean: how can such bullsh*t be produced without some cultivated person stepping in and preventing it?)
in my opinion hollywood (and all other film producing places at that) should refrain from making movies out of scripts that mean a lot to many people and are highly unlikely to satisfy most of them! some things simply can't be made into a movie (although H2G2U WAS originally written as a radio series, this does not make it into a better movie script)!
in my opinion it is a very textual book but (while giving great opportunities for wonderful and aesthetic visuals) is not suited for movie adaptation!
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Stephen Hawking
since the advent of the movement of enlightenment, science has more and more become a replacement for religion. but instead of making every one of us enlightened, rational persons this process has led to a situation in which we no longer question our "scientific" believes. instead we just assume that somebody else will have proven it, and that things couldn't be different from our expectation and our world view.
in fact, we are little better off today than the population before the enlightenment, who had serious problems with superstition, general fear of the unknown, etc. superstition is still a non-negligible factor in the lives of many today, even if outwardly sniggered at.
but most of all we tend to cling to a set of believes without ever questioning them! as my prime example I often use the phases of the moon, which nicely demonstrated my own "illusion of knowledge" which I had acquired during my childhood and never questioned.
ask yourself how the shadow on the moon is produced while it goes through one "monthly" cycle and how the sun and the earth are involved.
I will bet that more than half of you will actually have a wrong model of what is going on!
this in itself is not such a bad thing because the shadows on the moon are of such relevance for our daily lives, but it vividly demonstrates how little rationally we tend to be on topics which are not related to our "special field" of interest!
even more disturbingly it showed me with what fervor people will give blatantly wrong answers when asked about such problems. and this surely is a major problem of our para-scientific society today: applying scientific certainty and zeal to scientifically wrong statements!
By putting in Wine, the business users still have MSOffice and can do their jobs regularly, but they pay less money for the operating system, [...]
hmm, not so. when working almost solely with one or two applications the stability of the OS might well be less important than the stability/ease-of-use of those two apps.
beginning with w2k microsoft has vastly improved the stability of their OSs and apart from huge documents the office suite works fairly stable itself.
wine on the other hand has more than just a few quirks, especially when running such a complex software as MSOffice. therefore the stability argument won't hold (in my opinion) in this case! also, MSOffice running under wine will have problems with some menus, icons, animations,.... this has improved a lot, but still apps running wine are far from feeling "native"!
Eventually, Eugene, the marketing director, plays around in the new operating system and finds OSOffice. It can do the same things, and actually a few nice things that MSOffice can't. He plays around with it, and eventually switches to the new app.
no, I don't think so! although OpenOffice is becoming a veritable alternative to MSOffice, I am pretty sure that the incentive to change from MSOffice to OOffice is just not there. it might have some additional features, but it might also lack some or just have important functionality in other places or with another philosophy so that the cost of switching (learning to use a new application) is higher than the functional benefit.
Converting people from MS to Linux isn't a "drop ms and use linux" solution. Its a slow process that needs helping. Wine is one of those 'helpers.'
I couldn't agree more, but neither is MSOffice a good example for this effect nor does this refute the parents implication that being able to run commercial windows software might diminish the need for native linux application, be they commercial or free!
that's a bit like saying that prosecuting drug cartels and organized crime will in the end only be paid by drug consumers and those who come into contact with the "mob"!
at some point the law/the morals will have to be enforced at any cost because otherwise the capitalist system would break down under the load of all-powerfull monopolies!
i know, don't feed the trolls, but this much ignorance DOES actually hurt me!
"pro-Saddam-Hussein rallies"
if you had spent just a few minutes actually informing yourself about those rallies you would now be less likely to appear so utterly stupid! the rallies were actually AGAINST war and in the US there were actually similar rallies! maybe attacking a country without provocation ISN'T such a great thing after all!
"massive 'Down with the Jews!' rallies"
i don't find it fair to judge a whole continent on some minor rallies! sure, europe has minor problems with racism/xenophobia, but so have other countries! the USA have their fair share of neo-nazis and hooligans...
"despite the fact that socialism was responsible for the mass execution of tens of millions"
yep, you are SOOO right! make sure not to mix up the socialism of former russia with the socialism practiced in the rest of europe. were you to read the papers from time to time you might find out that they have little to nothing to do with each other!
i could go on, but if you'd care, i wouldn't have to anyhow!
just get an education,
jethr0
Slashdot Mirror
oh, now things become a lot clearer!!!
...
i thought that global warming (if really induced by humanity) was a cause of combusting fossile fuels and thus releasing previously bound CO2. not to forget our (european and american) incredible waste of energy and ressources!
how exactly do we have the problem of global warming due to nuclear energy?? the environmentalists haven't really proposed going back to fossile fuels but instead have campaigned for regenerative energy sources like wind, water, sun,
disclaimer: blaming global warming on the environmentalists is the most stupid thing i've ever heard!
well, you seem to have found the UBER-indian!
let me just finish this perl-script and see whether there IS another one to beat yours *ggg*
talking about privacy, maybe you shouldn't have posted the COMPLETE details here on slashdot.
;-)
the possibility of just guessing roll numbers has been noted before in this thread but the author was kind enough not to post the personal data!!!
well, now these kids can be googled for, that's not so bad either
i found the source of my contradiction...
;-) or relative to its sender.
the question is whether you subtract the speed of the moving star from the speed of light, i.e. whether "c" is absolute (to what
well, people with no clue in astronomy (like me) shouldn't be meddling in things they don't quite understand!
imagine a comet/planet/whatever moving away from us at slightly less than the speed of light...
relative to those far-off planets/stars/whatever we ARE travelling at nearly the speed of light. therefore we stay very "close" to the photons that were emitted at the beginning of the universe, them being just slightly faster.
but on the other hand, when thinking of the planet/star/whatever travelling away at close to "c", when having travelled 1/2 light year away from us, its image will reach us after 1 year (because light travels just as long).
but those two models contradict each other *argh*
i am confused
somebody help, please *gg*
hmm, if we were anything as intelligent as we often like to think, we would start putting mirrors in space right now!
instead of pre-crime we could then have post-crime investigation by just looking at the correct mirror and analysing the data from the past *gg*
well, if hubble could actually see as far as (light speed * age of the universe) light years than we could gain new knowledge about the big bang theory and the creation of the universe.
as it is, knowing what the universe looked like at age 300Million is quite nice by itself and simply saying that it "ain't nuttin' new" is quite ignorant!
as the light has traveled millions of light years, we ARE actually seeing something that existed millions of years before our time and thus you could call it some kind of "looking into the past"!
If you knew what you were talking about AT ALL, you would not go around spouting off about a lack of free Java implementations.
from their respective web sites:
kaffe:
Kaffe is constantly under development, and lacks compatibility in many ways with the current releases of Java. It lacks many key features of a full Java virtual machine implementation - including security related features such as a complete bytecode verifier essential for running untrusted code.
jikesrvm:
Jikes RVM can run many, but not all Java programs. The Classpath libraries, which Jikes RVM uses, currently does not provide a complete Java implementation; Swing and AWT coverage is particularly incomplete. Jikes RVM also currently does not support other features such as bytecode verification.
sablevm:
SableVM is able to run many applications and benchmarks, including multi-threaded programs, but it is limited by the current state of the class libraries, and occasionally lacks VM support for some class library features.
gnu classpath:
Not all classes and methods are implemented yet, but most are.
why be so rude to assume that i have NO PLAN AT ALL??? i do know about the free java implementations, but according to themselves they are (not yet) a complete alternative to the sun java jre. surely you can develop java projects under them, but you can't neccessarily run all code written for the sun JRE.
sun's java itself is most certainly NOT FREE (as in speech), which is all i said!. and the fact that after many years there are alternative implementation getting ready, does not refute the fact that in the past there weren't!
why be such a smartass? you know perfectly well that java's non-free-ness is a problem especially among the followers of the Free Software movement (which is also why so much energy has been put into writing alternatives).
java is not slow, it has a high overhead on startup!
it is just that the loading of the runtime engine, garbage collector, on-the-fly-compiling by the interpreter, etc produce a high overhead at startup. thus small, short programs seem to run slow, whereas in big applications the speed penalty is marginal!
how about: java is not Free
...). of course, this does not make it any better and in my opinion manual memory allocation is the GREATEST possible waste of a programmer's time (sensible exceptions excluded ;-).
while all these buffer overflows, etc are more than a nuissance in C/C++, many of the bugs stem from a misunderstanding on the part of the programmer (i.e. use of deprecated functions,
languages featuring garbage collection, length encoded strings, array bound checks, etc are hopefully the future, but at the moment (not least due to the lack of a free java compiler/interpreter/RE) many libraries and toolkits are still written for C/C++ and thus are also mostly used from these two languages.
it certainly is a nice idea and i am all in favor of it. but wouldn't this become just the antagonist of microsoft's efforts to slander OpenSource? ... to voice their own propaganda and TCO-FUD?
wouldn't this soon become an institution for companies like IBM, Novell, HP, SuSE, RedHat,
while unbiased information is always a good thing, it can only be achieved by a knowledgeable yet uninvolved person or group and how exactly is such a thing to occur with OpenSource?
in my opinion, it would be nice to have a more or less official institution releasing OpenSource/FreeSoftware related news to the news agencies to prevent obviously false and erroneous headlines. but to think that such an institution would abstain from propaganda and biased assessments is naive!
because the whole idea of the "bazaar model" is to allow anyone to contribute. if your restrictions on who is allowed to do what are too stringent, interest on the part of possible developers dwindles and you'll have to all the work by yourself *g*.
;-)
apart from that, many high-profile OSS project use such an approach that only senior developers (i.e. those who have proven themselves reliable in the past) are allowed write access to the repositories. the most obvious case being the linux kernel itself, where most (if not all) patches go through the top level maintainers.
but instead of just restricting write access (which as i pointed out above can be a hinderance to OSS projects) you can introduce a slashdot-karma-like moderation that ensures that any added code was reviewed by another developer before it is "submitted" into the real repository.
anyway, by what criterium would you give out privileges to single users and restricted file sets?
managing huge OSS project is an unbelievably complex task and so far, most of the projects have proven to be pretty responsive towards security issues. but successful intrusions at debian, gnu, etc have shown that one definite draw-back of a completely open community is the risk of shipping planted, evil code!
well, time for my daily code-review
in germany an "american billion" is called "milliarde" whereas the NEXT unit is called "billion". so what was the "american billion" called before, what is the next unit called and WHY create such confusion???
this is why I have switched to free (amateur) music from such places as garageband.
the recording quality is for obvious reasons inferior and some of the bands actually sound like amateurs, but for the most part I find the music better to listen to than the current charts. additionally I can promote a good band by downloading their music and don't have to worry whether the newest chart wonder, who claims to have come from the gutter through a life of hardship, is actually a casted middle class nerd.
not that I cared so much about the background of performers, but I DO hate to be lied to and especially when it is done to get my sympathies!
support free music - don't prolong the rip-off-music-industry tyranny - support the artists!
It's a very common practice in many industries to "tilt" the facts to their favor. Look at the hard drive industry and tell me why my 80GB drive ends up being a 74.5GB drive when I format it.
;-))
i do actually hope that the above was a rhetoric question... but just for the heck of it:
Giga is defined (in almost all of science) as 10^9; therefore 80GB = 80 * 10^9 Byte.
Computer Scientists have calculated most data sizes in exponents of "2"; therefore it is common to write KB as 2^10 Byte, MB as 2^20 Byte and GB as 2^30 Byte; this is also how your operating system will output your HDD capacity.
Recently it has been tried to introduce the units Mebibyte (MiB) and Gibibyte (GiB) for the exponents of "2", but it might still take quite a while (or may never happen) that the majority of computer scientists and the industry will switch to the new notation.
thus it is (due to ill-defined units) more or less correct to write:
80GB = 80 * 2^30 Byte = 8.59 * 10^10 Byte = 86GB
obviously it should really be written as 80GiB = 86GB, but such is our beloved computer science
yet, most likely you already knew that... well, next time better put the <irony> tags *gg*
Jerry: "The ocean called, they're running out of shrimp"?? [He said that to you??]
George: Yeah, yeah, but then I said to him: "The jerk store called and they are running out of YOU!"
Jerry: You SAID that to him?
George: Well, *hmm* actually I thought it up on the way over here.
Jerry: *Ohh*, THAT's not quite the same
I'd like to know what people with good equipment and golden ears think.
you mean the people who will have a generator in the basement and a large array of batteries in order to get a more constant current?
you mean people who buy audio cable for hundreds of dollars per meter, who put their hifi-rack on spikes in order to eliminate some of the speaker induced vibrations of the cd player.
who are buying cds only from certain companies famous for their great recordings, because the audio equipment is so perfect that it is actually becoming the quality bottleneck.
people who have no problem whatsoever with paying 5 to 6 figure prices for hifi equipment that (to the layman) sounds exactly the same as from a hifi set for $1000?
well, i haven't asked any lately, but if you ask me they might not be so happy with lossy compression in general, least of all at any realistic bitrate *gg*
But in the real world other factors may be more important to chose a coded, like for example general acceptance, freely available code and specs, and a large content base available.
;-?
well, maybe "humanity" should have a say which codec is to be widely accepted in the future, based on merit and not lazyness. and a large content base only really matters when considering decoding hardware, but with our superfast multipurpose computers, playing mixed codecs is a negligible problem!
you can't seriously be saying that we should go on using what we've "always" (i.e. for the last 5 years) have been using, can you
You see: performance will increase allways in all codecs with time... so this kind of testing is only a minute factor amongst others.
actually i don't see! why should the audio quality of a codec increase all the time all by itself and if it were so, wouldn't the best codec than stay the best? why use a mediocre solution when there are better ones at hand?
So uh, why is this necessary, exactly?
...). therefore just comparing the decoded signal with the original won't do, because the "subjectively" heard difference is what matters.
hmm, the whole point of the "lossy" compression algorithms is to filter out information the human ear/brain is unable/unwilling to hear (psychoacoustics,
and adhering to a certain norm and "scientific method" when comparing those codecs can't be bad...
so what is it exactly that you find unneccesary??
hmm, it's the same for H2G2U as for all "fantastic" fiction!
they did it to LotR, they did it to the Neverending Story, so why should H2G2U turn out to be exploited less than its noble predecessors? (oh, I almost forgot: although not fantasy at all, haven't "they" just spoilt the epos of the trojan war for just about everyone? i mean: how can such bullsh*t be produced without some cultivated person stepping in and preventing it?)
in my opinion hollywood (and all other film producing places at that) should refrain from making movies out of scripts that mean a lot to many people and are highly unlikely to satisfy most of them! some things simply can't be made into a movie (although H2G2U WAS originally written as a radio series, this does not make it into a better movie script)!
in my opinion it is a very textual book but (while giving great opportunities for wonderful and aesthetic visuals) is not suited for movie adaptation!
just my two cents,
jethr0
as another example:
ask yourself how the seasons come into being and what role the precession of the earth axis plays in combination with the sun
jethr0
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Stephen Hawking
since the advent of the movement of enlightenment, science has more and more become a replacement for religion. but instead of making every one of us enlightened, rational persons this process has led to a situation in which we no longer question our "scientific" believes. instead we just assume that somebody else will have proven it, and that things couldn't be different from our expectation and our world view.
in fact, we are little better off today than the population before the enlightenment, who had serious problems with superstition, general fear of the unknown, etc. superstition is still a non-negligible factor in the lives of many today, even if outwardly sniggered at.
but most of all we tend to cling to a set of believes without ever questioning them! as my prime example I often use the phases of the moon, which nicely demonstrated my own "illusion of knowledge" which I had acquired during my childhood and never questioned.
ask yourself how the shadow on the moon is produced while it goes through one "monthly" cycle and how the sun and the earth are involved.
I will bet that more than half of you will actually have a wrong model of what is going on!
this in itself is not such a bad thing because the shadows on the moon are of such relevance for our daily lives, but it vividly demonstrates how little rationally we tend to be on topics which are not related to our "special field" of interest!
even more disturbingly it showed me with what fervor people will give blatantly wrong answers when asked about such problems. and this surely is a major problem of our para-scientific society today: applying scientific certainty and zeal to scientifically wrong statements!
jethr0
By putting in Wine, the business users still have MSOffice and can do their jobs regularly, but they pay less money for the operating system, [...]
.... this has improved a lot, but still apps running wine are far from feeling "native"!
hmm, not so. when working almost solely with one or two applications the stability of the OS might well be less important than the stability/ease-of-use of those two apps.
beginning with w2k microsoft has vastly improved the stability of their OSs and apart from huge documents the office suite works fairly stable itself.
wine on the other hand has more than just a few quirks, especially when running such a complex software as MSOffice. therefore the stability argument won't hold (in my opinion) in this case! also, MSOffice running under wine will have problems with some menus, icons, animations,
Eventually, Eugene, the marketing director, plays around in the new operating system and finds OSOffice. It can do the same things, and actually a few nice things that MSOffice can't. He plays around with it, and eventually switches to the new app.
no, I don't think so! although OpenOffice is becoming a veritable alternative to MSOffice, I am pretty sure that the incentive to change from MSOffice to OOffice is just not there. it might have some additional features, but it might also lack some or just have important functionality in other places or with another philosophy so that the cost of switching (learning to use a new application) is higher than the functional benefit.
Converting people from MS to Linux isn't a "drop ms and use linux" solution. Its a slow process that needs helping. Wine is one of those 'helpers.'
I couldn't agree more, but neither is MSOffice a good example for this effect nor does this refute the parents implication that being able to run commercial windows software might diminish the need for native linux application, be they commercial or free!
jethr0
that's a bit like saying that prosecuting drug cartels and organized crime will in the end only be paid by drug consumers and those who come into contact with the "mob"!
at some point the law/the morals will have to be enforced at any cost because otherwise the capitalist system would break down under the load of all-powerfull monopolies!
jethr0
i know, don't feed the trolls, but this much ignorance DOES actually hurt me! "pro-Saddam-Hussein rallies" if you had spent just a few minutes actually informing yourself about those rallies you would now be less likely to appear so utterly stupid! the rallies were actually AGAINST war and in the US there were actually similar rallies! maybe attacking a country without provocation ISN'T such a great thing after all! "massive 'Down with the Jews!' rallies" i don't find it fair to judge a whole continent on some minor rallies! sure, europe has minor problems with racism/xenophobia, but so have other countries! the USA have their fair share of neo-nazis and hooligans... "despite the fact that socialism was responsible for the mass execution of tens of millions" yep, you are SOOO right! make sure not to mix up the socialism of former russia with the socialism practiced in the rest of europe. were you to read the papers from time to time you might find out that they have little to nothing to do with each other! i could go on, but if you'd care, i wouldn't have to anyhow! just get an education, jethr0