IANAD, but it seems to me that the smallpox threat is a bit overblown. The victory over smallpox was in large part due to the characteristics of the disease itself: short incubation period, very visible presentation. These characteristics would also make it easier to fight in the case of a terrorist attack.
FWIW, my Dad had mild case of smallpox as a child. He was not horribly disfigured nor did he describe it as particularly uncomfortable as diseases go.
The good thing about open source is that people hold strong opinions...
The bad thing about open source is that people hold strong opinions...
I really wonder how many people involved in open source ever heard "plays well with others"?
There are plenty of talented, new actors working there butts off to get a break. Any actor respectful of his/her fellow actors should refuse to do a movie with a dead man.
A number of distros are already using 2.4.x. I am curious how much of the maintenance of the 2.4 kernel will be simply incorporating changes already made by the different distros, how much will be making changes in response to distro requests, and how much of the process is independent from the distros?
I first fell in love with the Analytical Engine years ago after reading an article in Sci Am. The most fascinating feature which wasn't even addressed in the review is that it was programmable. I'm not sure if it was Turing-complete, though since it had both branching and looping mechanisms it must have been, but even the conceptualization of a programmable device during the age of iron and steam is just astounding. Maybe someday I'll get to The Science Museum and be able to watch the Analytical Engine in action.
Victors write the history books!
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"The victors write the history books."
It is all well and good for Jon Katz to challenge us to find a definition of globalization that isn't primarily about economics. Greater minds than ours have given it their best shot. Anthony Gidden in the 1999 Reich lectures produced a well-nuanced description of globalization. It took him five lectures to do so. A summary definition of Gidden's globalization might read: The process of global modernization, risk assessment particularly in response to human created problems including nuclear weapons and global warming, and global democratization emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion, carried along by a mixture of economic, technological and cultural imperatives.
But the process is larger than any of us. We are not even major players. Only in retrospect will we be able to write a good definition and we all know that victors write the history books.
If my friends and I were able to write the definition, I'd be all for globalization. With the G8, WTO, Worldbank, USA, EU, et al in charge, the best we can do is provide the occasional dissenting voice.
I was the computer guy in a small hospital when we purchased a unix-based pharmacy system. Even though we had a 24/7 support contract, I started reading the man files. Soon I was a unix administrator.
To address the last bit in your message. Nah, you aren't too old and don't worry about the experience factor. If you can get an interview you can get a job, because most people hire based on intangibles (personality, body language, etc.) more than on resume qualifications.
ITN World News for Public Television had a short piece tonight with the balloonists cavorting around Trafalgar Square in their Soviet-made spacesuits. Andy and Colin seemed quite competent despite their stated goal of reaching outer space in a helium balloon.
When I first started running linux, I checked out the various wordprocessor available. Abiword, kword, emacs, wp and staroffice. For awhile I used different ones for different projects. I've now settled on staroffice for heavy duty work and kword for light duty work. I've now started using Open Office. While I'm not convinced of the wisdom of Java as a development language, I'm quite pleased with the results.
Now you tell me that Richard Stallman doesn't like StarOffice, so what??? The cool thing about open source is we don't all have to be clones of each other. The open source community has benefited from both Richard and Linus. Even the current $100 million "open courseware" project at MIT is in some ways of legacy of Richard Stallman. I believe he'd make a good board member even if I disagree with him on StarOffice.
RMS has enough karma to last several lifetimes!!!
Anyone willing to decode document 27 for me??
Document 27 reads as follows:
Memorandum for: (blank)
Subject: (blank) Views on Trained Cats (blank) for (blank) Use
1. Our final examination of trained cats (blank) for (blank) use in the (blank) convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs. Repeated checks on the state of training and equipment showed us that it was indeed possible to train (long blank) locations; we were not able to visualize (blank) (blank) use for this technique under conditions that prevail (blank).
2. We have satisfied ourselves that it is indeed possible (very long blank). This is in itself a remarkable scientific achievement. Knowing that cats can indeed be trained to move short distances (blank) (blank) we see know reason to believe that a (blank) cat can not be similarly trained to approach (blank). Again, however, the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that, for our (blank) purposes, it would not be practical.
3. The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it, particularly (blank) whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers.
Right! American taxpayers spent tens of billions on the development of the space-shuttle now we should balk at spending $300 million per flight to use the danged thing. It'd be like buying a $50,000 car and then leasing it out when the price of gasoline hits $2.00 per gallon.
note: Actually the $300 million per flight includes lots of overhead. The direct flight related costs appear to be _only_ $90 million..
The piece really underplayed the role of wind generators. The cost of windpower has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. In the early '80s it was nearly 40 cents per kilowatt hour, it is now between 3 and 6 cents. Worldwide wind power is starting to take off. It increased by 29% in the USA alone between 1998 and 1999. By using hydrogen generation as an energy storage and transportation medium, the benefits of windpower can be extended to all energy using sectors.
After 10 years spent in the bowels of large buildings staring at computer screens, I decided to get out and see the world. When I resurfaced I became a HS Computer Science teacher. One piece of advice I always give my seniors is Major in something other than CS, but make CS a strong minor or even double major. Most kids don't take the advice and consequently suffer. Those that do come back and tell me how important it has been for them to have a content area in which they can apply their computer skills. They are happier _and_ have better-developed careers.
Anyone with Oberon experience out there?? It started out as a tiled windows system only, but now they've developed an overlapping windows desktop as well. Checkout the screenshots.
Their comment on tiled display is useful:
The Gadgets desktop also has a tiled display mode with two vertical tracks. In this mode a newly opened viewer automatically covers half of the largest existing viewer in the track. This is ideal for text-based work, e.g., programming or text editing. Viewers can be resized vertically and moved, but they always use the full track width. Because there are fewer degrees of freedom, it is much quicker to arrange viewers optimally. newly opened viewer automatically covers half of the largest existing viewer in the track. BTW, windows are called viewers in Oberon.
I'm not shocked, not even surprised...actually I'd have been rather more surprised if it were XP which was the faster OS.
Not to wax nostalgic, but PC-Write on DOS 4.01 and a 10 MHz (Turbo mode) 8088 had no noticeable latency while typing. In fact most of its non-disk operations were essentially simultaneous. Word under Win 3.1 had noticeable delays with most everything it did. Win 95 and Word 97 slowed things down further. Heck, Gecko was _much_ faster than Mozilla m.95, so it happens in open source as well. I am often told that "If you had the latest hardware it would be fast!". Alas, I've never been able to verify that. But, it seems to me that if you have to upgrade hardware to experience the same speed, then the software _is_ slower...
How did this get modded 5? Its just a rehash of lame old arguments.
don't plan to use it to build out your economic infrastructure so you can pay it back with interest
1) Third world countries had very little say in the granting of the money. World Bank, et al, sent "advisors" into a country for a couple of weeks who decided what the country needed then made them a deal they couldn't refuse. Literally! They risked losing what little relationship they had by refusing.
or fuck off and retreat into isolationism. Grow your own goddamned corn and feed yourselves
2) By 1990, every country in the world was food self-sufficient. Only war, often triggered by cold-war struggles, and/or drought, increasingly caused by industrialized countries via global warming, has kept any country from growing adequate food for their own people.
With the rise of globalization, the agricultural base of many countries is eroding. The U.S. for example is flooding Mexico with cheap corn , driving many farmers out of business and causing them to look for jobs in the cities.
I lived for three years on the border between two African countries and saw first hand the problems which borders spawn: smuggling of goods _and_ people, rebel activity, water disputes, fragmentation of traditional societies, etc. So in principle I'm all for globalism.
But, the globalism we hear so much about is not going to help much. This globalism is the bastard son of mutli-national corporations and the governments which stand to benefit from their activities. And they of course will always protect their own interests.
Using Open Source analogies, globalization means free beer (or damn near) for developed countries. It actually, as several posts have pointed out, hinders free speech of those in developing countries. Globalization should be an open process, not one which has to be done from inside a fortress.
How ironic that it only took two weeks after SonicBlue won a Technological/Engineering Emmy Award for the Advancement of Television for the big boys to crackdown on them. Too bad we still have media people wanting to control information rather than letting it free.
After living abroad for seven of ten years, I've often commented that "borders are evil". Just look at all the heartache that results from people smuggling, border-skirmishes, etc, around the world. Virtually every border I've seen creates some level of inequity/conflict between close neighbors living on opposite sides.
But recently I've found myself agreeing more and more with the anti-globalization activists. Why? Because I now see globalization as not being a process of breaking down borders but rather one of extending Western hegemony! This kind of globalization is allowing the dominant culture to ride roughshod all others.
In my experience (10 years as a programmer, DP manager, et al., 10 years as an educator) ideas which are well-developed and clearly explained always seem like commonsense. I've worked with people like your boss. In general they are big on what they could've done, but don't have alot to show for it. Hopefully that doesn't describe your boss...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...
Left-pos, Left-neg, Right-pos, Right-neg.
Four-states per bit (quit??)
65,536 states per byte (quyte??)
This is computing raised to the power of two...
IANAD, but it seems to me that the smallpox threat is a bit overblown. The victory over smallpox was in large part due to the characteristics of the disease itself: short incubation period, very visible presentation. These characteristics would also make it easier to fight in the case of a terrorist attack.
FWIW, my Dad had mild case of smallpox as a child. He was not horribly disfigured nor did he describe it as particularly uncomfortable as diseases go.
The good thing about open source is that people hold strong opinions... The bad thing about open source is that people hold strong opinions... I really wonder how many people involved in open source ever heard "plays well with others"?
There are plenty of talented, new actors working there butts off to get a break. Any actor respectful of his/her fellow actors should refuse to do a movie with a dead man.
Pssst, buddy. You new in town. I got some great IP addresses I can sell you. Cheap...real cheap!
A number of distros are already using 2.4.x. I am curious how much of the maintenance of the 2.4 kernel will be simply incorporating changes already made by the different distros, how much will be making changes in response to distro requests, and how much of the process is independent from the distros?
I first fell in love with the Analytical Engine years ago after reading an article in Sci Am. The most fascinating feature which wasn't even addressed in the review is that it was programmable. I'm not sure if it was Turing-complete, though since it had both branching and looping mechanisms it must have been, but even the conceptualization of a programmable device during the age of iron and steam is just astounding. Maybe someday I'll get to The Science Museum and be able to watch the Analytical Engine in action.
"The victors write the history books."
It is all well and good for Jon Katz to challenge us to find a definition of globalization that isn't primarily about economics. Greater minds than ours have given it their best shot. Anthony Gidden in the 1999 Reich lectures produced a well-nuanced description of globalization. It took him five lectures to do so. A summary definition of Gidden's globalization might read: The process of global modernization, risk assessment particularly in response to human created problems including nuclear weapons and global warming, and global democratization emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion, carried along by a mixture of economic, technological and cultural imperatives.
But the process is larger than any of us. We are not even major players. Only in retrospect will we be able to write a good definition and we all know that victors write the history books.
If my friends and I were able to write the definition, I'd be all for globalization. With the G8, WTO, Worldbank, USA, EU, et al in charge, the best we can do is provide the occasional dissenting voice.
I was the computer guy in a small hospital when we purchased a unix-based pharmacy system. Even though we had a 24/7 support contract, I started reading the man files. Soon I was a unix administrator.
To address the last bit in your message. Nah, you aren't too old and don't worry about the experience factor. If you can get an interview you can get a job, because most people hire based on intangibles (personality, body language, etc.) more than on resume qualifications.
ITN World News for Public Television had a short piece tonight with the balloonists cavorting around Trafalgar Square in their Soviet-made spacesuits. Andy and Colin seemed quite competent despite their stated goal of reaching outer space in a helium balloon.
Bon voyage!
When I first started running linux, I checked out the various wordprocessor available. Abiword, kword, emacs, wp and staroffice. For awhile I used different ones for different projects. I've now settled on staroffice for heavy duty work and kword for light duty work. I've now started using Open Office. While I'm not convinced of the wisdom of Java as a development language, I'm quite pleased with the results. Now you tell me that Richard Stallman doesn't like StarOffice, so what??? The cool thing about open source is we don't all have to be clones of each other. The open source community has benefited from both Richard and Linus. Even the current $100 million "open courseware" project at MIT is in some ways of legacy of Richard Stallman. I believe he'd make a good board member even if I disagree with him on StarOffice. RMS has enough karma to last several lifetimes!!!
Anyone willing to decode document 27 for me?? Document 27 reads as follows:
Memorandum for: (blank)
Subject: (blank) Views on Trained Cats (blank) for (blank) Use
1. Our final examination of trained cats (blank) for (blank) use in the (blank) convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs. Repeated checks on the state of training and equipment showed us that it was indeed possible to train (long blank) locations; we were not able to visualize (blank) (blank) use for this technique under conditions that prevail (blank).
2. We have satisfied ourselves that it is indeed possible (very long blank). This is in itself a remarkable scientific achievement. Knowing that cats can indeed be trained to move short distances (blank) (blank) we see know reason to believe that a (blank) cat can not be similarly trained to approach (blank). Again, however, the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that, for our (blank) purposes, it would not be practical.
3. The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it, particularly (blank) whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers.
(signed by blank)
Right! American taxpayers spent tens of billions on the development of the space-shuttle now we should balk at spending $300 million per flight to use the danged thing. It'd be like buying a $50,000 car and then leasing it out when the price of gasoline hits $2.00 per gallon. note: Actually the $300 million per flight includes lots of overhead. The direct flight related costs appear to be _only_ $90 million..
The piece really underplayed the role of wind generators. The cost of windpower has fallen dramatically in the last 20 years. In the early '80s it was nearly 40 cents per kilowatt hour, it is now between 3 and 6 cents. Worldwide wind power is starting to take off. It increased by 29% in the USA alone between 1998 and 1999. By using hydrogen generation as an energy storage and transportation medium, the benefits of windpower can be extended to all energy using sectors.
For more info, here is an article by Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute.
After 10 years spent in the bowels of large buildings staring at computer screens, I decided to get out and see the world. When I resurfaced I became a HS Computer Science teacher. One piece of advice I always give my seniors is Major in something other than CS, but make CS a strong minor or even double major. Most kids don't take the advice and consequently suffer. Those that do come back and tell me how important it has been for them to have a content area in which they can apply their computer skills. They are happier _and_ have better-developed careers.
Anyone with Oberon experience out there?? It started out as a tiled windows system only, but now they've developed an overlapping windows desktop as well. Checkout the screenshots.
Their comment on tiled display is useful: The Gadgets desktop also has a tiled display mode with two vertical tracks. In this mode a newly opened viewer automatically covers half of the largest existing viewer in the track. This is ideal for text-based work, e.g., programming or text editing. Viewers can be resized vertically and moved, but they always use the full track width. Because there are fewer degrees of freedom, it is much quicker to arrange viewers optimally. newly opened viewer automatically covers half of the largest existing viewer in the track. BTW, windows are called viewers in Oberon.
I'm not shocked, not even surprised...actually I'd have been rather more surprised if it were XP which was the faster OS.
Not to wax nostalgic, but PC-Write on DOS 4.01 and a 10 MHz (Turbo mode) 8088 had no noticeable latency while typing. In fact most of its non-disk operations were essentially simultaneous. Word under Win 3.1 had noticeable delays with most everything it did. Win 95 and Word 97 slowed things down further. Heck, Gecko was _much_ faster than Mozilla m.95, so it happens in open source as well. I am often told that "If you had the latest hardware it would be fast!". Alas, I've never been able to verify that. But, it seems to me that if you have to upgrade hardware to experience the same speed, then the software _is_ slower...
How did this get modded 5? Its just a rehash of lame old arguments.
don't plan to use it to build out your economic infrastructure so you can pay it back with interest
1) Third world countries had very little say in the granting of the money. World Bank, et al, sent "advisors" into a country for a couple of weeks who decided what the country needed then made them a deal they couldn't refuse. Literally! They risked losing what little relationship they had by refusing.
or fuck off and retreat into isolationism. Grow your own goddamned corn and feed yourselves
2) By 1990, every country in the world was food self-sufficient. Only war, often triggered by cold-war struggles, and/or drought, increasingly caused by industrialized countries via global warming, has kept any country from growing adequate food for their own people.
With the rise of globalization, the agricultural base of many countries is eroding. The U.S. for example is flooding Mexico with cheap corn , driving many farmers out of business and causing them to look for jobs in the cities.
I lived for three years on the border between two African countries and saw first hand the problems which borders spawn: smuggling of goods _and_ people, rebel activity, water disputes, fragmentation of traditional societies, etc. So in principle I'm all for globalism.
But, the globalism we hear so much about is not going to help much. This globalism is the bastard son of mutli-national corporations and the governments which stand to benefit from their activities. And they of course will always protect their own interests.
Using Open Source analogies, globalization means free beer (or damn near) for developed countries. It actually, as several posts have pointed out, hinders free speech of those in developing countries. Globalization should be an open process, not one which has to be done from inside a fortress.
How ironic that it only took two weeks after SonicBlue won a Technological/Engineering Emmy Award for the Advancement of Television for the big boys to crackdown on them. Too bad we still have media people wanting to control information rather than letting it free.
After living abroad for seven of ten years, I've often commented that "borders are evil". Just look at all the heartache that results from people smuggling, border-skirmishes, etc, around the world. Virtually every border I've seen creates some level of inequity/conflict between close neighbors living on opposite sides.
But recently I've found myself agreeing more and more with the anti-globalization activists. Why? Because I now see globalization as not being a process of breaking down borders but rather one of extending Western hegemony! This kind of globalization is allowing the dominant culture to ride roughshod all others.
In my experience (10 years as a programmer, DP manager, et al., 10 years as an educator) ideas which are well-developed and clearly explained always seem like commonsense. I've worked with people like your boss. In general they are big on what they could've done, but don't have alot to show for it. Hopefully that doesn't describe your boss...
I think the book looks quite useful. Check out the Table of Contents and this Sample Chapter