I don't get what you are saying...Why would you distribute the 15-page draft to 30 people all at once? whether is was paperless or not.
Documents should be distributed through the 20 people serially, not in parallel. If a document needs to be sent out to a whole bunch of people on a short deadline, then the people probably won't be reading it for very long anyways. And what's wrong with using "comments" features in your favourite Word Processor? These are super easy to integrate changes in your original document.
I don't think this will ever happen. You can't stop China from pumping out CD-Recorders. The music industry as well as the software industry would be dead if it wasn't for piracy. Piracy helps get their music around, and some goes for software. Corel CEO Michael Cowpland was quoted many times saying that his products (CorelDraw, Wordperfect) would not be the products there are today if it weren't for piracy.
Once artists make their music free we will not have to deal with any of this crap anymore. It will happen eventually. And artists will also stop making music a career prospect because there will be no money in it. Good artists, however will still do live shows where they can make decent cash, and fill the demand for entertainment in society (live shows are better anyways, CDs are lame...half the songs suck and most people stop listening to them after a few months, while they just collect dust. Unless it's Pink Floyd, those never get old).
The small time artists make almost no money on CDs as it is, so this is beneficial for them to just give their music for all to enjoy, so that they go to school and get a real career, and make some real cash. And I don't mean computer science, I mean engineering or sciences or arts (just kidding, comp sci. is okay too). Or they can always be music teachers and fuel their passion for music. Think about it. All you open source programmers should know what I am talking about. And as a musician myself, I always knew I would never be good enough to have big live shows to make big bucks. So I gave it up for engineering because I knew the CD business sucked.
"Linux is programmed by geeks, for geeks. The average customer/user has neither the time nor the inclination to program it themselves"
Yes, but geeks use the constant bug submits from the geekier of the average users, and the feature requests from all users. But there are many non-professionals who have written software for Linux. Linux makes it really easy to program. Having only taken two comp. sci. courses, I can easily make some Linux apps, either simple console programs or graphical KDE programs. However, I am totally lost when it comes to programming in Windows. I would have to get MS Visual Studio first, or some other IDE. In Linux, just install Mandrake, and use gcc, g++ at the console or use KDevelop for a K/Qt program. Windows is programmed by a select few at Microsoft, and other paid professional programmers who work for various companies (which get gobbled up by Microsoft eventually anyways). Linux IS programmed by the users, whether they be geeks or not, whereas Windows is programmed by people trying to make a buck doing it. There is a difference.
But when it comes to Linux on the desktop, experts' tone is less upbeat.
"Linux on the desktop is toast," said Goldman.
"Pathetic," Claybrook noted.
These people, whoever they are, don't know what they are talking about. I think the prediction that Linux is toast on the desktop is so far from the truth. I wish the myth that Linux is for servers and Windows is for desktops would stop. That categorization only looks at a few features of each OS. Sure Windows IIS Web or whatever the hell it's called sucks, and Apache rules. And Windows ease of use on the Desktop for doing stuff like web surfing and general file handling is far better than in Linux (IMHO). But I think that in general you could use either one for server or desktop and do just fine IN GENERAL. It's sort of how you use it, not what you use.
But about Linux's potential for the desktop now...
After switching to Linux as my desktop OS just a few months ago, I've come to realize that Linux can do almost everything. For example, just today someone sent me a link to a 7 MB DivX home video. I was in Linux at the time, I have dual boot with Win98 but I like to stay in Linux. I had installed a DivX program in Windows a while back called The Playa, which comes with the DivX codec. But I wanted to see if Linux could play it. In Mandrake 8.2 I looked on the distro CDs and found "aviplay" which has just added DivX support. I installed it, and it showed the video clip beautifully. This could not be done this easily in Linux before. For example, in Mandrake 8.1 I don't even remember finding anything for DivX on the CDs, unless it was hiding somewhere.
Another example of things that Linux can now do: Ximian Evolution is quite an amazing program. It is a total Outlook clone but still, it exists. And Ximian Connector which allows it to connect to all that Microsoft crap.
OpenOffice and StarOffice are now being included in the Mandrake distro for the first time AFAIK. OpenOffice is almost identical to Word as far as I can tell (they are still missing a few features, but those are of course being worked on as we speak). I just noticed the other day the OpenOffice Writer even has reviewing capability. I also think it is better than Word in many ways. It is far better than WordPerfect, which some people believe it or not, still use. I find that inserting pictures and figures into my text with OpenOffice gives me 10 times fewer headaches than with Word.
The things I still need to run in Windows: Microsoft Money 2002 (GNU Cash has far more potential, it's system of handling catergories and accounts is far superior. I just haven't bothered doing to switchover yet), Mathematica (although I could buy a UNIX version of this), Matlab (don't actually need this anymore because I have GNU Octave for Linux. That's about it. I'm thinking of looking into Wine in the next few months to try and run any of those programs in Linux. Wine development is pretty heavy apparently and it's getting better all the time by the sounds of it.
That's the best part about Linux and open source. Development is so much quicker when it really matters, for things like Mozilla (it has MathML before IE did), KDE (which is just getting better exponentially), and the kernel-type stuff as well, which is always on top of the latest hardware advances (USB was a litte slow to come, but I think it is getting better. Look at ATA133 for example). I think Linux has gone as far in two years as Windows did in 5 years. The best is yet to come. Windows can never win. It is programmed by a bunch of people in Redmond who aren't really in touch with the customers as much as they could be. Linux is programmed by the customers/users themselves. The open source model works, and it is what has made Linux the best server OS and will make it the best desktop OS in the future.
What do they do with these anthems? You can't play them to employees, and I doubt they ever would...it would be too emabrassing. People might be compelled to quit over it. Only to go to a competitor with a similar anthem which also makes you want to puke. It sounds like something that they might play on a voice mail system when customers are on hold. What a great way to make the customer hang up right away.
My favourites: KPMG's is hilarious.
PriceWaterhouseCooper's is just plain stupid-funny, if you know what I mean.
IBM's is interesting. Really old and very, very bad, and it sounds like they actually got some employeers to sing along! Sounds like a song from Merry Poppins. They must have been marketing people...the engineers would never be dumb enough to sing along to that. Unless management gave them free beer on a Friday and they got really pissed-up.
I wonder if any special space chopsticks have been designed for the mission. Special chopsticks designed for the "harsh space environment" I mean. This got me thinking though, are the Chinese going to copy the American's methods of preparing dehydrated foods for space? Or will the Chinese go completely liquid? Or perhaps they have thought of some ingenious method of being able to consume normal everyday food without contaminating the vessel with food particles. I find it difficult that the Chinese "taikonauts" could give up their rice and noodles, etc... so easily. That may sound prejudiced, but I think North Americans can never really "miss" any of the foods they eat regularly, since they don't really have any foods they eat regularly (and I mean every day). The Chinese, however, (now someone please, correct me if I'm wrong) eat rice every day, as far as I know.
And also on a related subject, I wonder if there any other significant technological advances which have or will come out of this manned space program (space-related or otherwise).
If we can have the ability to plug video cards into TVs (which I think this ability already exists, I'm thinking S-Video is probably the easiest way, I'm just not sure if any video cards have S-Video adapters, All-in-Wonder maybe?) then it seems like having a PC attached to the TV is pretty cool. Then you can play all your favourite PC games (downloaded from Kazaa or paid for). PS/2 games are too expensive and tough to copy right now. And once they are copyable, someone will probably have an emulator going for Linux anyways. It just seems to me that a PC is a better all-round solution to all of this. The main reason I think, is that I can keep plaing my Windows games (NHL2002, DiabloII, etc...) instead of having to fork over more money for games that will only run on PS/2.
Of course, the tires and their friction provide a nice pivot point for the moments to act about. Without some kind of pivot it would never flip at all. On a frictionless surface, it would be impossible to flip a car.
I think LOTR was the best picture of 2001. But even if the other two movies in the series are better (which they probably won't because after reading the books, I think the FOTR is the best as far as plot goes), there's no way they'll give the Oscar for best Picture to a sequel. Maybe at the end of the series though, they'll give an Oscar to the entire triology. That's not possible, but maybe they'll give a special award to Jackson for making such a great trilogy.
People always talk about this, but me, being a former Windows user, found switching to Linux so much easier because of the similarities. I think KDE for example has copied Windows a heck of a lot, but they've also done their own thing in many respects. I think making GUI's even more customizable would solve this problem. But Linux is already very customizable. If you try hard, you can make it look nothing like Windows. Or use one of the older UNIX-style window managers.
"Drop the in-jokes please"
I kind of like that kind of thing. It makes me think that real people actually made the stuff. On those same lines, I also like being able to e-mail the developer that made such and such a program. If there is a major bug that I spot, I can let him know, or I can just say what I like and don't like about his program.
"spending some of your time filling out bug reports and posting"
Yes! This is super important. I just got involved with doing this, mostly with Mozilla and OpenOffice. It takes a lot of my time away from studying, but it's fun!
Programs that were abandonned were abandonned for a reason. Either there were too many bugs, the design was poor, or there is just no demand for it. There's no sense in working on an application just because it doesn't work. It's the natural selection process of Linux programs. The strongest survive. If a program is buggy and people really want to see it work and happen, it will get some attention eventually. Linux is a perfect supply demand scenario in most cases. When developers want Linux to do something they just make an application. The advantage of course over Windows is that other people usually come in to help out, and the code is all over the internet.
There are more and more stable applications out there now, however. Take Mozilla for example. The long awaited 1.0.0 should be out in a month or so. An XMMS the MP3 player which is as good as they get (thanks of course to huge demand for a good MP3 player), OpenOffice.org which is slowly creeping towards their 1.0 release and beyond, KDE3/Koffice(and KOffice doesn't have many developers, partly due to low demand, but I think that will change soon). Things have really improved in the last year I think, and 2002 will be a big year as well.
I don't think any cat can be expected to fair well after that kind of fall unless he is a) really fat, b) can fly, or c) has a parachute pack on his back.
In the TV program they mentioned stuff like the heart rate and other vital signs of the animals which are completly different then ours. Also the longevity of these animals also factored in. It's all just theories of course.
They also used an example of a fly. Have you seen the reaction times of flies? It's pretty amazing. Supposedly time goes really slowly for them too, that is how they can react to our hand which is about to slap them. I bet in the case of the fly there's some simple explanation, like the fact that the distance from their eyes to their brain is an order of magnitude shorted than a human's. But whattever, I wish I could see this program again, it kind of kind of neat. They kept showing a camera view in the field of view of the animals, which was pretty neat.
No, as far as I know things don't just rotate in mid-air depending on which side is more massive. Neglecting air resistance, if you dropped something in a vacuum, both sides of the object would fall at the same rate. Pretend the objects are actually different objects, just barely touching each other. Say a baseball touching a softball. The softball has more mass, but it will not fall any faster, and cause the system to rotate. Like the guy in the post above said, acceleration is constant, so both bodies will accelarate at the same rate, thus their relative positions to each other will always be the same. So you can pile up a whole bunch of these objects and make a cat for example.
The SUV example you are talking about is a completely different example. Draw a free-body diagram and look at ALL the forces involved. There is also a normal force acting on the vehicle from the ground. This combined with the gravity force creates a moment force. If the SUV and car were falling in the air, the SUV wouldn't be more inclined to "roll". Neither would roll at all.
About the cat thing, I heard that that had to do with the fact that time runs slower for cuts, at least they perceive everything to happen slower than we do. To a cat, falling from 5 feet may "feel" like 2 seconds, where we actually measured 1 second. No, it's not a relativity thing, because the cat is not moving close to the speed of light. It's just that because of this perceived "time moves slower for the cat" thing, it has more time to react in the air. I heard this is the same for most animals smaller than humans, like dogs, etc... Maybe that's why dogs can react quickly when you throw food at them from close range.
It's not scientific or anything, I just saw it on the Discovery Chanel or the Learning Channel a couple of years ago...
"But Podkletnov insists the gravity-shielding effect only occurs when all the experimental conditions are precisely right"
Yeah, like when my instruments aren't calibrated because the Russian government won't pay me, and it just *looks* like a 2% decrease in gravity.
"The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration."
But once the spacecraft is some distance away from the device, the device will probably not have much effect. Sounds like a waste of money making a cryogenic chamber large enough to house this device which would have very little effect on a rocket.
"Cox himself is working on an anti-gravity backpack that he claims is nearing the patent stage"
I wonder what the pricetag will be on that. This is sure to join the ranks of famous humorous patents.
I'm not saying this won't work, but a lot of it sounds sketchy. The only credible part about it is that NASA is working on it. Wait a minute NASA...credibility...that doesn't sound right...I guess I was thinking about a different organization. If it does work, this device should theoretically be able to create gravity as well...sort of by conservation of gravity I guess.
Yeah, the town of Waterloo is fairly ugly looking. And I went to the Kitchener farmer's market to look for some food on a weekday, while I was there. The farmer's market was closed, so I ate in the trashy mall. But the mall stunk like a petting zoo from the farmer's market located on the ground floor. It was gross.
Sorry for posting the flamebait post about Mormons. I'm glad you have somewhat of a sense of humour by the sounds of it. I guess the average Morman does not fit the stereotypes. I know almost nothing about Mormans, so I should have kept my mouth shut. BTW, 100% Microsoft free, that's quite an accomplishment.
I'm just surpised you don't have at least 56k. I actually find 56k to be not too bad. I was on it up until August of 2001 when I finally got ADSL. I'm going to be moving to Waterloo in a few months, but I may end up living somewhere rural between Waterloo and London (which is where my girlfriend lives). I sure hope I can get high speed if I end up having to live there. Did you ever think about getting satellite internet from Bell ExpressVu?
Slashdot Mirror
If you have an account at Mozilla's Bugzilla, vote for this bug here.
Documents should be distributed through the 20 people serially, not in parallel. If a document needs to be sent out to a whole bunch of people on a short deadline, then the people probably won't be reading it for very long anyways. And what's wrong with using "comments" features in your favourite Word Processor? These are super easy to integrate changes in your original document.
The small time artists make almost no money on CDs as it is, so this is beneficial for them to just give their music for all to enjoy, so that they go to school and get a real career, and make some real cash. And I don't mean computer science, I mean engineering or sciences or arts (just kidding, comp sci. is okay too). Or they can always be music teachers and fuel their passion for music. Think about it. All you open source programmers should know what I am talking about. And as a musician myself, I always knew I would never be good enough to have big live shows to make big bucks. So I gave it up for engineering because I knew the CD business sucked.
Yes, but geeks use the constant bug submits from the geekier of the average users, and the feature requests from all users. But there are many non-professionals who have written software for Linux. Linux makes it really easy to program. Having only taken two comp. sci. courses, I can easily make some Linux apps, either simple console programs or graphical KDE programs. However, I am totally lost when it comes to programming in Windows. I would have to get MS Visual Studio first, or some other IDE. In Linux, just install Mandrake, and use gcc, g++ at the console or use KDevelop for a K/Qt program. Windows is programmed by a select few at Microsoft, and other paid professional programmers who work for various companies (which get gobbled up by Microsoft eventually anyways). Linux IS programmed by the users, whether they be geeks or not, whereas Windows is programmed by people trying to make a buck doing it. There is a difference.
"Linux on the desktop is toast," said Goldman.
"Pathetic," Claybrook noted.
These people, whoever they are, don't know what they are talking about. I think the prediction that Linux is toast on the desktop is so far from the truth. I wish the myth that Linux is for servers and Windows is for desktops would stop. That categorization only looks at a few features of each OS. Sure Windows IIS Web or whatever the hell it's called sucks, and Apache rules. And Windows ease of use on the Desktop for doing stuff like web surfing and general file handling is far better than in Linux (IMHO). But I think that in general you could use either one for server or desktop and do just fine IN GENERAL. It's sort of how you use it, not what you use.
But about Linux's potential for the desktop now...
After switching to Linux as my desktop OS just a few months ago, I've come to realize that Linux can do almost everything. For example, just today someone sent me a link to a 7 MB DivX home video. I was in Linux at the time, I have dual boot with Win98 but I like to stay in Linux. I had installed a DivX program in Windows a while back called The Playa, which comes with the DivX codec. But I wanted to see if Linux could play it. In Mandrake 8.2 I looked on the distro CDs and found "aviplay" which has just added DivX support. I installed it, and it showed the video clip beautifully. This could not be done this easily in Linux before. For example, in Mandrake 8.1 I don't even remember finding anything for DivX on the CDs, unless it was hiding somewhere.
Another example of things that Linux can now do: Ximian Evolution is quite an amazing program. It is a total Outlook clone but still, it exists. And Ximian Connector which allows it to connect to all that Microsoft crap.
OpenOffice and StarOffice are now being included in the Mandrake distro for the first time AFAIK. OpenOffice is almost identical to Word as far as I can tell (they are still missing a few features, but those are of course being worked on as we speak). I just noticed the other day the OpenOffice Writer even has reviewing capability. I also think it is better than Word in many ways. It is far better than WordPerfect, which some people believe it or not, still use. I find that inserting pictures and figures into my text with OpenOffice gives me 10 times fewer headaches than with Word.
The things I still need to run in Windows: Microsoft Money 2002 (GNU Cash has far more potential, it's system of handling catergories and accounts is far superior. I just haven't bothered doing to switchover yet), Mathematica (although I could buy a UNIX version of this), Matlab (don't actually need this anymore because I have GNU Octave for Linux. That's about it. I'm thinking of looking into Wine in the next few months to try and run any of those programs in Linux. Wine development is pretty heavy apparently and it's getting better all the time by the sounds of it.
That's the best part about Linux and open source. Development is so much quicker when it really matters, for things like Mozilla (it has MathML before IE did), KDE (which is just getting better exponentially), and the kernel-type stuff as well, which is always on top of the latest hardware advances (USB was a litte slow to come, but I think it is getting better. Look at ATA133 for example). I think Linux has gone as far in two years as Windows did in 5 years. The best is yet to come. Windows can never win. It is programmed by a bunch of people in Redmond who aren't really in touch with the customers as much as they could be. Linux is programmed by the customers/users themselves. The open source model works, and it is what has made Linux the best server OS and will make it the best desktop OS in the future.
My favourites: KPMG's is hilarious.
PriceWaterhouseCooper's is just plain stupid-funny, if you know what I mean.
IBM's is interesting. Really old and very, very bad, and it sounds like they actually got some employeers to sing along! Sounds like a song from Merry Poppins. They must have been marketing people...the engineers would never be dumb enough to sing along to that. Unless management gave them free beer on a Friday and they got really pissed-up.
If the Windows box mounts the iPod, what do you get? More iPod's?
And also on a related subject, I wonder if there any other significant technological advances which have or will come out of this manned space program (space-related or otherwise).
If we can have the ability to plug video cards into TVs (which I think this ability already exists, I'm thinking S-Video is probably the easiest way, I'm just not sure if any video cards have S-Video adapters, All-in-Wonder maybe?) then it seems like having a PC attached to the TV is pretty cool. Then you can play all your favourite PC games (downloaded from Kazaa or paid for). PS/2 games are too expensive and tough to copy right now. And once they are copyable, someone will probably have an emulator going for Linux anyways. It just seems to me that a PC is a better all-round solution to all of this. The main reason I think, is that I can keep plaing my Windows games (NHL2002, DiabloII, etc...) instead of having to fork over more money for games that will only run on PS/2.
Of course, the tires and their friction provide a nice pivot point for the moments to act about. Without some kind of pivot it would never flip at all. On a frictionless surface, it would be impossible to flip a car.
I think LOTR was the best picture of 2001. But even if the other two movies in the series are better (which they probably won't because after reading the books, I think the FOTR is the best as far as plot goes), there's no way they'll give the Oscar for best Picture to a sequel. Maybe at the end of the series though, they'll give an Oscar to the entire triology. That's not possible, but maybe they'll give a special award to Jackson for making such a great trilogy.
People always talk about this, but me, being a former Windows user, found switching to Linux so much easier because of the similarities. I think KDE for example has copied Windows a heck of a lot, but they've also done their own thing in many respects. I think making GUI's even more customizable would solve this problem. But Linux is already very customizable. If you try hard, you can make it look nothing like Windows. Or use one of the older UNIX-style window managers.
"Drop the in-jokes please"
I kind of like that kind of thing. It makes me think that real people actually made the stuff. On those same lines, I also like being able to e-mail the developer that made such and such a program. If there is a major bug that I spot, I can let him know, or I can just say what I like and don't like about his program.
"spending some of your time filling out bug reports and posting"
Yes! This is super important. I just got involved with doing this, mostly with Mozilla and OpenOffice. It takes a lot of my time away from studying, but it's fun!
There are more and more stable applications out there now, however. Take Mozilla for example. The long awaited 1.0.0 should be out in a month or so. An XMMS the MP3 player which is as good as they get (thanks of course to huge demand for a good MP3 player), OpenOffice.org which is slowly creeping towards their 1.0 release and beyond, KDE3/Koffice(and KOffice doesn't have many developers, partly due to low demand, but I think that will change soon). Things have really improved in the last year I think, and 2002 will be a big year as well.
I don't think any cat can be expected to fair well after that kind of fall unless he is a) really fat, b) can fly, or c) has a parachute pack on his back.
They also used an example of a fly. Have you seen the reaction times of flies? It's pretty amazing. Supposedly time goes really slowly for them too, that is how they can react to our hand which is about to slap them. I bet in the case of the fly there's some simple explanation, like the fact that the distance from their eyes to their brain is an order of magnitude shorted than a human's. But whattever, I wish I could see this program again, it kind of kind of neat. They kept showing a camera view in the field of view of the animals, which was pretty neat.
The SUV example you are talking about is a completely different example. Draw a free-body diagram and look at ALL the forces involved. There is also a normal force acting on the vehicle from the ground. This combined with the gravity force creates a moment force. If the SUV and car were falling in the air, the SUV wouldn't be more inclined to "roll". Neither would roll at all.
It's not scientific or anything, I just saw it on the Discovery Chanel or the Learning Channel a couple of years ago...
Yeah, like when my instruments aren't calibrated because the Russian government won't pay me, and it just *looks* like a 2% decrease in gravity.
"The Podkletnov effect suggests it may be possible to effectively reduce the mass of the ship, thereby reducing the overall energy needed for acceleration."
But once the spacecraft is some distance away from the device, the device will probably not have much effect. Sounds like a waste of money making a cryogenic chamber large enough to house this device which would have very little effect on a rocket.
"Cox himself is working on an anti-gravity backpack that he claims is nearing the patent stage"
I wonder what the pricetag will be on that. This is sure to join the ranks of famous humorous patents.
I'm not saying this won't work, but a lot of it sounds sketchy. The only credible part about it is that NASA is working on it. Wait a minute NASA...credibility...that doesn't sound right...I guess I was thinking about a different organization. If it does work, this device should theoretically be able to create gravity as well...sort of by conservation of gravity I guess.
Yeah, the town of Waterloo is fairly ugly looking. And I went to the Kitchener farmer's market to look for some food on a weekday, while I was there. The farmer's market was closed, so I ate in the trashy mall. But the mall stunk like a petting zoo from the farmer's market located on the ground floor. It was gross.
Sorry for posting the flamebait post about Mormons. I'm glad you have somewhat of a sense of humour by the sounds of it. I guess the average Morman does not fit the stereotypes. I know almost nothing about Mormans, so I should have kept my mouth shut. BTW, 100% Microsoft free, that's quite an accomplishment.
I'm just surpised you don't have at least 56k. I actually find 56k to be not too bad. I was on it up until August of 2001 when I finally got ADSL. I'm going to be moving to Waterloo in a few months, but I may end up living somewhere rural between Waterloo and London (which is where my girlfriend lives). I sure hope I can get high speed if I end up having to live there. Did you ever think about getting satellite internet from Bell ExpressVu?