I like your analogy to energy of activation. It fits well with my situation.
When it comes time to replace the printer, chances are I will complete the jump to Linux. In the meantime, I'll check again for a Turbo Printer driver for the beast (there were none a year ago when the printer was new on the market). If I can get a printer driver that will do satisfactory drafts even if it can't handle the final version well, and if Wacom does have a Linux driver for the Intuos 2, then I'll be working in Linux before the year is out (if I can get the graphics tablet to work with either the GIMP or with PSP v8 under Wine).
[This post includes indirect responses to a couple of other replies to parent-- I appreciate those other replies, thank you!]
Hmm, there seems to be an inability to recognize amusing hyperbole on this thread. I thought the bit about the Hummer and needing three seats on an airplane might have been a bit over the top myself, but evidently it would take something of seismic proportions to quiver some people's humormeter. Well that's led to a situation that is sort of funny in a slapstick Three Stooges kind of way. Unfortunately I was trying for a more erudite kind of humor, like Groucho Marx, so I guess it doesn't count.
Ah well. I'll just get these last digs in and we'll see what topples into the deeper hole I'm making. That might good for another chuckle.
While we're waiting for the clowns, the point remains that not going to Linux because there isn't a laptop that runs it that is also a great laptop envy generator doesn't seem like a significant reason for most people to avoid Linux laptops. If you want to demonstrate your prowess at conspicuous consumption, then probably Linux isn't the right OS for you. But that doesn't say anything about the people who don't think of their laptops as fashion accessories.
Oh I fail it as a geek. I'm not yet so overweight that a laptop with a 17" screen will fit on my lap.
I've used notebook computers off and on for years, plugging them into standard keyboards and screens at work or home, and using the builtin kbd and screen only when actually on the move. So that's like pretty geeky, with the cables on the desk and all. And when I'm on the move, I'm actually able to set the thing up and work on it, without taking up more than my allotted width on an airplane, at a library table, etc.
But I agree that my approach doesn't have the same kind of status symbol appeal as wrestling a supersized laptop out of your 6 mpg Hummer, buying three side-by-each airline seats so you can use the thing in flight, etc etc.
(a) get your government to put everything online, so you can just fill out some HTML forms and click "Submit", and/or:
(b) get your government to simplify the fucking tax code by a few orders of magnitude
Hear hear!
It is now time to start pushing (the USA) Congress for meaningful tax reform-- meaning that the tax law itself should be rewritten as pseudocode. Or maybe in Javascript.
I'm serious.
This could be a great issue in the 2008 presidential elections (assuming the country holds together that long).
I set up my computer as dual boot between WinXP and Mandrake more than a year ago, in hopes of migrating. But I'm still doing about 100% of my work in WinXP. (I have moved to Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo, etc-- but under WinXP).
The stumbling block is that I use a Canon i9900 printer in large format photorealistic mode, and a Wacom graphics tablet in Paint Shop Pro, for a very small percentage of my work, and there are no Linux equivalents. So I'm stuck with one toe in the Windows world. I can move more than 97% of my work to Linux at any time, but I'll have to go to WinXP to print the 11x17" photos and to do some of the photo touch-ups. I spend perhaps 4 hours a month on these activities-- it really is a small but important part of my work.
And it turns out that while I am prepared for the disruptions in habits that would go with a total conversion to Linux, I dread the thought of all the broken habit patterns that would result if I try to straddle both OSs. I don't want to surprise myself by trying to use Linux shortcuts in Windows-- that is the worst kind of interruption; it would definitely make it harder to stay in the creative sweet spot.
I expect that I'm not the only guy around who feels stuck in a slow migration pattern. I expect that there are lots of individuals and small businesses who continue to use Windows because less than 2% of their work requires templates, or macros or something like that which they can't duplicate in Linux (yet)-- and that, combined with realistic concerns about unsupported straddling of both systems, is sufficient to keep them in Windows.
unfortunately when I looked at those laptops, they hadn't yet offered one with a 17" screen.
If plugging your existing monitor into the video port of a laptop is too difficult, perhaps Linux isn't the best choice for you. I think that, in general, the somewhat greater technical mastery that is needed for a successful migration to Linux is within the reach of almost all readers of slashdot, but I suppose there are exceptions.
I want a license, not a promise. While it will protect me in court, a promise holds less weight than an explicit license.
That's fine for software.
But we're talking about standards governing the way I can store my proprietary data, and the way my government is to store any data that could affect me.
I want that to be free of any kind of license; I demand that this standard be completely unencumbered by any corporate or individual rights. What you compose on the keyboard is your intellectual property; no person, corporation, or government should have any hint of a right of control over any part of that process.
The significant point here is that Microsoft is now beginning to position Vista as vaporware. MS has a long tradition of announcing that they will start selling product Real Soon Now to mess up the heads of IT strategists who are thinking about moving their company away from MS products. This works because it activates all the PHBs and any effort to talk rationally about moving the company to Linux (or OS/2 back in the day, or D.R. DOS back at the dawn of time) is going to be met with a lot of thought-avoidance resistance since it becomes so easy to say "I don't want you to waste any time on looking at a possible Linux migration until we see what MS has to offer".
The vaporware stage of Microsoft product development is concerned with projecting mirages of paradise into the marketplace, in an effort to cause potential buyers to wait until MS actually has product to put out there. It is the kind of FUD that MS marketdroids are particularly good at generating. It is the kind of thing that PHBs soak up like sponges, because it gives them such great sounding excuses for avoiding actually having to think about IT problems or making management decisions that might put a ding in their careers.
but I assume (making an ass of u and me) that the evidence they're talking about are enzymatic activity assays from isolated tissues.
I think that is a fair assumption (caveat included). But note that the trigger for looking at the bioflavinoids was a statistical anomoly that has been dubbed the French Paradox. Some groups in France who eat a traditional diet that is high in fats and such were having a much lower incidence of heart disease than was predicted by American based statistics. Several investigations by unrelated researchers have been done and these clearly show that the high levels of proanthocyanidins in french table wines protect against cholesterol and LDL diseases. And almost as an aside, it was found that these very potent antioxidants also protect against some cancers.
The proanthocyanidins found in wine, grape seeds, and virtually all deeply colored fruits are in the larger class of bioflavinoids. The prenylflavinoids found in hops are also bioflavinoids.
Having spent some time in Corvallis and thus being aware of the beverage of choice at OSU, I am not at all surprised that OSU took up the study of the prenylflavonoids in beer. I think that's a good choice for pragmatic reasons-- it would be very easy to find candidates for a four year longitudinal study of beer ingestion among the OSU undergraduate population. It would be much more difficult to entice OSU students into embibing significant quantities of red wine... the wine drinkers all go to University of Oregon, not Oregon State University, you see. While the two are only about an hour's drive from each other, OSU and UO students mix about as well as a "lager" poured from a can mixes with a "chianti" from a box.
Back to a more serious level: there are now a number of grape seed extracts (GSE) being sold as nutritional supplements. These are an inexpensive way of assuring that there are plenty of bioflavinoids in the diet-- although they probably are not as fun as drinking a quart of red wine a day,
It's the same as if a wealthy person opened up a plumbing company for fun (which is essentially what OSS is... wealthy people doing it for fun)...
First, find a proper example that uses intangible goods or services and so is reasonably similar to software development. Then we'll have the beginnings of a basis for discussion. I'll give you a hint: FOSS is something like a convention of english teachers sharing their best practices with each other and developing a set of recommended lesson plans.
Second, stop with the nitwit unbacked assertion that FOSS is generated only by a few wealthy people as a hobby. Anyone who is willing to spend a few minutes looking at the development forums at OOo, Blender, POV-Ray, Firefox, etc, will quickly realize that a great number of people contribute to these projects, and most of them express concerns that are of distinctly middle class or poor student origin. FOSS isn't like the America Cup races. And since its development process is completely open, anyone can look at the email trail of any FOSS project and realize that the overwhelming majority of participants are just ordinary blokes.
A typical FOSS project is something like a medeval cathedral, built by small donations of labor and skill given by large numbers of contributors over a long time. Some of the individuals might do it for ego satisfaction, but most contribute because the work will increase their saleable skills or because they need a particular tool and extending a FOSS project like POV-Ray, Blender, GCC, or Apache is the best way to get it.
However, unlike a cathedral that starts to weather as soon as the cornerstone is laid, FOSS is immune to entropy. It only gets better and better over time, as more people make small contributions. Also, the code a contributor adds to a FOSS project is going to be debugged and refined by the supporting community in a way that no individual programmer could ever manage on his own.
In short, you cannot legitimately talk about a FOSS project without talking about its support community. It is this community's interaction with the software that adds the value to the FOSS project.
FOSS isn't a zero-sum game. A FOSS project is a community effort that creates new wealth out of nothing, where each contribution is of negligible cost to the contributor. There is nothing comparable in the commercial software world. Twenty hours of coding (or debugging, or writing user docs) for a FOSS project is qualitatively not comparable to the purchase cost of commercial software. The first is an investment in a community wealth generator; the second is an expenditure.
Hey, lay off that "MS is no badder than anybody else" line of bull.
MS has spent more than 20 years building its reputation for screwing competitors, customers, and even partners for any little bit of market advantage. Talk to some of the guys who've been around for a while about undocumented DOS routines, announcements of vaporware versions RSN, doublefaced Windows API (fast routines for internal development, and slower ones for everyone else), "embrace and extend", et cetera ad nauseum. MS has put the time into building its reputation. It is hands down the baddest big corporation in the western world. It has earned that unique place, and I'm sure it has taken a lot more cleverness and grunt effort to get there than any other institution would ever devote to such an endeavor. Microsoft is to business in our time as Ghengis Khan's Mongol hordes were to Asia in his time.
And besides, what other corporation of comparable size has a foul mouthed, chair throwing monkey dancer as second in command? Do you really think such a person could be found in the inner sanctum of IBM, Sun, GMC, Ford? Do you think there might be a reason why that is the case?
So you just peddle that soft soap your pushing somewhere else. Microsoft is hands down the baddest company around. They have worked hard to get there. They fully deserve all the "honors" that go with that status.
I've got a couple of technical questions about TFA (which I have read).
First, and most importantly, when Ms Wyne writes that "Eric Kriss flippantly stated 'Here we have a true conflict...'", what is the technical meaning of the word "flippant" in the context of IP - FOSS discussions?
I think this might very well be the first time anyone has taken the word "flippant" from if its native context (of discussing behaviors at cocktail parties) and used it in the realm of communications and data standards. So I'm rather confused about what meaning I can attach to it, and about how I can validate that Kriss did indeed make his statement "flippantly", and not, perhaps, "jocularly" or maybe "whimsically".
My second question is this: whine, WINE, Wyne... What's up with all this whining? And why do the guys across the pond spell it "whinge"? What's with that??
OK, that second question really isn't a technical question.
I won't speak for parent-- I am the author of GP and I can speak to that.
There are numerous belief systems that do not put a high value on what reality might be. For instance, Worf of Star Trek is the archetypal follower of the warrior ethic: no matter what reality he finds himself in, his ultimate concern is with behaving according to his inner model of the ideal warrior. He looks within for guidance, not to anything external. Another example: some branches of buddhism believe that the world we perceive is completely illusory; that "objective reality" is not only unknowable, but that pursuits based on these illusions are bound to end in grief. Suffering is inevitable until one learns to ignore the illusions and live in accordance with the Fourfold Way. Yet another example: much of zennist practice is involved with learning how to free the mind from the constraints imposed by "realistic" thinking, so that one can look at the world without preconception and in so doing freely express one's inner sacred nature.
Myself, I don't much care what you believe in, so long as your behaviors do not impact negatively on my life (or, by extension, on the lives of others). I favor some belief systems because I think they would lead you to things like community involvement that I think would improve my world in some way. I disfavor others, because I think they promote behaviors that damage others, and by extension, decrease the wealth and beauty of the world around me.
I generally don't favor belief systems that are based on "facts" or some form of "objective reality", because in my experience they fail badly in several ways. For one, it seems like all the most important behaviors a person might make have to be decided before the information about the problem is complete and unambiguous. Persons who have to have the 'facts' before acting end up having to make snap judgments that are often based too much on preconceptions, prejudice, and bigotry-- all various levels of assumptions that are made in the absence of facts. OTOH, people who rely on an inner model of correct behavior when making decisions can more easily process situations where the "facts" are questionable or incomplete. In my experience, I think these people are more reliable than the ones who insist on making "realistic" decisions.
Followed the ultimate realization of _really_ astute students: "Why am I pondering such a stupid question? What a complete waste of my time!"...
Good point! You have successfully recapitulated a core part of the mystic traditions (many branches of buddhism, zennist thought, many of the pre- Christian European religions, probably all of the shammanist schools, etc). Lots of people say that there is a core Mystery to existence that is beyond human understanding.
For the geek, the most accessable expression of this is probably the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of post classical physics, which can be generalized to something like this:
Reality is not only stranger than we think; it is stranger than our ability to think can handle. We can't deal with it. We can, however, construct models like quantum mechanics that we can fool around with, and if we do it right, we'll end up with a model that is predictive, useful, and fun. But no matter how successful we make that model, we can be sure that reality itself is different from it in some important qualitative ways.
...This thought then leading to inner peace & happiness.
Uh, yeah, one path to Nirvanna is by this route, but first you have to visit the despair of recognizing that you can attach no meaning to your personal existence. Nowadays, most americans who take this route can get themselves labelled "depressed" and go on to some fun experiences with antidepressant medications and the satisfaction of having a blanket medical excuse for having botched up their lives, their relationships, and everything. That seems to me to be an unnecessary and dangerous detour, but wtf, the point is in the travelling, not the destination, right?
Assuming that this "_really_ astute" student successfully navigates around the MAO inhibitors and the SSRIs, and the various other problems en route, there is the inner peace and happiness of knowing that what is important is not who you are or what happens to you, but how you behave.
Reality by definition is objective, not subjective.
I congratulate you on formulating such a wonderfully concise expression of your belief system. It does simplify an awful lot of things that have perplexed some of the best minds of the ages.
OTOH, very soon after asking about the nature of reality, many astute students will realize that a more fundamental question exists: how can I recognize reality if I ever happen to encounter it? It seems like such an innocent question, until you think about it a bit, and realize that it doesn't matter one whit whether reality is objective, subjective, or virtual, if you don't know how to recognize it.
Personally, here's the bad news: when this happens, the IT dept at the college I work for are going to demand a larger budget for the 64 bit hardware that will be required, and their selling point will be that this is an absolutely necessary upgrade. Realistically, it won't provide the college with any new capabilities and it will increase associated costs (diversion of resources from daily operations to preparing for the new installs, troubleshooting them, etc). This is personally bad news because it decreases the likelihood of my getting a raise or my department (adult education) hiring administrivia support people.
OTOH, this early announcement is good news: it gives me more time to work on management to get them to hold IT's feet to the fire. The current situation is that IT is running a successful smoke-and-mirrors racket where they mostly get their way with dazzles and baffles of technojargon and don't have to answer the hard questions concerning costs and benefits to the daily operations and the college's actual mission (which has something to do with educating students-- not with IT getting yet more Microsoft Certificates at the college's expense). However I really don't expect to be successful at this-- the current key people in IT have no knowledge beyond Microsoft alternatives so nothing is going to change until they retire or move on.
On rereading this, it's obvious that some of my bitterness has leaked through the keyboard into the text. I'm particularly frustrated at the moment, because I'm updating curricula files that are used in several different campuses across the city, and I've found that for "security" reasons, IT runs each campus as a separate network. I have to fall back on a sneakernet strategy to keep several copies of the files up to date, and I think that is absurd in this day and age. I'm also very aware that IT will point to the need to develop expertise with the coming 64 bit systems as a reason why they cannot find a way to serve up curriculum files from a single location. Apparently even setting up an FTP repository is too risky on the MS servers, at least in the way these are currently being managed by IT. (I very much doubt that this would change with the move to 64 bit systems).
Always gets me how none of the "reviews" ever deal with the issue that the majority of inkjet printers... are going to give you prints that will fade and turn orange in a matter of MONTHS some times.
This is a bit of mis-information that needs to be cleared up.
There is no significant problem with inks used in inkjet printers. There was, however, a problem with Epson's "micropore" photo papers a few years ago. The paper acted as an ozone scrubber, and the ozone it collected broke down the cyan dye. The result was the classic "Epson Orange" effect. It could happen in a matter of days in areas of high ozone concentration and mild UV exposure. Epson was badly burned by that, and they now have archival quality product lines that are very good.
The point here is that choice of paper is the most significant factor in longevity, with appropriate post-printing care of paper being the second most critical factor. If you want multigenerational archival quality*, you can have it with any of today's ink jet printers, if you are careful in choosing the right archival quality papers, and you protect the finished product with UV blocking glass or a coating of UV blocking acrylic spray. There is no reason why the product of inkjet printer won't hold up as well as other watercolor art, and museums have some watercolors that were done 200 years ago and are still vibrant.
*Multigenerational archival quality: the ability to print a photo of your grandparents that will not have degraded when your grown children show it to their grandchildren.
Any printer filling in a uniform, moderately light area with a sparse pattern of dark ink will produce dots that are visible (and annoying) to any person capable of focussing closer than about 5 inches.
While this is true, I don't see its relevance in a discussion of photorealistic printing quality. The only times I've ever run into anything close to what you describe is when shooting documents for OCR conversion to digital form-- which is "photo" work, but isn't intended to be "realistic" (distortions are purposefully introduced to increase the OCR accuracy).
Thanks for the link about printer profiles. I'll put it to good use later today.
Several months ago, I spent some effort in calibrating my software with my printer and my monitor, and got to where things were almost good enough that I could reduce my test prints to "proof of concept" kinds of things. After a lot of head scratching, I realized that I don't have sufficient control over the ambient lighting in the room to make it work. There was no way that I could be sure that what I was seeing on the screen would be close to how the image would print. Time of day, sunny or cloudy out, which lights I had on or off, and possibly some drift in my older monitor's settings were problems I can't solve at this point. Essentially, the effective gamma and color balance of my monitor are moving targets under these conditions.
I suspect that I'm not alone in facing these problems. For me, it is far easier and more efficient to do test prints than to work with profiles.
I can see a tremendous advantage in getting the printer profiled correctly, so that I can be sure that my final print is the same as what I would get if I send the image to lab (for multiple copies, for instance). So I will look at the link you provided most carefully, and probably revisit the profiling issue and make sure that I've got the printer part of it right.
That's too bad, but I appreciate your honesty. It helps in assessing how much weight should be given to your comments.:-)
Printers that use small drops have more nozzles, and with more nozzles, they can use more sophisticated dithering patterns for color gradations. I use a Canon 9900, which has a nominal resolution 4800x2400 dpi, but each of those "dots" can be built up from overlayments of 8 different inks in a large number of different combinations. Printers with 9600 dpi can achieve the same quality with 6 different inks and fancier dithering patterns (more nozzles and a more expensive print head).
While TFA talks about the smaller drops providing more resolution, I don't think anyone should put too much weight on that aspect. All of these higher end printers are working with the way the paper will bleed neighboring "dots" into each other, and doing so at higher resolutions than the human eye can resolve. The end product is a watercolor painting. With some papers and ink weights, the end result is truly an analog product as the neighboring "dots" completely blend into each other before the ink dries.
Using a photo lab is certainly a good option for a lot of people, especially with "point & shoot" casual photographs. You can get some very good photos and prints that way.
However I might spend half a day or more working on a promising photo in the digital darkroom. I have gotten some excellent results from images that were technically bad but had good artistic qualities, and I rarely find a photo that won't benefit from some tweaking with the unsharp mask and the histogram. But to do this kind of work-up properly requires being able to do test prints on the printer and paper that I'll use for the final product.
A good home color printer beats using a lab for any photo buff who has reached the phase where he wants to do test prints or explore different papers. I'm currently using a Canon 9900, and I'm very pleased with its quality and economy.
Im not disputing any facts, just the presentation by the editors on slashdot. Who seem to be getting worse at the same compound rate described above...
So greenhouse gases are causing the earth to get warmer, thus increasing the rate of evaporation of water above previous levels.
And somehow its the water vapor that is released from this evaporation, from increased heating, that is warming the earth?
The article was clearly written to be non-alarmist.
The pertinent facts presented are that CO2 accounts for only 30% of the observed increase in warmth while H2O vapor accounts for 70%. And that the CO2 increase is the cause of the H2O vapor increase.
A more alarmist presentation that seems to fit the facts is that a unit increase of CO2 will increase the amount of warming by over 200% of predictions based on CO2's effect alone (due to the multiplier effect of the H2O vapor that the CO2 brings about). This would mean that the predictions of sea level rise and so forth that were used in formulating the Kyoto Protocol are grossly conservative:
The model used in the Kyoto Protocol predicts a 1 meter increase in sea level by 2100 if the known greenhouse emissions continue to increase at historic rates.
Adjusting the model for this new information would probably bring it to predict that the sea level will rise by 1 meter in the next 20 years, give or take a 10 years or so. Think of compound interest equations.
In short, the discovery of this H2O vapor multiplier effect on CO2 emissions implies that we are a lot closer to a chaotic change of climate than the most widely accepted reasoning had suggested eight years ago (Kyoto was in 1997).
Our climate is *incredibly* complex, so accurate prediction either way is nigh impossible...
Global warming *is* happening...
There is NO consensus on whether or not man-made global warming is happening...
A very good summation, thank you. Except that the concern about whether global warming is man-made or natural is misplaced. That is something for the historians to argue out, 50 years from now.
Our concerns need to be focused on the pragmatics.
Is there is anything that can be done to reduce the impact of global warming or postpone the onset of its worst effects?
The answer is that yes, there are some laws and regulations that can be implemented now that might help (there are no guarantees). The cost to society of doing these things now is so much less than the costs we are going to face beginning in 10 years or so even in the best case, that the prudent course is obvious. Formulate and implement what new legislation is needed, and properly enforce the regulations that are already on the books but are being ignored (SUVs?? These monsters haul passengers-- why aren't they regulated as passenger vehicles??? What is with these loopholes in fuel efficiency regulations that are literally big enough to drive 3 tonne trucks through them???).
A major problem is that while the cost to benefit ratio is clearly favorable on the societal level, there are SUV dealers and others who have vested short term interests in keeping things as they are. Even though their long term self interest lie with those of everyone else, they are too blinded by their concerns with next month's profits to look ahead. They practice a kind of lucid denial that is worse than Orwellian doublethink. These guys are generating a tremendous amount of FUD and misdirection-- such as attempting to turn possibly productive discussions about what can be done to useless arguments about where the blame lies.
I suggest calling FUD any time the discussion turns toward who or what is to blame for global warming. Because that isn't important right now. What is important is how are the problems going to manifest; how can we deal with them; and what can we do right now to reduce the future hells that those of us young enough to still be alive in 2015 are going to begin facing?
Slashdot Mirror
I like your analogy to energy of activation. It fits well with my situation.
When it comes time to replace the printer, chances are I will complete the jump to Linux. In the meantime, I'll check again for a Turbo Printer driver for the beast (there were none a year ago when the printer was new on the market). If I can get a printer driver that will do satisfactory drafts even if it can't handle the final version well, and if Wacom does have a Linux driver for the Intuos 2, then I'll be working in Linux before the year is out (if I can get the graphics tablet to work with either the GIMP or with PSP v8 under Wine).
[This post includes indirect responses to a couple of other replies to parent-- I appreciate those other replies, thank you!]
Hmm, there seems to be an inability to recognize amusing hyperbole on this thread. I thought the bit about the Hummer and needing three seats on an airplane might have been a bit over the top myself, but evidently it would take something of seismic proportions to quiver some people's humormeter. Well that's led to a situation that is sort of funny in a slapstick Three Stooges kind of way. Unfortunately I was trying for a more erudite kind of humor, like Groucho Marx, so I guess it doesn't count.
Ah well. I'll just get these last digs in and we'll see what topples into the deeper hole I'm making. That might good for another chuckle.
While we're waiting for the clowns, the point remains that not going to Linux because there isn't a laptop that runs it that is also a great laptop envy generator doesn't seem like a significant reason for most people to avoid Linux laptops. If you want to demonstrate your prowess at conspicuous consumption, then probably Linux isn't the right OS for you. But that doesn't say anything about the people who don't think of their laptops as fashion accessories.
Oh I fail it as a geek. I'm not yet so overweight that a laptop with a 17" screen will fit on my lap.
I've used notebook computers off and on for years, plugging them into standard keyboards and screens at work or home, and using the builtin kbd and screen only when actually on the move. So that's like pretty geeky, with the cables on the desk and all. And when I'm on the move, I'm actually able to set the thing up and work on it, without taking up more than my allotted width on an airplane, at a library table, etc.
But I agree that my approach doesn't have the same kind of status symbol appeal as wrestling a supersized laptop out of your 6 mpg Hummer, buying three side-by-each airline seats so you can use the thing in flight, etc etc.
Hear hear!
It is now time to start pushing (the USA) Congress for meaningful tax reform-- meaning that the tax law itself should be rewritten as pseudocode. Or maybe in Javascript.
I'm serious.
This could be a great issue in the 2008 presidential elections (assuming the country holds together that long).
This is a kind of 'me too' post.
I set up my computer as dual boot between WinXP and Mandrake more than a year ago, in hopes of migrating. But I'm still doing about 100% of my work in WinXP. (I have moved to Firefox, Thunderbird, OOo, etc-- but under WinXP).
The stumbling block is that I use a Canon i9900 printer in large format photorealistic mode, and a Wacom graphics tablet in Paint Shop Pro, for a very small percentage of my work, and there are no Linux equivalents. So I'm stuck with one toe in the Windows world. I can move more than 97% of my work to Linux at any time, but I'll have to go to WinXP to print the 11x17" photos and to do some of the photo touch-ups. I spend perhaps 4 hours a month on these activities-- it really is a small but important part of my work.
And it turns out that while I am prepared for the disruptions in habits that would go with a total conversion to Linux, I dread the thought of all the broken habit patterns that would result if I try to straddle both OSs. I don't want to surprise myself by trying to use Linux shortcuts in Windows-- that is the worst kind of interruption; it would definitely make it harder to stay in the creative sweet spot.
I expect that I'm not the only guy around who feels stuck in a slow migration pattern. I expect that there are lots of individuals and small businesses who continue to use Windows because less than 2% of their work requires templates, or macros or something like that which they can't duplicate in Linux (yet)-- and that, combined with realistic concerns about unsupported straddling of both systems, is sufficient to keep them in Windows.
unfortunately when I looked at those laptops, they hadn't yet offered one with a 17" screen.
If plugging your existing monitor into the video port of a laptop is too difficult, perhaps Linux isn't the best choice for you. I think that, in general, the somewhat greater technical mastery that is needed for a successful migration to Linux is within the reach of almost all readers of slashdot, but I suppose there are exceptions.
I want a license, not a promise. While it will protect me in court, a promise holds less weight than an explicit license.
That's fine for software.
But we're talking about standards governing the way I can store my proprietary data, and the way my government is to store any data that could affect me.
I want that to be free of any kind of license; I demand that this standard be completely unencumbered by any corporate or individual rights. What you compose on the keyboard is your intellectual property; no person, corporation, or government should have any hint of a right of control over any part of that process.
The significant point here is that Microsoft is now beginning to position Vista as vaporware. MS has a long tradition of announcing that they will start selling product Real Soon Now to mess up the heads of IT strategists who are thinking about moving their company away from MS products. This works because it activates all the PHBs and any effort to talk rationally about moving the company to Linux (or OS/2 back in the day, or D.R. DOS back at the dawn of time) is going to be met with a lot of thought-avoidance resistance since it becomes so easy to say "I don't want you to waste any time on looking at a possible Linux migration until we see what MS has to offer".
The vaporware stage of Microsoft product development is concerned with projecting mirages of paradise into the marketplace, in an effort to cause potential buyers to wait until MS actually has product to put out there. It is the kind of FUD that MS marketdroids are particularly good at generating. It is the kind of thing that PHBs soak up like sponges, because it gives them such great sounding excuses for avoiding actually having to think about IT problems or making management decisions that might put a ding in their careers.
but I assume (making an ass of u and me) that the evidence they're talking about are enzymatic activity assays from isolated tissues.
I think that is a fair assumption (caveat included). But note that the trigger for looking at the bioflavinoids was a statistical anomoly that has been dubbed the French Paradox. Some groups in France who eat a traditional diet that is high in fats and such were having a much lower incidence of heart disease than was predicted by American based statistics. Several investigations by unrelated researchers have been done and these clearly show that the high levels of proanthocyanidins in french table wines protect against cholesterol and LDL diseases. And almost as an aside, it was found that these very potent antioxidants also protect against some cancers.
The proanthocyanidins found in wine, grape seeds, and virtually all deeply colored fruits are in the larger class of bioflavinoids. The prenylflavinoids found in hops are also bioflavinoids.
Having spent some time in Corvallis and thus being aware of the beverage of choice at OSU, I am not at all surprised that OSU took up the study of the prenylflavonoids in beer. I think that's a good choice for pragmatic reasons-- it would be very easy to find candidates for a four year longitudinal study of beer ingestion among the OSU undergraduate population. It would be much more difficult to entice OSU students into embibing significant quantities of red wine... the wine drinkers all go to University of Oregon, not Oregon State University, you see. While the two are only about an hour's drive from each other, OSU and UO students mix about as well as a "lager" poured from a can mixes with a "chianti" from a box.
Back to a more serious level: there are now a number of grape seed extracts (GSE) being sold as nutritional supplements. These are an inexpensive way of assuring that there are plenty of bioflavinoids in the diet-- although they probably are not as fun as drinking a quart of red wine a day,
Balderdash.
First, find a proper example that uses intangible goods or services and so is reasonably similar to software development. Then we'll have the beginnings of a basis for discussion. I'll give you a hint: FOSS is something like a convention of english teachers sharing their best practices with each other and developing a set of recommended lesson plans.
Second, stop with the nitwit unbacked assertion that FOSS is generated only by a few wealthy people as a hobby. Anyone who is willing to spend a few minutes looking at the development forums at OOo, Blender, POV-Ray, Firefox, etc, will quickly realize that a great number of people contribute to these projects, and most of them express concerns that are of distinctly middle class or poor student origin. FOSS isn't like the America Cup races. And since its development process is completely open, anyone can look at the email trail of any FOSS project and realize that the overwhelming majority of participants are just ordinary blokes.
One of your premises is flawed.
A typical FOSS project is something like a medeval cathedral, built by small donations of labor and skill given by large numbers of contributors over a long time. Some of the individuals might do it for ego satisfaction, but most contribute because the work will increase their saleable skills or because they need a particular tool and extending a FOSS project like POV-Ray, Blender, GCC, or Apache is the best way to get it.
However, unlike a cathedral that starts to weather as soon as the cornerstone is laid, FOSS is immune to entropy. It only gets better and better over time, as more people make small contributions. Also, the code a contributor adds to a FOSS project is going to be debugged and refined by the supporting community in a way that no individual programmer could ever manage on his own.
In short, you cannot legitimately talk about a FOSS project without talking about its support community. It is this community's interaction with the software that adds the value to the FOSS project.
FOSS isn't a zero-sum game. A FOSS project is a community effort that creates new wealth out of nothing, where each contribution is of negligible cost to the contributor. There is nothing comparable in the commercial software world. Twenty hours of coding (or debugging, or writing user docs) for a FOSS project is qualitatively not comparable to the purchase cost of commercial software. The first is an investment in a community wealth generator; the second is an expenditure.
Hey, lay off that "MS is no badder than anybody else" line of bull.
MS has spent more than 20 years building its reputation for screwing competitors, customers, and even partners for any little bit of market advantage. Talk to some of the guys who've been around for a while about undocumented DOS routines, announcements of vaporware versions RSN, doublefaced Windows API (fast routines for internal development, and slower ones for everyone else), "embrace and extend", et cetera ad nauseum. MS has put the time into building its reputation. It is hands down the baddest big corporation in the western world. It has earned that unique place, and I'm sure it has taken a lot more cleverness and grunt effort to get there than any other institution would ever devote to such an endeavor. Microsoft is to business in our time as Ghengis Khan's Mongol hordes were to Asia in his time.
And besides, what other corporation of comparable size has a foul mouthed, chair throwing monkey dancer as second in command? Do you really think such a person could be found in the inner sanctum of IBM, Sun, GMC, Ford? Do you think there might be a reason why that is the case?
So you just peddle that soft soap your pushing somewhere else. Microsoft is hands down the baddest company around. They have worked hard to get there. They fully deserve all the "honors" that go with that status.
I've got a couple of technical questions about TFA (which I have read).
First, and most importantly, when Ms Wyne writes that "Eric Kriss flippantly stated 'Here we have a true conflict...'", what is the technical meaning of the word "flippant" in the context of IP - FOSS discussions?
I think this might very well be the first time anyone has taken the word "flippant" from if its native context (of discussing behaviors at cocktail parties) and used it in the realm of communications and data standards. So I'm rather confused about what meaning I can attach to it, and about how I can validate that Kriss did indeed make his statement "flippantly", and not, perhaps, "jocularly" or maybe "whimsically".
My second question is this: whine, WINE, Wyne... What's up with all this whining? And why do the guys across the pond spell it "whinge"? What's with that??
OK, that second question really isn't a technical question.
I won't speak for parent-- I am the author of GP and I can speak to that.
There are numerous belief systems that do not put a high value on what reality might be. For instance, Worf of Star Trek is the archetypal follower of the warrior ethic: no matter what reality he finds himself in, his ultimate concern is with behaving according to his inner model of the ideal warrior. He looks within for guidance, not to anything external. Another example: some branches of buddhism believe that the world we perceive is completely illusory; that "objective reality" is not only unknowable, but that pursuits based on these illusions are bound to end in grief. Suffering is inevitable until one learns to ignore the illusions and live in accordance with the Fourfold Way. Yet another example: much of zennist practice is involved with learning how to free the mind from the constraints imposed by "realistic" thinking, so that one can look at the world without preconception and in so doing freely express one's inner sacred nature.
Myself, I don't much care what you believe in, so long as your behaviors do not impact negatively on my life (or, by extension, on the lives of others). I favor some belief systems because I think they would lead you to things like community involvement that I think would improve my world in some way. I disfavor others, because I think they promote behaviors that damage others, and by extension, decrease the wealth and beauty of the world around me.
I generally don't favor belief systems that are based on "facts" or some form of "objective reality", because in my experience they fail badly in several ways. For one, it seems like all the most important behaviors a person might make have to be decided before the information about the problem is complete and unambiguous. Persons who have to have the 'facts' before acting end up having to make snap judgments that are often based too much on preconceptions, prejudice, and bigotry-- all various levels of assumptions that are made in the absence of facts. OTOH, people who rely on an inner model of correct behavior when making decisions can more easily process situations where the "facts" are questionable or incomplete. In my experience, I think these people are more reliable than the ones who insist on making "realistic" decisions.
Followed the ultimate realization of _really_ astute students: "Why am I pondering such a stupid question? What a complete waste of my time!"...
Good point! You have successfully recapitulated a core part of the mystic traditions (many branches of buddhism, zennist thought, many of the pre- Christian European religions, probably all of the shammanist schools, etc). Lots of people say that there is a core Mystery to existence that is beyond human understanding.
For the geek, the most accessable expression of this is probably the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of post classical physics, which can be generalized to something like this:
More on this here and there.
Uh, yeah, one path to Nirvanna is by this route, but first you have to visit the despair of recognizing that you can attach no meaning to your personal existence. Nowadays, most americans who take this route can get themselves labelled "depressed" and go on to some fun experiences with antidepressant medications and the satisfaction of having a blanket medical excuse for having botched up their lives, their relationships, and everything. That seems to me to be an unnecessary and dangerous detour, but wtf, the point is in the travelling, not the destination, right?
Assuming that this "_really_ astute" student successfully navigates around the MAO inhibitors and the SSRIs, and the various other problems en route, there is the inner peace and happiness of knowing that what is important is not who you are or what happens to you, but how you behave.
Here's a neat thought to end with:
Quantum mechanics: the dreams stuff is made of.
Reality by definition is objective, not subjective.
I congratulate you on formulating such a wonderfully concise expression of your belief system. It does simplify an awful lot of things that have perplexed some of the best minds of the ages.
OTOH, very soon after asking about the nature of reality, many astute students will realize that a more fundamental question exists: how can I recognize reality if I ever happen to encounter it? It seems like such an innocent question, until you think about it a bit, and realize that it doesn't matter one whit whether reality is objective, subjective, or virtual, if you don't know how to recognize it.
Is there no spoon?
So is this bad news or good news, or??
Personally, here's the bad news: when this happens, the IT dept at the college I work for are going to demand a larger budget for the 64 bit hardware that will be required, and their selling point will be that this is an absolutely necessary upgrade. Realistically, it won't provide the college with any new capabilities and it will increase associated costs (diversion of resources from daily operations to preparing for the new installs, troubleshooting them, etc). This is personally bad news because it decreases the likelihood of my getting a raise or my department (adult education) hiring administrivia support people.
OTOH, this early announcement is good news: it gives me more time to work on management to get them to hold IT's feet to the fire. The current situation is that IT is running a successful smoke-and-mirrors racket where they mostly get their way with dazzles and baffles of technojargon and don't have to answer the hard questions concerning costs and benefits to the daily operations and the college's actual mission (which has something to do with educating students-- not with IT getting yet more Microsoft Certificates at the college's expense). However I really don't expect to be successful at this-- the current key people in IT have no knowledge beyond Microsoft alternatives so nothing is going to change until they retire or move on.
On rereading this, it's obvious that some of my bitterness has leaked through the keyboard into the text. I'm particularly frustrated at the moment, because I'm updating curricula files that are used in several different campuses across the city, and I've found that for "security" reasons, IT runs each campus as a separate network. I have to fall back on a sneakernet strategy to keep several copies of the files up to date, and I think that is absurd in this day and age. I'm also very aware that IT will point to the need to develop expertise with the coming 64 bit systems as a reason why they cannot find a way to serve up curriculum files from a single location. Apparently even setting up an FTP repository is too risky on the MS servers, at least in the way these are currently being managed by IT. (I very much doubt that this would change with the move to 64 bit systems).
Always gets me how none of the "reviews" ever deal with the issue that the majority of inkjet printers ... are going to give you prints that will fade and turn orange in a matter of MONTHS some times.
This is a bit of mis-information that needs to be cleared up.
There is no significant problem with inks used in inkjet printers. There was, however, a problem with Epson's "micropore" photo papers a few years ago. The paper acted as an ozone scrubber, and the ozone it collected broke down the cyan dye. The result was the classic "Epson Orange" effect. It could happen in a matter of days in areas of high ozone concentration and mild UV exposure. Epson was badly burned by that, and they now have archival quality product lines that are very good.
The point here is that choice of paper is the most significant factor in longevity, with appropriate post-printing care of paper being the second most critical factor. If you want multigenerational archival quality*, you can have it with any of today's ink jet printers, if you are careful in choosing the right archival quality papers, and you protect the finished product with UV blocking glass or a coating of UV blocking acrylic spray. There is no reason why the product of inkjet printer won't hold up as well as other watercolor art, and museums have some watercolors that were done 200 years ago and are still vibrant.
*Multigenerational archival quality: the ability to print a photo of your grandparents that will not have degraded when your grown children show it to their grandchildren.
Any printer filling in a uniform, moderately light area with a sparse pattern of dark ink will produce dots that are visible (and annoying) to any person capable of focussing closer than about 5 inches.
While this is true, I don't see its relevance in a discussion of photorealistic printing quality. The only times I've ever run into anything close to what you describe is when shooting documents for OCR conversion to digital form-- which is "photo" work, but isn't intended to be "realistic" (distortions are purposefully introduced to increase the OCR accuracy).
Thanks for the link about printer profiles. I'll put it to good use later today.
Several months ago, I spent some effort in calibrating my software with my printer and my monitor, and got to where things were almost good enough that I could reduce my test prints to "proof of concept" kinds of things. After a lot of head scratching, I realized that I don't have sufficient control over the ambient lighting in the room to make it work. There was no way that I could be sure that what I was seeing on the screen would be close to how the image would print. Time of day, sunny or cloudy out, which lights I had on or off, and possibly some drift in my older monitor's settings were problems I can't solve at this point. Essentially, the effective gamma and color balance of my monitor are moving targets under these conditions.
I suspect that I'm not alone in facing these problems. For me, it is far easier and more efficient to do test prints than to work with profiles.
I can see a tremendous advantage in getting the printer profiled correctly, so that I can be sure that my final print is the same as what I would get if I send the image to lab (for multiple copies, for instance). So I will look at the link you provided most carefully, and probably revisit the profiling issue and make sure that I've got the printer part of it right.
I stopped reading at this point.
That's too bad, but I appreciate your honesty. It helps in assessing how much weight should be given to your comments. :-)
Printers that use small drops have more nozzles, and with more nozzles, they can use more sophisticated dithering patterns for color gradations. I use a Canon 9900, which has a nominal resolution 4800x2400 dpi, but each of those "dots" can be built up from overlayments of 8 different inks in a large number of different combinations. Printers with 9600 dpi can achieve the same quality with 6 different inks and fancier dithering patterns (more nozzles and a more expensive print head).
While TFA talks about the smaller drops providing more resolution, I don't think anyone should put too much weight on that aspect. All of these higher end printers are working with the way the paper will bleed neighboring "dots" into each other, and doing so at higher resolutions than the human eye can resolve. The end product is a watercolor painting. With some papers and ink weights, the end result is truly an analog product as the neighboring "dots" completely blend into each other before the ink dries.
Using a photo lab is certainly a good option for a lot of people, especially with "point & shoot" casual photographs. You can get some very good photos and prints that way.
However I might spend half a day or more working on a promising photo in the digital darkroom. I have gotten some excellent results from images that were technically bad but had good artistic qualities, and I rarely find a photo that won't benefit from some tweaking with the unsharp mask and the histogram. But to do this kind of work-up properly requires being able to do test prints on the printer and paper that I'll use for the final product.
A good home color printer beats using a lab for any photo buff who has reached the phase where he wants to do test prints or explore different papers. I'm currently using a Canon 9900, and I'm very pleased with its quality and economy.
Im not disputing any facts, just the presentation by the editors on slashdot. Who seem to be getting worse at the same compound rate described above...
Ah!
Well, that's a different kind of hot air...
So greenhouse gases are causing the earth to get warmer, thus increasing the rate of evaporation of water above previous levels.
And somehow its the water vapor that is released from this evaporation, from increased heating, that is warming the earth?
The article was clearly written to be non-alarmist.
The pertinent facts presented are that CO2 accounts for only 30% of the observed increase in warmth while H2O vapor accounts for 70%. And that the CO2 increase is the cause of the H2O vapor increase.
A more alarmist presentation that seems to fit the facts is that a unit increase of CO2 will increase the amount of warming by over 200% of predictions based on CO2's effect alone (due to the multiplier effect of the H2O vapor that the CO2 brings about). This would mean that the predictions of sea level rise and so forth that were used in formulating the Kyoto Protocol are grossly conservative:
The model used in the Kyoto Protocol predicts a 1 meter increase in sea level by 2100 if the known greenhouse emissions continue to increase at historic rates.
Adjusting the model for this new information would probably bring it to predict that the sea level will rise by 1 meter in the next 20 years, give or take a 10 years or so. Think of compound interest equations.
In short, the discovery of this H2O vapor multiplier effect on CO2 emissions implies that we are a lot closer to a chaotic change of climate than the most widely accepted reasoning had suggested eight years ago (Kyoto was in 1997).
Our climate changes...
Our climate is *incredibly* complex, so accurate prediction either way is nigh impossible...
Global warming *is* happening...
There is NO consensus on whether or not man-made global warming is happening...
A very good summation, thank you. Except that the concern about whether global warming is man-made or natural is misplaced. That is something for the historians to argue out, 50 years from now.
Our concerns need to be focused on the pragmatics.
Is there is anything that can be done to reduce the impact of global warming or postpone the onset of its worst effects?
The answer is that yes, there are some laws and regulations that can be implemented now that might help (there are no guarantees). The cost to society of doing these things now is so much less than the costs we are going to face beginning in 10 years or so even in the best case, that the prudent course is obvious. Formulate and implement what new legislation is needed, and properly enforce the regulations that are already on the books but are being ignored (SUVs?? These monsters haul passengers-- why aren't they regulated as passenger vehicles??? What is with these loopholes in fuel efficiency regulations that are literally big enough to drive 3 tonne trucks through them???).
A major problem is that while the cost to benefit ratio is clearly favorable on the societal level, there are SUV dealers and others who have vested short term interests in keeping things as they are. Even though their long term self interest lie with those of everyone else, they are too blinded by their concerns with next month's profits to look ahead. They practice a kind of lucid denial that is worse than Orwellian doublethink. These guys are generating a tremendous amount of FUD and misdirection-- such as attempting to turn possibly productive discussions about what can be done to useless arguments about where the blame lies.
I suggest calling FUD any time the discussion turns toward who or what is to blame for global warming. Because that isn't important right now. What is important is how are the problems going to manifest; how can we deal with them; and what can we do right now to reduce the future hells that those of us young enough to still be alive in 2015 are going to begin facing?