[That is false.] As a quick google would have told you.
[re: as far as I know, such research cannot be done in ANY FACILITY THAT RECEIVES FEDERAL FUNDING at all whatsoever.]
I googled your reference. I found these salient points:
4. What if a scientist is conducting research with both federally fundable and non-federally fundable human embryonic stem cells?
...Federal policy is clear that no federal funding may be used, either directly or indirectly, to support human embryonic stem cell research outside the criteria established by the President on August 9, 2001. Therefore, the direct costs of such unallowable activity must be charged only to non-federal sources of funding [no surprise here]...The F&A costs [indirect costs for facilities and administrative overheads], which are allocable to stem cell research falling outside the criteria established on August 9, 2001, will not be charged to federally sponsored activities...
7. I am an investigator who receives NIH funding, and I am planning to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines. Can I conduct the derivations in my laboratory, or do I need to find a non-university-funded laboratory to do this work?
You may do the derivation in your university laboratory as long as: 1) you carefully and consistently charge all direct costs of doing the derivation to a non-federal funding source and 2) your university or research center has in place a method of allocating the costs of supporting your laboratory so that this activity's appropriate facilities and administrative (F&A) costs are charged to non-federal accounts.
IANAL. I did serve as a minor bureaucrat in a US Federal health care institution for 9 years and I've had to deal with this kind of language before. This is how the above translates into normal speech:
An institution recieving Federal funds that wants to conduct research that is outside of Bush's proscriptions would have to assure that all costs for the corner of the laboratory that was dedicated to this purpose were not paid for by federal funds. This includes everything from HVAC, phone service, janitorial supplies, and a portion of the janitor's wages. This also extends to administrative items, such as a portion of secretary wages, a portion of the service contract on computer maintenance and so on. How hard-nosed these rules would actually be would depend on agency law, not legislative law, and could therefore be dictated by the White House to any desired level of micromanagement.
The necessary changes in bookkeeping practices had an immediate effect of preventing any institution from doing proscribed stem cell research. The OP was correct in what he said, at the time when these regulations went into effect. Now some institutions have apparently set up mechanisms that they think will meet these new regulations-- but most institutions are not in a position to do this.
Changing bookkeeping systems to meet these requirements is a very costly process, with no productive benefit resulting from the change. And because this is an area mediated by brand-new agency regulations (which have the same force as federal legislative law), there are no precedents that can be used as guidance, or as shield. The enforcing agencies are currently in a position where they can make up the rules as they go along.
The phrase "lip service" comes to mind when I look at how Bush's administration has phrased these laws. On the surface, this issue appears to be a laudable attempt to ease moral concerns about government involvement in embryonic research while still seeming to allow such research to continue. But in practice it screws any attempt by anyone except some private corporations from doing anything in this field.
And perhaps that will prove to be the most significant part of all this-- that the large pharmaceutical houses with their $billions are now effectively the only ones who can explore th
Very few hardcopy publications have ever been done on pure white paper with pure black ink. Part of the reason for this is that literal "black on white" is harsh and tires the reader's eyes.
Visit an office supply store and you find dozens of different papers that all look "white" until you start comparing between them. Look at the "black" inks they have available for fountain pens and you'll find that not all "blacks" are black in the same way.
On the computer screen there are more than 4,000 colors between #EFEFEF and #FFFFFF that are each going to look white to your visitor, unless you contrast them with #FFFFFF or each other. There are also thousands of colors approaching #000000 that visitors will describe as black text, even though they are not.
Using off-whites and off-blacks that either complement or reinforce each other is a great way of setting the tone for a web page.
It isn't extortion or blackmail. It's called leverage, and it isn't illegal.
First, this isn't "leverage" the way that term is used in legal businesses, where it refers to a particular kind of debt financing (taking a second mortgage on your house to launch your new business is leveraging the business with your homeowner's equity). You are getting confused by a mafia euphemism for extortion.
It is true that this probably wasn't actually blackmail (unless there was some kind of pressure put on the Danish officials to keep quiet about the offer). It is therefore probably technically legal (I would expect as much from Bill Gates-- not because I think he's honest but because I think he is very shrewd). But if it happened the way it was reported, this was extortion and is definitely immoral (even if legal).
European copyright law should be developed based on the merits of the arguments for and against its details. Bill Gates has alledgedly used a threat of economic harm to a participant to try to influence this process. That would be extortion, and is definitely immoral even if though it may have been done in a legally defensible way.
I got to this phrase in the article "Proprietary Network Graphics (PNG)"
and decided that if there was any substance to the story, I wasn't going to find it in this guy's writing.
So, is the Microsoft policy of "embrace and extend" now being applied to common acronyms? Or is the writer too out of touch with the technology he is reporting about to know how to use dictionary.com or google to check a key definition in his story? And where were his editors??
I am looking into filing a similar request to obtain the GIS data for the Portland Oregon metro area.
Why do you want this, when the City of Portland Oregon already provides free web access to this information?
With a simple interface, too: enter a street address and you get the plot map, links to aerial photos, utility maps, crime maps, tax and permit history, census data for the neighborhood, etc etc.
My gf and I have been using this a lot as we look for a new house. It is an excellent resource. I'm deliberately not providing a link since I don't want the site slashdotted. Those with sufficient motivation can easily google their way to the site (and hopefully will not provide a direct link on slashdot).
So again, since the city of Portland is providing all this detailed information on any specific address, what exactly do you want to do with free access to the entire database? Some kind of market research? I would oppose many of the possible uses you might make of the entire database, since I would be very aware that my city taxes would be subsidizing whatever scheme you are cooking up.
It seems to me that paying the city $900/year for access to this data is more than fair: you only need to convince three hundred of us Portlanders that what you are doing is worth a three bucks a year to each of us, and that cost would be covered. Certainly if what you intend has any kind of social value, that wouldn't be hard to do.
I know some keen amateur photographers who have actually given up on home printing. When you take into account the ink and paper cost, it is often cheaper to get prints made in the high street, or using online services (where you upload a file and they send you the prints).
The quality of real prints on proper paper (eg. Fuji Crystal Archive) is hard to beat at home. Colour management is another nightmare that can waste time and paper.
I'm somewhere between high-end amateur and professional. I've invested more in the past year in cameras and printing equipment than I spent on the used car I just bought. I'm shooting between 1,200 and 2,500 photos a year, and working up about 100 of those to final prints. I never thought I could have so much fun-- the costs, hazards, and hassles of having my own chemical darkroom had always been too great.
At my level of involvement, it is less expensive for me to print at home, and I've got full control over the end product. I'm using a Canon i9900 and doing some prints at 13x19 inches. Most are 8x10 or 5x7.
Color management is an occasional nightmare. The worst of it has been a one-time hassle to get the monitor and printer to look identical on test images when the room lighting is optimum (almost dark). However I'm sometimes disappointed with my first print of an image, especially if I've had to adjust for a color cast in the original. What the printer produces is often not what you see on the screen in that situation. I probably average one throw-away test print for every final print. (For every 3 or 4 prints that are good on the first effort, there will be one that I need to repeat several times before I get what I want).
"Would the results be similar in a world-wide company with 10.000 employees located in different countries?"
A company of that scale has a bunch of problems....
To summarize your post, and several others, too:
While the TCO savings may scale well from small to large companies, large companies are usually dependent on custom legacy software and procedures that can be very expensive to move between platforms or replace. I don't disagree.
But IMO, lumping one-time conversion costs like legacy issues with TCO assessments is a very poor way of modelling a company's problem space. I think TCO comparisons should be done earlier in the analysis, with no reference to one-time conversion costs. TCO assessments answer these kinds of questions:
Assuming that we are in competition with a company that is the same in all respects as ours, except they are using OS "B" (while we continue with OS "A"), could we remain competitive with them at our current profit level?
Imagine that Santa Claus offers us a successful no-cost conversion from OS "A" to OS "B". Would the ongoing operating costs be low enough to be attractive to us?
After the answers to these kinds of TCO questions are determined, then it might be worthwhile to ask about what the conversion costs would be and how these might be handled. (I wonder how many companies are currently nibbling away at legacy issues to better position themselves for an OS change down the road?)
It does seem like the list is biased toward those names that are "politically safe". Some more of the missing names (and MHOs about why they are controversial) are:
Charles Moore - inventor of Forth and a pioneer in extensible language structures. Forth is out of favor mainly because Forth doesn't protect the programmer from making stupid errors, so a lot of write-only garbage has been written in Forth. (It isn't the right tool for almost all jobs, but it still shines in fuel injection computers, robotics and real time process control apps).
Larry Wall - inventor of Perl and champion of context sensitive interpreters. Perl is out of favor mostly for the same reasons Forth is out of favor: a lot of crap has been written in Perl and released to the world before it was properly revised. This is another case of a language gaining a bad rep because poor programmers could be productive with it.
Grace Hopper - COBOL. Demonstrated that computers could do business activities, and not just artillary tables. Aside form the gender bias, she is also out of favor because of COBOL coding sheets and the agonies we all went through over missed periods, back in the punchcard era.
Andrew Tanenbaum - teaches OS design and created Minix as a classroom tool. Out of favor because at one time juvenile geeks thought that "Tanenbaum" and "Torvalds" could not both be present on the same list without igniting a conflagration. Mature geeks recognize that this has never been the case, but of course the reality is nowhere near as exciting as the myth.
Whichever one of the AWK trio who first explored the heuristics of regular expressions. Out of favor because awk is extinct. Anything worthwhile that was done in awk has by now been rewritten in Perl.
Thanks for the quote from Dictionary.com on the use of "impact" as a verb.
So while the general rule to not verb nouns is apparently weakening, at least in this one case it is holding firm. Though I doubt this will impact slashdot commentary to any appreciable degree.
My impression is that HP and Canon are using a very different approaches to building a printer.
I got terminally upset with HP two years ago when a $60 tricolor ink cartridge failed right after installation and my backup cartridge refused to work because it had expired. I'm much happier with Canon's individual ink tanks that are separate from the print head, and don't have stupid little smart chips embedded in them to tell them when to stop working. I also like what the i9900 can do with a sheet of 130 lb coldpress watercolor paper. (Don't try this at home: it will void the warranty.)
I used to like HP products. At this point I've had three consecutive bad experiences with HP and I don't like the associated costs and aggravation. Offhand, I can't think of any reason why I would ever buy another HP product.
Thanks for the pointer (to Turboprint). They've added some support for the i9900 since I looked at them last spring-- I'll take another look when I get the time.
I looked hard at linux last year as I was setting up my digital darkroom. It wouldn't go. I was pretty sure that I could get good linux tools for capture and image manipulation. But being able to print effectively from linux within a reasonable budget is a no-go. The least expensive printer I could manage that would still meet the specs I needed (photorealistic at 13x17 inches and good giclee potential) is the Canon i9900--and there are no linux drivers for it. I couldn't find any linux photo printers that would be competitive in today's market.
I've still got linux as an alternate boot on my primary computer, but since I have to do the test prints, final color corrections, and final prints under Windows, I haven't bothered to learn the linux software.
I thought I'd send Mr William Gates a brief cheer-up note:
Dear Bill,
I just heard that you are the most spammed person in the world and I thought I'd send you a cheering-up note. Since that must really suck.
I mean I know he's rich and everything, but even rich guys must get the blues sometimes over things like spam. I'm sure he'd appreciate it if a few of us sent him our condolences.
Robert McHenry asked "how would they recognize it once they had (Shakespeare)"
Hmmm, I've searched the article and I haven't been able to find this quote or anything nearly like it. But I think I understand your point, and I don't disagree, in theory. (I see that the programming deficiencies have already been thoroughly addressed:-)
I think McHenry's lack of understanding of the wikipedian process lies in his old world view of the Universe, which he gives us in this statement (through implication):
In other words, the process allows Wikipedia to approach the truth asymptotically.
His underlying assumption is that there is an objective, true reality Out There (which an encyclopedia should approximate). This was a commonly held view during the Age of Reason, which IIRC is usually dated from around 1700 to about 1905.
Of course the sciences have moved on since then and many people now believe that understanding the role of the observer is integral to any understanding of reality-- that the two are somehow forever entwined. My personal belief is that whether or not an objective reality is Out There somewhere, all that we can know is our perceptions of it, and the only knowledge that we can actually share with each other is discussions of those perceptions. Which is generally sufficient for daily tasks.
Looked at in this way, whether Wikipedia has classical "authority" is less important than it being a place where a great deal of discussion about reality can be done in a controlled fashion. We have entered a post-classical period where many of us feel that "truth" is inherently slippery and possibly even flexible, and classical authority is less important than the ability to rapidly seek out opposing viewpoints and quickly deploy our personal bullshit shields.
I guess I'm not sure what the point is of this. If you want to support these projects, why not just donate it directly to them?
I see quite a bit of value in Lulu's products. When I want to encourage support for FOSS among people who are unfamiliar with it, these package deals could be just the ticket. This is something I could send as a gift to a relative, or pass around in a meeting while I was presenting the advantages of a windows to linux migration.
I will probably buy the OpenOffice set in the next month or so and if it is as well done as it looks on the web site, I expect to make heavy use of it next year (without ever spinning its CD).
No chance...this will ever be used. Not because it is dangerous, uneconomical, or anything even remotely having to do with reason.
Uh, well you have made some reasonably truthful statements, so long as we all agree only to look at a small part of the fueling process.
But until there is actually a working vitrification process that will handle 100% of the toxic waste of nuclear fuel production, the process as a whole is the most dangerous and uneconomical activitiy the human race has ever engaged in. We are nowhere close to having such a process, or any of the reasonable alternatives to it.
Now if nuclear rockets were designed to use recycled plutonium from warheads and put that stuff safely out of reach, I could get behind that kind of program. Since we are already paying the high price for that stuff, we might as well do something useful with it. But we're probably 10 to 20 years away from looking at that kind of sword to plow conversion (the political reality is that it won't happen until people who've built their careers on ignoring the flaws in our nuclear technology are retired).
Sounds like a gimmick. Can someone say if ceramic is truly better than glass, or just better "in theory"?
I'm guessing, but I think in this case the ceramic is better than glass because production can be less expensive.
Cheap cameras of this size use plastic lenses formed in molds, where the chosen plastic has a relatively low index of refraction. The lens is thicker, but is tolerant of the surface imperfections from the molding process, and is generally lighter than a glass lens that had the same optical quailities.
If you molded glass lenses this way, you'd face an expensive polishing operation afterward.
I'm guessing that these ceramic lenses are molded as "green bodies" and then sintered to reduce them to their final dimensions. The shrinking would reduce the surface imperfections of the molding process, so ceramics with fairly high indexes of refraction could be used. The end result would be a thin lens with many glass-like qualities, produced by an inexpensive molding process (a sintering oven would not add much to the cost).
There seems to be a little confusion...There is no lava actually coming out visibly. When they say there is magma at the surface, the geologists really mean it's just below the surface.
There is some continuing confusion. What MSH is doing is a little confusing.
The lower surfaces of the new bulge is rock with a temperature of 1100+ degrees F that also possesses other qualities of brand new rock: the geologists seem quite sure that this stuff was magma just hours ago. It probably still retains some plasticity. Think of this as a fresh lava in the same way the crust that forms on top of a hawaiian lava flow is fresh lava. The new bulge in MSH's crater is now recognized as a new lava dome, building just to one side of the old dome, and the lava is extruding out above the old crater floor.
(Hey, CamMac, your personal rating system appears to be out of synch with slashdot's. At least with respect to "flamebait". Just thought you might want to know that.):^)
Being pissed is somewhere along the continuum between being placid and being in a rage. Some of the physiological changes that accompany rage include:
loss of peripheral vision-- "tunnel vision";
diminished hearing;
an increase in strength of the larger muscles, with
a simultaneous loss in fine motor control, which leads to
a decrease in the capability for coordinated, precision reactions;
a decrease in the ability to reason
These do not a good driver make.
While I'm sure that being pissed is not as severe as being enraged, someone who is pissed is more likely to miss seeing or hearing something, and more likely to make a bad judgment call than when he is alert and relaxed. He is more accident prone.
Okay, right now you are probably in a pissed state, and therefore not receptive to what I've got to say-- this post might seem like just so much more flamebait to you. It isn't, nor was my first post. Maybe if you come back to read these when you're panties aren't in a bunch, you'll see that.
It is true that I'm playing hardball here, but I'm justified in that. For I am a bicyclist who hopes one day to tour through Colorado, and your attitude, sir, is a lethal threat to me.
While its true that William S. Burroughs had a broad range of direct experience with lots and lots of drugs over many years, it is also true that he was a novelist and wrote fiction. Like a lot of his beat contemporaries, it becomes very hard to say how much he fictionalized his own life experiences.
Read him for his literary value, if you wish. But please don't read into his works any third-party objectivity-- he wasn't into that.
So when its a biker who isn't hugging the curb, but instead taking up an entire lane, I reserve the right to get pissed.
I hope your license is taken away from you before you kill someone.
When you are driving any car, you are operating machinery that has more lethal potential and more difficult to control than any modern firearm. It is dangerous to give firearms to people who get pissed easily; people who cannot control their emotions are even more dangerous in a motor vehicle. They account for a big portion of the highway death toll in the USA, since the state of being pissed is a very accident prone state. You should not be driving when you are pissed. There are anger control clinics available-- you should take advantage of one of them.
In all the states where I have bicycled, it is legal for a bicyclist to "claim the lane"-- and the law requires him to do so when it is unsafe to do otherwise. A bicyclist in the middle of a narrow lane is safer than one who hugs the shoulder because he is more visible, because he causes other traffic to slow down to a speed that is safe for the current conditions, and because he is not encouraging drivers who maybe are poor at safety assessments to attempt to pass without changing lanes.
Good bicyclists minimize this practice through route planning and being courteous in using turnout opportunities when those are safely available. That does not mean weaving in and out of parked cars-- which is a dangerous habit.
Bicyclists are another slow moving vehicle, like farm equipment, metermaid threewheelers, and drivers rubbernecking for an address. Of course you probably get pissed at these other legal users of the road, too. Get some anger management before you end up carrying a sack of guilt around.
...what makes caffeine addictive, rather than dependency forming (like sweet foods used as an emotional crutch), is its withdrawl symptoms...
Your distinction between physiological addiction and psychological dependency is an important point. It has been recognized for a long time by many in the health care professions that caffiene seems to have some qualities of physiological addiction. But there is rarely a psychological dependency of any great degree. Outdoor enthusiasts who regularly drink a pot or two of coffee a day during the work week can give it up easily for a week of camping in the mountains, etc. The astute ones recognize that they are going to have an early morning headache for a day or so, but generally regard that as a minor inconvenience. If asked to rate it against other inconveniences of camping, they'd probably put it below such things as toilet paper management.
OTOH, heroin's physiological addiction is pretty mild as such things go-- withdrawal from heroin is uncomfortable but not life-threatening, like withdrawal from several prescription drugs (antidepressants, diazepam, etc) can be. The cravings associated with heroin withdrawal are due to the strong psychological dependency.
And it does seem like a lot of the blimpos and tubbos I've encountered have a psychological dependency on twinkies that is literally pathological.
Hope the above makes sense. I'm still working on my first pot of coffee...
I spent a fair bit of time trying to find a workable linux driver for a Canon i560 printer a few months ago. There isn't one. Since then, I've upgraded to the Canon i9900, which does awesome large format photographic prints, but AFAIK there is no linux driver for this one either.
I think it would be easy to get most of the Canon office printers to work under linux, but their newer line of photographic printers is another story.
OTOH, you are right about the Minolta cameras and I was wrong to suggest that there is a problem with linux support for these. Minolta has been complying with the USB storage device standard.
I agree about a native PSP for Linux - that would rock - but have you tried it with Wine?
I haven't. I would be very much interested in seeing any reviews of PSP v8.x running under Wine...
I have been using PSP professionally in both web graphics design and photographic work for years. The last few releases have had both macro language capabilities at the top end and customizable filters at the pixel by pixel bottom end. I haven't done much with PSP's vector graphics, but I understand that it, too, is solidly done. There is no way that PSP can be called "basic". These are amazing features for a package that can also be used by a graphics neophyte.
Krista will have to provide similar features to be competitive with PSP. I'll try to read up on Krista after the slashdot tsunami-- maybe these features are there already?
To my mind, the best thing that could happen would be for Jasc to wake up and produce a Linux version of PSP. PSP is the only remaining Windows app that I have to have. (Then if Canon and Minolta would come out with Linux drivers for their printers and cameras, I could be done with Windows for good.)
I agree that Pons and Fleischmann essentially sabotaged their careers with the ill-conceived press conference, rather than have their work peer-reviewed as most scientific research is done...
For me, this is one of the most curious aspects of the whole cold fusion debacle. P&F were not simple innocents wrt the way institutional science works, so why the hell did they knowingly trash their careers with that press conference circus? That is, I take the position that their press conference was not "ill-concieved", but chosen deliberately after due consideration of the risks and recognition of the probable outcome.
So I can't help but wonder if P&F were worried that their baby would be suppressed into oblivion if they introduced it to the world in the quiet ways of peer reviewed journals.
I'm NOT saying they were fighting a conspiracy of suppression. But the idea of cold fusion is more challenging to many of today's major institutions than the idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun was to the Catholic Church and its academic minions a little while ago. I am sure that Galileo's fate was at least somewhat in P&F's minds as they decided to do the press conference thing.
I look forward to reading their biographies, someday. Perhaps those will give some insight into why they made such an extraordinary choice in the way they first published their work.
Slashdot Mirror
[That is false.] As a quick google would have told you.
[re: as far as I know, such research cannot be done in ANY FACILITY THAT RECEIVES FEDERAL FUNDING at all whatsoever.]
I googled your reference. I found these salient points:
IANAL. I did serve as a minor bureaucrat in a US Federal health care institution for 9 years and I've had to deal with this kind of language before. This is how the above translates into normal speech:
An institution recieving Federal funds that wants to conduct research that is outside of Bush's proscriptions would have to assure that all costs for the corner of the laboratory that was dedicated to this purpose were not paid for by federal funds. This includes everything from HVAC, phone service, janitorial supplies, and a portion of the janitor's wages. This also extends to administrative items, such as a portion of secretary wages, a portion of the service contract on computer maintenance and so on. How hard-nosed these rules would actually be would depend on agency law, not legislative law, and could therefore be dictated by the White House to any desired level of micromanagement.
The necessary changes in bookkeeping practices had an immediate effect of preventing any institution from doing proscribed stem cell research. The OP was correct in what he said, at the time when these regulations went into effect. Now some institutions have apparently set up mechanisms that they think will meet these new regulations-- but most institutions are not in a position to do this.
Changing bookkeeping systems to meet these requirements is a very costly process, with no productive benefit resulting from the change. And because this is an area mediated by brand-new agency regulations (which have the same force as federal legislative law), there are no precedents that can be used as guidance, or as shield. The enforcing agencies are currently in a position where they can make up the rules as they go along.
The phrase "lip service" comes to mind when I look at how Bush's administration has phrased these laws. On the surface, this issue appears to be a laudable attempt to ease moral concerns about government involvement in embryonic research while still seeming to allow such research to continue. But in practice it screws any attempt by anyone except some private corporations from doing anything in this field.
And perhaps that will prove to be the most significant part of all this-- that the large pharmaceutical houses with their $billions are now effectively the only ones who can explore th
Very few hardcopy publications have ever been done on pure white paper with pure black ink. Part of the reason for this is that literal "black on white" is harsh and tires the reader's eyes.
Visit an office supply store and you find dozens of different papers that all look "white" until you start comparing between them. Look at the "black" inks they have available for fountain pens and you'll find that not all "blacks" are black in the same way.
On the computer screen there are more than 4,000 colors between #EFEFEF and #FFFFFF that are each going to look white to your visitor, unless you contrast them with #FFFFFF or each other. There are also thousands of colors approaching #000000 that visitors will describe as black text, even though they are not.
Using off-whites and off-blacks that either complement or reinforce each other is a great way of setting the tone for a web page.
It isn't extortion or blackmail. It's called leverage, and it isn't illegal.
First, this isn't "leverage" the way that term is used in legal businesses, where it refers to a particular kind of debt financing (taking a second mortgage on your house to launch your new business is leveraging the business with your homeowner's equity). You are getting confused by a mafia euphemism for extortion.
It is true that this probably wasn't actually blackmail (unless there was some kind of pressure put on the Danish officials to keep quiet about the offer). It is therefore probably technically legal (I would expect as much from Bill Gates-- not because I think he's honest but because I think he is very shrewd). But if it happened the way it was reported, this was extortion and is definitely immoral (even if legal).
European copyright law should be developed based on the merits of the arguments for and against its details. Bill Gates has alledgedly used a threat of economic harm to a participant to try to influence this process. That would be extortion, and is definitely immoral even if though it may have been done in a legally defensible way.
I got to this phrase in the article
"Proprietary Network Graphics (PNG)"
and decided that if there was any substance to the story, I wasn't going to find it in this guy's writing.
So, is the Microsoft policy of "embrace and extend" now being applied to common acronyms? Or is the writer too out of touch with the technology he is reporting about to know how to use dictionary.com or google to check a key definition in his story? And where were his editors??
Quoting from the story lead:
Why do you want this, when the City of Portland Oregon already provides free web access to this information?
With a simple interface, too: enter a street address and you get the plot map, links to aerial photos, utility maps, crime maps, tax and permit history, census data for the neighborhood, etc etc.
My gf and I have been using this a lot as we look for a new house. It is an excellent resource. I'm deliberately not providing a link since I don't want the site slashdotted. Those with sufficient motivation can easily google their way to the site (and hopefully will not provide a direct link on slashdot).
So again, since the city of Portland is providing all this detailed information on any specific address, what exactly do you want to do with free access to the entire database? Some kind of market research? I would oppose many of the possible uses you might make of the entire database, since I would be very aware that my city taxes would be subsidizing whatever scheme you are cooking up.
It seems to me that paying the city $900/year for access to this data is more than fair: you only need to convince three hundred of us Portlanders that what you are doing is worth a three bucks a year to each of us, and that cost would be covered. Certainly if what you intend has any kind of social value, that wouldn't be hard to do.
I know some keen amateur photographers who have actually given up on home printing. When you take into account the ink and paper cost, it is often cheaper to get prints made in the high street, or using online services (where you upload a file and they send you the prints).
The quality of real prints on proper paper (eg. Fuji Crystal Archive) is hard to beat at home. Colour management is another nightmare that can waste time and paper.
I'm somewhere between high-end amateur and professional. I've invested more in the past year in cameras and printing equipment than I spent on the used car I just bought. I'm shooting between 1,200 and 2,500 photos a year, and working up about 100 of those to final prints. I never thought I could have so much fun-- the costs, hazards, and hassles of having my own chemical darkroom had always been too great.
At my level of involvement, it is less expensive for me to print at home, and I've got full control over the end product. I'm using a Canon i9900 and doing some prints at 13x19 inches. Most are 8x10 or 5x7.
Color management is an occasional nightmare. The worst of it has been a one-time hassle to get the monitor and printer to look identical on test images when the room lighting is optimum (almost dark). However I'm sometimes disappointed with my first print of an image, especially if I've had to adjust for a color cast in the original. What the printer produces is often not what you see on the screen in that situation. I probably average one throw-away test print for every final print. (For every 3 or 4 prints that are good on the first effort, there will be one that I need to repeat several times before I get what I want).
To summarize your post, and several others, too:
While the TCO savings may scale well from small to large companies, large companies are usually dependent on custom legacy software and procedures that can be very expensive to move between platforms or replace. I don't disagree.
But IMO, lumping one-time conversion costs like legacy issues with TCO assessments is a very poor way of modelling a company's problem space. I think TCO comparisons should be done earlier in the analysis, with no reference to one-time conversion costs. TCO assessments answer these kinds of questions:
After the answers to these kinds of TCO questions are determined, then it might be worthwhile to ask about what the conversion costs would be and how these might be handled. (I wonder how many companies are currently nibbling away at legacy issues to better position themselves for an OS change down the road?)
It does seem like the list is biased toward those names that are "politically safe". Some more of the missing names (and MHOs about why they are controversial) are:
Charles Moore - inventor of Forth and a pioneer in extensible language structures. Forth is out of favor mainly because Forth doesn't protect the programmer from making stupid errors, so a lot of write-only garbage has been written in Forth. (It isn't the right tool for almost all jobs, but it still shines in fuel injection computers, robotics and real time process control apps).
Larry Wall - inventor of Perl and champion of context sensitive interpreters. Perl is out of favor mostly for the same reasons Forth is out of favor: a lot of crap has been written in Perl and released to the world before it was properly revised. This is another case of a language gaining a bad rep because poor programmers could be productive with it.
Grace Hopper - COBOL. Demonstrated that computers could do business activities, and not just artillary tables. Aside form the gender bias, she is also out of favor because of COBOL coding sheets and the agonies we all went through over missed periods, back in the punchcard era.
Andrew Tanenbaum - teaches OS design and created Minix as a classroom tool. Out of favor because at one time juvenile geeks thought that "Tanenbaum" and "Torvalds" could not both be present on the same list without igniting a conflagration. Mature geeks recognize that this has never been the case, but of course the reality is nowhere near as exciting as the myth.
Whichever one of the AWK trio who first explored the heuristics of regular expressions. Out of favor because awk is extinct. Anything worthwhile that was done in awk has by now been rewritten in Perl.
Thanks for the quote from Dictionary.com on the use of "impact" as a verb.
So while the general rule to not verb nouns is apparently weakening, at least in this one case it is holding firm. Though I doubt this will impact slashdot commentary to any appreciable degree.
My impression is that HP and Canon are using a very different approaches to building a printer.
I got terminally upset with HP two years ago when a $60 tricolor ink cartridge failed right after installation and my backup cartridge refused to work because it had expired. I'm much happier with Canon's individual ink tanks that are separate from the print head, and don't have stupid little smart chips embedded in them to tell them when to stop working. I also like what the i9900 can do with a sheet of 130 lb coldpress watercolor paper. (Don't try this at home: it will void the warranty.)
I used to like HP products. At this point I've had three consecutive bad experiences with HP and I don't like the associated costs and aggravation. Offhand, I can't think of any reason why I would ever buy another HP product.
Thanks for the pointer (to Turboprint). They've added some support for the i9900 since I looked at them last spring-- I'll take another look when I get the time.
real pro photographers now *can* use linux
Uh, no.
I looked hard at linux last year as I was setting up my digital darkroom. It wouldn't go. I was pretty sure that I could get good linux tools for capture and image manipulation. But being able to print effectively from linux within a reasonable budget is a no-go. The least expensive printer I could manage that would still meet the specs I needed (photorealistic at 13x17 inches and good giclee potential) is the Canon i9900--and there are no linux drivers for it. I couldn't find any linux photo printers that would be competitive in today's market.
I've still got linux as an alternate boot on my primary computer, but since I have to do the test prints, final color corrections, and final prints under Windows, I haven't bothered to learn the linux software.
This is so sad.
I thought I'd send Mr William Gates a brief cheer-up note:
I mean I know he's rich and everything, but even rich guys must get the blues sometimes over things like spam. I'm sure he'd appreciate it if a few of us sent him our condolences.
Does anybody know his address?
Robert McHenry asked "how would they recognize it once they had (Shakespeare)"
Hmmm, I've searched the article and I haven't been able to find this quote or anything nearly like it. But I think I understand your point, and I don't disagree, in theory. (I see that the programming deficiencies have already been thoroughly addressed :-)
I think McHenry's lack of understanding of the wikipedian process lies in his old world view of the Universe, which he gives us in this statement (through implication):
His underlying assumption is that there is an objective, true reality Out There (which an encyclopedia should approximate). This was a commonly held view during the Age of Reason, which IIRC is usually dated from around 1700 to about 1905.
Of course the sciences have moved on since then and many people now believe that understanding the role of the observer is integral to any understanding of reality-- that the two are somehow forever entwined. My personal belief is that whether or not an objective reality is Out There somewhere, all that we can know is our perceptions of it, and the only knowledge that we can actually share with each other is discussions of those perceptions. Which is generally sufficient for daily tasks.
Looked at in this way, whether Wikipedia has classical "authority" is less important than it being a place where a great deal of discussion about reality can be done in a controlled fashion. We have entered a post-classical period where many of us feel that "truth" is inherently slippery and possibly even flexible, and classical authority is less important than the ability to rapidly seek out opposing viewpoints and quickly deploy our personal bullshit shields.
I guess I'm not sure what the point is of this. If you want to support these projects, why not just donate it directly to them?
I see quite a bit of value in Lulu's products. When I want to encourage support for FOSS among people who are unfamiliar with it, these package deals could be just the ticket. This is something I could send as a gift to a relative, or pass around in a meeting while I was presenting the advantages of a windows to linux migration.
I will probably buy the OpenOffice set in the next month or so and if it is as well done as it looks on the web site, I expect to make heavy use of it next year (without ever spinning its CD).
No chance ...this will ever be used. Not because it is dangerous, uneconomical, or anything even remotely having to do with reason.
Uh, well you have made some reasonably truthful statements, so long as we all agree only to look at a small part of the fueling process.
But until there is actually a working vitrification process that will handle 100% of the toxic waste of nuclear fuel production, the process as a whole is the most dangerous and uneconomical activitiy the human race has ever engaged in. We are nowhere close to having such a process, or any of the reasonable alternatives to it.
Now if nuclear rockets were designed to use recycled plutonium from warheads and put that stuff safely out of reach, I could get behind that kind of program. Since we are already paying the high price for that stuff, we might as well do something useful with it. But we're probably 10 to 20 years away from looking at that kind of sword to plow conversion (the political reality is that it won't happen until people who've built their careers on ignoring the flaws in our nuclear technology are retired).
Sounds like a gimmick. Can someone say if ceramic is truly better than glass, or just better "in theory"?
I'm guessing, but I think in this case the ceramic is better than glass because production can be less expensive.
Cheap cameras of this size use plastic lenses formed in molds, where the chosen plastic has a relatively low index of refraction. The lens is thicker, but is tolerant of the surface imperfections from the molding process, and is generally lighter than a glass lens that had the same optical quailities.
If you molded glass lenses this way, you'd face an expensive polishing operation afterward.
I'm guessing that these ceramic lenses are molded as "green bodies" and then sintered to reduce them to their final dimensions. The shrinking would reduce the surface imperfections of the molding process, so ceramics with fairly high indexes of refraction could be used. The end result would be a thin lens with many glass-like qualities, produced by an inexpensive molding process (a sintering oven would not add much to the cost).
There seems to be a little confusion...There is no lava actually coming out visibly. When they say there is magma at the surface, the geologists really mean it's just below the surface.
There is some continuing confusion. What MSH is doing is a little confusing.
The lower surfaces of the new bulge is rock with a temperature of 1100+ degrees F that also possesses other qualities of brand new rock: the geologists seem quite sure that this stuff was magma just hours ago. It probably still retains some plasticity. Think of this as a fresh lava in the same way the crust that forms on top of a hawaiian lava flow is fresh lava. The new bulge in MSH's crater is now recognized as a new lava dome, building just to one side of the old dome, and the lava is extruding out above the old crater floor.
(Hey, CamMac, your personal rating system appears to be out of synch with slashdot's. At least with respect to "flamebait". Just thought you might want to know that.) :^)
Being pissed is somewhere along the continuum between being placid and being in a rage. Some of the physiological changes that accompany rage include:
These do not a good driver make.
While I'm sure that being pissed is not as severe as being enraged, someone who is pissed is more likely to miss seeing or hearing something, and more likely to make a bad judgment call than when he is alert and relaxed. He is more accident prone.
Okay, right now you are probably in a pissed state, and therefore not receptive to what I've got to say-- this post might seem like just so much more flamebait to you. It isn't, nor was my first post. Maybe if you come back to read these when you're panties aren't in a bunch, you'll see that.
It is true that I'm playing hardball here, but I'm justified in that. For I am a bicyclist who hopes one day to tour through Colorado, and your attitude, sir, is a lethal threat to me.
While its true that William S. Burroughs had a broad range of direct experience with lots and lots of drugs over many years, it is also true that he was a novelist and wrote fiction. Like a lot of his beat contemporaries, it becomes very hard to say how much he fictionalized his own life experiences.
Read him for his literary value, if you wish. But please don't read into his works any third-party objectivity-- he wasn't into that.
So when its a biker who isn't hugging the curb, but instead taking up an entire lane, I reserve the right to get pissed.
I hope your license is taken away from you before you kill someone.
When you are driving any car, you are operating machinery that has more lethal potential and more difficult to control than any modern firearm. It is dangerous to give firearms to people who get pissed easily; people who cannot control their emotions are even more dangerous in a motor vehicle. They account for a big portion of the highway death toll in the USA, since the state of being pissed is a very accident prone state. You should not be driving when you are pissed. There are anger control clinics available-- you should take advantage of one of them.
In all the states where I have bicycled, it is legal for a bicyclist to "claim the lane"-- and the law requires him to do so when it is unsafe to do otherwise. A bicyclist in the middle of a narrow lane is safer than one who hugs the shoulder because he is more visible, because he causes other traffic to slow down to a speed that is safe for the current conditions, and because he is not encouraging drivers who maybe are poor at safety assessments to attempt to pass without changing lanes.
Good bicyclists minimize this practice through route planning and being courteous in using turnout opportunities when those are safely available. That does not mean weaving in and out of parked cars-- which is a dangerous habit.
Bicyclists are another slow moving vehicle, like farm equipment, metermaid threewheelers, and drivers rubbernecking for an address. Of course you probably get pissed at these other legal users of the road, too. Get some anger management before you end up carrying a sack of guilt around.
Your distinction between physiological addiction and psychological dependency is an important point. It has been recognized for a long time by many in the health care professions that caffiene seems to have some qualities of physiological addiction. But there is rarely a psychological dependency of any great degree. Outdoor enthusiasts who regularly drink a pot or two of coffee a day during the work week can give it up easily for a week of camping in the mountains, etc. The astute ones recognize that they are going to have an early morning headache for a day or so, but generally regard that as a minor inconvenience. If asked to rate it against other inconveniences of camping, they'd probably put it below such things as toilet paper management.
OTOH, heroin's physiological addiction is pretty mild as such things go-- withdrawal from heroin is uncomfortable but not life-threatening, like withdrawal from several prescription drugs (antidepressants, diazepam, etc) can be. The cravings associated with heroin withdrawal are due to the strong psychological dependency.
And it does seem like a lot of the blimpos and tubbos I've encountered have a psychological dependency on twinkies that is literally pathological.
Hope the above makes sense. I'm still working on my first pot of coffee...
many Canon and Minolta printers are supported.
I spent a fair bit of time trying to find a workable linux driver for a Canon i560 printer a few months ago. There isn't one. Since then, I've upgraded to the Canon i9900, which does awesome large format photographic prints, but AFAIK there is no linux driver for this one either.
I think it would be easy to get most of the Canon office printers to work under linux, but their newer line of photographic printers is another story.
OTOH, you are right about the Minolta cameras and I was wrong to suggest that there is a problem with linux support for these. Minolta has been complying with the USB storage device standard.
I agree about a native PSP for Linux - that would rock - but have you tried it with Wine?
I haven't. I would be very much interested in seeing any reviews of PSP v8.x running under Wine...
I agree with parent.
I have been using PSP professionally in both web graphics design and photographic work for years. The last few releases have had both macro language capabilities at the top end and customizable filters at the pixel by pixel bottom end. I haven't done much with PSP's vector graphics, but I understand that it, too, is solidly done. There is no way that PSP can be called "basic". These are amazing features for a package that can also be used by a graphics neophyte.
Krista will have to provide similar features to be competitive with PSP. I'll try to read up on Krista after the slashdot tsunami-- maybe these features are there already?
To my mind, the best thing that could happen would be for Jasc to wake up and produce a Linux version of PSP. PSP is the only remaining Windows app that I have to have. (Then if Canon and Minolta would come out with Linux drivers for their printers and cameras, I could be done with Windows for good.)
I agree that Pons and Fleischmann essentially sabotaged their careers with the ill-conceived press conference, rather than have their work peer-reviewed as most scientific research is done...
For me, this is one of the most curious aspects of the whole cold fusion debacle. P&F were not simple innocents wrt the way institutional science works, so why the hell did they knowingly trash their careers with that press conference circus? That is, I take the position that their press conference was not "ill-concieved", but chosen deliberately after due consideration of the risks and recognition of the probable outcome.
So I can't help but wonder if P&F were worried that their baby would be suppressed into oblivion if they introduced it to the world in the quiet ways of peer reviewed journals.
I'm NOT saying they were fighting a conspiracy of suppression. But the idea of cold fusion is more challenging to many of today's major institutions than the idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun was to the Catholic Church and its academic minions a little while ago. I am sure that Galileo's fate was at least somewhat in P&F's minds as they decided to do the press conference thing.
I look forward to reading their biographies, someday. Perhaps those will give some insight into why they made such an extraordinary choice in the way they first published their work.