Sure, but then if you are trying to put these into schools, you probably would rather have a fixed cable running from the screens that the pupils could use rather than having them playing around with the cables at the back of the tv sets, likewise for a school computer lab, it'd only take one irritating brat to swap some wireless keyboards around to cause all sorts of confusion trying to figure out which keyboard is controlling what.
If any of those decided to downgrade UK governmental bonds, then the cost of borrowing the current debt would rise and it would be even harder to pay off.
During the election campaign a lot of noise was made about £8billion of cuts in public spending that the conservative party wanted to make, if UK debt is downgraded, the extra interest payments would end up costing another £10billion http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/07/how-safe-uk-aaa-credit-rating - more than wiping out any benefit to doing this and causing the public sector deficit to increase still further.
I don't like this situation; I think the ratings agencies have far too much power with no effective oversight, and I think it is a major failure in the UK political system that the government was able to generate so much debt in the first place, but simply calling the current situation 'neo-liberal propaganda' won't change this reality and certainly won't make it go away.
There may well be direct privatization of some parts of the public sector in order to raise funds; it is certainly clear that funds need to be raised in some manner in order to address the ludicrous deficit that currently exists (the other options are punitive tax hikes or extensive spending cuts, neither of which seem to command popular support). It isn't clear though that there is a great deal left in the public sector that would have much value in the private-sector (and I think potential buyers would be wary of taking anything labour-intensive after BT and British Airways were so badly burned by their pension deficits over the last 12 months)
Nonetheless, I don't think there is likely to be as much support for 'public-private partnerships' as you assume.
Over the last decade or so, Labour have used a lot of them, and they proved convenient insofar as they allow an multiple announcements of public spending projects to be made while hiding the cost from balance sheets for several years - but with existing lines of credit already running thin, the market is likely to take a dim view of any such 'hidden' commitments to public spending.
In the only place where there is direct executive power currently held by a the conservative party - The London Mayoralty - Public Private Partnerships have been wound down, indeed Boris Johnson only this week ended the PPP deal with tubelines for rebuilding the London Underground.
I don't claim that such a move is beyond criticism, in particular the compensation payment that tubelines has received from this looks to be excessive. Not only that, but when the books so urgently need balancing, then a long term infrastructure project such as rebuilding the tube may be the sort of thing that is canceled completely.
DRM isn't supposed to be foolproof
on
The DRM Scorecard
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The point of DRM isn't to hinder in any noticeable way the large groups that are responsible for most of the copyright infringement that takes place, rather the aim is to annoy and infuriate the average 'consumer' to the point where needlessly buying extra copies of $ITEM is the path of least resistance.
The same effect has been observed in software for years, Windows XP had an activation thing built in, anyone who knew what they were doing would bypass it, anyone who didn't (and didn't know anyone who did) would eventually go and buy superfluous copies of software they already owned.
I can't believe no one seems to have mentioned this yet, slashdot is not normally short of firefly fanboys.
Not that it actually deserves top spot, that should belong to Babylon 5, with Blake's 7 in second, but IMO firefly should still have made top 10
The problem isn't the stockpile of nuclear weapons that your side-of-choice is trying to manage. It is the stockpile held by random (and sometimes unknown) other sides.
Today there are an uncertain quantity of 'missing' nuclear weapons. How many of those would still work, and how long they might work for, are an important questions if your goal is to stop nuclear proliferation.
It therefore follows that the two largest religions would have the largest numbers of such people.
And such people are normally the ones that make the most noise, and so get the most attention.
There are plenty of "hypocritical, hateful, spiteful and violent" secularists around too, but since they claim no religious affiliation, their actions are not associated with one.
Consider that Christianity and Islam together account for about 1/2 the world's population, and you will find it surprising how/few/ acts of hatred and violence are attributable to people allied to one or the other.
Not so much in England (which is where the article refers to), certainly my mother was using a typewriter back in 1985 (up until she quit in 1987 in fact)
the average person working the average job is *gonna* be on Windows.
and
The fact of the matter is that people who are very familiar with Windows and Office - not love it, mind you, but know how to use it with some degree of expertise - have an advantage in the job market over people who don't.
my response is that whilst this may be true now, 10, 20, 30+ years from now it will most likely not be the case.
for that reason schools shouldn't teach software at all, instead of teaching/any/ word proccessing tool available today, they should teach the proper form for adressing a letter, and how they should be set out - this hasn't changed noticably in over 100 years. (although ignorance of the rules seems to be slowly changing this)
Thanks for posting without reading the whole thing. I appreciate it.
Your previous post made no mention of Apple and/or Macs. You do so in another thread, but I wasn't replying to that (and only saw it after trying to figure out wth you were refering to)
Please keep track of which thread you are replying to. I appreciate it.
We are talking about secondary schools here though, these normally have pupils aged 11-18(ish).
Assume you have a typical office worker, who does their A-levels, takes a gap year, goes to a middling 'university' then sells their soul working in some mindless office job (quite a common situation, at least in the South East of the UK)
These 11-year olds, entering school today, won't enter the work force for about a decade.
10-12 years ago, the Amiga was still alive, windows 3.11 was modern, and the 'new shiney stuff' was things like the Atari falcon. Word Perfect was battling MS Word, and not clearly losing.
Netscape navigator was the major web browser and most people didn't even know what the internet was.
what will be commonplace 10-12 years from now?
Furthermore, that is only at the point they enter the workforce, most school children will not retire until their 50's at the earliest, that is 40 years away.
40 years ago computing would've been unrecognisable to those in the field today.
15 years ago was the era of wordstar, 20 years ago the age of typewriters. Do you think that lessons in typewriter maintainence that they took as teenagers help 30-year olds in the job market today?
if schools are merely training mindless drones for a job now, then slavish adherence to modern de facto 'standards' is an uncertain proposition, but if, as I believe, education should be something that is for life, then such an approach is indefensible.
Whilst this might work (barely) in the MS windows world, with its elephantine 'suites' that try to do everything, in the *nix world where (for the most part) one program does one thing and does it (supposedly) well, this distribution model does not scale.
How is this an improvement over ubuntu or slackware's approach?
Whilst there seems to be a lot of alarmist over-reaction to this story, the principle behind it seems valid.
The following is a real world example.
crossfire is a MORPG (it can't fairly be called massive at this time, since it has dozens rather than hundreds of players). It is released under the GPL 2+
It has been around for years.
Graal online is a proprietory MMORPG which charges monthly fees to access. It runs a (now heavily modified) version of the crossfire server. They took the server, tagged on a pretty front end and charged some amount each month.
The client is also proprietory. As far as is known there is no stolen code in the client (this is based soley on screenshots though, since the source code to the client is hidden away).
However, with the exception of the graphics, it is apparent from the forums that large parts of crossfire are still being served to these clients. Parts of it they have rebranded, but kept otherwise identical.
Unfortunatly under the GPL2 there does not appear to be way to get these guys to contribute back, they have taken a Free software game, made some code tweaks and run their own server, which they base their business model around.
The clients won't store much if any of the game content, but they are served it by the server. But, since the server binaries are not distributed, nor is the source to it.
Unless the clients use some of the original code (and they might do, though this can't be proven), the GPL 2 is not sufficiantly powerful enough to get them to play fair.
The GPL 3 however would seem to be.
It's just a shame that it wasn't around 3 years ago.
exept that if it is done in a piecework style (the way many in the construction industry work), then any fixed payment is more attractive to someone who knows the codebase and can implement a feature in less time.
Actually an increase in national insurance is/worse/ than a rise in income tax, it is calculated weekly rather than yearly. This means that for those who only work part of the year, the amount taxed is far greater than they would pay under income tax, and it is the same for those working year round.
Effect being that the amount taxed is/more/ than with a rise in income tax and it disproportionatly effects seasonal workers (who often have lower incomes anyway)
the fact that it did 'just work' really impressed me
The fact that this shoud have impressed you probably says more about the current situation than anything else. There has been little progress in third-party binary distribution since the Loki Installer, I know that alternitives exist, but they don't get used.
The killer feature would be for any distro to seemlessly manage upgrades and uninstalls inside its packaging system. Distro's today are able to handle management of their own packages properly. I'd like to think some program to interface software distributed on CD would do similarly (checkinstall is probably the closest at the moment, but many distros don't have it, and it doesn't always work).
The fact is that software installation and management is, and has for a long time been, superior to MS Windows or Mac OSX. However this superiority hasn't carried through to the third party software installers that are in use today.
I know that, and certainly I no longer use opera (I have been using firefox since it was still called phoenix, and mozilla before that). However opera have had a large number of innovations that mozilla picked up on, things like popup blockers, and tabbed browsing.
It would be a shame to see Opera die, I don't want to use it myself, merely to have its nice features available as extensions to firefox....
Figures I have seen on w3cshools show a falling usage rate for opera, from 2.3% to 1.9% - almost a 20% drop. If this is a trend is across the entire userbase, then might firefox end up killing opera rather than (as well as?) IE?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but then if you are trying to put these into schools, you probably would rather have a fixed cable running from the screens that the pupils could use rather than having them playing around with the cables at the back of the tv sets, likewise for a school computer lab, it'd only take one irritating brat to swap some wireless keyboards around to cause all sorts of confusion trying to figure out which keyboard is controlling what.
If any of those decided to downgrade UK governmental bonds, then the cost of borrowing the current debt would rise and it would be even harder to pay off.
During the election campaign a lot of noise was made about £8billion of cuts in public spending that the conservative party wanted to make, if UK debt is downgraded, the extra interest payments would end up costing another £10billion http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/07/how-safe-uk-aaa-credit-rating - more than wiping out any benefit to doing this and causing the public sector deficit to increase still further.
I don't like this situation; I think the ratings agencies have far too much power with no effective oversight, and I think it is a major failure in the UK political system that the government was able to generate so much debt in the first place, but simply calling the current situation 'neo-liberal propaganda' won't change this reality and certainly won't make it go away.
Nonetheless, I don't think there is likely to be as much support for 'public-private partnerships' as you assume.
Over the last decade or so, Labour have used a lot of them, and they proved convenient insofar as they allow an multiple announcements of public spending projects to be made while hiding the cost from balance sheets for several years - but with existing lines of credit already running thin, the market is likely to take a dim view of any such 'hidden' commitments to public spending.
In the only place where there is direct executive power currently held by a the conservative party - The London Mayoralty - Public Private Partnerships have been wound down, indeed Boris Johnson only this week ended the PPP deal with tubelines for rebuilding the London Underground.
I don't claim that such a move is beyond criticism, in particular the compensation payment that tubelines has received from this looks to be excessive. Not only that, but when the books so urgently need balancing, then a long term infrastructure project such as rebuilding the tube may be the sort of thing that is canceled completely.
The same effect has been observed in software for years, Windows XP had an activation thing built in, anyone who knew what they were doing would bypass it, anyone who didn't (and didn't know anyone who did) would eventually go and buy superfluous copies of software they already owned.
I can't believe no one seems to have mentioned this yet, slashdot is not normally short of firefly fanboys. Not that it actually deserves top spot, that should belong to Babylon 5, with Blake's 7 in second, but IMO firefly should still have made top 10
The problem isn't the stockpile of nuclear weapons that your side-of-choice is trying to manage. It is the stockpile held by random (and sometimes unknown) other sides.
Today there are an uncertain quantity of 'missing' nuclear weapons. How many of those would still work, and how long they might work for, are an important questions if your goal is to stop nuclear proliferation.
It therefore follows that the two largest religions would have the largest numbers of such people.
And such people are normally the ones that make the most noise, and so get the most attention.
There are plenty of "hypocritical, hateful, spiteful and violent" secularists around too, but since they claim no religious affiliation, their actions are not associated with one.
Consider that Christianity and Islam together account for about 1/2 the world's population, and you will find it surprising how /few/ acts of hatred and violence are attributable to people allied to one or the other.
Not so much in England (which is where the article refers to), certainly my mother was using a typewriter back in 1985 (up until she quit in 1987 in fact)
for that reason schools shouldn't teach software at all, instead of teaching /any/ word proccessing tool available today, they should teach the proper form for adressing a letter, and how they should be set out - this hasn't changed noticably in over 100 years. (although ignorance of the rules seems to be slowly changing this)
Your previous post made no mention of Apple and/or Macs. You do so in another thread, but I wasn't replying to that (and only saw it after trying to figure out wth you were refering to)Please keep track of which thread you are replying to. I appreciate it.
No test that is performable today has been proposed, should you call that 'crap' too?
if so I suspect a fair few physicists might get a little upset about that description.
We are talking about secondary schools here though, these normally have pupils aged 11-18(ish).
Assume you have a typical office worker, who does their A-levels, takes a gap year, goes to a middling 'university' then sells their soul working in some mindless office job (quite a common situation, at least in the South East of the UK)
These 11-year olds, entering school today, won't enter the work force for about a decade.
10-12 years ago, the Amiga was still alive, windows 3.11 was modern, and the 'new shiney stuff' was things like the Atari falcon. Word Perfect was battling MS Word, and not clearly losing.
Netscape navigator was the major web browser and most people didn't even know what the internet was.
what will be commonplace 10-12 years from now?
Furthermore, that is only at the point they enter the workforce, most school children will not retire until their 50's at the earliest, that is 40 years away.
40 years ago computing would've been unrecognisable to those in the field today.
15 years ago was the era of wordstar, 20 years ago the age of typewriters. Do you think that lessons in typewriter maintainence that they took as teenagers help 30-year olds in the job market today?
if schools are merely training mindless drones for a job now, then slavish adherence to modern de facto 'standards' is an uncertain proposition, but if, as I believe, education should be something that is for life, then such an approach is indefensible.
IIRC RMS normally portrays himself only a saint, (St iGNUcius in fact) and not God.
I always build stuff myself, but then I run slackware....
Whilst this might work (barely) in the MS windows world, with its elephantine 'suites' that try to do everything, in the *nix world where (for the most part) one program does one thing and does it (supposedly) well, this distribution model does not scale.
How is this an improvement over ubuntu or slackware's approach?
Whilst there seems to be a lot of alarmist over-reaction to this story, the principle behind it seems valid. The following is a real world example. crossfire is a MORPG (it can't fairly be called massive at this time, since it has dozens rather than hundreds of players). It is released under the GPL 2+ It has been around for years. Graal online is a proprietory MMORPG which charges monthly fees to access. It runs a (now heavily modified) version of the crossfire server. They took the server, tagged on a pretty front end and charged some amount each month. The client is also proprietory. As far as is known there is no stolen code in the client (this is based soley on screenshots though, since the source code to the client is hidden away). However, with the exception of the graphics, it is apparent from the forums that large parts of crossfire are still being served to these clients. Parts of it they have rebranded, but kept otherwise identical. Unfortunatly under the GPL2 there does not appear to be way to get these guys to contribute back, they have taken a Free software game, made some code tweaks and run their own server, which they base their business model around. The clients won't store much if any of the game content, but they are served it by the server. But, since the server binaries are not distributed, nor is the source to it. Unless the clients use some of the original code (and they might do, though this can't be proven), the GPL 2 is not sufficiantly powerful enough to get them to play fair. The GPL 3 however would seem to be. It's just a shame that it wasn't around 3 years ago.
exept that if it is done in a piecework style (the way many in the construction industry work), then any fixed payment is more attractive to someone who knows the codebase and can implement a feature in less time.
Actually an increase in national insurance is /worse/ than a rise in income tax, it is calculated weekly rather than yearly. This means that for those who only work part of the year, the amount taxed is far greater than they would pay under income tax, and it is the same for those working year round.
Effect being that the amount taxed is /more/ than with a rise in income tax and it disproportionatly effects seasonal workers (who often have lower incomes anyway)
both; that is what the 2.4 branch is for.
The killer feature would be for any distro to seemlessly manage upgrades and uninstalls inside its packaging system. Distro's today are able to handle management of their own packages properly. I'd like to think some program to interface software distributed on CD would do similarly (checkinstall is probably the closest at the moment, but many distros don't have it, and it doesn't always work).
The fact is that software installation and management is, and has for a long time been, superior to MS Windows or Mac OSX. However this superiority hasn't carried through to the third party software installers that are in use today.
True, though there might be some mac users who would complain about ignoring their port of IE. Still, they are probably mostly using safari by now.
It would be a shame to see Opera die, I don't want to use it myself, merely to have its nice features available as extensions to firefox....
1. Some non-zero number of people aren't running windows.
2. More that 5% of these are runnning firefox.
Then these figures are an underestimate for the entire web population.
Of course accepting (1) but not (2) suggests an over-estimate, so in either case be wary of considering these figures as accurate.
Figures I have seen on w3cshools show a falling usage rate for opera, from 2.3% to 1.9% - almost a 20% drop. If this is a trend is across the entire userbase, then might firefox end up killing opera rather than (as well as?) IE?