You sound just like all the other elitists lamenting about how much it sucks now you don't need years of study and experience to be competent with a computer. Nope, you miss my point entirely. My opinion is that it does take years of study and experience to be competent a computer. Someone with no experience soon gets out of their depth and needs support performing even the most basic of tasks. The main difference nowadays is that most people start using computers alot earlier so don't notice the experience they have.
It's not a failure at all. It allows people who would not otherwise be able to produce even a slightly well-formatted document, do so. This would be true if they produced a well formatted document, but usually they do not.
If you expect people to produce a well formatted document, the best way to do ensure they do is making sure they are correctly trained in that piece of software and what consitutes a decent document. It is certainly not by giving a very complicated tool to an untrained monkey and expecting them to produce something decent.
For those who are genuinely interested in "proper" layout procedures - and have the discipline and knowledge to use them - the ability to do so is not impeded by the existence of WYSIWYG tools. Only someone who has never seen a document with a carriage return at the end of every line instead of word wrap would say this. Once you have been presented with such a document and asked to insert a single word into the first paragraph you will understand that the presence of WYSIWYG tools can be an impediment.
And yet it still soldiers on. Trying to get an old WP expert to switch is hell. No, it does not unfortunately. What soldiers on is the believe that WP5.1 was a better product, but WP for Windows was shite and I think most people who liked WP before then would agree with this.
The reason I greatly preferred WP5.1 was because it was not a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor. Some of us actually liked the idea of What You Want Is What You Get. It might take alot longer to get used to a word processor where you can't just jiggle stuff about until it looks right but the rewards are far greater when you put in the practice.
The whole idea of a WYSIWYG text editor was a novel idea (no pun intended) but you only need to look at why no professional web dev uses dreamweaver in layout mode to understand why it is a failure in the long term. The results are sloppy. You end up with a document full of bloated markup that does not actually change what the page looks like, instead it just contains loads of elements that countermand each other.
eg: <B></B>some text<B></B>
Now most of the time this is just inefficient, but on some rare occasions it becomes an issue. When this happens you have a few choices:
1) Keep tidying up the document until you can make it look professional, unfortunately this can sometimes involve alot of tidying for very little reward.
2) Keep pushing stuff about in another WYSIWYG layout program until it looks right but is now even more inefficient that when you started (and hence harder for anyone else to work on). This still might take longer that expected (ie - quoted).
3) Bodge it and hope the client does not notice the minor layout issue you were unable to fix properly.
Since none of these are exactly ideal I would recommend thinking the choice through. I personally would recommend point 1, and since alot of companies are now crying out for websites where the code validates against W3C guidelines alot of companies obviously think the same way.
I know there are differences between an HTML page being as small and efficient as possible and a word document, but that doesn't change why I prefer WP over Word. WP allowed you to view and edit the markup directly more easily ten years ago than Word does today.
Mum would surely have difficulty finding a job that would fit in with caring for those children and so any social security would be vital to keep them alive?
The children should be in school for most of the day and Mum could be working during that time. The kids can return home and do their homework, chores, etc in preparation for the return of their parents in the evening. Why should this be a problem? I did say children under 5. At what age does schooling start in most US states? Here in Britain it is 5 so I assumed it was the same over there. I should have said preschool to make things clearer, my appologies.
Actually I think alot of you miss a vitally important part of wikipedia when used to serious research: The references at the bottom of the page.
I would never actually quote wikipedia as a source in serious documents, but you don't have as a lot of the best pages have a bibliography at the bottom which quite often refers to thoroughly respected publications.
You see, most Americans look upon taxes as theft, thinking that the government is stealing their money and they couldn't care less about their fellow citizens, just their own money. How unbelievably sad. It makes me very glad I do not live there.
First off let me say that as a non-US citizen who has never been there I am fairly ignorant of how your medical or social security system works.
But would you rather that if someone who was unable to afford medical treatment got sick they were left to die rather than receive the care they need? Maybe if that person was the sole bread winner then the rest of the family (say 1 wife and two kids under 5) would be in trouble. Mum would surely have difficulty finding a job that would fit in with caring for those children and so any social security would be vital to keep them alive? Should in this case the whole family just be left to die because dad never got health or life insurance?
They own a huge chunk of US gov't debt. Which the gov't can repudiate at any time, or (as is the current case) pay off with inflated dollar bills. Funny how you might thank that about the US but if a foreign government tried it you would be up in arms. Maybe that is why the rest of the world would have bugger all sympathy if China did try and enslave you.
The US needs to look at the rest of the world as equals rather than sneer down their noses at us. How much longer can the US keep up its huge military spending necessary to support an empire of it current size? We know from history that every empire falls eventually. You might not think of the US as currently having an empire as such but it does have the largest military on the planet and bases in an awful lot of other countries. Some of those countries are happy with the US presence but some are not.
Will it be possible to support such a huge military when the worlds oil supplies run even lower.
These are all questions that the US people need to ask in order to ensure that if they are no longer able to enforce their will overseas militarily no other nation tries looking for revenge against a weakened opponent.
Here in Britain we also are required by law to have a TV license if you own anything that can pick up or record a TV signal. We also have some bunch of fuckwits who drive around in vans looking for unlicensed TV's. When I was a student I even had them turn up on my doorstep while I was watching TV.
The trick to dealing with them is to close the door as quickly and forcefully as possible (or not open it) then tell them they need a warrant, have no powers of entry or arrest. Then you tell them to fuck off and die since there is sweet FA they can do about it apart from come back later with a policeman. They will only get a policeman to accompany them on such a visit if they have proof you were watching TV last time they called.
They can supposedly obtain proof by picking up the output from a CRT using some sort of Van Eck device, but I know this doesn't include alot of projection TV's or TV tuner cards in a PC as we had both on at them time of their visit. I doubt it can pick up most plasma TV's either.
The main way they get suckers to pay is by requiring all retailers to pass on your details if you buy and TV equipment. If you pay cash they give you a form to fill out, if you pay on a card they do no need to as they just use your bank details to trace you.
It's almost like a set-up for an assault on the GPL. A sort of legal Kuwait. Or is that too paranoid? Nope, thats exactly what I thought as well. The problem in my mind is that if some uber lawyer decided to do this he must think he stands a damn good chance of destroying the GPL in court or he would not be risking the damage losing could do to his legal reputation.
An awful lot of people here would like to believe this is an open and shut case and that the SFLC will win quickly (me included). Unfortunately law is never that simple.
The fact is that this will cost both parties a lot of time and money and at the end Radstone will simply fold the company if he looks like he is going to lose so the SFLC is unlikely to get back the money it invests in winning the case. In the meantime Radstone is free to take money out of the company and make sure he personally doesn't lose even if his company does.
Also note that this case will probably take years to reach any sort of conclusion as any experienced lawyer will be able to come up with more delaying tactics than you can shake a stick at. Looks like the one will probably become the next linux legal soap opera to replace the SCO debacle.
After thinking long and hard on this, I realized that none of the Aussie's i've met sounded like they were in the middle of a two week drug binge. Two week? I think you mean two decade?
Basically, you first transform into the center of mass system and then solve the schrödinger-equation for the electron with a so called reduced mass to get its wavefunction. Which is not so easy if the centre of mass is the halfway point between the two constituents.
I get the idea that the non-scientist who wrote this article has no clue what he's talking about,... Sounds like most of slashdot then.
I would hazard a guess (note - guess as I have not yet purchased yesterdays new scientist and read the full article) that this works as the two particles they are combining actually have opposing charge. This should get around the equal number of protons and electrons rule as the net charge of the atom will still be zero.
Since neutrons are not a necessary part of an atom this should work. The wikipedia page on hydrogen is fairly detailed so should enable you to see some similarities:
Of course the big difference though will be the atomic weight as this will be close to negligible. This is probably why the resultant particle is so short lived as the two components of the atom are the same mass they would behave more like a dipole where both orbit each other rather than one being a stationary nucleus with orbiting electron.
What I would like to know is how they plan on making this form a stable molecule so I will be buying new-scientist to find out.
(Disclaimer - I flunked my degree in Physics some time ago so this may all be bullshit, if you think it is please post a detailed explanation of why and mention your level of physics education if possible. Please also do not bother pointing out that I am using the Bohr model of the electron and discrediting it UNLESS you can specifically state why it does not apply in this case.)
Then again I'm waiting for Enron to reopen for business so I can invest my life savings in another rock-solid business. Until then I can recommend a (Northern) Rock solid back over hear in little old britain.
We're talking about the system libraries (GNU libc), the shell (bash), the common Unix-like tools (tar/grep/etc), the development environment (gcc/make/etc), and frequently even the desktop environment (GNOME). If you wanted to build a Unix-like OS on top of Linux without GNU, your only other option would be to take vast chunks of some other Unix-like OS like Solaris or *BSD. You are quote right, Stallman has made an invaluable contribution to Linux and the Open source movement as it stands. The only real problem is that he is a fanatic. He seems unable to work with people who's views differ from his own. One of the great strengths of Linus and the reason that Linux has gained the popularity it has is his ability to encourage other people to carry on working with him even if they disagreed with him on some points.
Ok, there have been plenty of times with the kernel where other people have quit, but that is the same for any large project. the fact is though that almost every project RMS has been involved in has been forked by a large group of opposing developers who got so annoyed with him that they left on mass (EMACS / XEMACS, GCC / EGCS).
The fact is that even though he is clearly a very gifted individual he is also quite clearly on a bit of a crusade. I have always believed that to truly succeed in any endeavor you need to be able to work with other people who have a different outlook to your own, not just work against them and produce something better for free. This seems to me to be one of the cornerstones of collaborative (open source) development. I actually think he would be very suited to the world of commercial development where he could simply force other people to follow his design method by virtue of being the technical lead. This is something he would surely excel at by virtue of his almost unrivaled technical ability.
The problem he faces is though is probably similar to my own, he needs to be able to convince other people to work with him (ie - management, people with money to pay developers to put up with a sometimes very scathing personality). This is something he surely lacks or the free software movement and FSF would be very different.
For those who now rush to his defence, this did not mean to come across as a personal attack, as many of his fault are also mine and I am trying my hardest to improve. I also hope to have conveyed in this post that I have a huge amount of respect for the man himself and also his ideals, many of which I also share.
Actually, yes, you can say with certainty that the scroll wheel is better. Thats fine for you, but some of use don't keep single tracks on our MP3 players. I usually have a few MP3's but each one about an hour long (DJ mixes). If I accidentally hit the next track button it is a right pain to get back where I was in a 50+ minute recording.
I know I could try and manually split them up into 3-4 minute songs but being that they DJ mixes blended together and alot of the enjoyment I get from listening is the mixing between two tracks that delay you usually get would piss me off. The fact is that each accidental click to skip to another track usually pisses me off no end.
He said recently in an interview that he's trapped in a contract and has to produce some number of albums for his label,.... This also means his label are probably stuck with him for the same number of albums proving the previous one sells a certain minimum number.
It sounds similar to Matt Groening and FOX. They pissed him off by not letting him concentrate on Futurama and making him churn out more Simpsons so he used the Simpsons as a vehicle to insult FOX executives whenever he could. They had to put up with it as he was sticking by his contract and making them money.
Slashdot Mirror
If you expect people to produce a well formatted document, the best way to do ensure they do is making sure they are correctly trained in that piece of software and what consitutes a decent document. It is certainly not by giving a very complicated tool to an untrained monkey and expecting them to produce something decent. For those who are genuinely interested in "proper" layout procedures - and have the discipline and knowledge to use them - the ability to do so is not impeded by the existence of WYSIWYG tools. Only someone who has never seen a document with a carriage return at the end of every line instead of word wrap would say this. Once you have been presented with such a document and asked to insert a single word into the first paragraph you will understand that the presence of WYSIWYG tools can be an impediment.
The reason I greatly preferred WP5.1 was because it was not a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processor. Some of us actually liked the idea of What You Want Is What You Get. It might take alot longer to get used to a word processor where you can't just jiggle stuff about until it looks right but the rewards are far greater when you put in the practice.
The whole idea of a WYSIWYG text editor was a novel idea (no pun intended) but you only need to look at why no professional web dev uses dreamweaver in layout mode to understand why it is a failure in the long term. The results are sloppy. You end up with a document full of bloated markup that does not actually change what the page looks like, instead it just contains loads of elements that countermand each other.
eg: <B></B>some text<B></B>
Now most of the time this is just inefficient, but on some rare occasions it becomes an issue. When this happens you have a few choices:
1) Keep tidying up the document until you can make it look professional, unfortunately this can sometimes involve alot of tidying for very little reward.
2) Keep pushing stuff about in another WYSIWYG layout program until it looks right but is now even more inefficient that when you started (and hence harder for anyone else to work on). This still might take longer that expected (ie - quoted).
3) Bodge it and hope the client does not notice the minor layout issue you were unable to fix properly.
Since none of these are exactly ideal I would recommend thinking the choice through. I personally would recommend point 1, and since alot of companies are now crying out for websites where the code validates against W3C guidelines alot of companies obviously think the same way.
I know there are differences between an HTML page being as small and efficient as possible and a word document, but that doesn't change why I prefer WP over Word. WP allowed you to view and edit the markup directly more easily ten years ago than Word does today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2037200,00.html
Iraq?
They certainly want rid of you.
Actually I think alot of you miss a vitally important part of wikipedia when used to serious research: The references at the bottom of the page.
I would never actually quote wikipedia as a source in serious documents, but you don't have as a lot of the best pages have a bibliography at the bottom which quite often refers to thoroughly respected publications.
First off let me say that as a non-US citizen who has never been there I am fairly ignorant of how your medical or social security system works.
But would you rather that if someone who was unable to afford medical treatment got sick they were left to die rather than receive the care they need? Maybe if that person was the sole bread winner then the rest of the family (say 1 wife and two kids under 5) would be in trouble. Mum would surely have difficulty finding a job that would fit in with caring for those children and so any social security would be vital to keep them alive? Should in this case the whole family just be left to die because dad never got health or life insurance?
The US needs to look at the rest of the world as equals rather than sneer down their noses at us. How much longer can the US keep up its huge military spending necessary to support an empire of it current size? We know from history that every empire falls eventually. You might not think of the US as currently having an empire as such but it does have the largest military on the planet and bases in an awful lot of other countries. Some of those countries are happy with the US presence but some are not.
Will it be possible to support such a huge military when the worlds oil supplies run even lower.
These are all questions that the US people need to ask in order to ensure that if they are no longer able to enforce their will overseas militarily no other nation tries looking for revenge against a weakened opponent.
Here in Britain we also are required by law to have a TV license if you own anything that can pick up or record a TV signal. We also have some bunch of fuckwits who drive around in vans looking for unlicensed TV's. When I was a student I even had them turn up on my doorstep while I was watching TV.
The trick to dealing with them is to close the door as quickly and forcefully as possible (or not open it) then tell them they need a warrant, have no powers of entry or arrest. Then you tell them to fuck off and die since there is sweet FA they can do about it apart from come back later with a policeman. They will only get a policeman to accompany them on such a visit if they have proof you were watching TV last time they called.
They can supposedly obtain proof by picking up the output from a CRT using some sort of Van Eck device, but I know this doesn't include alot of projection TV's or TV tuner cards in a PC as we had both on at them time of their visit. I doubt it can pick up most plasma TV's either.
The main way they get suckers to pay is by requiring all retailers to pass on your details if you buy and TV equipment. If you pay cash they give you a form to fill out, if you pay on a card they do no need to as they just use your bank details to trace you.
An awful lot of people here would like to believe this is an open and shut case and that the SFLC will win quickly (me included). Unfortunately law is never that simple.
The fact is that this will cost both parties a lot of time and money and at the end Radstone will simply fold the company if he looks like he is going to lose so the SFLC is unlikely to get back the money it invests in winning the case. In the meantime Radstone is free to take money out of the company and make sure he personally doesn't lose even if his company does.
Also note that this case will probably take years to reach any sort of conclusion as any experienced lawyer will be able to come up with more delaying tactics than you can shake a stick at. Looks like the one will probably become the next linux legal soap opera to replace the SCO debacle.
Wow, your sig just made me piss myself laughing.
(Code drone / wannabe hacker talking)
I would hazard a guess (note - guess as I have not yet purchased yesterdays new scientist and read the full article) that this works as the two particles they are combining actually have opposing charge. This should get around the equal number of protons and electrons rule as the net charge of the atom will still be zero.
Since neutrons are not a necessary part of an atom this should work. The wikipedia page on hydrogen is fairly detailed so should enable you to see some similarities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen
Of course the big difference though will be the atomic weight as this will be close to negligible. This is probably why the resultant particle is so short lived as the two components of the atom are the same mass they would behave more like a dipole where both orbit each other rather than one being a stationary nucleus with orbiting electron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole
What I would like to know is how they plan on making this form a stable molecule so I will be buying new-scientist to find out.
(Disclaimer - I flunked my degree in Physics some time ago so this may all be bullshit, if you think it is please post a detailed explanation of why and mention your level of physics education if possible. Please also do not bother pointing out that I am using the Bohr model of the electron and discrediting it UNLESS you can specifically state why it does not apply in this case.)
Actually if anyone had followed my advice this morning they would have already made a profit.
The british govt have announced they will underwrite the company.
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=nrk.l
Sorry, wasn't replying to to your post at all, just your sig.
:)
I honestly did not mean to come across as disagreeing with your post or your opinion, I just thought you sig warranted a semi-facetious reply.
Ok, there have been plenty of times with the kernel where other people have quit, but that is the same for any large project. the fact is though that almost every project RMS has been involved in has been forked by a large group of opposing developers who got so annoyed with him that they left on mass (EMACS / XEMACS, GCC / EGCS).
The fact is that even though he is clearly a very gifted individual he is also quite clearly on a bit of a crusade. I have always believed that to truly succeed in any endeavor you need to be able to work with other people who have a different outlook to your own, not just work against them and produce something better for free. This seems to me to be one of the cornerstones of collaborative (open source) development. I actually think he would be very suited to the world of commercial development where he could simply force other people to follow his design method by virtue of being the technical lead. This is something he would surely excel at by virtue of his almost unrivaled technical ability.
The problem he faces is though is probably similar to my own, he needs to be able to convince other people to work with him (ie - management, people with money to pay developers to put up with a sometimes very scathing personality). This is something he surely lacks or the free software movement and FSF would be very different.
For those who now rush to his defence, this did not mean to come across as a personal attack, as many of his fault are also mine and I am trying my hardest to improve. I also hope to have conveyed in this post that I have a huge amount of respect for the man himself and also his ideals, many of which I also share.
I know I could try and manually split them up into 3-4 minute songs but being that they DJ mixes blended together and alot of the enjoyment I get from listening is the mixing between two tracks that delay you usually get would piss me off. The fact is that each accidental click to skip to another track usually pisses me off no end.
It sounds similar to Matt Groening and FOX. They pissed him off by not letting him concentrate on Futurama and making him churn out more Simpsons so he used the Simpsons as a vehicle to insult FOX executives whenever he could. They had to put up with it as he was sticking by his contract and making them money.