Think of it like this, as a business do you want all your data encoded in a proprietary format which tries to force you in to purchasing software from one supplier, or would you rather store data using open standard which give you a degree of independence?
Nice idea, but you miss the point that most businesses don't have that independance. If a company decides to migrate away from MS Office they could use an app to convert all the documents to whatever open standard they wanted.
The real barrier to switching is people and productivity. Everyone is used to MS Office, they know how to use it. If you try and switch your company to a different program there will be people who will use the unfamiliarity of the new software as an excuse to sit around and do sweet F.A. There will be some people who will get slightly less done while they learn but there will be more who use the change as a justification for pissing about more.
The combined effect of both these groups of people will be lower productivity in the workplace and no manager wants this.
You obviously dont understand how the relationship between chinese manufacturers and US companiesa actually works.
I most cases the companies doing the manufactuering are NOT US companies, otherwise the US companies would get in trouble (well get bad press anyway) for the chinese labour abuses. Instead the US companies buy from small chinese manufacturers who can treat there staff as badly as needed.
This relationship keeps the western companies at arms length from any dodgy goings on but still allows us consumers to benefit from super cheap goods.
Your idea of a space elevator is interesting, but very wasteful.
To make a far more energy efficient design you need to run the cars at constant speed. You also need to attach each car together. That way you can use the energy of the cars on the way down to help power the cars on the way up, much more like how a real elevator works. This means that the whole system requires a much more constant energy input.
This also does away with the idea that each car ever stops. It presents a problem of how you load and unload a moving system at the bottom but this is certainly a solvable problem. At the top you just have a fleet of small craft who dock with each car. Everything is moving in space anyway so all you need to do is match velocities, something the shuttle already does with the space station.
The mistake you seem to be making is trying to treat each car as separate entity rather than looking at the system as a whole. If you can do this then you can use the potential energy of the stuff (raw materials, people coming home, etc) you are bringing back rather than wasting it. This is why space elevators have the capability to be far more energy efficient than rockets ever can.
Now before everyone replies with all the problems, I know, its hard. The fact remains however that continuing on the current task of using semi reusable rockets (like the shuttle and it SRB's) then just letting the stuff we want to bring back fall is not an option. It wastes too much energy from the standpoint of bringing materials back.
Once I could have filled my post with numbers too, but I finished Physics (with Space Tech) several years ago now and have forgotten most of the maths needed.
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization.
Do not worry, since us British instituted the national curriculum a few years ago our schools are moving in this direction too.
I read Physics at Uni and I can say that I was also given long mathematical proofs to memorise. There was precious little emphasis on learning to derive the proofs for yourself unless you were enrolled on the MPhys (Master of Physics, 4 Years). I was only reading for a BSc (Batchelor of Science, 3 Years). When I asked about this I was told that due to the Maths syllabus for schools being made easier a modern MPhys is only equivalent to a BSc from twenty years ago.
The problem is that nowadays in Britain almost everyone is expected to study until 18. And what they study is mostly decided by a curriculum that is decided on at a national level. This is just daft. Some subjects like Maths, Physics and probably others are too complex even at this level for someone without any real interest in the subject to grasp. You can remove the hard bits but this just makes the subject boring for the people who do have an interest in it.
The fact is that all the league tables rating schools in Britain are a joke. If you want your kid to get the best education possible it doesn't matter what school (discounting private or boarding schools, these do seem to do the trick) you send them too, all that matters is that you foster an interest in learning in them from long before they get to school, and then reinforce the school system at home by encouraging academic pursuits rather than just allowing them to watch TV until their eyes drop out.
Addendum - For those who do not live in Britain the national curriculum was introduced to supposedly enable a fair comparison via school league tables. The idea was to give parents a choice about where they sent their little cherubs. Then the failing schools would empty out and eventually be closed down when the numbers of pupils attending got below a certain level.
I'd love to hear your source for that little comment. As far as I was aware the state of Israel was created by the Jewish people through there own blood. The british army even tried to prevent the ships from europe carrying thousands of Jews fleeing persecution (even though hitler was dead by then, the jewish people were still wary of the european people for letting the holocaust happen) from actually landing in the promised land. Eventually the ships ran aground I believe as the british prevented them from getting into port.
The only reason the british gave up Israel was the pressure put on them by the US. Otherwise they would have tried to hold onto it as part of their empire.
Sure that had their shortcommings, but the best bit was that you could use them really easily once you had defined that 8 by 8 grid. Just use them like any other character (print). The square ghosts were only a problem if you tried to put any detail in the background. Whether or not an 8 by 8 binary grid can count as a sprite I am not willing to argue about but it was super easy to use it as one.
One of the reasons there were so many great games available for it was that it was not that hard to write your own.
The other great thing about the speccy was that when you were starting to program and could not remember everey single basic command, they was a built in cheat sheet (the keyboard) and it even had its answer to command completion.
Why are people talking as if the school system / cops / whoever is some sort of single unified entity.
In this case someone made a fuckup and the wrong person was sent to prison. That person does deserve some sort of compensation for the aggravation and inconvenience caused. But lets not forget that the compensation will be paid out of our taxes. (Not mine as I am not a US resident, but possibly yours).
This is always the dilema when the state makes mistakes. It's not like a company where punitive damages hurt the shareholders profits, which hopefully trickles down in the form of better governance (Shareholders get pissed and sack board unless the manager who screwed up get severe reprimand).
In this instance the best policy for instituting change is to lobby the decision makers using democratic means. Write a letter to the relevant elected official complaining that you will not vote for them if they ignore these sort of mistakes by their own employees.
I know many people will reply to this that it is ineffective, maybe they are right. But any attempt to punish state mistakes with huge sums of damages just results in raising the tax burden or less money to spend on essential services. Both of these outcomes punish us all.
The problem with DDT's is that they become trapped in the body and do not pass out in urine or faeces.
A blood test would not necessarily detect a large amount of chemicals such as these as we have a number of organs in the body to filter our blood and prevent such chemicals from remaining in the blood stream. These organs however are not always able to process or expel that which they filter.
The main problem with all chemicals that are not able to be broken down and expelled by biological methods is that because we exist at the top of the food chain, they always end up in us in the end.
I am also a developer, but I installed IE7 as we needed to test our product with it. Now I have to put up with it crashing 4 or 5 times a day.
I think it crashes due to the helpdesk software we use but haven't narrowed it down yet as every time I try something happens which forces me to open the other web apps we use on a day to day basis which could also be the cause. They all have some method of ensuring the info they provide stays current so anyone of them (or a combination) could be causing it.
I know it would be fairly straight forward to find out but since I am not paid to fix other peoples software and none of the likely candidates are open source there seems little point.
Of course it is optional, all the windows updates are.
Instead of clcking repeatedly on the update icon until it asks you to reboot you can do a custom install and tell it to avoid certain updates. Then it will ask you if you want to ignore them forever, select yes and job done.
I would guess that a large part of the people still using IE6 are people using non-genuine copies of Windows which as far as I am aware do not let you install IE7 as it depends on that genuine advantage junk. I know there are probably ways round this, but I bet alot of people (like me) just cant be arsed as they almost never use IE anyway.
But I have not bothered to read the full article and I still understood they were talking about virtualization. In fact the only person who has mentioned dual booting thus far is you. Maybe you confused the two but I haven't got the impression anyone else did and I certainly didn't so as far slashdot goes it isn't that bad. (Dupes are ten a penny here, with a UID that low you should have noticed by now)
If this was such a blatant dupe why did you bother to read it and contribute to the discussion? Nothing better to do?
I have read quite far down the discussion and very few people seem to consider the fact that the manager might be incompetant and stupid.
Normally in business incompetent people reach a point where they fuck up and get fired. Or they fuck up and get demoted, however this was a council.
That means that the manager was probably fairly useless anyway (or she would have got a proper job, not working for a council). On top of this the manager did not run what she was doing past the legal team or the organisations HR officer. If she had we would not be discussing this as it never would have ended in a stupid legal fight which has probably cost the british tax payer (me) more than the pair of them's wages for ten years combined.
The reality is that most councils seem to have a high turnover of high quality staff as the good people leave when they have done enough time for it to look good on their CV. The crap people can't get sacked as nobody ever gets sacked so they just end up in positions of management by default as nobody else wants to stay that long. The manager in question was probably victimising this member of her staff for two reasons:
1) She was too stupid to find something she could sack the employee for.
2) The employee was actually good at her job and was making the manager look bad in comparison.
I dont particularly like Redhat either. But Oracle is very similar from what I am told.
Also, now that I am out in the real world of work I seem to have found myself supporting a bunch of linux servers. And guess what? they run Redhat. Not my choice, but I kinda like getting paid and replacing them is too costly to be worth bothering with.
If Oracle supported SunOne ASP I might recommend switching but as it is, the only other option I could suggest that anyone might have supported would have been Solaris and that was too different from what we were used to.
Incidentally if someone out there can recommend a modern, supported, decent linux platform that will run VBScript based ASP currently running under chillisoft I would love to hear any suggestions. Anyone recommending rewriting it should consider that it has taken 5 years to write in the first place. Eventually the entire app will probably be converted to PHP but this will take a while and be done incrementally so the company can carry on turning a profit.
I was referring to the fact that his name was probably pronounced Petra or something similar in Aramaic. (He may even have been a She)
I was also suggesting that the entire Peter being first pope legend was written by the Catholic church sometime before the inventing of the printing press at the time of the reformation. Before this almost the only people who could write were scribes who had to rewrite a previous scribes work.
Think of this as a huge game of chinese whispers that went on for 1500 years. The difference being that the only people who could actually pass a message on were the ruling class of the time (members of the Catholic Church). Anyone not in that club could not record and disseminate a message with the same ease and was also at risk of being burned at the stake for being a heretic if they did.
I think that every word of the modern bible needs to be questioned due to the number of people who have rewritten it over the past 2000 years. Sorry if I was a bit too vague.
I dont know when such similar meddling took place in the muslim date system but I bet it did. The fact is that all data we have about that period is subject to serious interpretation and debate due to the number of years that have passed and the small volumes of written records that have survived intact.
But was Peter an Aramaic name? It sounds a little to english and modern to have been someones name 2000 years ago?
And which legend are you referring to? If you mean that which is written in the bible it is hardly legend. It is a book that has been rewritten and translated from Latin at the very least, but probably Ancient Greek and something else as less people could actually write anything 200 years ago, let alone 2000.
Can you read Latin? Can you read Aramaic? Does anyone have a copy of the Bible in any langauge other than the Latin translation or they even later English one?
I did find this link regarding the language Jesus spoke if anyone is interested:
I am not opposed to Christ's message, I think he spoke a lot of sense which we would all do well to follow. I am opposed to the distortion of his message by organised religion in order to get people to obey. Something the Catholic church excelled at for over a thousand years.
I think one of Christ's key messages was to question authority, this is why the authority of the time killed him via a particularly nasty means.
If you want to insult a great number of people, which you apparently do, go ahead and call Jesus a Muslim prophet.
Its not a bigoted comment. I was pointing out that the muslim faith also recognise Jesus as a prophet. I have been involved in a great many discussions with muslims on this subject. Here is a quick link I found regarding the subject by a christian though so you may actually read it:
I believe from memory that in Islam his name is pronounced slightly differently but there are enough similarities that it is undoubtably the same person.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it like this, as a business do you want all your data encoded in a proprietary format which tries to force you in to purchasing software from one supplier, or would you rather store data using open standard which give you a degree of independence?
Nice idea, but you miss the point that most businesses don't have that independance. If a company decides to migrate away from MS Office they could use an app to convert all the documents to whatever open standard they wanted.
The real barrier to switching is people and productivity. Everyone is used to MS Office, they know how to use it. If you try and switch your company to a different program there will be people who will use the unfamiliarity of the new software as an excuse to sit around and do sweet F.A. There will be some people who will get slightly less done while they learn but there will be more who use the change as a justification for pissing about more.
The combined effect of both these groups of people will be lower productivity in the workplace and no manager wants this.
So lets het this straight.
Creating a map of a school using a map format that is used by a violent computer games is banned / illeagal or whatever.
Yet owning enough firearms and ammo to take out a small town is perfectly legal.
The US is the most fucked up country ever in this regard. When will they realise that guns kill people, not computer games.
You obviously dont understand how the relationship between chinese manufacturers and US companiesa actually works.
I most cases the companies doing the manufactuering are NOT US companies, otherwise the US companies would get in trouble (well get bad press anyway) for the chinese labour abuses. Instead the US companies buy from small chinese manufacturers who can treat there staff as badly as needed.
This relationship keeps the western companies at arms length from any dodgy goings on but still allows us consumers to benefit from super cheap goods.
Me. I pwned Compuserve.
:)
Thats because your old.
Your idea of a space elevator is interesting, but very wasteful.
To make a far more energy efficient design you need to run the cars at constant speed. You also need to attach each car together. That way you can use the energy of the cars on the way down to help power the cars on the way up, much more like how a real elevator works. This means that the whole system requires a much more constant energy input.
This also does away with the idea that each car ever stops. It presents a problem of how you load and unload a moving system at the bottom but this is certainly a solvable problem. At the top you just have a fleet of small craft who dock with each car. Everything is moving in space anyway so all you need to do is match velocities, something the shuttle already does with the space station.
The mistake you seem to be making is trying to treat each car as separate entity rather than looking at the system as a whole. If you can do this then you can use the potential energy of the stuff (raw materials, people coming home, etc) you are bringing back rather than wasting it. This is why space elevators have the capability to be far more energy efficient than rockets ever can.
Now before everyone replies with all the problems, I know, its hard. The fact remains however that continuing on the current task of using semi reusable rockets (like the shuttle and it SRB's) then just letting the stuff we want to bring back fall is not an option. It wastes too much energy from the standpoint of bringing materials back.
Once I could have filled my post with numbers too, but I finished Physics (with Space Tech) several years ago now and have forgotten most of the maths needed.
Can someone explain why he only went after the Vice President and didnt include Bush?
No time is given to thought or creation. Everything (Really, everything!) is rote memorization.
Do not worry, since us British instituted the national curriculum a few years ago our schools are moving in this direction too.
I read Physics at Uni and I can say that I was also given long mathematical proofs to memorise. There was precious little emphasis on learning to derive the proofs for yourself unless you were enrolled on the MPhys (Master of Physics, 4 Years). I was only reading for a BSc (Batchelor of Science, 3 Years). When I asked about this I was told that due to the Maths syllabus for schools being made easier a modern MPhys is only equivalent to a BSc from twenty years ago.
The problem is that nowadays in Britain almost everyone is expected to study until 18. And what they study is mostly decided by a curriculum that is decided on at a national level. This is just daft. Some subjects like Maths, Physics and probably others are too complex even at this level for someone without any real interest in the subject to grasp. You can remove the hard bits but this just makes the subject boring for the people who do have an interest in it.
The fact is that all the league tables rating schools in Britain are a joke. If you want your kid to get the best education possible it doesn't matter what school (discounting private or boarding schools, these do seem to do the trick) you send them too, all that matters is that you foster an interest in learning in them from long before they get to school, and then reinforce the school system at home by encouraging academic pursuits rather than just allowing them to watch TV until their eyes drop out.
Addendum - For those who do not live in Britain the national curriculum was introduced to supposedly enable a fair comparison via school league tables. The idea was to give parents a choice about where they sent their little cherubs. Then the failing schools would empty out and eventually be closed down when the numbers of pupils attending got below a certain level.
You too can have karma like mine! Just know when NOT to submit!
This post would have been a fine example since it is factualy innacurate. Mozilla Firefox had tabs in version 1.0.
Mean men with blunt objects?
Sounds just like Guantanamo bay to me. The only difference is that America does it foreign citizens whereas China does it too its own people too.
British decided to create Israel.
I'd love to hear your source for that little comment. As far as I was aware the state of Israel was created by the Jewish people through there own blood. The british army even tried to prevent the ships from europe carrying thousands of Jews fleeing persecution (even though hitler was dead by then, the jewish people were still wary of the european people for letting the holocaust happen) from actually landing in the promised land. Eventually the ships ran aground I believe as the british prevented them from getting into port.
The only reason the british gave up Israel was the pressure put on them by the US. Otherwise they would have tried to hold onto it as part of their empire.
Graphics was clunky
Sure that had their shortcommings, but the best bit was that you could use them really easily once you had defined that 8 by 8 grid. Just use them like any other character (print). The square ghosts were only a problem if you tried to put any detail in the background. Whether or not an 8 by 8 binary grid can count as a sprite I am not willing to argue about but it was super easy to use it as one.
One of the reasons there were so many great games available for it was that it was not that hard to write your own.
The other great thing about the speccy was that when you were starting to program and could not remember everey single basic command, they was a built in cheat sheet (the keyboard) and it even had its answer to command completion.
Of course here in Britain we have the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. (RIP)
One of the clauses states that if you fail to decrypt something at the courts request you get a 5 year statutory term in prison.
Why are people talking as if the school system / cops / whoever is some sort of single unified entity.
In this case someone made a fuckup and the wrong person was sent to prison. That person does deserve some sort of compensation for the aggravation and inconvenience caused. But lets not forget that the compensation will be paid out of our taxes. (Not mine as I am not a US resident, but possibly yours).
This is always the dilema when the state makes mistakes. It's not like a company where punitive damages hurt the shareholders profits, which hopefully trickles down in the form of better governance (Shareholders get pissed and sack board unless the manager who screwed up get severe reprimand).
In this instance the best policy for instituting change is to lobby the decision makers using democratic means. Write a letter to the relevant elected official complaining that you will not vote for them if they ignore these sort of mistakes by their own employees.
I know many people will reply to this that it is ineffective, maybe they are right. But any attempt to punish state mistakes with huge sums of damages just results in raising the tax burden or less money to spend on essential services. Both of these outcomes punish us all.
The problem with DDT's is that they become trapped in the body and do not pass out in urine or faeces.
A blood test would not necessarily detect a large amount of chemicals such as these as we have a number of organs in the body to filter our blood and prevent such chemicals from remaining in the blood stream. These organs however are not always able to process or expel that which they filter.
The main problem with all chemicals that are not able to be broken down and expelled by biological methods is that because we exist at the top of the food chain, they always end up in us in the end.
Count yourself lucky to still be on IE6.
I am also a developer, but I installed IE7 as we needed to test our product with it. Now I have to put up with it crashing 4 or 5 times a day.
I think it crashes due to the helpdesk software we use but haven't narrowed it down yet as every time I try something happens which forces me to open the other web apps we use on a day to day basis which could also be the cause. They all have some method of ensuring the info they provide stays current so anyone of them (or a combination) could be causing it.
I know it would be fairly straight forward to find out but since I am not paid to fix other peoples software and none of the likely candidates are open source there seems little point.
Of course it is optional, all the windows updates are.
Instead of clcking repeatedly on the update icon until it asks you to reboot you can do a custom install and tell it to avoid certain updates. Then it will ask you if you want to ignore them forever, select yes and job done.
I would guess that a large part of the people still using IE6 are people using non-genuine copies of Windows which as far as I am aware do not let you install IE7 as it depends on that genuine advantage junk. I know there are probably ways round this, but I bet alot of people (like me) just cant be arsed as they almost never use IE anyway.
Ok, we have heard about this before.
But I have not bothered to read the full article and I still understood they were talking about virtualization. In fact the only person who has mentioned dual booting thus far is you. Maybe you confused the two but I haven't got the impression anyone else did and I certainly didn't so as far slashdot goes it isn't that bad. (Dupes are ten a penny here, with a UID that low you should have noticed by now)
If this was such a blatant dupe why did you bother to read it and contribute to the discussion? Nothing better to do?
I have read quite far down the discussion and very few people seem to consider the fact that the manager might be incompetant and stupid.
Normally in business incompetent people reach a point where they fuck up and get fired. Or they fuck up and get demoted, however this was a council.
That means that the manager was probably fairly useless anyway (or she would have got a proper job, not working for a council). On top of this the manager did not run what she was doing past the legal team or the organisations HR officer. If she had we would not be discussing this as it never would have ended in a stupid legal fight which has probably cost the british tax payer (me) more than the pair of them's wages for ten years combined.
The reality is that most councils seem to have a high turnover of high quality staff as the good people leave when they have done enough time for it to look good on their CV. The crap people can't get sacked as nobody ever gets sacked so they just end up in positions of management by default as nobody else wants to stay that long. The manager in question was probably victimising this member of her staff for two reasons:
1) She was too stupid to find something she could sack the employee for.
2) The employee was actually good at her job and was making the manager look bad in comparison.
I have a feeling these people know a little more than you. :)
What good would switching to Oracle do, other than changing the price.....
:)
That would be enough as I am entitled to a profit share
I dont particularly like Redhat either. But Oracle is very similar from what I am told.
Also, now that I am out in the real world of work I seem to have found myself supporting a bunch of linux servers. And guess what? they run Redhat. Not my choice, but I kinda like getting paid and replacing them is too costly to be worth bothering with.
If Oracle supported SunOne ASP I might recommend switching but as it is, the only other option I could suggest that anyone might have supported would have been Solaris and that was too different from what we were used to.
Incidentally if someone out there can recommend a modern, supported, decent linux platform that will run VBScript based ASP currently running under chillisoft I would love to hear any suggestions. Anyone recommending rewriting it should consider that it has taken 5 years to write in the first place. Eventually the entire app will probably be converted to PHP but this will take a while and be done incrementally so the company can carry on turning a profit.
I was referring to the fact that his name was probably pronounced Petra or something similar in Aramaic. (He may even have been a She)
I was also suggesting that the entire Peter being first pope legend was written by the Catholic church sometime before the inventing of the printing press at the time of the reformation. Before this almost the only people who could write were scribes who had to rewrite a previous scribes work.
Think of this as a huge game of chinese whispers that went on for 1500 years. The difference being that the only people who could actually pass a message on were the ruling class of the time (members of the Catholic Church). Anyone not in that club could not record and disseminate a message with the same ease and was also at risk of being burned at the stake for being a heretic if they did.
I think that every word of the modern bible needs to be questioned due to the number of people who have rewritten it over the past 2000 years. Sorry if I was a bit too vague.
Its kind of hard to compare dates between the Bible and the Quoran as both dating systems have been messed with over the years.
m l
We know that Julius mucked with the calendar alot round about 45AD so dates before then are unreliable:
http://www.bibletime.com/tool/spec/roman/index.ht
I dont know when such similar meddling took place in the muslim date system but I bet it did. The fact is that all data we have about that period is subject to serious interpretation and debate due to the number of years that have passed and the small volumes of written records that have survived intact.
But was Peter an Aramaic name? It sounds a little to english and modern to have been someones name 2000 years ago?
s uslanguage.htm
And which legend are you referring to? If you mean that which is written in the bible it is hardly legend. It is a book that has been rewritten and translated from Latin at the very least, but probably Ancient Greek and something else as less people could actually write anything 200 years ago, let alone 2000.
Can you read Latin? Can you read Aramaic? Does anyone have a copy of the Bible in any langauge other than the Latin translation or they even later English one?
I did find this link regarding the language Jesus spoke if anyone is interested:
http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/je
I am not opposed to Christ's message, I think he spoke a lot of sense which we would all do well to follow. I am opposed to the distortion of his message by organised religion in order to get people to obey. Something the Catholic church excelled at for over a thousand years.
I think one of Christ's key messages was to question authority, this is why the authority of the time killed him via a particularly nasty means.
If you want to insult a great number of people, which you apparently do, go ahead and call Jesus a Muslim prophet.
Its not a bigoted comment. I was pointing out that the muslim faith also recognise Jesus as a prophet. I have been involved in a great many discussions with muslims on this subject. Here is a quick link I found regarding the subject by a christian though so you may actually read it:
http://debate.org.uk/topics/theo/jes-musl.htm
I believe from memory that in Islam his name is pronounced slightly differently but there are enough similarities that it is undoubtably the same person.