Disposal costs don't work like that. You cannot make it undesirable to send things to landfills by increasing the cost. We've got this problem already in the UK - landfill is becoming increasingly non viable as political pressure over locations rises. UK gov. have recently made it possible for local authorities to pilot so called 'pay as you throw' systems to penalize heavy users of landfill waste. Since the removal of domestic waste is a public good, you would be penalising their neighbours too. This makes me think about how householders will react to this.
1. Recycle more - a bit maybe, but a big change seems unlikely. Recycling rates are already very high for the recyclable portion of the waste. 2. Buy less - again, unlikely. Biggest outputters of waste are those with low incomes anyway, especially larger families. Discarded non-essentials aren't a big % of waste anyhow, most waste is food and non-recyclable packaging, or things like disposable nappies (which already slightly more expensive than reusable ones). 3. Pay the extra tax - see 2. 4. Dump the waste somewhere else - flytipping, contaminating recyclable waste, into neighbours bins (with or without their knowledge) or delivering it to local authority tip sites - all of which are more damaging than kerbside collection, and don't reduce landfill waste.
"I like the fact that Symbian has become a standard and that Nokia has a huge market share. Most people here see this as a negative, but what they probably don't realize is that without a company like Nokia having a huge majority of the market share, mobile phones would be substantially more expensive and less powerful than they are today.
Imagine if we had never standardized on an ARM platform. I seriously doubt that mobile phones would have taken off to the extent that it did, because so many people buying the same phone drive the price way down due to economy of scale."
Please note that MI5 said 'disrupted', not 'foiled'. The impact that this event has caused can definitely be considered a significant success by the planning organisation or anyone aligned with their goals, if not as much as they wished.
Mind you, it might actually serve some interests better for tens of millions of people to be worried, inconvienced, or annoyed than for airliners to explode.
The bulk of Education is driven by employers and their needs
If it was, then we would really have a problem. Fortunately, the 1984-type scenario where people are groomed throughout childhood to be a suitable drone to increase the GDP is not quite there yet.
Speaking for the UK, the bulk of your education (perhaps about 70%) of your education will be (aimed at) providing you with basic building blocks of knowledge and skills for your life in general. A small amount is not, and is driven by outside interests, limitations in the system, etc. Religous education is one of those - it might provide a much more in depth view on one religion, depending on the school. Physical education has a preference for sports that can be done in groups in a field. And so on.
IT is an area that schools are pretty poor at, probably due to the number of new concepts involved. As a result, they are susceptible to marketing abuse, poor curriculums and limited skills of teachers. Imagine a cooking course sponsered by ASDA (Walmart), limited to cakes only, and taught by someone who's only been cooking for a couple of years, and is still a bit unsure how the oven works.
In time, IT will adjust to the level of traditional subjects, and basic skills and knowledge will be taught, and domain-specific training will be handed off to employers. In the mean time, ill-informed citizens will continue to suffer at the hands of the softwide and hardware manufactures, malware writers, etc, in the same way that they pay the price for lack of social skills, personal finance skills or other poorly taught or untaught skills.
which is why they give education huge discounts
The huge discounts are there to perpetuate the current awkward situation. Anyone who has worked with public sector knows that discounts are more important than the eventual price. This went for a hardware a lot until recently. UK education supplier RM made many millions by selling 'education specific' PCs with 'huge discounts' - if you signed an exlusive deal. The discounts didn't make them any cheaper than the competition, but a £3500 RM box reduced to £1000 sold much better than an identical £1000 IBM box. In the same way, schools would not dare risk their '£300 MS Office for just £60' deals, although a objective viewer might notice that kids can learn word processing just as well on £0 openoffice, or even on £0 last years unreplaced MS Office.
School teaching stands alongside vendor lock-in and OEM coerced bundles as the pillars of monopoly support.
There's going to be a higher than normal percentage, early adopters etc, but not most.
Trying to change tabs after clicking the download button crashed Firefox for me. No error, it just disappeared. That's using 1.5.0.4 on Windows XP with Talkback, Adblock, Image Zoom and del.ico.us plugins, no themes, and/. in the only other tab.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Disclaimer: I work with Oracle databases for a living and the linux box I'm typing on runs no less than six oracle databases at the moment.
However, I am having difficulty understanding your problems with Oracle 9i on Linux. I have installed 8, 9 and 10 on different flavours of linux and never once seen that level of problems. What distro were you using? Redhat, Suse, and Debian/Ubuntu on x86 are all simple installs using standard Oracle. I can't speak for the others but to be honest if you're installing on uclinux or openwrt then you deserve the pain.
Oracle on linux is easier then any other platform I have worked with. And that includes Windows, HP-UX and AIX.
1. It has a kernel (belief in Jesus and God) and you can put different forms on top of that (barring a few that go against the license), leading to different branches and forks.
And, like GNU/Linux, there are few mad people who attempt to replace a proven, solid kernel with something new...
(relying on the sense of humour of the Hurd folk, and the general atheisism of/. for flame protection)
Now at 6,670,000 on Google... where can I find a nice bit of Javascript to show a pretty counter, alongside my 'terror level guage', my 'no. of war dead in Iraq/$billion defense budget graph'.
TLDs are very important. However, they're not going to change. It's not news.
a Dutch company called UnifiedRoot wants to offer top level domains without extensions
Yeah, and I want a gold plated toilet seat, baby. It's just not on the cards. With all the money new.net poured down the drain you would think that theses people would have given it up a long time ago.
It'll catch on just like that internet time thing did.
You're not alone, but you're in a pretty much irrelevant minority. Most people who buy XBoxes/Playstations etc don't have racks. Those who have both racks and consoles mostly don't base their decision to buy on whether it fits - bet you won't.
The half dozen people who will only buy a console if it fits into their rack have a special club where they drink real ale and discuss their plan to take over the world.
No offense:)
Besides if you're that desperate, mod it into your favourite shaped componant casing.
I would take it further than that. Society and civil behavior exist because everyone is different and unless we were able to support, nuture and protect the all those different people and their huge range of skills and knowledge, we'd all be eating berries and throwing rocks at rabbits all day.
Just because someone's skills are in cooking, firefighting or cartography, not self defense or computer security, doesn't make them a moron.
The major problem is the purchasers, not the designers. google is run by people who know what they want, pay for it, and get it. $300 dells in people's living rooms are bought by muppets who know nothing but price, and get nothing but price. (arguably, they good a pretty good deal on the hardware, but get stung by the software). Unfortuately, the software buying world consists of millions of muppets with dells, and a few people who know what they are doing.
Hence the popularity of bad software.
There is the argument that most of the best software is available for a few clicks, but that software has the hidden cost of knowledge, and is 'hidden' by lack of publicity/advertising to the mass audience.
A good modern example is hi-tech computerised buses. lots of money spent, lots of back handers no doubt, but they fail to break out of the 'last resort of the poor' bus market because of the social stigma. There was an article recently (google will find it) about new buses called 'streetcars' which are basically expensive bendy buses with the wheels hidden. I doubt these will help to break the stigma.
I agree with you, but I dislike that example. And you wonder why people are stranded on the side of the road with a flat they can't change I'm a 24 yr old male. If I get a flat, I get the car into a safe place, pop the boot (trunk), and get my tools out. If my wife gets a flat, the last thing I want her doing is changing a tyre. I want her to get the car into a safe place, lock the doors and phone the RAC (breakdown recovery) or me. I pay money for the excellent recovery service I get from them for the same reason as I get my milk from Tescos instead of a cow in my back garden. In todays society, we can afford to be specialists. I get paid for writing insurance software, my wife gets paid for paying peoples pensions, the RAC man gets paid for fixing my wife's car, and Tescos get paid for the milk.
Dragging that back onto subject, I don't need to be checking grammer any more than I need to be checking spelling, or writing a compiler before I can open a page of code.
Intel, AMD, HP, and DELL are all four linux supporters Linux supporters? No. I don't see anything like the support they have for MS Windows. They will be going down the Windows Vista/DRM route. Here's some examples - dell: sell linux servers because people pay for them, and it stops MS getting too carried away with licensing figures. Do you see a 'Ubuntu (-$17)' option on their website? Nope. HP: They do have a supported linux latop in some countries. better, but still only noise. Intel: They make chips, not systems. They will sell whatever Dell et al want them to. e.g. apple-only chips. AMD: See above.
Interesting practice, but imagine the outcry that would happen if Microsoft did this...
"What! They know there's a security problem but they only release it in some places! And auto-update doesn't work for a couple days! This is ludicrous... switch to open source!" Actually... MS do selectively release security patches to 'partners' before the great unwashed.
We're talking about Mozilla staggering the auto-update only here, the update is still available for download from the site. No censoring, just performance concerns.
Since this is slashdot, you might appreciate the results of scientific tests in this area.
The UK Transport Research Laboratory did a number of tests on this recently. Among their conclusions, driving while high is less dangerous than driving after a single glass of wine (below the limit!), and getting high and drunk is better than drunk alone.
That said, my opinion is that driving is dangerous enough anyway, so anything that impairs your judgement is bad. I always try to avoid becoming engaged with any distractions while driving, and I will not drink anything before driving (I don't smoke).
good article though, despite the minor confusing bits.
It looks like quite a nice operating system for 'geek who has everything'. Runs nicely on outdated systems too, and it will have a bucketload of security through obscurity too. reasonable hardware compatability and loads of bundled apps means its pretty functional too. 99 euros seems quite reasonable too (I was looking at RHEL prices for work this morning!).
Apple's iTunes Music Store can now say half a billion served. ...Except that you didn't link to their lovely half-a-billion front page, you linked to the store page which they forgot to update since 'over 430,000 '.
For the teeming horders: clicky on the apple in the top left, et voila.
Lawsuits these days sound more like people whining like spoiled brats than someone really done an injustice.
They publish the thing, person X stores it, person Y uses stored info to prove they publish it. So what? If they'd written the thing in a newspaper they would sue someone for keeping the newspaper?
I agree. I heard an Italian news station has the number at 50 so far, that seems unfortunately much closer.
I'm writing from Mansell Street, 200 yards from Aldgate station and I've seen a lot of the chaos from here. The police have just reopened our street but about 9.30am all you could see across Aldgate was rows upon rows of ambulances loading casualties. Even now the sirens have not stopped, I suspect they may not have found the last of the casualities yet. At Kings Cross they are still trying to get to people in the tunnels.
My prayers go with all the families of the victims.
Slashdot Mirror
Disposal costs don't work like that. You cannot make it undesirable to send things to landfills by increasing the cost. We've got this problem already in the UK - landfill is becoming increasingly non viable as political pressure over locations rises. UK gov. have recently made it possible for local authorities to pilot so called 'pay as you throw' systems to penalize heavy users of landfill waste. Since the removal of domestic waste is a public good, you would be penalising their neighbours too. This makes me think about how householders will react to this.
1. Recycle more - a bit maybe, but a big change seems unlikely. Recycling rates are already very high for the recyclable portion of the waste.
2. Buy less - again, unlikely. Biggest outputters of waste are those with low incomes anyway, especially larger families. Discarded non-essentials aren't a big % of waste anyhow, most waste is food and non-recyclable packaging, or things like disposable nappies (which already slightly more expensive than reusable ones).
3. Pay the extra tax - see 2.
4. Dump the waste somewhere else - flytipping, contaminating recyclable waste, into neighbours bins (with or without their knowledge) or delivering it to local authority tip sites - all of which are more damaging than kerbside collection, and don't reduce landfill waste.
I'm not sure I would be brave enough to introduce Titan to high-schoolers. Has to be one of the least optimistic SF stories I've ever read.
"I like the fact that Symbian has become a standard and that Nokia has a huge market share. Most people here see this as a negative, but what they probably don't realize is that without a company like Nokia having a huge majority of the market share, mobile phones would be substantially more expensive and less powerful than they are today.
Imagine if we had never standardized on an ARM platform. I seriously doubt that mobile phones would have taken off to the extent that it did, because so many people buying the same phone drive the price way down due to economy of scale."
Now see how pointless that argument is?
Please note that MI5 said 'disrupted', not 'foiled'. The impact that this event has caused can definitely be considered a significant success by the planning organisation or anyone aligned with their goals, if not as much as they wished.
Mind you, it might actually serve some interests better for tens of millions of people to be worried, inconvienced, or annoyed than for airliners to explode.
The bulk of Education is driven by employers and their needs
If it was, then we would really have a problem. Fortunately, the 1984-type scenario where people are groomed throughout childhood to be a suitable drone to increase the GDP is not quite there yet.
Speaking for the UK, the bulk of your education (perhaps about 70%) of your education will be (aimed at) providing you with basic building blocks of knowledge and skills for your life in general. A small amount is not, and is driven by outside interests, limitations in the system, etc. Religous education is one of those - it might provide a much more in depth view on one religion, depending on the school. Physical education has a preference for sports that can be done in groups in a field. And so on.
IT is an area that schools are pretty poor at, probably due to the number of new concepts involved. As a result, they are susceptible to marketing abuse, poor curriculums and limited skills of teachers. Imagine a cooking course sponsered by ASDA (Walmart), limited to cakes only, and taught by someone who's only been cooking for a couple of years, and is still a bit unsure how the oven works.
In time, IT will adjust to the level of traditional subjects, and basic skills and knowledge will be taught, and domain-specific training will be handed off to employers. In the mean time, ill-informed citizens will continue to suffer at the hands of the softwide and hardware manufactures, malware writers, etc, in the same way that they pay the price for lack of social skills, personal finance skills or other poorly taught or untaught skills.
which is why they give education huge discounts
The huge discounts are there to perpetuate the current awkward situation. Anyone who has worked with public sector knows that discounts are more important than the eventual price. This went for a hardware a lot until recently. UK education supplier RM made many millions by selling 'education specific' PCs with 'huge discounts' - if you signed an exlusive deal. The discounts didn't make them any cheaper than the competition, but a £3500 RM box reduced to £1000 sold much better than an identical £1000 IBM box. In the same way, schools would not dare risk their '£300 MS Office for just £60' deals, although a objective viewer might notice that kids can learn word processing just as well on £0 openoffice, or even on £0 last years unreplaced MS Office.
School teaching stands alongside vendor lock-in and OEM coerced bundles as the pillars of monopoly support.
There's going to be a higher than normal percentage, early adopters etc, but not most.
/. in the only other tab.
Trying to change tabs after clicking the download button crashed Firefox for me. No error, it just disappeared. That's using 1.5.0.4 on Windows XP with Talkback, Adblock, Image Zoom and del.ico.us plugins, no themes, and
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4
Disclaimer: I work with Oracle databases for a living and the linux box I'm typing on runs no less than six oracle databases at the moment.
However, I am having difficulty understanding your problems with Oracle 9i on Linux. I have installed 8, 9 and 10 on different flavours of linux and never once seen that level of problems. What distro were you using? Redhat, Suse, and Debian/Ubuntu on x86 are all simple installs using standard Oracle. I can't speak for the others but to be honest if you're installing on uclinux or openwrt then you deserve the pain.
Oracle on linux is easier then any other platform I have worked with. And that includes Windows, HP-UX and AIX.
If anything, Christianity is more like Linux:
/. for flame protection)
1. It has a kernel (belief in Jesus and God) and you can put different forms on top of that (barring a few that go against the license), leading to different branches and forks.
And, like GNU/Linux, there are few mad people who attempt to replace a proven, solid kernel with something new...
(relying on the sense of humour of the Hurd folk, and the general atheisism of
Now at 6,670,000 on Google... where can I find a nice bit of Javascript to show a pretty counter, alongside my 'terror level guage', my 'no. of war dead in Iraq/$billion defense budget graph'.
o rd1=cyber+monday&word2=orange+wednesday">Orange Wednesday is still beating Cyber Monday on GoogleFight
Mind you, http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&w
TLDs are very important. However, they're not going to change. It's not news.
a Dutch company called UnifiedRoot wants to offer top level domains without extensions
Yeah, and I want a gold plated toilet seat, baby. It's just not on the cards. With all the money new.net poured down the drain you would think that theses people would have given it up a long time ago.
It'll catch on just like that internet time thing did.
You're not alone, but you're in a pretty much irrelevant minority. Most people who buy XBoxes/Playstations etc don't have racks. Those who have both racks and consoles mostly don't base their decision to buy on whether it fits - bet you won't.
:)
The half dozen people who will only buy a console if it fits into their rack have a special club where they drink real ale and discuss their plan to take over the world.
No offense
Besides if you're that desperate, mod it into your favourite shaped componant casing.
I would take it further than that. Society and civil behavior exist because everyone is different and unless we were able to support, nuture and protect the all those different people and their huge range of skills and knowledge, we'd all be eating berries and throwing rocks at rabbits all day.
Just because someone's skills are in cooking, firefighting or cartography, not self defense or computer security, doesn't make them a moron.
The major problem is the purchasers, not the designers. google is run by people who know what they want, pay for it, and get it. $300 dells in people's living rooms are bought by muppets who know nothing but price, and get nothing but price. (arguably, they good a pretty good deal on the hardware, but get stung by the software). Unfortuately, the software buying world consists of millions of muppets with dells, and a few people who know what they are doing.
Hence the popularity of bad software.
There is the argument that most of the best software is available for a few clicks, but that software has the hidden cost of knowledge, and is 'hidden' by lack of publicity/advertising to the mass audience.
I know what a traditional streetcar is. This article was about disguising buses and calling them streetcars.
, 00.html
It's here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1520060
A good modern example is hi-tech computerised buses. lots of money spent, lots of back handers no doubt, but they fail to break out of the 'last resort of the poor' bus market because of the social stigma. There was an article recently (google will find it) about new buses called 'streetcars' which are basically expensive bendy buses with the wheels hidden. I doubt these will help to break the stigma.
I agree with you, but I dislike that example.
And you wonder why people are stranded on the side of the road with a flat they can't change
I'm a 24 yr old male. If I get a flat, I get the car into a safe place, pop the boot (trunk), and get my tools out.
If my wife gets a flat, the last thing I want her doing is changing a tyre. I want her to get the car into a safe place, lock the doors and phone the RAC (breakdown recovery) or me. I pay money for the excellent recovery service I get from them for the same reason as I get my milk from Tescos instead of a cow in my back garden. In todays society, we can afford to be specialists. I get paid for writing insurance software, my wife gets paid for paying peoples pensions, the RAC man gets paid for fixing my wife's car, and Tescos get paid for the milk.
Dragging that back onto subject, I don't need to be checking grammer any more than I need to be checking spelling, or writing a compiler before I can open a page of code.
To nit-pick, it's 'Fallen Angels'. And you can get a free e-book copy from the Baen library in a variety of formats.
Library here:
http://www.baen.com/library/
Direct to the book here:
http://www.baen.com/library/lniven.htm
I read the ebook, it's good. And then I bought several dead trees by Niven & Pournelle. They were good too. Baen rocks.
Intel, AMD, HP, and DELL are all four linux supporters
Linux supporters? No. I don't see anything like the support they have for MS Windows. They will be going down the Windows Vista/DRM route. Here's some examples -
dell: sell linux servers because people pay for them, and it stops MS getting too carried away with licensing figures. Do you see a 'Ubuntu (-$17)' option on their website? Nope.
HP: They do have a supported linux latop in some countries. better, but still only noise.
Intel: They make chips, not systems. They will sell whatever Dell et al want them to. e.g. apple-only chips.
AMD: See above.
FLOPS for FLoating OPerations per Second.
In this case, just FLoating OPerations. That's the total life expectancy.
If it is also a 10 PetaFLOPS machine, then it must be equipped with IBM Deathstar 70GXP hard disks or some equally reliable component.
Interesting practice, but imagine the outcry that would happen if Microsoft did this...
"What! They know there's a security problem but they only release it in some places! And auto-update doesn't work for a couple days! This is ludicrous... switch to open source!"
Actually... MS do selectively release security patches to 'partners' before the great unwashed.
We're talking about Mozilla staggering the auto-update only here, the update is still available for download from the site. No censoring, just performance concerns.
Since this is slashdot, you might appreciate the results of scientific tests in this area.
The UK Transport Research Laboratory did a number of tests on this recently. Among their conclusions, driving while high is less dangerous than driving after a single glass of wine (below the limit!), and getting high and drunk is better than drunk alone.
Read the summary at the New Scientist
That said, my opinion is that driving is dangerous enough anyway, so anything that impairs your judgement is bad. I always try to avoid becoming engaged with any distractions while driving, and I will not drink anything before driving (I don't smoke).
sometimes, it would partially turn all grey.
come again?
good article though, despite the minor confusing bits.
It looks like quite a nice operating system for 'geek who has everything'. Runs nicely on outdated systems too, and it will have a bucketload of security through obscurity too. reasonable hardware compatability and loads of bundled apps means its pretty functional too. 99 euros seems quite reasonable too (I was looking at RHEL prices for work this morning!).
Apple's iTunes Music Store can now say half a billion served. ...Except that you didn't link to their lovely half-a-billion front page, you linked to the store page which they forgot to update since 'over 430,000 '.
For the teeming horders: clicky on the apple in the top left, et voila.
Lawsuits these days sound more like people whining like spoiled brats than someone really done an injustice.
They publish the thing, person X stores it, person Y uses stored info to prove they publish it. So what? If they'd written the thing in a newspaper they would sue someone for keeping the newspaper?
Huh
I agree. I heard an Italian news station has the number at 50 so far, that seems unfortunately much closer.
I'm writing from Mansell Street, 200 yards from Aldgate station and I've seen a lot of the chaos from here. The police have just reopened our street but about 9.30am all you could see across Aldgate was rows upon rows of ambulances loading casualties. Even now the sirens have not stopped, I suspect they may not have found the last of the casualities yet. At Kings Cross they are still trying to get to people in the tunnels.
My prayers go with all the families of the victims.