I'm no China apologist, but I wonder if people are dismissing the long-lasting impacts of these efforts. Big political events such as the Olympics are great motivators for change and innovation in the same way as wars; and in much more agreeable conditions. A significant amount of spending and change that Bejing is instituting here is indeed short term; but not without some residual long-lasting impacts for Bejing and other cities. Even if the enviro-friendly spending is cut to a fraction of what it is now, the experience and momentum gained is non-trivial, IMHO. 10 years from now while the developed Western world is still holding each others' dicks and talking about policy change, we may wake up to find China as the underdog that beat everyone to the punch. I have no doubt that the central political forces in China would love to deal such a large international political blow.
I'd be very careful accounting for winds over a distance of 200 miles, particularly where chinese embassies are located. Must be a hell of a job to be spotter for this kind of weapon.
They're way ahead of you. They're already testing guided artillery rounds. I'm sure a similar guidance system adapted for railgun rounds is in the plans somewhere.
Also, re: your hypothetical pizza situation, I have long been of the opinion that Yes/No/Cancel dialogs could usually stand to benefit from a "Maybe" button.
Well, it's possible to simulate a non-deterministic finite automata deterministically, so I don't see why it's not possible to give "Maybe" options until a better decision can be reached later.
In real world product design, the most often used controls are typically placed on the right, where the right-handed majority of users may more easily interact with them. Think microwave ovens, old-school TVs, even ATMs. Onscreen representations of interactive panels take their cues from real-world appliances like these, and thereby offer an immediate sense of familiarity, rewarding intuition.
Not that this revelation will change your attitude towards user friendliness, of course, nor convince you of the value of progressive disclosure.
First of all, I dont understand why the grandparent post is flamebait at the moment. Seems like a perfectly valid observation to me.
I disagree with your post. First of all, no one said modern appliances were intuitive. If GNOME wants to build sane and progressive user friendliness, they shouldn't be looking to microwave panels.
Second, I agree with the gp-post that the button ordering should be "Yes"/"No". I understand why often-used objects should be in the lower-right for the right-handed inclined. But at the same time GNOME attempts to do button layout according to language preference. When I read dialog boxes, I read from left to right (English). I find that when we read or speak of yes-no questions in English, the "yes" option usually comes up first.
For example: "Want to get some pizza for lunch? Yes? No? Maybe?"
I very seldom hear people give the no option first.
I think the patent system should not be granted by a centralised and under-staffed authority like the patent office. Rather, patents should be peer reviewed. After all, granted patents become publicly disclosed anyways. The patent office simply acts like a program committee. The patent office receives patent applications and, depending on the domain of the patent, picks random reviewers from a pool. The reviews are returned and weighted differently depending on reviewer's association with the applying party. The patent office then chooses whether or not to grant a patent. All patent applications and their reviews are made public. Not perfect, but I think it's a good compromise.
First, companies or individuals can register as reviewers for specific categories of patents. They are then added to the pool of reviewers for said category. If patent applications are given to a pool of a dozen or so random reviewers, the odds are small that a small group of companies can collude to push their own stuff through.
Right now there's no penalty for companies to file a ton of patents. But a peer-review system ensures that anything they wish to patent will be pre-examined by their competitors. I think this will automatically push most things off the patent treadmill and into trade-secret territory.
Second, instead of patent clerks trying to digest the mangled legalese that most companies file, their competitors have a vested intrest in using their own lawyers to demangle and pick apart any application. The clerks then have access to a relatively clarified view of whether or not an application is valid.
I don't understand how this can possibly be worse. Lets break down the different motives...
First, you are right, there will always be a huge gray region as to what is or is not porn. Depending on how puritan you are, Greek art can be considered pornography. Hell, there's plenty of T&A on MTV, MuchMusic, or even Billboard ads, let alone the Internet. Come to think of it, have you recently flipped through and issue of Cosmo? Plenty of those lying around in hair salons. But we're not out to censor these gray-region sites. The bottom line is that no technological or legislative solution will replace parental guidance. We're out to limit access to commercial pornography. By commercial pornography I also include porno "ring" sites that try and get you to click all the way to a pay site.
Now, Porno sites WANT to be on a XXX domain. For the same reason porno stores and strip joints have "XXX" plastered over their signs and windows. They WANT to be found. That is, they want to be found by consenting and paying adults. Why in the world would they want children? That's asking for a basket-case of problems. Money is the motivation here. No one gives a rat ass about your kids, and everyone is too busy trying to earn a buck to bother with trying to corrupt them.
For public sites and services like libraries and Google, their job is now infinitely easier. Just exclude.xxx. Done. As for all the gray-region stuff, just put the computer in a public place and use supervision. Look, a kid that is determined to get porn will eventually find a titty to look at, a Cosmopolitan magazine to drool over, or a Playboy magazine to flip through. What we want to prevent is accidental or casual porno access.
For perverts like me, my job of finding porn on the net is now simplified because I can ask google to search only in the XXX domain.
oh c'mon... he needed "street cred" to get his tool off the ground and in popular use. It's like a million-dollar rapper robbing a 7-11. I'm guessing he chose that kind of rhetoric to get his tool off the ground with early adopters for downloading large files (surprise -- mostly illegal copies). Once its efficacy became apparent, legit uses started to pop up for it (like distributing distros). And now he cleans himself off. Like a good politician or businessman.
I have three computers (all Linux) which has firefox as their browser. Two desktops and one laptop. All three of them run cpufreqd.
My two desktops stay up for months on end. Thanks to tabbed browsing, I leave just one browser window open and use it for everything. I've had firefox stay up for as long as the machine, without problem.
For all three computers, I comfortably browse a various collection of websites, including many which have flash or java. None of the machines are taxed enough to force cpufreq into the gigahertz range.
You sound like you know what you're doing, so I won't question the poor behaviour you're seeing. Maybe you're browsing multi-lingual websites? Multibyte fonts killing the browser? Maybe a bad plugin or extension? I'm not sure what the problem might be or what to suggest if you've already talked to the developers.
How about having mobile communities do collective adaptation? Sure it might be painful at first when the community is small, but then things gain momentum and flourish.
First, watching any episodes or reading comics of superheroes, their lives are pretty repetetive. Save the world. Save the world. Save the world. Did you expect the game to be any different?
Second, playing a MMRPG from a single-player perspective is definitely going to get boring. The key is to have a system where capes, badges, and insignia plays a social role with other players and NPCs. In effect, you want them to give a "non-functional" quality to the game.
And finally... dude, it's a game. For real dynamic, fun, and interactive experiences... leave the computer and do some real human activities.
For example, I did some searching and did find that according to the Monreal Economic Institute, 51% of Canadian find it acceptable if the Goverment were to allow those who wish to pay for healtcare in the private sector to have speedier access to this type of care while still maintaining the current free and universal halthcare system. I'll even provide the link for you. The Report. Now if the universal healthcare is wonderful as you say it is, why is there a need for private sector care?
Being a Canadian, I'll offer my personal two cents on that.
It's nice to have private supplements not because the universal one is bad, but because it's a two tier optimization problem.
Many Canadians believe that there are certain services and minimum standards of living which need to be maintained, even at the cost of inefficiency. Universal Healthcare is one such service.
We recognize that a universal system is going to have a difficult time being efficient. I honestly believe our government and institutions try hard to make it efficient, but the bottom line is that it is designed to work uniformly for all patients, and that doesn't always lead to efficiency.
Now, a private citizen with extra money should be able to pay extra for more services. I use "more" to indicate better, faster, newer, etc.
Yes, it is unfair that some will be able to afford better treatment than others, but that's life.
Some people worry that a two-tier system will just place pressure on the universal one, causing the universal system to deteriorate in quality. I personally don't see that being a problem as long as the standard for minimum quality of life is updated to keep up with modern medicine.
One possible solution is for the government to place an additional universal tax (or fee) to all private health-care providers. Since it is likely the wealthy are the ones to purchase privatized health-care, they can afford to soak up that cost. That money can then be used to further supplement the universal system. Yeah, it's another tax on the wealthier people in Canada. But that's the Canadian way.
The world has always had big reserves in many places, especially around Alaska and Canada. Why burn up your own reserves when you can eat away at others first?
For countries like US and Canada to open up their own reserves would just drive down oil prices and make the oil worth less. Wait until the global supply is lower and then you can get some real bang for the buck.
The firmware code doesn't get executed by the CPU, and thus in a sense it doesn't get executed by Linux. Firmware is used by an off-board processor, and thus I don't see a GPL violation here.
Consider if a piece of hardware needed a Magic Number string to start up. No code, no logic, no meaning; just a magic number required to activate the device. Can't we consider the firmware code as just a magic number? After all, Linux doesn't interpret or execute it.
It gave me an interesting idea, though. If this situation actually happens, or even if it doesn't, imagine a company run as a democracy. Regular elections for CEO (of course there would have to be some accountability rules so they don't milk it for personal gain before stepping down, but that'a already a problem anyway). I can imagine workers for such a company being more motivated, and certainly more financially healthy since the massive salaries at the top would essentially be spread around.
You mean in the same way that average citizens have real decision power over their government (other than throwing one party out of power once in a while, only to face the same problem with the other one) and the politicians unable to creatively milk taxpayer money for their own benefit?
the silly slashdot answer: Simple. A beowulf cluster of profiting one-time-pad quantum computers.
the sly and dodgy academic answer: (being in academia myself, and not in networks research...) Sounds like an interesting topic! Perhaps take this opportunity to do some research into the field and hook up with one of your telecom/network profs for a potential undergraduate thesis idea.
The user is the loser. There's a clubby, exclusive, snotty attitude among user's groups. The online resources are hopelessly disorganized or relentlessly dinged with ads. The vision that Stallman has of software as knowledge, rather than product, is lost among the throng of sociopaths that spout RTFM at users that ask the same questions over and over.
Well, you know why people have the same questions over and over? Because the software is obscure and the documentation is unhelpful. GNU is based on people solving their own problems and then giving other people an opportunity to use thier solutions. Documentation, at best, is an afterthought. Once you have solved a problem, there's no need to go back and explain it to yourself, any documentation that does exist arises purely from the virture of developers, not because they need it themselves.
rdewald, I have to strongly disagree with you on this one. I'm a member of two separate LUG mailing lists, and I find that people are more than helpful in answering all questions, even simple ones.
But more specifically, let me ask you this: when was the last time, after spending hours to finally figure something out, you went back and wrote up a quick description that can be added back to the documentation?
As others have pointed out, F/OSS is written by people in their spare time, for pleasure. As a developer, I know that I more than welcome documentation patches submitted by users; and I'm sure many developers feel the same way. In fact, I get the general feeling that most projects are begging for people to write documentation.
So maybe the documentation sucks. But after investing so much time figuring something out, why not write up a little something to submit back to the project? What you write up doesn't have to be perfect or complete. It just has to incrementally improve the documentation so that one day it becomes "good". And maybe, along the way, it will save other people from going through the frustration you went through. Isn't that part of Stallman's vision, like you mentioned? Software is more than just code. It's documentation (and a whole lot of other stuff) too.
If you don't, and just go on your merry way, then you're part of the problem. You're no better than those that would reply "RTFM".
You're right, as a boycott itself, the effect is indeed laughable.
But, I've found that it's a nice emotional factor that forces me to take the 100-200 dollars per year that I might've spent on DVDs and movies, and add it to my retirement investments instead.
Gonna get modded as a troll for this one... but here goes...
Funny how already I see at least half a dozen posts about the legality of breaking CSS in order to rip those legally owned DVDs.
And yet the irony is so many people still buying DVDs and giving the MPAA and the CSS consortium their money.
Maybe I'm fooling myself by not buying DVDs and not going to movies. Should I just give in? Is anyone here actually still voting with their dollars by withholding it?
''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''
Yep... now raise your hands... how many of you have gone down that path, purchasing iTunes and DVDs? Yeah, that's what I thought.
The question of why to go to mars is the same as why we are here as a race. Do we have a purpose, and what might it be? If our future is to sit around in this little rock and argue with eachother for the next few million years, that's fine, but I sure as hell am going to do everything I can to change that.
Wish I had points to mod you up. I think many people also fail to realize that many social problems are incrementally improved by advances in how we, as a society and race, view and understand our role in the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no China apologist, but I wonder if people are dismissing the long-lasting impacts of these efforts. Big political events such as the Olympics are great motivators for change and innovation in the same way as wars; and in much more agreeable conditions. A significant amount of spending and change that Bejing is instituting here is indeed short term; but not without some residual long-lasting impacts for Bejing and other cities. Even if the enviro-friendly spending is cut to a fraction of what it is now, the experience and momentum gained is non-trivial, IMHO. 10 years from now while the developed Western world is still holding each others' dicks and talking about policy change, we may wake up to find China as the underdog that beat everyone to the punch. I have no doubt that the central political forces in China would love to deal such a large international political blow.
I'd be very careful accounting for winds over a distance of 200 miles, particularly where chinese embassies are located. Must be a hell of a job to be spotter for this kind of weapon.
They're way ahead of you. They're already testing guided artillery rounds. I'm sure a similar guidance system adapted for railgun rounds is in the plans somewhere.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.p
Well, it's possible to simulate a non-deterministic finite automata deterministically, so I don't see why it's not possible to give "Maybe" options until a better decision can be reached later.
First of all, I dont understand why the grandparent post is flamebait at the moment. Seems like a perfectly valid observation to me.
I disagree with your post. First of all, no one said modern appliances were intuitive. If GNOME wants to build sane and progressive user friendliness, they shouldn't be looking to microwave panels.
Second, I agree with the gp-post that the button ordering should be "Yes"/"No". I understand why often-used objects should be in the lower-right for the right-handed inclined. But at the same time GNOME attempts to do button layout according to language preference. When I read dialog boxes, I read from left to right (English). I find that when we read or speak of yes-no questions in English, the "yes" option usually comes up first.
For example:
"Want to get some pizza for lunch? Yes? No? Maybe?"
I very seldom hear people give the no option first.
I agree... partially.
I think the patent system should not be granted by a centralised and under-staffed authority like the patent office. Rather, patents should be peer reviewed. After all, granted patents become publicly disclosed anyways. The patent office simply acts like a program committee. The patent office receives patent applications and, depending on the domain of the patent, picks random reviewers from a pool. The reviews are returned and weighted differently depending on reviewer's association with the applying party. The patent office then chooses whether or not to grant a patent. All patent applications and their reviews are made public. Not perfect, but I think it's a good compromise.
First, companies or individuals can register as reviewers for specific categories of patents. They are then added to the pool of reviewers for said category. If patent applications are given to a pool of a dozen or so random reviewers, the odds are small that a small group of companies can collude to push their own stuff through.
Right now there's no penalty for companies to file a ton of patents. But a peer-review system ensures that anything they wish to patent will be pre-examined by their competitors. I think this will automatically push most things off the patent treadmill and into trade-secret territory.
Second, instead of patent clerks trying to digest the mangled legalese that most companies file, their competitors have a vested intrest in using their own lawyers to demangle and pick apart any application. The clerks then have access to a relatively clarified view of whether or not an application is valid.
I don't understand how this can possibly be worse. Lets break down the different motives...
.xxx. Done. As for all the gray-region stuff, just put the computer in a public place and use supervision. Look, a kid that is determined to get porn will eventually find a titty to look at, a Cosmopolitan magazine to drool over, or a Playboy magazine to flip through. What we want to prevent is accidental or casual porno access.
First, you are right, there will always be a huge gray region as to what is or is not porn. Depending on how puritan you are, Greek art can be considered pornography. Hell, there's plenty of T&A on MTV, MuchMusic, or even Billboard ads, let alone the Internet. Come to think of it, have you recently flipped through and issue of Cosmo? Plenty of those lying around in hair salons. But we're not out to censor these gray-region sites. The bottom line is that no technological or legislative solution will replace parental guidance. We're out to limit access to commercial pornography. By commercial pornography I also include porno "ring" sites that try and get you to click all the way to a pay site.
Now, Porno sites WANT to be on a XXX domain. For the same reason porno stores and strip joints have "XXX" plastered over their signs and windows. They WANT to be found. That is, they want to be found by consenting and paying adults. Why in the world would they want children? That's asking for a basket-case of problems. Money is the motivation here. No one gives a rat ass about your kids, and everyone is too busy trying to earn a buck to bother with trying to corrupt them.
For public sites and services like libraries and Google, their job is now infinitely easier. Just exclude
For perverts like me, my job of finding porn on the net is now simplified because I can ask google to search only in the XXX domain.
See? Everyone wins! What's so wrong about that?
oh c'mon... he needed "street cred" to get his tool off the ground and in popular use. It's like a million-dollar rapper robbing a 7-11. I'm guessing he chose that kind of rhetoric to get his tool off the ground with early adopters for downloading large files (surprise -- mostly illegal copies). Once its efficacy became apparent, legit uses started to pop up for it (like distributing distros). And now he cleans himself off. Like a good politician or businessman.
which leads to the question... if Slashdot converts to IPv6 and only accepts IPv6 connections, how quickly would the rest of the Internet get changed?
Hmmm which firefox versions are you using?
I have three computers (all Linux) which has firefox as their browser. Two desktops and one laptop. All three of them run cpufreqd.
My two desktops stay up for months on end. Thanks to tabbed browsing, I leave just one browser window open and use it for everything. I've had firefox stay up for as long as the machine, without problem.
For all three computers, I comfortably browse a various collection of websites, including many which have flash or java. None of the machines are taxed enough to force cpufreq into the gigahertz range.
You sound like you know what you're doing, so I won't question the poor behaviour you're seeing. Maybe you're browsing multi-lingual websites? Multibyte fonts killing the browser? Maybe a bad plugin or extension? I'm not sure what the problem might be or what to suggest if you've already talked to the developers.
Yes, I'm whoring, but...
0 04 a/
How about having mobile communities do collective adaptation? Sure it might be painful at first when the community is small, but then things gain momentum and flourish.
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~delara/papers/wmcsa2
No, I am not one of the authors.
First, watching any episodes or reading comics of superheroes, their lives are pretty repetetive. Save the world. Save the world. Save the world. Did you expect the game to be any different?
Second, playing a MMRPG from a single-player perspective is definitely going to get boring. The key is to have a system where capes, badges, and insignia plays a social role with other players and NPCs. In effect, you want them to give a "non-functional" quality to the game.
And finally... dude, it's a game. For real dynamic, fun, and interactive experiences... leave the computer and do some real human activities.
If I have enough beer, almost any girl is hot.
This is slashdot. You don't need the beer. Statistically speaking, every girl is hot.
I find that programmers relate TOO well with women. We end up being their friends.
Being a Canadian, I'll offer my personal two cents on that.
It's nice to have private supplements not because the universal one is bad, but because it's a two tier optimization problem.
Many Canadians believe that there are certain services and minimum standards of living which need to be maintained, even at the cost of inefficiency. Universal Healthcare is one such service.
We recognize that a universal system is going to have a difficult time being efficient. I honestly believe our government and institutions try hard to make it efficient, but the bottom line is that it is designed to work uniformly for all patients, and that doesn't always lead to efficiency.
Now, a private citizen with extra money should be able to pay extra for more services. I use "more" to indicate better, faster, newer, etc.
Yes, it is unfair that some will be able to afford better treatment than others, but that's life.
Some people worry that a two-tier system will just place pressure on the universal one, causing the universal system to deteriorate in quality. I personally don't see that being a problem as long as the standard for minimum quality of life is updated to keep up with modern medicine.
One possible solution is for the government to place an additional universal tax (or fee) to all private health-care providers. Since it is likely the wealthy are the ones to purchase privatized health-care, they can afford to soak up that cost. That money can then be used to further supplement the universal system. Yeah, it's another tax on the wealthier people in Canada. But that's the Canadian way.
The world has always had big reserves in many places, especially around Alaska and Canada. Why burn up your own reserves when you can eat away at others first?
For countries like US and Canada to open up their own reserves would just drive down oil prices and make the oil worth less. Wait until the global supply is lower and then you can get some real bang for the buck.
I agree that this is going a little far.
The firmware code doesn't get executed by the CPU, and thus in a sense it doesn't get executed by Linux. Firmware is used by an off-board processor, and thus I don't see a GPL violation here.
Consider if a piece of hardware needed a Magic Number string to start up. No code, no logic, no meaning; just a magic number required to activate the device. Can't we consider the firmware code as just a magic number? After all, Linux doesn't interpret or execute it.
It gave me an interesting idea, though. If this situation actually happens, or even if it doesn't, imagine a company run as a democracy. Regular elections for CEO (of course there would have to be some accountability rules so they don't milk it for personal gain before stepping down, but that'a already a problem anyway). I can imagine workers for such a company being more motivated, and certainly more financially healthy since the massive salaries at the top would essentially be spread around.
You mean in the same way that average citizens have real decision power over their government (other than throwing one party out of power once in a while, only to face the same problem with the other one) and the politicians unable to creatively milk taxpayer money for their own benefit?
and in a related thread, when commanders are coordinating themselves:
Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process
the silly slashdot answer:
Simple. A beowulf cluster of profiting one-time-pad quantum computers.
the sly and dodgy academic answer:
(being in academia myself, and not in networks research...)
Sounds like an interesting topic! Perhaps take this opportunity to do some research into the field and hook up with one of your telecom/network profs for a potential undergraduate thesis idea.
The user is the loser. There's a clubby, exclusive, snotty attitude among user's groups. The online resources are hopelessly disorganized or relentlessly dinged with ads. The vision that Stallman has of software as knowledge, rather than product, is lost among the throng of sociopaths that spout RTFM at users that ask the same questions over and over.
Well, you know why people have the same questions over and over? Because the software is obscure and the documentation is unhelpful. GNU is based on people solving their own problems and then giving other people an opportunity to use thier solutions. Documentation, at best, is an afterthought. Once you have solved a problem, there's no need to go back and explain it to yourself, any documentation that does exist arises purely from the virture of developers, not because they need it themselves.
rdewald, I have to strongly disagree with you on this one. I'm a member of two separate LUG mailing lists, and I find that people are more than helpful in answering all questions, even simple ones.
But more specifically, let me ask you this: when was the last time, after spending hours to finally figure something out, you went back and wrote up a quick description that can be added back to the documentation?
As others have pointed out, F/OSS is written by people in their spare time, for pleasure. As a developer, I know that I more than welcome documentation patches submitted by users; and I'm sure many developers feel the same way. In fact, I get the general feeling that most projects are begging for people to write documentation.
So maybe the documentation sucks. But after investing so much time figuring something out, why not write up a little something to submit back to the project? What you write up doesn't have to be perfect or complete. It just has to incrementally improve the documentation so that one day it becomes "good". And maybe, along the way, it will save other people from going through the frustration you went through. Isn't that part of Stallman's vision, like you mentioned? Software is more than just code. It's documentation (and a whole lot of other stuff) too.
If you don't, and just go on your merry way, then you're part of the problem. You're no better than those that would reply "RTFM".
You're right, as a boycott itself, the effect is indeed laughable.
But, I've found that it's a nice emotional factor that forces me to take the 100-200 dollars per year that I might've spent on DVDs and movies, and add it to my retirement investments instead.
Gonna get modded as a troll for this one... but here goes...
Funny how already I see at least half a dozen posts about the legality of breaking CSS in order to rip those legally owned DVDs.
And yet the irony is so many people still buying DVDs and giving the MPAA and the CSS consortium their money.
Maybe I'm fooling myself by not buying DVDs and not going to movies. Should I just give in? Is anyone here actually still voting with their dollars by withholding it?
''Sooner or later,'' predicts Miriam Nisbet, the legislative counsel for the American Library Association, ''you'll get to the point where you say, 'Well, I guess that 25 cents isn't too much to pay for this sentence,' and then there's no hope and no going back.''
Yep... now raise your hands... how many of you have gone down that path, purchasing iTunes and DVDs? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Thanks for the references. At least it'll look like I'm working, though I'll still be procrastinating.
The question of why to go to mars is the same as why we are here as a race. Do we have a purpose, and what might it be? If our future is to sit around in this little rock and argue with eachother for the next few million years, that's fine, but I sure as hell am going to do everything I can to change that.
Wish I had points to mod you up.
I think many people also fail to realize that many social problems are incrementally improved by advances in how we, as a society and race, view and understand our role in the universe.