Minerals melt and boil at various temperatures and at 2,370 C most minerals will probably break down into smaller molecules and atoms. Since Silicon dioxide (quartz) is a stable and common component of various kinds of rocks, and it has a boiling point of 2,230 C, I suspect that the surface is a sea of melted and boiling quartz and that most of the "atmosphere" is gaseous quarts, and that the "rain" is droplets of liquid quartz. Aluminum oxide melts at 2072C and boils at 2,980C, so the "ocean" is probably a mixture of the two minerals. 2,370C is enough to boil Silicon but not Aluminum. http://www.science.co.il/PTelements.asp?s=BP
An ISP in our area is advertising their Internet connection speed by claiming it is "Fasterizer". They hope that term will confuse the clueless into thinking that their.V92 or tier 1 DSL service is as fast as my 10Mb/s cable connection.
21st Century business is all about three things: lying, stealing and bribing Congress with campaign contributions to make those actions legal. I suspect that they are redefining decades old terms & understandings simply so they can justify a large increase it their rate structure for the same old service.
Fifteen years ago the cable and telcos bribed Congress into outlawing local communities from filling in the service gap the private sector was ignoring: a high speecd fiber optic internet connection that would be a public utility. After recieving $200M from Congress to "finish the job", they promptly pocketed the money and forgot the rest. Congress failed to include a non-performance penalty, so they had nothing to lose by just stealing the money. Had the telcos & cable companies had any ethics the average US internet connection would be 20Mb/s or more and costing less than $30/month. Can't build any multi-million dollar luxury homes in the Bahamas at those rates.
Solar panels are limited by their distance from the Sun. Double the distance and you'll get only 1/4th the power. Head to the outer planets and you'll need a large collector to collect a lot of power.
For a nuclear reactor/Sterling Engine combo, the power output of 2.3KW seems awful low. Perhaps there should be two, one to back up other and to double the power output if needed.
I saw dollar amounts listed for the various services, so that info is not redacted.
BUT...
If I had a contract to do that work I would do everything possible to keep my identity secret to avoid the total and complete invasion of my personal life, professional life, financial info, family member and friends. The mind boggles at the damage and death that could result.
Why would anyone consider keeping that kind of information secret breaking the promise of transparency?
Most people who have any talent at all for programming usually "invent" the bubble sort during their first attempt to re-arrange data in arrays, even before they read about it, so easy is the bubble sort to code.
The bubble sort is just an example of why software patents are ridiculous.
"I am sorry sir, your prostate cancer is not a "covered" disease. You will die of old age before the cancer kills you!" says the bureaucrat, with a copies of several scientific studies stating otherwise laying in his trash can.
On the other hand, the same reply from a corporate doctor paid to lie for their bottom line has the same effect.
bribes,,,,er,,,"campaign contributions". As soon as the right palms get enough greese on them this "issue" will go away faster than due on the morning grass.
Here is a summary of a LOT of Microsoft's dirty tricks, and the reasons why so many "independent" corporations behave as wholly owned subsidiaries of Microsoft: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history
So, ya, it is no surprise when NVIDIA knucles under to Microsoft, otherwise their video chips would suddenly fail to work as well as those from other video chip vendors, just the way DRDOS "failed" to work as well as MSDOS when users tried to install Win3, which was one of the first of an unending examples of how a copy without ethics operates. An people were surprised that Capitalism exhibited a "flaw" in the current economic crisis?
1. Core components
2. Mono/Linux/GNOME development stack
3. Microsoft compatibility stack.
The Microsoft compatibility stack provides a pathway for porting Windows.NET applications to Linux. This group of components include ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and Windows.Forms, among others. As these components are not covered by ECMA standards, some of them remain subject to patent fears and concerns.
Mono's implementation of those components of the.NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project. In particular, discussion has taken place about whether Microsoft could destroy the Mono project through patent suits.
The base technologies submitted to the ECMA, and therefore also the Unix/GNOME-specific parts, may be non-problematic. The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the.NET Framework, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms (see Non standardized namespaces), i.e. parts composing Mono's Windows compatibility stack. These technologies are today not fully implemented in Mono and not required for developing Mono-applications. Richard Stallman has claimed it may be "dangerous" to use Mono because of the possible threat of Microsoft patents.[9]
On November 2, 2006, Microsoft and Novell announced a joint agreement whereby Microsoft agreed to not sue Novell's customers for patent infringement.[10] According to Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza,[11] this agreement extends to Mono but only for Novell developers and customers. It was criticized by some members of the free software community because it violates the principles of giving equal rights to all users of a particular program...
There are a LOT more infomercial channels than that. I used to subscribe to an 80 channel cable service. One night, around 1:30AM, I counted that over 75% of those channels were broadcasting infomercials. The cable companies are double-dipping. The infomercial businesses have to pay cable to get their ads on cable, and the consumer has to pay to watch them.
I got tired of it and dropped my cable service. I got a converter for my one analog TV and and built to HD antennas as decribed on the YouTube video, They worked great! I was able to receive 16 over-the-air HD channels, which is all that are broadcast where I live. At 1:30AM half of them are off the air, and of the eight remianing one broadcasts the weather radar all night, one pumps out news, and the other six dispense infomercials. That's still 75%, but I don't have to pay for them or watch them.
After I dropped my cable tv I purchased just a 10Mb/s Internet connection with another ISP. When I have an itch to watch something I usually use HULU. I pay $10/y for ad free access to the wunderground.com weather site, which isn't bad. If I had to pay $10/y for access to, say, the Science Channel, History Channel, Discovery Channel, NASA channel and the Military Channel, for a total of $50/y, that wouldn't be too bad. It would sure beat the $129/mo I was paying RoadRunner for a 7Mb/s Internet connection and 80 channels, most of which I didn't watch.
I realize that exact figures don't really change your argument much but market share figures are something that have long been slippery. The more appropriate figures, in my opinion, put Windows at about 88%, Mac at 9.7 and Linux around 1%.
"Appropriate"? Only if you enjoyed the Kool-Aid. The marketshare.hitLink site is owned by NetApplications, whose business model was selling rebranded Windows executables to track Windows visits to Windows websites. No bias there, eh?
ZDNet reported on Feb 24th, 2004 http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=5334 that the 2003 Linux desktop market share hit 3.2% and expected it to hit 6% by 2007.
In 2005 they reported that the 2004 saw the Linux desktop at 4%.
I believe that the all the ZDNet figures were spot on. If anything, the Linux desktop market share has continued to increase and is probably currently at 8-10% and rising. Dell and the other PC OEMs wouldn't have invested in selling Linux pre-installed if it appealed only to less than 1% of the desktop market.
It is quite obvious that NetApplications latest "report" is merely Microsoft's continuing attempt to control the news about Linux's success in replacing Windows on the desktop...."
The best evidence that the NetApplications "report" is fake is from Ballmer himself. In a Feb, 2009 presentation he displayed a graph showing the percentages of desktop marketshare for Windows, Linux and Apple. HE puts the Linux pie slice at around 10%, and slightly larger than Apple's. http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple
Ballmer can't listen to his own PR pulp. He has to plan using real data. Fortunately, he let it leak.
"Bloat" suggests unnecessary code, often called "code bloat". One person's "bloat" is another person's indispensable feature.
The more functions and capabilities a package has the larger its code base will be.
A better definition of "bloat" is a section of code that none of the developers know what it's for, and removing it causes instability. Windows is the dictionary reference for bloat because a lots of its code base is ambiguous, and even Microsoft agrees, but only because it was part of their campaign to get people to move to VISTA. http://apcmag.com/microsoft_agrees_windows_is_a_really_large_bloated_operating_system.htm
"Niklaus Wirth has summed up the situation in Wirth's Law, which states that software speed is decreasing more quickly than hardware speed is increasing." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
KOffice 2.0 is an excellent effort for a *.0 release.
I installed it from the Kubuntu 9.04 repositories without any problems.
However, it still has some show stopping bugs. On my laptop KWord cannot open a txt file but it has no trouble with ODT files. Krita can't open any file.
I played with it for a while and then removed it.
After I removed it I noticed that the menu items for the major components were not removed, so I had to remove them manually.
Replace oil fields with Corn fields?
on
The Great Ethanol Scam
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Some research and calculations I did in 2005...
Replace oil fields with Corn fields?
Dr. Bartlett, retired Univ. of Colorado Physics professor, wrote that "Farming is merely a way of using land to convert oil into food". People either have forgotten or never realized the food IS energy. It takes 7 TIMES more petroleum energy to put a slice of bread on your breakfast table than you get by eating it. And, oil is used for many other things besides transportation. How long would squirrels survive if they spent more energy collecting nuts than they get from eating them? We are the squirrels, and we are about to find out.
One measure of how much oil we may still be able to find is the "Barrels Per Foot Drilled" metric. In 1946 oil companies recovered 45 barrels of oil for each foot they drilled. That metric, which is an aggregate measurement, has been showing a steady decline since 1946. It was obvious that at some time in the future it would take the same amount of energy to drill a well as the energy that is in the NEW oil produced by that well -- the "break-even" point. That time is now. The "Barrels Per Foot" value crossed below the break-even point in 2005. During the last 10 years only 38 billion barrels of oil have been discovered. All the cheap oil and most of the expensive oil has been found. Now we, and the rest of the world, are draining the bottom half of the world oil barrel and are beginning to cast about for other high density energy sources to replace oil, something we should have been doing 30 years ago when the current problem was accurately predicted. We will need oil to help us build an alternative energy resource before our oil resources are totally exhausted. Have we waited too long to act?
What else is available? Wind and tidal energy can't even replace 5% of our oil needs. Geothermal energy is not widely available and is usually located in unstable geophysical areas. People are rightly afraid of radioactive contamination from nuclear power, besides the fact that it takes more energy to make, maintain and decommission a nuclear plant than it delivers in its lifetime. Cold Fusion was an illusion and Hot Fusion has been a 50 year old multi-billion dollar pipe dream that experts say will take another 50 years of research and billions more before we'll see fusion power plants, if ever. That leaves solar energy as the only remaining source of renewable energy which could be harnessed in sufficient capacity to replace oil. One way of extracting solar energy is with Solar Power Tower II devices, developed in the USA but being installed by other countries. Another way to utilize solar energy is to utilize photosynthesis. That is why, in the USA, Corn is receiving considerable attention.
Initially, Ethanol from Corn was added to gasoline in small amounts to replace toxic fuel additives used to prevent pinging. As percentages increased farmers began to see Ethanol plants as big customers for their Corn. The Ethanol Industry set up front organizations to lobby Congress for subsidies and publicize Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. Ethanol import tariffs and Federal subsidies support Ethanol production at slightly over $1 per gallon. Now that politicians have jumped on the bandwagon they are presenting an illusion that Ethanol is the answer to our energy problems. One politician had a campaign ad that suggests "corn fields may replace oil fields". One interesting aspect in the Ethanol dynamic is that demand for Ethanol has increased considerably over the last 5 years, but the price of Corn had remained essentially the same, about $2.55/Bu, for the last 50 years (but recently -6/2007- has risen as high as $4.04/Bu). Concerning the price of corn, what is interfering with the laws of supply and demand? The role of the multi-national agri-corps in annually suppressing the price of Corn just when farmers bring their product to market is a topic for another investigation.
Ethanol industry sponsored studies report that Ethanol p
The King is dead. Long live the King! Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov on January 26, 2009 - 5:16 P.M.
I quite agree with you and after having tried KDE 4.1 RC1, I decided to stay with KDE 3.5.10 at least until KDE 4.3.0 is out.
I don't really need all those new shiny buttons when simple operations become difficult. Even though theoretically it's possible to tune KDE 4 to the point where it looks and behaves like KDE 3.5.. the old one is just warmer, more responsive and simpler (yet remaining powerful).
Imagine that... another rant saying KDE4 is "not ready" for the Desktop... but, he defies his own claim that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" by using KDE 3.5.10. Do as he says but not as he does?
Yet, here I am, responding to this FUD on a 6 month old Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E laptop running Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 4.2.3, a desktop which is running fast and stable. It does everything I ask of it and more, even more than what VISTA Home Premium could do on this same machine before I replaced it with Kubuntu. A friend of mine, 78 years old, is having the same results with Kubuntu 9.04/KDE 4.2.2 on his eMachine laptop. My wife's Acer Aspire 3004Li is also running Kubuntu 9.04 and while she hates computers, she is having no trouble running Kubuntu. Windows XP frustrated her before I replaced it with Linux. My old Compaq Presario 1500 is running Kubuntu 9.04 too, and without problems. My son's Gateway m675prr laptop is running Kubuntu 9.04 without problems. I installed it on another friend's Toshiba, where it works perfectly.
Since "Linux" isn't ready for the desktop are you suggesting I immediately take Linux off these machines and replace it with an OS which is notorious for being insecure and buggy, because it IS ready for the desktop? Ya, right. rof, llllll
There is absolutely no reason to believe that science must be practiced in a "naturalistic" context. That is simply your presupposition applied before you enter the ring.
Indeed. And presupposition and personal bias in science is a practice with a long history. A practice which is now enforced with all the austerity of the Inquisition.
When Hubble first measured redshifts he noticed, and wrote, that every galaxy or object red-shifted away from Earth, no matter which direction he looked. His first thought was that the Earth was, or was near, the center of the observable Universe. He later rejected his own conclusion stating "Such conditions would imply that we occupy a unique position in the Universe... But the unwelcomed supposition of a favoured position must be avoided at all costs..... Such a favoured position is intolerable, more over, it represents a discrepancy with theory because the theory postulates homogeneity. Hubble went on to say "Therefore, in order to restore homogeneity and escape the horror of a unique position the departures from uniformity, which are introduced by the recession factors (the redshifts), must be compensated by the second term representing the effects of spacial curvature.". Edward Hubble, "The Observational Approach to Cosmology", pg 50-59.
Why introduce spacial curvature sustain homogeneity? Hubble made these assumptions to avoid the unwelcome conclusion that the Earth is near the center of the universe, and thus is special. The maps created by the 2dF Galactic Redshift Survey, and by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey do not show homogeneity. The maps, with dots representing galaxies, appear to form gigantic concentric structures centered on the point of observation. To say that any other observer, in any other galaxy, would generate the same map centered on their galaxy would be to use the assumptions of homogeneity to prove homogeneity.
The mantra is that conclusions which contradict theory must be avoided at "all costs", rather than change the theory. THAT is bias, not evidence, not fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Minerals melt and boil at various temperatures and at 2,370 C most minerals will probably break down into smaller molecules and atoms. Since Silicon dioxide (quartz) is a stable and common component of various kinds of rocks, and it has a boiling point of 2,230 C, I suspect that the surface is a sea of melted and boiling quartz and that most of the "atmosphere" is gaseous quarts, and that the "rain" is droplets of liquid quartz. Aluminum oxide melts at 2072C and boils at 2,980C, so the "ocean" is probably a mixture of the two minerals. 2,370C is enough to boil Silicon but not Aluminum. http://www.science.co.il/PTelements.asp?s=BP
IF Microsoft gets its way with their proposal.
An ISP in our area is advertising their Internet connection speed by claiming it is "Fasterizer". They hope that term will confuse the clueless into thinking that their .V92 or tier 1 DSL service is as fast as my 10Mb/s cable connection.
21st Century business is all about three things: lying, stealing and bribing Congress with campaign contributions to make those actions legal. I suspect that they are redefining decades old terms & understandings simply so they can justify a large increase it their rate structure for the same old service.
Fifteen years ago the cable and telcos bribed Congress into outlawing local communities from filling in the service gap the private sector was ignoring: a high speecd fiber optic internet connection that would be a public utility. After recieving $200M from Congress to "finish the job", they promptly pocketed the money and forgot the rest. Congress failed to include a non-performance penalty, so they had nothing to lose by just stealing the money. Had the telcos & cable companies had any ethics the average US internet connection would be 20Mb/s or more and costing less than $30/month. Can't build any multi-million dollar luxury homes in the Bahamas at those rates.
No, but it is easily added:
http://atdot.ch/scr/
bureaucratic ineptness like this suggests that it would not be run any better than the way the Health Insurance companies run the current system.
In fact, it would be worse. I can change health care providers, but if the gov runs health care changing governments would be much more difficult.
Solar panels are limited by their distance from the Sun. Double the distance and you'll get only 1/4th the power. Head to the outer planets and you'll need a large collector to collect a lot of power.
For a nuclear reactor/Sterling Engine combo, the power output of 2.3KW seems awful low. Perhaps there should be two, one to back up other and to double the power output if needed.
I saw dollar amounts listed for the various services, so that info is not redacted.
BUT ...
If I had a contract to do that work I would do everything possible to keep my identity secret to avoid the total and complete invasion of my personal life, professional life, financial info, family member and friends. The mind boggles at the damage and death that could result.
Why would anyone consider keeping that kind of information secret breaking the promise of transparency?
In a week or less?
Linus already patched it.
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=e694958388c50148389b0e9b9e9e8945cf0f1b98
He wrote it at 8:28AM and committed it at 10:57AM this morning. Expect to see it in your repositories tomorrow, if not sooner.
Ya, didn't you hear?
They discovered a massive 1.9 MILLION zombie bot farm a few weeks ago. It was in all the news ..... Oh, wait, those zombies were all Windows boxes.
Never mind.
Most people who have any talent at all for programming usually "invent" the bubble sort during their first attempt to re-arrange data in arrays, even before they read about it, so easy is the bubble sort to code.
The bubble sort is just an example of why software patents are ridiculous.
No one wants to live next door to bible bashers.
You mean "Bible thumpers". Bible bashing is what you are doing.
"I am sorry sir, your prostate cancer is not a "covered" disease. You will die of old age before the cancer kills you!" says the bureaucrat, with a copies of several scientific studies stating otherwise laying in his trash can.
On the other hand, the same reply from a corporate doctor paid to lie for their bottom line has the same effect.
bribes,,,,er,,,"campaign contributions". As soon as the right palms get enough greese on them this "issue" will go away faster than due on the morning grass.
not to use Linux or Mac.
If they do they'll get their "Air Supply cut off"... their per/unit price will jump significantly, making them uncompetitive with their competitors ...
I could go on but space is limited. Microsoft is full of dirty tricks. Just ask James Plamondon and his "Technical Evangelists (TE):
http://platformevangelism.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
http://platformevangelism.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!37F174267DC274C!155.entry
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
Or the training materials he used, which taught the "Slog" and the "Stuffed Panel":
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20071023002351958
And financial dirty tricks:
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
Here is a summary of a LOT of Microsoft's dirty tricks, and the reasons why so many "independent" corporations behave as wholly owned subsidiaries of Microsoft:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history
So, ya, it is no surprise when NVIDIA knucles under to Microsoft, otherwise their video chips would suddenly fail to work as well as those from other video chip vendors, just the way DRDOS "failed" to work as well as MSDOS when users tried to install Win3, which was one of the first of an unending examples of how a copy without ethics operates. An people were surprised that Capitalism exhibited a "flaw" in the current economic crisis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)
Mono consists of three groups of components:
1. Core components
2. Mono/Linux/GNOME development stack
3. Microsoft compatibility stack.
The Microsoft compatibility stack provides a pathway for porting Windows .NET applications to Linux. This group of components include ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and Windows.Forms, among others. As these components are not covered by ECMA standards, some of them remain subject to patent fears and concerns.
Mono's implementation of those components of the .NET stack not submitted to the ECMA for standardization has been the source of patent violation concerns for much of the life of the project. In particular, discussion has taken place about whether Microsoft could destroy the Mono project through patent suits.
The base technologies submitted to the ECMA, and therefore also the Unix/GNOME-specific parts, may be non-problematic. The concerns primarily relate to technologies developed by Microsoft on top of the .NET Framework, such as ASP.NET, ADO.NET and Windows Forms (see Non standardized namespaces), i.e. parts composing Mono's Windows compatibility stack. These technologies are today not fully implemented in Mono and not required for developing Mono-applications. Richard Stallman has claimed it may be "dangerous" to use Mono because of the possible threat of Microsoft patents.[9]
On November 2, 2006, Microsoft and Novell announced a joint agreement whereby Microsoft agreed to not sue Novell's customers for patent infringement.[10] According to Mono project leader Miguel de Icaza,[11] this agreement extends to Mono but only for Novell developers and customers. It was criticized by some members of the free software community because it violates the principles of giving equal rights to all users of a particular program...
Four?
There are a LOT more infomercial channels than that. I used to subscribe to an 80 channel cable service. One night, around 1:30AM, I counted that over 75% of those channels were broadcasting infomercials. The cable companies are double-dipping. The infomercial businesses have to pay cable to get their ads on cable, and the consumer has to pay to watch them.
I got tired of it and dropped my cable service. I got a converter for my one analog TV and and built to HD antennas as decribed on the YouTube video, They worked great! I was able to receive 16 over-the-air HD channels, which is all that are broadcast where I live. At 1:30AM half of them are off the air, and of the eight remianing one broadcasts the weather radar all night, one pumps out news, and the other six dispense infomercials. That's still 75%, but I don't have to pay for them or watch them.
After I dropped my cable tv I purchased just a 10Mb/s Internet connection with another ISP. When I have an itch to watch something I usually use HULU. I pay $10/y for ad free access to the wunderground.com weather site, which isn't bad. If I had to pay $10/y for access to, say, the Science Channel, History Channel, Discovery Channel, NASA channel and the Military Channel, for a total of $50/y, that wouldn't be too bad. It would sure beat the $129/mo I was paying RoadRunner for a 7Mb/s Internet connection and 80 channels, most of which I didn't watch.
I realize that exact figures don't really change your argument much but market share figures are something that have long been slippery. The more appropriate figures, in my opinion, put Windows at about 88%, Mac at 9.7 and Linux around 1%.
"Appropriate"? Only if you enjoyed the Kool-Aid. The marketshare.hitLink site is owned by NetApplications, whose business model was selling rebranded Windows executables to track Windows visits to Windows websites. No bias there, eh?
http://blog.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/05/1-linux-market.html
"Matt Assay said it was at 2.02%
ZDNet reported on Feb 24th, 2004 http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=5334 that the 2003 Linux desktop market share hit 3.2% and expected it to hit 6% by 2007.
In 2005 they reported that the 2004 saw the Linux desktop at 4%.
I believe that the all the ZDNet figures were spot on. If anything, the Linux desktop market share has continued to increase and is probably currently at 8-10% and rising. Dell and the other PC OEMs wouldn't have invested in selling Linux pre-installed if it appealed only to less than 1% of the desktop market.
It is quite obvious that NetApplications latest "report" is merely Microsoft's continuing attempt to control the news about Linux's success in replacing Windows on the desktop...."
The best evidence that the NetApplications "report" is fake is from Ballmer himself. In a Feb, 2009 presentation he displayed a graph showing the percentages of desktop marketshare for Windows, Linux and Apple. HE puts the Linux pie slice at around 10%, and slightly larger than Apple's.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple
Ballmer can't listen to his own PR pulp. He has to plan using real data. Fortunately, he let it leak.
That's total nonsense.
"Bloat" suggests unnecessary code, often called "code bloat". One person's "bloat" is another person's indispensable feature.
The more functions and capabilities a package has the larger its code base will be.
A better definition of "bloat" is a section of code that none of the developers know what it's for, and removing it causes instability. Windows is the dictionary reference for bloat because a lots of its code base is ambiguous, and even Microsoft agrees, but only because it was part of their campaign to get people to move to VISTA.
http://apcmag.com/microsoft_agrees_windows_is_a_really_large_bloated_operating_system.htm
"Niklaus Wirth has summed up the situation in Wirth's Law, which states that software speed is decreasing more quickly than hardware speed is increasing." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
I agree.
KOffice 2.0 is an excellent effort for a *.0 release.
I installed it from the Kubuntu 9.04 repositories without any problems.
However, it still has some show stopping bugs. On my laptop KWord cannot open a txt file but it has no trouble with ODT files. Krita can't open any file.
I played with it for a while and then removed it.
After I removed it I noticed that the menu items for the major components were not removed, so I had to remove them manually.
Some research and calculations I did in 2005 ...
Replace oil fields with Corn fields?
Dr. Bartlett, retired Univ. of Colorado Physics professor, wrote that "Farming is merely a way of using land to convert oil into food". People either have forgotten or never realized the food IS energy. It takes 7 TIMES more petroleum energy to put a slice of bread on your breakfast table than you get by eating it. And, oil is used for many other things besides transportation. How long would squirrels survive if they spent more energy collecting nuts than they get from eating them? We are the squirrels, and we are about to find out.
One measure of how much oil we may still be able to find is the "Barrels Per Foot Drilled" metric. In 1946 oil companies recovered 45 barrels of oil for each foot they drilled. That metric, which is an aggregate measurement, has been showing a steady decline since 1946. It was obvious that at some time in the future it would take the same amount of energy to drill a well as the energy that is in the NEW oil produced by that well -- the "break-even" point. That time is now. The "Barrels Per Foot" value crossed below the break-even point in 2005. During the last 10 years only 38 billion barrels of oil have been discovered. All the cheap oil and most of the expensive oil has been found. Now we, and the rest of the world, are draining the bottom half of the world oil barrel and are beginning to cast about for other high density energy sources to replace oil, something we should have been doing 30 years ago when the current problem was accurately predicted. We will need oil to help us build an alternative energy resource before our oil resources are totally exhausted. Have we waited too long to act?
What else is available? Wind and tidal energy can't even replace 5% of our oil needs. Geothermal energy is not widely available and is usually located in unstable geophysical areas. People are rightly afraid of radioactive contamination from nuclear power, besides the fact that it takes more energy to make, maintain and decommission a nuclear plant than it delivers in its lifetime. Cold Fusion was an illusion and Hot Fusion has been a 50 year old multi-billion dollar pipe dream that experts say will take another 50 years of research and billions more before we'll see fusion power plants, if ever. That leaves solar energy as the only remaining source of renewable energy which could be harnessed in sufficient capacity to replace oil. One way of extracting solar energy is with Solar Power Tower II devices, developed in the USA but being installed by other countries. Another way to utilize solar energy is to utilize photosynthesis. That is why, in the USA, Corn is receiving considerable attention.
Initially, Ethanol from Corn was added to gasoline in small amounts to replace toxic fuel additives used to prevent pinging. As percentages increased farmers began to see Ethanol plants as big customers for their Corn. The Ethanol Industry set up front organizations to lobby Congress for subsidies and publicize Ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. Ethanol import tariffs and Federal subsidies support Ethanol production at slightly over $1 per gallon. Now that politicians have jumped on the bandwagon they are presenting an illusion that Ethanol is the answer to our energy problems. One politician had a campaign ad that suggests "corn fields may replace oil fields". One interesting aspect in the Ethanol dynamic is that demand for Ethanol has increased considerably over the last 5 years, but the price of Corn had remained essentially the same, about $2.55/Bu, for the last 50 years (but recently -6/2007- has risen as high as $4.04/Bu). Concerning the price of corn, what is interfering with the laws of supply and demand? The role of the multi-national agri-corps in annually suppressing the price of Corn just when farmers bring their product to market is a topic for another investigation.
Ethanol industry sponsored studies report that Ethanol p
http://blogs.computerworld.com/what_do_kde_4_2_and_windows_7_have_in_common#comment-127389
The King is dead. Long live the King!
Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov on January 26, 2009 - 5:16 P.M.
I quite agree with you and after having tried KDE 4.1 RC1, I decided to stay with KDE 3.5.10 at least until KDE 4.3.0 is out.
I don't really need all those new shiny buttons when simple operations become difficult. Even though theoretically it's possible to tune KDE 4 to the point where it looks and behaves like KDE 3.5 .. the old one is just warmer, more responsive and simpler (yet remaining powerful).
Imagine that... another rant saying KDE4 is "not ready" for the Desktop... but, he defies his own claim that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" by using KDE 3.5.10. Do as he says but not as he does?
Yet, here I am, responding to this FUD on a 6 month old Sony VAIO VGN-FW140E laptop running Kubuntu 9.04 with KDE 4.2.3, a desktop which is running fast and stable. It does everything I ask of it and more, even more than what VISTA Home Premium could do on this same machine before I replaced it with Kubuntu. A friend of mine, 78 years old, is having the same results with Kubuntu 9.04/KDE 4.2.2 on his eMachine laptop. My wife's Acer Aspire 3004Li is also running Kubuntu 9.04 and while she hates computers, she is having no trouble running Kubuntu. Windows XP frustrated her before I replaced it with Linux. My old Compaq Presario 1500 is running Kubuntu 9.04 too, and without problems. My son's Gateway m675prr laptop is running Kubuntu 9.04 without problems. I installed it on another friend's Toshiba, where it works perfectly.
Since "Linux" isn't ready for the desktop are you suggesting I immediately take Linux off these machines and replace it with an OS which is notorious for being insecure and buggy, because it IS ready for the desktop? Ya, right. rof, llllll
There is absolutely no reason to believe that science must be practiced in a "naturalistic" context. That is simply your presupposition applied before you enter the ring.
Indeed. And presupposition and personal bias in science is a practice with a long history. A practice which is now enforced with all the austerity of the Inquisition.
When Hubble first measured redshifts he noticed, and wrote, that every galaxy or object red-shifted away from Earth, no matter which direction he looked. His first thought was that the Earth was, or was near, the center of the observable Universe. He later rejected his own conclusion stating "Such conditions would imply that we occupy a unique position in the Universe... But the unwelcomed supposition of a favoured position must be avoided at all costs..... Such a favoured position is intolerable, more over, it represents a discrepancy with theory because the theory postulates homogeneity. Hubble went on to say "Therefore, in order to restore homogeneity and escape the horror of a unique position the departures from uniformity, which are introduced by the recession factors (the redshifts), must be compensated by the second term representing the effects of spacial curvature.". Edward Hubble, "The Observational Approach to Cosmology", pg 50-59.
Why introduce spacial curvature sustain homogeneity? Hubble made these assumptions to avoid the unwelcome conclusion that the Earth is near the center of the universe, and thus is special. The maps created by the 2dF Galactic Redshift Survey, and by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey do not show homogeneity. The maps, with dots representing galaxies, appear to form gigantic concentric structures centered on the point of observation. To say that any other observer, in any other galaxy, would generate the same map centered on their galaxy would be to use the assumptions of homogeneity to prove homogeneity.
The mantra is that conclusions which contradict theory must be avoided at "all costs", rather than change the theory. THAT is bias, not evidence, not fact.
Has a war ever been won by not fighting back or just surrendering?
Dell's relation to Microsoft?
false advertising? "VISTA Ready" - check...
misleading representation? "Fastest, most secure OS ever" - check ....
unfair competition? Ad rebates, illegal secret contracts, NVidia support - check....
Nothing is different. The corporations own the courts which enforce the laws they bribed Congress to get passed.