Bear in mind that relationships between organizations have a way of evolving into equilibrium. When circumstances suddenly change, as with the appearance of a new organism in an ecosystem, things can take swing around wildly before they settle into a stable pattern. Some examples:
- Invasive species typically turn isolated ecosystems (like islands) upside down.
- Diseases in humans usually become less virulent over time because it doesn't pay to kill a host. For example, when it first appeared in European society - presumably after contact with human populations in the New World that had long been isolated - syphilis was a disease with symptoms similar to the flesh-eating-bacteria horrors we occasionally read about in the news. After a century or so, it simmered down into it's slow and lingering form. The majority of human diseases are of this time, with only a relative few being maladapted enough to be quick killers.
- The wrong bacteria in the wrong part of your internal ecosystem (gut, bloodstream, etc) can wreak havoc. Say, staph-induced meningitis, or your guts after a visit to Taco Bell.
Of course, once you consider the extremely large distances between any two stars it is easy to come to the conclusion that all this life will not come in contact with each other (the intelligent life, that is).
Oops, some anthropocentricity of your own there. Exploration of the galaxy over a timescale of millions of years only seems prohibitive from the point of view of a civilization comprised of many individual mortal creatures with a life span of a few decades - like our current one. For civilizations without such limitations - perhaps like ours a few thousand years from now - this would not present a problem.
And it's really amazing how the Earth's gravity is the perfect amount to be compatible with human legs! What are the chances of that!? Like, a gazillion to one!
I'm one of those non-geek users who would like to switch to Linux completely just to support the open-source/free software movement. Once every couple of years I download whatever Linux distro seems to be the most hands-off and noob-friendly to give it a shot. Ubuntu is the most recent. I was seriously chuffed to see it run right off the CD, but I never ended up installing it. Know why? Because the disk partitioning utility is about as clear as mud - and apparently you can't install Ubuntu without creating a partition for it. I have a brand new high-end laptop. It's got two hard drives, one of which is partitioned (creating a 10GB factory-recovery drive). I took one look at that utility, and said no way. Here's why:
- It wasn't clear which drive was which, since there was no data about how much free/used space was on each. - It wasn't clear which one was partitioned (I would have had to go back into Windows to check which of the drives the recovery partition was on). - It wasn't clear what would happen to any existing data on any of the drives if a new Linux partition was created.
So given that I couldn't tell which drive was which, where the partitions were, or what would happen to my data if I made a new partition, I wasn't about to install Ubuntu.
So there you go. Stopped before I even got started. I was even more disappointed to find that the latest Ubuntu how-to book is totally unhelpful. The section on the partitioning utility was basically just useless screenshot captions: "This is the partitioning utility screen. This is where you enter how big of a partition you want." No answers to the real questions. Which drive is which? What will happen to my existing data when I make a new partition? If I have two drives and want to dual-boot, should they be on the same or different drives?
None of this would matter if Ubuntu were just for geeks. But Ubuntu is supposed to be this massive effort to make Linux accessible to noobs like me. Utter and complete failure.
My aunt just got a new laptop with vista installed. I just got a new laptop too, but with XP. I made that choice after spending a few hours with Vista and being completely unconvinced of the one thing I'd heard about it that made me consider adopting: that it was _different_ than XP. I'd heard all of Microsoft's hype about how the OS was being rewritten from the ground up, that it was the first totally new Windows in years. Well I call utter and complete bulls*t on that claim.
It's not that Vista doesn't have a new enough look and feel, or that it doesn't have some nice shiny new bells and whistles. It's that it still has all of XP's crappy baggage, and many of the 'improvements' like the new start menu that lists all programs in a big drop-down list that runs off screen and requires scrolling to access I actually find cumbersome and unintuitive. By baggage, for example, I mean the crappy 2D rendering that has plagued Windows from the start. How HARD is it to get the OS to sync vertically with the monitor's refresh rate so that windows don't flicker and tear when you drag them around? It's certainly not impossible, as Mac's OSs have shown for years. If Vista is 'All New!' then why does the desktop periodically blink and refresh all it's icons exactly like XP and 2000 and 98? Why is there a flicker of an hourglass (oh, now shining circle, excuse me) for a split second when you right click? That garbage should be history if the OS and it's GUI were really rewritten from the ground up.
Vista being new and improved is total BS from a GRAPHICAL-user-interface point of view. Maybe they fixed networking and security issues, I don't know, but they sure as hell didn't do anything special with the 2D or even 3D graphics. The GUIs in many DX9 games are smoother. What happened to Vista running in native DX10? What a bunch of crap. Vista is basically just a new skin over XP. My nVidia graphics card's nView features can do transparencies and stuff in XP almost as well, and that really is just a skin.
And did I mention bugs and crashes? I had a hell of time installing a stock-standard HP printer, for example. Didn't work for the first two ports I plugged it into, but then started working randomly in a third. Is it in the list of installed printers? Is it, bogroll. And my aunt got some weird spyware or worm that I went over to clean out. Windows Defender threw a fit with it, so I ran AdAware. The result? Windows Explorer got completely borked. And I mean COMPLETELY. From that point forward Windows Explorer would crash and restart every 6-7 seconds. Even in Safe Mode. How do you like them apples? I had to us Internet Explorer to navigate through the file system to save some photos and videos before doing a complete recovery from the ghosted image on the recovery drive. And bear in mind this happened while running nice a light AVG antivirus. I can't imagine what would have happened if I hadn't removed all 15,000 components of Norton Internet And-Suck-My-Ass Security.
Two thumbs down for Vista - one for actual performance and one for sheer disappointment - in my opinion.
If you've got people computer-savvy enough to get onto an irc server (they still have those?) but who are all asking the same "mundane, spoon-feed" FAQs, then that would seem to be overwhelmingly indicative of Ubuntu's functional shortcomings. Like Steve Jobs says, if something doesn't work exactly the way you expect it to then it is essentially broken. Sounds to me like Ubuntu fails that test pretty hard if an obscure chat room on a hopelessly outdated IM system is "drowned" with the same basic questions. Of course this point would be moot if Ubuntu was like other specialized Linux distros, but it isn't. Ubuntu's stated primary mission is to provide a user friendly, easy to install, hands-off Linux desktop environment that offers a genuine alternative to MS Windows for the mass-market computer user. Sounds to me like they have a long way go, and my guess is that the attitude of 7EET H4x0rz like yourself is much more of a hindrance than a help.
Staggering amounts of money are spent every year on things that don't put food in people's bellies and roofs over their heads, but as long as that's going to happen I'd prefer it go to something inspiring like putting men on the moon and Mars rather than, say, the war on Iraq, unconstitutional wiretaps, or Halliburton 'rebuilding' contracts.
The article says it can be erased and reused within 10 minutes. Everything sounds great, except the part where it automatically and uncontrollably erases itself after a fixed period of time.
Paper whose ink was permanent until erased would be much more useful.
-Paper is made from trees grown for the explicit purpose of making paper, and on the timescale on which things biodegrade is one of the first things to return safely to its original state.
The article mentions resonant frequencies, and I'm suddenly reminded of a certain visor-wearing Starfleet officer always blaming the phase-inducers for some damn thing to do with resonant frequencies...
I just don't get this whole thing about supplying cheap computers to developing countries. It probably just gets a lot of press on the internet because it's something geeks can relate to a little better than starvation, typhoid and malaria. But anyone who's ever actually been outside of a developed country knows that cheap computers are a hell of a long way down the list of needful things. When you've got kids dying by the thousands of... diarrhea... then things like clean water, decent food, and sanitation are a slightly higher priority. And unless these $100 laptops and $250 desktops "for developing countries" are solar powered, it might be an idea to do a little work on, say, power infrastructure first, mmm?
I know these computer people making this stuff can't be stupid, right? I guess that means they're just insane.
I'll be the first to point out how ignorant I am when it comes to computer-based security, but it seems to me that it will always be easier to mess with software than with hardware. So I figure it would be best to make the hardware as simple and tamper proof as possible, hence a mechanical security solution.
It could be as simple as a super-tough box with pull-down punch levers that stamp a whole of a specific shape out of a card. There's no mistaken a circular whole for a square or a triangular one. If the device is simple enough, it wouldn't be possible to screw with.
Then the only issues are: 1) whether people can pull the right 'lever' (always a problem, but again best addressed with big mechanical solutions - no butterfly ballots please, but big levers with 6" circular handles with the candidates name and photograph printed on); and 2) security in counting the ballots (again, a simple mechanical or electrical counter is harder to mess with than a computer-based one, and since even the electronic voting machines have a 'paper trail' physical counting is still a requirement if only as a fallback).
My wife and I were actually looking at their biological anthropology programs, which are rumoured to be quite good. Obviously, we will no longer continue to do so. This moron is so far off base, it's positively astonishing. There won't be anything alive on earth remotely similar to sexually reproducing homo sapiens in 3006, let alone in 100,006.
I assume you're being sarcastic, and that you don't actually think that blowing up aliens is less disturbing that beating someone with a bat, in which case you make my point very well for me: there IS no empirical proof either way. That is precisely what makes the issue impossible to quantify, and which is why it is therefore a serious challenge for the courts.
This Bully issue is interesting because it highlights the salient point so often missed by those who criticise violence in entertainment: context. To a thinking person, it is obvious that entertainment involving beating a schoolmate bloody with a bat is more disturbing than entertainment involving a bodybuilder blowing up aliens with a bazooka, despite the fact that - objectively at least - murder is worse than assault. The context being so much closer to home - a kid with a bat is much nearer to actual reality than a bodybuilder blowing up aliens - is where the disturbance factor comes in, and it's pretty much impossible to quantify closeness-to-home realism which makes it a challenge for the courts.
Well I hope they toss out Thunderbird's word processing and replace it with Eudora's. Ack, I have lost count of how many bug reports I've submitted about the crapiness of Thunderbird's text editor. Sheesh. I don't use Outlook because of the virus/worm issue, but it's sure got Thunderbird's ass kicked for text editing quality.
The vast majority of people find paper easier to read than any kind of VDU, regardless of age group. Part of this is, as other responses have pointed out, that paper is higher-res than screens. But it is also because paper is not an active light source, and human eyes are better equiped to perform close inspections of reflected rather than emitted light. Also relevant is the fact that VDUs are in a fixed position, forcing us to move our heads and bodies in order to reposition our viewpoint. This is also less comfortable for us than being able to manipulate the object we're inspecting itself - think of whether it is easier to read a piece of paper stuck to a bulletin board or one you're holding in your hand. Furthermore, the position of VDUs forces us to look forward rather than down, which is also less 'natural' and therefore inherently less comfortable for inspection at close range.
Maybe when we have VDUs that display at 2500dpi and refresh at 1Khz that are the same size and weight as a piece of paper, they will be as comfortable to look at, but otherwise no: we simply aren't built to be comfortable staring at flickering 72dpi computer monitors. Just look at the continued (indeed, growing) popularity of printed matter - books, magazines, and newspapers - for proof.
All the more reason for exams to evaluate understanding rather than knowledge. My university experience at Arizona State was crap because every test, exam and quiz was multiple choice. An 'A' in a class like Human Sexual Behavior meant memorizing names and dates. An 'A' in Latin American History meant memorizing names and dates. An 'A' in Political Economy meant memorizing names and dates. All the rote garbage was like something out of the Dark Ages. The way to test understanding is by making students explain concepts in their own words. That's where open-book exams with long answers and essays are far superior, and where 'cheating' by using references for the specific details is irrelevant.
There doesn't seem so much of a crack in any edifice as much as there's ultimately a saturation of the marketplace. At some point, pretty much everyone who wants an iPod gets one, and by now that's pretty much done (anyone hear any recent "I want an iPod" whines from anyone?).
You mean there's a finite market for any given electronic device? No way...
Seriously, you nailed it with this single paragraph. That's it, end of story. Move along. Move along.
Crazy as it sounds, I solve this problem with both my film and digital cameras using an amazingly sophisticated trick called bracketing.
Seriously. With bracketing you simply take multiple shots at different exposures in quick succession. Most modern cameras with computer controls offer automated bracketing functions. And for compositing afterwards there's a nifty program called Photoshop...
Irrespective of its pros and cons, this just highlights the fact that the lines are blurring between gaming and traditional film and television entertainment.
That whizzing sound you just heard was my point zipping right over your head.
This guy is complaining about a problem that plagues all of academia. FYI, academia includes a slightly broader range of subjects than just "Artificial Intelligence, Security, Compilers, Theory, Distributed Systems, Formal Methods, Programming Languages, [and] Databases." You know, like physics, biology, geology, English literature, ethnomusicology, and a few others...
crucial in improving our education systems and preparing our younger generations
Sounds like he had it right: OUR education sustems and OUR younger generations. But as I understand it, the CM1 is targeting children in developing countries. While that's grand, I'm nevertheless a firm believer that when it comes to a child's development having access to food and water and not dying of diarrhea is more important than having access to a computer.
I just wish all the big brains at MIT and elsewhere who've put such an enormous amount of time and effort into this project had instead put it into a device or infrastructure system that could provide for the clean water and power needs of the same communities their $140 laptop is targeting. In my opinion, that would do a lot more good.
This reminds me of something I heard about in Scotland, where power companies were providing broadband via the existing power grid. Since the power companies have laid cable to virtually every home, there was no need for massive investment in infrastructure. I'm not sure what happened. Anyone know why US power companies haven't entered the broadband market?
Slashdot Mirror
- Invasive species typically turn isolated ecosystems (like islands) upside down.
- Diseases in humans usually become less virulent over time because it doesn't pay to kill a host. For example, when it first appeared in European society - presumably after contact with human populations in the New World that had long been isolated - syphilis was a disease with symptoms similar to the flesh-eating-bacteria horrors we occasionally read about in the news. After a century or so, it simmered down into it's slow and lingering form. The majority of human diseases are of this time, with only a relative few being maladapted enough to be quick killers.
- The wrong bacteria in the wrong part of your internal ecosystem (gut, bloodstream, etc) can wreak havoc. Say, staph-induced meningitis, or your guts after a visit to Taco Bell.
Oops, some anthropocentricity of your own there. Exploration of the galaxy over a timescale of millions of years only seems prohibitive from the point of view of a civilization comprised of many individual mortal creatures with a life span of a few decades - like our current one. For civilizations without such limitations - perhaps like ours a few thousand years from now - this would not present a problem.
And it's really amazing how the Earth's gravity is the perfect amount to be compatible with human legs! What are the chances of that!? Like, a gazillion to one!
See the problem with your argument?
I'm one of those non-geek users who would like to switch to Linux completely just to support the open-source/free software movement. Once every couple of years I download whatever Linux distro seems to be the most hands-off and noob-friendly to give it a shot. Ubuntu is the most recent. I was seriously chuffed to see it run right off the CD, but I never ended up installing it. Know why? Because the disk partitioning utility is about as clear as mud - and apparently you can't install Ubuntu without creating a partition for it. I have a brand new high-end laptop. It's got two hard drives, one of which is partitioned (creating a 10GB factory-recovery drive). I took one look at that utility, and said no way. Here's why:
- It wasn't clear which drive was which, since there was no data about how much free/used space was on each.
- It wasn't clear which one was partitioned (I would have had to go back into Windows to check which of the drives the recovery partition was on).
- It wasn't clear what would happen to any existing data on any of the drives if a new Linux partition was created.
So given that I couldn't tell which drive was which, where the partitions were, or what would happen to my data if I made a new partition, I wasn't about to install Ubuntu.
So there you go. Stopped before I even got started. I was even more disappointed to find that the latest Ubuntu how-to book is totally unhelpful. The section on the partitioning utility was basically just useless screenshot captions: "This is the partitioning utility screen. This is where you enter how big of a partition you want." No answers to the real questions. Which drive is which? What will happen to my existing data when I make a new partition? If I have two drives and want to dual-boot, should they be on the same or different drives?
None of this would matter if Ubuntu were just for geeks. But Ubuntu is supposed to be this massive effort to make Linux accessible to noobs like me. Utter and complete failure.
It's not that Vista doesn't have a new enough look and feel, or that it doesn't have some nice shiny new bells and whistles. It's that it still has all of XP's crappy baggage, and many of the 'improvements' like the new start menu that lists all programs in a big drop-down list that runs off screen and requires scrolling to access I actually find cumbersome and unintuitive. By baggage, for example, I mean the crappy 2D rendering that has plagued Windows from the start. How HARD is it to get the OS to sync vertically with the monitor's refresh rate so that windows don't flicker and tear when you drag them around? It's certainly not impossible, as Mac's OSs have shown for years. If Vista is 'All New!' then why does the desktop periodically blink and refresh all it's icons exactly like XP and 2000 and 98? Why is there a flicker of an hourglass (oh, now shining circle, excuse me) for a split second when you right click? That garbage should be history if the OS and it's GUI were really rewritten from the ground up.
Vista being new and improved is total BS from a GRAPHICAL-user-interface point of view. Maybe they fixed networking and security issues, I don't know, but they sure as hell didn't do anything special with the 2D or even 3D graphics. The GUIs in many DX9 games are smoother. What happened to Vista running in native DX10? What a bunch of crap. Vista is basically just a new skin over XP. My nVidia graphics card's nView features can do transparencies and stuff in XP almost as well, and that really is just a skin.
And did I mention bugs and crashes? I had a hell of time installing a stock-standard HP printer, for example. Didn't work for the first two ports I plugged it into, but then started working randomly in a third. Is it in the list of installed printers? Is it, bogroll. And my aunt got some weird spyware or worm that I went over to clean out. Windows Defender threw a fit with it, so I ran AdAware. The result? Windows Explorer got completely borked. And I mean COMPLETELY. From that point forward Windows Explorer would crash and restart every 6-7 seconds. Even in Safe Mode. How do you like them apples? I had to us Internet Explorer to navigate through the file system to save some photos and videos before doing a complete recovery from the ghosted image on the recovery drive. And bear in mind this happened while running nice a light AVG antivirus. I can't imagine what would have happened if I hadn't removed all 15,000 components of Norton Internet And-Suck-My-Ass Security.
Two thumbs down for Vista - one for actual performance and one for sheer disappointment - in my opinion.
If you've got people computer-savvy enough to get onto an irc server (they still have those?) but who are all asking the same "mundane, spoon-feed" FAQs, then that would seem to be overwhelmingly indicative of Ubuntu's functional shortcomings. Like Steve Jobs says, if something doesn't work exactly the way you expect it to then it is essentially broken. Sounds to me like Ubuntu fails that test pretty hard if an obscure chat room on a hopelessly outdated IM system is "drowned" with the same basic questions. Of course this point would be moot if Ubuntu was like other specialized Linux distros, but it isn't. Ubuntu's stated primary mission is to provide a user friendly, easy to install, hands-off Linux desktop environment that offers a genuine alternative to MS Windows for the mass-market computer user. Sounds to me like they have a long way go, and my guess is that the attitude of 7EET H4x0rz like yourself is much more of a hindrance than a help.
Staggering amounts of money are spent every year on things that don't put food in people's bellies and roofs over their heads, but as long as that's going to happen I'd prefer it go to something inspiring like putting men on the moon and Mars rather than, say, the war on Iraq, unconstitutional wiretaps, or Halliburton 'rebuilding' contracts.
Paper whose ink was permanent until erased would be much more useful.
And paper is such a clean industry too.
The article mentions resonant frequencies, and I'm suddenly reminded of a certain visor-wearing Starfleet officer always blaming the phase-inducers for some damn thing to do with resonant frequencies...
I know these computer people making this stuff can't be stupid, right? I guess that means they're just insane.
It could be as simple as a super-tough box with pull-down punch levers that stamp a whole of a specific shape out of a card. There's no mistaken a circular whole for a square or a triangular one. If the device is simple enough, it wouldn't be possible to screw with.
Then the only issues are: 1) whether people can pull the right 'lever' (always a problem, but again best addressed with big mechanical solutions - no butterfly ballots please, but big levers with 6" circular handles with the candidates name and photograph printed on); and 2) security in counting the ballots (again, a simple mechanical or electrical counter is harder to mess with than a computer-based one, and since even the electronic voting machines have a 'paper trail' physical counting is still a requirement if only as a fallback).
Well, that's how I would solve it anyway.
My wife and I were actually looking at their biological anthropology programs, which are rumoured to be quite good. Obviously, we will no longer continue to do so. This moron is so far off base, it's positively astonishing. There won't be anything alive on earth remotely similar to sexually reproducing homo sapiens in 3006, let alone in 100,006.
I assume you're being sarcastic, and that you don't actually think that blowing up aliens is less disturbing that beating someone with a bat, in which case you make my point very well for me: there IS no empirical proof either way. That is precisely what makes the issue impossible to quantify, and which is why it is therefore a serious challenge for the courts.
This Bully issue is interesting because it highlights the salient point so often missed by those who criticise violence in entertainment: context. To a thinking person, it is obvious that entertainment involving beating a schoolmate bloody with a bat is more disturbing than entertainment involving a bodybuilder blowing up aliens with a bazooka, despite the fact that - objectively at least - murder is worse than assault. The context being so much closer to home - a kid with a bat is much nearer to actual reality than a bodybuilder blowing up aliens - is where the disturbance factor comes in, and it's pretty much impossible to quantify closeness-to-home realism which makes it a challenge for the courts.
Well I hope they toss out Thunderbird's word processing and replace it with Eudora's. Ack, I have lost count of how many bug reports I've submitted about the crapiness of Thunderbird's text editor. Sheesh. I don't use Outlook because of the virus/worm issue, but it's sure got Thunderbird's ass kicked for text editing quality.
Maybe when we have VDUs that display at 2500dpi and refresh at 1Khz that are the same size and weight as a piece of paper, they will be as comfortable to look at, but otherwise no: we simply aren't built to be comfortable staring at flickering 72dpi computer monitors. Just look at the continued (indeed, growing) popularity of printed matter - books, magazines, and newspapers - for proof.
All the more reason for exams to evaluate understanding rather than knowledge. My university experience at Arizona State was crap because every test, exam and quiz was multiple choice. An 'A' in a class like Human Sexual Behavior meant memorizing names and dates. An 'A' in Latin American History meant memorizing names and dates. An 'A' in Political Economy meant memorizing names and dates. All the rote garbage was like something out of the Dark Ages. The way to test understanding is by making students explain concepts in their own words. That's where open-book exams with long answers and essays are far superior, and where 'cheating' by using references for the specific details is irrelevant.
You mean there's a finite market for any given electronic device? No way...
Seriously, you nailed it with this single paragraph. That's it, end of story. Move along. Move along.
Seriously. With bracketing you simply take multiple shots at different exposures in quick succession. Most modern cameras with computer controls offer automated bracketing functions. And for compositing afterwards there's a nifty program called Photoshop...
Irrespective of its pros and cons, this just highlights the fact that the lines are blurring between gaming and traditional film and television entertainment.
This guy is complaining about a problem that plagues all of academia. FYI, academia includes a slightly broader range of subjects than just "Artificial Intelligence, Security, Compilers, Theory, Distributed Systems, Formal Methods, Programming Languages, [and] Databases." You know, like physics, biology, geology, English literature, ethnomusicology, and a few others...
And this guy is changing to which academic field where things are different?
Sounds like he had it right: OUR education sustems and OUR younger generations. But as I understand it, the CM1 is targeting children in developing countries. While that's grand, I'm nevertheless a firm believer that when it comes to a child's development having access to food and water and not dying of diarrhea is more important than having access to a computer.
I just wish all the big brains at MIT and elsewhere who've put such an enormous amount of time and effort into this project had instead put it into a device or infrastructure system that could provide for the clean water and power needs of the same communities their $140 laptop is targeting. In my opinion, that would do a lot more good.
This reminds me of something I heard about in Scotland, where power companies were providing broadband via the existing power grid. Since the power companies have laid cable to virtually every home, there was no need for massive investment in infrastructure. I'm not sure what happened. Anyone know why US power companies haven't entered the broadband market?