Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
Nevertheless, KWord's inability to export to MS Word format is a dealbreaker... so I reluctantly installed AbiWord
Abiword doesn't really export to doc either, they just save as rtf and give it a.doc extension (see here. KWord can easily save to rtf, and even lists it as "RTF Document (Microsoft Word Compatible)" in the save-as dialog. Maybe you can request that the developers add an option to automatically save as rtf with a doc extension, just like Abiword, although I don't personally consider having to change a document extension manually a "dealbreaker."
How about a diskless workstation, that isn't going to have ANY data left after power loss, regardless of file system?
Uh, if it's a diskless workstation, what exactly are you formatting with XFS or Reiser? How is a diskless workstation at all relevant in a discussion about the merits of various filesystems?
I like stable - it is justly named. Please, focus on a new stable release and drop the interproject bickering.
And how are they supposed to maintain a "stable" release when they are not allowed to backport security fixes? This issue is about more than just the copyrighted logos you know.
Metal, properly smelted and what have you, does not weaken with age unless coroded or put under significant stress.
Haven't you ever heard of fatigue? Besides, "metal" is a pretty useless term here, do you mean steel, aluminum, titanium, beryllium, magnesium, etc.? What alloy? All of these have very different properties. There are also thermal cycling issues (as the craft travels from shadow to sun). I believe that there can also issues related to using materials in a vacuum and exposing them to radiation. To sum up, material design and selection for space applications is not nearly as simple as you are claiming.
I don't know if CrossOver gives you better security than real Windows (and I'm convinced I'll never know), but it's just possible.
Since Wine runs in userland, it is definitely more secure than Windows, especially if you usually run Windows as Admin. Of course, it is probably still possible to run many viruses and trojans, but once you kill Wine they will stop as well.
In which case those patents are invalid. Previously published inventions are not eligible for patent protection.
And how much would it cost to prove that in court? It's not like you can just wave your prior art at the USPTO and they'll automatically invalidate the patent.
Best radar systems in the world hey? I don't suppose you have heard of JORN, developed in Australia? It can detect stealth aircraft over 3000km away, but i'm sure lockheed must have something better right?
From the wikipedia entry on JORN:
It was built by RLM Management [1], then in Burwood East in Melbourne, in partnership with Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Lockheed Martin, Telstra, BAE and Tenix Defence Systems.
The permissions system means that a common virus could damage a user's home directory, but the system for the most part would remain unaffected, including other users.
In reality, this is not an important distinction for home users. I don't know about you, but I don't care a whole lot about by system, I can re-install everything without too much trouble. Replacing years of digital family photograghs, financial records, etc. in my home directory? Impossible. This is why I backup my home directly regularly, but don't bother with the system.
I don't think it's a very valid comparison. Gasoline is readily available at every other street corner in most of the world, of course you are going to see much worse accidents, especially in poor countries with inadequate safety provisions. If hydrogen ever gets the same penetration, will the magnitude of the accidents be the same, worse, or better? This depends in large part on the hydrogen transportation mechanism chosen, but is still very much an open question. At least with the current liquid fuels, the danger are well known, and generally well contained and managed.
Of course, I completely agree with you that hydrogen is a total waste of time and a huge unnecessary expense, and basically a really crap idea for vehicular transportation (but a good idea for replacing batteries in many other applications, such as personal electronic devices). Personally, my vote is for biofuels, I really hope the government puts more money and effort towards this instead of some ridiculous "hydrogen economy."
I take it you've never heard of Pascal's wager? I think people should spend a bit more time reading books and a bit less time flaming others on slashdot.
Exactly what is your point? Pascal's wager has absolutely nothing to do with logical thought. Basing your determination of what is "true" on how the outcome personally benefits or harms you is a particularly poor way of determining truth. This is the same as deciding that global warming or the energy crisis couldn't possibly be happening, since it would be bad for us if it did. In addition, Pascal's wager is fundamentally flawed, it assumes there is only a binary decision (usually, Christian God vs everything else). In reality, there are about 5000 or so different deities to choose from, with more cropping up all the time. In order to follow Pascal's wager to its logical conclusion, you should believe in the religion with the absolute worst hell for unbelievers, and the absolute best heaven for the faithful. Give me five minutes and I'll think something up, I look forward to having you as a faithful disciple.:)
-- current energy use, especially in the industrialised countries, is not sustainable anyway, whatever the energy source.
So what that page is really proposing drastic cutbacks in per-capita energy usage, not that biofuels can be used as a substitute for fossil fuels.
That's not what the page is proposing. They say that current energy use is not sustainable (which is a fact), biofuels (or hydrogen) are not a silver bullet which will change this. Actually, hydrogen doesn't even factor into this, since it is net energy negative, it actually makes the energy crisis worse. At least biofuels help the situation. What the page is really proposing is a combination of efforts, i.e. replacing unsustainable fossil fuels with sustainable solutions, as well as increasing efficient energy usage (do the same amount or more with less), as well as decreasing overall usage.
That's a fine and admirable plan, but my feeling is that it will only be politically feasible if conditions get extremely bad and no other solutions can be found. As your article says, people and nations are extremely addicted to using lots of energy, and would have to be dragged kicking and screaming away from it.
Of course, but it will happen eventually. That's what unsustainable means. Of course, biofuels might help us stretch out our unsustainable habits even longer, givng us more time to adjust.
Which is why things like hydrogen have such popular appeal: if a sufficient energy source can be found/tapped to supply enough of it, people wouldn't have to return to a 19th-century localized agricultural economy when the oil runs out.
As I said earlier, hydrogen doesn't help with unsustainable energy usage at all, it actually makes things worse in terms of total energy used. You seem to be saying that hydrogen will be great once we find a source of unlimited energy (i.e., the world's energy problems are already solved). While I may agree with you, at present this is not the case.
Say in the future we develop ultra-fusion which produces HUGE amounts of electricity and can solve all of our energy needs. How can we convert that electricity into biofuels to put in people's cars? You can't. But can you take that electricity and produce hydrogen for fuel cells? Easily!
Having unlimited energy would solve a great deal of problems, unfortunately we are forced to live in the real world, a world in which we are facing a rapidly approaching energy crisis. Implementing a hugely expensive policy and infrastructure change based on pie-in-the-sky dreaming doesn't seem very wise. Besides, we aren't going to replace the entire fleet of fuel-burning vehicles anytime soon. The internal combustion engine will be around for a long, long time, and you can't easily convert them to burn hydrogen.
Hydrogen isn't a way of generating power, it's a way of storing it and moving it around. Like a battery.
Biofuel is also a great energy storage mechanism, the same as regular transportation fuels, this is the primary way in which they are used! Did you miss the part where I said biofuels are more energy dense than hydrogen? Of course, biofuels also create energy (they are net energy positive), while hydrogen production (like traditional batteries), is inefficient and net energy negative.
You can use your biofuel to create hydrogen fuel cells, or you can use a nuclear plant, or you can use coal, or you can use good old fashioned gasoline. It'd be stupid NOT to use hydrogen.
You can use electricity to heat your home as well, but it is much more efficient to use natural gas. Same concept applies here. I definitely disagree that it would be stupid not to switch to using a brand new, immature, net energy negative energy storage mechanism, instead of using a net energy positive energy storage mechanism, similar to what we have been using for the past 100 years.
But we have *no* efficient green energy delivery mechanisms.
Uh, what about biofuels? They are about as green as can be (they grow in the ground for goodness sake!), and are far greener than hydrogen. They also have much higher energy densities than hydrogen. Furthermore, pretty much any car ever made can be run with these fuels today with little or no modifications, the distribution infrastructure is already in place, and we have years and years of experience handling fuels similar to these. None of these things can be said of hydrogen.
a lot of heat dissipation on the skin occurs through evaporation of sweat on the hair.
Okay, now that actually sounds possible, however this would be a completely different phenomenon than just "increasing the surface area of the body part in question" as the original poster claimed. Incidentally, does this effect work on the long, thick hairs on the head, or just with the relatively fine hairs found on most of the body?
Hair serves as a cooling mechanism by increasing the surface area of the body part in question, thus increasing the rate at which heat is dissipated to the atmosphere.
I'm pretty sure that is incorrect. Hair is an insulator, and so it will not act as an extended surface as you claim. While you are correct that increased surface area increases heat transfer (that is what the fins on heat sinks are for), the extended surfaces must be conductive. Try replacing your metal heat sink fins with foam ones and see how long your processor lasts. FYI, I am not an evolutionary biologist, however I am a mechanical engineer with some experience in heat transfer.
you're still looking to at least an hour for a 1.4GB compressed copy, even longer if this service uses full 4.6GB uncompressed.
FYI, commercial DVDs are definetely not uncompressed, they use MPEG2 compression. Also, full dual layer DVDs are closer to 7-8GB, not 4.6GB (of course, this includes things like extras and special features, which I'm not sure if these downloads will have).
hmmm... whats missing is the fact that the Genesis account begins with the earth already existing, and with water everywhere on it. It does not begin with the creation of the universe. There is nothing in the bible to contradict what astronomers guess the age of the universe to be.
Who the hell modded this insightful? From the "first" creation story: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." From the "second": Genesis 2:4 "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens..." "Heavens" is generally understood to be everything which is not the earth, i.e. the universe. In addition, according to the first story the earth was covered with water, but according to the second the earth wasn't covered with water until a "mist from the earth" came.
If you want real, functional tabs, you need to use Opera
Or you could just install one of the tab browser extensions to Firefox. Really, isn't one of the strengths of Firefox supposed to be the numerous extensions available?
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Abiword doesn't really export to doc either, they just save as rtf and give it a .doc extension (see here. KWord can easily save to rtf, and even lists it as "RTF Document (Microsoft Word Compatible)" in the save-as dialog. Maybe you can request that the developers add an option to automatically save as rtf with a doc extension, just like Abiword, although I don't personally consider having to change a document extension manually a "dealbreaker."
Uh, if it's a diskless workstation, what exactly are you formatting with XFS or Reiser? How is a diskless workstation at all relevant in a discussion about the merits of various filesystems?
Heh, I use both, so I can be very flexible in the tools I choose.
Incidentally, what tools do you use to convert mpeg4 avis's to DVD? This is something I've been meaning to investigate for a while now.
What aboud kspread and gnumeric? Sure they're not native, but they're there.
I beleive CoLinux is another FOSS program (and a very useful one at that) that is affected by this.
And how are they supposed to maintain a "stable" release when they are not allowed to backport security fixes? This issue is about more than just the copyrighted logos you know.
Haven't you ever heard of fatigue? Besides, "metal" is a pretty useless term here, do you mean steel, aluminum, titanium, beryllium, magnesium, etc.? What alloy? All of these have very different properties. There are also thermal cycling issues (as the craft travels from shadow to sun). I believe that there can also issues related to using materials in a vacuum and exposing them to radiation. To sum up, material design and selection for space applications is not nearly as simple as you are claiming.
Since Wine runs in userland, it is definitely more secure than Windows, especially if you usually run Windows as Admin. Of course, it is probably still possible to run many viruses and trojans, but once you kill Wine they will stop as well.
Are you suggesting that regedit is somehow okay, but using a text editor (it doesn't even have to be vi) is not?
And how much would it cost to prove that in court? It's not like you can just wave your prior art at the USPTO and they'll automatically invalidate the patent.
From the wikipedia entry on JORN:
In reality, this is not an important distinction for home users. I don't know about you, but I don't care a whole lot about by system, I can re-install everything without too much trouble. Replacing years of digital family photograghs, financial records, etc. in my home directory? Impossible. This is why I backup my home directly regularly, but don't bother with the system.
I don't think it's a very valid comparison. Gasoline is readily available at every other street corner in most of the world, of course you are going to see much worse accidents, especially in poor countries with inadequate safety provisions. If hydrogen ever gets the same penetration, will the magnitude of the accidents be the same, worse, or better? This depends in large part on the hydrogen transportation mechanism chosen, but is still very much an open question. At least with the current liquid fuels, the danger are well known, and generally well contained and managed.
Of course, I completely agree with you that hydrogen is a total waste of time and a huge unnecessary expense, and basically a really crap idea for vehicular transportation (but a good idea for replacing batteries in many other applications, such as personal electronic devices). Personally, my vote is for biofuels, I really hope the government puts more money and effort towards this instead of some ridiculous "hydrogen economy."
Exactly what is your point? Pascal's wager has absolutely nothing to do with logical thought. Basing your determination of what is "true" on how the outcome personally benefits or harms you is a particularly poor way of determining truth. This is the same as deciding that global warming or the energy crisis couldn't possibly be happening, since it would be bad for us if it did. In addition, Pascal's wager is fundamentally flawed, it assumes there is only a binary decision (usually, Christian God vs everything else). In reality, there are about 5000 or so different deities to choose from, with more cropping up all the time. In order to follow Pascal's wager to its logical conclusion, you should believe in the religion with the absolute worst hell for unbelievers, and the absolute best heaven for the faithful. Give me five minutes and I'll think something up, I look forward to having you as a faithful disciple. :)
So what that page is really proposing drastic cutbacks in per-capita energy usage, not that biofuels can be used as a substitute for fossil fuels.
That's not what the page is proposing. They say that current energy use is not sustainable (which is a fact), biofuels (or hydrogen) are not a silver bullet which will change this. Actually, hydrogen doesn't even factor into this, since it is net energy negative, it actually makes the energy crisis worse. At least biofuels help the situation. What the page is really proposing is a combination of efforts, i.e. replacing unsustainable fossil fuels with sustainable solutions, as well as increasing efficient energy usage (do the same amount or more with less), as well as decreasing overall usage.
That's a fine and admirable plan, but my feeling is that it will only be politically feasible if conditions get extremely bad and no other solutions can be found. As your article says, people and nations are extremely addicted to using lots of energy, and would have to be dragged kicking and screaming away from it.
Of course, but it will happen eventually. That's what unsustainable means. Of course, biofuels might help us stretch out our unsustainable habits even longer, givng us more time to adjust.
Which is why things like hydrogen have such popular appeal: if a sufficient energy source can be found/tapped to supply enough of it, people wouldn't have to return to a 19th-century localized agricultural economy when the oil runs out.
As I said earlier, hydrogen doesn't help with unsustainable energy usage at all, it actually makes things worse in terms of total energy used. You seem to be saying that hydrogen will be great once we find a source of unlimited energy (i.e., the world's energy problems are already solved). While I may agree with you, at present this is not the case.
Having unlimited energy would solve a great deal of problems, unfortunately we are forced to live in the real world, a world in which we are facing a rapidly approaching energy crisis. Implementing a hugely expensive policy and infrastructure change based on pie-in-the-sky dreaming doesn't seem very wise. Besides, we aren't going to replace the entire fleet of fuel-burning vehicles anytime soon. The internal combustion engine will be around for a long, long time, and you can't easily convert them to burn hydrogen.
Hydrogen isn't a way of generating power, it's a way of storing it and moving it around. Like a battery.
Biofuel is also a great energy storage mechanism, the same as regular transportation fuels, this is the primary way in which they are used! Did you miss the part where I said biofuels are more energy dense than hydrogen? Of course, biofuels also create energy (they are net energy positive), while hydrogen production (like traditional batteries), is inefficient and net energy negative.
You can use your biofuel to create hydrogen fuel cells, or you can use a nuclear plant, or you can use coal, or you can use good old fashioned gasoline. It'd be stupid NOT to use hydrogen.
You can use electricity to heat your home as well, but it is much more efficient to use natural gas. Same concept applies here. I definitely disagree that it would be stupid not to switch to using a brand new, immature, net energy negative energy storage mechanism, instead of using a net energy positive energy storage mechanism, similar to what we have been using for the past 100 years.
Have you actually researched this at all? Go to Journey to Forever and look around a bit, it seems to address most of your points.
Uh, what about biofuels? They are about as green as can be (they grow in the ground for goodness sake!), and are far greener than hydrogen. They also have much higher energy densities than hydrogen. Furthermore, pretty much any car ever made can be run with these fuels today with little or no modifications, the distribution infrastructure is already in place, and we have years and years of experience handling fuels similar to these. None of these things can be said of hydrogen.
Okay, now that actually sounds possible, however this would be a completely different phenomenon than just "increasing the surface area of the body part in question" as the original poster claimed. Incidentally, does this effect work on the long, thick hairs on the head, or just with the relatively fine hairs found on most of the body?
I'm pretty sure that is incorrect. Hair is an insulator, and so it will not act as an extended surface as you claim. While you are correct that increased surface area increases heat transfer (that is what the fins on heat sinks are for), the extended surfaces must be conductive. Try replacing your metal heat sink fins with foam ones and see how long your processor lasts. FYI, I am not an evolutionary biologist, however I am a mechanical engineer with some experience in heat transfer.
You can change this in your preferences, under "Homepage." I use the "Sun Mar 21, '99 10:00 AM" setting myself.
FYI, commercial DVDs are definetely not uncompressed, they use MPEG2 compression. Also, full dual layer DVDs are closer to 7-8GB, not 4.6GB (of course, this includes things like extras and special features, which I'm not sure if these downloads will have).
Who the hell modded this insightful? From the "first" creation story: Genesis 1:1 "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." From the "second": Genesis 2:4 "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens..." "Heavens" is generally understood to be everything which is not the earth, i.e. the universe. In addition, according to the first story the earth was covered with water, but according to the second the earth wasn't covered with water until a "mist from the earth" came.
Or you could just install one of the tab browser extensions to Firefox. Really, isn't one of the strengths of Firefox supposed to be the numerous extensions available?