A simple rule of thumb: Citizens have rights, subjects have privileges. We believe our rights are unalienable -- they come from God. Subjects' privileges are granted by the crown and taken away by the crown as it sees fit.
This is ont of the things that Americans seem to commonly misunderstand about the British system. We don't have rights, or privileges. We have responsibilities, our system is based on the responsibilities we have to the crown (or these days, effectively, society). So long as we fufill these responsibilities, we can do pretty much what we like...
That said, I don't think any of our politicians understand our system anymore either... *sigh*
I have the chance to work in the USA in the near future - I'm going to jump with both feet.
Having worked in the US, I was more than happy to return to the UK. We at least have the illusion of privacy, the Yanks don't even seem to have that any more...
...As an example, we recently had an all-hands afternoon team-building exercise with free food and drink for all. One person dropped and broke a glass bottle. Our CEO cleaned it up. Get that?
I'm more concerned that you used the phrase all-hands afternoon team-building exercise without cracking up.
...the method described is science in action, the way it is supposed to work.
No, actually this isn't how things work these days. Science has become so specialised that there are very, very, few people that can do both theoretically and experiemental work at the cutting edge.
Most of us have a fairly good knowledge of a very small corner of one field, a slightly less good knowledge of the entire field, and an educated layman's knowledge of the rest of our discipline. Outside of our own discipline our knowledge is fairly scanty, most physicist's knowledge of chemisty for instance is probably no better than your average layman.
It's just not possible to keep up with everything even in your own field anymore.
The characteristic of bogus (or "junk") science is theories that give predictions that are untestable, or theories that predict things that have already been proved experimentally to be untrue.
While I haven't read the paper, not alot of point as I'm not a quatumn physicist, and my knowledge of quatumn field theory is fairly basic, this guy seems to have made predictions which are provable. This is good science. Whether he is right or wrong is imaterial (to the scientific process), his theory is interesting enough that some experimentalist will pick this up and run with and then we'll find out whether the theory is correct (or not).
Just because he hasn't provided extrordinary proof, doesn't mean that he's doing bad science.
I mean the Mac is a little bit better, but not much. Linux is a giant step backwards.
A step backwards is only a bad thing if you were going forwards in the right direction. Windows wasn't the right direction, integrating the GUI into the operating system was a dumb idea...
Ummmm, in the days of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven they didn't have recording media and the world's largest distribution network. Kind of an apples to oranges comparison, bro...
They still wrote the music, people did that before recording media came along. If you took away copyright tommorrow people would still write music. Maybe the bulk of it would disappear, but the question you ahve to ask yourself is, would it be the mass produced, mass market junk that disappears. If so, isn't that a good thing?
While I was stuck in London during the week after September 11, I worried that things would change for the worse, not because of things that terrorists did, but because of the things we would do out of panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy.
You say this, but further up your post you said this...
I have not traveled by air since returning from Europe on September 19 (delayed from Sept. 12).
Your reaction is one of "panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy", having travelled extensively, both in and outside of US airspace, the security on internal US flights is still worse than internal flights in Europe.
So you've let a bunch of terrorists stop you flying, that's the reaction they wanted, why are you giving in...?
Actually, h, j, k & l are the cursor keys in vi and I'm just a little annoyed that they didn't get it right.
Mea culpa. That shows you how long its been since I got stuck infront of a machine with a totally fubar'ed keyboard map and no other editor but vi. Oh, how times have changed...
They must have thought of azerty keyboard users. Afaik, i,j,k,l are at the same place on every keyboard.
MY guess is that they picked i, j, k & l since they are the cursor keys in vi. These days all keyboard have a numeric keypad, with cursor keys, way back when this wasn't always the case...
So either the contract has expired and the shuttles have exceeded their lifespan, or Intel has broken its contract.
The the "design lifetime" of the shuttle was around 100 flights. Based on this the most of the shuttles have only burned a quarter to a third of their design lifetimes.
On the other hand, the shuttles have been flying for over 20 years, the first flight was in 1981. NASA was, initally at least, anticipating a much higher number of flights per year, in theory this means that they were really expecting to take them out of service during the early to mid-nineties. I remember hearing 15 years as being the expected design lifetime back in the '80's.
I guess you take their pick, depending on how you want to look at it, they're only a quarter of the way through their design lifetime, or they're outlived their design lifetime by five years (possibly more).
Sprit was apparently a visionary. They don't need to artifically disable unapproved phones from working... They just build their own propritary PCS system, and NOTHING can even potentially communicate with it unless it uses that same PCS protocol.
Erm, are you sure? I've regularly roamed onto Sprint when I've been in the States using my tri-band (900/1800/1990MHz) GSM phone purchased in Europe. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be doing any funky propritary Sprint only stuff.
Libraries already pay extra for books because they loan them out (at least they do in the U.K. anyway).
It was my impression, which could be mistaken, that while libraries paid extra for the so called "Library Edition" of the book, the difference was that this edition is more study, having a better quality binding. The advantage for the library of having bought a book which is decently bound should be fairly obvious...
In keeping with the Einstein / astrophysics thread, "your admin is so far beyond clueless that he couldn't find clueless with very-long-baseline interferometry"
Optical or radio interferometry? Make a difference...;)
Microsoft defends the solution by remarking Windows was not designed to be a modular system, and the current operating system is highly dependant on core technologies like IE and Windows Media Player.
Its an operating system, why on Earth is a Media Player a core technology? An OS is the layer that stands between the hardware and applications. If it does anything other than this, its fluff...
PORTLAND, Oregon - August 29, 2001 - Gobe Software, Inc. today announced Gobe Productive for the Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems, available this fall...
So they said they were going to release the Windows and Linux versions last autumn, but its now coming into summer of the following year, and they've only now released the Windows version...along with a coupon for the Linux version "when its released".
We haven't had any problems with the 2.4.9 errata kernel for 7.2, though.
There is a bug in the usb-uhci driver that causes the machine to hang when using the pwc (Philips Webcam) module. Presumably the bug shows up in other places although I haven't run into it myself.
GRID Computing is the current sexy term in scientific computing, but its something that is so vague that it can mean all things to all people. Which is perhaps why its suddenly so popular, everyone can get their pet project funded.
To some people it means actualy hardware, routers, fibre, supercomputers, that sort of thing. Certainly in the UK and Europe this group consists mostly of Particle Physicists, see the GridPP Project Homepage for details of whats going on there...mostly the Particl Physicsts seem to have ridiclous amounts of data on their hands (Petabytes/day) that they have to ship. Fun stuff!
To the astronomical community it means software, virtual observatories, data mining and intelligent agents. In the UK and Europe have a look at the AstroGrid and the AVO projects. Although some of us are talking about hardware, the project I'm working on for instance, eSTAR, is putting robotically operated telescopes onto the GRID. However even here the main focus of the project is on the fun stuff we can do with the software, intelligent agents and data mining spring immediately to mind. In the US the NVO is the main focus of GRIDs for the astronomers there...
Also, I don't know where these IE specific webpages exist...don't think I've ever seen one.
Thats a joke right? Just about anything produced by MS Frontpage with the default output preferences will be IE specific HTML, which while it might get rendered by Netscape, it won't be rendered "correctly".
Actually, you make my point. Netscape 4.x does render pages that are not in strict conformance with . This is a good thing for users.
Considering how long Netscape 4.x has been around I guess I could argue along the lines of decfacto standards, but I conceed the point, but only partially. There aren't very many other browsers around that won't render something that 4.x will render, but there are a whole bunch around that won't render stuff that is IE specific (by definition).
Personally, I think Flash is trash, but that is beyond the scope of the argument.
Actually I think Flash is the arguement, or at least its a prime example of what the arguement is all about. I can't think of anyone that has come up with a good use for Flash yet, but its everywhere because business seems to value appearance over content.
The bulk of the extensions to HTML which aren't rendered well, or at all, by the Gecko engine (lets get back to the point here) are just that, they deal with the appearance rather than the actual content. The web, or at least HTML as designed, is nothing to do with the appearance. Its the entire point its supposed to be information which can be rendered in different ways. I agree the vast bulk of the web is broken, but I think its broken in a different way than you seem to think.
If people really want to render something that looks like a printed page into a browser (of some kind) they should go off and invent something to do it and stop trying to bend and pevert HTML to do it.
By maintaining an ivory tower postion, where only so-called standards-compliant HTML gets rendered, and ignoring the web-wide reality of broken HTML generators, common HTML errors, and commonly used HTML extensions, we embark on a losing strategy.
Perhaps its because I am looking out from the ivory tower, see my web page if the email address doesn't make it immediately obvious, but there isn't anything on the web that I actually want to use that doesn't render perfectly happily in Navigator 4.x. So why am I loosing anyuthing at that point?
But at the end of the day, the browser which just "works" for Joe Business is the one which wins. Simple as that. No arguments about standards. No lectures about speach and beer. It either works, or it doesn't.
Why has the web got anything to do with what business wants? The commerical end of the web may be driving cutting edge development, for somewhat dubious values of cutting edge and development, but its certainly not the interesting bit. Amazon is nice, I like ordering by books online, but I don't particularly want to order my groceries online, or clothes or much else. In most cases I want to be able to pick the thing up and look at it before I buy it so I'd never buy it online. The bulk of the rest of the commerically orientated web is advertising. I don't volunteer to read advertising, so I don't look at it.
Time to get away from theory and have a look at real-world practice.
Your priorities aren't my priorities, your real world doesn't necessarily correspond to mine. I'll use the web for what I want, you use it for what you want, but don't expect me to care if browser specific junk makes vast sections that I don't care about un-navigatable.
A case in point is the receent Slasdot story concerning the development of sites only in Flash (no HTML content at all). This breaks lots of things you probably take for granted, like search engines. You're saying this is a good thing because its obviously what bussiness wants? I'm not convinced.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, it's easier for a developer on a closed-source project to sneak stuff in, than on an open-source project.
Heck, there is an entire flight simulator embedded in MS Excel 97, try and do that on an open source project.
Al.A simple rule of thumb: Citizens have rights, subjects have privileges. We believe our rights are unalienable -- they come from God. Subjects' privileges are granted by the crown and taken away by the crown as it sees fit.
This is ont of the things that Americans seem to commonly misunderstand about the British system. We don't have rights, or privileges. We have responsibilities, our system is based on the responsibilities we have to the crown (or these days, effectively, society). So long as we fufill these responsibilities, we can do pretty much what we like...
That said, I don't think any of our politicians understand our system anymore either... *sigh*
Al.I have the chance to work in the USA in the near future - I'm going to jump with both feet.
Having worked in the US, I was more than happy to return to the UK. We at least have the illusion of privacy, the Yanks don't even seem to have that any more...
Al.I'm more concerned that you used the phrase all-hands afternoon team-building exercise without cracking up.
Al....the method described is science in action, the way it is supposed to work.
No, actually this isn't how things work these days. Science has become so specialised that there are very, very, few people that can do both theoretically and experiemental work at the cutting edge.
Most of us have a fairly good knowledge of a very small corner of one field, a slightly less good knowledge of the entire field, and an educated layman's knowledge of the rest of our discipline. Outside of our own discipline our knowledge is fairly scanty, most physicist's knowledge of chemisty for instance is probably no better than your average layman.
It's just not possible to keep up with everything even in your own field anymore.
The characteristic of bogus (or "junk") science is theories that give predictions that are untestable, or theories that predict things that have already been proved experimentally to be untrue.
While I haven't read the paper, not alot of point as I'm not a quatumn physicist, and my knowledge of quatumn field theory is fairly basic, this guy seems to have made predictions which are provable. This is good science. Whether he is right or wrong is imaterial (to the scientific process), his theory is interesting enough that some experimentalist will pick this up and run with and then we'll find out whether the theory is correct (or not).
Just because he hasn't provided extrordinary proof, doesn't mean that he's doing bad science.
Al.I mean the Mac is a little bit better, but not much. Linux is a giant step backwards.
A step backwards is only a bad thing if you were going forwards in the right direction. Windows wasn't the right direction, integrating the GUI into the operating system was a dumb idea...
Al.Ummmm, in the days of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven they didn't have recording media and the world's largest distribution network. Kind of an apples to oranges comparison, bro...
They still wrote the music, people did that before recording media came along. If you took away copyright tommorrow people would still write music. Maybe the bulk of it would disappear, but the question you ahve to ask yourself is, would it be the mass produced, mass market junk that disappears. If so, isn't that a good thing?
Al.While I was stuck in London during the week after September 11, I worried that things would change for the worse, not because of things that terrorists did, but because of the things we would do out of panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy.
You say this, but further up your post you said this...
I have not traveled by air since returning from Europe on September 19 (delayed from Sept. 12).
Your reaction is one of "panic and fear and prejudice and idiocy", having travelled extensively, both in and outside of US airspace, the security on internal US flights is still worse than internal flights in Europe.
So you've let a bunch of terrorists stop you flying, that's the reaction they wanted, why are you giving in...?
Al.Actually, h, j, k & l are the cursor keys in vi and I'm just a little annoyed that they didn't get it right.
Mea culpa. That shows you how long its been since I got stuck infront of a machine with a totally fubar'ed keyboard map and no other editor but vi. Oh, how times have changed...
Al.They must have thought of azerty keyboard users. Afaik, i,j,k,l are at the same place on every keyboard.
MY guess is that they picked i, j, k & l since they are the cursor keys in vi. These days all keyboard have a numeric keypad, with cursor keys, way back when this wasn't always the case...
Al.We discussed the same thing only a couple of weeks ago, see this article. Looks like a different grocery chain this time though...
Al.So either the contract has expired and the shuttles have exceeded their lifespan, or Intel has broken its contract.
The the "design lifetime" of the shuttle was around 100 flights. Based on this the most of the shuttles have only burned a quarter to a third of their design lifetimes.
On the other hand, the shuttles have been flying for over 20 years, the first flight was in 1981. NASA was, initally at least, anticipating a much higher number of flights per year, in theory this means that they were really expecting to take them out of service during the early to mid-nineties. I remember hearing 15 years as being the expected design lifetime back in the '80's.
I guess you take their pick, depending on how you want to look at it, they're only a quarter of the way through their design lifetime, or they're outlived their design lifetime by five years (possibly more).
Al.Without the ability to click handsfree, this thing is utterly worthless.
Thats why they sell foot switches which are compatible with the trackIR EG model of the thing...
Al.Are you sure it was Sprint? AFAIK they only have GSM networks (today) in a couple of US cities...
Fairly sure it was Sprint, now which city was I in? It was either NYC or Boston I think... But yes, most other places I seem to end up on Voicestream.
Al.Sprit was apparently a visionary. They don't need to artifically disable unapproved phones from working... They just build their own propritary PCS system, and NOTHING can even potentially communicate with it unless it uses that same PCS protocol.
Erm, are you sure? I've regularly roamed onto Sprint when I've been in the States using my tri-band (900/1800/1990MHz) GSM phone purchased in Europe. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be doing any funky propritary Sprint only stuff.
Al.Libraries already pay extra for books because they loan them out (at least they do in the U.K. anyway).
It was my impression, which could be mistaken, that while libraries paid extra for the so called "Library Edition" of the book, the difference was that this edition is more study, having a better quality binding. The advantage for the library of having bought a book which is decently bound should be fairly obvious...
Al.In keeping with the Einstein / astrophysics thread, "your admin is so far beyond clueless that he couldn't find clueless with very-long-baseline interferometry"
Optical or radio interferometry? Make a difference... ;)
Al.Microsoft defends the solution by remarking Windows was not designed to be a modular system, and the current operating system is highly dependant on core technologies like IE and Windows Media Player.
Its an operating system, why on Earth is a Media Player a core technology? An OS is the layer that stands between the hardware and applications. If it does anything other than this, its fluff...
Al.From the press release...
So they said they were going to release the Windows and Linux versions last autumn, but its now coming into summer of the following year, and they've only now released the Windows version...along with a coupon for the Linux version "when its released".
Err, I won't hold my breath, sorry...
Al.The same story was posted on the 4th of March by Hemos, see 'Garmin To Marry GPS with FRS/GMRS'.
Al.We haven't had any problems with the 2.4.9 errata kernel for 7.2, though.
There is a bug in the usb-uhci driver that causes the machine to hang when using the pwc (Philips Webcam) module. Presumably the bug shows up in other places although I haven't run into it myself.
Al.GRID Computing is the current sexy term in scientific computing, but its something that is so vague that it can mean all things to all people. Which is perhaps why its suddenly so popular, everyone can get their pet project funded.
To some people it means actualy hardware, routers, fibre, supercomputers, that sort of thing. Certainly in the UK and Europe this group consists mostly of Particle Physicists, see the GridPP Project Homepage for details of whats going on there...mostly the Particl Physicsts seem to have ridiclous amounts of data on their hands (Petabytes/day) that they have to ship. Fun stuff!
To the astronomical community it means software, virtual observatories, data mining and intelligent agents. In the UK and Europe have a look at the AstroGrid and the AVO projects. Although some of us are talking about hardware, the project I'm working on for instance, eSTAR, is putting robotically operated telescopes onto the GRID. However even here the main focus of the project is on the fun stuff we can do with the software, intelligent agents and data mining spring immediately to mind. In the US the NVO is the main focus of GRIDs for the astronomers there...
Al.Also, I don't know where these IE specific webpages exist...don't think I've ever seen one.
Thats a joke right? Just about anything produced by MS Frontpage with the default output preferences will be IE specific HTML, which while it might get rendered by Netscape, it won't be rendered "correctly".
Al.Actually, you make my point. Netscape 4.x does render pages that are not in strict conformance with . This is a good thing for users.
Considering how long Netscape 4.x has been around I guess I could argue along the lines of decfacto standards, but I conceed the point, but only partially. There aren't very many other browsers around that won't render something that 4.x will render, but there are a whole bunch around that won't render stuff that is IE specific (by definition).
Personally, I think Flash is trash, but that is beyond the scope of the argument.
Actually I think Flash is the arguement, or at least its a prime example of what the arguement is all about. I can't think of anyone that has come up with a good use for Flash yet, but its everywhere because business seems to value appearance over content.
The bulk of the extensions to HTML which aren't rendered well, or at all, by the Gecko engine (lets get back to the point here) are just that, they deal with the appearance rather than the actual content. The web, or at least HTML as designed, is nothing to do with the appearance. Its the entire point its supposed to be information which can be rendered in different ways. I agree the vast bulk of the web is broken, but I think its broken in a different way than you seem to think.
If people really want to render something that looks like a printed page into a browser (of some kind) they should go off and invent something to do it and stop trying to bend and pevert HTML to do it.
Al.By maintaining an ivory tower postion, where only so-called standards-compliant HTML gets rendered, and ignoring the web-wide reality of broken HTML generators, common HTML errors, and commonly used HTML extensions, we embark on a losing strategy.
Perhaps its because I am looking out from the ivory tower, see my web page if the email address doesn't make it immediately obvious, but there isn't anything on the web that I actually want to use that doesn't render perfectly happily in Navigator 4.x. So why am I loosing anyuthing at that point?
But at the end of the day, the browser which just "works" for Joe Business is the one which wins. Simple as that. No arguments about standards. No lectures about speach and beer. It either works, or it doesn't.
Why has the web got anything to do with what business wants? The commerical end of the web may be driving cutting edge development, for somewhat dubious values of cutting edge and development, but its certainly not the interesting bit. Amazon is nice, I like ordering by books online, but I don't particularly want to order my groceries online, or clothes or much else. In most cases I want to be able to pick the thing up and look at it before I buy it so I'd never buy it online. The bulk of the rest of the commerically orientated web is advertising. I don't volunteer to read advertising, so I don't look at it.
Time to get away from theory and have a look at real-world practice.
Your priorities aren't my priorities, your real world doesn't necessarily correspond to mine. I'll use the web for what I want, you use it for what you want, but don't expect me to care if browser specific junk makes vast sections that I don't care about un-navigatable.
A case in point is the receent Slasdot story concerning the development of sites only in Flash (no HTML content at all). This breaks lots of things you probably take for granted, like search engines. You're saying this is a good thing because its obviously what bussiness wants? I'm not convinced.
Al.