MIT lost because they didn't care enough about their display:) Apparently they were a little too myopic about the task. As an engineer myself, it figures:)
I catch your wry humor, but I also note a number of comments elsewhere in the thread along the lines of "if it works, who cares about the display [i.e. documentation]?"
This, I think, cuts right to the problem in a number of areas, including a lot of FOSS projects. If you can't explain what it is you've done, your accomplishments aren't worth much. Sure, I understand the argument that "you can read the source code" if there's no or shoddy documentation (or in the case of physical objects like the robot in the article, "you can mess with it to see how it works", or "open it up and poke around"), but frankly, this is not an acceptable answer for most of us. The simple point is, while I could read the source code of an application or reverse-engineer a robot project, it would be a much more efficient use of my time to read well-written documentation that tells me exactly what I need to know.
Good documentation is an integral part of any complete project. Telling people to "just mess with it" or to "look into the internals to find out how it works" is disingenuous and just plain lazy.
Most people don't even have jobs that have anything to do with their degree.
Could have if they'd wanted.
Precisely.
The biggest part of the problem with jobs and degrees is knowing what you really want to do. If you've got a fire in your belly to do X, chances are, you'll find a way to do it. If you kinda sorta maybe like X, and a job doing Y pays better and is easier to get, you'll probably wind up doing Y.
Me, I knew I wanted to build a career using my language skills. I studied Japanese, German, and Spanish in high school, continuing my studies in university and adding a smidgen of Chinese for variety:). Since I knew what I wanted, I found a way to make it work, and I am now gainfully employed as a Japanese-to-English translator.
Once you know what you want, what you really want, then it's simply a matter of making that real. If you have no clue what you want in life, you have no real path, no real direction, and as such it should not be surprising if you go through life adrift on the seas of social whim.
College hardly teaches you anything tangible(unless you major in something really technical).
Perhaps I'm just the exception. I studied something very un-technical, upon which I've built my career -- while my stated major was international relations, a large part of that was languages, and I now work as a Japanese-to-English translator.
But then, I knew roughly what I wanted to do before I even got to university. I think that might be key here. If you don't know where it is in life you want to go, it's perfectly natural that you won't get much of anywhere. A good number of my friends from university didn't have a rat's arse of an idea about what to do with their lives, and university provided an excellent means for them to explore different options and try to figure out their futures. And in that, at least, I think their time spent in uni is a good thing.
It sounds like the four kids in the article already have a pretty good idea of what they want to do, thanks to a couple teachers taking them seriously, and as such they will no doubt get a lot of useful learning out of university -- the trouble for them lies in the financial and legal barriers between them and higher education. Anyone who cares about education would do well to find out how they can help, either by donating any extra cash, or by getting in touch with their own local schools to see what assistance they might provide. Pass along what you've got, because you can't take it with you when you go.
Chinese is the hardest language in the world to learn.
By what metric? I've had a number of people tell me the same thing about English. As a native speaker of English, I've found Arabic much more daunting simply for the number of sounds that don't even approach anything in English, let alone the very complex grammar. Chinese by comparison was quite simple, with a grammar much closer to what I'd grown up with, and sounds I could at least approximate enough to be understood.
The problem with anyone saying "Language X is difficult" is that it has everything to do with where you're coming from. If you speak Samoan, then Mâori and possibly even Tagalog won't be too much of a stretch, as the languages are related. Coming from English and learning Mâori is a completely different ballgame.
By way of example, let's look at some simple sentences. "I am going to the store" in English works out to wö qù shângdiàn, literally "I go store" in Chinese. But try the same thing in Japanese, and it could come out umpteen different ways depending on who you're talking to. If you're amongst friends, you could say mise ni iku, lit. "store to go", with the subject of "I" only implied (implied subjects can make interpreting Japanese into English a real bitch, especially if you just missed the beginning of the conversation:). If you're talking to your boss, you might say watashi wa o-mise ni ikimasu, lit. "I (topic) (honorific)-store to go."
I'll be the first to admit this is a lame-ass example, but nonetheless, I hope it at least illuminates my main point -- what's difficult to learn depends on what you already know.:D
MS should really step in here and mandate a total-removal tool. Something that wipes ALL THE BLOODY FILES and icons from the HDD.
Isn't that what Windows is, in the first place?:)
I understand WinXP is a lot better, but there are still times when the best you can do in terms of time savings are to wipe the HDD and start over with a fresh install. So, BAM -- looks like Windows itself is exactly what you were looking for!
They just might not be so externally obvious as the ones in the US.
I don't think Japan, which has had at least as big a shake up as the US, has seen the rise of a large religiously motivated subculture.
There was an interesting, albeit cursory, article touching on this recently in the free mag Metropolis that's worth a look. Let's not forget Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo subway gas attack. And it's also worth mentioning that pseudo/quasi-religious groups like the Raelians have a visible presence here. The big difference between here and the US seems to be that the more problematic religious groups in Japan are all relatively new.
There has also been a lot written about how quickly Japan has changed and the dizzying effects of history being lost so quickly -- the tangible history of family heirlooms, old houses, even mountains and rivers, literally disappearing before your very eyes. Most of this writing has been in Japanese, naturally, as it's part of the dialog here internal to the country and its culture, but there has been some in English. The only title I currently have to mind is Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr, admittedly a honky, but one that grew up here. If it's any indication of his credentials in terms of Japanese society, he is the first non-citizen to win Japan's Shincho literary prize for works written in Japanese, so I take his writings on the country with a smaller grain of salt than for most other gaijin authors.
However, I will certainly grant you that the US is undergoing its own peculiar reaction to so much change. I've often found myself thinking along lines similar to clive_p's comment, that part of the religious character of the US is built atop a set of beliefs and creeds that proved too extreme and inflexible for Europe. Though religious refugees certainly don't account for all US immigration by any means, I wonder how much this might have to do with the current kerfuffle?
Nice to know it still does -- just tried on Win XP with all the latest patches and had to kill explorer.exe.
Well, at least MS is consistent. I know a lot of people complain that Linuxland is too much of a hodge-podge, with different this and that. But hey, WIndows can consistently offer us the same platform, and for how long now? Bugs and all...
There are many flavours of Linux which result in there being (to the user) many different OS's being called "Linux"
Aha, for herein you might just cut to the root of the problem, from a public image viewpoint -- though there is no one thing identifiably "Linux" beyond the kernel, the public (i.e. userland) sees one thing from a distance called "Linux", and is then confused when upon closer inspection this single thing turns out to be a multiplicity of distros. Hmm.
To that end, I sincerely hope the Linux Standard Base initiative currently in progress amongst some of the major distros makes headway towards providing the basic interoperability such a user base would conceivably expect, with the straightforward binary compatibility you talk about in the great-grandparent post. In fact, it seems the LSB aims to solve the very issues you presented. The mission statement on the LSB page:
To develop and promote a set of standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant system. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for Linux.
While I am a fan of variety and a stauch believer in avoiding monocultures, I do find myself thinking that the efforts of the LSB are pushing things in the right direction if we are to see greater adoption of Linux OSes, and in particular, greater participation by ISVs in the Linux-compatible software market. In such a case, there would at least be a few distributions that could, for userland, be collectively termed "Linux" without confusing things too much for the uninitiated.:)
This makes me think about that old joke about the panda that "eats, shoots and leaves".
A question about your sig:
I think we need to transition to a non-magic fish based economy.
Does this mean an economy that isn't magic, but is based on fish? Or an economy that is based on fish that aren't magic? Or an economy that isn't based on magic fish?
There is no sensible way to talk about "Linux" in this context. It's not "an operating system", it's the kernel. I'm honestly not trying to be pedantic here; it's just that there are severaldistributions, i.e. OSes, in Linuxland. Proclamations like the current one by the Agility Alliance that lump everything Linux into one basket are simply FUD-slinging. I agree with you, the big vendors need to get together and just choose one, and by "one" here I mean distro. (By "vendors", I mean anyone trying to seriously look at issues of "security, scalability and the possibility of forking" and not just muddy the waters.) Comparing Debian to Redhat to Suse to Slackware to Gentoo and complaining that "there isn't enough commonality", which is what the Alliance seems to be saying at one point ("the alliance does not consider Linux to be a suitable operating system for the largest of enterprise customers because the open source operating system has issues with... the possibility of forking."), is simply silly.
In fact, it seems relatively clear from the Alliance comments that they are fully committed to comparing disparate systems and finding fault in the differences. Looking at some of what they say:
WWe see some of the same things occurring that did to Unix -- it could splinter into many different types of languages. We are quite cautious about Linux and its deployment,"... "Also, we are somewhat cautious about what happened with Unix - it splintered into eight applications -- until McNealy (Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun) finally announced he won the battle and had the one surviving Unix out there. We think Linux has the possibility of going the same route," said Rasmussen.
Aside from the surface logical problems (is Unix a collection of languages, or applications? Since when was Solaris the "one surviving Unix"? etc), it's clear the Alliance is not in the business of making clear, informed, and informational statements about Linux, or even Unix in general.
----
Ultimately, I agree with most of what you say. However, I cannot fully agree with nor understand your statement that until there is some standardization between them though, there's no reason to switch. Why should there be standardization between them? (Well, aside from simpler developing processes -- this is obviously important for anyone writing software for public release.) If a company decides, as you suggest, to go with "GTK on Redhat" for their internal enterprise systems, then good, more power to them. It shouldn't matter one wit to such a company, vis-à-vis their own internal systems, what's happening over on Slackware.
I hesitate to wade into this argument, but I feel compelled to point out here that the argument about "deterrent" vis-à-vis the death penalty is not that it deters the original perpetrator from going on to commit further crimes, but rather that the understanding that certain crimes carry the death penalty would deter would-be criminals from committing said crimes in the first place. Consequently, simply in logical terms, bringing up the executed party as proof of deterrence is irrelevant and misleading.
i find it very difficult to see where WP would be far superior to OpenOffice.
In case you've missed out, you might want to take note that folks in the legal profession have very specific requirements vis-a-vis word count, to the extent that there have been legal snafus caused by incomplete word count functionality in MS Word (link courtesy this post by Animaether).
Given that OOo's word count hashadnumerousproblems, apparently even in the v2.0 beta,, and given how fundamentally important an accurate and simple word count is in so many real-world applications (legal, scientific, academic, business, yada yada), I can see quite easily how OOo would be kept out of the running.
Not meaning to piss on your parade, but OOo's just not there yet. I love it -- it's free, it's functional, but it's also "almost" -- it's soooo close to being what people need, but close isn't good enough in some areas.
As a fellow OOo user, I say, great! Not great that it's got deficiencies, but great that you're aware of them. Please, I ask you to go over to http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_is sues.html, register, and start by looking up those deficiencies -- a lot of my own (and several others') pet peeves have been fixed or at least improved in the move to v2.0. Any issues you've run across that haven't been addressed deserve attention, so go ahead and be specific! File a bug report, and get the ball rolling to make something better. The best MS will do is maybe be polite in ignoring you (c.f. previous comment about problems in Word that show no sign of going away).
There's a really obvious possibility that you folks are missing. What if the DOJ had instead used that $13.2mil over 5 years to contract with Sun/OpenOffice.org to hire a bunch of top programmers and perfect OpenOffice. Same budget, but much better outcome for themselves and for society.
Precisely! Instead of spending gobs of money to basically tread water (by buying one static software package), a government could spend the same amount of money to contract for improvements to existing, functional, useful FOSS software (ongoing improvements), thus benefiting both themselves (better software, same budgets) and their citizenry at large (better software). Any silliness about "but that would be using MY tax dollars to support something that's free, that's communist!" etc. is simply that -- silliness -- for how is spending public funds on FOSS any worse than spending those same funds on (potentially) overpriced proprietary software? At least with FOSS, you know the code inside and out, and short of a compromised compiler, you know you've got no back doors. If I remember rightly, that's part of the Chinese government's argument against using proprietary software; this prompted MS to let them see (some of) its code.
Do you realize how tragic it is every time a deal like this goes down? Going with WP instead of MS is better than nothing, but it's a major lost opportunity to move the entire Open Source movement forward.
Thank goodness Munich has some balls. It seems some other governments are also wising up to FOSS benefits. Here's to more public initiatives to use FOSS!
Whoohoo! I had no idea anything like this existed. Fabulosity baby, I'm going plaid! (<- oblique Spaceballs reference for the clue-impaired)
It'll be fun to see what the correlation is between the Doppler Effect and my own spare time. Well, at least once I've finished doing my taxes, or I'll have a number of unhappy government types come calling...;)
Precisely why I got myself a cheapie Wacom tablet. I had some graphics-heavy translation work at one point, and nearly rendered myself unable to work using a trackball (which I'd gotten after using a mouse began to be painful). I figured, heck, I never had any problems all those years at school writing things by hand, why not use the same posture and motions for moving the cursor? It's been a godsend in some ways.:)
(You -- you there sniggering, you know who you are -- that kind of mouse use is not what I'm talking about.)
My understanding's a little fuzzy, but I seem to recall that Windows (surprise surprise) doesn't play well with others, and demands that it get the main boot record of the hard drive all to itself. I'm not sure if that's what's happening here (stories I've heard talk more about Windows formatting the MBR and hosing grub or lilo in the process), but it might be somewhere to start if you ever decide to retry setting up a double-boot configuration.
As you point out, gravity and acceleration are to some significant extent functionally identical.
The universe is constantly expanding.
Now if we add ideas 1 and 2 to arrive at 3:
What of the possibility that this expansion is, in fact, the root cause of "gravity"? I.e., what if the observable effects of gravity are in fact caused by acceleration as everything expands?
This last idea has been bothering me for some time. I'm quite interested to hear (read) what your thoughts might be.
Man, first I quit taking methamphetamines, and now this... If it wasn't for my talking sofa and the giant fat men, I don't think I'd make it through some days...
I'm curious, have you used NetBeans? Is it comparable to Eclipse for incremental compiling, refactoring, etc?
I last looked at Eclipse some time ago, and I should probably just download it again, but at the time it was *painfully* slow, and I got tired of waiting for it and switched to NetBeans. Any informative advice you can give comparing the two would be appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes two to tango, and lord knows the US doesn't make the most graceful of dancing partners...
I catch your wry humor, but I also note a number of comments elsewhere in the thread along the lines of "if it works, who cares about the display [i.e. documentation]?"
This, I think, cuts right to the problem in a number of areas, including a lot of FOSS projects. If you can't explain what it is you've done, your accomplishments aren't worth much. Sure, I understand the argument that "you can read the source code" if there's no or shoddy documentation (or in the case of physical objects like the robot in the article, "you can mess with it to see how it works", or "open it up and poke around"), but frankly, this is not an acceptable answer for most of us. The simple point is, while I could read the source code of an application or reverse-engineer a robot project, it would be a much more efficient use of my time to read well-written documentation that tells me exactly what I need to know.
Good documentation is an integral part of any complete project. Telling people to "just mess with it" or to "look into the internals to find out how it works" is disingenuous and just plain lazy.
Reminds me of an old proverb in Chinese.
All I can say is, damn straight. It may not be an easy row to hoe, but it's there for the hoeing. Set to it or get out of the field.
Precisely.
The biggest part of the problem with jobs and degrees is knowing what you really want to do. If you've got a fire in your belly to do X, chances are, you'll find a way to do it. If you kinda sorta maybe like X, and a job doing Y pays better and is easier to get, you'll probably wind up doing Y.
Me, I knew I wanted to build a career using my language skills. I studied Japanese, German, and Spanish in high school, continuing my studies in university and adding a smidgen of Chinese for variety :). Since I knew what I wanted, I found a way to make it work, and I am now gainfully employed as a Japanese-to-English translator.
Once you know what you want, what you really want, then it's simply a matter of making that real. If you have no clue what you want in life, you have no real path, no real direction, and as such it should not be surprising if you go through life adrift on the seas of social whim.
Perhaps I'm just the exception. I studied something very un-technical, upon which I've built my career -- while my stated major was international relations, a large part of that was languages, and I now work as a Japanese-to-English translator.
But then, I knew roughly what I wanted to do before I even got to university. I think that might be key here. If you don't know where it is in life you want to go, it's perfectly natural that you won't get much of anywhere. A good number of my friends from university didn't have a rat's arse of an idea about what to do with their lives, and university provided an excellent means for them to explore different options and try to figure out their futures. And in that, at least, I think their time spent in uni is a good thing.
It sounds like the four kids in the article already have a pretty good idea of what they want to do, thanks to a couple teachers taking them seriously, and as such they will no doubt get a lot of useful learning out of university -- the trouble for them lies in the financial and legal barriers between them and higher education. Anyone who cares about education would do well to find out how they can help, either by donating any extra cash, or by getting in touch with their own local schools to see what assistance they might provide. Pass along what you've got, because you can't take it with you when you go.
By what metric? I've had a number of people tell me the same thing about English. As a native speaker of English, I've found Arabic much more daunting simply for the number of sounds that don't even approach anything in English, let alone the very complex grammar. Chinese by comparison was quite simple, with a grammar much closer to what I'd grown up with, and sounds I could at least approximate enough to be understood.
The problem with anyone saying "Language X is difficult" is that it has everything to do with where you're coming from. If you speak Samoan, then Mâori and possibly even Tagalog won't be too much of a stretch, as the languages are related. Coming from English and learning Mâori is a completely different ballgame.
By way of example, let's look at some simple sentences. "I am going to the store" in English works out to wö qù shângdiàn, literally "I go store" in Chinese. But try the same thing in Japanese, and it could come out umpteen different ways depending on who you're talking to. If you're amongst friends, you could say mise ni iku, lit. "store to go", with the subject of "I" only implied (implied subjects can make interpreting Japanese into English a real bitch, especially if you just missed the beginning of the conversation :). If you're talking to your boss, you might say watashi wa o-mise ni ikimasu, lit. "I (topic) (honorific)-store to go."
I'll be the first to admit this is a lame-ass example, but nonetheless, I hope it at least illuminates my main point -- what's difficult to learn depends on what you already know. :D
Cheers,
Isn't that what Windows is, in the first place? :)
I understand WinXP is a lot better, but there are still times when the best you can do in terms of time savings are to wipe the HDD and start over with a fresh install. So, BAM -- looks like Windows itself is exactly what you were looking for!
They just might not be so externally obvious as the ones in the US.
There was an interesting, albeit cursory, article touching on this recently in the free mag Metropolis that's worth a look. Let's not forget Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo subway gas attack. And it's also worth mentioning that pseudo/quasi-religious groups like the Raelians have a visible presence here. The big difference between here and the US seems to be that the more problematic religious groups in Japan are all relatively new.
There has also been a lot written about how quickly Japan has changed and the dizzying effects of history being lost so quickly -- the tangible history of family heirlooms, old houses, even mountains and rivers, literally disappearing before your very eyes. Most of this writing has been in Japanese, naturally, as it's part of the dialog here internal to the country and its culture, but there has been some in English. The only title I currently have to mind is Dogs and Demons by Alex Kerr, admittedly a honky, but one that grew up here. If it's any indication of his credentials in terms of Japanese society, he is the first non-citizen to win Japan's Shincho literary prize for works written in Japanese, so I take his writings on the country with a smaller grain of salt than for most other gaijin authors.
However, I will certainly grant you that the US is undergoing its own peculiar reaction to so much change. I've often found myself thinking along lines similar to clive_p's comment, that part of the religious character of the US is built atop a set of beliefs and creeds that proved too extreme and inflexible for Europe. Though religious refugees certainly don't account for all US immigration by any means, I wonder how much this might have to do with the current kerfuffle?
Just my ¥2 to add to this discussion...
Nice to know it still does -- just tried on Win XP with all the latest patches and had to kill explorer.exe.
Well, at least MS is consistent. I know a lot of people complain that Linuxland is too much of a hodge-podge, with different this and that. But hey, WIndows can consistently offer us the same platform, and for how long now? Bugs and all...
Aha, for herein you might just cut to the root of the problem, from a public image viewpoint -- though there is no one thing identifiably "Linux" beyond the kernel, the public (i.e. userland) sees one thing from a distance called "Linux", and is then confused when upon closer inspection this single thing turns out to be a multiplicity of distros. Hmm.
To that end, I sincerely hope the Linux Standard Base initiative currently in progress amongst some of the major distros makes headway towards providing the basic interoperability such a user base would conceivably expect, with the straightforward binary compatibility you talk about in the great-grandparent post. In fact, it seems the LSB aims to solve the very issues you presented. The mission statement on the LSB page:
While I am a fan of variety and a stauch believer in avoiding monocultures, I do find myself thinking that the efforts of the LSB are pushing things in the right direction if we are to see greater adoption of Linux OSes, and in particular, greater participation by ISVs in the Linux-compatible software market. In such a case, there would at least be a few distributions that could, for userland, be collectively termed "Linux" without confusing things too much for the uninitiated. :)
A question about your sig:
Does this mean an economy that isn't magic, but is based on fish? Or an economy that is based on fish that aren't magic? Or an economy that isn't based on magic fish?
I'm so confused...
I agree with your two points. However:
There is no sensible way to talk about "Linux" in this context. It's not "an operating system", it's the kernel. I'm honestly not trying to be pedantic here; it's just that there are several distributions, i.e. OSes, in Linuxland. Proclamations like the current one by the Agility Alliance that lump everything Linux into one basket are simply FUD-slinging. I agree with you, the big vendors need to get together and just choose one, and by "one" here I mean distro. (By "vendors", I mean anyone trying to seriously look at issues of "security, scalability and the possibility of forking" and not just muddy the waters.) Comparing Debian to Redhat to Suse to Slackware to Gentoo and complaining that "there isn't enough commonality", which is what the Alliance seems to be saying at one point ("the alliance does not consider Linux to be a suitable operating system for the largest of enterprise customers because the open source operating system has issues with ... the possibility of forking."), is simply silly.
In fact, it seems relatively clear from the Alliance comments that they are fully committed to comparing disparate systems and finding fault in the differences. Looking at some of what they say:
Aside from the surface logical problems (is Unix a collection of languages, or applications? Since when was Solaris the "one surviving Unix"? etc), it's clear the Alliance is not in the business of making clear, informed, and informational statements about Linux, or even Unix in general.----
Ultimately, I agree with most of what you say. However, I cannot fully agree with nor understand your statement that until there is some standardization between them though, there's no reason to switch. Why should there be standardization between them? (Well, aside from simpler developing processes -- this is obviously important for anyone writing software for public release.) If a company decides, as you suggest, to go with "GTK on Redhat" for their internal enterprise systems, then good, more power to them. It shouldn't matter one wit to such a company, vis-à-vis their own internal systems, what's happening over on Slackware.
Or should it? If so, great -- convince me. :)
I hesitate to wade into this argument, but I feel compelled to point out here that the argument about "deterrent" vis-à-vis the death penalty is not that it deters the original perpetrator from going on to commit further crimes, but rather that the understanding that certain crimes carry the death penalty would deter would-be criminals from committing said crimes in the first place. Consequently, simply in logical terms, bringing up the executed party as proof of deterrence is irrelevant and misleading.
Just my ¥2 here...
In case you've missed out, you might want to take note that folks in the legal profession have very specific requirements vis-a-vis word count, to the extent that there have been legal snafus caused by incomplete word count functionality in MS Word (link courtesy this post by Animaether).
Given that OOo's word count has had numerous problems, apparently even in the v2.0 beta,, and given how fundamentally important an accurate and simple word count is in so many real-world applications (legal, scientific, academic, business, yada yada), I can see quite easily how OOo would be kept out of the running.
Not meaning to piss on your parade, but OOo's just not there yet. I love it -- it's free, it's functional, but it's also "almost" -- it's soooo close to being what people need, but close isn't good enough in some areas.
As a fellow OOo user, I say, great! Not great that it's got deficiencies, but great that you're aware of them. Please, I ask you to go over to http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_is sues.html, register, and start by looking up those deficiencies -- a lot of my own (and several others') pet peeves have been fixed or at least improved in the move to v2.0. Any issues you've run across that haven't been addressed deserve attention, so go ahead and be specific! File a bug report, and get the ball rolling to make something better. The best MS will do is maybe be polite in ignoring you (c.f. previous comment about problems in Word that show no sign of going away).
Precisely! Instead of spending gobs of money to basically tread water (by buying one static software package), a government could spend the same amount of money to contract for improvements to existing, functional, useful FOSS software (ongoing improvements), thus benefiting both themselves (better software, same budgets) and their citizenry at large (better software). Any silliness about "but that would be using MY tax dollars to support something that's free, that's communist!" etc. is simply that -- silliness -- for how is spending public funds on FOSS any worse than spending those same funds on (potentially) overpriced proprietary software? At least with FOSS, you know the code inside and out, and short of a compromised compiler, you know you've got no back doors. If I remember rightly, that's part of the Chinese government's argument against using proprietary software; this prompted MS to let them see (some of) its code.
Thank goodness Munich has some balls. It seems some other governments are also wising up to FOSS benefits. Here's to more public initiatives to use FOSS!
Whoohoo! I had no idea anything like this existed. Fabulosity baby, I'm going plaid! (<- oblique Spaceballs reference for the clue-impaired)
It'll be fun to see what the correlation is between the Doppler Effect and my own spare time. Well, at least once I've finished doing my taxes, or I'll have a number of unhappy government types come calling...
Precisely why I got myself a cheapie Wacom tablet. I had some graphics-heavy translation work at one point, and nearly rendered myself unable to work using a trackball (which I'd gotten after using a mouse began to be painful). I figured, heck, I never had any problems all those years at school writing things by hand, why not use the same posture and motions for moving the cursor? It's been a godsend in some ways. :)
(You -- you there sniggering, you know who you are -- that kind of mouse use is not what I'm talking about.)
My understanding's a little fuzzy, but I seem to recall that Windows (surprise surprise) doesn't play well with others, and demands that it get the main boot record of the hard drive all to itself. I'm not sure if that's what's happening here (stories I've heard talk more about Windows formatting the MBR and hosing grub or lilo in the process), but it might be somewhere to start if you ever decide to retry setting up a double-boot configuration.
Here's a few ideas:
- As you point out, gravity and acceleration are to some significant extent functionally identical.
- The universe is constantly expanding.
- What of the possibility that this expansion is, in fact, the root cause of "gravity"? I.e., what if the observable effects of gravity are in fact caused by acceleration as everything expands?
This last idea has been bothering me for some time. I'm quite interested to hear (read) what your thoughts might be.Now if we add ideas 1 and 2 to arrive at 3:
You know, I'm not so sure that'd be such a good idea....
Oh, so you live in Japan now? Oh, wait, you didn't say talking toilet or talking toaster... (^^;)
I'm curious, have you used NetBeans? Is it comparable to Eclipse for incremental compiling, refactoring, etc?
I last looked at Eclipse some time ago, and I should probably just download it again, but at the time it was *painfully* slow, and I got tired of waiting for it and switched to NetBeans. Any informative advice you can give comparing the two would be appreciated.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=136414&cid=113 92284/
Well, especially the fumes...