E3 is meant to accomplish two things:
1) Publishers and developers to all be in one place to have meetings, sign or work on deals, and all the other face to face work that goes on to get projects in motion
Fine, but you don't need an Expo for that.
2) A concentrated press event for companies to show off their stuff
Over time E3 became a magnet for fanboys to find a way in to the show to get free promotional material, lamely try to pick up on the local LA strippers working as models, and in general just clog up the place.
Right, bad bad fans, disgusting fans who show their interest in an inappropriate way, rather than applauding the 10th reincarnation of the same old idea.
E3 is perfect now. I don't know of anyone who actually is involved with game development who doesn't love the new format.
If you think that it is a good idea to exclude customers from an ENTERTAINING EXPO , you probably agree to Rock concerts only with music journalists, about as intelligent as excluding fans from E3. But I am glad that the "jouralists" can listen to the "press conference" without being disturbed by common people.
I am certainly not an Apple fan, but the website says: TFT display with support for millions of colors. How they "support" the amount of colors will certainly be a joyful exercise of a lawyer in front of the court. Hint: the word dithering may appear in his explanation...
Well, lets assume Linus gets along with GPLv3 and other Kernel developer too and put the Kernel under GPLv3. or Xorg, or (put any vital part of a distribution here). Than either Novell is using it and that would put the GPLv3 into the game or they fork and exclude anything that is under GPLv3. Very rapidly (GPLv3 is supposed to be out end of June) Novell will be left behind or they have to put a lot of manpower (maybe even with help from M$) into coding around whatever is released under GPLv3.
No matter what they do, once there is a snippet of code in their distribution that has been released under GPLv3, there are screwed.
all this deadly EM radiation will kill our children, and than there is this bad, bad, bad radiation from the stars, gamma ray burst anybody? So let's destroy all this stars, maybe with a, a...star destroyer, uh wait, never mind.
See, that's why it is called FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) , if someone ( You ) is peeing his pants because of M$ "pocket money" which helped so much in the SCO against IBM or SCO against Novell litigation...
That isn't informative and whoever modded you insightful, is either paid by pocket money, our hasn't finish school yet...
I think, that it is not risky at all, after Eben Moglen said that the SuSE vouchers distributed by Microsoft have no expiration date on it and thus are also legitimate, once GPLv3 is in effect. And as the GPLv3 has an interesting clause;
"If, pursuant to or in connection with a single transaction or arrangement, you convey, or propagate by procuring conveyance of, a covered work, and grant a patent license providing freedom to use, propagate, modify or convey a specific copy of the covered work to any of the parties receiving the covered work, then the patent license you grant is automatically extended to all recipients of the covered work and works based on it.(emphasis added)"
Microsoft is kind of trapped, although they argue, that they don't distribute Linux that way. Let's see.
Oh, absolutely right. I don't recommend buying from Dell and pay MS for getting Linux on my PC (I guess I could do that easier myself). I was just referring to the statement that now Dell jumps in bed with MS. I would rather see Linux as an affair, where the partner has to do compromises in the partnership because of the affair...:-)
The only way to avoid it? Buy parts and assemble it yourself. Certainly more expensive, but at least you roughly now what is inside of your computer and you could even buy parts known to run Linux well.
So I was all geared up to buy a Dell system preloaded with Linux.. Then they go and jump into bed with Microsoft.
What do you mean? Was Dell the biggest non Windows PC seller before this deal...? They sold MS-Stuff since day one, now they want to sell Linux also and just because they do this with there long term partner, you don't trust them anymore and they "jump in bed with Microsoft"?
How would you describe the situation before; a gangb... at the open window...?
it was so promising in the 90ths why not revamp it,you get a 3D-display, a data-glove and off you go...If we go to space, we could as well go to cyberspace, about time...
Congratulations/. for proving once again that common sense doesn't work.
You are here since yesterday? Nobody,but nobody expects common sense on slashdot, but we do enjoy it once we stumble upon it (see all those "insightful"comments?)
Why don't we choose a real and sane OSS leader?
Because we a just users/readers/subscribers of a website, nothing more, nothing less, you don't get a voting right by posting to slashdot...that would be too easy, right?
Yep, that does support your argument way more, lets see what the future will bring, as somebody else said (our experience) they moved all web-based application users to linux. I guess if we get more and more to the web-based application we are back at the old client-server architecture and there Linux is just the better choice.
Of course, if you want to play games, it's still windows or a console
Great, now we know that the TCO for a mixed Linux environment is higher than for Windows. And what does it mean?
Did they calculated the costs by taking the productivity of their personal into account, the increased security risks and possible costs for disaster recovery ( like an employee responsible for account creation, who had a keylogger installed, yesterday news http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/133 0215)?
What does it really mean, if you don't get the details of the entire installation and their calculation? Training people on new software is certainly the biggest costs, training people on a closed source system just means that security is controlled somewhere else and that users will not understand, can not understand and will make errors, which put your business at risk.
Sure, Linux can be attacked as well, but once there is a critical bug known, you can react by getting a patch, disable that part or write your patch yourself (not that I could do it, but a programmer employed by a bank...)
[...]
But what of the other option? What of continuing to mine carbon/hydrogen and burn it? This will continue to dump CO2 into the planetary carbon cycle. This is not bad. This is in spite of the feelings (but not logic) of a large percentage of the population which have been brainwashed with the religeon that CO2 must be bad for us.
Well, I do disagree that CO2 is fine in general and I do disagree that our rate of adding CO2 to the system is fine as well. I don't care so much about what has been here 500 million years ago, as that is very difficult to compare, what was the average CO2 production, what was the ratio of sea to continent, and in particular how was the weather, volcano activity, etc.
The earth can quite easily cope with atmospheric CO2 levels many times what it is now. During the Ordovician for instance the CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now... and in fact CO2 levels are presently at a very low level. This low level might be partially explained by the C4 plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_plant
The earth might cope with it, but can the humans and can our economy? I doubt that. Lets look at the C4-plants and CAM-plants, which use an intermediate to store CO2, which than is finally fixed in the night (as far as I remember) into glucose (or some other sugars, ribose, etc. lets spare the details). Now there is a little problem with these guys, as you state, this is a quite recent invention from evolution ( or god, but than our timescale doesn't work) and it is unlikely that all this CO2 get fixed by C4 or CAM plants. As far as I know they close their stomata (the openings in the leave) at a certain CO2 level, as they do breathe as well and that wouldn't be possible at a certain CO2 level. While they operate better for now, this may not be the case when we reach the 1000 ppm CO2.
Note that the C4 metabolic pathway didn't exist back in the Ordovician! Neither did the angeosperms of course. Ordovician is about 470 million years ago and angeosperms showed up maybe 100 million years ago. The C4 metabolic pathway is much more recent.
One argument is that the clearly far less efficient photosynthesis available 500 million years ago was able to cope with CO2 levels over 10x higher than today so its pretty clear that the plant life on the planet can cope with the negligible amount of CO2 we are adding.
It wasn't that much less efficient, but obviously possible in this atmosphere, as you said there were mainly gymnosperms. But it is very difficult to argue that there everything was alright, why should we worry. First, I don't know the state of the oceans in this time, did they start storing CO2 or were they giving of CO2, second, what was the state of the atmosphere, was it as clean (in terms of sunlight transmission) as today or better or worse? Again, what about volcano activity, which is low today, very, very low.
Oh... a question to be answered? Did the high levels of CO2 back in the Ordovician cause global warming? The answer is that during the Ordovician the earth plummeted into an ice age dispite the high CO2 levels.
So, the short of it is that CO2 is not a problem. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is actually good because it stimulates plant growth, increases food production, and makes plants more tolerant of arid conditions.
I really disagree with this point. There hasn't be a point in time were we had this extreme change in CO2 concentration in such a short time. I guess if you look back at earth history, we can't even measure such a short temporal window like last 100 years or last 30 years. And this change is what is causing the problem. And it is not good, if it is true that C4 and CAM plants just shut off at a certain CO2 level.
We have habitated this planet for a long while, but our civilisation has flourished in the last 5 millenia, wit
So plants fix CO2 for a living and therefore once you use sugar from plants the CO2 pollution is O?
Well that's not really true. First, plants do breathe also, which means they also produce CO2. They fix more CO2 than the produce, but it is not like they do this without any CO2 production. So than the carbon is stored in sugar which is a carbonhydrat, C6 H12 O6 is for example such a sugar.
To derive to diesel you have to reduce the sugar (get rid of the oxygen) to have something like CnH2n (roughly), which is a process for which the plant or the yeast needs energy. Lets asume they genetically modify the yeast such that they produce diesel rather than ethanol (CH3-CH2OH). You can genetically modify them until they are green glowing fast shiny spinning spaceships, that doesn't change the fact that you need at least two glucose molecule to make one CnH2n with n>6. And this doesn't tell you anything about the energy the yeast needs itself for a living, which it does.
So you invest into fertilizers, harvesting machinery, storage, and transportation, which is all energy dependent, to produce sugar, which then is transformed into diesel by yeast, which put out some oxidation endproduct like CO2 ( before ethanol, but can't 'cause know they produce diesel).
And that is going to solve our energy and climate problems, which are based on the oxidation of fossil fuel?
Build nuclear power plants and when does this ITER starts, dammit!
If somebody would have told me, when you use DOS and its successors you will finally support the media companys, I may have used Atari...
An OS selling company is enforcing the media industry "rights", whithout even asking the customer nor the companys (Ok, I guess they talked to them)? Well, that's cool
You are starting to see less about embryonic stem cells because the major venture capitalists have sold out after they did thier pump and have no need to spend the money on PR any more. Maybe some scientist were a bit loud and of course some companys too. But that doesn't change the fact, that there is active research goin on and a lot of groups around the world are actively characterising and working with stem cells right now. There is always basic or fundamental research going on before applied science jumps in. And you want to have everything double checked before you work with humans and particulary with human therapy.
At which time there will be organs or tissue from human stem cells (adult, embryonic, your own or from a donor) I don't know, but you can be rest assured; this will happen.
It's quite hard to extract relevant amounts of stem cells from few drops of fluid. Unless you just need a cell or two, I would say you need to drain much more that few drops. Not really, there are 10 to 1000 cells per ul (microliter) of amniotic fluid and if you take 100 ul, you have already a significant amount, as they do grow (become more), when you cultivate them under proper conditions
The argument to preserve "potential persons" is completely bogus as it enforces an entirely arbitrary dividing line. I can prove this as follows.
Seeing that I am fertile, when I walk into a room with a fertile woman there in lies the potential for a human being. Just as easily as you can argue that the embryo should be preserved, I can argue that you must let me mate with the woman.
There is no end to this. The argument can be moved further and further from actual human life.
Pointing to the embryo and saying "don't kill this" is a priori no more reasonable not allowing people to use contraceptives (something which many Catholics still believe).
There must be a reason to place the dividing line in a certain spot, and that reason must be based on knowledge and not belief. Enforcing beliefs over people's welfare is just as evil as anything else, and stupid too. Good, there should be a border, but were should be this border? If you say, that it can potentially become a person, than you have to define a "person". Now, it is well known, that even a 1 year old child doesn't have that much personality, but if you want you can go back to weeks after birth. Would you define a 3 month old baby as a person or a potential person? Would you define a severly mentally disabled human as a person even if he/she can not express their own will?
These are just examples, to show you the difficulties if you apply a definition based on "person" or personality. You have to be aware of the ethical consequences, if you put up a definition of human life that is worth to be protected, because it implies that there exist human life which is not worth it.
Now if you rely on knowledge and knowledge tells you that human life is a pure vegatative act, until lets say there is a certain complexity in brain activity reached, what are you doing? If you asume that self awareness is the first sign of a concious mind, should we treat all babys as potential persons until they reach this point?
Right, they wouldn't like it so much. As they wouldn't like it so much if an earthquake destroys their corporate headquarter. Now lets look at the probabilities; earthquake, yeah can happen depends where your HQ is located, lawsuit from Microsoft against Linux...you are joking, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I am certainly not an Apple fan, but the website says: TFT display with support for millions of colors. How they "support" the amount of colors will certainly be a joyful exercise of a lawyer in front of the court. Hint: the word dithering may appear in his explanation...
Well, lets assume Linus gets along with GPLv3 and other Kernel developer too and put the Kernel under GPLv3. or Xorg, or (put any vital part of a distribution here). Than either Novell is using it and that would put the GPLv3 into the game or they fork and exclude anything that is under GPLv3. Very rapidly (GPLv3 is supposed to be out end of June) Novell will be left behind or they have to put a lot of manpower (maybe even with help from M$) into coding around whatever is released under GPLv3.
No matter what they do, once there is a snippet of code in their distribution that has been released under GPLv3, there are screwed.
all this deadly EM radiation will kill our children, and than there is this bad, bad, bad radiation from the stars, gamma ray burst anybody? So let's destroy all this stars, maybe with a, a ...star destroyer, uh wait, never mind.
See, that's why it is called FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) , if someone ( You ) is peeing his pants because of M$ "pocket money" which helped so much in the SCO against IBM or SCO against Novell litigation...
That isn't informative and whoever modded you insightful, is either paid by pocket money, our hasn't finish school yet...
Buying Linux preinstalled from Dell..."is basically like paying your wife to let you sleep with a hooker."
See and as Software is like Sex; it's best if it is free... You should know what to do!
Oh, absolutely right. I don't recommend buying from Dell and pay MS for getting Linux on my PC (I guess I could do that easier myself). I was just referring to the statement that now Dell jumps in bed with MS. I would rather see Linux as an affair, where the partner has to do compromises in the partnership because of the affair... :-)
The only way to avoid it? Buy parts and assemble it yourself. Certainly more expensive, but at least you roughly now what is inside of your computer and you could even buy parts known to run Linux well.
How would you describe the situation before; a gangb... at the open window...?
it was so promising in the 90ths why not revamp it,you get a 3D-display, a data-glove and off you go...If we go to space, we could as well go to cyberspace, about time...
You are here since yesterday? Nobody,but nobody expects common sense on slashdot, but we do enjoy it once we stumble upon it (see all those "insightful"comments?)
Because we a just users/readers/subscribers of a website, nothing more, nothing less, you don't get a voting right by posting to slashdot...that would be too easy, right?
You mean NASA uses Windows for scientific applications? No wonder the think tank doesn't get any money anymore...
Yep, that does support your argument way more, lets see what the future will bring, as somebody else said (our experience) they moved all web-based application users to linux. I guess if we get more and more to the web-based application we are back at the old client-server architecture and there Linux is just the better choice.
Of course, if you want to play games, it's still windows or a console
And another little correction; they didn't talk about OSS but solely about Linux. You can get your Microsoft costs down by using OpenOffice :-)
Great, now we know that the TCO for a mixed Linux environment is higher than for Windows. And what does it mean?
3 0215)?
Did they calculated the costs by taking the productivity of their personal into account, the increased security risks and possible costs for disaster recovery ( like an employee responsible for account creation, who had a keylogger installed, yesterday news http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/14/13
What does it really mean, if you don't get the details of the entire installation and their calculation? Training people on new software is certainly the biggest costs, training people on a closed source system just means that security is controlled somewhere else and that users will not understand, can not understand and will make errors, which put your business at risk.
Sure, Linux can be attacked as well, but once there is a critical bug known, you can react by getting a patch, disable that part or write your patch yourself (not that I could do it, but a programmer employed by a bank...)
Much better than a "patch/nopatch tuesday".
[...] But what of the other option? What of continuing to mine carbon/hydrogen and burn it? This will continue to dump CO2 into the planetary carbon cycle. This is not bad. This is in spite of the feelings (but not logic) of a large percentage of the population which have been brainwashed with the religeon that CO2 must be bad for us.
Well, I do disagree that CO2 is fine in general and I do disagree that our rate of adding CO2 to the system is fine as well. I don't care so much about what has been here 500 million years ago, as that is very difficult to compare, what was the average CO2 production, what was the ratio of sea to continent, and in particular how was the weather, volcano activity, etc.
The earth can quite easily cope with atmospheric CO2 levels many times what it is now. During the Ordovician for instance the CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now... and in fact CO2 levels are presently at a very low level. This low level might be partially explained by the C4 plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_plant
The earth might cope with it, but can the humans and can our economy? I doubt that. Lets look at the C4-plants and CAM-plants, which use an intermediate to store CO2, which than is finally fixed in the night (as far as I remember) into glucose (or some other sugars, ribose, etc. lets spare the details). Now there is a little problem with these guys, as you state, this is a quite recent invention from evolution ( or god, but than our timescale doesn't work) and it is unlikely that all this CO2 get fixed by C4 or CAM plants. As far as I know they close their stomata (the openings in the leave) at a certain CO2 level, as they do breathe as well and that wouldn't be possible at a certain CO2 level. While they operate better for now, this may not be the case when we reach the 1000 ppm CO2.
Note that the C4 metabolic pathway didn't exist back in the Ordovician! Neither did the angeosperms of course. Ordovician is about 470 million years ago and angeosperms showed up maybe 100 million years ago. The C4 metabolic pathway is much more recent.
One argument is that the clearly far less efficient photosynthesis available 500 million years ago was able to cope with CO2 levels over 10x higher than today so its pretty clear that the plant life on the planet can cope with the negligible amount of CO2 we are adding.
It wasn't that much less efficient, but obviously possible in this atmosphere, as you said there were mainly gymnosperms. But it is very difficult to argue that there everything was alright, why should we worry. First, I don't know the state of the oceans in this time, did they start storing CO2 or were they giving of CO2, second, what was the state of the atmosphere, was it as clean (in terms of sunlight transmission) as today or better or worse? Again, what about volcano activity, which is low today, very, very low.
Oh... a question to be answered? Did the high levels of CO2 back in the Ordovician cause global warming? The answer is that during the Ordovician the earth plummeted into an ice age dispite the high CO2 levels.
So, the short of it is that CO2 is not a problem. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is actually good because it stimulates plant growth, increases food production, and makes plants more tolerant of arid conditions.
I really disagree with this point. There hasn't be a point in time were we had this extreme change in CO2 concentration in such a short time. I guess if you look back at earth history, we can't even measure such a short temporal window like last 100 years or last 30 years. And this change is what is causing the problem. And it is not good, if it is true that C4 and CAM plants just shut off at a certain CO2 level.
We have habitated this planet for a long while, but our civilisation has flourished in the last 5 millenia, wit
I really hate to tell you, but I liked the first version more, it was also easier to read
So plants fix CO2 for a living and therefore once you use sugar from plants the CO2 pollution is O?
Well that's not really true. First, plants do breathe also, which means they also produce CO2. They fix more CO2 than the produce, but it is not like they do this without any CO2 production. So than the carbon is stored in sugar which is a carbonhydrat, C6 H12 O6 is for example such a sugar.
To derive to diesel you have to reduce the sugar (get rid of the oxygen) to have something like CnH2n (roughly), which is a process for which the plant or the yeast needs energy. Lets asume they genetically modify the yeast such that they produce diesel rather than ethanol (CH3-CH2OH). You can genetically modify them until they are green glowing fast shiny spinning spaceships, that doesn't change the fact that you need at least two glucose molecule to make one CnH2n with n>6. And this doesn't tell you anything about the energy the yeast needs itself for a living, which it does.
So you invest into fertilizers, harvesting machinery, storage, and transportation, which is all energy dependent, to produce sugar, which then is transformed into diesel by yeast, which put out some oxidation endproduct like CO2 ( before ethanol, but can't 'cause know they produce diesel). And that is going to solve our energy and climate problems, which are based on the oxidation of fossil fuel?
Build nuclear power plants and when does this ITER starts, dammit!
If somebody would have told me, when you use DOS and its successors you will finally support the media companys, I may have used Atari...
An OS selling company is enforcing the media industry "rights", whithout even asking the customer nor the companys (Ok, I guess they talked to them)? Well, that's cool
At which time there will be organs or tissue from human stem cells (adult, embryonic, your own or from a donor) I don't know, but you can be rest assured; this will happen.
Unless you just need a cell or two, I would say you need to drain much more that few drops. Not really, there are 10 to 1000 cells per ul (microliter) of amniotic fluid and if you take 100 ul, you have already a significant amount, as they do grow (become more), when you cultivate them under proper conditions
Seeing that I am fertile, when I walk into a room with a fertile woman there in lies the potential for a human being.
Just as easily as you can argue that the embryo should be preserved, I can argue that you must let me mate with the woman.
There is no end to this. The argument can be moved further and further from actual human life.
Pointing to the embryo and saying "don't kill this" is a priori no more reasonable not allowing people to use contraceptives (something which many Catholics still believe).
There must be a reason to place the dividing line in a certain spot, and that reason must be based on knowledge and not belief. Enforcing beliefs over people's welfare is just as evil as anything else, and stupid too. Good, there should be a border, but were should be this border? If you say, that it can potentially become a person, than you have to define a "person". Now, it is well known, that even a 1 year old child doesn't have that much personality, but if you want you can go back to weeks after birth. Would you define a 3 month old baby as a person or a potential person? Would you define a severly mentally disabled human as a person even if he/she can not express their own will?
These are just examples, to show you the difficulties if you apply a definition based on "person" or personality. You have to be aware of the ethical consequences, if you put up a definition of human life that is worth to be protected, because it implies that there exist human life which is not worth it.
Now if you rely on knowledge and knowledge tells you that human life is a pure vegatative act, until lets say there is a certain complexity in brain activity reached, what are you doing? If you asume that self awareness is the first sign of a concious mind, should we treat all babys as potential persons until they reach this point?
Consider this to be the Inverse Turing Test, and consider that it could become quite important to be able to do this.
Why?In the moment we need this test, we would propbably be close to a singularity... and the speed of change would make every test a slow joke.
Right, they wouldn't like it so much. As they wouldn't like it so much if an earthquake destroys their corporate headquarter. Now lets look at the probabilities; earthquake, yeah can happen depends where your HQ is located, lawsuit from Microsoft against Linux...you are joking, right?
Summary: FUD as usual...