Okay, if this is the wish-list thread, then I need to be able to set the default calendar to something other than My Calendar. Also it would be nice if it sat in the bottom right of the toolbar on my windows system instead of a whole tab. It's perfectly usable though and pretty amazing for a beta version. I'll stick with it as it grows.
The way it now works is that the kids with fast mouths victimize and ridicule the ones with fast fists
I'm curious as to how you find that division. There is no reason for someone who is quick-witted to be weak, nor for a strong person to be mentally slow.
My area in Bristol is popular with users of crack cocaine.
Possibly St. Paul's?
I used to live along St. Anne's in Nottingham. That can get pretty vicious too.
I'm not going to reflexively yell about privacy in response to your post, because I don't doubt your right, and your area is a little safer for the time being.
But I am against CCTV cameras as a means to solve crime for a number of reasons, but the foremost being the same reason I'm against pain killers to treat an abcess, using my credit card to make my loan repayments and tidying one room in my house by shoving all the stuff into another one.
I don't believe CCTV solves the problem of crime. It's a way of brushing the real problems aside. Poverty, lack of education, frustration and alienation. Although I believe people have made choices to get where they are, including hard drug use, I'm not naieve enough to think people aren't pushed into it by their environment. The addicts I've known (and I have known a few) were using the drugs mostly because their lives were shit.
CCTV has a short term deterrant effect, but after it's effectiveness depends on helping to catch the criminals so they can be put away. All well and good, but prison is not a long-term solution nor a deterrant.
There has to be a better way of dealing with this than just finding new ways of slapping people down and restricting their behaviour, or we might aswell just condemn the human race now. I'd like to see more work to build communities, offer support to drug addicts and more community-based policing. I think that CCTV also fosters a feeling of fear and an Us-and-Them mentality. Which caused crime in the first place.
There's a pretty poor level of IT knowledge throughout the NHS hierarchy as far as I can see. Well, maybe not so much a poor level, as a very poor breadth. Many little things annoy me, such as how NHS sites (such as QMAS for those who know what I'm talking about) are explicitly geared towards IE, even when they work fine with other browsers. Our Clinical Systems supplier is proudly announcing an enhanced partnership with Microsoft, and the PCTs (Primary Care Trust - regional organizational bodies for local practices) will only fund Windows systems. Some of their tech support staff are pretty competent on Linux, but they wouldn't be allowed to support it. From where I work, it seems as though Microsoft has got its hooks into the NHS very deep.
I work in the NHS at the moment, and I'd love to have a linux system at our practice. Unfortunately, our clinical systems supplier is Windows only and it's too late (or too early) to switch, even if there were a linux alternative.
As a pretty strong programmer, I'd be more than happy to contribute to an OSS clinical system, or even do a chunk of the design work for it. But I don't know anyone else who would help.
And really do not get me started on the switch from READ codes to CAP's SNOMED.
Just an unexplained dropoff in purchases will, as you suggest, be explained by the RIAA in such a manner as to demonize their opponents.
The RIAA however, may still realize the truth themselves, irregardless of what they put in their press releases. And more to the point, so may the labels that comprise it.
A boycott comes much more naturally however, when people can move to an alternative. I've started buying music from smaller labels more often. Have a look at Magnatune I also like being able to buy individual songs from iTunes. If the money stays in the public's pockets, that's one thing. If they see it going to someone else they'll change their tune pretty quick.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't spot that pun until I'd hit preview. Honest...
Unfortunately, IBM has a patent on the nipple interface
Blast! And there was me cynically putting it down to people's usual phobia of new ways of doing things.
I should have cynically put it down to people's greed and possesiveness. Oh well, if IBM is still producing laptops with the clits, then that might actually be enough to persuade me to buy one for my own next laptop. It's far far far better than a touchpad.
And I think I'm going to have to side with clit in the great clit vs. nipple debate. It's too responsive for a nipple.:D
Bah. Cordless mice are too laggy and they don't have good sample rates. Not like a standard USB mouse.
My favourite problem with a mouse so far happened last week.
"My mouse isn't working, it keeps jumping in the wrong direction" she said.
The culprit? Optical mouse with promotional hologram mousepad.
I'm not sure on the speeds you'd get across USB2, but this is also USB1 compatible and I don't think you'd want your swap mounted on it. Nope, you're right and you don't need to qualify it. This is no alternative to a laptop.
And if the purpose of it was to have portability of software and data, well I have an email client running from a pen-drive and it also stores a few spreadsheets and Word documents. I've not found much else I actually need to carry from computer to computer for rountine work.
I'd say the best use for this is demoing a linux system to clients.
So I was right, or almost anyway. I just googled on 'clitmouse' and found no end of references to it.
Apparently, it is a standard term (although don't analyse the word itself too hard) and I've even turned up the very first reference to it in back in 1998.
I always found it to be superior to a mouse or touch pad in every way, especially for a touch typist like myself who doesn't like to break the rythm by moving my hand away from the keyboard.
If anyone hasn't seen one of these, there is a picture here. I don't really care what they're called, but I wish they were more common.
Now on a more serious vagina-computer-interface subject (no, really), is that little mouse / touch-pad alternative in the middle of some laptop's keyboards, you know, those little rubber nubs that you can steer the pointer with, called a clitoris or not.
That's what we all called it, and that's what a tech support guy called it, but when I called it that to a colleague, she just laughed and wouldn't believe me.
Though on the subject of this mouse - why the Hell is this a story? I mean a new mouse?
To be honest, this trend disturbs me, because I've always considered myself a "hard core I.T./computer" guy
I'd agree with this, not so much for what it does to the job market, but because those who learn it as a supplemental skill will not be that good at it. They wont learn how create effective algorithms, maintainable code, etc. And they'll probably all use VB and PHP.
And the PHB's wont know the difference, of course.
I've noticed that IT skills are now necessary requirements for roles in other areas. Employers are less often looking for just a programmer, but a statistician who can program, or a physics graduate who can program, or a graphic designer who...
Where once you would have hired a programmer to implement the specialist's work, you now expect the specialist to comprise the IT specialist's role as well.
I'm currently doing some work in data analysis, but they want me to do the SQL work on the databases myself (the cheek of it!)
That point made though, I don't think this accounts for major falls in IT work availability. I think if there are such falls then they are more a result the market being flooded with muppets who think they can program (done the correspondence or the nightschool course) and that less and less work is needing to be done from scratch. We have MS Office, we have Postnuke, we have Dreamweaver templates and anything else you might want, requiring only the barest customization.
My advice is to get good at a supplementary field (maths is always good) and get yourself into something that requires more skill than the college course kid can fake in an interview. Go for jobs with people who take things seriously, not the ones who are looking for someone cheap and can't tell the difference between you and the muppet.
Renewing costs $1000.
And here's the rub: each time you renew, the cost is double that for last time.
If you set $FEE high, it penalizes small business and individuals who sell/market their work themselves or not for profit. If you set the price low, it does nothing to penalize Big Corp(inc). The multiplication of fees is just a variation on this.
You could tie the fee to the profits generated and other such variations, but I forsee that getting messy, and marketing loopholes will arise. I doubt it would be to the benefit of the people.
Anyway, what gives the government (or whichever organization the government apoints) the right to levy yet another tax on artists and creators? They already tax the profit on the work.
pressing for laws that will put more people in prison for longer (three strikes law).
That's an 'increasing revenue' move. Don't forget the other attack of 'cutting costs.' No doubt their are legal requirements on conditions in the jails that would save money if they could be lifted.
My guide to ethics usually consists of acting in such a way that if everyone behaved in that manner, then the world would be better.
In this instance, we can see that if people did not invest in things that profit (cavalierly or not) from other people's suffering, then there would be less suffering. No matter how small a part the investor is, he is still supporting such a system.
Whether you believe prisons cause unneccesary suffering or not is a seperate argument, but it hardly seems that making their purpose profit will help matters.
And in my experience and knowledge, based on people I have known who spent time there and statistics I have read, a prison is a machine for turning people more or less ordinary people in difficult circumstances into violent thugs who are thereafter barred from getting anywhere in life and usually sink further into crime.
I've just read through the comments and it's hard to believe that no-one has mentioned Pi. The film is about a mathematician who is working on exactly this - spotting trends in the stock market by describing patterns in Chaos. It's a strange intense film and in addition to being pursued by shady stock market brokers, he's hounded by a jewish Kabbalah sect who believe he might be working out the true name of God.
This is has honestly been the only reason that I still boot up in Windows.
Also seems I not the only one:
"iTunes has been our No. 1 most requested application," CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White said in a statement.
And presumably a free open source version cannot be far behind? Now, if I can just take this opportunity to ask the iTunes people to please add some (a lot) more to their back catalogue then the world will become perfect.
The Christian and Islamic God are one and the same.
Ah, only if 'they' exist. Which is to say that they are both the deities of monotheistic religions and that if they exist then they must therefore be one and the same. This applies of course to the Judaic god also.
However, if they do not exist, then we can determine that they are not the same. The reasoning for this is that if they do not exist they must be defined purely in terms of human belief in and attitude towards them. Now although they have the same origins (both being taken from Israelite mythology), they are clearly attributed different qualities by their adherents. As this attribution is all that defines the non-existent $DEITY, they are therefore different.
So it really depends on the existence or lack of, of God.
(Which is "God bless America" spoken by Bush and "Allah Akhbar" spoken by bin Laden is so incredibly funny)
I've never been convinced of Bush as a Christian. He seems to have missed quite a lot of stuff about loving your neighbours, forgiving trespassers and renouncing wealth.
The X axis has two positions: x1{There is a God}, x2{there is not a God} The Y axis has two positions: y1{You believe in God}, y2{You don't believe in God} The Z axis has two positions: z1{God is sensible}, z2{God is not sensible}
Of course, we also have to determine whether God is the Christian God, Islamic God, Hindu, etcetera...
Hmmm, I appear to need 22-dimensional graph paper...
Yes, yes...this type of stuff only happens because of those on the 'ultra right':
Protestors to be Caged at Democratic National Convention
I hate to bring this to your attention, but even your left-wing is right-wing. What would be considered left-wing forty years ago is nowhere to be seen at all these days. I'm guessing this is because the Democrats get their funding from the same sources as the republicans. European definitions of left wing (not UK) are much further left than the USA's.
But on topic, what good will supressing the effect of hard drugs do? Those I've known who were on heroin weren't doing it for fun. They were doing it as an escape. So what if the government shuts another door on them? It doesn't make their actual situation better.
Of course if you postulate that utopia breaks out and all humans will be suddenly nice and friendly, as another poster did, anarchy will be really great. But any political system would be in such a situation.
Heh! I think I might be that other poster. If Utopia breaks out then as you say, all systems of government would work and we'd simply pick the most efficient. Which would almost certainly be Anarchy: witness the Linux development cycle compared to Windows for an illustration of this.
I want to emphasize that I'm not disagreeing with anything in your post. I think I'd better do that, because the standard/. thread goes point, counter-point, repeat and I don't want to follow that here.
I do want to add something though, and that is that anarchism is not mutually exclusive of meritocracy, unless you're using a really literal definition of meritocracy. Given that true anarchism levels the playing field substantially, you would expect it to be much more meritocratic than existing systems.
What I really wanted to comment on was this bit however:
In a sufficiently big group with no one specifically concerned with enforcing laws this can quickly devolve into rule by power,
A good principle I've found is that cybernetic systems do not scale well. In this case, the larger the organization the more quickly it becomes inefficient and breaks down. However, I feel that this is more true of centralised systems such as the UK government, than it is for decentralised systems such as anarchy. One reason for this is the breakdown in communication/feedback between the vast majority of the people and distant leaders who are never met, never talked with. In a large system there needs to be localised self-governance and the emphasis should move to co-operation rather than enforced obedience. Compare it with Object Oriented Analysis and Design vs. the old SSADM / Yourden methodologies. The old ones were better and more efficient for small systems. They broke down in the complexity of large modern systems.
It might be a mistake to bring up software methodologies as someone will disagree with my view, but I'm just using them to illustrate my point. And also inevitably, willing co-operation will be more effective than obediance.
The best pragmatic definition of an anarchist I know is "Someone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do."
If I hadn't already posted umpteen times in this thread, I would mod you funny, or insightful. If you weren't already listed as a friend, I'd add you now.
As it is, I'll simply have to steal your quote and use it as often as I can. V. nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, if this is the wish-list thread, then I need to be able to set the default calendar to something other than My Calendar. Also it would be nice if it sat in the bottom right of the toolbar on my windows system instead of a whole tab. It's perfectly usable though and pretty amazing for a beta version. I'll stick with it as it grows.
The way it now works is that the kids with fast mouths victimize and ridicule the ones with fast fists
I'm curious as to how you find that division. There is no reason for someone who is quick-witted to be weak, nor for a strong person to be mentally slow.
My area in Bristol is popular with users of crack cocaine.
Possibly St. Paul's?
I used to live along St. Anne's in Nottingham. That can get pretty vicious too. I'm not going to reflexively yell about privacy in response to your post, because I don't doubt your right, and your area is a little safer for the time being.
But I am against CCTV cameras as a means to solve crime for a number of reasons, but the foremost being the same reason I'm against pain killers to treat an abcess, using my credit card to make my loan repayments and tidying one room in my house by shoving all the stuff into another one.
I don't believe CCTV solves the problem of crime. It's a way of brushing the real problems aside. Poverty, lack of education, frustration and alienation. Although I believe people have made choices to get where they are, including hard drug use, I'm not naieve enough to think people aren't pushed into it by their environment. The addicts I've known (and I have known a few) were using the drugs mostly because their lives were shit.
CCTV has a short term deterrant effect, but after it's effectiveness depends on helping to catch the criminals so they can be put away. All well and good, but prison is not a long-term solution nor a deterrant.
There has to be a better way of dealing with this than just finding new ways of slapping people down and restricting their behaviour, or we might aswell just condemn the human race now. I'd like to see more work to build communities, offer support to drug addicts and more community-based policing. I think that CCTV also fosters a feeling of fear and an Us-and-Them mentality. Which caused crime in the first place.
How to obfuscate in copious detail.
How to write unmaintainable code
There's a pretty poor level of IT knowledge throughout the NHS hierarchy as far as I can see. Well, maybe not so much a poor level, as a very poor breadth. Many little things annoy me, such as how NHS sites (such as QMAS for those who know what I'm talking about) are explicitly geared towards IE, even when they work fine with other browsers. Our Clinical Systems supplier is proudly announcing an enhanced partnership with Microsoft, and the PCTs (Primary Care Trust - regional organizational bodies for local practices) will only fund Windows systems. Some of their tech support staff are pretty competent on Linux, but they wouldn't be allowed to support it. From where I work, it seems as though Microsoft has got its hooks into the NHS very deep.
I work in the NHS at the moment, and I'd love to have a linux system at our practice. Unfortunately, our clinical systems supplier is Windows only and it's too late (or too early) to switch, even if there were a linux alternative.
As a pretty strong programmer, I'd be more than happy to contribute to an OSS clinical system, or even do a chunk of the design work for it. But I don't know anyone else who would help.
And really do not get me started on the switch from READ codes to CAP's SNOMED.
Seriously, it's either "irrespective", or "regardless", but not both.
Sorry.
Just an unexplained dropoff in purchases will, as you suggest, be explained by the RIAA in such a manner as to demonize their opponents.
The RIAA however, may still realize the truth themselves, irregardless of what they put in their press releases. And more to the point, so may the labels that comprise it.
A boycott comes much more naturally however, when people can move to an alternative. I've started buying music from smaller labels more often. Have a look at Magnatune I also like being able to buy individual songs from iTunes. If the money stays in the public's pockets, that's one thing. If they see it going to someone else they'll change their tune pretty quick.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't spot that pun until I'd hit preview. Honest...
Unfortunately, IBM has a patent on the nipple interface
Blast! And there was me cynically putting it down to people's usual phobia of new ways of doing things.
I should have cynically put it down to people's greed and possesiveness. Oh well, if IBM is still producing laptops with the clits, then that might actually be enough to persuade me to buy one for my own next laptop. It's far far far better than a touchpad.
And I think I'm going to have to side with clit in the great clit vs. nipple debate. It's too responsive for a nipple.
Bah. Cordless mice are too laggy and they don't have good sample rates. Not like a standard USB mouse.
My favourite problem with a mouse so far happened last week.
"My mouse isn't working, it keeps jumping in the wrong direction" she said.
The culprit? Optical mouse with promotional hologram mousepad.
I'm not sure on the speeds you'd get across USB2, but this is also USB1 compatible and I don't think you'd want your swap mounted on it. Nope, you're right and you don't need to qualify it. This is no alternative to a laptop.
And if the purpose of it was to have portability of software and data, well I have an email client running from a pen-drive and it also stores a few spreadsheets and Word documents. I've not found much else I actually need to carry from computer to computer for rountine work.
I'd say the best use for this is demoing a linux system to clients.
You must mean the IBM TrackPoint/ClitMouse.
So I was right, or almost anyway. I just googled on 'clitmouse' and found no end of references to it.
Apparently, it is a standard term (although don't analyse the word itself too hard) and I've even turned up the very first reference to it in back in 1998.
I always found it to be superior to a mouse or touch pad in every way, especially for a touch typist like myself who doesn't like to break the rythm by moving my hand away from the keyboard.
If anyone hasn't seen one of these, there is a picture here. I don't really care what they're called, but I wish they were more common.
Now on a more serious vagina-computer-interface subject (no, really), is that little mouse / touch-pad alternative in the middle of some laptop's keyboards, you know, those little rubber nubs that you can steer the pointer with, called a clitoris or not.
That's what we all called it, and that's what a tech support guy called it, but when I called it that to a colleague, she just laughed and wouldn't believe me.
Though on the subject of this mouse - why the Hell is this a story? I mean a new mouse?
To be honest, this trend disturbs me, because I've always considered myself a "hard core I.T./computer" guy
I'd agree with this, not so much for what it does to the job market, but because those who learn it as a supplemental skill will not be that good at it. They wont learn how create effective algorithms, maintainable code, etc. And they'll probably all use VB and PHP.
And the PHB's wont know the difference, of course.
I've noticed that IT skills are now necessary requirements for roles in other areas. Employers are less often looking for just a programmer, but a statistician who can program, or a physics graduate who can program, or a graphic designer who...
Where once you would have hired a programmer to implement the specialist's work, you now expect the specialist to comprise the IT specialist's role as well.
I'm currently doing some work in data analysis, but they want me to do the SQL work on the databases myself (the cheek of it!)
That point made though, I don't think this accounts for major falls in IT work availability. I think if there are such falls then they are more a result the market being flooded with muppets who think they can program (done the correspondence or the nightschool course) and that less and less work is needing to be done from scratch. We have MS Office, we have Postnuke, we have Dreamweaver templates and anything else you might want, requiring only the barest customization.
My advice is to get good at a supplementary field (maths is always good) and get yourself into something that requires more skill than the college course kid can fake in an interview. Go for jobs with people who take things seriously, not the ones who are looking for someone cheap and can't tell the difference between you and the muppet.
Renewing costs $1000. And here's the rub: each time you renew, the cost is double that for last time.
If you set $FEE high, it penalizes small business and individuals who sell/market their work themselves or not for profit. If you set the price low, it does nothing to penalize Big Corp(inc). The multiplication of fees is just a variation on this.
You could tie the fee to the profits generated and other such variations, but I forsee that getting messy, and marketing loopholes will arise. I doubt it would be to the benefit of the people.
Anyway, what gives the government (or whichever organization the government apoints) the right to levy yet another tax on artists and creators? They already tax the profit on the work.
pressing for laws that will put more people in prison for longer (three strikes law).
That's an 'increasing revenue' move. Don't forget the other attack of 'cutting costs.' No doubt their are legal requirements on conditions in the jails that would save money if they could be lifted.
My guide to ethics usually consists of acting in such a way that if everyone behaved in that manner, then the world would be better.
In this instance, we can see that if people did not invest in things that profit (cavalierly or not) from other people's suffering, then there would be less suffering. No matter how small a part the investor is, he is still supporting such a system.
Whether you believe prisons cause unneccesary suffering or not is a seperate argument, but it hardly seems that making their purpose profit will help matters.
And in my experience and knowledge, based on people I have known who spent time there and statistics I have read, a prison is a machine for turning people more or less ordinary people in difficult circumstances into violent thugs who are thereafter barred from getting anywhere in life and usually sink further into crime.
Just make damn sure Mandelbrot has no drills in the house.
:)
Ah, I knew someone must have seen it.
You'd get the name of God.
I've just read through the comments and it's hard to believe that no-one has mentioned Pi. The film is about a mathematician who is working on exactly this - spotting trends in the stock market by describing patterns in Chaos. It's a strange intense film and in addition to being pursued by shady stock market brokers, he's hounded by a jewish Kabbalah sect who believe he might be working out the true name of God.
Top of the list of 'Films to be Watched On Acid."
This is has honestly been the only reason that I still boot up in Windows.
Also seems I not the only one:
"iTunes has been our No. 1 most requested application," CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White said in a statement.
And presumably a free open source version cannot be far behind? Now, if I can just take this opportunity to ask the iTunes people to please add some (a lot) more to their back catalogue then the world will become perfect.
The Christian and Islamic God are one and the same.
Ah, only if 'they' exist. Which is to say that they are both the deities of monotheistic religions and that if they exist then they must therefore be one and the same. This applies of course to the Judaic god also.
However, if they do not exist, then we can determine that they are not the same. The reasoning for this is that if they do not exist they must be defined purely in terms of human belief in and attitude towards them. Now although they have the same origins (both being taken from Israelite mythology), they are clearly attributed different qualities by their adherents. As this attribution is all that defines the non-existent $DEITY, they are therefore different.
So it really depends on the existence or lack of, of God.
(Which is "God bless America" spoken by Bush and "Allah Akhbar" spoken by bin Laden is so incredibly funny)
I've never been convinced of Bush as a Christian. He seems to have missed quite a lot of stuff about loving your neighbours, forgiving trespassers and renouncing wealth.
Still, who am I to judge?
let us represent it with the three axes x,y,z.
Of course, we also have to determine whether God is the Christian God, Islamic God, Hindu, etcetera...
Hmmm, I appear to need 22-dimensional graph paper...
Yes, yes...this type of stuff only happens because of those on the 'ultra right': Protestors to be Caged at Democratic National Convention
I hate to bring this to your attention, but even your left-wing is right-wing. What would be considered left-wing forty years ago is nowhere to be seen at all these days. I'm guessing this is because the Democrats get their funding from the same sources as the republicans. European definitions of left wing (not UK) are much further left than the USA's.
But on topic, what good will supressing the effect of hard drugs do? Those I've known who were on heroin weren't doing it for fun. They were doing it as an escape. So what if the government shuts another door on them? It doesn't make their actual situation better.
Of course if you postulate that utopia breaks out and all humans will be suddenly nice and friendly, as another poster did, anarchy will be really great. But any political system would be in such a situation.
/. thread goes point, counter-point, repeat and I don't want to follow that here.
Heh! I think I might be that other poster. If Utopia breaks out then as you say, all systems of government would work and we'd simply pick the most efficient. Which would almost certainly be Anarchy: witness the Linux development cycle compared to Windows for an illustration of this.
I want to emphasize that I'm not disagreeing with anything in your post. I think I'd better do that, because the standard
I do want to add something though, and that is that anarchism is not mutually exclusive of meritocracy, unless you're using a really literal definition of meritocracy. Given that true anarchism levels the playing field substantially, you would expect it to be much more meritocratic than existing systems.
What I really wanted to comment on was this bit however:
In a sufficiently big group with no one specifically concerned with enforcing laws this can quickly devolve into rule by power,
A good principle I've found is that cybernetic systems do not scale well. In this case, the larger the organization the more quickly it becomes inefficient and breaks down. However, I feel that this is more true of centralised systems such as the UK government, than it is for decentralised systems such as anarchy. One reason for this is the breakdown in communication/feedback between the vast majority of the people and distant leaders who are never met, never talked with. In a large system there needs to be localised self-governance and the emphasis should move to co-operation rather than enforced obedience. Compare it with Object Oriented Analysis and Design vs. the old SSADM / Yourden methodologies. The old ones were better and more efficient for small systems. They broke down in the complexity of large modern systems.
It might be a mistake to bring up software methodologies as someone will disagree with my view, but I'm just using them to illustrate my point. And also inevitably, willing co-operation will be more effective than obediance.
The best pragmatic definition of an anarchist I know is "Someone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do."
If I hadn't already posted umpteen times in this thread, I would mod you funny, or insightful. If you weren't already listed as a friend, I'd add you now.
As it is, I'll simply have to steal your quote and use it as often as I can. V. nice.