While it is nice to see someone trying to do something to reduce the worlds dependence on oil (even if it sounds like it's purely for profit reasons) renewables just aren't going to produce enough power any time soon.
While TUPE does protect the employees rights to some extent it's not half as strong asmany people think it is. Having just been through it and seeing both sides it was quite clear to me that people could be shed for any number of reasons. Don't bank on TUPE saving your job long term.
If word can't correctly read and format 99.99% of ODF documents perfectly it's not fully compatible with ODF. At 99.99% you are talking about 1 in 10000 documents having a formatting error (it's actually probably better than that because the problems are most likely to appear in rarely used formatting types but the idea is good). That isn't a fantastic level of realiability IMHO. In a company where 100 people are using Office that would mean one user would see a fault every 100 documents. I could easily imagine people use 100 documents a month.
In reality I bet the "perfect conversion" rate is much lower, something like 80% with another 19.5% being pretty well converted - well enough that the developers feel they can get away without calling it a failure.
Maybe some people are willing to live with that level of reliability but I'm not. Don't get me wrong I use Open Office for all my personal documents but everything for my company is MS Office and never the twain shall meet.
While this is certainly great news for KDE realistically we are going to be able to count the number of Windows users on one hand. There will be plenty of people (me included) that will down load it to see how good it is but then never use it again because it's incompatable with other office software*. While I know it can read ODF and.doc etc it doesn't do it well enough that it's a drop in replacement for MS Office or even Open Office.
Personally I really hope that they port Kontact soon. It's streets ahead of Thunderbird and a half way decent competitor to Outlook.
* any broken formatting when opening a non-native file format means it's incompatible as far as I'm concerned.
...it's what the kids and other people that don't understand money do. It's easy for the phone companies to gouge this section of society while also catering for the general population by giving them a few text's included in their monthly package.
I'll bet if you look at the economics of it they would break down like this:
20% will pay stupid money for sending tiny, nearly pointless text messages./li>
60% will not pay but think that text messages are a useful add on to the basic phones features so texting is a minor selling feature that can be added with little cost.
20% will never text because it's too complex or they are against it on religious grounds because it harms children (or some other nonsense).
If this doesn't send a clear signal regarding how totally broken the current patent system is what will?
I actually like the basic idea behind the patent system. I think it fosters innovation and provides reasonable reward but it's completely lost its way in the area of computing.
Unlike some I don't actually think we need a complete re-think of the patent system. What we need to do is think long and hard about the hurdle a patent in computing needs to jump over to be accepted because it appears the current hurdle is too low.
I guess indirectly, my response is that everytime a woman ovulates and fails to get pregnant, someone's entire DNA is also destroyed.
Well, not quite all their DNA the man does have a small part to play even now. Still, it reminded me of the Monty Python song "Every Spem is Sacred" which brought a smile.
Something that has always concerned me (more as I play games less often now) is how much power these cards draw when they aren't pumping out a zillion triangles a second playing DNF.
Most of the time (90%+ probably) I'm just doing very simple desktop type things. While it's obvious from the heat output that these cards aren't running flat out when redrawing a desktop surely they must be using significatnly more power than a simple graphics card that could perform the same role. Does anyone have any figures showing how much power is being wasted?
Perhaps we should have two graphics cards in the the system now - one that just does desktop type things and one for when real power is required. I would have thought it would be fairly simple to design a motherboard such that it had an internal only slot to accept the latest and greatest 3D accelerator card that suplimented an on board dumb-as-a-brick graphics card.
You must be from the UK. That was the IRAs favourite bomb making mixture for a long time. Typically it was a transit van filled with oil drums containing a mixture of diesel and fertilizer (about half a dozen drums normally). I saw a video of such a truck going exploding once - I wouldn't like to be near that!
One cardboard house: http://www.housesofthefuture.com.au/hof_houses04.html
I've seen another cardboard structure as well, a community centre or someting, that is actually in use but I can't find a link to it. Apparently with the correct treatment it's got for 30+ years. There was a little wood in the sturcture to support a large roof span but other than that is was all cardboard.
Personally, I think if shuttle was about to let go in a big way I wouldn't be going anywhere near a helicopter especially not one 60 meters from where the fun is taking place. I think all things considered staying in the APC with your foot to the floor is an entirely better plan.
Having said that I wonder why they don't have some sort of rocket sled to take them away from the shuttle. Pretty simple technology and capable of going very fast safely in one direction.
Man I wish I could get power that cheap. My last bill (converting @ $2 = £1) would put it at 28 cents / KWH! Dropping to 25 cents after using several hundred KWH.
I read a bit about English law the other day. We have been going in the same general direction of leglislating against eveyrthing the figures...
Since 1801 there have been approx 3400 acts of parliment passed. Since 1997 (when labour came to power) there have been roughly 400 acts passed (roughly 12%) So, assuming an even spread of act passing you would expect about 0.5% a year or in the reign of Labour about 5.5% of acts to be passed. They have more than doubled the average rate of act passing! Time to leave I think.
This is great news. I've been using OOo for ages but lets face it before 2.0 it wasn't really up to scratch and even 2.0 has some pretty rough corners. I'm hoping that the release of 3.0 which sounds like it will have added all the missing features will also indicate the start of the "polishing" of this great product.
As far as databases go I don't think it gets much better than Postgres and I reckon over the years I've tried most popular databases. What I really don't understand though is why Postgres doesn't own more of the database market. Sure it was a bit slower than MySQL a few years ago but the benifits that you reaped for that slightly slower speed far outweighed the cost. The difference know is, I would say, much small and less significant.
I can only assume that MySQL keeps it's large market share because it has commercial backing and therefore good support. I'm sure there are plenty of products taht don't require that level of support though.
Couldn't agree with the parent more. I'm one of those programmers that is passionate about programming but I choose to develop mainly in Java for a number of reasons. Firstly, programming is hard, if it wasn't hard we wouldn't have so many bugs so I want tools and languages that make it as hard as possible to srcew up. Secondaly, as I now move into a more managerial roll I see a clear need to be able to quickly hire new developers that can work on the projects I'm running.
I admit that Java isn't perfect but right at the moment, for what I (and thousands of others) am doing, it fits better than any other technology.
I'm pretty fed up with all the Java bashing. I feels like the Luddite movement. Java, for better or worse, has allowed us to produce more code in less time and generally with fewer bugs.
...they provide us with a way to produce something that works vaguely like a modern desktop GUI that doesn't take 6 months to get working and even then have more bugs than Scotland in midge season!
The web applications produced in the last few years are a real testament to dogged determination in the face of insurmountable odds but come on we need a rethink regarding (interactive) web applications if there are going to really take off.
As with most things in life the best solution is probably somewhere in the middle. Hundred page proofs are not really suitable for Wikipedia and a complete ban on proofs would leave the site lacking. If it is sensible to include the proof or part of the proof then it should be included.
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be. Do they want it to be an encyclopedia or does it want to be the source of all knowledge. Personally I think it should aim to be the best encyclopedia going as I suspect being the one source of all knowledge is probably impossible and there is a danger the real worth of the site will be swamped by too much detail.
Wikipedia should be the starting point of learning not the start, middle and end.
I couldn't agree more with what you are saying. I, too, develop sites in this way and I've found that by catching the quirks in IE early I've pretty much figured out all the problems for myself. Over time I've naturally started developing sites in such a way that I rarely now fall for one of IE's bugs. This means I can develop against firefox and just take a quick peek now and then to make sure everything is alright in IE.
I must have slipped into a parallel universe or something because it's starting to look like Java might finally make it's way onto the Linux platform in a useable way. Fair enough we have been deploying Java apps on Linux boxes for a while but it's been much harder than deploying a PHP, C, C++, etc etc application. That always struck me as strange because I would have thought that Java was the perfect language for open source projects. Fairly quick, simple to develop in, stacks of libraries, popular.
Maybe you will be able to hold a machine that matches a current super computers power in your hand in ten years but there is one thing it won't be able to do in your hand - run.
Extrapolating power consumption over the last ten years would seem to indicate that this "super computer in your hand" would probably be glowing red hot. Before we increase computing power much more we need to get a handle on efficiency.
Does anyone have any idea why this comet has suddenly got so much brighter? Presumably it is flying past a star but surely it would do this on a fairly regular basis.
Whatever the merits of the of the eventual player released for Linux (and Mac) this announcement hasn't been done quietly. Looking at news.bbc.co.uk the story is one of the big three stories in the technology section of the site - how much bigger do you want the annoucement to be?
Like it or not this story is only of interest to a small number of people compared to the whole population. As such I think it is asking a bit much for it to get front page space on one of the most visited news sites on the web. A little perspective is needed here I think.
It's an interesting idea there is no doubt about that. I really liked the map browsing right up to the point where I noticed the zooming in action looked a lot like he was trying to reproduce goatse with the map. The device will never been the same for me.
There are some really good points in your post and I agree with a large part of it. When I thought about "desktops" I was thinking about workstation type desktops. I fully agree that there are at least two other classes of desktop environment for smaller devices. Neither Gnome nor KDE can serve these smaller devices as they are simply to large and resource hungry.
Looking at workstation desktops though makes me think that a single desktop environment is possible. I agree with you that there is room for both types of desktop environment. There are a lot of people that need / want a desktop environment with very few settings. When people compare and contrast KDE and Gnome basically all their arguments boil down to "Gnome doesn't have enough settings - it's restrictive" and "KDE has too many settings - it's confusing".
No one says "Gnome doesn't have x functionality" or "KDE does have very good y functionality". It all boils down to how many settings are exposed.
Surely in that case then this is a presentation layer issue not a fundamental architecture issue. Wouldn't it have been better to have developed one desktop environment engine and two presentation layers. One that looked like Gnome that presented the user with virtually no settings and one that looked like KDE and presented the user with loads of settings.
I'm actually fairly sure that both Gnome and KDE have the ability (with some effort probably) to mimic the others design ideas to a greater or lesser extent. IMHO we have wasted a huge amount of effort developing two systems that are basically the same under the hood.
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While it is nice to see someone trying to do something to reduce the worlds dependence on oil (even if it sounds like it's purely for profit reasons) renewables just aren't going to produce enough power any time soon.
I suggest people have a read of this before voting for this plan, it's quite an eye opener. In summary, the average person in the UK (which is the focus of the book) uses about half the power per person per day of the average. Even if we covered our entire windy island with turbines and ringed the entire coast with wave and tide generators we wouldn't even be close to providing enough power.
If we are to get off foregin (middle eastern) oil we need to go nuclear with fast breeder reactors and we need to start doing it soon.
While TUPE does protect the employees rights to some extent it's not half as strong asmany people think it is. Having just been through it and seeing both sides it was quite clear to me that people could be shed for any number of reasons. Don't bank on TUPE saving your job long term.
If word can't correctly read and format 99.99% of ODF documents perfectly it's not fully compatible with ODF. At 99.99% you are talking about 1 in 10000 documents having a formatting error (it's actually probably better than that because the problems are most likely to appear in rarely used formatting types but the idea is good). That isn't a fantastic level of realiability IMHO. In a company where 100 people are using Office that would mean one user would see a fault every 100 documents. I could easily imagine people use 100 documents a month. In reality I bet the "perfect conversion" rate is much lower, something like 80% with another 19.5% being pretty well converted - well enough that the developers feel they can get away without calling it a failure. Maybe some people are willing to live with that level of reliability but I'm not. Don't get me wrong I use Open Office for all my personal documents but everything for my company is MS Office and never the twain shall meet.
While this is certainly great news for KDE realistically we are going to be able to count the number of Windows users on one hand. There will be plenty of people (me included) that will down load it to see how good it is but then never use it again because it's incompatable with other office software*. While I know it can read ODF and .doc etc it doesn't do it well enough that it's a drop in replacement for MS Office or even Open Office.
Personally I really hope that they port Kontact soon. It's streets ahead of Thunderbird and a half way decent competitor to Outlook.
* any broken formatting when opening a non-native file format means it's incompatible as far as I'm concerned.
...it's what the kids and other people that don't understand money do. It's easy for the phone companies to gouge this section of society while also catering for the general population by giving them a few text's included in their monthly package.
I'll bet if you look at the economics of it they would break down like this:
If this doesn't send a clear signal regarding how totally broken the current patent system is what will?
I actually like the basic idea behind the patent system. I think it fosters innovation and provides reasonable reward but it's completely lost its way in the area of computing.
Unlike some I don't actually think we need a complete re-think of the patent system. What we need to do is think long and hard about the hurdle a patent in computing needs to jump over to be accepted because it appears the current hurdle is too low.
I guess indirectly, my response is that everytime a woman ovulates and fails to get pregnant, someone's entire DNA is also destroyed.
Well, not quite all their DNA the man does have a small part to play even now. Still, it reminded me of the Monty Python song "Every Spem is Sacred" which brought a smile.
Something that has always concerned me (more as I play games less often now) is how much power these cards draw when they aren't pumping out a zillion triangles a second playing DNF.
Most of the time (90%+ probably) I'm just doing very simple desktop type things. While it's obvious from the heat output that these cards aren't running flat out when redrawing a desktop surely they must be using significatnly more power than a simple graphics card that could perform the same role. Does anyone have any figures showing how much power is being wasted?
Perhaps we should have two graphics cards in the the system now - one that just does desktop type things and one for when real power is required. I would have thought it would be fairly simple to design a motherboard such that it had an internal only slot to accept the latest and greatest 3D accelerator card that suplimented an on board dumb-as-a-brick graphics card.
You must be from the UK. That was the IRAs favourite bomb making mixture for a long time. Typically it was a transit van filled with oil drums containing a mixture of diesel and fertilizer (about half a dozen drums normally). I saw a video of such a truck going exploding once - I wouldn't like to be near that!
One cardboard house: http://www.housesofthefuture.com.au/hof_houses04.html I've seen another cardboard structure as well, a community centre or someting, that is actually in use but I can't find a link to it. Apparently with the correct treatment it's got for 30+ years. There was a little wood in the sturcture to support a large roof span but other than that is was all cardboard.
Personally, I think if shuttle was about to let go in a big way I wouldn't be going anywhere near a helicopter especially not one 60 meters from where the fun is taking place. I think all things considered staying in the APC with your foot to the floor is an entirely better plan. Having said that I wonder why they don't have some sort of rocket sled to take them away from the shuttle. Pretty simple technology and capable of going very fast safely in one direction.
Man I wish I could get power that cheap. My last bill (converting @ $2 = £1) would put it at 28 cents / KWH! Dropping to 25 cents after using several hundred KWH.
I read a bit about English law the other day. We have been going in the same general direction of leglislating against eveyrthing the figures...
Since 1801 there have been approx 3400 acts of parliment passed.
Since 1997 (when labour came to power) there have been roughly 400 acts passed (roughly 12%)
So, assuming an even spread of act passing you would expect about 0.5% a year or in the reign of Labour about 5.5% of acts to be passed. They have more than doubled the average rate of act passing! Time to leave I think.
This is great news. I've been using OOo for ages but lets face it before 2.0 it wasn't really up to scratch and even 2.0 has some pretty rough corners. I'm hoping that the release of 3.0 which sounds like it will have added all the missing features will also indicate the start of the "polishing" of this great product.
As far as databases go I don't think it gets much better than Postgres and I reckon over the years I've tried most popular databases. What I really don't understand though is why Postgres doesn't own more of the database market. Sure it was a bit slower than MySQL a few years ago but the benifits that you reaped for that slightly slower speed far outweighed the cost. The difference know is, I would say, much small and less significant.
I can only assume that MySQL keeps it's large market share because it has commercial backing and therefore good support. I'm sure there are plenty of products taht don't require that level of support though.
Couldn't agree with the parent more. I'm one of those programmers that is passionate about programming but I choose to develop mainly in Java for a number of reasons. Firstly, programming is hard, if it wasn't hard we wouldn't have so many bugs so I want tools and languages that make it as hard as possible to srcew up. Secondaly, as I now move into a more managerial roll I see a clear need to be able to quickly hire new developers that can work on the projects I'm running.
I admit that Java isn't perfect but right at the moment, for what I (and thousands of others) am doing, it fits better than any other technology.
I'm pretty fed up with all the Java bashing. I feels like the Luddite movement. Java, for better or worse, has allowed us to produce more code in less time and generally with fewer bugs.
...they provide us with a way to produce something that works vaguely like a modern desktop GUI that doesn't take 6 months to get working and even then have more bugs than Scotland in midge season!
The web applications produced in the last few years are a real testament to dogged determination in the face of insurmountable odds but come on we need a rethink regarding (interactive) web applications if there are going to really take off.
As with most things in life the best solution is probably somewhere in the middle. Hundred page proofs are not really suitable for Wikipedia and a complete ban on proofs would leave the site lacking. If it is sensible to include the proof or part of the proof then it should be included.
The maintainers of Wikipedia really needs to ask themselves what they wants it to be. Do they want it to be an encyclopedia or does it want to be the source of all knowledge. Personally I think it should aim to be the best encyclopedia going as I suspect being the one source of all knowledge is probably impossible and there is a danger the real worth of the site will be swamped by too much detail.
Wikipedia should be the starting point of learning not the start, middle and end.
I couldn't agree more with what you are saying. I, too, develop sites in this way and I've found that by catching the quirks in IE early I've pretty much figured out all the problems for myself. Over time I've naturally started developing sites in such a way that I rarely now fall for one of IE's bugs. This means I can develop against firefox and just take a quick peek now and then to make sure everything is alright in IE.
I must have slipped into a parallel universe or something because it's starting to look like Java might finally make it's way onto the Linux platform in a useable way. Fair enough we have been deploying Java apps on Linux boxes for a while but it's been much harder than deploying a PHP, C, C++, etc etc application. That always struck me as strange because I would have thought that Java was the perfect language for open source projects. Fairly quick, simple to develop in, stacks of libraries, popular.
Maybe you will be able to hold a machine that matches a current super computers power in your hand in ten years but there is one thing it won't be able to do in your hand - run.
Extrapolating power consumption over the last ten years would seem to indicate that this "super computer in your hand" would probably be glowing red hot. Before we increase computing power much more we need to get a handle on efficiency.
Does anyone have any idea why this comet has suddenly got so much brighter? Presumably it is flying past a star but surely it would do this on a fairly regular basis.
Whatever the merits of the of the eventual player released for Linux (and Mac) this announcement hasn't been done quietly. Looking at news.bbc.co.uk the story is one of the big three stories in the technology section of the site - how much bigger do you want the annoucement to be?
Like it or not this story is only of interest to a small number of people compared to the whole population. As such I think it is asking a bit much for it to get front page space on one of the most visited news sites on the web. A little perspective is needed here I think.
It's an interesting idea there is no doubt about that. I really liked the map browsing right up to the point where I noticed the zooming in action looked a lot like he was trying to reproduce goatse with the map. The device will never been the same for me.
There are some really good points in your post and I agree with a large part of it. When I thought about "desktops" I was thinking about workstation type desktops. I fully agree that there are at least two other classes of desktop environment for smaller devices. Neither Gnome nor KDE can serve these smaller devices as they are simply to large and resource hungry.
Looking at workstation desktops though makes me think that a single desktop environment is possible. I agree with you that there is room for both types of desktop environment. There are a lot of people that need / want a desktop environment with very few settings. When people compare and contrast KDE and Gnome basically all their arguments boil down to "Gnome doesn't have enough settings - it's restrictive" and "KDE has too many settings - it's confusing".
No one says "Gnome doesn't have x functionality" or "KDE does have very good y functionality". It all boils down to how many settings are exposed.
Surely in that case then this is a presentation layer issue not a fundamental architecture issue. Wouldn't it have been better to have developed one desktop environment engine and two presentation layers. One that looked like Gnome that presented the user with virtually no settings and one that looked like KDE and presented the user with loads of settings.
I'm actually fairly sure that both Gnome and KDE have the ability (with some effort probably) to mimic the others design ideas to a greater or lesser extent. IMHO we have wasted a huge amount of effort developing two systems that are basically the same under the hood.