By that argument we should try to preserve every piece of media we ever produce in any format no matter what quality it is. Can you imagine the situation if that were the case? What if every civilization for 6000 years before us had preserved everything they had written? Sure we would know a lot more about them but we would have so much material we would never be able to sift through it and preserving it all would probably consume damn near all our resources. Further more we would probably struggle to determine what the people of the time found important and what drove them.
It is better, I feel, to let history filter the material. If it really is worth keeping someone will keep it and it will stand the test of time. If it doesn't get preserved then obviously it wasn't important enough to anyone to preserve.
Yet again we see the Cult of Save Everything trumpeted in the media as if they are the ultimate force for good in the world. Get a grip, the plug was pulled because it wasn't popular enough to warrant keeping. Now that it's stuck on some hard drive somewhere who do you think is going to go and dig it out and look at any of it. At best it will last one generation and then get thrown away by his grandchildren.
I completely agree with the idea that we should preserve quality works of our and previous generations so that generations to come can enjoy them but we just seem to be trying to archive everything. How will future generations know what drove and inspired us?
...and we will get good cross browser support for all those features in 2196, until then the world will be running Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX in that order (shame beause I think JavaFX actually has quite a lot to offer). Even if cross browser support isn't required getting those features into IE in a reasonable time frame is not likely.
I first tried Linux back sometime in 98 and I installed RedHat. The install process went fairly well but I remember struggling for hours and hours to get X to start. I didn't do much with my Linux install for a year or so and then I discovered I could get a static IP address (very rare back then) and I started hosting my own webserver. I've been running at least one Linux box 24/7 since then. As a testament to how stable Linux can be in all that time my site hasn't been down due to a failure of part of the kernel or supporting software, I've managed to screw it up a few times though:). My longest uptime so far is about 14 months on a home server, it would have been longer but I had to move house!
All in all I'm very happy with the progress Linux has made. I would like a little more focus on quality, there are a lot of really good ideas but they almost always have rough edges. And a little more consistency, some applications are fantastic (e.g. K3B which I've just used) and some, like Open Office, leave quite a lot to be desired. I feel bad for picking on Open Office but it looks and feels like it's stepped out of the nineties.
Both RedHat and Suse produce something that is hard for the community to copy, packaing up god knows how many pieces of software and managing them takes time and effort which is what RedHat, for example, sell along with a bunch of enterprise tools. It's hard to equate the main RedHat offering with MySQL I think but I take your point.
IANAL either but I suspect as they are the copyright holder they can change the licence whenever they want to whatever they want. In fact I believe this happened with the X Server and is one of the things that spawned the X Org that we now use.
What I don't think that can though is change the licence retrospectively so you would just have to fork from the nightly before the licence change. If you could have retrospective licence changes how would you ever know if the software you were running was valid?
As the owner of a software development company I think your would have to be stark raving nuts to open source your main product. It's not that the model can't work it just that if it becomes successful you are pretty much guaranteed to lose control of it at some point.
If we look at MySQL for example: here's a company that produces half way decent database engine that that make open source. They play the open source game "properly" producing code that a mortal can compile to get a working database. While the company is giving the community what they want everything is hunky dory and there is peace.
Enter Sun who buy MySQL and suddenly the community isn't happy and it's fork fork fork. Only one of those forks needs to be any good and all of a sudden Suns not bought very much at all. If a company plays nice with the open source community forks are fairly easy but rare. The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
That said I think there are situations where companies can participate in open source. The Linux kernel and Plone being a couple of good examples. Both of those projects are structured very differently to the MySQL situation though as no one company is trying to make a living off the code.
Norway must have a very tame Government then because here in the UK the IWF (a quasi governmental body answerable to just about nobody) has been making a serious grab for power over the last year. It started off with hidden lists of child porn sites and now is spreading / has spread to include "terrorist" material and "violent" pornography and they want to block more material.
Of course because the list is completely secret and it's not strictly a government body there is no accountability, they are free to do pretty much anything they want. My problem with this situation is not that they want to block access to some material it's the way the system is set up. It's so ripe for abuse it's untrue.
For a start the list should be open for review along with the reason for the block and a review period. There should also be an appeals process against a block which can come from either the site owner or a user (can't see this getting used all that often but it should be available).
Also, since it is essentially a Government body it should be accountable like a Government body not hiding behind some "we're a business / charity / trust and therefore not accountable" wall.
This is very interesting but no where near as exciting as finding another Earth like planet. I suppose we will have to wait for the next generation of telescopes before we find it though.
What is a little surprising though is how many planetary systems we have found that are very different to our own. I can't believe ours is unique but perhaps it's quite rare.
I am not a professional plumber but I have done a fair bit... As I understand it your hot water should be stored at between 60 and 70 deg C to prevent legionaries, any hotter will cause scale build up. The 38 to 40 deg C is only a requirement in places where the general public may be using the hot water (all council buildings have hot water that is tepid). The main store of water is still held at 60 to 70 deg C it is simply blended near the point of use down to 38 to 40 deg C.
As for plastic pipes I would choose them over copper any day for the simplicity of fitting. I've never had a joint go bad after fitting miles of the stuff. I do, however, always make sure I use polythene based pipes and not the poly-butyl based ones. The butyl pipes are softer but there are some questions over them leaking plasticisers into the water.
I think you sum up quite nicely what a lot of people are failing to understand|: what ever new models / theories we come up with they have to account for everything we currently observe and the new things that current models / theories don't explain correctly.
I think a lot of people think that when we discover a theory of everything or at least the next quantum mechanics we will suddenly unlock the ability to teleport our selves, have faster than light travel and a multitude of other things that are strictly in the realm of science fiction. Taking faster than light travel as an example: everything we know tells us that it is fundamentally forbidden by the laws of the universe, that isn't about to change because we better explain the event horizon of a black hole. It's like saying that because we discover this amazing new theory the apple that hit Newton on the head would fall up rather than down! It might tell us how to generate anti-gravity but that is totally different to re-writing the rule book.
I wouldn't in anyway say that I am a supporter of the music or movie industry and in particular their out of date business models but I can't help feeling that this was probably the correct outcome.
I realize that TPB didn't actually host any copyright material but there can be no argument that they were blatantly assisting people in commiting copyright infringement. I struggle with deciding if this should be illegal behaviour but I feel it is certainly immoral. The problem with making it illegal is deciding how many steps away from the offence one needs to be in order to not be commiting a crime. Would liking to TPB become a crime?
IMHO the music industry has got everything it has deserved the film industry less so. Most films can now be picked up a very reasonable price as long as you are willing to wait a little while which, for me at least, is a fair compromise.
I've been looking at trying to replace a very expensive bulb in an old projector of mine too but I've not really had time to do much research yet (and my electronics knowledge is sadly lacking). Have you got any further than planning on doing it? I would be very interested in more information if you have it.
It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out. While I hope it will be successful I suspect it will produce mixed results. The amount of power they are generating sounds fairly low for the size of the city (unless the population density is very low) and I'm guessing that the cars and most of the space heating won't be electric (but the cooling probably will be).
Solar power is great but it's probably not going to be how we generate most of our power in the next 100 years. We really need to start some serious investment into fission and fusion.
I believe most people, if they thought about it with reply with something like: I don't know about you but I don't think I'm going to be around in 10,000 years so considering the state of the planet / human race at that point doesn't appear to make much sense. I have to agree to a large extent with their thinking but you are right in saying if we took a longer view we would probably avoid most of the problems we are going to face.
I think you were correct right up to 7. Most of the alternatives aren't as good as what we have right now. There is no realistic alternative to the car and all the alternatives to electricity generation are very expensive or unreliable. Space heating is also a serious problem.
Converting to a very low or zero carbon world would involve rebuilding just about every home, office block and factory as well as throwing away and remaking every car. That isn't going to happen any time soon. The expense would make the current financial system bailout look like pocket change.
I fully intend to build a zero carbon home in the not to distant future but the reality of the matter is we took 200 years to make our built environment, it will take 200 years to re-make it carbon neutral.
I believe they are talking about putting the pollution very high up in the atmosphere where rain doesn't wash it out in a few days / weeks. Particulate matter high enough up in the atmosphere stays there for many many years.
Interesting points but I don't think any of them are XP killers for a lot of users. Security is important to businesses but it's still a complete unknown for a lot of home users and they seem generally fairly happy with their machines.
As for us upgrading to 64 bit (which is what I presume you mean) I don't see a big driver for that in the home or general business areas. In the server room I'd love to see 64 bit machines (would make my job easier) but what would home users get from the move? Even speed has stopped being an issue, only gamers a a few intensive users need faster machines now.
Not only is what you say 100% true but is there actually going to be any reason to upgrade even a decade from now? XP is far from perfect but I feel it marks the point at which computers became "good enough" and changes became mostly minor bug fixing and moving things around. Barring a major revolution which I don't think anyone expects any time soon (e.g. hard AI) XP will continue to do everything people want for a very long time.
What will be interesting is to see how / if Mac and Linux eat into Windows market share over time. Since Windows has essentially stopped changing it gives other players a chance to become highly compatible. I don't suppose they will knock Windows off the top spot any time soon but I could imagine it getting to a point where it doesn't really matter what OS you run.
Sorry but I think your political career would be short lived. While you have clearly defined all the ways in which you would waste the tax payers money on junkets and toys, erm I mean, carefully spend the tax payers money on important projects you have completely overlooked:
Thinking of the children.
New ways to raise taxes while claiming to lower them.
Restricting freedoms.
Ruining the national infrastructure (extra points for claiming to be improving it).
Entering in to massive and pointless PFIs.
Increasing national debt.
Starting a pointless war.
Penalizing drivers.
Still, I wish you luck with the political career. I'd vote for you for a month in the Caribbean data centre.
While QM is exceedingly complex and I would say probably not completely correct or at least not the whole picture the effects that it predicts have all been observed by experiment. The "wierdness" is therefore actually what is there and any better theory (a theory of everything perhaps) will predict exactly the same weirdness.
While I am broadly anti the monarchy I have to agree with you that the Queen does do the British people proud. She is a fantastic ambasador for the country (when she leaves the hubby at home) and I believe that unlike just about everyone else in power in Britian she actually earns the money she gets. The rest of the royal family can go jump for all I care though. Charlie Boy is loosing the plot more and more each day and his two sons are spoilt little brats. When the Queen finally leaves office I think it will be the beginning of the end of the British monarchy.
I don't mind the front page but then I view it with ad blocking and most of the new features turned off (and idle hidden!). The comments section "improvements" have been a mixed bag IMHO. I like being able to click and expand a thread but I find that it tends to do unexpected things like suddenly cause a page down if the comment being expanded is near the bottom of the window.
I was quite excited by idea of being able to use the keyboard to step through a discussion but it just seemed to do random things when I tried it so I gave up. I'm sure it wasn't random but it wasn't what I immediately expected - lifes to short.
I wonder if I get a special achievement for a +5 in the april fools thread?
So what would you call it? You could name it after a famous scientist or a scientific theory but that doesn't really engage with the average person. Alternatively you can give it a name based in a horribly contrived acronym which means nothing to anyone. Serenity might not be a terribly scientific name and the show certainly wasn't based on scientific fact but it is a name a large number of people interested in science are familiar with.
Slashdot Mirror
By that argument we should try to preserve every piece of media we ever produce in any format no matter what quality it is. Can you imagine the situation if that were the case? What if every civilization for 6000 years before us had preserved everything they had written? Sure we would know a lot more about them but we would have so much material we would never be able to sift through it and preserving it all would probably consume damn near all our resources. Further more we would probably struggle to determine what the people of the time found important and what drove them.
It is better, I feel, to let history filter the material. If it really is worth keeping someone will keep it and it will stand the test of time. If it doesn't get preserved then obviously it wasn't important enough to anyone to preserve.
Yet again we see the Cult of Save Everything trumpeted in the media as if they are the ultimate force for good in the world. Get a grip, the plug was pulled because it wasn't popular enough to warrant keeping. Now that it's stuck on some hard drive somewhere who do you think is going to go and dig it out and look at any of it. At best it will last one generation and then get thrown away by his grandchildren.
I completely agree with the idea that we should preserve quality works of our and previous generations so that generations to come can enjoy them but we just seem to be trying to archive everything. How will future generations know what drove and inspired us?
...and we will get good cross browser support for all those features in 2196, until then the world will be running Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX in that order (shame beause I think JavaFX actually has quite a lot to offer). Even if cross browser support isn't required getting those features into IE in a reasonable time frame is not likely.
I first tried Linux back sometime in 98 and I installed RedHat. The install process went fairly well but I remember struggling for hours and hours to get X to start. I didn't do much with my Linux install for a year or so and then I discovered I could get a static IP address (very rare back then) and I started hosting my own webserver. I've been running at least one Linux box 24/7 since then. As a testament to how stable Linux can be in all that time my site hasn't been down due to a failure of part of the kernel or supporting software, I've managed to screw it up a few times though :). My longest uptime so far is about 14 months on a home server, it would have been longer but I had to move house!
All in all I'm very happy with the progress Linux has made. I would like a little more focus on quality, there are a lot of really good ideas but they almost always have rough edges. And a little more consistency, some applications are fantastic (e.g. K3B which I've just used) and some, like Open Office, leave quite a lot to be desired. I feel bad for picking on Open Office but it looks and feels like it's stepped out of the nineties.
Both RedHat and Suse produce something that is hard for the community to copy, packaing up god knows how many pieces of software and managing them takes time and effort which is what RedHat, for example, sell along with a bunch of enterprise tools. It's hard to equate the main RedHat offering with MySQL I think but I take your point.
IANAL either but I suspect as they are the copyright holder they can change the licence whenever they want to whatever they want. In fact I believe this happened with the X Server and is one of the things that spawned the X Org that we now use.
What I don't think that can though is change the licence retrospectively so you would just have to fork from the nightly before the licence change. If you could have retrospective licence changes how would you ever know if the software you were running was valid?
As the owner of a software development company I think your would have to be stark raving nuts to open source your main product. It's not that the model can't work it just that if it becomes successful you are pretty much guaranteed to lose control of it at some point.
If we look at MySQL for example: here's a company that produces half way decent database engine that that make open source. They play the open source game "properly" producing code that a mortal can compile to get a working database. While the company is giving the community what they want everything is hunky dory and there is peace.
Enter Sun who buy MySQL and suddenly the community isn't happy and it's fork fork fork. Only one of those forks needs to be any good and all of a sudden Suns not bought very much at all. If a company plays nice with the open source community forks are fairly easy but rare. The problem is they hang like a knife (or maybe that should be fork) over the company and if they are unfortunate enough to annoy the community they could eaisly lose control of their product.
That said I think there are situations where companies can participate in open source. The Linux kernel and Plone being a couple of good examples. Both of those projects are structured very differently to the MySQL situation though as no one company is trying to make a living off the code.
Norway must have a very tame Government then because here in the UK the IWF (a quasi governmental body answerable to just about nobody) has been making a serious grab for power over the last year. It started off with hidden lists of child porn sites and now is spreading / has spread to include "terrorist" material and "violent" pornography and they want to block more material.
Of course because the list is completely secret and it's not strictly a government body there is no accountability, they are free to do pretty much anything they want. My problem with this situation is not that they want to block access to some material it's the way the system is set up. It's so ripe for abuse it's untrue.
For a start the list should be open for review along with the reason for the block and a review period. There should also be an appeals process against a block which can come from either the site owner or a user (can't see this getting used all that often but it should be available).
Also, since it is essentially a Government body it should be accountable like a Government body not hiding behind some "we're a business / charity / trust and therefore not accountable" wall.
This is very interesting but no where near as exciting as finding another Earth like planet. I suppose we will have to wait for the next generation of telescopes before we find it though.
What is a little surprising though is how many planetary systems we have found that are very different to our own. I can't believe ours is unique but perhaps it's quite rare.
I am not a professional plumber but I have done a fair bit... As I understand it your hot water should be stored at between 60 and 70 deg C to prevent legionaries, any hotter will cause scale build up. The 38 to 40 deg C is only a requirement in places where the general public may be using the hot water (all council buildings have hot water that is tepid). The main store of water is still held at 60 to 70 deg C it is simply blended near the point of use down to 38 to 40 deg C.
As for plastic pipes I would choose them over copper any day for the simplicity of fitting. I've never had a joint go bad after fitting miles of the stuff. I do, however, always make sure I use polythene based pipes and not the poly-butyl based ones. The butyl pipes are softer but there are some questions over them leaking plasticisers into the water.
I think you sum up quite nicely what a lot of people are failing to understand|: what ever new models / theories we come up with they have to account for everything we currently observe and the new things that current models / theories don't explain correctly.
I think a lot of people think that when we discover a theory of everything or at least the next quantum mechanics we will suddenly unlock the ability to teleport our selves, have faster than light travel and a multitude of other things that are strictly in the realm of science fiction. Taking faster than light travel as an example: everything we know tells us that it is fundamentally forbidden by the laws of the universe, that isn't about to change because we better explain the event horizon of a black hole. It's like saying that because we discover this amazing new theory the apple that hit Newton on the head would fall up rather than down! It might tell us how to generate anti-gravity but that is totally different to re-writing the rule book.
I wouldn't in anyway say that I am a supporter of the music or movie industry and in particular their out of date business models but I can't help feeling that this was probably the correct outcome.
I realize that TPB didn't actually host any copyright material but there can be no argument that they were blatantly assisting people in commiting copyright infringement. I struggle with deciding if this should be illegal behaviour but I feel it is certainly immoral. The problem with making it illegal is deciding how many steps away from the offence one needs to be in order to not be commiting a crime. Would liking to TPB become a crime?
IMHO the music industry has got everything it has deserved the film industry less so. Most films can now be picked up a very reasonable price as long as you are willing to wait a little while which, for me at least, is a fair compromise.
I've been looking at trying to replace a very expensive bulb in an old projector of mine too but I've not really had time to do much research yet (and my electronics knowledge is sadly lacking). Have you got any further than planning on doing it? I would be very interested in more information if you have it.
It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out. While I hope it will be successful I suspect it will produce mixed results. The amount of power they are generating sounds fairly low for the size of the city (unless the population density is very low) and I'm guessing that the cars and most of the space heating won't be electric (but the cooling probably will be).
Solar power is great but it's probably not going to be how we generate most of our power in the next 100 years. We really need to start some serious investment into fission and fusion.
I believe most people, if they thought about it with reply with something like: I don't know about you but I don't think I'm going to be around in 10,000 years so considering the state of the planet / human race at that point doesn't appear to make much sense. I have to agree to a large extent with their thinking but you are right in saying if we took a longer view we would probably avoid most of the problems we are going to face.
I think you were correct right up to 7. Most of the alternatives aren't as good as what we have right now. There is no realistic alternative to the car and all the alternatives to electricity generation are very expensive or unreliable. Space heating is also a serious problem.
Converting to a very low or zero carbon world would involve rebuilding just about every home, office block and factory as well as throwing away and remaking every car. That isn't going to happen any time soon. The expense would make the current financial system bailout look like pocket change.
I fully intend to build a zero carbon home in the not to distant future but the reality of the matter is we took 200 years to make our built environment, it will take 200 years to re-make it carbon neutral.
I believe they are talking about putting the pollution very high up in the atmosphere where rain doesn't wash it out in a few days / weeks. Particulate matter high enough up in the atmosphere stays there for many many years.
Interesting points but I don't think any of them are XP killers for a lot of users. Security is important to businesses but it's still a complete unknown for a lot of home users and they seem generally fairly happy with their machines.
As for us upgrading to 64 bit (which is what I presume you mean) I don't see a big driver for that in the home or general business areas. In the server room I'd love to see 64 bit machines (would make my job easier) but what would home users get from the move? Even speed has stopped being an issue, only gamers a a few intensive users need faster machines now.
Not only is what you say 100% true but is there actually going to be any reason to upgrade even a decade from now? XP is far from perfect but I feel it marks the point at which computers became "good enough" and changes became mostly minor bug fixing and moving things around. Barring a major revolution which I don't think anyone expects any time soon (e.g. hard AI) XP will continue to do everything people want for a very long time.
What will be interesting is to see how / if Mac and Linux eat into Windows market share over time. Since Windows has essentially stopped changing it gives other players a chance to become highly compatible. I don't suppose they will knock Windows off the top spot any time soon but I could imagine it getting to a point where it doesn't really matter what OS you run.
Sorry but I think your political career would be short lived. While you have clearly defined all the ways in which you would waste the tax payers money on junkets and toys, erm I mean, carefully spend the tax payers money on important projects you have completely overlooked:
Still, I wish you luck with the political career. I'd vote for you for a month in the Caribbean data centre.
While QM is exceedingly complex and I would say probably not completely correct or at least not the whole picture the effects that it predicts have all been observed by experiment. The "wierdness" is therefore actually what is there and any better theory (a theory of everything perhaps) will predict exactly the same weirdness.
While I am broadly anti the monarchy I have to agree with you that the Queen does do the British people proud. She is a fantastic ambasador for the country (when she leaves the hubby at home) and I believe that unlike just about everyone else in power in Britian she actually earns the money she gets. The rest of the royal family can go jump for all I care though. Charlie Boy is loosing the plot more and more each day and his two sons are spoilt little brats. When the Queen finally leaves office I think it will be the beginning of the end of the British monarchy.
And Google says they aren't evil!
I don't mind the front page but then I view it with ad blocking and most of the new features turned off (and idle hidden!). The comments section "improvements" have been a mixed bag IMHO. I like being able to click and expand a thread but I find that it tends to do unexpected things like suddenly cause a page down if the comment being expanded is near the bottom of the window.
I was quite excited by idea of being able to use the keyboard to step through a discussion but it just seemed to do random things when I tried it so I gave up. I'm sure it wasn't random but it wasn't what I immediately expected - lifes to short.
I wonder if I get a special achievement for a +5 in the april fools thread?
So what would you call it? You could name it after a famous scientist or a scientific theory but that doesn't really engage with the average person. Alternatively you can give it a name based in a horribly contrived acronym which means nothing to anyone. Serenity might not be a terribly scientific name and the show certainly wasn't based on scientific fact but it is a name a large number of people interested in science are familiar with.