What everyone forgets is that the time of Microsoft's rise to being a monopoly their OS (ie DOS) was a command line and ordinary people used it well enough to get by (I even knew a sales guy who was more proficient with edlin than any programmer I knew). If people need to use it then they will learn. But with Linux the command line is actually one of its strengths. Ubuntu does a nice job of getting around the need for a newbie to use the command line, but it still has to be there somewhere. I'm curious as to why the guy found Kubuntu too hard. Maybe he just expected Windows and couldn't handle the different look and feel.
Windows long ago reached a critical mass so that it is now self sustaining. Linux isn't there yet and may never be there because Windows already occupies that niche. I don't worry about it anymore... Linux is too useful to disappear and given it is open source then there is more likelihood that the next really big OS is based on Linux in some form (ok that was for the optimists out there).
When I hear talk of ocean worlds I am always reminded of the amazing speculation about them that Stapledon did in his books.
In Olaf Stapledon's book "Star Maker" (see here also) he describes one water world.. I'm thinking of the world of the living ships, not the that of the dolphin-crab symbionts or the avians. Living ship-like beings, think a cross between a whale and a squid with natural deployable sails. The symbionts eventually develop technology and starships because there are a few islands that become the site of research. But even the world of the living ships have a few islands. However there are also avian races on true water worlds where flying fish have evolved into bird like things... small bodies, small brains but group minds. Been a while since I've read it. Hmmmm... must read it yet again. Bliss.
Re:Where's the need come from?
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
I live in Brisbane, Queensland. Our dams are projected to run out of water within 2 years if the drought continues (it has been going for years already). The inland is much much worse. The other Australian cities are slightly better off. E.g. Sydney still have their dams at 30% full, whereas ours are at under 23% triggering a new level of water restrictions (by the end of next year the dams are projected to be at 5%)... want to wash your car? Use only a bucket because all use of hoses is banned. That is life in Australia. Talk is of recycling water, desalination etc but they are just stopgap measures. This is very very serious stuff here, always has been.
Yeah... let 'em have their online vote for everything. Just so long as I control the newspapers, radio and TV. The people, my pawns. That is what an online voting future would look like I fear. Creepy.
One solution would be to have software patents treated differently. Ten years for a software patent is a very long time. So instead we could have simple patents apply for 2 years, medium level patents 4 years and complex patents 8 years. Under this scheme "one click" would have lasted 2 years and given Amazon a clear advantage. Whereas some voice synthesis application may have core technology that could be patented for 8 years. The only alternative to anything like this I suspect is just to get rid of software patents. When the industry wasn't 'assisted' by such patents it boomed... I don't remember too many software patents around on things like word processors or spreadsheets.
Imagine if Id had patented FPS, yeah I know there was prior art... so what. Would that have been a boon to the industry? Or maybe a patent on email, by say AT&T (not sure if was them).
There were two factors involving heat that were regarded as having had an impact from what I used to read on this.
Firstly, at the time of impact there would have been a large amount of ejecta that would have been thrown into a sub-orbital trajectory around the Earth, as it re-entered it would have broiled anything in the open and started a lot of wildfires. This would apply even to locations very far away... possibly even the other side of the planet.
Secondly, as research continued there was mounting evidence of a prolonged very warm period with heavy rainfall for the next 500,000 years. This was a mystery until it was proposed that the impact occurred in a rock type that would have liberated a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, this I believe was the situation with the Chicxulub site. The Deccan Traps would certainly have made a significant contribution to this, and probably (just guessing now) is why it lasted so long.. CO2 only stays in the atmosphere for some centuries or so but the Traps evolved CO2 etc for 100,000s of years. Of course it always seemed an odd coincidence to me that the Deccan Traps happened at the same time as such a large impact... I think they are related, either the impact weakened the crust to create the Traps or another impact created them (think fragmented large comet etc).
OK just had a look at the article about the Deccan Traps and it mentions the possibility of a new and far larger crater than Chicxulub located just off India. This is Shiva Crater. If it is an impact then it would likely be caused by a 40 km wide asteroid resulting in a crater 600 km in diameter. This structure is associated with the Deccan Traps.
The real attraction of 99 Bottles of Beer... and the reason it is so unhelpful if you just want to compare languages is that the examples often use exotic uses of the programming language in question. More a "lets use the weirdest way possible of writing this program that we can in the given language". So we see examples like, Java using no loops or ifs just throwing exceptions and printing stack traces to get the effect, or the C++ version doing it *all* in template meta-programming.... or my favourite the perl example (who said perl is hard to read?). Very amusing, but not a real comparison of languages.. as they are actually used.
Suddenly reminded of the story of Mozart and the Miserere. The Miserere, a choral piece of exceptional beauty, was written around 1630 by Allegri. The Church in due course decided this was too good for the plebs so one of the Popes decreed that only it could only be performed in the Sistine Chapel in Rome and furthermore, this is the part I love, any of the performers who divulged, copied or gave any part of it to anyone else would be excommunicated. Ahhh original brand DRM.
When Mozart was 12 years old he went to Rome and witnessed the performance. Then later wrote it down from memory.
Not being flippant here, this is deadly serious. If I was doing IT support for a school and could end up as part of a criminal action for this I would switch to an OS that was safe and a browser that was safe. Could go Mac could go Linux, being a school with existing x86 boxen then Linux would be it. If the school didn't want to do that then I'd just tell them I am not going to go to jail because of their decisions and quit.
I guess just about everyone on/. would regard this whole thing as an injustice and a tragedy. Actually, reading about this makes me almost physically sick... maybe for an encore they should take the teacher out and stone her.
Global warming is a theory. It has a lot of supporting evidence, otherwise it would just be a hypothesis. But to say it is "only a theory" is the double talk of the Creationists. In science 'theory' has a meaning that is much stronger than the wishy-washy definition of the wider community.
These are the arguments I heard when Australia went metric, some units seemed OK but temperature... no-one thought they would get used to Celsius. But they did. Now Fahrenheit looks odd. The only time I see non-metric units anywhere these days is when I go to an Irish pub and order a pint. After a while you wont even notice, though older people quite often never really accept it.
At first sight it seems odd but it is very useful. For example say my car gets 9 litres/100 km, then I plan to take my car on a 600 km trip... how much fuel do I need... why 9 x 6 = 54 litres ! If on the other hand I wanted to do it the old way so I have 11 km / litre then if I am going 600 km I will need.... 600 / 11 = 54 litres. I have replaced a division, a harder task, for a simple multiplication.
This was also used in a Poul Anderson story in the Polesotechnic League series. About a new civilisation that appears on the scene selling island of stability elements that no-one else can manufacture in quantity. Turns out they are an average culture that found a surviving planetary core around an old supernova. Don't remember the name of the story or date though so I don't know if it predates Nova.
Yeah it's a bit like when you first tried transparent terms. Eterm in my case (pause for a bit of nostalgia). Really really cool looking. But actually using it was less wonderful. Sadly transparent terms are not a good idea, even with tinting. 'Cept for showing off your OS... definitely a winner with chicks.
Must admit I accepted this too until the argument was put to me recently. Fact is of course that the ice is fresh water (less dense) than the sea water it floats in. Check out the links posted elsewhere to physorg about this. Archimedes principle is about the force of the ice pushing down and displacing an equal weight of sea water. But since the ice is lower density then the volume of sea water displaced is less than the volume of the fresh water in the ice... even after melting. So when floating ice melts in sea water the sea level goes up. Check here, not just the reasoning but also the actual experiment to prove it.
And paper records should survive the 40-50 year hiatus, if they aren't burned. In fact even pulp stuff written on acid containing paper should last more than that period. Though not by a lot. So textbooks etc will survive... Even if the DVDs survive you need a PC to play it on (talking software here not video). So you have to have a functioning semiconductor / electronics industry. Fat chance that will still be around.
Also as you say the density of the information is a problem. If I pick up an old book with a spot on one page I can still read around it and surmise what is in it. But if a zip/gz file gets hit by a cosmic ray and flips some bits: checksum error, too bad.
I have been thinking about this for a while and have thought that what should be done is that some electronics docs, even slabs of wikipedia should be printed onto acid free paper and saved in some special vaults around the place... must have redundancy. If we have the 40-50 year failure a lot will be lost but some important stuff will survive. Can't win against entropy all the time, so we just have to choose the battles we can win.
Beazley (Labor Party) is just a well meaning dufus. Nice guy, as a neighbour, not as PM. Put Julia Gillard in the role, damn smart woman. Or... or... we can put out a plea "come back Paul, all is forgiven". Hmmm Keating and Gillard, both smart but Keating is damn good in a street fight^W^W debate.
It would buy us some time. But if continued would just be like ingesting more and more antidote to tackle an increasing toxin... sooner or later something is going to go badly wrong. It would lead to an unstable situation.
One scenario: after a couple of decades of this strategy we have a few big volcanic eruptions (they're not that rare) which cause a considerable dimming globally, enough to affect global food production, I mean there has already been a lot of dimming by this time anyway. Which triggers an economic downturn. Which reduces industrial pollution which starts a warming cycle, by reducing the particulants. Such cycles have periods, and if you don't get the right phase you will produce positive feedback resulting in a... um interesting situation.
Sadly I don't have the time to research all of their statements. I can't take them at face value either. How should I evaluate them then? If I look for vested interests then that can supply a hint at probable distortions of their conclusions and possibly allow me to dismiss it until I see something more convincing. I know this is a logical fallacy, but it also is likely to be correct anyway.
I have seen systems running on DOS, at the time Win2k was out. One in particular had been written by a colleague who's solution was so elegant and bug free no-one wanted to upgrade the OS because it would mean a rewrite and the result would not be as good. Time and again I've seen code re-written which ignores a lot of little fixes that are there for a reason but are typically not documented and so seem to make no sense. Sometimes you have to re-write but if you have backwards compatibility it can remove an enormous headache and support burden.
Yeah. It's because of the sad, indeed tragic, decline of Scientific American to just another science mag. At least New Scientist hasn't changed, but the two together were fantastic. NS gave news and gossip and speculation and fun. SA gave deeply thought out sometimes pioneering articles that you could use as references. They balanced each other.
If they lose then that means that all images and text from all websites are free to use whether there is a copyright on them or not since they have been 'given away' to your PC free of charge.
Apart from that only a dope would rule against JMRI.
Slashdot Mirror
What everyone forgets is that the time of Microsoft's rise to being a monopoly their OS (ie DOS) was a command line and ordinary people used it well enough to get by (I even knew a sales guy who was more proficient with edlin than any programmer I knew). If people need to use it then they will learn. But with Linux the command line is actually one of its strengths. Ubuntu does a nice job of getting around the need for a newbie to use the command line, but it still has to be there somewhere. I'm curious as to why the guy found Kubuntu too hard. Maybe he just expected Windows and couldn't handle the different look and feel.
Windows long ago reached a critical mass so that it is now self sustaining. Linux isn't there yet and may never be there because Windows already occupies that niche. I don't worry about it anymore ... Linux is too useful to disappear and given it is open source then there is more likelihood that the next really big OS is based on Linux in some form (ok that was for the optimists out there).
When I hear talk of ocean worlds I am always reminded of the amazing speculation about them that Stapledon did in his books.
In Olaf Stapledon's book "Star Maker" (see here also) he describes one water world .. I'm thinking of the world of the living ships, not the that of the dolphin-crab symbionts or the avians. Living ship-like beings, think a cross between a whale and a squid with natural deployable sails. The symbionts eventually develop technology and starships because there are a few islands that become the site of research. But even the world of the living ships have a few islands. However there are also avian races on true water worlds where flying fish have evolved into bird like things ... small bodies, small brains but group minds. Been a while since I've read it. Hmmmm ... must read it yet again. Bliss.
I live in Brisbane, Queensland. Our dams are projected to run out of water within 2 years if the drought continues (it has been going for years already). The inland is much much worse. The other Australian cities are slightly better off. E.g. Sydney still have their dams at 30% full, whereas ours are at under 23% triggering a new level of water restrictions (by the end of next year the dams are projected to be at 5%) ... want to wash your car? Use only a bucket because all use of hoses is banned. That is life in Australia. Talk is of recycling water, desalination etc but they are just stopgap measures. This is very very serious stuff here, always has been.
Yeah ... let 'em have their online vote for everything. Just so long as I control the newspapers, radio and TV. The people, my pawns. That is what an online voting future would look like I fear. Creepy.
One solution would be to have software patents treated differently. Ten years for a software patent is a very long time. So instead we could have simple patents apply for 2 years, medium level patents 4 years and complex patents 8 years. Under this scheme "one click" would have lasted 2 years and given Amazon a clear advantage. Whereas some voice synthesis application may have core technology that could be patented for 8 years. The only alternative to anything like this I suspect is just to get rid of software patents. When the industry wasn't 'assisted' by such patents it boomed ... I don't remember too many software patents around on things like word processors or spreadsheets.
Imagine if Id had patented FPS, yeah I know there was prior art ... so what. Would that have been a boon to the industry? Or maybe a patent on email, by say AT&T (not sure if was them).
There were two factors involving heat that were regarded as having had an impact from what I used to read on this.
Firstly, at the time of impact there would have been a large amount of ejecta that would have been thrown into a sub-orbital trajectory around the Earth, as it re-entered it would have broiled anything in the open and started a lot of wildfires. This would apply even to locations very far away ... possibly even the other side of the planet.
Secondly, as research continued there was mounting evidence of a prolonged very warm period with heavy rainfall for the next 500,000 years. This was a mystery until it was proposed that the impact occurred in a rock type that would have liberated a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, this I believe was the situation with the Chicxulub site. The Deccan Traps would certainly have made a significant contribution to this, and probably (just guessing now) is why it lasted so long .. CO2 only stays in the atmosphere for some centuries or so but the Traps evolved CO2 etc for 100,000s of years. Of course it always seemed an odd coincidence to me that the Deccan Traps happened at the same time as such a large impact ... I think they are related, either the impact weakened the crust to create the Traps or another impact created them (think fragmented large comet etc).
OK just had a look at the article about the Deccan Traps and it mentions the possibility of a new and far larger crater than Chicxulub located just off India. This is Shiva Crater. If it is an impact then it would likely be caused by a 40 km wide asteroid resulting in a crater 600 km in diameter. This structure is associated with the Deccan Traps.
Um yeah. Is the next phrase: "Burn the libraries!" ? Cos you know they are just tools of the guvmint.
The real attraction of 99 Bottles of Beer ... and the reason it is so unhelpful if you just want to compare languages is that the examples often use exotic uses of the programming language in question. More a "lets use the weirdest way possible of writing this program that we can in the given language". So we see examples like, Java using no loops or ifs just throwing exceptions and printing stack traces to get the effect, or the C++ version doing it *all* in template meta-programming .... or my favourite the perl example (who said perl is hard to read?). Very amusing, but not a real comparison of languages .. as they are actually used.
The object code is the open source. Well ... more readable.
Suddenly reminded of the story of Mozart and the Miserere. The Miserere, a choral piece of exceptional beauty, was written around 1630 by Allegri. The Church in due course decided this was too good for the plebs so one of the Popes decreed that only it could only be performed in the Sistine Chapel in Rome and furthermore, this is the part I love, any of the performers who divulged, copied or gave any part of it to anyone else would be excommunicated. Ahhh original brand DRM.
When Mozart was 12 years old he went to Rome and witnessed the performance. Then later wrote it down from memory.
DRM didn't work then, and wont work now.
My 2 cents worth.
Not being flippant here, this is deadly serious. If I was doing IT support for a school and could end up as part of a criminal action for this I would switch to an OS that was safe and a browser that was safe. Could go Mac could go Linux, being a school with existing x86 boxen then Linux would be it. If the school didn't want to do that then I'd just tell them I am not going to go to jail because of their decisions and quit.
I guess just about everyone on /. would regard this whole thing as an injustice and a tragedy. Actually, reading about this makes me almost physically sick ... maybe for an encore they should take the teacher out and stone her.
Global warming is a theory. It has a lot of supporting evidence, otherwise it would just be a hypothesis. But to say it is "only a theory" is the double talk of the Creationists. In science 'theory' has a meaning that is much stronger than the wishy-washy definition of the wider community.
These are the arguments I heard when Australia went metric, some units seemed OK but temperature ... no-one thought they would get used to Celsius. But they did. Now Fahrenheit looks odd. The only time I see non-metric units anywhere these days is when I go to an Irish pub and order a pint. After a while you wont even notice, though older people quite often never really accept it.
At first sight it seems odd but it is very useful. For example say my car gets 9 litres/100 km, then I plan to take my car on a 600 km trip ... how much fuel do I need ... why 9 x 6 = 54 litres ! If on the other hand I wanted to do it the old way so I have 11 km / litre then if I am going 600 km I will need .... 600 / 11 = 54 litres. I have replaced a division, a harder task, for a simple multiplication.
This was also used in a Poul Anderson story in the Polesotechnic League series. About a new civilisation that appears on the scene selling island of stability elements that no-one else can manufacture in quantity. Turns out they are an average culture that found a surviving planetary core around an old supernova. Don't remember the name of the story or date though so I don't know if it predates Nova.
Yeah it's a bit like when you first tried transparent terms. Eterm in my case (pause for a bit of nostalgia). Really really cool looking. But actually using it was less wonderful. Sadly transparent terms are not a good idea, even with tinting. 'Cept for showing off your OS ... definitely a winner with chicks.
Must admit I accepted this too until the argument was put to me recently. Fact is of course that the ice is fresh water (less dense) than the sea water it floats in. Check out the links posted elsewhere to physorg about this. Archimedes principle is about the force of the ice pushing down and displacing an equal weight of sea water. But since the ice is lower density then the volume of sea water displaced is less than the volume of the fresh water in the ice ... even after melting. So when floating ice melts in sea water the sea level goes up. Check here, not just the reasoning but also the actual experiment to prove it.
Gut instinct. Yeah right.
What that means is "Truthiness is what agrees with my basic prejudices".
And paper records should survive the 40-50 year hiatus, if they aren't burned. In fact even pulp stuff written on acid containing paper should last more than that period. Though not by a lot. So textbooks etc will survive ... Even if the DVDs survive you need a PC to play it on (talking software here not video). So you have to have a functioning semiconductor / electronics industry. Fat chance that will still be around.
Also as you say the density of the information is a problem. If I pick up an old book with a spot on one page I can still read around it and surmise what is in it. But if a zip/gz file gets hit by a cosmic ray and flips some bits: checksum error, too bad.
I have been thinking about this for a while and have thought that what should be done is that some electronics docs, even slabs of wikipedia should be printed onto acid free paper and saved in some special vaults around the place ... must have redundancy. If we have the 40-50 year failure a lot will be lost but some important stuff will survive. Can't win against entropy all the time, so we just have to choose the battles we can win.
Correction a sly and sleazy one.
Beazley (Labor Party) is just a well meaning dufus. Nice guy, as a neighbour, not as PM. Put Julia Gillard in the role, damn smart woman. Or ... or ... we can put out a plea "come back Paul, all is forgiven". Hmmm Keating and Gillard, both smart but Keating is damn good in a street fight^W^W debate.
It would buy us some time. But if continued would just be like ingesting more and more antidote to tackle an increasing toxin ... sooner or later something is going to go badly wrong. It would lead to an unstable situation.
One scenario: after a couple of decades of this strategy we have a few big volcanic eruptions (they're not that rare) which cause a considerable dimming globally, enough to affect global food production, I mean there has already been a lot of dimming by this time anyway. Which triggers an economic downturn. Which reduces industrial pollution which starts a warming cycle, by reducing the particulants. Such cycles have periods, and if you don't get the right phase you will produce positive feedback resulting in a ... um interesting situation.
Sadly I don't have the time to research all of their statements. I can't take them at face value either. How should I evaluate them then? If I look for vested interests then that can supply a hint at probable distortions of their conclusions and possibly allow me to dismiss it until I see something more convincing. I know this is a logical fallacy, but it also is likely to be correct anyway.
I have seen systems running on DOS, at the time Win2k was out. One in particular had been written by a colleague who's solution was so elegant and bug free no-one wanted to upgrade the OS because it would mean a rewrite and the result would not be as good. Time and again I've seen code re-written which ignores a lot of little fixes that are there for a reason but are typically not documented and so seem to make no sense. Sometimes you have to re-write but if you have backwards compatibility it can remove an enormous headache and support burden.
Yeah. It's because of the sad, indeed tragic, decline of Scientific American to just another science mag. At least New Scientist hasn't changed, but the two together were fantastic. NS gave news and gossip and speculation and fun. SA gave deeply thought out sometimes pioneering articles that you could use as references. They balanced each other.
Sigh
If they lose then that means that all images and text from all websites are free to use whether there is a copyright on them or not since they have been 'given away' to your PC free of charge.
Apart from that only a dope would rule against JMRI.